#harlequin grey

[magnifigal]

Welcome to "The Carolingian Heresy"

[remiicore]

look at the harlequins!

day seven of drawing all the birds sparkbird references in their music!! harlequin ducks are so cute i’d never heard of them but they’re up further north and i hope i’ll get to see one soon!

[viphile]

Different breeds of rabbits

[wishingprince]

Me: I’m gonna reread this old favorite

Actually me: picks up a new series, gets a new book for bday tears into them

[dullahandyke]

Usually my 2 modes are 'shitty emo kid trying to be a butch clown' or 'hawaiian shirt lesbian who isn't trying' but laundry days quick approach has somehow launched me into pastel nerd territory for the day

[cathygeha]

REVIEW

Dragged to the Wedding by Andrew Grey

Fairytale feel to a fake-date trope in which a couple goes to a family wedding. The relationship is fake, the girlfriend is not a girl, the boyfriend is not into girls, and the family is Montana conservative. There are secrets to keep, problems to solve, a wedding to save, family drama, and a come-out for one character that was not as he had ever planned it to be.

NOTES:

* This was an easy-to-read, quick-paced, fun frolic with some big issues alluded to and some that were tackled.

* I loved Daniel-Daniella-Lala in all of his appearances. He was wise, aware, knew himself, took no guff, and was also caring, kind, generous, and a person anyone would want as a friend.

* James, the brother of the bride, grew quite a bit in the story and began to come into his own. I loved his interactions with his sisters and how he became more aware of himself and others.

* Holly and her fiancé were good people and so was little sister Margot.

* Grace, mother of the bride, was someone that may have had a good heart lurking somewhere underneath all of her commandments, expectations, and pushiness…maybe.

* Phillip, father of the groom was…a bit nebulous but spoke his mind from time to time.  

* Weston was someone I would never want to meet…anywhere

* Interesting and sometimes “unbelievable” but eye opening and made me think

Did I like this book? Yes

Would I read more by this author? I think so

Thank you to NetGalley and Carina Adores for the ARC – This is my honest review.

4-5 Stars

BLURB

The Wedding Date meets The Birdcage in this laugh-out-loud gay romantic comedy from Andrew Grey He’s here to slay…but will he stay? James Petika is living the single gay life he always wanted. A police officer in Chicago, he has a good job, good friends—and he’s two thousand miles away from his family’s expectations. He also needs a date for his sister’s wedding in Missoula, Montana, but his family has no idea that he’s gay, and he’d like to keep it that way. The solution? Daniel Bonafonte aka Lala Traviata, the queen of the Chicago drag scene. Lala is the real she can sing, she can dance—and she can throw more shade than a solar eclipse. One drink and plenty of dishing later, Daniel agrees to help James out and be his incognito date to the wedding. Daniel’s drag-diva skills are put to the test right away, with the bride’s ill-fitting wedding dress, a groom who’s a danger on the dance floor and more drama than auditions for a gay men's chorus. Faking this relationship—and ignoring the very real feelings developing between them—might just be the performance of their lives.

[samanthamayorofgothem]

Master Phoenix

A large, modern master bedroom with a dark wood floor and gray walls is an example.

[kniterly]

Master Phoenix

A large, modern master bedroom with a dark wood floor and gray walls is an example.

[itsseasonal]

Master Phoenix

A large, modern master bedroom with a dark wood floor and gray walls is an example.

[geekbonchic]

Master Phoenix

A large, modern master bedroom with a dark wood floor and gray walls is an example.

[paintinghippos]

Master Phoenix

A large, modern master bedroom with a dark wood floor and gray walls is an example.

[neilsnyder]

Master Phoenix A large, modern master bedroom with a dark wood floor and gray walls is an example.

[eztul]

Master Phoenix

A large, modern master bedroom with a dark wood floor and gray walls is an example.

