#sunoftheguns

Tagged by @garglyswoof

1. Favorite book of all time?

If I pick one, all the others will get jealous, and anyway, with much hand-wringing I could maybe provide a top ten list of books that are very important to me for one reason or another, but picking one solitary favourite is an impossible task, and I won’t attempt it.

2. What are you currently reading?

Leucippe and Clitophon. It’s one of the few surviving novels of Ancient Greece, and it’s delightfully bizarre, and also features an argument about how gay sex is better than straight sex, but I’m not sure it can hold a candle to that one Roman novel that involved bestiality, a man getting his face peed on, and the protagonist twice escaping peril thanks to the timely arrival of some explosive diarrhea.

3. Have you ever considered writing a book?

Why yes, yes I have. It’s the one great existential crisis of my life, actually, thanks for asking.

4. Favourite series?

These are probably all going to be fantasy, because no other genre feels like you just absolutely can’t tell a story unless it’s 22 1000+ page volumes long. (If anyone wants to call me out here, let me just point out that there are 13 fics in that series, the first three are around 30 pages, and even the longest one is only about 200. It’s about 1400 pages altogether, which is like one and a half volumes in The Wheel of Time series or whatever. So THERE.)

Phedre’s Trilogy. I love Jacqueline Carey’s worldbuilding and the concept of a bunch of pansexuals running around doinking each other and playing dangerous political murder games.

Imriel’s Trilogy. See above. There’s actually a third trilogy set in the same universe a couple hundred years later, but honestly, I didn’t find it as compelling and didn’t read the third book. The first two are grand, though.

The Banned and the Banished. I read this series as a kid and it was dark and fucked-up and further proof that my parents left me to my own devices when it came to reading and really did not vet my books, because this would have made the TIMMY SHIELD YOUR EYES list for sure. The image of a naked woman parting her knees and a bunch of spiders crawling out of her vagina is still, for obvious reasons, viscerally with me.

The Deathgate Cycle. Another childhood favourite. Just a really good old school fantasy series with some great worldbuilding; I’ve been eyeing them again lately because I’ve been in the mood for some fantasy.  

The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve made it really clear that I’m not remotely religious, so you’d think the overt themes of Christianity might annoy me, but these are just great stories, and honestly, I don’t find them overly preachy; I think C.S. Lewis’ writing has so much to take away from it, whether the reader is devoutly faithful or an unrepentant sinner like myself.

5. Book you’d like to read?

Sea of Darkness by Brian Hicks. This is actually one of my dad’s Christmas presents. It’s about the history and discovery of the H.L. Hunley, a submarine that sank during the American Civil War. 

Nicholas II: Life and Death by Edvard Radinsky. I spotted this at the used bookstore Friday afternoon and it immediately called to the obsessive Russophile part of me, so I had a flick through it and decided I must own it. Then I remembered that I was pretty sure I’d seen the Russian edition in one of the bookstores I use for all my Russian reading needs, and rushed home to find it. I did nick a copy from e-bay, so it’s now on its way to me, and, weather permitting, in about a week we will find our way into one another’s arms and I can read yet again about the brutal demise of the Romanovs and wring my hands over it, except this time in Russian, so with 3x the misery for half the price.  

Neil Gaiman’s The View From the Cheap Seats. This is a collection of essays on writing and creating that I’ve been eyeing for a while because Gaiman has such a great attitude about writing and seems like such a down-to-earth guy who probably has some great things to say about literature and the way it shapes us. 

 The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti. It’s about cheese. Also, Kelly’s descriptions of it really intrigued me.

And Quiet Flows the Don/Quiet Don (It’s literally just Quiet Don in Russian, but the English title is And Quiet Flows the Don, I’m sure because a lot of English speakers have no idea that it’s a river in Russia.) This is a massive War and Peace sized novel on the Don Cossacks during the turbulent years of WWI and the following Revolutions that I’ve been meaning to read for a while; I’m just waiting for my Russian vocab to catch up; I think I’m going to attempt it soon.

7. Favourite fictional character(s)?

D’artagnan, the little poncing YOU WANNA’ GO?? shit

 Edmond Dantes/The Count of Monte Christo, because I aspire to those levels of revenge but I know I’m far too impatient to carry out anything so glorious.

