#i know it’s not the Alecto release date

[henreyettah]

Ok am i missing something. Why are we trending. I’m so confused????? Someone please help whY???????

[voyagerone-1]

i need at least three months to recover before reading again or my brain will explode. I'm not being dramatic i am Very Tired. but i can tell how much reread value this series has so i will definitely reread!!

finished nona the ninth. as always, i am confused as fuck.

[lemon-natalia]

Nona the Ninth Reaction - Review

firstly, i just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has taken an interest in and encouraged me in doing these liveblogs! this has been such a fun project to work on, and reading these books for the past nine months or so has been a bright spot in what has otherwise been a relatively tough period of my life. i’ve really enjoyed getting to theorise about all of the lore of these books and make horribly ill-advised emotional attachments to inevitably doomed characters

more fun statistics that no one asked for: this liveblog was the longest, at about 20,000 (!!) words. my GtN liveblog was 12000 words for comparison. i have no excuse other than i like to talk

NtN definitely was an interesting diversion from the other two books so far. it wasn’t exactly a breather, since it was still incredibly heartbreaking and horrifying, but it was fun to see a part of the worldbuilding very different from what we’ve seen before. as much as I missed both Harrow and Gideon, i liked that it gave other characters time to shine outside of interacting with them. it was fun to see more of Palamedes, Camilla, and Pyrrha, and how those characters act in a vastly different environment to the Nine Houses

although NtN was essentially telling two different narratives, John chapters vs Nona’s, it still didn’t feel particularly disjointed - i think it was thematically held together by being a bit more grounded than the other books so far, sci-fi and fantasy elements notwithstanding (contemporary issues like climate change and nuclear war, & John’s world being a setting far closer to our own vs Nona’s domestic life & very real problems of living in a warzone)

i also loved getting John’s perspective in the chapters narrated by Harrow, his point of view and recollections were equal parts funny, terrifying, and fascinating. he’s certainly got a … unique perspective on the world. it was just a slow horrifying journey trying to figure out how the world ended, knowing that it was doomed but not exactly how it happened

Muir really has a talent for endearing you to a protagonist, and Nona was no exception, I absolutely loved her, and just, her whole story and how tragic it was physically hurt me. i also wasn’t expecting to get as attached as i was to Hot Sauce and the school gang - i hope we get just even just a mention of what happens to them in AtN

tldr: 11/10. reading this series is like the emotional equivalent of voluntarily getting stabbed in the heart repeatedly. i have absolutely no clue what I’m going to do with my life now that this is over for the meantime, other than go crazy in a locked room with a red string conspiracy board trying to figure out whats going to happen in Alecto the Ninth

speaking of, obviously its not a pressing issue since to my knowledge there isn’t even a release date yet, but i’m not sure if i’ll do a liveblog for Alecto when it comes out? on one hand the most fun bit about liveblogging has been the reaction from everyone who’s already read the books and we’ll all be in the same boat of not knowing what’s going on when Alecto comes out, so i don’t know how much of a point there is? on the other i would very much enjoy doing it anyway, and i’m a perfectionist so it would be nice to have completed all of the books like that. so i guess it depends on how impatient i am to read the whole book when it comes out lol

[torpublishinggroup]

besties please could you tell us the release date for Alecto the Ninth 🥹 please i need to know when to call in sick to work

hello so actually there's no news to share rn but with ur permission we'd @ u when that changes to help plan ur convalescence 🙂

we're not going to stop posting about the locked tomb though bc these books have permanently and drastically altered the chemistry of our brain, but if y'all think we're being vague and annoying now just wait (threat <3)

25 5 1 18 14 9 14 7

[grideon-nav]

hello goths, does anyone actually know anything about alecto’s release date? even the smallest crumb. like im aware its still tbc, but like for anyone who’s really avid and on it has anything been picked up from podcasts or tweets? i keep having dreams that alecto is about to drop only to wake up and become sad

[a-big-apple]

ok locked tomb fam, we’re getting closer to october and the original release date for Alecto, and i’ve been seeing an uptick in anxious/aggravated fans in the tags wondering when we’ll get any new info. waiting is very hard, i feel it too, so i wanted to share some things i have gleaned about publishing through a masters degree and a decade of bookselling!

