Hi, here's my question in response to you: what's the first story that you can remember coming up with/wanting to write? Is there anything about it that you would still want to use today or that you really like?
Hiya TC!
I know there were earlier stories, but I can't recall anything before the Legendarium, really. The Seven Gods Legendarium was an old sprawling fantasy epic in the style of the Martian Chronicles, a series of interconnected short stories across a world recovered from a devastating war and a world-shattering cataclysm. I still sort of keep it in the back of my mind to work on, but generally other projects take precedent.
I've grown and changed a lot as an artist and as a worldbuilder since the original conception, so if I go back I'd have to do some pretty significant changes to bring the world up to something I'm super proud of, but I still bleed stuff into the lore every now and again.
That said, a lot of my early work on gods and magic all ultimately bears its roots in the Legendarium. It was built on the anchor of: there are seven constitutive gods of reality, all of which are necessary to keep the world ticking along. A lot of metaphysical concepts and the stuff I explored in making those gods carry through and crop up in every other project I touch. I'd say it's almost like an ur-setting of mine!
The idea of Weight as a soft, but crucial component of magic systems, the Serpent, one of the gods, has slipped into other stories and novels unexpectedly, my personal link between peace, death, tranquility, cold, and darkness all have deep roots in the Legendarium.
🐱 - Which piece of writing advice do you always ignore?
Gonna be real boss I don't pay attention to near any writing advice. I read shit, think oh that fuckin' rules, and then I try to mimic it.
That's it. It's been going great.
I guess one thing that's maybe, advised against is adverbs? I love a good -ly. It's so terribly efficient at attaching an extra mood to literally anything. I cannot live without adverbs. Sometimes I'll even add two or three adverbs to the same action. I don't give a damn.
You can emphasize with an aligned adverb, you can richen with an orthogonal adverb, you can complexify/make really really funny with a contrasting one. Whispered loudly? Iconic. Flounced angrily? Showstopping. Go off.
🐌 - Slow or quick writer?
YOU KNOW IT REALLY DEPENDS.
I'm a very slow writer overall. I tend to favor short works, shorter scenes, poetry and haiku, and I'm still working on the...technical skill of showing up and writing? Which is the most important part of being a Writer(tm).
But GOD when I know what to write and I'm ready for it and I'm not dying, I am a very fast writer indeed. I can go from short story concept to full draft in a couple hours. I can write a thousand words of analysis or flash fiction in like half an hour.
🐺 - Do you prefer creating heroic characters or villainous characters?
I think I prefer creating heroic characters. Characters who try, despite all that they are, to do the right thing. Emilia is a wonderful example of this -- she is, mostly, a heroic character, albeit a prejudiced, short-sighted, proud one prone to emotional outburts.
I find there's a lot of power in making weird, fucked up heroes, like my D&D character Sean Deepwater, who is designed as a "bad guy" who nevertheless did a lot of good over the course of his career just because. Despite being mostly amoral and callous and like crushingly depressed, he just kept doing stuff, and looking out for people. Sean is made for people who aren't the best people, all the time, and want a little reassurance that you can still be shit, and still do good, or still be shit and not do good sometimes, and your life can keep on going.
But...I do have a talent for making villains. For taking something monstrous, some form of arrogance or cruelty or megalomania and unfurling it into a breathtakingly believable or utterly inhuman adversary.
You can't have a hero without a villain, and making that pair play off and lock together in thematic and literal rivalry is delicious.
For the most part though, I focus on the heroes.
🐭 - Does your family know much about your writing?
Not a ton, I don't think. Everyone knows I write, but not many of them ask about my writing. My Mom reads whatever I send her, and likes it very much. My Dad offers critiques sometimes (and keeps trying to buy one of my concepts off me lmao -- maybe I should just take him up on it)
But I tend not to share or post except with close friends, and I'm not actually particularly prolific. So, some, but not most.
🐞 - Do you have any writing lucky charms or superstitions?
Writing at dawn or midnight.
