Sep 28, 2025
Patrick Lenton, In Spite of You.
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Patrick Lenton, In Spite of You.
When my partner recently decided to watch Game of Thrones for the first time, I concluded that the best way to help her enjoy it would be to lie my head off
This Tumblr avoids recent spoilers. So we have sympathy for Australian writer Patrick Lenton whose partner had never seen Game of Thrones and decided to watch it to prepare for House of the Dragon.
So when my partner Eilish decided to watch Game of Thrones for the first time recently, in order to prepare for House of the Dragon, I was shocked to find out she knew absolutely nothing about it. Like a child raised by wolves, or someone who has woken up from a coma, she’d completely missed all the culture-defining discourse around the show. The horror of the Red Wedding? Ned Stark and his fragile neck? That time a takeaway coffee cup was spotted in the medieval world of Westeros?
I immediately made a vow (which is a very fantasy boy thing to do, and involved cutting my palm with a big sword and swearing to, I dunno, a very fancy tree) to try and keep her spoiler free. I wanted her to watch Game of Thrones like the rest of us had: gooped and gagged by the horrific twists and turns.
Avoiding spoilers can potentially be stressful and requires a lot of effort – and often subterfuge.
What I learned, in case you also want to successfully bamboozle someone who trusts and loves you, is that the trick lies in smoke and mirrors. For example, in the season that the sadistic boy-king Joffrey dies, I muttered, “Gosh, it sucks how we have to wait for the final season for Joffrey to die.” Similarly, when she was baying for Ramsay Bolton’s blood, I declared that it was a shame, for “he’s one of the only characters who never gets his comeuppance”. Imagine me cackling devilishly, fingers steepled, a creature of lies and shadow.
The biggest hurdle was Jon Snow’s death and his subsequent resurrection. Somehow, the only event Eilish knew about beforehand was that Jon Snow died, which was a huge moment in the show when it first happened. However, when she saw it, she turned to me with the look of a budding Hercules Poirot in her eye, about to uncover the old-timey train murderer. “Wait, I SWEAR I’ve seen photos of him and Daenerys kissing,” she said. “Oh my god, he must be resurrected by the Red Woman!”
This is exactly what happens. I had to nip this in the bud. “Oh, I wish,” I said. “That was just a press shot – they were the two biggest actors, so magazines did shoots of them kissing.”
In the end, it was worth it. During the Red Wedding, she sat bolt upright, barely breathing, glued to the screen. When Joffrey choked to death, she threw her hands into the air. When Jon Snow was resurrected, she had been so convinced by my lies that she actually shrieked. It was joyous to watch. I felt that I had given her a gift: a genuine Game of Thrones-watching experience.
It apparently was really worth it. I’m happy that Eilish was able to have the experience, even if it was one decade late for her.
It isn’t totally necessary to watch Game of Thrones to enjoy House of the Dragon. After all, HotD is a prequel rather than a sequel. One or two paragraphs about the Targaryens, dragons, Westeros, and the various houses would be sufficient for new ASoIaF series viewers. Though watching GoT first does enhance your appreciation for various references and lets you enjoy some of the Easter eggs scattered through HotD.
If I'd even known about anyone, literally a single person, in real life or popular culture, who was a queer person in a 'straight relationship', perhaps I wouldn't have had the agony of my false choice to work through.
Patrick Lenton, Why would you bother ‘coming out’ as queer while in a heterosexual relationship?
So, basically a few days ago I was very hungover and trying to write an article about Parks and Rec, and decided to procrastinate by going on Twitter and talking about Skyrim. Cut to a couple of hours later, and my phone literally shut itself off because I was getting too many notifications. I’d gone viral. Over the next few days – up until about now basically, although I think it’s dying down – I watched it spread around the world. It seemed to take off in the UK first, and then got picked up by Buzzfeed UK:
and then spread into the US when they all woke up, getting picked up by Imgur, Daily Dot, Kotaku, all the other Buzzfeeds, and then basically everywhere. It was the front page of Reddit, it’s doing the rounds on Tumblr with a billion reblogs, it was even shared by New York Magazine?
