#Riptide Publishing

[alessandroiiidimacedonia]

[jeannereames]

Please buy DANCING directly from Riptide

First, I actually get (a little) more money...and so do they. They're a queer publishing house.

But now, given Amazon's new position on LGBTQA+, I actively don't want to give any money to Bezos. For why, see below. Amazon has taken over print-on-demand, so you can no longer buy a physical book from Riptide. BUT you *can* get it from B&N!

Please go there for a hardcopy.

[razberrypuck]

holding finn tidestrider in my hands. why are you SUCH a whore.

[bisexualbaker]

Not fanfic, but professional original fiction: The Burnt Toast B&B by Heidi Belleau and Rachel Haimowitz, available from @riptidepublishing​ . Bi trans man x cis gay man; two sex scenes, during one of which the trans man tops. It’s set in a particular Romance universe, but can stand on its own perfectly well. Available as an ebook (currently only $1.99), audiobook, and physical book.

ok but say what ya wanna, why DO transmasc characters always have to be the "bottom"???? I mean, ofc transmasc can enjoy having their vago fucked, but maybe we also wanna see ourselves being the tops? I don't think I've ever seen a transmasc top-story with a cis partner or even in T4T fic. Just because the "equipment" isn't there by default doesn't mean there aren't tools that can be used. Really brings across the feeling of "ur a lesser man" when that's the default.

--

[thatseadog]

Currently writing a fic where Chip doesn't manage his time with his prosthetic on correctly and ends up getting hurt because of it. It's first draft is already finished but I'm doing it on my phone so it's hard as SHIT

Anyways I'm really glad Bizly and the others forgot about Chip's prosthetic because that shit would have been GONE in a single silly goofy bit

[semidecentpoet]

Aaaaaand chapter 2 is in the books, holy shitttttt. I think it’s the riptide hiatus, rip meeeeeee

Snippet:

Chip didn't notice her inner turmoil. “Look, I'm starting a band of my own, and—”

“Are you gonna order anything?”

Chip faltered. “What?”

“I said,” Jay repeated, her tone icy, “are you gonna order anything?”

“Uh, not today. I—”

“Then you should probably leave,” Jay said, “and free up space for paying customers.”

[galadrieljones]

Riptide

❤️ masterpost ❤️

Dragon Age | Solavellan | Abevellan | Amerivellan | Mature ❤️

Over the past ten years, Sene Lavellan has tried to move on from Solas. First, with Abelas, an ancient elf with a fierce but gentle soul, and then with Ameridan, one of the wisest men she's ever known. But it's never enough. She finds herself forever yanked under the surface, in dreams. Like a riptide, Solas is always there. And when his ritual fails, and the shit hits the fan, she will do anything to protect him, and to pursue her destiny by his side. Slowly he will come to learn that there is no fate but the love they share. *This is a canon rewrite, beginning in the time period that Solas leaves Skyhold and extending through the canon era of Veilguard.*

Only @ AO3

Chapters will be published every week or so!

Part I: Abelas

Chapter 1: You're Welcome (9/23/24)

Chapter 2: Inertia (9/25)

Chapter 3: The New World (9/27)

Chapter 4: Digging (9/29)

Chapter 5: Lighthouse (10/1)

Chapter 6: Paper Flowers (10/3)

Chapter 7: The Storm Coast (10/5)

Part II: Ameridan

Chapter 8: Inquisition Folklore (10/7)

Chapter 9: Last Call (10/9)

Chapter 10: Fireflies, Marshes (10/11) - NSFW

Chapter 11: Dragon Slayer (10/13)

Chapter 12: Winter's Bone (10/15)

Chapter 13: Unlocked Doors (10/17)

Chapter 14: The Dragon, the Redhead, and the Wolf (10/20)

Chapter 15: Who Are You Now? (10/22)

Chapter 16: Goodnight, Halamshiral. (10/24)

Part III: Fen'Harel

Chapter 17: What the Dread Wolf Takes (10/26)

Chapter 18: Valor (10/28)

Chapter 19: Haven (10/30)

Chapter 20: All New, Faded for Sene. (11/30)

Chapter 21: Sweet Sorrow (12/6)

Chapter 22: Wise Men (12/13)

Chapter 23: Possession (12/20)

Chapter 24: Lovers at War (1/3)

Chapter 25: The Dread Wolf's Girl (1/10)

Chapter 26: Weight (1/17)

Chapter 27: Snow (1/24)

Chapter 28: Worm Hole (1/31)

Chapter 29: Wicked Gentry with the Wolf (2/7)

Chapter 30: Here on Earth (2/14)

Part IV: Solas

Chapter 31: The Messenger (2/21)

***Chapter 32: Huckleberry Pancakes (2/28)***

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Beginning in Chapter 20, this fic contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard ❤️

[simplegeneral]

HC: 14 years into the future of the DoD

Always disappointed with how little time passes in WoF, I decided to build a few headcanons of how the DoD are living at their 20 years old, 14 years after they ended the sandwing war.

Will do more with the Jade Winglet, but idk about Pantala, I don't have much ideas for that crazy place.

Clay:

Out of the dragonets of destiny, without doubt, Clay had the roughest entrance to real life. From an uncaring mother, to a nonexistent father, all he truly had were his siblings. Clay taught self-defense classes at the Jade Academy until the queens decided they would eventually replace him with more proper teachers of their choosing. Unfair as it was, Clay at that point only had Sunny and Starflight occasionally working there, thus his decision to leave it was a harmless one.

Clay would camp with his siblings through the land, ever curious to explore the world rather than live in one place, he was followed eventually by Peril, who would get together for a while, after officially becoming a couple only recently, as both of them had much to work in terms of their minds and souls.

Clay eventually would find work at the very organization which he started in, the Talons of Peace, not underground anymore and an official institution of peacekeeping led by Riptide. He would join them gladly, together with Peril and his siblings, working as an artist and publisher for them, Clay was finally where he wanted to be, at peace and working to spread the message of peace.

Sunny:

An inspired orator, Sunny would bath in the glory of having ended the war with humble aspirations. She founded the Jade Academy so every tribe may gather together and learn about each other, and while reality had hit harder than she could have predicted, she demonstrated that her spirit is not easily crushed by outside forces.

A principal, a teacher and a caring ever hopeful soul, she demonstrated her academy would survive the test of time. After an abysmal year in 5012 AS, 5013 AS had begun with inspiring news, Starflight’s project to demystify lies, stereotypes and harmful beliefs had brought credibility to the academy, and while ever doubtful of her abilities, Sunny constantly proved everyone wrong by working harder each time.

By 5025 AS, the Jade Academy is now the most prestigious institution of learning of all Pyrrhia, making even the most well-known icewing learning centers small in comparison.

While the other dod may have found someone in their lives to complete their halves, Sunny remains alone. The hope that she is building the future fulfills her heart, plus her life is incredibly busy as of now, being a former dod, she participates in the queen’s summit, frequently visits the sand palace as an adviser of queen Oasis II and still is a principal of the academy.

She is always somewhere, and everywhere at once! Some would ask if she is ever tired, and her response always is:

“Tired of helping the world heal? Pfft. Never!”

Glory:

Glory had faced her entire life the stereotypes and beliefs that her tribe was inferior to the rest, lazy worms who couldn't even inspire to be something in life... Yet she proved one rainwing can make the difference, all of them, change the world.

Going from a former DoD to a princess, and now main representative of the rainwings worldwide, Glory has worked tirelessly as much as Sunny to rebuild her society into the pride of Pyrrhia they once were, introducing writing, scrolls, printing machines and other technologies that were quickly revolutionizing the rainforest when mixed with local costumes and traditions.

RainWings by now have the highest scores in most subjects studied at the Jade Academy, thanks to their exceptional memories and learning abilities, mixed with almost uncanny calm and persistency. RainWing healers now work at almost every healing center and hospital of Pyrrhia, and traders from the rainforest are famous worldwide for their most exotic foodstuffs.

As of 5025, Glory rest easy as she tirelessly worked against discrimination of her tribe and the efforts have brought the RainWings and the world together once more, while she never found anyone that would complete her other half, she now passes her time wondering what the great RainWing queens of the past would think of her efforts, as she dives deep into their culture, after living her whole life as an outsider to her own people.

