Always Fiction

You have to deal with real-life all the time. What can be better than to escape to a place where literally anything can happen? I mostly blog about The Wheel of Time, but am by no means limited to that series. Here, as in fiction, anything can happen.

[ultrafacts]

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

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[chase820-deactivated20161117]

I nominate either Hiddleston or Cumberbatch to read this aloud for us.

[adramofpoison]

okay but some of these pronunciations are dependent on region (eg aunt)

[kingkilling-and-stormlight]

@bre-e-e-e

[moghedien]

Nynaeve al’Meara: too young to be a village Wisdom, too old to train with the Aes Sedai, just the right age to fight the entire world

[harrypotterhousequotes]

SLYTHERIN: “I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected to me.” -Jane Austen (Elizabeth Bennet: Pride and Prejudice)

[joannalannister]

As someone that's never read any Wheel of Time, where would you suggest starting?

Lemme give you a Wheel of Time primer, because I wish that more people would read these books. WoT isn’t flaw free, but there are so many great female characters in Wheel of Time, and so many great poc characters, and so many of them are in positions of power. There are well thought-out matriarchies (plural)! Body positivity! These characters are my friends, and I want everyone to meet them. This is the order of the main series:

The Eye of the World

The Great Hunt

The Dragon Reborn

The Shadow Rising

The Fires of Heaven

Lord of Chaos

A Crown of Swords

The Path of Daggers

Winter’s Heart

Crossroads of Twilight

Knife of Dreams

The Gathering Storm

Towers of Midnight 

A Memory of Light

Other stories set in this world:

New Spring - a prequel, set approximately 20 years before the main series. I recommend reading this after Winter’s Heart.

The Strike at Shayol Ghoul - a prequel, of sorts, available online. It’s written as if it were an ancient, fragmentary “manuscript” that someone recently found. Don’t read this until you’ve at least Book 5 or 6, imo.

“River of Souls,” a short story in the Unfettered anthology - deleted scenes from A Memory of Light. Do not read until after AMOL. 

There were two other novella prequels planned, one about Moiraine & Lan’s arrival in The Two Rivers, and another about Tam’s journeys during the war, but Robert Jordan died before these stories could be written, and while there are notes about them, they will probably never be written, and I will never get over it. More info.

Companion books:

The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time - informally referred to by fans as The Big White Book. An encyclopedia with a lot of history and background, similar to GRRM’s The World of Ice and Fire. Don’t read this until you’ve read through Winter’s Heart (Book 9)

The Wheel of Time Companion - A dictionary / encyclopedia. It’s basically a wiki in book format. Contains spoilers for the entire series, so do not read this until you’ve read the whole series.

Leigh Butler’s Wheel of Time Reread - basically officially sanctioned meta. Also available for free on Tor.com

Keep reading

[fanonical]

boring harry potter headcanons: mcgonagall makes the best cup of tea anyone has ever tasted, and nobody knows how

[thisnewson]

October arrived, spreading a damp chill over the grounds and into the castle. Madam Pomfrey, the nurse, was kept busy by a sudden spate of colds among the staff and students. Raindrops the size of bullets thundered on the castle windows for days on end; the lake rose, the flower beds turned into muddy streams, and Hagrid’s pumpkins swelled to the size of garden sheds.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (via thisnewson)

[moghedien]

Sometimes I remember that Egwene has four older sisters and it’s just like….how do they feel about that

[katie0718]

Smooth mouth of whiskey, tell me lies of truth

Keri Hulme, The Bone People

[awesome-picz]

Cats Who Immediately Regretted Their Poor Life Choices.

