#Spirit keeper would be GREAT; but that one exists in my head as a comic + series of animations so it's harder to translate into another for

[subway-boss-jericho]

I don't think I'll ever be a proper Content Creator because of the way my brain works, but my biggest goal is to somehow make a story that makes someone so mentally ill about a thing that they can't think straight. As I do. Every couple weeks or so. Someday it will happen and I will do skitter around dancing and cheering wildly on the subway platform in my brain

[jellybeanforest-a-go-go]

Fic Snip

This is the opening of an upcoming fic for Yondu Week called “(Don’t) Fear the Reaper.” (Fic Summary: Yes, Thanos wants to restore balance to the universe, but it didn’t hurt that Death was kind of cute, too. This is entirely the fault of @burrowingdweller fantastic Thandu fanart.) 

This fic is essentially a reimagining of Thanos’s primary drive in Infinity War to decimate half of all life by blending his MCU motivations (create balance in the universe) with his original comics one (where he’s courting Lady Death). In this fic, Grim Reapers are essentially dead people stuck in purgatory working off their past sins (sort of how Red Skull died and then was assigned the task of leading people to the Soul Stone), but time is wonky in the afterlife and doesn’t quite line up with that of the living. So Yondu has been a Reaper for over a millennia when he is essentially assigned to a young Thanos, who makes himself Yondu’s full-time job. Also, for those who are unaware, Thanos has a younger brother in the comics called Eros who was likely cut from the MCU for pretty obvious reasons (he’s the “hero” Starfox with the power of extremely dubious consent).

The first time Thanos meets Death, he’s terrified.

Reclining on the shores of a mud-thick river, the young Titan sucks on a button, chewing at the lip of hard plastic, and dreams of bread, of fruits falling plentiful from the cornucopia, and of yellow stalks heavy with fat kernels of wheat. His muscles are withered stick-thin and pulled across a too-broad frame. His younger brother, Eros, sits beside him, digging trenches in the wet earth with quick repetitious passes of restless feet.

Thanos tongues the button to one side. “If you have the energy to twitch, you have the energy to check the fishing nets,” he reprimands him.

Eros pauses, looking sheepish. “Sorry,” he replies, lifting himself up to his feet and shaking out his stiffened joints in a stretch. Even with Thanos sitting, Eros stands level to his brother’s forehead. The difference is to be expected. Born during the first Great Famine as an unplanned spare, the boy had grown to be runty and pale, a stark contrast to Thanos’s intimidating bulk.

“Go on, then,” Thanos orders, waving in the direction of the buoy that had floated down and halfway across the stream, the line pulled taut by the swift currents. It had rained that morning, causing the river to swell.

Eros worries his bottom lip with his teeth. “It’s a bit fast, don’t you think?”

His brother’s response is unnecessarily harsh. “If you don’t go, we don’t eat.”

Thanos means not only today but also in general. It had been Eros’s birth that had violated the famine-era one-child law and subjected their entire family unit to reduced rations as punishment. His existence is unnecessary, selfish, with a direct negative effect on Titan’s burgeoning environmental crisis.

The state – and to a certain extent, his own brother – never let the boy forget it.

Eros ducks his head in shame. “Alright,” he says, as he removes his shirt and outer pants to carefully fold and place them on an elevated boulder to warm in the sun. He will be glad for his foresight when he emerges wet and shivering later.

Thanos clicks the button between his teeth.

As a child, Thanos had been different, special, advanced. He had grown quickly, demonstrating formidable strength and advanced intelligence in his youthful endeavors. He often tussled with his father and frequently won, much to the older man’s ceaseless pride. He had also developed an unusual aptitude for hunting, taking down a pachioraptor at an age where most children were still learning to set snares for smaller prey. Surpassing even his physical strength was his cleverness occasionally bordering on a sort of mean-spirited cruelty.

Kronan may never regain sight in his left eye again, his mother had told him.

I see, Thanos had replied, his tone carefully even.

