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[suzannahnatters]

You've heard of Pascal's Wager, now get ready for Nijam's Theorem: the presence of a Higher Power may be deduced from the sudden onset of unwanted and uncomfortably romantic situations with the man you have been successfully avoiding for the last 12 months

[suzannahnatters]

“The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.”

― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante NB. it is probably important to note that although this quote is an ageless banger, Charles Williams was, himself, as a person, scum.

A post of mine from several months ago about the Perlesvaus self-rearranging forest just wandered across my dash again and made me think about it some more, so I wanted to talk about it a bit.

Perlesvaus, for those who don’t know, is a 13th-century French Arthurian romance. It’s intended to be a continuation of Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, but it’s mostly known for being completely batshit when it’s known at all. (There’s an old book on Arthurian texts that dedicates a chapter to Perlesvaus and repeatedly speculates that the anonymous author had Something Wrong With Him. This is the longest scholarly treatment of Perlesvaus I’ve been able to find & read.)

Anyway, there’s an odd worldbuilding detail in the text. See, it’s a Thing in chivalric romances that the questing knights happen upon castles & lords & damsels & such that are unfamiliar to them and have to be explained. You know, “this is the Castle of Such-and-Such, where the local custom is as follows. It’s ruled by Lady So-and-So, whose character I shall now describe to you.”

This is a genre convention that largely goes unquestioned, but it’s a bit odd if you think about it. All these knights are at least minor nobility. They don’t know the other nobles in their region? They don’t know what castles are where? Don’t they have, like, diplomatic relations with these people or at least attend the same tournaments? Even if they’re all fully committed to the knight-errant lifestyle and don’t really engage in courtly diplomacy, you’d think they would share information with each other and get the lay of the land. But instead, to use TTRPG terminology, it’s like they’re all on a hexcrawl that was randomly generated just for them to have these adventures.

The author of Perlesvaus decides to address this. In what’s kind of a throwaway paragraph late in the text, he explains that God moves things around so knights always have new quests to do (and, presumably, is also making sure they always arrive at the right narratively-significant moment). So the reason they’re always encountering people & places they have no knowledge of is because those people & places really weren’t there yesterday. They didn’t know about the Castle of Such-and-Such because it’s normally a thousand miles away and the forest path they followed to get there used to lead somewhere else.

And I think that would be a really interesting thing to stick into a novel or a TTRPG or something. When a knight rides into the forest with the intent of Going On A Quest, at some point they go around a bend in the path, cross an invisible barrier, and wind up in the Forest of Narrative. This is a vast forest with no set geography, filled with winding paths and populated almost entirely with questing knights, damsels in search of questing knights, friendly hermits, strange creatures, and allegorical set-pieces. Then, at the narratively-appropriate time, they cross back over the invisible barrier back into the regular world, and find themselves wherever the Narrative has decided they need to be. This could be a different country, a different continent, or a different world entirely.

Whether anyone involved is actually aware that this is how it works is… optional, really. Though if it’s not a Known Phenomenon, the people whose jobs it is to handle trade & diplomacy & god forbid, maps, are going to end up tearing their hair out in frustration.

[suzannahnatters]

Just under 48 hours away now! Don't miss it <3

The girlies and I (Christina Baehr, Claire Trella Hill, and WR Gingell). have all released books in the past month, so we're going live on Instagram to celebrate! Come and hang out with us - bring questions and tea!

Instagram Live

6pm Sunday 21st PDT

9pm Sunday 21st EDT

11am Monday 22nd AEST

1pm Monday 22nd NZST

[suzannahnatters]

I have finished watching MR SUNSHINE, and there was so much that I loved about this prestige kdrama. The writing of the heroine was SO good in how it discussed and defied some of the worse kdrama-heroine tropes. There was amazingly trenchant and deeply nuanced social criticism, gorgeous cinematography, lots of fascinating history, the warmest and most positive depiction of Christianity I've ever seen in a kdrama, men who drink respect women juice, the beautiful and angsty Gu Dong-Mae, FABULOUS period clothing, and rivals in love learning to put aside their differences in favour of shooting imperialists.

But the show has a major flaw - a flaw that was particularly interesting to me, because it's the precise sort of flaw that I would be most prone to. The screenwriter, who does such brilliant work in so many other ways, is clearly most fascinated by the themes and symbolism she keeps bubbling away in the story's subtext. The problem is that these themes and symbolism - which delightfully clever - are not actually supported by the storytelling, and particularly by the characterisation.