It’s just been ridiculous and hilarious, and has meant I’ve spent the last few days chatting with really excellent people (except for a couple of gamergaters who I joked about summoning AND THEN THEY CAME and then I blocked them all bc it was all too much).
And some legend sent me 10 Euros for ‘dog food’ to my Paypal account, so it’s been pretty lucrative for me.
Going viral is just a weird experience, because literally more people than I can actually imagine have read something dumb that I’ve written. It’s not the dumbest thing, but it’s also a story about being overly committed to a video game. Oh, and my mum sent me this amazing message:
Internet success.
Anyway, here’s the whole ludicrous story, or you can read it on Twitter here.
I tweeted a dumb story about my Skyrim dog and I went viral and it’s insane So, basically a few days ago I was very hungover and trying to write an article about Parks and Rec, and decided to procrastinate by going on…
How do you decide on the illustrations for your novel covers? How much do you think this affects the readers interest in the book and how much say do get in what is chosen?
Answered by Buzzwords blogger Patrick Lenton
The whole ‘never judge a book by its cover’ saying is not so much a rule as an entreaty. It’s pretty obvious that customers DEFINITELY always judge a book by the cover, and really, it’s easy to see why. Sometimes a bad cover can make a book seem old fashioned or tacky or in a completely different genre than it’s meant for. In both physical and online stores, a cover has to grab your attention - and in a market saturated by more books than ever before in history, you need to grab people’s attention. As a side note, if I was just publishing Bats as an ebook, I wouldn’t have chosen that cover, as with an ebook, clarity is super important - you need to be able to see title, author and eye grabbing image all at thumbnail size. With the print version of Bats we were aiming for a beautiful artefact, something you’d be proud to display or give as a gift. So, yeah, I think covers definitely affect a reader.
For A Man Made Entirely of Bats, my publisher, Bronwyn Mehan from Spineless Wonders, read my manuscript and immediately thought of a young artist named Daniel Lethlean Higson whose work she’d recently seen. He does these amazingly surreal cartoonish hypercolour pictures, which she believed suited the stories in Bats really well. After seeing his art, I absolutely agreed.
To see more of Daniel Lethlean Higson’s art, check out mountforeverest.tumblr.com
Daniel and I had a meeting early on the process, in which I explained some of my ideas and looked at some other covers that I liked, which is a rare form of collaboration for the writer, which I’m really thankful for. Daniel read the book and sent me some drafts, one of which the current cover came from and which I absolutely loved from the beginning. This kind of collaboration is rare for most writers, but is one of the fantastic benefits of working with a small publisher who is able to think outside the box.
Buzzwords #1
I struggle massively with self-promotion. I can't seem to say a good word about myself to save my life, let alone online or across three separate mediums, which is where it seems to really count. But I know it's so, so important for writers to have a personal brand. What can/should I do if I don't feel confident creating a brand for myself? Is there a cheat sheet for this "author as brand" thing?
Answered by Buzzwords blogger Patrick Lenton
OK, so this is a great question, because unless you've been hiding under a rock which has no wi-fi, you'll have been on the receiving end of all sorts of conflicting nonsense information about author brand. Luckily, helping authors create their online presence is actually a major part of my job, so I think about this A LOT.
I have one piece of advice that I use for everything to do with writing, and I can't remember who gave it to me or where I read it or if maybe I'm brilliant and came up with it by myself. But that maxim is 'there's no right way to do it'.
All this advice that you see flying all over the place, saying that you need to tweet 43 times during the luna cycle, that your Pinterest needs to be synced with the laughter of a small child, that you need to send famous authors pictures of your freshly bleached asshole - this is all based off looking at what's worked for other people, and taking their experience and saying that you should do the same thing. You can certainly be inspired by the methods other authors use, and even blatantly copy them if you feel it works for you, but it's not a prescriptive method. Find your own thing! Give it your own unique flavour!
Your brand, and I hate even using the term, is about your outward facing persona - it can be as truthful, honest, insincere, funny, gassy, chilly as you feel comfortable with. The only 'must' is that it's something only you can provide the world, and if that's the case, then you'll find the people out there who respond to it.
