#but every other detail and character description is totally book accurate

[nicnacsnonsense]

📖

Okay Dark Lord of Derkholm AU. I don't believe you've read that book from what I recall of our Dianne Wynne Jones conversation, so I will be sure to explain the relevant parts of the plot as we go.

Our setting is a world that vibes similar to a standard fantasy setting -- which is a key plot point -- and they have a serious problem. The Badminton Twins who are business men who forty years ago managed to capture a demon, which they use as leverage to make the demon king do their bidding. (I have no strong feelings on who should be the demons, but I do think it would be funny if it were Mary and Doug, and since the demon king does help our protagonists, but really only to secure freedom for himself & his mate, it works). Their bidding being to force the upholding of a contract the people of this world signed to hold Badminton's Pilgrim Parties.

Every year they have to do up their world to look like an even more exaggerated and tropey version of a fantasy setting, all of which must conform to the Badminton's exact very racist and sexist expectations, and give a fantasy world quest to 100+ parties of about 20 Pilgrims (people from our world) which culminates in them defeating the Dark Lord and saving the world. They are paid for this service, but it's significantly less than what the Badmintons earn selling the experience, and also significantly less than the cost of running it in resource and labor on the people in the world.

(It's a colonialism. The whole story is an anti-colonialism & -capitalism allegory that's honestly pretty light on the allegory part of it.)

Our story starts with Spanish Jackie, Chancellor of the Wizard University, having an emergency meeting with a number of other various guild leaders, heads of state, high priests, etc. etc. About how they are going to stop the Pilgrim Parties. Their plan is to go see the two Oracles and do what both of them say. The instructions come down as make the first person you see the Dark Lord and the second person you see the Wizard Guide for the last tour group. Upon exiting the second Oracle, the first two people they see are Stede and his younger human son Olu.

Stede is regarded by people in this universe to be just as cringefail as he is in canon. He did technically graduate from the University and is a wizard, but he did very poorly. The trouble was he couldn't seem to conform to what was required of him -- which was to perform to specific standards to cater to the Pilgrim Party economy -- and only wanted to do his own magic that he was good at. The University was a very traumatizing experience for him and decimated his self-esteem, but he now has a beautiful farm/estate with a whole bevy of animals and a loving husband and many children where he is very happy and can focus on the type of magic he likes (or at least he could until this whole Dark Lord thing interrupted).

His preferred magic is kind of like a biology magic, I guess? Plants and animals. He's super great at using magic to grow any kind of plant. Nana, a high priestess/queen of one region, gives him an orange that she bought off of a Pilgrim because she is fully confident Stede will be able to use the pips from this fruit that isn't native to their entire world to grow a whole grove of orange trees. And as far as animals, at his home he has flying pigs, flying talking horses, Friendly Cows (they are so fucking dumb, but they have kind eyes), invisible cats, super intelligent geese (which tbf, I'm pretty sure are just normal cats & geese), etc. etc.

As to his children, Frenchie is the eldest. He's in training to become a bard. And I already mentioned Olu, who is the next oldest and who wants to train to be a wizard. These two are probably adopted in this version of the story. And then we move on to his & his husband's biological kids.

Pete is the oldest, and he and Olu are often refer to as the twins since they are about the same age. Pete is also a humongous black griffin. Yeah, so Stede took some of his cells, his husband's cells, cells from a lioness, and some cells from an eagle, did some kind of magic, put it in an egg, and out hatched a baby griffin, who is also a whole sapient person. John, Roach, and Swede (and possible Ivan & Fang, haven't decided on that) are their other griffin children.

For the rest of the crew, starting with Lucius, he is an elf prince in this one. He and his people are supposed to pose as dark elves and the Dark Lords minions. Stede manages to get Lucuis to agree to give him some additional help because (and this is different than the book) Lucius is into Pete. Lucius the elf is dtf the massive griffin, because why not.

For Jim, as a reminder Olu is the wizard guide for the last tour group (and Frenchie comes along too as their group bard). Jim is one of the Pilgrims in that group, but it eventually comes out they're here to try to figure out what happened to their parents, who went on a tour when they were just a kid, and never came back. We don't find out for sure what happened, but we are able to conclude that the Jimenezes were probably marked down as expendable.

Because yeah that's another service the Badmintons offer. You can pay an exorbitant sum to get an X put down next to a person's name, and that person will meet with an unfortunate accident and simply not make it back from their trip to the other world.

(Also in Olu & Frenchie's tour group are Evelyn, Hornberry, and Wellington. They are posing as a married couple plus sibling, though I'm not sure which configuration of that would be funniest. Ultimately it doesn't matter because they are all revealed to actually be undercover agents from various government organizations in our world investigating the shady shit the Badmintons are pulling).

Buttons is the nickname that is given to a dragon that randomly shows up, half-crazed and very confused. HE just took a little 100 year nap, and when he woke up the world was entirely different. Stede helps hims recover and reacclimate, and in return Buttons helps him out with the whole Dark Lord thing.

And then, saving the best for last, Ed. Obviously Ed is Stede's aforementioned husband. He is a very well-respected wizard and can do these little pocket universe things that everyone loves. When Stede is volunteered to be the Dark Lord, Ed is likewise assigned the role of Glamorous Enchantress. The vibe here of the Enchantress and her domain seems like it's kind of going for a Fae Queen & her court kind of thing. Anyway, as the Glamorous Enchantress Ed is required to look extraordinarily beautiful and extremely sensual if not overtly sexual. I'm picturing him having shaved his beard for the role and lounging about in his loose plait, pearls, a robe, and probably nothing else. To the point that when Frenchie & Olu's group show up off-schedule because Olu got them horribly lost and this was the first place they were able to find, Ed is running around freaking out trying to find his tiny gold shorts (thinking a real RHPS number here) because his kids are coming and he needs his least slutty outfit.

As for the actual plot beats, mainly what's important is that the story is about Stede and his kids running around trying to fulfill all the requirements of the Dark Lord role through an escalating series of everything that can go wrong, will. Made worse by all the people who have had enough of the Pilgrim Parties and are actively protesting in some fashion or another, and Izzy, another wizard who is supposed to be helping them but is actually secretly working for the Badmintons, helping them to mine magic from the ground and import it back to our world, and Spanish Jackie who has decided that the point of Stede being the Dark Lord must be that he's going to fail so hard that the whole operation is going to fall apart, and secretly actively working to make things harder for him.

The worst of Jackie's actions being the enchantment she put on Ed to compel him to leave Stede, so Stede is dealing with all of this and the additional stressor of his marriage suddenly and inexplicably falling apart. Of course when Jackie finally realizes what an asshole move that was and removes the enchantment, Ed is immediately all over Stede, like oh my god, I'm so sorry, I didn't even realize how I was acting, I love you so much.

So our happy ending when things all come to a head, Izzy is discovered for his crimes and arrested. Mary is set free and she and demon king Doug go off together. The gods show up (finally) and imprison the Badmintons inside the jar they kept Mary in and put Jackie in charge of working toward setting the world back to rights after the mess the Pilgrim Parties made of it. All the Pilgrims go back home to their own world, except Jim who decides to stay. Pete and Lucius official become an item. Buttons is revealed to be king of the dragons. And we end with Stede & Ed deciding to have another baby, this time a winged human. The End.

[coco-bee]

COCO'S REVIEW: LACKADAISY INGENUE (Ft. @thesilliestofallqueers)

Welcome to Coco’s Review! Where I review and breakdown episodes, movies and etc and overthink every tiny detail  and/or give my thoughts and opinions :D

Today I'm discussing Lackadaiy Ingenue (ft.Robin)

Yes I’m a fan of Lackadaisy! I haven’t been there since the start BUT I have been following the series ever since the animated pilot- I’ve also read a handful of the comics but I wasn’t able to read everything. But I have a good idea of the characters and their lore. I’m very happy to revisit this series through Lackadaisy Ingenue! So to start things off I want to define what ‘Ingenue’ means for those who don’t know (like I did). According to google, “An Ingenue is an innocent or unsophisticated young woman, especially in a play or film.” which makes a lot of sense since this short focuses on Ivy when she was a little kitten (I’m assuming she’s around 6-9 here), and I guess this short technically counts as a film. New word to add to your vocabulary ✨ So the short opens with Ivy’s father, Reuben Peppers showing off a car to Atlas (who is confirmed to be Ivy’s godfather in the description). Btw Reuben sounds INCREDIBLY young in my opinion, I didn’t even think he was her father- I thought he was her older brother or something but nope, that’s her dad. Confirmed in the description!

We aren’t even a minute in and I’m already asking questions- mostly with how close Ivy and Reuben are. With “I like it when it’s just you and me”, it got me confused since it IS just them traveling. I’m going to assume maybe she prefers private trips with her father over using public transportation where others can hear their conversations. Which really shows how close they probably are if Ivy really enjoys one-on-one time with him. 

So as Reuben greets Mitzi, Atlas, Viktor and “Joe”. Reuben and Mitzi have an interesting conversation… “What happened to New Years?” “It’s Effie, she's uh.. We’ll talk later” The look Reuben gives Ivy might imply that “Effie” is Ivy’s mother or just a relative of the Pepper family since Reuben doesn’t want to talk about it with Ivy listening. But that's just me- So that’s totally not suspicious :D 

I also just want to mention the nice hug Atlas and Reuben have- it really does seem like they’re very close. Which is probably why Atlas is Ivy’s godfather- Atlas seems pretty comfortable around Reuben too! From what I can tell Atlas was more of a “show more, talk less” kinda guy but that’s maybe because this is my first real introduction to him before he died (lmk if he appears in a flashback in the comics). He doesn’t have any lines in this episode too so I just thought that’d be interesting to point out. And that's why I came to that conclusion.

Upnext is Ivy meeting Mordecai for the first time I’m assuming. So this seems to take place when Mordecai used to work with Lackadaisy before switching to Marigold. This also confirms that he was the bookkeeper for the daisy cafe to which if you don’t know- a bookkeeper oversees a company's financial data and compliance by maintaining accurate books on accounts payable and receivable, payroll, and daily financial entries and reconciliations. They basically take care of the finances of the cafe. This scene also highlights the gun Mordecai was trying to hide, which I guess adds more evidence for Ivy to what these people actually do for a living. In the description it seems that Ivy is not very aware of what her father does for work. At least at the time. Mordecai having a gun despite being “just” a bookkeeper gives her an idea of what they might actually do other than running a cafe.

Also the “I subtract numbers too” line is fucking hilarious I’m sorry 😭 Now we have the scene where Ivy and Viktor’s bond seems to have started! I would eat up their interactions in the comics istg I LOVE THEM<33 Victor becoming that one chill uncle 

Viktor lying about how Mordecai broke his arm is fucking hilarious too- I’m now requesting a short comic of Mordecai trying to rollerskate but failing miserably! ANYONE PLEASE- TAG ME IF YOU DO THAT (Rob ik youre an artist pls /j)

I don’t have a lot to say about this scene- I just love Ivy and Viktor’s dynamic smm! I gotta talk abt them in one of my Dynamic Duos episodes! (getting ready to go through so many comics) After their interaction Ivy notices a broken car door with bullet holes on it. It looks very similar to the door Viktor was replacing while he and Ivy were talking. That’s when Ivy pieced it together, Mordecai’s gun and the bullet holes? Yeah it became obvious to her that these guys are criminals-

You can tell that was her conclusion with her asking Viktor directly if they were robbers or gangsters while also assuring that the secret is safe with her! 

I’d just end my breakdown here BUT YOU SAW THE TITLE! I would like to welcome my first guest ROBIN!!! Aka TheSilliestofallQueers :D I wanted to bring them in because they know more about the extensive lore of Lackadaisy so I feel like this’d be a perfect time to have them featured! SO I GIVE THE FLOOR TO ROBIN!! 

HELLO YES THIS IS ROBIN!! (@thesilliestofallqueers)

I’m not as obsessed with Lackadaisy as I used to be back when the animated pilot was just released (I had a friend who got me into it, thank you for that Breezy) but I still know quite a bit so I’ll be putting a few footnotes to this already extensive deep dive into the animated short

Apologies in advance but this is just going to be me analyzing / ranting about Viktor and Ivy’s interactions since Coco didn’t!! (ITS SPELLED WITH A K?? -Coco fixing her typos) (YEAH ITS VIKTOR LMFAOOAOAOAO -Rob) Now first of all, I found it so endearing that Viktor almost immediately warms up to Ivy and starts joking with her / trying to cover up what they actually do with lighthearted / white lies. 

As someone who has read the comics I always knew Viktor was fiercely protective of Ivy (He beat up her exes because he thought they were no good lol) but Ivy almost always responded to this by being annoyed with Viktor (specifically in the instance of the ex boyfriends, she got mad at Viktor for it)

So seeing her as a kid getting along with Viktor so well was refreshing and sweet (Also this short implies that these mfs are OLD AS HELL -Coco) (YEAH IT DO DUNNIT LMFAOAOAO -Robbobin)

Now they keep getting along until Viktor suddenly tells Ivy that she shouldn’t be there in the middle of her telling a joke, and you can SEE his expression shift from fond to worried as I guess he realizes that if he keeps being nice to her, she’ll want to stick around. Therefore putting her in more danger than if she was kept away

He slams the car door as he yells at her to go, and she does, but not before giving him one last angry look because dude WHAT THE FUCKK WE WERE SO CHILL LIKE 5 SECONDS AGO

And then Coco details the rest of what happened 

SORRY IF MY PORTION WAS SHORT I JUST WANTED TO EXPAND ON WHAT COCO DIDNT LMFAOOAOA (also there wasn’t much to go off of since it was short + coco covered most of it in detail already) THANK YOU ROB FOR YOUR INPUT!! Tbh I was struggling with finding words for Viktor and Ivy’s scene so thankfully Rob did the job! Please go follow Rob on their page! And that concludes our breakdown of Lackadaisy Ingenue :D  Huge respect to Tracy Butler and her team for their amazing work on this because the animation is GORGEOUS and the storytelling is super clever! I’m so excited to cover the future episodes of the series when it eventually comes out !!

This is Coco and Robin typing... thank you for reading!

[windandwater]

Everybody stop what you’re doing we need to talk about

Title/Author: Sorcerer to the Crown & The True Queen by Zen Cho

Semi-spoilers under the cut (they’re kind of vague and I avoid the big ones).

(If you’ve read this one, feel free to come yell with me about it in the replies, messages, or my ask box! Open invitation!)

It’s Diverse Yo: The first book has POC characters & deals with themes of economic & racial disparity & imperialism & sexism in Fantasy Victorian England. The second book has all of the above as well as a f/f romance and Fantasy Malaysia.

Book Description: Fantasy Victorian England magic and dragons and fairyland (more accurately, The Gentry)  + what I said above listen go read the summaries for these books, I cannot sum them up in my own words.

Me Rambling:

Here is. THE THING. About these books. Zen Cho is a hell of a storyteller. At no point did I have any damn idea where either of these books were going, but I was grateful to be along for the ride.

Sometimes when an author jumps somewhere that I don’t expect to go, it can be jarring/disorienting, or annoying: but I want to go back to where we were and find out what’s happening with that thing! I have to force myself to trust the author.

Not so with these books. Even if I had no idea why she was doing what she was doing, I was immediately fascinated by the new plot wrinkle. I trusted her instinctively, because every new thing she did was so interesting and creative.

She doesn’t pull any emotional punches. The first book features a character, Zacharias, who was born a slave and bought/freed from slavery by a rich white couple. His parents were not bought, though they probably could have been. He has complicated feelings about this--and they are dealt with. He is thrust into a public position that he does not want and that makes life very difficult for him (because racism, and yes that’s putting it mildly) out of a sense of obligation and yes, love, to them, but it’s very hard and doesn’t suit him. That is also dealt with.

The other main character in the first book, Prunella, is half Indian, being raised as an orphan in a boarding house, and is only treated well until she’s of no more use to the woman who owns it. But Prunella is a fucking delight and is having none of that so she immediately runs away? With Zacharias? But in a friend way? Like hey teach me magic and help me get married to someone rich. Hijinks ensue.

She is a fucking incredible foil to Zacharias’s angst mcangst journey, not that he & his dead ghost guardian aren’t justified (he has it pretty rough, as it turns out. Prunella just kind of approaches life with a very “well I’ll fix it then” approach this is, like I said, delightful--but unusual!).

Oh also women aren’t allowed to practice magic so in this boarding school for magical girls they’re using a spell that’s a form of torture to repress their magical abilities which horrifies Zacharias and everyone else is fine with it look this book has a LOT to say and it says it very well, with delightful characters. There’s a dragon who’s a total fop and gay for his best friend but it doesn’t resolve until the second book. You should 100% read the second book.

