#literary blog post

[joncronshawauthor]

Last Chance: Pre-Order The Fall of Wolfsbane for Just 99c/99p - Goes Live Tomorrow!

The countdown is nearly over! We’re just one day away from the official release of The Fall of Wolfsbane, the first book in the Ravenglass Legends series. The excitement is palpable, and I can hardly wait to share this epic adventure with you. But, before this fantastic journey begins, I have an incredible offer for you. For those who haven’t yet seized this opportunity, today is your last…

[the-broken-pen]

Honestly the pipeline of “reading the-modern-typewriter snippets at midnight on the floor of my bathroom at age eleven so I wouldn’t get caught” to “being a tumblr writer myself” is a wild one.

[twilight-good-yall-dumb]

Can I just say that I was, and still am, a little heartbroken over the POV shift in The Prisoner's Throne? Like, don't get me wrong, I love hoof boy as much as the next guy, but I was SO in love with Wren's POV. Still, months after finishing the duology, I feel unsatisfied. There was something about Oak's POV that lacked for me. For some, it was golden because they got more Jurdan content (based on the overwhelming amount of discourse surrounding Jurdan in TPT rather than Oak and Wren, the protagonists, but I digress). For me though, it was a bit disappointing. It also just felt impersonal compared to Wren's (the shift to 3rd person didn't help with this). I fell in love with The Stolen Heir as soon as I began it, and Wren quickly became my favorite protagonist I'd read from the Holly Black faerie world. I loved her backstory, I loved her perspective, I loved her reserved yet determined personality. I LOVED WREN. I wanted more of HER story, and in TPT, I was left feeling robbed of it. She felt so absent in her own sequel, which I understand helped contribute to the plot in a way, but still. I missed Wren. The way she was written in TSH was so elevated; it was such a fascinating read for me.

Idk. I just still feel a little bit let down by it, which I'm so heartbroken about because I was fully expecting it to be a five star read for me. I wonder if I had a different perspective than most having read tfota AND modern faerie tales before the duology? Because for me, Wren's character, the worldbuilding, and the quest elements of TSH were so much fun and provided so much interesting context for Holly's universe! And I think I was also not so desperate for Jurdan content as other readers may have been. I wonder if TPT took the direction it did because of pressure Holly felt not to disappoint loyal Jurdan fans? And don't get me wrong, I am a loyal Jurdan fan, but I'm also a loyal Holly Black faerie fan in general, and I was excited to get to know this new, interesting character. And then she was taken away from me. Or at least it felt that way :/

Does literally anybody else understand this? Or was everybody else too distracted by Cardan and Jude for all of TPT lmao

[candlelightkiss]

She's never gonna be like the one before. She read it in her stars that there's something more. No matter what it takes, no matter how she breaks, She'll be the queen of Hollywood.

ᥫ᭡. jackieshauna aspiring fashion designer and makeup artist jackie x aspiring actress and film writer shauna au

[anghraine]

One of the more peculiar things about my current academic existence is that it's like—

me (to my best friend): It feels kind of strange that I've always had so many ties to people who are much more literary than me. There are all these people I know who keep ending up at "I discovered True Art and now I'm too good for Star Wars" and I'm just thinking, "damn, couldn't be me."

best friend: ...you have a PhD in literature.

me: True, but not their kind of literature!

best friend: It's still a PhD in literature. Do these people have that?

me: Well, hmm, maybe not, technically. But I've never been all that interested in major experiments with form and style—doing that stuff myself or reading the kind of literature that focuses on pushing those boundaries. I've always cared more about popular literature that prioritizes immersion and world building and just getting people to care a lot about characters and plot and such, not the really prestigious stuff.

best friend: You literally teach Shakespeare.

