sparksandspells

[sparksandspells]

Tomfoolery actually transitioned and only does she-nanigans now

[sparksandspells]

If you are a vampire NEVER feed from someone named Richard. 400 fucking years and everyone still calls me Dick Sucker

[sparksandspells]

Lamen in box 🍜 Forced proximity, anyone? (If they had more time for shenanigans and escapades in book 2, we could get some fun filler episodes 🤭)

[sparksandspells]

Warm-up sketches

Laurent, Damen, Jokaste & Nikandros

[sparksandspells]

So everyone's heard of "god loves you, but not enough to save you", right? I propose a new version: "god loves you too much to save you". The god is too selfish to let you go. They'd rather keep you trapped somewhere or doom you than lose you. They will do anything in their godly power to keep you with them. And you know what? Maybe you're okay with that. Maybe you begged them not to leave you behind when they ascended. Or maybe you're begging them now to just please, let me go, let me die, let me leave. And god says no, I love you, I can't live without you.

[sparksandspells]

Why is it that in futuristic sci-fi stories, all of the architecture is uber-modern? What's to say that in 100 years people won't be desperately trying to recreate Victorian homes, but with newer materials? Imagine a futuristic story, set 50-300 years from now, but you can tell how wealthy someone is based on how many turrets and towers their house has. Buildings are explicitly designed to look as old as possible. The ultra-wealthy live in their own personally designed medieval castles. Instead of houses made of cubes and steel and glass and all sharp angles, you have houses with stained glass chandeliers, and intricately carved spandrels, and painted porch ceilings, and walls that are a mix of wood and wallpaper.

[sparksandspells]

the problem with "elf ages"

or, intentional lifespan worldbuilding

So, one thing that I've run into a few times among people who do fantasy worldbuiding (dnd players, fantasy writers, etc.), is very divided opinions on species with extremely long (or even immortal) lifespans. Some people hate them, and give everyone a similar lifespan, while others LOVE dishing out elongated lifespans. So what's the deal? Check out a very, very long ramble about long lifespans and worldbuilding under the cut.

TL;DR: To make them interesting, unique, and compelling enough to justify their extended lifespan in your world, your long-lived species should be strongly impacted by their long lifespan on a cultural and societal level, as well as strong potential for impacts on a personal level. Lean into that. Play around with it. If the culture of your long-lived species wouldn't change at all if they lived a human lifespan, you gotta change something.

I'm going to use elves from Dungeons & Dragons as my example here, but it applies to all kind of species across many many works and worlds. According to the Player's Handbook, D&D elves can easily live to be 750 years old. As in, that's their average life expectancy. Obviously that means that even longer lifespans are possible.

The PHB also says that elves "claim adulthood and an adult name at the age of 100". People have interpreted this many ways. I've seen takes that elves physically mature at the same rate as humans (what the PHB technically says), and "adulthood" is based on experience. (i.e., a certain level of life experience or worldliness needed to be taken seriously by other elves.) This works pretty well for D&D, because it provides a good excuse for your elven adventurers to be out exploring the world.

I've also seen a couple of takes in people's fantasy worlds or hypothetical situations where elves really do just age that slowly, including physically. (I once saw a post where someone talked about how weird it would be for a human to be babysat by a "teenage" elf, and have them be barely reaching adulthood by the time they die.)

Both of these takes have interesting implication, and most of what I'm going to talk about is applicable to both, although I personally favor the first option, so I might lean there sometimes.

But anyways. What's the "problem" with long-lived species? The most common take I see advocating against extended lifespans is either that it's boring (stagnant, what the hell do you do for 600+ years) or somehow unfair. Or perhaps most commonly, that they just don't know what to do with their long-lived species.

I would like to put forwards the argument that: If your long-lived species are boring, you need to play around with your worldbuilding.

