#i sometimes think i could write a victorian novel about the drama in my home parish

[fictionadventurer]

⛪️

[joealwyndaily]

Sometimes the best Christmas presents are the ones we don’t think we need; a new Christmas Carol, for instance. Indeed it may be indicative of a certain unappreciated vacancy around the Christmas tree that in discussing the BBC’s new version of the Dickens classic both its director and leading man refer back to The Muppet Christmas Carol made way back in 1992.

“I was sent the script,” admits Nick Murphy, best known for directing the Rebecca Hall ghost movie The Awakening, “and my first thought was, ‘For God’s sake! The Muppets! They nailed it. What’s the point?’ ”

Joe Alwyn, who plays Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit in the BBC three-parter, has meanwhile posted a trailer on Instagram with the caption: “Hard to fill the shoes once worn by Kermit. But I tried.” The self-deprecation was quickly “hearted” by the singer Taylor Swift, who is the actor’s girlfriend and who will be watching the mini-series with Alwyn and his family in London in the final days before Christmas.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with The Muppet Christmas Carol. It is probably in most people’s top three adaptations of Dickens’s masterpiece (alongside, I would say, Alastair Sim’s 1951 version and Scrooged). Its endurance does suggest, however, that it may be time someone did something a bit more serious, a little darker and a touch more grown-up with a tale that excoriated Victorian neglect and associated Christmas with the relief of poverty for ever more.

And this is exactly what Nick Murphy has achieved with a bracingly fresh script by the Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Guy Pearce’s Ebenezer Scrooge is still a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner”, but since Pearce is only 52, there is rather less of the old. At the end of the novel, Dickens wrote that “ever afterwards” — that is after Scrooge’s Very Bad Night — “it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well”. That is rather more of an achievement when, as in this version, you may have 40 Christmases, rather than a couple, left to you.

Equally remade is Cratchit, who in Alwyn’s incarnation is far from the bashfully gulping frog thanking his master for granting him Christmas Day off before scampering back to Miss Piggy’s fleshy arms. Although Alwyn grew a rough beard for the part, his is also the best-looking Bob Cratchit you have seen. As the actor and I talk at the Picturehouse Central cinema in London, I find him as mesmerising off screen as on.

“Bob is trapped by Scrooge,” Alwyn says. “He’s abused by him. He’s not treated fairly. He’s there only because he has to be. He’s treated like shit.”

I’d say there’s a definite feeling in their shared scenes that Bob might just snap and hit Ebenezer over the head with a poker. “That was the intention. He’s at breaking point. He’s pushed right to his limits and Scrooge, I think, relishes winding him up. All Bob can do is hold his ground and fight back as much as he can — but he isn’t such a sap in this version.”

Scrooge and Cratchit’s relationship so much resembles an unhappy marriage that the niggling, bitter exchanges invented by Knight, with very little reference to Dickens’s dialogue, resemble Steptoe and Son rewritten by Strindberg. The easy contrast would have been with the Cratchits’ poor but happy marriage, but this too comes under scrutiny. There is an acknowledgment of the challenges a disabled child can bring to a household, and it is somehow emphasised by Tiny Tim being played by Lenny Rush, an extraordinary young actor, aged ten, who has a rare form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, the same condition as Warwick Davis.

“It really mattered to me that nobody was photo-fit,” Murphy says from a studio where he is dubbing the last episode. “Bob Cratchit is always a winsome, put-upon nice guy and the Cratchits themselves represent this idea of an ideal, working-class, lovely family. So we looked into their relationship on the page and there seems a genuine tension between Bob and his wife. Things are hard. It isn’t easy to have no money and a disabled child, and they lean on each other and they’re not straight with each other and there is a genuine antagonism between them.”

Knight has written into the narrative a family secret that connects the Cratchits to Scrooge. The secret belongs to Mrs Cratchit, played by Vinette Robinson, whose part is greatly expanded; indeed, the novella does not even grant her a first name, although the Muppets, and other adaptors, opted for Emily.

“Inevitably the secret begins to surface and cracks appear in the family,” Alwyn says. “Something has to happen. I think what Steven has done is take the story and drill deeper. He hasn’t taken too much liberty. It’s not bending the truth too much from what Dickens would have wanted. Or I hope not.”

Murphy insists that worthwhile adaptations of classic texts should be “edgy” and have “a good bite to them”. “If you absolutely don’t want any variation from the book then I strongly suggest you sit in a corner at Christmas and read it again. But if you want to see it used as a prism through which we can see a broader and slightly different subject explored, then this one’s for you.”

Alwyn’s performance is part of the iconoclasm. “Joe’s instinct as an actor is always to push away from the obvious and into ambiguity,” Murphy says. “He’s very quietly spoken. He’s not brash at all. He’s a gentle, intelligent guy, but he just simply wasn’t interested in fitting a Dickensian cliché.”

“I’ll take that,” Alwyn says when I pass on the compliment, having not considered his technique in such terms. He is 28 and would probably accept that he is best known for two facts: the first is that he is Taylor Swift’s boyfriend; the second that, aged 25 and with no professional acting experience, he won the title role in an Ang Lee movie.

He is from north London, the middle of three sons. Their father is the television documentary-maker Richard Alwyn, renowned for making The Shrine about the public reaction to Princess Diana’s death.

“He was away a bit,” Alwyn says. “He made quite a lot of films in Africa when I was growing up. He was often in Uganda, Rwanda at one point, South Sudan. So he’d come back with stories and artefacts from all over the place. He made a great documentary in Liverpool during the World Cup about two kids on an estate growing up there.”

His mother, Elizabeth, is a psychotherapist. So, I say, although his family were comfortably off and he was sent to the fee-paying City of London School, he knew something of other people’s lives?

“All different kinds of people, all different kinds of stories,” he says. “Obviously, she couldn’t share them with me in the same way that Dad could, but both their jobs take an interest in other people and are about how to empathise, understand, and listen to stories and tell stories. I suppose it’s not a million miles away from an actor’s job; listening to other people, understanding them, trying to tell stories.”

I ask about the contemporary political resonances of A Christmas Carol. I cite the wealth of certain members of his profession and of Swift’s. Only the other day I have read that she has a private jet so she can visit Alwyn on a whim. He promises me that 99.9 per cent of what the press write about them is false, and this is an example.

I ask if he finds it embarrassing.

“Find what embarrassing?”

The disparity between the amount some people earn and the wages of workers in, say, Amazon fulfilment centres.

“I saw something in The Guardian the other day, I think, saying that the top six richest people in the UK accumulate the same amount of wealth as the poorest 13 million. I think that was the figure,” he says.

And politics today?

“It’s bigger than Scrooge, but it’s the same thing amplified; not being able to see beyond yourself, building walls, cutting yourself off from other countries. If there was ever a story to counter that, featuring someone who epitomises that and then who remembers who he is as a human being, it is A Christmas Carol.”

Unlike the young Dickens, Alwyn was not a boy to stand on a table and sing and dance. As a child he auditioned to play Liam Neeson’s son in the Richard Curtis film Love Actually, but didn’t get it. He harboured ambitions to act, but pursued them only later at the University of Bristol, where he took plays up to the Edinburgh Fringe. One night he acted before an audience of one: the writer’s mother. Undeterred, he went on to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, joining the scramble at the end to find an agent. Weeks later, his new agent rang to say that Ang Lee was working on a new film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and wanted to see an audition tape.

“I got some mates to film me in a lunch break and then my dad filmed another scene, and we got a call that night saying, ‘He wants to meet you this weekend. He’s saying, we’re going to put you on a plane and take you out of school. Come for the weekend. Learn these scenes.’ ”

As Billy, a young US Marine fêted for killing an enemy assailant in Iraq, Alwyn was painfully believable; a virgin solider returning home to be exploited for an act that had devastated him. The film did not do well, mainly because it was shot at a hyper-reality frame rate that few cinemas had the technology to show, but Alwyn was on his way.

“Things only evolve by change and people taking risks,” he says. “And Ang Lee is someone who I admire for that. None of his films are the same. Maybe thematically they draw on the same things, but he’s always pushing the boundaries.”

The same can be said for A Christmas Carol and, even more, about Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, in which Alwyn appeared alongside Emma Stone and Olivia Colman. It applies less so to his other recent films, Mary Queen of Scots, Boy Erased and now Harriet, a faithful biopic about the slave liberator Harriet Tubman in which he played a slave owner’s son. What he has managed to do consistently is work and learn from some seriously good actresses — Colman, Stone, Saoirse Ronan and Cynthia Erivo. “I know. I am targeting them,” he jokes.

I tell him my daughters have insisted I ask if he minds Swift writing songs about him (whole albums, actually, but check out London Boy if you are in search of a little cringe). “No, not at all. No. It’s flattering.”

Does it matter to him that the press — it’s a bit metatextual this, I admit, for I’m probably doing the same thing — make it obvious that they are as interested in his girlfriend as they are in him? “I just don’t pay attention to what I don’t want to pay attention to,” he explains tolerantly. “I turn everything else down on a dial. I don’t have any interest in tabloids. I know what I want to do, and that’s this, and that’s what I am doing.”

The boyf, described only the other day as “mysterious” in one of those tabloids, is no mystery at all. He knows what he wants for Christmas, and it is the career he is already forging.

A Christmas Carol begins on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday

[svankmajerbaby]

13, 20, 30, 40 !!

thank you so much for the ask!!!!!!

13.  Describe your writing process from idea to polished i’m not really sure, but i think i’d go something like this: i get the idea usually by either being obsessed with a property (whether it’s frankenstein, beetlejuice or barbie) or by thinking up characters and adding traits and backstory to them, and then thinking up possible dynamics for them to have with other characters. then, i try to figure out a particular context (place and time) that could fit these characters, and i make sure to think it up in such a way that it doesn’t really conflict with the source material (for my barbie-frankenstein fanfic, for example, i didn’t want to set it in early 19th century, because i wanted vivianna to be able to become barbara roberts at some point, and as such it was more comfortable to preserve the victorian aesthetic while also being closer to the 20th century); if there’s not a proper space and time these characters can feel comfortable in (whether because of a particularly tense political situation, persecution, or simply The Wrong Aesthetic Choice), i make up one. after that i begin to write dialogues and location descriptions, try to picture it all in my head as clearly as possible. then, after i have some scenes written and some interactions done, i try to organize them, thinking what should come first, what can lead to a good finale, what would be the most important moment for each character and so on. when this is done, i usually already figure out the ending and can structure everything to lead up to it. after that, it’s all a matter of sitting down and writing between the scenes i’ve already done, editing them and adding whatever new ideas i get in the meantime. usually this is what takes the longest, because by this point i’m losing steam and interest and become distracted by new projects... but sometimes i manage to finish it and by then the editing process starts on full, checking for any grammar or spelling mistakes, wrong pronouns or words or names, usually cutting down on redundant descriptions or dialogues, adding things if i think something is not clear enough or erasing things if they seem too on the nose, and then i do this over and over until i feel it’s good enough.

