#WordWeavers 2405.28 — Did your MCs have comfort objects they carried as a child? Now?
I guess if you could run away from home and fear being dragged back again, you must be a child? Right? The day she ran away, she took only one thing that wasn't essential. It wasn't a doll. She was tutored on how to govern and had people (not dolls) to practice with everyday. It wasn't a remembrance of her parents. Their celebrity had made them shy away from photography, and then they died. Taking a vinyl record was a nonstarter; listening to it, if she could, would have made her cry. Not comforting. No, what she took was a very obscure book! I'll let her talk about it for you:
My books lay thrown on the counter, on top of the messenger bag, on top of my clothes. I felt a spike of anger. I looked from them to him.
He said, "Stop with the playacting. This—" He tapped a hand on my Marlin's Tertiary Primer for the New Age Thaumaturge."—is a month's basic for most!"
I shook my head. Over the last nine months, I'd learned the first edition was worth magnitudes more.
He pushed aside the book revealing the stained blue paper-backed journal. "And this: Thaumaturgical Review Letters. That's nobody's idea of light reading."
I snorted at how wrong he was. "I dumpster-dived that one. I hiked up to the university a few weeks ago. You'd be surprised what moneyed folk throw away!"
"I was saying—"
"My Marlin's is kind of like a plush bear for silly girls. And yes, I do sleep with it. Give it a sniff. It smells like silly me—"
#PennedPossibilities 328 — If you could meet your characters, what would you say to them?
I'm way too #shy to meet them, even the kind and beautiful one... a white wolf with a gold collar that reads HUMAN follows her around. These people live a life on a different level from someone like me. I'd need someone to introduce me, and then I'd probably lock up.
Hahahaha! Pluperfect snark — thanks for the memories. What a fresh voice! "Gideon the Ninth" was by far my favorite SF novel of its year (2019).
Thrilled to see Tamsin Muir at Boskone in 2022. Blazingly smart and funny. Though I was disappointed she didn't brandish a sword in each hand and another in her mouth during panels …
#wordweavers 28 Did your MCs have comfort objects they carried as a child?
For Freya's sixth birthday, her brother Lazarus wrote her a story about climbing the highest tree in the world and plucking a few stars from the sky while he was up there. He told her he stuck some of those stars in a peach pit so they could have a nap and gave it to her.
"If you're really quiet, you can hear the little star snore."
She believed him, and on a bad day, she can still hear it snore.
A unified universe.
Constant crossovers of characters and events.
A timeline stretching from the beginning of the world to its end.
Welcome to my world...
#PennedPossibilities 327 — How much does your MC value other people? Do they wish to have many friends, lovers, and / or associates? Are they an easy person to love?
Both my MC's have difficulties with how they value people.
Wintereyes views people and beasts through the same nonjudgemental prism. She understands beasts' natures' intuitively. Where her gift allows her to live amongst the beasts she's befriended, she is prohibited from using her gift on humans. A decade of living with wolves, thriving, has rewired her social understanding of her species with no magical map to ease her way. It's unfortunate how people are attracted to her—and that she doesn't understand them or her body's reactions to them. She has met a boyfriend who she thinks will make her experiences in the human world better.
The devil-girl is autistic, but was raised with this being one of her best features. She isn't wired for dealing with people; it's a learned skill that her tutors drilled into her until using it became natural. Well, natural with a few glitches, if you were looking from the outside. She can be stiff. She can be undiplomatic. She really will only give you one chance. She finds too much glee in fighting (though her target needs to give permission to fight them, but implicit is good enough). The reader knows her struggle. Dealing with people is exhausting but a challenge; it's often a self-dare. Were she given her druthers, she'd say she'd rather be reading a book. Deep in a university library stacks. Alone. Helping people is a culmination of her skill, and part of her very much adores seeing people safe and happy. In part, this may be an achieved reduction of drama, but it may be her human heart. Now that she's discovered the concept of lovers—and that her brain is delightfully wired for it—and is learning the give and take that requires to make that work fabulously, her world is shifting toward really understanding those around her on their terms.
From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Jennifer Donnelly comes a revolutionary, gender-swapped retelling of Beauty and the Beast that will forever change how you think about beauty, power, and what it really means to follow your heart.
Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty?
Blame Tolkien and time - by Eric Grundhauser December 7, 2016
"...Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures & histories to speak them... In the case of the ever-present Elvish in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men & hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like Khazad-dûm & Moria.
“When dwarves actually talk, they don’t sound Scottish at all,” says Olsen. “They sound like Arabic or Hebrew.”...As radio & film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the slow evolution of the dwarven accent..."
Yeah, I know. My father's family was Scottish (Clan Crawford) and the men were not very tall, low to average height. My husband is 6'4" and his family was Welsh, and the Elves were supposed to be tall, so I thought that was interesting.
It's been a while since the last #FamArtMonday, so how about this inimitably gorgeous Art Nouveau-flavoured piece by Melissa Pagluica, for our first Kickstarter back in 2018?
Was lange währt ...
14 Jahre hat @v_d_richards an ihrem Erstling geschrieben und nun ist es so weit:
Schicksalsweber: Nabas Weg
von Viktoria D. Richards
kommt am 5. Juni 2024 in den Handel.
Eine Geschichte um Liebe und Freundschaft. Magischer Realismus vermischt mit Historischem, Questelementen und casual Queerness.
Heute gibt es schon mal einen Blick auf Cover und Klappentext.
Ich liebe die Bezeichnung "Casual Queerness" gerade sehr.
Ja genau!
Wenn ich das nächste Mal stotternd irgendwo stehe, und den Vibe des Buches kurz beschreiben soll, dann rufe ich dich an, weil du es so schön zusammengefasst hast! (da merkt man die erfahrene Autorin von der ich als Newbie noch viel lernen kann )
Ich möchte mich noch mal sehr herzlich bedanken, dass du mitgemacht hast!!! Das war super lieb von dir!!!
@v_d_richards
Sehr gerne! Wir Unabhängigen müssen doch zusammenhalten 😘
Und bei "erfahrene Autorin" erröte ich immer noch innerlich. ^^ @buechermachen@buchstodon