#novel themes

[sometimesraven]

MOODBOARD MONDAY: Shelter

I can't hear the word without thinking of the Magiverse and its current WIP, House of Magi.

Shelter (a village, not to be confused with The Shelter), is a village built by the hands of a group of largely teenage Magi (magic weilders) who escaped from a psychiatric institute where recently-awakened Magi are held 'for their own good'.

[lucidloving]

@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

[joncronshawauthor]

The Human Experience in The Fall of Wolfsbane: Exploring Core Themes

Today I want to share some of themes in my latest novel, The Fall of Wolfsbane. In writing this novel, my intention was not just to tell a story, but to create a narrative that resonates with the universal truths and struggles we all face. In this post, I aim to unravel these themes, offering a glimpse into the world I’ve constructed through the lives of Ragnar, Maja, and the myriad characters…

[yeoldenews]

For all my fellow name nerds out there, I am very pleased to present the second annual "Gloyd Roberson Memorial List of Actual Human Children Who Wrote Letters to Santa in 1920s/30s Oklahoma".

These aren’t all necessarily “weirder than Gloyd” but fall into three rough categories which I’ve dubbed: “that’s got a nice ring to it”, “if I used this in a novel it would be considered too unrealistic” and “you’ve got 5 seconds to name a character that lives in 1920s Oklahoma, GO!”:

Selvyn Atteberry

Dyer Banfield

Bert Baxter

Hilda Bender

Imogene Berry

Heloise Blakely

Burl Boyer

Clyda Pearl Boyington

Okal Brooks

Vada Jo Bricker

Deverett Brumley

Lee Roy Buck

Vivian May Burdue

Donnie Buster

Elmarie Button

Junior Buzzard

Melchor Caldex

Tycene Calhoun

Tiny Bell Callison

Dapalene Caywood

Edney Clopton

Buster Combs

Georgia Countryman

Vantruba Crockett

Alto Day

Buddie DeWayne

Violet Divine

Elwanda Downing

Cletys Durham

Thurlo Epps

Apple Fields

Floyd Fleetwood

Metherine Franklin

Ula Fay French

Wanda Jo Fronterhouse

Irline Fuller

Jack Gritzmaker

J. D. Grizzle

Billie Jean Gulley

Joline Hardcastle

Kaloolah Herrill

Thelias Hatfield

Elva Heavins

Coleman Hewlett

Helen Hillhouse

Virgil Holderby

Katymae Houston

Myree Huffstutlar

Estelline Hurrypack

Blondie Huhm

Lila Lou Jackson

Denver Jones

Vernell Lambert

Sonny Boy Lockart

Dinkey Long (autocorrect really wanted this to be Donkey Kong)

Bamma Lynn

Rep Madden

Standford Mann

Jack Mattingly

Goldia McGee

Madge Messinger

Mauzell Mullins

Jeffie Wayne Muskrat

Archibald Neighbors

Hazel Nickerson

Eulah Oakley

Lyle Oyler

Milburn Partain

Jackson Payne

Montana Phillips

Bobbie Dean Phoenix

Toots Putman

Madonna Mae Rickey

Cyprine Robertson

Juanelle Schneeberger

Billie Jean Sparks

Texanna Smith

Pansy Stetson

Patsy Ruth Stubblefield

Eldon Sweezy

Hoy Trotter

Pearl Vandorien

Leland Weems

Joe Bob West

Wayness Whitely

Buster Wyatt

John Ira Youngblood

Domby Zinn

[lastnightinlasvegas]

suffering and religion

(references coming soon)

[pallisia]

taking psychic damage (positive) (???) comparing current build of my vn to screenshots from last august

[idledee]

cyanotype

[aerithisms]

i understand what people are saying when they talk about fandom overstating the importance of farcille to the dunmeshi narrative and that their frustrations are related to a larger frustration with fandom in general prioritising shipping over other relationships/narrative themes. HOWEVER i do find it a little suspect and annoying that the one time the Big Tumblr Thing Of The Month has a popular f/f ship that the fandom is over-extrapolating from in the same way that fandom usually over-extrapolates m/m relationships i'm suddenly seeing all these posts complaining about it

[beetlelegs2003]

Heather and “The Hum”

[ahalliance]

just finished Nimona… DAMN does it feel good to watch such an openly queer movie man

[sometimesraven]

MOODBOARD MONDAY: Dream

Trying to get back in the groove of writing book 2 of the Truth Saga and @moon-and-seraph's MBM came up on my dash just in time!

