Once Upon an Answer Time - Nuada Is a Douche (Mhmmm)

ppl keep talking about Nuada bieng so romantic and shit but I'm on chapter 8 and he's still a fucking dick. What is up with him? Why does Dylan fall in love w/ him? Why does she put up with his shit?

What is up with him? Well, besides the fact that he comes from an oppressed people that have been butchered over countless centuries by her people, the fact that the monarchs responsible for protecting his people refuse to do anything about it (even just talk), that her people have massacred countless numbers of his loved ones and comrades, and that he’s been abused himself in serious horrible ways and has vicious PTSD that he’s getting no help for because his father essentially won’t let him…

On top of all those things, he’s also kind of a douche at the beginning.

And she doesn’t put up with his crud. She calls him on it. But she’s not going to trivialize or invalidate his anger and pain, either. She understands pain and oppression and anger and fear. She has PTSD and she’s a psychiatrist. She knows what to do with him. She cares about him because he’s in pain and he saved her life but she’s not letting him abuse her. When he tries, despite the fact that he’s magical and could squash her into people-pulp, she still goes toe to toe with him to make him stop getting in her face and forces him to acknowledge that she doesn’t deserve the anger that isn’t her fault.

They’re not together in chapter 8. They’re not together in chapter 18 or chapter 28 or even chapter 38. Give it some time. They’ve both got a lot of trauma and prejudice and grief to work through.

Empress of Ice and Oceans Mythology Influences

It’s actually only 1/3 in Africa. 1/3 of it is in a country modeled after Yoruba, 1/3 is in a country modeled after Russia, and 1/3 is in a country modeled after Persia. Because the male and female leads have to do a lot of traveling.

But! So my male lead is essentially Koschei the Deathless, but instead of being his love, Marya Morevna is his enemy. I’m combining the story of Koschei with the story of “The Firebird” and several others. My female lead is a water-witch from this kingdom called Ilfe.

The “Hades & Persephone” thing is more a winter vs summer deal. My male lead, Katschei, is from the country of Zima, where it’s always cold as frack and snowing and awful. Thing Siberia. Ayao, my female lead - her people call it the Winter Kingdom and refer to Katschei as the Ice King and the Winter Jackal (they also call him Nunda, Eater of People).

Ayao is from Ilfe, which is islands and jungle and some desert, and it’s usually pretty warm there (summers in Zima are as cold as winters in Ilfe).

So we have essentially a summertime princess being forced to go live in the (in her mind, anyway) coldest, bleakest, darkest place imaginable when she’s used to sunshine and warmth and crashing ocean waves and jungles. Now she’s got ice and snow and dry wind and 30 whole days when the sun isn’t coming up. Luckily she’s allowed to bring some handmaidens and Katschei’s “cousin” Vasalisa is a good friend of hers, so she’s not entirely alone.

Was Asked Why I Made Nuala Disabled in The Silver Princess?

She’s a racebent, genderbent version Nuada Airgetlamh (Nuada of the Silver Hand) from Irish mythology.

In the myth, he gets his arm chopped off in battle and because of ridiculous laws loses his right to be king, because he’s not “perfect.” What I like about the myth is that in order to become “perfect” again and take the throne back, all he has to do is wear a prosthetic. It doesn’t even have to be realistic looking (it’s made of silver, hence Nuada of the Silver Hand), he just has to have 4 limbs of some sort attached to his torso.

Also Irish myth is full of strong warriors; their war deity is a woman, and the greatest warrior in Irish myth, Scathach, is a woman. But Nuada is considered one of the greatest rulers of Irish history/legend. And I always wondered, since female warriors were a thing, why Nuada wasn’t a woman. So I made him one.

Casting September as Mixed-Race (A Comment from a Follower)

thanks for casting September as actually mixed! You're right, she's not white because her dad is black. I love your aesthetics for the books.

Thank you so much! I adore the books to absolute death, they are some of my favorites. Unfortunately, I’m a little burned out on middle grade right now or I would totally be working through The Boy Who Lost Fairyland. But I’m on a YA kick right now instead. But I’ll have another aesthetic up sometime. :)

And I know, right? I don’t like the illustrations of September at all because she’s pretty obviously mixed and the illustrations show her as being white. I don’t understand why they did that. Sigh…

How Long Does It Take Me to Read a Book?