[captainfantasticalright]

In 1985, one of the only persons interested in an interview with a “new” writer called Terry Pratchett, after his publication of the Colour of Magic, was one Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman was writing for Space Voyager at the time. "The Colour of Pratchett" was the name given here:

It ran exactly one page inside the June/July issue of that year. The interview took place in a Chinese restaurant in London.

Here is Neil many years later holding that issue. You can see it here if you want. Warning: extremely emotional video.

Neil arrived wearing a grey homburg hat. “Sort of like the ones Humphrey Bogart wears in movies” he later wrote. (Before saying that in fact he did not look like him, but like someone wearing a grown-up’s hat). Terry Pratchett, photo courtesy of one @neil-gaiman, was in a Lenin-style leather cap and a harlequin-patterned pullover. At this point, Terry was already a hat person, although not that hat.

Terry offered Neil this : "An interview needn't last more than 15 minutes. A good quote for the beginning, a good quote for the end, and the rest you make up back at the office"*. (Terry Pratchett had worked many years in journalism by this point ).

But the meeting went terribly well. The two of them realized they had "the same sort of brains". So well indeed, that in 1985, Neil had shown Terry a file containing 5282 words, exploring a scenario in which Richmal Crompton's William Brown had somehow become the Antichrist. Was a collaboration in the cards as of that moment? Not really. But Terry found in Neil someone to whom he could send disks of work in progress and to whom he could pick up the phone sometimes when he hit a brick in the road of his writing.

Terry loved it and the concept stayed in his mind. A couple of years later, he rang Neil to ask him if he had done any more work on it. Neil had been busy with The Sandman, he had not really given it another thought. Terry said, "Well I know what happens next, so either you sell me the idea or we can write it together". **

On collaborating together:

Here is a video of Sir Terry saying why he chose to collaborate with Neil, another video talking about the technical difficulties of writing a book when the two of them where miles apart ,and some pages from Interzone Magazine Issue 207 published December 2006:

An Interview with Sir Terry Pratchett and his works- and Neil Gaiman, where he shortly addresses the process of writing Good Omens.

Terry shortly mentions,

“Neil doesn't rule out another book with me and he was good to write with...yep, it could happen. With anyone else? I don't know, but probably not.?”

Neil says,

"Terry took that initial 5,000 words of mine and ran it through the computer (because I’d lost the files in a computer crash) and made it the first 10,000 words, and it was definitely Good Omens at that point. Neither one thing nor the other, but a third thing.”

"I think Terry could do a very good impersonation of me if he needed to, and I could do a very good impersonation of him; so we knew the area of the Venn diagram in which we were working. But mostly the book found its own voice very quickly. It helped that we were both scarred by the William books when we were kids...”

And as you know, unless you’ve been living in Alpha Centauri, the rest is history. That was the beginning of what would become William the Antichrist and later would get the name Good Omens:The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. (Title provided by Neil Gaiman and subtitle by Terry Pratchett).

More about the writing process:

Terry took the first 5,000 words and typed them into his word processor, and by the time he had finished they were the first 10,000 words. Terry had borrowed all the things about me that he thought were amusing, like my tendency back then to wear sunglasses even when it wasn't sunny, and given them, along with a vintage Bentley, to Crawleigh, who had now become Crowley. The Satanic Nurses were Satanic Nuns.

The book was under way.

We wrote the first draft in about nine weeks. Nine weeks of gloriously long phone calls, in which we would read each other what we'd written, and try to make the other one laugh. We'd plot, delightedly, and then hurry off the phone, determined to get to the next good bit before the other one could. We'd rewrite each other, footnote each other's pages, sometimes even footnote each other's footnotes. We would throw characters in, hand them off when we got stuck. We finished the book and decided we would only tell people a little about the writing process - we would tell them that Agnes Nutter was Terry's, and the Four Horsemen (and the Other Four Motorcyclists) were mine.

