#Stolen Book two

[author-a-holmes]

@duckingwriting

#im not screaming and making ungodly noises that confuse my cat#thank you!

I speak only the truth! :D The sweeetness between the two characters really enhanced the gutpunch of Harper's story <3

You've temped me to go and find a scene of my own to share now though lol, So...

Content/Trigger Warnings: Memories of Abuse, Traumatic Past, Emotional Abuse

Extract from Takeover, book 2 of the Stolen Stories…

"Well?" she asked, "If you're going to interrupt and be nosey the least you can do is tell me what you think," she tried joking, but the nerves were clear in her voice as he slid his eyes from the plans up to meet her impatient gaze. "You literally never fail to impress, Stella, these are really good," he said, garnering a slight frown of confusion as she shook her head, puzzled. "What?" "You asked me what I thought…" Reilly explained slowly, but Stella simply blinked at him and shook her head. "I meant what's wrong with it, where I can improve, not…" "I don't see anything to improve, Stella," Reilly said, voice soft as though he was worried about startling her further. "You've spotted every point of entry or exit that I can see, listed tools and equipment needed for each route, highlighted potential points of interest, suggested guard locations…" he pointed to the bottom corner where and huffed a soft laugh, "You've even listed best weather conditions for remaining unseen… I'd let anyone in the guild trust their lives to this, what could you possibly improve on?" "But… there's always something," Stella muttered frowning, watching Reilly's features soften in the face of her confusion. "Not this time, darling." She bit on her lip hard as she heard her Da's voice in her head, scoffing. She had to have missed something, she always did, and her frown deepened at Reilly's reassurance, causing her to step closer to the table and glance down at it herself. Maybe it was a test, maybe she would spot the flaw in her designs, but as her fingers stretched out towards the parchment to brush lightly over the inked lines it vanished from beneath her hand. "Hey—!" "Come on, I'll prove it to you," Reilly said simply, already rolling up the parchment when she spun to face him, "I told you I'd trust the lives of anyone in the guild to these plans… so let's go run a heist."

Poor Stella :D For context, at this point in Takeover she's still not quite aware that the manner in which she was raised was anything other than normal. Reilly, however, is painfully aware and making a concerted effort to gently get her to realise her own worth.

Hey btw, to new writers who want to write angst: Nothing illustrates darkness as well as sparse and brilliant highlights.

If you want to write a character with an unspeakably awful past, there’s no need to go into deep and gory details about how horrible it was. Readers who can’t relate to it won’t relate to that, and the readers who have been there generally don’t want to see that. Instead, highlight some of their happiest moments but make them unsettlingly small.

Sprinkles in some realism, too. Having a character go “my parents were abusive monsters and I’ve literally never had a happy moment in my life” isn’t realistic, and both the people who haven’t witnessed that kind of thing outside of fiction, and the people who have personally lived it will just go “yeah, yeah, tragic childhood, misery, darkness, we’ve all seen it”, and being nothing but negative makes the character both uninteresting and unlikeable.

Now, having someone casually think or say shit like “I think my happiest childhood memory was that christmas when dad was in prison. Nobody was yelling or throwing anything and mom was sober the whole time”, and be genuinely surprised by other peoples’ concerned reactions - now jesus christ that’s bleak.

[13eyond13]

Please tell me about art and media you know of that accurately captures the weirdness of dream logic and atmosphere and emotions... books and movies and video games and art and comics and YouTube stuff, whatever you want... you know, where it only makes sense on an intuitive level and falls apart when you try to explain it...

[hoeelliexx]

I started doing end of the year TBR last year and it went horribly… So here I am trying again!

24 books I want to read before 2024 is over. My hopes are abysmal but we will see! Big thanks to NetGalley for doubling my TBR with a few ARCs!

QOTD: Do keep to a strict list when working through your TBR or are you a mood reader?

[readinthedarkpod]

Come one, come all! Today we bring you the best of the best, from all across the land, to compete in the ultimate competition. Who will be crowned as the biggest, most pathetic, simp of all time? Listen to find out.

Our Challengers: Thomas Cresswell from Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco Vektal from Ice Planet Barbarian by Ruby Dixon Damianos of Akielos from The Captive Prince by C. S. Pacat Rhysand from the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas Lorcan Salvaterre from the Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas Edward Cullen from Twilight by Stephenie Meyer Oliver Marks from If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio Benjamin Evans from The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black Cardan Greenbriar from The Folk of the Air by Holly Black Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo Oak Greenbriar from The Stolen Heir by Holly Black Prince Corrick from the Defy the Night series by Brigid Kemmerer Matthias Helvar from Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo Hal Cavendish from Down Comes the Night by Allison Saft Nathaniel Thorn from A Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson Jamie Westenberg from Two Wrongs Make a Right by Chloe Liese Follow the hosts at @figonas @adxmparriish @hazelsheartsworn @laequiem

Join our book club, WORNPAGELIBRARY!

