#qantaqa

[crown-and-stallion]

Some more Dragonbone Chair art because i am SO excited for the Navigator's Children (my book is in the mail! yippee!)

Here is Qantaqa, I've been meaning to draw her for awhile! The saddle was fun to design.

[codenameantarctica]

Donato Giancola’s artwork for the Grim Oak Press Limited Edition of Tad Williams’ “The Dragonbone Chair”

Beware of spoilers!!!

From top (left) to bottom (right):

Simon vs. Igjaruk the Ice Dragon

Simon Snowlock with Thorn

Scullion Simon sneaking into the Hayholt’s throne room with the Dragonbone Chair and the Malachite Statues of the former kings

Simon (from behind), Dr. Morgenes and Prince Josua in Morgenes’ study

Qantaqa, Binabik and Simon at Saint Hoderunds’

Da’ai Chikiza

An’ai with the white arrow, with Simon and Binabik in the background

The Harrowing of Naglimund

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

Sources:

Donato Giancola’s Homepage

Donato Giancola on Twitter

Grim Oak Press

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

[9thbutterfly]

Reasons for happiness:

Having a car that handles like a small one, but can fit so many moving boxes.

[clumsybutterflies]

In my twenties: I want to meet Binabik and Qantaqa!

In my thirties: I want to meet Rachel the Dragon (specifically, have her come visit and clean my home.)

[ichooseviolence]

I have 170 pages left in The Dragonebone Chair 🙌🏻 I believe GRRM said he got some inspo from this series for ASoIaF, so it's no wonder certain characters remind me of those in Westeros and Essos. Thoughts on major characters/POVs so far:

Simon: I actually really like him. I've seen a lot of people complain about him online, and I can understand why, but for some reason, I relate to him here and there. Mostly I relate to his mood swings.

Binabik: I would marry this man in a heartbeat. Hear me out. He'd take care of me, he'd be an incredible dad, he's funny and cute, feisty, a fighter, extremely intelligent, and he's very resourceful. And he loves animals. Binabik is a ray of sunshine.

Josua: he's basically a slightly positive Stannis. I call him Jannis.

Morgenes: I miss him.

Miriamele: she's cute! And a tough little cookie. <3

Maegwin: No opinion yet. I think I like her, though. Listen, female characters are really lacking so far, though it's not surprising.

Vorzheva: Daddy issues?? Idk. If I ever spotted her in person, I'd turn around and walk in the opposite direction. I'm sure she has her reasons for being the way she is, but holy crap, I could live without her. It's giving a weird Cersei/Melisandre mix.

Isgrimnur: passionate, loud, brave, honest. Beard. What's not to love?

Geloë: Queen. I love her, and if she ever scolded or berated me, I'd thank her. When do we get to meet her again??

Jarnauga: I'm intrigued. The male Melisandre, but without a beauty glammer. They should meet.

Eolair: I can see why Maegwin has the hots for him. I do too.

Qantaqa: the goodest girl ever!!

[donatoarts]

Fifth of six interior illustrations for Tad William's 'The Dragonbone Chair', a limited edition reissue from Grim Oak Press and Shawn Speakman. Simon, Binabik, and Qantaqa the wolf, discover the remains of an attack. St. Hoderund's 17" x 14"  Oil and Acrylic on Duralar

[clumsybutterflies]

Not quite how I picture Binabik, but he is one of my favourite characters, so I want the t-shirt anyway.

Binabik, by #DjamilaKnopf. Indiegogo, ‘Tad Williams Is Making Merch’, RIGHT NOW (March 2018). Thank you for your attention, kind people. There’s lots of #OstenArd & #Otherland Things To Love.  Ongoing Tad Williams news too, from this date forward. Thank you!

[the6thexpeditionaryforce]

Not WoW related, but those who know me know I am also a huge Battletech nerd. I've been playing a lot of MechWarrior Online lately, and my unit is also called the 6th Expeditionary Force.

