This Tumblr aims to collect resources for a deeper understanding and enjoyment of the Locked Tomb series. There's an absurd wealth of material online, much of it on Tumblr, Reddit but also Discord, and I want to help centralize it so it can be easily consulted. I want the full content of this blog to be searchable, so this masterpost will grow until it contains an index of the material I will share, reblog and write.
I will use hashtags such as #after HtN to indicate material that is best read after competing a certain novel, to enhance your understanding without spoiling anything, or to prepare for a reread.
Thank you!
INDEX:
Posts for after reading Gideon the Ninth:
#after GtN #GtN #Gideon the Ninth
Posts for after reading The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex (read online here):
#Dr Sex #The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex
You may read a scan of the supplementary material here, courtesy of penroseblue on Reddit: Glossary, A Sermon on Necromancers and Cavaliers, #Cohort Intelligence Files/#CIF, A Little Explanation of Naming Systems
Posts for after reading Harrow the Ninth:
#after HtN #HtN #Harrow the Ninth
Posts for after reading As Yet Unsent (read online here):
#As Yet Unsent #AYU
You may read a scan of the supplementary material here, courtesy of penroseblue on Reddit: Glossary, #Blood of Eden Memorandum for Record/#BEMR
Posts for after reading Nona the Ninth:
#after NtN #NtN #Nona the Ninth
Posts for after reading The Unwanted Guest (read online here):
#The Unwanted Guest #TUG
Posts for the Alectopause:
#Alectopause #Alecto speculation #Alecto predictions
#Alecto bingo #Alectopause bingo (yes) (pending)
(I'm mostly saving #Alecto the Ninth and #AtN for when the actual book comes out.)
#interviews #Tamsyn Muir (masterpost incoming)
#TLT shitposting #TLT memes
#TLT fanart #TLT comics
I will add a list of character hashtags, just give me some time.
All posts are tagged #TLT and #The Locked Tomb.
INDEX: my own posts
• What does Alecto want?
• Does Gideon age?
• Why I think the letter in Dr Sex was from Anastasia to Cassiopeia
• Is the broom cupboard a clue to the Tower? (this is my proudest Alectopause moment no I'm not letting go of your arm)
• Is Heteroscedasticity in Viscus Models a clue to the Angel?
• Valentine the Ninth, Tamsyn's unpublished AU: everything we know
• A guide to Tamsyn Muir’s writing beyond TLT
INDEX: other people's posts
• On the relationship between TLT and Lolita, by @familyabolisher
• ossifer-bones’s fascinating On the Mechanics of Lyctorhood (archived)
• The Tridentarii and the eidolon: an analysis by @kallistoi
• A non-exhausting list of foods from the Nine Houses, by @thesaintofpatience
• @katakaluptastrophy's masterpost of TLT metas which is pure gold
• The DailyKos readalong for the whole series
popping back here just to tell @staff that their new “oooh you can't screenshot a long post anymore” feature is flaming hot garbage that makes it actually harder to get people to use Tumblr
grits teeth. none of you are playing tuoys correctly. here, give me the princess doll. since apparently none of you can be trusted with her. i'm going to make her do something truly nauseating.
the skeletons at Canaan might have been an inspiration too, he might have known he could turn himself into “what I'll term the hideous corpse”—but the art of attaching a shred of spirit to a corpse to keep it fresh or animated is thee school of magic practiced in the Seventh
he even draws the parallel in that same paragraph, when they figure out the skeleton servitors:
The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that's the idea, anyway—whereas what I'll term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body.
I know it's obvious, it's just something I hadn't fully contemplated—how much did Palamedes learn about Seventh necromancy, talking to Dulcie and knowing her corpse would likely be exhibited this way? what did Camilla think when they came up with the plan?
There is one more deranged explanation for this, which is that, faced with an enthusiastic offer of feedback from a reputed historian (who might or might not have, along with her husband, metaphorically seen Ortus from across the bar and digged his vibe if you know what I mean), Ortus sat down and simply wrote down some of it to give to Abigail (no wonder there's a couple misspellings!).
hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes
i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D
Key takeaways
Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that
Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)
Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame
Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda
Q&A: Alecto when?
(putting this first because I know you want to know!)
Alecto is not yet finished
Reason why:
Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)
Floralinda took longer than expected
Muir also suffered from health issues
Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.
Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies
And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!
Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series
TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts
George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion
Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing
She spent around 3 years publishing short stories
Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel
Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now
Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.
Muir wouldn’t do anything differently
We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript
Advice for aspiring authors
Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are
Work in the industry
There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.
Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)
Basically, getting successful requires having good connections
Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series
Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford
Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.
Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.
In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players
This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…
…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series
There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV
Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?
Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence
This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books
Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader
Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!
