#cigaretteburnslikefairylights

[gaslightgallows]

🌧️ (gimme that angst <3)

🌧️Share something angsty from your WIP.

“You’re a busy angel. You’ve got responsibilities, underlings, divine plans to put into motion. Heaven depends on you. Even if you wanted to… you don’t have time for me now, Supreme Archangel. Not that there’s much time left. You made your choice.”

“I made—I was not the one who walked out of the bookshop. I told you that day what I wanted.”

“Yeah. For me to come back to Heaven with you, and be a good little angel again and help you fix this blasted place that’s been rotten since the beginning.”

“I told you I needed you!” Aziraphale exploded. “That I wanted you with me—that I wanted us to be together! Us, Crowley! But you, you… you weren’t listening.”

“You weren’t listening, angel. We can’t be ‘us’ in Heaven. Because Heaven isn’t made for us.”

Send me an ask!

[veliseraptor]

1 and 11 for the reading ask game!

What are 2-5 already published fiction books you think you want to read in 2023?

easy for this one: I can just look at my shelves. the hard part is picking just between two and five

Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee. I've had this on my shelf for so embarrassingly long you guys, initially I had to wait until I had a chance to reread the first two books (because I'd been too long away from them and needed a refresher) and then I got a case of the "my favorite character is going to die again, I think" willies, and I just have to suck it up and take the plunge because I will almost certainly love it and even if Fonda Lee does kill my fave I will forgive it because Fonda Lee gets to do that to me.

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. Another one where I've had it sitting on my shelf for a while because I loved A Memory Called Empire but probably have to now reread A Memory Called Empire in order to read this one, so it keeps ending up getting deferred. But it's time, you guys. It's time.

Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Another sequel! The conclusion to this series is coming out this year but since I'm only reading it in paperback I'm woefully behind. Very excited to read this, though, Adrian Tchaikovsky has earned a spot in my fave scifi writers pantheon by now.

The Glory of the Empire by Jean d'Ormesson. This one's a weird one relative to the first three on this list, but it has been sitting unread on my shelf for a long time and the concept is sooooo fascinating to me, and I've liked the NYRB books that I've read...so here goes. If anyone else hasn't heard of this one (I hadn't before kind of accidentally tripping over it), the conceit is that it is a history of an empire that never existed.

The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough. I read The First Man In Rome a couple years ago kind of on a whim and kinda loved it; I've had this one waiting for me since then and the stars just haven't aligned correctly (and also it's an intimidating brick of a book, even for me). But I am feeling like this might be my year to read more stuff that isn't just SFF, tbh, because while there is a lot of SFF on my TBR list I've also been kind of on the outs with it lately. So returning to my other love (historical fiction) seems like maybe a good move here, and I am a sucker for writing about Late Republic/Early Empire times. (We're still in the republic for now, baby, but boy is it not looking good!)

but this is like. a rough list, because as I was writing it I went "oh but also Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and also King Hereafter, and I'd love to start the Niccolo series," and so on and so forth. consider this a snapshot of what I'm thinking as of january 22nd at *checks watch*

How do you plan to keep track of your reading? E.g., goodreads, bullet journal, tumblr, etc.

Currently I still use Goodreads though I might make another go at weaning myself off and moving to Storygraph again. We'll see. Also since I am now doing monthly recaps of the books I read on this blog (and I do want to keep doing that) I guess that's me keeping track of what I'm reading, too.