Starflight:

Starflight have had rough times since the second nightwing exodus out of their former island, suffering severe injuries due to the volcanic explosion, but nothing his nowadays self couldn’t handle. In time, he became the head of the library and begun realizing that the scrolls he once relied so much on his life were either incomplete or downright falsehoods he could only see through after the travels he had with the DoD in their fun adventure to end a war.

As the head of the library, Starflight felt personally responsible for the information they would pass down to future generations and sought to correct mistakes of the past, launching his partner and later wife Fatespeaker into expeditions across Pyrrhia to obtain first-hand information for the next series of books to be released and studied.

Whenever he is not in the library nowadays, he is at the queens’ summit as a former DoD and adviser of foreigner affairs and diplomacy of queen Greatness, although the later job he had honorably retired after the stress of the second exodus. Rarely though, he made visits to Renewal, the new capital and city of the NightWings outside of the rainforest, either visiting his step-sister Fierceteeth and her family, or despite being overall seen as an outsider by his nation, honorably as a DoD, being allowed a proper nightwing marriage ceremony with Fatespeaker.

Tsunami:

Tsunami had the welcoming home she always dreamed when she returned home in 5011 AS, but realities are often disappointing, after realizing her mother tried to murder her friends, held her sisters on a leash and was a braindead goose easily manipulated by Blister, she decided that enough was enough, challenging Coral and killing her mother, becoming the new queen.

With the tales of murdering both her mother and father, Tsunami saw herself in a situation simply too equal to the ones of her considered enemies, a monster. Even though she had the support of Anemone, and now had Auklet under her care, she decided that her redemption would come through helping the DoD from her now strong position.

As they ended the war on their terms, Tsunami was now a proper queen of the seawings and begun restructuring the queendom, undoing the severe mess her mother left it in, ensuring proper dragonet education, undoing Coral’s impressive propaganda system, and often using it on her favor to gain popularity among the common folk.

Now Tsunami, despite all, had grow solitary and tired of ruling, being ever pressured, after years of ruling, to find a proper king to announce successors of her own blood. While Riptide was on the line, the reality of both of their jobs, as well as the distance, made them merely exchange letters for so long until eventually they went their separated ways.

Tsunami and Anemone always considered Auklet to be the more proper queen of the seawings, growing without their vicious and uncaring tendencies, Tsunami intends to abdicate the throne in favor of her younger sister next year.

[teehee-vibes]

Guys, I think Grizzly hid lore in Dark Puckered Hole.

NOW JUST- JUST HEAR ME OUT. (Mieru, look away).

I’m not just talking about the potential purity culture of the Undersea being exposed through Finn’s self exploration… I’m talking RAFT lore.

In Chapter 69, “Behind Bars,” of Dark Puckered Hole, Finn Tidestrider is imprisoned “somewhere in the eastern sea” with another triton, who is on the brink of death. They fall in love and bang before the anonymous convict passes in Finn’s arms, but that’s not what I’m focusing on. Im focusing on the presence of another triton, an injured one, in the Oversea, especially the Sakura Ocean.

Historically in Mana, Finn Tidestrider was one of, if not, THE FIRST to leave the Undersea behind. A decade or so-so later, in modern day Riptide, there have been practically no other triton. Gillion, who was banished, and Edyn, who left to find and avenge him, are the only ones. Even more so, the only other Undersea characters are found in the Undersea (Unnamed NPCs in The Tank OR Felipe, a grung, being from Liquidus) or having left it behind for personal reasons a la Edyn (Caspian, a water genasi). When the Tidestrider siblings go around Allport, they have to wear cloaks to avoid standing out. There aren’t even other triton in Liquidus!

So how, why, is there another triton in the oversea? Finn himself is shocked by his presence. “In this prison, to find another man from the Undersea… my mind raced with questions.” He doesn’t dwell on this weirdness because his questions are drowned out by the sound of his blood beneath his skin, rushing downward, BUT it’s very bizarre, no?

Another detail: Why was the other triton on the verge of death? Of course, inadequate care, but could he have been thrown back into the cell like that? Whoever imprisoned them did not care about their lives. They could live, or they could die.

To go further, isn’t it kind of weird how Finn Tidestrider doesn’t specify where his imprisonment is? He is a very detailed author. He could have said one of the villages in Onawa Country or anything else to feed more detail into his writing, but he didn’t. I feel like the reason he wouldn’t be specific is because he himself was unsure exactly of where he was. He was taken in secret, likely kept out of sight while being arrested and transported to his cell.

I also have to wonder… who imprisoned them? I think you know what I’m getting at. I think RAFT did. RAFT has the resources. RAFT has the political sway. RAFT has governmental power. And it’s worsened by the fact that this imprisonment occurred in the Eastern Sea, the site of the Promised Bastion, where triton are imprisoned, tortured, skinned, and experimented on…

Judging by the fact that Finn refers to the other triton’s you-know-what as “a lighthouse to guide this lost sailor home,” Finn was likely a part of the Black Rose Pirates at the time. He couldn’t hide his presence in the Oversea as a crewmate for a pirate lord, let alone Captain Rose. Finn was on wanted posters, Finn was in newspaper headlines, Finn was a published author. I think RAFT had its eyes on him, but when they arrested or kidnapped him, it wasn’t for crimes of piracy… at least not on the surface.

I think this experimentation on Undersea people and gods has been going on for a long time, and Dark Puckered Hole could be evidence of this fact. Finn was intended to be a source of skin, of blood, and of magic for RAFT’s experimentation in the artificial leviathan and black ops projects. His lover was too, maybe already was (I say maybe because Finn doesn’t allude to the idea that he was physically ripped apart… that would have been unignorable). Finn probably only made it out because he’s that strong (in episode 82, when Drey is talking to and comforting Jay, he said Finn was terrifying when angry or passionate) or his crew came to his rescue.

I think political and military purposes against the pirates weren’t the only reasons RAFT wanted to ally with the Undersea. “Joining forces” with them led either to less suspicion as they funneled triton out of the ocean and to the recently abandoned Promised Bastion, or coming to dominate them allowed RAFT to simply take triton without enough pushback. Either way, without their Champion to rise against them (the one triton on the hooks accused Gillion of abandoning them), they’ve been taken en masse. And maybe Edyn’s collaboration with the navy permitted her some of this knowledge, and that’s how she knew to hide Gillion from prying eyes in navy territory.

Uhhh tldr: It’s weird that there’s an injured triton in the Eastern Oversea. I think DPH could imply that Finn and his lover were imprisoned by RAFT as test subjects for the artificial leviathan and black ops projects, proving the longevity of Fay Ferin’s plans.

[gillionmeowstrider]

HELLO! Here is the link to my Riptide Undersea Superdoc. This contains timestamps and notes for all mentions of the Undersea and Gillion/Edyn's backstory in Riptide and in the Rolleds.

It's around 2.5k words so far, and I'm currently working through the Feywild arc. The link to the published doc will update as I update the original.

[salmonight]

Free Title Ideas Pt. 1

I am always looking for new title ideas trying to find the perfect match for my meager amount of fics actually published ( I got a ton of wips mind you) so I have this little file full with title ideas I got from here and there and I thought I share them! Feel free to use them and all! I only actually used a few of them myself so theyre up for the take! Enjoy!

( I suck at categorizing mind u so take it however u want)

Low Mood:

Paint Splattered Teardrops

A Mournful Radio Song

The Quite Ivories

20 Minute Too Long… Too Late-

No Third Round Up

My Heart's An Artifice, A Decoy Soul

If These Walls Could Talk

Like Drying Paint on the Walls

Withering Memories

Bury Our Secrets Shallow

Isn't It Tragic How Far You Came?

The Best of the Worsts

Your Wings Are Failing, Icarus

Let Your Wings Carry You Away From Here

Cry For Reflection

The Scream of Winter

Much Madness in Divinest Sense

Family Doesn't End in Blood

In This Castle Of Glass

All the Same (Once a Liar, Always a Liar)

Crack:

Law is Where You Buy It

Miles from Normal

Stop Screaming - It's Me

Between Two Liars…

Lost My Soul and All I Got Was this T-Shirt

Dude, Where's My Soul?

When Life Hands You Demons Make Demonade

Demon-Blend Straigh From Hell

Nothing to See Here Officer, Just a Bunch of Blobs

Hey Kid, Wanna Buy a Blob Ghost?

