The Ship of Dreams
I made this collage a while ago and realised I don't think I ever posted it here - Lenore's ship out on the honey-sea.
This is one of my favourite presiding images from The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: that wide open blackness, all the light from beneath, a fairytale ship with blood-red sails. Enchanting i loooooove
Anyway, new cover photo!
60 notes
·
View notes
Today, I read a book.
It was one that my mother had been pestering me to read for a while now, telling me that it wasn't like anything she had ever read before - not with adoration or embellishment, my mother isn't that kind of person. She stated it as fact. I didn't believe her, because that is quite the statement to make to your child who has read many-a books. But, I was at my grandma's and at a loss for what to do because my laptop simply wasn't calling to me, so I brought it out of my bag, where it had stayed over the past couple of weeks. I finished it only fifteen or so minutes ago, not having put the book down aside for eating.
I understand what my mother meant, now.
I don't think I'll be able to sleep until I blurt all of my thoughts about this book somewhere. So, here I am. Imploring you to read the book, and if not - just to listen to me talk about it. I truly do plead that you read this book, because I am highly certain that I am not fully here as I write this, stuck in a world between fantasy and reality as I contemplate everything and nothing. I do not think I will be able to sleep tonight. Not well, anyway. I completely skip out of a lot of things, but I need to talk about it or I might never sleep the same again (this is not me being dramatic, I swear). This book is just how my mother described it: hard to describe, and entirely something else.
Do read this book. I'm telling you, you will not regret it.
If you won't? Then allow me to tell you about Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.
(In the reblog, because it's too big otherwise)
11 notes
·
View notes
One year since Fateheart
A year ago I posted Fateheart: A Starless Seaquel to Ao3 (link here) - the mammoth fanfic sequel to Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea.
Fateheart has had an incredible year, and has completely changed my life, by all measures. Posting it has connected me to so many wonderful people and helped bring together a genuine community over on the Starless Sea discord (which you should join hey here's a link) who have supported me through the last hellish few weeks of uni assignments as well as months and months of creative projects and ambitious fic writing.
So on this blessed solstice day, here is a lil update for those who are following the slow progress of the unofficial Starless Sea canon as developed in Fateheart.
Oh that's right, baby. It ain't just one fan sequel. It's gonna be uhhh (checks notes) at least four.
I really really wanted to get the next book out at this year mark - on the solstice and year anniversary - but despite hitting that 50k mark for NaNoWriMo last month it just didn't happen (it's been a rough couple months - I am currently doing a master's course that is kicking my ass).
But I am determined to get Fever Pitch, the next full-novel-length follow-up story, out in full as soon as humanly possible. Toward that end I have gone ahead and made a posting for it. The first few chapters are done and have been done for a while, so I shall slowly be posting them as I work on the rest.
Watch this space!!!!
I never really intended Fever Pitch to be a fully-fledged sequel. Mind you, I didn't intend that with Fateheart either, but in a different way. In my mind the next book in the sequence is and always has been a story called The Lotus Flowers. Nearly 180k words of that one exist, but it is too important a story not to get right. So I'm gonna give it as much time as it needs - and it may need quite a lot.
But in working on Lotus Flowers, I came to realise that a lot of the world-building and character development which I was taking for granted was in fact not as obvious to the reader as it would be to me - LF is, after all, set ten or so years after Fateheart, and considering all of The Starless Sea (at least for Zachary and Dorian) takes place in about two weeks, ten years is space enough for a LOT of story.
So in order to strengthen my sense of where Zachary, Dorian, and Kat have found themselves by the ten year mark, I started noting down some of the more important moments from that decade of time. And then just kept writing. And writing and writing and writing until a handful of them were fully fledged novellas.
I have put up the polished ones - they are collected together on Ao3 as 'Fateheart: The Extended Canon'. Which is. A bit pretentious. But whatever. (Also I'm not kidding myself that all the fics in this collection are vital plot points, but there are a couple standout ones which are Canon Events in my mind, that will be referenced in later full-length fics. Namely A Heart That Won't Break, Death in the Valley, and The Man Named Sky.)
But one of these short (aspirationally) stories seemed as I wrote to have particular space in it for so much of that world-building and exposition, and that was Fever Pitch.
Fever Pitch takes place five years after the birth of the Harbour, and the events of Fateheart, and is an Alice-in-Wonderland themed story which explores the lives of all the main Fateheart characters (Zachary, Dorian, Kat, and Leander, namely), introduces some new players (shoutout Tabuzae and Kirsty Baudeville), as well as establishing the limits and life of the Harbour they live in.
I'd say a solid sixty percent of this story currently exists, and I'm gonna amp up the pressure on myself to complete it by posting it as I go - something I've never done before, so bear with me.
It means so much to me that there are people out here who care as much about these people and this little world on the Starless Sea as I do - even more so that so many people have loved my offerings of more story. The above photo is of my christmas present from a housemate who was one of Fateheart's earliest readers. It's so beautiful it makes my heart leap.
We rise, we fall - as stories do.
I am committed to seeing this story through, by the way - all the way to the end - and that is gonna take years. But we start here - with the next book in the series. First few chapters to appear over Christmas.
Until then, happy solstice. To seeking x
25 notes
·
View notes