I've done all my best writing when I'm not quite...there. One of my best short stories, Patchwork, came about from a midnight flash of inspiration that I just hammered onto a page. When I'm just sitting there, in a trance, bleeding onto a page...
That's when I think I do my best work. I suppose that counts.
Thanks for the asks! Take care, TC, happy writing~
I have some short stories that the 'glur may enjoy. I'll start posting my way through them, I suppose, starting with Dead Angels. The actual title is "In a Ditch," but that buried the lede a little. The demands of the era....
Enjoy.
Someone poked my shoulder. I cracked open my eyes begrudgingly to see the neighbor's kid, staring at me, framed by the afternoon sun. He pointed back behind him and beckoned. I sighed and stood up, dusting the dirt off my pants, and picked up my blanket, tossing it in a heap over one shoulder.
"What's up?" I asked.
He didn't say anything, just looked at me with wide and dazed eyes and beckoned again before setting off across the fields, bare feet slapping against packed dirt, so I followed him, down the path, and to the cracked old asphalt road that led down out of the mountains.
I left my eyes half-lidded, basking in the summer heat as I followed the loose shadow of him, wandering past trees and fields and wild grasses that were starting to go gold with the season.
"Look." He said, finally.
I opened my eyes and looked, and then it made sense. Down in the ditch, surrounded by a loose ring of kids, was a dead angel. It'd unfurled, all feathers and wings and blank eyes staring up at the sun.
I immediately grabbed the kid's face and turned it away. "Go on, get." I said, sharp. "You shouldn't be lookin' at this."
He stumbled, and I gave him a gentle shove at the shoulderblades. He broke into a stumble, and then an easy jog back. I watched him go, and turned to the others, clapping my hands. I tried not to look. "For all've y'all too. Get, get."
The sound didn't reach them. I had to pull out my pocket knife and clash it on the asphalt, bright steel on dark, lumpy stone, before they startled, and scampered away, leaving just me and the angel in the ditch.
Then, I looked at it.
I thought I recognized it. My cousin had an angel a while back. I don't know what happened to it. It might've been the same one, might've not. She tended to keep mum about stuff like that. I didn't know. Most people didn't like talking about their angels.
I looked down the street. Next car that came rattling along would call the folks down the hill, and they'd come up to haul the body away to dispose of it properly. If any of the parents were told, they'd probably do the same. I didn't know what they did to dead angels.
I looked back down at the poor dead thing, lying there, staring up at the blue, blue, empty sky. It frizzed on my eyes. A tear started to gather at the corner of my eye, and I blinked, and more tears came after it.
I slid back into the ditch. The grass was rough and tall, pushing up against my jeans with a hiss as I half-slid, half-stumbled to the bottom of the ditch and pulled out my work gloves from my belt.
Eyes still half-closed, navigating by touch and by the fuzzy sensation of a dead angel, I folded up its wings all careful-like until I could grab the body. The feathers were like gossamer, and itched wherever they touched my skin. I pulled my shirt up over my mouth, when I noticed. I didn't know what angel dust did if you inhaled it, but it was probably better not to test my luck.
Getting the thing up out of the ditch was easier than I expected. Once the wings were all arrayed, and I managed to get a grip on the smooth inner wheel, it was almost easy.
Angels didn't weigh as much as I thought they would.
It rustled against the grass as I dragged it back up onto the road. I spread out my blanket, and then dragged the angel onto it. It fit. Barely.
Moving the body any further was even harder. I didn't even know where to put it. Angels didn't like dying where you could see them. They didn't like being where most people could see them, anyway, I knew that much. So I squinted at the trees around me and tried to get my bearings. That way to town, that way down the mountain, that line of trees snaking across fields, and that lumpy hill that they huddled around in a big cluster. That was what I was looking for.
Lighter than expected wasn't light. Dragging the blanket across the pavement was not a pleasant task. It got only a little easier when I made it off onto the dirt path. Every foot I dragged it, I had to crush down the grass to either side. I had to take a break, halfway there, and I left it at a distance, staring at it out of the corner of my eye, panting in the hot air and fanning myself.
