mostly for my own memory

Goblin culture doesn’t have a concept of “Property”. A stick on the ground and a tool in a locked shed are equally up for grabs if a thing needs doing. They casually take and leave things all over their communities, eat from communal pots, and genuinely Do Not Understand why the Core Races are so Angry and prone to Violence all the time.

Consequently Goblins who live near Core communities develop a reputation as “Thieves” despite not even having a *word* for that. (The closest word they have is more like “Greedy” and it means a person that hides things so nobody else can use them, and it’s a surefire fight-starter to call a Goblin that)

Common Orc Spiritual beliefs hold that a Soul can only grow stronger by overcoming Challenges in life, and see intruding on another person’s Challenge unasked for as not just Rude, but Deeply Harmful. You’re Stealing their chance to Grow. Asking for help is deeply personal and doing so can be both a way to grow closer with them or a too-personal intrusion, depending on your existing relationship with them. An exception is Children, as far as most Orcs are concerned, all Children are fundamentally the responsibility of the Whole Community, regardless of whose child they are, or even if said child is an Orc at *all*.

And in case Tumblr flags the post as porn again, here is the free-to-access link on my patreon, complete with PDF download file: https://www.patreon.com/posts/23396846

Some MORE incredibly rude ravens

from TheTruthShallMakeYeFret/@MakeYeFretPod on Twitter:

Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.

You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.

You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.

The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.

Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”

That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not. 

J.R.R. Tolkien

“[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”

Yeah! I write poetry and I have a #poetry tag where I share my original stuff, but most of it’s old :^) !

Among my favorites are:

for women who are “difficult” to love - Warsan Shire

wild geese -Mary Oliver

the lake isle of Innisfree - W.B. Yeats

1) Women actually being quite clear, but not telling men what they want to hear.  ”She said she doesn’t want to talk to me?  So many mixed messages and confusing signals!”

2) Women not having cheat codes.  ”I tried being nice, and she didn’t have sex with me.  I tried being an asshole, and she didn’t have sex with me.  Come on, there’s got to be some kind of solution to this puzzle!”

3) Women not being a hive mind.  ”First a woman told me that she likes guys with big muscles.  Then the very next day a woman told me she thinks muscles aren’t attractive at all.  Make up your mind, women!”

According to his birth certificate, anyway. She just kind of accepted that the details were a little fudged. Relativity, and all.

Maybe the stranger would have succeeded in whatever it was he wanted to do, except that he really did just show up. Appeared, like a ghost made flesh, right in the backyard. Clark, thank goodness, was out in the fields with Jonathan. He couldn’t bear to be alone, that boy, and they could never bear to leave him.

Which left Martha free to shoot the ghostly intruder in the face.

Martha had not always considered herself a shoot first, ask questions later sort of a person. But that was before she found a baby in a spaceship where her corn was supposed to be.

They’d switch off, Jonathan and her, who got Clark and who got the shotgun. Martha got the shotgun more often than not. Guns made her husband uncomfortable. She was hardly a fan, but she’d always been a terrible pacifist. Too determined to defend herself.

The sight of all that blood and brain and bone was still nauseating. She compartmentalized, told herself it was no different from slaughtering a cow; didn’t think about riot gear or tear gas or the friends she’d lost or all the things she’d moved away from when her heart couldn’t take it any longer. This was different. This was her son.

She prodded the corpse with her foot. It remained a corpse. A real nasty looking corpse, all big and burly and holding a gun much too large. She didn’t like making assumptions based on appearances, but she didn’t imagine he’d been coming for anything nice. She bent down to search his pockets, found a metal wallet and flipped it open.

Born 2018.

Well, hell. Wasn’t that just a kick in the pants?

Probably she ought to have been a bit more unsettled than she was. But she’d been waiting two years for someone to show up on her doorstep, men in black or UFOs or something. Hell, she’d half expected her sweet little boy to hatch into something worse.

Just because she brought home space babies didn’t mean she was a damn fool.

Jonathan had rejoined her in long strides, was holding Clark in such a way that he couldn’t see the corpse on the ground. “Well, shit,” he said.

“Eyup,” Martha agreed.

“Don’t look government.”

“Nope.”

“We burying him?”

“I’ll bury him,” Martha said, standing up. “You get Clark inside and read him a book or something. I don’t want him seeing any of this, getting him messed up in the head.”

“You sure? Looks heavy.”

“That’s why we have a wheelbarrow. I’ll stick him out behind the barn, might as well keep all our secrets in one place.”

Martha had a long time to think as she dug a time traveler’s grave. There were a lot of reasons someone might travel back in time trying to kill her kid. The first was her instinct as a mother, which was: he was a fucking asshole. Who killed a kid? Fucking assholes, that was who.

Now, it was also possible that her sweet little boy grew up to be some kind of space Hitler. She didn’t think she’d raise that kind of a kid, but she didn’t suppose there was any parent who set out to raise a Hitler.

Still didn’t sit right with her. She didn’t much like the idea of killing baby Hitler, either.

The BookCon panel For Fans, By Fans: Fanfiction Addiction can best be summed up by the moment when Riot Baby author Tochi Onyebuchi mentioned a Superman fanfic about Martha Kent shooting every time traveler who tries to kill baby Clark—and then an audience member piped up with the name of the fic, and suddenly all the attendees were distracted bookmarking Empty Graves by Unpretty to read after they were finished gushing about fanfiction.

source: Geeking Out About Fanfiction with Tor.com Publishing Authors at BookCon by Natalie Zutter at Tor.com