#the narrators voice being so different from katniss' reveals something about the writing that has me in awe

[edwardshundredyearoldspunk]

stumbled across a ballad of songbirds and snakes critique video and I couldn't even watch it because the person so did not get what the book was doing and saying and the comments were complaining about the unnecessary romance when it's super obvious it's not intended to be a romance. suzanne collins is, yet again, ahead of her time because I remember the hate mockingjay got when it came out for killing prim and having katniss vote for new hunger games when those plot points are crucial and are meant to act as a commentary

[ophiedokes]

So this is. Probably a stRAnge question lmao. But hey, I’m kinda new to writing and not the best at sexual tension, and since you’re like, The God at it, I was wondering if you have any tips?

I just made this very strange noise because this is like, the absolute best compliment ever and not something I considered myself to be particularly skilled at, omg, but -- wow thank you thank you thank you. 

Okay. SO. I think my most sexual tensiony fic is definitely RE AOT MAYD and I wanna just kind of grab some of the moments that I think worked best and what my thought process was for that? I don’t know if this is helpful. But for me the sexual tension starts in Chapter Six, with the fake tattoo scene, right. I think that’s my peak sexual tension moment ever, they’re both so thirsty in that moment, and I wanted that to start before they were back into the kissing because I wanted to make it a really long night/slow build. 

And the thing about sexual tension is that if it comes on too heavily and your internal monologue is just straight up, “I wanted to fuck her” then that’s, like, valid, but the way you get your reader to really feel what you want them to feel is by leaving

I wanted to fuck her in the blanks for them to fill in. Example: 

 I cannot unstick my eyes from her hands while she unbuttons her cardigan. It falls open to reveal the gray tank top I noticed underneath before, with just . . . man. Impossibly thin straps. It clings to her form so much closer than anything else I’ve ever seen her in.(..) In the light from the fixture over the table, I catch sight of the way her skin goes all shimmery in places, spiderwebbing across her hip, up towards her waist. And --I sort of can’t breathe?Like, I’m fully rooted to my spot on the floor(..) I catch just a flash of black scalloped lace before she tugs that down, too. It’s just the very top bit of her ass that’s visible.Just enough to make sure I don’t really catch my breath.

I’ve gotten a LOT of really flattering feedback about the tattoo scene in particular because it’s sex but it’s not sex -- and I think that because everyone’s response to various visual stimuli is different, including not only what’s being seen but how the character feels about what’s being seen is important. Like here, it’s not just “And Katniss inched her shirt up” so much as, “Peeta cannot breathe because he thinks it’s so sexy that Katniss inched her shirt up” 

And that same tension builds with little flashes into his internal dialogue that again, only come about half an inch short of him saying, I wanted to fuck her, she asks where he wants her and he thinks

Oh, god. Everywhere. Anywhere. On her back? Fuck. I feel guilty as soon as the thought flashes into my mind. I do want her that way -- and every way, probably. But that’s not what she meant.

I think rather than playing it fully straight, these little moments of like, “Oh, god what am I thinking?” help to ground it in realty -- for me personally, I’m too repressed to ever think “Damn, she fine” without immediately feeling creepy and predatory for it. 

And then the actual beginnings of AOT!Katniss realizing that Peeta was turned on happen in this paragraph here: 

I look up, forcing my eyes to jump up her body without holding on one of the many places they’d like to focus. “Perfect,” I say. “I’m just -- I need to put my hand here,” I warn, reaching out with my right hand and using it to brace myself against her side. Oh, man, I hope she can’t feel the way my hand is trembling. “Try to hold still,” I say, but I’m a moment late, because her hip shifts against my touch, just a little.And man, I’m trying to be professional, but I can’t help but to think about how else I might make her hips shift like that. How else I might have her up above me on a table, like this.Her skin is so soft under my palm. I use my left hand to bring the sharpie to my mouth and I bite off the cap, chancing another glance up at her face to see the way her eyes are fixed on my face. Oh, I am so fucked.My left forearm braces against her thigh and I lean forward, holding my breath as the tip of the marker makes first contact with her soft skin.

Because the thing about sexual tension is it’s only tension if both characters are into it, right? So thinking about what the other character’s physical reactions and tells is really helpful. Here, Katniss sees that Peeta is flushed and holding his breath, which is why she starts to think, “Oh shit, hey, maybe he’s into me” 

My fingers land on her hipbone, something I had felt before under the head of the marker, and her hips stir against the table again. It’s an unconscious, innocent gesture, but it may as well be downright filthy for all the effect it has on me.

And she has no idea. She probably doesn’t even realize she’s done it.(...) “Kay.” Katniss’s voice is a little pinched. Oh, god. Can she tell? Am I that obvious? She must think I’m a total freak. 