[portraitoftheoddity]

Xan was already friends with @mostfacinorous and had introduced me to her, and then suggested 'Little Talks' to me (by suggested I mean told me about it, at great length, over our various pizza nights after work). Xan also pointed me to your blog here and I was like "oh no her art is awesome!!", then I started reading 'Little Talks' and when I commented you answered the art comments, and I was like yeah I've gotta follow. And here we are XD Excellent choice, 100/10 <3

SO GLAD YOU DID, FRIEND!!! Man, I remember losing my mind when you gave us Little Talks fanart. And now you illustrate our TTRPGs. XD

(And big love and shoutout to @xandwyrms for making all that happen! <3)

[witchazile]

Hello I love you I can't believe I was not following your artblog I love your draws!!!!

hi!!! no worries I hadn't made any kind of announcement I made it or anything I was gonna wait until it was more set up and then I think I just forgot lmao

[cyrsed]

ty for tagging me @ifvwasix!! c:

Nine people i'd like to get to know better:

Last Song: alter ego - doechii

Favourite colour: deep yellow

Currently watching: wayneradiotv vod

Spicy/Savoury/Sweet: sweet, i love desserts :)

Relationship status: married & qpp'd

Current Obsession: collecting rusty nails from my yard?

tagging: @zpires @frumpytaco @werewolfmack @cigaretteburnslikefairylights @knightjockey @nioice @crypticdork @tdedy @tlonista @panicfable @livelovelucifer

[kiwimeringue]

Tagged by @woobifiedvillain!

rules: put your music on shuffle and list the first 10 songs that come up and tag 10 people

Dance Macabre- Ghost

Favoured Son- The Mechanisms (Ulysses Dies at Dawn)

Your Father's Son- Shayfer James

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A Man After Midnight- Brian David Gilbert (Aaah!Bba)

It's Not a Fashion Statement It's a Death Wish- MCR

Prom Queen- Beach Bunny

Everybody's Fool- Evanescence

Ribs- The Crane Wives

Invisible Touch- Genesis

Na Na Na (Na.... Na)- MCR

amazingly I got no will wood even though that's like ALL i've been listening to xD or Bear ghost. A lot of these are from palylists I put together that give me character vibes!

@portraitoftheoddity @cigaretteburnslikefairylights @katiemcmahonart @gaslightgallows @jessiarts @rubusrosaceae @not-so-terrible @idleleaves @thelightofthingshopedfor @mostfacinorous and anyone else who wants to! <3

[rhymeswithhazel]

for the character opinion bingo: Martin Blackwood

[pitviperofdoom]

fae au jongerry?

I had a feeling that one would catch your attention.

I’ve posted a little bit of it here! In a world where the fourteen Entities are now the fourteen Fae Courts, Jon is a mortal blessed (or cursed) by the Court of the Eye, bound to collect stories to feed their ever-curious patron. Their travels lead them to Gerry, a faerie forced to serve a pair of werewolves who possess his true name. After their initial meeting, Jon continues to return and visit Gerry, bringing a new story with each visit as they search for clues to Gerry’s past, in the hopes that they’ll find a way to free Gerry from his imprisonment. Every time they return, they risk the hunters catching on to their intentions, but they can’t bring themself to leave Gerry to his fate.

This AU has everything - fae romance, whump, angst, happy endings, they/them Jon, and the inherent romance of favors freely given.

[mostfacinorous]

Tell me about IKNI III?

IKNI is I Know no I, which is on my Ao3, previously as one story and now split up into multiple. It’s a Loki rehabilitation story, at its core.  I accidentally wrote myself into a corner where, in order to do it justice, I have to do INTENSIVE world building, which is intimidating and I keep putting off, and also it’s a REALLY long story to have to reread every time I want to work on it.  Bad combo, it’s been sitting in limbo for YEARS, getting chipped away at every now and then. 

[sterling-silvaa]

“a skilled smoker” - my photography prof.

(original image)

[gaslightgallows]

🐱 -> when I first started interacting with you

🐰 -> now that I know you

🐱 for "moderately intimidating"

🐰 for "barely intimidating"

This is The Way 😂

[veliseraptor]

April Reading Recap

so apparently I read a fuckton in April. I put that on the week off for Passover and also a number of very fast reads last month. here goes

The Spite House by Johnny Compton. Might be the best horror book I'd read in a while, and I did not see the twist coming for a long while. Good and very spooky on the whole, but the "creepy kids as ghosts" thing took some of the luster off it. Still, some good and original ideas here and I'll be watching for more books by this author.