Every time I looked at it too long, even indirectly, another tear came and trickled down alongside my sweat.
Our town didn't have a speaker or priest or nothing like that. She'd died last year, I thought, and her daughter was still off in the big city, doing whatever it was that the daughter of the faithful did in cities where they'd run off to. I think she was having a good time.
She came back now and again.
That reminded me to get up and start hauling it again.
The glade I was pulling it to was cool, even in high summer. At this point, it was bumpy going, trying to haul the blanket over the knotted roots and leaf litter. In the end, I couldn't get it all the way to the pool. I had to leave it a little to the side, under a wide pine.
I sat there, and then I looked at it again. It still sat there, eyes still blank and staring. It was dead. Dead as doornails.
A speaker'd have a nice word. A priest'd have a nice book to read.
I pulled off my glove instead and reached out to the central eye. I touched it, and it fizzed against my skin, even dead, as I pulled it gently down, like I'd seen the undertakers do, so it didn't have to look no more.
A single glittering teardrop beaded as I closed its eye, and quickly soaked into the pale feathers of its body, leaving a dark blotch.
I did it again, and the same thing happened. And then again, and again.
Angels had a lot of eyes.
The last eye closed, and I stood up, suddenly creaky.
"Rest well," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say. My right hand was numb.
I left it there. Told the village kids to not go down to that hole a while. I didn't have much else to do.
Next Spring Break, the speaker's daughter told me that angels faded at sunset after they died. "You didn't need to haul it all the way out there," she'd said.
I looked at her. "I did," I said. "I think."
She looked at me back a long while, before she said, very thoughtfully, "I guess so."
Happy world building Wednesday! What is your absolute favorite part of world building to do?
My favorite part of worldbuilding is when the world locks into the story just so -- and I stop worldbuilding and the world starts telling me things.
I think of it like...I sink the world into itself, and once it reaches a critical mass of reference, and roots, and content, it starts creating itself. This is especially true of the big, worldbuilding-focused projects. Peasant is a character study before anything else, but the Legendarium is a setting that I feel is no longer at a point I write or build, but one I study to see what's there, and every once in a while, pour a little something something in the pot to see what it disturbs.
The only struggle is, I haven't figured out how to go back from worldbuilding to character. I really do enjoy what I'm doing with Peasant, making a clean world sculpted to the characters and the story, making it all fit together, but I do really want to learn how to do the reverse: go from a world to characters, and tell stories that way.
🧾What is the most memorable book ending you’ve ever read? Did it leave you satisfied or wanting more?
📔Do you have any bookish rituals or habits that you follow before, during, or after reading a book?
both or one, go wild go crazy
🧾- I don't think it was my favorite, I think there are others, but I will always remember Gideon the Ninth's ending. Muir had an excellent eye for what we wanted, and how to use it to hurt us. I wanted more, but I think I also disagree a little with Muir on her endings. Still a hell of a writer, though, I respect her immensely.
To cast the net a little broader, the endings to Dungeon Meshi and Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer are solid gold, and I love them both desperately. Both are excellently paced conclusions to the stories they set out to tell, and narratively incredibly satisfying. But that's manga, not books.
📔 - The most ritual I have is, after I finish any book, I sit down and do nothing for a bit. I let the book sit with me. What did I like, what did I disagree with, what was compelling about it, what was it doing. I let my writer's brain spin and see what it turns up. Even if I didn't like a book, or disliked parts of a book, I always try to turn up something it did well, and so far, I have never failed to do so. Basically, I want a why for anything I thought or felt during the reading of the book.
oh nooooooooooooooooo how dare you ask me to do terrible things to these--lol, nah, jk. I'm going to run through all of these for all of Peasant's cast. Because I'm trying to make myself obsessed with it again so Revenant doesn't take over.
Doing this also reminded me -- Peasant's actually really dark if I let it be. There is a reason I'm writing it as a silly romcom action-fantasy school romp.