Depends on the book. As an example, I read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in about 5 hours on a trip to Disney World when I was 11. I read one of those old early 90s RL Stine Fear Street books in about 2 hours when I was maybe 8 years old (I remember because we were visiting my grandparents and my grandma bought me a whole big bag of Fear Street; I read the first one in about 2 hours and my mom was like, “Those have to last you, you know?” And my grandma was like, “No, I’ll take her back if she manages to finish them all before you go home”).

But now I have a job and bills to pay and writing to do. And even then, it depends on the book. I read the entire Raven Cycle in approximately a week if you subtract the time it took for the books to arrive. I read A Court of Mist and Fury in less than 30 hours and it’s 622 pages long (and I had to take notes because it was a library book). I read Throne of Glass in about the same amount of time even though it’s 200 pages shorter.

But I’ve also been working through Delusion’s Master for the last 2 months and it’s maybe ¼ the size of ACOMAF. I’ve had to start, stop, and restart Eye of the World at least six times (I finally caved and bought the audiobook). I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in less than a day but took several months to get through The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland.

It just depends.

How Long Does It Take to Edit a Book? Part 1

Depends on what I need to do, what the problems are, and what it’s like at work, honestly. If there’s low call-volume, I have more time to work between calls. Also, if I have a lot of passive voice (which I do sometimes), that involves a lot of reordering my sentences or sometimes my entire paragraphs to get rid of it. I tend to have repetitive info in each chapter - a holdover from writing fanfiction that only updates every few weeks - so when editing w/ a pen, I have to cross all that out and then delete it later from my docs. 

Like, I don’t edit out of a doc. I edit off a hard-copy of a document, so a big stack of about 400 pages. I’ll go through with colored pens and underline, circle, make notes, cross stuff out. And then I go back to my manuscript doc on my computer, make all those corrections - usually rearranging masses of sentences and possibly adding new scenes, scrapping old ones, enhancing some that are already there, reassigning actions and dialogue between my characters, etc. 

Then I print out another 400 pages, hole-punch them again, stick them in a binder again, sit on it for a few weeks, and then come back to it to edit it all over again. Rinse and repeat until the number of the issues I’ve found have dwindled down to “oh, I just went 30 pages without making any notes, awesome.” Which can take up to 5 or 6, sometimes even 7 printings. Especially because once I get to printing #3 or #4, I’m looking for particular things I notice that keep slipping by me - mostly passive voice, overwriting, and repetition. Those 3 things tend to be my downfall until I get to like, draft 8.

Luckily my mom buys my paper. :D

A Good Question (With a Reasonable Answer)

Honestly, what's up with all your hate? It's completely unnecessary. You seem like a wonderful person.

Thank you. Part of it is that I get a lot in general, so I tend to not answer my asks for several months and they accumulate and then it takes like, a week to get through 3-5 months of asks. I should probably stop doing that…

Another thing is that I ran afoul of the Chris Colfer fandom (although many of them are sending me private messages saying that it’s actually mean trolls trying to stir up trouble and distress the fandom, but I find that difficult to believe in its entirety considering the barrage of hate I got last time his books came up - some of these are old anon messages from January when I left a negative comment about one book and a somewhat negative review of another book).

Finally, I accidentally offended 2 big-name Booklr book-dragon queens (whereas I am naught but a book-dragon lady, with far less clout) and am now reaping the fallout from that. They have a lot of fans - including me - and they’re both very nice, so I’m not surprised their fans want me to die for upsetting them. If somebody upset someone like @books-and-cookies, I’d probably eat their face off, too. Although not anonymously.

SILKPUNK! (It's the Silkiest)

Silkpunk is an offshoot of steampunk (sort of), similar to clockpunk, candlepunk, gearpunk, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk, and decopunk. But silkpunk takes things waaay, waaay back in time and to a different part of the world than where -punk usually goes. It was invented/established by the author Ken Liu, who wrote The Grace of Kings.

“The technology aesthetic I’m going for is what I call ‘silkpunk,’ which is of course analogous to steampunk,” he says. “[There are] battle kites, giant airships that are propelled by oars through the air instead of propellers, and even underwater boats.”

And though the book features much that’s pure fantasy—sea monsters, meddling gods, and telepathic books—all the silkpunk technology has a basis in real history.

“All of these are based on direct East Asian analogs or extensions of what was done,” says Liu. “So it’s a fun tech fantasy world that I think people will enjoy.” (x, emphasis added by me)

Hopefully this takes off because it sounds freaking awesome.