Gingers Have No Souls

This Little Blob of Mine

Feral Goose Hunting: A Beginner's Guide (Just Don't)

10 Ways to Connect with Your Feral Goose by Robin

A Guide on Ruining Your Life

It IS and Idea (Just NOT the Brightest)

I Am totally NOT the One to Blame for THIS

Dead Men Won't Shut Up

Encryptid

Cryptid Crash Course

Shakespeare Has Nothing on Me!

[insert name]'s Observation Diary of the Weirdest Boss(es)

The Devil’s Eyes and His Voice of Reason

Romance:

Makeshift Chemistry

Stargazing, Coffee and the Mystery of You..

Play Love Like Killers (We All Fall)

Good Vibes:

Sunshine Riptide

Come on Baby, the Laugh Is on Me

Fair With Some Rain

Star Light, Star Bright, First Arrow I See Tonight

Bitter (?):

Ah, Lay Waste to it, then Laugh at it

Believe, We Were Never Gonna Lose Control

Die, but too Blind to See

Too Latte for Smiling (yes thats a pun there no miss typing)

And as the Scribe Said, Mark Me Up With Words

Vodka Shots in the Dark

What Lingers, What Waits

Dr.Sunshine is Dead

Action:

Swing 'em Sword, Comin' in Swarms

Droppin' Guns all on the Floor 'till it look like River Styx

Black on Black at Night

Rifles, and they're Useless in this House

Dropp the Dagger

Watch Us BURN

Death:

Leave Your Body and Soul at the Door

Dead Man's Party

'Till the Reaper Call

'cause the Hangman's Waiting

A Night in the Ice Box

Stars Fall Underground

Can't Reach the Stars from the Underworld

Dance on Your Grave in All Whites

I Will See You Down Below

A Toast to the Passing Lights

I am a Ghost, but Only If You Remember

A Forray into Thanatology

Do You Want to Build a Snow-ghost?

In the In Between

Deceased When Last Seen

They Only Murdered Him Once

Colder Than These Bones

A Ghostly Collection of Stories once Untold

Dearly Departed

Hopeful:

City of Last Hopes

Bright Foggy Skies

This Bird Has Flown

A Bard's Tale, so Bittersweet

In the Winter, the Van Keeps Rolling

Oh Raven (Sing Me a Happy Song)

A Light to Call Home

Lost and Found

Towards the Sun

Khmm I have quite a few ghost/death and Dc related ones cuz I mostly wrote DC and DP fics so I looked for tittles for those. Those who know, know those who don't can ignore them.

Pt 2 |

[zeawesomebirdie]

Tag Game: First 10 Lines Challenge

Rules: Share the first line of your last ten published works or as many as you are able to and see if there are any patterns!

Thanks for the tag @tnc-n3cl !! Let's just pretend it did not take me [counting on fingers] some eight months to do this one? I had wanted to wait until I had ten recently posted works that I was really proud of, and then time,,,, happened, as it is wont to do,,,,,

Anyway, here we go! Oldest to newest >:) [General content warning for blood + violence]

Bruce Wayne was not the kind of man who hid from others, particularly not when he had something he needed to discuss with them, regardless of what Alfred might say to the contrary. Distractions, Distractions

not gonna make it tonite. to much to do @ STAR. (Sometimes Canceled Dates Are) Worth It

It didn’t matter which way he tossed and turned, Barry Allen just couldn’t get himself comfortable enough to sleep. A Quiet Night In

There was hot breath on the back of his neck, a warm body pressed against his back, and an arm wrapped around his waist. Bed & Breakfast

There were only three things that Nightwing knew for certain when he shoved himself to his hands and knees where he had crumpled at the base of the alley wall: first, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and the Joker were on a war path tonight, given that they had managed to take both him and Batman by surprise; second, that was his own blood splashing on the grimy pavement between his hands and staining the fingers of his suit, though he was yet uncertain as to where he was bleeding from; and third, Batman should have called him in days ago, back when they first received word of the mass breakout from Arkham, and then perhaps they wouldn’t be in this situation, with Nightwing’s head swimming even as he struggled to regain his feet, squinting through the dim streetlights to try to bring absolutely anyone into focus. Bruise Your Lover (So He Remembers Once You're Gone) [yes, that really is all one sentence!]

It was a warm, early summer night in Gotham City, and when Batman finally allowed them to pause on the rooftop of the Wayne Enterprises building, Robin was ready for him. stuck in that moonlight riptide

“Pull into that alley there, Kato.” The Hornet's Concern

Matches Malone may be one of the most toxic men he's ever been on a date with, but Dick had no choice but to admit to himself that he was just as drawn to Matches as he was to Bruce. this time i won't be complacent (my old shit ends here tonight)

There was too much blood splattered across the office, dribbling down the pale wallpaper, seeping into the plush carpeting, staining the hardwood desk, blurring the ink on the page that sat in the typewriter where Dick had abandoned it only minutes before. Guidance of the Gray Son

“Jeez Louise sir, you can’t sneak up on a guy like that! There’s a war on!” Dear Hearts and Gentle People

What's really fun about all of these is that they're mostly all trying some new (for me) stuff! Figuring out that first line is one of the hardest parts for me, and you can really see when I finally figured out what level of action is appropriate for that very first sentence (very affectionate!) (Also shout out to @unmaskedcardinal who got me to start starting things in the middle of the action!)

And then there's the content of each of these; it's really cool to see them all lined up like this, as it makes it so incredibly obvious that I've started really writing the kind of things that I love!

No pressure tags: @ful-crum @nixie-deangel @astrophilic-soul @someguywriting @bastognes-ghosts @mister-warmth @sasheneskywalker @thefandomlesbian @hanshenrykcd and anyone else who wants to play!

[jeannereames]

Do you think people idealize Alexander and Hephaestion's relationship too much?

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: it’s part of a general tendency to oversimplify relationships that plagues a great deal of Romance (the genre).

Romancing Alexander & Hephaistion

Oodles of opinion articles exist about why that’s the case. What I don’t like about too many of these is an embedded misogyny that implies Romance is “women’s literature” which Just Isn’t As Serious as “real” (=men’s) literature. And it’s not just Romance. “Women Fantasy Writers” were denigrated in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and even ‘90s. Hard SF author Ben Bova famously said: “Neither as writers nor as readers have you raised the level of science fiction a notch. Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns, but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.”

(Bova was full of shit, btw.)

One of the first ways to torpedo misogynistic critiques of Romance is to remind people that Romance novels were invented in antiquity (Hellenistic era forward), where they were written BY men FOR men. And they had the same issues then.

It’s not a “woman” problem.

Furthermore, I’m not sure it is a problem when recognized for what it is: fun fantasy not reality. I was in a group of writers once where one of the men rather snidely asked one of the women, “Why do you like writing and reading that stuff?” Romance. “Those aren’t real men.” Her reply: “You’re right. I read Romance novels to get away from real men.” Oh, THAT shut him up! Ha.

But where I find myself having issues with Romance is when it creates unrealistic expectations for what relationships are like, which in turn may lead people to bail on real-life relationships when the going gets tough, as it inevitably will. “I guess I just fell out of love.” Or, “I guess we weren’t meant to be.” Or, “I’m still looking for my soul mate.” Bullshit. Soul mates are another thing I hate. They don’t exist. Or rather, we make them, we don’t find them.

That said, this sort of reaction is true only when folks have no healthy real-life relationships to provide models. How do you know what real love is like if you’ve never seen it?

Youth can also play a factor, mostly because we learn about life as we age. Yet I’ve met plenty of savvy young people when it comes to love, and absolutely fruity hot messes of middle-aged men and women. If one consumes only Romance and has few/no examples of normal relationships, it’ll fuel unrealistic ideas. That affects men just as much, even as they pretend it doesn’t. In fact, pretending it doesn’t makes it worse, ime. Some of the dumbest ideas about love I’ve heard have come out of male mouths.

In any case, some of this is why I note that Dancing with the Lion is not a Romance, even if put out by a Romance publisher. It’s a coming-of-age novel with a love story on the side (because falling in love is part of coming of age). Romance (the genre) has specific conventions and plot shaping that DwtL defies (because, again, it was never meant to be a Romance). Yet Riptide was willing to take a chance on the novels, and I’m hardly going to thumb my nose at them for that grace. It’s only an issue when readers’ expectations aren’t met.

