#they're novellas

[a-soft-fluffy-girl]

Callout post for Seanan McGuire, author of the hit book series, Wayward Children-- I mean criminal mastermind

As you can see by this very official and very clearly cited and sourced and verified claim with no basis, my adorable and precious and sweet cat has been THIEFED and SCRUNKLED and SMARTENED by none other than @seananmcguire , author of the recently published Lost in the Moment and Found, part of the Wayward Children series (which is quite good-- I mean a fiendish ploy to catnap my baby girl).

Pictured above, is the DESCRIPTION of what they had DONE to my BABY by my best friend ACE RESEARCHER.

SUCH EVIL.

Here is my poor little baby who has done no wrong ever in her whole life and is just a little creature.

Look at her. Sleek. Commanding. Pristine. Orange and therefore dumb as a bag of rocks.

How daaaare you take my baby and un-himbo her. How daaaare you scrunkle such a sleek child. This needs to be dealt with promptly with the fullest extent of my power!

MORE CAT PICTURES.

So yeah anyways if you could spread this around that'd be great because everyone needs to see my child-- I mean get more eyes on this series-- I mean BRING SEANAN TO JUSTICE.

[ministarfruit]

good ol' outfit swap

[shuffleoflove]

after all these years... i have them all

[tricoufamily]

a current day nils and a 90s college student nils who's way too intense about his internship walk into a bar

[necrotic-nephilim]

i recently remembered DickTim Week 2024 is happening very soon and i looked at the prompts again to see if i could get anything out for it and. the Hades & Persephone AU prompt for day 1 has got me really thinking so here's a vague concept i plan to write.

i've been pretty burnt out on modern Hades & Persephone retellings because of how they always seem to fall into the same generic "innocent wide-eyed girl runs from her evil mean mother into the arms of a dark mysterious man because actually she went willingly and chose to marry him" which has gotten repetitive for my tastes. (for clarity i don't care if this retelling is your cup of tea personally, so long as you're not actively trying to rewrite the original myth and claim untrue things about it, if this is your favorite flavor i sincerely hope you enjoy the buffet i just have little interest in it since it feels overdone for me and exhausted of it's supposed commentary atp)

but? but. biblically accurate Hades & Persephone AU has me all kinds of interested. because wait listen so hear me out right. Hades!Dick and Persephone!Tim, obviously. i feel it'd be more loosely inspired by with themes and imagery (though playing with death and nature powers could be interesting, i haven't decided) rather than explicitly making them gods and all. but. something dark and fucked up where Dick and Bruce are especially estranged. maybe to do with Jason's return, maybe to do with them just clashing and having their usual explosive arguments. and Bruce knows the peace needs to be kept, if he and Dick are at odds then everyone starts to pick sides and things just fracture so he needs a peace offering.

and the peace offering is Tim.

Bruce (the stand-in for Zeus) offers up Tim. agrees to have Tim move to Bludhaven and be Dick's... whatever Dick wants him to be. knowing that with the implication comes the likelihood of Dick grooming Tim. and Tim has no real say and is hesitant to put up a real fight. he doesn't want this, he knows what this is going to imply Dick will do to him, but he also knows if he says no things have the possibility to just... fall apart. so he's the unwilling bride, dragged off to the metaphorical underworld (Bludhaven) with Dick, away from his family, his friends, the life he built.

and on the flip side, i think weirdly enough, your best pick for the Demeter stand-in is *Jason*. just, hear me out on that. not necessarily on the side of it being motherly, but on Jason being just estranged enough from the Batfamily to be the one willing to call it out for being bad and wrong and raising bloody hell to get Tim back. maybe it's because Jason wants Tim for himself, maybe it's truly out of a concern for Tim to have autonomy, i'm toying with the idea of it primarily being Tim's POV and him genuinely not knowing which of these is true. (and the truth possibly ends up being a complicated middle ground) and because i like Helena, i think you can use her as the Hekate stand in, the one who strikes a tentative alliance with Jason and tries to go find Tim and bring him back. Tim stuck with Dick, getting groomed and hyperaware of it, possibly even getting fucked the whole time as well, knowing he can't go back without causing massive issues for Dick and Bruce because well, Bruce did promise him to Dick. so he has to adjust his whole life, try to figure out being a vigilante in this new city with Dick breathing down his neck the whole time.

and then much like the ending of the myth, a sort of compromise is struck that's a shaky deal for everyone involved. Tim is put on an essential timeshare, going back and forth between Gotham, where he has friends and family and a support system, then getting dragged right back to Bludhaven with Dick in this brutal cycle that he slowly gets used to and stockholm'd into even liking it. Dick isn't so bad, once he gets used to the quirks of their unbalanced 'relationship'. the sex is even something he can adjust to as well. not quite a happy ending but one that sits in this realistic grey area that becomes Tim's life.

i will write this, eventually, but i don't know if i'll get to it before DickTim Week ends so by posting the idea i'm essentially putting it out into the world so the peer pressure holds me accountable. i just. really like the potential of making Hades/Persephone AUs as fucked up as they can be simply by adhering to the source material and making it a raw story of being stolen away and forced to like this new home you didn't ask for.

also a less fleshed-out aspect of this idea i have ties into Persephone becoming the Queen of the Underworld when she's taken and how the transition from Kore to Persephone could be reflected in Tim. how he makes the best of the worst situation and becomes something far more dangerous and dark when he's in Bludhaven, possibly takes on a new vigilante name/identity and leans into the worst quirks of his personality he tries to tamper because there's no point in not going full tilt Obsessively Weird if he has no choice anyway and it being one small way he takes back his autonomy, and that inevitably making Dick *more* into him, because he gets to see Tim finally just. let loose.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: June Wrap-Up.