For more information:

INTERVIEW: Ken Liu Discusses Silk Punk Fantasy and THE GRACE OF KINGS

Tired of Steampunk? Try Silkpunk on for Size

‘Silkpunk’: Redefining Technology for ‘The Grace of Kings' 

Silkpunk - Playing Engineer in an Imaginary World

Why I Like World-Hopping Fanfics

I think the dynamic would be more interesting if more than one person fell into another world because maybe not everyone likes the fandom? Also they may have different goals, different priorities, and they’ll definitely have different reactions to the situations they find themselves in, but then they also have to balance out how they handle everything with how it affects the group as a whole, and that makes the whole world-hopping thing so much more interesting than just one girl or one guy (it’s usually a girl) being sucked into a television or something and having just their agenda to deal with.

People Have Asked What I Think of JK Rowling

Oh, goodness, I’m afraid. O.O

Okay, but in seriousness…this is gonna take me a minute. Because my feelings for the author herself are a bit complicated. And this is going to be a bit long, too. Sorry.

So…I know a bit about JK Rowling’s personal life before she published HP1. I know she had an abusive signif and at one point I think she was on food stamps or something and she basically overcame a lot of hardships. I know she’s a big supporter of LGBT+ rights and is very open about that on her social media. I know she’s also very responsive in a positive way to her fans, which is great, because some celebs can be just awful to their fans. I know that this woman is wildly creative and it took a lot of imagination to come up with the first Harry Potter book. I know that she is very dedicated to her series and the world of Harry Potter. None of these are bad things and are, in fact, really good things that impress me a lot. I think she tries to be a genuinely nice lady.

However. I think she has a few problems.

I think when Harry Potter started with book 1, despite her claims that she had literally everything plotted out, I don’t think HP was originally intended to be as dark and adult as it became. The reason I bring this up in relationship to how I feel about the author is this - I don’t think, as the books got darker, that she really knew what she was doing in all aspects of the story and where it was going. I think she set up a world in book 1 and 2 that wasn’t really sustainable at the level she was pushing it to as the series went on, and she didn’t realize this somehow.

And she still doesn’t realize it. She doesn’t consider Merope Gaunt to be a rapist. She doesn’t consider James, Lily, Remus, and Sirius to be bad people at any point (”a bit of a prat” isn’t the same as a legit bad person). She doesn’t acknowledge the severely abusive nature of Ron and Hermione’s early romantic relationship before they acknowledged they were in love. She doesn’t consider Neville’s grandmother to be abusive or a bad person. She doesn’t show Dumbledore to be a bad person in any way (he comes across more as “complicated” and as an older version of the somewhat bad boy doing bad things for good reasons trope). The inherent evilness of all the Slytherin kids. And while this impacts my ability to enjoy the books as much as I used to when I try to reread them, it also informs me quite a bit about the kind of person JK Rowling is herself.

Then we have things like the lack of racial diversity in the original books, what she did with Newt Scamander being a racist dirtbag, Ilvermorny, her appropriation of sacred topics, complete lack of understanding of American culture, the whitewashing/cultural erasure of characters like the Patil twins and Cho Chang, her blatantly impossible idea that racism based on skin color doesn’t exist in the Wizarding World…things she doesn’t acknowledge are an issue. She’s been notoriously silent any time anyone brings this stuff up.

So…what do I think of JK Rowling? She reminds me of my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law tries to be nice to everyone. She tries to be very loving and friendly and she’s generally sweet-tempered. But she’s also very ignorant, very non-aggressively racist, very non-aggressively against various demographics (one of those sweet, little ladies who stays in her house and knits socks for homeless people while murmuring, “Oh, my goodness gracious, well, all lives matter, especially the blue ones, and transgender bathroom laws are to prevent child molesters from taking advantage, everyone knows that”).

And that’s what I think of JK Rowling. I think she’s just ignorant of certain things. I think, for whatever reason, she doesn’t notice the fallout from things. She doesn’t see rape sometimes when it’s right there in front of her (or she does and just didn’t handle it right at all). She doesn’t see abuse every time it’s right there in front of her. Institutionalized racism seems to be a thing she is unaware of as it applies to British minorities like Indians and the Chinese. And she seems to be unaware of writer resources that are now available called sensitivity readers that can help her to avoid the pitfalls she’s already tripped and fallen into…

Unless she does know about them but is too set in her ways to change now. After all, she’s like 50 or something, and she used to be a billionaire, and Harry Potter is still one of the biggest money-making franchises in the book world to ever happen.

