#if its not gothic prose... sorry | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ddarker-dreams · 1 year

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You’re writing never ceases from fascinating me and I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while now, but could you perhaps give us some book recommendations? There’s no fixed criteria, nor any fiction or non fiction preference, I really just would like to know what sort of books you enjoy and how they’ve impacted you!

Sorry if there’s any grammatical errors, I don’t use English quite often and my apologies if you’ve answered this question before and I simply did not notice :’)

your english is excellent, don't worry!!! thank you so much for your encouraging words, i really appreciate it 🥺💖💖💖

as for books i'd recommend, you can check out the definitive list here, but i can expand on the impact my favorites have had on me!! i don't think i've done that yet, at least. i'm always down for an excuse to gush about my favorite books.

“I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

ah, my favorite author, who i mention on this blog frequently. TBK takes the crown of being my absolute favorite book. it deals with themes that resonated with me personally, since i grew up in the christian faith and have experienced no small share of skepticism with what was essentially my childhood foundation. while there are plenty of intriguing themes explored throughout this work, dostoevsky's take on the age old question "if there is a god, why does he allow such terrible things to happen, and if such a god exists, can he really be called 'good'?" is a sight to behold. he takes the question very seriously and doesn't settle for simple platitudes to explain it away. at its heart, TBK is deeply human, delving into our flaws and triumphs.

“I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” Notes From Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

the novella's protagonist, the underground man, embodies some of our more unsightly thoughts and beliefs. he's openly bitter, resenting the 'common man', while secretly pining for the simple joy they're able to live life with, unburdened by being overly self-aware. it's a fascinating look into how self-contradictory people often are. one of the themes this story tackles was a philosophy gaining traction at the time, determinism. through the underground man, dostoevsky posits that humans are not so simple as to always take the best course of action for themselves, as rational egoism would claim. trying to understand people by thinking they'll always act in their best interest, while a nice sentiment, just doesn't match with what we see in reality. people are weird and do weird things, sometimes just for the sake of it. dostoevsky has such a solid grasp on human nature and how confounding it is.

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

there's nothing like a good ol' fashioned fall from grace. here we get to see the slow yet steady degradation of innocence into depravity, the highs and lows that come from it. the conversations between dorian and lord henry are some of my favorite dialogue exchanges in fiction. there's this wry social commentary, sharp wit, and undeniable charisma. it's almost as if we the reader are being seduced by lord henry's libertine inclinations in the same way dorian is. oscar wilde is another author who has some of my favorite prose. he knows how to paint a scene with words. it's always such a delight to read his work.

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

gothic elements and references to alchemy? i'm running at top speeds. i loved watching this tragedy unfold. frankenstein's monster was always my favorite perspective to read from. his handling of the curse of being created, his initial naïve desire to belong to humanity, then the burning rage upon his unfair rejection... it's so eloquently written. even as he devolves into committing cruel acts, i still felt sympathetic toward him, and similarly lamented 'what could've been' had people been kinder. it's a classic for a reason.

“Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.” The Plague, by Albert Camus

albert camus is a very fascinating author to me. i'm especially interested in his absurdist philosophy, there are a lot of beats to it that i find appealing. maybe it's due in part to recently experiencing the covid 19 pandemic, but man did this book hit close to home. beyond the metaphysical themes of just living in a world that doesn't care about you and how to handle that realization without falling into despair, it also mirrors a lot of what we saw these past few years. an initial reluctance from positions in power to acknowledge a plague outbreak, the wide range of people's responses (trying to live on as normal, turning to religion, turning away from religion, looking for a way to make profit, looking for a way to help others...), the steady numbness to seeing numbers that represent those taken from the plague every week. camus just nails it. at the same time, the book isn't overly pessimistic or optimistic. there aren't any gallant heroes or nefarious villains. there are just... people, doing what they can, in spite of overwhelming circumstances.

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.” We Have Always Lived In The Castle, by Shirley Jackson

shirley jackson's prose... i can only describe it as magical. it tickles the brain. right from the beginning, we have a tale of intrigue told from an unreliable protagonist who, throughout the story, you slowly get the sense is somewhat off. there story feels dreamlike in a sense. it's rooted enough in reality where your suspension of disbelief isn't shaken, yet there's also this uncanniness to it that makes for a unique experience.

#sweet asks #recommendations #answered #Anonymous

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doomsayings · 10 months

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i'm curious.. what are some movies that you think are good adaptations of their books (like dracula, hill house, etc)? or movies that aren't the best adaptations but you would still recommend

HI ANON I LOVE THIS QUESTION!! Film adaptation of books is a topic that interests me deeply because I think there’s so many factors that go into whether or not an adaptation is successful, including things that are very subjective and situational… I’m definitely of the mind that an adaptation needn’t be super exact or faithful to be good, in fact some of my favorite adaptations take a lot of liberties with the source material to tell a better story via it’s given medium (film or tv), and intentionally use things specific to film like cinematography/sound/visual/design to translate the book onto screen

An example of an adaptation I loved, and that I think is an interesting case study of the subject at hand is crash (1996). I once uploaded a video of cronenberg’s press conference with the original author, JG Ballard, who personally loves the movie says during it that he think it’s best movie adaptation of a book ever lol Despite all the differences!!! Cronenberg dropped whole plot lines from the book (such as the Elizabeth Taylor one), went very minimalist on the script to focus on capturing the experience of the book.

The book itself is of course crazy non-stop bash of violent and erotic prose about car crashes, so I think it’s effective that Cronenberg spends so much time obsessively lingering over the sex and violence. It’s an approach slower and more clinical than the book BUT. I remember him saying that the point of the movie is that by the end, your sense of eroticism and it’s scope should have slowly shifted to accommodate the world of the movie. It’s the same effect the book has!! Which is why it works as an adaptation for me

You mention hill house, it’s really unfortunate that I don’t think it’s ever gotten a proper adaptation that I like though I’ve seen all of them :( I’ve said before on here that I really disliked Mike Flanagan’s approach, again, not because I dislike changes to a story! But bc I think the changes he made flattened the characters and relationships. I also think his style of directing isn’t capable of translating the gothic world of Shirley Jackson stories…he has too incessant of a need to overexplain his themes and none of the strange whimsy. I’ve actually said I think stoker 2013 is waaaaay more successful at emulating Shirley Jackson, and setting the tone for character like India/Merricat because of the directing. The strange and purposeful cinematography does so much to characterize India, in the same way that Jackson’s prose introduces us to Merricat’s rituals and magic…