Magdalen from Wilkie Collin’s No Name because despite restrictive Victorian conventions meant to keep women in their parlors with a dainty cup of tea, she said ‘Fuck you all, I’m gonna’ steal back the rightful inheritance you cheated me out of through cunning and deception’ and went on to outwit a bunch of men.

Pierre Bezukhov from War and Peace because he’s such a great bumbling dweebus of a well-meaning Russian aristocrat, and I’ve always had a soft spot for him

Elizabeth Bennett, Pride and Prejudice. She destroys men with only her words; a true rolemodel for us all.

8. Book Ships

Elizabeth Bennett/Mr. Darcy

Sarra Ambrai/Collan Rosvenir from Melanie Rawn’s Exiles series. At one point I was so upset by something that happens to this couple that I actually threw the book across my room

Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler; they’re both terrible people, and tbh I think Scarlett totally gets what she deserves in the end, but their push and pull is so entertaining.

Jo and Laurie from Little Women and, ok, I know it doesn’t happen, I know this book was published over a century ago, but I’m still salty about it, all right??

9. Pick up the book closest to you, open page one and write down the first paragraph.

The closest book to me is a Russian translation of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, so I walked over to the closest available English books and picked one at random. It’s a collection of Keats’ poetry:

Now Morning from her orient chamber came,

And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill;

Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,

Silv’ring the untainted gushes of its rill;

Which, pure from mossy beds of simple flowers,

By many streams a little lake did fill,

Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,

And, in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.

10. What’s the 1st fandom you were in?

I don’t remember ever really participating in any fandom related to books. I do remember when I was a kid getting pretty into an online forum dedicated to Quest for Glory (90s point and click fantasy game), though. 

The concept was great really. The idea and the inspiration were there. But the execution was so damn horrible.

I mean we have a character that was born into slavery. Is taken from his mother that is left behind as a slave. The separation alone is a horrible thing to do to a child. And then he is taken to an order that takes only youngest children because their indoctrination is not working that well on older ages due to emotional attachments. He is brought up with the responsibility of being the chosen one. In an environment that is teaching him to be a weapon and is using him at will all the while forbidding him to feel, to care, to form emotional attachments. It is literally inhuman. And it is disguised as the moral compass of the world. You have a young man that is now allowed to fall in love. To express sentiment. That he must obey blindly. That even individual thinking is not allowed ‘completely’. He serves the Jedi and a corrupt system as the Republic was and had a devil on his shoulder whispering in his ear for years paving his path towards one destination alone. Anakin saw his mother raped and beaten to death. He was born by the force so he never had a father and the father figures he had taken him away from his mother and brought him up not to be Anakin but a Jedi. The chosen one nonetheless. 

It is like a flood building and building behind a dam that is bound to break. The cracks were there. Becoming bigger and bigger and then that ‘Do It” would be the climax of a lifetime of anguish and suffocation. Of course all that emotional weight and all that fear and the terror and messed up upbringing would lead to rage and hate and despair and pain. And it would all go out at once. It is the click that shutters your mind. The straw that breaks the camel’s back and chaos follows.

And as an idea it was brilliant. But then...Sigh.

It was not just the dialogue and the acting and the soap. It was a combination of every element that could go wrong. This is why creators should not be left unchecked and they need editors and some balance and a reality check. A great idea does not mean that the outcome will be great. Talent and ideas are like 10% of a project if not less. And the Star Wars prequels are an example of this.

this is super cute oh my goodness! I’m always so happy to hear that people like my art, and it’s an even better feeling when I get messages that are as sweet as this!

LOL exactly, I honestly think so many people are salty because all of these male director’s excuses just got pwned by one relatively inexperienced female director. Like wow, when you actually want to write men and women and white people and black people and Native Americans or any other person like an actual person all you have to do is treat them like an actual person.

cupcakemolotov said: yay! i can’t wait to see it next weekend!!!!

I lurk on a gay forum from time to time because it’s got a subforum on relationships and sexual advice, and there are a lot of topics to do with the physical mechanics of gay sex. Research, y’know. lmao Anyway, there’s also a forum where members can post dick pics, and me being me, I’m scrolling through them with fascinated horror like, WTF IS WRONG WITH THESE THINGS?? And all the comments are like, ‘beautiful cock!!’ WHERE. WHERE. SHOW ME A BEAUTIFUL DICK. I GUARANTEE YOU IT DOESN’T EXIST, SON.