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unhinged-summer-fun · 19 days ago

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the foolish heart's guide to not repeeating history - chapter 5

Pairing: Dream of the Endless "Morpheus" x F!Reader

series masterlist

chapter 5: folly of man

Things are… different after that.

You keep a place on Earth, the standard ‘flat in London’ that the Endless enjoy—even Despair seems to have one. You decorate it in the same eclectic style Death had done in her own space, but with crystals that catch the light and all manner of reflective surfaces to illuminate the otherwise dim interior. Hob likes to stop in to gossip and meet another bogglingly old bastard like himself.

Despite the tentative trust in the joys you have, Death’s question from three thousand years ago follows you with every footprint you leave behind.

“What will you do when this is done and he is… saved?”

You still have no idea.

Even the rules are different here now. The Destruction from your old universe had mentioned it a few times, but you didn��t truly understand what he meant until you started playing by them. You knew some fundamental things: The Endless cannot dream. The Fates cannot dream. You had always been told that you could not dream.

Until the night you do.

The Dreaming is unlike how you’d ever seen it before.

You remember the palace as it had been, spires and battlements kept away from the rest of the realm by miles of bridges, forests, and jagged stone mountains. You remember the gigantic monument where a grand funeral had been held. You remember an ozone-scented scorch mark atop a lonely ledge in the Frontiers of Nightmare. You remember a burning, lonely star in the sky.

This is not that place.

Your memories and expectations of the place are vastly different than what you expect.

Where the palace was distant and inaccessible before, it is now surrounded by a vast, lively royal city full of joyful dreams and clever nightmares. They go about their lives just as humanity does in any other place in the waking world. The hollow, echoing stretches of land from your memory are now full of crowded streets made of comfortable moonstone cobbles, dirt-and-diamond paths, and staircases made of solid emerald and jade. For all its twists and turns, you never once feel lost.

You take one of the verdant staircases carved into the western city wall. While admiring the view, you quietly accept the defeat of your preconceptions of the Dreaming. Small lakes of many colors dot the landscape like a painter’s palette in that empty vale that once held a massive funerary hall (and hopefully never would). When you cast your eyes to the north, where Nightmare looms dark and persistent, you imagine the lonely ledge among the gray-stone canyons would be free of any marks.

In the daytime, you can see the stars. Not a one is blotted out by the soul of a dead king.

This is the Dreaming, and it always reflects its monarch. And its monarch is very much alive.

He finds you watching a sky battle starting thousands of feet in the air: triple-masted sky-sloops cleave through clouds to battle an approaching fleet of sky pirates.

“Do you like it?”

His voice still startles you each time you hear it.

Dream stands in a cloak of deepest night, ready to sink into peripheral thought at a moment’s notice. He keeps his hands in his pockets to give off a relaxed air, but you note the tension in his shoulders and the carefully relaxed expression on his lovely face.

“What?”

He gives you a look that’s half-anxiety, half-sarcasm. Any of it, do you like any of my kingdom at all?

“It’s the Dreaming,” you answer. “What’s not to love?”

He joins you, leaning against the stone railing and tilting his head back as you’d been to watch the ships overhead. You watch him for a moment longer, gleefully admiring the silver in his hair before returning your attention to the gathering action.

A small explosion rocks the great ship high above, the pop of noise reaching your ears a moment later.

“You say that like you’ve never had a nightmare.”

Several sky pirates swing aboard on grappling hooks over the gap between ships, primed for battle. It doesn’t look good for the sky-sloop.

“I haven’t.”

He looks away from the battle to stare at the city within the walls, processing what you said. When understanding dawns, he turns his gaze to you, but you’re still doggedly looking up.

A few skynauts fall off the side.

“I don’t take your meaning.”

“I’ve never had a nightmare before.”

“You do not dream?”

“Before,” you start carefully, “I existed in conflict with your realm. You govern reality and the imagination of all who touch your realm. I was unreal: I could not be found in stories, thoughts, or ideas of the waking and living. I did not exist in any perpetual sense until I came to this universe… if I am honest with myself, I haven’t let myself start to believe it until recently.”

The plummeting sailors activate their jetpacks and return to the action. A dark green and black storm moves forward as a maelstrom made of clouds, but the ships locked in battle pay it no heed.

“Are you saying this is the first time you’ve slept in three thousand years?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds bad,” you wince.

“How would you spin the truth to make it sound good?”

“…touché.”

The storm starts to touch the edge of the battle, obscuring the scene in a hazy mist of green-black smoke. Within this arm of the storm, the only signs of battle are brief flashes of light that could be cannon fire or lightning. You frown, wishing for the wind to show the skirmish again.

“And there was nothing to be done?”

“He declared it impossible very early on.” Using that tone, you never have to indicate who you’re talking about—the other Dream. “When he cared to, he would agonize over it and offer to bring me personally into his realm, but I could already do so on my own. He didn’t like being told he couldn’t help, even when it was himself saying so.”

“I understand his side of things.”

“You would.”

A few pirates drop out of the cloud, still firing shots at the ship as they fall through the sky without a safety net. It seems that the sloop has found some foothold within the safety of the chaotic storm.

“You say you could always visit my realm, but in the three thousand years you’ve been here, you did not?” Were you not sure it would be impossible, you would have thought he sounded hurt by the idea.

You finally look away from the battle. His face betrays little insight toward the impossibility you’d pondered in his voice.

“Distance was necessary. I had to see how the world played out after my interventions. It wasn’t easy.” Yet, you hadn’t seen how things played out. You’d avoided Earth nearly as much as the Dreaming and had to be tricked into seeing the fruits of your labor in both places. You’re distantly aware of the cup of chamomile tea Hob had shared with you the night before, spiked with just a nip of honeyed whiskey before he’d left. Hob Gadling has officially made your shit list.

Twice, now. You’d been tricked into seeing Dream twice.

His eyes scan your face, jumping around and taking you in like a rushed museum-goer. You’re confused by his urgency. A lovesick (and foolish) part of you wants the reason to be: he has ten billion years of knowing your face to make up for.

Foolish.

His gaze falls a little, and you hope he’s just lost in thought as much as you hope he’s looking at your lips—

“May I ask you something?” you say, breaking the tension and looking for a worthy question of your interruption.

“Of course,” he says, blue eyes back upon you.

Your gaze catches his hand, glimmering gold in the dappled light of the Dreaming. “Your tattoo,” you say, your voice filled with intrigue. He raises his hand for you to inspect it. “How long have you had it? And what’s the story behind it?”

Touching his hand seems taboo, but you hold his graceful hand anyway, peering closer at the scattered stardust cascading over delicate bones and skin. At some angles, the sparkle disappears entirely, leaving only pale skin. Looking up at him, you see the same effect in his hair, silvers going invisible, though you just saw them a moment ago among the black.

