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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 wonāt be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrowās POV (I hope I heard that right)
Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame
Muirās 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 ā Muir got published because she had good contacts
George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muirās mentor at Clarion
Muir took what she described as the ātraditional routeā 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 ā Muir doesnāt approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.
Muir wouldnāt do anything differently
We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the āsisterly relationshipā between characters in Muirās 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 ā it doesnāt suit Muir personally, but itās 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. Thereās 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 universesā¦
ā¦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 whatās really happening, and one which is Nonaās 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 doesnāt 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 companyā¦ which didnāt come to anything
POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series
A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didnāt want to write the same thing again ā she gets āeasily boredā
She focussed on the sentence links of each character ā Gideonās sentence links are very different from Harrowās
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, thatās 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 didnāt write in perfect second person ā it was actually first person
She will always turn to On a Winterās Night a Traveller
And this is another videogame inspiration
She mentioned Homestuck then said donāt mention Homestuck soā¦
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 ā note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book
Itās 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
Sheās drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic
Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series
Muir wasnāt 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 ātelekinesis with meatā
Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: what was Muirās worldbuilding starting point/seed?
Muir struggled to find this out. Thereās no magic formula
Creative writing canāt 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 worldbuildingās sake
Everything in Muirās 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 didnāt 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 Jacksonās early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example
For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged ā 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 āDawn Hound by Necksy Strownackā 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
Muirās advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as youāll 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 didnāt make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured ā many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if Iām wrong!)
Mr Bonesā Wild Ride
Emperish meme
Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)
Harrow calling Ianthe the āGod of Thotā 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 doesnāt 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 ā 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 doesnāt see this as jarring ā why canāt 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, itās stuck in time. Thereās 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
āFloralinda blowsā ā Tamsyn Muir
Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ābad girl who gets worseā
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 donāt hold back
Take a sin, take a virtue
All of Muirās characters, in some way, are a āfuck upā
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: whoās 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 āBehind the Nameā lol
She has a ālaundry listā of names she likes which sheās 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 doesnāt mind if people sus out a characterās 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
Itās eating someoneās 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 Muirās favourite ideas
And, itās 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 didnāt simply wipe and rewrite them ā 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 didnāt 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 doesnāt do a perfect job, and that itās actually impossible to actually write immortality ā it will be too alien for the reader
But this links back to the theme of memory ā 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 doesnāt 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
āPayback for Malory Towersā
A.K. Markwoodās 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 āGormandustā doesnāt exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)
Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didnāt hear this correctly)
Q&A: Warhammer inspiration
Muir didnāt 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: Whatās 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 itās done!
There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add
For example, thereās a big Harrow AUā¦
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 :))
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I wentānot overseas, but by public transportāto Corpus to hear Tamsyn Muir speak.
The bad news: Alecto is not finished. It will hopefully come out "soon" and will likely be fast tracked with few ARCs when it's finished.
The news you may take differently depending on your preferences: It is not being split.
The good news: It is not all written in Ye Olde Alecto speak (it sounds like Harrow's POV will be fairly major, but there will apparently be several narrators).
A slightly random selection of things I frantically scribbled down:
The protagonists of TLT would make an "absolutely shit" D&D party ("Palamedes and Camilla would be fine")
We could have had horse plinko and begone thot, but for the anti-meme ministrations of her editor. She would love an edition that puts all of the memes back in.
On Catholic imagery and lesbianism: "you ain't seen nothing yet"
"Harrow is now a believer without a church"
She said that while John and Alecto's relationship is not meant to be a 1:1 analogue to Humbert Humbert and Lolita, there is the idea of a man fashioning (something he thinks is) a girl into a perfect partner (the question of whether that is a sexual partner apparently may be relevant to ATN)
She does not have a favourite House and would just be a regular person in the world of TLT (though she would last about 0.5 seconds)
The tension between the Houses' ostensible gender equality and the misogyny that still persists is apparently also relevant to ATN. "John has set out to make a society on values he holds dear and cherishes and in some ways he has done really well... And in some way he has fucked it up beyond comprehension" (Maybe not an exact quote. My auditory processing is questionable.)
The backstory in NTN was planned right from the beginning
Lyctors "are not truly human any more. They've crystallised themselves" and "They have lost themselves and the only thing they've been able to hold on to is what other people make of them". She said she would have liked to make the Lyctors more alien but had to balance that with them being relatable narratively.
She is dying to read TLT fanfiction once she finishes the series.
Having a traumatic childhood means you cannot talk even objectively about your basic foundational experiences without it being "venting", even if you're not actually venting. You just straight up have a huge chunk of your life you can't talk about, full stop, without it being trauma dumping.
And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.