SORRY THIS GOT REALLY LONG. In general I am very forgiving of adaptations if I personally think they are beautiful or fun (dracula 1992 and Roger Corman adapting Edgar Allen Poe, respectively). There are also some times where I actually enjoy the movie better than the book! (the talented mr. ripely or re-animator 1985). Like Stuart Gordon and his lovecraft adaptations, sometimes it really becomes a thing of its own, almost entirely separate from the books and I can still respect that too! Films can build up their own lore and canon, and i think it can be fun :)

#asks #SORRY. FOR ALL THE RAMBLING but. Movies Are My Passion

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deadboyfriendd · 2 months

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hello i hope ur well. firstly, i want to apologise from ahead because this is likely going to be a long ask as i am very bad at being succinct and precise and i truly am sorry about that. this ask is basically a lengthy compliment(s)(?)/maybe some questions about your series "cochise". i confess i hadn't read any of it before you posted the last one because i'm not a very big eddie fan (i felt quite neutral on him in the show up until his death), but i decided to give it a go, partly because i was missing the wild west from your bisbee letters, and partly out of curiosity. and my god. what a fool you made of me. that shit was so good dude, genuinely. you answered in a previous ask that your writing style can lean towards purple prose, and i really felt like it's a feature, not a bug in your case. i really felt the vivid imagery you described, especially of the heat and the dryness of the desert, and i really appreciate the tone that your intricate words built, both in terms of feeling the age of the story, as well as lent it a gothic western feel that really struck a nerve with me.

like i said before, the descriptions of the desert setting itself really stood out to me, but i wanted to point this one in particular from chapter 1: "When it brought the heat back with a haughty laughter and a heart full of vengeance...The cereus blossom fragrant with rot that filled the stagnant night air and its timely beauty". this line of the blossom reminded me of my grandfather's home in karachi from over a decade ago. his birthday was last week and for a moment, i could smell the jasmines climbing up the boundary wall in his garden again. you've spoken before how you feel connected to your grandfather through your western works because of his love for the desert and for his western novels, and i just wanted to share how much that line meant to me, truly. he passed away a long time ago and i find myself forgetting things, so it's really nice when i get parts of him back, so. thank you for that.

i also really loved the way you described Nellie's grief. I remember once I asked you something a long the lines of how your characters all felt so unique to each story despite al being reader inserts, and you talked a little bit about how Nellie was a way to process grief and heal with Eddie. There was such a feeling of Nellie's grief lingering throughout the story, at times large and somewhat violent, but mostly it felt just present in the home, like it was a part of it. This description in chapter two really fascinated me: "He laid in bed at night next to the shell of grief that resembled you, the decanter on the table filled with tears of loneliness and guilt." Idk the image of someone's grief so shapeful, and so essential to their being that it makes their form was a very powerful image, and the thought iof it cast in shadows because of the decanter really played into that gothic western aesthetic i enjoyed. Later on in the chapter, when you wrote, "That holy shape becomes a devil, best.", I thought it was so interesting how the grief over their spouse, a loyalty to their marriage, could turn into a "devil", and i think it really beautifully summarised the whole deal with guilt specifically. That no matter how righteous or justified we feel it is, it's not meant to be held onto, and it's best to let go of it, and can really turn into a much darker thing the longer you keep it with you and allow it to shape you. i also loved the way you mirrored it to eddie's grief here, "He stared at the hole in the floor, the discolored groove where you had scrubbed your knuckles bloody and raw. He thought about the him-shaped divot he had scrubbed into the frozen planes of Montana". The contrast of the desert and the cold, both equally difficult terrains to navigate and both nellie and eddie trying to scrape their grief out of that terrain, mapping out both their desperation and the difficulty of trying to get the grief out is so powerful and oh my god the description of her bloody knuckles was so raw, i could like feel the sting of bleach on my own fingers. And as much cool work you did with pointing things out, there's also this cool line here in i think chapter 2, "That emptiness would always linger, but that coldness of keys was now not for the absence of his warmth. They just were." and i think it's so powerful to describe how the absence of something can be it's own thing, that can then drain away into being not-about-the-absence-anymore. i've heard a lot of writing advice about how the worst thing to do is to try to explain something that's not there, the darkness, the silence, the not-thereness, and instead focus on what the absence leaves behind, and this was a really good example of that.

i also loved how many small descriptions were sort of called back on and made a reprisal in the beginning and ending of your story, and it makes me wonder how much of this was pre planned and how much of it was sort of improv/ a decision made later. For example, in chapter one, you have this paragraph that describes eddie watching nellie's bet time routine, "He watched the way your skin rippled at your lower back as your bare skin pressed against your vanity stool, and the way your skin stretched over your shoulder blades as you pulled your hair to the side, raking through it with the brush in front of you. Your lips fell into a supple pout in concentration, and your lashes kissed your cheeks as you looked down. He could feel the windowsill digging into his palms, it grounded him– kept him from free-floating into the stagnant desert air." and it's sort of right before he has that wet dream about her, but it's repeated in i think chapter v, and i think it's such a cool way to show how his "dreams" have come true, that this sort of dreamy, idea of a person was made more real for them, that instead of watching her intimate ritual from a distance and imagining being with her, he gets to see it from inside her bedroom and actually be with her. But then there was also the description of death twice, once in chapter 2, "There is a split second in which you can see the silver line between life and death, in which you can walk the plane between realms. There reaps a morosity heavy on your heart in the fractions of a second before a man’s life ends." and in chapter 4, "There is a gilded line between life and death. In that moment, the sun shines too bright, the hum of the earth becomes deafening. The desert respires one heavy and pungent sigh. And all is silent again... A silent prayer washes over the desert." This mirroring in the ways you describe witnessing death is so interesting and i think really striking about that final second before it happens, and calling it this silver line, this gilded line, filling in this in-betweenness with something extra and sort of suspending it between two worlds, is really special, especially when you suspend the moment in two different halves of your story, making readers feel equally suspended in the in-between, though with lower stakes. I also feel like this in-between space makes perfect room for your final chapter that also sort of takes place with a lot of in-between dimension with christine and wilhelm, of grieving someone but not letting them die, of dying but not dying, of seeing and having dinner with ghosts but not dancing with them. And it sort of cuts through the injustice and harshness of michael and milt's deaths as well, that were bloody and violent, and sort of, not neutralises them, but creates another mode of death for them which is super interesting in this terrain that's been described as ever expansive, ever present, and ever difficult, an escape from a place that has no escape.