She had frowned at the pun but continued, It appears that the visor he had stolen from Eros was laced with a metal highly reactive to water, and when he jumped into Brower’s Lake, they exploded. She had watched him after, gauging his reaction to the subtle accusation.

Thanos waited a beat, then: Is it Eros’s visor now? Last week, he had claimed ownership over the bronzed wristguards that bore a striking resemblance to the ones Eros had ‘lost’ the day he came home with all those bruises. His mother had taken a deep steadying breath at that, while he persisted, If Kronan hadn’t been both a thief and a liar, then he would still have use of both his eyes.

She had looked at him, hurt and concerned and more than a little unnerved. If you keep this up, you are going to kill someone some day.

Thanos no longer dabbles in explosive eyewear, but he is still his brother’s (reluctant) keeper. Presently, he watches his charge dip a toe in the water upstream from the buoy, hissing at the cold and looking over his shoulder to meet his glare. Don’t you dare complain, it manages to convey. So, the boy stomps forward resolutely, splashing in the shallows before diving into deeper waters.

In contrast to his elder brother, Eros had been a disappointment – feeble, useless, but determined to make up for his shortcomings and prove his worth. He often failed, losing to Thanos in nearly all contests of skill, save one.

You’ve found your calling, Thanos had told him months earlier, flopping onto the opposite shore minutes after his brother. It appears your diminutive stature and lack of muscle mass gives you the advantage in a limited set of circumstances.

Eros had smiled then, happy to have finally bested his brother.

That success had bred expectation and responsibility.

He starts out well enough, his lithe body flashing pale as it breaks through the brown currents in rhythmic strokes. Thanos watches the distance between the boy and the buoy shrink than stall. His body vertical, Eros swims against the water rushing over him.

He’s dawdling again, Thanos thinks. Typical.

He’s about to call out to his brother to stop screwing around when the boy’s head disappears entirely beneath the surface, the white ghost of his body pinned in place but pulled in the direction of the current.

Panic blooms fast and breathless in Thanos’s chest. He spits out the button and rushes forward, splashing into the river and clumsily fighting through the swift rapids to reach his submerged brother. The stream is stronger, faster than anticipated, and his own body is too dense to float effectively as he expends much of his energy just treading water.

Thanos has many gifts, but he has never been a strong swimmer.

The water overwhelming and suffocating him is murky dark brown, but when he opens his eyes, he thinks he sees blue several shades darker than the sky and centered in that unexpected hue, fuzzy from water and terror, two burning red eyes.

It is the face of Death.

Thanos feels the taut fishing line pass by one arm, bowling him over, but he reaches out to grab it with the other hand, grasping it tight then pulling himself above the surface where he gasps large mouthfuls of air. He swivels his head around, chasing his hallucination, chasing Death, but finds nothing but his brother’s body several yards away, his foot tangled in an old discarded net, anchoring him down as the river flows over his limp form.

 …

 In the aftermath of Eros’s fatal drowning, their home is quiet, and his parents grieve in their own way, emotionally detaching from Thanos and from each other. His mother in particular proves inconsolable, sewing then destroying her youngest child’s funerary garbs before remaking them yet again.

It has been three days, and though there is more food available with one less mouth to feed, she snaps at Thanos when he reaches for his brother’s portion. Thanos misses his brother, but that is no reason for good food to go to waste. He wisely chooses not to say as much to his stricken mother.

Instead, she confronts him about the circumstances of Eros’s death on the fourth day.

“My son, tell me: did you…?” She can’t even finish, not wanting to give voice to the unfathomable.

Had he? The current had been swift, his brother small, and their need great.

You are going to kill someone some day.

“No, of course not, Mother,” he replies.

Thanos is uncertain whether it’s the truth, and by the look on this mother’s face, so is she.