20.  How many WIPs and story ideas do you have? oh boy do i have plenty. i’ve sorta finished the first novel of the story of Olimpia Gómez -the first one is simply called “La Ejecutora, 1938″; i’m currently writing the second, the third and the fourth ones -”La Ejecutora, 1946″, “La Ejecutora, 1954″, and “La Ejecutora, 1966″ respectively. then i also have almost finished my stage adaptation version of “Corpse Bride”, which i renamed “Death and Marriage”. i’m a chapter away at finishing my toy story fanfic, “Sitting On The Shelf”. i’ve written a single chapter of a beetlejuice fanfic about the maitlands that i still haven’t found a proper name fore, but which i’m very excited about. i’m writing several chapters at once of a massive addams family fanfic, focused on most of the main family characters’ backstories or developments beyond the nineties movies, which i’m calling “Family Beyond Blood”. i’ve started a little princess tutu fanfic that i’m not sure if i should continue, but which is a stylistic deviation of what i’ve been writing so far, so that’s good. i’ve kind of abandoned another fanfic idea i had, “Vulnavia & Vulnavia”, from one of my favorite horror movies, “abominable dr phibes”, which i have to come back to... and like the madwoman i am, i’m planning on rewriting the star wars sequel trilogy, so i got that in my to do list, as well. besides those fanfics, i got a sci-fi novel being developed, called “Los Prototipos”, about two twins that escape the enclosure where they had been raised to find out they were being studied to make a single-minded working force (kind of like the replicants in blade runner) with an expiration date -all this set in a dystopic 1960s country somewhere in latinamerica, tackling issues of economic imperalism, forced labor and independece through revolution. this is one of my most political works, so i’m giving it a lot of space to breathe. i’ve also began some time ago a series of noir/horror short stories set in Buenos Aires, one of them based on a short movie script i’ve written, which i’m really excited to do -because i’m usually crap at writing short stories -but i’ve left it in standby until i finish the bigger projects first... and then I Have Scripts, Baby! “Mi Amiga Carolina”, about a possessed doll that emotionally manipulates a depressed teenager that moves alone into her grandmother’s old house; “El Moderno Prometeo”, a (mostly) faithful retelling of frankenstein set in Argentina, focused on the family drama of the frankenstein family and on the relationships between victor, daniela (justine, here being his older sister), quique (henry) and elsa (elizabeth); a screen adaptation of a novel of a friend of mine, “La Chica Que Trabajaba Los Sábados”, about a non-practising jewish woman in Buenos Aires who falls in love with a rabbi, and how their relationship ebbs and flows; and “Verano en los Manzanos”, about a boy who lives in rural Córdoba who falls in love with a girl from Buenos Aires (i try to write what i know, usually), and who as they grow up become a couple, have a kid, and ultimately wind up apart due to his struggle with depression and her own struggle with acute anxiety, all of this interweaved with his own return to the little forgotten village he grew up on, where he reflects on the life he used to have. so, in total... 16 WIP. plenty.

30.  Favourite idea you haven’t started on yet i just now realized that i forgot to mention it in the last point, but technically i havent’ even started, so yeah, it’s just an idea: a series of sci-fi books about a parallel history in which India was the first country to go to the moon, and in which South America has the ASADE (Asociação Sul-Americana D’exploração Espacial), where they train cosmonauts to explore the vastness of space: set in an alternate 1930, a team of specialists on several fields and from several countries (the ones I got thought up already are captain Alfonsina Shua, from argentina, and copilot Adolfo Chaviano, from a paraguayan-argentinean couple) go on the fifth ever tripulated voyage. on an exploration, copilot Chaviano gets lost and disappears in space, cut off from his crew, and ends up going through a wormhole and crossing a threshold between sci-fi and fantasy of a blooming star -rendering him immortal but extremely radiated, which allows him to continue exploring space (ending up in several planets, registering his encounters with varied extraterrestrial cultures) while back in Earth the ASADE and his family try to locate him and bring him back home -it’s basically “The Martian” meets “The Little Prince”. and then, there’s the sequel series, about the three grandchildren of Adolfo Chaviano, who, after his death, discover that their grandfather had been developing a time machine alongside Alfonsina to go back in time and look for a way to revert the effects of the radiation in him, in order for him to live longer -and, perhaps, to find the way to become immortal and continue exploring the deepest limits of space. set in an alternate 1971, where space travel is now commonplace, the three siblings, Lena, Majo and Laucha embark on a space mission, meeting all sorts of new characters similarly affected by radiation and some mysterious magical/space properties, in order to find Alfonsina and ask her to give them one more chance to ask questions and say goodbye to their grandfather. so yeah, i got a lot of ideas, but i haven’t been writing any scenes yet -it’s still all in my head so far.

40.  Share some backstory for one of your characters well, the original character i’ve got developed the most is Olimpia Gómez (whose birth name is Beatriz Moreno), the orphaned daughter of two spanish union workers who were killed in the Semana Trágica on 1919 by the mysterious Society (of course, working in cahoots with the repressive government), and taken in by that same Society and raised to kill supposed “criminals and dangerous subjects”. trained in the countryside, taught to always be ready to die an honorable death for peace and justice while on duty, she’s taken to Buenos Aires to prove herself by stealth-killing the targets she is given, who she is told are people beyond salvation. she’s never been popular, but her closest friend, Eugenia Menéndez, always tries to get her to open up and join her own attempts at having a normal social life -which is quite difficult when being a spy and “executioner”. Olimpia has a boyfriend, fellow agent Evaristo Gutiérrez, but by the time they’re nineteen their relationship feels cold and strained, and at the same time there’s the pull of one of the most powerful members of the organization, Azucena Velázquez, daughter of two high-ranking agents: she’s kind-of out as a lesbian (only able to be so because of her high status), and has always been interested in Olimpia; Olimpia has to wrestle with her own internalized homophobia, feelings of guilt and bisexuality in order to finally decide who she wants to be, alongside her discovery of precisely how the Society is corrupt and extremely politically motivated when electing its “targets”, which leads Olimpia to try to escape it -despite knowing that the Society is everywhere, and if she can manage to escape, it’s because the Society allows it in the first place.

[alydiarackham]

(cover by me)

How to Be a Hero Like a Villain by Alydia Rackham

Introduction

I’m Basically a Geek

                 Hi. Yeah, so, it’s true. I’m a geek. Have been forever. I really had no shot at being otherwise. My mom raised my brother and I on musicals and Star Wars and Star Trek and Disney. Growing up, I read loads of YA sci-fi novels—again, lots of Star Wars—and then when Marvel started making movies, I got into X-Men and then Iron Man, Thor (my major crush on Loki still remains alive), Captain America, then Batman; all that jazz. I’m also a Disney fanatic and a theatre nerd.

I was an English major in college, am in love with Tolkien and Austen and Dickens and Doyle, and adore all things Victorian. My friend Jaicee introduced me to Vampire Diaries and Originals (which are both compelling studies in heroics and villainy, let me tell you). I’ve written tons of fanfiction, in addition to loads of original novels. I write in all genres, mostly because I get hooked on a good story, good characters, no matter the setting—though I do have a weakness for an epic story arc, flawed heroes and of course, powerful villains. Right now, I’m on the 5th book in my fairy tale retellings series. So far, I’ve retold “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Little Mermaid,”—and then I did a totally-original one about a Curse-Maker, from the POV of…yep, the villain! At the moment, I’m working on a retelling of the legend of King Arthur, called “Excalibor.” It’s a blast.

               As you might imagine, I am intrigued most of all by character. I enjoy reading about the great ones, and inhabiting the interesting ones in my own writing. Flat romantic interests and motivation-less villains drive me nuts. I’m fascinated by a character’s inner workings, his history, his motivation, his mannerisms, his relationships, his skills, his style, the way he presents himself to the world. My brother and I love analyzing plot holes and devices and flaws and symbolism and insights. (Our after-movie discussions can get very animated, and last for hours.)

               Often, we find ourselves yelling things at the Hero on the screen like “For crying out loud, don’t do that! Don’t go in there! Stop wasting your time! Watch out—don’t you know what’s in there?” We easily see the choices that the Hero makes that are flawed, impulsive, or just plain stupid.

               But very rarely do we notice such things about the Villain. A good one, anyway.

               The Villain takes us by surprise. He startles us. He’s two steps ahead. He already has the device, he’s laid the trap, he’s captured the girlfriend, he’s destroyed the evidence. (Cancer Man in X-Files makes me absolutely want to scream because of this stuff.)

               Why is that? How did he know? How is he doing this?? It drives us crazy—and yet, we reluctantly have to admire the greats for being such awesome masterminds.

               So…how are the Villains so successful? Sure, we could shrug it off and say, “Well, he’s a super-genius, what do you expect?” But that’s too easy, and frankly, it’s doing a great disservice to our Evil Neighborhood Menace. In fact, with everything we see, and with the Hero making such rash and stupid decisions, oftentimes it’s a wonder that the Hero even lives, let alone triumphs in the end.

               And actually, in real life, that’s often true. The Hero does die or fail, and the Villain lives and prospers. Why?

               What is it that the Villain is doing that the Hero is not doing, which makes him successful? Again, the easy and lazy answer is “He kills people to get what he wants, he lies, he steals.” Okay, sure. What you’re describing is a garden-variety thug. Somebody who gets caught in Spiderman’s webs every weekend.

You are not describing a Super-Villain.

There’s something about a Super-Villain—a really great one—that keeps him in the game, that makes him a serious threat to the Hero, even after being beaten over and over again. What is it about Lex Luthor—who has no powers—that keeps him alive, and makes him a continuous, serious threat against Superman, the most powerful being on the planet?

How is it that a Villain keeps coming back, when similar failures and losses would crush a Hero and send him home forever, never again to don the super suit?

Could it be that a Villain’s methods, his mindset, his approach, are vastly different from a Hero’s?

And, if a Hero could learn to take these qualities and mesh them with his own already-existing awesomeness, could he perhaps avoid a devastating loss, a crushing defeat?

Is that…in fact…what does make the Hero succeed in the end??

That’s what this book is about. Examining what truly is awesome about a great Villain, and showing YOU how you can put those qualities to use in your own life to do a great deal of good, instead of great evil.

Be a great Hero. Take a few tips from the Villains.

-Alydia Rackham

         P.S. I’m going to refer to both the Hero and Villain in this book as “he.” I’m doing that because it’s waaay easier than saying “he or she” all the time. Not because I don’t believe that women can be awesome Heroes, or terribly wicked Villains.

Because I totally do.

 Chapter One

What Makes A Hero or a Villain?

                 So, what is it that makes a person a Hero, instead of a Villain? We’re talking the foundation, here. What are the qualities he or she possesses deep down inside that distinguish, that draw the line, that clearly state to the world: “Nope, this is a good guy, this is a bad guy”? This can be confusing. Especially when we look at two characters, say Loki and Bucky Barnes. Both of them have been all over the map with both good and evil deeds. Both have been called Villains, and both could be Heroes.