“Near two hundred years.”

“Following what?”

He heaves a sigh, looking up at the battle again and wincing when it’s still mostly stormcloud.

“My tools were stolen from me.”

“But… didn’t Burgess—”

“My sister has a centennial tradition of her own. She chooses to walk one day as a mortal every hundred years, experiencing the life she gives humanity and the end of that life. I joined her at her request, and once a century, I would set down my vestments and surrender the authority of my station into an hourglass, just for one day…”

The hourglasses were truly magnificent. I put thought into all my creations, but this day always excited me, and with each passing century, I kept the tradition; its design grew more elaborate to accommodate my tools. I kept the sand within a red crystal bulb fashioned from the very material of my ruby. The outer structure of the hourglass was made from the bone and steel of my helm.

The day would begin when the hourglass turned over, and I could not reach for my powers until each grain of sand had passed through the neck. Until then, I could live as mortals lived, and in all honesty, I spent most of that time finding comfortable places to doze off.

Don’t laugh; there are few things better than a good nap.

Each time the hourglass would run out, the next time I fell asleep, I would meet myself there and return my symbols of office, resuming my functions as Dream of the Endless. It’s no different than my sister coming to claim herself at the end of the day, though perhaps a little less morbid and existential.

These days were chosen randomly, and it was only after I’d spent my day looking at humanity from one perspective that I realized I had missed out on many other things. Humans often ask themselves about when they would go, were they able to travel through time. If I had been asked, I would have spent that single day in each century a thousand times over again, doing a hundred thousand things differently.

The tradition changed after I met Hob Gadling, and in 1394, I asked him to be my guide to spending a day in the waking world. He would be guaranteed to see me twice a century: once as an Endless and once as a man. The days were much more enjoyable in the company of a friend, and I found I regretted less at the end of each day as a man.

It all went well for four hundred years.

In 1789, Hob had spoken at length about the wonders of travel, journeying for the journey’s sake. I’d never done such a thing, and he’d convinced me to try it. In 1794, he’d planned passage for us from London to the south of France, and I turned what was already a potentially risky event into an assured disaster.

Hob spoke of finding things on his various journeys, and I sent my tools to be found somewhere in the waking world.

Specifically in Paris.

During the Reign of Terror.

Yes, oh no is right.

Do you want to know what made this century’s hourglass worse? The crown atop it. It was a magnificent, bejeweled golden crown sent to the heart of anti-royalist France. When crafting the hourglass, I had allowed three weeks to pass for the passage by sea and across France.

It took us three entire months to locate the hourglass.

Like all other things that displeased les amis, it had been moved to the Luxembourg prison. Among the treasure cells, my hourglass sat among crown jewels, books of poetry, and the vestments of many other monarchs than myself. Robespierre had been elected mere days before we found it, and the beheadings forced us to rely on stealth and clever planning. I did not worry for my mortal form, but as the guillotine fell over a thousand times that summer, I worried more for my companion should we be found out.

Hob is a Londoner, through and through. It was a miracle he was not found out and summarily executed, for as little as that mattered to a deathless man as he. His French was abysmal at the best of times, so it fell to me to attempt any subterfuge within the prison walls. I determined that the best way to get into the palace was to be arrested for something annoying enough to be put away but not egregious enough to warrant execution. It worked, and I was put where everything was sent to rot. That indignity was worth the—

What did I do? Ah.

I spilled wine on Maximilien Robespierre. As I said, it was annoying enough to be arrested but not enough to be charged with crimes against the state.

While I worked on getting myself out of my cell, Hob Gadling did what he was best at: causing trouble. His French had become passable enough to spur some revolutions of his own, but his hand in military strategy was always more on the lower-ranked end of things. Don’t tell him I said that. Regardless, the chaos allowed me enough distraction to escape my cell and safely retrieve my hourglass.

And if I freed some poets and philosophers along the way, who could blame me?

“But how does that tell me how you got your tattoo?” you say, walking with Dream along the battlements. The sky battle above had dissipated into nothingness, to your annoyance. Now, your eyes are either drawn to him or a gleaming set of windows at the top of a tower in the castle. It’s so bright it could be a lighthouse.

“Ah. Well, I’d found my hourglass and learned that putting all my eggs in one basket was decidedly unwise. Hob had, before turning to more profitable forms of shipping, briefly served as crew upon Captain Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific. He’d quickly learned how to tattoo from the native tribes they encountered and had taken the skill back to England with him just in time for our meeting. That said, while I was still mortal, I had Hob find some needles, and using ink made from the sand in the hourglass and the crushed dreamstone, he could ensure I wouldn’t be caught without at least all my tools again.”

“This is your sand?” you whisper, stopping and holding his hand up in the waning light. He’d been speaking for some time, and you’d been loath to stop him. You twist his hand this way and that, watching it glimmer. “And your ruby?”

“Well—” he raises his other hand and moves his sleeve out of the way. On the inside of his other wrist sits the image of a very angular red rectangular gem, so stylistic you almost think it’s made of text. This tattoo does not shine and glitter like the sand-stars, but glows softly. You brush a thumb over the surface. It’s long-healed, but the sheer depth of power within the tattoo is undeniable.

Dream has gone unnaturally still beneath your touch. When you realize, you drop his wrist and hand at once, flushing furiously with embarrassment. “My apologies, I didn’t mean—”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he says quickly, his voice soft, without reproach.

Still, after ten billion years of being denied his touch in another place and time, the instinct to scold yourself remains. You ball your hands at your sides and look down at your feet. “It’s impertinent to be so bold, especially without asking if you wanted to be touched.”

“Darling, do you think I would have let you touch me if I did not want you to?”

You look up at him then, just a little stunned. He’s right. This is a being who has never let a single enemy triumph over him for longer than it took to outsmart them. Neither is he a shrinking violet, determined to please every crowd. He is Dream of the Endless.

And he is standing so close to you.

He holds his hands before you again, offering them once more.

You are about to reach out and take them when a voice cuts through the two of you.

Star-treader. I stand in my gallery, but you have no sigil. I bid you speak with me. Come.

And the Dreaming drops out beneath you.

This place is unchanged each time you come to it.

Still, this is new.

Summoned against your will, your back and shoulders hit the coarse gravel path in the Garden of Forking Ways.

Garden of Forking Bullshit, more like.

Destiny of the Endless holds all seven-and-a-half feet of his height above you in as looming a posture as possible. Behind him, seven gigantic statues of the Endless loom over him. “I greet you, star-treader.”

“Yeah. Greet you very much.” You roll onto your side with a cough to get your lungs working correctly again and stand, groaning. “You could have asked me to come and spared me all this.”

Destiny does not answer because he does not need to. Destiny of the Endless does not stoop to such depths as politeness.