[6stronghands]

Goodreads interview with Seanan McGuire

Author Seanan McGuire is the busiest person you know, even if you don't know her yet. She's that busy. McGuire has 33 novel-length works currently listed on her bibliography page, and that's not counting her pseudonymous acquaintance, Mira Grant. Scroll down and you'll find short fiction, essays, comics, nonfiction, and poetry. The crazy part? She didn't turn to full-time writing until about three years ago. Along the way, McGuire has won several marquee book prizes, including Hugo and Nebula awards for speculative fiction. Her series of fantasy novellas Wayward Children was recently picked up by the TV network Syfy for development. McGuire's brain is clearly a restless explorer, and her ambitious new novel, Middlegame, maps out another enormous chunk of notional real estate. In the new book, a pair of separated twins named Roger and Dodger endeavor to solve a series of increasingly sinister mysteries. Why were they separated? Why are they being hunted? Why are they developing world-breaking powers? And perhaps most importantly—why did they get such ridiculous names? The brother-and-sister team find themselves squaring off against a cabal of eldritch predators who have cracked the ancient code of alchemy, the missing link between science and magic. Speaking from her home outside Seattle, McGuire talked with Goodreads contributor Glenn McDonald about the new book, the weird science of alchemy, and the curious case of the prescription typewriter… Your bibliography is really astonishing. Are you just writing all the time? Seanan McGuire: Well, I'm not writing at the moment because I'm talking to you. But yeah, I was writing right up to the point where my phone rang. That's pretty much my life, because I am a workaholic and I enjoy what I do. GR: When did you make the leap into full-time writing? SM: I made the transition around January 2016, I think. The best advice I ever received from anyone, about professional writing, was from Todd McCaffrey. He said: Don't quit your day job until you're reasonably sure you can pay your bills off of your royalties. My last job was for a nonprofit, and I was basically sick all the time because I was writing all these books and I was still working a full-time day job. My friends never saw me. Like, never. Then the ACA happened, the Affordable Care Act. I don't think people realize what a difference that made, for all of us that work in the creative fields, to be able to get affordable insurance. I kept my day job for a few years after I strictly had to, just because I was terrified of dying under a bridge. The attacks on the ACA that are happening now are terrifying. Genuinely terrifying. Especially if they take away the protection for preexisting conditions. GR: Were you into writing as a little kid? 

I was. I did not figure out that writing was an option until I was about three. I started reading before I was talking, really. Then I started getting migraines because I was trying to write, but I didn't have the physical coordination to actually write at the speed that I could think. So the doctor prescribed a typewriter. Really. My mom went to a yard sale and got me this gigantic thing. It weighed more than I did. I started writing stories. At the beginning, they were all very factual. I would write stories about going to look for my cat. A lot of my earliest work was what we would classify as fan fiction now. There were a lot of adventures with My Little Ponies. The thing about being a genius when you're a kid is that you grow out of it. I was perfectly average by the time I hit school. But there was that brief, frustrating time when I was so far ahead of where they wanted me to be that they just didn't know what to do with me. I would write until 3 a.m. on my typewriter, which sounded like gunfire. GR: There seems to be some of that experience in the new book, with the child prodigies Roger and Dodger. Their relationship is fascinating; it's a sibling thing but also this deeper connection that suggests they're resonating on the cosmic level. SM: I love that this is my best-reviewed book so far and it's about characters with intentionally terrible names. It's a delight to have people have to try to talk seriously about the relationship between Roger and Dodger. It's terrible, and it makes me so happy. Roger and Dodger really are soul mates because they are functionally the same person. They're one person split into two to embody the Ethos [the alchemy formulation sought after in the story]. I don't think that's a huge spoiler; that's basically the premise of the book. We know that, but they don't for a good part of the story. Locking down their relationship, a lot of that was looking at my own relationships with my siblings and the places where it's good or weird or awkward. GR: For readers who might not be familiar, what do we mean when we talk about alchemy? SM: Alchemy is sort of like magical chemistry. It's this idea that you can transform parts of the world into other parts of the world. You just have to figure out the right combination of elements. The classical example is lead into gold. But alchemists also believed that there were spirits and such that could be called upon to help with these processes. It has some of what we might call sorcerous ideas. They were trying to find the magical formulae for these things, like the panacea, which is the cure for everything. Or the alkahest, which is the universal destroyer, a fluid that could dissolve literally anything. Then there's the Philosopher's Stone, which was said to give eternal life. Harry Potter fans are probably familiar with alchemy, more than previous generations, because of the character Flamel, who was an actual and quite famous real-world alchemist. GR: Did you research the actual history of alchemy?