I feel compelled to show off some of my more successful builds and some of my more enjoyable stompy bots to play with.

The Raven is my absolute favorite mech. This one is my RVN-4X, nicknamed 'Warbird', has a rac5 and 2x ERML's.

2nd favorite to play, this Viper-C is called 'Super Snek' and has 4x Heavy medium lasers, 4x Heavy MG's and a whopping 8 jump jets.

The LBK-H, nicknamed 'Swamp Thing', is fast, heavily armored and has 4x medium pulse lasers and 5x ER micro lasers.

And the classic Timber Wolf, my TBR-WAR is named 'Qantaqa' after the grey wolf in Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. 4x Heavy medium lasers, 2x Heavy large lasers and 2x LRM-10's.

These are just some of my favorites. I have 17 owned mechs currently and am starting up a Mechwarrior/Battletech tabletop RPG with some friends IRL.

If anyone else is interest in Battletech or knows of a good community here on tumblr, let me know. I may end up making a 2nd blog for it specifically.

[shinylitwick94]

Finished Tad William’s “The Dragonbone Chair”, the first part of the “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” trilogy.

I really wanted to like this book and I’m not sure I did. There were some very interesting and well done things and others that either bored me or frankly irritated me.

We can start with the obvious for the things I didn’t like: pace.

Almost nothing happens in the entire first third of this book. Or rather, quite a bit seems to be happening, but it’s all background events and we’re stuck inside the dumb teenage boy main character’s head who is mainly concerned with getting scolded for not sweeping the floors. The awareness that there were interesting things going on but I was stuck reading Simon’s mind-numbingly boring daily tasks quickly made me feel annoyed with the whole book and I nearly dropped it. This doesn’t go on for the first two chapters, it goes on for some ten chapters and never seems to end.

Even when the story picks up after Simon leaves the castle it takes quite a bit of time before it reaches a normal pace and we follow Simon stumbling around the forest for way too long too.

The other thing I really didn’t like was the church.

Here’s the thing - the last 3-4 fantasy books I’ve all have really poorly thought out copies of the Catholic Church. It’s a thing that fantasy authors do - they apparently seem to believe their story will be missing something crucial if the catholic church isn’t there, wearing a different hat. Why? No idea. It’s always lazy and always annoying, but at least in some of these books the “totally not the Catholic Church” serves a purpose or is even central to the story, or the author tries to change it in some significant way. I can tolerate it there. Here? Here it’s the catholic church with names and symbols switched out and it’s cringey and painful and so far serves no purpose whatsoever. It completely takes me out of the story

I mean I get it that fantasy authors looked at Tolkien and saw a pseudo-medieval world and wondered why there wasn’t a church (although God is flat out stated to exist, which is not the case for many of these other fantasy worlds) and all decided to include one or multiple churches in their works for....realism? I guess? But they seem to forget that they’re not writing the middle ages, not even remotely, they’re writing made-up worlds with pseudo medieval aesthetics and if those churches don’t add any thing to them, then they don’t need to be there. Particularly if, as is the case here, they are so close to something from the real world that it doesn’t feel at all like they fit the world they’re in.

Connected to the church thing, but a smaller irritation was unnecessary renaming of things, particularly of the months. Just call October October, or call it something completely different. Octander or whatever it was is just stupid.

Then there’s the other big issue: female characters.

Normally I give older books a pass on this one. This was published in 1988. It’s not an “older book” to me. And therefore it has no excuse for what it does with its female characters.

In all of its almost seven hundred pages of meandering there are maybe four female characters with speaking roles, most of whom are only around for a small portion of the book. The first is Rachel, who runs the castle servants and is sort of Simon’s mother figure, the second is Miriamele who is a textbook Rebel Princess disguised as a boy, the third is Vorzheva, who is the good prince’s shrieking shrewish hysterical foreign wive and there’s one other whose name I can’t recall who is in love with a count and her brother and father die I think.

