#rummuttaja

[evelhak]

📚

Time to reflect on one of my books again.

⛰️Rummuttaja🎶

(drummer)

Published: 2023 by Nysalor

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

I was so much more nervous about this book than even my debut one, because it's an opening of a series and the world and themes are structurally a lot more ambitious than anything else I've published. Again, this is something I wrote fresh out of university, as a rewrite of a story I started as far back as in high school during my Japan exchange in 2011. Possibly why it deals with earthquakes. The mythology and world-building were further developed during my university years, influenced by my theology studies. I can't describe how happy I am to get to share this series which will be four books. Along my debut novel this is definitely a story I wish to see translated into English, even if I have to do it myself.

It's a story about 15-year-old Lilea, who is a reluctant, passive student at the Academy of Guardians, where musically gifted children learn how to reduce earthquakes by music. Legend says that a mythical being called the Singer saved their small home island from a terrible beast by trapping it inside a mountain, and the frequent earthquakes were caused by the monster tossing and turning in its sleep. The Singer is said to have left 12 holy tunes to the people to protect them and ensure the beast remains trapped. However, these stories are generally not believed around the island anymore and people know the origins of the earthquakes to be volcanic. The job of the Guardians is based on researching sound waves. Lilea's best friend Ennu however, swears by the old stories and prays to the Singer any chance she gets. Ennu is an ambitious vocalist at the Academy, seems to live and breathe music, practically enchanted by her fate as a Guardian, while Lilea is a drummer whose heart is not in the job and she would rather take care of her goats and chickens at home. Ennu's radiant personality and friendship are the only things that keep Lilea afloat in her drag of a daily life. Lilea has never cared about the old stories either, until she stumbles upon a book in the school library, and the Legend of the Singer gets reinterpreted before her eyes. Feeling alone while Ennu's time gets more and more filled with studies, Lilea begins to look for answers to questions about their world she didn't know how to put into words before.

There are so many reasons why I wrote this book I don't know where to begin. I wanted to explore a main character who would hate her magic school. I wanted to have an anti-hero in a setting traditionally built for a hero. I wanted to explore how myths take shape and influence different kind of people. I wanted to contrast different approaches to belief systems. I wanted to draw from my long experience as a music student and reflect upon school systems and the social atmosphere and how it affects different kind of students with different personalities and brains. The shortcomings of the school environment, and people who, despite being labelled gifted, fall through the cracks were of special interest to me.

Like all my books, this is a very character driven story focused on relationships and individual life stories. The larger themes and the world are reflected through them. The complicated friendship between Lilea and Ennu takes centre stage a lot, other important ones include Lilea's other best friend Rooni, a boy from her village who struggles to connect with Lilea while she's far away at school for most of the year and doesn't want to talk about it while she's home. At school Lilea has a slightly annoying couple for roommates: explosive Sisi and snarky Orinna, and spends time with another drummer, Denix, who couldn't care less about the school's unspoken hierarchy, allowing Lilea to remove herself emotionally from it. However, it's Lilea's last school year and this shakes things up, leading her to cross paths with people she previously paid no attention to, which works as a catalyst for a perfect storm.

I really wanted to reflect the atmosphere in the cover: it is not a happy book. It's better to know that going into it. The story deals with depression, chronic stress, overachieving, loneliness and misguided coping mechanisms among other mental health and relationship subjects that can be heavy to read. I don't write hopeless stories, my point is always growth, that's literally why I write, but I don't gloss over the hard and traumatic things.

The aesthetic and atmosphere of the world reflects my personal tastes a lot, possibly more than my other published stories so far: it's rather down to earth, rural and simplistic but has mysticism and some fairytale spark to it. The world resembles ours but doesn't follow a specific time period or sometimes our laws of physics either, and most of these things are not explained because it isn't the point of the story.

Believe it or not, I didn't get the beast under the mountain idea from The Hobbit, since I actually read that for the first time only after writing the first version of this book. So, it's not a homage to Tolkien, though it seems like such an obvious one. The first spark for this story was actually a Yoko Tsuno comic where a group of people play flutes to a beast to make it go away, and I think they had three holy chords or something. I read it in elementary school, it was a small element in that comic, and I always wanted to elaborate on that idea. The other clear influence I can name for this story is Ursula Le Guin, but not a particular work, it was more about her vibe, which may or may not be detectable since I was reading her books a lot when I first came up with this story but it has gone through many versions since then.