In the second book, two girls wash up on the Malaysian coast with no memories except the knowledge that they are sisters, are found by a witch (who is also a delight) who tells them that one of them is under a curse that means she has no heart and has lost her magic--they should both have magic, but only one does. They manage to get in trouble with the ruler of the country, who has beef with said witch because he’s trying to use the British government to squash his political enemies and she’s like you dumbass they are imperial fucksticks.

So to avoid this trouble (I won’t get into the details, you’ll have to read it) she sends them off to Prunella to take care of it but on the way one of the sisters is kidnapped by fairies so the other one has to pretend to be magical with the help of a demon and get her heart back and also rescue her sister from the fairies and it turns out [SPOILER REDACTED BUT IT’S A GOOD ONE THERE ARE SEA SERPENTS INVOLVED] and gay shit happens and it all works out.

Did I mention there are dragons? There are dragons who also take human form. And write bad poetry. In prison. And are sick of their own bad poetry.

THESE BOOKS ARE VERY GOOD.

Every character is a delight. Every plot point is a delight. Every important thing this book has to say is said well & in a new and exciting way. I never wanted either of these stories to end except that the endings were also very good.  They were fun all the way through and there’s very few books I can say that about.

[tigerkirby215]

5e Lillia, the Bashful Bloom build (League of Legends)

(Artwork by Riot Games)

I’m waiting for the Neeko x Hecarim OTP short story, Riot.

Memes aside Lillia is a fairly simplistic champ in-terms of abilities, and she’s new so of course I’m going to try to recreate her as accurately as possible before she even comes out!

Oh and she’s also EXTREMELY SCOTTISH despite being from the Japan region of Runeterra. I mean... okay then Riot.

GOALS

Every flower blooms to be seen! - Lillia has many a nature-themed spell at her disposal. You’ll never guess what class we’re going to be...

Every time I hold my branch... - Lillia literally has an ability where she runs at you and bonks you on the head with her branch. And it’s called “Watch Out! Eep!” Goddammit Riot and your Japanimes...

Where are you little lost dreams? - Despite dreams and sleeping and what-not kinda being Lillia’s thing she doesn’t really have that much sleeping ability to her. Still: sleep is sleep.

RACE

Four legs? Human body? Sounds like a Centaur to me! As a Centaur your Strength increases by 2 and your Wisdom increases by 1. Your movement speed is 40, which is good because if you Charge 30 feet and hit an enemy with your weapon you can then strike them with your Hooves, which do a d4 + Strength bludgeoning damage.

Your creature type is considered Fey rather than humanoid, which gives you some indirect counterplay to spells like Charm Person and Hold Person. And your Equine Build doubles your carrying capacity at the cost of making it a lot harder for you to climb.

Finally you can speak both Common and Sylvan, and get proficiency in either Animal Handling, Medicine, Nature, or Survival thanks to the Survivor trait. This may come as a surprise to you but the character who was literally born from a flower and lived their entire life in a garden should be proficient in Nature.

ABILITY SCORES

15; WISDOM - You are literally a being of dreams, and can go into people’s subconcious to see what they think.

14; DEXTERITY - You have the body of a fawn to hop, skip, and jump around the battlefield. That, and 14 DEX is enough for Medium Armor, even if Lillia doesn’t wear armor in-game.

13; CONSTITUTION - I can’t make a testament to Lillia’s stats in-game since she’s... you know... not in-game yet, but she’s a very close-range champ who no doubt needs a bit of bulk to survive.

12; CHARISMA - You’re a cute little deer lady who I’m going to say right now... furry bait.

10; INTELLIGENCE - You spent your entire life in a garden where I doubt you got to read many books.

8; STRENGTH - Lillia is a deer and deer are not strong. The +2 from our race helps this out a bit but still.

BACKGROUND

If you want the most accurate choice of background Outlander would fit Lillia perfectly. However Lillia doesn’t exactly know her way around or how to find water so we’ll be going for the next most logical background which is Far Traveler. This is because the feature of Far Traveler “All Eyes on You” makes it obvious that you’re not from around these parts, based on your mannerisms, figures of speech, appearance (what? A deer centaur isn’t common?) and your accent. Some people might be interested in meeting you, and you might be interested in meeting them! You might even be able to distract them or get some information from them with stories of your garden!

Along with your feature you get proficiency in the Insight and Perception skills, to see the dreams and see the dreams. You also learn one language of your choice (Quori is the language of the Kalashtar, who are dream people, but if your setting doesn’t have Eberron races just pick a language that will be more useful) and either a musical instrument or gaming set. Lillia just sings for her dance emote so I’d pick whatever instrument you want since it’s not like you had much time to play chess with Mother Tree. I opted for a Pan Flute but you can choose whatever you want.

(Artwork by Riot Games)

THE BUILD

LEVEL 1 - DRUID 1

wOw WhO wOuLd’Ve GuEsSeD tHaT tHe NaTuRe ChArAcTeR wHo’S bAsEd EnTiReLy ArOuNd NaTuRe WoUlD bE a DrUiD? Regardless Druids can pick two skills from the Druid list: Arcana would be good to know about the magic of dreams but none of the other skills really stick out to me. I opted for Survival for one that made the most sense.

As a Druid you know Druidic, an ancient language only spoken by Druids which no doubt has a massive Scottish accent to it. The message is hidden to non-Druids unless they succeed on a DC 15 Perception check, but even if they see it they can’t decipher it without magic.

Speaking of magic: Spellcasting! You learn two cantrips from the Druid list and of course to whack people with a stick Shillelagh will let you do so very hard. For the spell’s duration your weapon becomes a d8 and uses your spellcasting modifier to attack. For your second cantrip Druidcraft will let you make flowers bloom and petals fall; it has a bunch of effects detailed in the spell’s description which I suggest you read.

Druids are prepared spellcasters, meaning they can choose what spells to have ready. You can prepare a number of spells equal to your Wisdom modifier plus your Druid level. Anyways for a Booming Blooming Blows Thunderwave will hit everyone within 15 feet of you. For a bit of dreaming magic Charm Person will make your target think they’re in a dream for awhile. To light an enemy up with Dream Dust Faerie Fire will illuminate them and make them easier for your allies to hit. And finally when in Rome take Healing Word to help in a pinch.

LEVEL 2 - DRUID 2

Second level Druids can Wild Shape, allowing them to turn into a Beast of CR 1/4 or lower. You spend your action to gain all the statistics of the chosen beast, and you gain their health as Temporary Hitpoints. You can stay in a beast shape for a number of hours equal to half your druid level (rounded down) or until you lose all the health of your beast form. There’s a lot of other factors to Wild Shape that I recommend reading into, even if Lillia doesn’t really shapeshift. But hey instead of being a half-deer you can turn into a full deer (or rather an Elk since that has a higher CR.) Dreams are weird, you know. “I’m not wearing any pants!”

And with “the big Druid ability” out of the way it’s time to talk about your subclass, or rather your Druidic Circle. Surprisingly we won’t be going for the Circle of Dreams, or even the Circle of Stars, but rather the Circle of the Land. You can choose a type of land to connect with and despite the fact that you lived in a Forest I’m going to instead suggest Grassland as your land of choice. This will come into play next level but it’s still good to mention it now.

As a Circle of the Land Druid you get an Extra Cantrip, and I’d be remissed not to mention Guidance. Free d4 to ability checks? Absolutely! You also get Natural Recovery, allowing you to recover spell slots during a short rest. The combined level of all the spells you recover can equal no more than half your Druid level (rounded up) and none of the spells can be above 6th level. Is this just the Wizard’s Arcane Recovery feature tacked onto a Druid? Yup! Even down to the fact that you can only use it once per Long Rest, so use it wisely!

And all that talk of spells reminds me that you can prepare another spell such as Entagle, to keep your foes wrapped up in their dreams.

LEVEL 3 - DRUID 3

I’m going to instead suggest Grassland as your land of choice. This will come into play next level but it’s still good to mention it now.

Third level Druids can cast second level spells, and as a Grasslands Druid you know Invisibility and Pass without Trace innately. These spells don’t count against your total spells prepared, nor do you have to prepare them. They’re great spells to keep hidden from the world.

Additionally you can prepare another spell such as Moonbeam to force your foes to sleep, one way or another.

LEVEL 4 - DRUID 4

4th level Druids get Wildshape Improvements to transform into beasts of CR 1/2 or lower, and can turn into a beast with a swim speed! But more importantly for us you get an Ability Score Improvement, or rather a Feat. And because Magic Initiate smells here comes Aberrant Dragon Mark from Eberron!

Along with an increase to your Constitution by 1 the Aberrant Dragon Mark lets you cast one cantrip and one spell from the Sorcerer list. For cantrip I’d suggest anything with range, though seeing as Swirlseed slows I’d recommend Ray of Frost. For your leveled spell this may be shocking but you’re going to want Sleep to put foes to... sleep. Your Sleep spell can only be used once per short rest, so use it wisely!

Additionally when you cast Sleep you can expend one of your Hit Dice. If you roll an even number, you gain a number of temporary hit points equal to the number rolled. If you roll an odd number, one random creature within 30 feet of you takes force damage equal to the number rolled. If no other creatures are in range, you take the damage. I’d personally say that the damage is done before the effects of sleep, so that you don’t accidentally wake your enemy up. Do use this ability wisely though, as your hit die are limited as the random force damage can be quite chaotic!

Oh and finally you also get the ability to prepare one more spell, and learn one more cantrip! For your cantrip of choice Mending will help if you ever see a crack in your staff, and for your spell Hold Person will force your foe to do a little more than just sleep.

(Artwork by M-LukaART on DeviantArt)

LEVEL 5 - DRUID 5

5th level Druids get third level spells. As a Grasslands Druid you get Daylight and Haste innately: bright lights and fast movement aren’t typical for a dream, but Haste is a really good spell and Lillia moves faster when hitting her abilities. (Probably better to give Haste to someone else though.)

You can also prepare third level spells like Speak with Plants to speak with Mother Tree. Is this spell highly situational? Yes. Can you swap out spells as you please as a Druid? Also yes. Do you have to follow this guide point-for-point? No; make your own Lillia!

I should also mention that by this point your cantrips start to scale, but Shillelagh doesn’t. So now would be a good time for me to tell you about our Lord and Savior Primal Savagery. (As well as its more well-known cousin Thunderclap, which is loud as hell but hits in an AoE.)

LEVEL 6 - DRUID 6

6th level Land Druids get Land’s Stride, allowing them to move through difficult terrain without expending extra movement and move through nonmagical plants without taking damage. Additionally you gain advantage against magical plants made to slow you down. Isn’t this literally the Ranger’s 8th level ability? Yes it is; good thing we won’t be taking levels in Ranger.

You can also prepare another spell and I’m going to hop back to second level for Healing Spirit, which is just a really good spell even after its eratta nerfs. Maybe you picked up a Redemption? Who knows.

LEVEL 7 - DRUID 7

7th level Druids can prepare 4th level spells. As a Grasslands Druid you get Divination and Freedom of Movement innately, to see around the world in your dreams and to be able to pop a Quicksilver Sash in a pinch.

You can also invoke Mother Tree with the spell Guardian of Nature. If you take the form of a Great Tree you gain 10 temporary hitpoints, you make Constitution saves (such as Concentration checks!) with Advantage, you make Dexterity and Wisdom-based attacks with Advantage (such as literally all your attacks!), and the area within 15 feet of you is difficult terrain.

You could also take the form of a Primal Beast for +10 movement speed, greater Darkvision, advantage on Strength attacks, and more damage with your melee attacks. Now would be a good time to mention that spells carry over even if you Wildshape, so you can use them to boost your combat skills as an animal if you so desire.

LEVEL 8 - DRUID 8

Speaking of Wildshape: 8th level Druids get Wildshape Improvements, allowing them to turn into a beast of CR 1 with no restrictions on the Beast’s ability to run, swim, or fly! There aren’t many deer at CR 1, but you could dream that you’re a Dire Wolf. Or a Giant Eagle!

You also get an Ability Score Improvement and now would be a good time to increase your Wisdom for stronger spells. You’ve gotten some practice so you can’t be meek anymore!

With the Wisdom increase you can now prepare two more spells! Hallucinatory Terrain will let you send your foes to a dreamscape, where things aren’t always as they seem. For your other spell there isn’t much to take at 4th level, so I’m going to suggest hopping all the way back to first level for a good old-fashioned Cure Wounds.

LEVEL 9 - DRUID 9

At 9th level you can prepare 5th level spells, and as a Grasslands Druid you learn the Insect Plague spell innately as well as the spell Dream; finally another spell to sleep on! This is honestly the main reason we opted for Grassland Druid, but the other innate spells we got are good to.

You can also prepare a spell such as Commune with Nature to ask Mother Tree for guidance. Even though this is a 5th level spell it is a Ritual, so you can spend some time to speak to the trees if need-be.

LEVEL 10 - DRUID 10

10th level Land Druids get Nature’s Ward, making them immune to Charming or Frightening effects from Elementals or Fae, and making them immune to poison and disease. You’re a dream blossom that was brought to life so naturally you can’t catch a cold. But don’t let it stop you from sneezing adorably!

You can also prepare another spell and we’ll be taking Wrath of Nature from 5th level for all sorts of powerful effects when Mother Tree gets angry! You can also learn another cantrip but at this point we’ve gotten most of the cantrips we would need. Perhaps Gust to choose where the wind blows the dream petals?

LEVEL 11 - DRUID 11

11th level Druids can prepare 6th level spells and while you stop gaining innate spells as a Land Druid you can still make a garden on the fly with Druid Grove. There’s a lot to the spell that I highly recommend reading yourself because if I copy-pasted everything this one level would be huge.

LEVEL 12 - DRUID 12

12th level Druids get another Ability Score Improvement: increase your Wisdom further for the strongest connection to Mother Tree possible.

You can also prepare another two spells thanks to the Wisdom increase and the level increase: Sunbeam is a bit of a rude wake-up call, forcing creatures in a 60 foot line to make a Constitution save or take 6d8 Radiant Damage.

Heroes’ Feast meanwhile lets everyone sit down and enjoy themselves during the Blossom Festival! You conjure a feast that takes an hour to eat, and those who partake are cured of all poisons / diseases, becomes immune to poison and being frightened, and makes all Wisdom saving throws with advantage. Their hit point maximum also increases by 2d10, and it gains the same number of hit points. These benefits last for 24 hours, so if you all have a nice dinner before going to bed it guarantees sweet dreams and a great day to come tomorrow!

(Artwork by HazielWishmaster on DeviantArt)

LEVEL 13 - DRUID 13

13th level Druids can prepare 7th level spells, and while there are a lot of fun ones feel free to Reverse Gravity since the laws of physics can be weird in a dream. This spell makes everyone fall upwards which is pretty straightforward in my opinion, but feel free to read the spell over to figure out how exactly it works.

LEVEL 14 - DRUID 14

14th level Land Druids are protected by Nature’s Sanctuary. When a beast or plant creature attacks you, they must make a Wisdom saving throw against your Druid spell save DC. On a failed save, the creature must choose a different target, or the attack automatically misses. On a successful save, the creature is immune to this effect for 24 hours. The creature knows that you are Mother Tree’s chosen before it attacks you, however.

You can also prepare another spell but I’d actually suggest going back to earlier levels for a hop, skip, and a Jump to triple your jump distance. Am I just suggesting this because you get a boat load of spells and not nearly enough spell slots? Yup, but you’re a prepared caster so pick what you want!

LEVEL 15 - DRUID 15

15th level Druids can cast 8th level spells. There are a lot of great ones at this level but Antipathy/Sympathy is your best choice to keep your garden safe. I suggest reading the spell over in full to see what it can do because it’s rather hard to explain without copy-pasting the description.

LEVEL 16 - DRUID 16

16th level Druids get an Ability Score Improvement: you can either increase your Constitution for better health and a better Ray of Frost, or invest in some Feats if you so desire.

You can also prepare another spell and you know that moment that your dad opens the curtains even though you could get another 10 minutes of sleep in? Well you can recreate that with Sunburst, a bright flash of light that does a hella-lot of damage to everyone’s eyes.

LEVEL 17 - DRUID 17

17th level Druids can prepare the mighty 9th level spell! Shapechange will let your dreams shape you into whatever creature you want to be. Want to be a dragon? Go ahead! A god? That’s an option! (Well, a Celestial anyways.) An ooze? Weird choice, but sure!

LEVEL 18 - DRUID 18

18th level Druids get Beast Spells, allowing them to cast spells while in Wild Shape! Yeah it’s kinda dumb that you have to wait until 18th level to use your core class feature while using your other core class feature, but now there’s practically no downside to Wildshaping! (Except that you can’t provide Material components to cast spells while Wildshaped.) Additionally time moves slower in your dreams as you gain a Timeless Body, only aging 1 year for every 10 years that pass. That way you can spend as much time as possible with Mother Tree!