It's to the point I get irritated when something I said is framed as venting when I'm literally just talking about my life experiences, doing my best to keep emotion out of it.
when I was in high school, I overheard two older students talking about a friend of theirs.
One of them said something like, "it doesn't bother me that [Friend] was in residential mental health treatment, I just wish they wouldn't talk about it ALL the time".
The other replied, "Well, that was all of last year for them. So when they say 'when I was in treatment,' it's like when you say 'last year'."
I try to remember that any time someone says something that sounds Shocking to me. sometimes one person's scary special crisis is another person's last year.
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It's absolutely crazy that intellectual labor can wipe you out. It seems like it shouldn't be a thing, like your stores of brain juice shouldn't be able to be depleted in that way.
I feel like a wizard that's out of spell slots, and to me that's a hackish mechanical limitation put in place to try to balance the classes.
#it's fucked and it's bad design
#i should be able to write and edit for 20 hours a day
#i'm just sitting there how are we even using energy
#feels made up (via @softest-punk, emphasis mine)
Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).
And that's how much energy it's using at rest.
That's the baseline.
So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.
ok so for those of you who haven't seen it, wandavision is a marvel show centered around wanda maximoff and her husband vision. im a little hazy on the context because i haven't seen any of the avengers movies lol, but prior to the show vision died, i think fighting thanos. wanda is so full of grief that she uses her powers to create a contained world where everything is fine, based on her childhood love of sitcoms. essentially, what she's actually done is mentally enslave an entire town into acting out sitcom plots, and then wipe her own memory. over the course of the show she slowly realizes that this isn't reality, interspersed with like fbi agents or whatever the fuck on the outside trying to get into the town.
the obvious parallel is to harrow and her dream bubble, but i think it would be even more interesting for wanda's place to be filled by john. i firmly believe that any adaptation of tlt should do its own thing with the plot and world rather than trying and inevitably failing to recreate the books. so what i'd love to see would be a canaan house sitcom with the original necros/cavs as the supporting actors.
in my mind, this would be a prequel of sorts, split across the resurrection. half of the show would be set in canaan house, with the gang trying to figure out lyctorhood, but framed as a comedy, with all sorts of lighthearted interpersonal drama and necromantic hijinks. i think it would also potentially be interesting as a mockumentary; definitely it would be based on iconic millenial shows and that specific style of comedy. like maybe the show is a cross between friends and the office.
meanwhile, you have flashbacks to before the apocalypse, with the compound and the cow wall etc. like in wandavision, this side of the story would have a completely different aspect ratio/coloring/tone entirely. you get some of the moments of comedy, but overall there's this tone of horror-fueled dramatic irony as we learn more and more about how they ended up in canaan house.
as the season goes on, the canaan house plot becomes more and more strained, as tensions between the various necros/cavs become more and more evident. you see cristabel and alfred whispering together, cytherea's getting more and more sick, mercymorn and augustine are sniping at each other, their research grows more and more intense, and overall the audience is feeling increasing dread.
both plotlines begin to ramp up in intensity, with the apocalypse getting nearer and nearer in one, and the climax of the research at canaan house/the lyctors' ascension is on the horizon. in the finale, we see everything go to shit in both, ending with john's ascension to godhood and alecto's creation in one, and the chain of lyctoral ascensions in the other. we end first with anastasia's death, with hints of john's lies, and then with john surveying the ruins of earth, with a shot of canaan house to close us out.
and then there are a couple of possibilities for a season two, following john's slipping control of the situation on the mithraeum as well as covering the post godification john chapters, and potentially up to dios apate major. however i think in this hypothetical scenario where i'm showrunning this i would go to a completely new format for season two.
so yeah! wandavision but it doesn't fall apart like 3-4 episodes in š
so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, weāre supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men canāt tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.
This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.
And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jenniferās Body. I was flabbergasted. Itās not scary! Itās not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.
Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldnāt even talk about it. One of them said he couldnāt look at his wife for a week after reading it.
Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.
Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlashāmen yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulateāthe backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.
My conclusion? Most menāat least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a āvillaināāare perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). Theyāre even sort of fine when women do violence to women (āooooo cat fight!ā).
But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.
So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassmentābehavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actionsāis to break something?
Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.
In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.
If any of this is at ALL interesting to you, I *highly* recommend reading The Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas. Itās post-apocalyptic āfeministā fiction that can be difficult to stomach (alllll the trigger warnings) but thereās no other book series that has made such a strong impression on me and for a lot of the reasons explained by the above post. It goes the extra steps of flipping the narrative a few times so once the reader feels that justice starts getting served the author swings the pendulum so far the other direction that you get extremely uncomfortable again.
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This is like the time after 100+ episodes of watching this amazing young couple restore a house on YouTube, I found out Iām the same age as the womanās dad.
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