Sign up for our newsletter to get teasers for the next episode, get the inside scoop, and much more!

[hell0mega]

how many people are gonna only buy the stolen century volume of the taz balance graphic novels you think

[etdraconis]

( me: I’m gonna finished The Familiar first, and then I’m going to read the Calling since DA has consumed me once more

Also me: *stares at the Calling for several days before giving in, with the Familiar only half-read* whoops… )

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Midnight Market

fantasy adventure

A sea elf gets her magic & voice stolen by a thief, and goes on a journey on land to get it back before it's sold at a magical night market, with the help of a city guard

no romance

[girlpetrarca]

apparently my destiny is to work on manuscripts where there's fuck all clues on their provenance

[danielnelsen]

i wouldnt go so far as to call the calling a good book necessarily, but it's so much better than the stolen throne and it's actually got an interesting plot & lore, it's very refreshing when im reading them in order

[author-a-holmes]

Happy STS! I'm turning your question back on you cause I really wanna know. What's a line or scene from your works that you're proud of?

Hello hun! Thank you for the ask <3 I hope your weekend's going well!

I'm not gonna lie, I thought this would be an easy one to answer but I've been staring at my screen for ages trying to pick just one line/scene.

Do I share my most recent one? Or the first time I remember reaading back a line and falling in love with my own words? Or something in the middle of all that?

I've finally settled on a scene in book two of my 'Stolen Stories' series, where Stella runs across a creature I've designed called the Krilla-Setika. I really love this scene in part because it was quite fun to write Stella just falling back in base insticts, her fear overiding thought when she's usually very held together, but I also just really loved describing the creature I'd created.

It was great fun adding details for the reader, the longer Stella stared at it, and just upping the creep-factor as it advanced on her...

They retraced their steps back towards the window they'd used to enter the building, moving quickly but not quite falling into a run as Reilly pulled them both to a stop at every corner so he could carefully check the next hallway. It was the soft clicking sound of claws against stone made them both pause, but Stella could already tell it wasn't coming from the hallway Reilly was in the middle of checking, her free hand landing against his shoulder as she glanced behind them and froze. It looked like a weasel, with large bat shaped wings, but it was huge. Almost twice as large as the mountain lions that roamed the peaks to the north and as Stella stared at the creature that seemed to be dripping shadows of smoke, its clawed feet clung to the wall and it skittered up to hang from the ceiling, it's wings spreading wide as the finger-like hooks at the wing tips embedded into the walls, bracing the creature and keeping it in place as Stella backed away. "Don't run," Reilly hissed in her ear and she shivered, eyes transfixed by the creature before her, but the longer she stared the more she saw. Scales covered its body, but it was somehow still translucent. She could see the hall behind through it's smokey form, and she shook her head, her skin crawling with the desire to get as far away as fast as possible. "Stella, don't run," Reilly warned again, his hand still curled around hers, but the creature tipped it's head at Reilly's voice, and she took another step back at the movements of a hunter, a predator, and she wanted nothing more than to flee. "Walk, don't run..." Stella could hear Reilly, knew the man well enough to know that he had to have a reason for the recommendation, but as the mass of dripping shadows began advancing slowly, her control snapped and she turned on her heel, dashing for their exit with Reilly's hand still grasped in hers.

[saessenach]

My dudes, Mimi Matthews' The Siren of Sussex and The Belle of Belgrave Square single-handedly kicked me out of the reading slump I was in after Camus, and there is just something to be said about fun Victorian romances which are lush and the precisely perfect amount of ridiculous

[beware-thecrow]

IT'S AI HENCE NOT ART.

Wounds of the Earth

— by xis.lanyx

[transmasc-tabris]

.

[deprivedofbraincellsandsleep]

I got 3 new books, one as a gift, and stopp books r so expensive and I feel so guilty everytime I buy one snd I always regret buying them and I alr spent sm money today and arghhhh😭😭😭

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!

For most of US history, copyright was something you had to ask for. To copyright a work, you'd send a copy to the Library of Congress and they'd issue you a copyright. Not only did that let you display a copyright mark on your work – so people would know they weren't allowed to copy it without your permission – but if anyone wanted to figure out who to ask in order to get permission to copy or adapt a work, they could just go look up the paperwork at the LoC.

In 1976, Congress amended the Copyright Act to eliminate the "formality" of copyright registration. Now, all creative works of human authorship were copyrighted "at the moment of fixation" – the instant you drew, typed, wrote, filmed, or recorded them. From a toddler's nursery-school finger-painting to a graffiti mural on a subway car, every creative act suddenly became an article of property.