You can also prepare another spell at this level but at this point you can prepare so many spells I’m inclined to just tell you to pick what you want. You have every Druid spell at your disposal I’m sure you’ll find something.

LEVEL 19 - DRUID 19

19th level Druids get another Ability Score Improvement and again: CON if you want health, Feats if you want feats.

LEVEL 20 - DRUID 20

At level 20 you officially become an Archdruid. As an Archdruid you can Wildshape an infinite number of times, and you ignore all the components of a spell unless they have a gold cost.

FINAL BUILD

PROS

The magic is within you - You essentially chose “the Wizard” subclass for Druid, giving you access to tons of spells and the ability to refresh your spells akin to a Wizard.

Oh! Hello bird! - You are a friend of the forest. Plants and animals will be careful when attacking you, and no manipulation of nature can slow you down! And as a centaur spells meant to stop humans don’t affect you either!

Look who's blooming now - So let’s talk about the Archdruid capstone... Firstly: Wildshaping gives you Temporary hitpoints, and you can Wildshape an infinite number of times. Henceforth you have infinite hitpoints? Secondly the fact that you ignore the components when casting a spell means no one can counterspell you!

CONS

Better a sleepy head than a sleepy heart - You have 25 prepared spells and 10 extra innate spells from your subclass, but only a limited number of spell slots to cast them with. There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Eeeep! I mean... eep. - While none of them are negative (thankfully) your stats other than your Wisdom are rather lacking. Your Strength in particular is very lacking which makes your centaur hooves rather unappealing.

It's the dream's turn to sleep - Much like in League your ability to actually put people to sleep as “the dream champion” is extremely limited. You gain the ability to cast it again on a short rest yes, but you can only cast the sleep spell at level 1, and it will quickly lose its potency.

But yes: one of your downsides is literally “you are too good.” You’re basically a Wizard who doesn’t have to do anything to cast their spells, and can turn into a bear; what a dream that would be! Be the blossom that blooms into a fully grown tree, and connect the world with their dreams again. Just watch out for ganks and stay away from e621; eep!

(Artwork by kukuruyo - WARNING: NSFW ARTIST)

[mongrel-eyes]

Everything I Read in 2019

In total, I read 45 books of my own accord in 2019, and there were probably about one-fourth as many that I started but never ended up finishing. A loose goal for myself (which I formed in the later half of the year as I realized that I had read quite a lot) was to reach 52 books so that I would effectively have one book per week of the year. That obviously didn’t happen, but it’s not something I feel was of great importance. Last year, I read 10 books (I think I may have read a few more than that, but I don’t remember). That was more than all the books I’d read in the past 7 years added together. The past decade has been a rollercoaster, but this final year has brought something of a conclusion, closure, and some healing. It’s the end of one novel of my life - time for the next.

2019 Booklist

The Slow Regard of Silent Things // Patrick Rothfuss

I have read all of the books published for The Kingkiller Chronicle thusfar; however, The Slow Regard of Silent Things honestly trumps both The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear for me (and I do not say this lightly because I think both novels are fantastic, and I was practically drunk and grinning from ear to ear after reading “A Silence of Three Parts” for the first time). Auri’s quirks and the way she sees and moves through the world is nearly identical to what I have experienced for much of my life. The first time I read this book, I wept because I saw myself so vividly written in its pages. Though it is short, and I think many would deem it as not particularly exciting or significant, I understand it very deeply. As Rothfuss writes in his end letter: it is not a normal story for normal readers; it is a story for the storytellers and the dreamers.

The Magician’s Nephew // C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe // C.S. Lewis The Horse and His Boy // C.S. Lewis Prince Caspian // C.S. Lewis The Voyage of the Dawn Treader // C.S. Lewis The Silver Chair // C.S. Lewis The Last Battle // C.S. Lewis

I grew up reading C.S. Lewis’s stories of Narnia. One of my earliest memories is of listening to an audiotape recording of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I remember exactly where I was in this memory, and the exact sentences of the book being read to me through the car speakers. Narnia has always and will always hold a special place in my heart, and it was good to visit again after such a long time away. Thanks to a variety of health problems which had all but wiped out my long-term personal memories, I remembered only an echo of the enchantment of these books, and when I picked them up again early in the year, I was not disappointed.

Educated // Tara Westover

Educated was a hard book for me to read. It was raw and powerful, and I know a fraction of the pain and circumstance Westover describes. In one portion of the book, she writes that believing you are not hurt is sometimes the way in which abuse hurts you the most. I understood that, and by the end I felt so proud of this strong young woman who challenged her entire world. It wasn’t always pretty or heroic (oftentimes it was ugly and lonely), but it was true.

Bridge to Terabithia // Katherine Paterson

I grew up 10 miles away from the small town which served as the inspiration for Lark Creek. It has been a powerful and significant story in my life from the time I first read it early in 2009. Again, due to failing memory, I only recalled an echo of what it really was. One spring morning, I walked outside, hung in my hammock and didn’t budge until I had read this book from cover to cover. It was like reuniting with a very old friend.

Mortal Engines // Philip Reeve

I became interested in Mortal Engines because of the trailers for the upcoming film that kept showing up for me in Spotify. I was thoroughly warned by the internet to steer clear of the film (I still would like to see it at some point, but I don’t have high hopes), but my friend highly recommended that I read the book. I actually listened to the audiobook recording from Hoopla. Barnaby Edwards is a brilliant narrator, and I loved every minute of it. It was not the kind of story that struck me to my absolute core (personally), but it was powerful and captivating all the same.

Where the Forest Meets the Stars // Glendy Vanderah

I picked up this book because I liked the title, nothing more. It turned out to be a beautiful story of the making of a beautiful family (it also made for a beautiful hardcover). It was unfortunately triggering at one point, but despite that I enjoyed the story and the characters and the cleverness crafted into Ursa’s character.

Perelandra // C.S. Lewis

In the Fall/Winter of 2018, I listened to Out of the Silent Planet on my commutes to and from school. Many years ago (I can’t even remember how long), I had read Out of the Silent Planet but had quite forgotten anything about it other than that the main character’s name was Ransom. After returning to it at the end of last year, I listened to Perelandra in late May. Out of all of books in the Space Trilogy, I found this one to be the slowest and least interesting. However, that is not to say that I did not enjoy the book. Lewis’s descriptions of the world on Venus were riveting and vivid, and listening to and analyzing the debate/war between Ransom and Weston was of particular interest and importance to me.

That Hideous Strength // C.S. Lewis

Following Perelandra, I immediately listened to That Hideous Strength. It surprised me later to learn that this third installment of the Space Trilogy was received with the least positive appraisal of the three. I found it to be my favourite of them all. I see many echoes between this fiction and the reality which we face, and that was somewhat intriguing, frightening, and comforting all jumbled together. I have a theory (or more accurately, a hypothesis) which I refer to as “the mortal gods.” I won’t go into any details of it here, but I felt in That Hideous Strength that C.S. Lewis understood my mortal gods. He just called them by different names.

Night Flights // Philip Reeve

I listened to this book on Hoopla, and though it was short I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the character of Anna Fang. This story provides details on how she rose to become the notorious Wind Flower plaguing the cities from Mortal Engines.

I Rode a Horse of Milk-White Jade // Diane Wilson

I first read this book when I was younger than 9 years old. Even back then, I loved this book, and when I returned to it this year, I loved it again. I had not even touched it for over 10 years. When I was very young, I had a great respect for the Mongolian nomads; and, of course, since this book brought those people to life, it became and is very special to me.

The Bible (English Standard Version)

Though I was raised in a religious household, I had never actually read the Bible from cover to cover (although I had read the majority of it in bits and parts throughout my life and been lectured on it for countless hours). It took me 3 months to slog through it, but in the end, it wasn’t just slogging. I found that if I put aside everything I thought I knew about this book and read it as if it was historic mythology instead of whatever rigid, legalistic stories and verses I had been led to believe it was when I was younger, it came alive in the way the story of Icarus comes alive every time you read a new rendition or see a new painting. C.S. Lewis described it as “true myth,” and I am inclined to believe that approaching it as “myth” is perhaps the most accurate of all the different ways in which I see people trying to describe or understand it and failing in their attempts to squash a god (seriously, the thought of a god in and of itself is mind-bending if you really stop to think about it) to fit into the tiny boxes of their mortal lives.

The Wanderer’s Journal: A Journey Through the Heart of Hallownest // Kari Fry & Ryan Novak

Saying I loved the game Hollow Knight is an understatement. Of course, when Fangamer announced they would be publishing a wanderer’s journal in collaboration with Team Cherry, I had to read it. I’ve always loved field guide-esque books (specifically, Dragonology), so of course I was especially delighted while reading the journal.

The Hobbit // J.R.R. Tolkien

Previously, I had only listened to The Hobbit as an audiobook. Once. That was over 10 years ago (probably closer to 13 or 15 years). This summer, I finally read the words written on the pages myself. Middle Earth is home to me, and it was good to be home.

The Book of Three // Lloyd Alexander The Black Cauldron // Lloyd Alexander The Castle of Llyr // Lloyd Alexander Taran Wanderer // Lloyd Alexander The High King // Lloyd Alexander The Foundling // Lloyd Alexander

I remember I was in the car with my mom and sister on the way to Nowhere one day. I was reading a book of my own in the back (I have a vague recollection that it might have been from the Redwall series by Brian Jacques) when my mom announced that she had a new series from the library that she wanted us all to listen to together in the car. Initially, I was annoyed because my mom did not always pick out the most interesting of books (there had been occasions where I was bored to tears when she picked something), but I grudgingly gave in. Of course, it was The Prydain Chronicles. I returned to these books this summer and barreled through them within two days (during which I had been excused from work with a doctor’s note due to a curious situation). Middle Earth is home, but Prydain (alongside Narnia) has to be a close second.

Native American Myths // Diana Ferguson

I have held great respect and admiration for the Native Americans and their cultures for as long as I can remember. Over the years, I’ve read books on Norse, Welsh, English, German, Greek, Egyptian, and Sumerian mythology; however, finding good books on Native American mythology seemed almost impossible (at one point I did find a book of Native American myths centered around Raven in a used bookstore but it was 60USD, and while I did want it very much, I was a poor student who couldn’t afford expensive second-hand books). Ferguson’s compilation of myths was fascinating to read. Some of the stories I had heard echoes of before in various places, but Ferguson also provided anecdotes and insights of how these myths were woven into the Native American tribes and cultures. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed learning even a little bit more about these people whom I have admired since I was a small child.

The Fellowship of the Ring // J.R.R. Tolkien

[ See The Return of the King ]

The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen // Lloyd Alexander

I started out reading this story expecting it to be one thing, but it turned out to be something else entirely. I had read it before a long time ago and gotten it mixed up with a different story I have been able to vaguely recall but unable to find for 10 years and counting. Jen’s story is captivating and lovely in its own right – simple and enchanting, like a dandelion wish.

The Two Towers // J.R.R. Tolkien

[ See The Return of the King ]

Tolkien and Lewis: The Gift of Friendship // Colin Duriez

Despite having read the vast majority of Tolkien’s literature and a good amount of Lewis’s, I had never read a biography of either of them. I found this biography addressing both authors and their unique friendship. I enjoyed learning more about both of them and how their relationship formed and affected each other’s work.

The Return of the King // J.R.R. Tolkien

[Unlike Narnia and Prydain, I felt I couldn’t lump the titles of The Lord of the Rings together and still maintain the chronological list; therefore, the first two titles received no paragraph, but here is a summary for all three.]

In lieu of how easy it is to just watch Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, it’s easy to forget how deep and rich Tolkien’s writing really is. I can say this with honesty and without judgement, because I forgot too. Relearning the depths of Tolkien and rediscovering why I came to love and live and breathe Middle Earth in my childhood in the first place was powerful and healing for me. If you’ve only watched the movies, you’re honestly really missing out. Yes, Tolkien loves to talk about plants and trees and forests to no end, and maybe that’s not your thing and that’s okay; however, these stories are pure magic – tried and true.

The Raven Boys // Maggie Stiefvater The Dream Thieves // Maggie Stiefvater Blue Lily, Lily Blue // Maggie Stiefvater The Raven King (+Opal) // Maggie Stiefvater

I had tried to listen to The Raven Boys on Hoopla earlier in the year and become bored to tears – the narrator was just that bad and I felt the whole thing was just doomed to become a terrible love polygon. Several months later, a friend encouraged me to give it another try. I did (this time reading it straight from the page), and I was delightedly surprised. I had heard of The Raven Cycle for years but been too scared to pick it up (honestly, love polygons can be terrible things), but I’m glad that this year I finally did.

Carry On // Rainbow Rowell

I heard of Carry On while in the midst of reading The Raven Cycle. I found it to be highly amusing: reminiscent of Percy Jackson, but perhaps with better writing (in my personal opinion; I still have a fondness for Percy).

Comet in Moominland // Tove Jansson

I have seen screenshots of the 90’s Moomin show for years but never bothered to truly figure out where they came from until recently. I learned that Moomin originally came from a book. I thought it would be a picture book, and I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that Moomin actually came from a book book. I found Comet in Moominland to be heartwarming and cute with beautiful illustrations and words that can speak to the oldest soul, despite being a children’s book.

Call Down the Hawk // Maggie Stiefvater

Ronan was my favourite character from The Raven Cycle because I felt I understood him the most, which is a rather amusing sentiment to me on the surface level since I am probably one of the least edgy people you will ever meet. Learning more about Stiefvater’s world of Dreamers was particularly interesting and important to me (dreams have always been important to me, and dreams have shaped a good part of my life, actually). Chapter 3 (starts on page 19 of the hardcover copy) was very much like reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things for me: I understood, and I felt understood.

Tales from Moominvalley // Tove Jansson

A collection of cute short stories from Jansson’s Moomins. These were amusing, but at this point Moomins are important to me, so the book was very special all the same.

Six of Crows // Leigh Bardugo Crooked Kingdom // Leigh Bardugo

Six of Crows is a significant book to me. I remember when it was first published in 2015. I heard of it and immediately wanted to read it; however, there were many circumstances and unfortunate happenings which led to me not being able to read it until this year. The duology is now ranked among the stories which made me. To me, it’s a victory song.

The Moomins and the Great Flood // Tove Jansson

I had heard talk of the Great Flood in Comet in Moominland and been slightly confused from it being out of context. This book provided the context for this flood and is somewhat of a prequel to the rest of the Moomin books. As always, it’s a cute story with wonderful illustrations.

Shadow and Bone // Leigh Bardugo Siege and Storm // Leigh Bardugo Ruin and Rising // Leigh Bardugo

After finishing the Six of Crows duology, I learned that it was actually a sequel series to Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy. I finished Ruin and Rising last night and while I didn’t enjoy the trilogy as much as Six of Crows, it provided context for some of the characters featured in the duology, and I enjoyed the characters of Alina and Mal as well as learning more about Bardugo’s Grishaverse.

Other Reading

For school, continuing education, etc… Basically stuff I was compelled to read in one way or another.

Gilgamesh (English version by N.K. Sanders)

“The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like a painted death.”

The Song of Roland (translated and with an introduction by Robert Harrison)

I’d read this long ago, and re-reading it would have been a better experience if I wasn’t being pressed into writing a paper about it for a professor who was Machiavellian in behaviour but only intelligent in his own pride (these are gentle words).

The Prince // Niccolò Machiavelli

I seriously hate this guy.

The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People // Oscar Wilde

I read this for a compare-contrast essay between the original play and the 2002 film adaptation. I thought it would be annoying and tedious to re-read, but I actually enjoyed it because the professor was simply a delight to work with.

A General Introduction to the Bible // Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix (8th printing, 1975)

I’ve always been interested in how the Bible came to be compiled because almost no one talks about it (asking questions on this topic basically got me excommunicated when I was 12 hah). I read this book to find the answers to the questions I suffered for asking. I found some answers and a whole lot of data (seriously, these people aren’t messing around).

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens // Alice Walker

A beautiful short story – perhaps one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read.

[redsweaterreads]

Review: Villains by V.E. Schwab

God, I love villains so much.

I went out on a limb when I decided to read this, and I am so damn glad that I did. I had been more than a little disappointed with Schwab’s Monsters of Verity duology - however, the praise, the promising summary, the adult categorization rather than YA, and the lure of villains instead of heroes all smashed together and lead me into one of the most astounding anti-hero stories that I’ve ever read.

Thanks to the alternative POVs and time jumps, pretty much every chapter brought a new revelation or plot twist and I just couldn’t help doing some kind of gleefully evil laugh every single time because let’s face it, we all love villains, especially wickedly beautiful ones like this book has.

