#WHICH. I MEAN EVERY DISCWORLD BOOK I’VE READ SO FAR HAS CHANGED MY LIFE.

[syl-stormblessed]

I’M ABOUT TO START READING NIGHT WATCH EVERYONE WISH ME LUCK

[marxonculture]

Personhood and Genre Fiction | My 2024 Reading Journey So Far

I’ve been working as a Library Assistant for six months now, and boy has it been a massive jolt to my love of reading. It’s hard not to be excited about digging into a book when you’re surrounded by them all day, and I credit that feeling with being responsible for my reading more books for pleasure in the first four months of 2024 than I have in the previous seven years combined. As I reach a modest milestone in my reading for the year, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve observed to be a common theme among the books that have most captured my imagination since January. With the world having been in a particularly fraught state over the last few years, and an increasingly prevalent trend of groups of people being actively dehumanised by those with power and influence, it’s been quite an emotional experience for me to discover that the books which have most captured my imagination this year have been about personhood and what defines it.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

The first book I finished this year is one that I think about every day. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a wonderful little novel about who we are at different times, and crucially different places, in our lives. It explores personhood through the lens of fundamental internal change; when we go through seismic changes, do we become different people or are we fundamentally the same?

Clarke uses magical realism and a meticulously well-designed alternate reality/dream world as a means of exploring the evolution of one’s own personhood, as well as an adoration of design, architecture, and place. Piranesi was invigorating for me as a reassurance that it’s okay to redefine oneself at different points in life, and that just because you’re a different person now, that doesn’t mean that the old you ceases to exist.

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett (1996)

Terry Pratchett is so well known for being a satirist, that it’s easy to forget how sincere and moving his work can be. After putting it off for many years, I finally started reading the Discworld books this year, and have been enjoying them immensely, and while I had a great time with the first two books in the City Watch sub-series, it wasn’t until the third entry that one of them really hit me, emotionally.

Feet of Clay is about golems (‎גּוֹלֶם). For those unfamiliar with Jewish folklore, golems are anthropomorphic clay constructs ordered to obey the commands of their master and animated via the inscription of the Hebrew word for truth on its head. Pratchett’s golems are slightly different in that they are brought to life by placing governing words inside their heads. Pratchett uses this to remarkable effect to build a story of self-ownership and self-determination. It was especially moving to me to see Jewishness used in this way – as something empowering rather than grotesque, which is a real rarity in Western fantasy writing.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (2016)

The last book I wanted to talk about here was this second entry in Becky Chambers’ beautifully humane, space opera anthology, The Wayfarers series. A Closed and Common Orbit centres on two protagonists, one an AI learning to adapt to a life passing as a human in an illegal ‘body kit’, and the other a clone, bred for factory work, trying to help the AI make a life for herself.

As with her first book, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, what characterises Chambers’ writing is her deep love for her characters, and the way that love manifests itself in this book is nothing short of miraculous. Sidra and Pepper’s parallel journeys are not merely about convincing others of their personhood, but rather convincing themselves. A Closed and Common Orbit is about finding a way of living where you feel most like yourself, learning to feel that you deserve for your needs to be met, and accepting that your loved ones see you as a person, even in times when you don’t.

All of these books have meant a great deal to me during a time where I have had to completely re-evaluate the ways in which I see myself. Genre fiction is not necessarily where I expected to find this feeling of personhood and recognition, but it’s especially exciting to have done so. There’s nothing quite like finding deep meaning in something you have engaged with purely for entertainment, and I hope to continue to do so as the year goes on.

[cricketnationrise]

quarantine reads part 4

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

76. The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan: book 3 of the brothers sinister romance series. you absolutely DO NOT need to read these in order. i certainly didn’t. also. its a romance novel. there is sex.

77. Joy: And 52 Other Very Short Stories by Erin McGraw: short story collection. some of these are less than a page long. ideal reading for only having like 5 mins.

78. One Good Earl Deserves a Lover by Sarah MacLean: did i get this from the library because of the title? yes. is it a fantastic story? also yes. book 2 in the rules of scoundrels series. romance novel. there is sex.

79. The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman: magical library world at the heart of multiple universe has agents that retrieve unique works. featured universe is a sort of victorian england plus elves and werewolves and vampires and dragons and magic and this book is FANTASTIC. still need to get the others because IT IS A SERIES BUCKLE UP BUTTERCUP

80. The Rogue Pirate’s Bride by Shana Galen: book 3 of the sons of the revolution series. look i like romance novels. i especially like that you don’t have to read them in order. its a romance novel. there is sex. also PIRATES and the leads saving each other’s lives.

81. The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History by Nathalia Holt: non-fiction look at the history of disney animation via the women who worked there. lots of details i didn’t know. chapters are movies rather than years.

82. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett: bit of a misnomer since the guy is straight up stealing rare books with credit card fraud. he just thinks he’s being gentlemanly by amassing these books. it started off as a feature article and it shows.

83. We’re Here, We’re Here by KM Szpara: tor.com short story, 2 members of a boy band fall in love. management doesn’t like that so starts to control/manipulate the implants they put iN THEIR VOICE BOXES AHHH

84. The Night Soil Salvagers by Gregory Norman Bossert: tor.com short story, cool story telling form with in-world songs/poetry/recipes, very poetic writing

85. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt: two brothers are hitmen get hired for a job. one of the brothers is really excited, the other starts to contemplate a different life, gold rush era california/western USA, horses, violent, seriously at least one person is killed in every chapter. at one point they burn down a whole lodge. cw: harm to animals, murder, starvation

86. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin: classic piece of writing about the Black Male experience in the united states

87. The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick: lonely old man goes on scavenger hunt to find the meanings behind the charms on a bracelet he finds in his dead wife’s closet. travels all around UK and paris and makes friends near and far.

88. The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by HG Parry: some people can read characters out of books. i repeat. CHARACTERS CAN COME OUT OF THEIR BOOKS. theres a whole diagonalley esq space that houses characters that can’t go back. chaos and danger ensue when uriah heep refuses to go back into his book. magic!

89. Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett: #11 in the discworld series, DEATH gets tired of doing all the things and decides to retire.

90. Death and What Comes Next by Terry Pratchett:  discworld short story

91. Love and Other Foreign Words by Erin McCahan: girls life is about to change when her sister is proposed to, very gifted, coming of age, crush on her teacher, endgame is her/her best friend who is a guy and has clearly been pining THE WHOLE TIME

92. Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder:  i love the little house books and this was the first non-fictionalized account of her life i’ve read. the introduction by the editor was especially cool/helpful to read, lots of photos and drawings

93. Exhalation by Ted Chiang: this might be my favorite book of all quarantine. and i read a lot of books. a collection of short stories that all fucked me up, but in a good way? title story contains the sentence, “It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.” which like, how dare you sir

94. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell: book 2 in the simon snow series, which is a fantasy series created by rowell in her novel Fangirl. She then proceeded to write fanfic of this already fictional series. i’m in love with the meta. 3rd book out in 2021.

95. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward: set in mississippi before/during/after hurricane katrina hits, follows one family through the eyes of the daughter. tw: sexual assault, dog fighting, harm to dogs, death of dog

96. The Will of the Empress by Tamora Pierce: was still doing my Emelan reread. 4 protags reunite to help out Sandry as she goes to Namorn to deal with her estate and her cousin the empress. whether they will be allowed to leave is another story

97. The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner: book 3 in the queen’s thief series, seriously, go back and read from the beginning. political machinations of the king from a (Mostly) outside POV. the gods are always closer than you think

98. The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson: a very Spanish vibe fantasy novel. book 1 in a series. chosen one trope. new queen stumbles into the resistance. magic!

99. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley: first book in a mystery series. a young teen girl is super into chemistry in 1950′s england countryside. someone is murdered in her garden. she tries to figure out what happened because her dad is still shell shocked. cw: kidnapping, harm to children

100. A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White: first in the salvagers trilogy. motley crew turns into found family on a space ship. in this world almost everyone has magic. older female protagonist. queer representation out the wazoo, SPACE. boots just wants to brew her beer and be left alone.

[ice-connoisseur]

ten faves

Rules: name ten favorite characters from ten different things (tv, movies, books, etc.)

This came from @thegirlwholied nearly...3 weeks...ago now, but I am slow, and indecisive, and time basically has no meaning at the moment anyway, so. 

1.       Sally Lockhart (the Sally Lockhart quartet)

First name I wrote down.  I met Sally in my early teens and I’ve never quite given up on wanting to grow up to be her. I love each and every member of Garland and Lockhart a ridiculous amount (and my love of the found family trope can probably be traced back to their door), but Sally, with her grit and her stubbornness and her fierce indepenance, captured me in something special from that moment in the first paragraph of the first book when all I knew was her name and that she was about to kill a man. 