Petty, you put a heel over the path’s edge just to revel in the way his frown deepens.

As the silence stretches, your annoyance grows. “Was there a reason you—”

“You have appeared in my Book.”

Yeah, that’s a pretty good reason.

“Oh.”

“Seventy-seven days ago, when you met my brother Dream, your life grew fate upon these pages.” He is too tall for you to see what he is reading, but when he taps something on his book, you hear your voice speaking with graveritas:

I belong here.

“It’s only started then? It hasn’t… I don’t know, it wasn’t retroactive?”

“It was.”

“Well.” You put your hands on your hips and walk around a bit, processing. Destiny remains where he stands, patient or waiting for his cue. Of all the Endless, he keeps his own counsel the most. “Does—”

“My brother Dream has theorized on this topic and does not need my verification to support his beliefs.”

“A pity you never believed it before, my wishing star,” a warm voice speaks from behind you.

The Three-In-One stands off the path you and Destiny share. A glance tells you Destiny also disproves of the Hecatae acting thus.

You bow your head to them in respect. Sensing you’ll get more information from them than him, you take a breath. “Am I still an agent of Fate as I was before?”

“Unfortunately for us all,” the Crone says with a roll of her (your) eyes.

“You are distinct from us, sister,” the Maiden says placatingly.

“But our sister, nonetheless.”

“As you ever were, my sweet.”

You shake your head with a sigh. “So I have my own fate, and I guide Fate when I speak.”

“Everybody guides their own fate, girl. You’re just the last one to know it.”

You scowl at them. “Thanks,” you say, dripping with acid.

The Sisters cackle and disappear in a flash of lightning with no thunder.

Destiny raises a hand. “The purpose of your visit is concluded, star-treader. We can answer you no more. Return to Dream.”

You’re given little choice, for an unseen force pushes you through a golden frame that feels like home.

Skipping between worlds and galaxies can be as simple as changing your mind.

Other times, it’s as simple as waking up.

Several things occur to you at once.

When you’d fallen asleep in your flat last night, you’d gone to the Dreaming like all of humanity already knew how to. The relationship between your newly-fated soul and your tangible form on Earth was still complicated, but your soul had gone there. You’d been summoned to the Garden nearly right out of Dream’s arms and then dispatched back to your body.

The snap-back of your soul from the Garden is intense enough to wake you. You blink into awareness, body feeling a little shimmery-strange as parts of you reincorporate together.

It’s daybreak in your flat in London, and Dream of the Endless is standing over your bed.

“I suppose a conversation is in order?”

CHAPTER 6

#unhingery #TFHGTNRH #dream of the endless x reader #Morpheus x reader #dream x reader #sandman fanfiction #the sandman #dream of the endless

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wethepixies · 1 year ago

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✨About WTP✨

Your questions about the project itself will be answered here! ⠀ What is We The Pixies? We The Pixies (WTP for short) is a rewrite of Disney's Pixie Hollow online multiplayer game that ran from 2008 to 2013. WTP has been in development since 2018.

WTP is not affiliated with The Walt Disney Company and/or the Disney Interactive Media Group. ⠀ Where can I play it? As WTP is still in alpha testing, you cannot play the full version of Pixie Hollow at the moment. You can give the demo a play at: https://www.wethepixies.net/ ⠀ When will new features be released? Watch the ⁠game-news channel in our Discord server for updates as soon as they happen!

We know it’s hard to wait for new game features, but please try not to nag the staff about updates. We’ll let you know when we release new features on all our socials. ⠀ When will WTP be completed? Unfortunately, there's no definite answer. WTP is a volunteer project, meaning that staff members have to find time in their busy schedules to work on it. The game essentially has to be rebuilt from scratch, which means that things may take a while to get finished.

Please be patient. We’re working our wings off to make WTP the best it can be. ⠀ When WTP is complete, will I have to pay for a membership to access all of the features? Not at all! Everything in WTP will be free for each & every player. ⠀ Will I be able to play as my old fairy from Pixie Hollow? No. WTP is in no way affiliated with Disney so, unfortunately, we cannot transfer old fairy accounts over from Disney’s game. ⠀ Will WTP be merging with other Pixie Hollow remakes? No. WTP has no plans to merge with any other Pixie-Hollow-related projects. ⠀ Will there be updates to the original game/new content? WTP’s number one priority is to bring the original game back to life. However, we are hoping to incorporate more original content (in accordance with Pixie Hollow’s aesthetic) sometime in the far future. ⠀ Will there be a website for WTP? If so, when will it be available? Yes! The team is hard at work creating an official website that reflects the magic of the original game. As the website is still under construction, we do not have an estimated time of release. ⠀ Will WTP begin accepting donations? No, WTP will not be accepting any donations. The game will be 100% funded by staff.

✨Current Game Features✨

Your questions about the current version of the demo will be answered here! ⠀ Can I make an account and save my fairy? Accounts aren't an option right now - to enjoy the demo, you'll have to create a new fairy every time or use a CaF code.

At the end of the Create-A-Fairy process, you can copy and save a CaF Code, which you can use to skip Create-A-Fairy while keeping your character's design. We suggest you save this code in a Word document so you can copy and paste it at the beginning of Create-A-Fairy next time you play. To learn more about CaF codes, click here. ⠀ What meadows can I explore? At the moment, players can explore three meadows: Dewdrop Vale, Palm Tree Cove, and Neverberry Thicket. Other classic meadows are being developed. ⠀ Where are the talent games? Only Bubble Bounce and Butterfly Painter are available for now; they are located in Dewdrop Vale and Palm Tree Cove respectively. More talent games are on the way! Can I go shopping? Yes - we currently have three stores in-game. Brook's Basics clothing store in Dewdrop Vale, Schelly's Shears hair salon in Palm Tree Cove and Harmony's Sweet Shop in Neverberry Thicket are open for business! More items and shops are in development. ⠀ I see other fairies, but I can't add them as friends! Adding fairy friends isn’t available right now, although we’re working on it!

How do I complete the tasks in my journal? At the present moment the tasks listed in your journal are merely suggestions and not something that can be completed.

Can I play We The Pixies on mobile? Yes, We The Pixies is playable on mobile.

Which browser is the best to play We The Pixies on? We The Pixies works on all browsers, although some players have run into issues on Safari, so please be sure to include which browser/device you're playing on when submitting a bug report.

What’s up with the profiles? They look like they’re missing a lot of stuff. We’re working with fairly simple profiles right now - over time, we’ll add more features. Right now, you can use profiles to report and whisper to individual users. ⠀ How will the chat system be filtered to keep the game kid-friendly? All chat messages are filtered using a whitelist of allowable words, including: meadow names, fairy name combinations, and much more. In the future, we hope to take player recommendations of words to add to our whitelist!

