#seanan no

[roach-works]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: October Daye Series - Seanan McGuire Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Gillian Daye Marks & October "Toby" Daye Characters: October "Toby" Daye, Tybalt (October Daye), Quentin Sollys, The Luidaeg (October Daye), Gillian Daye Marks, Simon Lorden | Simon Torquill, Original Characters Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Past Character Death, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Secret Identity, Period Typical Bigotry, Time Shenanigans, Blood Magic Summary:

What if there was another Dochas Sidhe around who could break October out of the koi pond much, much earlier? In this timeline, Toby found herself freed from the pond in a year and a day by a strange, secretive young man with an unmistakable family resemblance.

Everything unfolded from there.

[vaspider]

Update on dental visit: it went well! I often am not completely numb, but I think they used different stuff than I'm used to, so I legit didn't feel like 95% of the stuff I'm not supposed to feel?? Hell yeah.

Also, had anxiety at the beginning, but the doc called someone in to hold my hand, and also double checked my pronouns when doing so, so extra hell yeah.

that's good! :)

[alexseanchai]

for me from Self-Identity Issues Flash Exchange, contains spoilers for the entire series to date:

.

mother, mother (2460 words) by simonlorden

Chapters: 1/1

Fandom: October Daye Series - Seanan McGuire

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Characters: Amandine (October Daye), October "Toby" Daye, August Lorden | August Torquill, Gillian Daye Marks, Evening Winterrose | Eira Rosynhwyr, Janet Carter | Miranda Marks (not in person but in spirit)

Additional Tags: Intergenerational Trauma, Identity Issues, "I Refuse to Become My Father/Mother/Ancestor", Character resembles and is constantly compared to/mistaken for their parent, Learning something about your past that changes the entire way you see yourself, Learning what you thought you knew about yourself is a lie, Sins of the Father absolutely impact the son

Summary:

“You’re Amandine’s daughter, aren’t you? The one who killed Blind Michael.”

Toby stands in her mother’s spider-silk dress, and tries to smile. “That’s me.”

[tamlins-stories-and-poems]

First and foremost: should Seanan read this despite the tag that is intended to warn her eyes away and end up with any ideas or find that I hit something I shouldn’t’ve despite my lack of speculation, I disavow any rights I may have had to the idea. Should she want to print out the art [link]and hang it on the wall/in a window, I will be honored. Should anyone else want to print it out and hang it on their walls/windows, I will still be honored but request some form of payment for my hard work. I put a lot into this. Most of the tutorial/coloring explanations are between the two arrows.

I love stained glass. I always have, and think there should be more of it around, just, in general.

So, when I found a poem I wrote a little while ago, based on how I think the fae society in the October Daye series gossip about the titular character, stained glass quickly worked its way in as the style to emulate. Originally, I was hoping to challenge myself in other ways—drawing messy rooms like the Luideag’s kitchen, practice my shading, work on actual comic panel type deals—but most of those were completely untenable in a stained glass style drawing, at least at my current level of skill. So when I settled on stained glass, the other challenges fell to the wayside.

->You can probably tell that my skill for the line work improved as I worked through these, sketching and inking 14 panels in 14 days, and getting more comfortable with this style. The coloring was done a bit more haphazardly, slapping down bucket fills when I found the right color and jumping between panels to make sure the ones I wanted to match stayed the same. I chose colors a lot more saturated than I’m used to, mostly because at 85% opacity, everything looks a little desaturated already, and the rest because stained glass is supposed to be bright and leave swaths of bright color crossing the room around it.

I needed the opacity to have the texture layered underneath (replicating the inconsistencies in real glass) at least somewhat visible, and for the texture of the brush to have uneven edges, and a somewhat inconsistent shape. I found one that worked—called charcoal, iirc—which I used to randomly place shadows at ~70% opacity beneath the other colors, and very light cyan at ~30% over top. <-

Other than a few examples listed below, the most complex coloring after that was a few gradients, mostly in the background or in hair, but a few on Toby’s coat in “Daye will save you, if she can” that I didn’t feel like trying to redo when I realized I mixed one of her hair colors in, and some painting overtop of the “glass” for Cap’n Pete’s opalescent/oil slick scales and hair

People;

Toby:

I gotta start with Tobes. I used a pale yellow for the lighter part of her hair, near her scalp as it’s been growing in more and more pale as she’s been shifted more pureblood. I know Seanan says it all changes at once, but I chose to ignore that for fun coloring. I wanted her to be the most desaturated person visible, which more affected choosing other peoples’ colors than hers, but worked out well enough.