               What is it that makes us decide where someone stands?

               I would say that it all comes down to one thing: CHOICES.

               It can’t be anything else. You can’t say it’s kindness, or love, gentleness, trust, honesty, bravery, self-sacrifice, or self-respect. Many Heroes and Villains alike struggle with self-respect. Many Villains sacrifice themselves for a person, or a cause. Villains are almost always exceptionally brave. Villains probably are honest with at least one person, or have been in the past. They also have trusted someone, been gentle with someone or something. Most certainly, the best Villains have loved very, very deeply, and tried their best to be kind to that person or animal.

               However, something went wrong. Very wrong. And with every Villain, it can be traced back to Choice.

               Sometimes, it’s a single choice. Many times, it’s several choices in a row. And eventually, they all decide that “the ends justify the means.” They opt for self-preservation, for the removal of liberty for other people, for the arrogant assertion of their own will. Over and over again, until it poisons them.

               A Hero is someone who does not do this. Who chooses, even if it is wrenchingly difficult, to stand by what is right, no matter the consequences. No matter if he loses everything. He will not betray his honor. Even if no one else would see or know—he would know. And he will not do it.

               In the end, this is what makes the Hero stronger than a Villain. The climax, and the defeat of the Villain, comes when the Villain’s weaknesses are exposed, and the Hero takes all his own strengths, combines them with the strengths of the Villain, and declares victory.

               A Hero guards his or her good conscience fiercely. It’s pretty well summed up in this quote from Captain America:

               “Whatever happens tomorrow, you must promise me one thing. That you will stay who you are: not a perfect soldier, but a good man.”  

 Chapter Two

Good Guys Can Be Stupid

                 We all know it’s true. When we’re in the movie theatre, we mutter under our breath, shake our heads.

When we’re at home, we scream at the TV.

               “Nooooo! What are you thinking? Don’t go that way, go the other way!”

               “You moron, don’t go off by yourself! Never leave the group! Especially in the dark!”

               “What, you jumped in there but you had no way of getting out?”

               “Don’t ignore her calls, she’s trying to save your life!”

               Yep, we’ve all been there. So what are some bad traits that Heroes tend to display that we ought to try to avoid ourselves?

  Stupid Impulsiveness

               Sure, impulsiveness can be good on a date, or at a restaurant trying some new dish.

It’s not good when you’re, I dunno, jumping off a ten story building. Following a noise into a dark forest. Or deciding to stop a bank robbery two days after you discovered your powers. Bad planning, or none at all. Not even thinking about what could happen in the next five minutes, let alone preparing for it.

For us regular folks, this can be translated into deciding to go for a drive in the snow with no 4-wheel drive, jumping off something that’s too high, going on a trip without enough money, walking down a dark alley in New York City…

               Yeah, you get the idea.

Not Keeping Family and Friends in the Loop

               We’ve seen it a lot: Heroes thinking they need to conquer alone—deal with all their problems, and protect their family members. However, all that ends up causing is major trouble. Sometimes life-threatening, sometimes not, but it’s never good. One that comes to mind is Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. If she had told her sisters about what was going on with Darcy, and especially the drama with Mr. Wickham, she might have saved her sister Lydia from being entrapped by the Villain. Pretty much every single story about a superhero contains this type of lament: “If I had only just told them the truth!”  

               Heroes fall into the trap of thinking that they’re protecting their loved ones by keeping secrets. By not trusting their friends or their family with what’s going on in their lives. When in fact, this only puts their loved ones in danger, and puts serious stress and pressure on the Hero, which can lead to exhaustion, panic, stretched resources, missed opportunities, and giving the loved ones the feeling that they’re being neglected and forgotten.

  Discouragement

           So many times, the Hero just doesn’t have the tools to do what he needs to do. He’s isolated himself, he’s gone without sleep, he’s fighting an uphill battle every day. And then, one major thing goes the wrong way, and he’s broken. He collapses, he throws things, he cries, he’s in despair. He thinks there’s no possible way for him to do this, to keep going.

               He dwells on the failure. It almost swallows him. He loses all confidence, all belief in himself. He might even lose faith in the cause itself, in the people and things he’s been fighting so hard for. And if someone doesn’t come along and convince him otherwise, he’ll never put on that Hero cape again, or pick up that shield, or that sword.

Read this book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Hero-Like-Villain-Villainous-ebook/dp/B07NMVGCHP/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=how+to+be+a+hero+like+a+villain+alydia+rackham&qid=1572901986&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

[vcngttpt-a]

ALL OF THEM. @mun meme ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

@deceptivetreat || mun q&a                      

                            ━━━━━━━━━▼━━━━━━━━━

||you are. the bane. of my existence. 

☯ Is there a muse you’ve always wanted to play?

hmm ig i’ll go with canon for this one because i have many ocs, but uh i really wanna write for seto from fragile dreams. i used to have an ask blog for him back in the day but that died quickly seeing as how dead the fandom is so- but i do love him with all my heart and i would love to be able to someday write him or something

♣ Is there an author(s) that you look up to with your writing skills?

rick riordan, marissa meyer and michelle rowen. i’ve read their books throughout middle school and high school and i still find myself going back to reread their books because i just love how their words flow as well as how engaging their plots are. i honestly hope i can reach rick riordan levels of skill whenever i get around to finishing my own novel!

♧ Is there an RP partner(s) that you credit for becoming a better writer?

one would have to be an old rp friend that we sadly don’t talk to anymore since she was the first one i started writing with a lot more back in high school as well as the one who would give me advice on how to improve and just be patient with me when i go stuck with writing our threads and also mikey (@snw-cnvs) since he also supports me outside of rp’ing to get me to write actually fiction drabbles. i just wish i could finish them lmao

♥ What’s your favorite ship with your muse?

all of my ships with mikey no i’m joking lolol i really love my ship with haneul because i’ve had him for two years now and he’s grown a lot because of his ship. he’s someone whose never believed that love was real and sure their relationship is a little rocky, but they both don’t really have the proper understanding for love until waaaay later. i also really love how whenever he’s with obe, he’s able to pull out this different side of haneul, someone whose so overconfident and quick to words, becomes at a loss for words and questioning himself a lot. i just love them best otp 

♡ Would you ever write a poly ship?

sure, i’d be down for it as long as our muses have the right chemistry as well as if i know both muns pretty well and if they’re also comfortable with it.

♦ What’s an AU that you’ve always wanted?

answered

♢ What’s an AU that you think just won’t work with your muse?

any au that causes too much of a shift in my muses’ personality. i’m usually willing to try any au but if it becomes too much that my muse basically becomes a different person i don’t like it. 

♔ What’s your opinion on teacher/student verses? Do you have any of these as threads?

eeeeh i dont really care, but i work at a school so the thought makes me like uncomfy because i don’t wanna think about work lolol but its also like fiction and i’m able to tell the difference between fiction and reality so yea. also no i don’t have any threads like that

♕ Do you like magic!anons? Why or why not?

not really. it became too much of a thing to deal with back in the day. i just like the simple things

⚜ What is the best time to write for you? Why?

nighttime because i’m fuckin nocturnal even tho i have a day job rip my sleep schedule and ever growing eye bags

★ What type of historical AU would you like to do one day?

Victorian era, or the prohibition era don’t ask me why i like them i don’t even know myself i just know i wouldn’t mind

☆ What type of fantasy AU would you like to do one day?

all of them. i’m a huge slut for fantasy in general. its one of the best things i love the most. 

☄ Do you think your muse would have liked going to high school sports games? Do you or did you go to high school sports games?

haneul: no, he’s not into those things, but also he was home schooled until he went to college

eiji: he used to play soccer in high school so yea

reese: do magic tournaments count? cause if so then yes

sage: no, i was the loser who hung out at the library with friends to sit around and read books and manga 

☾ Do you like writing smut? Why or why not?

okay, if it wasn’t obvious i used to rp back in middle school through high school and on tumblr and i have done my fair share of the sin once i turned 18. nowadays i’m pretty much like eh, but ig i could try again if the need arises, but it also depends on my mood ig? i’d have to write it with someone i’m completely comfortable writing with but also even then it’s gotten to the point i’m more like ig we can just fade to black yea? 

tbh i feel i got all the urges to write sin outta me when i was on my old en blog lmao i had so many smut threads on there i’m ashamed 

☽ Do you like writing angst? Why or why not?

yes god i love being able to break my muses because it’s so fun. like yea it also hurts because that’s my kid i’m hurting but i’m okay with that. it’s just something that adds realness to them because the world sure as fuck ain’t rainbow and sunshine

☼ What’s an FC that you’re dying to use? Why?

i have these icons that i squirreled away for awhile now and i really wanna use them but my brain is too dead to figure out who he could work for. like he was my first thought for reese but he didn’t really give off the right reese vibes so maybe i’ll dig around my oc bin and see who looks the closest to him 

or i cave and just make a brand new oc for him

☀ What’s an FC that you desperately want to play with? Why?

i’m not really picky about what fc write with tbh 

☁ What’s an FC that you refuse to play with? Why?

not really refuse to play - more like i’m eh with. if only because en used to be my main chara for a long time like, i was so deep into the magical boy lore that a good chunk of my headcanons became canon. but also it just…leaves a bad taste in my mouth even more so since the drama that happened in that fandom left me filled with fear and hesitance to rp for a good chunk like before. it just brings back bad memories and i thought i was moving past it when i was thinking about using him for reese but alas. some memories don’t leave

maybe one day i’ll either get to write en again or i can use his face as fc but we’ll see

☂ How does your muse spend a rainy day? How do you spend a rainy day?

haneul: he loves the rain and he’ll spend it either under an umbrella or just sitting there in the rain just letting it wash away his thoughts and fears for a little bit 

eiji: he’d spend it indoors playing a video game or playing with seto

reese: he’d prob be dumb and splash in the puddles because he likes to enjoy the little things. other times he’ll just ignore it and stay indoors either hanging with friends or studying and practicing his magic for his school’s next tournament 

sage: i like to spend it just lookin out my window with my kitty on my chest. i love the sound of it against the sidewalk and streets. 

☃ If your muse was cartoonized, what would their FC be? Why?

uh idk how to answer this tbh 

☺ What’s a character that you desperately want your muse to play with? Why?

toshi @ haneul *stares at @snw-cnvs* and also reese @ momo *stares at @deceptivetreat* but also i just want everyone to bother my boys i love them so much. 

☹ What’s a character that you refuse to play with? Why?

idk i’m pretty open for any character

☢ Are there any ships that you would like to write for one day? Any that you wouldn’t?

uh dunno. i’m open for any ships that have the right chemistry tbh just not haneul since he’s already taken

☣ What’s one thing that will make you drop a thread?

useless drama and or if i can’t seem to figure out where the thread is going for our muses. like if they don’t clash well i don’t wanna give tryin to grasp at straws. but i’m always down to try again unless it ends up the same than welp

♨ What’s a muse that you wished had lasted, but didn’t?

aaaah my supernatural brothers!!! i love them so much but they didn’t last and i’m not sure if i’m goin to add them on here or leave them in the void. 