The snake was wrapped around his throat, dragging him down into thick, black oil. He choked, tried to scream, but the oil filled his mouth and no sound could leave. There was a knife in his hand. The metal was cold in his palm as he lifted it through the sludge. His hand came free, plunged the weapon into the snake’s coiled body – but the snake was gone. His throat burned and blood coated his hand.

Blade, the main character of Bitter Truth, is an extremely closed off and brainwashed man, to the point where he can scarcely understand or recognise his own emotions in his waking life.

As such, one of the main narrative tools I use is his nightmares, thick with symbolism to warn him where his mind is at throughout the novel. These nightmares are recurring/themed so I thought I'd throw together a moodboard based on them!

--

SOURCES (that I could find, I'm aware not all of these are actual sources)

Top [x] / [x] / [x]

Middle [x] / [x] / [x]

Bottom [x] / [x] / [x]

Background [x]

Template [x]

[lucidloving]

Girlpool—Before the World Was Big // memorial bench quoting Toni Morrison's Sula // @inanotherunivrse // Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You // Zadie Smith, Swing Time // Fall Out Boy—The Kids Aren't Alright // Audrey Emmett // Mikko Harvey, "For M" // Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi) // Langston Hughes, "Poem"

[redspringstudio]

The exclusive trailer song is out! 🎉Backers who purchased the soundtrack can now find it on their surveys! 🎶

All backers who added the song to their cart, whether as a standalone purchase or through a bundle, should receive an email from Red Spring Studio to access your digital download.

If you haven’t received one, please email us at redspring (dot) helpdesk (at) gmail (dot) com, or check out BackerKit's digital download instructions

[glitteringmoonlight]

I was re-reading the Intrusion extra recently and I remembered just how much I loved the casual intimacy between wangxian, so I decided to make a list of my top 5 favourite wangxian moments from this extra in no particular order:

1. Lan Wangji leaving Young Master Qin to wait outside their room until Wei Wuxian woke up much later in the morning, and only after being “hugged and caressed” a lot by Lan Wangji (ft. poor Sizhui who had to first drag Lil’ Apple away from bamboo shoots and then lie to Young Master Qin that his senior was ill to explain why lwj and wwx weren’t to be interrupted)

2. Wei Wuxian wearing Lan Wangji’s clothes. Both the time he is stated to roll up the sleeves many times because they’re too long for him, and this:

[Lan Sizhui] wanted to tell him, Senior Wei, you accidentally wore HanGuang-Jun’s clothes again. But after some thought, he still swallowed the sentence.

After all, Wei WuXian wore the wrong clothes every couple of days. If he reminded Wei WuXian every single time, wouldn’t he die of fatigue?

And every time Senior Wei would wear it anyways because he thought it was too much trouble to change. Feeling that there was no point in reminding him anyways, Lan SiZhui decided he’d much rather pretend he saw nothing.