2.       Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice)

I considered shying away from the stereotypical here, but that would just be lying to myself as well as anyone else.  I relate more to Jane, or Charlotte Lucas, or even Mr Darcy – at least in terms of social awkwardness, not finances, sadly – but, like him, I can’t remember the first time I fell in love with Lizzy Bennet, I was in the middle of it before I even knew I had begun. 

(Jennifer Ehle probably had something to do with it though.)

3.       Hermione Granger (Harry Potter)

Look, I was an introverted, bookish, rule-abiding adolescent, and Hermione was suddenly someone I could recognise myself in.  I wanted to be Ginny (and Sally, and Lizzy, and several others on this list); I already was Hermione, in a lot of ways, and she made that a bit more ok.

4.      Carrot Ironfoundersson (Discworld)

I wanted to put a Discworld character in here, and I’m a little bit sad at myself for not picking a woman – especially since this is inadvertently turning out to be a very female-heavy list.  I even started the process of trying to choose between Sybil Ramkin, Tiffany Aching, Adora Belle Dearheart, and Angua, to name but a few.

But the thing is, I made the fatel error of first trying to read the Discworld in publication order, and it took me years to venture any further than the first 50 pages of Colour of Magic.  Even in later books the Wizards just.  Aren’t my thing.

And then, at some point – and I’m a bit hazy on the when, to be honest – I picked up Guards Guards and spent the entire book blinking at Carrot, reading and re-reading; I kept wanting to turn to someone else and nudge and point, because is this guy for real?! And then, again, a page later, for completely different reasons and in completely different tones, is this guy for real AGAIN?!  Terry Pratchett’s books are richly populated with wonderfully rounded, flawed, individual characters, and at first glance Carrot is comparatively straightforward. I hope I never lose that quiet moment of glee I feel at realising that, of course, he really, really isn’t. 

5.       Titty Walker (Swallows and Amazons)

Consider Titty a bit of a catch-all for the tomboy girls who filled my childhood reading – George Kirrin, Maia Fielding, Kit Russell and the rest – but she’s the one I thought of first.   I was not an adventurous child - I am not an adventurous adult, for that matter – but these were the books that meant I could be.  I think Titty’s adventures always felt the most tangible, somehow, and the image of her tacking up the field home to read her father’s telegram cemented something in me at an impressionable age that I don’t think I’ve ever quite shaken off.

6.       Leslie Knope (Parks and Recreation)

Again, I love each and every character on this show, but Leslie Knope; annoying, overbearing, forthright Leslie Knope, who cares so damn much about everything that she makes everyone else care more too, who never once considers being anyone other than who she is, who makes mistakes and faces up to fixing them, who will always, always use a favour to help other people…Leslie Knope, folks.  I love her and I like her. 

7.       Rose Tyler (Doctor Who)

It’s a pretty close call between Rose and Donna Noble, to be honest, but Rose got there first.   Unapologetically, unashamedly working class Rose, from the council estate, with no A-levels and no prospects and no expectations that anyone will ever give a damn about her, who saves the world in so many different ways, who grows up and laughs and loves and changes but never in the fundamentals of who she is – brilliant, compassionate, brave.   Her life is fantastic because she marches through it punching literal holes in the universe to make it so. 

8.       Lyra Silvertongue (His Dark Materials)

Lyra, who loved her world of Oxford rooftops, and ran from it.  Lyra who loved Roger, and killed him.  Lyra who loved Pan, and left him.  Lyra who loved Will, and lost him.  Lyra who lies.  Lyra who left home and came back different, and that was only just the start of her growing up. I’ve been reading Lyra for 20 years and I read her a little bit different every time, but I never love her any less.

9.       Phil Coulson (Marvel Cinematic Universe)

I’m probably stretching things a bit here, because when I say I love Phil Coulson, I’m referring to Phil Coulson of the MCU up to and including 2012, and the subsequent fanon interpretations of him.  I tried Agents of Shield early on and it didn’t stick.  But I saw Avengers Assemble in the cinema with no prior Marvel knowledge (comic or film) and spent the next three days watching the rest of Phase One (hilariously, at the time, five films felt like a lot).  I was in my very early days on Tumblr when #Coulsonlives was a thing, and I still remember the absolute explosion of joy that was.  Every now and again (like right now, actually) I go through a phase of re-reading an unhealthy volume of Clint/Coulson fic – and I do love Clint, and I love Gamora, I love Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanoff and Pepper Potts - and it’s dry, snarky, utterly unflappable who Coulson hooks me every time. 

10.       Georgiana Lestrade (The Least of All Possible Mistakes)

Look, I have a lot of feelings about every person on this list and quite a few who aren’t, but if I had to pick the one who felt the most…real, I suppose…then Georgiana Lestrade is my easy answer.  She’s the person I would always want fighting my corner.  George has no false ideals, no delusions about either herself or her world; she is completely grounded in herself and her London – which is almost a character in its own right, one of my very favourite things about Pru’s writing.

Competent, practical, fiercely unphased George, who carries a taser and throws stationary at her underlings; who is gloriously, unashamedly pragmatic; nearing forty and glad of it; as honest and self-aware of her own nature as I think a person can be; and above all else who is damn good at her job.  She might give one hoot about what other people think of her, but she’s certainly not going to waste a second.  That she is surrounded by wild, dangerously intelligent men is almost incidental, but she is, and that is a part of her story – though far from the whole of it - and she takes no more shit from them, never doubts her own right or ability to stand beside them, than she does any other person. 

One of the saddest truths of my fandom life is that Pru will never finish the Regency spy AU of this AU, and I mourn this far more often than is healthy XD

***

This was fun and hard in equal measure, and there are so many more I could have listed - Jack Robinson, Violet Baudelaire, Brienne of Tarth, Leia Organa, Theo Hart, to name but a few - but I’m as happy with it as I’ll ever be.

Tagging @firesign23, @kiraziwrites, @angel-deux-writes and @ajoblotofjunk, and also anyone else who wants to give this a go, because I would love to read more of them. 

[the-light-followed]

MORT (1987) [DISC. #4; DEATH #1]

“‘Why did you have to save me?’  The answer worried him.  He thought about it as he squelched all the way home.  …As he lay shivering in bed it settled in his dreams like an iceberg. In the midst of his fever he muttered, ‘What did he mean, FOR LATER?’”

Rating: 6/10

Standalone Okay: Yes

Read First: Sure, why not!

Discworld Books Masterpost: [x]

* * * * * * * * * *

I’m just going to get it out of the way right off the bat: as much as I hate to admit it, the Death books are my least favorite of the Discworld sub-series.  (I mean, I still love them, a lot, but I don’t love them as much.)  And I know, I know—Death is an excellent character, and I love all of his cameos in the other Discworld books.  I love Susan Sto Helit, because I’m a sensible human lady with eyes and I recognize a brilliant, beautiful powerhouse of a woman when I read about her.  But the Death books just…aren’t my favorite.

And it’s doubly strange that I still think that’s true, even though Reaper Man might be my favorite Discworld book, depending on the day.  It’s definitely top three.

Mort, though, is—kind of boring.  Actually, no.  Let me rephrase that, without the italics this time: Mort is kind of boring.  The story itself is unique, and the concept is fantastically interesting, and I’m almost sad about that.  Because Mort, the character, is unimpressive.  I spend half the time reading this book wanting to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.  It might just be that he’s a teenage idiot—I do sort of have the same feeling with him (and especially all his interactions with Princess Keli) that I do any time I’m forced to read Romeo and Juliet. It’s a sort of constant, high-pitched, internal shriek of rage and distress.

Stop that!  Stop what you’re doing right now!  Grow some common goddamn sense!!

But he never does.  I am continually disappointed.

Even beyond his regrettable life choices, the kid is just dull.  Some early text flavor we get for Mort includes gems such as: “Mort was interested in lots of things.  Why people’s teeth fitted together so neatly, for example.  He’d given that one a lot of thought.  Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful.  He knew the standard explanation, which somehow didn’t seem satisfying.”

Yikes, buddy.  Yikes. Might as well be interested in watching paint dry.

It’s wild to me that of everyone and everything involved in Mort, Pratchett picked—well, Mort—to be his main character.  Mort, who complains that he’s not an ordinary human being living an ordinary human life.  He’s got a super awesome thing going for him, given that he’s Death’s actual apprentice, and he wants to be normal and boring?  By the time he makes this complaint, he’s already messed up reality and, frankly, a very easy job by being a lovestruck twit over a girl whose eyes he met exactly once across a crowded room—just before her father was brutally murdered.  He’s clearly already the king of bad decision-making.  It’s baffling that he wants to be even more boring, too.