From the introduction to William the Antichrist:

“In the summer of 1987 several odd ideas came together: (..)I found myself imagining a book called William the Antichrist, in which a hapless demon was going to be responsible for swapping the wrong baby over, and the son of the US Ambassador would be completely undemonic, while William Brown would grow up to be the Antichrist, and the demon would need to stop him ending the world. The unfortunate demon, whom I called Crawleigh, because Crawley was a nearby town with an unfortunate name, would have to sort it all out as best he could.

It felt like a story with legs.

Terry took the 5,000 words, and rewrote them, calling me to tell me what he was doing and what he was planning to do. The biggest thing he was going to do, he told me, was split the hapless demon into two characters – a would-be-cool demon in dark glasses (which was, I think, Terry’s way of making fun of me, a never-actually- cool journalist in dark glasses) who had renamed himself Crowley, and a rare-book dealer and angel called Aziraphale, who would embody all the English awkwardness that either of us could conceive.”

William the Antichrist being a direct inspiration of the 1976 film The Omen. If the baby swap had just been a little bit messier and the kid had gone off somewhere else he would have grown up as somebody else. “And then there was a beat and I thought, I should write it, it will be called William the Antichrist” says Neil. ***

“The first draft of Good Omens was a William-book. It was absolutely in every way it could be a William book. It had Violet Elizabeth Bott, it had William and the Outlaws, it had Mr. Brown”.

Over time they realized that they would have more creative freedom if they in their own words filed off the serial numbers. William and the Outlaws becoming Adam and the Them.

But the spirit of Just William was never far away.

The joy for Neil was to construct “perfectly William sentences”. The one when Anathema tells Adam that she has lost the Book, and he tells her that he has written a book about a pirate who became a famous detective and it is 8 pages long… that’s “a William sentence”.

If you want to read more details about William The Antichrist, here are some slides I made.

Good Omens was also inspired by a particularly antisemitic moment in The Jew of Malta and John le Carre's spy novels. (Neil’s ask)

 Then I was reading The Jew of Malta by Kit Marlowe, and it has a bit where the three (cartoonishly evil) Jews compare notes on all the well-poisoning and suchlike they’d done that day, and as a Jew who never quite gets his act together, it occurred to me that if I were the third Jew I’d just be apologizing for having failed to poison a well… And suddenly I had the opening of a book. It would be called William the Antichrist. And it would begin with three Demons in a graveyard… (x).

“When we finished the book we estimated that the words were 60% Terry’s and 40% mine, and the plot, such as it was, was entirely ours.” -Neil Gaiman

"Neil and I had known each other since early 1985. Doing it was our idea, not a publisher's deal." "I think this is an honest account of the process of writing Good Omens. It was fairly easy to keep track of because of the way we sent discs to one another, and because I was Keeper of the Official Master Copy I can say that I wrote a bit over two thirds of Good Omens. However, we were on the phone to each other every day, at least once. If you have an idea during a brainstorming session with another guy, whose idea is it? One guy goes and writes 2,000 words after thirty minutes on the phone, what exactly is the process that's happening? I did most of the physical writing because: 1) I had to. Neil had to keep Sandman going -- I could take time off from the DW; 2) One person has to be overall editor, and do all the stitching and filling and slicing and, as I've said before, it was me by agreement -- if it had been a graphic novel, it would have been Neil taking the chair for exactly the same reasons it was me for a novel; 3) I'm a selfish bastard and tried to write ahead to get to the good bits before Neil. Initially, I did most of Adam and the Them and Neil did most of the Four Horsemen, and everything else kind of got done by whoever -- by the end, large sections were being done by a composite creature called Terryandneil, whoever was actually hitting the keys. By agreement, I am allowed to say that Agnes Nutter, her life and death, was completely and utterly mine. And Neil proudly claims responsibility for the maggots. Neil's had a major influence on the opening scenes, me on the ending. In the end, it was this book done by two guys, who shared the money equally and did it for fun and wouldn't do it again for a big clock." "Yes, the maggot reversal was by me, with a gun to Neil's head (although he understood the reasons, it's just that he likes maggots). There couldn't be blood on Adam's hands, even blood spilled by third parties. No-one should die because he was alive." -("Terry Pratchett : His World”)

(Here are some slides of mine where I go into some other details concerning the origins of Good Omens).