✨Ways to Help✨

Interested in contributing? Your questions about volunteering will be answered here!

How can I help with the current bugs? 1) I'm trying to create a fairy but the avatar isn't showing up! 2) My fairy turned white! 3) Other bug not listed above These are bugs we're working on fixing. Please be sure to send in a bug report, and in the meantime we recommend refreshing your browser to see if that solves the issue.

Can I apply to help? Fly on over to ⁠the application-links channel in our Discord server to check which positions are open as we don't announce that on any of our socials & you need to have been in the Discord for some time to apply. ⠀ I don't know anything about developing. Can I still apply to help? Occasionally, other roles such as Moderator, Artist or Sound Designer will open up. Applications for these roles will be present in the ⁠application-links channel when they are available. Developer is the only staff position that is always accepting new members. However, everyone can help the staff by reporting bugs in the demo! ⠀ How can I report a bug? To report a bug, you can fill out this official bug report form: https://forms.gle/4NPZa5Rrq1q69zT99 Please be sure to include a clear and detailed description of the bug, exact steps to reproduce the bug, and screenshots (if possible). ⠀ What do artists and developers do? Together, our artists and developers work to rebuild the game from the ground up. Individually, they do a lot, but to summarize:

Artists restore art & assets from the original game, as well as create animations and spritesheets.

Developers are responsible for game development and/or web design. ⠀ I recently applied for a position and haven’t heard back. What should I do? Responses to application forms generally go out within the week, either via email or Discord. However, if you have any questions about your application, feel free to message any of the staff members on our Discord server.

Thank you for supporting the We The Pixies project! We look forward to flying with you at wethepixies.net!

#we the pixies #pixie hollow #disney fairies #faq page #faq

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playshrp · 5 months ago

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plot ideas:

domeric knowing your muse from being a page in barrowtown or squiring in the vale & keeping in touch with them via letters & visits that become more difficult to share as other plots in the world progress. ( optional: we can switch canon to have him squire elsewhere. )

domeric is an accomplished painter & might paint your muse. which would take a long enough time for them to establish some sort of dynamic where they know / might forge an opinion of one another.

arranged marriage

domeric doing damage control for the horrors ramsay inflicts upon the north. this could be taken poorly because of domeric's part in the red wedding.

someone in the stark's army before robb dies knowing domeric via their experiences in war. he was not on the battlefield very often because of physical difficulties as a result of him being poisoned, but often had robb stark's ear because of his tactical mind. ( optional: domeric exchanging letters on his father's behalf with a lannister-allied force & having to do so in secret. )

domeric seeking out allies anywhere to try & oppose ramsay's claim on winterfell. it's a thing of ' i don't care if i win i just want him to lose '

domeric visiting king's landing for one of the royal weddings, all while avoiding returning north to his home & brother.

domeric holding harrenhall in his father's place / our characters crossing paths that way

#ooc.#wishlist.#it's just some very general places we could start w a plot or dynamic #more details would get worked in as we develop characters & things #but just a few potential starting points #Happy 3am

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staox · 1 year ago

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Welcome to the Show new Towny!

Hello Hello and Howdy-do there Towny! <:o)

[If you happen to know me personally then please do not share or spread my personal information on any internet platforms, such include my address, full name, deadname, age, school, grades, grade level, voice etc. UNLESS you have my consent to it.]

Hello Hello! My name is Vale/Staox! I'm a Transmasc person that goes by he/him/they/them/it/it's/xe/xim/ze/zim!

Welcome to my blog!

I post lots of random stuff here based off my hyperfixations or whatever makes me happy! <:o) I'm in multiple fandoms aswell! I enjoy posting a vast variety of art not from one fandom specifically!!

I am an aspiring poet and an illustrator!! I have dreams that one day I will be known as a famous poet, painter, artist, and sculptor

I'm an artist and a minor so please no uncomfortable things on my page! (Please.. Kindly watch the words you use when commenting))

I'm still growing and developing as an artist!! Everyday I grow and develop into something new!! I hope you can be patient and enjoy as you watch our little art journey!!

Please, kindly, DO NOT INTERACT if you are: A proshipper/comshipper, ableist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, problematic, a toxic neurological, extremely political, a pedophile, rcta, MAP, apart of the "Art lore", etc. etc.

- Again, I'm a minor, so if you are 18 or above please do NOT send me any disgusting or extremely personal DMS

This is a safe space, so please no toxic topics here! Here, I encourage everyone to support their differences cause everyone is human, I will not tolerate in any way any disgusting and heinous words, especially if they degrade or do discriminate others.

This is a Sfw account! however I do not take art requests! (Although I will draw gore from time to time!)

I will NOT post: NSFW, Intimate stuff, anything 18+, and anything else like this

If you force me to make anything like this, I will not be afraid to permanently block you. I understand if you want or request me to do this if you are unaware, but if you are perfectly and openly aware that I am not comfortable with this, plus if you continuously request and ask me to create it after I refuse, do not expect me to be hesitant whilst blocking. Please, respect my bounderies.

My Special Interests/Hyperfixations! :

* Welcome Home

* Dhmis

* Avenue Q

* Bugbo

* Sesame Street

* Cookie run: Kingdom/Ovenbreak

* Omori

* Good Omens

* Nimona

* Captain Underpants

* Tmc/The Mandela Catalogue

* Twf/The Walten Files

* Fnaf

* The Stanley Parable

* Miracle Musical

* Tally Hall

* T.H.I.S (Tally Hall Internet Show)

* Jack Stauber's Opal

* Shop: A Pop Opera

* Ride the Cyclone (RTC)

* Sundy Stairway

* BBirthday

* The Amazing Digital Circus (TADC)

* Town Folks (my own creation! <:o))

* Trolls

Some of my favorite music artists &/or bands! <:o)

These aren't even all of them yet! (tumblr has a 10 image only thingy!!) I will list them down for you! <:o)

- Jack Stauber

- Weezer

- Will Wood/ Will Wood & the Tapeworms

- Tally Hall

- Miracle Musical

- Chonny Jash

- Elliotly

- Jhariah

- Sodikken

- 6arelyhuman

- H3artcrush

- Rebzyyx

- Laufey

- Mitski

- Mother Mother

- Scowl

- Slipknot

- Soupy Garbage Juice

- Lemon Demon/Neil Cicierega

- S3RL

- Korn

- Pleasentries

- Kikuo

- Ruben the Understander

- The Chats

- The Mountain Goats

- Mindless Self Indulgence

- Oingo Boingo

- Rio Romeo

- Marina

- Drive 45

- Lesley Gore

- Temporex

- Bo En

- Bo Burnham

- Xavlegmao

- Queen

- Lorna Shore

°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•

Stay safe my fellow Town Folk! I love you very much! <:o)

#pinned post #introduction #intro post #Town Folks #I feel as if this is very wordy!#Oh I've started rambling again!

