shivadh

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I know there's basically no catholics in the Ask, but I would love to be a fly on the wall as the royal family follows the Conclave.

I am watching the livestream! so are the entire Jewish Shivadh Royal Family. We, they, love Rome and Italy. And we are awaiting the new Pope with excitement.

And trepidation.

We love Italy and we are awaiting the announcement of the new pope. But the pope has never been great news for Jews, regardless of his name. So we watch in awe and fear.

I wish Askazer-Shivadlakia was real, because Jews are safe there. They are not in Rome.

G-d please ordain a pope who loves Jews.

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@dignitywhatdignity said regarding this post:

I have it in my head that everyone *knows* Prince Edward ben Gregory and nomadic food writer Zack Rambler are the same guy, but no one says so.

Even better --

So, the Rambler surname is pretty unique and Eddie's brand is strong enough that it's still pretty well known in the 2040s. If Zach wants to go incognito he's going to have to pick another surname.

He could go with Johnson, that's Tully's birth surname, but Zach Johnson isn't that marketable. Nobody knows Ceece's birth surname, she won't tell. So he could go to his other father's side -- Miranda was a Daskaz before she was crowned, but Zach Daskaz looks like some kind of attempt at a palindrome. Michaelis never had a proper surname, Ben Jason is more like an honorific and wouldn't be passed down. But King Jason was just a guy before he was elected. And his surname is perfect -- interesting but not super weird, and a nice way to honor Zach's grandfather.

Zach Michaelis, award-winning travel and food influencer for his innovative web series See You On The Road, will be releasing his first book this fall. Part travel memoir and part cookbook, "King of the Road" details his food-driven ramblings from rural Wales to the seaports of New Zealand, meeting chefs and surfers, artists, fellow vagabonds, royalty, and con men along the way.

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Ahaahahhaha I could write an entire novel set in the One Highland.

swallowkite replied to your post “Omg Sam, reading that you burn Mountain Lodge in your cursed condo…”

For some reason I thought Mountain Lodge was a book at first and that is was totally normal for someone to burn a Chris Evans book to ward off evil condo spirits.

Oh my god I went on the best little journey with this comment, where I was like Yes, Chris Evans would write a book called Mountain Lodge, or maybe it would be a fantasy novel, like King of the Mountain Lodge – no wait, he would star in LORD OF THE MOUNTAIN LODGE, a romance novel with him with super long flowing hair on the cover…

Probably standing on a rock with like, Sebastian Stan clutching his leg or something…

The mental image of Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan posing dramatically on the cover of a gay romance novel, like, standing on a rock with waves crashing against it, at least one of them wearing a lace-up style shirt with billowy sleeves and holding a sword, is going to get me through January, probably.  

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Just stashing this here as a note to self along with a link....

Antler engraving found in Lortet Cave in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of France. It was carved from a reindeer antler and shows a group of reindeer crossing a river or lake full of swimming salmon. Dating to the Magdalenian period, approximately 17,000-12,000 years ago.

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ofinfinitespace replied to your post“ofinfinitespace replied to your post“drgaellon replied to your…”

Apparently there was a literal red-pen war as the drawings were being approved where the city would cross the bridge out and then the matriarch of the Pritzker family would demand it would be put back in because she had her heart set on Gehry doing the Pavillion and he was going to bail if the footbridge got axed.

I need a book about this. I mean, I’ve been waiting for literal years for someone to do a tell-all about their interfamily feuds and their bizarre shadow rule over Chicago; this just sounds like the perfect way into the story of The Pritzkers. And while I don’t know a ton about Gehry I know enough about architects to know he probably contributed to the conflict in not insignificant ways. 

What I’m saying is there needs to be a book about this that I don’t write myself.

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Read the rest of the twitter essay on Calgary’s bootleg Pizza delivery companies here

Definitely the highlight of tonight was stumbling on this. Calgary WTF.

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Well, in some ways this was a bit prescient. In any case tucking this away here to consider a future Shivadh novel playing with these themes...

Oh my God.

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Wedding vest, 1879

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Realized I should probably stash this here so I can find it again...

If its not too personal could you talk about what was the inspiration for Michaelis? He's got a lot of depth to him, especially for what could have been a one off character in the background after Fete. Also the way he mourns but carries on really resonates with me in Jes.

Oh sure! I mean, on the one hand it is quite personal but it's a kind of personal I really enjoy sharing. :D Michaelis began life as the Standard Hallmark Parent -- you see them a lot in the movies, the parent who is

1. Kinda grouchy

2. Usually pushing their kid slightly too hard in slightly the wrong direction (with the best of intentions)

3. Often a widow/er

4. Practically a cameo designed to stress out the lead, but easily attractive enough that they could be romantic lead themselves in the sequel.

There are actually several Hallmark films where the over-sixty characters are either the supporting romance in a one-off film or the main romance of a sequel film. (The Wedding Veil films, which despite their flaws are actually very enjoyable, have a Michaelis-like character for the mother of the male lead in the first movie, and she then becomes the major supporting romantic lead in the fourth movie.)

By the time I got to Michaelis talking to Eddie at the end of the script for Fete, I'd grown to really like him. When I adapted the script to a novel, I liked him even more. I thought that I could do a sequel with him getting jolted out of himself a bit -- and I was encouraged by how many people liked him in the initial read through. The main inspirations for the actual plot of Infinite Jes were, one, Gregory jokingly suggesting he do a podcast, and two, Michaelis's defensive dismissal of Gregory's question about what he's done for companionship since Miranda passed.