The Nine Eyes of Lucien by Madeleine Roux. Not very good writing and a good third of the book was rehashing the events of the end of Campaign 2, which I just watched. It was fine, I guess? But I didn't find it added much.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. I've had this one on my list for literal years - it's a retelling of the Biblical story of Dinah, Jacob's one daughter. I kind of wish I'd read it sooner, when (a) I was less burned out on retellings/reinterpretations of familiar stories, and (b) when I would've been less bothered by the flavor of gender essentialism of the text and could have appreciated other things about it without getting stuck in feeling iffy about that. I am trying to work out why it bothers me so much that Diamant chose to change the reading of the text from (an implied) rape to a consensual love affair, and I'm not quite sure I can explain that.

It's an interesting book and I'm glad I read it but I don't think I'd recommend it without disclaimers; I think in some ways it's more interesting as an artifact of the cultural movement it comes out of than anything else. Would analyze in a class about Jewish feminist responses to stories in Tanakh (or Talmud, tbh).

Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts and More by Marina Warner. Fascinating collection of short essays originally given as lectures on the BBC, apparently - the one essay about the way the West conceptualizes the simultaneous purity/monstrosity of children was particularly interesting to me. Interesting piece of work I picked up totally by happenstance because it was short and looked interesting and it lived up to both qualities.

Gallows Hill by Darcy Coates. Good spooky horror recommended by @cigaretteburnslikefairylights and actually legit scared me in places, which doesn't happen all that often to me anymore when I'm reading horror. (I'm still a weenie watching it.) I actually...liked this one start to resolution and am going to be looking up more of Darcy Coates' writing, because if it's not, you know, doing something super ~innovative~ it is good spooky reading and that's really what I've been craving.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester. Reading this book was a weird experience. I went into it just thinking "ooh, book about an interesting natural disaster, I love volcanoes" and came out of it going "whoa, surprise Islamophobia," checked the publication date, and learned it was 2003, whereupon I was miserably unsurprised. I don't know why the author felt like he needed to make colonial apologetics and blame the post-eruption upheaval on Islamic fundamentalists manipulating the natives into uprising against their Dutch masters but apparently he did. (I'm exaggerating. But not that much.)

The geology stuff was interesting. Mr. Winchester should've stuck with that and the reportage of the eruption itself and left politics out of it.

Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation ed. by Kavita Bhanot & Jeremy Tiang. This might be my favorite book I read in April, honestly. It's a really good collection of essays about the concept of decolonizing translation, and what that means, and whether it's possible, and the uneasy and uncomfortable relationship between translation and imperialism. I didn't agree with all the essays in here, and they didn't necessarily all agree with each other, but all of them at least had something interesting to say. I would recommend this one to people who can find it - it's by a small press - who are interested in translation or who frequently read in translation. The writers have a lot to say that I think is worth thinking about.

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thahn Tran. I think I just need to give up reading YA books with the realization they're generally not for me, though this one almost had me. It's something about the...I know there's a range of styles, I can't generalize style across the genre, but there is a texture to YA writing that doesn't quite work for me.

I love the concept - diaspora horror, colonialist horror, some really fucked up body horror stuff that got surprisingly gruesome - and would love to read a slightly different book about it, but alas, that book wasn't this one.

American Midnight: Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, 1917-1921 by Adam Hochschild. Another contender for favorite book I read this month though I think this one loses out to Violent Phenomena and possibly Gallows Hill, though comparing horror fiction to historical nonfiction feels kind of unfair. Anyway, I knew some of what this book was digging into - the Sedition Act and the intensely violent repression that was going on in the United States during World War I - but I learned a lot more here.

The depressing thing about reading this, though, was watching (so to speak) the brutal crushing of a once fairly robust American Socialist Party such that it never recovered. Not to mention the grinding down of the labor movement, which I think was at its most powerful during this period of time and hasn't been as strong since.

Just looking at that and wondering what might've been if Woodrow Wilson wasn't such a fucking dick.