The entire point of this story is bad vs. worse, and Schwab pulls it off so well. I really loved the dynamic between Victor and Eli throughout the whole story, and their motivations, though murderous and all kinds of bad, are entirely understandable. Ten years ago they were best friends at college, both of them ambitious, somewhat happy, and searching for more. When they get a little too obsessed with obtaining superpowers and becoming EOs (ExtraOrdinaries), Eli gets there first and thus Victor’s bitterness starts to override his admiration for his friend. His path to power involves the death of Eli’s girlfriend, so Eli rats him out and sends him to jail. Victor spends that decade locked away, intimidating the other inmates, honing his powers, and plotting the best way to get his revenge on Eli - who, in the meantime, has been killing pretty much every EO he can find, because Religion (more on that later). When Victor finally gets out, lemme tell you, everything just ramps up even more.

The plot sucks you in from page one and switches between a glorious cast of wildly different characters. Present-day Victor and Eli are so intense and determined and, dare I say, vicious, and it makes for such a fast-paced and wonderfully evil ride. Seriously, look at this quote:

“He clearly wanted it to be two separate words. Distinct. For. Ever.”

If this doesn’t describe the entirety of Victor and Eli’s relationship, why Victor is doing what he’s doing, the twisted reason he’s dying for Eli’s attention in a multitude of different ways, and how he gets under Eli’s skin so much, then what does?

my new favorite person: Victor Vale

“Victor Vale is not a fucking sidekick.”

I became Victor’s #1 fan pretty much right off the bat and that quote is the truest, most accurate description of him. When that line came up at about 25% of the way through, I got actual chills. I was sitting there just grinning like yes, this is it, here we go.It was right then that I felt his arc kick into gear. It set the precedent for literally everything he would become and everything he would do from that moment on, and it was pretty amazing, watching things play out from there. He’s not so much complex as he is just damn cool.He’s Calm and Collected and I love him!! Is he a mostly terrible person? I mean, yeah. He’s a villain, he kills people, he spent ten years fantasizing about the most satisfying way to torture his former best friend. But Schwab’s writing and characterization of him makes it absolutely impossible not to love him. Though a lot of his humanity is stripped away by the process of becoming an EO, the main difference between him and Eli is that he wants to feel human, and I love that. He doesn’t really want to be a total psychopath, but in the end, his emotional numbness (a downside of his ability to control pain) and his desire for vengeance win out. Unfortunate, but it’s not going to stop me from rooting for him with every damn page (and I mean who wouldn’t, when the other option is Eli?).

Eli Ever - Better Than You (and wishes he had his own inherited alliteration)

So, our genius and driven homeboy Eli has a HUGE god complex. He’s rich, righteous, and he’s got the girl. When he lands Victor in prison and starts his quest of eliminating all EOs, he’s totally convinced that he’s right, that God has given him A Divine Purpose, that he’s completely invincible and that his abilities were bestowed upon him just so that he could wipe out other EOs. It’s a beautiful and incredibly well-developed reason for why he’s doing what he does, and it makes his point of view that much more interesting to read. Is it right? Hell no, but none of the characters in this book are exactly Good. I can and will petition for Eli’s total destruction in the sequel (am I reading it right now? yeah, no luck so far but fingers crossed).

Sydney Clarke (raises the dead, watches Disney Channel) & Mitch Turner (cursed, loves chocolate milk)

Sydney and Mitch really rounded out the story in terms of characters. Not only did they have their own fully developed backstories, relationships with characters other than our protags, and differing morals, they also contributed to Victor’s characterization in that they gave him a sense of humanity that Eli lacked.

Firstly, Sydney, a twelve-year-old necromancer who wears rainbow leggings. How can you not love her? She’s taken in by Victor and you can immediately see her struggling with right and wrong, especially because her survival depends on adopting a dubious code of morals from Victor. Also, she revived a dog and convinced Victor to let her keep it. Love that for her, honestly. And Mitch! An icon! He has a chocolate milk addiction, insane computer hacking skills, and a curse of wrong-place-wrong-time that landed him in jail. The relationship between he and Sydney is so adorable and should be protected at all costs.

Serena Clarke, a literal goddess

Even though Serena wasn’t my favorite character of the story, she’s a whole entire goddess and that’s just fact. She’s elegant, cunning, and will not hesitate to step on your throat with her heels. So, why is Eli not killing her, because she’s clearly an EO and doesn’t he want all the EOs six feet under by his own hands? Yeah. Well, Serena’s power is the ability to get anyone to do anything she wants. Literally anything, so she’s got Eli convinced to keep her around. She both loves her power and hates it, and that facet of her inner conflict is explored in wonderfully interesting detail. She’s dealing with guilt over Sydney (her younger sister), her own self-loathing, and the problem of blood staining her gorgeous blonde hair. Respectable priorities.

So.

The only issue I had was how it felt like I was catching up on backstory until the last 30% of the book, mainly because of the time jumps. Otherwise, bury me with this book!! Tattoo every word of it on my eyelids!

[pcttrailsidereader]

Then and Now

Fifty years is a long time. It doesn’t seem that long if you have had the good fortune to have lived that much and that long. If you haven’t, then imagining fifty years can be a challenge to get your head around.The Pacific Crest Trail passed the fifty year mark in 2018. Since 1968 many people have left their tracks in the duff, the mud, the snow, and any other the surface the PCT might throw their way. 

In the early 1970′s two young men named Will Gray and Sam Abell succeeded at covering about 1600 miles of the 2400 mile (at that time) distance of the Pacific Crest Trail. Their journey is documented in text and pictures in a book published by the National Geographic Society in 1975. Their story is told in a captivating National Geographic style. A little emotion here, some subtle detail there. Their tale is told as if we are sitting around a campfire. 

Even though the gear has changed quite a bit, the spirit and the challenges associated with the effort required to thru hike the PCT are still there. Admittedly, the trail is better maintained and better marked now than in the 1970′s. That was a challenge that today’s hikers don’t encounter all that much. With the added advantage of GPS, people are no longer at the mercy of a missing blaze/marker as Gray and Abell were.

The authors excitedly tell us, “ A few hardy men and women, no more than two score, have traveled the entire trail. At a steady, muscle-taxing, spirit-rending pace of 15 miles a day, every day, it takes more than five months to cover the whole distance.”  By the standards set by today’s thru hikers 15 miles a day seem like a ‘light’ day of effort. However when you consider the sheer weight of the gear, external frame packs, wool clothing, leather boots, etc. this is a seemingly accurate description. Remember, there was no ‘GO Lite’ thinking or movement taking place then. Then and now a thru hiker will take abut five months to complete the trail. The accomplishments detailed here take on a much greater significance for the reader.

The authors took two seasons to walk or about seven months in total to cover nearly 1600 miles. They took some side trips along the way to meet local characters and to nearby points of interest such as reaching the summit of Mount Rainier. This volume still has relevance forty plus years on. The trail has grown and been re-routed in many places since the 1970′s. Many of the characters we meet in this book are long gone but reverently acknowledged here. The author William R. Gray and  photographer Sam Abell went on to other projects separately. They speak of the camaraderie that came from their time together on the PCT. Gray comments, “I found that much of my enjoyment of the trail came through sharing the experience with someone else.” 

Many decades later, the camaraderie found along the trail and stunning sites and sounds continue to this day for many of us. The National Geographic’s ‘The Pacific Crest Trail’ can still be found in used book stores, library discard bins, and on Amazon. I find it to be more than an artifact. If you are considering the PCT or want to revisit places you’ve experienced in your own hikes along the trail this may be a pleasant stop along your way. I found my copy on a discard shelf at my local library. Interestingly, this was the copy I actually checked out many years ago. This book may have been the first resource on the PCT after my long time friend and hiking partner, Rees suggested he and our friend Jim hike several sections together in  the summer of 1981. Our friendship and deep connection continues today. The Pacific Crest Trail has the capacity to do that. As John Muir reminds us, “Wherever we go in the mountains we find more than we seek.” 

[ais-n]

Hi Ais! Sorry to bother you. I just need someone to talk to about this. I have been writing since i was like 15. My dream have always been to write a book. And i have started a lot of them but never finished anything. It’s like i get stuck at one point and feel my story is trash so i stop. Sometimes i find my plot boring and stupid and other times it’s my own inability to properly put it into words. I admire you and i wish i could write like you. I hope you never stop writing wonderful stories❤️

You’re so sweet, thank you!

I’m not sure if it would help to get a long ass rambling answer to this to encourage you to keep going based on my personal experience… but just in case it would, here goes:

It’s really hard to actually finish projects… starting them is so much easier. I get to a point where I’m like, “This is trash!” and/or I grow bored, and then I kind of peter out. I also have this unfortunate aspect of my personality where I figure I’m pretty unimportant and invisible, therefore what I have to say or write isn’t that particularly necessary for others to see, therefore it’s not that big of a deal if I just never post anything I did because I’d just be cluttering up the space where actual good writers or actual interesting people would be speaking instead. 

Sometimes I just want to write a story to see where it goes, and then once I get to a point I can figure out how it will probably end, and if no one else is reading it or interested in it, I’m kind of like, well I know how it ends so I guess there’s no real point in writing the rest of it out or posting it because that’s just extra work for no reason. It was a combination of that thought process, and the feeling of “this is trash! Start over!” that had me writing and rewriting and dropping and restarting and editing and dropping and rewriting Incarnations since I was 12-14… I keep forgetting if I started at 12, 13, or 14 on that book. I think 14? But then maybe it was actually 13? idek.

Point being, that was a book that I started, stopped, started, stopped, dropped entirely, on and off for years. The idea would be really strong in my head but then sometimes I’d forget about it for years, then remember it for a while, then avoid it because I felt like a failure. What I know is when I first wrote it, I got 150 pages before I thought it was trash and totally stopped it. In the ensuing 15ish years, I would think of that world and want to do something in it but I just did not want to pick up where I had left off. So what I did was I kept starting new scenes, creating new characters, adding new aspects to the world, and each time I’d get a little ways into it and then go UGH THIS IS BORING or THIS IS TRASH and stop/drop it again, until the next time when I started something new again. 

Around 2012, for Nanowrimo I tried starting it up again. I looked at the bits and pieces I’d written over the years, grabbed one of the scenes that seemed more interesting, started with that and ran with it. I met the requirements for nano, I liked the characters, I liked the new concept, but I still wasn’t sold on the book. I was kind of bored at the end of it because I didn’t fully know where I wanted to go with it… I was a little overwhelmed. It still didn’t really click with me to keep working on it again. I left it on the backburner for more years. 

At one point, I created a Scrivener project for it, and then as the years passed and I’d get a brief idea for something, I’d go open it up and throw that info into a note, or add a new document exploring the idea, or whatever. Sometimes I’d write another short scene, other times I’d just do that and go.

Sometimes I tried to do other stuff related to it which was not writing the actual book… like I created some Sims to look like the characters, to see if I wanted to change anything in the description when I got an idea of it visually. Far more recently, I started making some of the key buildings in Sims so I could get inspired for more details on those. Are they accurate? Absolutely not. But they gave me ideas. Same as I tried to store the inspiration I’d get when watching tv shows or movies or whatever, and it would make me think of the characters or world or some other aspect. If I was inspired to write, I’d go write a note or scene right then, but if it was just a vague inspiration I would just try to focus on it when it was there, and really acknowledge the importance of feeling that inspiration, but then not actually do anything about it. But that would keep it in my mind.

Another thing I did when I really wanted to write was I would go to sleep thinking about an aspect of the story, to try to make myself dream something related, so I would wake up with inspiration.

I also tried to inspire myself by buying some physical organization materials – I got a bunch of whiteboards so I could figure things out by writing it out, and I got a huge roll of white butcher paper so I could hand draw massive timelines for the characters to lay out their events and see whose overlapped with whose; I got a corkboard and pinned index cards and sticky notes to it and then took different colored strings and connected them across the board according to various criteria. I got notebooks and wrote out ideas and notes on the magic system and all sorts of things. I had gotten to a point where I was glad to have all the digital information but sometimes I needed something physical to work on, something tangible, so I felt like I actually had accomplished something and it wasn’t just in my head. I also made a book cover for the book (digitally) to remind myself to keep working on it, and made a digital map of the world with the help of a friend who’s good with geology so I had a reference I could hang about my computer.

Every time I had a thought or idea, or I had this vague restlessness of wanting to work on something but not feeling like actually writing, I tried to do something else related to it in some form. Usually world building or character creation of some sort, but sometimes just thinking about things.

I tried a lot of things, but in all honesty I figured I would never, ever finish that story. But then one day, and I don’t even remember what the catalyst was to be honest, it just… clicked. I had an idea for something, and when I went to write down that idea or do whatever with it, I remembered other notes I’d left over the years, other scenes, and I started looking at the massive amount of information I had compiled - and I realized, holy shit, I know how to connect this all. I found a way to pull together a lot of stories I’d made which I thought were all totally disconnected, and bring them into one theme. And when I did that, all these questions I had for this or that aspect of this or that, suddenly had really interesting answers or ideas I could roll with. 

I found a way to stop being bored. And now, when I find that I just really really don’t want to do the next thing, I try a few times to make myself do it if I’m just feeling like I’m being lazy, but if repeated attempts are unsuccessful then I throw myself a curveball in the story or plot or characters, and it becomes fun again to write and plot it out as I try to figure out how to integrate that. I do that until I run out of steam, and try the same things again.

Because of that, a couple of years ago, I finished the book, and I was really happy with it. I’m still proud of myself for finishing writing it, but now I’m on a two year slump of editing the damn thing. 

When I think back to the original story I wrote when I was younger, versus the book it became now and the series it’s starting, they are VERY different despite the fact that have the same initial basis. In fact, the original heroine of the book is now technically sort of a villain. Her story is the same; I just flipped the perspective. The original book was very base; I mean, at the time, I felt it would be interesting to write because it was a young woman as the main character with all the power, at a time when almost all the main characters I found to read were young men. 

But the thing is, it was otherwise a super basic concept. Young woman suddenly finds out she’s the chosen one, lots of cool magic, she goes through her whole storyline with how things affect the world around her, the end. The story might have worked and been interesting solely because I was like 14 when I wrote it; if it had been published then, people might have given me a bit of slack for some of the laziness just because I was young. But the story I have now, informed by decades of life and experience since then, is SO fucking much better than that book was originally. It’s way more complex, far more interesting, the worldbuilding is far beyond what I had before, the characters are more nuanced, the cast is more diverse, the prejudices are more tailored. I’m GLAD I put that book aside a million times. I’m GLAD I didn’t finish it any of the times I had it in my head I had to finish it by the time I was xyz age. I feel like the series it is now is going to be far beyond what it would have been if I’d run with the original idea.

You know what helped me A LOT in actually finishing it in the end? Aside from everything I said? 

I asked some friends to beta read it for me. And the people who read it really liked it, and gave me ideas on how to improve it. Their interest renewed my own interest and gave me enthusiasm I sometimes lacked on my own. I care a hell of a lot more about actually finishing something if someone else cares if I finish it.

Someone once asked Neil Gaiman how to be a good writer and get published, and one of his biggest recommendations was to just finish writing a book. He also said not to conform; to write the story that you want to write, that is right for you. I feel the same way, which is nice because Neil Gaiman is super dope so I feel better that my feeling is reflected in an actual successful and great writer. I feel a little safer in having my weird ass view on things, which is that I don’t believe in genres, really, or rather I don’t really believe in writing a story specifically for the boxes checked off for a specific genre. 

For me, anyway. It’s totally fine for others, if that’s their jam - there can be some great stories that way! 

But for me, I literally just do not want to write a story at all if I have to make it fit someone else’s label. I lose all interest in it and give up completely. I think that’s probably because when I started writing, it was because I was a nerdy ass  youngster who couldn’t find books that felt like they represented me exactly or what exactly I wanted to read, so I was kind of just like, “I guess I’ll write it, then.” There are tons of books out there that do fit the criteria of the genres, and they can be SUCH fun and good books to read… the people who write those books excel at that type of writing, and so if they tried doing anything else they would not be true to themselves. 

We need those writers and we need those books. But we also need the writers and the books that just say fuck it to everything and do what they want. You may not be as popular, or you may find it difficult to go the traditional route; maybe you can’t become a full-time writer, if everything is stacked against you, I don’t know. But you can write what feels right for you, and there will always be readers out there who needed that book to feel right for them.

My hope for you is you don’t silence yourself and your stories like I tend to do. I hope you finish your books/stories, and I hope you share them. There is probably someone out there wishing your book existed, and until you write it, they won’t have that exact perspective and that exact story to read. Don’t get discouraged if it takes you a long time; and don’t downplay the value of walking away and not thinking about it for a while at a time. But I do think there’s definite value in always coming back.

So what I hope you do for yourself is find some easy way to compile all the different information you’ve formed for your book(s) over the years so that you make it really easy on yourself to add extra bits and pieces as you go. I hope that you do other things that aren’t specifically writing but still get your creativity going for the stories - whether that’s making Sims, drawing art, writing things out on paper or whiteboards, doing everything digitally, doing everything physically, whatever it may be. I hope you find ideally a few someones to read what you have so far, get their take on it, and I hope they are enthusiastic enough to help you keep it in the forefront of your mind.