the book is not coming out in october. the marketing would have started months ago if it was—and there’s no way that the final book in a series as on the radar as TLT would have less marketing than the previous books did. the galley isn’t out there yet either, as far as i’ve seen. i think a fall or winter release is extremely unlikely at this point.

book publishing, for the most part, is not willy nilly. marketing has to thread the needle between starting too early (risking losing the attention of the casually interested) and starting too late to build a good buzz. release dates have to take into account what other books are coming out at the same time—not just what Tor is putting out, but likely what their parent company, macmillan, is putting out. i know this is capitalism at work, but this is the system we live in: they don’t want similar or similarly big books in the same company or imprint competing with each other, it can hurt sales all around. 

Tamsyn said in an interview back in december ‘22 that Alecto was written, but editing had not begun yet. editing takes a lot of time, and marketing steps are frequently linked up—announcing a release date hinges on how close the book is to being ready, especially since the original release date is no longer applicable, and getting books ready for print takes a lot of time and a lot of steps!

the biggest times of year for book releases, especially highly anticipated books, are Oct/Nov before holiday shopping starts, and Mar/Apr/May. obviously that’s not true for every book, but this is a big book for Tor, and big books get better spots in the release calendar. if i had to make an educated guess, i would wager Alecto will probably come out in spring ‘24, and we won’t start to see announcements or marketing until after the official release of the Nona paperback on Sept 12. again, this is sales driven: news about Alecto could muddy the waters for the Nona paperback and impede sales, especially since there’s new content in there. i think it’s likely we’ll hear something a little later in the fall.

i’m not as plugged into publishing as i used to be, so i am fully prepared to be wrong about any of this—it’s just assumptions based on what i’ve experienced of the book industry.

either way though, a point i want to make is that nobody at Tor is witholding information from us maliciously. there are a million moving parts in making and marketing a book (and i’m sorry, but huge Hollywood movie releases that are topically resonant but not actually related do not have any effect on publishing schedules). most of those moving parts are human beings: Tamsyn, trying to tie up the series under enormous pressure, still during a pandemic; her editor, who has other books to edit at the same time, and surely wants to do this work justice; Moira Quirk, hopefully, bringing her genius to recording the audiobook; copy editors, designers, marketing people, all of whom are people, many of whom are overworked and underpaid in an industry that is largely not unionized. 

they’re not trying to fuck with us. i understand where these impulses come from, but getting angry, begging, pestering, none of that is going to change the plain fact that you can’t market a book until you have an almost-ready book, and Alecto is one that Tor will want to put the best tactics and timing behind. be patient a little longer. fuck corporations and capitalism, but have empathy for the individuals who will put Alecto in our hands from within a very flawed system. Tor has a long and successful history in speculative fiction publishing, they know what they’re doing.

[phantomspren]

God I miss the Owl House Fandom and what was going on here in between the tail end of season two coming out and then the end of season three.

It was so much fun and there was so much activity.

While stuff is still actively coming out is the best time to be in a fandom.

I'm so grateful for the incredible show that we got, but I'm going to miss that time for the rest of my life.

I'm really glad the fandoms I've joined in the last year are right in the middle of some big things (The Locked Tomb (Alecto still doesn't have a release date!), Good Omens (FILMING IN JANUARY BABYYYYYYYYY), and Sandman (the comics are finished but the show is keeping things generally kinda alive, and the comic fans are always down to chat)), but they just. Don't compare to tOH. (I mean Good Omens is similar in terms of how active it is, but totally different in most other ways, if that makes sense.)

Remember when we didn't even know Evelyn's name???

It's been over a year since the end and it hurts every time I remember that.

Very few pieces of media have impacted me the way tOH did. In terms of seeing myself in the characters, connecting me to other people, and just having a story that I absolutely fell in love with.

I could gush about it for hours but I needed to be in bed an hour ago because my dumb ass decided I'd be just fine with a job that starts at 6am this summer.

Good night!

