🦇 Goodnight, my beloved bookish bats! Some of you, like me, thrive at night. I hope your latest read is bringing you comfort (and helping you relax before it's time to sleep).

🌙 firebreathing.bookqueen posted a daylights savings day post featuring a few things that bring her sunshine. Personally, I'm all about that moonlight! I know learning how to take care of ourselves, so we have the battery power to take care of others, is an ongoing process. Remember: "don't let the hard days win."

🌙 Here are a few things that have brought me moonlight lately. What about you?

🦇 Going to a silent book club meeting with C 🌙 Reading amazing, diverse ARCs 🦇 Re-reading comfort books 🌙 Buying spring flowers and produce 🦇 Kitty cuddles with Luna and CleoCatra 🌙 Journaling 🦇 Cooking with my bae 🌙 Learning how to knit 🦇 Homemade oatmilk honey cinnamon lattes 🌙 Falling in love with new authors and their work 🦇 Buddy reading with my sister 🌙 Talking to all of you! 🦇 Kickboxing class 🌙 Learning new paleo recipes 🦇 Comments from some of my favorite authors 🌙 Meeting new Bookstagrammers

🦇 What's bringing you joy?

Hi Tumblr! It’s been [redacted] years that I haven’t posted something, which is rather silly actually. Fixing that.

Anyway, here’s Harrowhark Nonagesimus from The Locked Tomb series! :) Enjoy!

I love how Tamsyn Muir was like, in this world everybody’s totally cool about gender and sexuality, but there’s a new invented binary that’s culturally and religiously defining and dictates who people are allowed to love and/or fuck and the roles they play in society.

They’ve written volumes and volumes of religious texts about how to conform to these sacred binary roles and filthy porn about people fulfilling or breaking the stereotypes of these roles. The role a person fulfills is determined before they’re born and dictates every aspect of their life. Once in a while someone who’s supposed to be on one side of the socioreligious binary is born more suited to the other side and has to hide it all their life (Coronabeth). Sometimes people fall in love in a way the socioreligious binary declares blasphemous and they decide to love each other openly anyway, and it shocks and scandalizes people no matter how wholesome and lovely and mundane their relationship is (Abigail and Magnus).

And these sacred binary roles are not equal, oh no, as much as the religious doctrine crows the importance of both roles, one is supposed to sacrifice endlessly and unquestioningly for the other, body, mind, and soul. And these binary roles have existed for ten thousand years and were created by God and underlie the whole structure of the universe! But here’s the secret: there was a time before this sacred binary existed, and God is just Some Guy who made this shit up.

Gideon Nav from 'Gideon the Ninth' by Tamsyn Muir

p.s.: i took some artistic liberties, mainly handcanon-ing that gideon has a ton of freckles because she is a ginger also, i know the face paint is suppose to be black and white but i don't really enjoy working with greys so i went with that kind of hybrid purple/grape/desaturated magenta/wine grey colour instead which felt like a good alternative, sorry if it is sacrilegious to some

We see the aviators Gideon wears as anachronistically modern for this archaic world, and Harrow reacts to them accordingly, but we must not forget that they are an ancient artefact, pre-resurrection. For all we feel like they mess with her Ninth image they must actually strengthen it to the other houses. This Ninth cultist is wearing ten thousand year old glasses to block out the light. I dare you to think of something more Ninth than that.

Drawing skeletons is goofy ahh

Ngl Ianthe is my fav character ever. The way she acts, totally careless of others but following some sort of fucked up plan she made, very girlboss of her. And also I LOVE how Muir potrays her, as a tall seraphic crazy lady thirsty of blood but yet very pale and weak. I haven’t read Nona the Ninth yet, I hope to see her again there.

Imagine a whole book abt her tho (delusional)

favourite underrated part of the locked tomb is how in gideon, everyone fights w swords and magic, so we the audience are just like, okay this is how things are in this universe, there are no guns, it’s all swords and magic, neat! and then in harrow, wake has a gun, but every non-lyctor who sees wake’s gun considers it a weird and ancient weapon, so we the audience are like, okay so there used to be guns in this universe. and the characters are vaguely aware of what they are, but they’ve become pretty much obsolete, which gives wake’s ghost this terrifying old-school vibe, cool!... 

and then we come to nona, and everyone and also their mother has a gun, and we the audience are like, oh. we’ve been seeing all this through the aristocratic space catholic sword-and-magic cultists who are only a small and also kind of brainwashed part of what’s going on in this universe, and there’s been a whole gritty, grounded space dystopia going on this entire time with absolutely fascinating worldbuilding, political, and urban warfare elements, neat! but the whole time nona is only interested in patting everyone’s dogs. 

The Locked Tomb Series Summary:

The “Lesbian Necromancers in Space” book series

The Murderbot Diaries Summary:

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

“You've got two scientists and an engineer and a nun and a lawyer and a banker and a cop and an artist. That's not a defence force, that's a cop and six different kinds of nerd.” JOHN IS SO FUCKING FUNNY GOOD FUCKING BYE

"but when i am in heaven i will remember your mouth, and when you roast down in hell i think you will remember mine" is such a beautiful line but it's made even better by the fact that it's said by a vengeful ghost named after an eminem song haunting the brain of a lobotomized lesbian nun

Utterly blown away by the kind words and responses to the previous Harrow piece everyone! ❤️

Here’s the matching Gideon Nav, in the same Alphonse Mucha x The Locked Tomb series! (I know, armour isn’t strictly canon, but it’s badass, so yeah. No apologies) Enjoy!

PS: Both this and Harrow will be available in 11” x 17” print form at Otafest this upcoming weekend! (I’ll be at the charity Sketch Drive all three days)! If you’re planning on coming out to the Con, stop by and say hi! :)

the thing about gideon the ninth is that it should not work. the whole thing sounds like a fucking disaster. you look at it on paper and it seems like a word salad made into a novel. there's bible shit. there's space shit. there's whodunnit shit. there's Human Anatomy and Physiology BIO 2102 and Lab shit. the characters have names like Williambert Decaheptagoneronagus. there's internet memes for some goddamn reason. none of this should work. and yet somehow it all ends up not only working as a coherent novel and series of books, but being an incredibly profound piece of art on themes of grief, love, and human nature itself. it doesn't pull any punches, even if sometimes the punches are protonjon quips from 2007. thank you tamsyn.

Locked Tomb Meme Zine

So in love with my DazzlingBooks edition of The Locked Tomb series. 🥰😍

See the thing is, you read HtN and like yeah, obviously lobotomizing yourself so a dead girl’s soul doesn’t get cannibalized is completely fucking wild and you probably have to love someone at least a little to do that, but Harrow has spent the whole book having tension with Ianthe and fervently claiming to be in love with the Body— and then you get to Act V and Harrow is literally weeping wailing feral about Gideon, constructing Prince!Gideon AUs (which, she doesn’t know about Gideon’s paternity!! She is simply drawing upon a (romantic!!!) genre trope!!!) and role reversal AUs and fucking coffee shop AUs about Gideon, and she’s refusing to go back to her own body, and Abigail and Magnus and Dulcie so obviously and completely believe that Harrow is in love with Gideon because they directly compare them to Abigail and Magnus, and she says she’s saving the last dance. Agh!!! Aggghhhhh!!!!!!