Yes, this was the first time I really jumped into it. I did a lot of research, and research makes me so happy. I hunted down every book I could find on alchemy; they're all downstairs in the library now. Alchemy was a real thing, even if it never worked, even if they never turned lead into gold with these processes. Really smart people spent a really long time trying hard to make these things happen. I wanted to make sure what I was trying to do would fit into at least one school of alchemical thought—and there were many, many schools of thought. Alchemy sounds a little ridiculous now, but there was a time when it was a commonly accepted belief. GR: In the book you have a great villainous force in the Alchemical Congress, who are modern practitioners of the ancient art. They reminded me of historical groups that purported to be keepers of secret knowledge, like the Masons. SM: Right, or like the Order of the Golden Dawn. I never found a specific historical analog to that in alchemy, but maybe that's because they never got it to work. My Alchemical Congress is a group of people who can actually say that alchemy works. They're able to do all kinds of ethically negotiable things. With that kind of power, you're absolutely going to have a group that locks it down so it stays in what these people consider the right hands. GR: The cover image of the book depicts a delightfully creepy magical item known as the Hand of Glory, which also has a historical basis. Do you recall when you first came across that? SM: I feel like I've always known. I don't remember where I first read about that. I studied folklore in college, and the Hand of Glory was very common in certain parts of Europe. It's amazing. Everyone was chopping hands off for a while there. GR: When did you actually start writing Middlegame? SM: Middlegame is kind of unique. I'd been thinking about it for ten years, but it took me a while to develop the technical skill to tell the story and have it make sense to people who don't live inside my head. My brother must have heard me explain this story 90 times before I even sat down to write it. At this point in my career, I have the enviable problem that, for the most part, I don't get to just sit down and decide that I'm going to write. Everything has been pre-sold. I'm working off contracts until 2023. So I know exactly what I'm going to be writing every day when I get out of bed. GR: Don't you ever just get burned out? SM: Well, I think I'm dealing with ten years of systemic burnout because I'm exhausted all the time. But if you mean: Do I ever get to the point that I can't write? Thankfully, no. I think everybody's wired differently that way. So much of my storage space is devoted to people who don't exist. There's a certain concern that if I leave them alone, those parts of my brain will go offline. GR: There are fictional lives at stake! SM: There are! You don't depend on me for your persistence of existence. If I forget about you, you'll still be fine. GR: Your series Wayward Children was just picked up for development with the Syfy channel. Is there anything you can disclose about that? SM: No, not really. For the most part, for myself and other creators, we can't disclose anything because they don't want to let us know what's happening. We have family members that are going to ask, and they don't want us to be the leaks and endanger the production, so we're frequently not told things. I've basically just sold them my canvas, because I'm a wee baby author from the perspective of Hollywood. I have no properties under my belt, I have no track record. There's not a lot of bargaining power on my side of the table. But I trust the people that are involved in this project. And even if I didn't, honestly, television changes everything. The worst show that absolutely butchers my concepts—which is not a thing I'm expecting with this team at all—but the worst show in the world is going to be seen by more people than have read the first book. So that bumps my book sales, almost guaranteed. That sounds very mercenary, I'm sure, but that's just the math of it. Jim Butcher, Charlaine Harris, even Neil Gaiman—they weren't household names until they got something on TV. My mother raised three daughters on welfare, and she lives with me. I'm basically her sole support. I worry fairly regularly about what would happen if I get hit by a bus and can't write anymore. But what happens with a successful TV show—or even a failed TV show—is that my mom lives off my royalties for the rest of her life. GR: This is a question we've been polling authors on: When you read for pleasure, do you read one book at a time or do you have several going at once? Some people say it's insane to read multiple books at the same time, but I usually have two or three going. SM: Well, I'm currently reading six. GR: Is there anything else you'd like to highlight or discuss about the new book? SM: Middlegame is currently a standalone, but there are two follow-ups I'd really like to write, so please buy Middlegame from your local bookstore so that my publisher will let me continue!