[familyabolisher]

now that it's been a fair few months since the release, how do you feel about nona the ninth as compared with the first two entries in the series?

you know what! i like it a lot, and i think a good number of the criticisms leveraged against it were unfair. certainly it’s less cohesive than gideon and harrow were – compared to its predecessors, it leaves us with a maddening number of unanswered questions that can’t be tackled through inference or else left ambiguous in ways that could be compelling (what happened in the interim between the two books? how did pyrrha come to be with camilla + palamedes, and how did harrow’s body get there? what happened to gideon’s body? what’s up with the barrage of new concepts that the book introduced and left hanging: the messenger(s), the tower, the devils, the cradle creature?), such that it felt quite a bit less tightly formed and plotted than the other two. i think gideon and harrow had a good balance of internally asked-and-answered questions and questions that were posed with intent to be answered at a later date, whereas nona was heavily skewed towards the latter such that it felt a little off-kilter. i do think some of that disorientation comes from the fact that tamsyn muir is a very precise writer; i don’t know that i’d be picking up on the comparative thinness of nona if it weren’t for how gideon and harrow were both so fluently composed in the first place. but the point is, it’s definitely there; i don’t at all think that a pared-down nona incorporated into alecto would have been ‘better’ (contrary to some people’s opinion, i don’t think any parts of nona are superfluous), but nor do i think it wholly holds up on its own.

it also has a handful of other weaknesses – i have a fairly high tolerance for tmuir’s humour, which when it lands manages to land really well but when it doesn’t it doesn’t, and i think nona often erred on the side of doesn’t, and it felt a little too heavyhanded at points; which has been a consistent problem throughout, tbf, but, idk. tmuir can be a very subtle writer when she wants to be, but, again, when she isn’t, she … isn’t. and that began to grate a little, after a while?

however, at a certain point i’m willing to throw over the instinct to be nitpicky about Form or Structure or whatever and say that the actual content of the text – the discourse it managed to develop, the direction it dragged the body of the series in, the sorts of themes and ideas it articulated – was really, really strong, such that i’ve been chewing on it for months now. i think the fact that i still think about the scene with john’s ‘creation’ of alecto almost every day is a testament to the sheer weight that got thrown behind that passage – at the end of the day, whatever structural weaknesses the book may have is secondary to the fact that it made me feel the need to go eat sandpaper. a book that makes you need to go eat sandpaper is a good book!

also, god, some of tamsyn muir’s writing! there are times when she leans into a voice that a less skilled writer would deploy to create something excessively florid and, frankly, pretentious, but she’s laid the kind of groundwork throughout where there’s substance and meaning and precision to the prose voice that makes it equal parts chilling & joyous to read. some of many passages i’ve been rotating in my mind:

“Green thing,” said the Captain. “Green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? Where will your body go? What did he do to you, to make you this way? You eat yourself. I gorge on unliving marrow.” It was true; the Captain looked as though she were withering before Nona’s eyes. She cried out in haste: “Don’t ... stop that! I can’t stop it, but you can stop it. Stop hurting her ... She doesn’t know what you’re doing.” “You cry mercy?” said the Captain. “Yes—mercy—yes,” said Nona. “I have crossed the face of the universe,” said the Captain. “I poison it to match my grief.”

“They concoct their own vengeance,” said the Captain. “Their justice is not my justice. Their water is not my water. I came to help. I am made a mockery. The danger is upon you, and you do not even know ... they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. There is a hole at the bottom of their tower. I will pull their teeth. I will make it blank for you.”

He said, From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas-tree fairy ... I made you look like a Renaissance angel ... I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair. He said, As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you ... I hid you in me. And when we were together ... once the shaman had claimed the sun ... I became God.

He coughed fretfully—batted another metal-fisted hand at Paul, who had instinctively surged forward—and he said, “Look at you, you cock-o’-the-walk, you filigree piglet, you scum. A whited sepulchre ... Ninth blood on your foreign sword...”

