ravenclawlibrary

[ravenclawlibrary]

Some very important facts in my life right now:

I'm currently visiting NYC with my kidlets, aged 8 and 10.

We are staying about three blocks away from the Empire State Building.

There is currently a giant inflatable dragon wrapped around the Empire State Building.

Kidlets are delighted by the dragon.

Kidlets are rather more delighted by the dragon than might be expected.

Yes, you might say, it's a dragon wrapped around a famous skyscraper, where's the surprise in that?

No surprise.

It's just that they're extremely excited.

They're reading Terry Pratchett 's Guards! Guards!

A book that features a giant dragon swooping off the tallest tower in the great city of Anhk Morpork.

They are quoting the book constantly

"The shape that looked like a large pair of wings unfurling was, in fact, a large pair of wings unfurling."

All the time

"Dragons don’t have friends! The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive!"

Little girls, wandering through the tourist attractions of midtown Manhattan, like

"A people united can never be ignited!"

With such enthusiasm

"This is going to be the world's first democratically killed dragon! One man, one stab!

I love them so much, I'm so proud, I picked the right partner, we made the best possible kids

(It's a promo for HBO's Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon)

[ravenclawlibrary]

Happy "Van Helsing calls Seward bitchless in front of Lucy" day to everyone! 🌹🌹🌹

[ravenclawlibrary]

So in honor of there maybe being someone out there who cares now, wherever you are, here's the drawing I did right after rereading like 80% of The Truth and then stopping right before the sad bit lmao but anyway yayyy

[ravenclawlibrary]

The one Discworld thing that lives rent free in my brain is how military generals would observe which military uniform Nobby Nobbs was wearing throughout the battle to determine who was winning

[ravenclawlibrary]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[ravenclawlibrary]

the trick to a good insult is sort of talking around it and making them think so that it hits harder when they realize what you’re talking about

[ravenclawlibrary]

Blake's Fire

Fire, fire, burning bright, weaving shadows from the night, how did mortal man learn to unlock the secrets within you? 

From what darker, distant past did we emerge, free at last, once we'd learned to tame then free thy flaming volatility? 

For the magic of your light gave us ways to fend off night, steal back daylight, and explore lands unseen by man before. 

Fire, with your powers near, we outshone our darkest fears so that, in caves, we could start making works of timeless art.

What hand or eye or mind was first moved to quench deeper, inner thirsts; to–with pigment, coal, or chalk– imbue their Self upon the rock? So, with these powers over dark, one last thought was left to spark, as we, through art, learned to see our true immortality.

-- @thoughtsfromb4

[ravenclawlibrary]

"I know your school didn't teach you how to write fanfic-" I know this is something said in response to Americans whining about their education system in response to racism, but my school English class actually did have us write an epilogue to a book we were reading as an assignment, so in a way my school did teach me how to write fanfic. I have no point to make with this point and I don't care to i just wanted to share a tidbit about my life

[ravenclawlibrary]

wait, no?

she's saying no?

huh

I didn't know that was an option

[ravenclawlibrary]

no writing workshop can help you improve your writing as much as this screenshot can

[ravenclawlibrary]

Me recommending Discworld books: So there's this guy called Moist von Lipwig, and he—yeah. Yeah, that's his real—yeah, no, I'm serious. So anyway, he—yes, L-I-P-W-I-G, that's right—no, shut up, listen, ok, it's actually really clever and thematic—

[ravenclawlibrary]

A boy can dream, can't he?

[ravenclawlibrary]

[ravenclawlibrary]

I want to be granny weatherwax when I grow up!

[ravenclawlibrary]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[ravenclawlibrary]

granny dropping bangers

[ravenclawlibrary]

I love Nobby Nobbs so much. He was a street urchin. He was briefly an earl. He is a drag queen. He is a looter and a weapons maniac. He carries around a paper to prove he is human. He is smarter than he looks. He is still a dummy. He once dated a gorgeous stripper because no one else approached her. He dumped her because she couldn't cook. He has a goblin girlfriend whose friends think he is too good for her. Everyone outside the Watch thinks he is a werewolf. He is the character of all time.