So, returning to the question of over-idealizing of Alexander and Hephaistion’s relationship … yes, it’s a problem when folks can’t let them be human, and flawed. When their relationship turns Hephaistion into Alexander’s shadow with no personality (or ambitions) of his own. When any love story between them just happens magically because … of course! They’re Soul Mates and Meant to Be. When happily-ever-after is assumed without the recognition that life will be hard sometimes, they won’t agree, they’ll disappoint each other, and they may have to actually work at their relationship. Communicate. Fight it out. Give a little. Forgive offenses.

Personally, I’ve always found real relationships a lot more compelling than idealized ones. Real love is the most romantic of all. ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

[flawseer]

WoF Reference guide - #01: Turtle, Squid, Pike

Preamble

I'm rather fond of the way characters are rendered in the Wings of Fire graphic novel adaptation, so whenever I draw WoF stuff, I like to lean into that style.

A problem I often run into there though, is that while the dragons in the comic are very expressive, members of the same tribe are sometimes difficult to tell apart, especially in close-ups. Reading the second one in particular is a bit of an undertaking, with a lot of Seawings that look very similar.

So to help myself out with that, I've started doing a style guide for my own reference that attempts to diversify the designs a bit while hopefully still keeping the basic principles introduced in the comics. Just a collection of my own headcanons really.

I wasn't really intending to publish any of this, but then I showed some of my friends and they said "This is cool", so... I suppose here we are. I've done about 20 of these by now, but I'm going to have to polish them a bit first so I don't just throw my dirty sketches at people.

Okay, that's probably enough talking, let's show something for it.

Flawseer Headcanon Refs

Build is somewhat heavy-set/chubby; hates exercise and tends to get second helpings during meals.

Facial structure very soft, round, and smooth; big nose; upper lip ends in a slight point like a little beak.

Eyes are bright, warm, and friendly.

Forehead fins are round with no sharp angles, average distribution of gaps.

Horns are smooth and curved backwards, with a small upwards barb at the end.

Luminous patches in face are polygonal, orderly. Ventral patches are roughly square and relatively large. Patches on limbs, back, and tail are polygonal and tend to cluster together and interlock, like pattern on a turtle shell.

Neck plates angular, slightly reminiscent of turtle shell.

Very petite and underdeveloped frame; scrawny, light-weight build with barely any fat or defined muscle.

Small head; youthful face; somehow nose is always wet.

Eyes are large; expression usually either guilty-looking or close to bursting into tears.

Horns are nubby and curve upwards, dull ends.

No defined chin barbels whatsoever, but a few nubby points growing out the back of the jaw.

Luminous patches on face, limbs, and back are thick, swirly spirals with splotches dotted around, or small clusters of 2 to 3 splotches by themselves; ventral patches are ring-shaped and look similar to suction cups, tail thus looks like a squid's tentacle.

Ventral fringe is very small and wispy, dorsal fringe made up of small leaf-like shapes that are oddly spaced out.

Build is somewhat runty and small; lean with wiry muscle; overall reminiscent of a draconic chihuahua and about as noisy.

Pointy face with sloped forehead; furrows on nasal ridge from excessive scowling; jaw juts forward with a bit of an underbite.

Eyes somewhat angular but still open; expression serious and dutiful.

Forehead fins angular; frayed with lots of gaps and blemishes.

Horns are bendy and pointed; smooth but covered in numerous small scrapes and blemishes.

Chin barbels are pointy and sharp-looking, but soft to the touch.

Face and body show a few small nicks and scars everywhere; little cut across the side of the mouth; ears are nicked and frayed. All of these accumulated from training accidents and reckless behavior.

Luminous patches on face and ventral side are small, flecky, like shards of broken glass; patches on limbs and back are large and pointy, shaped like spades or arrowheads.

Ventral and dorsal fringe pointy with small nicks and tears.

And that is it for now. Next batch is probably going to be... I don't know. Webs, Nautilus, and Riptide maybe.

[dreamerwriternstargazer]

It Ends With Us… Or Does It?

In the wake of Blake Lively’s stoic fight against Justin Baldoni for his alleged sexual harassment and aggressive PR campaign to ruin her image and reputation, it’s perhaps important that we all take a step back and consider the new era of MeToo and its decomposition in the digital age.

In case you, reader, are one of the few sensible minds closed off from the noise and chaos of popular social medias such as X, Instagram and Tiktok, you may not be aware of the recent “drama” between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni regarding their summer film release, It Ends With Us. The film in question had a large spotlight on it due to the fact it was an adaptation of the popular Colleen Hoover novel by the same name, in which the protagonist Lily Bloom goes through and survives an abusive marriage to love interest Ryle Kinkaid, roles played by Lively and Baldoni, respectively. To put the drama in layman’s terms, the two were feuding; it was reported by the Daily Mail (1) that Baldoni was unfollowed by Blake Lively and Colleen Hoover and that the rest of the cast appeared to be avoiding Baldoni at the US premiere as well as mention of him in press interviews. This was quickly brushed under the rug however as Blake Lively’s behaviour on the press tour took centre stage - in contrast to Baldoni who chose to highlight and discuss the abuse narrative of the film in interviews (2), Lively appeared more lighthearted in front of the cameras, focusing on emphasising the floral, feminine aesthetics through her glamorous outfits on the tour and promoting her drinks company Betty Buzz, as well as launching a haircare line Blake Brown and promoting it alongside the film (3). Such behaviour is hardly unusual for movie press nowadays and it seemed to be following the precedent that Margot Robbie had set in promoting Barbie by highlighting its feminine themes and aesthetics, however it escalated quickly with fans of the film and book commenting and putting pressure on her to talk about the darker themes of the story. Lively’s responses to questions on domestic violence ranged from polite yet ignorant (such as in interviews where she chose to talk about her love for Lily and how empowering of a character she was to play rather than domestic violence) (4) to outright insensitive by joking sarcastically about sharing her address and phone number in response to a question about how fans who cared about the abuse themes could begin a conversation with her about it (5). As a result, she has been vilified heavily on social media ever since, with many taking the opportunity to criticise her brands, mock her through comedic skits on Tiktok, and even digging up old interviews in which she acted coldly and rudely towards the interviewer (6). The tide seemed to have turned incredibly strongly on Lively, typically accustomed to popularity due to her highly publicised relationship with husband Ryan Reynolds, now suffering a riptide of nastiness as the new mean girl of pop culture, drowning her in a sea of cruel comments and hate characteristic of our online cancel culture.

And then, come Saturday 21st December 2024, a new narrative was broadcasted across our screens; Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer were the bad guys, as laid out in the 80 page legal complaint from Blake Lively published by the New York Times (7), allegedly responsible for a slew of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour towards Lively and further members of the cast and crew, as well as hiring a PR team specifically to manufacture the social media campaign against Lively. The claims listed are a nightmare to read, from sexual, objectifying comments directed towards the female cast during filming (p.17-18), to Baldoni and Wayfarer’s CEO Jamey Heath directly intruding on Lively when nude or exposed in her trailer and refusing to grant her privacy (p.19). Further disturbing claims made were on how “Mr Baldoni ignored well-established industry protocols in filming intimate scenes, and exploited the lack of controls on set to behave inappropriately” (p.13). This claim goes on to illustrate how Baldoni was allegedly making inappropriate, sexual comments towards cast after shooting intimate scenes (p.16) as well as not hiring intimacy coordinators, improvising on said scenes and pressuring actors to make either more or make them more sexual with little to no notice, and failing to hire “nudity riders” who could “[spell] out the parameters of nudity or simulated sex scenes” (p.13). Consequently, Blake Lively made moves to set boundaries through a meeting with Baldoni and Heath on January 4th 2024 accompanied by her husband Ryan Reynolds, and all parties allegedly agreed to the terms presented by Lively, allowing the film to still be made (p.2). 

Yet, apparently this was not enough of a resolution for Baldoni and co, as displayed by the fierce and aggressive plans of attack from the PR company TAG (The Agency Group PR LLC) “to engage in “social media mitigation and proactive fan posting to counter the negative” as well as “social manipulation”” (p.5) an illegal style of PR called astroturfing*, of which consequences on Lively became the foundation for the complaint now publicised. The fight now made transparently clear to us is her challenge against Baldoni and co for the social destruction wrought on her, and with this publicity she has garnered support from official figures, fellow actors and actresses and fans in just a few short days. 

