#Starless Sea

[ashenalchemy]

🐝the Kitchen would like to make you a cup of tea🐝

Oh dear tea lovers, once again I am positively *delighted* to share this collaboration. As you know, a while back I had the privilege of working with @erinmorgenstern to create a companion blend based on her book The Night Circus. Well, as my luck would have it when I once more reached out to create a companion to The Starless Sea, Erin once again graciously agreed! I am so pleased to share this latest collaboration tea blend, pulling notes from Erin’s book to offer you a fully immersive reading and sipping experinece!

Without further ado: The Starless Sea tea

The Starless Sea tea has a sweet and smooth black tea base that is delicately spiced and floral, brewing up light enough to enjoy alone but best when mixed with a heavy spoonful of sweet golden honey. Lemon and orange dance together in a play of citrus reminiscent of the scent of a certain man now called Dorian and when mixed with vanilla, hint at the orange blossoms of Zachary Ezra Rawlin’s drink to enter the Harbor and his favorite mixed cocktail, the Sidecar. Lapsang souchong curls around the back of the brew, reminiscent of the smoke of long distant fires which is smoothed and sweetened with the rich amber notes from honeybush. And while the brew swirls in your cup when caught in the light, enjoy the mesmerizing effect of shimmering glittery gold.

[tailorwww]

The Starless Sea- Erin Morgenstern

I read this in January while waiting for the semester to start and doing not much else, would recommend

[fateheartblog]

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!

[thesunincarnate]

First time doing linoprint! I'm hoping to print these onto my best friend's jacket.

[puddle-books]

"how strange, but how lovely, to have a favourite book that is so full of unread stories."

fateheart: a starless seaquel - boogleboot

[the-teapot-collection]

i firmly believe that if you love the amazing devil you should read the starless sea and if you love the starless sea you should listen to the amazing devil.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fantasy Books Bracket: Round 2

Book summaries below:

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life. Fantasy, portal fantasy, adult, metatextual, romance

The Radiant Emperor series (She Who Became the Sun, He Who Drowned the World) by Shelley Parker-Chan

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness… In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected. When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate. After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future her brother's abandoned greatness. Fantasy, historical fiction, alternate history, epic fantasy, adult

[queer-media-tourney]

[prosescandles]

"Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets."

– Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

[voidlingduck]

More Starless Sea reading thoughts but it is a book that really makes me go ‘oh this would be so interesting to analyze and write an essay on’… story about stories book about books and the amount of intertextuality laced through the whole thing makes it so rich for unpicking.

[anarchicstoner]

zachary and dorian are a wolfstar variant you cant convince me otherwise

[sun1seeker]

i wanna know what people who don’t obsess over every piece of media they’ve ever consumed do in their free time

[boogleboot]

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

[puddle-books]

"i need you to know that what i feel for you is real. because i think you feel the same. i have lost a lot of things and i don't want to lose this, too. "

the starless sea - erin morgenstern

[the-teapot-collection]

is this something or is this nonsense

im deep in the autism and cant tell

[acousticgirlwithelectricdreams]

The Starless Sea 📚