i know most of your asks are about sandman and good omens, so im gonna go against that trend and instead ask about a niche short story of yours from 1985. its understandable if you dont remember but i thought i'd give it a shot anyway

so in "when is a door" from secret origins, you mention the characters quiz and probe as part of the riddlers backstory. the dc wiki states that these are the same characters as echo and query (created by chuck dixon) and query and quiz (created for a cartoon i think?? or by doug moench. i dont remember). in your opinion, do you think these are all the same characters or are query and echo separate from quiz and probe? this is a long standing discussion between riddler enjoyers and im curious to hear you weigh in

I'm pretty sure it was Query and Probe in Secret Origins. I'm pretty sure that was their first appearance anywhere, and they have transmuted since. I forget whether they were originally my idea or Matt Wagner's (ditto the male assistants all called Mark).

Eddie and friends :]

I feel like I would love Jason Todd if I could actually get the right fic recommended to me.

Hint hint.

(I have never read DC comics. Assume that I know only the basics of his background and story.)

happy 28th birthday justice smith !! ( ft. some of my favourite roles )

GUESS WHOSE BACK

BACK AGAIN

QUERY WITH AN ASCII PEEN ON THE COVER IS BACK (in print)

TELL A FRIEND (reblog)

au wHERE kEVIN fLYNN FORGOT THAT CAPS LOCK WAS ON WHEN PROGRAMMING tHE gRID SO ALL THE pROGRAMS TALK LIKE THIS

Some of my newest sketches

Your opinion on this cursed conlang?

https://youtu.be/LAeeUwF-clw?si=IwN3-M_zbNQlEaOG

I want to take a moment to respond more seriously to this—not the video specifically, but things like it. The video is an amusing attempt to come up with a system of reading Chinese characters literally (so the strokes have actual phonetic realizations). It's intended as a joke, and presented in a style that is humorous. This is why it's called a "cursedlang" or cursed conlang.

I've seen non-conlang humorous posts on here and other places (like Reddit) that I've found quite amusing. They're called shitposts.

If I may be old for a minute, we had a different word for these things in my day:

JOKES

A joke is meant to be funny, and if it is, then it's good.

Shitposts and cursedlangs and things like them, though, are derided.

Why, if I may ask, the fuck?

Is there something wrong with fun? Is there something wrong with being funny? Are posts only good if they're serious? Or is this one of those "we show you we like a thing by telling you in kind of a mean way it sucks and saying you shouldn't have done it" types of things?

Like, seriously, I don't get it.

Thank you for the prompt @sigma-time-lord :D 💚 The prompt was: Edward stuck in one of his own traps.

R: Um... Query...? Echo? There's a...situation.

Q: Oh God, not AGAIN.

Some riddler sketches (+ memes)

I like that the preview screenshots on the Steam page for Tron Identity includes one of Grish choking Query. As if to say "Yeah, this isn't a spoiler, you're probably going to piss off the big beefy grumpy guy with the scar at some point."

I of course also love the dialogue options of this scene. It's like a joke straight out of Monkey Island.

GUYS you have no idea how much I want this goat. If anyone out there in the continental US is going to Ikea sometime soon, can you please get two of these for me?? It's already sold out at my local store and it's not available online. I will Venmo you money and pay for shipping just please get me this goat.

On this Batman Day I have to give a huge shout out to the sensational entertainer and cosplayer Ruby Rinekso, who always brings his A game to every single cosplay he does. I love his energy and spirit so much! Happy Batman Day Ruby! ♥️

Querying Stats for Saints!

This post originally went out via my author newsletter, but I realized that if I’m finally going to start using tumblr as an author platform that means I HAVE A BLOG AGAIN!! 

I  recently announced that Saints of Storm and Sorrow, my Filipino Epic Fantasy sold in a two book deal to Titan UK and will be coming out June of 2024. (if you’re interested in Submission Stats definitely go sign up for my newsletter as those stats will go out exclusively in this month’s newsletter. I also send out whatever Filipino recipe I’m tinkering with at the moment, this month is a mouthwatering Kang kong/water spinach adobo stirfry)

Saints was pitched as a Filipino EMPIRE OF SAND X POPPY WAR Lunurin, a mestiza stormcaller, hides in a convent—from the Inquisition branding her a witch, and the Goddess of Storms, who sings of drowning colonizers. When she’s discovered, a marriage-of-convenience might save her from the Church, but not her Goddess. A typhoon is brewing in Lunurin’s bones. Freeing it will destroy the violent colonizers, but also the family she found in the convent and her new marriage.  