This is also the first book I drew maps for, not super detailed ones, but that was still really hard. It's a difficult task to combine the artistic and informational aspects of maps, at least when you've never really drawn a publishable one before. It was hard to find the balance and the right style.

A fun little feature I came up with was to use rest symbols as dinkus. These are not the literal symbols the characters would use in their world but for a reader who can read music, they open new layers of interpretation to the story (beyond just the passage of time).

In general this is what I aim for in all of my work: the story should be interesting enough to work on the surface level well enough even if the reader is not interested in or misses all of the other layers of the story. But for a reader who likes to analyse deeper there are multiple intentional layers to explore and contemplate. This book is possibly the most elaborate example of that from me yet. This is a hard balance to maintain of course, and so far it has been evident that the more plot driven readers don't enjoy my books as much: although the plot is there and a lot of them love it, they have time to get bored because it doesn't move fast enough since there has to be room to create that web of other things, and sacrificing that space for the plot to move faster would reduce the complexity of the book (at least for now, because I'm not that good yet!). Yes, I know it's impossible to please everyone, but this isn't so much about that anyway. Yes, it's in part an attempt to balance aspects that sell, with artistic aspects, but it's also because I just inherently enjoy combining my favourite elements from genre fiction and literary fiction and I don't want to attempt to fit into either box. A good number of my favourite books don't fit into those boxes either. It's difficult, for sure. But I want my books to be accessible without extensive background in reading, while I also want them to provide enough meat to analyse for those that do.

That's literally my dream. I want my stories to speak to readers with different levels of experience and reading skills. I wish for them to be simultaneously easy and challenging, in a way that can encourage people towards the latter if they want to, because the needs of the former are being met first. I am by no means perfect at this, but I'm sure that getting through writing this fantasy series will improve me a lot. I do hope that it will already accomplish this task better than my other books have.

[yokyopeli]

Jyväskylän kirja- ja joulumessut (25.11.2023)

Meidy on olemas- Karjalazet nuoret Suomes (suomi, livvinkarjala), 2023

Rummuttaja (2023) Eve Lumerto @evelhak

Aina ollu tääl- Suomi-räp 4.0 (2023) Elina Westinen (signeerattu)

Stallun pata (2018) Ante Aikio

Koruliike Careliahelmi

[evelhak]

🔹2023 Wrap Up🔹

I've never really done an end of the year type of post, but I got inspired somehow. Maybe because this year has been in many ways slower and filled with rest more than any other year in my life so far (which is a good thing), but I started looking back, wondering if I'd really done "anything" this year, and I can see there's still a decent amount of things I've accomplished that are meaningful to me. So, this is almost diary type self-reflection. But I'll post it because I would like to see other people do this type of thing too. ✨

This is mostly work and hobbies related.

Original writing published

Rummuttaja (Drummer)

My third published novel and the first book in my first fantasy series. I'll talk about it more in its own post but it's about an island where people can control earthquakes with music, and musically gifted children are brought up as heroes to be. I spent about half of 2023 editing this book and I'm probably more proud of it than anything else I've published.

Sydäntekniikkaa (Heart Techniques)

A short story, or a novella, with a spin on the innocent girl meets heartless boy trope. Discusses politics, environment, prejudice, ignorance and disability in a fantastical setting. It was published in a steampunk anthology Rautasilmä ja muita steampunk-kertomuksia (Iron eye and other steampunk stories) with three other stories. Here's a drawing of my main character.

A book review I wrote on Sankareita ja shakkinappuloita (Heroes and chess pieces) by Heidi Torn, appeared in a Finnish SFF magazine Kosmoskynä. I very rarely make time to help with this magazine I've subscribed to for many years, so I'm glad I did. The book was about Greek gods in modern day Finland, so as a Percy Jackson fan I was obviously intrigued.