He said, I just wanted to be in the lab. It felt like I could sit by those two bodies, those two kids, and make time go away. I could sit next to them for six minutes, I could sit next to them for six hours. Just listening. They were my moreporks and possums. I was hearing their bodies in all that silence, all the bacteria that weren’t growing ... what wasn’t building up in the gut, what wasn’t pooling at the joints. They were my silent night. I should have been doing paperwork and closing reports, but I hadn’t opened the computer in days. I couldn’t stop thinking about their palms, their hands. I touched their hands so often. I’d touched their hands before, but not like this. Even when I wasn’t touching them I could feel their skin on my skin, that temperature that wouldn’t change. I kept thinking I was touching them when I wasn’t. M— said I should probably get tossed in a rubber room, but she wasn’t scared I was nuts. She was scared I wasn’t. He said, You know, I can’t even remember how it came together now. There was no catalyst, no revelation. I was too far gone for revelations. It was like I’d been dozy and now I was waking up. So, my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U— and T— on their certificates, you know, their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted. My two kids with their frozen brains and their perfect internal temperatures. There wasn’t a place on the poor bastards I hadn’t breached with a thermometer, and now I was knocking before I came into their room.

literally just the phrase ‘the shimmering white figure of the dead Kiriona Gaia’

The rock loomed so big above, so awful in the electric light. There were so many people standing above her, her body, the baby’s body. The baby with the big black eyes. The scrap of meat with the purple mouth.

John loved her. She was John’s cavalier. She loved John. For she so loved the world that she had given them John. For the world so loved John that she had been given. For John had so loved her that he had made her she. For John had loved the world.

i’m not one for close reading but there are so many lines and passages in nona that i just want to go through with a fine-tooth comb, word by word, because everything is so deliberate and so infuriatingly good, lmao. i actually struggle to care all that much about the points where tamsyn muir is bad because when she’s good she is running circles around just about anyone else in genre fiction at the minute, and frankly when you’re doing the kind of things that she’s doing i think you get to use homestuck fanfiction and 2010s internet humour as your building-blocks as often as you like. 

i’ll also say that i think the john chapters are the strongest pieces of writing that taz muir has put forth in the entire series, including the whole of harrow, which is already like genuinely one of the best-written books at least in contemporary genre lit (and probably in a far wider-reaching net than that) that i’ve encountered in recent memory. john 1:20 is permanently lodged in my brain; i am never escaping john 1:20 disease. i reread it when i’m bored sometimes just to make myself insane.

anyway, i’m really looking forward to revisiting nona in the wake of alecto and treating the two as one unit, because i suspect that a lot of nona’s weaker points will disappear or else become more coherent when considered as part of that broader whole. if we remember that nona was originally act one of alecto – well, it makes total sense for there to be a lot of questions posed in act one, with the assumption that they will then be developed and answered in acts two, three, four, and five. + something like paul, who imo felt very random and unresolved, makes far more sense as a near-the-end-of-act-one incident; it’s introducing a sudden change, doing something we as audience have never seen before, and setting up the other four-fifths of the narrative to carry its implications. my point is, nona to me makes a lot more structural sense as an opening to a more expansive text; which is exactly what it is. pro-nona the ninth account, its weaknesses stem from the fact that it’s a breakaway from alecto and i’m just not pedantic enough to mind all that much about internal coherency if that coherency can then be achieved in the last book – which i suspect it can! where nona’s good, it’s really fucking good.

[persimnon]

i’m not gonna do it until we get an Alecto release date but i cannot waitttt to reread tlt for the first time. the first time was purely insanity and vibes and not knowing what was going on. that second read through i’ll actually get to know the characters and simply enjoy the world and prose and fucked up relationship dynamics without being (as) confused

[chekhovs-tantrum]

Re: lack of AtN news:

I am noticing a lot of snarking at Tor (swipes in Tor's comments, general moaning in tags) regarding lack of Alecto cover or release date — and don't get me wrong, I am starving for news too —

but uhh does pressuring Tor mean they go and pressure Taz, or the cover artist? My understanding is that Taz has some diagnoses that might make things hard for her at times, and my assumption is that if AtN is taking extra long, it's because everyone's working hard to make sure she sticks the landing.

I don't know the politics of publishing, but I know everyone making money off this books wants to drop this book, because capitalism. So if there's no release date... isn't it likely that someone is dealing with shit (Taz, or an editor, idk), and needs a little more time to perfect the masterpiece we all love?

