#dreamspinner

Weekly Wing-it: DatBan

i'm open for wing-its weekly on fridays/saturdays via google form linked on FA/twitter/BlueSky/discord! Moonbeam+ supporters get a discounted price on Simple-Cel Wing-its! https://www.patreon.com/nixsmis https://ko-fi.com/nixsmis/tiers character © DatBan art © me

Feanor/Nerdanel Ship It

What made you ship it?

I think it just comes as a natural consequence of Feanor being one of my favourite characters and just sort of... really liking how this ship happens in the canon itself. we have nothing at all about how some relationships come to be, others just straight up happen because of insta-love, and it’s very refreshing to see like, an actual relationship develop on the basis of mutual understanding and growing love (like, right there on the page rather than just in my head) -- by actual relationship meaning not a fairy tale type nor doom-decreed type, nor just... left to my own devices to decide how it comes to be, or “royalty conveniently falls in love with other royalty”. it just reads like two actual people, realistically loving one another.

What are your favorite things about the ship?

I think their first meeting is one of my fave aspects, the meeting in the wild while travelling and being companions of many journeys. and how it is based on mutual respect, which of course makes their ending all the more tragic.

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

I’m not sure how unpopular this is in a wider context, but -- Nerdanel is short and chubby. With a wide set of shoulders, but not fit and athletic. For fit, and tall, and athletic, you want to look at Galadriel “Nerwen”, tallest and fairest of eleven women; Aredhel, taller than most women; throw in Idril, described as tall as a warrior.

my point is, the beauty standards the elves shat out include tallness as a very desirable trait; as well as being slender. and Nerdanel isn’t “the fairest of her people” (according to the narrator anyway lol), and I’m just kinda like, giving her traits that both we and the elves generally consider attractive kind of defeats the entire point. 

so, she’s short and most definitely not thin and/or visibly fit. 

I realise this is mostly about nerdanel but I guess that’s what came to mind

Finrod/Curufin Ship it

What made you ship it?

I'm getting a hint of the pissed at some shit around RWA so we are gonna talk. (Disclaimer: writing and its history are a special interest of mine, I know a lot about it but do not have a degree, if you catch misinfo, tell me)

I saw someone say that POD might not be considered 'real' publishing, so we gonna have a QUICK history lesson. Publishing started with some motherfucker hand. Printing. Every. Single. Letter. There was no handy button to press and make a million copies of your book. Everything was "publish on demand." I'm serious. Think about how hard you have to focus to make your writing pretty. Now imagine doing that every day for months. To hand print one book. And then one interesting dude invented the printing press. And publishing was still "publish on demand" for a while. Now at a certain point the industry morphed to what it is today (blah blah thou shalt commit adultery, blah blah Martin Luther is a smart motherfucker, blab blah newspapers, blah blah computers, blah blah fuck McMillan blah), but understand that this all started with some high and fancy noble asking a monk to hand print him a really pretty book for a shitwhack of gold coins he liberated from his peasants.

At the moment I’m working on the third Dark Space book to end that series. Shit just got really weird, NGL. So hopefully I’ll get that out sometime this year–it’s self-published, so the schedule is entirely dependant on whether or not I get my arse into gear and finish the damn thing! 

On my list after that will be the third Emergency Services book, which I keep stopping and starting and for some reason changing where it’s set. I really gotta pin that down, lol! 

And I’m doing this while fighting off an unexpected attack from some steampunk plot bunnies that keep screaming ideas for a trilogy at me. Those bastards! 

But the next official thing is out on July 23, of course, with this: 

Aramin Decourcey—Min to his few friends—might be the best thief in Amberwich, and he might have a secret that helps him survive the cutthroat world of aristocratic families and their powerful magic users, but he does have one weakness: his affection for his adopted nephew, Harry.

When the formidable Sabadine family curses Harry, Min must accept a suicide mission to save his life: retrieve Kazimir Stone, a low-level Sabadine hedgewitch who refuses to come home after completing his apprenticeship… and who is in Anhaga, a seaside village under the control of the terrifying Hidden Lord of the fae. If that wasn’t enough, Kaz is far from the simple hedgewitch he seems.

With the Sabadines on one side and the fae on the other, Min doesn’t have time to deal with a crisis of conscience—or the growing attraction between him and Kaz. He needs to get Kaz back to Amberwich and get Harry’s curse lifted before it kills him. Saving Harry means handing Kaz over to his ruthless family. Saving Kaz means letting Harry die. Min might pride himself on his cleverness, but he can’t see his way out of this one.

The Hidden Lord might see that he never gets the choice.

“I have never seen a wolf love another as much as he loved you.”