But whose property? That was on you to figure out, before you could copy, publish, perform, or preserve the work, because without registration, permissions had to start with a scavenger hunt for the person who could grant it. Congress simultaneously enacted a massive expansion of property rights, while abolishing the title registry that spelled out who owned what. As though this wasn't enough, Congress reached back in time and plopped an extra 20 years' onto the copyrights of existing works, even ones whose authors were unknown and unlocatable.

For the next 20 years, creative workers, archivists, educators and fans struggled in the face of this regime of unknowable property rights. After decades of well-documented problems, Congress acted again: they made it worse.

In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, AKA the Copyright Term Extension Act. The 1998 Act tacked another 20 years onto copyright terms, but not just for works that were still in copyright. At the insistence of Disney, Congress actually yanked works out of the public domain – works that had been anthologized, adapted and re-issued – and put them back into copyright for two more decades. Copyright stretched to the century-plus "life plus 70 years" term. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years.

So many of my comrades in the fight for the public domain were certain that this would happen again in 2018. In 2010, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart and I got into a friendly email argument because he was positive that in 2018, Congress would set fire to the public domain again. When I insisted that there was no way this could happen given the public bitterness over the 1998 Act, he told me I was being naive, but said he hoped that I was right.

Michael didn't live to see it, but in 2019, the public domain opened again. It was an incredible day:

https://archive.org/details/ClosingKeynoteForGrandReopeningOfThePublicDomainCoryDoctorowAtInternetArchive

No one has done a better job of chronicling the fortunes of our fragile, beautiful, bounteous public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Every year from 2010-2019, Boyle and Jenkins chronicled the works that weren't entering the public domain because of the 1998 Act, making sure we knew what had been stolen from our cultural commons. In so many cases, these works disappeared before their copyrights expired, for example, the majority of silent films are lost forever.

Then, in 2019, Jenkins and Boyle got to start cataloging the works that were entering the public domain, most of them from 1923 (copyright is complicated, so not everything that entered the public domain in 2019 was from that year):

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

Every year since, they've celebrated a new bumper crop. Last year, we got Mickey Mouse!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

In addition to numerous other works – by Woolf, Hemingway, Doyle, Christie, Proust, Hesse, Milne, DuBois, Frost, Chaplin, Escher, and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Now, 2024 was a fantastic year for the public domain, but – as you'll see in the 2025 edition of the Public Domain Day post – 2025 is even better:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

So what's entering the public domain this year? Well, for one thing, there's more of the stuff from last year, which makes sense: if Hemingway's first books entered the PD last year, then this year, we'll the books he wrote next (and this will continue every year until we catch up with Hemingway's tragic death).

There are some big hits from our returning champions, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse and A Farewell to Arms from Hemingway. Jenkins and Boyle call particular attention to one book: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, its title taken from a public domain work by Shakespeare. As they write, Faulkner spoke eloquently about the nature of posterity and culture:

[Humanity] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The main attraction on last year's Public Domain Day was the entry of Steamboat Willie – the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – into the public domain. This year, we're getting a dozen new Mickey cartoons, including the first Mickey talkie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_(film_series)#1929

Those 12 shorts represent a kind of creative explosion for the Disney Studios. Those early Mickey cartoons were, each and every one, a hybrid of new copyrighted works and the public domain. The backbone of each Mickey short was a beloved, public domain song, with Mickey's motion synched to the beat (animators came to call this "mickey mousing"). In 1929, there was a huge crop of public domain music that anyone could use this way:

Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.

These were recent compositions, songs that were written and popularized in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents who took their kids to the movies to see Mickey shorts like "The Barn Dance," "The Opry House" and "The Jazz Fool." The ability to plunder this music at will was key to the success of Mickey Mouse and Disney. Think of all the Mickeys and Disneys we've lost by locking up the public domain for the past half-century!

This year, we're getting some outstanding new old music for our public domain. The complexities of copyright terms mean that compositions from 1929 are entering the public domain, but we're only getting recordings from 1924. 1924's outstanding recordings include:

George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson’s 1924 recording is of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

While the compositions include Singin' in the Rain, Ain't Misbehavin', An American in Paris, Bolero, (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Happy Days Are Here Again, What Is This Thing Called, Love?, Am I Blue? and many, many more.

On the art front, we're getting Salvador Dali's earliest surrealist masterpieces, like Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator. Dali's contemporaries are not so lucky: after a century, the early history of the works of Magritte are so muddy that it's impossible to say whether they are in or out of copyright.

But there's plenty of art with clearer provenance that we can welcome into the public domain this year, most notably, Popeye and Tintin. As the first Popeye and Tintin comics go PD, so too do those characters.