There's just so many ways you can go!! Consider human progress: 750 years ago, it was the year 1275. The late 13th century. In the 13th century the Mongol empire was founded, Thomas Aquinas was alive, the Magna Carta was signed, and Cahokia's population potentially rivaled that of London. Oh, and the Ottoman Empire was founded.

Some inventions of the century: Wooden movable type printing was invented, as were earliest rockets and landmines for warfare, both in China.

And look at where we are today. Imagine watching that much progress happen within your lifespan. If you can remember the days before cellphones (or even just before smartphones), imagine that feeling multiplied by a thousand.

Now, I know that technological progress in fantasy settings is usually slowed, so that exact feeling might not apply. But think about it! How do your long-lived species feel about the progress made by others? Are they pioneers, innovating new techniques? Is there a single inventor (or a whole team) who's been working tirelessly to improve a single kind of technology (or spell/school of magic) for centuries? Are they slow to adapt, preferring to avoid using "newfangled, untested" technology? Are they jealous of what shorter-lived species can accomplish in their lives, or are they in awe of their ingenuity?

Obviously, cultures and species aren't a monolith, so there is almost certainly a range of these opinions across their society. Play around with it! Maybe there's a band of staunch traditionalists (or even extreme nationalists) who oppose the use of any tech or magic not created by elves (or whatever long-lived species you're talking about). Maybe there's an elven philanthropist who has spent centuries expanding their network of charities and safety nets, knowing that they can help so many more people in a lifetime.

Consider how your elven/long-lived species integrates with other societies. Are they mostly isolated, living in elven-majority nations? Or are they spread out across the world, living side-by-side with shorter-lived species. How do they feel about their shorter-lived neighbors? (both on a larger, international scale and a small, building scale) How do their neighbors feel about them? Does the long-lived species find short lifespans beautiful? Tragic? Disdainful?

Again, you're going to run into a range here. Maybe there's an oddball elf who moved into a majority human village and has been like, their weird community uncle for the past 300 years. He knows everyone in the village by name, and mourns every death, even though he's seen so many. Or maybe there's an elf who was scarred early on by the loss of their shorter-lived friends, and now they stay isolated, refusing to interact with anyone who doesn't share their long lifespan.

Maybe there's a mad elven scientist who desperately wants to find a way to share their long lifespan with their loved ones. Do their loved ones actually want it?

And that's just a societal level. We haven't even gotten into the political or personal level. Imagine the power of a grudge or a wound that has been festering for centuries. Hating another nation even though the regime that wronged you was overthrown centuries ago. Or demanding someone honor a treaty that was signed before their great-grandparents were born.

Imagine a character who can't grow or change or let go of their hurt. Instead it grows, setting down roots. (AMC's Interview With The Vampire is an excellent example of this. You never change, never get better. The cycle of abuse continues for eternity, a dance following the same steps over and over and over again.)

[sparksandspells]

I feel like the reason many fantasy settings with multiple sapient species struggle to come up with a Special Thing for humans that isn't just "adaptable" or "strong-willed" is because they're trying to stick to something that could plausibly be true of real-world humans, but you don't actually have to do that. It's a fantasy setting. Maybe in your world humans are fireproof. You're allowed to get a little freaky with it.

[sparksandspells]

Drafting: The Theory of Shitty First Drafts

Writing books often exhort you to “write a shitty first draft,” but I always resisted this advice. After all,

I was already writing shitty drafts, even when I tried to write good ones. Why go out of my way to make them shittier?

A shitty first draft just kicks the can down the road, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, I’d have to write a good draft—why put it off?

If I wrote without judging what I wrote, how would I make any creative choices at all?

That first draft inevitably obscured my original vision, so I wanted it to be at least slightly good.

Writing something shitty meant I was shitty.

So for years, I kept writing careful, cramped, painstaking first drafts—when I managed to write at all. At last, writing became so joyless, so draining, so agonizing for me that I got desperate: I either needed to quit writing altogether or give the shitty-first-draft thing a try.