[cheese24k]

[markdoesstuff-deactivated202210]

worth every second

[smallcowboyhat]

i want to erase everything in my brain and download this video to my head and have this be my only thought ever

[alrightevans]

jane austen: this character is going to be the purest, sweetest, prettiest, kindest character i have ever written jane austen: everybody will love her jane austen: she is her mother’s favourite jane austen: a rich, kind, handsome bachelor falls instantly in love with her jane austen: the heroine looks up to her jane austen: she has never done anything wrong in her entire life jane austen: if she has any character flaws at all its that she is TOO much of an absolute sweetheart jane austen: and i will call her….. jane austen: jane :-)

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

I was talking to a friend who was feeling down about human-caused global climate change. “It may be,” I told a friend in London as we walked across Tower Bridge, “that our ticket was punched before we ever got started.” While there is no doubt we’re cutting our time on earth shorter through carbon emissions and the destruction of the ecology, it might be that our species was never going to make it past the end of the womb of our ice-age birth. I explained this, about how fragile an organism we are, and how the ice ages cycle. She laughed, she was used to my strange form of hope. “You have to choose to have hope, or just jump out of a window,” a person I was interviewing once told me, a person who’d been accused of techno-utopianism. We were walking along the California coast hills at sunset, talking about all the ways our technological lives could go wrong, and the many ways it is going wrong. He wasn’t utopian, it turned out, he’d thought of the worst long before his detractors had. He’d decided to try to head it off, instead of jumping out of a window. We are diseased and angry and we kill each other and ourselves and all the world. We are killing off life on Earth like a slow moving asteroid. I try to look at this, and my own part in it. Sometimes it is overwhelming. I feel so powerless trying to comprehend all the terrible things we face, much less get past them into our future, with our humanity and our inconceivably beautiful little blue-green planet preserved. … All these grown-up monsters for my grown-up mind, they are there in the nights I wake up terrified and taunted by death. When I feel so small and broken, when despair and terror take me, I have a secret tool, a talisman against the night. I don’t use it too often so that it doesn’t lose its power. I learned it on airplanes, which are strange and thrilling and full of fear and boredom and discomfort. When I am very frightened, I look out the window on airplanes and say very quietly: I have seen the tops of clouds And I have. In all the history of humanity, I am one of the few that has seen the tops of clouds. Many would have died to do so, and some did. I have seen them many times. I have seen the Earth from space, and spun it around like a god to see what’s on the other side. We are the only consciousness we’ve ever found that has looked deep into the infinite dark, and instead of dark, we saw galaxies. Galaxies! Suns and worlds beyond number. We have looked into our world and found atoms, atomic forces, systems that dance to the glorious music of the universe. We have seen actual wonders that verge on the ineffable. We have coined a word for the ineffable. We have coined thousands of words for the ineffable. In our pain we find a kind of magic, in our worst and meanest specimens we find the flesh of a common human story. We are red with it. I know mysteries that great philosophers would have died for, just to have them whispered in their dying ears. I can look them up on my smartphone. I live in the middle of miracles, conceptions and magics easily worth many lifetimes to learn, from which I can pick and choose. I have wisdom and knowledge poured around me like a river, more than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes, and I am still alive. It is good that I am alive, it is good that we are alive. Even if we kill ourselves off with nuclear fire, or gray goo, or drown ourselves in stinking acid oceans, it is good that we have lived, that we did all of this, and that we grew into what we are, and learned to dream of what we could be. The only thing we can say for sure is that we will die, but we will die having gone so far above our primordial ponds and primate forests that we saw the tops of clouds.

I Have Seen The Tops of Clouds — The Message — Medium (via fuckyeahdarkextropian)

[moghedien]

In the wot universe there should be a painting called “Nynaeve crossing the Taren” which is very similar to Washington crossing the Delaware, but its just Nynaeve, her horse, and that ferryman she found crying in his house that she made find a boat and row her across the Taren so that she could get to her children

[harrypotterhousequotes]

RAVENCLAW: “Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.” –Walter Moers (The City of Dreaming Books)

[dynatally]

our new currency is metal as fuck

[alliumfucker]

that’s it, that’s the whole series right there in EotW…

[whatshouldwecallgradschool]

TRYING TO DATE IN GRAD SCHOOL

Throwback Thursday from May 2014!