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luckyy19 · 1 year ago

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GENRE: fantasy (somewhere between urban and high), more character driven than plot driven POV: Third person limited, multiple POVs, past tense STATUS: I don't even know anymore. This is technically the third draft but it's also a rewrite soo... PROJECTED WORD COUNT: between 90k-115k; first in a series THEMES: art as a tool for social change, art as the opposition to war, the innate power and beauty of humanity CONTENT WARNINGS: Addiction (moderate), alcohol consumption (moderate), blood, death, violence I'm sure there will be more added later

SYNOPSIS

Allow me to elucidate. You were found to be hiding aves from us. That’s a punishable offense, here. Doubled, considering where I found you. Holed up in the other world, thinking you were safe. What a fool you were. All of the angels are dead. At least, that's what the crown would like you to believe. But Erica Bolvade, heir to the throne of Katalxi and daughter of the ruthless Killian Bolvade, knows firsthand this is a lie. Sent to the other world--the one with no magic and warmth and humans--to hunt down angels and drag them back to face their deaths, Erica can finally begin the first step of her own plan. Most people would need time to grapple with the decision, but after the deaths of her mother and her lover at her father's hand, Erica's revenge can't come soon enough. Apollo Mack, exhausted artist and circumstantial guardian to his teenage cousin, Kaylie, has a high tolerance for the fantastical. He paints people who cannot exist and worlds that never will. He makes enough for the two of them to survive in relative comfort and wonders if he made a deal with the devil somewhere along the way. And he hears about all of the teen angst occurring with Kaylie and her friends--especially when it pertains to Gwendolyn Vale and the fate that comes with wings. He really would have preferred boy drama. As Erica's path crosses with Apollo's, they become entangled in a world of war and politics, wings and magic. Rebellion is brewing, and Erica intends to help them in whatever way she can, turning the people around her into pieces of her chess game. And somehow, she's certain, Apollo's humanity and artistry will be the key they've been missing all along.

MAIN/POV CHARACTERS

Apollo Mack: 26, artist (specifically painter, but also draws), human, charming, bisexual disaster I character intro I

Erica Bolvade: 23, Princess of Katalxi, daemonium/demon, fire magic, hard exterior soft interior I character intro I

Kaylie Waterman: 19, aves/angel (black wings), places too much responsibility on herself, believes in fate/destiny I character intro I

Gwendolyn Vale: 18, aves/angel (white wings), preppy exterior exhausted interior, can't settle on a hobby to save her life I character intro I

SECONDARY CHARACTERS

Skylar & Dylan: 18 & 18, Kaylie and Gwen's friends, humans, affectionately referred to as "the Merry and Pippin" by me except they aren't nearly as important I character intros I

Korinne: 22, banshee, mute, ex-priestess of Myra (Goddess of Death), assassin for the king, friend & servant to Erica I character intro I

Gabriel & Evander: 24 & deceased (brothers), aves (gray & iridescent), Princes of [REDACTED], magic unknown; Evander was 21 at time of death and romantically involved with Erica

Raquelle & Crimson: 20 & 19 (siblings), kelpies, nobility through their mother although their family was denounced; Raquelle acts as a lady's maid to Erica, Crimson fled and has yet to be found I character intro—Raquelle I

Alexander "Ace" & Evelynne "Eve": 24 (twins), aves/angels (gold wings), fire magic, guards of the aves heirs; Eve had her wings removed prior to FWBS and is presumed dead, Ace fled in the aftermath

Arielle: 234, ???, looks like a daemonium, manager of the "Circus of the Stars," fortune teller I character intro I

Festus: 156, ???, looks like an incubus, owns a bar in Katalxi, always smells of wine I character intro I

Selected Excerpts:

Apollo & Kaylie

Random Snippets

Apollo Reflects

Gwen's Late Night Thoughts

Erica & Apollo Chat: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

#writeblr #wip intro #wip: fwbs #that's right i've got another one #remember when i said zodiac would be my main project this year? me either #i'm so excited to finally get this to a place i'm proud of #at about 30k as of posting!

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alfvaen · 9 months ago

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Novel Madness

Still reading, and apparently still blogging about it.

So this is what I read in March. Possible spoilers for the Vorkosigan Saga, and the Mercy Thompson and Peter Grant series, among others.

Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson: You Feel It Just Below The Ribs, completed March 2

So as you may recall, back in February, I had given up on Ruth Ozeki's A Tale From The Time Being, wasn't fond of Kristen Painter's Flesh And Blood, and was also not really liking the nonfiction book on Reddit I was reading.

I was somewhat tempted to just skip ahead to my reread of Memory, my favourite book in the Vorkosigan series. I mean, when I had started doing more frequent rereads, it had been after just such a string of subpar books, and I wanted to retrench and remind myself why I loved reading. Looking back in my records, I can't actually find that string of subpar books, but I can find about when I started doing the rereads--the fall of 2007, when I started doing a Wheel of Time reread, where every second book was a reread; it was the first time I reread the entire series (up to that point, which was Knife of Dreams). After that, my rereads went back to their more sporadic pace, until the spring of 2008 when I did an every-second-book reread of the Vorkosigan saga (the first of three such rereads in the next few years). And I kept doing every-second-book-a-reread for two years, at which point I slowed down to mostly every third book. By 2012 this was down to every fourth book, and there it seemed to stabilize. So it wouldn't be unprecedented for me to do my rereads more frequently, but the cycle has been stable for a while--I added in the alternation of author gender, the diversity slot, the trying-out slot…it would throw my cycle off now if I did the rereads more frequently. But don't think I wasn't tempted.

Anyway… I was looking for a male author, something that wasn't urban fantasy (because of the Kristen Painter), probably something that wasn't space opera (because Memory was still coming up)… I toyed with the idea of selecting something that might be "fun" (like John Scalzi's Agent To The Stars or the Doctor Who And The Krikkitmen book), but there were also books that I had been thinking "maybe" on for some time and hadn't yet picked up. And You Feel It Just Below The Ribs was one of them.

Many of you are likely familiar with Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor's "Welcome To Night Vale" podcast, which I discovered relatively early (by current standards--maybe around the "Sandstorm" episodes?). I've see the show a couple of times when it came through (or near) Edmonton, I try to keep up on the podcast (though mostly I fail because I can't keep up with a bimonthly podcast schedule any more), and I have read all of the tie-in novels and the script books. The novels are decent, not great, but okay. And I have also tried out a lot of the other related podcasts--"Alice Isn't Dead" and "Within The Wires" are the ones I stuck with.