And it's a really fun, rich, resonant bit of symbolism: Ae-Sin is not just a character in the story, she's the living embodiment of Joseon Korea. She's beautiful, desirable, noble, privileged, gradually awakening to a life of hardship and struggle and resistance. Each of the three male leads in the story has a different complicated relationship with her. Eugene has run away from Korea, but returning as an adult cannot help falling in love with the land and the people in defiance of the nobility who mistreated him as a boy. Gu Dong-mae was horribly oppressed by his homeland but cannot help loving it anyway; the Korea which oppressed both men also saved their lives through small acts of kindness. And finally, Hee-Sung, Korea's richest son, is her approved betrothed, but past injustices committed by his family against the people Ae-Sin cares about stand between them. The three men fall in love, not with Ae-Sin, but with their homeland. They express their love for the woman by sacrificing themselves for the homeland; in dedicating themselves to her, they cannot help dedicating themselves to the fight for freedom.

This is why the story had to have a sad ending. None of these men can espouse the whole country; they can only die for her, while Ae-Sin - Korea itself - lives on, alone and victorious, even in exile.

This symbolism is itself delightfully rich, deftly painted, and rewarding to think back upon once you see it. There's only one problem: it doesn't. make. sense.

From the very start of the show, I felt a little impatient with the writing because the relationships between the heroine and her three suitors are so poorly developed. The feelings come out of nowhere. Take Gu Dong-Mae, for instance: he last met this woman when she saved his life as children. Now, it just takes a brush of her dress across his fingers to get him pining madly for her. Hee-Sung, after avoiding her for the best part of a decade, gets one glimpse of Ae-Sin at the washing-line and just like that conceives an undying passion for her. The central relationship, between Ae-Sin and Eugene, doesn't fare much better. The problem is that the story demands each of the male leads to sacrifice himself for Ae-Sin by the end of the show, and I simply couldn't understand why they should. They all have multiple other women pining for them, and Ae-Sin doesn't give two of them the slightest encouragement to hope. I wanted them so badly to find happiness with one of the other women, and they never did.

What MR SUNSHINE needed was not primarily rich and complex symbolism - it was believable characterisation and relationship development. As it was, the lack of substance to the relationships cheapened the grand historical tragedy which was being told. When at the climactic moment the last of the three leads sacrifices himself for the heroine, it felt cheesy and unintentionally funny, rather than tragic.

I loved so much about this story, but the heart of it never clicked for me, and it's a crying shame that with all that budget and talent, it wasn't better written. And that, for me, will be the central tragedy of MR SUNSHINE.

[suzannahnatters]

The girlies and I (Christina Baehr, Claire Trella Hill, and WR Gingell). have all released books in the past month, so we're going live on Instagram to celebrate! Come and hang out with us - bring questions and tea!

Instagram Live

6pm Sunday 21st PDT

9pm Sunday 21st EDT

11am Monday 22nd AEST

1pm Monday 22nd NZST

[suzannahnatters]

I asked @scarvenartist to draw Molly and Vasily AND DID SHE EVER 🤣😍😭 Look at their little faces!

There's a moment in DARK & DAWN when Molly imagines a future with Vasily and while I can't always think of moments that would make good illustrations I knew I wanted to see this one:

"I was struck, quite helplessly, by the vision of a domestic life with this man. I imagined a little loft in Paris or Vienna somewhere, wallpapered with sketches of me, in which Vasily lounged comfortably in bare feet and a dressing-gown of figured silk, by turns sipping champagne, ironing sheets, ordering duck, and complaining about the landlady."

[suzannahnatters]

Thank you so much for opening this up and for the list, Suzannah! :) Below are my asks~~

5. What is your ultimate favourite book?

11. Favourite authors? (Feel free to include/emphasize the underrated/non pop ones ;)

31. Is there a particular album/movie/TV show that really matched the vibes of a book you read? Which ones?

39. Favourite book to movie/TV show adaptation? (feel free to throw in a few - old+new are appreciated ;)

42. If you could change the ending of any one book, which book would you pick and why?

58. A book that emotionally wrecked you?

Thank you so much!

5. My favourite book of all time is The Lord of the Rings. Not a single misplaced word. The greatest artistic achievement of the 20th century, bar none. Demonstrates magnificent command of narrative, spectacular use of language, majestic thematic resonance, unforgettable settings and characters, impeccable grasp of military strategy and tactics, and an ending so poignant in its bittersweet emotion that it lifts an already brilliant book into the pantheon of great classics.