Turns out everything I believed about drafting was wrong.

For the last six months, I’ve written all my first drafts in full-on don’t-give-a-fuck mode. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

“Shitty first draft” is a misnomer

A rough draft isn’t just a shitty story, any more than a painter’s preparatory sketch is just a shitty painting. Like a sketch, a draft is its own kind of thing: not a lesser version of the finished story, but a guide for making the finished story.

Once I started thinking of my rough drafts as preparatory sketches, I stopped fretting over how “bad” they were. Is a sketch “bad”? And actually, a rough draft can be beautiful the same way a sketch is beautiful: it has its own messy energy.

Don’t try to do everything at once

People who make complex things need to solve one kind of problem before they can solve others. A painter might need to work out where the big shapes go before they can paint the details. A writer might need to decide what two people are saying to each other before they can describe the light in the room or what those people are doing with their hands.

I’d always embraced this principle up to a point. In the early stages, I’d speculate and daydream and make messy notes. But that freedom would end as soon as I started drafting. When you write a scene, I thought, you have to start with the first word and write the rest in order. Then it dawned on me: nobody would ever see this! I could write the dialogue first and the action later; or the action first and the dialogue later; or some dialogue and action first and then interior monologue later; or I could write the whole thing like I was explaining the plot to my friend over the phone. The draft was just one very long, very detailed note to myself. Not a story, but a preparatory sketch for a story. Why not do it in whatever weird order made sense to me?

Get all your thoughts onto the page

Here’s how I used to write: I’d sit there staring at the screen and I’d think of something—then judge it, reject it, and reach for something else, which I’d most likely reject as well—all without ever fully knowing what those things were. And once you start rejecting thoughts, it’s hard to stop. If you don’t write down the first one, or the second, or the third, eventually your thought-generating mechanism jams up. You become convinced you have no thoughts at all.

When I compare my old drafts with my new ones, the old ones look coherent enough. They’re presentable as stories. But they suck as drafts, because I can’t see myself thinking in them. I have no idea what I wanted that story to be. These drafts are opaque and airless, inscrutable even to me, because a good 90% of what I was thinking while I wrote them never made it onto the page.

These days, most of my thoughts go onto the page, in one form or another. I don’t waste time figuring out how to say something, I just ask, “what are you trying to say here?” and write that down. Because this isn’t a story, it’s a plan for a story, so I just need the words to be clear, not beautiful. The drafts I write now are full of placeholders and weird meta notes, but when I read them, I can see where my mind is going. I can see what I’m trying to do. Consequently, I no longer feel like my drafts obscure my original vision. In fact, their whole purpose is to describe that vision.

Drafts are memos to future-you

To draft effectively, you need a personal drafting style or “language” to communicate with your future self (who is, of course, the author of your second draft). This language needs to record your ideas quickly so it can keep up with the pace of your imagination, but it needs to do so in a form that will make sense to you later. That’s why everyone’s drafts look different: your drafting style has to fit the way your mind works.

I’m still working mine out. Honestly, it might take a while. But recently, I started writing in fragments. That’s just how my mind works: I get pieces of sentences before I understand how to fit them together. Wrestling with syntax was slowing me down, so now I just generate the pieces and save their logical relationships for later. Drafting effectively means learning these things about yourself. And to do that, you can’t get all judgmental. You can’t fret over how you should be writing, you just gotta get it done.

Messy drafts are easier to revise

I find that drafting quickly and messily keeps the story from prematurely “hardening” into a mute, opaque object I’m afraid to change. I no longer do that thing, for instance, where I endlessly polish the first few paragraphs of a draft without moving on. Because how do you polish a bunch of fragments taped together with dashes? A draft that looks patently “unfinished” stays malleable, makes me want to dig my hands in and move stuff around.

You already have ideas

Sitting down to write a story, I used to feel this awful responsibility to create something good. Now I treat drafting simply as documenting ideas I already have—not as creation at all, but as observation and description. I don’t wait around for good words or good ideas. I just skim off whatever’s floating on the surface and write it down. It’s that which allows other, potentially better ideas to surface.