A win then, for #MeToo?

I don’t think it’s that simple.

What is truly concerning to me about this latest Hollywood scandal is not the extent of the sexual harassment Lively and others allegedly suffered, but the complex and aggressive cover up launched by TAG, a cover up that quite frankly…. Was watertight. It’s been noted online by Lively’s supporters how TAG’s involvement should have been a red flag signal to us, as they are most notably associated with Johnny Depp and the alleged online smear campaign against Amber Heard during the 2022 Depp vs Heard trial (8), however that case had a very complicated coverage with most average viewers not aware of the intricacies of the trial, let alone in possession of hindsight towards the coverage itself. As someone who could have been termed “chronically online” during the trial, I myself was completely ignorant to the nuances of the case and certainly the PR tactics used by both sides, and at the time sided against Heard due to the oversaturation of voices against her. Even now, I find it difficult in looking up anything regarding the case to find clear information removed from fanaticism for Johnny or hate against Heard, so then how can the involvement of this same PR company ring the alarm bells for me? 

This may seem like a minor complaint, one that you, dear reader, could find fault in me with, for not educating myself properly, but that is my exact point. We live in a supposed “age of information”, the digital age with knowledge at our fingertips… and yet a woman’s reputation was so easily and thoroughly torn to shreds, an extremely popular woman at that, often the apple of social media’s eyes due to her aspirational relationship with Ryan Reynolds and friendship with Taylor Swift, pop idol of millions. And how was she torn to shreds? Through our supposedly superior digital media. Through the information we all receive daily. Through every source available, fake online users overwhelming posts and forums with negative comments and “start[ing] threads of theories” (p.5) about her, third party contractors “who weaponized a digital army around the country from New York to Los Angeles to create, seed, and promote content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums” (essentially influencers who were directly involved in promoting anti-Lively content) (p.9), and tabloid and broadsheet articles fed and corrupted by half truths from TAG. What is terrifying is that this woman’s reputation and her case against the powers that be, her stand against sexual harassment and her #MeToo moment was almost and could still be lost to the void because of the reality of our media today, where all sources of information rather than just unofficial ones are dubious and questionable and are used to their fullest to obscure anything resembling truth. Already Baldoni’s legal team has been quick to defend him by publishing an official statement in the New York Times against Lively’s complaint, claiming that her accusations are “false” and “another desperate attempt to ‘fix’ her negative reputation which was garnered from her own remarks and actions during the campaign for the film” from which the “internet generate[d] their own views and opinions” (9). It may not withstand the support Lively has already amassed, and the thorough, detailed publication of the events on set, but what is concerning is that the seeds of a counternarrative are already being sown. A counternarrative that has and will likely continue to be used to vilify victims of sexual assault, and scare them away from speaking up, making an example of someone as powerful and popular as Lively in a manner that makes me fear for the rest of us. It appears that the sword of misinformation and what I can only call propaganda is no longer exclusively wielded by the kings of industry and government. 

Something that strikes me as so insidiously wrong in all the triumph from the supporters of victims of online campaigns, is this unwillingness to admit the potential for mistakes in information, in people’s conclusions or characters. Instead, there’s this mass celebration of having been in the right camp in the first place, of having said the right things and supported the right person, without making a single misstep. 

Ironically, this righteousness characterises the case, as Baldoni’s stated intent behind the alleged sexual harassment and inappropriate comments towards Lively and others was in the pursuit of “making the Film “through the female gaze””, as well as to reflect Baldoni’s more progressive political views around sexuality and consent and his personal growth. The motivation behind the PR campaign against Lively too was highly centred around Baldoni’s desire to retain his image as a feminist ally, to remain righteous and so weaponised politically correct language and “survivor content” to draw audiences’ attention. It’s even mentioned in the complaint document that Baldoni proposed an “offensive move showing [ his] neuro divergence and some of the attributes that come with it," to explain that “anything that [ he had] been ‘accused of’ [was] social awkwardness and impulsive speech....", a move that appears to be consistent with recent interviews he’s had discussing his ADHD (10). Baldoni notably has been co opting politically correct language or topics in pursuit of concealment of his alleged wrongs, working to uplift his reputation as someone who talks the feminist talk, while apparently failing to walk the feminist walk. 

It’s interesting then, to view this same adherence to faultless views and language to be reflected in the loud majority of Baldoni’s critics that I’ve observed. Such people appear to affirm their righteous status as having “always known something was off” and everyone needs to “believe women”, but appear to have failed to support Lively actionably, evidence their views, or beyond that, dissect the case and the powers that made it possible. Rather than an acknowledgement of any of the issues that forced a woman into a corner; that we are beginning to have a very serious problem in finding the truth; that more people than ever are choosing short form content and information over long form; and that a reactive, blameworthy culture has festered online, there’s instead a slew of self satisfied sycophants congratulating themselves because their political purity is unblemished.

The fact of the matter is, no matter how many of you are posting “I stand with Blake Lively” and talking about how you always believed her because “ugh it just seemed like another hating women cancel culture issue”, there is no merit to your virtue in weathering a storm of misinformation, despite what you may think, because its nature as misinformation and social manipulation was completely and utterly obscured in the first place. Blake Lively really did fail to talk about domestic abuse on her press tour, she really did avoid all questions on it or handle questions in a tactless manner. Baldoni did talk about the film’s series themes as he was applauded for. All it means then, is that you ignored the available information in favour of suspicions and personal preferences, and that in this particular instance you happened to support and condemn the correct parties… What will happen then, the day your gut is wrong? 

So let me say something radical - I fell victim to the propaganda. Not significantly, not in any way that mattered, but my perception of Blake Lively was changed, I believed that she was the “mean girl” as she was painted by the media, my opinion of both her and her husband changed because “ah seems like they really are some rich entitled folks”, when hearing about his supposed involvement with scripts that he technically from what I could judge, had no right to be involving himself in. I didn’t care enough to comment on it, to hate at all, but I am guilty of believing all of it. 

Why? It was the only information out there. 

What was exempt was the story behind the scenes, the fact that Lively had fought a battle against alleged sexual harassment and reprehensible working conditions. The fact that her husband’s involvement was due to the alleged transgressions in the workplace. The fact that she was under contract to promote the movie as “a story of hope” (p.26) and to highlight the feminine themes and aesthetics. The fact that she was doing her job to avoid talking seriously about abuse because PR is still an act and obligation, and was doing her job to promote her brand which was preplanned by her and the companies involved. And the fact that Baldoni’s more impressive, serious interviews were a way to uplift his image in anticipation of the exposure of his alleged crimes. 

It was not my fault for not being aware of the stage outside of the spotlight. 

It is the fault of every internet user who perpetrated the wave of hatred and cancel culture, who fanned the flames of the witch burning of another woman, for participating in a culture of cruelty and condemnation. It is their fault for going to extremes and using snapshots of publicity through years of media to define their perception of a person, and using it to bully, mock and attempt to sabotage a woman’s career, ironically becoming the villains of the same story they demanded some profound commentary on. Not only becoming the villains, quite literally becoming complicit in the real life scenario of sexual harassment and abuse that their precious film was oh so important for. Trading a story’s importance for a real person’s life. 

What is our fault is allowing and normalising this online behaviour. 

On page 9 of the complaint document are screenshots of messages between Baldoni’s publicist Jennifer Abel and TAG crisis communications specialist Melissa Nathan, the woman responsible for running the alleged PR campaign against Blake Lively. Nathan states “[ t] he majority of socials are so pro Justin and I don't even agree with half of them [sic] lol." (p.9).

It remains evident to me that the only reason this campaign was as powerful as it was was due to the audience unwilling to take it with a grain of salt, as the phrase goes, and who then went on to unwittingly become the biggest agents of it. 

How then, is it a victory that people who ignored all information and blindly combatted it, or perhaps silently supported Lively but did nothing to substantiate it, were on the right side all along? How is that considered a victory when we now know the very successful machinations of social media manipulation, and the vicious extent they were taken to, to discredit and hurt someone? 

You could be on the right person’s side every day of your life. What good does it mean if there is every avenue for misinformation, manipulation and abuse? 

What good is there if you can’t help others stay on track with the truth? 