Elektra by Jennifer Saint. I feel so funny about this book. I read another mythology retelling even though I swore not to because a Tumblr user I respect mentioned it being good; my experience was that it wasn't bad and it didn't actively bother me like some other retellings I could name, but I don't know that I'd actually call it good. Mostly I'd say I wasn't annoyed, just uninspired.

Of the three narrators, Elektra was definitely the best, and I really did like the construction of her relationship with Clytemnestra, which really felt like the meat of the book. (Perhaps, considering the House of Atreus, that's a bad turn of phrase to use.) The Cassandra sections felt like a distraction, mostly a way to keep the reader up with what was going on across the sea and provide some action in between the familial drama. Ultimately I just felt like those sections took away from the Elektra/Clytemnestra dynamic, leaving insufficient meat.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. I went through a period of time where I was reading all of Mary Roach's books, and was kind of obsessed with them, so this was sort of returning to an old and familiar friend. I found I wasn't quite as enamored with this one as I remembered being of some of her others (I think I remember Stiff being my favorite), but it was an interesting look at the intersections between human and animal - which is really more what this is about than law, per se. It's about what we do when animals cause problems for humans, from monkeys to bears, and the questions that are raised about the best way to handle those issues.

Nero: Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome by Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth. I'm so confused by this book. From the insistence on referring to Nero as "princeps" throughout the book, to the random dropping of French in places it really didn't need to be, to the frankly credulous approach to the sources, particularly when it comes to sex, even when the author mentioned how sex is often a proxy for politics in Roman historical writing, the weird sideways digression into "did Rome have gay marriage?", the weird "maybe she got what she deserved" aside about Messalina's death...

I learned a fair amount, I can say that, I'm not as knowledgeable about this period's Julio-Claudians. Frankly I think Agrippina (the Younger) was the real star of this book, despite Anthony Everitt's heroic efforts to make Nero the protagonist. Buddy, I see your point, but you're pushing a little too hard here.

Anyway. Weird reading experience, I'm tempted to recommend it just so someone else can either validate it or go "what are you talking about, this was a perfectly normal history book."

---

woof long post, but hey it was a lot of books. currently reading A Fever in the Heartland for more American racism in the early 20th century. I have a stack of library books that are waiting for me and I think the next one is probably going to be The Social Lives of Animals, which will either be really enjoyable or annoy the hell out of me, possibly both.

[portraitoftheoddity]

Eight shows to get to know me (tagged in by @shinelikethunder)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Foundational to my adolescence

My Hero Academia - current obsession

Avatar: the Last Airbender - an enduring favorite

Agent Carter - look, I have a type

Leverage - my comfort show

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood - first anime I ever watched and near and dear to my heart

Horatio Hornblower miniseries (A&E) - I imprinted on this HARD as a kid and it has endured with my age of sail special interest

Wishbone (PBS) - Defining media of my childhood

tagging @veliseraptor, @mostfacinorous, @cigaretteburnslikefairylights, @kiwimeringue, and @ophidiae!

[carrionkid]

@cigaretteburnslikefairylights replied to your post “gonna have to put on my clown shoes and go preorder killjoys: national...”

HELLO WHAT IS THIS ABOUT KILLJOYS AND HOW DID I MISS IT (I know how I missed it, I live under a rock lol)

HERE’S AN ARTICLE, IT’S LIKE, DEFINITELY A NEW TAKE ON IT BUT IT’S BY GERARD AND I’M HYPEDDDDDDD

[xandwyrms]

I don't always litter, but when I do, it is always, ALWAYS because there is a spider in my car

[kiwimeringue]

FIRST

Eeeeeeeee, thank you! <3 I think I’ve posted this as part of a 6 sentence Sunday, and Ok like 2.5 because I’m leaving the heading in here, but: 

1407 AD: Asgard, Valaskjálf

Thor calls for another round of drinks, clapping a broad hand on Haldor’s shoulder. He had been surprised, but pleasantly so, when Haldor had suggested they talk.