#ayt mada

[mythrender]

Map endpapers for the Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee The Broken Binding special edition 306mm x 234mm, LB Royal format, 2024

The Green Bone Saga is one of my favourite series of all time, so getting to make the maps, endpaper illustrations, and edges for TBB's edition of the trilogy was a dream come true.

For the maps, I wanted to use paraphernalia as storytelling: conveying a sense of the plot and cultures through items that are significant to characters, such as Anden's training band and the Duchesse car keys, or media that might exist in the world, such as pamphlets, ferry tickets, and news broadcasts.

Art director Petrik Leo and I spent lots of time discussing the little details for each map—what to include, how much to reveal without spoiling the story for new readers—and we'd go to Fonda for feedback on any new inclusions (some of the locations are shifted, compared to the original maps by Tim Paul, and the world map has new places labeled).

Close-ups of some of the paraphernalia details:

The city map of Janloon is printed as a foldout, while the other two are endpaper spreads at the back of the books. You can find plenty of beautiful photos of the books on Instagram; I'm still waiting for my set to arrive, or I'd post pics too! If you aren't a TBB subscriber, the extras will go on general sale some months from now, so keep an eye out for that.

Prints available.

[one-1-eye]

the fact that there are only 31 greenbone saga fics on ao3 and not ONE of them is ayt mada/kaul shae is a CRIME and i am taking it personally

[kauledin]

more gbs doodles

[danhn10]

My cousin has been listening to the Jade war audiobook and he said that Ayt mada sounds like Yzma in the audiobook and I can't unhear it.

[teartra]

MAWS Lois and Vicki’s dynamic reminds me of Kaul Shae and Ayt Mada from The Green Bone. They’re not exactly the same but still

[goblinsngremlins]

Ayt Madashi could step on my neck and I'd thank her

[crisdrawsandcries]

Ayt Mada 🔪🔪🔪

[fauvester]

reading Jade City and its sooooo so so good and sooooo fun and soooo oc-ish but I got to say man. getting to the end of book 1 and its looking bleak. this shit isnt even fun anymore

[jadebone]

i dont like only exploring romantic connections etc etc whatever but i think shae... should have a gf..........

[kikuism]

ayt mada backstory in the new collection of prequel short stories from the green bone saga????

[mythrender]

Back to Tumblr after years away (hi folks!), so I guess I’ll share the cover art I painted for THE JADE SETTER OF JANLOON by Fonda Lee!

This is a wraparound cover for Subterranean Press’ limited edition of the novella; I got to do the title lettering too:

When coming up with ideas, I wrote a mini brief for myself: balance, power, mystery, family ties. The jade setters' neutrality is central to the story and a counterpoint to the clans’ power. (Alternative brief: make it jade as fuck.)

Figuring out the composition was tricky—the piece's rhythm has to work not just when viewed as a whole, but also in smaller sections like the back and front flaps. And while the novella introduces new characters, the Pillars and Horns still loom large as symbols over Janloon...a nod to both their power in the city as well as how readers would be coming off JADE CITY or JADE WAR  familiar with the Kaul family or Mada and Gont Asch.

While reading the manuscript I jot down ideas as they flash by. The seed for this cover can be seen in the top left of this sketchbook page:

I then develop each thumbnail into a very rough colour sketch and put them together with reference images to send to Fonda and Bill Schafer at Sub Press. Sort of a combination of moodboard and thumbnails:

Got the go-ahead to develop thumbnail D, so I make a more detailed sketch of the full composition, with two options for characters’ gestures on the front cover:

And then it’s off to paint! I sneak in little references to the story where I can. The mansion is based on the Straits Eclectic architectural style of shophouses in Penang, where I live, while some of the buildings in the city are based on Hong Kong. Many hours of painting and finagling later, it’s finished, gets sent to the publisher, then the printers, then to Green Bone fans everywhere.

I recently turned in the cover for JADE SHARDS, a short story anthology that’s my favourite Green Bone Saga title so far, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it when pre-orders open next year! Don’t take my word for it: https://twitter.com/FondaJLee/status/1574248123463266304

Fonda’s also posted a peek at the signature page over on her Instagram, showing a crop of Shae and cormorants from the cover art. It’s been a real honour and pleasure getting to draw for a world I’m a fan of :)

[the-tropes-are-hungry]

Oh. A whole AU just dropped fully formed in my head.

Here tumblr have this:

Lamb is either a street criminal or corporate-sector intern/low-level associate who gets sent by their boss, Narinder, to corporate-espionage and destroy 4 competing companies. Whether the AU includes these several years of backstabbing, paper-shredding, phone-tapping and one or more possible bodies sunk in the local river is unimportant.

What is important is when Lamb realizes that as Narinder’s greatest legal liability, they’re about to go in the river too. Obv they backstab and undermine Narinder’s whole operation the same way they did the other 4, using their own resources this time instead of his. Lamb has their own connections (your favourite NPCs), their own money streams, their own power.

Narinder avoids death (org. Crime version) or jail (corporate version) on Lamb’s say-so.