I TOTALLY understand having wanted to be a writer since you were young… I have always wanted to be a writer, as far back as I can remember. (Of course, if you go back far enough, I also wanted to be a veterinarian or other things too). 

My goal is still to someday be an actual author. I feel like I’m not, still, but maybe someday I will be. 

I used to put a ton of pressure on myself to finish things by certain ages, and when I missed my goal I got depressed and thought I was the worst and why bother, no one wants to read it anyway, and etc etc etc. Also, for like 10 of those years I was working on ICoS and that really took my mental energy and creative interest as a focus so I didn’t really even want to work on my LGBTQIA+ fantasy books for a while. But as time passed, and objectively looking at the story I have now compared to the story it was before, I think it was far better that I didn’t force the story before I was ready to write it, but also that I didn’t let myself just put it off forever and never make myself work on it again. 

There is no age limit to being a writer… first of all, you’re a writer if you write, so if you already wrote a bunch of books or parts of any stories - you are already a writer. You’ve already accomplished something awesome! But if your goal is to be a paid author/writer, then whether you are one now or one in 20 years or even 70, you still can be a writer. You still can fulfill that dream. Never give up on it, for yourself and for the diversity and complexity of the stories out there in the world, and for the readers who would want to see what you have to say.

Nanowrimo is next month… maybe you could start thinking about the stories you’ve worked on so far, see if any strike your fancy for exploring a bit further, or just take the general concept of one of the worlds and create a totally new set of characters and plotline on that world. Whether or not you end up liking that new plot, the new characters, it will still give you a more nuanced view of the world itself. It might spark an idea now or 20 years from now. It might, someday, be the key to finishing the story.

Don’t devalue the importance of those little bits and pieces, or the importance of taking your time but never giving up, or of even just talking the story out to others and seeing what they have to say. I constantly think what I write is boring and stupid, I constantly get suddenly bored with something and just cannot for the life of me write the next chapter no matter what because it sucks ass. 

So I switch it up. I push aside for a moment what I thought I had to do next, and then I ask myself, “What can I add that would make me actually want to write this?” I’ve found that by doing that, you can get some super interesting new ideas that coordinate together out of nowhere later if you just keep going. 

So maybe for nano, you can ask yourself, “What would I want to write in this world or this character’s life, etc, that would make me actually want to write it?” Completely forget about it fitting perfectly with what you have. Screw that. Just make it fun for you. I feel like it’s a very natural writer thing to do where even if you start with something that seems extremely disparate, as long as they’re following the same general world rules, eventually you’ll have an epiphany that ties it all together. 

Also ask yourself, are you trying to make the characters conform to the plot, or letting the plot conform to the characters? If your world or characters want to veer totally off from what was planned, as long as it’s in character - follow them, not your plans. You wrote those plans when you had a limited understanding of the characters and world… the time you spent with them since then is valuable and shouldn’t be ignored. If they want to send you on a wild goose chase into the middle of nowhere when they’re supposed to be doing something else entirely, do it. Follow that goose. See where it leads you, and then see how fun it is trying to make your way back.

Maybe you can try that this nano (or just do a totally new story altogether if that’s your jam instead), and see where it takes you. Maybe you can find some people to read it, and maybe you can track all the info you put together, no matter how small and stupid it may seem. And maybe, someday, you’ll be able to look back years later like me, and thank your past self for never giving up and for keeping that information accessible so that one day, far down the line, you’d have everything you needed at your fingertips when a sudden idea inspires you to look at your story, characters, or world, from an angle you’d never considered before.

Also, fwiw, I like to always throw one thing in that’s a bit unexpected, if possible, into characters or plots. In all honesty, I do that in part because I get bored affffff very easily so I want to keep myself entertained. But it also makes for a lot more interest, I think, in the characters. Like, whatever the plot is, or the character is, think about what would be the easy next thing… think about what the stereotype of that would be. And then deliberately choose something either completely different or a little bit off in order to introduce intrigue.

ICoS, for example - Boyd was judged a lot for many things, and he wasn’t really good around people naturally. It would have been easy to say that because he was kind of socially distant/awkward he would suck at undercover, but to me that wasn’t interesting. Instead, he could go undercover and be very good at it when needed because, despite his natural reticence to trust others, he had spent his life watching other people trying to learn their behavior/mimic them to understand why people didn’t like him. So even though on his own he would hate going into a party or have no fucking clue what to say, if he was playing a character, he was very good at it because he had gathered that information for years. Instead of saying that because he was bullied he didn’t know how to deal with people, I said he knew how to deal with people because he was bullied.

Incarnations, for example - Vikenti is a magical cop who’s really grouchy, kind of rude, kind of a dick. He spends most of his time seemingly insulting everyone around him. It would have been easy to just make him be a dick cop who grumps on everyone and does nothing beyond the job. And yet, he’s taken under his wing a young woman who others see as a monster. A young woman who everyone who knows the story of their background would think he would have every reason to hate. And you also see him helping this random girl get a memento even though he easily could have ignored it because, ultimately, she had nothing to do with him. There’s also an Empath who’s a pretty good dude who has the biggest crush on him even though their sexual orientations don’t line up. Everyone wonders how this Empath can even like him when he’s such an asshole, but then you have to ask yourself, wouldn’t an Empath of all people know best who to trust and who not? There are scenes with Vikenti, who seems like a super straight and straight-laced dude who doesn’t know how to explore emotions beyond insulting people, where he is the one there who catches someone when they fall, or says just the right thing when it’s needed. Because he’s an asshole, but not an asshole. He cares but just doesn’t care.

So, if you’re bored with parts of your stories or characters, I also really encourage throwing dichotomy and contradictions in there. Take something solid on the story, and then think of something that seems to be at odds with that, and make that be a solid part of it too. Now you have something interesting to explore… how someone or something can be these two seemingly contradictory things in the same form. I find that can help me stay interested, too.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough and am probably not very helpful, I’m sorry :( I just wanted you to know I totally know what you mean, and precisely because of that, I know without a doubt you can do this. You will finish the story or stories you need to finish. I 100% believe in you, and I hope you can get to a point where you 100% believe in yourself too.

Happy writing, my friend! You are going to finish your stories and they’re going to be fantastic! And if they aren’t fantastic the first draft, that’s the way it is for pretty much everyone - all you have to do is keep working on them until they are. You will absolutely get there, because it’s a journey you already started long ago. You’ve come this far and there’s a lot more waiting for you as you go forward. My writing voice is no better or worse than anyone else’s, it’s just what feels right for me. Your writing voice is yours and therefore inherently lovely. Which means, if you wish you could write like me, you absolutely can: by writing like yourself. I bet you already are, you just can’t see it because of how stressful it can be in the middle of the millionth project feeling like you got nowhere previously. But if you keep going, keep pushing, I know you won’t regret it later, and I know the story you end up finishing will be exactly the story you needed to write at that time, and somewhere out there in this world, someone will be incredibly grateful to you for having written and shared it.

(Oh btw the thing I was talking about is Incarnations - and the first 4 chapters are out free here if you want context on the stuff I mentioned, in case somehow it helps? I really need to edit it… I keep putting it off, but your message is making me want to start it up again, so thank you!

[aion-rsa]

How Winter’s Orbit Went From AO3 to Published Space Opera

https://ift.tt/3r0YY7S

There have been some very public examples of works that began life as fanfiction (i.e. not-for-profit stories written in the already existing fictional worlds or pop culture, often by and for writers from communities underrepresented in commercial storytelling) only to later become published books— the most famous examples probably being E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey, Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, or Anna Todd’s After. But not all works published on fanfiction websites are fanfiction. Fanfiction platforms, such as Archive of Our Own or Wattpad, also play host to “original” (not based on an existing canon) non-commercial fiction. While these original works are, by and large, less common than fic, they often have much in common with their transformative fandom neighbors.

Winter’s Orbit, a healing and action-packed queer romance space opera that hits bookshelves next week, began life as an original work on Archive of Our Own (AO3), where it gained an enthusiastic following. Now, British author Everina Maxwell, is hoping to find a broader, commercial audience for her story about two space princes in an arranged marriage on which the political stability of their solar system rests. The story of Winter’s Orbit path from original work on AO3 to published book is a fascinating one, and one that is emblematic of the increasingly candid impact the world of transformative fandom is having on the book industry and other spheres of the commercial entertainment world. We talked to Maxwell about her debut novel, what it was like to bring Winter’s Orbit from AO3 to Tor Books, and how the transformative fannish experience has impacted her writing.

Den of Geek: Where did the kernel for the story of Winter’s Orbit begin? Was it a character? A relationship? A setting? A theme?

Everina Maxwell: It all grew out of the first scenes: a good-natured prince is told to marry the widower of his cousin. It’s a political emergency. But his cousin and this diplomat had the perfect marriage, while the prince himself is a talkative disaster; how can he ever match up to the previous marriage? Was it as perfect as it looked? So I guess that’s a character, a relationship and a setting! I like to start from something that has an inbuilt tension. It means I’m anticipating scenes before I even properly plot them out.

Winter’s Orbit is told through the dual perspectives of the two main characters. Did you find it easier to write from Jainan or Kiem’s point-of-view?

Jainan—the diplomat—makes more sense to me; he’s introverted, anxious, and his thought processes flow logically from his basic assumptions about the world. On the other hand Prince Kiem is an absolute delight to write. It’s just fun to be in the head of someone who’s happy by nature and genuinely delighted to talk to anyone who crosses his path.

Winter’s Orbit is such a comforting book, but it also deals with some heavy issues, including domestic abuse. How did you go about balancing the hurt and the comfort of this story?

When it comes to fiction, I think the dark and the light are two sides of the same coin. Healing is possible; danger and trouble can pass. Though Winter’s Orbit is a “light” book, it’s definitely true that it contains heavy topics. To me, it’s reassuring on a very deep level that it’s possible to find happiness and joy even if life hasn’t been easy.

I do believe in content warnings to let people know if it’s a story will deal with specific upsetting topics, and I encourage anyone who wants details to check out the content warnings page (https://everinamaxwell.com/content-warnings).

Do you think romance and science fiction make good bedfellows?

They always have! I grew up reading writers like Bujold, who built up a universe where love stories were essential to the action plots and vice versa. I strongly believe books in every genre benefit from two people having unreasonably strong feelings about each other, and romance is just one subset of that.

Winter’s Orbit began life as an original work on Archive of Our Own. When and why did you start considering publishing it commercially and what did that process look like?

It was very long and meandering, since when I was writing it I didn’t have a long-term plan. At first I was just trading Kiem and Jainan snippets with a friend; later I posted them for more people to read, then when I had a whole story to share I put it on AO3. I still don’t know if that was technically the right place to put it, but it was the only writing website I was familiar with, I knew my way around it, and I’d read origfic on there before. The first draft was online for a couple of years. People very kindly read it and told their friends. I still have no idea how Tamara (my now-agent) found it, but she contacted me out of the blue and rewrote it with me, and then Ali Fisher at Tor picked it up and really helped me with the final rewrite. I wrote it five years ago now—I don’t know if that seems too long or too short, but it certainly doesn’t seem accurate.

How different is The Course of Honour from Winter’s Orbit?

The Course of Honour was laser-focused on Kiem and Jainan’s relationship. And don’t get me wrong, Winter’s Orbit very much is too, but working with a professional editor encouraged me to consider the implications of worldbuilding and plot events, and to build them out into a bigger picture. I knew some of this stuff from the beginning—I remember answering a comment years ago with some of the galaxy link explanations—but it wasn’t until the third major draft that it became part of the plot.

How did the decision to change the title come about and how did you settle on Winter’s Orbit?

It turns out The Course of Honour is already the title of a book! I’m bad at titles and my editor was really helpful on this one. I liked how it made the winter imagery more central.

What role has fanfiction played in your life as a reader and a writer, if it has?

I’ve both read and written fanfiction but as a very small fish in a very large pond—if you’re reading this and wondering what my AO3 handle is, you’ve almost certainly never come across it! Casual writing and shared-world creation with friends have brought me huge amounts of joy over the years, whether connected to a canon or not.

Fanfiction is such a broad category, loosely defined as non-commercial works based on existing stories, but I am super interested in some of the common narrative and stylistic traits that much of fic shares. How would you define Winter’s Orbit’s narrative and prose style and interests, and how much of that, if any, comes from the world of transformative fandom?

Winter’s Orbit’s primary concern is its two main characters. Where there was a choice between a revealing conversation about the characters and an action scene, the character work often won out. I think one thing that fannish experience gave me was a strong appreciation for character arcs and permission to unabashedly put them at the centre of a story.

Read more

Books

How Do You Approach Worldbuilding?

By Kayti Burt

Culture

Ngozi Ukazu Interview: Check, Please and Beyond

By Kayti Burt

Do you think there are story things the world of fanfiction (generally) does better than the world of commercially published fiction (generally)?

This is a complicated question, since “fandom” includes so many people who are interested in so many different things! I will say that my experience has been based around stories with a laser focus on character development (including relationships) above everything else, and this focus produces some amazing works—though my narrow description there leaves out worldbuilding fans and so many others. Ultimately it’s a rich and creative community that has both its own tropes and room to experiment.

Do you have any plans to continue writing in this world and with these characters? (I would read so many more!) Either way, can you tell us what you are working on next?

I’m not totally ruling out revisiting these characters, though they’ve earned a bit of a rest for now! I definitely plan to continue in the Resolution universe. I’m currently working on a book set on a planet outside the Iskat Empire, starring two even bigger disasters than Kiem and Jainan (and an expansion of Remnant powers). I’m very excited for that.

And, finally, what stories, of any kind, have been bringing you joy recently?

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There are so many good books coming up this year, which is lucky because generally it’s very hard to concentrate. On the queer SFF side, I’m very excited about The Unbroken by C. L. Clark, which is North African post-colonial fantasy, and She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, which deals with the rise of a genderqueer emperor in fantasy China. I’ve read these two and they’re excellent. I’m waiting impatiently for Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard and The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri. Oh, and on the romance side, I really loved Division Bells, by Iona Datt Sharma, a beautiful queer workplace romance which is almost elegiac about public service. I’ll stop now—but it’s a good year for books!

Winter’s Orbit is available to buy and read on February 2nd. You can preorder here. Find out more about Everina Maxwell on Twitter or at her official website.

The post How Winter’s Orbit Went From AO3 to Published Space Opera appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[scriptmedic]

Content and Reality Genres

(This post is an excerpt from the upcoming Maim Your Characters) 

What’s Your Content Genre?

Genres in fiction are the promises you make about the story you’re going to tell.

They’re a mutually shared set of expectations between you and your readers.

If you put a skull and crossbones on the front of your novel, there had better be pirates inside, preferably on the first page.

If there’s a spaceship, your readers would be very mad to find their story set entirely in a jungle in 1930s Congo and a distinct lack of aliens.

And iIf you put a cartoony cover of kids playing in a park on an erotica novel, monster is the kindest thing you will be called.

Genres tell readers what to expect. In an Adventure novel, we’re going to see great settings and a fast pace. In a Thriller we’re going to get violence, and at least one moment when the villain has the hero at their mercy.

We also don’t expect a bear-trap amputation injury in a Cozy Mystery or a Sweet Romance. But we do expect it in the Horror novel.

 The point I’m trying to make is that your readers have expectations about what will or won’t happen in your novel, based on the genre you’re writing in. There are always methods available to push the limits, of course, but you can’t go wrong by  sticking with what your reader expects – or at least by avoiding stepping too far out of the boundary lines.

 A few suggestions…

Fantasy is typically fairly “clean,” in that we don’t see enormous gouts of blood or detailed descriptions of the gristle coming out of  the wound. Wounds aren’t horrendous (unless you’re reading George R.R. Martin books). They also tend to be healed with magic rather than naturally, with truncated injury arcs. 

Science Fiction likes fancy weapons like blasters and phasers, especially if you’re writing in Military Sci-Fi, but there may be some room for older-school wounds depending on who your hero is fighting. Also, I have never seen a car / scooter / spaceship crash producing significant injuries in a sci-fi story. Again, descriptions tend to be sparse and general; we see the man go down, but we aren’t invited to smell the burning flesh of the wound.

In Romance plots, I would stay away from significant injuries unless they happened prior to the start of the story. There are definitely stories in which nurses fall for their patients, and vice versa, and they’re not wholly made-up; if nurses never fell for their patients, I wouldn’t be alive, because my grandmother cared for my grandfather’s wounds in World War II.

In the softer subgenres of Mysteries, there tend to be murders but not injuries per se.