Yes I want more Alecto content, yes I want to snarf up everything this brain wizard writes and chew on it like corn string stuck in my teeth. But I never want my love of an artist's content to come at the expense of that artist's mental health or general wellness.

[lvl1-cleric]

I really really need a ballpark release date for Alecto I need something to look forward to I don't care if it comes out in a year I'll mark my calendar but pleaseeee let me know let me know let me know

[15-lizards]

In my dream last night Alecto release date was announced. Alecto the Ninth coming to a bookstore near you in fall 2025 how do I know this it literally came to me in a dream

[throughdarkeningskies]

I want to know what happens BUT I don't want to be stuck waiting for the final book for ages, so I'm letting tumblr decide teehee <3

(important info: I already have the book)

[ryttu3k]

Okay, going through Tumblr's year in review posts for 2024! Let's see how things I like did!

Top 24 of 2024: The big hyperfixation of the year, Baldur's Gate 3 came in number 6! Also posted stuff for Doctor Who for the most recent season, in at 20. I believe since this is from October, it also includes last year's specials?

Ships: F for the lack of Bloodweave, which I was almost certain would place. The only BG3 content was Astarion/Tav at 40 (a rise of 48 positions) and Durgetash at 67. I did reblog some of the latter. Spirk came in at 33, reblogged a little. Griddlehark dropped two places to 42, we'll call that steady. Without a that-year release, poor Zelink dropped 33 places to 45. Korrasami clings on with its nails at 100 even.

TV shows and TV characters: Doctor Who rose eleven places to a very respectable 4, and... yeah that's all. For characters, the Fifteenth Doctor came in at 44, followed by the Tenth Doctor at 51 and Donna at 55 and Fourteen at 57. Ruby debuted at 76, and even Rose showed up at 83 despite not appearing in anything.

Movies and movie characters: Lord of the Rings made it to the top five, rising four places to 3! Goncharov dropped 27 places to 30th, which is still hilarious considering. Everything. Three Star Wars movies placed - Revenge of the Sith at 50, Rogue One at 84, and A New Hope at 98. The Lost Boys dropped 12 places to 88. For characters, Anakin was way at the pointy end with number 3, presumably thanks to Ahsoka. Luke was at 12, Leia at 29, Padme at 31. Darth Maul showed up at 60, Han at 64, Yoda at 90, and Cassian at 95. A solid eleven characters from Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit showed up too.

Celebs: David Tennant rose two spots took the top place! Ncuti Gatwa rose 84 places to hit 8, Catherine Tate hit 36, and Millie Gibson hit 73. Gillian Anderson hit 92, and Jodie Whittaker dropped 13 spots and just clung on to the top 100.

Books: "This list is brought to you by Tor Publishing Group, which you’re probably familiar with, given that this is tumblr dot com." Yeah... yeah. Locked Tomb dropped to 4, alas. Please, Tamsyn... Alecto release date... please... Dracula dropped 4 spots to remain in the top ten at 9. Animorphs dropped thirteen spots, but still picked up 36. Only a top 50 here, pensive emoji.

The only anime/manga I watched or read was Mononoke, and that was too recent for these lists. Ditto characters. For the Dungeon Meshi enjoyers on my dash, six of the top ten characters are from it.

Video games: OKAY NOW WE'RE TALKING. BALDUR'S GATE 3 NUMBER ONE. Take that, Genshin :D TS4 remained steady at 12. Tears of the Kingdom came in at 30, Breath of the Wild at 35, Echoes of Wisdom at 65, Twilight Princess at 87, and Ocarina of Time at 97. Flight Rising dropped a single spot to 41. Interestingly, TS3 rounded it out at 100!

Video game characters: "Honestly? We brought this list back out of our own need to know whether Astarion or Gale would come out on top." So many BG3s <3 Astarion did indeed hit number 1, Gale at 5, Shadowheart at 6, Karlach 8, Lae'zel 9, Wyll at 12, Halsin at 16, Tav at 19, Gortash at 47, Minthara at 55, and Durge at 67. For Zelda characters, Link was at 18 and Zelda at 56.

Web series: Dracula Daily dropped to 21, Re: Dracula to 38. Still solid results, considering this is the third year of Dracula Daily and a second year for Re: Dracula!