We’ve got so many cool and interesting characters that we could have focused on instead!  Actual, literal Death!  Ysabell, his immortally teenage daughter, who’s been sixteen for thirty-five years!  We’ve even got Albert, a formerly great and terrible wizard so terrified of death (and Death) that he chose to become Death’s eternal servant rather than die!  Any one of those would make a cool as hell main character.  We could have had it all, but instead we focus on a dunderheaded teenager, distracted by hormones and totally lacking in common sense.

I get that Mort is acting as a sort of audience surrogate, coming from a vanilla human background, learning as he goes, and only just beginning to move in the occult and magical circles.  But I would be about one hundred million times more interested in following Ysabell’s journey from normal human orphan to the never-aging daughter of Death, both rescued and trapped by her father in his land outside of reality, where time never moves and there’s no one to interact with except the stories of the outside world as they write themselves in the library.

She’s a cool goth romantic trapped in the body of a sixteen-year-old for decades.  Her favorite thing to do is read real, historical accounts of love stories where everyone dies horribly.  Death is her dad and why is this book not about her?

Mort, I’d argue, doesn’t really get interesting himself until he and Death start picking up some of each other’s traits.  And even then, if Mort-going-inhuman is cool, it’s overshadowed entirely by Death becoming a person rather than simply an anthropomorphic personification.  It’s, just, damn.  Death’s arc is beautiful and poignant and has lasting implications for the Discworld. Meanwhile, Mort’s whole…thing…will soon be fridged so that his daughter, Susan Sto Helit, can begin her reign as unstoppable badass and also queen of my heart.

Susan is great.  On second thought, I wish this book was about Susan.

Conceptually, everything about this story is wonderful.  I love the plot elements, the concept itself is so unique and executed well, and Mort does an amazing job of setting up the rest of the Death series within the Discworld.  It’s impossible to read Mort and not think about what it means to be a person—recognizing that everyone must and will die, that there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but also knowing that fighting back against that inevitability is built into us on a fundamental level.

Not yet.  Not today. Fairness might not matter; justice might not matter.  But part of what makes us human is that we think they should.  We want them to.  

And, by the end of Mort, Death agrees.

Part of the reason I keep coming back to Mort is that I do like seeing the seeds of what Death will become in later Discworld books. Mort, Ysabell, and Albert—and eventually Susan as well—all give Death the experience and the space to become more than what he was meant to be.  Rather than just an anthropomorphic personification, just a thing, Death becomes a person.  He has wants and desires and needs, and he acts on them, sometimes despite the fact that it causes problems with The Duty—his literal, actual reason to exist.  He grows and changes.  He cares.

Compared to the Death we see in The Colour of Magic, who seems relentlessly antagonistic to poor Rincewind—who implies, several times over, that he is actually, actively, trying to kill people himself—the Death we meet at the beginning of Mort is already a relief. He’s perfectly neutral, not threatening at all.  He’s an entity who performs a necessary service without any sort of emotion at all.  But by the end of Mort, the Death we see is—well, I find him flat-out comforting.

It’s the little things.  He goes fishing.  He makes jokes, even if they’re creepy and morbid and so specific to his field that most people don’t understand them at all.  He likes cats.  He’s a good cook.

[Death’s Glory, by Paul Kidby, off his website. Shit, I love his official Discworld art. This, I think, shows his attempt at making a fishing lure that Pratchett describes in a way that seems—nightmarish at best.]

And it’s the big things, too.  Death makes mistakes.  He plays hooky from his work, which is a bit more impressive when you remember that it’s the literal reason for his existence.  He knows right from wrong, and when it comes down to it, I think it’s less important that he chooses to do what’s right over the letter of the law (though I also appreciate that he does), and more important that he can choose at all.

“THERE IS NO JUSTICE,” Death likes to say, “JUST ME.” But when Death is a person, and on top of that, a good person, it almost feels like the same thing.

You have to love the see-saw of Mort and Death going wrong in equal but opposite ways, both of them fascinating (and horrifying). Mort starts losing his humanity as he picks up aspects of Death, leaving him with more and more of the power and knowledge, but none of the steadiness and impartiality that Death has shown so far. And as Death gains humanity, gains personhood, he starts to feel and to understand those feelings.  

It’s beautiful to see, but it’s also desperately sad.  I think it’s almost cruel to give an emotional range to an undying being who must be there for the end of every life, who must be alone for most of time.

But he gets the good things out of existence, too. Over the course of the Death books, he seems to think it’s worth it more often than it’s not.  So it’s a good thing that even after everything’s sorted out and the humans have been given back their normal lives, Death keeps what he has taken.

One of my favorite quotes:

“WHAT IS IT CALLED WHEN YOU FEEL WARM AND CONTENT AND WISH THINGS WOULD STAY THAT WAY?  ‘I guess you’d call it happiness,’ said Harga.  Inside the tiny, cramped kitchen, strata’d with the grease of decades, Death spun and whirled, chopping, slicing and flying.  His skillet flashed through the fetid steam.  He’d opened the door to the cold night air, and a dozen neighborhood cats had strolled in, attracted by the bowls of milk and meat—some of Harga’s best, if he’d known—that had been strategically placed around the floor. Occasionally Death would pause in his work and scratch one of them behind the ears.  ‘Happiness,’ he said, and puzzled at the sound of his own voice.”

While Death moves more and more towards being a person, Mort goes the opposite way, and I, reluctantly, have to agree he’s right to give it all up and go back to being purely human.  As conceptually cool and interesting as it is to be apprenticed to Death, to be more powerful and more real than any other living person, people aren’t meant to live like that, and certainly not meant to live forever.  Mort understands that.

As Death says, “YOU COULD HAVE HAD ETERNITY.”  

And in reply: “‘I know,’ said Mort.  ‘I’ve been very lucky.’”

Honestly, in the course of writing this all out, I’ve almost talked myself back around to really loving this book.  It’s got everything we all want from a Discworld novel: exquisitely crafted and delivered puns, punchy and memorable quotes, unique and well-written characters in a unique and well-crafted setting, a perfect blend of humorous absurdity and heart-wrenching sincerity.  And unlike the first few Discworld books (especially The Colour of Magic, but I’d include all of the previous three novels), Pratchett is clinging less to established High Fantasy tropes and relying more on Discworld-specific flavor. Ankh-Morpork feels more and more like a real place with every visit, and even the other regions of the Disc come across less as never-explored, baffling and bizarre foreign lands (Here There Be Dragons!) and more as places that really do exist, even if we haven’t seen them personally just yet.

And, if nothing else, Mort is so, so important to the rest of the Discworld books from this point on because it establishes exactly what and who Death is on the Discworld.  He’s a person.  He is, at his core, good.  And maybe, as Death says, “THERE IS NO JUSTICE, JUST ME,” but I think it’s incredibly reassuring while reading the series to know that no matter how badly things go wrong, no matter how much danger our Discworld heroes are in or how nerve-wracking things get, the absolute worst thing that could happen is that they end up in Death’s hands.  And Death will treat them as they deserve.

I will always appreciate Mort for that peace of mind.  (And I can appreciate Mort for it, too, even if I still want to grab that ding-dong dumbass by the shoulders and just shake—ahem.  Sorry.)

* * * * * * * * * *

Side Notes:

I need everyone to read this quote about a party at the Patrician’s palace and join me in my confusion: “In fact some two hundred of the Patrician’s guests were now staggering and kicking their way through the Serpent Dance, a quaint Morporkian folkway which consisted of getting rather drunk, holding the waist of the person in front, and then wobbling and giggling uproariously in a long crocodile that wound through as many rooms as possible, preferably ones with breakables in, while kicking one leg vaguely in time with the beat, or at least in time with some other beat.”

Vetinari let them do WHAT

Sure, he’s not technically Vetinari yet, he’s never been named at all, but that’s still proto-Vetinari’s guests at proto-Vetinari’s house and he’s letting them do WHAT

Rincewind pops up briefly in this book, serving as an assistant to the Librarian.  Is this an important cameo?  No, probably not.  Does it make me smile down at my book like I’m seeing a long-absent friend, even if there’s only been one book so far in the series that does not include him? Absolutely, yes.  Hi, Rincewind!  Missed you, buddy!  See you in a minute, Sourcery is coming up next!

Ysabell and Mort have such a strange love story.