Lamb then has to deal with the fact that his arch nemesis/mentor/notice-me-senpai is now a washed up mid-40s single dad with 2 teenage boys.

Tl;dr: sure you can woo the cat after demolishing his pride and empire. But can you woo his kids whose lives you completely derailed and whose existence was always one way and is now something else?

Basically I want Aym and Baal to be more important to lamb than what I usually see.

Yes this is the result of me reading Jade War this week. Ayt Mada would never kiss the Lamb.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you have any other OT3 recs? Rook & Rose rewired my brain

Alas, my beloved Rook & Rose OT3 is the only one that I can think of in that exact configuration, but two other recs if you (like me) enjoy Big Fat Plotty Fun Fantasy Trilogies In Well-Drawn Worlds, which is the essence of the Rook and Rose series:

The Daevabad Trilogy (City of Brass, Kingdom of Copper, Empire of Gold) by S.A. Chakraborty. I have recommended this before, but I will continue in my dedicated quest to get more people to read it. Set both in 18th-century Cairo and the magical djinn city of Daevabad; politics, magic, intrigue, morally grey characters, sass, snark, Garbage Men (Muntadhir al-Qahtani, my beloved), and much more.

The Green Bone trilogy (Jade City, Jade War, Jade Legacy) by Fonda Lee. Set in a modern Asian fantasy world inspired by 80s Hong Kong gangster movies; tons of martial arts action and family drama; possibly one of THE best-built worlds in fantasy I have encountered; also Garbage Men Galore AND my Garbage Queens, Kaul Shae and Ayt Mada. (They hate each other but I still think they should have ended up together sshhhhhhh.)

[tridentarii-trash]

I simply think Kaul Shae and Ayt Mada, Pillar of the Mountain, should have a homoerotic toxic lesbian rivalry with a body count in the thousands

[luckydicekirby]

erin hasn’t read jade legacy yet and i have 700 pages worth of Opinions about it and you can’t put stuff under a cut in tweets so i am finally returning to “posting on tumblr”

this book did not fully work for me! and i am really chewing on why. I enjoyed reading it, and it made me cry several times, but it felt structurally disconnected and didn’t really come together for me like, Thematically. the ending was just kind of eh. points for ending on bero and the twice lucky, because i’m a simple woman i love a good bookend, but it feels really weird that the end was basically like “well, we won bc our family likes each other and the mountain all hates each other” guys your family is a nightmare!!!!!!!! 

on some level I think I had expectations the book ultimately wasn’t interested in fulfilling so I’m not a super fair judge--my called shot for this book was that niko was going to kill hilo for murdering his mom, or that at least that was going to be a major point of contention between them. at a certain point it became obvious this was not the direction we were going in, which is fine, but eyni’s murder was SUCH a great momentous “oh shit” moment in jade war and I feel like we never fully followed up on it--it makes perfect sense that hilo would see it as necessary and like it was the right thing to do, because he’s a freak and he sucks (affectionate), but we barely get to see niko react to it as an adult. like I really thought we were going to get a moment in jade legacy that was like, hey hilo, turns out you cannot just kill your nephew’s mom and kidnap him as a toddler without consequences, but I guess......you can? i feel like we missed out on sooo much meaty crunchy stuff in this vein.

also this should have been at least two or three books. I was excited about the time skips, because I wanted to see the kids as adults, but a lot of specific moments had to get skimmed over to fit everything in, and the kids kind of got the shaft as far as characterization--we get the most interesting character stuff with niko, and he barely has any POV! I liked what we got of Ru (and his death made me cry like a baby), but jaya was cool but completely flat. my mind palace ideal structure is like. one book still centered on the adults while the kids are growing up, and then one book centered on the adult kids where we actually get to dig deep into their character stuff/their relationships with each other. 

anyway, stray thoughts:

making anden and lott narrative foils but then not having them get together honestly kind of a power move. i kind of respect it. my read is that lott is gay but decided he would never be able to be out and be the horn, and stuck to that. which WOULD sure make him feel real weird about anden!

shae/ayt mada real and no one can convince me otherwise. they both tried to kill each other they both saved each other’s lives that is romance baybee

i did really enjoy the continuing bero throughline/his ultimate insignificance, and inability to even MAKE himself significant by confessing to lan’s murder to niko. that scene was so good. 

it feels like all the interesting thematic stuff in this book was coming together in the wake of Ru’s death, and then it all had to get dropped bc we were once again at like, “uh oh mountain’s gonna take over”. like no go back i want to talk more about senseless death and about how vital it is to die for a cause as a green bone but ultimately lan’s death was also a senseless accident and hilo HAS ALWAYS KNOWN THAT AND ALWAYS LIED ABOUT IT AND THAT’S THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE WAR!!! CAN WE TALK ABOUT THAT!!

2 black 2 green made me lose it. 

anyway i AM staring at my hands like is it just that i’m a slut for tragedy and wanted a worse ending to this book where like five major characters died....am EYE the problem for wanting this family to be irrevocably broken...am i too successionpilled.....

[sowlmates]

Bero is to us what hilo is to ayt mada. We want him to die but he's unkillable like a cockroach