What good is it if the good people you support end up suffering regardless, because of our culture’s habitual negligence of respectful, measured behaviour online, and lack of critical thinking.

Ultimately, it was not our fault for being fooled. 

It remains, however, our responsibility to take a step back, re-evaluate our conduct, and search for the truth, to have minds open enough and humble enough to be able to change them. To accept the magnitude of information out there and the flux of “truth” presented in the media, and to rein in our intense impulse to react cruelly in the face of human error, in ourselves or those on the plethora of screens we’re surrounded by. 

Without that understanding, any social movement, #MeToo or otherwise, will lose their efficacy and strength as they have started to in the past years, lose credibility in favour of reactionary social media usage, and the victims of abuse, sexual assault, discrimination or any other kind of injustice will once again be suffering. Pyres of the stakes we built to keep ourselves cosy, warm, and ignorant of the cold, grey, digital world around us.

*Astroturfing - the deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign in the guise of unsolicited comments from members of the public.

Sources (I’ve ensured to include links to an accessible archive version of the NYTimes articles):

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-13727789/it-ends-blake-lively-justin-baldoni-feud.html

https://www.today.com/popculture/movies/justin-baldoni-it-ends-with-us-interview-rcna165792

https://www.buzzfeed.com/natashajokic1/it-ends-with-us-blake-lively-justin-baldoni

https://www.tiktok.com/@cbsmornings/video/7400806313539718442

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/blake-lively-cruel-response-ends-154520069.html?guccounter=1

https://youtu.be/F2-2RBi1qzY?si=hViBatehgTMOvxVA

https://web.archive.org/web/20241221211059/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/21/us/complaint-of-blake-lively-v-wayfarer-studios-llc-et-al.html

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/justin-baldoni-hires-pr-crisis-manager-melissa-nathan-it-ends-with-us-1235973715/

https://web.archive.org/web/20241221160802/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/21/us/statement-to-the-new-york-times.html

 https://people.com/justin-baldoni-reveals-he-was-diagnosed-with-adhd-at-40-8756535

[justforbooks]

How Deborah Levy can change your life

From her shimmering novels to her ‘living autobiographies’, Deborah Levy’s work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve

Last August, the author Deborah Levy began to sit for her portrait. The starting point was a selfie – eyes penetrating, lips sensuous, head topped by a tower of chestnut hair. The artist, her friend Paul Heber-Percy, used Photoshop, then a pencil and tracing paper, to reverse and multiply the image of her face, until he had a drawing, neatly laid out on a grid, that satisfied him.

Then it was time to paint. He liked to work in the mornings, in hour-long bursts, in his tiny attic studio. When Levy came for sittings, he’d bring the painting down to the dining room, and the two of them would drink tea or wine, and talk. Not that these were sittings in the traditional sense, but “times I could observe her without feeling self-conscious”, he said.

Sometimes they’d discuss Levy’s new novel, August Blue, which she was finishing; but mostly it was “everyday things – friends, the news, exchanging recipes, how to unblock a sink”, said Levy. But, Heber-Percy said, nothing about these conversations was really everyday. She is the sort of person who makes the mundane remarkable. Even “going down to the bakery with her to get a baguette becomes a slightly magical thing”, says her friend the novelist Tash Aw. When her friends talk about her, they say things like this: “she is an event”, “she is a personage”, “she is a whole world”. People often remember the first time they met her. For Kate Bland, an audio producer, it was at a party at a Shoreditch warehouse. Levy was sitting on a high windowsill; Bland was leaning on it. The author’s rich, slightly breathy voice was coming over Bland’s shoulder. Talk unwound in a sequence of dazzling vignettes. “It seemed that there was a necessary theatricality: we had to hoist ourselves out of the ordinariness of chat and have a conversation that was going to be memorable,” she recalled. “I was quite thrilled by it.”

At the time of that party, in 2008, Levy was 49. Her life had contained one immense dislocation: when she was nine, her family emigrated from South Africa to the UK, after her father had spent three years as a political prisoner. After school at a London comprehensive, Levy took a theatre degree at the pioneering, avant-garde Dartington College of the Arts in Devon, and first forged a path as a playwright. Her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, was published in 1989, the year she turned 30. Twenty years on, at the time of the Shoreditch party, she wasn’t famous, and hadn’t sold more than a modest number of books, though she carried herself as if she had. She was teaching, adapting Colette and Carol Shields for the radio, raising two daughters, and living with her husband, playwright David Gale, in a semi-detached house off Holloway Road in north London. She was working on a novel, her first since 1996. Her previous books were out of print.

Four years later, Levy’s life was transformed. Her novel, Swimming Home – a sun-drenched story about a family holiday on the French Riviera, beneath whose glinting surface runs a Freudian riptide of wartime trauma – was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker prize. That sent sales flying. At the same time, her marriage fell apart. “By the time I went to the Booker dinner in December I knew I would be moving house and I was packing up,” she recalled. “It was very turbulent and very painful.”

The following year, she published Things I Don’t Want to Know, the first in a trilogy of what she calls “living autobiographies”, to convey their selective, fictive nature. Over the next few years, she alternated two more novels, Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, with two more volumes of living autobiography, which spoke of how, after her marriage ended, she recomposed a life for herself and her daughters in her 50s, outside the old patriarchal structures. All of these books, flew out of her “like a cork coming out of a bottle”.

Levy’s novels are popular and critically acclaimed. But it is with the living autobiographies that her reputation has transcended the literary. At events, readers tell Levy that her books make them feel less lonely, or ask her what to do about a life crisis. (One can’t quite imagine readers doing this with, say, Rachel Cusk, who also anatomises female experience, but in a somewhat chillier style.) At one of Levy’s online readings during the Covid pandemic, an audience member posted in the chat: “I’m 41 with two kids and sometimes I don’t feel I’m at home at all … Did it work for you, coming out of an unhappy marriage?” Levy answered: “It did work for me. You have to make another sort of life and gather your friends and supporters to your table” – which is pretty much the story of the second and third of her living autobiographies, The Cost of Living and Real Estate.

Levy’s writing has a very particular quality: it seems to infiltrate the mind. You absorb her way of seeing and start to perceive the world in Levy-ish ways. In her stories, seemingly trivial moments take on political force: an encounter with a hairdresser in The Cost of Living becomes a story about the camaraderie of women and what they reveal to each other; a scene about sharing a table on the Eurostar becomes about how men, literally and figuratively, fail to make space for younger women. In the new novel, August Blue, the narrator, having been insulted by a young man in a cafe, tells us, “I think he was expecting me to respond, to reply in some way, but I didn’t care about him or his problems.” I’ve used that in my own life more than once, since first reading it. The books become “almost a guide to life”, said Gaby Wood, director of the Booker Foundation. “She trains you to become your best self.”

Part of the appeal of Levy’s writing is that it is shot through with unpatronising sympathy towards younger women – both the hesitant, tough young female characters who populate her novels, and those who appear in her living autobiographies, often negotiating sticky situations with older, entitled men. In Real Estate, there is a passage in which she describes her joy in cooking for her daughters’ friends: “I liked their appetite – yes, for the dish prepared, but for life itself. I wanted them to find strength for all they had to do in the world and for all the world would throw at them.” She is not just talking about her daughters’ friends. Levy is also in the business of feeding and strengthening her readers. And they feel it.

The plays and the novels Levy wrote in her 20s and 30s are collage-like, gravelly, spiky, and dense, marinated in the eastern European avant-garde influences she absorbed at college. She had a talent for epigrammatic, slightly surreal sentences. “I once heard a man howl just like a wolf except he was standing in a phone box in Streatham,” says a character in her first novel. But the work had not yet acquired the razored-away, spare quality that has given the later work such airiness, such ripple and flow, nor was there the emotional force with which readers identify so strongly.

It was in the late 2000s that she forged the style that transformed her reputation. She was working at the Royal College of Art at the time. Two days a week, she’d take the tube from the fumes of Holloway Road to green South Kensington. She was a tutor in the animation department, helping students learn to write and construct narrative. “It was a potent time,” she said. Her colleagues at the Royal College of Art were inspiring; so were her students. At nights, while her young daughters slept, she was writing Swimming Home. “I was somehow living closer to my own emotions and understood that I might be able to put them to work in my book.” She had always felt that emotion was frowned upon by her avant-garde art “family”, but “from Swimming Home onwards, I decided to totally up-end that”. Charging the story with feeling changed her writing – and her relationship with readers. “I knew I was on to something, and it rocked me,” she recalled. “There were times when I’d stop writing and I’d come down to cook my daughters spaghetti in the evening. There was a sort of cool place under the steps, and I was so on fire, I would just stand there and cool down.”