“‘I don’t want to get married to anyone yet,’ he added, suppressing a fleeting mental picture of the princess.  ‘And certainly not to you, no offense meant.’  ‘I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on the Disc,’ she said sweetly.”

“‘Obviously we shouldn’t get married, if only for the sake of the children.’  Mort nodded.”

“DAUGHTER, EXPLAIN YOURSELF.  WHY DID YOU AID THIS FOOL?  Ysabell curtsied nervously.  ‘I—love him, Father.  I think.’ ‘You do?’ said Mort, astonished.  ‘You never said!’  ‘There didn’t seem to be time,’ said Ysabell.”

Teenagers. Honestly.

We get a lot more discussion about belief and reality in this one—Mort himself kind of embodies the point as he becomes “more real” and begins to stroll through walls, or doors, or arrows.  Nobody can see Death wandering around the mundane world (with the exception of cats and the magical community) because nobody expects to see him; they don’t believe he’ll be there, and so they don’t see him.  Princess Keli died, according to history, so even though Mort “saved” her, history (and the population of her kingdom) start to write her out.  Belief = reality.  We change the world with the force of that belief.

Favorite Quotes:

“I?  KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT.  PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT’S THEIR BUSINESS.  I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON.  AFTER ALL, IT’D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN’T IT?”

“Let’s just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colorful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.”

“‘How do you get all those coins?’ asked Mort.  IN PAIRS.”

“‘Are you going to send me home?’ he said.  Death reached down and swung him up behind the saddle.  BECAUSE YOU SHOWED COMPASSION?  NO.  I MIGHT HAVE DONE IF YOU HAD SHOWN PLEASURE.  BUT YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE.  ‘What’s that?’  A SHARP EDGE.”

“They’re always telling people how much better it’s going to be when they’re dead.  We tell them it could be pretty good right here if only they’d put their minds to it.”

“It had been a long afternoon.  The mountaineer had held on to his icy handhold until the last moment and the execute had called Mort a lackey of the monarchist state.  Only the old lady of 103, who had gone to her reward surrounded by her sorrowing relatives, had smiled at him and said he was looking a little pale.”

“Logic would have told Mort that here was his salvation…Logic would have told him that interfering with the process a second time around would only make things worse. Logic would have said all that, if only Logic hadn’t taken the night off too.”

“‘Why did you have to save me?’  The answer worried him.  He thought about it as he squelched all the way home.  …As he lay shivering in bed it settled in his dreams like an iceberg. In the midst of his fever he muttered, ‘What did he mean, FOR LATER?’”

“‘I mean, friend or foe?’ he stuttered, trying to avoid Mort’s gaze.  ‘Which would you prefer?’ he grinned.  It wasn’t quite the grin of his master, but it was a pretty effective grin and didn’t have a trace of humor in it.  The guard sagged with relief, and stood aside.  ‘Pass, friend,’ he said.”

“The sword burned icy cold in his hand, dragging him on in a dance that would not end until there was nothing left alive.  And that time came, and Mort stood alone except for Death, who said, ‘A fine job, boy.’ And Mort said, MORT.”

“‘I think there’s something you ought to know,’ said the princess.  THERE IS? said Death.  (That was a cinematic trick adapted for print.  Death wasn’t talking to the princess.  He was actually in his study, talking to Mort.  But it was quite effective, wasn’t it?  It’s probably called a fast dissolve, or a crosscut/zoom. Or something.  An industry where a senior technician is called a Best Boy might call it anything.)”

[p-and-p-admin]

Interview taken from The Severus Snape and Hermione Granger Shipping Fan Group.  (Admin approved)

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/199718373383293/

Hello Loten and welcome to Behind the Quill, thank-you for letting us get to know you a little better.

Many of our members will know your works with Post Tenebras, Lux and Chasing the Sun being considered classics for the SS/HG pairing.

Thanks for the invitation, hello everyone.

What's the story behind your pen name?

There's a werewolf novel, Bareback by Kit Whitfield. In one scene a character is looking at the moon and mentions that in Old English poetry they would use the term loten to describe a night when the moon was bright enough to see by. I haven't been able to verify it since the author may well have invented it, but I love nights like that and I liked the word, and the rest is history.

Which Harry Potter character do you identify with the most?

I get asked this a lot, actually. There is no one character, I don't think - I identify to some extent with most of the characters that feature more frequently in my fics, or I wouldn't be able to write them (the exception is Lucius, as far as I can tell he's truly fictional and not derived from anything in me). I probably have more in common with Hermione than the others, at least my version of her, but it's hard to say for sure.

Do you have a favourite genre to read? (not in fic, just in general)

Fantasy all the way. My mother nagged me into reading The Hobbit when I was around seven or eight, and that was it. I do read other genres but a good 85 per cent of my reading material almost certainly has magic or dragons somewhere in it.

Do you have a favourite "classic" novel?

I have a few. I like all of Austen's works, my favourite is probably Sense & Sensibility. I've just finished re-reading Jane Eyre. I like Elizabeth Gaskell's novels as well.

At what age did you start writing?

My mother is one of those parents who hoards everything her offspring do, and among the boxes of paper is a short story I wrote and illustrated when I was maybe five, about a flying shoe (imaginatively titled The Magic Clog). And when I was six I had a poem published in an anthology of children's verse (I don't remember how that came about; I think my school was asked to get involved, had a competition and picked out a few that ended up in the book) - my contribution was a piece of free verse about a dripping tap. So it's something I've always done, though I started taking it more seriously as a teenager developing roleplay characters.

How did you get into writing fanfiction?

My best friend when I was around thirteen was into fanfiction, she wrote Stargate SG-1 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fiction at the time. I don't know how she got into it herself but she introduced me to reading it, though it was a year or two before I found the courage to try writing any. My early stuff was... not very good, and I will never admit to being the author of any of it now!

What's the best theme you've ever come across in a fic? Is it a theme represented in your own works?

Oh, that's a hard one. I like seeing consequences being explored - often authors will give a character the backstory or motivation they need them to have for the sake of the plot, but if it's not one of the main characters they won't pay it any more attention after that. When it's done well, I do like stories exploring the realism of just how a character would be affected by what happens to them. It adds a new dimension to their personality, and the psychology behind it is interesting in its own right. We're a product of our experiences, and so are fictional people. I try to show it in my writing as well - why a character does something is as important as the thing itself.

What fandoms are you involved in other than Harry Potter?

I read fics from all sorts of fandoms, but Discworld was where I first started writing (badly). It's a pretty small fandom despite the legions of fans worldwide, so I got to know a few writers there and learned more about what I was doing. Took a break for a while due to personal reasons, and when I returned under this name I started off in the even smaller Tamora Pierce fandom, trying my wings before entering the madness of Harry Potter. These days the Potterverse is still my first love along with the other two, but others include the Wheel of Time, Good Omens and too many smaller ones to list. I don't write for them or anything so active, though.

If you could make one change to canon, what would it be? Do you have a favourite piece of fanon?

Snape surviving, and the HG/SS ship, naturally! Do you listen to music when you write or do you prefer quiet?

Music, or Youtube videos (I watch a lot of Let's Plays), or just having the TV on. I can't concentrate in complete silence, my mind wanders to other things. I also talk to myself if there's no other source of noise and I'm trying to break the habit.

What are your favourite fanfictions of all time?

This would have been far easier to answer a few years ago, but I read less and less fanfiction as time goes by and I don't read Potter fics at all any more. My personal headcanons have developed more and more over the years, and nobody's headcanon is the same as anyone else's, so I end up disagreeing with fics these days because it's not how I would have done it and it makes it difficult to enjoy them.

The best fic I ever read was also the one that introduced me to HG/SS, but at some point, along the way, it was deleted and the author removed their account, and I've never managed to remember the title or pen name to look for it elsewhere. I don't remember the plot either after so long, but the characterisation was absolutely superb and the ship just made so much sense that I never looked back.

Are you a plotter or a pantser? How does that affect your writing process?

A plotter, definitely. I always have a first draft mostly complete before I start uploading anything. Initially, it was just because I realised I was writing longer stories and didn't want to risk hitting writer's block or real-life delays and having to go on hiatus in the middle of uploading a story, but later I realised I preferred it. I don't have to worry about writing myself into a corner or contradicting myself, I can take the time to make sure things are coming across the way I want them to. And it means I never have to force myself to write 'the next chapter' to a deadline - if I don't want to work on whatever comes next, I can jump ahead and write something later in the plot that I do want to work on. I also find it a lot easier to plan a story around a timeline to get the overall pacing right.

What is your writing genre of choice?

I don't really know what you'd call it. Slice of life, I suppose? I like stories about characters rather than about plots.