Okay, y'all have Convinced Me--I'm going to start doing little wrap up posts! Behold: a shelf of what I read in June (not pictured: the bookmark at page 466 of ORDINARY MONSTERS, because despite having read two (2) books worth of book so far, I'm still not quite done with that one).

June was kind of a slow reading month for me (I did a LOT of writing, looking back--nice). I wanted to take OTHER TERRORS and THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE a bite at a time so the horrors and figures of rhetoric (respectively) didn't all run together. Both of those, much like A SHINING, turned out to be pleasantly leisurely wanders, whereas MONSTERS is kind of a plod.

I already did bigger write-ups for TERRORS and SHINING, linked in the bullets below.

OTHER TERRORS - ★★★★ Great bite-sized horror anthology with a really inclusive mix, as promised! I enjoyed most of these (always nice in an anthology!)

A SHINING - ★★★★ Weird fucked up heavy little book in translation, lit-fic flavored, but very approachable, I thought. Tiny enough to swallow in a sitting, but also kind of exhausting to do it that way? I'll definitely reread this one in the future.

THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE - ★★★ Fun romp through rhetoric! The examples were fun, and I appreciated the humor, but I also find myself still uncertain what a bunch of the figures actually ARE, definitions-wise, despite having read a book full of so many of them (I did just buy his recommended A HANDLIST OF RHETORICAL TERMS to help with that, at least, which is. almost entirely. definitions by volume). Neat thing to have on my references shelf, but it wasn't as excellent as I was hoping it'd be.

ORDINARY MONSTERS - 466/658 pages read; will report back later (but it's not looking good, folks).

[lady-corrine]

He smiled faintly, just one corner of his mouth quirking up, and Bonnie realize with a thrill that it was a genuine smile, not the flashy one he put on for all sorts of reasons. This was just for her, and his eyes had gone soft and velvety for her, too. Bonnie knew that her own lips were parted in astonishment, her breath coming lightly and quickly. She had never realized... but then she’d never really allowed herself to imagine this. It was all like some magical dream.

“You know,” he said, very slowly and softly, as if he were puzzling out each word, “there are times when I think I’ve had enough of adventure, little redbird. When I just want to... come home. But... where is home, really? I wonder about that. Don’t you think sometimes that it’s nice to just relax... on your nest?”

[bonefall]

Petition for Fury to be one of the beautiful BloodClan girlies CinderFury forever

Sure lmao

Fury: "ILL RUN THIS TOWN, MARK MY WORDS! BLOODCLAN WILL BE MINE AND THE PAVEMENT WILL QUAKE BENEATH MY PAWS!"

Cinderpelt: i hate you clerics vow i hate you clerics vow i hate you clerics vow

[hussyknee]

If you aren't reading KJ Charles's books I sincerely do not know what you're doing with your life.

[aquitainequeen]

Me, reading that bit with the hare in What Moves The Dead while also eating my lunch:

[dyrewrites]

In Fog -- organized the rough draft >.>

For those of you who would like to read the rough words, posted as I wrote them, those are in this tag now.

You will want to scroll all the way down for the first part, lest you ruin the story for yourself. >.>

[fromtheseventhhell]

I’ll never forget how insecure Stansa’s got when the Key Five was revealed, complained about it and then to cope they created the ‘Core Six’ and actually ties into their continuous stream of passing of fanon as canon and at the same time being the usual delusional bunch they’ve always been

What's really funny is that they still confidently claim that the Key Five doesn't mean anything, solely because she isn't a part of it. The Core Six is a completely fanon invention but people talk about it like it's fact. They want her to be more important than she is so badly that they're straight up ignoring the author. And yes, until otherwise stated by George, the Key Five are still a thing. Tbh I'm not sure if there was ever a time that they engaged with the source material though? A lot of them came from the show (*cough*fanfiction) so that's where a majority of their takes are coming from. That's why we get people saying things like "Sansa charmed George off the page" or "Sansa took Arya's place as George's favorite Stark sister". They just desperately want the show to match up with the books. What's annoying is that her not being a part of the Key Five doesn't mean she isn't important, but people take it as hate towards her. It's sad that the only version of her they like is her fanon one.

[andromeda3116]

finally started reading the murderbot diaries because i kept seeing people talking about it and like. shit. okay, fine. this is my candy. space sci-fi set in a corporation-controlled semi-dystopian future, told from the pov of a snarky asexual part-organic sentient robot who has hacked itself into having free will, interwoven with an anti-capitalist, almost-whodunit plotline, and featuring strong platonic relationships as the emotional core of the series?

like, yes, okay, fine. jeez, next time just @ me

[kathhey]

HELP ME YALL. I just counted, and jorgen smiled/chuckled/grinned/expressedpositiveemotions FIFTEEN TIMES during the cytonic interludes and epilogue. 15 TIMES OVER THE SPAN OF 17 PAGES (not including interlude 4 bc like cmon spensa wasn't even there). BRO SMILED IN ALMOST EVERY SINGLE PAGE WITH SPENSA. HE GETS SO HAPPY WHEN HE'S IN SPENSA'S PRESENCE I CANNOTTTTTT AND THEN COMPARE THAT TO THE NOVELLAS WHERE HE PRETTY MUCH NEVER SMILES god i'm so sane and normal over these two

[lexreadsdiversely]

How the fuck did I, loather of series with more than two books, start a nine book series without realizing?

[nanistar]

ripley idk if you know this but that post you just reblogged of the tigerspotted hypokit...tigerclaw is spottedleafs direct nephew

le sigh. i'll remove it