i also really loved the way you wrote about nellie and eddie's affection for each other. These two lines from chapters 3 and 4, "Tonight, you think you will unmake the left side of the bed." and "He feels real again, like he’s standing in front of you. You reach for his hand but find Eddie’s instead." is soooo good in contrast and extending from the house described as a large ghost for wilhelm. the sort of impression that eddie leaves in the house of his presence getting stronger and stronger, until his boots are in the same spot as wilhelm's, is really cool and just a nice way to sort of build up the fractured feeling that nellie's house has. also there's this line, "This feeling was not akin to butterflies and moths. It was frantic, more persistent. Like that of the hummingbirds that drank from the cactus blossoms in the cooler mornings.". i don't have anything to say about that other than it's very pretty and i like it a lot. there's also this line i found very interesting, "On this day, you wear white. Married to your grief and eloped to this place…You would not be healed today, but you say you will never die." It's very stark imagery for sure, both the idea of a bride to grief and mountain, it makes these characters feel very elemental and not totally of this realm, and i understand they are like totally human, it does feel like it gives them access to the in-between realm of life an death, and the idea that there is a place between life and death where you don't die, feel like a very plausible thing. and it makes sense too, for someone whose healing as a widow, that half her heart is in another realm, that she's married to someone whose in another plane of existence, so like, why can't she marry a mountain where she's having sex??

also, everytime you mentioned steve alli could think was "my man my man my man" and reaaaaaalllyyyyy excited me for bisbee! this line especially, from chapter 2, "Steve’s eyes had hardened from something stone-cold to something ablaze. His eyes reaped the anger of the afternoon sun, alight with anger. Anger from defiance. Anger for Milt." captivated me so much. all that anger both for the in justice of milt's death as well the injustice of the mob was welded together so well, it made me very excited to get to know him more whenever/if you ever decide to continue bisbee, and the line in chapter 4 when he apologises to michael before putting the noose on him made for a very great snapshot of what justice looks like for steve, as like this duty that must be done by him with a backdrop of endless injustice and hardship but also hates that it's him that has to do it because of the necessary violence that comes with it. it made the sort of monologuing on violence he did in bisbee letters sort of more foreshadow-y for me. Also, i'm very excited to see nellie's cousin, you mentioned once that she was like more naive and sort of pushing steve's buttons, which fascinates me because steve seems just so stoic and like singularly focused that anything getting underneath his skin seems sort of funny, and makes me that much more excited to see the hijinks this girl gets to.

i think this is all i want to say, and i am aware it's a monster giant of an ask, and i really am sorry about that, i just had a lot of thoughts about your lovely story that i wanted to share both because i want you to know how much your story means to me and how in awe of your talent and skill i am, and how excited i am to read any and all future works from you, and if you have any insights to share about anything, please please please do tell, they would all be valuable!! your a real talent and i know it takes skill and drive and determination to build on a craft and i just want you to know that it is appreciated very much.

oh my god hi!

Sorry I'm just not getting around to this, I, unfortunately, am one of the people that take 7-10 business days to reply to a text message.

So, first off, PLEASE don't apologize to me about this response because I'm still flabbergasted that anyone thinks I am as smart an talented as the people on this website do. I mean, seriously, everyone here gives me way more credit than I'm worth.

So, in reference to the night-blooming cereus. I LOVE writing about it in any sort of desert setting. I am so touched that you thought of your granddad because it also makes me think of mine. He had a night-blooming cereus cactus that he tended to relentlessly and that we continue to care for. We haven't been lucky enough to see a bloom for it yet, but I hope one day I get to. As I've mentioned before, my first real taste of mourning and grief were through his passing, and this story was my way to rationalize that for myself.

As for Nellie's grief, I think one of the hardest things for me to navigate in this was how to write the mourning as "old enough to be healed but new enough to still hurt". I wanted it to be a nagging feeling, something in the back of her mind constantly, always threatening to bubble back up, but simultaneously trying to figure out how to not make it consume her. She was always Nellie, the grief was the obstacle for her to overcome. It was never her entire character and I never felt like my own grief was ever an extension of myself but rather this big ugly storm cloud that likes to loom over me sometimes. Again, my first real, big struggle with it was through my granddad's passing. It's been three years and it still looms around. I don't think I will ever NOT feel it. And I really wanted to encompass that in this story. I'm still ME, just like Nellie is still Nellie and Eddie is still Eddie. Just with new, big feelings. The reason she feels it so much in the home is because I felt it so much in mine. A big part of my granddad was his antique collection. We ended up with a lot of it and then it served as a constant reminder. It literally felt like every little thing reminded me of him because I searched for him in everything. As for the depiction of guilt as the devil, especially in the constant back and forth incantation of Faustus. That was a happy accident. They watch Faustus in tombstone and this bit ended being left in. Eddie was originally supposed to be a lot more closed-off. There was going to be way more of a storyline with him as a vigilante lawman or a bandolero. Eddie wasn't supposed to be a good guy, he was supposed to be someone way more hardened off my grief than Nellie. He was supposed to have more blood on his hands and be way more rough around the edges, but as I wrote, the story turned into Nellie's story- MY story, and Eddie became a mirror reflection and a catalyst for the softening woman. Feminine rage was a huge turning point for their dynamic because I felt that rage. I felt like scrubbing my knuckles raw and I felt like the devil and I felt like the villain because I, myself, was being overtaken with feeling.

As for the story itself, the original storyline was already planned. Everything with mudsill and milt was always going to be the plan. The biggest major change I made to the storyline was the finale. It was going to open in their wedding during the superbloom, and, the more I tried to write a wedding with vows, the worse it felt and the more it felt like I was writing it because that's what everyone else wanted to hear. And then I realized that this is MY story and this isn't who they are. They can be tied to each other in their grief for now and learn how to not be tied to that later. They aren't happily ever after people. The west never was. There is happiness in content, and content was what they were searching for the entire time. I wrote the finale in a single evening because it it felt right for them. I wasn't going to push more purple prose and draw the story out to a 15k word chapter. I summarized them the way they needed to be. Even if it was weird and dreamy. It was right for them. As for everything else you mentioned, I will say this: Yes, I refer back to previous parts when I write a lot but I always thought it was lazy writing lmao. You give me a LOT more credit for my work than I deserve.

Okay okay okay, I will admit that I'm completely going to be leveraging milt's death in bisbee. So, the way I'm finding the storyline working out currently is, he was writing letters back and forth the Elsie the entire time. In my most recent letter, he is discussing hanging Mudsill and the blood he feels on his hands. I am SO excited to write how the events in the Doten v. Tombstone case will affect the rest of my characters, and how the sheriff will have to navigate situations as the singular resident lawman from now on. It is a HUGE part of where Bisbee is headed and I am SO EXCITED to dip my hands in it and torture this ken doll. This Steve is going to be violent. He's going to be more impulsive. He's going to be drenched in blood and really play into what I think the actual character could come to when he gets pushed that far. And this violence and impulsiveness will 100% be tested by Elsie. It's going to be a huge part of their story.