❀ Do you like reblog karma? Why or why not?

i’m gonna sound old but i don’t know what that is hold on. *googles* oh okay yea no. that seems like too much pressure to do and i have too much anxiety to do that i’m sorry. 

✿ Do you have a mun FC? If so why did you choose that as your FC, and if not who would you choose?

yes. because i have so many icons it’s not even funny, but also before i got my  hair cut she looked the most like me and also i thought it’d be fun to be able to tell the difference between me and my boys 

see, back in the day i was the loser who would make ooc posts that included my muses and it was easy to have mun fc so you could do that and it was a lot fun, but it’s somethin i won’t so nowadays.

♪♩♫ Does music inspire your muse? What’s one song on your playlist that reminds you of your muse?

haneul: mirror part II

any of weiss’ songs work for him tbvh

eiji: rpg

reese: havent found one that works for him yet, so come back later

✂ Do you like to format your posts? Why or why not?

yes it’s all for the aesthetic 

✆ Other than RPing, what’s a hobby of yours?

i love to write and draw. lmao sometimes i don’t write drafts so i can write more of my novel or little drabbles that’s for friends. 

✉ Do you RP on any other platforms?

nope

❤ Have you or are you currently in love?

answered

❥ Has something ever happened for you to hate a ship? Why?

uh nope can’t say there has been.

ツ Who has been your favorite muse to play so far? Why?

haneul, eiji, lifty and shifty, and en

han and eiji because they’re both my ocs and it’s so much fun to see them develop and grow their characters more. 

en because i was able to write a lot of different aus, headcanons, and just develop a canon character until he pretty much just became my own character

lifty and shifty were my roots. i started in the htf fandom and had so much fun writing those lil shits. it was just my go fuckin crazy shit. i still have their icons and their old blog is still up and i do kinda miss them some days.

回 Which muse was the worst to play? Why?

i used to have an oc named harley who was a living doll and i haha came to hate him because i made him around the same time i created haneul and i always loved haneul because i put a lot of effort into him and not much in harley and i got annoyed and jealous that back then everyone seemed to love harley more him. so i pretty much tossed him to the curve adfhsdkfjh

sorry harley but you were also hard to write because you were too sweet and cliche for me 

✘ People come in a group. If I were to look on your blog, who would I see you interacting with the most?

@snw-cnvs and @deceptivetreat

ღ Do you have a personal blog? Do you share it with your followers or do you keep it private?

nah i haven’t used tumblr in years until now. i do have one but i don’t use it so idc it’s called @shouyoutheworld but again i don’t use it it’s…v old

▼ Do you keep your character in character even if they are one of the worst people in the world?

yes. what’s the point of writing and creating said character if you’re gonna sugar coat them?

▽ Why did you create this muse?

haneul: i wanted an oc who was really jaded and brat. i wanted to see him grow into something more even if its difficult 

eiji: i pretty much wanted a muse that i could dump all my useless game infos on

reese: i wanted a witch oc who had a rival that they both hated their guts for and eventually fall in love I’M SO RR Y THAT’S REALLY WHY HE WAS MADE FORGIVE ME BUT NOW I DEVELOPED HIM A LOT MORE FOR RP’ING PURPOSES BUT Y’KN OW

[cbk1000]

Jenn Recommends: Historical Fiction II

Welcome to another blog post in which I tell you what to read, and you just sit and passively do it because I have excellent taste in literature and also I’m kind of a bully. Check this tag for more recommendations.

Today we revisit historical fiction, because it’s one of my favourite genres and I have lots of suggestions, all of which you should definitely take to heart. My first list of historical fiction recs (which can be found here if you’re curious) was all gay, all the time; this list is slightly more heterosexual, although not much, because here be lesbians.

If You Like: Dickensian lesbians (and really, who doesn’t?)

Read: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

I’m going to lift the summary from Goodreads, because it’s faster, and I’m lazy:  Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

This novel really hearkens back to ye old days of sensation fiction when literary thrillers were a bit slower, a little more cumbersome; they wanted more patience from the reader, who watches all the little threads get teased out bit by excruciating bit. There’s a sinister undercurrent you feel pulling at you till about the halfway point of the novel, when everything is suddenly upended and you sit up in bed screaming, “BRUH!!” because your stupid ass did NOT SEE THAT COMING EVEN A LITTLE BIT.

Waters is really good at this; her evocation of Victorian England is excellent, and transports you in a way that only the best historical fiction can manage. The narrative unfolds slowly in the first half, building upon itself with a sense of heightening doom that a faster pace could never achieve. As the reader, you’re in on the con (or are you?), and you know what’s going to happen, how it’s all going to end, where the burgeoning relationship between the two girls is painfully trundling along to--except you don’t. Waters pulls the rug out from under your feet, and she doesn’t just do it once, which is why I’m reluctant to say too much about the plot. AND--she does it all in really lovely prose that’s reminiscent of the time period she’s working in; I never really felt a modern hand guiding me. I could have been reading any piece of 19th century literature; the seams between the 21st century and the 19th are never visible, never jarring. If you, like me, are a slut for ornate Gothic literature, and/or you want your historical lesbians and you want them now, give this a try.

If You Like: Watching an oblivious pre-WWI Edwardian society hurtling to its inevitable doom through the eyes of a fucked-up family whose matriarch loses herself in the magic of her own fairytales instead of actually paying attention to the flesh and blood children they are based upon

Read: The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt  

From Goodreads:  When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

It actually took me about a month or so to read this book--not because I kept putting it down and then begrudgingly picking it back up again, but rather because I purposefully wanted to draw it out. The language, the atmosphere--it was all just something I needed to savour. This is a slow, thoughtful book that focuses rather minutely on the dramas of one family and the people who become entangled with it; it will not be for everyone (which is a caveat attached to every book, but I feel this one in particular requires the warning). This is a book about the creative process and the myriad escape hatches it offers us from the real world, sometimes to our own detriment. It is a book about WWI even though the actual war inhabits only the last quarter of the book. It is a book about the options of women in a time when society was still debating whether or not they should be considered full-fledged people. 

This is one of those books that sort of just crawled inside me and stayed; I didn’t want to leave it. I think part of my reluctance came in not wanting to reach the end, knowing WWI was bearing down on these characters, knowing many of them wouldn’t make it, because that’s what the war did to an entire generation: it erased it. I knew it was going to erase whole swathes of the story I had spent hours devoting myself to. I knew for so many of the characters there wasn’t going to be a tidy ending, and there wasn’t; they just stopped, abruptly. You follow generations of the family and in the end feel cheated, not through any failing of the author, but through the cruel and arbitrary machinations of history and the things it has perpetuated against the human race through our own blind stupidity (I’m still upset about WWI, ok??? please don’t touch me).

There was magic in this book, in Olive’s fairytales, in the puppet shows of a family friend: but it’s magic that the matriarch in particular is using to encapsulate herself. It’s not a childlike reverence for things we forget about as we age; it’s a hiding. It’s a sort of disappearance into ourselves and our storytelling because we can’t bring ourselves to look at the material world in all its varying shades of shit and wonder.

Anyway, I had feelings, ok?

If You Like: Italian people, anatomically impressive statues, and erotic descriptions of marble (seriously, I think my dude Michelangelo might have put his penis in a block or two of it)

Read: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone 

This is a biographical novel of Michelangelo which begins when he is thirteen and still in the very beginning throes of his artistic talents. Stone apparently read through Michelangelo’s entire personal correspondence (and patiently waited years for it all to be translated) and also moved to Italy to write this, so that’s dedication, and the least you can do to repay it is sit through the sometimes vaguely uncomfortable descriptions of Michelangelo’s artwork and his sexual tension with it.

While this doesn’t have the literary merits of the previous recommendations, it’s meticulous historical fiction; Stone painstakingly recreated Michelangelo and his work. It’s an interesting peek into a niche section of art history and also covers part of the turbulent Renaissance period and the powerful politics at play which snare the hapless Michelangelo when all he wants to do is sculpt (and probably wank to) realistic marble people, goddammit. It’s entirely believable as a biography (though it is, in fact, fiction).

Bonus: Michelangelo’s poetry, which was not a thing I even knew about prior to reading this book.

[kiaronna]

Yuri on Ice AO3 Fic Recs!

Hi. I am one of those terrible people that consume a lot more fic than I comment on, because I’m a shy and lazy child. So: fic recs. To promote lesser-known authors, I’ll list from least to most bookmarked (I’ve left out some really popular ones, you can likely find those on your own). Feel free to give me recs in return!

If you’re an author on this list (and somehow see this despite my small following) and are like “mothereffer who’re you we’ve never talked” I plan on commenting on all of these this weekend, because #ficrecdays.

Symphony in a minor by Anicaruscomplex: This adorable 2 part drabble was published around Christmas and it’s been with me ever since. It’s a slice of life, but also Yuuri dealing with the temporary nature of their relationship.

what he notices most is the quiet by fishingclocks: Long distance fic. Did you know that a scene about Viktor making blini in the morning could send your heart into conniption fits? Well, now I do.

Nightfall in Osaka by ryukoishida: A perfect and soft date night for Viktor and Yuuri at the start of them being competitors. Also, the author researched actual beautiful locations for them to go to.

Step three: I’m calling you baby by polly_perks: Viktor deals with the fact that Yuuri isn’t the same man he met at the banquet. It’s sweet and crafted so well.

Scents of home by espritneo: This is the best fic I’ve ever read about Makkachin. Have you ever heard of espritneo? NO? Allow me to introduce you to this gift of a human being. Everything espritneo puts out has wonderful characterization of both Viktor and Yuuri and everyone else in their lives. Also, espritneo is versatile: canon continuations, folklore AUs, sex, time travel, and this whole puppy fic. You have no excuse not to check them out.

Seagulls on the shore (that which we grasp) by Gintsuki: Everyone has daemons and this story makes me wish daemons were canon, because it works SO WELL. This story flows like poetry.

Heart Lines by thelonelywriter: Yuuri reads Viktor’s palm, Viktor is ridiculous, and it’s adorable. Thelonelywriter, despite being lonely, has written some very quality fluff, so check them out.

Infinitesimal being by sarahyyy: An Otabek/Yuri fairytale story where Otabek is an immortal goblin, and it’s… written from OTABEK’S POV sometimes. I feel like this is so rare but it’s done so perfectly, and the lore behind it is bittersweet.

Every inch of you is perfect by lazulisong: *fans self* Every inch of lazulisong is perfect and I’ll say it as many times as I need to. Just go read everything. You’ll thank me later.

Again and Again by grayclouds: A reincarnation AU that is heart-wrenchingly beautiful and unconventional. It’s a whirlwind of different forms of Victuuri and some have me turning over in my bed at night—in one of them they don’t even exist at the same time and it still makes my stomach flip.

The road that stretches out ahead by hellodeer: Yuuri and Viktor go on a road trip. THIS FIC. I’ve read it so many times, and it’s just raw and so convincing in its story of how Yuuri finally realizes that Viktor actually loves him and intends to stay with him. It doesn’t get all the attention it deserves.