QUERY STAT TIME!

I’d like to start by saying I did query 3 books in addition to Saints, And They Called Her Stormbringer (2018- Epic Fantasy), One Half a Dead Witch (2019-Contemporary Fantasy), and Mushroom ABCs (2022- Picture Book) and I’m glad to have signed with an agent who’s so supportive of my backlist. If I’m completely honest I sent my first query for And They Called Her Stormbringer, my freshman year of college in 2012 and received such a brutal (though personalized) rejection that I stopped querying for 6 years and creative writing for almost 2. I will admit now that the feedback was accurate, but as a young writer I had no idea what to do with it or how to revise as I had no writing partners or critique groups at the time.

Fast forward almost a decade. Saints of Storm and Sorrow was fast drafted all 131k words in 31 days for Nanowrimo 2020. I worked to revise it with help from beta readers and CPs from February through August of 2021, I’m a fast drafter and a slow reviser. I went through several rounds of revision. I started querying Saints in the fall of 2021. In Oct 2021 I learned I’d gotten into Pitchwars with my amazing mentor Michella Domenici <3 and I quickly pulled all my active queries and fulls promising to resend the manuscript after the revisions I’d complete during the Pitchwars Mentorship. I then spent the winter of 2021 in an absolute whirlwind of revisions that culminated in the PitchWars Showcase in February 2022. I got 15 requests!! I was thrilled and sure that my querying journey would soon be over!! Saints and I then entered the LONG WAIT. I went into and came out of several writing burn out funks. At no point in the last five years I’ve never written so little as I did in 2022, I found it very hard to write the wait for the first time in my querying journey. Every few months I’d drag myself out of my agonies of waiting and hurl out another thirty or forty queries. Over TEN months post PitchWars I sent a total of 164 queries for Saints of Storm and Sorrow, I received 50 full requests, 4 partial requests, and finally 3 offers. For those who like maths that’s a 33% request rate. In my low moments it started to feel like I’d written a great query but a terrible book! I was told the pacing was too slow and too fast, that the world building was too hard to grasp and not detailed enough! I completed a panic revision in September 2022 trying to address these issues. I nudged everyone who still had my full or partials with the revision, and low and behold two months later, Saints got its first offer on the week of Thanksgiving. I was ecstatic. I asked for three weeks to consider (on account of thanksgiving) and quickly sent out nudges for every open full (18!) AND every query remaining open (65!). OVER 80 emails/Query Tracker messages WOW. 10 more requests for fulls and extensions to read came in. I waited, my inbox rattling with news for almost three weeks. I don’t ever want to send that many emails again! My agent Ramona Pina with Bookends actually ended up requesting my full on my original decision date! But I’d been asked for an extension by a few other agents and let her know she had 3 more days if she wanted to read. Ramona read Saints in two days and the day before my extended decision date sent me her offer of rep. We hopped on a call and I quickly realized there was no way I could decide in 24 hours between such excellent agent choices. I reached out to the other offering agents requesting the weekend to consider and contacted several of Ramona’s clients to get their perspective. After a weekend of decision agony I made the best decision for me and Saints of Storm and Sorrow.

I can’t emphasis enough how much of this process depended on LUCK and GRIT. The Luck of finding a fellow Filipina mentor in Pitchwars who totally understood my vision for the book. The luck of getting Saints into the right hands at the right time. The GRIT to keep sending my query package out even though at points I was convinced far too many people had rejected it to ever find my yes. My book had to get in front of SO many eyes before I found the right ones, but if you’re in the trenches now remember it only takes one yes. Querying is a numbers game and a luck game more than one of skill. You may read about those unicorn authors who send out 15 queries on their first book and get 7 offers, remember they are the outliers. Their books had the exceptional luck of speaking to the market at the right time. Many many wonderful books, telling excellent stories, having great literary merit will struggle in the trenches for reasons that have nothing to do with the book, but everything to do with timing, a contracting market, layoffs of editors and closing of imprints for particular genres.

It can be so hard to remember that rejections can come on your manuscript that have nothing to do with the quality of your work, but I think it’s one of the essential skills that this long journey to become published forced me to learn.