Mar 25
I can't believe this incredible book series got a MANGA ADAPTATION
✨️they/them✨️
seen from United States
seen from Maldives
seen from Russia
seen from Russia
seen from Germany
seen from Guatemala
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Uruguay
seen from Germany
seen from Indonesia
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
I can't believe this incredible book series got a MANGA ADAPTATION
✨️they/them✨️
My Dear Friend: Piper J Drake
This is going to be a difficult post to read.
Please skip it and protect yourself if necessary.
On May 18, 2026 in New York, one of my very favorite humans, the author Piper J Drake (Lalana Dararutana), died. She was not yet 50.
She leaves behind an amazing husband (Matthew), wonderful parents and siblings, a large and delightful family of foodies, thousands of devoted readers, and countless friends who loved her, one of whom was me.
Piper fought cancer incredibly hard, at great expense in all ways, to stay alive as long as she could. It was only when she was told she wouldn’t be able to eat the foods she loved that she decided enough was enough. Fair cop, if you ask me.
This last winter I was away in Thailand, a place I truly love, spending time with people I adore. But it was not a vacation, it was a pre-reminiscence. Piper and I were foreshadowing the fact that we would not get to be crotchety little old ladies complaining together about the lack of good spice profiles in our nursing home’s kitchen.
Instead, we spent several months co-authoring experiences and hoarding memories, mostly mine – because we knew she wasn’t going to get to keep them for herself. We got out and about (me learning to push a wheelchair… badly) visiting food markets, gardens, and temples. We even did a little shopping, terrorizing vendors with our infectious enthusiasm.
I’m sure we were horribly embarrassing for everyone around us and I will miss her.
One of my most beloved Piper memories is us at a fancy restaurant in Seattle squealing over a yummy appetizer, Matthew smiling at us with a kind of indulgent wonder. (I’m sure we were a lot.) Piper prepared the “perfect bite” off her own plate and fed it to me, just because she wanted to see my delighted face. Both of us have cultural heritage, from very different parts of the world, that believe food is love.
That bite was one of the purest acts of love I have ever received in my whole life.
And I will miss her.
She introduced me to one of my favorite teas (Taiwanese milk oolong), and teapots (Japanese), and countless new-to-me Thai dishes (especially khanom).
No one else I have ever met so exactly shared my taste in both food and travel, and those are two of my most favourite things ever. Bonus, we were both writers! No wonder she so quickly became one of mine.
When I asked what her favorite parts were to write, she said “movement, whether fighting or intimacy.” This makes perfect sense if you knew her or read her books. She was strong and graceful and still discussing story structure right up until the end. I am gutted we got less than ten years. It wasn’t enough time.
It just wasn’t.
She left, without question, too soon. And I know, without a doubt, that I am not the only one who will miss her.
I’ve always liked the concept of the red thread connecting souls through multiple lifetimes. Not just one thread of romantic love but multiple threads for all forms of love, from family to friendship and beyond.
If this is the case, and love is a many-stranded means of connection, then Piper wove a beautiful crimson tapestry. I was so very lucky to be part of that weave.
I hope in our next life that our thread will tug us together again and that I’m lucky enough to get to be her friend once more.
Piper requested donations to charities be made in her honor, in lieu of other forms of condolences:
Writing the Other
Coral Gardeners
Clarion West
But, her medical expenses were exorbitant, leaving Matthew struggling not just with grief, if you have the means to contribute to her GoFundMe, that would really be appreciated.
Piper truly loved writing and releasing her books into the world, please read them and share them with others who might enjoy them?
Since you are readers of my stuff, the 3 I’d recommend the most are:
The Ink That Bleeds
A cozy paranormal mystery set in the greater Seattle area that I had the honor of brainstorming with her.
Wings Once Cursed And Bound
A romantic contemporary fantasy series (of linked stand-alones) that uses little known mythology, including Thai.
An Idol With Luv
If you enjoyed Divinity 36 or The 5th Gender this one might work for you.
Please take care of yourselves out there and tell the people you love that you love them.
If Piper taught me nothing else it was to write when you can, take pictures of your food, and seize every opportunity to enjoy yourself.
So, please eat something tasty for us and remember:
Travel smart, pack the snacks.
Miss G
tbr challenges • february 2025
Print: Changeless / Blameless by Gail Carriger
Graphic Novel: First Test by Pierce/Grayson/Farrow; The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag
Audiobook: Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind
25-in-25: Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind; Penric and the Shaman / Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Heroine's Journey
Hello writers, I want to introduce you all to The Heroine’s Journey.
I've pulled this together from an old series of posts I've written for a project at @the-wip-project. There will be homework!
Through general media consumption most of us know about or have at least unknowingly absorbed The Hero’s Journey. I spare you the details, they’re easy to look up, but in the most general sense, lots of very successful stories are set up like this:
The Ordinary World
The Call of Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Meeting the Mentor
Starting the Quest
Tests, Allies, Enemies
Approach the Underworld
The Ordeal
Reward
The Road Back
Recognition
Glory, Reward, and Isolation
If you look at that and think “Star Wars: A New Hope” you got it exactly right. A lot of successful stories are written with these steps in mind. It usually follows a hero, who has to overcome internal and external conflicts to reach their goal.
The lesser known Heroine’s Journey is the equivalent to this but with a focus on connections and relationships. Where the Hero’s Journey is about a lone hero, the Heroine’s Journey is about finding community.
The concept of the Heroine’s Journey is not new but there wasn’t a lot of easy to read literature written about it. But recently, Gail Carriger has written a delightful and educational non-fiction book for writers and readers, called, not surprisingly, The Heroine’s Journey.
