Adventures in Imaginary Worlds

I'm a Catholic writer and reader. I like books, TV shows, and movies and I talk about them here, and I'll reblog anything that catches my fancy.

[stingrayextraordinaire]

Literature Moodboards // Persuasion by Jane Austen

When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

[thesweetnessofspring]

And sometimes he and Roaring Abel smoked fiercely the whole evening and never said a word, while Cissy lay in the hammock swung between the verandah posts and Valancy sat idly on the steps, her hands clasped over her knees, and wondered dreamily if she were really Valancy Stirling and if it were only three weeks since she had left the ugly old house on Elm Street.

🏰HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY TO THE BLUE CASTLE!

For the 100th birthday of one of my favorite books, I commissioned @sparemoon to do an art piece of Valancy, Barney, Cissy, and Roaring Abel. There were certain elements from the book that I wanted in the piece, and @sparemoon combined them all so skillfully and with the beauty and wonder that the book evokes, I could cry looking at this. I'm particularly thrilled that we now have art with Cissy and Roaring Abel, and more of Valancy and Barney.

The Blue Castle may sometimes be an overlooked little book, but it certainly now has a @dustpileofherown thanks to the fandom we've found here. 🩵

[whenthegoldrays]

twinkling watermelon, 2023 // a luc bat by @fictionadventurer

[daily-rayless]

In honor of the hundredth anniversary of The Blue Castle, @dustpileofherown sent out a call for a hundred new TBC fan works. So here's Valancy and her beloved cat Good Luck.

[sirarxen4]

Hmmm.

[smartlovingunitedtough]

Wood block color prints by gustave baumann

[lady-merian]

Progress pictures under the cut

And again the final result!

reference

[awesomebutunpractical]

Fairy tales aren't just ooey gooey fluffy princess stories or grim scare em straight morality tales. A lot of them are Adventures and Funny.

[maxinevee]

Moonrise 🌙🌊

[laurasimonsdaughter]

What if Disney adapted The Three Spinners?

I don't think there's anything ~Disney~ in this story to latch on to, really. But I wish wish wish this one had been included in the Jim Henson's the Storyteller adaptations!

They'd cast someone big eyed and pouty mouthed for the peasant girl and someone startled and wholesome looking for the prince. And the three spinners with the big foot, the big lip and the big thumb could be friendly, troll-like puppets. It'd be darling.

I really like The Three Spinners. Its general plot of a young woman who is mistakenly thought to be able to spin inhumanly fast and is therefore put to the test by the royal family and helped out by three "aunties", shows up all over Europe. But I like the versions that explicitly call the three old spinners fairies or some other supernatural entity the best.

It's also really fun that the "price" for the three spinners help is actually another blessing. They tell the protagonist they'll spin for her, if she invites them to her wedding as her aunts. And when she does this, her new husband is told that her aunts have gotten their big foot, lip and thumb because of all the spinning they've done, so he hastily tells his beautiful wife never to go near a spinning wheel again. It's such a fun piece of trickery and such a merry ending, I love it.

[assassin1513]

🍁✨🍁Autumn Stars🍁✨🍁

[doodleoo]

today I got the most beautiful batch of strawberries

[mirrorsinner]

[jimbles-archive]

[flea-palace]

[hannahlockillustration]

Morning Glory

[sailforvalinor]

The more time goes on the more I become obsessed with Islington and Hawkes’ friendship, because imagine you’re just starting college and you see that a fifteen-year-old is also in your year and your overprotective-big-brother instincts go on red alert, so you go out of your way to befriend him only to find out that he’s both an absolute genius and a wonderful person and you become so close that he’s almost like family to you, but then one summer he goes on a trip to Ireland and comes back looking like he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders. Something clearly happened but he insists that the kindest thing you can do is not ask. And you watch as whatever is haunting him or whatever purpose he’s been burdened with hollows him out, exhausts him; he starts to keep the people he cares so deeply about at arm’s length and you suspect this is because he thinks getting too close to him isn’t worth the danger it begets. This goes on year after year, gets worse year after year, but the kindest thing you can do is not ask. It hasn’t changed him—he’s still kind as summer, but there is still something very Wrong and still, the kindest thing you can do is not ask.