#questburger

[radrattradish]

Heart of the world fanart

Heart of the world fanart @janedoewrites

tis i huzzah huzzah, this is my mostly pretty silly tumblr

[janedoewrites]

how did you come up with questburger's name?

I needed a name, and it was the funniest thing I could come up with at the time.

I never came up with anything better.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

I've just finished Heart of The World and it was delightful! Frank the vampire minion and that mystery of his missing boss forever going unanswered is truly a tragedy.

I've not looked at any Lily and Sisyphus stuff but gathered Ilyn originated from Snape at some point in the development process. I truly enjoyed the "They put him in charge of children!?" realisation, but what had you decide he was going to be notorious as a warlord primarily for blowing things up with fire? Ilyn's hilarious retrieval mission blowing up cars, setting a house on fire, abducting a child and then not commenting on the most convenient portal you've ever seen form works brilliantly naturally, but when did you know that was the direction you were going?

Your remarkably nuanced handling of the very fraught political tensions among factions was very cool to see. It ends up making you feel bad for essentially everyone in some capacity (maybe not Questburger, he seemed like he was doing quite well for himself).

The Heart of the World (by me!) @janedoewrites

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it so much! Really, this is very high praise indeed and I'm not only flattered but very glad to hear that I did what I set out to do successfully. (And yes, Questburger's done great for himself, at least so far.)

And that's a very interesting question.

So, Ilyn obviously started as a Snape counterpoint, same as Elizabeth is clearly what Hermione was, Theyn is clearly some mix of Dead Last and Neville, so on and so forth but he deviated in a large way very early/had that personality when he got introduced as a character in the first draft.

I don't think there was ever a draft where he hadn't set Lily's house on fire for no reason and was always this very taciturn/stoic/least talkative person you can ever find. @therealvinelle who helped with a lot of the editing maybe remembers better than I do but I think his characterization was set very early and the big surprise for me writing when it worked out and for her on editing is that he and Lily end the novel on very good terms.

I actually don't think characters changed that much in general between drafts. They changed a lot from the fic and in the outline for obvious reasons, the primary one being that they had different backgrounds now, different roles in the story, and that would inform who they were as people and how they best served the story but once they were decided on early in, they didn't change much in terms of personality. They've been very stable. The one who changed the most in a nitpicky manner was Lily herself who was made more... noble I suppose is the word for it in part of things happening or not happening to her in her youth, and being with the Tylors who are just absent versus the Dursleys who are present and awful. A lot of things about her and her lines changed between drafts and it took a bit to settle on just what her personality would be like with these changed circumstances and events.

But yeah, Ilyn's pretty much always been Ilyn, which is great because I love him and other people better like him because he's not going away any time soon.

[darkwing-ramblings]

The Heart of the World by Jane Doe

Is delightful! Frank the vampire minion and that mystery of his missing boss forever going unanswered is truly a tragedy. The remarkably nuanced handling of the very fraught political tensions among factions was very cool to see. It ends up making one feel bad for essentially everyone in some capacity (maybe not Questburger, he seemed like he was doing quite well for himself).

I like how it takes various staples of fantasy and weaves them together in a thoroughly engaging narrative with compelling characters and very natural and unobtrusive humour worked into it throughout. The main character works incredibly well in the role of an outsider peering into a magical society with lots of questions and I found Lily rather charming. (I have stolen some of my previously written words on it from my main blog to reformat nicely above).

As of writing this post, one novel is out and one day there shall hopefully be a sequel yet, which I look forward to!

“Jane Doe” in this case is also known as @janedoewrites (the official author's tumblr blog) or else @theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin (plus side blogs).

[mike13mt]

QuestBurger by igmen

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

I just finished The Heart of the World, literally a day after receiving it. It's so good! I love the way that you reinterpreted the characters in the fic so that you can still see them in the characters of the book. I'm also intrigued by Death-who's-not-Lily.

I have a couple questions. First, how and why did you decide on Iff, Theyne, Wheyne, and Annde as the humans' names? Second, Lily doesn't really get along well with Snape, if I remember, so why does she get along with Ilyn now?

And finally, when is the next book coming out???

Oh my god, look at you go! Thank you, I'm very flattered and glad you enjoyed it.

And now, your questions.

The Names

So, a fun fact, I hate naming characters and things. It's generally not something I have that much interest in and am not that attached to. Sometimes, you get a really great name and you're never letting go of it for that character, and sometimes you could honestly call them "Boy with Stick" and be done with it.

I now needed a lot of names and I wanted readers at a glance to be able to know, generally, which character belonged to which group. Which meant I needed themes.

There's a hilarious anecdote to be told where @therealvinelle on editing, wanted to go all out and come up with real, non-existent, but believable names for characters where you can tell a whole lot about their society by naming them.

I, um, said "Uh, these people will have backwards common English names. And these people will have QWERTY keyboard smash names. And these ones... Fuck it, he'll be Questburger."

So as for the human nobility, Lily got her name first, as Iff, the idea being a stupid joke/pun that isn't funny on my end where "iff" in mathematics is short for "if and only if". What it gets at is that Lily, as we see her, is the product of a very particular chain of events, that we're in a very particular world, and that there's something to follow that "if and only if" that is integral but that we're currently missing.