"Within The Wires" was always weird, and not every season was great, but it was an interesting combination of two conceits--one, that every season was done through "found audio", which included relaxation tapes with hidden messages, dictaphone recordings, answering machine messages, and museum audio guide recordings, among others. And two, that this all took place in an alternate history where, due to an early-20th-century upheaval called The Reckoning, the new regime had taken the drastic step of abolishing the family: breaking the emotional links between parent and child by altering their memories and raising the children in communal creches. (There's also a distinct shortage of male characters in the podcast, which is fine--at some point I'd even thought that men had been wiped out entirely, but there are occasional male characters mentioned now and then. And the new season features a male voice actor for the first time.) But we've never really gotten much detail about the Reckoning, because it was too far in the past, and nobody needed to talk about it much because it was just part of their common world. (Maybe in the season where we were following a woman who was part of a secret rebel group that did raise their own children, but even then we didn't get much.) So I was very interested in the novel that they came out with, in hopes that we would find out more about what the Reckoning actually was and how the change in society came about.

It's a bit of an odd novel--it has a sort of framing story of it being a found document, and has frequent footnotes. But I'm not clear why it was done like this. The document is the memoirs of a woman who was orphaned during the Reckoning--which seems here to have been a worst-case version of World War I that lasted until 1941 and did literally engulf the entire world, possibly with a worse flu pandemic as well. (This was published during Covid so that may have affected things a little.) The author, Miriam Gregory, ended up being influential to the whole post-Reckoning New Society practice of editing memories to remove parent-child bonds. She later got involved with the mysterious Institute from the first season, and there were some hints of the plot from the third (the political thriller told through dictaphone recordings). The footnotes mostly seem to be there to try to point out places where the editors of the document found stuff they were pretty sure was inaccurate. They quoted information from the official record and mentioned when there was no evidence of something existing or having happened at all. Which, okay, maybe this was people parroting the official history even with all its inaccuracies, as a method of showing how the truth had been hidden. But supposedly the publication of this document was being done by a group which was already not following the New Society party line, so why would they be so certain that this was wrong whenever it contradicted the accepted source of truth? It's not clear, and so it seems like they're just there to undermine the story whenever it gets too dramatic. It doesn't feel like an effective technique.

Overall it was a decent book, but flawed, and I felt like it could have covered more of the world than it did.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Memory, completed March 5

I have probably mentioned before that Memory is my flat-out favourite Bujold book. It's not an easy one to recommend to other people, though, because it may only work (and certainly works much better) if you've read all the previous books first. Jo Walton has talked about the "spearpoint theory", where a tiny sharp point can be made much more effective if you've had a lot of buildup to it. This book has a shaft consisting of all the Miles books and stories that came before. Obviously Mirror Dance, of course, the immediate prequel, but it has an especially poignant revisiting of "The Mountains of Mourning", as well as the reappearance of Duv Galeni from Brothers In Arms, and robust roles for Emperor Gregor Vorbarra, Delia Koudelka, Ivan Vorpatril, and Simon Illyan, who is central to the plot. It also has one of the dullest titles in the series, though it is relevant, not least because of the reference to Simon Illyan's eidetic memory chip.

The first part is the most painful, as Miles manages to lose most of what's important to himself through an attempt to keep it from slipping away. But I love almost every scene that takes place on Barrayar. It's such a treat just to see Miles coping with day-to-day life there (my favourite bit is still the convenience-store "Reddi-Meals!"), plunged back into a life he's been neglecting for years, that it doesn't even feel disappointing when it's over a third of a way into the book before the "real" plot really gets going. Because the shaft of that spear is still building up.

In later rereads, there are some bits I find fascinating. Like the worldbuilding details about the existence of Imperial Auditors, special investigators answerable only to the Emperor himself, that actually were never mentioned before in the series. But the way the native Barrayarans explain it to one Komarran feels completely organic, and they've known it all along, so surely these Auditors have been mentioned before? Nope, they're probably something that the author pulled out of her hat for this book (there were "auditors" mentioned in the framing story of Borders of Infinity, but I think they were just regular auditors, not Imperial ones). But if feels like they've always been in the background. (Maybe, if they were, they should have been mentioned in Barrayar somewhere? Well, whatever. Good enough.) Also, there was one relationship that blindsided me first time through, but now I can spot all the groundwork being laid for it all the way through. Very deft.

Steven Barnes: Zulu Heart, completed March 12

Next, according to my cycle, it was time for a book by a "diverse" male author. As I may have mentioned before, I seem to be much shorter on those than I am on female diversity, particularly on the black authors.

I first read Steven Barnes many years ago, at least in collaboration. His book with Larry Niven, Dream Park, has long been a favourite; I recall one day, after a stressful move between cities, that I spent just rereading the book from cover to cover. The sequels never hit quite the same spot, though, which may be why, although I did occasionally buy a Barnes solo book in a second-hand store, I had never actually gotten around to reading any of them. But they were there when I needed to draw from them for this slot. A couple of years ago I read his Lion's Blood, an alternate history novel about a world where African (and mostly Muslim) nations colonized the New World (which I believe they called Bilalistan), and they enslaved Europeans. (I don't recall if there was an in-universe explanation for the change in dominance--maybe the ever-popular Hyper-Virulent Black Death--or if it just turned out that way. There was something about Alexander The Great maybe going to Egypt…) One of the main characters was an Irish man named Aidan who was enslaved as a child near the beginning of the book, and separated from his sister; the other one was a black Muslim named Kai, son of a Wakil in Bilalistan. It probably covers a lot of slave-story tropes, but race-swapped, plus there's also drama an intrigue centered around Kai's family. It was an okay book, but I wasn't particularly planning on searching out the sequel; however, last summer at the When Words Collide convention in Calgary, I saw it on a table of "free to a good home" books, and decided to pick it up. And having basically exhausted pretty much all the other possibilities, I was perforce reading it next.

Once of the principles I mostly stick to with the diversity books is that I don't give up on them. (Maybe I should have done this with the Ruth Ozeki book last month, but I guess I didn't.) It's supposed to be about broadening my horizons, approaching different kinds of stories, etc. I've always been a little hit-or-miss with alternate histories; my perception, at least, is that a lot of them tend to focus on the same things--the American Civil War, the American Revolutionary War, World War II--all American stuff. This one is, at least, a little more creative, and is very black culture focused in a way that, frankly, Barnes's other books I read really weren't.

Plotwise, though, it's only okay; some threads are interesting, some I'm less interested in, and some seem to be a little rushed, as if he was trying to squeeze in plots from a third book the publisher had nixed. The back cover blurb seems to imply that the book is going to cover this world's version of the Civil War, but given that they're still colonies of overseas nations (Egypt and Abyssinia) it's really more like a Revolutionary War. And, spoilers, what there is of it is not a major part of the story. In that sense it's almost more like Diana Gabaldon's later books where the (American) Revolutionary War is going on, and it affects our characters, but it's not primarily about the war itself. And maybe this book would have benefited from being even longer to have that increased scope.