Which of your stories are you most proud of? Why?

Most of them, in their own way. My Tamora Pierce series, even though they're nothing groundbreaking and even though I know I could write them far better now, because they were the first things I wrote that I felt truly pleased with and because the overwhelmingly positive responses gave me the confidence to keep going, to try for something completely original rather than a retelling, and to venture into a far bigger and much more terrifying fandom.

Post Tenebras Lux, because it's (almost) exactly the story I wanted to tell and (almost) exactly the way I wanted to tell it. Chasing the Sun because it's the best written of anything I've done and I can see how much I've improved over the years, although I prefer the content of PTL. And I'm incredibly proud of the thousands upon thousands of positive and constructive reviews both of them gathered along the way,

I never expected to attract much notice at all and it's been a tremendous help to me both as a confidence boost and helping me see more about how others view storylines and characters in ways that I'd miss. I think overall it's PTL I'm most proud of, with CTS a close second.

Did it unfold as you imagined it or did you find the unexpected cropped up as you wrote? What did you learn from writing it?

Talking about CTS and PTL both, they're more or less the way I imagined them. Sometimes I'd get a review showing me a perspective I'd never considered, and one or two of them ended up having quite a long-running impact. Sometimes I'd reach a point, particularly in CTS, and realise that what I had planned for that part of the story wasn't going to work and I'd end up writing something completely different.

During the writing of both of them I mostly learned about how my brain works and how to organise myself to write at my best - I think I've learned more after they were done; I re-read both of them every year or so and see things I could have done differently and things that work and things I no longer agree with.

How personal is the story to you, and do you think that made it harder or easier to write?

Back to PTL for this one, since most of CTS' plot isn't completely mine. I never planned it to be particularly personal to me; at the time I just wanted to write about my favourite character and give him a better ending than canon did, and enjoy myself telling the story. As I went along and started touching on different subjects it became more personal - I've experienced bullying and depression, amongst other things, though fortunately not on the same scale as the characters I write about. I think it made it both harder and easier; stirring up old memories wasn't particularly pleasant, but it meant less time researching and rewriting those particular parts because it felt more real, to begin with.

What books or authors have influenced you? How do you think that shows in your writing?

That's another hard one. Subconsciously I think almost everything you read influences you at least a little. I tend to divide books into three categories - ones I don't enjoy and don't finish (which is rare but does happen), ones that were good but ultimately forgettable, and ones that deserve to be re-read, and I've probably learned something from almost all of the latter kind.

If I had to name one author it would be Terry Pratchett. His writing spanned such a vast spectrum it blew my mind wide open from the first time I picked up one of his books (I think I was ten or so) and he's still the author I come back to time and time again and find something to enjoy and appreciate no matter what my mood is. He's known for humour but there's so much more in everything he wrote. As for how outside influences show in my writing, I really don't know but I can guarantee they're there.

Do people in your everyday life know you write fanfiction?

Not really. Some of my school friends did, but over the years I've lost touch with all of them. Of my family and current friends, the ones that would understand fanfiction don't share the fandoms I write for, and the others just wouldn't understand the concept. I'm not ashamed of it, I just don't know how to explain it to someone who has no overlap with this world. Some of my online friends know, but half of them I met via my fanfics in the first place, so I'm not sure that counts!

How true for you is the notion of "writing for yourself"?

Where fanfiction is concerned, there's no point doing anything else. If you're trying to make a career out of writing you do have to write for your audience at least to some extent, but one of the joys of something not for profit like fanfiction is that you can tell the stories you want to tell and don't need to impress anyone.

The whole reason PTL exists is that I couldn't find a fic that told the story I wanted to read, so I wrote it myself. CTS primarily exists so I could fix a lot of the parts of canon I had the greatest problems with. The fact that other people agree is amazing and I still get warm fuzzies from every review from someone sharing the same opinion, but that wasn't the point.

Starting out in small fandoms meant I had no expectations for reviews so I never felt the need to try and court them, and every piece of feedback was a pleasant surprise rather than a main motivation. It's also a lot easier and more enjoyable to write for yourself; my other fics are mostly small one-shots based on prompts from other people, and many of them were a real struggle to write.

How important is it for you to interact with your audience? How do you engage with them? Just at the point of publishing? Through social media?

I'd say it's pretty important. I try to answer every signed review where possible, and it's always surprised me when people tell me they weren't expecting it - it seems to be something most fic authors don't do. It never occurred to me not to at least thank someone for taking the time to leave a review, and for those who leave longer reviews with questions or observations or (constructive) criticism I like the chance to explain some of my reasons for a particular decision or to talk about something in the fic or the wider fandom or writing in general.

That said, I don't have much contact with readers outside review responses and FFN messages. I don't really use social media (hence the format of this interview). Nothing against it, but introversion and a lack of much free time (and, it must be said, a little laziness) mean it's not for me at this point in time. I do have a blog but it's not very active.

What would you most like your readers to take away with them when they've finished your stories?

Honestly? I'm happy if someone finishes and thinks 'that was a good read, I enjoyed it'. Anything else is icing on the cake. Sometimes I get lovely messages from people who've been going through rough times and they tell me something in my stories resonated with them and helped them feel a bit better, and that's an incredible feeling. Others tell me they've been inspired to work on their own writing or to read more about a subject I mentioned. Some just want to let me know they've checked out a song or book I referenced or quoted and they liked it. All those are great, but as long as someone likes the story and enjoys reading it, that's enough.

What is the best advice you've received about writing?

The most specifically useful was probably "when you're writing dialogue, read it out loud". Time after time I've done that and realised a piece of a conversation was very awkward and strange and been able to rewrite it. In a more general sense, the best thing I've seen was "don't force it". If you're not in the mood to write something, don't try to, because it'll be far lower quality than if you wait until you're excited to write it down.

What do you do when you hit writer's block?

That ties into the previous question. Usually, I leave that piece of writing alone and either work on something else or move away from writing entirely and give myself a break for a few days to clear my head. Sooner or later something will shake loose and I'll see my way past whatever the problem was. (This usually happens either in the shower or while driving, when I can't do anything about it, because the universe just hates people sometimes!)

Has anything in real life trickled down into your writing?

Oh, absolutely, though I can't give many specific examples. As I mentioned before, my experiences with bullying and depression definitely added an extra dimension to the way I write about those issues, but that's the only obvious thing. I haven't consciously included any specific incidents from my life anywhere in my writing, but I'm sure there are a lot of small things I haven't even noticed. And there are definitely some details that are me, such as certain characters' music tastes (or a preference for black forest gateau...)

Do you have any stories in the works? Can you give us a teaser?

I get asked this one a lot! Yes, I do plan on at least two more long Potter fics, if possible. I'm fairly sure at least one of them is going to happen. I have some concrete writing and a lot of notes. But it's difficult to avoid treading ground I've already covered in existing fics, I don't want to produce anything that feels too similar. I also wrote both PTL and CTS while I was unemployed and living with my parents, and now I'm living on my own and working, so I have much much less free time. No teaser, I'm afraid :)

Any words of encouragement to other writers?

The only way to get better at writing is to write, so write. Don't worry about not being good. That can come later. You can always rewrite anything. My early fics under other names range from thoroughly amateur to absolute trash that I've disowned, and there's plenty of original writing that will never, ever see the light of day.

If you write something down and hate it, leave it for a while and then go back and look at it and figure out why you hate it. Try not to be afraid. It takes real courage to let other people see your writing for the first time, and nothing hurts like your first negative review, but the world won't end. Criticism comes in three forms - misunderstandings that you can address; genuine criticisms that you can learn from; and, very rarely, flames or trolling that you can ignore. Most people will have a valid point, and most of them will genuinely be trying to help you.

And READ. Read everything you can get your hands on. Fics, books, blog posts, newspaper articles. If you don't like something, try and work out why. If you do like something, try and work out why. Exercise your imagination and the rest will follow.

Thank you so much for spending some time with us Loten, it was a genuine pleasure getting to spend some time getting to know you better.

[bythegardengate]

BOOK TAG

I was tagged by the lovely @annedey. Thank you for giving me an excuse to talk about books! 

1. What is your favorite book of all time?

A mean question, honestly. I’ll give you my top few, whose order changes around depending on mood and how the question is phrased. The Lord of the Rings is my standard answer to this question, and it’s probably been the most formative book that I’ve read (though if I read it for the first time now, while I’d like it a lot, it would probably not mean as much to me). The book that means the most to me now is probably The Once and Future King by T.H. White. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco has also shaped me a lot, as has Orlando by Virginia Woolf. My favorite book I’ve read in the last year is Acceptance, the third book in the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanDerMeer. 