Undertow by Mhalachai: *heavy breathing* this fic is beautiful and creative and almost made me cry for Viktor Nikiforov. It’s one of the few fics that demonstrates Viktor’s insecurities and doubts and does it by successfully using supernatural Russian folklore. I am so impressed by this piece and it’s still messing with my head—it also has a companion piece that’s Yuuri-centric.

Understand Someday by triste: A wonderful piece of Victuuri family fluff, starring Yurio. You will want to hug the little tiger by the end of it. Triste has other excellent works, too!

Rumour has it by lunaetude: Viktor and Yuuri are at Hogwarts together, and are ADORABLE and very in-character, and it alludes to Viktor’s loneliness softly but emotionally. Lunaetude has multiple AUs for YOI that are gorgeous, so go read everything by that author, even if you don’t think it’s your cup of tea, because you WILL like it.

Of Dahlias and Deadlines by ingthing: have you ever read a fic and been like, this is so cute? Why isn’t this a show all by itself? Well, ingthing has a florist/wedding planner AU series that makes me say this every time they post, and everyone should read it. Viktor was born to be a wedding planner.

Easy on my knees by ineptshieldmaid: A Viktor-centric relationship study that has such a careful and touching path to them getting together, and Viktor trusting and loving Yuuri. Ineptshieldmaid has written other equally squeal-inducing fanfic, too!

High-Flying, Adored by terra_incognita: I’m a sucker for superhero AUs and this is amazing. Everybody has secret identities and it’s a love square between Viktor and Yuuri and their superhero personas—it’s quirky and emotional and addictive. Also, Yuri Plisetsky is amazing in it. You will have to suspend your disbelief a bit though, because Yuuri somehow doesn’t realize that two silver haired Russians arriving in town at the same time ARE THE SAME PERSON.

The measure of the year (the mind of men) by geckoplasm: A fic where Yuuri and Viktor are a real couple with actual communication issues, just like in the show! They screw up and make up and you always get both sides of the story in a way that is personal and eye-opening as to how two people that love one another can still have misunderstandings and cause major damage.

Adoration (noun) by crossroadswrite: pre episode 10, but an incredibly convincing and thoughtful explanation of how Viktor fell in love with Katsuki Yuuri—an AU where Viktor had originally intended to leave Hasetsu after a year.

Chasing Tail by Metallic_Sweet: This is the only fic on my list that I think is probably dead but please read it just for an A/B/O experience that you’ve likely never had before. Viktor has his scent glands removed and he is calculating in a way almost nobody depicts him as, but which I think is true to canon.

From june to September by bigspoonnoya: “This is the summer they fell in love.” This fic is essentially canon to me, it’s so well written.

Body music by fan_nerd: Um, everybody probably already knows fan_nerd because they’re a magical presence in the YOI fandom, but their reverse AU is the best. Viktor looks up to five-time champion Katsuki Yuuri and some things stay the same (being drunk at the banquet) and some things hilariously change (Yuuri actually emails Viktor before he just shows up at his house).

Dear Mama by Ferrero13: Viktor writes letters and emails to his beloved mother throughout the YOI series, and it’s HILARIOUS. Also sweet. Viktor’s writing and drama is spot on, and this whole fic is just well done.

Specks of silver in the evening sky by winchilsea: “Viktor’s kink is taking care of Yuuri” in a way that’s both eros and agape. This fic is breathtaking. *sobs into hands* I love winchilsea. Sometimes I read things by winchilsea that I don’t even know about (I read a Pacific Rim AU of YOI and I’ve never glanced at Pacific Rim) and it doesn’t matter because they are such high quality.

I’ve been up nights making you my god by kevystel: Oh, kevystel. I’m reccing this fic because it’s one of the first I found, but anything by kevystel is golden. It’s a brilliant and gorgeous relationship study.

On top of the world by springsoldier(ladydaredevil): Another superhero AU, where superman Viktor takes on Yuuri as his superhero protégé and Yuri Plisetsky fails terribly in his attempt to be a villain (he rescues kittens, y’all). It’s so, so precious and I love its Viktor.

I have my body (and you have yours) by astoryaboutwar: *UNINTELLIGIBLE SCREAMING* if you haven’t read any of her works, you need to go read astoryaboutwar RIGHT NOW. This is a heart-stopping soulmate AU where Yuuri keeps his soulmate a secret and then everything is emotional and stunningly written. *points helplessly at ‘our doubts are traitors’* Look, she’s writing this too and nobody is worthy of it. Nobody.

Nerve Endings by Phyona: Yuuri moves to St. Petersburg, and they deal with Yuuri’s anxiety. Yuuri has A LOT of anxiety, and it’s depicted at length here in ways that feel real and devastating. Later, Viktor has anxiety too, and overall I was just sitting there clenching my head in my hands, having a lot of feelings. 

Healthy Impropriety by mtothedestiel: Viktor and Yuuri in Victorian times!! Viktor is EXTRA extra, in the most perfect way, and Yuuri is just a normal Victorian guy trying to live his life. The author clearly worked really hard to keep it true to novels written during that time (Pride and Prejudice, etc).

Closer, Still by sciencefictioness: *spits out beer* did you know that A/B/O could be incredibly poetic and full of gorgous yearning and make you feel like you’ve been missing out on someone for your entire life?! Go read this.

The naming of cats by csoru: Another Yuri/Otabek rec. It’s realistic and Yuri is so in character it hurts. It actually spends time depicting their ice skating careers, and doesn’t just focus on their relationship, in true YOI style. Also it’s wonderfully written, so go check it out.

Stargazer by Fahye: No ice skating, just amazing space AU sports. Yuuri is a commoner that gets taken under the wing of space royalty to learn how to ballist.

From Almaty, With Love by BoxWineConfessions: another one that I probably don’t have to rec because if you like Yuri/Otabek, you’ve already discovered it. Yuri goes to visit Otabek for a summer and they fall in love. It captures both of them very well, and its scenes are written out so stunningly that even them lounging around in Otabek’s apartment is like a painted picture in your mind. I’m not even a huge Yuri/Otabek fan and this fic is just… sigh.

Always My Soulmate by Watermelonsmellinfellon: obviously, I’m a sucker for soulmate AUs and compilations and this is a good one. Watermelonsmellinfellon contributes a massive amount to the YOI community, and has done everything: soulmates, an AU where Yuuri is deaf, and time travel, and they actually research everything. So, so impressed.

A glide in your step by Yuu_chi: this was one of the first fics I read that threw me into the pit of YOI. It’s so, so sweet and masterfully crafted and something I always go back to; it’s a beautiful depiction of how Yuuri and Viktor got together in Hasetsu. It’s pining Viktor written before pining Viktor was even canon.

Maelstrom by feelslikefire: Viktor relives the a day of the Sochi Grand Prix over and over. A fic in which Viktor is actually initially a terrible person that gets to do character development, AND the worst day of Yuuri’s life is handled masterfully again and again.

Victor Effing Nikiforov by shysweetthing: so I would like to recommend both the story and the author, who despite being a writing god constantly descends from heaven to grace everyone with reviews and tumblr musings (her tumblr is the same as her author name on AO3). Yuuri doesn’t fail the Japanese nationals after GPF1, makes it to Worlds, and Viktor Nikiforov steamrollers him with love that Yuuri is incredibly confused by. Go read everything by this author and pray that she updates Viktor!!! With Swords at some point.

Until My Feet Bleed and My Heart Aches by Reiya: They’re rivals! Do I even have to rec this? It’s so frickin popular and THERE’S A REASON. I daydream about this fic and the worldbuilding for the AU is sublime. The author plans everything out so beautifully. In case you’ve somehow missed it, Yuuri meets up with Viktor as a kid, Viktor is Viktor and is blunt, and Yuuri’s heart breaks, resulting in him ferociously working to beat Viktor in competition. Then, there’s incredibly respectful one-sided hate sex.

Like your French girls by ebenroot: Viktor is an artist, and Yuuri his figure skating muse. Everybody knows this fic. It’s perfection.

[mrmichaelchadler]

Bright Wall/Dark Room July 2018: A Room with a View

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room. The theme for our July issue is "Heat," and in addition to Fran Hoepfner's piece below about "A Room with a View," they also have new essays on "Miami Blues," "The Lost City of Z," "Thelma & Louise," "Kiss Me Deadly," "Rebecca," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Fahrenheit 451," "Jezebel," "Rango," Oliver Stone, and a piece exploring how heat functions in the screen adaptations of Tennessee Williams' plays. 

You can read previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or purchase a copy of their current issue, click here. 

i.

Summer is restless and stupid and hot. I have written about this before (and before that) and I’ll write about it again. The season itself is bad, I think, and yet, year after year, I cannot help but set wildly high expectations for myself. I’ll go to the beach every weekend. I’ll run 10 miles. I’ll shave my head. I’ll have a passionate, short-lived affair with someone I’ll never see again. What do I expect? It’s always the same, and it’s always lackluster. I get sunburned, I get sick of running, I’m growing out my hair. An old girlfriend peels herself away from me—this is before I got my AC unit and we stuck to each other if we embraced for even a second—“We should really make a summer bucket list,” she suggests. I can’t even make that happen. Anyway: I’m really making the most of my July so far, can’t you tell?

This summer, I’ve already turned down minor league baseball games and park outings and even just going for a walk around the block, in favor of lying on my stomach and curating my FilmStruck watchlist. OK, fine, I’ll stop bragging. What I will say is that I added A Room With a View to my watchlist because I thought, “Is this The Age Of Innocence?” And you know those memes that are like, “EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY”? One is me running 10 miles; one is me sleeping all hours of the day. One is The Age Of Innocence; one is A Room With a View. The answer, of course, is that it was not The Age Of Innocence. It was A Room With a View. Insert meme here.

ii.

So if A Room With a View is not The Age Of Innocence—and for what it’s worth, when you’re expecting a Scorsese and wind up with an Ivory, that might be one of the only expectation vs. reality situations in which you’re not settling—I will tell you what it is: A 1985 period drama directed by James Ivory, based on a novel of the same name by E. M. Forster. “Ivory?” you might ask, “as in Merchant and?” to which I would say, yes, of course. And maybe, if you are between the ages of 19-22, you might instead ask, “Ivory? As in the guy who wore a Timothée Chalamet dress shirt to the Oscars this year? The screenwriter of Call Me By Your Name?” To which I would say, yes, it’s the same guy. The script, in turn, was written by longtime Merchant/Ivory collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who captures, in Helena Bonham Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch, the elegant moodiness and confusion that is often part of being a young woman. Lucy has come to Florence with her cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith), whose first line in the film notably summarizes my entire summer thus far: “This is not at all what we were led to expect.”

iii.