me: Well, I decided not to study the things I love most so they didn't get tainted by academia. And anyway, I still focused on popular literature from my eras. The seventeenth-century stuff I was writing about made a lot of the late Victorians very angry because they thought it was crude and cravenly appealing to unrefined common tastes instead of True Art. The novel in Austen's lifetime was even more of a low-prestige popular form at the time, especially the female-dominated genres, which were most of them, and she took care to identify herself as a woman.

best friend: I know you did get into academia through Tolkien and then didn't study anything close to that.

me: I couldn't let them ruin him for me! And besides, I know that Shakespeare and Austen are about as prestigious as it gets now, but for me they've still got that pop culture media energy, you know? Though sometimes when people make sweeping pronouncements about artistry and literature that don't make sense for anything in English published before 1700, I have to fight the temptation to be ... that person.

best friend, laughing: You mean pulling a well akshually? At least you have the credentials. You could even do it like "well actually, *obnoxious cough* as someone with a PhD in this subject..." now. You spent years earning this! Tell a few people Well Actually as a treat and then go watch Star Wars.

[aew-kun-age-regression]

Moodboard!!! Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven!!! (⁠ﾉ⁠◕⁠ヮ⁠◕⁠)⁠ﾉ⁠*⁠.⁠✧

I gonna do a Tell Tale Heart version cause it's my favourite of Poe's!!! (This 1 is my 2nd favourite)

My mum read it to me!!!

[ogwriter22]

I wish...

I wish I was my mother's son

Provide her without a fear

Give a warm shoulder for her tears

Make her proud and wear

Her proudest smile

[diaryofruchita]

ruchita, excerpt from baby come back please

[mercylikestowrite]

There’s so many things that make you different from everybody else. You know me, you genuinely know me and took the time to learn all of my stories, all of my secrets, my annoying habits. You know me, and see me, and, really love me. I thought i knew love by name before you but i didn’t even know what she looked like. You are love. There’s a reason why before you nothing ever seemed to work, never satisfied. Always something missing.. my darling that something was you. My heart has always been yours, i fully believe that the moment i was thought up, you were mixed up with me. created with the same materials, made to love one another. everything i have done has lead me to love you and i believe that even if i wasn’t where i am today even off in another state, i would find you. somehow somewhere we would cross paths and my heart would know. i am undeniably all yours, and so deeply in love with you.

love always,

merc

[suddencolds]

✍️ (non-snz character study)

[clit-a-cola]

Over the Garden Wall is one of those shows where it's like "yeah the main demographic is kids but no you the adult with a job who pays taxes reading this should still check it out"

It's short, wonderful music, simple but good story, gorgeous art.

[hotgirlyshit]

[maverick-prime]

fanfiction is worth way more than you might think it is. here's why.

something i don't think anybody ever talks or thinks about is how fanfic helps writers develop incredibly useful skills and tools in the same way that prompts, worksheets, and studying literature does. (i actually think it's much more accessible than many of those types of supposedly helpful methods to build good writing skills. fanfiction makes the possibilities limitless while building upon media that people love and really connect with. you can find whatever you want if you use the right tags in AO3.) to illustrate exactly what i mean, i present these points:

*NOTE: if you're not familiar with fanfic terms, i'll define them as i go! i'm also an AO3 user, so i'll be using that as a basis for a lot of my thoughts.

it’s a really helpful way to get a grasp of how to keep characters consistent in a piece, since you have to work with characters that already have established personalities, backstories, habits, and character traits that carry over from their source material. this can get a bit tricky when writing AUs (alternate universes) or canon divergences (hopefully self-explanatory) in particular, but if you acknowledge that characters are OOC (out of character), this can solve that issue pretty quickly and as long as you make everything make sense within context, you're golden. not only that, but you can fix any flaws that you perceive in a character by adding in your own headcanons (personal ideas/beliefs about a character) or by creating realistic traits in that character that don't exist in canon but make sense for the character. this also works for expanding upon canon traits that are never explored to their full potential in canon.