Action stories seem to think that anything from a bullet to the knee to a love tap with a pistol butt will knock someone unconscious (a trope I despise, by the way), but tend to be light on life-altering injuries. This is, in part, because a great many Action tales don’t have underlying emotional arcs. Think of Indiana Jones: He gets the treasure, loses the treasure, gets the treasure, loses the treasure, meets his ex, gets the girl again, gets the treasure. At no point does Indiana Jones fundamentally change.

Police Procedurals tend to focus on murders, but may be up for a good maiming, especially when an officer gets too close to an investigation and gets hurt. But it’s usually a beating that sidelines the character without a significant change in who they are or how they behave because of it.

 The list could go on forever, but the point is this: understand the genre and subgenre you’re writing for so you know what your readers expect. Then deliver on those expectations, making sure that things actually matter.

It’s harder than it sounds, and more crucial than I could ever emphasize.

 What’s Your Reality Genre?

There’s a phenomenal book on editing called The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne (and an absolutely epic podcast by the same name). It’s one of the most amazing writing books I’ve ever bought, and it’s worth every penny, and I’m going to borrow an element rather shamelessly from Shawn’s work.

Among other things, Shawn discusses what he calls the Five-Leaf Genre Clover, which is basically his way of categorizing stories. It’s based on structure, on content, and a few other things.

While there are obvious “genres” to do with story type and convention (horror, action/adventure, thriller, coming-of-age, etc.…), these fall under only under one leaf of the Clover, specifically the Content Genre leaf.

I want to talk about a different leaf: the Realism leaf.

Shawn breaks the Realism leaf of the Genre Clover down into four separate categories:

Factualism: These are stories based on things that have actually happened. An injury in a Factual story would be based on what happened and how a person coped. Biographies and historical tales fall into this genre.

Realism: Something that could plausibly happen in our real world. Injuries in the Realism genre need to be strictly accurate: the Inciting Injury is possible; the Treatment, plausible; the Recovery, realistic; the New Normal, what we would expect if it happened to our cousin.

Fantasy: This is Realism with added elements that are not possible in our reality. They can be elves, spaceships, or portable nuclear generators. Injuries in the Fantasy setting can be totally realistic (if the fantastical elements have nothing to do with healing technology or magic). Remember what Arthur C. Clarke said:   Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Science Fiction is a kind of fantasy in which the fantastical elements are based on real or theorized science, though different subgenres incorporate different levels of realism.

Absurdism: This is a type of world in which an Injury might be treated by filling the character with marshmallows and rolling them up a hill, or a fish might tell your character that to err is divine but to drive to New Mexico is human. Absurdist stories aren’t bound at all by Realistic logic, or at least break that logic deliberately.

 Here’s the thing: You need to know which genre you’re writing in. Can you get away with hand-wavy magical healing in your genre? If you’re writing a gritty Realistic war story, probably not. If you’re writing a soft sci-fi (Fantasy) book, probably so. But what about stories in the middle?

 For example, if you’re writing an Absurdist piece, go with your imagination: Why shouldn’t the poisonous snake spit healing medfoam that gives your character acid trips but heals their wounds?

Factualism is simply a subset of Realism: it’s based in the real world, and also bounded by history and actual events that took place. The rules of Realism and the rules of Factualism are going to be essentially the same, from this perspective, so we can just roll them into one.

So that leaves us with two functional reality genres left to work in: Realism and Fantasy. We’re going to discuss each of them in detail in the next chapter.

This post is an excerpt from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters, out September 4th, 2017 from Even Keel Press. If you'd like to read a 100-page sample of the book, click here. If you'd like to preorder signed print or digital copies of the book before 9/4/2017, or claim Executive Producer status of the upcoming Blood on the Page, click here.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

This post appeared first on Patreon! Would you like to see the future? 

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What are other books/series that you'd recommend that are in the same vein as Animorphs?

Honestly, your ask inspired me to get off my butt and finally compile a list of the books that I reference with my character names in Eleutherophobia, because in a lot of ways that’s my list of recommendations right there: I deliberately chose children’s and/or sci-fi stories that deal really well with death, war, dark humor, class divides, and/or social trauma for most of my character names.  I also tend to use allusions that either comment on Animorphs or on the source work in the way that the names come up.

That said, here are The Ten Greatest Animorphs-Adjacent Works of Literature According to Sol’s Totally Arbitrary Standards: 

1. A Ring of Endless Light, Madeline L’Engle

This is a really good teen story that, in painfully accurate detail, captures exactly what it’s like to be too young to really understand death while forced to confront it anyway.  I read it at about the same age as the protagonist, not that long after having suffered the first major loss in my own life (a friend, also 14, killed by cancer).  It accomplished exactly what a really good novel should by putting words to the experiences that I couldn’t describe properly either then or now.  This isn’t a light read—its main plot is about terminal illness, and the story is bookended by two different unexpected deaths—but it is a powerful one. 

2. The One and Only Ivan, K.A. Applegate 

This prose novel (think an epic poem, sort of like The Iliad, only better) obviously has everything in it that makes K.A. Applegate one of the greatest children’s authors alive: heartbreaking tragedy, disturbing commentary on the human condition, unforgettably individuated narration, pop culture references, and poop jokes.  Although I’m mostly joking when I refer to Marco in my tags as “the one and only” (since this book is narrated by a gorilla), Ivan does remind me of Marco with his sometimes-toxic determination to see the best of every possible situation when grief and anger allow him no other outlet for his feelings and the terrifying lengths to which he will go in order to protect his found family.

3. My Teacher Flunked the Planet, Bruce Coville

Although the entire My Teacher is an Alien series is really well-written and powerful, this book is definitely my favorite because in many ways it’s sort of an anti-Animorphs.  Whereas Animorphs (at least in my opinion) is a story about the battle for personal freedom and privacy, with huge emphasis on one’s inner identity remaining the same even as one’s physical shape changes, My Teacher Flunked the Planet is about how maybe the answer to all our problems doesn’t come from violent struggle for personal freedoms, but from peaceful acceptance of common ground among all humans.  There’s a lot of intuitive appeal in reading about the protagonists of a war epic all shouting “Free or dead!” before going off to battle (#13) but this series actually deconstructs that message as blind and excessive, especially when options like “all you need is love” or “no man is an island” are still on the table.

4. Moon Called, Patricia Briggs

I think this book is the only piece of adult fiction on this whole list, and that’s no accident: the Mercy Thompson series is all about the process of adulthood and how that happens to interact with the presence of the supernatural in one’s life.  The last time I tried to make a list of my favorite fictional characters of all time, it ended up being about 75% Mercy Thompson series, 24% Animorphs, and the other 1% was Eugenides Attolis (who I’ll get back to in my rec for The Theif).  These books are about a VW mechanic, her security-administrator next door neighbor, her surgeon roommate, her retail-working best friend and his defense-lawyer boyfriend, and their cybersecurity frenemy.  The fact that half those characters are supernatural creatures only serves to inconvenience Mercy as she contemplates how she’s going to pay next month’s rent when a demon destroyed her trailer, whether to get married for the first time at age 38 when doing so would make her co-alpha of a werewolf pack, what to do about the vampires that keep asking for her mechanic services without paying, and how to be a good neighbor to the area ghosts that only she can see.  

5. The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner

This book (and its sequel A Conspiracy of Kings) are the ones that I return to every time I struggle with first-person writing and no Animorphs are at hand.  Turner does maybe the best of any author I’ve seen of having character-driven plots and plot-driven characters.  This book is the story of five individuals (with five slightly different agendas) traveling through an alternate version of ancient Greece and Turkey with a deceptively simple goal: they all want to work together to steal a magical stone from the gods.  However, the narrator especially is more complicated than he seems, which everyone else fails to realize at their own detriment. 

6. Homecoming, Cynthia Voight

Critics have compared this book to a modern, realistic reimagining of The Boxcar Children, which always made a lot of sense to me.  It’s the story of four children who must find their own way from relative to relative in an effort to find a permanent home, struggling every single day with the question of what they will eat and how they will find a safe place to sleep that night.  The main character herself is one of those unforgettable heroines that is easy to love even as she makes mistake after mistake as a 13-year-old who is forced to navigate the world of adult decisions, shouldering the burden of finding a home for her family because even though she doesn’t know what she’s doing, it’s not like she can ask an adult for help.  Too bad the Animorphs didn’t have Dicey Tillerman on the team, because this girl shepherds her family through an Odysseus-worthy journey on stubbornness alone.

7. High Wizardry, Diane Duane

The Young Wizards series has a lot of good books in it, but this one will forever be my favorite because it shows that weird, awkward, science- and sci-fi-loving girls can save the world just by being themselves.  Dairine Callahan was the first geek girl who ever taught me it’s not only okay to be a geek girl, but that there’s power in empiricism when properly applied.  In contrast to a lot of scientifically “smart” characters from sci-fi (who often use long words or good grades as a shorthand for conveying their expertise), Dairine applies the scientific method, programming theory, and a love of Star Wars to her problem-solving skills in a way that easily conveys that she—and Diane Duane, for that matter—love science for what it is: an adventurous way of taking apart the universe to find out how it works.  This is sci-fi at its best. 

8. Dr. Franklin’s Island, Gwyneth Jones

If you love Animorphs’ body horror, personal tragedy, and portrayal of teens struggling to cope with unimaginable circumstances, then this the book for you!  I’m only being about 80% facetious, because this story has all that and a huge dose of teen angst besides.  It’s a loose retelling of H.G. Wells’s classic The Island of Doctor Moreau, but really goes beyond that story by showing how the identity struggles of adolescence interact with the identity struggles of being kidnapped by a mad scientist and forcibly transformed into a different animal.  It’s a survival story with a huge dose of nightmare fuel (seriously: this book is not for the faint of heart, the weak of stomach, or anyone who skips the descriptions of skin melting and bones realigning in Animorphs) but it’s also one about how three kids with a ton of personal differences and no particular reason to like each other become fast friends over the process of surviving hell by relying on each other.  

9. Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar is the only author I’ve ever seen who can match K.A. Applegate for nihilistic humor and absurdist horror layered on top of an awesome story that’s actually fun for kids to read.  Where he beats K.A. Applegate out is in terms of his ability to generate dream-like surrealism in these short stories, each one of which starts out hilariously bizarre and gradually devolves into becoming nightmare-inducingly bizarre.  Generally, each one ends with an unsettling abruptness that never quite relieves the tension evoked by the horror of the previous pages, leaving the reader wondering what the hell just happened, and whether one just wet one’s pants from laughing too hard or from sheer existential terror.  The fact that so much of this effect is achieved through meta-humor and wordplay is, in my opinion, just a testament to Sachar’s huge skill as a writer. 

10. Magyk, Angie Sage

As I mentioned, the Septimus Heap series is probably the second most powerful portrayal of the effect of war on children that I’ve ever encountered; the fact that the books are so funny on top of their subtle horror is a huge bonus as well.  There are a lot of excellent moments throughout the series where the one protagonist’s history as a child soldier (throughout this novel he’s simply known as “Boy 412″) will interact with his stepsister’s (and co-protagonist’s) comparatively privileged upbringing.  Probably my favorite is the moment when the two main characters end up working together to kill a man in self-defense, and the girl raised as a princess makes the horrified comment that she never thought she’d actually have to kill someone, to which her stepbrother calmly responds that that’s a privilege he never had; the ensuing conversation strongly implies that his psyche has been permanently damaged by the fact that he was raised to kill pretty much from infancy, but all in a way that is both child-friendly and respectful of real trauma.  

[hahanotsofunny]

World of Cinema & The Great Indian Censorship

#NSFW Post. Reader discretion is advised.

According to Deep Thought, the accurate answer to everything is 42.

1. On page 42 of Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter discovers he’s a wizard.

2. Elvis Presley died at the age of 42.

3. 42 is the average number of cuts a filmmaker has to make in order to get a clean chit and approval for release from the censor board.

All films that requires a display on big screens have to be certified by the Censor Board prior to release. Given the diaspora of the artists and audience, more than 1000 films are made per year.  It behoves us to think there must be a reasonable standard for censoring/certifying movies. Think again, my friend.

What warrants a cut in a movie?

Anything that falls within the spectrum of foul language, nudity (sexual & non-sexual, suggestive & full-frontal), smoking, drinking, innuendos, violence, bloodshed, gore etc, has to be chopped off from the film. The morality of the audience is top priority.

“Awesome! There’s no complaint then”

Wrong.

Filmmaking is a form of art. Any form of art needs to be sung/displayed/painted/performed the way the creator intended it to. Censoring a work of art mutilates the narrative. Anything that is sensual or sexual is considered inappropriate for the audience and therefore required to be removed from the film. Unfortunately, nudity falls under this category.

“But nudity IS inappropriate because it is sexual in nature”

Allow a self-proclaimed movie buff to explain why that assumption is wrong.

More so than often, a director uses nudity as a storytelling tool. It could be a narrative device for character development, progression of story, or both. A better description can be provided through a narrative used in Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Shoshanna aka Emmanuelle is summoned to a restaurant where she is introduced to Joeseph Goebbels. A minute later, she is introduced to his haughty French interpreter, Francesca Mondino. It’s a fascist regime under the Nazi, and the translator is quite high on style and exquisiteness. It almost feels like she doesn’t fit in. Judging from her looks, it is obvious that there is more to her than she lets on. The scene cuts to a 5 second juxtapose of Joeseph Goebbels having sex with the interpreter. There is suggestive nudity. Shoshanna’s imagination can be speculated as an answer to why the interpreter has the luxury to be seated alongside men who dance to the whims of Hitler.

How does this scene serve any purpose?

Cut to the scene before the climax of Inglourious Basterds. Joeseph Goebbels makes a Nazi propaganda film on the war exploits of Frederick Zoller, a German Sniper, who has killed over 250 soldiers. A delightful Hitler leans to his side and says this is Goebbels’ finest film so far. Goebbels is so overwhelmed with joy that he starts crying. As he tears up, Francesca Mondino places her hand on his shoulder. This implies that intimacy is a part of their relationship, a plot point that was established in the previously discussed scene.

To an average moviegoer, this might not make much sense. However, in terms of narratives and character development, scene#2 is incomplete without scene#1.

Every movie is a package. Even a 15 second cut could mutilate the story that the screenwriter/director originally intended to narrate.

“Kids should not be exposed to adult content “

Fair enough. Children tend to perceive everything at face value. They constantly see women washing dishes in advertisements and grow up to believe that women are born to do household chores.

On what basis is a scene deemed appropriate or inappropriate for children?

Discrepancies in Censorship

Discrepancy #1  

Baahubali 2: The Conclusion was released with U/A certificate(Parental guidance for children below the age of 12 years). Screens in Tamil Nadu censored a liplock scene between Bahubali and Devasena under the assumption that it was inappropriate for children. The same movie had scenes that showed beheading, impaling, and a slow motion sequence of a woman walking with a decapitated head. None of these scenes were censored for children. Violence and bloodshed is fine, but a consensual kiss is not. Noted with due diligence, Your Honour!

Discrepancy #2

The 2016 superhero movie, Deadpool, was released with an A certificate (Restricted to Adults), but the swear words were muted. There is a shot of the protagonist severing a head and kicks the head like a soccer player. The head is hurled at full force and injures another person. The violence is comedic in nature. Fans in India were not lucky enough to enjoy Deadpool in its full glory on the big screen.

Discrepancy #3 

Befikre (2016) was cleared by the Censor Board with U/A certification. The movie had several kissing scenes and one glimpse of Ranveer Singh’s bare ass. I’m not here to complain about Ranveer’s perfectly shaped ass, but I couldn’t help wonder how movie certifying in India is more complicated than Schrodinger’s equation.

Discrepancy #4 

The 2017 action adventure reboot The Mummy received A certification for release in Indian screens. The booking portal in cinema websites had a prompt that warned potential viewers that no one under the age of 18 would be allowed to watch The Mummy. In spite of this warning, a scene  was partially censored/blurred for a cinema hall full of adults. The scene shows a woman offering her soul through a ritual. She is shown to be undressed, albeit in angles that warrant for suggestive nudity.As she completes the ritual, writings are etched on her bare skin. 

An Objective Look at the Problem

Films released in Indian screens are certified under 4 categories. (Source - Wikipedia)

1. U (Unrestricted Public Exhibition - Films with the U certification are fit for unrestricted public exhibition, and are family friendly. These films can contain universal themes like education, family, drama, romance, sci-fi, action etc. Now, these films can also contain some mild violence, but it should not be prolonged. It may also contain very mild sexual scenes (without any traces of nudity or sexual detail).

2. U/A (Parental Guidance for children below the age of 12 years) - Films with the U/A certification can contain moderate adult themes, that are not strong in nature and can be watched by a child under parental guidance. These films can contain some strong violence, moderate sex (without any traces of nudity or sexual detail), frightening scenes and muted abusive and filthy language.