This summer hasn’t even had the decency to have consistently good weather. Rain one day, hot rain the next day; 90 degrees and sweltering the day after, only to be followed by a dip in temperature so baffling I find myself wearing a jacket to take out the trash. I can’t predict it. I can’t control it. So you see, another thing about curating my FilmStruck watchlist: it is perhaps the only thing I have in my life right now that gives me any remote sense of stability. I put what I want on there, and no one can say or do otherwise.

In the past month of my life, I have moved not once but twice, quit my job, endured a breakup, and watched a half-dozen friends move to the opposite side of the country. This is fine; I am fine. I mean, there are 28 films on my watchlist and I occasionally spiral, unsure of what to watch, shut off my laptop in a fit of indecision and stare at the ceiling until 3 in the morning, but again, I am fine. Today, rain; tomorrow, sun. The day after, who has any idea? I brazenly entered my late 20s earlier in the year with the confidence of, I don’t know, two women looking to enjoy a nice vacation to Florence and, say it with me now: “This is not at all what we were led to expect.”

iv.

Charlotte, and in turn Lucy, are not talking about my wayward late 20s, though; they are discussing their room in an Italian pensione (fake word) in Florence. It was meant to have a view, you see. (A room with a—you get it.) A view of the Arno, a river I know about mainly from the daily crossword. But they don’t have a view. Charlotte audibly complains about this at dinner that night, well within earshot of the pensione’s other inhabitants: Eleanor Lavish (Judi Dench), a bawdy female novelist (literally can you imagine); the kind, gossipy spinsters, the Misses Alans (Fabia Drake and Joan Henley); the amiable Reverend Mr. Beebe (Simon Callow—ICONIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!); and the Emersons, an oddball father (Denholm Elliott) and his brooding but hot as hell son, George (Julian Sands).

And here’s where the magic happens: the Emerson boys have a view, and they’re willing to give it up to Charlotte and Lucy––free of charge. What they wanted (which was not what they got) could be what they get, if only they accept a gracious favor. Charlotte, obviously, says no.

Though Charlotte’s reasons to refuse can easily be traced to a British rigidity, there’s an emotional self-punishment here that feels recognizable. When someone does a good thing because you’ve more or less asked for it, it feels correct to say no. To stay the course, keep carrying the burden, and so on and so forth. The face reddens, the jaw clenches. “Women like looking at a view,” Mr. Emerson generalizes, in a way that both offends and humors me, “Men don’t.” To accept feels wrong, it feels like stepping outside of oneself and bridging a gap. Charlotte does not want something owed to two men she has never met. Later, after the dinner, the Reverend Mr. Beebe and Lucy convince her she ought to accept. It’s what they all want, as indelicate as it is. A Miss Alan says: “But things that are indelicate can sometimes be beautiful.” Touché.

v.

Lucy and George make out in a field of barley. This is scandalous, insane, beautiful.

vi.

If there’s one thing that rarely lives up to expectations, it’s the comfort of returning home after a vacation. For Lucy, going home is a punishment. There is no relief in the distance between her and Charlotte, or her and George, for that matter. Not only is it summer in England, the heat pooling in the crevasses of their long-sleeved linen clothing, but at home, there is Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis). 

Cecil is a nightmare. He’s the worst possible amalgamation of what every person who describes themselves as a nerd on dating apps is like in real life: loud, boastful, pretentious, chaste, rude, and stuffy. He doesn’t like being outside. He hoards Lucy like a possession to be trotted out. He loves to read aloud from a book, the Victorian era version of making someone watch an eight-minute long video. He has never had fun and he’s not interested in the idea of it whatsoever. At one point, he mentions the concept of a joke, and I know he’s never even heard one before.

Cecil is reality to a tee. Nothing you want but everything you deserve. I hate him. He’s my favorite character. In keeping with this month’s theme, it’s funny to think I thought A Room With a View would be a traditional period piece, when in actuality it’s a very dressed up jocks vs. nerds narrative. The more you know, etc.

Because summer is hell, and hell is always finding new ways of making itself worse, Cecil does the worst possible thing imaginable: he invites the Emerson father and son to stay in a home for lease in their village. Why the fuck does he do this? According to Cecil, as a prank (Author’s note: this is not a prank). On who? Uh, the landlord? Rich people should not be allowed to ever think they are funny. This is borderline life-ruining for Lucy, who was hoping she could use the time at home to get over her crush. No such luck! For now she is home for the summer with both a fiancé and a crush and a wayward younger brother, and everyone looking to her to do the right thing. Whatever the hell that’s supposed to be.

Vii.

My worst opinion on A Room With a View is that I wondered for many weeks after seeing it if Helena Bonham Carter was miscast. It’s strange to watch her at only 19, when she has occupied a certain witchy middle age for the entire time I’ve known her on screen. Lucy, to me, was so passive and formal and rigid. “Don’t you know Helena Bonham Carter is a total freak?” I wanted to ask. (Again: “This is not at all what we were led to expect.”) It wasn’t until I started my rewatch that I finally got it. There is a moment in which Lucy excuses herself after an odd conversation with Mr. Emerson, saying Charlotte will want her back. “Poor girl,” he notes. She takes offense. “Poor girl? I think of myself as a very fortunate girl. I’m thoroughly happy and having a splendid time,” she tells him. I’m thoroughly happy, she says, no trace of a smile on her face, and having a splendid time, she adds, every muscle frozen into the utmost perfect posture.

This was not, in my assumption, a passive and formal and rigid girl; this was a weirdo trapped in the social norms of turn of the century England. “Mother doesn’t like me playing Beethoven—she says I’m always peevish afterwards,” Lucy tells Mr. Beebe at one point. Has a more goth sentence ever been uttered? In a documentary produced 30 years after the film’s release, Bonham Carter herself says she imagines she got the part because she came in looking so disinterested, slumped over, and moody. Lucy Honeychurch is a young woman burdened by the rigorous expectations thrust upon her from every side. She ought to marry Cecil. She ought to stay at home. She ought not to travel alone or live in London or be by herself or anything that exerts any type of independent thought. No wonder she’s in a bad fucking mood all the time! Maybe that’s why the Emersons seem so appealing. They answer to no one. 

In an act of desperation, she lies. (When a description of a book or a movie tells you it is about repression in society, that is code for lying.) Even in the opening moments, the milliseconds before “This is not at all what we were led to expect,” Lucy opens and closes her mouth. She wants to say something. She wants to express her disappointment. But she shuts it before Charlotte says something. There isn’t supposed to be anything wrong. Everything is precisely as it’s meant to be, even if it’s a lie.

viii.

I did not expect there would be an extended scene of full frontal male nudity but what can you do!

On a warm summer’s afternoon, George, Mr. Beebe, and Lucy’s brother Freddy (Rupert Graves—a crush!) go for a naked swim in what the Honeychurch siblings refer to as their sacred pond. The scene is miraculous: playful and happy and free. It’s everything Lucy isn’t. Earlier in the film, she mentions to Cecil that she used to swim there until she was caught.

I don’t want to go so far as to say that it’s the act of stumbling upon these naked men running around with their flaccid dicks that breaks Lucy, jumpstarting what is essentially a nervous breakdown causing her to lie to everyone she knows including herself about what she wants to do with herself and her life and her engagement and whatever the fuck George wants, but…it certainly doesn’t help.

ix.

Summers end. Heat abides. “Is it even the longest day yet?” is asked quietly on an outing to the beach. No, but it comes quicker than you realize and then it’s cold before you know it. Maybe it’s the not knowing about the weather that’s the only constant we have right now (extremely right now). As the days get darker and colder and windier, Lucy goes to see Mr. Emerson and speaks, almost plainly, about how abominable George has behaved towards her.

“He only tried when he should not have tried,” Mr. Emerson says, sympathetically. George’s sin was acting in his self-interest, and what he believed (correctly) to be the self-interest of Lucy. Isn’t it stupid, doing what you want sometimes? In spite of everything else, including the whole world? Feels like the most summer action you could take. Mr. Emerson goes one step further, and he breaks the news to Lucy: he and George are leaving and heading back to London. And it is only when faced with something truly unexpected—a surprise, a change, an abrupt action for which she is the direct catalyst—that Lucy cries. It’s the storm at the end of a hot summer day. These are not delicate, poised tears streaming one by one down the side of her face. They are heavy, hurtful sobs. She can’t control it. She’s free.

Because none of it is fair. The summer is long and awful. Unfair. She can’t love who she wants to love. Unfair. She’s forced to love someone she can’t stand. Unfair. She has to wear, like, a long-sleeved dress in the summertime! UNFAIR! Summer ought to stand for a specific type of freedom—emotional, physical, let those bellies hang out, etc.—and yet it’s unnaturally burdensome. It’s repressive. It forces us back within ourselves, questioning and nervous and moody as all fuck. And so, to cry—to full-on heave, honestly, at this particular misery, both an over- and an underreaction—is quite possibly the most liberating thing Lucy can do. This is the sacred pond, renewing and refreshing and horrible, baptizing her in something new.

from All Content https://ift.tt/2usTpUf

[the-chaotic-neutral]

Is it possible to go home again? Are your favorite books of childhood actually as good as you remember? Or should they simply remain just that, memories, never to be revisited? I went back to my childhood touchstones to see. The results were varied and interesting.

Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis

One of the earliest of my childhood loves to be taken off a pedestal. I was near obsessed with these novels as a child. I found the amount of world-building to be enthralling. It felt grounded and fantastic, and there always seemed to be more out there to be discovered. However, my memory failed me a bit regarding the specifics of the later books (or earlier depending on your preferred reading order).

Revisiting this was crushing. I suddenly remembered being put off by the nonsensical rules that seemed to govern Narnia… sometimes. And Aslan never. There were holes in the storytelling that eclipsed the actual story. And the Christianity. It’s not fair to call it symbolism or imagery. The reason I kept petering out toward the end of the series is that it goes from Christian allegory to a blatant Christian bible retelling. Which, both as a child and adult, is incredibly unfulfilling. But to my younger self, the Rapture ending was unforgivable. There was enough magic in Narnia and the other realms to save everything. Either the people could have rallied, or the citizens of Narnia, or Aslan. In order to stick with the canonical bible ending, Lewis was forced to write an ending where everyone essentially either forgets their power or forgoes their power, giving up and running away. It’s dull, derivative, and didn’t really hold up when I was a kid.

Still, there are aspects of the world-building that appealed to me as an adult. The parts that aren’t Christian, that is. There’s a mundanity to the magic that seems both sincere and slightly ironic. That sensibility is what I’ve kept with me. The fact that after magic is discovered then it simply is. The act of discovery can’t go on forever, and at some point the magic will either be gone or become part of every-day life. And the latter is what Narnia showed me.

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville

I was the most nervous about picking this one back up. I’ve written at length about this book meant and means to me. My adult self is delighted to tell you that this book still works. Not necessarily on a prose level. The story is very simple, many details that I recall likely came from my imagination. It moved along as was over before I expected. It was, dare I say, breezy. The book was a perfect cocktail for my younger self because it was made of two ingredients.

