Free idea for someone:
A sequel to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, where the native inhabitants of Faerie organize and overthrow their English/Christian/Elfin colonizers.

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@kaelsmiscellany
Free idea for someone:
A sequel to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, where the native inhabitants of Faerie organize and overthrow their English/Christian/Elfin colonizers.
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐,
貞志篤終誓穹蒼,
欽所感想妄淫荒,
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心,
荒淫妄想感所欽,
蒼穹誓終篤志貞,
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑,始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖,璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”
YALL. Holly Black has a list of resources she's used for writing her books on the fair folk. I'm OBSESSED. I love her work and world building. it's so true to the heart of faeries
Some other resources that might be worth checking out (not strictly about faeries but related):
The Corpus of Electronic Texts, or CELT, a collection of Irish cultural materials. This includes English translations of Irish myths.
Mary Jones - similar to CELT, and a resource we used for translations in the Irish mythology class I took in undergrad.
An Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Mary Briggs, a British folklorist.
The Folklore of Cornwall by Ronald M. James. Unfortunately this book is harder to access and is often only in university libraries, but if you're interested in piskies it's a potentially very helpful read.
Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall by William Bottrell.
British Goblins by Wirt Sikes is THE encyclopedia of Welsh faerie mythology
The problem with trying to come up with a way to say "this book has sex in" is that there's loads of options which all mean different things and none are perfect. Like...
clean/wholesome vs dirty - obviously this one is bullshit, we don't need to talk about why
smut/smutty - a classique. Pretty good, but feels like its falling out of favour.
steamy - as above, really. feels slightly more vague, makes me assume it's sexy but not explicit. More dated - been replaced by spicy.
erotic - erotica is a whole genre to itself, with different parameters to romance. Conflating the two weakens genre defninitions for both.
explicit - does what it says on the tin, but risks sounding a bit clinical. If steamy is make outs and fondling, explicit is genitals getting described up-close.
spicy - gets a lot of complaints, but lends itself well to a rating scale and is very popular
open/closed door - this is a good shorthand, but not very familiar to people who aren't reading romance. Again, doesn't rate very easily - a closed door is a closed door, but the open door could lead to either slow vanilla missionary or a full-on BDSM scene.
porn/pornography - comes with a lot of assumptions which makes it harder to use in certain spaces. Sits at the 5/5 end of the scale in my head. Similar to erotica in that its a distinct genre.
saucy - this is just a Carry On film. no one is aroused.
sexy - too vague. colin firth fully clothed in a pond is sexy. gwendoline christie in plate armour is sexy. that one fish from finding nemo is sexy. brushing hands described in the right way is sexy. could mean anything.
this book has sex in it - literally no
Then you've got the problem that websites like tiktok and instagram, which is where most marketing happens, can surpress content that's too sexy, especially if its queer, and authors are being forced to be over-cautious with the words they use.
And we also can't forget too that on these platforms you have to catch people's interest really quickly, and often they might not read the description. So you have to catch people as quickly as possible, using as few words as possible.
The problem with trying to come up with a way to say "this book has sex in" is that there's loads of options which all mean different things and none are perfect. Like...
clean/wholesome vs dirty - obviously this one is bullshit, we don't need to talk about why
smut/smutty - a classique. Pretty good, but feels like its falling out of favour.
steamy - as above, really. feels slightly more vague, makes me assume it's sexy but not explicit. More dated - been replaced by spicy.
erotic - erotica is a whole genre to itself, with different parameters to romance. Conflating the two weakens genre defninitions for both.
explicit - does what it says on the tin, but risks sounding a bit clinical. If steamy is make outs and fondling, explicit is genitals getting described up-close.
spicy - gets a lot of complaints, but lends itself well to a rating scale and is very popular
open/closed door - this is a good shorthand, but not very familiar to people who aren't reading romance. Again, doesn't rate very easily - a closed door is a closed door, but the open door could lead to either slow vanilla missionary or a full-on BDSM scene.
porn/pornography - comes with a lot of assumptions which makes it harder to use in certain spaces. Sits at the 5/5 end of the scale in my head. Similar to erotica in that its a distinct genre.
saucy - this is just a Carry On film. no one is aroused.
sexy - too vague. colin firth fully clothed in a pond is sexy. gwendoline christie in plate armour is sexy. that one fish from finding nemo is sexy. brushing hands described in the right way is sexy. could mean anything.
this book has sex in it - literally no
Then you've got the problem that websites like tiktok and instagram, which is where most marketing happens, can surpress content that's too sexy, especially if its queer, and authors are being forced to be over-cautious with the words they use.
And we also can't forget too that on these platforms you have to catch people's interest really quickly, and often they might not read the description. So you have to catch people as quickly as possible, using as few words as possible.
writing tip: searching "[place of origin]ish names" will get you a lot of stuff and nonsense made up by baby bloggers.
searching "[place] census [year]" will get you lists of real names of real people who lived in that place.
I feel like I'm constantly shilling for them but BehindTheName.com, the only baby name site that doesn't feel like it's run by mommy bloggers, includes census-based graphs for dozens of countries/regions (though not all of them go back very far yet)
And you can expand them to see rank, number of babies, and percentage of babies and add a second name to compare. (in 1973 four percent of babies were named Jennifer! 1 in 25!!!)
Also this. Cursed.
@homoqueerjewhobbit what name did you search for your example, and what's going on with Moldova?