2. What are you currently reading?

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll. I am a sucker for good books that will explain fancy science to me, a history student. I also bought this in an airport bookstore because I sort of admire the audacity it takes to name your book something so over-the-top.

3. Have you ever thought about writing a book?

Yes! Pretty much all the time? I have a draft of a fantasy novel that’s around 1/3 to 1/2 complete. It causes me endless anxiety and it is very hard to gather the emotional/mental energy to work on it, but it also probably makes me happier than anything else that I do.

4. What’s your favorite series?

Eek. I’ve been a little burned by series ever since the slow but steep decline of High-School-Katie’s love affair with the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. That said, while I haven’t completed it, I have genuinely loved pretty much every Discworld book that I’ve read so far (special shout out to my guy Sam Vimes). Also maybe the Southern Reach trilogy, though I’d have to read that again I think. 

5. What is a book you want to read?

All of them? I’m about to start Use of Weapons by Iain Banks. I’m also excited to read The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake, and The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon.

6. What’s in your Tbr pile?

I have 621 books on my Goodreads to-read list. :(

7. Who are your favorite fictional characters?

What? Oh my god. This question genuinely stresses me out. I will defend to the death anyone in Lord of the Rings and I refuse to pick a favorite. I quite like King Arthur, but only his Once and Future King iteration. Sam Vimes from Discworld. I don’t know what it says about me that my first answer maybe 15 answers to this question were historical figures who I guessed live long-ago enough that I now apparently think of them as fictional. 

8. Favourite Ship?

I don’t really tend to ship things at all? I will ship characters with abstract concepts like happiness and I will look askance at ships I don’t like, but I have a heart of stone and usually don’t care that much about whether characters fall in love and/or bang.

9. Open the first page of the book closest to you and write down the first paragraph.

"Strictly speaking, history is a textual discipline: when human beings developed writing, they started to create written records, the foundation of history (from the Greek word historia, meaning ‘inquiry’). Study of the human world before the advent of writing is the domain of archaeology and anthropology. All three disciplines share the same aim - to understand how human life, in all its variety, has developed over time - but they use different tools and methods. Apart from a handful of early markings founds in southeastern Europe, dating to the 6th century BCE, which may or may not be examples of writing (scholars have been debating them since they were discovered), the first definite use of writing appear around the year 3200 BCE in the ancient Near East.”

Clifford Backman, Culutres of the West: A History (for the intro western civ class I’m teaching online this summer)

10. What was the first fandom you were in?

Tolkien. I remember dialing up to the internet to Entmoot forums when I was in middle school, and my mom yelling at me for blocking up the phone line.

Tagging: @fractalpaladin, @wju2015, @existentialismandmakeup, @somedudewithacatidk, @literalforklift, @scientia-rex, @blacksheepboybucky, @monologuesforingenues, @wheremarymeetseve, and @theonewithpurplehair but of course only if you want to. And anyone else! Talk to me about books plz.

[redorblue]

Book 15/2017 - Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

First, this was my first ever Terry Pratchett book, so yay to that. And lots of love to my roommate who felt that my life was lacking something and therefore got me copies of Hogfather and Guards! Guards!, just because why not. I don’t know why I’ve never read a Terry Pratchett novel, I’ve heard so many good things about him over the years, and turns out I really did miss out on something. Although I have to admit, the amount of books he’s written is a bit overwhelming, so I’m glad that someone picked my starting point for me.

I want to talk about this book, but I really don’t know where to start. I feel like I‘ve only just scratched the surface and I’ll need at least three more read-throughs to discover all the more serious issues that are addressed under this facade of adventure and witty dialogue and play of words. At times I was a bit confused because the POVs changed every few pages or so, and normally I love that, and I also enjoyed it here, but as it was also my first time in the Discworld, I sometimes had trouble remembering who was talking now, who they were, what they were doing and why… I’ll definitely need another round with this book, ideally at a time when I can stay with it a few hours without being interrupted, and maybe I’ll be able to be a bit more consistent then. Until then, I’l just go with a few snippets of what I especially liked.

Undisputedly in first place, Pratchett’s writing style. I have a weird little thing for formal language, whenever a character takes great care to express themselves I automatically fall for them a little, and Pratchett does that a lot, not only in dialogue but also in his prose. I feel like it must have taken him forever to just write a few pages because he chose his words so carefully and expressed precisely what he wanted to express, without even one word too much or too little. And at times he’s just plain hilarious. I’m not a native English speaker, which is why words automatically feel a little different to me than they did to him, or any other native speaker, so I don’t know if it was just me or if other people also got a whole different view on some words and expressions that was just so obvious and yet normally overlooked that it had me laughing out loud. His wordplays and his dry sense of humour, especially in the footnotes, is just so damn funny (and one hell to translate)! So even without the story I would have enjoyed every single line.

Which doesn’t mean I didn’t like the story, or the setting. That’s another compliment to his writing, I got the worldbuilding basics I needed in passing while the story was already unfolding, and although that was challenging at times, it worked, and I enjoy a challenge ;) I don’t know much about the Discworld yet, but this book certainly got me interested in learning more about it. And about Death because he’s such a great character! They all are, even the ones with very little screentime are incredibly fleshed out, but Death beat it for me. Back when I read The Book Thief a few years ago I loved looking at things from this unusual perspective, and Pratchett’s Death feels a little different than Zusak’s, but I loved it all the same. It’s fascinating how this personification of most people’s greatest fear is humanized, while also very obviously not being human at the same time. It made me so sad to see how he struggled to fill the shoes of another mythical creature with a radically different set of associations and in the process changed because of the way people treated him while thinking he was the hogfather, which was so different from what he was used to… All the while knowing that he’d have to give it up eventually when the real hogfather got back (assuming he would). And I’d love to know how he and Susan got to the point they’re at in this book, so estranged and awkward. So there’s a plan how to continue reading Discworld novels, I’ll just read the other Death novels.

Among the settings I enjoyed most the Tooth Fairy’s castle. Although enjoy might be the wrong word for it, at times I was thoroughly creeped out, so I guess intrigued is more accurate. A place where everything you believed to be real as a child comes true is a scary, scary thing. But it was executed with such lovely detail that I couldn’t help but devour it all the same. Like, the fact that the landscape around the tower looks exactly like a child’s drawings? What an amazing idea! Not that I’d like to actually go there, I don’t even wanna start thinking about what kind of childhood horror would come for me, just the thought of it gives me the creeps, but it makes for a great read.

Last thing I wanna mention for today is how relevant this piece of fantasy writing is for real-world society. I’d go as far as saying that it’s like a mirror world for our own where everything, every human quirk and social issue, is exaggerated and uncovered and exposed for all the world to see through Pratchett’s on point writing. I loved the passages in Unseen University that show exactly how careless and indifferent scientists living in an ivory tower can be toward the “ordinary” world surrounding them, and how the internal workings of an elite function.

And this last dialogue between Death and Susan about the nature and the value of belief? God, I love it. In another book I adore, The Bone Clocks by my favourite author David Mitchell, I came across the same underlying thought: that all the values we base our civilizations on, like justice and mercy, are fragile and need to be believed in for them to exist. That’s what makes it so important to believe in something, no matter what it may be, even if it is the tooth fairy which is presented as some kind of training ground for children before they’re taught the beliefs that society needs to function. Another lesson I got out of this dialogue is that it isn’t possible to not believe in anything at all because anyone who tries, or is convinced to be an entirely rational, no-bullshit-person, either still has some superstitious beliefs (like a gnome that brings people warts) or ends up conjuring some random superstition themselves (like the god of hangovers). That’s why I think this book is also a good read both for religious people and for hardcore atheists: it reminds us of the value of belief itself, no matter how childish or strange it may seem at first, and the function it performs in keeping us all from mistreating each other and giving the world a vital bit of glitter, or meaning, it otherwise sorely lacks.

[barbecuedphoenix]

200 Followers: 11 Things About Me

So I was re-tagged a week ago by @eldarya-scenarios. (I had no idea I tagged you twice, dear. ^_^ Having two aliases is awfully sneaky.) 

If you’re a little curious on who your friendly fan blogger is behind the Leiftan icon and the barrage of text-winks, feel free to read on. Watch out though: it’s a long post like everything else I write... 