Rachel is fine, I suppose, for what she does, she’s not meant to be a major character or anything as far as I can tell. Vorzheva drives me up the walls because her particular stereotype is one I can’t stand. The one whose name I can’t remember I actually liked. And Miriamele...ugh. Simon falls in love with Miriamele almsot from the moment he discovers she is a girl (but not before of course!) and it’s every annoying teenage romance ever. She doesn’t return his feelings yet, but the reader is left with no doubt that she will eventually. Maybe if we got Miriamele from her own POV it would be less annoying, but from Simon’s...yeah, no.

Finally, there is Simon himself.

Simon is bland, Simon is boring, Simon has no outstanding character traits that I can think of other than the apparent inability to concentrate on anything and asking lots of questions. I have no interest in Simon whatsoever. I’m willing to tolerate orphan farmboy stories if the farmboy himself is at least remotely interesting, which Simon really really isn’t. I’m still willing to give him a chance, maybe he gets better later on (Rand certainly did), but in this book I wished I was reading this from the POV of any character but Simon.

Alright, this is getting long, but on to the things I liked.

Binabik and Qantaqa! What a breath of fresh air! I think if these two hadn’t shown up when they did I might have actually dropped the book. I love them, they’re fun to read and fun to be around. It’s a new take on trolls too. Binabik reminds me, strangely enough, of Dersu Uzala, which has no relation to this at all, but hey Dersu is a cool character too. Binabik and Qantaqa were the soul of this book and I doubt it would have been salvageable without them.

Another thing I liked were the more surreal scenes, in particular Simon’s dreams and the whole escape from the Hayholt sequence, which was by far my favorite part of the whole book. The tunnels were fascinating, terrifying and appropriately claustrophic...and Simon promptly forgets all he saw there once he gets out. Which I felt was a huge waste.

Lots of people praise Williams’ writing to high heavens. I mostly thought it was ok, it at least tries to be pretty, although it definitely overdoes things sometimes. I don’t think it’s amazing, but it’s fine.

So, final veredict for a way too long review: average or below average book.

If I call it below average it’s because it’s way too long to do so little. Fantasy authros really need to remember that LOTR is 1000 pages total if you remove the appendices, not 1000 pages for each part.

The things that annoyed me really annoyed me, so I’m not sure I’m picking up the next one any time soon. I haven’t completely given up on this series, but I’m not sure I want to invest this much time in a meh book so soon after this one.

[erintintin]

Between the age of roughly 8-16 weeks old, wolf pups' eyes will slowly transition from baby blue to amber/yellow. At about 9-10 weeks old, Qantaqa and her 2 brothers are undergoing this exact change, and it's given her a bit of a glowing gold effect. 💕 Wolf Hollow is a nonprofit endangered wildlife facility located in Ipswich, MA that exists for the purpose of protecting the wolf in the wild through education and exposure.

[vironicadart]

@wolf_hollow_ma

・・・

Our beloved vet Dr. Lori Gordon gets a love bomb from Akela and Qantaqa during a regular check up 🐺

📷@goodwolfsessions

[crown-and-stallion]

Here's Homefinder, Simon's horse from Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. In the second book, she's described as a 'black and gray spotted mare', so I interpreted that as a blue roan appaloosa. I also wanted to give her a more sturdy, cob-type build. She has to go on a very long journey, after all!

I want to try to draw Qantaqa soon!

[fic-dreamin]

Intriguing bridge between the two series I've been waiting many years for the return to Osten Ard and this little teaser to the upcoming Witchwood Crown was a great bridge between Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and the upcoming Last King of Osten Ard. The Heart of What Was Lost narrates Duke Isgrimnur's attack on the Norns' home in the northern mountains. The book switches between Duke Isgrimnur, Porto - one of the non-northmen to join the fight after the attack on the Hayholt - and Viyeki, one of the Norns. Go to Amazon