Original works written

2023 wasn't the most active writing year since I spent so much time editing, but I managed to write

about a half of a fantastical murder mystery in a ballet school told from the perspective of seven students with very different views on the school and the people in it

a short story about a magical doll maker student attempting to manipulate another guy to be less full of himself

Editing work

I've just started as one of three editors for a magic school story anthology. It is my first time so I'm learning from the other two who are more experienced and actually have their university degrees in Finnish language which I don't. I was asked along as more of the magic school expert since most of my published work so far is set in them. We are only just starting to go through the submissions since the deadline was the end of the year, so I haven't done much yet but I really love helping other people make the most of their writing, so I'm very excited. ✨

Fan fiction

Words published: 225 239

Words written: 263 315

Not including a few 100 word drabbles, and fake chats which are actually from past fics anyway just in visual form.

My fics were mostly KagaKuro, as they usually are, but I also wrote one AoMomo. My plans for 2024 have more diverse focus characters, though!

Illustration/Graphic design

I got more work for cover design than before this year. I'm still such a newbie on this, but I'm fairly happy with many of them, and I've discovered such passion for this art. Only writing books is more satisfying than getting to be the one to bring out the book's core in a visual form. And some of the authors have really loved the covers and felt like I got them, which of course feels amazing. I always wanted to do my own covers but now that I get to do other people's too I just want to do it more and more.

Drawings/Paintings

This was definitely a KnB heavy year! Which I enjoyed a lot. I didn't do that many original things but I was really happy to get back to traditional art after several years now that I think my digital art skills have improved to pretty much the same level.

Comics

I didn't really complete anything but in June I got about half way through this KagaKuro comic (with female Kuroko) based on my own fic Kuroko's Fairytale.

This is definitely one of the things I want to finish the most in 2024! I felt so high drawing it. It was such a strange experience because female Kuroko was not supposed to be a thing for me... (it was supposed to be just one funky fic that happens in a dream, never to be revisited again, because my brain is so much work it beats itself up about even the most minuscule changes I might like to make on existing characters, like, my brain just has no chill about fiction, everything is death serious, it's fucking annoying even to me) But. BUT. B U T. When I was drawing this comic. Oh. My. God. I have no words for how good it felt. Like, I obviously knew you can experience love on behalf of fictional characters (hello, shipping) but I had never before experienced gender euphoria on behalf of a fictional character. There's no other way to describe it, girl Kuroko absolutely destroyed me in the best of ways. So she's here to stay, I can't push her back anymore.

Anyway, have a sneak peek. I still struggle a lot with consistent anatomy as I have my whole life, but there are a few frames I love already, my favourite probably being the one which is also my icon.

Not that I'm not also in love with stupid prince Kagami, but I was never fighting that so it's a little different.

Books read

Not an especially good reading year in quantity. In quality it was, though. I don't think there was one book that I disliked. My problem these days is that every time I try to take time to read a book, about a half an hour into it my brain goes like... You know what? You could be working on your own writing. But it's also very important for a writer to read, so I have to retrain my brain to stop feeling like it's wasting time when I read.

Total: 29 (or 35 if you count KnB as two volumes each since it's double edition)

New books: 17

Rereads: 12(/18)

Several of these are books I did covers for, and I started a KnB reread to check for ideas I haven't covered in my fics yet, so if you take these "business" reads out of the equation, I didn't read that much for just pleasure. That's something I want to improve in 2024.

The most memorable book was probably The Song of Achilles (a damn difficult read since I saw so many of my own relationships patterns in Patroclus to a painful detail, ugh. And yeah Achilles definitely reminded me of some specific people too. Kind of destroyed all my blissful surrealist separation with this story and made me disillusioned with it, but in the end it might have been good for me).

Fics read

Ok, this is downright shameful to me. I read so little. But go give some love to these fics I've read which were obviously made with love.

Reap What You Sow (one-sided (??) AoMomo) by @vespersposts

summer drabble (Kagami) by cempasuchil_03

Noodle Kiss (KagaKuro) by @myndless88

The Art of Self-Pillage (Haizaki, OC) by @lylakoi

Let's Have a War (Kise, Kasamatsu, OC) by @lylakoi

Tastes of Cinnamon (KagaKuro) by @lilypheria

Nail art

A new hobby for me! I hadn't even owned nail polish before. And couldn't stand long nails either. I have no clue what inspired this, to be honest. I'm very new to it, but here are my favourites.