But then I have to come up with names for everyone else. And so we got the House of Prepositions and Conjunctions. Very serious they are.

Theyn was next up, as the next central royal character, and his name has a similar "har har but not really because it's not that funny and kind of weird" theme to it where the idea is he's "then BLAH", you're always waiting on something to occur with Theyn, unwittingly passing over him for the more interesting context in the sentence. He's there to set up something else, and by himself feels incomplete/not that interesting. Poor poor Theyn, even the universe doesn't think he's interesting or important.

Annde was next as he's the next important character we meet from this background after Theyn. Similar joke with him, he's "And... And?" You're waiting for the rest of the sentence with him, you can't end a sentence on "and" nor can you start it on one. He's just there to fill the gaps, to not be that important, and oh look a spoiler.

Wheyn (the regent) was next and was in part because a) I needed a name b) he's a bit of an inevitability in the universe. When one has a shake-up in a monarchy that holds all the power/isn't a constitutional monarchy, there's always going to be backstabbing nonsense and power plays. Wheyn is an unimportant inevitability, one that shocks no one (except Theyn, poor Theyn) and the answer to "When blah happens expect rain".

Which leaves us with, I believe the last, Whye, Lily's father. Him it's a similar gag but three-fold. There's the "WHY?!?!?!?!" in that no one really understands why he gave up the throne, married a sun elf, and scandalized absolutely everybody. Then there's "why?" as Lily's reaction, she's ambivalent about her parents and not sure how she should feel about them, and shields herself from feelings of abandonment by telling herself she's indifferent. As a result, she tends to approach any information about her parents with a "why should I care?" and gets very uncomfortable when anyone brings either of them up (and there's also that every character so far has brought up Lily's mother much more than her father leading to that question of "why are we talking about him?") Then there's the fact that there's a question to be asked that implies he has some kind of an answer to it a "why?" drifting off out there somewhere in the backgrounds.

And that's all the human nobility from our fantasy universe so far. (Elizabeth is noticeably an Elizabeth and sticks out like a sore thumb.)

Lily and Ilyn

The short answer is that Snape and Ilyn are different people fundamentally. They're in similar roles, took similar actions for various reasons, but they're very different as people.

And that goes for a lot of the things in the book. Elements of the fic remained, and some elements of HP, but not as much as people probably suspect even with the things that are very clearly taken over (believe it or not, I would call Elizabeth and Hermione different).

As for the long answer, well, for other people read the book and I hope it's explained.

When Next Book?!

I'm flattered but I don't know yet. Have to write it then edit then cover art and all that jazz.

I'll let people know.

[janedoewrites]

I absolutely love the book! I was wondering, is there any official pronunciation for some of the fantasy names?

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it so much.

"Official" well... no, but there is what I come up with right now! Which we can consider a general guide/how I would go about it if reading out loud.

The Human Nobility

There's a bit of a pun here. Basically, no matter how the names are spelled, they're actually just English propositions/conjunctions and what it says on the tin.

Annde -> "And"

Iff -> "If"

Theyn -> "Then"

Wheyn -> "When"

Whye -> "Why"

As we add to our royal house (or not, they didn't do too well) it'll follow this pattern. If it looks like an English word it's just that English word.

The Gold Elves

They actually just have common backwards English names (hello John Nhoj, how you doing?) We haven't met anyone else yet so it's just just Nhoj on the table.

That one I always pictured as essentially "noj", h is silent, j is soft.

Questburger

Exactly what it says on the tin "quest" followed by "burger" said with the utmost seriousness because this is a serious story.

The Night Elves

These ones are... harder as they're the land of Qwerty Keyboard Smash (not kidding, that's their names) but essentially I imagine it's just phonetic as Lily's doing her best from what it sounds like.

So just stare long and hard and take the plunge.

Gwendlrarjunikartzin -> "Gwen" "dleh" "rar" "juni" "kart" "zin" "Frank"

The Moon Elves

Ailill got the most unpronounceable real name I could find, Ailill, and because I have no imagination it's Irish for "elf", you're welcome.

The Sun Elves

These so far have really been me throwing darts (for plot justified reasons I won't get into).

Lilyanna, I needed a name that could be conceivably shorted to Lily or was Lily for... reasons but sounded different enough. It's pretty much what it looks like "Lily" "ahnna".

Ilyn, I believe I keyboard smashed or saw it somewhere and liked it, can't remember, personally I imagine it's "eel" "lynn".

[janedoewrites]

help, your book is so good. I'm at the part where Lily just met Frank and he told the story about all the elves and it was so so awesome. I'm astounded by how well you deharripotterfied the story and replaced it with this amazing amazing high fantasy world, and it's a struggle for me to stop reading long enoug to go to sleep. Awesome awesome job, and I hope you do more professional writing

Thank you!

It's so nice to hear that people like it as well, I'm a character person more than I am a world person (and you can tell by things like "The Noble and Ancient House of Preposition" and "This Man's Name is Questburger Because it's Funny"

For what it's worth, this isn't the end as there's clearly a lot left to go through. So, there will be more.