As a younger writer, my misery and frustration perpetuated themselves: suppressing so many thoughts made my writing cramped and inhibited, which convinced me I had no ideas, which made me even more afraid to write lest I discover how empty inside I really was. That was my fear, I guess: if I looked squarely at my innocent, unvetted, unvarnished ideas, I’d see how bad they truly were, and then I’d have to—what, pack up and go home? Never write again? I don’t know. But when I stopped rejecting ideas and started dumping them onto the page, the worst didn’t happen. In fact, it was a huge relief.

Next post: the practice of shitty first drafts

Ask me a question or send me feedback!

[sparksandspells]

I am new to the captive prince fandom (love the series) and wanted to have more discourse - like, these books require an english class to teach them to me lol. Can you explain the scene in the first book where Laurent has Damen bathe him and then whips him? What's your take on why he did that / CS Pacat's goal in writing that scene? Also, what's your take on the food/feeding each other motif and how that plays into the power dynamic series? i need a TED talk on these books

i am so so sorry this took so long to answer it’s been like,,, at least a month,,, i have executive dysfunction and heaps of work that’s not being done please forgive me.

this is going to get,,, really long,, so i think for now i’ll just address the bathing scene and write about the feeding motif in another post. i tried to put this under the cut but it wouldn’t let me view it on mobile for some reason so i’m sorry in advance for the length.

i think the goal in writing the scene is to show the readers early on how manipulative laurent is. it’s very easy to say “laurent is a conniving snake”, but i think there are only a handful of instances in the books where you can see laurent at the height of his snakery, and this is definitely one of them. putting this so early in the books establishes laurent’s character very well and does it in a way that doesn’t leave pacat just telling us he’s manipulative. we see laurent manoeuvre damen into an extremely sensitive position (being naked with him in the bath) wherein there are a million ways in which he can fuck up (given that he is not actually a slave and, again, is nakey in the bath) with the express purpose that damen will fuck up (which he does) and give laurent an excuse to whip him. although he gets reprimanded for it later, he hasn’t, from an outside perspective, done anything wrong - he had his slave wash him, which is pretty run of the mill, and the slave behaved inappropriately, at which point laurent had him whipped. excessively? yes. but can anyone say laurent was outside of his rights to act the way he did? no. 

as well as deflecting blame, there’s also the deliberate framing of damen as the archetypal barbarian. laurent baits him into acting exactly how the court expect him to as an akielon, thus reinforcing their prejudices against him. look, the barbarian slave acted in exactly the way we expected him to! who is surprised? and, more importantly, who has sympathy for him? no one. even the regent doesn’t sympathise with damen - he uses laurent’s behaviour against him as a means by which to attack laurent politically, but that’s all. 

this isolation from sympathy is, imo, so that laurent can get away with humiliating damen. it’s been said before, but laurent’s actions are meant as a revenge and a punishment, and to do this successfully, he needs to make sure no one cares about damen enough to stop him (hence, bathing scene). laurent whips damen as a punishment for killing auguste, but also as revenge for what happens after. damen knows he’s a prince, and he knows he killed laurent’s brother. damen doesn’t know laurent knows, but laurent also knows he’s a prince and killed laurent’s brother. the bathing, the whipping, and the feeding all reinforce laurent’s position of power over damen that is both institutional (master/slave) and psychological. i won’t go too deeply into the feeding stuff now because i really want to go into that in more depth and this is already quite long! but isolating damen and forcing him into a servile position, stripping him of his power, rank, and sense of self? that’s an awful lot like what the regent does to laurent. and the regent is able to do that because of damen, even if damen didn’t know that. 