The idea that a fictional character can have a copyright separate from the stories they appear in is relatively new, and it's weird and very stupid. Courts have found that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character (Batman won't enter the public domain until 2035).

Copyright for characters is such a muddy, gross, weird idea. The clearest example of how stupid this gets comes from Sherlock Holmes, whose canon spans many years. The Doyle estate – a rent-seeking copyright troll – claimed that Holmes wouldn't enter the public domain until every Holmes story was in the public domain (that's this year, incidentally!).

This didn't fly, so their next gambit was to claim copyright over those aspects of Holmes's character that were developed later in the stories. For example, they claimed that Holmes didn't show compassion until the later stories, and, on that basis, sued the creators of the Enola Holmes TV show for depicting a gender-swapped Sherlock who wasn't a total dick:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/22/lawsuit-copyright-warmer-sherlock-holmes-dismissed-enola-holmes

As the Enola lawyers pointed out in their briefs, this was tantamount to a copyright over emotions: "Copyright law does not allow the ownership of generic concepts like warmth, kindness, empathy, or respect, even as expressed by a public domain character – which, of course, belongs to the public, not plaintiff."

When Mickey entered the public domain last year, Jenkins did an excellent deep dive into which aspects of Mickey's character and design emerged when:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Jenkins uses this year's entry of Tintin and Popeye into the public domain to further explore the subject of proprietary characters.

Even though copyright extends to characters, it only covers the "copyrightable" parts of those characters. As the Enola lawyers wrote, the generic character traits (their age, emotional vibe, etc) are not protected. Neither is anything "trivial" or "minuscule" – for example, if a cartoonist makes a minor alteration to the way a character's pupils or eyes are drawn, that's a minor detail, not a copyrightable element.

The biggest impediment to using public domain characters isn't copyright, it's trademark. Trademark is very different from copyright: foundationally, trademark is the right to protect your customers from being deceived by your competitors. Coke can use trademark to stop Pepsi from selling its sugary drinks in Coke cans – not because it owns the word "Coke" or the Coke logo, but because it has been deputized to protect Coke drinkers from being tricked into buying not-Coke, thinking that they're getting the true Black Waters of American Imperialism.

Companies claim trademarks over cartoon characters all the time, and license those trademarks on food, clothing, toys, and more (remember Popeye candy cigarettes?).

Indeed, Hearst Holdings claims a trademark over Popeye in many traditional categories, like cartoons, amusement parks, ads and clothes. They're also in the midst of applying for a Popeye NFT trademark (lol).

Does that mean you can't use Popeye in any of those ways? Nope! All you need to do is prominently mention that your use of Popeye is unofficial, not associated with Hearst, and dispel any chance of confusion. A unanimous Supreme Court decision (in Dastar) affirm your right to do so. You can also use Popeye in the title of your unauthorized Popeye comic, thanks to a case called Rogers v Grimaldi.

This all applies to Tintin, too – a big deal, given that Tintin is managed by a notorious copyright bully who delights in cruelly terrorizing fan artists. Tintin is joined in the public domain by Buck Rogers, another old-timey character whose owners are scumbag rent-seekers.

Congress buried the public domain alive in 1976, and dumped a load of gravel over its grave in 1998, but miraculously, we've managed to exhume the PD, and it has been revived and is showing signs of rude health.

2024 saw the blockbuster film adaptation of Wicked, based on the public domain Oz books. It also saw the publication of James, a celebrated retelling of Twain's Huck Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick.

This is completely normal. It's how art was made since time immemorial. The 40 year experiment in life without a public domain is at an end, and not a minute too soon.

You can piece together a complete-as-possible list of 2025's public domain (including the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts, Disney's Skeleton Dance, and Del Ruth's Gold Diggers of Broadway) here:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

[tswaney17]

Resharing this because, apparently, it still needs to be said. 🙄🙄

For the love of god, please stop putting Elain’s arc on Azriel! It’s NOT about HIS choice. It IS about HERS. Elain, who has had every decision made for her. Elain who has never gotten to voice what she wanted. Elain, who’s own mother used her as a pawn to wed off one day so they could live well.

ELAIN’S ARC IS ABOUT MAKING A CHOICE FOR HERSELF. 👏👏👏

There is no love triangle between Elain, Az, and Gwyn. There is no love square between them three and Lucien. It is Elain’s love triangle between Az and Lucien. Her choice between what the Cauldron shoved at her or what she truly wants.

Ship whoever you want. But stop changing the narrative that the next book is about Azriel picking between two women (because really? Ew.).

Elain: the female who’s never had a choice.

Azriel: the male who’s never been chosen.

It’s literally right there!!

Fuck, okay. Rant over.