3. Lan Wangji hugging Wei Wuxian to comfort him when they’re discussing how Young Master Qin talks about servants and the conversation drifts to Wei Wuxian’s past (and Wei Wuxian hugging back, of course)

4. Wei Wuxian laughing so hard at the thought of Lan Wangji being a virgin that Lan Wangji has to wrap an arm around his shoulder to steady him (followed soon after by Lan Wangji pulling Wei Wuxian into his lap and Wei Wuxian complaining about how unfair it is that people misperceive the two of them)

5. Wei Wuxian eating the apple the fierce corpse brought over, claiming he’s “trying to save Hanguang-jun some money” and Lan Wangji taking it away and saying that would never be necessary

Honourable mention to how in-sync the two of them are whenever Wei Wuxian is about to start saying absolute bullshit to get Young Master Qin to tell them the truth and Lan Wangji shows no indication that he’s lying his ass off

[mae-i-scribble]

tonight i was thinking about orv’s theme about how yjh as a character, and to a larger extent people, will in some ways always be unknowable. (orv spoilers following, read at your own risk)

i feel like i’ve seen a few posts on here that somewhat take this theme to an extreme, leaning *hard* into that “kdj doesn’t actually know yjh like at all” which while on the right track, i feel completely misses the point. Orv goes out of its way to showcase that kdj actually understands yjh to a scary degree, even once they’re out of the early scenarios and the gap between kdj’s knowledge and yjh’s personhood grows larger, there are still things about yjh that *only* kdj can fundamentally understand. And I don’t think that the novel does anything to discredit that understanding, only says that there is much more to yjh. In the same manner, even if you’ve known someone for years, spent all your time with them, there can and will always be new things for you to learn about them. The danger that orv speaks of is trusting in that assumption, that your understanding will be enough and you don’t have to keep an eye out for more developments. That the person you know will forever stay the same. And this isn’t a kdj problem either, fundamentally a lot of the big disagreements that happen between kdj and yjh in the latter half of the novel are born from both of them misconstruing what the other is thinking, trusting that their understanding of the other is deep enough to base their judgements off of. (Post first murim destruction, divorce arc, yjh thinking kdj scattered his soul on purpose, etc.)

As always with orv’s themes, we can view it in a meta sense as well. Kdj’s understanding of yjh as a character is so complete that it’s nearly flawless- until the story begins to deviate and a yjh grows outside the parameters that kdj’s judgements are based on. Even before then, there was always more to yjh- but as readers, we can only understand a character as much as we see them. What you come away with from a story is your complete understanding, there is no growth outside of those boundaries because then it wouldn’t be an understanding of *that* character, you would be putting your own ideas and such into it. But talk to another person, and suddenly the same character you understand so clearly becomes someone else. Talk to the author, and they say something completely different. And can one truly claim to understand a character when the story will never talk about them in every conceivable way? What does it take to truly understand such a thing? Learning that 1863rd round hsy wrote ways of survival with such limited resources and knowledge on who yjh even is, and yet despite it all, still manages to write a story that captures so much of his essence. As orv readers, we know it isn’t everything- it could never encapsulate all of yjh, but the idea that even when one knows nearly nothing, you can still put on a facade of understanding.

We can get into a chicken or the egg argument with this, as 1863!hsy dictates how yjh acts with her writing, and that yjh in the 1863rd round is the one she comes to know before ever starting this story, but when it comes to this theme of the unknowable in the people around us, I don’t think this sort of debate is worth much. We know that yjh exists outside the story written, and how much of him is determined by hsy’s writing is negligible because no matter what, he always grows beyond it. Whether as 1864 or secretive plotter, it all comes back to that same point of there is always more to see within a person.

I don’t know quite where I want to go with this, only that I wanted an outlet for some of these thoughts inside my head, but one of the best things about this theme for me is how it answers itself. When the people around you become unrecognizable, what should you do? And orv says to reach out. To try. To understand. Kdj loses access to omniscient reader several times but always, always gains it back in orv (as far as i remember), because at the end of the day, he is not someone who stays trapped in his idea of who he knows yjh to be. Yjh too, even at the end of orv, is trying to learn more and more about kdj. Only when you are willing to hear out the other person, to learn about them every day, does this unknowable aspect become something less daunting.

[add1ctedt0you]

An interesting theme, imo, in mdzs is the sheer tiredness you must feel when dealing with someone who, having been dead for more than a decade, is still the same person as before, while you aren't anymore.