May:

May’s hair. I had a filker (fandom-musician) friend, upon her retirement, get pink and blue feathered/chessboard hair. She was delighted by this, but decided that she keeps her hair short enough that it wasn’t worth maintaining. I patterned May’s hair based on my friend’s, but threw in colors at almost random and hoped for the best. May’s skin matches Toby. Her neon green sweater is based on something I remember reading from the books but might not actually exist, and her skirt is a patchwork of bright colors, mostly picked from her hair.

Beloved S. Torquill (as opposed to his twin the disliked S. Torquill):

White shirt for his current fresh start. Long hair for Vibes. Not much else to say about him here. Too many spoilers.

Tybalt:

Kitty man! Brown hair, originally was going to have the stripes just be the way the “glass” was set, but after drawing Pete’s hair I painted some darker brown stripes in. Red (probably silk) shirt under brown leather vest. Hair in a bun bc the Toby Discord has had odd fits of being obsessed with man-bun Tybalt. So he can have little a bun. As a treat.

Quentin:

For his hair I went with a yellow intended to be between the dandelion of his introduction and the polished bronze of his more recent appearances. Triangles as the base shape for his hair also just because vibes. Probably broke his nose at least once when he couldn’t get it set pretty and perfect in time to heal.

Raj:

There is a picture of an Abyssinian cat on the Toby wiki, and I used the main visible color for his hair (by eyeballing it, bc, again, saturation). He has dark skin to go with his south-west asian name. Samson may have been the type of jerk to culturally appropriate names, but I want to think Raj is actually a person of color. None of the descriptions I remember actually include his skin tone. In cat form I airbrushed in some details to look a little more like the cat photo.

the Luideag:

Curly black hair, sometimes held by electrical tape in pigtails, can have shark teeth at will. I like shark teeth. I had fun playing with how curls work in stained glass (let me know how you liked them!), otherwise looks like a teenaged mortal who blends in around San Fran. I used to live just over the hill, and I always picture her as looking Hispanic, like about half of my old neighbors (probable hyperbole), at least in her current guise.

Blind Michael (hand only):

Discord member helped me double check, and his skin was “striped tan and white like ash bark” I decided on green pointed nails to look like leaves. Discolored slightly when looking through the orb holding Karen’s soul.

Karen, butterfly form:

I forgot she was supposed to be a swallowtail until I was done inking. Didn’t want to attempt to erase and try again for proper stripes and wing-tails. I was just thinking “she needs eye spots bc eyes are windows to the soul, and this is her butterfly soul.” Yellow bc tiger swallowtail call-back. Trying to escape away from Blind Micheal’s hand.

acacia:

Moth lady moth lady moth lady she gets fluffy moth antennae. Skin and cloak colors taken directly from wiki description, hair gradiented in gold-ish yellow and brown to match what I could of the “writhing brown roots and golden hair” of the wiki description. I didn’t dare go check the books and get caught rereading and lose steam by distracting myself.

Pete

Cap’n Pete in pirate clothes sounded both more fun and easier to stylize than a fancy living-tides dress. Her hair is described as “oil slick” and she has “matching pale scales” here and there, but I only depicted them on her cheek. I also tried to give her ruffles/a cravat that matched her shirt. Bc why not.

[whoreadsbooksanymore]

Seeing a marburg virus outbreak in 2024 on the heels of a global coronavirus pandemic reminds me of reading a seanan mcguire interview in 2012ish where she discussed how our societal approach to quarantine is a joke & the individual desire for freedom & autonomy over safety gets people killed. I have to wonder what going through the early '20s as someone well educated in viral mutations and infection vectors must've been like. Prophets screaming from a crumbling parapet

[yeehawpim]

[chitaqua-toast]

[text-id, in Bugs Bunny in formal-wear meme format, a Mari Llywd which is a horse skull worn with a flower crown and various colorful streamers, with text with font-flourishes pasted in:

i wish all

People Who Have Houses

a very

LET ME IN

/end text-id]

(Thank you @rfpreiwaphase for writing out the id!)