I am holding this ask gently in my hands and kissing it. THANK YOU for bearing with me through cochise and THANK YOU for letting me scream about my cowboys, because I love them a lot.

#flea writes #flea speaks #flea answers #flea's friends

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cor-ardens-archive · 10 months

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have you ever read james’s portrait of a lady? if yes, may i ask u what you think of it? love seeing you back and I hope u don’t feel burdened by the amount of asks u have, hope you’re doing well ❤️

Yes, and I was actually rereading it when you sent this ask! I haven't had a lot of time to post on tumblr, which is why I've let this sit in my askbox for so long, I'm sorry.

And I really love this book! I haven't read much of Henry James yet, but I love what I've sampled of his prose, and I think he does such a wonderful job of crafting characters. The Portrait of a Lady is one of the most thorough explorations of a character that I've ever read, and of course I'm biased because of its Gothic inclinations. It reminds me a lot of The Mysteries of Udolpho in all the best ways, but the characters are much more complex and therefore interesting. I would even say I consider Isabel a Gothic heroine of sorts. And it's a very oppressive novel, in ways that are similar to The Turn of the Screw.

Don't think I have much more to say, but I plan to read more of Henry James soon, starting with The Golden Bowl!

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glassamphibians · 2 years

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do u have adult lesbian lit recs? no worries if not!

u sent this when i was still in school… i am so sorry

Books i’ve read:

- our wives under the sea by julia armfield: deep sea gothic, watch the slow and steady destruction of two women’s happy life together while talking about fish!

- this is how you lose the time war by alam el-mohtar: very abstract sci fi, very flowery prose, very fun

- the empress of salt and fortune & when the tiger came down the mountain by nghi vo: fantasy folk tales, can be read together or separately

- honey girl by morgan rogers: seemingly cheesy romance gets real introspective real fast, super fun characters

Books i have yet to read but really want to:

- notes of a crocodile by qui miaojin: coming of age story abt queer friends in 1980s Taiwan

- black water sister by zen cho: Jessamyn’s dead grandmother keeps asking her to take down a gang boss who pissed off an ancient god! woohoo!

- the gilda stories by jewell l gómez: follows a vampire’s life from the 1850s to 2050s and explores how race, gender, & sexuality influence one another

- stay and fight by madeline ffitch: its literary fiction abt a lesbian commune in Appalachia that’s literally all i know but it is enough for me

#i say ‘when i was still in school’ like im 30 its been like two months but still i meant to get to this so much sooner 😭😭#asks

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devitalise · 2 years

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hello miss imo 💞 can you let the good people (me, first and foremost) in on your july reads & perhaps even a mid-year reading wrap up (fav so far + most disappointing 🧮)

hello hi 🤭😁 i got the app so i can sprinkle in emojis (it always starts unironic but apple kind of did something). ok so:

july wrap up:

a room with a view by e. m. forster: 3/5. went right back to edwardian era fiction in my attempt to be more Rounded 🧘🏾‍♀️ cute romantic read right on the cusp in terms of language of the time wouldn’t go older than this.

tell me i’m worthless by alison rumfitt: 5/5. i’ve spent the year trying to read horror, and then i read what is now my favourite horror book. trans characters, haunted house, actually scary and menacing? cracked it. one of my top of the year. visceral reading experience. (cw: fascism, transphobia, antisemitism, sexual assault)

real life by brandon taylor: 4/5. love this style of prose. very intimate, tender and quiet read that was introspective without being boring. think this is a debut too? impressive. (cw: sexual assault)

my brilliant friend by elena ferrante: 3/5. lovely prose, very absorbing. first in a series so not completely blown by the narrative, but i suspect every look on white female friendship has referred back to this. (cw: sexual assault)

seven days in june by tia williams: 5/5. 😁😁😁😁 LOVE. one of the most convincing romance books i’ve read in a while. so real and raw—unflinching. just yeah 🥰🤭 (cw: chronic illness, drug use and addiction, alcoholism)

the republic of false truths by alaa al aswany: 3.5/5. this is like a fictionalised retelling of very real events in egypt. appreciate for having expanded my worldview, not sure it stands as a work of fiction on its own. decent. (cw: sexual assault)

giovanni’s room by james baldwin: 3/5. classics girlies HATE me i’m sorry! 😟 the strength of the writing did not meet the narrative for me at all. didn’t emotionally connect but will try another baldwin book i swear

the man who watched the trains go by by georges simenon: 4/5. 1930s thriller spanning several european cities? sign me up. such a well constructed story

2022 mid year check in:

ok so i’m gonna talk about the books i’ve been talking about since i’ve read them 🤭😋🫣. open water by caleb azumah nelson always in my mind whenever i read 2nd person it sticks with me. also: transcendent kingdom by yaa gyasi 🥰🥰 top 2 of the year for me

disappointments… most notable my year of rest and relaxation. mexican gothic was clunky. the other black girl 🤨😐

i’ve read 170 books so far this year so i can absolutely go on but 🤭 i’ll go back to what i’m currently reading which is mouth to mouth by antoine wilson

#book talk #imo inquiries #robertpancakes #good god the length of this ask that i had to type out twice it got deleted the first time #hope i haven’t lost my approachable casual book talking vibe in that rewrite #😋#v brief recap sorry but i do have a top 2022 shelf on goodreads with the fav books i’ve read so far this year titles subject to change

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dame-nostalgique · 2 years

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hiii its the previous anon here late but i see your point w how the person from "in plaster" differs from the one you have written about... (though ive interpreted the ending as quite ambiguous since, maybe, the two have to fuse to create one; the white one molding and shaping the yellow one to its full potential and the yellow one to fill the empty plaster w raw emotion... imsorry the rant i loved both yours & sylvias poem i could write entire essays about them)

i also adore the religious—esque imagery; (not to ramble about sylvia again but in the moon & the yew tree theres this verse inside the church will all be blue; floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews; their hands and feet stiff with holiness...) and as for heretics in love, no words can convey how much in awe i am, truly. i could talk about it for hours & hours but not to bother you all i have to say is that i know future has so much in store for you; youre so creative & so well articulated, thank u for inspiring me with your work. its lovely (i saved it in my tiny when in need of inspiration folder). i cant wait for your next poems and i mean it. im sorry for writing so much again but thank u for making my day! ♡

Hello! I'm so glad to see a message from you again! 🤍

Thank you for recommending me another of Sylvia's poems! To be honest, I loved her prose but I never could get more into her poetry, I think because I only read translations to Polish, and a lot can get lost in translation. Especially the essence of the language (I personally try to write in one language at a time, as they have different qualities). I really enjoyed this poem, she describes her mind as this cold, dark, gothic looking night and I relate to that a lot. I spend most of my life in the night hours and I always feel, especially in late Autumn and Winter, that I'm sort of inhaling the night, becoming it, and I would describe it too as cruel and hopeless, although I could write a ton of poems about how beautiful and calm the night is as well.