AOT!Peeta is oblivious but this is where I start hinting to the audience that, yeah, Katniss is into it, which I attempted to make progressively clearer as she continued to escalate and escalate -- grinding on him in the van and licking his hand and following him into the shower. SO I guess the real advice I have to give is mostly like, be aware of how the characters are playing off of one another especially when it’s not clear to the narrator, and try to make that as clear to the audience as you can. In a scene with just like, really good sexual tension, I find the characters continually are drawn towards each other, usually by some force they don’t understand, and there’s at least some level of, “I shouldn’t be thinking this” which, of course makes it even sweeter that they are thinking it. 

[brigdh]

Book Blogging

A Tyranny of Queens by Foz Meadows. The sequel to the portal fantasy I read last month. Most of the plot here is fallout from the climax of that book: Saffron has returned back to Earth from the fantasy world of Kena, but can she re-adjust to a 'normal' life? And if not, what choices will she make? Yena's adopted sister died in the final battle, but can Yena reclaim religious rights for her sister's funeral and learn more about her mysterious heritage? The evil king has been overthrown, but escaped – where is he and what caused his actions? What's up with the mysterious magic artifact he left behind in the castle? Sadly, I didn't like this book nearly as much as its predecessor. The biggest problem is simply a shift in the use of characters; whereas the first book divided its pages fairly evenly among a vast cast, A Tyranny of Queens is hugely dominated by Saffron and Yena. And I'm sorry to say it, but they're the most boring characters in this series. Both are an example of the 'normal teen girl dealing with events outside her experience' archetype, which is a fine enough archetype as far as it goes, but not one that's particularly exciting unless you give her some sort of distinctive personality trait, anything other than 'determined', 'hard-working', 'smart'. Buffy wanted to date boys and wear cute clothes; Katniss wanted to be left alone and was unexpectedly ruthless; Saffron wants... ? The characters who did grab my attention in An Accident of Stars are pushed mostly off-screen here. Yasha, the grumpy, staff-wielding elderly matriarch who was revealed late in the first book to be an exiled queen, gets something like ten lines of dialogue in this entire book. Viya, the young, spoiled but trying hard to improve noblewoman who is named co-ruler of Kena at the end of the first book, and thus should be navigating the delicate balance of maintaining equality of power while still learning to handle so much responsibility, gets literally two scenes out of three hundred pages. And so on through a whole list of really cool characters. Instead we get multiple chapters of Saffron arguing with her guidance counselor, then her parents, then her social worker over whether she should apologize to one of her high school teachers over a minor incident caused by a bully. Exciting fantasy! My second problem with the book, unfortunately, is much more fundamental. The plot revolves around discovering that the evil king wasn't really evil after all, but was brainwashed. I'm sure this is an attempt to do an interesting redemption arc, or to look at how even the worst-seeming villains have their reasons, but it didn't work for me at all. It felt like a cop-out to remove blame from the king by passing it on to a historic figure from centuries ago (who never gets an explanation for his evil actions, so Meadows hasn't really complicated the role of villains so much as pushed the question a few steps outside the main narrative). None of the many people who died in the wars he started or were tortured in his pursuit of knowledge get a voice in this second book, so I kept feeling as though the suffering he caused was conveniently being swept under the rug to get readers to feel sorry for him. In addition, for a book that tries so hard to be progressive, ending with 'it's not the king's fault! He was manipulated by a foreign woman who made him fall in love with her!' is, uh... not a great look. All in all, a disappointing book. But there was enough good about the series that I'll give the author another chance. The Written World: How Literature Shaped Civilization by Martin Puchner. A nonfiction book that makes its way through human history via the medium of literature. Each of sixteen chapters focuses on a particular classic and shows how it both influenced and was influenced by contemporary events, from Homer's Odyssey giving Alexander the Great a hero to model himself after to The Communist Manifesto inspiring revolutions across the world. A subthread is the development of the technologies of literature itself – the inventions of the alphabet, paper, the printing press, ebooks, etc. It's a pretty neat idea for a book! Unfortunately the execution is terrible. I started off being annoyed that Puchner never seems quite clear on what he means by the term 'literature'. He implies it only includes written works (in the Introduction he says, "It was only when storytelling intersected with writing that literature was born."), and yet many of the pieces he choses to focus on were primarily composed orally (The Odyssey and the Iliad, The Epic of Sunjata, the Popul Vuh, probably the Epic of Gilgamesh, certainly at least parts of One Thousand and One Nights). And yet there's never any discussion of what it means to go from an oral mode to a written one, a topic I was eagerly awaiting to see analyzed. It's just... never addressed beyond a passing mention here and there. Okay, fine, I thought to myself, Puchner means 'literature' as in 'stories'. But that doesn't work either, since once again many of his choices don't tell any sort of narrative (Saint