What Levy found in her writing was a way of giving her story a shimmering, attractive surface, while allowing her preoccupations with literary theory, myth and psychoanalysis to occupy its murkier depths. The novel can be taken as “a kind of holiday novel gone wrong”, she said – and it has been slipped into many a suitcase as a beach or poolside read. “I’m happy if the surface is read. Because everything else is there to be found. And I’m working hard for my readers to find it. But I don’t look down on readers who don’t. I think, ‘Something will come through.’” The “something” might include the Freudian desire and death-wish that suffuses the novel; its peculiar linked imagery of sugar mice and rats; above all the immense treacherous undertow of history – of the Holocaust, of 20th-century suffering and wars – that Levy sketches into the story with almost imperceptible strokes.

But Swimming Home was rejected by every major publisher it was sent to. Levy, in all her certainty that it was good, was devastated. The years following the financial crisis of 2008 were inhospitable to a midlist novelist who hadn’t been in print for a while. The publishing industry was in trouble; the powerful new wave of feminism of the 2010s was a whisper rather than a roar; and the kind of spare, experimental books by women that would come to define recent literary trends, such as Cusk’s auto-fictional Outline trilogy, or Annie Ernaux’s intimate unfurling of memory, or Elena Ferrante’s revelatory novels on female friendship, had yet to appear in Britain. At the time, she said, “your book was either going to sell or it wasn’t going to sell, and when they said it was ‘too literary’, they meant it wasn’t going to sell”.

Then, in summer 2009, something changed. A friend of Levy’s, the late Jules Wright, who ran an arts centre in east London, read the manuscript. She was organising a show on photographer Dean Rogers, who documented the sites of car crashes that had killed cultural heroes – the spot, for example, where Marc Bolan died. Swimming Home begins with a scene in which Kitty Finch, a young woman with a death wish, perilously drives an older poet, with whom she believes she has a telepathic connection, along a winding mountain road. Wright decided to have the first two pages of the book printed large and installed at the beginning of the exhibition. Not long after the opening, though, she called Levy and bluntly announced she was removing them. It was a disaster, she said – people were clogging the entrance as they stopped to read the text. “It was,” Levy said, “the first spark: that those two pages of this much-declined book were gathering a crowd around them.”

Eventually the novel did find its publisher, a tiny new press called And Other Stories. The literary translator Sophie Lewis was editor there. Levy’s pitch, remarkably given all the rejections, was supremely confident. “Deborah said: ‘This is the tightest book I’ve ever written, and it’s going to be a bestseller,’” Lewis remembered.

In autumn 2011, Levy’s friend Charlotte Schepke, who runs Large Glass gallery in London, hosted the launch party. They decided to project The Swimmer, the 1968 Burt Lancaster film, on to the wall. On the night, to Schepke’s immense surprise, “you couldn’t stand – the place was absolutely packed. It was rammed.” Her interesting new friend, who had written witty labels for the opening show at her small gallery earlier that year, was suddenly making waves. It was almost, said Schepke, “as if she’d done this grand thing of claiming to be an author – and then, suddenly, she really was an author”.

In her living autobiographies, Levy frequently refers to her rented shed, a writing space in a friend’s garden, on whose roof the apples used to fall in autumn with a dull thunk. These days, as she moves deeper into her 60s, the shed has been replaced by an attic in Paris, a few blocks behind the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, near the Seine. On a limpid blue February day, she had pinned a branch of yellow mimosa to her front door. Its flowering marked, she said, the “end of gloomy, rat-grey January”.

The studio was as near to the platonic ideal of a Paris garret as you could imagine: reached by a winding stair through a courtyard, and with low ceilings and wooden beams. Kilim rugs were scattered on the floor, and her bed was covered in a fluffy sheepskin throw. There was a stash of red wine in the fireplace. Everything about the studio radiated her delight in objects and food and pleasure. If you met the author and saw the studio before you read the work, you might expect something more excessive and elaborate than the stripped-down, translucent prose she produces.

She poured coffee from a moka pot and passed me a dish heaped with croissants from her local boulangerie, La Maison D’Isabelle; pastries from the same shop turn up in the new novel. Objects from her real world often slip into her fiction. There was a biography of Isadora Duncan face-out on a shelf, perhaps the same book about the dancer she has her character Elsa read in August Blue. On a table stood a bowl of pearl necklaces, and at her throat were pearls – like the pearl necklace she has her beautiful, careless character Saul wear in her novel, The Man Who Saw Everything.

Things in her stories often hold the kind of powerful significance that Freud attaches to artefacts in dreams – such as the pool in Swimming Home, which, at its most basic, Levy pointed out, is a rectangular hole in the ground, and thus also metaphorically a grave. She loves the surrealists. The turning point of Hot Milk is the moment when her narrator, Sofia, discovers boldness through making bloody handprints on the kitchen wall of a man who has been tormenting his dog – a scene borrowed from a story told about the artist Leonora Carrington who, letting herself into the apartment of her prospective lover Luis Buñuel, smeared menstrual blood over his pristine white walls.

Motifs slip between books, too; in this she has something in common with a visual artist building a subtly interconnected body of work. The title August Blue, for example, is taken from the colour of the thread that, in Hot Milk, one character Ingrid uses to embroider Sofia’s name into a shirt. Horses, in particular, gallop through Levy’s work – from the tiny horse-shaped buttons that, in Real Estate, she kept from her late stepmother’s button box, to the moment Ingrid appears in the desert landscape on horseback, like a bellicose goddess, in the myth-infused Hot Milk. The whole of August Blue hangs on striking images of horses: it begins with her character, the pianist Elsa, watching jealously as a woman she thinks might be her doppelganger buys a pair of mechanical dancing horses in an Athens flea market.

Levy laughed when I asked her about her equine enthusiasms. “That’s a case for Dr Freud!” she said. She ponders, in Real Estate, what it is to be a woman “on your high horse”. Sometimes, she writes, you might find yourself incapable of controlling your high horse; at other times, people are all too eager to to pull you off it. She imagines a friend riding her high horse “down the North Circular to repair her smashed screen at Mr Cellfone”. When I think of Levy’s horses, I also think of her adoration of her small fleet of e-bikes, now famous from her living autobiographies, which she stables by her London flat and lends to friends when they visit; she bought her first when she moved out of her marriage and into her new life. When they start up with a little equine surge of power, she told me, “it’s hard not to whoop every time”.

When Levy was a small child in South Africa, and her father, Norman Levy, was imprisoned for his anti-apartheid activism, she started to speak so quietly that her voice became barely audible. What saved her from this state of virtual silence was her imagination: the dawning understanding that she could write other realities. “It was a question,” Levy told me, “of finding avatars.” The avatar she created for her nine-year-old self was a cat with wondrous powers of flight – perhaps unconsciously imagining freedom for her father, as well as liberation for herself. (In Real Estate, The Flying Cat is the name she gives to the ferry that brings her daughters to her for a holiday on a Greek island.) The characters in her fiction are still her avatars. “I’m in every one of them,” she said, “including the cats and including the horses.”

For a long time, in adulthood, she resisted writing or even talking about South Africa. The difficulties of her family felt irrelevant, when set against the struggles of black South Africans. But since she had decided to base the structure of Things I Don’t Want to Know on George Orwell’s headings in his essay Why I Write – one of which is “historical impulse” – she found herself obliged to tackle those repressed memories. Using a child’s eye view, she said, “I tried to convey, without using the old language of ‘the bloodstained regime of apartheid’, what it’s like to be told that you’re supposed to respect adults, while there are white adults who are clearly doing very cruel things to children of colour my age.”

Her mother, Philippa, through her husband’s imprisonment, coped alone, earning a living through a succession of secretarial jobs. Levy remembers her as capable and glamorous. “I loved the way she cooked, with her cigarette holder, and the way that she’d dance a bit to the record she’d put on when she came back from work.”