[rose-tylers]

So, I saw IT today. Ramblings behind a read more, including spoilers and book-to-movie things. Probably don’t read if you haven’t read the book, or just really loved the movie (I didn’t hate it, but a lot of the changes bugged me, most of which I talk about here.)

If you don’t already know, IT is probably my all-time favorite book. I love the story, I usually read it at least once a year (in fact, I’m strongly considering another reread now), I used to be obsessed with the miniseries until I read the book (I still enjoy the miniseries, but it definitely doesn’t hold up as well after reading the book, though it holds up a bit better than the movie...).

I’ve been waiting for what feels like forever for them to make a proper movie version of IT, and while I know any movie version could never fully convey the depth and epicness of the book, I looked forward to at least the spirit.

The movie version of IT takes a lot of liberties with the story (most notably changing the time period from the 1958 to 1989 for the bulk of the kids’ part of the story, while the second half with the adults will take place in the present day, as opposed to 1985), but the spirit is mostly still there. Pennywise/It was also fucking TERRIFYING, much more so than It seemed in the book, and was in the miniseries (though Tim Curry definitely made a very scary Pennywise); with the magic of modern film and special effects, we get to see Pennywise take on all sorts of frightening physical changes, and become literally larger-than-life in some scenes.

On its own, the movie was great, and solid, but as a lover of the book, I can’t help feeling a bit of a disconnect, and wishing some things hadn’t been changed.

My biggest problem was Mike Hanlon’s character. In the book, he’s the only black kid in Derry, and he and his parents live on a farm outside of town, so he goes to a different school than the other kids, and doesn’t see them very much until the fateful rock fight. His parents are both devoted and loving, and want nothing more than to give Mike a good life. Mike is also the “keeper” of Derry’s history, through stories and clippings saved and given to him by his father, and he’s the one who fills in the rest of the Losers on the town’s history; this is his role in the group, as their historian. In this movie, his parents are dead (unnecessarily, in my opinion), killed in a house fire when Mike was a little boy, and he’s now being raised by his grandfather, who is not a very kind or patient man (in the beginning of the movie, Mike is hesitant to kill a sheep with a gun, though we see later, after the group’s encounter in the house on Neibolt Street, that he has been able to overcome this hesitation to do what his grandfather asks of him). Most notably, the role of the group’s “historian” is given to Ben, for reasons I can’t quite understand, and it makes Mike superfluous. He doesn’t really get to do much of anything. In the second encounter with It in the house on Neibolt Street, he brings the gun he uses to kill the sheep, but wastes one bullet during his fight with Henry Bowers, and loses the rest of the ammo down the well after loading the gun with one more bullet, and then Bill takes the gun and ultimately uses it to harm IT.

There are small references to the book throughout the movie (Richie wears a t-shirt that says “Freese’s department store,” which is a nod to his encounter with Henry Bowers and his gang in the book, we see the giant statue of Paul Bunyon, which is Richie’s first encounter with It, there’s a brief shot of the Neibolt Street church and we hear singing coming from inside, Georgie has a Lego turtle on his bedside table, which is presumably a nod to the cosmic turtle in the book), but I feel like there’s a lot lost in translation.

For one, no mention is ever made of the power that holds the group together. There’s a glimmer of it in the first encounter in the house on Neibolt Street, when the kids are able to send Pennywise away through their combined effort as a group, but in the book, there’s a constant feeling of fate and destiny, that these kids are meant to be together, and there’s no mention of it here.

For two, in the book, each kid in the group has a clear, well-defined role. Bill is the leader; Eddie is the navigator; Bev is the sharpshooter; Ben is the architect; Mike is the historian; Stan is the reason; and Richie is the comic relief. In the movie, we see almost none of this, except for Bill’s leadership, and Richie’s jokes, and I feel like this takes away from what makes this group so special.