a great example of this would be tony stark in the MCU. a lot of fanfic interpretations of his character put a stronger focus on his anxiety and PTSD, since the movies hint at those traits existing, but don't do them a lot of justice. another good example that's a bit more broadly applicable is LGBT+ or neurodivergent headcanons. if you really identify or kin with a character and feel that they have a certain orientation, gender identity, or mental disorder/condition, you can make it happen! this often has the great side effect of opening up a lot of possibilities for writing those traits into that character and how they affect the world and other characters around them differently than in canon.

you can think of an almost infinite amount of different scenarios to put characters and story events in. i mentioned AUs and canon divergences above, but there are also fanfic tropes like everybody lives/nobody dies, kidfic, time loop/time travel, role swap, missing scene, and even omegaverse (i'm not explaining that one to you, you're on your own pal) that offer different possibilities for putting characters and story events in all sorts of circumstances and contexts that differ from canon. (continuity soups are one of my very favorite examples of this technique. in a continuity soup, an author working with a franchise that has multiple different continuities can cherry-pick aspects of each continuity they like and smash them all together into a single world. this technique works especially well with transformers, which has, at this point, almost a dozen different continuities that are in fact all canon at the exact same time.) a writer doing this learns how to translate certain necessary story events into a completely different world, or can come up with a whole new world, storyline, or context on their own to play with plot, conflict, characters, and story events.

there are a near-limitless number of AUs out there, and every AU that is widely used comes with its own set of tropes. tropes are another useful tool for writers, because they can either be cliche or they can actually be very helpful for building a compelling plot or for introducing characters in a certain way. there are even fanfic genre tropes that exist, like hurt/comfort, fluff, whump/angst, slow burn, enemies to lovers, dead dove do not eat, crackfic... the list goes on!

writers who have difficulty writing things like romance, intimacy, emotional turmoil, injuries, sci-fi, or magic can easily learn a lot from how different fic writers write those topics (and many others). there are tons of fics that focus a lot on one specific genre and whose authors have developed a really great understanding of how to write those genres. not only can you learn a lot in terms of how to write genre, but you can also learn to develop your own writing style. this is one of the reasons why i think fanfiction is a lot more accessible than traditional books and classics. sure, you could read danielle steel novels or fifty shades of grey (which is itself fanfiction!!) or 1984 by orson welles, but unless you're really invested in the worlds being created, you'll find it harder to appreciate the prose. and, a lot of fic writers are not professional writers, so they don't even care about prose! (this is a broad generalization, and i mean "prose" in a more academic sense because i am literally studying rhetoric and prose for my bachelor's degree. not a lot of fic authors are breaking down writing styles for dialogue, diction, or sentence structure. they just write what they love writing and often develop their own styles out of that, which is also just as valid.)

i myself have definitely not been reading as many books in recent years as i've read fanfics. i go through fanfics like wildfire through a dry field. finding fic authors i love reading has really helped me improve my writing style! not only that, but i feel confident to try writing real romances with kissing scenes, to use actual scientific language to describe in-text phenomena, to describe magical objects and worlds with more clarity, and even to try my hand at writing smut. i've learned to break out of my comfort zone thanks to fanfiction, and it's helped me become a much better writer.

developing a writing style through reading other authors' work is much like developing an art style. any artist knows that you're encouraged to create your own style by mashing together traits from other artists' styles you really love and making them into something that's wholly your own. writing works the exact same way. one of my professors last semester had us do an "apprenticeship" with a short story collection written by a certain author to open us up to styles we like and don't like. she said that's how you create your own style, by figuring out what you like and what you don't like. i've been doing this with fic authors for years, and let me tell you, there are some real literary geniuses out there.

fanfiction helps writers learn to accept criticism as well as suggestions for what to write next. one of the hardest parts of being a writer is having someone read your work and tell you there's something wrong with it. your peers do it, your professors do it, editors do it, publishers do it. i've had the great privilege of participating in multiple writing workshops as part of my university education, but it can be really, really hard to find or create writing workshops outside of an academic setting. sites like AO3 cut out the middleman and bring authors right to their audiences. anyone can leave kudos on a fic if they liked it, and anyone can comment on a fic and chat directly with an author. i know for a fact that most authors regularly check and read the comments sections on their fics for feedback, criticism, and requests for what to write next. you can't necessarily do that with big-time authors like stephen king; you’d have to send a letter that may never be read.