I get a lot of authors who rail against the idea of sharing personal information - authors are expected to tweet about their lives more and more, and to make their lives accessible to the public. People are often wary about this, which I understand, because the internet is about as trustworthy as a chimpanzee riot and you're a banana person. I personally share a lot of anecdotal experience from my life, stories about things I, or my pets, or my family etc have done. What I don't share is genuine emotion, as it makes me uncomfortable and I'm deeply repressed. That's a line I have.
I know some authors who exist online in almost a pure halo of emotional energy, and that works well for them. But I also know some authors who use their entire online presence to live Tweet TV shows and share pictures of shirtless men, and they have a HUGE and engaged online following. They are each doing the thing they feel comfortable doing, so yeah, that's it. There's no correct way to do it, but do it this way.
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Buzzwords is Noted Festival's very own advice column, with five notable writers taking on the agony aunt role.
Suffering from writer's block? Unsure how to ethically blur the lines between fact and fiction? Struggling with self-promotion? Let the Buzzwords bloggers soothe your writing-related woes - you provide the questions, they'll dish the dirt. Submit your questions here or e-mail us.
Buzzwords bloggers: Kate Iselin, Patrick Lenton, Lynette Noni, Katie Taylor, Samantha van Zweden
Friday Faves: After I Was thrown in the River and Before I Drowned by Dave Eggers
…in which I invite someone bookish to share one of their all-time favourite works of fiction and what it means to them. This week’s Friday Fave comes from writer Patrick Lenton:
I'M A FAST DOG. I'm fast-fast. It's true and I love being fast I admit it I love it. You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by and you say, Damn! That's a fast dog! Well that's me. A fast dog. I'm a fast- fast dog. Hoooooooo! Hooooooooooooo.
Personification is one of those unique techniques that you only really see prevalent in short stories. And like a lot of techniques that you only see in short stories, it sometimes screams ‘style over substance’. But not in this story by Dave Eggers, ‘After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned’ which is a part of his collection of stories How We Are Hungry, and is entirely from the manic and beautiful perspective of a really fast dog.
What I love most about this story is its incredible energy and momentum, the feeling that you are swept along with this dog, with its quicksilver thoughts and observations, with its speed and enthusiasm. I constantly fall into the trap where I think this is one of Egger’s short short stories, something under 500 words, because there’s nothing stagnant in it, and it feels short and to the point. Whereas in reality, it’s on the longer side, it has a surprisingly long arc for such a fast dog.
Around two months ago my partner and I began the process of adopting a dog of our own, which was pretty much the most exciting thing we’ve ever done. Adopting a dog from a shelter or a pound can have different processes, some of them forcing you to apply first, see the puppy second, and then wait for approval from some kind of nebulous dog overseer. In the case of Ernest, the puppy we were lucky to adopt eventually, we had to go to the pound first, inspect the dogs and then apply and then wait a week. At the pound, the noise of all the dogs barking was deafening, the weight of mournful, hysterical, angry canine eyes palpable. In this one cage was a tiny Fox Terrier puppy, quivering gently and giving little licks through the cage. He wasn’t wet, but there was everything in his stance that suggested he had just been pulled out of a river. While I petted him, I thought of the Eggers story, a story I hadn’t read for years and years.
They brought me to the place with the cages and I yelled for days. Others were yelling too. Everyone was crazy. Then people and a car and I was at a new home.
After we applied for him, we had to leave him in the pound for the next four days, and all I could think about was such a little thing yelling in this crazy place. And I know it’s impossible to write properly from a dog’s point of view, hell it’s impossible to write from another human’s point of view but we attempt that kind of magic every day, but sometimes when I don’t know why Ernest is freaking out and crying or running up and down the hallway as fast as he can, I think of Eggers story and I realise Ernest is also a fast fast dog, and sometimes that helps him make sense.
Patrick Lenton blogs at The Spontaneity Review and at the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge. His writing has been featured in publications like Junkee, Spook Magazine, Going Down Swinging, Seizure, The Lifted Brow and Best Australian Stories. He edited The Sturgeon General and is a digital marketer at Momentum Books.
Your turn: What's your favourite dog story?
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