sashakielman

[sashakielman]

Who is your fancast for Sara Snow?

i think eleanor tomlinson in her poldark era looks a lot like how i picture sara snow. redheaded for sure, so she looks a little more distinct from cregan, since they’re half-siblings. and eyes that can see through cregan’s front so easily 😂

[sashakielman]

Very rare - black orchid or Cymbidium Kiwi Midnight.

[sashakielman]

"#reading is not like eating food" (previous tags via @stardustandtwilight)

God save me from people who insist on comparing books to food and insist there are "healthy" genres and "unhealthy" genres and insist that consuming only one type of genre (usually the one they arbitrarily decide is "unhealthy") will make your mind sick.

[sashakielman]

Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death.

-Katherine Rundell, "Why children's books?"

[sashakielman]

This was on @whatareyoureallyafraidof's post where they put up this:

And I responded with this image:

and promised in the tags to elaborate if asked. And, @frodo-the-weeb, I will. But it's going to get long and I'm going to have to split it up into several reblogs.

First of all, since not everybody in the world is a Silmarillion enthusiast, let me explain what we're referring to.

One of the stories in the Silmarillion, and possibly the one Tolkien cared about the most, is the tale of Lúthien and Beren; a highly condensed version of a narrative poem called the Lay of Leithian, which Tolkien began writing in the 1930s and tried to get his publisher interested in after the success of The Hobbit.

(Their readers said no, and they tactfully asked him to focus on his Hobbit sequel instead. "The result," in Tolkien's own words, "was The Lord of the Rings.")

The skeleton of The Lay of Leithian is as follows; I'm intentionally leaving out a bunch of information that weaves it into the overarching story of the Silmarillion but isn't relevant to the thesis I'm advancing here.

Lúthien, an Elven princess and enchantress, falls in love with a mortal man, a ranger called Beren. Her father, the Elven King Thingol, disapproves and sends him Beren off to fetch one of the jewels from the crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth. Lúthien tries to join Beren but her father imprisons her in a tower to stop her, only it's actually a treehouse because they're forest elves. Lúthien magically grows her hair long and uses it to escape. By the time she catches up with Beren he is chained in the dungeons of Morgoth's second-in-command, Thû (whom Tolkien later renamed Sauron). She rescues him with the help only of a dog, who defeats Thû himself in single combat. They then live in the forest together for quite some time, but Beren feels bad about being the reason she can't go home to her family, and still intends to finish his mission and get the jewel. He leaves one morning while she's still asleep, so as not to put her in danger, and then when he's on the threshold of Morgoth's underground fortress in the far North of Middle-Earth she catches up with him again and he accepts that she's not going to be put off. Together they enter Morgoth's fortress and make their way to his throne room. They are in disguise but Morgoth is not fooled and uncovers Lúthien in front of everyone, declaring his intention to make her one of his many slaves. Lúthien offers to sing and dance for him, which is the way she works her magic. She puts everyone in the throne room to sleep, including both Beren and eventually Morgoth. She wakes Beren and he takes the jewel and they flee, but as they get to the outer door they are stopped by Morgoth's guard-wolf, who bites off Beren's hand holding the jewel.

That's as far as Tolkien ever got with the poem, but we have the synopsis in the prose Silmarillion to tell us the rest of the story; again cutting it down to the quick, Thingol accepts Beren as his son-in-law, Morgoth's guard-wolf attacks Doriath, Beren goes and hunts it but is mortally wounded, his spirit goes to the Halls of Waiting in the Undying Lands where the dead in Middle-Earth go, Lúthien also goes there and, again through her magical song, persuades Mandos the god of the dead to let him come back. Mandos offers her a choice: live on immortally as an Elf without Beren, or return to Middle-Earth with Beren but both of them will grow old and die. She chooses the latter.

Tolkien created Lúthien as a portrait of his wife Edith, which makes Beren a picture of himself. We know this for a fact because he had LUTHIEN written on her grave when she died, and when he joined her in it two years later the name BEREN was written for him:

Now on the lower right side of my response image you'll see Pauline Baynes' illustration of the Lady in the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair, one of C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories. A quick synopsis of the Lady of the Green Kirtle's part in the story:

The Lady is a witch who rules a gloomy kingdom underneath Narnia, accessible through a fissure in the earth in an old ruined city far to the North. Before the story opens she has enspelled and kidnapped King Caspian's son Prince Rilian, whom she intends to send leading an army to conquer Narnia in her name. For twenty-three hours a day he is her willing slave and lap-dog; to maintain the spell, he must be bound to the titular silver chair for the remaining hour, during which he is sane and aware of his imprisonment. The protagonists, Eustace and Jill and their guide Puddleglum, meet her and Rilian unawares on their journey to the North; she sends them astray and almost succeeds in getting them eaten by giants. Eventually they rescue Rilian from the chair, but she sings a magical song which very nearly puts them all to sleep but for Puddleglum's intervention. Foiled, she transforms into a serpent, attacks them, and they kill her.

It is my contention that the Lady in the Green Kirtle is Lewis's caricature of Lúthien, with the enslaved and befuddled Prince Rilian representing Beren; and further, that Lewis knew or recognised that Lúthien and Beren were a literary portrait of the Tolkiens, so that The Silver Chair is ultimately a nasty commentary on their marriage.