Thank you so much for the kind reception of my poem! I worked on it since July, and I felt like it's ready. I'm very, very grateful for your words, they are a huge compliment! Thank you for making my day, if I may repay with the same words🌷

By the way, if you ever feel like it, you can DM me to chat about poetry! I appreciate your insight, we could share some interesting poems and you wouldn't feel guilty about the long messages (although I don't mind them). It doesn't have to be tumblr chat if you prefer more anonymity! As you can tell from this profile, I'm also a Pen-pal kind of person, so long form of messages is something I quite like. Have a lovely day! 🕊️

#ask #long post

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spectralscathath · 2 years

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1 and 10 for Devil and the Huntsman?

oho, now this is an interesting choice~ (under a readmore because true to form I ramble the second I get to talk anything literature)

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

Okay so I'm not entirely sure what this question is asking but I'm going to answer what I think it's asking. I basically wrote this long oneshot in what I call my Gothic Style of thought process, slightly different to my usual sense of prose that I use for most other oneshots/longer fics, though I think the differences are a bit hard to see, it's more of a General Vibe, and the reason I wrote it this way is because of the whole setting and subject matter.

Make no mistake, this fic is one of my darkest oneshots out there. General trigger warnings for anyone who hasn't read it yet, this fic contains very frank discussions/implications of sexual assault (nothing explicitly shown but its There), abuse, mental torture, imprisonment, forced marriage, and what I would consider a touch of tasteful gore though your mileage may vary on that one. And yes, Salem causes all of this, because she is Literally The Worst (fascinating character, absolutely evil, lots to explore)

Because I was writing it in my Gothic Mindset, I tried to make the atmosphere of the piece (not the subject matter) as tempting and alluring, as it was deeply messed up, because that kind of weird mix of beauty and horror builds a sort of tension in the words that is my absolute favourite thing about writing horror. Because when that tension breaks, and when the bad stuff happens, it's another layer of contrast. And, I hope I got this across, also a strange catharsis.

And that energy, that contrast of artistic intrigue to explore dark topics, that is often what makes good horror to me. That is Dracula, that is The Thing, that is Alien and The Colour Out of Space and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to me. That is Salem to me. That is what I want to bring to the table whenever I write her. Because Salem is a monster, a very regal, graceful, and elegant monster, but a monster nonetheless. And having her take the idea of classic romantic literature tropes and twisting them into a nightmare for James, just seemed fitting. My intention is not to romanticise the horror, but to horror-cise the romantic, so to speak.

James I'm so fucking sorry I'll make it up to you in Antares, I swear

10: Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?

Ah yes, Irondeath, Ironwood/Salem, definitely not a first choice of pairing most people would think of. Mostly it started because someone I knew used to make jokes about it, and the idea just sank into my head as 'what-if'.

And, I mean, it kinda works? Catch me watching that volume 7 scene which is the one and only time they fucking talk (i loathe you crwby) and their personalities clash in such a fascinating way. Salem is at her scariest when she's kind, and Ironwood is so strong-willed, I just think it would be a fascinatingly toxic dynamic to explore. And so I did! Also, contrasting aesthetics that still look great together? yes please. and they both had the best vocal performances of the atlas arc like go off king and queen we love to see it

#asks #rwby

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linesinyourpalm · 2 years

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I Would Like A Book If It Is Alright With You

oooooF COURSE ZOE <3 !!!! i was just scrolling through ur blog for my morning and i JUST saw your ask notification just now at 8:22 am in my day i am so sorry. i’m on it !!!!!!

warning this answer is prob gonna be LONG. it’s the morning so i’m using a lot of words to say very little because i am horribly hyperverbal in the morning, have many many thoughts, and barely any that i can hold on to for longer than like twenty seconds. now i’d like for u to know that my fav three genres are: psychological thrillers, messy literary adult fiction, and books on soft living. and i got and have read MANY books on the first two genres so i was pulling out so many to try n think hard on which one(s) i’d like to pick for you.

- if i actually read the book, The Picture of Dorian Gray would be such good choice because gothic horror, homoerotic angst, crime, and prose !!!! so perhaps that will be my choice for your representation! it’s captivating, interesting, and more (imagine i said more in a spooky scary thriller esq voice). but i really want to deem/recommend u one of the thrillers or messy lit fics that i actually have read because idk idk you like thrillers, i like thrillers, the world goes round. most the books and media that consistently hold my attention are indeed some form of thriller. your blog always reminds me that i need to watch american psycho, and that we both need to watch angels egg.

okay yea i know what im gonna choose. Luster by Raven Leilani. My absolute favorite book that I read from 2021. my most annotated book. some people really dislike this book, not i though. (this is a recommendation rather than blog comparison btw) its lovingly chaotic and emotionally complex, and my favorite FAVORITE part is that the author dedicated it to her mother. just 'for my mother' thats it. yeah. felt felt felt. ANYWAYS. book holds a unspoken yet blatant hatred for working and the usa, is quietly passionate, and unfortunately relatable. everything i LOVE in a book, really.

also if you intend on reading it, please make sure to check the trigger warning list for this book beforehand tyty

here's some quotes from Luster that when i first laid eyes on it, i scrambled as fast as i could to tab it so i would be able to return to it and greedily reread over and over because it verbalized many feelings i have felt before as a person learning How to Be that i struggled to verbalize because i was going through so much at the time. (Im doing a lot better now for anyone wondering, healing is tough but so worth any turmoil that it takes)

"I hate the idea that I have repeared an action, that he has looked at me, discerned a pattern, and silently decided whether it is something he can bear to see again. There is nothing I can do to level the playing field."

"It's that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void." my single commentary under that line was simply: '"yeah."

but uhh yeah! luster & dorian gray lol

fin at 10:35am (simply could not sit still so i kept leaving n returning leaving n returning on repeat) i am so sorry for how many words this turned out to be, i rlly rlly hope you can still enjoy it. also, i hope you’re having a wonderful day and congratulations on the 1000 posts !!! <3

#ask game #m #jo calm down challenge #mutual correspondence

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rebeccadumaurier · 1 year

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April 2023 Reading Review

The TL:DR; of this one is “I read a lot of Murderbot.” I didn’t get much reading done this April because I was busy with some [redacted] stuff, but now that I’m done with it, I’m swiftly purging the JStor research papers and half-memorized plot summaries of literary fiction (some interesting, some not) from my system by shamelessly indulging myself in SFF. As I told some of my friends, I feel like a kid who’s been on a diet of boiled vegetables who’s just walked into a candy store. Sorry, Villette, you’re going to have to wait.

Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #3): I saw that this series was regularly posted on r/CozyFantasy and it gets discussed a lot for its humor, so I thought it would be a chill, fun, lighthearted read. This book made me realize it was not. I cried a lot. Shit got real. I hate everyone who told me to read it.

If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin: Read for my 2023 12 book challenge. As expected from Baldwin (I’ve previously read Giovanni’s Room and a few essays), great prose, an intense sense of dread paired with lots of love and humanity, insightful and nuanced themes, and had me lying down and staring at the ceiling for a while when I was done.

Exit Strategy, Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #4): My least favorite of the first four novellas because it didn’t really bring anything new, just tied up loose ends from previous books. Still super satisfying and entertaining, and it was great to see Mensah again.

Certain Dark Things, Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Didn’t like Mexican Gothic (short version: it’s basic), but the premise of this one intrigued me. SMG needs to work on tightening her prose a ton, but I enjoyed how much it leaned into noir tropes while exploring themes of class divide, politics, and colonialism. The best part is Domingo and Atl’s relationship—I love that she knows it’s unhealthy and imbalanced, and instead of trying to idealize it as many romance novels would, she’s like, “Isn’t it so fun how fucked up this is?” Guillermo del Toro would be proud, even if the ending was a bit of a letdown. Basically, this book > MG because SMG is willing to lean into the fucked up things and the genre elements, whereas MG felt like she was afraid to actually go hard and scare off readers.

Network Effect, Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #5, favorite of the month): I would have rated this book 6 stars on Goodreads if I could. I finished this book last Friday and I have not had a single thought about anything else since then. The brainrot is so real. Cried like 5 times. Was into platonic Murderbot/ART after Artificial Condition but uh, not so platonic anymore. (Still deciding what it is, because I don’t like the idea of applying human labels to whatever they have going on, but it is definitely a Form Of Relationship.) Anyway, I’ve been dismayed by rumors of Alecto's release date (anyone with a verified source yet?), but knowing Murderbot #7 is coming out in November gives me will to live.

#ange.txt #ange.book #ange.log

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itmightbeneb · 1 year

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what's your favorite book? if you don't have one, what's the book you read most recently?

I love gideon the ninth (and am currently reading the second in that series), six of crows will also always hold a piece of my heart for stopping my reading slump

the skulduggery pleasant series was my first dive into gothic/horror stuff (while still being funny af and ehhh probably a lil too old for when i read it buuuuut still teen aimed)

also love the three body problem, but thats so hard to get through due to it being translated form chinese, the prose is unlike other things i read so its always a difficult one, but i love it anyway

on the sci fi note, i enjoyed the majority of consider phlebas, there are some bits where im like 😬 but that ending, inasne! apparently the player of games is better, i should give it a read when im finished with harrow

there are so many i cant choose one sorry anony, ive always been a book girlie (gender neutral) so ive got so many lil stories and blorbos that live in my head rent free

#asks

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prome-th3us · 3 years

Text

Runes for beginners: introduction

In this grimoire I'm going to go through runes and their meaning in a way that is accessible to everyone. I'm gonna make a post for every rune so it's gonna be a long serie. I hope you will find this useful and if there's something unclear or wrong, please let me know!

I decided to avoid runes magic because I just want to help to get to know the runes a little better. Before practicing magic, you have to understand what this powerful tool is.

Introduction

Runes are not only a writing system, but they were also used as a magical, divinatory and spiritual growth tool. Rune (norse: rún/rúnar) means "segret, mistery". The characters used to engrave the rune, symbol of a certain energy in this world, were called runstafas (runic sticks).

They are an oracle and we can ask them to guide us: they work better if our question is specific and detailed. The lecture of Runes sometimes is obscure: the petitioner must interpret the details and understand them. Runes give us a way to analize the path we are on and to understand one of his possible outcomes: the future isn't static, we can change it with everything we do.

each rune has a phonetic value and a name that identifies its function and meaning; then it has a very specific history behind it and is associated with a diety.

Historical origins

I'm not gonna say much about the historical origins of the Runes because there are so many different theories about them and we could write an entire book just about this topic.

This is what you have to know:

the ancient futhark comes from the alphabet used by the Celts of Lugano (leoponzi) which has Greek origin. The Greek alphabet would have been absorbed by the Etruscans in the 12th century BC. and then by the Celts of Lugano in the VII. From here, thanks to trade, it would have arrived in the far north, with the necessary changes.

The Greek alphabet influenced the Gothic one and then the Germanic peoples adapted it (we can see how the Gothic alphabet is actually similar to both Greek and Runic, then the Othala rune resembles the Greek Omega).

it originated from the Roman alphabet, given the many relationships that different peoples entertained.

Mythological origin

"I know that I hung

On the wind-blasted tree

All of nights nine,

Pierced by my spear

And given to Odin,

Myself sacrificed to myself

On that pole

Of which none know

Where its roots run.

No aid I received,

Not even a sip from the horn.

Peering down,

I took up the runes –

Screaming I grasped them –

Then I fell back from there."

from the Old Norse poem Hávamál.

In Norse mythology, it's Odin who brought the Runes to the other gods. He wanted to know everything and he was envy of the Norns, who already knew them. He went to the Well of urd, the home of Runes, and since they reveal themselves to any but those who prove themselves worthy of such fearful insights and abilities, Odin hung himself from a branch of Yggdrasil, pierced himself with his spear, and peered downward into the waters below. He forbade any of the other gods to grant him the slightest aid. He survived in this state, teetering on the precipice that separates the living from the dead, for no less than nine days and nights. At the end of the ninth night, he at last perceived shapes in the depths: the runes. He's also lost his eyes for the wisdom.

Other important concepts

First of all, to truly understand how runes were used, you have to know at least a little of Norse mythology (I will tell you some books and links in the last paragraph). Then you have to understand what Orlog and Wyrd mean.

Orlog

This is basically karma but without reincarnation. Every person is born completely responsible for everything they do in their life since the first second: positive actions bring positive results, bad actions bring bad results, even in the afterlife. Who did positive things will go to Valhalla (where the heroes and the people who died in battle go) or to Sessrumnir (the halls of Freya). Who doesn't die in an honorable way or who did bad thing will go to Helheimr (the realm of Hel, this means that even who died in a normal way and who had a normal life will go there) or to Nilfheimr (the world of ice and cold, where the Ice Giants live).