The terms Hero and Heroine are gender neutral, for instance the movie Wonder Woman is a Hero’s Journey while a buddy comedy like Man In Black is a Heroine’s Journey (generalizing here).
I like to think about it in terms of found family and friends. These stories are Heroine's journeys, they tell of community building and how we are stronger together. If you think about your WIP and how it can be applied to it, it might just blow your mind. Let me just says those tropes, “found family”, “the gang gets together”, “me and my friends gonna kick your ass” that we all love? Those are all elements of The Heroine’s Journey 😘. Doesn't that sound great?
Just to compare it to the list I made at the beginning of the post, The Heroine's Journey has the following points:
A broken familial network
Heroine's pleas are ignored
Abdication of power
Family offers aid
Subversion and disguise
Find surrogate family
Visit the Underworld, search aided by companions
Information gathering, delegation, networking
Negotiation for reunification
Revenge and Glory are irrelevant
Network established or rebuilt
Let me just put in a graphic here that Gail Carriger provided on her website.
Homework: The Heroine’s Journey begins with the protagonist having broken with their familial network, their pleas being ignored, turning away / being pushed out from their position, and finding help from family/friends. Think how this beginning could apply to your WIP.
I'm pretty sure, a few of you had the kind of “omg why did I not see that?” epiphany with The Heroine’s Journey 😀. Same thing happened to me and I realized why one story just wasn’t working. It couldn’t work because I was trying to cram a Heroine story into a Hero’s Journey. If you want to hear the author Sasha Black have that kind of epiphany live on air (so to speak), listen to this [podcast], where she interviews Gail Carriger about The Heroine’s Journey. Just be warned, that epiphany involves a lot of swearing 😜.
We talked about the beginning of the Heroine’s Journey. In this first part, the Heroine is involuntarily kicked out of their familial network. This is one of the main differences to the Hero’s Journey, where the Hero refuses and turns away voluntarily. The first part of the Heroine’s Journey is about involuntary isolation.
The Hero refuses the quest, for whatever reason, the Heroine is getting kicked into the quest.
The next part is the Search.
The Heroine’s Journey follows a pattern of connections, reunification, finding family. Mentally, physically, or emotionally. A successful journey ends with new connections, new community.
The Heroine searches for new connections, new companions, to solve the problem the story gives them. Often they employ disguise/subversion and alter their identity in this part. They form a new network, a found family. With the network, they go on a quest into “the Underworld” to gather information and build more connections.
Homework: Applying the Heroine’s Journey to your WIP, what connection does your protagonist make? What kind of community do they form? And if you have a problem with your WIP, maybe try giving your protagonist more friends?
As humans, we easily think in binary concepts, things are either this way or that way. But in reality, things overlap, mix and match, and the same can be said for the Heroine’s Journey and the Hero’s Journey.
Stories can have a Hero and a Heroine working together. Think about your basic buddy comedy, the one stoic character who wants to work alone and the fun character, who has many friends and connections. That’s a Hero with a Heroine in the same story and one possible arc could be that the Hero changes into a Heroine.
In romance, you often have the bad boy, a rogue character, who wants to stay on a Hero’s Journey, but the love of the one good person in their life changes them and pulls them into their Heroine’s Journey.
Stories with multiple characters may have each character on a different journey, with different focal points on what is important for their journey.
I also think that fanfiction often has a way of turning a Hero’s Journey into a Heroine’s Journey. When the source material says “and they won the fight but now they’re all alone”, fanfic takes a stick and whacks that on the head with “but what if they had friends /whack/”, “and they all lived together in a house /whack/”, “and they raised tomatoes, kids, and chickens together /whack whack whack/”.
Homework: Think of your favorite characters (from your WIP or from an interesting source material) and identify who leans more towards Hero and who leans more towards Heroine. Sketch out how they influence each other and what direction their stories could go.
This has been a short overview of the Heroine’s Journey, if you’re interested in this structure, I very much recommend the book [https://gailcarriger.com/books/the-heroines-journey-for-authors-book/]. It’s really a fun read, Gail Carriger did not switch to some weird academic tone for this book. She has lots of popular examples in the book, to illustrate how these concepts apply to stories we know and love.
Favorite Book Vampires
Round 2
Lord Akeldama (Parasol Protectorate series) VS Lady Margolotta von Uberwald (Discworld)
Lord Akeldama
Lady Margolotta
Show results
NO ANTIPROPAGANDA PLEASE
Queer Book Ship Tournament 2025 Round 1
Henry Jekyll/Robert Lanyon- The Glass Scientists
Gyre Price/Em Arasgain- The Luminous Dead
Biffy/Professor Lyall- The Parasol Protectorate series
Sunai/Veyadi- The Archive Undying
Character, book, and author names under the cut
Today has been Spectacular so far
I refused to wake up at 6 AM so I went to my local record store with a twenty and a dream at 11 AM. Lucked out.
Then I went to the nearby bookstore. There's this 3 book manga series that used to be one of my Comfort Reads until the library weeded it 3 years ago. It's out of print and no other libraries in the area have it. I was shit out of luck. But APPARENTLY it just got republished in a full series omnibus that I had no idea about but ran into headfirst on a display
Got that, obviously.
Now I have a free entree at Noodles and Company which was next door
and I have a 30% off coupon for World Market where I get my tea. Then I will go to COLDSTONE which is near here and NO WHERE ELSE in my area
Tl;dr it's just ups and ups and ups
Had to get a book for one of my semester classes, but we were also given blank bookmarks to draw on. This book looked fun so I picked it, and it gave me an equally fun drawing idea
closer pic without book