The first was Jeremy Thatcher and his dragon. He was simplistic enough that my imagination could put me in his shoes, and his emotional bond with the dragon Tiamat. Style aside, the fact that I had a book with an emotional core to latch on to, rather than the story-driven books I was used to (a la Louis Sachar and the like). That just clicked with me. It stood out from the rest of my books at the time. This variation was showing me a difference between drama and emotional resonance. Did I understand that at the time? Hell no. But I had a book I could get emotional over that featured a dragon.

The other is the framing device of S.H. Elives’ Magic Shop. The shop shows up across a number of titles by Bruce Coville, creating a loose series. The fact that it was a place that revealed itself to each protagonist gave me just a bit of day-dream fuel that the next time I was walking home from school on a foggy day or just biking around town I had a small chance of finding an old shopfront I had never noticed before. And whereas with the wardrobe you get Narnia, or with an owl letter you get Hogwarts, the shop was so mysteriously stocked that I would often wonder what item should call to me from the shelves.

So yeah, this book still has some magic in it. It didn’t blow me away now, but I can clearly see all the parts that cemented it into my imagination as a child.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

This one is probably the most disappointing revisit. I absolutely adored these books as a child. And unlike the Narnia books, I whole-heatedly loved the entire quintet. But upon revisiting these they were the biggest fall from grace, so to speak. Unlike the Narnia books they aren’t blatantly Christian, but they are blatantly pro-religion. There’s a pervasive, albeit holistic, focus on selfless devotion, grace, and faith.  To some that may not sound terrible, but I remembered these as being about children who found personal strength. The focus on faith takes away some of their agency and replaces it with a weak version of destiny.

Faith in and of itself is not a good thing. It is made through the pairing of belief and an absence of evidence, which is a terrible combination. Faith, both in definition and in practice within these books, requires a certain degree of ignorance. Faith without ignorance becomes confidence and loyalty. These books made me appreciate mysteries as a part of life, but I hadn’t realized how much they also eschewed the act of solving said mysteries.The takeaway I had with this series as that as a child I believed they were about strength and perseverance, but as an adult they have a strange reliance on faith and fatalism.

Tom Swift Jr. (Tom Swift IV)

Jesus, what was I thinking? The takeaway from these? Shame. Actually, that was what they taught me back then, as well. I stopped reading them after I had chosen it for a “what did you read over the summer” book report in elementary school and then was too embarrassed to talk about it for my presentation. I got a zero.

Okay, in all honesty I could see an anthology TV show being made of these today. They would be over-the-top faux 90s nostalgia and based solely on the covers, rather than any of the actual novels. They’d be produced by (and first episode directed by) Chris Miller & Phil Lord or John Carpenter, depending on how much they wanted to lean into the humor. And lord help me, I’d probably watch it.

The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs

This was an odd one. If you’ve ever revisited grade school as an adult you know how everything seems so much smaller. Well, the prose felt smaller. I remembered these books as dripping with a wry darkness. Not sinister, but macabre and mysterious. They don’t read that way to me now. Granted, they’re not bundles of sunshine. There’s death, children in peril, and well-meaning adults keeping kids in danger because they don’t believe they need all the facts. This isn’t the dark favorite I remember.

But it’s the foundation of it. There are elements that, when properly fermented and aged, will grow into my love of dark literature and sinister storytelling. There’s danger without cruelty. There’s darkness and the threat of violence, but it’s the mystery that fuels it all, not the threat of death. Death is just the seasoning, and that’s still pretty satisfying.

And then there are the illustrations. These books, or at least the editions I read and re-read, are illustrated by the illustrious Edward Gorey. Whether or not you know the name, there is little doubt you know his art. His creepy Victorian/Edwardian-esque art probably has at least as much to do with what I took away from these books as the text. I don’t really feel the need to contextualize that aspect of these books. It’s Edward Gorey. I loved his art then and I love it now.

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

This one is probably the strangest and most complicated as far as lasting influence and  how well it holds up over time. This book may be the only one that could be considered more solid now than when I read it as a child.

The plot is bizarre and convoluted and purposefully opaque. The book is dense. I had a bit of a touch go with it this time around, though don’t remember it being a particularly hard read as a child. Now it comes across as a mix between Jeff Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the Canadian horror film Cube. But for kids.

Looking outside just the plot, the author, Diana Wynne Jones, dedicated this novel to Neil Gaiman, who had previously dedicated his mini-series The Books of Magic to four witches, one of which was her. There’s also the fact that the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle is based on one of her novels, something I did not know when I first saw it. Coming back to this book, with all these pop-culture threads that have woven back into my life, was like finding out that someone you befriended recently was in the background of some of your childhood vacation photos. It’s strange and unsettling but also a little comforting in a cosmic way. Like a little validation from the universe about who I am and what I like today.

There are countless books I did not go back to, including The Tripods trilogy by John Christopher, The Time Warp Trio by Jon Scieszka and Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin. These weren’t out of fear so much as I realized that once I finished the titles that came immediately to mind there really wasn’t a point on delving deeper. These books all made my childhood to one extent or another. Some were emotionally fulfilling, others helped build my literary taste and personal aesthetics. The point isn’t whether they’re still fulfilling to me now, but that they served their purpose at the time. A Wrinkle in Time’s awkward religion felt like a huge blow to discover, but it’s not that bad. I tore through those books as a kid, often identifying with Meg and sometimes oddly put off by Charles Wallace. But that series left a desire for mystery in my genre stories. I liked that there was always more somewhere else in their world. The Narnia chronicles gave me a taste for concrete world-building, for an underlying mechanic and logic in the substructure of a book. This eventually led me to delight in the construction of Eric Nylund’s fantasy and is probably why the Feed and Wayward Children books by Seanan McGuire are utterly compelling and fulfilling to me as an adult. The John Bellairs books gave me a taste of the macabre with prose, and a second helping of darkness from the Edward Gorey illustrations.

That might seem like an obvious lesson, but it’s still worth learning on your own. There’s a security in knowing that while a loved story from youth may lose its appeal, that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. None of my subsequent loves and discoveries came tumbling down. I think there’s a strength in knowing that first-hand. It lets me be less precious with what I loved in the past. And when some of those old stories turn out to hold up, it makes them all the more magnificent.

Nostalgia calls! But do these classics from my childhood hold up? Can You Go Home Again? Revisiting Favorite Childhood Books Is it possible to go home again? Are your favorite books of childhood actually as good as you remember?

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Can thrillers really be feminist?

For The Pool

There is a dead woman. She is bloodied and battered. She’s probably naked, she’s almost definitely beautiful. A ruggedly handsome detective with a dark past stands over her and shakes his head at the sadness of it all. A steely look enters his eyes as he resolves to avenge this horrible waste of female flesh.

The above may read as sarcasm, but it’s an all too familiar opening for the crime genre. All stats seem to show that thrillers are overwhelmingly read by women and yet we still have to regularly negotiate the uncomfortable or downright problematic treatment of women and women’s bodies. But, increasingly, people are saying enough is enough. The team adapting Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike books for TV have recently publicly criticised the “voyeuristic level of violence against women” in TV dramas. And, when it comes to books, there is an increasingly noisy collection of female characters wielding axes, cocktails and secrets, and an ever-deepening pool of writers questioning whether there’s another way to explore our darkest fears without having to sacrifice any feminist principles.

There’s still a strangely intense fascination with women who write crime and thrillers; still regular thinkpieces, even documentaries, where women writing about violence are treated a little like dogs walking on their hind legs. It smacks uncomfortably close to the rather Victorian belief that women couldn’t be surgeons because of their constitutions, as if dealing with blood coming out your vagina once a month would make you more, rather than less, squeamish. And, despite this, more and more male writers are writing under genderless or even outright female names. Author Martyn Waites describes the books he writes as himself as “more complex, more metaphorical, the kind of things things I like in writing” whereas (although it’s unclear if these are Waites or the journalist's words) when he writes as Tania Carver, the books are “simpler” and “more mainstream”.

Last year, Terrence Rafferty wrote a piece for The Atlantic called “Women Are Writing The Best Crime Novels”. The title of the article is deceptively positive and, among his praise for specific books, the piece is full of frustrating, patronising assumptions about female writers and readers. Even though it’s male writers choosing to write under female pseudonyms, apparently it’s “a bunch of very crafty girls” sneaking in, redefining the genre. On the subject of recent megahits like The Girl On The Train, Rafferty goes on to explain that “writers of the current school tend to favour a volatile mixture of higher-pitched first-person tones: hectoring, accusatory, self-justifying, a little desperate. Reading these tricky 21st-century thrillers can be like scrolling through an especially heated comments thread on a web site of wandering unaware into a Twitter feud”. Leaving aside that the horrors of comment threads or Twitter trolls are distinctly male-dominated, the language used here shows that, even very loosely masquerading as praise, there’s a deep discomfort with the way women have changed the crime and thriller market.

But, as with many things, peel away the layer of men making things weird (#notallmen) and you have a lot of women (and some men) getting on with actually interrogating what writing a feminist thriller really means. Erin Kelly’s latest book, He Said/She Said, revolves around a Ched Evans-esque rape trial, after a couple see what appears to be a sexual assault during an eclipse at a festival. The book grew from the idea of a crime taking place during an eclipse, not the desire to write a feminist thriller, but as Kelly says, “It must be feminist, because I’m getting emails from Men’s Rights Activists telling me that I’m a rabid man-hater.”

Kelly’s book explores sexual assault head-on; it’s at times a difficult book to read, but it shows that thrillers can tackle these things without slipping into gratuitous descriptions of violence against women. “The best thrillers don’t deny the female condition, but hit the sweet spot between exploiting real-life victims for cheap thrills and turning a novel into a morality play. I agonised over using an allegation of rape as a plot device,” Kelly says. “More so than I ever have when writing a murder. But for every sensitive, thoughtful examination of rape in fiction there are literally thousands of raped and murdered and mutilated women whose victimhood is little more than a plot device. I knew I was treading on eggshells, but I walked with incredible care. I researched this book more thoroughly than anything else I’ve ever written.”

Ruth Kenley-Letts, the executive producer for Strike, said “great efforts had been taken to treat the crimes against female victims with sensitivity on screen” and it’s something book editors are increasingly sensitive too as well. “It’s a tough one,” Sam Eades, a commissioning editor at Orion, says. “It’s important for fiction to reflect the society we live in – and violence against women happens to those we love and care abou – but that’s not to say I wouldn’t love to read a thriller that explored the world how it could be, not just as it is now.” Alison Hennessey, a commissioning editor for crime at Bloomsbury, has issued a blanket ban on books that start with the rape or murder or a woman being investigated by a male detective: “There are enough of these books out there already, and enough violence in the world, frankly, that I’m not interested in contributing more to that unless the book was doing something to explore why this happens.”