the closest thing this system of interaction comes to is voice actors hopping on twitch streams and taking requests from viewers to say all kinds of things in-character. (this actually has the added benefit of inspiring new and interesting fic ideas.) the community on AO3 is genuinely one of the most accepting and welcoming internet spaces i've ever existed in, with possibly the exception of tumblr. fic authors really value feedback, and they love when people leave comments. sometimes they write fic just for themselves, but sometimes they do it for their audiences too! there's a really deep appreciation for source material and fanon (fan canon) alike in the world of fanfiction, and a lot of that is fostered in the author-audience connection. this is invaluable as a beginning writer, because it can help establish criticism as a valuable tool and not something to fear.

it can be scary when you put so much love into something and people don't like it. but fic readers are some of the most encouraging, wonderful people ever. you can trust them to offer valuable feedback and actually constructive criticism.

in short, fanfiction is a bit like placing a kid into a sandbox that only has a select few toys in it and letting them play however they want. so much creativity can come out of working within certain restraints, and it can really help you develop a lot of skill you might not develop otherwise. more aspiring writers should write—or at least read—fanfiction so they can reap some of these benefits. i wish it were more widely discussed in universities, at the very least, because there is so much to learn from fanfiction.

and if you really think fanfiction is only for gross internet weirdos, i remind you of fifty shades of grey being fanfic of twilight, or that city of bones, the first mortal instruments book, was originally a ginny/draco fanfic. i don't even need to mention the sheer number of more recently published romcom books that are based off of reylo from the star wars sequels. plus, if you really think about it, most modern shakespeare adaptations and homages (10 things i hate about you, leo dicaprio's romeo and juliet, the lion king) are fanfiction! there's no shame in making media of what you love. there's no shame in loving anything in the first place. do what makes you happy, and chances are you'll learn something along the way.

[neversetyoufree]

I have not stopped thinking about The Vampyre since I read it, so here's some extra trivia for y'all about Lord Ruthven's name:

VnC's Lord August Ruthven is, of course, named after the Lord Ruthven from the short story "The Vampyre." Written by John William Polidori and published in 1819, "The Vampyre" is often cited as the first piece of true modern vampire fiction. It makes sense for Mochijun to want to reference something so genre-founding.

However! The circumstances surrounding this short story (and thus the Ruthven character) are both deeply weird and deeply fascinating.

For starters, do y'all know the famous story about how Frankenstein was written? It started as a challenge between friends stuck inside due to bad weather—write a frightening story for everyone's entertainment. Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and her future husband Percy Shelley were there, of course, but so were the poet Lord Byron and his personal doctor: a man named John Polidori.

While Mary penned the beginning of one of the most famous books in history, Byron's own attempt at horror was abandoned partway through. He wrote a fragment of a novel about an aristocratic vampire and a foolish young man that traveled with him to Turkey, but he never inteded to finish it. However, after learning how Byron thought the tale would end, Polidori eventually came to write his own (complete) version of a similar plot.

The Vampire in Byron's fragment went by the name of Augustus Darvell, but for the majority of "The Vampyre," Polidori's titular monster calls himself Lord Ruthven. This name comes from the novel Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb, a book that openly parodied and mocked Lord Byron (Lamb's ex lover) with its main character.

Now, why did Polidori name the monstrous, cruel, almost parasitic monster in his story after a parody of his patient and boss? That's because their relationship was deeply fraught. I am not the person to speak accurately on this history, so let it suffice to say that Polidori did not have a rose-colored image of Lord Byron.