When Levy’s father was released in 1968, he was banned from working, and the family – Levy has an elder half-brother from her mother’s first marriage, as well as a younger brother and sister – had little option but to emigrate. Her father found work lecturing at Middlesex University, among other places. Money was tight. Her parents’ marriage ended in 1974.

After the “blue sky, and the bone-white grass of the garden” in Johannesburg, arriving in London felt “as if someone had pulled the plug out”. But despite England’s greyness, she loved it. She made, for the first time, proper friends. “I don’t have that narrative of exile, of wanting to return to the place that you left”. She adored the way people spoke, and she still delights in English turns of phrase: “Hello pet, hello lamb, hello duck.” As for her accent, “I had to lose it very quickly in the playground not to be beaten up.”

She often plucks her characters out of their familiar environments, partly in order to see their psychological foibles magnified on foreign shores. (She herself likes very much to be in a hot country, in southern Spain or a Greek island, swimming in the sea.) Sometimes these characters, like her, have been swept on the tides of 20th-century history – like the English poet Joe in Swimming Home, who is really Jozef, smuggled out of Łódź in 1943; or Lapinski in Beautiful Mutants, whose mother was “the ice-skating champion of Moscow”. Levy recalled of an interview in the news that moved her recently: it was with a Ukrainian woman from Kherson who had been lying in bed, thinking, when she was blown into her kitchen by a Russian shell. “Those were her words: ‘I was lying in bed, thinking,’” said Levy. “I do not take a place of calm, a place that is agreeable to think in, for granted.” Levy’s senses are finely tuned to the fragility of things.

After her A-levels, in the summer of 1978, she would walk past the Gate cinema in Notting Hill, timidly noting the thrilling, eccentrically dressed people who hung out there. One day, she saw an ad in the Evening Standard for front-of-house staff. For the interview, she put on a pair of big, gold platform wedges; as she left the house, her mother yelled, “‘You’ll never get a job dressed like that.’” Those gold wedges are the ancestors of the shoes that have carried her female characters on to victory, or else to triumphant defeat: the silver gladiator sandals that Ingrid, like the goddess Athena, straps high up her calves in Hot Milk; the sage-green Parisian tap shoes that get her into a scrape in Real Estate; the brothel creepers that, to her younger self, “marked me out for a meaningful life”; and the “scuffed brown leather shoes with high snakeskin heels” that we meet on page three of August Blue.

She got the job at the Gate. Her new colleagues were “either at drama school or off to university, and all way cooler than me. I was a nerdy writer” – of poetry, at the time – “with a great love of Bowie.” The cinema was screening Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, “and he would come in, and he was curious and charismatic and friendly and cultured and he didn’t feel above talking to this 18-year-old making the popcorn, tearing the tickets and scooping the ice cream”. It was Jarman who told her she should apply not to university but to Dartington, where she’d learn about improvisation and dance and avant-garde theatre and art.

It was at this time, not having the kind of parents who dragged her round galleries at weekends, that she encountered contemporary art for the first time. It was an exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys. She remembers, a grand piano muffled and covered with cloth marked with a cross; other objects made of gold leaf; dried plants tacked to the wall; things scribbled in pencil. “I remember almost not being able to breathe. And there was this voice inside my head, saying, ‘This is it. This is it.’ And I had no idea what it was.”

The Cost of Living opens with the narrator witnessing an encounter between a young woman and an older man in a bar in Colombia. The man, whom Levy calls “the Big Silver”, invites the young woman to his table. After she tells him a strange story about a perilous diving expedition, he remarks that she talks a lot, and carelessly knocks her book off the table. Levy writes: “It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character.” It is a very Levy-ish story, in its wry observation of dynamics between men and women, and with its implicit call to arms to women who have, as the critic Dwight Garner has put it, “come to sense they’re not locked into their lives and stories”.

Levy herself is without doubt a major character – and is intent on expanding the role. She has an immense appetite “for experiencing the strange dimensions of living and the absolutely practical dimensions”, she said. We were sitting, at the time, outside a cafe near the Panthéon in Paris after a good lunch, and Levy was smoking a roll-up. “I’m not endlessly open to experience. I am easily bored and impatient. I want to keep things moving, keep thought moving. I want to make something new of the old story. How do you make the novel as complicated as life, as interesting as life? That’s what I want to do.”

She has many plans. She wants to adapt her two most recent novels for the screen. (Swimming Home and Hot Milk are in other scriptwriters’ hands.) She knows exactly, how the opening scene of August Blue will go, and she has the perfect idea of how to tackle the temporal complexities of The Man Who Saw Everything, which slips, through its main character’s fractured consciousness, between the Berlin of 1988 and the London of 2016. In The Cost of Living, Levy fantasises about living in California and writing scripts by her pool. When I teased her lightly about the unlikelihood of this, she said, “You never know. I just might be there in my swimming costume at 80, writing films. I’d have a river now – with a little rowing boat tied to the jetty, and I’d smoke, drink coffee and write my scripts, I think probably in France.”

In the meantime, now that her daughters are in their 20s, she comes from her London flat to work in her Paris studio for weeks at a time. She is taking French lessons, though presently her literary enthusiasms outstrip her linguistic ability. “I say, ‘Shall we translate this poem of Apollinaire together?’ and my teacher says, ‘I think today, Deborah, we will try to master être and avoir.’” Her most natural creative affinities are in fact French – Godard, Duras – rather than British. To her evident delight, Levy has won one of France’s most important literary awards, the Prix Femina Étranger. She has not yet won a major prize in Britain, despite multiple short listings, perhaps because British prizes tend to favour large, self-sufficient, discrete slabs of fiction.

She begins her days early, with a walk by the Seine. After work there might be an exhibition, or dinner – which she might depart, more than one friend told me, with sudden decision, announcing that she is back off to work. She looked abashed when I mentioned this habit, worried she might appear rude to her friends. “I’m immensely sociable and then I really need to be on my own. I do like to write after a dinner party,” she said. (She herself loves to cook – “delicious mountains of cream and garlic, and the kitchen is like a bomb site,” Charlotte Schepke said, “but it’s like being in the finest restaurant. Her presence makes it an occasion”.)

At the moment, in a sharp change of gear, she is researching a biography of the young Gertrude Stein, to be titled Mama of Dada. She is concentrating on the writer’s early training under psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry. Levy wants to think about how this academically brilliant American – who’d be late for her medical lectures because her bustled skirts were weighted down by horsehair-stuffed hems – moved to Paris, ditched the corset and became the pioneering modernist who dressed in monk-like robes and filled her house with Picassos.

It’s a characteristic way for Levy to build character. But while the books are rooted in the physical, they also make room for the uncanny and the unexplained, for the sudden intrusion into a person’s consciousness of unwelcome memories or dark imaginings. “It would be very sad to have all the possibilities of the novel, this hot-air balloon, but to say, ‘I only write social realism and the hot-air balloon must never leave the ground,’” she said. “That’s not how people’s minds work: people have very strange dreams, and thoughts, and daydreams, and associations.” She is, she said, very careful not to let her hot-air balloon float away into the clouds of fantasmagoria. It is all in the balance and control.

What also earths Levy’s work is her wit. “She is so amused, diverted and delighted by life,” said the actor Tilda Swinton, who is a fan. Her jokes, often wryly commenting on her own failings, make for a kind of intimacy, even complicity – “the kind of complicity that many of us can only relate to the dry land of childhood companionship”, said Swinton. Levy’s women, especially the “I” of the living autobiographies, fail as well as succeed; they have good days and bad. They are neither “feisty” and “gutsy” – those tiresome cliches – nor are they self-saboteurs, who put themselves down to ingratiate themselves with the reader. They are both real and offer an example of how to live well. When Levy was finding a way to write her living autobiographies, she searched for a voice that “was immensely powerful, immensely vulnerable; immensely eloquent and totally inarticulate. Because that’s all of us.”

In March, I went back to Paul Heber-Percy’s house to see her portrait finished. It renders Levy’s face in triplicate, as if seen through a kaleidoscope, and her hair, piled on her head, soars upwards like Medusa’s snaky locks, dissolving into abstract, Rorschach-like patterns and repetitions. It gave the impression of a presence with many selves, in constant movement of thought. In the portrait, Levy has five large, wide-open, scrutinising eyes; but one of her tripled faces disappears into the world outside the frame, and the sixth eye is unseen.

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