Over the course of writing Infinite Jes, he came to be a collection of themes I've explored or wanted to explore, sometimes themes I knew I wasn't skilled enough to handle yet. The core of him is based on a professor I worked with as a student; the confidence that occasionally tips into arrogance, the keen intellect that likes to take things apart, the ability to look at some toxic family traits and decide "RIP but I'm different" and be a present, nurturing masculine figure, all come from that professor, who had a huge impact on me.

But I have also been fascinated for decades now by a certain kind of character in fiction, someone who has had a devastating loss and keeps going, even if they aren't driven by something like revenge. Profound grief is difficult and fascinating for me, and I finally felt capable of exploring that fully, perhaps because the pressure on romance novels is a bit lower at times.

And honestly, a lot of him is me, processing the fact that I am aging in fandom. I'm older (44) than the oldest person I knew in fandom (38) when I joined it at the age of 14. I have, for lack of a better word, a position in fandom, a status, that affords me certain perks and requires of me certain obligations. Not to call myself elected king of fandom ("I didn't vote for him!") but the duty I feel to fandom, both as a culture that raised me and a found family, is very similar.

Most of my characters contain some of me, but Michaelis and Jerry contain far more of me than most, perhaps because I'm in a place to do some reflection. Michaelis -- intelligent, experienced, hopefully a mentor, but also lonely and detached at times -- is who I'm coming to grips with being; Jerry, the charming fuckup with power but no real clue how to use it, who is doing his best to grow up a little later than a lot of his peers and figure out how disability fits into his identity, is who I still see myself as.

So yeah -- I find Michaelis incredibly fun and compelling to write for, and I think that's because I had hit a skill level in my work where I could combine a lot of tropes and themes into one character and use him to explore why I enjoy them so much. But he definitely began life as the Hallmark Widowed Dad. :D Well, there are worse origin stories.

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I do sometimes think about Athena the tiger going to her preserve in Texas, where she immediately gets a reputation as the sweetest of the tigers. The preserve staff don't go near the tigers except for feeding and even then it's always on the other side of the fence. They're a preserve, not a petting zoo. They have a no-visitors policy, even. But Athena always takes her dinner daintily and is very well-behaved for the veterinarian.

And inevitably there's a moment where a charming if somewhat tired-seeming man and his wife arrive with a toddler, and the director of operations shakes their hands and guides them into the staff breakroom. The staff all look uneasily at each other because every so often a celebrity does visit and gets to go look at the tigers because they pay the bills, but these people aren't famous, nobody seems to know who they are. All the same, the director of operations does, and she loads them into the jeep when it's feeding time, and off they go.

They don't get out of the jeep while the staff are feeding the tigers, but as soon as Athena comes up for her turn at the food the man and woman both clearly recognize her, and the woman says, "Look, Sera, there's Ms. Athena," to their little daughter. She giggles and stands up and her dad has to catch her before she tries to leap out of the jeep.

And when they're back at the main building a check changes hands, and the woman asks the director of operations if she needs anything, and when they're assured that Athena is well and thriving, they go on their way.

"Who was that?" one of the staff asks the director of operations.

"Old friends of Athena's," the director replies.

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ok

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Haven't read this yet because I'm a loser but throwing it in here so I will remember to. Thank you!

The original Coronation Chicken. The lord of the manor of Addington was required as a “kitchen sarjeanty” to provide this chicken dish to the monarch at every coronation from William the Conqueror to George IV

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Ostia Archaeological Park, Italy.

In the year 48, the Emperor Claudius was in this place when some freedmen arrived to give him the incredible news that his wife, the Empress Valeria Messalina, had married a senator and were planning to overthrow him. Ostia Antica is an ancient Roman city located at the mouth of the Tiber.

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Recently, I discovered these "Galia melons" while shopping. It obviously made me think of the Shivadhverse immediately, but also made me question how you came up with the name? (Wikipedia told me that Galia means "God's wave" in Hebrew is that related to why?)

[ID: A small cantaloupe-looking melon with wrinkly yellow skin, labeled "Bio Galia Melone"; it looks delicious.]

So, fun story, as I recall I just...came up with the name, like I thought "what would I like to name a country" and thought "Galia." Then I googled to make sure the word wasn't already in use or offensive or something, because it did feel like a word that already existed. That was when I found out it means "God's Wave" in Hebrew, at least that's how it is in my memory. (I'm...genuinely worried there's something out there about me finding the meaning first, everything gets muddled after a while -- as Michaelis says there's so damn much to remember when you get to be my age.)

ANYWAY, I definitely did not know about the melons until later, although I suspect honestly what happened is that I saw the melons in Trader Joe's, where they sell them seasonally each year, and internalized the word without consciously noticing it. The first time I saw a Galia melon in Trader Joe's I nearly did stop and do a forehead-smack, but I've done enough dumb things in that Trader Joe's (viz patience bananas and multiple times getting mistaken for a manager in my floral shirts) that I can't push my luck. :D

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For #WorldHoneyBeeDay 🐝 here are two golden illuminations from a pair of famous early 13th c. English bestiaries:

Aberdeen Bestiary, Univ. Lib. MS 24 f.63r Aberdeen University Library

Ashmole Bestiary, MS Ashmole 1511 f.75v Bodleian Libraries

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The Mont Blanc Vertical Kilometer. It’s actually 3.8K (about two and a third miles) but from start to finish you climb one full vertical kilometer up the side of a motherfucking mountain. (The video at the link is not in English and is still mind-blowing.)

How does one even train for that kind of thing. 

Like. I kinda wanna do it. And as a Chicago runner it would 100% destroy me.