Another wonderful insight with Rob Wilkins in "The Worlds of Terry Pratchett".

*Quote: from Terry Pratchett A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins, but said by Terry of course.

** All the quotes, facts listed here : see above.

***all other quotes by Neil Gaiman from various interviews and asks I’ll link.

[taryn40k]

Oh hey look, the plot of the Warp Wandering Arc! :D

I took would be terrified

[kinaaaard]

Tommy looks at Evan in his bed and thinks of Mr. Darcy. Thinks of period pieces. Thinks of Love, Actually. 

If you were to glance him in a grocery line or catch his profile in traffic, it wasn’t a surface-level judgment anyone in sane society would ever make: this guy loves a bleeding-heart romance. It was a left-of-field, out-of-pocket fact of himself that felt like less of a secret and more of the thing tacked on by the producers of romance reality TV — this guy’s too unapproachable, let’s give him some charm. 

Guys like Tommy (broad, blue collar, a wealth of oppression and military repression) were rare to even exist within the genre unless you delved into the more harlequin novel bodice-ripping romance of it all. And maybe that’s why he liked them. 

They allowed easy oxycontin. He liked when people miscommunicated for the sake of the narrative, only to end up falling into bed by the end. He liked how declarations were made about the other’s faults, and that they blearily choked out, and despite it all, I still love you! He liked how often the romances brought together opposite people under unlikely circumstances, and how fate wrapped them up in a neat little bow. 

Most of all, he liked how far away they felt. How untouchable. To him, streetlamp-yellow kisses under soft falling snow felt as plausible as dragons and space operas. 

His other interests felt imbedded in his person. Muy Thai, engines, those were par for the course. The expected things he would readily wear on his sleeve. A man like him, into romcoms, on the other hand? It was something that seemingly only existed in the grey matter of his brain. A secret. A gentle smile from a barrel-chested man didn’t necessarily betray this penchant for treacly, cinematic love. He didn’t pretend that it did, and certainly not with the men he dated in the past. He never wanted to jar previous boyfriends with the disconnect, never wanted to shatter the veneer of masculinity. That felt dangerous. That felt vulnerable. 

But he looks down at Evan in his bed. 

His face is slack and easy with sleep, half-pushed into the pillow. Pale morning light swallows the room, gilding the corkscrew turns of his curls. Burnishes them as they rest against his forehead, the skin smooth and unbothered. Tommy’s eyes linger on the soft bed of hair, hands tingling with memory of how they feel between his fingers — not unlike Mr. Darcy’s hand after holding Lizzy Bennet’s — before trailing down to the slopes of his eyes, his lashes. They rest undisturbed on his cheeks as Evan’s body takes deep, beautiful breaths of air. He almost mourns the view of Evan’s cornflower blue eyes. Then the slope of his nose, prominent and round, before dipping to the petal-soft plush of his lips. Pink like early, early dawn. 

He can’t help it. He plants his hand on the curve of Evan’s stubbled jaw and cups, thumb brushing against the soft thistle. Romcoms don’t feel so far away, anymore. Don’t feel like a contrary fact or a rare allergy or a study of ancient mythology. It feels close, nestled in his chest. Just looking at Evan is easy oxycontin. 

Evan starts to rustle, brows knitting. His face turns a bit but Tommy keeps his hand steady. Tommy thinks, I’ll make him coffee soon, just the way he likes it. 

Tommy thinks of the Mr. Darcy’s deep, anguished yearning. How it culminates into warmth at the end. Thinks of how he kisses her on the nose, on the forehead, and the cradle of love seen before the credits. 

He looks at Evan and wonders if he’ll ever watch a romcom again. He doesn’t need to, really.