Paul's letters, Martin Luther's theses, Benjamin Franklin's 'Poor Richard's Almanac', Confucius's Analects, Mao's 'Little Red Book'). So what does Puchner mean by literature, the central organizing principle of his whole book? God alone knows. My irritation with the book deepened when I got to Chapter Four, where Puchner claims credit for inventing the concept of the Axial Age: "It was only in the course of trying to understand the story of literature that I noticed a striking pattern in the teaching of the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. Living within a span of a few hundred years but without knowing of one another, these teachers revolutionized the world of ideas. Many of today’s philosophical and religious schools—Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, and Christianity—were shaped by these charismatic teachers. It was almost as if in the five centuries before the Common Era, the world was waiting to be instructed, eager to learn new ways of thinking and being. But why? And what explained the emergence of these teachers?" Sure, dude, sure. You came up with this vastly original idea all on your own. (To be fair, if one choses to read through the endnotes, Puchner does cite Karl Jaspers, though he still insists his own version is ~so different~.) He then proceeds to get basic information about the Buddha completely wrong. For example: Some form of writing may have existed in India during the Buddha’s time (the so-called Indus Valley script may not have been a full writing system and remains undeciphered). This sentence. I can't even. I almost stopped reading the book right here, it's so incredibly incorrect. It's like saying, "Thomas Jefferson may have been literate, but since we find no Latin engravings in his house, we can't be sure." Let me lay out the problems. The Buddha lived around 500BCE; the last known well-accepted use of the Indus script was in 1900BCE. That's a gap of nearly two millennia. The Indus script was used on the western edge of South Asia, in Pakistan and the Indian states of Gujarat and Haryana; the Buddha lived on the eastern edge, in Nepal. At minimum, they're 500 miles apart. There is no chance in hell the Indus script was remotely relevant to writing about the Buddha. And in fact, we don't need to guess at the script of the Buddha's time and place. It's called Brahmi and it's quite well attested – though Puchner doesn't once mention it. He does include a photo of an Indus seal, because why not waste more space on utterly irrelevant information. Let's quickly go through the problems on the rest of this single page: What mattered above all were the age-old hymns and stories of the Vedas, which were transmitted orally by specially appointed Brahmans for whom remembering the Vedas was an obligation and a privilege. Though the Vedas do have an important oral history, they were certainly written down by the time of the Buddha, and possibly as early as 1000BCE. The oldest Indian epic, the Ramayana, was also orally composed and only later written down, much like Homeric epics. The Mahabharata is generally considered to be the older of the two epics. Despite my disillusionment at this point, I continued on with the book. And to be fair, I noticed many fewer mistakes! Though possibly because I know much less about Renaissance Germany or Soviet Russia than I do about Indian history. I did hit several problems again in the chapter on the Popul Vuh, the Mayan epic. To begin with, the chapter opens with a long dramatic scene recreating the Spanish conquistadores' capture of Atahualpa, the Incan emperor. Incan. Who lived in Peru, in South America. The Classic Mayan culture was based in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize – North America and a bit of Central America. This time Puchner is literally on the wrong continent. Once he finally makes his way up to the Mayan homeland, he focuses his narration on Diego de Landa, a Spanish priest who did indeed write an important ethnography of the Mayans of the 1500s. The Classic Mayan Era was over by 950CE, introducing a discrepancy Puchner does not deign to acknowledge. Even aside from that small problem, Puchner describes Landa's writings multiple times as "an account [...] that has remained the primary source of information on Maya culture." This entirely ignores not only the Popul Vuh itself; but the multiple other Mayan codices that survived Spanish colonialism; the many Mayan writings carved on their pyramids, palaces, and stele, and painted on their pottery; their murals of war, sport, and history; the enormous archaeological record of their cities, technology, and diet; and, oh yeah, the fact that Mayan people are still around today. Oh, my bad – Puchner does remember the Mayans still exist. Here's what he has to say about them: "My journey began in the Lacandon jungle. A bus dropped me at the border of the Maya territory, where a beat-up truck picked me up at the side of the road. The village of several dozen huts was located in a clearing in the jungle. Everyone but me was dressed in what looked like long white nightgowns. Men and women both wore their black hair shoulder length (I thought of the shipwrecked sailor who had gone native), and most of them walked around barefoot, sometimes donning rubber boots." That's it. That's literally the only mention of the modern Mayan people. (Puchner's in the area to learn about the Zapatista uprising, to which he devotes the rest of the chapter.) I'm so glad he spent ages detailing that and de Landa's biography instead of devoting any space at all to the contemporary persistence of Mayan beliefs, language, or rituals. When I first read its blurb, I looked forward to the rest of The Written World. Unfortunately it's the closest I've come to hurling a book at the wall in a long, long time. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

[DW link for ease of commenting]