In forthcoming reblogs I will lay out my evidence for this thesis.

[sashakielman]

my fave writing reminder

honestly, this phrase has been on my mind more times than i can count. i've kidnapped it, taken it as a hostage with no ransom money because i need it to live permanently in my head.

[sashakielman]

writing exercise i just did that kind of helped me, sharing just in case:

I've been struggling for inspiration with my current project, specifically for the dynamic of the main couple (it's a romance novel, after all). So here's what I did:

Wrote down all my favorite romantic couples in fiction. Literally went through my e-reader app and bookshelves and wrote them one by one.

Add bullet points of all the qualities I like about them. For example, with Faramir and Eowyn, I wrote "healing," "he falls at first sight," etc.

At the end, make a list of the words that appear most often. For me it was "pining," "dislike to friends to lovers" and "I see the real you." (No one is surprised)

Voila! Now you have some dynamics to play with in your WIP. From there, I brainstormed how my couple could be rivals at the start of their story, and it unlocked the possibility that they've met before and this is a second chance romance for them, which has opened up a huge new avenue of plot.

You could do this for anything, doesn't have to be romance. Favorite characters. Favorite stories. Etc. As long as you include the elements that you love about them, you are golden.

[sashakielman]

HOT NOVEL SUMMER is officially on. Ten weeks to finish a first draft--let's do this together!

[sashakielman]

[sashakielman]

My short story it is shameful to mention the things done in secret is now available to preorder on Amazon Kindle! It's about patriarchy and Catholicism trauma.

[sashakielman]

A Princess's Dream

i spent literally 3 days on this

[sashakielman]

how it feels querying agents right now

[sashakielman]

Original Novel Masterlist

Okay! Now that I have finally, over the course of uh, several years, gotten my ass in gear and published all my currently completed novels, it seems smart to put them in one place. If you're looking for some summer reading, have enjoyed my fics and other writing, or just feel like buying a book for the hell of it (always a top choice), here they are for your perusal. They are all quite different in plot, setting, and style, so please do see if anything appeals to you specifically. I am writing sequels for a few of these, namely Empire of Bones and Wormwood, but progress is slow due to insane amounts of work and also the Horrors. Nonetheless, hope springs eternal.

Generally, the available formats will include Kindle and Paperback for Amazon, Paperback and Hardcover for Lulu, and general eBook options for Draft2Digital, including Apple, B&N, Kobo, Smashwords, etc. This may vary between books, but yes.

THE EMPIRE OF BONES (doorstopper epic fantasy, for you if you like stubborn gay idiots and historical/magical adventure) Amazon | Lulu (Paperback / Hardcover) | Draft2Digital

THE WIVES (dark literary/feminist revenge saga, for you if you like women's rights and women's wrongs) Amazon | Lulu (Paperback) | Draft2Digital

WORMWOOD (sci-fi/adventure/postapocalyptic, for you if you like mind-bending sci-fi/dystopian thrillers with hopepunk) Amazon | Lulu (Paperback / Hardcover) | Draft2Digital

Enjoy!

[sashakielman]

[gripping the sink] perfectionism does not help me avoid embarrassment or shame. perfectionism is in itself a form of shame. when i struggle with perfectionism i struggle with shame. when i struggle with perfectionism i struggle with shame. when i struggle with perfectionism i struggle with shame

[sashakielman]

I got the proof PDF of the dark fantasy/fairytale anthology my Sleeping Beauty reimagining is being published in for review 🥺 she's a chonker, over 400 pages of stories and poems!

[sashakielman]

A SUGGESTED READING ORDER FOR TAMSYN MUIR'S SHORT FICTION FOR LOCKED TOMB FANS

1. The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time. 5k. It's short, it's the very first thing she published, it's sweet, you can think CamPal thoughts while you read it.

2. The Magician's Apprentice. 4.8k. Let's get into it. Simply one of the best things she's written, has all sorts of echoes for the Locked Tomb and altogether a barn burner. (tw: grooming)

3. Chew. 3.7k. Zombie fiction set in WWII. (tw: sexual assault)

4. Union. 5.5k. I love Union and think it doesn't get enough hype. Deeply, deeply Kiwi and also quite unsettling. A great follow-up to Nona.

5. Princess Floralinda and The Forty Flight Tower. 216 pages. A novella, get it from your library or as an ebook, alternatively, Moira Quirk does a great job with the audiobook. This is a fairy tale satire, as pointed and black-hearted as you can imagine. A main course & a must-read.

6. The Woman in the Hill. 3.9k. I'll be honest, I think this one is skippable, but then you can say you've read them all. Lovecraftian horror, told in an epistolary format between settlers in the New Zealand bush.

7. Undercover. 59 pages. Plop your money down (or find a pirated version), it's worth every penny. A undercover cop risks her life to investigate rumors of a ghoul in a gangster's speakeasy. Blood, devotion, deceit--everything you could want in a TMuir story.

8. The Deepwater Bride (links) Dessert. Available through hoopla, your local library or several ebook anthologies. Teen Hester Blake, from a family of seers, determines that blonde, Converse-clad Rainbow Kipley is destined to be the bride of an uncanny god. 22 pages and it'll change your life.

BONUS: self-published webcomic APOTHECIA, illustrated by Shelby Cragg. Space monsters, teenage girls & corruption, oh my.

[sashakielman]

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