It may surprise you to learn that this is my favourite book because I've never even attempted to write anything remotely like it, but this is simply me recognising that I'd be an utter loon to try.

11. Favourite authors? I have so many! Among the dead my faves are JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser. The most obscure author I'm really abnormal about is Spenser, whose Faerie Queene is a magnificent epic of knights, monsters, virtues, vices, and the coolest ladies you will ever meet (Britomart, my love!!!). My favourite author of nonfiction is William Dalrymple who writes about travel and history mostly in Asia and is always worthwhile. 31. I'm having a lot of trouble with this one, so I'm going to flail out wildly and say that the album "Arcadia" by Eurielle is, from memory, a really close vibe match with Elizabeth von Armin's The Enchanted April, which is totally a book you should all read - peaceful, sunshiny, nostalgic.

39. Right now my favourite book-to-screen adaptation is Dune - Villeneuve's two movies are a brilliant adaptation job that capture what makes the book great and then improve on it in some key ways. Other noteworthy adaptations include The Princess Bride for a note-perfect adaptation of an already enormously fun book and Crazy Rich Asians which is SO much better than the book it's hard to believe.

42. Ooh! There are two books I absolutely adore, but the endings really disappointed me. Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? is one of my favourites of his, but I will always be disappointed that Alice ends up with John Grey - he starts out by disrespecting and gaslighting her, and while they eventually patch things up at the end, I never felt that he had really learned his lesson or would treat Alice any better in the future, and given that the book is over 300,000 words long I was super invested in Alice getting a good ending and I will never not be disappointed that she didn't. On the other hand, there's The Prisoner of Zenda in which the hero and heroine heroically relinquish their love for honour and this is why I can never write a good old-fashioned swashbuckler, even though I adore reading them, because deep down I don't believe that one should act like a turnip for the sake of honour, and you can't have a swashbuckler without that. 58. The most emotionally wrecked I've ever been by a book is Jennie by Paul Gallico. I was a BLUBBERING MESS but also mad about it to this day because I don't think he had the right to do that to anyone.

(Ask me more asks!)

[suzannahnatters]

Hello! I have bookish asks! I'm doing them all in one; hope that's ok.

4. What is your favorite book this year?

18. Recommend a book to the person who sent you this ask. (Please?)

33. Do you annotate as you read or prefer not to? (Piggybacking: if you annotate, do you annotate your main copy, or do you keep a separate copy for annotation?)

48. If you could be a part of any story you've read, which book would you pick?

4. The year is yet young! But of the books I've read for the first time in 2024 so far, my favourite fiction read has probably been The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf by Gerald Morris. I'm legendarily picky about medieval-set books and Arthurian books, having written both of those myself. I haven't loved all the Gerald Morris books I've read (I'm finishing the series now). BUT. This was a never-ending delight. The real favourite is non-fiction, however - Amy Peeler's Women and the Gender of God was just brilliant, discussing what the Incarnation of God through Mary the Virgin can tell us about God, gender, and the place of women in redemptive history. I've read a lot of books about women in Christianity and this is by far the best. 18. Going on the fact that you've enjoyed a lot of books by me and my friends, and thinking about which books I think could have been written by me and my friends, I think you'd probably love Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson and/or The Red Palace by June Hur. 33. I rarely write ON a book (though it has been known to happen). I often do take notes in a note-taking app while reading, however, from detailed summaries of things I'm reading as research for my own books, to main points I want to hit in my Goodreads review. 48. The Chronicles of Narnia, without the slightest doubt. You're bound to have thrilling adventures, nothing bad is going to happen to you, and you will be part of a splendid magical world designed to make you a better person. When I was 9 years old I used to sit in my little white wardrobe waiting expectantly to be let through to Narnia any minute, and I was absolutely making the right choice there. (Ask me more asks!)

[suzannahnatters]

. 𝓟𝓪𝓾𝓵 𝓜𝓾𝓪𝓭'𝓭𝓲𝓫 𝓐𝓽𝓻𝓮𝓲𝓭𝓮𝓼 ⋆ 𝓓𝓾𝓴𝓮 𝓸𝓯 𝓐𝓻𝓻𝓪𝓴𝓲𝓼

...painting illustration study of my favorite feral goth space desert rat Paul Atreides

[suzannahnatters]

Book Asks

How many books did you read last year?

Do you have a reading goal this year?

How many books have you read (this year) so far?

What is your favourite book this year?