Basically we decide where we are going with every choice we make.

Wyrd

A giant cobweb that extends in space and time: each thread is made up of a different manifestation of energy and all together it constitutes the very fabric of the universe. Since we are born, we are in some part of this web so we are also part of it.

Wyrd and Orlog are intertwined: who does good things and has a good Orlog, he will be on a good thread of the web. Wyrd is the fabric of life as well, so the world will be influenced by the positive energy of the man and will give him back this energy.

If each strand is a different manifestation of energy, each type of energy must have a name: the runes. In runic divination, what we see is a reflection of the energies in and around us (or around the person we are divining for). When we want to modify the Orlog, the process is different: we use the Runes as a channel for the energies that we need. We can say that the practice related to the runes is of two types: passive (divination) and active (healing, protection, etc ...).

Aettir of Runes

In the ancient futhark, there are 24 runes divided in three aettir (sing. aett, sets) of 8 runes each. Every aett is dedicated to a different diety:

Aett of Freya. She is of the Vani lineage and is therefore linked to fertility and harvest. She was welcomed with her twin brother Freyr in Asgard at the end of the war between the Aesir and the Vanir (basically the "wae" between the Norse people and the invaders). She can use the Runes, so she's a goddess of magic but also of love, associated with death (she is the leader of the Valkyries) and sexuality. The runes in this aett are: ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ ᚷ ᚹ.

Aett of Heimdall. Of the Aesir lineage, he is among other things the guardian god of Bifrost and Asgard: he has hearing and sight that reach everywhere. Following a spell of Odin, he was born of nine waves and for this reason he is called "son of the wave". The runes in this aett are: ᚺ ᚾ ᛁ ᛃ ᛇ ᛈ ᛉ ᛊ.

Aett of Tyr. Of the Aesir lineage, he is known as the "Father of Heaven". He sacrificed one of his hands to be able to bind Fenrir and is a god linked to justice, loyalty, heaven, defense, war and law. The runes in this aett are: ᛏ ᛒ ᛖ ᛗ ᛚ ᛜ ᛞ ᛟ.

Last things

Ok so for this first post it's everything! I will continue in the next posts to explore every single rune. I just wanted to suggest some links and books if you want to go deeper into the fascinating history of runes.

Here you can find an interesting article about everything I just said, with so many references and here they also give a list of good books (if you can't afford them you can download their pdf from this site)

Anyway if you want to dig into norse mythology you can read:

Poetic Edda

Prose Edda

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs by John Lindow

(other good books can be found here).

And of course, if you still didn't realize this, I fricking love the website Norse Mythology for Smart People, even tho everything I wrote in this post is from "Le Rune" by Marco Massignan (I couldn't find the English Translation sorry).

#runes #viking runes #ancient runes #witchblr #norse heathen #norse paganism #norse runes #pagan witch

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serpenteve · 3 years

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Seeing the recent posts re: Shatter me , I wanted to ask you if you have actually any good books in mind following the enemies to lovers trope ( actually, well, something with Darklina vibes. y'know :D ) . I would prefer not YA stuff, but tbh if the prose /plot is decent, I don't mind. Thanks!!

Contemporary Romance

Hotshot Doc by R.S. Grey (I actually LOVE this one it's soooo cute! It would work perfectly as a modern au with darkles as a notoriously mean surgeon and alina as his assistant)

Vicious by L.J. Shen (this dude is the kind of chaotic asshole you can't look away from, heroine is a bit too quirky for my taste, but it did keep me entertained)

Young Adult / New Adult Fantasy

The Folk of the Air Trilogy (the OG of enemies to lovers; one of my favourite heroines!)

Kingdom of the Wicked (not strictly enemies to lovers per se but a girl has to make a deal with a demon prince so what's not to love?)

The Shadows Between Us (a *very* trashy read, but the male lead has shadow powers so there's some obvious darklina parallels there)

A Court of Thorns & Roses (the Rhysand/Feyre dynamic is the one that reminds me of Darklina more than Tamlin/Feyre even though that's also got an enemies to lovers thing going on. Though full disclosure, I gave up on the second book because it was so fucking long and insufferable...)

From Blood & Ash (more of a bodyguard romance but its very deceptive with how it pulls you in!)

Movies/ TV Shows

North & South (2004 Miniseries) - aahsdjkh I love this one! It's probably my fave out of the gothic romances

Jane Eyre (2006 Miniseries) - I mean, sure, you could read the book, but this is a perfectly moody adaptation

Phantom of the Opera (Royal Albert Hall 2011) - this is a filmed version of the stage production and Ramin Karimloo as the Phantom is 🔥🔥🔥👀👀!!! Sorry, but Gerard Butler and his garbage voice could never!!!!

I think you'll find similiar Darklina dynamics if you follow the Beauty & the Beast tropes. There are a lot of YA retellings but I've yet to find one that I really liked. The closest was maybe "A Curse So Dark and Lonely" but I ended up shipping the cursed prince with the captain of his guard so......👀

#viv answers #book reccs

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theradioghost · 4 years

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Can you talk more about the history of the language and storytelling techniques/conventions of audio dramas? That's an incredibly intriguing concept but I wouldn't have the first idea where to look for more info about it. It reminds me a lot of the idea of video game literacy and how a lot of games aren't accessible to people who are brand new to video games because there are so many established conventions that aren't explained to new players

It has taken me nearly a month to reply to this, which I know is in reply to this post, and I am sorry for that! But also, yes!!!!! Hell yes, yes, I see exactly what you mean about the video game stuff.

Unfortunately I think there’s not much out there already written about the developing conventions of the new wave of audio drama. In large part, I think, because coverage of new audio fiction from outside the community has been so notoriously poor. But maybe also partly because there seems to be a strangely negative take on classic radio drama from a lot of the US sector within that community? Which I think really comes down to exactly the things I was talking about -- Old radio drama feels wrong to a lot of people now, because its storytelling language just doesn’t exist in our culture the way it once did; and even fewer people are familiar with late-20th-century American audio fiction like ZBS that might feel more comfortable or closer to other present-day mass media storytelling techniques. I see it claimed sometimes that there’s something inherently unsophisticated about old time radio storytelling, which is just flat out untrue, and I would highly encourage anyone who’s wondering to check out something like the “Home Surgery” episode of Gunsmoke or “The Thing on the Fourble Board” from Quiet, Please to see just how effective and well-done a lot of those old shows were.

