#can't believe i thought badly about laurent's kemptian family this whole time for no reason 😂

[laurents-laces]

Notes on Pacat's livestream for this month! It's not a complete summary but you can watch the video on instagram if you missed it. I'm starting with one quote that I thought was important and the rest will be divided by fandom/topic. The part that's under the cut isn't spoilery, it's just cut to keep the post shorter.

“So I use she/her and he/him pronouns. And I guess just to speak really honestly about where I’m at with gender stuff, I identify as genderqueer- at least that’s the term I use when I’m asked publicly about this- but the truth is that, like a lot of people who are not cisgender, I struggle a lot with gender dysphoria. I’m probably trans masculine and it means that in a lot of ways the pronouns decision can feel very fraught for me. When you’re dysphoric, you know, sometimes even thinking about what your pronouns are can be a little bit traumatic. I absolutely love this new era where we are asking people their pronouns and people are free to have whatever gender expression they want. But for me I guess I choose “he” and “her” both together because it alleviates something of that dysphoric pressure for me. But I’m equally fine with either of those. So I just go with the flow there.”

Fence Comic:

Fence volume five is not supposed to be announced yet at all but it’s in the works. Pacat has already seen some of Johanna’s art for it and he feels like she’s gone to a new level with this volume. Pacat is excited for volume five because the boys’ storylines are really starting to take off

Pacat’s favourite Haikyuu character is Kageyama because he likes that character type that appears in nearly every sports drama. Seiji is that same character type. (There’s a character from Hikaru no Go that he compares to Seiji too but I didn’t catch the name)

Fence is written in a “shounen level up” structure

Pacat wants to read The Foxhole Court because it’s a seminal m/m romance and a lot of people brought it up after Fence got published, but he’ll probably wait until after Fence is done because he doesn’t want to be influenced by any similarities

Captive Prince:

We’ll find out what The News is “soon”

The Laurent’s hair debate is funny because his hair length is described in the books, but nobody cares about Damen’s hair length even though it isn’t described at all

There’s going to be a Japanese box set for capri in December, it looks spectacular

The funny thing about the Japanese version is that when capri was first published, western publishing didn't know what to do with it. It was published as a different genre in every country. But Japan was like “this is a BL light novel.” That's exactly what it is, you've nailed it Japan. Pacat loves the Japanese covers

Capri got a lot of weird western covers because people didn't want to telegraph that the book was gay. The Brazilian covers look like such a male het dude fantasy, and the Australian cover is so enigmatic that you can't tell what it's about. One time at Comic Con there were a lot of US marines there, and they came over to Pacat’s booth and picked up captive prince. Pacat could tell that the cover wasn't telling them everything they needed to know.

About why Laurent didn’t ever get help from Kempt: What Pacat tried to do with the map in capri was make Kempt so inaccessible through the Great Northern Forests that it was hard to get help from them in time, but that's a bit of a questionable part of the plot

Pacat’s pronunciation of Laurent’s name isn’t the most accurate because no one in Akielos and Vere is saying it with an Australian accent, so you really want to get a French person to pronounce it

Pacat might change his mind at some point, but the story of capri is complete for the moment. He likes stories that have an end. Additional material can act as a series killer when the story overstays its welcome

Pacat learned a lot about the structure of the hero's journey while writing capri. He thought it was a really easy, simple structure but it's actually really hard and unforgiving. If you mess up a single step the story feels broken

Captive Prince has elements of a hero's journey but really the A plot is a romance. Pacat did his best with the hero’s journey in Dark Rise but it was a huge learning curve, it was the hardest thing by far about writing the book

Dark Rise:

The Dark Rise trilogy is completely planned out, Pacat knows what will happen down to the last word

Book two will delve more deeply into the past, history and backstories of the characters; we're gonna learn a lot more about the old world. The romance will be explored a little more deeply. It's more “on page gay” than book one. Pacat is two thirds of the way through writing the manuscript. The book doesn’t have a release date yet but the manuscript is due in June

It’s been hard to get Dark Rise in the UK because they have to import the books, but Harpercollins US just agreed to do full distribution to the UK so Dark Rise should be in stores there soon

Dark Rise is in its second printing in the US and Australia but if you pre-ordered you'll get a first edition even if you haven't received the book yet. There have been a lot of COVID-related shipping delays

Pacat chose the names Will and James in two different ways. The first way was that he looked at a lot of censuses from the 1800s because he wanted to choose names people would actually have had, and the two most popular boys' names were Will and James. A lot of people tell him that the two main characters in Clockwork Princess have the same names. He hasn't read that series because it's set in the same time period as Dark Rise and he doesn’t want to be influenced by it but he wonders if Cassandra Clare chose their names the same way he did

The second reason for their names was that Pacat had something to say about pastoral English fantasies. We're so colonized by the idea of Englishness, England is the cultural true North. Australia doesn't have a lot of typical fantasy things like a medieval period, a cold north, a thick forest, castles, sieges, or walls. Those things don’t resonate with Australians but they're still colonized by those ideas. Those books taught what a hero was and Dark Rise is a push back against all of that. Those heroes are always called Will, it's a heroic name. “I wanted to take that Will and *smiles and makes a ripping apart motion with his hands*”

Pacat pronounces Sarcean like Sar-see-en but readers are free to choose the pronunciation they like best because it's not like people in 1800s England had an Australian accent

The scenes he most enjoyed writing in Dark Rise were the ending and both of the unicorn stabbing scenes

Most of the stories about unicorn horns say that they have truth-telling properties when they’re ground into powder, but Pacat thought it would be much more interesting if you had to stab someone with it

He had appointments with historians in Castleton where the inn is in Dark Rise

He often hires a historian to start background research on certain topics because they have an easier time knowing what to look for and where to find primary sources

Personal Things:

When Pacat lived in Tokyo he had an apartment in Jingumae in Harajuku

His family immigrated to Australia from Calabria, Italy after WWII when his mom was eight. He can speak a bit of dialect but he would sound like an old lady because he learned from his grandma

Pacat used to be really into Chinese dramas like the Legend of Fu Yao and Legend of the Condor Heroes. He hasn't watched a lot of the new danmei dramas but he really liked the Untamed

He enjoyed The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, he’s loved her stuff since Valiant and Ironside and the Spiderwick Chronicles

Pacat used to write fanfic for a lot of obscure Japanese fandoms like Hikaru no Go and Utena. He wasn’t a very popular fic author, he wrote gen character vignettes that no one read. The first romance he wrote was capri. He never wrote Harry Potter fic