Web celebs: It was definitely Hatsune Miku's year. It's Miku's world, we just live in it. There's a bunch of TTRPG people here (will we ever get a new season of NY by Night? Uncertain), lots of Vocaloids, and Fucking Chocolate Guy at 39.

Musical acts: Hozier came in at 18, which is fine because I have not stopped listening to Too Sweet. Queen came in 28th, Pink Floyd at 94.

The 'Blrs: I think the only one I actively participated in was Simblr? Came in at 9th. Like I wrote but didn't consider myself part of Writers On Tumblr, etc. Some interesting ones here, will check some of them out later, I think!

[mayasaura]

Barnes and noble added a release date for Alecto 👀👀

Oh? 👀

So it did! But just the audio book, interestingly enough.

I did some poking around, and it looks like the date B&N has listed - Oct. 10th 2023 - has been listed as the release date for the Alecto audiobook in various locations for months, now. Well before Tor released its statement about not knowing when Alecto would be finished. There still aren't any ARCs out, as far as I know, so I wouldn't get my hopes up too much just yet.

But that is definitely interesting, and something to keep an eye on!

[iviarellereads]

Full TLT series to date thoughts on rereading Harrow the Ninth, chapters 11-15

A probably semi-regular weekly bonus to my reread blog, since sometimes you realize things on reread that just make you need to yell in a full spoiler space.

(Fair warning, this one's a lot more personal than usual. Controversial hot takes inside.)

I really haven't had much to say about 11-13, but 14. Just. Let's address this in order of appearance.

Harrow "so rarely ate for pleasure that it was beyond imagining" that she would learn to cook. Just gonna smirk knowing chapter 25 is coming. Soup.

The BOE! It's not until the end of the chapter that Jod says the least bit of who they are but I gotta yell now. Fascinating how he views them. He's the paternal figure framing himself as "bitten" by their ungratefulness. These children of the children's children's children on down ten thousand years or more of history, of the billionaires who fled and he couldn't reach in time. He killed his whole SOLAR SYSTEM trying to kill them instead and he still has this tone. He's still trying to make them pay for their ancestors' sins. And I mean, what sins they were, if the dream River in Nona is at all the real story. But, I think it's kind of incredible. I don't think he's right to still be pursuing vengeance, I don't think his actions were acceptable, but I can see how he came to it and why he can't let it go.

And then John's gentleness with Harrow over the circumstances of her conception just totally undoes me every single time. Just to THINK about, really. I said it in the initial notes, but I'll expand it here: I know some people hate him, find him manipulative and irredeemable, but I think Muir is doing something deeper than that. At least with him. Ianthe is irredeemable and perfect for it. John…

Like, sure, you could read this as a scene where he realizes how much more power he has over Harrow knowing this blackmail, but he's never used it that we've seen, he's never leveraged it against her to get her to comply. He manipulates, yes, but I firmly believe he also cares in his own way, twisted by circumstance and ten thousand years of anger and pain and lack of therapy and nobody being able to tell him no.

And I guess I also just… I saw a tweet before Twitter went to hell, about how John is Maori, he's an Indigenous man with a whole lot of baggage from his society about it, and Muir making him out to be irredeemably evil feels so insensitive that I don't want to believe that of her until I have to. I think a lot of people are projecting their assumptions and biases and opinions and expectations of fiction onto him rather than giving him room to be more complex than that, even though a lot of them are the same people who love other characters, particularly women, for similar, if smaller-scale, atrocities. And, heck, I'm also projecting my life experiences onto him, I'm not saying that's BAD.

I just see a lot of who I could have become in John, the way I see myself in every sociopath in fiction who isn't played explicitly for a villain, because I don't think it's that clear cut, here. I want to think there's room for him to change, the way I have tried to change. Somehow. I bring my hope like a candle into dark places, knowing that at any moment (well, when the final book is released) it could be snuffed without warning.

And of course, chapter 15, where we learn Alecto died twice. Once when John blew up the world, and… once, metaphorically, when he left her in the Locked Tomb? Or something else? True death, the death of sleep, or the death of her heart? But the part of her that becomes Nona still loves completely and guilelessly. It bears thinking about.