BREAK
Emilia: This one is hard. Emilia's strong, terribly strong. Getting a complete breakdown might be downright impossible. Her pride is too powerful: instead of shattering and destroying her, it's liable to drag her back together after breaking her instead. Spine of steel, pride of neutronium. If it was possible, she'd have to break by her own hand, taking an action she was forced into by her own pride, and destroying herself and her values in one go. The narrative takes a crack at breaking her near the end, but completely? She's made of stern stuff. That said...if anyone has seen her at her lowest, it's Emilio, just before her big Scene in Act 3. I think if you manage to break her completely, she just...shuts down. Either her pride reignites and drives her forward again, or the ascendant sun of the Empire simply burns out and turns to a husk.
Noam: Not hard. Emilia never listens to him, he never meets Aria. He continues on his current course. He's already beaten down by the time Peasant starts. Let the Academy finish it, burn out the ostensibly gifted child, and discard him like the trash everyone thinks he is. Noam never gets to go home. What he looks like...isn't honestly different from how he looks at the beginning, but more withdrawn, more quiet. He stops talking about gods. Stops talking about his little wonders. Stops staring at the sky. Just. Stops.
Aria: Aria's slightly harder, she's on an unsustainable course, but she could probably manage without outside interference. If you can destroy her chances, though, and kill her siblings/family? If she messes up her social games or makes the wrong enemy and they cut her options for sustaining herself after the Academy? That would be a start. Aria breaking is the most interesting, because nobody sees it. She's too good a liar. Too smooth a hand. She just keeps going, keeps masking, hiding, until she eventually breaks down all at once, to the surprise of everyone around her.
GHOST
Emilia: Emilia doesn't have a ghost until the story starts. She gets one. I'll be vague for what, but she lives with it in the same way she handles every other problem has: with aplomb, pride, and absolute unwillingness to back down. Emilia's own actions are her ghost and she's going to sear them away with the light of her pride, damn it, or die trying.
Aria: Aria's haunted by the fact that she has no connections and no backup plan. It's a very real, very concrete haunting, unlike Emilia's -- the peasants have concrete bad things that are looming over them, and Aria's throwing her all at a frankly unsustainable rate into making sure the haunting's managed. She patches it and patches it and patches it, but it's a logical solution to an emotional problem, and her solution and refusal/inability to let the mask down causes more problems along the way.
Noam: Noam's haunted by his sponsor. Everyone assumes that Noam has only had a brief stint of training, and no support from his sponsor. Noam knows that isn't the case. Noam knows he's spent the last four years, at least, drilling, practicing, learning, having all this information and skill hammered into him, and it didn't take. His patron wasn't kind about it. And his patron informed him of such. Noam was supposed to be a triumph, a second prodigal peasant. He wasn't. So Noam's a failure. So his patron told Noam he was a failure. So Noam thinks he's a failure.
FAILURE
Emilia: Failure? She can fail at things? Lol. That's part of her problem. She hasn't failed. She wanted it, she got it. She wanted to be the best. She is. And that's that. And that's the problem. Because she's the best heir to the current Empire that there is.
Aria: I was going to say she hasn't failed yet. And that's also the problem, she's trying so hard not to fail. But I don't actually think that's the case...she left her family for this opportunity. I think she kind of had to. And I think that's her failure. To be unable to support them without, in a sense, abandoning them. And I don't think anyone knows this.
Noam: Noam's failure is face-up on the table from the first scene. Noam cannot incant properly. Noam is a failure at everything that noble society demands he be. Noam survives this by internalizing it and accepting it. People with emotional intelligence will not that this is a decision which is usually categorized as "unhealthy." That's okay, that's what the plot is for.
//
This story can be super dark! I don't want it to be! So I have my silly narrator and I let Emilia puff herself up in righteous indignation, and Aria flirt outrageously and Noam Noam all over the haters.
Thanks for asking about the horrors I have behind the curtain!!
