#it's tamsyn's world we're just living in it

[lady-harrowhark]

I’m so confused by the 9 months before and 10 months before chapters. Am I misunderstanding that in chapter one of HTN they’re on the Erebos and haven’t been to the Mithreaum yet and we haven’t met other lyctors but in 19 which is meant to be a whole month before that they’re AT the mithreaum and we DO know the other lyctors..

Am I missing something

i don't think you are! i'm inclined to believe it's a typo/mistake that got overlooked, but also given The Way These Books Are, i also wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was some Fuckery going on relating to that.

it wouldn't be the first time there was a numbering/timing typo - for example, the version of As Yet Unsent that Reactor (previously tor.com) put on their website has Judith stating that Camilla told her Gideon was "no older than seventeen" whereas in the paperback copies of htn it's "no older than eighteen." the paperback's eighteen matches what we know of Gideon's age, so i'm pretty content to say that one's an oopsie.

if the nine months/ten months thing isn't a typo, i don't think we have the full information to be able to make any sense of it yet anyway. i'm just living my life as if it's a mistake, but also occasionally shooting some suspicious glances at it.

[silverjetsystm]

📚

Send "📚” and I will flip to a random page in a book and use the first line of dialogue I see as a starter.

“Maybe it's that I find the idea comforting…that thousands of years after you're gone…is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice is.” ― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

Moon Knight was rarely chipper these nights. Professional, courteous, a level head. However, he projected an aura akin to the dark side of the moon. Unknowable. Old friends saw through it. One of the reasons he was still wearing his full vestments, nursing a glass of vodka instead of a hot drink.

Blood stained his gloved and gauntlet covered hands; the cloak remained spotless, seeming to glow and twist in the breeze.

"How long do witches live?" he asked his scarlet-dressed friend. Wanda wasn't a standard witch; Marc wasn't a standard Moon Knight. Rather than melancholy, he seemed reflective. "Us Fists of Khonshu live as long as we're needed. Apparently." He laughed, breath floating away in his breeze. "I learn as I go." Chapped lips take a sip, harsh winter wind stinging bare jaw.

"I like to think we aren't forgotten. Me, you. There'll be stories of us passed down to kids and down to their kids. Good stories, where we save people. Not just the world, or the universe. One life. That's all we need sometimes. Maybe it's that I find the idea comforting…that thousands of years after you're gone…is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice is."

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

Ok, your post about the Celtic burial with the adorably-repaired Greek lion cauldron came across my dash, and I just have to ask - is your URL on this blog an intentional Guy Kay reference? And if so, do you have good Guy Kay blogs recs? He’s my favorite author of all time and I feel like he’s desperately underrepresented on my dash.

Yes, it absolutely is! And the short answer is, alas, I do not know any good GGK blogs.

Beyond this Dark House is my favourite poem, found when I was living in Calgary, breaking my heart. There was a boy I'd once driven from Edmonton to Saskatoon in four hours flat just to see who didn't love me enough, or in the way I wanted, and also I wasn't ready to be loved, which was its own kind of tragedy.

So it caught me with its prairie soul, the knowledge of the richness of life and also that things die out here and take a long long time to fade, all

The shortest night wheels past this window, stars dropping behind the trees.

Somewhere there are bonfires for St John, somewhere fires for the summer king.

It's so late. For this, for everything, for being still awake beside a window

And then the lines I took for my blog:

Beyond this dark house a train is running away into the night plain. We've all had dreams break fantasies we shaped.

I dragged the boy I was in love with and a few other friends to GGK's book tour pit stop in Calgary, where I was savagely disappointed by how badly he read a sample of Ysabel. Displayed no talent for vocal performance at all. Read almost as if he didn't know how the sentences would end, in a bad way. But you know what, we're human. Everyone's allowed to have flaws.

So the answer about GGK blogs is... I don't seek them out, and don't particularly want to be fannish about them on Tumblr. Some books are like that; some I want to shout about like I've been doing about Tamsyn Muir's Nona the Ninth on @with-my-murder-flute for the last two weeks, and some I just want to take back to my secret cave and devour them where other people can't see.

I love The Fionavar Tapestry with my entire soul, but not my entire brain, and that's uncomfortable. It's a discomfort I'm especially not up to addressing on Tumblr, because like... I don't love how tied he is to a paradigm of queerness being weighed down by heteronormativity, so that queerness is salacious and risqué or just societally sidelined and we don't address the pain that causes because everyone just takes that for granted. But I also think in some senses it's a more accurate reflection of the past than modern queer-positive fantasy, and it's important and useful to keep around reminders of what the world before gay liberation was like. I will candidly admit that I don't actually want to praise him unconditionally and hold him up as an author I would recommend to everybody. He's problematic, you know? I think a lot of his books are him trying to approach a concept, and only capturing it in wisps, and that's especially true when he tries to write about sex and gender relations.

But, the thought of sitting through Tumblr discourse about how he's homophobic and bad gay representation/not homophobic at all and very important and validating actually? Gag me with a spoon. I hate doing that about media I'm enthused with but have no personal stake in, so doing it with something I love so intimately, with pieces of my soul poured into the honeycomb of its matrix, would be torture. When I was fourteen, The Summer Tree convinced me that I'd have a life outside the depression that was crushing me like a stone. It showed me how to imagine a future for myself. I really don't want that tangled up in Tumblr wrangles.

Oh, I do have a fic rec: the late legionseagle wrote The Road Goes Ever On and On, a non-Ysabel-compliant story about a Toronto cop who can't get past the old cold missing persons case of Jennifer Lowell.

And several times a winter, especially when the icicles start to melt, I look up and chant to myself,

Too much of Greece can sear the soul. I am a northern man. Where I come from the sky is wide and far away and March is mired in snow.

[thelockedtomb]

all these theory posts about how alecto is the RB of Earth made me think about how John's name is John GAIUS. The Lyctors traditionally take on a last name that is the first name of their cavalier. John's cavalier was Alecto, and his last name is "gaius" a.k.a. "GAIA" a.k.a. literally "earth," a.k.a. maybe all of tamsyn's plot twists are wordplay based and we're just fools living in her world. sorry if this has already been said but I realized it while rereading htn the other day and I feel like my third eye was blown open

Yesss, oh, a thousand times yes! It’s infuriatingly wonderful and maddeningly satisfying how these details are blatantly scattered EVERYwhere. Reading TLT is a slow-burn game of trying to follow the ball underneath shuffling cups. I feel like a starry-eyed volunteer in a magic show: “How did I not see that sleight of hand? And is that lovely lady coming back or did we seriously kill her? Also, you can’t seriously expect me to believe that you’re gonna- Oh my god, that really just happened.”