(Leaving the UK out of this, because audio fiction stayed way more prominent there and I do not think the same problems exist, and leaving everywhere else out because unfortunately I just don’t know enough about how the medium fared elsewhere, or how it’s doing now. Alas.)

I’ve been thinking lately about parallels to this in other media that I have been able to study and read other people’s writing on, and I think a good comparison is possibly novels? The western “novel” as we think of it is really something that didn’t exist at all until about the 18th century (there are earlier works that have been kind of retroactively labeled ‘novels,’ some of them centuries earlier, but even if they have the characteristics of what we now call a novel, they’re very much disconnected from the evolution of the novel as something we have a name and a definition for). There are no novels from the medieval period, from the Renaissance. There are books as long as novels, but they’re not novels.

The thing is, when you read 18th and even 19th century novels, it shows, because the techniques for telling a story in that form hadn’t been really figured out yet. What you get is a lot of meandering, episodic doorstoppers, some of which have hundreds of pages before the main characters even enter the picture. A lot of writers at the time, and into the 19th century, actually hated the whole concept of novels. I think it’s a bit like going back and watching Monsters, Inc. and then watching Monsters University. The first one was revolutionary, yeah, and it’s a good movie still, but it’s not hard to see the visual difference between the two just in terms of the tools that the people making them had available to them. Before you can write a story or animate hundreds of thousands of individual hairs on one character, you have to figure out how.

One of the big, obvious things about novels from that period, though, is that many of them are first-person, and many are epistolary. It’s hard to find one that isn’t supposedly a memoir or a journal or a set of letters. The third-person perspective in long-form prose was something that had to be figured out; it didn’t just exist in the void, automatically summoned into existence the moment we started writing novels, which I think is really fascinating. There’s a lot of work in those early novels that’s being put into explaining why, and how, and to whom the story is being told. Because otherwise, how does it make sense that the book exists? It’s not a poem, or a play; it’s not taking the form of a traditional story or myth, not attempting to be an epic. Those early novels were about contemporary, real-seeming people, so the writers and audiences wanted an explanation for how the story had been recorded that relied on other existing forms of writing -- letters, journals, memoirs, sometimes claiming to be older texts that had been “found” (gothic novelists seemed to like this one). Sometimes the narrative voice is just the author using first person to actively tell you the story. They hadn’t yet bought into the presumption that we take for granted now, that a novel can have a voice that knows everything, without being the voice of any character in it.

And I think that it’s fascinating how similar that is to the heavy use of recording media as frame narrative in modern audio drama. It’s worth noting: classic radio drama doesn’t do this like we do now. By far, the standard for OTR is the same as the third-person omniscient perspective, the film camera; the storytelling presumes that you’re not going to need an explanation for how you’re hearing this. The audiences those shows were made for were used to fiction told solely in audio, in a way that a lot of modern audiences are not, and so that narrative leap of faith was kind of inherently presumed.

There’s also a way more common use of omniscient or internal narration in old radio drama that I feel like I mostly see now only in shows that are deliberately calling back to old styles and genres. A good example is The Penumbra; we hear Juno’s internal thoughts, just like so many of the noir-style detectives from the 40s and 50s I grew up listening to, and we never really ask why or how. (Except, of course, when the show pokes fun at this affectation, which I think really only works because it feels more like lampshading the stock character tropes of noir, as opposed to the actual audio storytelling technique it facilitates.) To take it further, there are some old radio shows like the sitcom Our Miss Brooks which go so far as to use an actual omniscient narrator to facilitate a lot of the scene transitions, but do so in a much more confident and comfortable way than modern shows like Bubble, where the narration reeks of “we’re making this audio drama in the hopes we can finally make the TV show, and we actually hate this medium and don’t know how to work in it, so rather than learning how to make what’s happening clear with just audio, we’re going to tell you what’s happening and then reference that we’re just telling you what’s happening.”

Bubble’s narration doesn’t work, because it’s actively pushing against the show, telling you things that sound design could have told you just as easily, sometimes actively acknowledging that the narration feels wrong instead of just not using narration. Our Miss Brooks is admittedly not one of my favorite old radio shows, but its use of narration is much smoother, because it’s written with a confidence that it’s only being used to clarify the the things that would be the absolute hardest to show with audio alone; confidence that they know how to tell everything else with sound. Internal narration from the likes of Juno Steel or Jack St. James or my favorite classic detective Johnny Dollar works because noir as a genre is inherently tied to the expressionist movement, where the (highly idiosyncratic) personality and worldview of the characters literally shapes how the world around them appears to the audience; it works to hear their thoughts, because we’re seeing the world through their eyes. We don’t have to know how they’re saying this to us, they just are.

None of which is at all to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with using framing devices! Actually the opposite, kind of. First of all, because I genuinely do think that it’s a sign that we are actively, at this moment learning how to tell these stories, and how to listen to them, which is just so, so exciting I don’t even have words to express it. And secondly, because as a person who loves thinking about stories and storytelling enough to write this kind of ridiculous essay, I am obsessed with metafiction. I’m a sucker for the likes of Archive 81, The Magnus Archives, Welcome to Night Vale, Station to Station, Greater Boston, Within the Wires. They’re stories that take the questions that framing devices are used to answer for writers and audiences who don’t feel comfortable not asking them -- Why is this story being told? Who is telling it? Who is it being told to? -- and use those questions to the full advantage of the story, exploring character, creating beautifully effective horror, creating a bond with the listener. (Hell, one of the admittedly many things that Midnight Radio was about for me was exploring how much value and comfort I have found in listening to stories that acknowledged I was listening to them.) I think, though, that not all stories necessarily are their best selves when they feel like they have to address those questions, and as fiction podcasts become a bit more mainstream I’m really hoping that writers will feel more comfortable in trusting the audience to suspend that disbelief, and that audiences will feel more comfortable doing it, and that framing devices will be less unjustly maligned.

Of course, all of that is focused on writing techniques, and I think that’s because I’m a writer who has studied writing! I know very little concretely about the part of audio storytelling that relies on sound design, so while I have a definite feeling that classic and modern audio fiction is using different sound design languages, or that the audio language of British audio drama (where there’s much more continuity in the history of the medium) is different from audio fiction from elsewhere, that’s a lot harder for me to put into words like this. It’s something I would desperately love to see explored by someone who did know that field intimately, though.

#there also ARE books out there about (mainly classic) audio fiction and I really need to read some of them #anyway! here's today's ridiculous ramble about The Medium #hope this was maybe enjoyable and/or interesting rather than just self indulgent lmao #stories and media tag #geekeryisafoot #asks #my posts

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