Byron was famously promiscuous and often in terrible debt. He doesn't seem to have been particularly nice to his doctor. If you read about their time together in any detail, it becomes obvious why Polidori might feel the urge to mock him as a monster.

Polidori wrote a vampire that seduced, tore through, and ruined innocent young maidens. He wrote this after traveling Europe with a man who was forced to flee England with a rake's reputation and a charge of sodomy. He named his vampire Ruthven, after a caricature of Byron, because his own Ruthven was also based on the man.

In other words, the first finished story to create the modern trope of the aristocratic vampire was in large part a parody of Lord Byron. It is a monster inspired by him and named after a character that existed to sleight him. It is also based on a story that Byron wrote.

And in addition to this being generally fascinating, there's something so fun about this in the context of VnC.

The Case Study of Vanitas is its own story, but it's also so chock full of allusions and references that you could almost call it a pastiche. Half its characters are half-crafted out of pre-existing characters and historical figures, but they're only ever halfway stolen. There's always something new built from the base of the reference.

And in a big way, that's what Polidori did back when he penned the first piece of modern vampire literature. His first vampire was partly a reference to a real man, partly borrowed from a pre-existing story (Byron's fragment), and partly conjured from Polidori's own imagination. It's history and literature and new content all bundled together, just like VnC is.

Lord August Ruthven is a reference to Polidori's Lord Ruthven, who was in turn a reference to Lord Byron. He's named after both Byron's Augustus Darvell and Polidori's Ruthven, and Polidori's Ruthven is named after Lamb's Ruthven (who was also based on Lord Byron). He's yet another layer on this tower of self-referential Ruthven-ness, now totally abstracted from any real Byron traits.

As much as Mochijun is playing with the tropes and ideas of this era of vampire literature, it's really fun to see how her tendency toward allusion and reference is itself a nod back to vampire literature's beginnings. It's another way in which VnC slots in as another link in this 200 year old literary conversation.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about the bonkers story behind the Vampyre, here's a link to a not super scholarly but very entertaining essay about it.

[anghraine]

I'm usually irritated by the people sneering about fanfic insisting it is just intrinsically inferior to early modern writers raiding Ovid or Chaucer or the news or each other or whomever. I've never seen anyone have a decent rationale beyond early modern writing is intrinsically Art and fanfic is intrinsically Not Art, because of reasons (the artistic purity of working within early modern patronage and censorship, I guess?).

I'm not talking Shakespeare specifically (though Lear <3). He was by no means alone in borrowing characters and plots from previous sources and then doing his own thing with them. A lot of my favorite plays of the time re-purpose established stories in this way.

But also, it comes around to kind of funny when people are not only insisting that fanfic is definitionally Not Art and in some way totally different from the usual kind of borrowing that goes back millennia, but also that fanfic is somehow morally degenerate and harmful and unhinged in a new and shocking way.

Because if early modern English literature is defined by anything, it's being absolutely fucking unhinged.

I mean! The Revenger's Tragedy?? The White Devil (borrowed directly from the murder headlines)??? My best beloved 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (pretty obviously a spin on Romeo and Juliet But Now With Incest and Even More Murder)? These things are batshit. And fantastic! I love them! But holding them up on some pedestal of artistic and moral purity is just bizarre IMO.

There are differences between what they did and contemporary fanfic because we live in different eras and cultures, in some ways radically so, because copyright and intellectual property work so differently now and have affected storytelling so much, because of the effects of things like genre romance and the Internet and AO3, because patronage and censorship now work very differently in a lot of ways, because educations and literary norms are so different, and so on.

But is fanfic in some way uniquely trashy and shocking by contrast to what those men were thinking up? Nah.

[sunshades]

One thing about canto VI is like. I see so many people predicting it'll be about Fighting Evil Wife or Breaking Codependent Toxic Relationship and I just kinda think that would suck? If the major theme isn't grief AND love and the way both are seen as like Kinda Weird/inappropriate in the setting of the city. Then I'll be very sad.