Those are the graphs for Samuel. They only have 1 year's data for Moldova right now, so that's why it's a straight line. Similarly, they only have 2 years for Mexico right now. The US goes back to 1880. I'm not sure how much of that is publicly available/translated records and how much of it is that it's like 1 or 2 guys maintaining a website of 27000 names and a finite amount of time to format and upload.
Here's the list of all of the countries/regions they have popularity statistics for if you want to nerd out on it!
You can't advertise BehindTheName for writers without mentioning the advanced search! You can search names based on cultural origin and usage, gender (including unisex), meaning, and even things like meter and number of syllables, or famous namesakes (you can also see a list of famous namesakes on every name's page, along with meaning, history, related names, alternate spellings in different languages, the above popularity graphs, and more).
I wouldn't even call BehindTheName a baby name site. They have a surname sister site and a random name generator with tons of variables to set that is very clearly intended to be used for fictional characters (iirc it can even generate a cause of death? I haven't looked at it in many years so it might have changed but these things predate generative AI so unless it's been forcefully enshittified it shouldn't be slop). Like, you can use it for baby names, but the website isn't explicitly intended for that purpose. This website caters to us.
Current mood
mood. and alternatively:
I raise you:
istg kael and i's recent shenanigans might get me to write hilda/zelda at some point
Ro said ‘let’s see how far Hilda can push it’ and the spirit took me 🙃
me as a writer
Anyone having weird 4thewords problems? It wasn't taking my words today so I refreshed the page, and now it's taking forever to load anything. Also when I try to log in anywhere else I get told my email/username and password or wrong, despite not having changed either (and it's frustrating that sometimes the site takes my username and sometimes it says it'll only take email). I just want to get my writing in, and not spend over an hour trying to get this site to work.
Any suggestions/tips are welcome.
Update: what the actual fuck?
Anyone having weird 4thewords problems? It wasn't taking my words today so I refreshed the page, and now it's taking forever to load anything. Also when I try to log in anywhere else I get told my email/username and password or wrong, despite not having changed either (and it's frustrating that sometimes the site takes my username and sometimes it says it'll only take email). I just want to get my writing in, and not spend over an hour trying to get this site to work.
Any suggestions/tips are welcome.
i’ve never been more humiliated to be recognized in my life
... there's some sort of solo ttrpg idea, here.
People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.
Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.
It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…
It’s an ant again.
Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.
This is madness.
Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”
forms of eldritch horror include but are not limited to - nobody will ever believe you, you must live alone with this knowledge - you will never feel safe again, and you realize you were never safe before - everything that was familiar is now strange and abhorrent to the point anything that now seems normal should be held in utmost suspicion - having this new knowledge has opened doors that will continually reveal new equally cursed knowledge without end - death and madness are no longer escapes
I’ve always felt that the idea of madness or sanity in an eldritch horror sense were misnomers. If anything, I feel a better term is a change of perspective. There is nothing inherent in seeing a greater being that “drives you insane”, it’s that this being doesn’t fit into your previous worldview at all and you have to wrestle that. Every character can and should react differently, changing in ways that “make sense” for them. It’s either a change in worldview or attempting to fit the greater being into your preexisting one. Both will have negative results, but will be interesting as hell to explore.
You know what? Unironically, I think this is the best comment I’ve seen on this post.
i binged all of rise with me in a three-day span... genuinely one of the best pieces of literature ive read on that hellish website. do you have any updates on vaguely when to expect part two!! i am an impatient person who enjoys consuming good media lol. i cannot wait for part two!!
Thank you! I hope you got some sleep in that three day period! As for when part to will come out, Ro and I are thinking perhaps late this year/early next year. We're still writing and working together, but we have solo projects that we want to focus on as well (Ro's getting publish in fanzines! I'm working on the second draft of my novel!), so we've decided to focus on those for the moment.
This is.....niche. Do period-appropriate chickens even still exist? Idk anything about chickens. I like the fancy ones.
Period appropriate chickens ("heritage breeds") do still exist, and even include some very fancy ladies, such as:
The Brahma, a popular giant known for its massive meat production and comically large eggs.
The cochin, seen here with gold and black 'lace' pattern
The barred plymouth, an incredible forager for lightly wooded terrain
The fayoumi, often regarded as The Oldest Breed of chicken
The wyandotte, a particularly good forager as well as a bulky, meaty bird.
The Minorca, a Spanish bird with stunning black feathers
And of course, the famous indonesian ayam cemani, which has black meat and bones
Old timey chickens often ARE the 'fancy' ones!
op on the version of this I saw has turned off reblogs while posting lots of frustrated messages about how they don't care about people's actual responses. I'm adding some things they didn't think of.
I care about y'all's actual responses.
choose your fiction writing strength
dialogue
worldbuilding
characterization
prose
plot
smut
action other than smut
description
research
other (tell me in the tags!)
I think I'm awesome at multiple of these
I wanna hear all about your writing in the tags. do tell.
LAST DAY!
calling all authors!!
i have just stumbled upon the most beautiful public document i have ever laid eyes on. this also goes for anyone whose pastimes include any sort of character creation. may i present, the HOLY GRAIL:
https://www.fbiic.gov/public/2008/nov/Naming_practice_guide_UK_2006.pdf
this wonderful 88-page piece has step by step breakdowns of how names work in different cultures! i needed to know how to name a Muslim character it has already helped me SO MUCH and i’ve known about it for all of 15 minutes!! i am thoroughly amazed and i just needed to share with you guys
Cultures include Yoruba, Sikh, Vietnamese, Polish, and dozens more!
This could also be a good staring point for conlangers looking for inspiration for personal name conventions.