the only person laurent blames for that is damen, not the regent. the regent works very hard to make sure of that - consider his speech at the kingsmeet, where he puts the blame on laurent for being so young and vulnerable, that he ‘just couldn’t say no’. also consider the fact that laurent is actively puzzled by damen’s refusal to have sex with nicaise because he’s a child. this isn’t because it’s necessarily ingrained in veretian society, or because laurent personally thinks it’s fine to have sex with children - it’s because laurent does not realise that his abuse was the regent’s fault, and a decision that the regent could have not made if he wanted to. 

laurent’s aim with the bath scene, and most of his actions in book 1, is to put damen in the same position that he considers damen to have put him in; subservient to someone else, powerless, and susceptible to random acts of violence. laurent can have damen beaten at any time with a contrived excuse if he wants to. he can have him chained up and sexually assaulted if he wants to. there doesn’t have to be any real reason why, other than he wants to, and there probably wasn’t any reason young laurent could see as to why the regent abused him, except that he wanted to. in my view, that’s laurent’s goal in the bathing scene - to establish that kind of power over damen, to inflict upon him what laurent blames him for. 

and, from a literary perspective, pacat’s goal is to create a frame of reference for laurent very early in the book to acquaint readers with his character without just telling us that he’s a calculating, violent SOB. what’s more effective - telling the reader that laurent is awful, or the raw brutality of reading damen being beaten to within an inch of his life for reasons yet unknown from his own perspective? 

[sparksandspells]

...huh! "the craft in capri is middling" is such an unexpected take, because as a fellow certified Prose Snob™, i never at any point felt like the capri books were anything other than Exquisite. (Though I could certainly have used a few more dialogue tags for better understanding of who was speaking, but this was only a problem occasionally.) So I would really be curious to know what elements of it you had problems with, because, of all the many (valid and less valid) criticisms of the books, I don't think I've ever encountered this one lol.

I definitely have a lot more problems with the structure and plot holes, though mostly only in the third book's second half (and, well, the implication that Damen had realized something he very much had not realized, which completely changed my reading of some of his interactions with Laurent for the next book and a half 😅), so if that's most of what you mean, I definitely agree with that aspect way more. but overall, i generally found the writing incredibly lush and evocative, sharply insightful and surprising, and consistently humorous in a quiet, wry way.

I would also argue that it's not romantasy, and in fact it's not a romance at all -- to me, there is a distinct difference between, "this work has many subplots, one of which happens to be a love story that ends happily," and "the main appeal, plot, stakes, and conflicts are related to these two characters' romantic relationship and whether they can make it work". it's a completely different story structure, set of concerns, and overall feel. furthermore, i think pitching book one as a "romance" is, uhhh... incredibly misleading, and definitely sets the reader up for the wrong set of expectations. (not that you did this, but I've seen it around and it always annoys me)

also, personally i was unaware of any distinction between "genre" fiction and "literary" fiction until i started researching the publishing industry of the U.S., and I didn't realize just how deep that divide went until I was in creative writing courses in a U.S. college and realized that there was nothing in those discussions, reading materials, or exercises, that was geared towards producing writing that was... enjoyable, to read, in any way? until people started calling my work "genre fiction" and acting as if that was something to be pitied about ("oh, poor girl, she wants to write *lowers voice* genre fiction"), I didn't realize that there were people who thought of 'genre fiction' as a lesser art form. now, I will freely admit that while I was a wide and voracious reader as a kid, I haven't read much of the classics or literary fiction as an adult, because I naturally drifted towards the kind of fiction that felt more meaningful and enticing to me personally, and that was basically anything *but* literary fiction lmao. (though i did not know of that category then.)