The text print on blue nails was definitely the most me, but I think I particularly enjoy prints in general. I made the star ones for Christmas.

I bet I've forgotten something obvious but this post is pretty long already and it looks like a pretty good summary. Definitely helped me sort out my thoughts on what I want to do in 2024 and what priorities I should have.

Good luck to everyone on all your future plans. ✨💙

[evelhak]

Hello! I've attempted to organise the most relevant (and some funny) content here.

KnB

AO3 fics

One shot: Extra/Last Game missing scene

One shot: Kuroko Tetsuya, Unabridged

One shot: Ripples (KagaKuro)

One shot: Inevitable World (KagaKuro)

One shot: Push and pull, back and forth (AoMomo)

Comic: Love Bumps/Kuroko's Fairytale (KagaKuro) Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Drabbles: Shiro, the Cat | Boy Meets Bees | When the Lights Go Out

fan art

fake chats

taiga chocolate

knb drinks

japanese munch time rush

knb and fandom being tone-deaf

Incorrect quotes: Kagami Aomine Kuroko Himuro Seirin

SPOP

fan comics

barbie princess and the pauper au part 1 part 2

spop asks answered

comic commentary

my perfuma friend

bfs in my clothes part 1 part 2

catradora amv

catradora in the woods

misty date night

Sherlock Holmes

the abominable ace

scandal in bohemia

Original art

butterflies

distortion

the singer

the lakemaid

bed head

girlfriends chilling

a flutist

girl on a mountain

village boy

tired

christmas ballet

character sketches

the trio

flower fairy

dancing

My Books

For now my books are in Finnish but I talk about them here in English in the hopes of getting them translated one day!

Unitytöt (Dream girls) - a sapphic dream world fantasy

Kaapin nurkista (From the Corners of the Closet) - a heavily asexual and aromantic high school drama

Rummuttaja (Drummer) - a high fantasy about a mythical music school

[vespersposts]

One day I hope your books will be translated so I can enjoy them fully ✨🍀📚🔖

📚

Time to reflect on one of my books again.

⛰️Rummuttaja🎶

(drummer)

Published: 2023 by Nysalor

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

I was so much more nervous about this book than even my debut one, because it's an opening of a series and the world and themes are structurally a lot more ambitious than anything else I've published. Again, this is something I wrote fresh out of university, as a rewrite of a story I started as far back as in high school during my Japan exchange in 2011. Possibly why it deals with earthquakes. The mythology and world-building were further developed during my university years, influenced by my theology studies. I can't describe how happy I am to get to share this series which will be four books. Along my debut novel this is definitely a story I wish to see translated into English, even if I have to do it myself.

It's a story about 15-year-old Lilea, who is a reluctant, passive student at the Academy of Guardians, where musically gifted children learn how to reduce earthquakes by music. Legend says that a mythical being called the Singer saved their small home island from a terrible beast by trapping it inside a mountain, and the frequent earthquakes were caused by the monster tossing and turning in its sleep. The Singer is said to have left 12 holy tunes to the people to protect them and ensure the beast remains trapped. However, these stories are generally not believed around the island anymore and people know the origins of the earthquakes to be volcanic. The job of the Guardians is based on researching sound waves. Lilea's best friend Ennu however, swears by the old stories and prays to the Singer any chance she gets. Ennu is an ambitious vocalist at the Academy, seems to live and breathe music, practically enchanted by her fate as a Guardian, while Lilea is a drummer whose heart is not in the job and she would rather take care of her goats and chickens at home. Ennu's radiant personality and friendship are the only things that keep Lilea afloat in her drag of a daily life. Lilea has never cared about the old stories either, until she stumbles upon a book in the school library, and the Legend of the Singer gets reinterpreted before her eyes. Feeling alone while Ennu's time gets more and more filled with studies, Lilea begins to look for answers to questions about their world she didn't know how to put into words before.