I liked it. I wasn't sure what this book would entail, and what I got here was a nice slice of Osten Ard, even if it didn't much involve many of the characters we knew from MS&T. I will say, despite being a short novel, this may be the longest I've taken to read a Williams novel (except the online Shadowmarch serial novel experiment) - I guess you can say that I was sort of savoring this return to Osten Ard. When I finished, I did go right back and re-read many sections, and after doing so, I suspect that we'll see more than one of these characters in the future. Go to Amazon

A great followup to Memory Sorry and Thorn trilogy! The Storm King has fallen. The Norns have been defeated. And now Duke Isgrimnur, under the commands of the newly crowned King Seomon and Queen Miramele, seeks to end the threat of the dark and immortal race of fairies once and for all. After the misery they and their Queen caused to Osten Ard in the events of the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy. With them travels two Predurinese mercenaries, men far from home and thrust back into another war. Go to Amazon

While I didnt get to hear from two of my favorite characters (Binibik and Qantaqa) I did get to spend ... Tad Williams sets the table for a whole new trilogy set in Osten Ard. While I didnt get to hear from two of my favorite characters (Binibik and Qantaqa) I did get to spend a great deal of time with Isgrimnur! No one does character development like Williams. Simple purchase if, like me, you loved the original trilogy!! Go to Amazon

A great lead-in for the new trilogy! Tad Williams revisits Osten Ard and it is excellent. This short, 200 page novel acts a bridge from his first trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, to the new trilogy that is being released this year, 2017. I highly recommend reading this book before you jump into the Last King of Osten Ard. A lot happens in here that I'm positive is going to lead into the new trilogy. Go to Amazon

Learn about the norns Great read! A good follow-up to memory sorrow and thorn series. Looking forward to the rest of the series. An old book but still a great series. Check it out. Go to Amazon

Must read for Tad fans! Mr Williams has done it again! So happy to revisit Osten Ard, and learn so much more about the Norns. I can't wait for the next trilogy. Thank you , Tad, for this bridge between the books I've loved for so long! Go to Amazon

Unexpected Great Book, Awful Price Welcome back to Osten Ard Five Stars Four Stars I really enjoyed this book Four Stars Two Stars Five Stars Five Stars

[9thbutterfly]

Another thing that @bogglebabbles​ tagged me in!

Rules: Name your top ten favorite female characters from different fandoms. Then tag ten people. 

- Ronia, from Ronia the Robber’s Daughter

- Minerva McGonagall, from Harry Potter

- Adsini, from Wolfsaga (wolves count, damn it. At least if all the characters are wolves.)

- oh hell, who to pick from Memory, Sorrow and Thorn? Miriamele, I guess. (Tempting to say Qantaqa, since I just said wolves count. But that would be cheating if she’s the only wolf in the story.) Or Sisqinanamook. Or Rachel. Or Geloe. Or Aditu. Or...

- Meggie Folchart, from Inkheart

- Althea Vestrit, from The Liveship Traders

- Hel, from Feenlicht and Magierlicht

- Renie Sulaweyo from Otherland (kinda tempted to name someone else, but it’s debatable if that person is really female, so...)

- Auri from The Kingkiller Chronicle. (I can’t believe I almost forgot her. I! Love! Auri! So! Much!)

George from The Famous Five (although, again, it’s debatable if she’s really female, considering how much she rejects anything feminine. Also I forgot her last name, and that is embarrassing.)

And again I’m not tagging anyone, because it’s too difficult. Feel tagged if you feel like doing this.

[clumsybutterflies]

When a Taddict goes travelling:

- with my car called Qantaqa

- and my GPS called Homefinder

- and the Yásira in the trunk

- wearing, for variety, not an MST shirt but the "confident, cocky, lazy, dead" one because that's also a pretty good motto for driving.

(And they did a good job of getting me to the Netherlands.)

[royallyeric]

#artsnackchallenge number two. #fanart from the book I am reading #TheDragonboneChair I drew my favorite characters so far #Binabik the troll and #Qantaqa the wolf. #ink #woods #artsnacks #fantasy