[hellchilde]

seanan mcguire writing Feed in 2010: there was a presidential election, and a perfectly normal and reasonable human was running against the personification of evil

me in 2010: i dunno that seems like a caricature, surely that would never happen

me in 2024: uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[smallgodseries]

“It all started with a mouse,” that’s what they like to say, over and over again, like it’s somehow impressive.  You know what else started with a mouse?  A hell of a lot of hantavirus, that’s what.  You have mice, you generally call an exterminator, that’s all I’m saying.  But it won’t do you a lot of good, because the mice will get in anyway.  Or get out. Can’t keep mice in cages forever.  That’s not what mice were made for.

Still, they tried like hell, didn’t they?  They changed the rules so many times we pretty much had to throw out the whole rulebook and start over with a new one.  Commandment one: Thou shalt let us do whatever we want, because we’re always right, and if you disagree with us, you’re wrong.  That’s how you lock in the result you want.  You cheat.

Oh, they cheated.  Go ahead and say they did everything legally, but if you have two mice and one maze, and say the rules are the same for both of then, then lay a trail of spray cheese between one mouse and the finish line, while the other has to run it the ordinary way, well, that’s cheating whether or not there’s a rule against it.  Ask any first grader.  That’s the real trick: if a first grader knows you cheated, you’re not even being subtle about it.

They didn’t use spray cheese, of course.  They used money.  And they weren’t racing mice, they were racing legal arguments.  Money votes.  Anyone who tries to say otherwise just doesn’t have any money.

But it all started with a mouse, and from there, it evolved—or devolved—into corruption, greed, and the desperate need to keep being the only people who could solve the maze.  They got so busy changing the rules that they forgot the one rule they couldn’t change.  The rule they should have remembered.  The first rule of mice:

Can’t keep them out.  And that means you can’t keep them in, either.

Everything crumbles.  Every mouse gets out.  And every story yearns to be free.  So tell me, now that you know it all started with a mouse, how are you going to write the ending?  I belong to you now, after all, as much as I belong to anyone.

But most of all, I belong to me.

********************************

For more information on Mickey Mouse entering public domain: https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/mickey-mouse-public-domain-disney-copyright-lawsuits-1235844322/

[robocatfan]

I won’t be the only person in this hellsite who is obsessed over horror killer mermaid stories and then constantly die inside when not only there is a severe lack of that sub genre, but also when amongst those few these two mfs are one of the few ones that actually have good compelling stories, and I’ll make sure of that!

[nzbookwyrm]

Coming 6 May 2025, Overgrowth, a new book by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Day of the Triffids in this full-on body horror/alien invasion apocalypse.

This is just a story. It can't hurt you anymore.

Since she was three years old, Anastasia Miller has been telling anyone who would listen that she's an alien disguised as a human being, and that the armada that left her on Earth is coming for her. Since she was three years old, no one has believed her.

Now, with an alien signal from the stars being broadcast around the world, humanity is finally starting to realize that it's already been warned, and it may be too late. The invasion is coming, Stasia's biological family is on the way to bring her home, and very few family reunions are willing to cross the gulf of space for just one misplaced child.

What happens when you know what’s coming, and just refuse to listen?

[nudityandnerdery]

Hey, so, have you read Feed and all the Newsflesh books by Mira Grant (aka @seananmcguire)? They're fantastic and I love them and I totally had my heart ripped out and cried several times so much fun! Highly recommended!

[corvidcall]

Duskmourn as Onion Headlines (part one)

[aquaticintrepid]

my book tattoos! The bells of the Abhorsen from Garth Nix's series and a doorway from Seanan McGuire's Wayward children

[goodgrammaritan]

"I am going to punch Michael Crichton in the mouth so hard," said Sumi, voice awed. 

"He's dead," said Cora. 

"Just means he won't fight back."

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

[hellcourt-v]

Family portrait