There are so many reasons why I wrote this book I don't know where to begin. I wanted to explore a main character who would hate her magic school. I wanted to have an anti-hero in a setting traditionally built for a hero. I wanted to explore how myths take shape and influence different kind of people. I wanted to contrast different approaches to belief systems. I wanted to draw from my long experience as a music student and reflect upon school systems and the social atmosphere and how it affects different kind of students with different personalities and brains. The shortcomings of the school environment, and people who, despite being labelled gifted, fall through the cracks were of special interest to me.

Like all my books, this is a very character driven story focused on relationships and individual life stories. The larger themes and the world are reflected through them. The complicated friendship between Lilea and Ennu takes centre stage a lot, other important ones include Lilea's other best friend Rooni, a boy from her village who struggles to connect with Lilea while she's far away at school for most of the year and doesn't want to talk about it while she's home. At school Lilea has a slightly annoying couple for roommates: explosive Sisi and snarky Orinna, and spends time with another drummer, Denix, who couldn't care less about the school's unspoken hierarchy, allowing Lilea to remove herself emotionally from it. However, it's Lilea's last school year and this shakes things up, leading her to cross paths with people she previously paid no attention to, which works as a catalyst for a perfect storm.

Believe it or not, I didn't get the beast under the mountain idea from The Hobbit, since I actually read that for the first time only after writing the first version of this book. So, it's not a homage to Tolkien, though it seems like such an obvious one. The first spark for this story was actually a Yoko Tsuno comic where a group of people play flutes to a beast to make it go away, and I think they had three holy chords or something. I read it in elementary school, it was a small element in that comic, and I always wanted to elaborate on that idea. The other clear influence I can name for this story is Ursula Le Guin, but not a particular work, it was more about her vibe, which may or may not be detectable since I was reading her books a lot when I first came up with this story but it has gone through many versions since then.

I really wanted to reflect the atmosphere in the cover: it is not a happy book. It's better to know that going into it. The story deals with depression, chronic stress, overachieving, loneliness and misguided coping mechanisms among other mental health and relationship subjects that can be heavy to read. I don't write hopeless stories, my point is always growth, that's literally why I write, but I don't gloss over the hard and traumatic things.

The aesthetic and atmosphere of the world reflects my personal tastes a lot, possibly more than my other published stories so far: it's rather down to earth, rural and simplistic but has mysticism and some fairytale spark to it. The world resembles ours but doesn't follow a specific time period or sometimes our laws of physics either, and most of these things are not explained because it isn't the point of the story.

This is also the first book I drew maps for, not super detailed ones, but that was still really hard. It's a difficult task to combine the artistic and informational aspects of maps, at least when you've never really drawn a publishable one before. It was hard to find the balance and the right style.

A fun little feature I came up with was to use rest symbols as dinkus. These are not be the literal symbols the characters would use in their world but for a reader who can read music, they open new layers of interpretation to the story (beyond just the passage of time).

In general this is what I aim for in all of my work: the story should be interesting enough to work on the surface level well enough even if the reader is not interested in or misses all of the other layers of the story. But for a reader who likes to analyse deeper there are multiple intentional layers to explore and contemplate. This book is possibly the most elaborate example of that from me yet. This is a hard balance to maintain of course, and so far it has been evident that the more plot driven readers don't enjoy my books as much: although the plot is there and a lot of them love it, they have time to get bored because it doesn't move fast enough since there has to be room to create that web of other things, and sacrificing that space for the plot to move faster would reduce the complexity of the book (at least for now, because I'm not that good yet!). Yes, I know it's impossible to please everyone, but this isn't so much about that anyway. Yes, it's in part an attempt to balance aspects that sell, with artistic aspects, but it's also because I just inherently enjoy combining my favourite elements from genre fiction and literary fiction and I don't want to attempt to fit into either box. A good number of my favourite books don't fit into those boxes either. It's difficult, for sure. But I want my books to be accessible without extensive background in reading, while I also want them to provide enough meat to analyse for those that do.

That's literally my dream. I want my stories to speak to readers with different levels of experience and reading skills. I wish for them to be simultaneously easy and challenging, in a way that can encourage people towards the latter if they want to, because the needs of the former are being met first. I am by no means perfect at this, but I'm sure that getting through writing this fantasy series will improve me a lot. I do hope that it will already accomplish this task better than my other books have.