They also aged the kids up by about 2 years, putting them in middle/junior high school, as opposed to elementary school, which brings about a different sort of dynamic between the kids, their peers at school, and Henry Bowers.

We lose a lot of the impact of the history of Derry. It’s all mentioned; the explosion at the Ironworks, the killing of the Bradley Gang, the fire at the Black Spot, but it’s just anecdotal, and doesn’t convey the true scope of It’s power over Derry, and how long It’s actually been there.

Other changes include making Henry’s father a cop (again, another change that feels unnecessary, and also takes away a large part of why Henry hates Mike so much; in the book, Henry’s father also owns a farm, which is right next to Mike’s family farm, but the Hanlon farm is much more successful and prosperous than the Bowers farm, and the Bowers’ family failure is blamed entirely on the Hanlon family; racism is definitely a factor, but it goes much deeper than that in the book, in addition to “crazy” running in the Bowers family; Henry’s father is referred to throughout the book as “crazy Butch Bowers”), though I did appreciate that Henry kills his father in the movie the same way he does in the book.

Bev also has short hair for most of the movie, while her hair is long in the book, but this is more of an acceptable change. In the book, Bev’s father’s incestuous feelings for her are very subtle, only coming to a distinct head when It “possesses” her father near the climax of the kids’ portion of the book. In the movie, it is much clearer that he has some not-so-fatherly feelings towards his daughter, and may actually be molesting her, if not outright already raping her. Bev has long hair at the beginning of the movie, but cuts it short after an early scene with her father, where he asks, “Are you still my girl?” and touches her hair and face; Bev cutting her hair off is a clear trauma response, and a perfectly acceptable shift from the book canon. (A curious change that happened in both the miniseries and this movie is the removal of Bev’s mother as a character; she’s not as influential in Bev’s life and overall arc as her father is, but she’s still present in the book, and I hoped she would still at least exist in the movie, even just sort of in passing.)

Another thing that sort of bothered me, and that I didn’t see a purpose in doing, was having It steal Georgie’s body after ripping his arm off, causing Georgie to be another “missing” kid. In the book, It rips his arm off, and Georgie’s screams alert several neighbors, who come running, though Georgie is already dead by the time the first person reaches him. It just felt... strange to me to have him be presumed “missing,” and to have Bill think that he could still be alive, rather than just having Georgie be outright dead.

The inclusion of Patrick Hockstetter seemed pointless, given that they didn’t even reference his original arc in the book, which was honestly one of the more disturbing and creepy subplots of the book. Additionally, Henry’s friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss were much more important figures in the book, and here they were nothing more than background characters to back up Henry’s bullying.

The epicness of the group’s trip down to the sewers, and their ultimate fight with Pennywise, also felt a bit... lacking. They basically just beat the shit out of him and sent him retreating back into the sewers, and while it was satisfying, it lacked the grandness and epicness of the fight in the book.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed, though. Ben’s love of New Kids on the Block was cute, and I liked that Bev knew about it, but didn’t tease him for it, and kept it from the others, who probably would have teased him for it. I liked the soft acknowledgment of Ben’s crush on Bev, and Bev’s crush on Bill; Bev kissing Bill at the end, while not in the book, felt true to these characters as they were presented in the movie. The scene of the kids playing in the water was also cute, and felt like one of the few “real kid” moments in the movie. I’m glad they included the house on Neibolt Street; the scenes in the house in the book are the most terrifying, and here they were as well, even if the contents of the scenes were changed entirely for the movie. We didn’t see a lot of It’s different forms that were used to scare the kids (like Richie’s werewolf, or Ben’s mummy, or Mike’s bird), but Eddie’s leper was horrifying, as was Stan’s creepy lady in the painting (even though that wasn’t It’s form for Stan in the book).

Ultimately, I know I won’t be fully satisfied with any visual retelling of the book unless it’s a many-hours long miniseries for SciFi or something, but I did enjoy the movie, so long as I keep it largely separate from the book in my mind.