And if not, please continue to enjoy this blog’s smart-assery and the text-winks. ;)

1) Why did you name your blog the way you did? ...Because that’s the screen-name I use for my main Eldarya account. I’m not very creative with names. :( Not to mention that it’s probably very politically-incorrect to say ‘Barbecued Phoenix’ in the faery realm. Huang Hua would not be amused. And my blog is guaranteed to be politically-incorrect as far as folklore and faeries are concerned. ;) My screen-name is actually homage to a Neil Gaiman short-story called ‘Sunbird’, which is still one of my favorites from its double serving of dark humor and culinary catastrophes. And it sounds really funny when you say it out-loud (at least that’s my opinion).

2) What was your last meal? *checks bowl next to laptop* Eh… a fruit salad I scraped together from some Rainier cherries and leftover cantaloupe slices. It’s summer here, and I enjoy my fruits. :)

3) Jeans or skirts? …I must have at least nine different pairs of jeans in my closet, half of which I don’t even wear most days. And just one pencil skirt. Because at least once in my life, I’ll need to go to a court room. So there’s your answer. :)  

4) What’s your favourite letter of the alphabet? In the English alphabet, ‘L’ is my favorite. It just rollllls off the tongue so nicely. :) 

5) Favourite fandom/shipping? I’m a mercenary crack-ship writer. Anything goes so long as characters are in-character. ;) *cough* Truthfully, I haven’t shipped anything in a fandom since I was eleven or twelve, and that was waaaay back when the cartoon series Avatar the Last Airbender premiered. I think that experience has inoculated me to serious shipping. So now, while I enjoy seeing a well-developed, well-paced canon romance (because it means the creators have really thought the story through), it’s never a huge concern for me who’s paired up with whom. Romance isn’t actually the selling point for me for a lot of stories; it’s individual character development and plot direction that counts.   And anyway… fan shipping is really a fabrication. With a bit of imagination, effort, and tactical writing, functional relationships can be spun between anything and anyone, and unraveled in the same way. Even when keeping all parties in character. So why blow a gasket over shipping? To each their own dirty little fancies. ;)

As for my fandoms… they’re a patchwork quilt of games, books, movies, TV shows, anime from a lot of different sources, and it changes every year. For the sake of time, I’ll give a rundown of just the fantasy/supernatural genres I’ve been following for a while (translating some of the titles to English when possible):  

Games: the Dragon Age series, Folklore (also called FolksSoul), Uncharted, the Persona series 

Books: Discworld, His Dark Materials, the Dr. Siri Paiboun series, the Temeraire series, The Tiger’s Wife, Brisingamen, pretty much anything done by Neil Gaiman… the list goes on. With a few rare exceptions, I’ve shifted from being a high fantasy lover (those tropes get old after a while) to an acolyte of more low-key genres like magical-realism, fantasy-historical-fiction, and satirical-fantasy.  

TV Shows: Supernatural  

Anime & Cartoons: the Fate series (even though my fanfiction ends up making fun of it 95% of the time, it’s still a really intricate universe), the Avatar series  

Movies: Practically anything done by Studio Ghibli and Tomm Moore, ‘Coraline’, ‘Corpse Bride’, ‘Therapy for a Vampire’, ‘Let the Right One In’, ‘Groundhog Day’, the very first installation of ‘The Hobbit’   

6) What’s your favourite sport? (You don’t necessarily have to play it) Favorite sport I can’t do, but love to watch: Surfing. Forget berserk football matches; give me a crazy Australian riding a tunnel wave any day. :D  Favorite sport I can do: Bicycling. I’m no Tour de France candidate, but my bike regularly takes its share of unreasonable hills and descents in the city where I live. Personally, It’s a great way to get around. ^_^

7) What’s your idea of a perfect day? Getting everything on my list done with minimal coffee and hair-pulling.  -_- Sorry… I’m still listening to the robot half of my brain. Switching over.  Start the day by making a difference and sharing a good time with both the students I see where I work, and the odd friends and colleagues I do have. Attend a really good lecture. Then take a quiet bus ride to the beach or an aquarium, where I can watch all the wildlife shenanigans I want. Tourists included. Cook something awesome for lunch or dinner, and eat it to discover that it’s still more awesome. End the day with a good book, an avalanche of blankets, and a conveniently-rainy night. And maybe a quick Skype/phone call with my dad.  ;( Oh there I go, listening to the sappy half of my brain. Switching over.  

8) What animal do you hate with all your soul? The logical part of my brain tells me I have no cause to loathe any animal for existing. But the cave-woman part of my brain still gets creeped out by a few of them…. Geckos especially. Because the house where I grew up was infested with them (like a typical equatorial house, actually). The geckos could be found on absolutely any flat surface, even the underside of the table and on the ceiling, so we always had to check right before sitting down that something cold, bug-eyed, and squirmy wasn’t going to drop on us in the middle of dinner. And they also liked to appear in other surprising places: like in your shoes (as my father found out one day while rushing to work), inside drawers, inside trash cans, crushed between door hinges, trapped in the kitchen sink, and inside the refrigerator a couple of times (worst idea ever, for a lizard).      One of the best things that happened to me on moving to this corner of the United States: no geckos anywhere. I can clean my apartment with an easy heart. \o/    

9) Can you dance? Besides some lingering muscle memory from my early days doing classical ballet... no. :(  I’d really like to take up Spanish Flamenco though. Generally, I do better with choreographed dances rather than impromptu club-dancing. As all my friends have told me. I’ve given them so many priceless memories on the dance-floor… 

10) What’s the name and age of your favourite character? (OC or otherwise) I can’t decide on a ‘favorite’ character in media; there’s too many of them. So how about a favorite OC instead? ^_^   Right now among the Eldarya OC cast, my favorite would have to be Zephania ‘Zee’ Tantiango because she’s a magnet for trouble as a protagonist very dynamic heroine to work with. (She’s 23, in case you’re interested.) Zee is actually the latest incarnation of the ‘funny-but-unlucky action heroine’ archetype I’ve spent years working on, and I’m happy with how she’s turning out so far. On one hand, she’s the typical small-town heroine who’s sharp, plucky, energetic, and more than a little kooky herself; the story never stops moving once she starts improvising in a tight situation. :) But there’s a strong undercurrent of tragedy in the way she continues to isolate herself through her pride and her decisions, especially because she’s allergic to either admitting that she’s in real trouble, or cutting herself some slack for her mistakes. There’s a lot of sadness behind that finger-snap smile. I’m still debating on whether to give her a good ending, or a bitter one. :(  No, that was not a spoiler for the fan-fiction that’ll one day hit this blog.

11) What got you into your favourite activity?(i.e how did you start?) Favorite activity? Like… a hobby?  Well the longest-running hobby I’ve ever had is writing (no guesses there). And it was more-or-less self-taught. As a kid, nobody could take me anywhere without a book in my hand, or some other adventure happening inside my own head (which made it awfully inconvenient to get my attention in a mall… but hey, I never wandered off). And writing short stories was always the most entertaining school assignment for me.  But it wasn’t until I started home-schooling at thirteen that I found the time and need to write something for myself, putting to paper those increasingly-complex sagas and fan-fictions that lived in my head (because my short-term recall just couldn’t keep track of all the dialogue and plot twists anymore; I needed to start recording my stories to make sense of them.)   And I haven’t stopped since. :)

Uh-oh. Here come… my questions. For @mentacomchocolate, @areyntheheartseeker, and @the-irish-hoor​. 

Why did you name your blogs the way you did? ;)

What would your honest personal reaction be if you accidentally stepped into a fairy ring, landed in a strange place, and got threatened by a fox-lady wielding fireballs?  

What’s your dream job in this life?  

Is there anyone you have a crush on that you’re still really embarrassed to admit? Would you like to mention them anyway? ;)  

If there’s only one book genre you could spend the rest of your life reading, what will it be?  

What are the top 5 things you geek out over? (Today, at least. ;) )

If you’ve been given a 24-hour advance warning that the world is definitely going to end (i.e. via Death Star), what will you do?

And if you’ve been given an exclusive two-person escape pod during above scenario, what/who would you bring with you to escape the planet? Would you want to?

If your friends can agree on one thing about you, what would it be? Do you agree with them? 

What’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to you this past week?  

What do you remember as your most incredible feat of endurance to date? Physical, mental, and/or social?

*looks up* ...All right, those are some weird questions. I won’t blame you at all if you ignore them. 

[iyarpage]

The Witches’ Guide to Design

No, no. I didn’t go researching modern-day witchcraft or anything like I did with Taoism. No, I’m taking web design lessons from a set of entirely fictional witches who live on a flat, circular world which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a turtle that swims through space.

It’s called the Discworld, and it is the subject of forty-one of the best darned books I’ve ever read in my life. The witches of the kingdom of Lancre are the protagonists of several of these books. They’re a cross between village doctors, local magistrates, and (on relatively rare occasions) magical troubleshooters.