I do worry a bit about the reversed slavery idea--on the one hand, maybe it'll give some of us white people a better feeling for what the Africans suffered under slavery if we replace them with Europeans. The concepts that stuck with me were things like having white slaves given Arabic or African names rather than names from their own culture, and also all the African cultures being treated as distinct things while all the European cultures get jumbled together. But I also picture some people pointing at this and saying, "See? They'd do just the same as us if they were in charge!" Which may be true, but of course it doesn't say that, in our world, the slaves in America didn't suffer, and we're not living in that alternate world. It means that one group may not be inherently nobler than another, but that doesn't mean that they're not deserving of justice, or equity, or reparations. (I can also picture frothing white supremacists screaming that this the what the blacks want, and turning it into a story of white victimhood. Well, I guess we can't control what white supremacists are going to froth about.) It's not a bad thing, but it seems like it can be mischaracterized. (One novel I was working on, I have a setting with an area's native inhabitants being oppressed by intrusive colonials, and I was toying with the idea of having the natives be white, but I'm afraid it'd get read as anti-immigrant rather than anti-colonial, so I probably won't.)

Natalie Zina Walschots: Hench, completed March 16

After the long and somewhat topically heavy slavery book, I decided I was in the mood for something maybe a little lighter, and it was time to get back to a female author. My wife had recommended this Hench book to me, and nudged me about it a couple of times, and I decided to give it a go. I know that technically I do have my special slots for new authors (with the "try but feel free to give up if it does not spark joy" parameters), but if I never tried a new author outside of those slots, then it would take forever me to try all the ones I'm interested in, so I decided to let myself read this one.

The book is clearly set in a world with superheroes, and of course supervillains. I've read a lot of comics--mainly Marvel comics from the 60s through to the 90s (my attempt at a comprehensive read-through on Marvel Unlimited has just inched its way to the end of 1993, so I may be a little behind on the current state of the superhero genre, apart from the MCU stuff) but fewer actual prose novels. I suspect that the modern superhero novel, with its narrower focus, is more prone to examining superheroes in more depth, and frankly most of them tend to come out on the anti-superhero side of things, and at the very least turns them into more complex, flawed characters. The Annihilation Score tended to treat them as problematic; Brandon Sanderson's "Reckoners" series treats them as existential threats (admittedly, in that setting their powers literally drive them insane); and at best, they are severely flawed people who just happen to have powers, as in James Alan Gardner's "Sparks Vs. The Dark" series. Maybe it's a generational thing--in an age where the status quo is far from kind to the vast majority of those who are Millennials or younger, who are your sympathies with--heroes who fight to uphold the status quo, or the villains who subvert it? (Which is not too far off from the logic from that gets people to vote for Trump…)

Hench shows us mostly the villain side of the story, with superheroes mostly shown as overpowered thugs and walking disasters. We're mostly concerned with Supercollider, an example of the former, whose every brush with our protagonist leaves her damaged, and his longtime nemesis Leviathan, who lifts her up and makes her feel valued. I keep wanting to draw analogues with the heroes I'm familiar with--is Supercollider basically Superman? Leviathan seems more like Doctor Doom than anybody. Supercollider's partner Quantum Entanglement (a bit of an awkward name) seems more like a combination of Invisible Woman and Shadowcat than anything else. (I'm always low-key amused at superhero naming where they just silently have to avoid the names of real Marvel or DC characters, without seeming to. In my superhero stories I mostly tend to think that the real heroes are afraid of getting sued by the corporate juggernauts who own the trademarks on the fictional ones…) It got a lot darker than I was expecting, actually, but it was absorbing and I liked it a lot.

Patricia Briggs: Silver Borne, completed March 19

I had originally been thinking of something like Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower for my next book, but after Hench I wasn't feeling like it; instead I thought it might be time for another urban fantasy. I have started so many, and finished (or even caught up with) so few--the Dresden Files, for sure, and the Kelly Meding might be the only one. I find a lot of them appealing in the abstract, but it seems like they appeal to my wife more, so she's the one who reads then, gets hooked on the series, stays caught up, buys them in hardcover, etc. She has always been more of a fan of romance, and a lot of the female-authored urban fantasy seems like it's on a spectrum to paranormal romance. (The main difference, of course, is probably whether there's a single continuing protagonist, or a different romantic pairing every book.) Anyway, I'm in the middle of a lot of series, and it seems to take a lot to get me to the state where I get hooked and have to start reading them faster, so it can be years between books for me.

Patricia Briggs has, like many, split off a side series--her main series follows Mercedes "Mercy" Thompson, but there's also a "Charles & Anna" series which crosses over, and after the last Mercy Thompson book (Bone Crossed) left me a little underwhelmed, I had started those books, so the last Briggs I read was actually side series novel Cry Wolf. Apparently reading them in alternation is not a bad idea anyway, so I went back to Mercy for this one. I even remembered most of the characters, or at least was satisfied with the author's descriptions of them (a lot of minor werewolf pack members showed up, and I couldn't tell you for sure which ones we'd seen before or had character traits before this book).

The pacing was a little weird--there's basically three plot threads which show up at different times, which aren't really connected causally but do interact with each other, and the balance doesn't always work (like pack politics dominating everything else for a few chapters until we get back to our other plots), but it was better than Bone Crossed, at least. It's unfortunate, given how much urban fantasy I read, how little I enjoy the dominance politics of werewolf packs, and particularly the touchiness of Alphas. (Oh, no, we can't meet their gaze or undermine their authority or it's a challenge and they'll have to kill us. And they can't show any weakness or others will try to kill them.)

Next book in the series will be back to Charles & Anna, anyway. I am not yet really hooked on the series, but I'll keep going for now.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Komarr, completed March 22

Back to the Vorkosigans again, for Komarr. Like her other planet-named books, it takes place entirely on the planet in question (if we allow space stations in the same system to be close enough, anyway), the troubled vassal of Barrayar. Because the only current access to Barrayar comes through a wormhole in the Komarr system, and the earlier Cetagandan invasion of the planet was abetted by the Komarrans, Barrayar ended up conquering Komarr to secure its interface to the rest of the world. (I always wondered if it was only upon conquest of a second planet that Barrayar became a true empire, but I think they had emperors before that so probably not.) They've tried to be benevolent rulers since then, but we already saw in Brothers In Arms that there are those, like Ser Galen, that want to get rid of the Barrayaran yoke. And Aral Vorkosigan acquired the sobriquet of "The Butcher of Komarr" when a group of prisoners in his custody were executed--supposedly on his orders, but in fact it was an overzealous subordinate who Aral later killed.