3. A (Restricted to Adults) - Films with the A certification are available for public exhibition, but with restriction to adults. These films can contain heavily strong violence, strong sex (but full frontal and rear nudity is not allowed usually), strong abusive language (but words which insults or degrades women are not allowed), and even some controversial and adult themes considered unsuitable for young viewers.

4. S (Restricted to any special class of persons)  - Films with S certification should not be viewed by the public. Only people associated with it (Engineers, Doctors, Scientists, etc.), have permission to watch those films.

For the sake of convenience, I am going to compare this with the certifying standards used by Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). 

1. G (General Audiences) - Nothing that would offend parents for viewing by children

2. PG (Parental Guidance) - Parents urged to give 'parental guidance.' May contain some material parents might not like for their young children

3. PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned) - Parents are urged to be cautious. Some material may be inappropriate for pre-teenagers

4. R (Restricted) - Contains some adult material. Parents are urged to learn more about the film before taking their young children with them.

5. NC-17 (Adults Only) - Clearly adult. Children are not admitted.

“Alright. Every country has its own certification standards. I don’t see the problem.”

The Jungle Book (2016) is an animated film primarily targeted at a family audience. Due to the near-realistic motion capture technology, tigers and snakes look close to the real deal. Shere Khan the Tiger has burn scars on his face. He attempts to pounce at Mowgli, creating a jump-scare moment. A huge menacing snake intimidates the kid. As a result, the movie received a PG rating in the U.S for intense and frightening sequences.

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) contained scary sequences too. A dream sequence involves a demonic creature breaking out a tombstone and grabbing Bruce Wayne by his torso. There are several other scenes that are slightly eerie in nature. The theatrical version received a PG-13 rating in the U.S for sequences of violence and action throughout, and some sensuality.(The extended/ultimate edition received a R rating)

Despite the fact that The Jungle Book and Batman V Superman were not intended for the same audience, both movies received U/A certification for release in India. To fit into the U/A category, few shots were blurred or cut prior to release in India.

Unless the current certifying categories are expanded, it will be difficult for both filmmakers and the audience to relish a movie in its true form.

“Scenes that are sexual in nature can have an effect on youth”

So can scenes that glorify stalking or objectification of women and ‘educate the audience’ that it is an accepted norm in society. We have incessant smoking and drinking disclaimers for films but the audience is yet to see a disclaimer that says ‘Stalking is injurious to society and punishable by law’.

“Oh for crying out loud, we cannot have a disclaimer for everything immoral”

Doctor Strange (2016), a superhero origin story, starts with a neurosurgeon who drives recklessly and ends up in a major accident that later gives him the chance to be a superhero. One could argue the film was trying to tell everyone that reckless driving is totally fine. The studio decided to go out on a limb and display a disclaimer during the end credits, even if they really didn’t have to.

As you can see, there is responsible filmmaking and then there is responsible-for-the-sake-of-being-responsible censorship. 

“Sensual scenes can create unwanted urges”

An urge is natural. How one acts upon that urge matters more. A scene involving a mouth-watering chocolate cake can create an urge, but you don’t satisfy the urge by grabbing chocolate cake from another person’s plate without their consent. It’s not that hard of an analogy. Go figure!

I can’t end this post without addressing the elephant in the room, especially if the elephant takes up 30% of the room. A major reason for every movie producer vying to get ‘U’ certification is the tax exemption of 30%. This might be an unpopular opinion but IMHO, a tax exemption for U certification makes no sense at all.

It’s a TL;DR post already and I am pretty sure a lot of people haven’t resumed reading after Ranveer’s ass!

To the ones who did, here’s a thought/question...  Between a hero punching bad guys that sends them flying 20 feet off the ground and a hero stalking a woman under the pretext of true love, which one do you think the audience is more likely to emulate?

[a-reading-journal]

I needed a break from all that Narnia. This book had been on my radar for a few years now, and the price was finally right online so I ordered it.

This was an amazing debut. Only around 250 pages, but it felt so much longer, in a really good way. There was a lot of everything, facts and emotions, between the covers, but the pacing was brilliant in that it never felt rushed or too slow. At first I had fear that switching between the main character and his mother as narrator was going to detract from the focus, but it was exactly this that kept the pacing even, and allowed for decades of time and totally different experiences to be described in detail without feeling overwhelming.

I also thought of how the novel would work if the first half was the mother’s story, and the end of her narrative catching up to the beginning of the son’s in the second half, but enjoyed the original presentation nonetheless.

Eagerly awaiting his second novel in the upcoming months.

My only real complaint is that the cover image of The Cat, doesn’t match the description of The Cat in the book. Would it really have been that difficult to portray the character accurately? When he’s described so vividly. Not doing that homework seems sloppy on the part of the designer. 

Our eldest children started going to school. When it turned out that children in Finland are entitled to preschool education even before they start school, I was so happy that I could hardly believe it was true. I was afraid they might send the children back home and say there was no good reason why my children should be at preschool. Because Finnish women had jobs, they didn’t have time to stay at home with their children, and so they let other people take care of them. When I heard that children as young as eighteen can move away from home, I was shocked. What kind of person is an eighteen-year-old? What does an eighteen-year-old know about life? Nothing whatsoever. Every day I sent my children to school and preschool slightly early and collected them late in the afternoon. All my spare time I spent sleeping. I couldn’t get enough of it. It was as though I was addicted to killing time: the time until my husband would come home again and leave again. 151

[goswagcollectorfire]

CARL’S BLOG: DARK CLOUDS OVER ALABAMA; carlsblog.online; http://sbpra.com/CarlJBarger; Arkansas-Hillbilly.com

AMAZON.COM REVIEWS ON DARK CLOUDS OVER ALABAMA    

FROM THE AUTHOR: DEAR FACEBOOK AND BLOG SUPPORTERS: As we come to the end of DARK CLOUDS OVER ALABAMA and start BLUE SKIES OF EL DORADO, ARKANSAS.  I wanted to leave with you a few Amazon reviews of DARK CLOUDS OVER ALABAMA.  I had over 70 reviews of the book when it was first released the reviews were mostly 5-star reviews.  The sequel, BLUE SKIES OF ELDORADO, ARKANSAS has done well also.  I hope you enjoy BLUE SKIES OF EL DORADO which I will start blogging in the next few days.  BLUE SKIES OF EL DORADO pick up where DARK CLOUDS OVER ALABAMA finishes with Obadiah’s return home from the war.  There will be a few chapters in BLUE SKIES OF EL DORADO still dedicated to Autauga County, Alabama before the move is made to Arkansas. Hope you continue to support my blogging.  Love you guys and enjoy your comments.  Some of you may not have my website:  Here it is:   http://sbpra.com/CarlJBarger.  On my website you will find some trailers of my novels.  I think you would enjoy watching these life film clips.  

Synopsis: The year is 1853. The place is Twin Oaks Plantation, Autauga County, Alabama. Twenty-one-year-old Obadiah Bradford's life is transformed forever when he accompanies his father to purchase a new household servant in nearby Selma, Alabama.  Obadiah is deeply affected by his immediate attraction and intense feelings for Penelope, the beautiful mulatto daughter of his family's new servant. These feelings will eventually present some of the greatest challenges of his and Penelope's lives. With the threat of civil war looming on the horizon, Dark Clouds Over Alabama is the heart-wrenching story of Obadiah Bradford, his forbidden love for Penelope, his struggles with the immorality of slavery, his service in the Confederate Army's medical corps, and how he overcomes every challenge by adhering to his traditional values, Christian beliefs, and deep faith in God. It is a story of love, life, hope, commitment, politics, tragedy, and triumph in the Old South that is quite simply a must read for anyone interested in this fascinating chapter in American history. ***About the Author: Carl J. Barger grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Cleburne County, Arkansas, one of eleven children of migrant workers. After graduation from college, he coached high school basketball for five years then thirty-three years as a public-school superintendent. He has authored Several books: Swords and Plowshares; Mamie: An Ozark Mountain Girl of Courage; Cleburne County and its People, Vol. 1 and II;  Dark Clouds Over Alabama; BLUE SKIES OF EL DORADO, ARKANSAS; ARKANSAS HILLBILLY; and SONS OF WAR.   Carl is now retired and resides in Conway, Arkansas, with Lena, his wife of fifty-five years. Publisher’s website: http://sbpra.com/CarlJBarger

*****This book is a must read not only for those who enjoy historical fiction but also for those who enjoy stories about families facing the challenges of their lives while clinging to their values and faith in God. With the country on the cusp of and then during civil war, Obadiah Bradford grapples with the issues of slavery and war while in his personal life he wrestles with his feelings for a young slave girl. You will become totally immersed in his life as a son, brother, slave owner, husband, father, doctor, and soldier. You will rejoice for him in the good times, you will root for him in his struggles, and you will hurt for him in his suffering. Great character...great book. Hoping for a sequel.

*****I gave this book a five-star rating because it was riveting to the end. Not only was it a romantic story but there was much history intertwined which gave a great understanding of the times back then. I also appreciated the clean language throughout. A person of faith would not be uncomfortable reading this book. Can't wait for the sequel!

*****This is a great read! Wonderful storyteller, very gifted in his writing! I have read three of Carl's books and the fourth is on the way! I can't wait for your next book! Big Fan! Highly Recommended! You won't be disappointed!

*****What a great story. I couldn't put the book down. A romance with a lot of great information about the Civil War that I didn't know. I have already started the sequel. It's a page turner, too!!

*****Great read. I read the book in one day. Very well written.

*****I enjoyed this book and hope there is a sequel I would like to know if they made it to Arkansas. Sure, would like to know if they married. The author made me feel as if, I was there. I could see the land, smell the returned earth and see the full crop of cotton or corn ready for harvest. good authors use words as artists use paint to express themselves. Mr. Barger created a wonderful piece of work and would highly recommend to anyone who Loves the south then and now.

*****As a physician and a Southerner, I found this story fascinating. As the book opens in the 1850’s the main character, Obadiah Bradford, is a son of a plantation owner and an apprentice to a local Alabama doctor with aspirations of going to medical school. His visits to various plantations with his mentoring doctor expose him to a variety of living conditions for the slaves of Autauga County. Racial relations comprise one of the strongest themes of this novel. The plot is surprising, even shocking, to those raised in the South. I suspect that the author believes that Christian people are our best hope for developing love and respect among folks of different skin color. It is a timely, sorely needed message for our day. A second strong theme is that of family. The author’s background as revealed in the biography of his mother, Mamie, gives little clue as to why racial relations might be so central a focus in Dark Clouds, but the biography does explain the strong emphasis on close family ties. It also explains how he is so knowledgeable about the specifics of running a farm or plantation, an understanding that is obvious in this novel. If you have read At Home in Mitford series by Jan Karon, you will recognize a similar style in the author’s story telling. The flavor of this book is much more like that series than it is Corrie Ten Boom’s the Hiding Place. If you were up lifted by Karon’s books, I think you will enjoy this one also. The final central theme found here is that of Christian ethics. We are shown that one man’s decisions and convictions can make a difference. Reading this book will strengthen your faith. It may also challenge you to rethink some of your present convictions. I’d highly recommend it.

*****5 Star Rating! Romantic and Historic: The novel starts the year of 1853 as the Civil war was brewing and rumors of getting closer into the deep south. Lots of history of both southern and northern lives and the struggles and sorrows of so many lives taken though out this terrible time in America. The main character is Obadiah Bradford the son of a wealthy plantation owner. A family of strong faith in God and values for other mankind of any race. It also describes in detail the different relationships and treatment of plantation owners toward their slaves in this time period. This was very moving to my heart as I read of how other human beings could be treated and the freedom brought about by God's perfect plan. On the lighter side the chapters are filled with love, romance, laughter, friendships, respect, dreams, prosperity, family ties, faith and joy. You will be fascinated by the way the author brings out the characters and feel as you know each one individually and anticipate success and happiness in their future. Highly recommend this book. Waiting on the continued edition of Blue Skies of El Dorado.

*****Totally different from the books I usually read. Historically educational with a solid story combined with romance. Don't get me wrong-this is no frivolous love story. Both this and "Blue Skies of El Dorado" deliver insight as to why we as a nation are still struggling with the aftermath of the Civil War even today. Told from a male perspective, the main character, Dr. Obadiah Bradford, comes off as a bit pompous and the more feminine details of southern life, such as descriptions of women's clothing, are beneath observation. What you get instead are reports of battles that would have been of immediate concern at the time. Devoured both books!

*****I have read many of Carl’s book blogs day by day to the end. There was something about this book and the history it portrayed that I couldn’t wait for the day to day blog, so I purchased the book. Within a few hours I finished the book. Could not put it down. Thank you for another great book. Only downside to reading this book is now I don’t have nothing to look forward to reading the blog every day

*****"Dark Clouds Over Alabama" is an engaging book, filled with intrigue and insight into human nature--its strengths and weaknesses--and how true love conquers all. Although fictional, Carl Barger has done his homework and couches the story in historically accurate times and settings. Throughout its pages the reader finds the tension that exists even today between racial differences, forbidden love vs. loyalty and fidelity of faith, man's inhumanity to man, etc. I look forward to reading his sequel to this book--"Clear Skies Of El Dorado"--to see what happens to the main characters, Dr. Obadiah Bradford and his beautiful slave girl/wife, Penelope. I recommend this book to all who love to read.

*****In the best tradition of historical fiction, Carl Barger weaves an intriguing and beautiful tale of love, life, hope, commitment, politics, tragedy, and triumph. The book begins in 1853, near the beginning of the end for America's Old South. The main character is Obadiah Bradford, the young son of a prominent south Alabama plantation and slave owner. The story revolves around Obadiah's secret and forbidden love for Penelope, the beautiful Mulatto daughter of his family's new servant. As the story unfolds, readers share in Obadiah's heart-wrenching conflict over Penelope, his struggles with the immorality of slavery, his success in medical school, his service in the Confederate Army's medical corps, and how he overcomes every challenge by adhering to his traditional values, Christian beliefs, and deep faith in God. This book is a must read for anyone interested in this fascinating chapter in American history.

 *****Excellent read!! Knowing Carl Barger, I'm not surprised at how this book has been accepted. His interest in and love of history make the story very believable. The plot holds your interest as it develops through the plantation era of the old South and the way slaves were mistreated by many overseers and slave owners. The story continues to hold your interest as it evolves into the Civil War and how that time takes its toll on all aspects of Southern life. The characters seem more real than fictitious as Carl weaves interesting and unexpected aspects of their individual and collective lives into the story. A very worthwhile read, and I look forward to other books to come!

[tandewrites]

When I started to read this book, I put it down after the first 80 pages and sent a message to my friend to tell her that I felt like I was reading a fanfiction of the first two books. I think the author got too carried away with trying to please the fans: I was someone who wanted more Tella and Legend, but not this much.

It’s sad when a book doesn’t live up to your expectations, especially when you spend a year with it as your most anticipated book. If it was a standalone, this could have been great. But, when you remember that it’s the final book in a trilogy you loved every word of, it’s hard to ignore how it’s missing all the magic you put it on a pedestal for.

I wish I could give it a half star rating, because 3 stars is too low, but 4 stars is too high. I originally gave it 4, but I’m rounding down to 3 because that’s a better representation of my first reaction to the book. It’s almost painful for me to write this review because of how highly I think of the series.

This review has so many potential spoilers that I’m not going to tag them all, otherwise it will just look like a ‘fill in the blanks’.

  Characters

The characters were what I loved most about this book, so I’m going to focus on them. The book is dual-narrated by Scarlett and Donatella, and features mainly characters that I’ve known and grown to love from the first two books, as well as the addition of the Fates and their mother.

Scarlett: between the sisters, I was more interested and invested in her storyline, but I think she had a lot less ‘screen time’ than Tella. I love her significantly more than I did in the first book, even though she still did childish things and I don’t really understand her motivations.

Tella: she used to be my favourite sister, but she did so many questionable things in this book that I’ve lost some of my love for her. She seems to have lost some of her characterisation from Legendary and is a shadow of her former self, obsessed with loving people who don’t love her.

Julian: I’ve never been sure what to think of him. He’s too perfect and not in an endearing way. All of his actions and motives seem to revolve around Scarlett, and I’m not sure if he has any personality besides loving her.

Legend: I loved him so much as Dante in the second book, but everything that made him likable disappeared in this one. I will forever love Dante. I just don’t know how to feel about him as Legend. There’s a quote in the description about Tella discovering the boy she fell in love with doesn’t really exist, and I think that’s an accurate way of describing what’s happening. It’s like Legend is a whole new character.

Jacks: I love him. He was the villain throughout the second book, but Tella was still shocked when he did villainous things. I love that he embraces his actions and doesn’t hide from being a villain. However, his character is reduced to a minor side character who just shows up at convenient times to woo Tella. He has less of a purpose and is mainly there to cause drama. Also, how did he manage to escape the cards before the more powerful Fates?