all of which is a long-winded way of saying that I (like you, seemingly) also don't consider the distinction between "literary" and "genre" fiction to be entirely valid, but if we *are* talking about fiction in those terms, then the comparison between the two would come out unfavorable towards the literary side. there are definitely many works of varying quality on both sides, but in my estimation, a well-crafted "genre" work that really takes care to polish its plot as well as its prose can reach heights I've never heard any "literary" work even aiming for. and that high execution level doesn't make those genre works any more "literary", it just makes them really well-executed "genre" fiction. and I am frustrated by how few authors I see attempting it, but I think that with a bit more polishing of that third book (and maybe the very first chapter of book one), Capri would be up there, above all the Austens and the Dickenses, at least for me. so, again, I'm really curious to read the examples of what you mean; please tag me in that post! 😁

(huh, I'm not sure why I wrote all that out 😅 please don't think I'm attacking you or anything, I just find discussions about art and people's different perceptions of it really fascinating)

@dehautdesert replied to your post “@dehautdesert replied to your post “@tajmutthall...”:

your last paragraph makes me think that you took my comment as me being critical of your stance and saying that you're unfamiliar with the genre, but that wasn't really my intention, I just love dissecting writing and watching other people do it as well haha. Dunnett isn't in the same genre as Pacat, not really being either romance or fantasy. She writes historicals and has a very ornate, almost melodramatic style full of sensory details and weird word choices that's just super specific and recognizable as her own. And I know Pacat has been influenced by her and is aiming for a similar style, so I'm incapable of judging his writing separate from what I know was the benchmark in his head. So that's why I was curious to see what someone sees without that framework in their heads! I totally agree with you that we shouldn't avoid judging genre fiction against more "highbrow" works because we're automatically expecting it to be bad. For me genre fiction vs. literary should be more a reflection of what each aims to express, not a signifier of quality. admittedly it's been a while since I read CaPri, but I don't remember the prose being particularly bad on a craft level. I even remember finding it better than the average fantasy novel with similar themes/length (IMHO Holly Black writes worse than Pacat, and so does Ellen Kushner). So I was curious about what I missed. Honestly it's the uneven tone and pacing that I had issues with, mostly because of the way it jumped from one genre's conventions to another's a bit too clumsily for me, so you would get a very melodramatic trauma porn scene and then it would jump to a cutesy tropey fanficcy scene in the next paragraph. And also the whole structure of book 3 I guess.

​"your last paragraph makes me think that you took my comment as me being critical of your stance and saying that you're unfamiliar with the genre" oh i wasn't at all, don't worry!! sorry, i forget that tone doesn't quite come through on the internet but i'm glad we both seem to having a conversation in good faith lol

ah that's so interesting re: dunnett, i really should check out her work then! i do admit i have a preference for fantasy/fiction authors published before 1990s lol because i prefer that style of written english, now you're making me want to read her work then go back to CaPri to observe said benchmark.

re: craft in CaPri, it's not particularly bad but it's definitely middling (i'll see if i can get around to making a post w examples and i'll tag you if/when i do!), i have a friend who said he only made it 2 chapters before he put it down bc the writing style wasn't his thing. i haven't read any black or kushner or really much else for fantasy (went through a 5-year fiction reading drought that only just broke last year)...i think overall the CaPri writing style is YA-esque (despite the topics being mature/explicit etc) and you can see that fanfic influence come through (unsure if Pacat has said he's written fanfic before but i would hazard yes). i've only just started rereading book 2 so i might post more about it later on.

also if you have any recs for the fanfic that does it better I'm totally open lmfao

hmm i'll have to dig into my ao3 bookmarks but i do have one off the top of my head! it's Immovable, unbreakable by Cards_Slash (rated E, 137k words). It's an Assassin's Creed fic but imo you don't need any AC knowledge to enjoy the fic (i didn't have any/wasn't from the fandom).

It's of course not an exact match to CaPri, but it does the m/m enemies-to-lovers, dubious consent/captivity, slowly trusting each other/revealing of secrets, and working together to defeat a larger enemy really well. it's the fic I think of the most when reading the more ehh parts of CaPri. It's set in omegaverse, which i know some people dislike from the get-go for various reasons, but i'd still recommend giving it a try even if you're not an a/b/o fan. i think it's done really well in this fic with solid worldbuilding and doesn't shy away from the inherent dubcon/gender fuckery that comes with omegaverse. The writing is solid, confident, and beautiful, and I enjoy the style. hope it's to your liking!

