Madeline - 27 - they/she. Mostly here to talk about science and culture, textiles, and whatever books, games, movies, or shows my brain is currently latched onto. I'm here against my will.
a really funny thing about working with seeds in a day to day capacity is that you really need the seeds to stay in one place at any given moment, and the seeds disagree. so it’s just like, seeds end up on the floor. seeds end up on the desk. seeds appear in the crack between the glass plate of the microscope stage and its surrounding metal casing. seeds are around the dumpster outside. sweeping up seeds, patching up bags of seeds, picking seeds off your clothes and from between keyboard keys, very carefully transferring seeds into containers less likely to cause catastrophe should the seeds breach containment, like it’s just an uphill battle built into the work. almost as if the seeds are hyperevolved to disperse themselves or something
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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 :))
i think the luckiest moment of my life - at least, the luckiest moment i'm aware of & can remember - was when i poured HOURS of wrist-grinding labor into nålbinding baby socks with no pattern & vague measurements pirated off a machine-made baby sock, and they turned out weirdly long and skinny. and then the baby was born with such weirdly long and skinny feet that the only socks that fit him were the ones i made. what a very specific little lottery to win.
Nobody held me back so I reverse-engineered the process of deflected double-weave for my first loom weaving
I was so inspired by @batbetbitbotbut's very cool scarf that I pounced on the first 4-shaft loom that I could get my hands on! As I said in the tags of that post, I was going to need a heck of a prayer circle to restrain my crafter's hubris, and no such circle happened so here we are!
I couldn't find any non-paywalled explanations of the foundational concepts of deflected double-weave, nor did I see any patterns that i liked at a quick glance. Thankfully, I had a 30 second long vaguely gestured explanation from @absolute-messs of how it was done*, and the self-confidence of a guy who's fiddled around with string and trash enough to independently re-invent warp-weighted looms and rigid heddles with no prior knowledge of either.
The first pattern I drafted turned out to have major flaws with tension, so I un-wove it and figured out something else I could make without re-threading the whole thing. ~15 hours of pulling apart fuzzy halos with every row of the rainbow yarn and letting-the-yarn-tell-me-where-it-needed-tension later and it was done!!! It's the coziest thing I own. Feels weird to admit this but I had no idea scarves could actually count as a layer beyond keeping the wind off your face??? It's so fucking warm I love wool. (plsss ignore how messy the fringe is in the first pic, i'd been wearing it daily for several weeks and i wanted to see if it would felt enough to stay together without knots)(it didn't)
*or so I thought! turns out it was a rough gist of how regular-ass non-deflected doublecloth is made and my brain auto-completed the rest 😅
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I am reading an interview with a historian that set out to weave the type of textiles that was sold to plantations for use by enslaved people using period appropriate looms.
But because I knew nothing about weaving, everything had to be explained to me, down to the most basic tacit knowledge: things that an eight-year-old girl in 1828 would have known, because when she was not winding yarn around a quill to help her mother, she was working on the family’s loom herself...
The great challenge of our work as scholars—at least, those who are interested in historical reconstruction or the histories of any craft tradition—is that almost none of what we want to know is written down—because it didn’t have to be and it didn’t need to be articulated. So to be in a situation where expert weavers had to talk to me like I was a child was one of the best things that happened to me in the course of my research for this book.
SW: ... That’s really awesome. You’ve taught this class now for two semesters. What have you learned from your students?
SR: Their expertise as makers has clued me into historical experiences most scholars have glossed right over. A 1930s Federal Writers Project interview with a formerly enslaved octogenarian might reference a grandmother’s sewing prowess, but then a student will say, No, you can’t just skim over by that! Do you know how many hand stitches it takes to do the seam of a dress? If you’ve never handsewn a skirt (and I haven’t), you might need to be reminded of the labor involved. One student reproduced a 19th-century skirt as her final project, and it was all about the stitches. Their reading of primary sources picked up on things that I missed.
And this took me in new directions in my own research. You might remember a discussion of sewing labor in the final chapter of Plantation Goods and the implication of a cloth’s width for a woman’s work routine. If you know how to cut the pieces for a shirt from a 32-inch-wide piece of fabric, it is going to mess everything up when you’re given a bolt of 28-inch-wide cloth. I had seen letters from slaveholders in the 1830s and 1840s complaining about the narrowness of the cloth and how enslaved women didn’t “understand” these fabrics. This wasn’t transparent to me as a historian. Only with students talking about the expertise involved in cutting cloth into the components of a garment did I realize what a difference it made when, say, a New England weaver was haphazard and turned out fabric four inches narrower than the usual variety. That error would reverberate in the lives of people 1,000 miles away who might face extreme forms of violence because they couldn’t meet their daily production quotas. Or they might experience other kinds of privation—a lack of rags for postpartum women, for example—because a wider fabric left scraps while a narrower one did not.
After 9 months of work, my Oseberg tapestry sweater is complete!
This was my first sweater knitted in the round, first stranded colourwork project, and my first time steeking. It was definitely my most challenging project so far, and a lot of learning and research was involved. I used a colourwork chart created by the very talented Molly Gifford, which is available for free on Ravelry
For reference, this is one of the fragments uncovered from the gravesite:
Some scholars think that the Oseberg tapestry includes the earliest known artistic depiction of Odin's ravens, Huginn and Muninn. So I added them to the sleeves as a little Easter egg.
it is soooooo dangerous* how much crossover there is between different fiber arts. at their core theyre all just twisty twisty makes long string and twisty twisty plus over under makes fabric
"Sys how is your decent into fiber arts hell going"
Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'
This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'
Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.
I FAILED YOU ALL here is the site. You can also buy flax fiber from them. The PROPER shit, not the hot garbage ass tow fiber sold as flax top for handspinners.
'machine combing shortens the flax fibers by several inches'
This right here is part of why modern linen is a pale shadow of historical linen. Legitimately it cannot be properly replicated by machines. It HAS to be made by human hands if you want the best quality.
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This map is actually accurate. If you go to its source, WikiRug and click on each province, it will direct you to a wikirug page about that particular rug.
day one after changing sheets: ok im gonna kick my bad habits i won't eat in bed or leave knives or scissors or lighters in bed I'll have only normal bed things in my bed and I'll change the sheets more often too
day two after changing sheets: oh yeah this half eaten bundt cake is sleeping with me tonight
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I cannot stand the parodies of modern major general, they're overdone and simply not as good as the original. They've done them about everything, whatever topic, big or small.
And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.
The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.
The scanning of the lyrics in the meter is unbearable, they emphazise the syllables in ways that are untenable, in short in matters musical, prosodic and ephemeral, i cannot stand the parodies of modern major general!
I hang with older women shoutout to older women. Gotta be one of my favorite demographics. I'm at the knitting circle. I'm at your mom's place. I'm at leather pride. They love me for my polite young [gender indeterminate] swag