The Fallen Star/Gavriel: he is the main villain of the book, but he doesn’t really do many villainous things. Personally, as the concept of the Fates was introduced in Legendary, it’s strange for one to be the main villain, especially as he isn’t introduced until the final book of the series. We don’t have a chance to fear him. And he’s defeated so easily.

The other Fates: the Maiden Death and Poison have such a strong aesthetic. Everyone made a big deal about how the Assassin was ‘mad’ but that never seemed to appear through his character or the plot. The rest of them were more like very minor side characters who didn’t play a pivotal role in the story. Most are just mentioned by name because they’ve been seen, not because they’ve done anything.

  Plot

The plot felt weaker in this book than the last two, almost to the point where I didn’t really know what was supposed to be happening. A large portion of it felt too rushed and linear for what I was expecting. Unlike the previous books, it didn’t focus on the mystery of the Caraval and the magic that caught my interest in the first place.

The writing was still stunning. It was so beautiful. So magical. So enchanting. The way Garber writes makes everything seem otherworldly and fairytalelike. I admire her imagination and how vividly she brings everything to life. Caraval world is so detailed and magnificent, and I love how you never know if something is real or not. There’s always a deception, twist and turns.

My one problem with the writing is that she likes to repeat things and its actually kind of annoying. Characters would keep repeating things that happened only a few sentences ago as if we’d already forgotten. The plot itself is also repetitive in some places, focusing on lavish descriptions of beautiful dresses and pretty boys in ‘love triangles’ and damsels in distresses. I felt like most of the time we were being told rather than shown. It’s full of characters speaking in long paragraphs about the history of something. It dragged and made me lose focus. I don’t want to be told everything; I want to see it.

The book felt very anticlimactic. Dramatic events happened out of nowhere with no warning or build up and had very little impact other than being shocking for a few pages. I’m going to put a list of a few of the events that bothered me the most.

Paloma’s entire existence. Tella spent the entire second book trying to save her, then she wakes up, runs off, has an outfit change, meets her former lover, stabs him, gets stabbed, then dies all in the space of a few pages. Her existence adds nothing to the plot and takes away the value of everything Tella did to rescue her.

Scarlett’s ‘love triangle’ was set up to be something a lot bigger than it was, but she decided she chose Julian almost immediately. She makes a competition to see who will ‘win’ her and regrets it instantly, but keeps stringing the other guy along. Then he just dies??

Tella and Jacks’ relationship. She finds out that they’re ‘married’ then they separate within paragraphs. He curses her to be in love with him, but she goes into a dream with Legend and the curse disappears a few pages later.

The blood book that I don’t remember the name of. They spent so much effort trying to get it and trying to get the blood to use it against the villain, but Tella just ended up using it to find out she was ‘married’ and that’s the only purpose the book had.

Scarlett’s real father?? I felt like this came out of nowhere just to add drama to the plot, and everyone accepted it without question. Then Scarlett spends the entire time hating him, but breaks down when he dies because he had a redemption speech.

  Worldbuilding

The world in this series is something I have praised, but I think this book relies on you remembering the world from the previous books rather than developing a version of it without Caraval.

I loved the myths and the folklore of the Fates. But I feel like we’re never really given true context and explanation of how they work.  It felt like the world was never given a reason for being the way it was. But, I suppose that’s just the way of magic and we’re not supposed to question it.

I found the Fates interesting, but I still feel like the story could have carried on the same without most of them there. They were what I found most interesting about the book – especially their backstories – but they purpose didn’t feel important. It felt more like they were setting up for their own spinoff series.

Also, this is probably another plot point, but I don’t want to even acknowledge the time-travel loophole because that’s one of my least favourite tropes for tying up a loose end. And I still don’t understand why it was necessary.

  The Ending

I think Finale has one of the most unsatisfying endings that I’ve ever read. It just… happened. Everything feels rushed and it wraps up too neatly and all the inconvenient things get ignored. It was a high stakes story which should’ve had so many sacrifices, but the ending was too convenient and too much of a Happily Ever After.

There’s this quote in the book description: “Caraval is over, but perhaps the greatest game of all has begun. There are no spectators this time: only those who will win, and those who will lose everything.” And, spoiler alert: no one loses anything, let alone everything. There are moments where it feels like something could be lost, but the day is saved straight away.

  The writing is beautiful. The world is magical. Despite my disappointment, I still completely recommend this series. I didn’t hate this book, but I just didn’t love it either. I know my review sounds very negative and almost ranty, but I loved being back in the world and with these characters again.

Also, I’m going to place a bet that there’s probably going to be a spinoff series or something. Garber definitely left enough space to expand this world, especially with that scene at the market. If you’ve read it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Also, I’d be totally down for a new story about The Fates.

  I’m going to take a moment at the end here to appreciate how stunning the book physically is. I have a Waterstones exclusive hardback, and it has red stained pages and it’s signed and I think there are four different options for what’s written on the front cover beneath the dust jacket. My series no longer matches, but this book is so beautiful that I don’t care.

“Most of my life, I’ve romanticized death. I used to love the idea of something being so tremendous that it was worth dying for. But I was wrong. I think the most magnificent things are worth living for.” ― Stephanie Garber, Finale When I started to read this book, I put it down after the first 80 pages and sent a message to my friend to tell her that I felt like I was reading a fanfiction of the first two books.

[writinggeisha]

How to write descriptions and create a sense of place

Your first job as a storyteller is a simple one, and a crucial one. You have to get your passengers into your train – your readers into your story. Only then can you hope to transport them.

And that crucial first step doesn’t have much to do with characters or story or anything else. All that matters, but its importance shows itself more slowly.

What matters first is this: your fictional world has to seem real. It has to grip the reader as intensely as real life – more intensely, even.

And that means that the buildings, cities, places, rooms, trees, weather of your fictional world have to be convincing there. They have to have an emphatic, solid, believable presence.

A  big ask, right? But it gets harder than that.

Because at the same time, people don’t want huge wodges of descriptive writing. They want to engage with characters and story, because that’s the reason they picked up your book in the first place.

So your challenge becomes convincing readers that your world is real . . . but using only the lightest of touches to achieve that goal.

No so easy, huh?

Step 1: Start early

Set the scene early on – then nudge.

It may sound obvious but plenty of writers launch out into a scene without giving us any descriptive material to place and anchor the action. Sure, a page or so into the scene, they may start to add details to it – but by that point it’s too late. They’ve already lost the reader. If the scene feels placeless at the start – like actors speaking in someeblank, white room – you won’t be able to wrestle that sense of place back later.

So start early.

That means telling the reader where they are in a paragraph (or so), close to the start of any new scene. That early paragraph needs to have enough detail that if you are creating a coffee shop, for example, it doesn’t just feel like A Generic Coffee Shop. It should feel like its own thing. One you could actually walk into. Something with its own mood and colour.

And once, early in your scene, you’ve created your location, don’t forget about it. Just nudge a little as you proceed. So you could have your characters talking – then they’re interrupted by a waitress. Then they talk (or argue, or fight, or kiss) some more, and then you drop in some other detail which reminds the reader, “Yep, here we still are, in this coffee shop.”

That’s a simple technique, bit it works every time.

One paragraph early on, then nudge, nudge, nudge.

As the roughest of rough guides, those nudges need to happen at least once a page – so about every 300 words. If it’s natural to do so more often, that’s totally fine.

Step 2: Be specific

Details matter! They build a sense of place like nothing else.

Gabriel García Márquez, opening One Hundred Years of Solitude, introduces his village like this:

Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.

Boom! We’re there.

In his world. In his village. Already excited to see what lies ahead.

And yes, he’s started early (Chapter 1, Page 1, Line 1). But it’s more than that, isn’t it? He could have written something like this:

Macondo was a village of about twenty houses, built on a riverbank.

I hope it’s obvious that that sentence hardly transports us anywhere. It’s too bland. Too unfocused. Too generic. There are literally thousands of villages in the world which would fit that description.

In short, it’s the detail that gives this description its vibrancy. They’re not just houses, they’re adobe houses. The river doesn’t just flow over stones, its flows over polished stones that are white and enormous, like (wow!) prehistoric eggs.

The sentence works so well because Marquez has:

Created something totally non-generic

Via the use of highly specific detail, and

Uses surprising / exotic language to make those details blaze in our imagination.

That basic template is one you can use again and again. It never stales. It lies at the heart of all good descriptive writing.

So here, for example, is a more ‘boring’ space . . . but still one redolent with vividness and atmosphere thanks to the powerful use of atmospheric specificity. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred introduces her room with details that not only grab us but hint at something dark:

A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.

Those clipped words transport us straight to Offred’s enclosed, and terrifying, space. We’re also told just enough to give us an image of that place, enough to heighten tension, enough to tease curiosity. This is just a description of a room – but we already feel powerfully impelled to read on.

Step 3: Be selective with your descriptive details

Be selective – don’t overwhelm.

It might be tempting to share every detail with us on surroundings.

Don’t.

Even with a setting like Hogwarts – a place readers really do want to know all the hidden details of – J.K. Rowling doesn’t share how many revolving staircases it has, how many treasures in the Room of Requirement, how many trees in the Forbidden Forest. That’s not the point. (And it would write off a little of Hogwarts’ magic and mystery.)

If you’re describing a bar, don’t write:

The bar was approximately twenty-eight feet long, by perhaps half of that wide. A long mahogany bar took up about one quarter of the floor space, while eight tables each with 4 wooden chairs occupied the remaining area. There were a number of tall bar stools arranged to accommodate any drinker who didn’t want to be seated at one of the tables. The ceiling height was pleasantly commodious.

That’s accurate, yes. It’s informative, yes. But it’s bland as heck.

The reader doesn’t want information. They want atmosphere. They want mood.

Here’s an alternative way to describe a bar – the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange. This description delivers a sense of intimacy and darkness in a few words:

The mesto [place] was near empty … it looked strange, too, having been painted with all red mooing cows … I took the large moloko plus to one of the little cubies that were all round … there being like curtains to shut them off from the main mesto, and there I sat down in the plushy chair and sipped and sipped

We’re told what we need to know, thrown into that murky Korova atmosphere and Burgess moves the action on. All we really have in terms of detail are those mooing red cows, some cubies (curtain booths?), and a plushy chair. There’s lots more author Anthony Burgess could tell us about that place. But he doesn’t. He gives us the right details, not all the details.

Step 4: Write for all the senses

You have a nose? So use it.

Visuals are important, but don’t neglect the other senses. Offering a full range of sensory information will enhance your descriptive writing.

Herman Melville, say, describes to us the chowder for the ship’s crew in Moby Dick: ‘small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes.’ Such descriptions are deft, specific, and brilliantly atmospheric. Where else but on board a nineteenth century American whaler would you get such a meal? By picking out those details, Melville makes his setting feel vibrantly alive.

Here’s another example.

Joanne Harris’ opening of Chocolat plays to readers’ senses, as we’re immersed straightaway in the world of her book through scent, sound and sight:

We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausage and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hotplate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters.

These non-visual references matter so much because sight alone can feel a little distant, a little empty.

By forcing the reader’s taste buds to image Melville’s clams or Harris’s pancakes – or making the reader feel that warm February wind, the confetti ‘sleeting’ down collars – it’s almost as though the writers are hauling the readers’ entire body into their scenes.

That’s good stuff: do likewise.

(And one easy test: take one of your scenes and highlight anything that references a non-visual sense. If you find some good references, then great: you’re doing fine. If not, your highlighter pen remains unused, you probably want to edit that scene!)

Step 5: Get place and action working together

That’s where the magic happens!

Use the atmospheric properties of a place to add to other properties of the scene. That doesn’t mean you should always play things the obvious way: no need for cliché;.

You can have declarations of love happen in idyllic meadows, as in Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, but why not at a bus stop in the rain? Shouted over the barriers at a train station?

Your character also brings one kind of mood to the scene, and the action that unfolds will bring other sensations.

Lynda La Plante’s crime novel Above Suspicion makes a home setting frightening after it becomes obvious a stranger has been in protagonist DS Anna Travis’ flat, and she’s just been assigned to help solve her first murder case.

So the place is influenced by action, once Anna notices:

Reaching for the bedside lamp, she stopped and withdrew her hand. The photograph of her father had been turned out to face the room. She touched it every night before she went to sleep. It was always facing towards her, towards the bed, not away from it. … In the darkness, what had felt safe before now felt frightening: the way the dressing-table mirror reflected the street-light through the curtains and the sight of the wardrobe door left slightly ajar.

Here a comfy, nondescript flat becomes a frightening place, just because of what else is going on. Go for unfamiliar angles that add drama and excitement to your work.

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Step 6: Use unfamiliar locations

And smart research ALWAYS helps.

Using unfamiliar settings adds real mood and atmosphere.

Stephenie Meyer, when writing Twilight, decided she needed a rainy place near a forest to fit key plot elements.

Like protagonist Bella, she was raised in Arizona, but explained the process of setting Twilight in an unfamiliar setting on her blog:

For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest. … In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.

As her success has shown, it’s possible to write successfully about a place you don’t know, but you must make it your business to know as much as you can about it. (Or if you’re writing a fantasy or sci-fi novel, plan your world down to its most intricate details.)

And to be clear: you’re doing the research, not because you want that research to limit you. (Oh, I can’t write that, because Wikipedia tells me that the river isn’t as long / the forest isn’t as thick / or whatever else.)

On the contrary:

You are doing the research, because that research may inspire and stimulate a set of ideas you might not have ecountered otherwise.

The key thing is to do your research to nail specifics, especially if they are unfamiliar, foreign, exotic.

Just read how Tokyo is described in Ryu Murakami’s thriller In the Miso Soup:

It was still early in the evening when we emerged onto a street in Tsukiji, near the fish market. … Wooden bait-and-tackle shops with disintegrating roofs and broken signs stood next to shiny new convenience stores, and futuristic highrise apartment complexes rose skyward on either side of narrow, retro streets lined with wholesalers of dried fish.

There’s authenticity, grit to this description of Tokyo, as opposed to using ‘stock’ descriptions that could apply to many modern cities.

Note this same thing with foods: in Japan, your protagonist could well be eating miso soup, as per Ryu Murakami.

Or say if your story was set in Hong Kong, you might write in a dai pai dong (a sort of Chinese street kitchen), something very specific to that city if you’re describing a street there.

Alternatively, if you are setting something in the past, get your sense of place right by doing your research right, too.

In historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, set in Holland in 1664, maid Griet narrates how artist Johannes Vermeer prepares her for her secret portrait, musing, to her horror, that ‘virtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings’.

That last is just a tiny detail, but Griet’s tears show us how mortified she is. Modern readers won’t (necessarily) think about seventeenth-century connotations like this, so if you’re writing a scene set in a very different era or culture to what you know, research so you’re creating a true sense of place.

Step 7: Use place to create foreshadowing

A brilliant technique – we love it!

Descriptions of place are never neutral.

Good writers will, in overt or gently subtle ways, introduce a place-as-character. If that character is dangerous, for example, then simply describing a place adds a layer of foreboding, foreshadowing, to the entire book.

Just read how J.R.R. Tolkien describes the Morannon in The Two Towers: ‘high mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained … like an obscene graveyard.’ It’s obvious from this description trouble lies ahead for Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee.

But even if you’re not writing this sort of fantasy, character psychology and plot (as we saw above) can also render seemingly harmless places suspect, too. A boring apartment in Above Suspicion becomes scary when it seems someone’s been inside.

In the same sense, we thrill to the sense of a place with excitement and promise, too, like when Harry makes his first trip to Diagon Alley (in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) to shop for Hogwarts equipment with Hagrid.

There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels’ eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon. … They bought Harry’s school books in a shop called Flourish and Blotts where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather; books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk.

Just weave place and action together like this to create atmosphere, excitement, tension, foreboding.

Step 8: think about your words – nouns and adjectives

Specific is good. Unexpected is great!

One final thought. When you’ve written a piece, go back and check nouns.

A bad description will typically use boring nouns (or things) in settings, i.e. a table, chair, window, floor, bar, stool, etc.

If you try to fluff up that by throwing in adjectives (i.e. a grimy table, gleaming window, wooden floor), the chances are you’ll either have (i) made the description even more boring, or (ii) made it odd.

Of course, this works for that first passage we looked over from Margaret Atwood.

We sense Offred counting the few things she has in the little room she calls hers, the window and chair, etc., in terse phrasing. We sense her tension, her dissociation, and we feel trapped with her.

All the same, play with nouns, with taking your readers to new surroundings. Give them a Moloko. Play with surroundings, how you can make them different, how you can render the ordinary extraordinary. With the right nouns in place, you’ll need fewer adjectives to jazz things up – and when you do use them, they’ll feel right, not over the top.

Happy writing!