What is your ultimate favourite book?

What is a book that you hated but read anyway?

A book you were hyped about but ended up being disappointed by it?

A book you've always wanted to read but never got a chance?

A book you're never, ever gonna read?

Actually, do you have an anti TBR? If so, list it!

Favourite authors?

Least favourite authors?

A genre you aren't a fan of in particular?

A genre you love?

A reading habit you could get "canceled" for?

Paperbacks or hardcovers?

Physical copies or e-books?

Recommend a book to the person who sent you this ask.

Do you prefer reading translated works?

A book series you can't wait to read.

A book series you're never going to read.

A celebrity's book rec that you loved?

A celebrity's book rec that you hated?

Do you have a reading playlist? If yes, would you mind sharing it?

How about favourite reading snacks?

Your favourite reading position?

The smallest book you've read?

The thickest/longest book you've read?

Do you enjoy buddy reading or do you prefer to read alone?

If you could have access to anybody's bookshelf, dead or alive, which person would you pick?

Is there a particular album/movie/TV show that really matched the vibes of a book you read? Which ones?

Dog-earing: yay or nay?

Do you annotate as you read or prefer not to?

Your favourite poetry collection? A specific poem that you love?

Favourite romance novel?

Favourite YA novel?

Favourite mystery/thriller book?

Favourite horror book?

Favourite book to movie/TV show adaptation?

Least favourite book to movie/TV show adaptation?

If you could read the first draft of any one book, which book would you pick and why?

If you could change the ending of any one book, which book would you pick and why?

Do you follow any bookstagrams, bookblrs or booktubers? If yes, recommend some?

Favourite book protagonist?

Favourite book villian?

Favourite literary quote?

If you could visit any fictional place possible, where would you go?

If you could be a part of any story you've read, which book would you pick?

What is the best title you've come across?

Best book cover?

Do you have a goodreads account?

Do you like audiobooks? If yes, which is your favourite audiobook?

Tag someone you'd love to buddy read with.

Tag someone who's taste in books is perfect.

If you could have any book related job in the world (librarian, editor, publisher, writer, etc), what job would you pick?

What is the cheesiest book you've read?

What is the creepiest book you've read?

A book that emotionally wrecked you?

A book you wish you'd have written yourself?

Talk about books! Anything you like, maybe share some more recs<3

[suzannahnatters]

I AM SO EXCITED I'm working on the Stab in the Dark outline right now - in which Molly Dark and her crew go heisting at the Paris Opera - and just discovered this: A VIRTUAL TOUR OF THE "LAKE" IN THE CELLARS OF THE PARIS OPERA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

(oh, and yeah, there's water down there - not quite the way it looks in The Phantom of the Opera but it's definitely down there!) HOW COOL IS THIS IT'S GOING TO BE SO USEFUL

[suzannahnatters]

Going back to revisit stories you haven't read in years is such a wild ride, you never know what you're in for. The gamut runs from "whoah this is terribly racist/ableist/misogynist" to "this is a much richer and more transcendent experience than I remember" to "yes I loathed this the first time I read it as an immature twerp and while I can see now that Valid Decisions Were Made...I STILL DON'T LIKE IT AND NOBODY CAN MAKE ME WOOOOOOOO"

[suzannahnatters]

i'm in a real toad of toad hall mood (staring into the dreamy distance, whispering "boop boop")

[suzannahnatters]

DARK & DAWN out of context spoilers:

Someone asked if this was intentional and not only was it intentional, I was giggling the whole time.

Happy release day to the fourth (but by no means final) MISS DARK'S APPARITIONS book! You can get it now wherever ebooks are sold, paperback coming very soon and audiobook in due course!

[suzannahnatters]

SHUT THE GATE Gu Dong-Mae, every damn day:

(this has been your Mr Sunshine: ep18 update)

[suzannahnatters]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[suzannahnatters]

Wordle is running out of words. Only 2,000 five letter words remain. When that supply is exhausted the Creation shall begin. One day the word will be ZHURM, and all shall get it, and all shall understand it to mean "an ache from suddenly remembering a long-ago friend, who meant something to you once, but whose face you can no longer conjure". The next day the word shall be JOROL, and all will get it, and all will know it means "the melancholy confusion of passing by somewhere where you once could have died". The next day it will be GREFT, and all will understand it to be a small brown bird with white streaks found only in South America, and suddenly, it will appear, in the underbrush of the Amazon, in the streets of São Paulo, and all will know that it once was not there, but now, will always be