If they were designers, they’d be the scariest and probably the best designers in the business. Here’s what I’ve learned from them:

[Note: All illustrations are by Paul Kidby.]

Trust Yourself

If you want to change the world around you, you first have to know who you are. And then, you have to have absolute confidence in who you are, knowing both your capabilities and your limits. Esmeralda Weatherwax defines this trait. It is her nearly unshakable confidence and her will, which make her the most powerful witch known. Officially, the witches don’t have leaders, and Granny Weatherwax is the leader that they definitely don’t have.

Designers, of course, have to learn how to be wrong, and then deal with it. Granny does, too. The problem is, if you get too used to thinking you’re wrong all the time, it can become a hard habit to break. You can’t do your best work by second-guessing yourself at every turn. You have to see if you’re actually right or wrong first, and go from there.

Granny trusts her knowledge and experience, and when she is proven wrong, she trusts the new knowledge and experience. Eventually.

Granny Weatherwax

Enjoy Yourself

What’s the point of any of this if you can’t enjoy yourself? Looking after a whole community isn’t easy, but Gytha “Nanny” Ogg finds the time to eat and drink rather heavily, dance whenever she feels like it, and sing loudly enough to send her entire village literally running for cover. She’s been married three times, has fifteen children, and still she checks under her bed for strange men at night because “you never know your luck”. She takes full advantage of everything she can get from being the village witch, and matriarch to half the people in the village besides.

In learning about (and selling) the importance of our work as designers, it’s easy to get lost in all of the grand ideas. We’re trying to make sites that are accessible, usable, beautiful, and hopefully profitable, and each of these is almost a discipline unto itself. It’s worth taking the time to just sit there and marvel at all the cool stuff the web can do, and enjoy being a part of it.

Nanny Ogg

People Want Magic…

The witches of the Discworld very rarely use “actual” magic, beyond their flying brooms. They can. Granny Weatherwax in particular is terrifyingly powerful. Mostly, though, they practice a generalist sort of medicine, and a whole lot of what they call “Headology”. People are always coming and asking for magical solutions to things that can be fixed by far more practical means. Headology is mostly a means of making people think something magical is going on, leaving the witches free to do what’s necessary in peace.

For most users, everything we do seems magical. The very act of making a static web page seems mystical to them, especially if you do it with [gasp] a text editor. And the simple truth is that like the villagers in Lancre, they don’t want that illusion broken most of the time. They want something to magically fix their problem. If you can help them to solve their problems, but make it feel like them was magic, you’ve got a winning formula.

… But People Have to Work Things Out For Themselves

The younger witches often ask questions like, “But why can’t we just use magic to solve all of these problems?” The answer, of course, is that magic can cause as many problems as it solves. Magic is a blunt instrument, and most situations with people need something more like a scalpel, a screwdriver, or even a small paintbrush.

Ask any therapist. Lasting change comes when you guide people to the solutions, and let them do the rest. Trying to force your solutions on them basically always backfires. For example, I could point at the many ways algorithms are going horribly wrong in the world of social media. You can do your best as a designer to make things easier for your users, but you can’t do everything for them, and you shouldn’t try.

Know When to Go For Help

Over the course of the books, there are a few witches in training, including Magrat Garlick, Agnes Knitt, and Tiffany Aching. While they all have amazing story arcs that I just don’t have space for in this article, there was one thing they all had to learn: when to ask for help. The witches of Lancre are fiercely independent, and they are mostly expected to handle problems—even the big ones—for themselves, but occasionally they run into problems too big for any one witch.

Designers are going to run into those sorts of problems a lot more often, frankly. There’s so much to learn out there, and it’s rare that any one designer will come up with perfect solutions all on their own. Everything we do is built on the work of thousands who came before, and keeping all of that in one head just isn’t going to happen. You have to stand on your own as a designer, and take responsibility for what you build, but you can’t do everything alone.

When in doubt, try to get at least two outside opinions. Remember: you need three witches for a coven; two witches is just an argument.

  Featured image via DepositPhotos.

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Source p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;} .alignleft {float:left;} p.showcase {clear:both;} body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;} The Witches’ Guide to Design published first on https://medium.com/@koresol

[webbygraphic001]

The Witches’ Guide to Design

No, no. I didn’t go researching modern-day witchcraft or anything like I did with Taoism. No, I’m taking web design lessons from a set of entirely fictional witches who live on a flat, circular world which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a turtle that swims through space.

It’s called the Discworld, and it is the subject of forty-one of the best darned books I’ve ever read in my life. The witches of the kingdom of Lancre are the protagonists of several of these books. They’re a cross between village doctors, local magistrates, and (on relatively rare occasions) magical troubleshooters.

If they were designers, they’d be the scariest and probably the best designers in the business. Here’s what I’ve learned from them:

[Note: All illustrations are by Paul Kidby.]

Trust Yourself

If you want to change the world around you, you first have to know who you are. And then, you have to have absolute confidence in who you are, knowing both your capabilities and your limits. Esmeralda Weatherwax defines this trait. It is her nearly unshakable confidence and her will, which make her the most powerful witch known. Officially, the witches don’t have leaders, and Granny Weatherwax is the leader that they definitely don’t have.

Designers, of course, have to learn how to be wrong, and then deal with it. Granny does, too. The problem is, if you get too used to thinking you’re wrong all the time, it can become a hard habit to break. You can’t do your best work by second-guessing yourself at every turn. You have to see if you’re actually right or wrong first, and go from there.

Granny trusts her knowledge and experience, and when she is proven wrong, she trusts the new knowledge and experience. Eventually.

Granny Weatherwax

Enjoy Yourself

What’s the point of any of this if you can’t enjoy yourself? Looking after a whole community isn’t easy, but Gytha “Nanny” Ogg finds the time to eat and drink rather heavily, dance whenever she feels like it, and sing loudly enough to send her entire village literally running for cover. She’s been married three times, has fifteen children, and still she checks under her bed for strange men at night because “you never know your luck”. She takes full advantage of everything she can get from being the village witch, and matriarch to half the people in the village besides.

In learning about (and selling) the importance of our work as designers, it’s easy to get lost in all of the grand ideas. We’re trying to make sites that are accessible, usable, beautiful, and hopefully profitable, and each of these is almost a discipline unto itself. It’s worth taking the time to just sit there and marvel at all the cool stuff the web can do, and enjoy being a part of it.

Nanny Ogg

People Want Magic…

The witches of the Discworld very rarely use “actual” magic, beyond their flying brooms. They can. Granny Weatherwax in particular is terrifyingly powerful. Mostly, though, they practice a generalist sort of medicine, and a whole lot of what they call “Headology”. People are always coming and asking for magical solutions to things that can be fixed by far more practical means. Headology is mostly a means of making people think something magical is going on, leaving the witches free to do what’s necessary in peace.

For most users, everything we do seems magical. The very act of making a static web page seems mystical to them, especially if you do it with [gasp] a text editor. And the simple truth is that like the villagers in Lancre, they don’t want that illusion broken most of the time. They want something to magically fix their problem. If you can help them to solve their problems, but make it feel like them was magic, you’ve got a winning formula.

… But People Have to Work Things Out For Themselves

The younger witches often ask questions like, “But why can’t we just use magic to solve all of these problems?” The answer, of course, is that magic can cause as many problems as it solves. Magic is a blunt instrument, and most situations with people need something more like a scalpel, a screwdriver, or even a small paintbrush.

Ask any therapist. Lasting change comes when you guide people to the solutions, and let them do the rest. Trying to force your solutions on them basically always backfires. For example, I could point at the many ways algorithms are going horribly wrong in the world of social media. You can do your best as a designer to make things easier for your users, but you can’t do everything for them, and you shouldn’t try.

Know When to Go For Help

Over the course of the books, there are a few witches in training, including Magrat Garlick, Agnes Knitt, and Tiffany Aching. While they all have amazing story arcs that I just don’t have space for in this article, there was one thing they all had to learn: when to ask for help. The witches of Lancre are fiercely independent, and they are mostly expected to handle problems—even the big ones—for themselves, but occasionally they run into problems too big for any one witch.

Designers are going to run into those sorts of problems a lot more often, frankly. There’s so much to learn out there, and it’s rare that any one designer will come up with perfect solutions all on their own. Everything we do is built on the work of thousands who came before, and keeping all of that in one head just isn’t going to happen. You have to stand on your own as a designer, and take responsibility for what you build, but you can’t do everything alone.

When in doubt, try to get at least two outside opinions. Remember: you need three witches for a coven; two witches is just an argument.

  Featured image via DepositPhotos.

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