A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything
POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series
A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’
She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s
Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)
The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it
Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person
POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style
There will be different POVs
Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?
Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person
She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller
And this is another videogame inspiration
She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…
The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series
Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain
This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book
It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto
Muir is using memory as horror
The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real
She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic
Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series
Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT
She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons
She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn
She also wanted a magic system to be gross!
TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”
Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?
Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula
Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced
For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom
She wanted the story to be about two young women
Gideon was originally a cop/fireman
For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake
Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot
Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?
Absolutely not!
Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine
There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out
Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series
Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction
She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example
For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi
Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space
The genre merging created publishing problems
Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth
We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune
Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?
Not really.
Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences
An example is A. K. Markwood
Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)
Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series
Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.
Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing
Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)
Mr Bones’ Wild Ride
Emperish meme
Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)
Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN
And many more
Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore
Writing process for short stories vs books
Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)
With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot
Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills
Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new
Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series
Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN
GtN and HtN are the question arcs
NtN and AtN are the answering arcs
Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story
Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series
Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?
All epics want you do to is die gloriously
You can do anything after that
Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series
The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.
There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.
The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.
This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero
Add lesbian to anything
Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games
Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow
“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir
Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’
Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda
Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?
Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back
Take a sin, take a virtue
All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’
Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general
Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?
It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic
And also very fun!
Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?
In the TLT universe: Valancy!
In the real world: Saint Barbara
This sparked some light-hearted banter
Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series
Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight
Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol
She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life
Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role
Also Biblical names
Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona
Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names
Umineko inspiration
Lolita and the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.
Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery
Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.
There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people
Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.
Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.
They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there
Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth
Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work
Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?
This question had Muir wriggling in delight
The answer to this is addressed in Alecto
Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?
Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.
Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series
Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love
Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh
Link to Lolita
It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently
Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas
And, it’s not necessarily negative
Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)
They had to eat each other
Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?
Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?
HtN spoilers!!
John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?
John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back
Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers
BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John
Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?
Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader
But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?
The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular
Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?
0.5 seconds
Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier
Nor is she particularly aligned with any House
Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend
(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)
Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
‘Payback for Malory Towers’
A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher
Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.
Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child
She was a highly prolific reader as a child!
Obviously Animorphs
Weird Kiwi fantasy stories
Margaret Margey
She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books
Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)
Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)
Q&A: Warhammer inspiration
Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.
She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work
Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?
Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!
There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add
For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…
Muir wants to go back to videogames
But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold
Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python
A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited
Everyone was really lovely at the event! Cambridge folk, you have a lot to look forward to :))
IN HONOR of the fact that I once lost a mutual of ~10 years due to me posting that I would bend Augustine the First over the kitchen table (which, yeah, a fair and valid reason to unfollow me, ngl)--
AND ALSO in honor of the fact that I, as always, crave attention--
Locked Tomblr, my confession booth is open. Please regale me with your moste secret and cryptique TLT thoughts, your unpopular hear-me-outs, your bonkers headcanons, your controversial ships. Excavate those catacombs! Please nothing actively hateful or targeted at specific other members of the fandom, but pretty much everything else is fair game. My ask box is open to anons!
love designing outfits but keeping them monotone has always been a struggle for me, so for harrow i focused more on shapes and textures. i like her in structured, top-heavy silhouettes!
there's also a part in htn (the ball dream sequence) about the aunts repurposing her ancestors' old clothes for her so i kept that in mind for some of her outfits...jacket cut and laced back together to become adjustable, ruching to fake more volume or maybe hide holes in tattered thin cloth, etc :')
I love how, after two books of portraying him as an unsalted nuisance, when we get to know the real Ortus it turns out he was an amazing human being who would have been so much more if he hadn't brought up in an abusive cult.
my dad was like send me a picture of your costume, you never send me pictures of you. and I said I look a little scary idk if you'd wanna see it. he said of course I do, and then he said you don't look scary at all you look nice. thank you dad
and my fuckass wig. it barely fit on my huge head. but I've never styled a wig before and this shit was cut from a bob, I feel like I did a decent job
Hey Ianthe quick question. Yeah that's a very funny own but I just gotta ask. You aren't planning on, uh, forcibly binding his soul to yours in any sort of Holy Union where two people become one in the Eyes of the Lord, right? You're not gonna do something like that and then TAKE HIS NAME FOR YOUR SURNAME
I have a very chaotic idea for convincing myself to write some fic. Ok, every note on this post is one more word of a nona at school fic that I’ll write. In my brain it’s a “everyone tries to teach nona their idea of valuable skills” fic, so Joli tries to teach the alphabet, Aim tries to teach the water cycle, and the gang each try to teach various crimes.
Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
Between this and Ianthe smoking over the fat-covered floor of the entrance to the Tomb, every single bit of foreshadowing about Gideon or Harrow possibly dying came back at the end of Nona, and most of us didn't even notice until a third re-read because there was So Much Going On.
