Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@austrohungarianwriteblr
still sometimes think about the discord writing server i was in where someone combed through my personal blog, found a post I reblogged praising AO3's lack of censorship, and sent me a DM telling me to delete it or I'd get harassed
weirdly I didn't leave that server for another six months?
amen
romcom about a noble falling for the court jester
and it's called Fooling Around
Order Christmas in Carinthia!!! OUT NOW!
Okay, I know the arrow thing is a bit silly, but it's a convention of the genre so here we are.
Anyway! Behold a story about Marta's grandparents!!!
Dorothea Dornbach is on the verge of spinsterhood, and that's just how she likes it. Once Vienna’s boring bachelors have finally given up pursuing her, she’ll finally be free to pursue her great passions: botany, gardening, and being left alone. All she has to do is survive one interminable Christmas party at the house of dull, priggish, annoyingly handsome Gerhardt von Holstadt. It’s been three years since Gerhardt’s father passed away, and the young count isn’t entirely confident about hosting his first Christmas party at the family estate. With high-society guests to look after and a thousand events to plan, he has more than enough on his plate. A visit from Dorothea, the most irritating prankster of his childhood, can only make things worse. Dorothea is expecting weeks of sheer boredom. Gerhardt is expecting an utter disaster. But circumstances - including a midnight surgery, a secret passage, and a long-buried family secret - keep bringing them together, and the outcome is more of a surprise than any Christmas gift.
(I'm only releasing this one as an e-book; if you don't have a Kindle, DM me if you want to read it and we can work out an epub deal!)
Order Christmas in Carinthia!!! OUT NOW!
Okay, I know the arrow thing is a bit silly, but it's a convention of the genre so here we are.
Anyway! Behold a story about Marta's grandparents!!!
Dorothea Dornbach is on the verge of spinsterhood, and that's just how she likes it. Once Vienna’s boring bachelors have finally given up pursuing her, she’ll finally be free to pursue her great passions: botany, gardening, and being left alone. All she has to do is survive one interminable Christmas party at the house of dull, priggish, annoyingly handsome Gerhardt von Holstadt. It’s been three years since Gerhardt’s father passed away, and the young count isn’t entirely confident about hosting his first Christmas party at the family estate. With high-society guests to look after and a thousand events to plan, he has more than enough on his plate. A visit from Dorothea, the most irritating prankster of his childhood, can only make things worse. Dorothea is expecting weeks of sheer boredom. Gerhardt is expecting an utter disaster. But circumstances - including a midnight surgery, a secret passage, and a long-buried family secret - keep bringing them together, and the outcome is more of a surprise than any Christmas gift.
(I'm only releasing this one as an e-book; if you don't have a Kindle, DM me if you want to read it and we can work out an epub deal!)
you have a disgusting storytelling addiction
It’s true. It goes back a long way, too. It all started when…
This book is actually pretty good
AI is literally ruining publishing. 3 years ago I was able to get an incredibly nice cover made in Photoshop by a professional designer. This week, when I asked that same designer to do the cover for my upcoming novella, she handed me a draft that was clearly AI generated and got offended when I criticized it. Fuck's sake.
Anyway if you or someone you know is an artist who takes commissions for book covers, let me know.
writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months
woop there it is
okay i have another idea for a novel. not in Austria-Hungary this time. dunno if i'll ever write it. but my endless disappointment with popular romantasy despite its potentials as a genre has inspired me.
so:
our hero is a handsome and honorable knight, very dedicated to his job, kind of a dork (real Davrin from Dragon Age energy)
he has been assigned by the king to go investigate all the kingdom's necromancers to make sure they're not doing any scheming (because the kingdom has previously had issues with necromancers)
the one he's meeting next is the famously reclusive Baroness Veronika Kovatch
Veronika turns out to be a perfectly nice woman but also has no idea how to act around living people...
because her parents died ten years ago leaving her a broken-down castle full of ghosts and skeleton servants (skeleton crew lol) and she's majorly stuck in a rut
all media today is writers frantically trying to make their work idiotproof and then the audience frantically trying to make themselves better idiots
Fallout: Hungary is projected to sell 1 or 2 copies. At the store
I get a lot of ads and suggested posts from authors promoting their books with trope lists so I started compiling my favourites. personally nothing makes me want to pick up a book like knowing there's a scene where a guy gives his love interest some water 😍 you can rest assured there's no plot description to be seen because who needs that when you know the main guy loves a good boat 😍😍
a few more gems <3
some things I've learned from my time in the self published romcoms algorithm:
sports romance is HOT right now (usually ice hockey, sometimes nfl, if the female character is also an athlete it can only be gymnastics or figure skating, if not her dad probably owns/coaches the team) but if he can't be an athlete he will be a cowboy or a billionaire
these readers apparently can't get enough of the come in his pants moments?? who knew
if the guy is grumpy it's called grumpy/sunshine but if the girl is grumpy it's called golden retriever/black cat (because dogs are boys and cats are girls. duh)
the cardinal rule is that the guy will usually "fall first" and he will ALWAYS "fall harder"
This was mine. I'm sure you'll agree that no one is doing it like me
Big thanks to @kehindes-world for helping me out with some beta reading for my Christmas novella! Here's a link to their Fiverr profile if any of you are interested in professional editing/beta-ing services.
How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)
after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while
read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.
you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.
anyway after that i wrote a lot.
i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.
and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.
the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?
read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.
#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)