I can’t help but think of the people who defend the level of sexual violence in Game Of Thrones by saying it’s historically realistic, or that’s just what would have happened in a society like that, even though it’s a society where there is also magic and dragons. Art in whatever form is important because it lets us explore how we feel and react to the real world, and yet it is fiction – it does not have to do or be anything. But if fiction is where we explore life, thrillers are where we explore fear. They arguably don’t work if they’re not tense, uncomfortable reads. I had to stop reading He Said/She Said at several points to calm down, and I worked myself up into a righteous fury reading Little Deaths by Emma Flint – but at what was going on in the story, not because of the way the writer was handling it. “I don’t know a single woman who has never been made to feel threatened or afraid,” Flint says. “Our real-life experience gives an extra frisson of terror to reading about a woman being followed home, a woman who has a stranger sit next to her in an otherwise empty train carriage. We are used to being afraid that we will become victims.”

So, it’s not that these subjects shouldn’t be tackled in thrillers (as Kelly says, “I read this shit on my phone every day – not to explore it is just another kind of silencing”) – it’s how to skirt a very delicate line without tipping into gratuitous and exploitative presentations. How do you write a book about people doing awful misogynistic things without writing an awful misogynistic book? There’s no easy checklist of how to make a thriller feminist, and everyone has their own definition of what that means. But, as Kelly says: “I think any novel that makes the reader think seriously about the fact that women still cannot move through the world with the same ease as men can be read as feminist. Sometimes the authorial intent to write a feminist novel is clear, but with crime fiction it’s more of a Trojan horse. Big Little Lies arguably got more women examining their prejudices about domestic abuse than a Guardian editorial.”

Here are a few of our favourite feminist thrillers to try:

THE POWER BY NAOMI ALDERMAN It would be impossible to not mention the book that won this year’s Baileys Prize. A tense, blistering, darkly humorous look at what might happen if women suddenly became the physically stronger sex. It’s impossible to read it without interrogating your own perspective on gender.

LITTLE DEATHS BY EMMA FLINT A startlingly insightful, intelligent read about the way society closes its walls against women who are not what they are asked to be and the way the patriarchy is terrified by the women it cannot control, and how far it will go to reassert that control.

HE SAID/SHE SAID BY ERIN KELLY A pageturner that tackles sexual assault head-on. When a couple witness what seems to be a rape during an eclipse, they get embroiled in a court case and the lives of the two people affected. It always puts plot and character first, but isn’t afraid to interrogate how we decide who we believe and who to trust.

PULL ME UNDER BY KELLY LUCE Coming out next month, this scratches at the edge of the genre, as there is no trail of bodies or plot twists. Instead, it’s a tight, intense portrait of one woman’s psychological state as she tries to leave behind the legacy of a horrifying act she committed as a 12-year-old. A sharp literary read about guilt and anger.

OUT BY NATSUO KIRINO From one extreme to the other, this shocking, violent crime novel follows four female friends working together in a factory who band together to try and cover up the murder by one of them of their abusive husband, and things escalate from there. One for readers who like their biting feminist commentary with some dismemberment.

THE WOMAN WHO RAN BY SAM BAKER While it’s a little awkward to mention a book by the co-founder of the site, a list of feminist thriller recommendations would be incompletely without this modern take of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. Not quite a retelling, but playing with Brontë’s themes of gossip, broken relationships and carving out your own identity.

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Raven Dane is an award-winning author of steampunk, dark fantasy, alternative history and horror fiction. Her first novels were in the critically acclaimed Legacy of the Dark Kind series; Blood Tears, Blood Lament, Blood Alliance. These are dark fantasy/alternative history/SF novels about a non human race of vampires who most definitely do not sparkle!

In 2009, Endaxi Press launched The Unwise Woman of Fuggis Mire, Raven’s scurrilous and most definitely adult spoof of all things High Fantasy. A fairy tale for grown ups with a sense of humour.        

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/287640.Raven_Dane

Described as The Gothmother, Raven Dane is all things Gothic. With a ‘taste’ for vampire’s and ghosts, poison and dark fantasy, she has entertained readers of all ages with creations from her inky quill (I’m absolutely convinced she uses a real quill and ink!). She also enjoys dressing up in Victorian Gothic clothing for Steampunk conventions, and has a wicked sense of humour.

  Hi Raven, Welcome, and thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for my blog; Flailing Through Life…

  And talking about flailing; do you ever find yourself ‘flailing through life’?

Flailing?  Sounds very energetic …lol!   I used to find myself frantically plate-spinning, trying to balance work, bringing up my son, looking after my mares and writing. These days, I sort of crawl between time spent writing and  the necessities of real life and my ever welcome duvet. Wish I had the energy for flailing now!

  Raven, you’re well-known for writing supernatural stories. There is the Cyrus Darian series and Legacy of the Dark Kind series, plus many more. What draws you to this genre and what kind of horror do you prefer to read (or watch) yourself?

I have always loved SF and dark fantasy.   I was a precocious early reader as a child and devoured books at a fast rate. I used to sit on the floor by my parent’s book case and read works by Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, especially the Canterville Ghost.  That story terrified me; it wasn’t until I re-read it as an adult that I realised what a poignant, sweet story it really was. In those early days I was definitely drawn to the dark side. My brother and I used to sneak downstairs late at night and peak through a gap in the living room door and frighten ourselves with Quatermas, SF and old horror films. Later when we were older and could watch what we wanted, we loved the old black and white Twilight Zone and Outer Limits as well as Hammer horror  and old SF films like The Trollenberg Terror. And of course, Doctor Who which I have watched since the very first episode, usually from behind a cushion.   Today my love affair with horror and dark fantasy has not dimmed. I am not a fan of gory fiction (unless it is something by Sam Stone, who adds style and great characters to the genre). The same goes for torture porn like the Saw films and  the growing in popularity extreme horror books, they are not for me.  I do enjoy creepy ghost stories; I am a huge fan of Susan Hill and M R James novels and their film adaptations. Ghost stories in a Victorian setting are a favourite for me to write. Other favourites include dark fantasy like Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, his two Hellboy films and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed.

  As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? And why?

That’s a tough one. I have a special affinity with horses and love cats, wolves and ravens.  I would have to choose a dragon though, for its magical nature, grandeur, its ability to soar to distant, exotic realms and to incinerate anything and anyone who gets in its way.

Editors beware!

  What was the best money you ever spent as a writer? What did you do with your first advance?

Did you splash out on something exotic with your first pay cheque?

Not my first pay cheque or advance. My other half has supported my writing all our married life and allowed me to work as full time writer for many years. It has been a struggle and we have gone without the material things that many people have thought essential in life, like holidays, big, new TVs and modern cars.  So anything I have earned has gone straight into the household running costs. I did however, treat myself to a huge golden velvet dragon made by a lovely lady in the US.  Total extravagance though!

Oh, and after a successful morning’s book sales at an Asylum weekend, I treated myself to a gorgeous black pirate ship hat, very steamgoth, very me. I have had so much fun and use out of that hat, it was worth every penny.

  What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

I was blessed to be taught English literature by a lovely lady called Miss Curry. She was not far off retirement when she had the tough job getting our lively class through the GCE’s for O and A levels but she introduced us to wonderful things. The powerful emotional impact of the War Poets like Rupert Brook and  Siegfried Sassoon, the ravishing beauty of the English language from  poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins.  I think the most powerful moment for me personally was the first book that made me cry, to really weep as if for a person I actually knew…and that was The Ship Who Sang by Anne MacCaffrey. If the fate of fictional characters can move me to mourn, than what better proof of the power of language?

  What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

Research is vitally important to me, whatever I am writing. I tend to research as I write as I never plan a book in advance. Some writers are planners, others fly by the seat of their pants and get straight to work with no idea of where the story will go. I am a definite pantser. Research can take me more time than writing sometimes but I think it is essential.  I spent all afternoon recently researching a historical find that I mentioned in just one line of a book. Even in the most fantastical setting, research can give a depth and believability to a story , anything less is cheating the reader with shallow, implausible storytelling.

  Cyrus Darian is a rather unusual name, how do you select the names of your characters?

Some come to me instantly as if been channelled from another dimension. Others can be a nightmare and get changed many times throughout the writing process. Thank goodness for my friend, the search and replace thingie on Microsoft Word.  Cyrus Darian was a bit of a blend between the two. I decided he was Persian, so being named after a great Persian king of antiquity suited his vanity. Darian came into my head as a nice sounding name. I used my other friend, Google to see if it meant anything and discovered it was a town in Iran. Perfect. Mind you, it might not be his real name, Cyrus lies all the time and uses many aliases.

  To date, what has been your hardest scene to write?

The hardest was also the easiest…if that makes any sense.  The end of a story arc for one of my favourite characters was always going to end badly for him. He had become more than someone fictional but a very real presence in my life, so knowing how it had to end was deeply emotional for me. But the scene wrote itself, confirming it was the right plot thread for the culmination of a trilogy. Not saying any more…Spoilers!

  If you were not a writer, and you could be anything else in the world, what career/vocation would you choose?

I love any form of creativity so always drawn to arts and crafts but I have no talent and anything I do is just for the pleasure of making things.  I was always a good actor as a teenager, I was the annoying little madam who always got the main female role in all the school drama productions which were almost always Shakespeare. I was the only child for years that was encouraged by the teachers to go into acting much to the ongoing annoyance of my younger sister who was at the same school and  did become an actress. Her teachers suggested a career as a secretary for her.  A mixture of a sense of family duty and the need to earn regular money took me on another path, journalism and later fiction writing. I take part in amateur dramatics now and thoroughly enjoy being on stage…I love to make people laugh… or boo, when playing the baddie in Panto.

Or be one of those smiling ladies in sparkly clothes riding a dancing pure white Spanish stallion in a circus….

  Have you ever had what one might call, a supernatural experience or event occur in your life? If so, would you care to share it with us? If not, which figure from history would you like to receive a visit from?

So many!  I am very attuned to the presence of earth bound spirits since a child. I wish I wasn’t to be honest. It is not something I can switch off and has led to many uncomfortable times in the past. My present home is totally spirit free which is so relaxing!  The worse one was an encounter with an angry, aggressive spirit in an old farmhouse where I worked. Young students at the riding school lived there and though we never told them about it to avoid hysteria, he was always targeting the youngest females, trying to frighten them. One day, when the house was empty for a couple of hours, I went in and ended up being pushed down the stairs. I could feel the imprint of strong fingers digging into my shoulders.  In 1995, there was a big fire there, no one was hurt but the oldest part of the house was burnt down. All the spirit activity stopped and never returned.

  11 And finally, what is your favourite childhood book?

Oooh….a tough one, I have so many. The first one that sprang to mind was  the fantasy novel, Elidor by Alan Garner. I loved it and he is an early influence on my writing.

Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed Raven.

      Raven’s most recent work is included in, Trumpocalypse; an anthology of satirical horror from authors on both sides of ‘the pond’.

    You can find Raven at   http://ravendane.blogspot.co.uk/  and her books to order from all good bookshops, on Amazon or direct from Telos Publishing. At the moment her books published by Endaxi Press are only available as eBooks.

The Raven Dane Interview Raven Dane is an award-winning author of steampunk, dark fantasy, alternative history and horror fiction. Her first novels were in the critically acclaimed Legacy of the Dark Kind series;