[sparksandspells]

Having myths and lore-within-lore in your worldbuilding

I mentioned this elsewhere but having lore within your lore that the narrative never reveals whether or not it’s true is some delicious worldbuilding that I live for.

It’s the opposite of “characters in a fantasy setting are inexplicably extremely knowledgeable about politics and history that does not concern them to inform the clueless protagonist”.

As with fairytales and myths in real life, having myths within your world, and which groups believe in them, can say a lot about their perspective on their world and how they see themselves in relation to others, the gods, the earth, etc.

Even better is when there’s multiple refuted versions of the same myth and which characters believe which version also speaks to their personality, and anything they probably would never admit about themselves otherwise.

You can reveal which myths are true, but I think it’s more fun to leave it unknown and let both the characters and the audience speculate.

Example:

I write about fantasy vampires, and my deuteragonist tells the protagonist ~allegedly~ where they came from. In my universe, vampires have a signature scent, as unique as their voice, and it’s always from the land. Soil, petrichor, flowers, wheat, cut grass, herbs, spices, nectars, fruits, etc.

Why? Nobody knows but…

“Allegedly, the first vampire was a person wrongfully murdered for the death of their child. Brought back by their grief to seek justice on the true killer. So we are all reborn from the earth and the flowers that were buried with them.” … “Other versions say it’s the child who came back to guide their anguished parent and others say it was the secret killer cursed by the gods to live forever with their guilt, and the shroud of all their unmarked graves.”

Which is the real reason? Idk. It doesn’t matter. Which version is believed by my characters—and which versions were propagated by those who hate vampires—speaks volumes.

Are vampires ruthless serial killers compelled to kill every chance they get, or are they just people, trapped by immortality while all they’ve ever known and cared about inevitably ages and dies around them?

[sparksandspells]

Aussie Laurent is so shoujo prince coded ✨👼🔪

[sparksandspells]

Six to Seven Hours: or; The Adventures of Arkas, a Once Famous Gladiator from Isthima (on AO3)

rated E | 10K words | one-shot, complete!

“My cousin told me,” said Alexon, proudly, “he met a man who had once been a famous gladiator from Isthima. He lasted only minutes in the arena with Damianos. But afterwards Damianos had him in his chambers for six hours.”

“Seven hours,” said Lamen, frowning slightly.

— C.S. Pacat, The Adventures of Charls, the Veretian Cloth Merchant

This is (in part) the story of Arkas, a once famous gladiator from Isthima, and his friend, Basia, a once famous gladiator from Vask. At an inn in Patras they meet two sheep farmers: one a sizable man, the other has yellow hair and keen blue eyes. Perhaps they drink too much double-strength wine. Perhaps they tell too many tales.

It is also (in part) the story of King Laurent of Vere and King Damianos of Akielos. At an inn in Patras, at a table with two gladiators, King Laurent learns of more than just his husband’s sexual prowess.

[sparksandspells]

🌺

[sparksandspells]

okay tumblr’s exclusion from the twitter social media ban list is hilarious but genuinely we do not belong on there. if a real human person asks “where can i find you on social media” and your choice is a swift death or revealing your tumblr, most of us would simply expire. half of y’all change urls every week like you’re in witness protection. just imagine for one second attaching your wholeass government name to your latest two am clownposting and tell me that didn’t send a cold chill down your spine. the only place i ever want to see the words “connect with me on tumblr!” is on the ao3 profile of an author i’m actively stalking. anyone in the world can follow me except anyone i personally know. antisocial media.

[sparksandspells]

my dream as a fanfic writer is for one day, one of my fics to be someones comfort fic. like the fic that they reread when they don't feel good and want to be happy. i want my words to comfort someone one day