sarahreesbrennan - Tumblr blog

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“Is this woman dumb or is she joking?” Is a question many people should ask themselves. Today, I am referring to Taylor Swift’s lyrics and also to a woman who recently caused a twitter kerfuffle by calling Joan Dideon an It Girl. However, this is good advice in general.

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Ladies and gentlethem, our heroine! ‘You waited long enough to show me kindness.’ Meet Lady Lia Felice, the Pearl of the World, the most beautiful woman at court, the sweetest and most persecuted maiden in the city, the heroine of the book Time of Iron. (She doesn’t look sad.) She’s in a love triangle, as is traditional, with the king and his most loyal and brave white knight (Or is she?). (She doesn’t look sad, why would you say that?) Her wicked stepsister is finally going to be punished for her misdeeds and Lia shall go triumphantly to the ball! Unless something were to go wrong. Unless the novel in which our pure damsel stars is villainously hijacked. Thank you so much to @vkelleyart for rendering Lia in all her pearlescent pre-Raphaelite glory. I hope you guys like The Heroine… though I know some among us are more villainously inclined…

If you want to have a ball with this beauty, there’s a preorder link to the fabulous Parnassus Books, one of the amazing US indies taking part in my preorder (with evil incentives) campaign.

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Happy Bard-day to all who celebrate. Shakespeare turns 460 today and I must celebrate his influence on Long Live Evil. He created many unforgettable villains (e.g. Edmund of King Lear, ‘now gods stand up for bastards’ a personal crush!) but I’ve always been fascinated by his play Richard III - a real person, and the last Plantagenet king, supplanted by the Tudors reigning in Shakespeare’s day, i.e. Shakespeare had to BLACKEN his name. That meant Shakespeare also wrote Richard III as the kind of man who could seduce a widow, on the day of her husband’s funeral, after killing the husband in question! What can I say, baby? Evil’s just sexier.

Shakespeare being a genius was part of what made Richard III’s name echo with infamy down the ages. Josephine Tey’s A Daughter of Time gives us a very different Richard. But isn’t that the case with Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, or a thousand fanfictions for a thousand properties, or Shakespeare himself with the legend of Romeo and Juliet, all asking ‘why’ and ‘what if’ and ‘can we explore…’

The best stories ask: who’s telling the story? How does that change the story? How many different ways are there to tell it? What do you do with the story people are telling about you? Who’s good, who’s bad and who’s interesting? That’s why, three years ago, I picked this epigraph for LONG LIVE EVIL. Thanks to the Bard for a perfect opener.

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“Your boyfriend is evil!” “Your boyfriend is cruel and horrifying!” Well, he’s a joy to me. Maybe it’s a you problem.

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“She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.”

Pride and Prejudice illustration based on the book.

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I've spent all afternoon thinking about the line from Wentworth's letter "you sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others" and about how that really is the most important part of the letter. Yes "you pierce my soul" and "I have loved none but you" and "I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago" are all more swoon-worthy. But the whole point of Persuasion is how Anne suffers because none of her friends or family acknowledge her needs or anything she says. She is made small by everyone around her. She is persuadable because she has been stripped of her agency; not by the circumstances of her life, but because the people in her life have talked over and down to her so much that she has stopped resisting. She knows that she won't be heard, so she just stops speaking. But then Wentworth hears her voice! He hears her, sees her, and he loves her for who she is, not what he wants her to be. I think Jane Austen knew exactly what she was doing by including that line. It's so subtle in such a purposeful way.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk

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unavoidable that you will be the villain in someone else's story. You will be painted in an unfavorable light. You will be the irredeemable one. and all of this will happen despite how nice you might usually be or how kind or how respectful or how warm. and you will just have to move on.

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Lil Nas X did a cover of Jolene and Dolly Parton responded to it on twitter

Image descriptions under the cut

[ID: Screenshots of two tweets. The first one is by Dolly Parton and it says "I was so excited when someone told me that Lil Nas X had done my song #Jolene. I had to find it and listen to it immediately…and it's really good. Of course, I love him anyway. I was surprised and I'm honored and flattered. I hope he does good for both of us. Thank you @LilNasX". The second tweet is Lil Nas X responding to the Dolly Parton tweet by simply saying "HOLY SHIT" in all caps. End of ID.]

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Preorder Sale

Today is the last day of the #BNPreorder deal, so I slide in villainously late because if you were considering pre-ordering my chaotic band of villains taking over a story, writers deeply appreciate a pre-order and you all deserve a wicked deal!

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/long-live-evil-sarah-rees-brennan/1144328593

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EASY A (2010) dir. Will Gluck

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The best quality a fictional man can have is being deeply, pathetically, wretchedly in love with someone, I think

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Norway, 2018

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“But pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it. What is difficult is not impossible. That English lacks an adequate lexicon for all that hurts doesn’t mean it always will, just that the poets and marketplaces that have invented our dictionaries have not—when it comes to suffering—done the necessary work.

“Suppose for a moment the claims about pain’s ineffability are historically specific and ideological, that pain is widely declared inarticulate for the reason that we are not supposed to share a language for how we really feel.”

—Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time. Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

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From the Penguin Classics intro to the 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

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HELP

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DERRY GIRLS (2018 - 2022) Season 3 | Episode 4