Miles comes along to investigate a bizarre act of destruction--accident or sabotage, we don't yet know--where the "soletta array", a group of orbiting mirrors reflecting additional sunlight onto the cold, still-being-terraformed world (the world's population still lives in domed cities), has been damaged through collision with an off-course ship. He's mostly just shadowing older Lord Auditor Vorthys, the engineering professor who's analyzing the debris, and they end up staying over with Vorthys's niece Ekaterin Vorsoisson, who is our other viewpoint character in the book. Ekaterin has a highly unsympathetic husband, Tien, who has a secret shame, a hidden genetic disease called Vorzohn's Dystrophy. He also happens to be in charge of a small department of the terraforming effort.

I guess my biggest problem with this book is just that Tien and his department turn out to be directly related to the soletta disaster. I mean, think of it--the disaster happens, and an auditor is sent to investigate it. If it hadn't happened to be someone connected to Tien, the investigation might have gone nowhere, or taken a lot longer, because they wouldn't have had that extremely gratuitous link. It bugs me every time.

So the best part of the book is probably the introduction of Ekaterin, and her growth as a character through to the end of the book, where she strikes a decisive blow. And without it, we wouldn't have A Civil Campaign (or would, at least, have a much different book). But it is a dip in what would otherwise be a five-star run from Mirror Dance.

Shaun Barger: Mage Against The Machine, completed March 27

Catchy title, eh? That's probably part of why I picked it up in the first place, though I don't remember for sure. This is in my actual "trying a new author" slot, generally with permission to give up if the book doesn't grab me.

Essentially, it seems that the world ended at some point (2020?) when the machines/AIs rose up against the humans. The mages, who had been living in secret veiled communities for centuries, were hidden and thus not affected by this, though they're pretty sure that the humans were all wiped out. At least, that's what Nikolai, a young magically-talented officer (with a traumatic past) in the year 2120, has always been told.

Meanwhile, outside the veil, a young human cybernetically-enhanced woman named Jem, who remembers the machine uprising ten years earlier (she has her own tramatic past), and who mostly escaped because they were on the way to a colony on Venus at the time, is working as a courier, escorting a rare pregnant woman (unaffected by the fertility plagues the machines spread) through the fringes of Philadelphia.

The two stories go back and forth for several chapters in what seems like an attempt to sow confusion in the reader about the inconsistencies between the two versions of the timeline, which mostly led me to conclude that either these are literally parallel worlds, or that the mages are severely misinformed about the last century of history outside the veils. Or, presumably, most of them are misinformed but the ones at the top are all in on it and keeping the secret for their own reasons.

It seems like a bit of a hodgepodge. Part The Matrix, part Harry Potter (the mages have a sport named "flyball" that seems a lot of like Quidditch without broomsticks), part Brandon Sanderson/Brent Weeks (the flavour of the actual magic system), part Children of Men, part Wool (for the sheltered society ignorant of the world outside)… But I guess that means it's not too derivative, because of the variety of sources?

The biggest problem with it, really, is that the story clearly is not finished…but, in the five years since its release, no further books have come out. The author still seems to be actively posting on Instagram, and I found a Reddit post which said that as of two years ago the sequel was finished (and apparently there are supposed to be four books total), so I hazard a guess that the roadblocks are publishing-related. Like, his editor, Navah Wolfe, bought the first book for Saga Press, but moved on, so he might be editorially orphaned, leading to Saga passing on later books, so he'd have to be looking for a new publisher, or giving up and self-publishing (or just giving up). Always awkward--ask my wife who has two self-published sequels to the books that Scholastic published twenty-some years ago, because no other publisher would take them without rights to the first two. (Diana Rowland managed it somehow, but mostly it just doesn't work.) So I may hang on to this one and await further news (which presumably he'd post on Instagram or something…)

Ben Aaronovitch: Whispers Under Ground, completed March 31

Most of the urban fantasy series out there had female authors and female protagonists; I tend to call this the "post-Buffy" wave--before that, it felt like "urban fantasy" was more like Charles de Lint, with people in and around cities coming into contact with fairies and the like. Although stuff like Tanya Huff's "Blood Ties" series was also around back then, and that's clearly very close to what we call urban fantasy these days. Anyway. There are a few male authors as well, Jim Butcher the most famous, and Kevin Hearne, but they have a different flavour to them. And then there's Ben Aaronovitch, which is different again, being very British. Which is all just a way of saying that, while I normally try not to read too-similar books too close together, this doesn't really feel very much like the Patricia Briggs book I read a couple of weeks ago.

I'm a bit behind on this series--I read Midnight Riot (the North American retitled version of Rivers of London) some time ago, and Moon Over Soho more recently but still a while ago. But my wife was just reading the latest, Amongst Our Weapons, from the library, and apparently it's full of Monty Python references (in the chapter titles, if nothing else), and my eldest son was just reading Midnight Riot (apparently he'd heard that this series's magic system is vaguely similar to the system from the Ars Magica RPG we've been playing recently), so it felt like time to revisit it. My memory is of course a little fuzzy, but my overall impression is that this book is a little more police-procedural murder mystery than the previous two. Definitely there is a murder to solve, and there is a lot of interaction with other police (and an American FBI agent). Definitely a certain amount of underground (including sewers), as the title implies (so it's not just the London Underground). I enjoyed it and will have to try to revisit the series a little more frequently.

And that's it for the prose fiction books for March. For completeness I can also add in a graphic novel I squeezed in (literally just finished it before midnight on the 31st). See, one of the podcasts I've been listening to for a while is the "Endless" podcast, about the Sandman, cohosted by Lani Diane Rich and Alisa Kwitney. Kwitney, who was a former DC editor, particularly on Sandman itself, also apparently did a series for Ahoy Comics called "G.I.L.T.", which they were shilling on the podcast, so I thought I'd give it a try. I got my library to order what turned out to be a collection of the first five issues (I guess I'm not sure if there are more, but I wouldn't be surprised). "G.I.L.T." apparently stands for something like "Guild of Independent Lady Temporalists", though I'm not sure such a guild actually turned up… Anyway, two women, 70ish Hildy and 50ish Trista, get sent back in time to 1973, though Trista wasn't supposed to come along; they try to deal with their respective pasts, linked by a creepy cult-leader type that Hildy was engaged to and Trista's mother was a follower of. They're not supposed to be able to change anything, but they're also not supposed to both go back at once, so things get a little screwy. I wasn't 100% sold on it, but it was interesting.

And now I am actually reading The Raven Tower, but that'll be for next month's post.

#Lois McMaster Bujold #Vorkosigan #Ben Aaronovich #Patricia Briggs #Steven Barnes #Shaun Barger #Natalie Zina Walchots #Jeffrey Cranor #Janina Matthewson #Within The Wires #books #reading #Alisa Kwitney

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