And the thing is, I don’t know her personally. So I’m not going to say she’s a racist evil witch who hates gay people or whatever because I don’t know that. And I’m not going to say she’s deliberately trying to hurt marginalized people because I don’t know that either. But she seems to be doing most of what is hurtful in ignorance. And she is a strong advocate for the oppressed in many, many ways. So I’m not going to say she’s all bad or mostly bad or even half bad. And she has accomplished a great deal that she has every right to be proud of, and overcome things that I don’t know I ever could. But she’s also made mistakes and so far, she hasn’t acknowledged or fixed any of them.

So that’s what I think about JK Rowling. It’s a 50-50 thing, basically. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, even when they muck up something beneath the umbrella of a cause or causes I’m violently passionate about…which she did. And even though sometimes I see a thing and I kind of want to throw something (I have a bad temper; it’s no reflection on her, to be honest. More on me). Still gonna give her the benefit of the doubt, though. Just not going to be rereading HP anytime soon because I just can’t and I’m not buying The Cursed Child because it sounds ridiculous.

All the Fairy Tale Retellings? (People Have Been Asking)

Almost all of my original novels have some fairy tale or classic lit element in them somewhere, but often transmuted to the point that most people might not even notice. A good example is House of Gears. It’s a retelling of Cinderella, but you wouldn’t know by reading it right off the bat. Reading it, you might not realize it until the pumpkin coach near the end, because for the most part the book is about Cinderella rescuing her stepsister and the ball happens to be a part of the plan to get that done. But yes, most of my books are retellings of some kind in some way.

Elevator Pitches: Round One

Eidolon: Batman meets Edgar Allan Poe

Empress of Ice&Oceans: Hades & Persephone meets Koschei the Deathless


Frost & Fire: Cruel Intentions meets Harry Potter

Glass: Alice in Wonderland meets The Craft


Hit the Lights: Rainbow Brite meets 1984


I Hear the Bones Singing: Criminal Minds meets the Brothers Grimm


Night-Dreamed Roads: Mad Max: Fury Road meets the Pixie Hollow movies


Samedi: Princess & the Frog meets The Night Circus


Sayuri: Star Trek meets Pacific Rim


VR Book: The Matrix meets Young Justice

Is It Unhealthy Not to Get Angry?

It depends on how you do it. You can’t just get super angry and then shove it down without dealing with it; that is very unhealthy. I know, I did it for years when I was a kid. It resulted in exacerbating a lot of my mental issues and spurred on my self-harming. Never, ever, ever just suppress your negative emotions.

But that’s not what I do. First of all, I’m very aware of my emotional state most of the time; it’s a holdover from when I was a kid, when I was incredibly volatile and had been known to literally just snap and attack people physically with sharp objects like pens. Like once I literally chased a kid across the school courtyard with a pencil screaming, “F*** you!” over and over again because he’d made a comment about a grade I got on a paper. So I’m very much about keeping tabs on my emotions, especially in a charged situation.

What that means is, I can usually tell when I’m starting to get upset. Usually I have the self-control to just not get upset unless there’s a crud-ton going on but when that happens, I usually have the option of stepping out of the situation long enough to calm down before I even shift from annoyed/frustrated to angry int he first place. If I don’t have that option, I take some time to remind myself of some points of Mormon doctrine that help temper my rising anger and turn it into something else - sympathy, worry for the other person(s), love. I work on focusing on those emotions, those aspects of the situation, instead of lashing out in my rage.

Sometimes I don’t manage it. Sometimes I don’t notice fast enough when I’m getting angry and I don’t stop myself from lashing out like I should. Sometimes I’m too tired or too overwhelmed or too whatever to behave the way I feel I should in that particular situation. When that happens, I then pray for forgiveness and usually apologize to the person involved.

However, that’s when I get angry. When I tell someone, for example, that they need to not bully my friends (this happened recently with another Booklr who was standing up for a trans person and told the haters to fight them; I told the haters they better not, or I’d get involved), I’m not usually angry. I’m just prepared for things to get a little crazy and I’m asserting that a particular behavior isn’t okay to do. But you don’t have to be angry at someone to tell them to stop doing something you don’t like.

Sorry for the long post, but hope that makes sense. :)

Defining Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is basically your ability to pitch a book in 1 or 2 lines. So…for example, let’s take a look at some classics most people know.

Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire: Four wizards compete in a three-wizard tournament. Scandal! (I borrowed that from @polandbananas20).

The Hobbit: middle-aged introvert dragged along by dwarves who want to slay a dragon and get their kingdom back.

Throne of Glass: Game of Thrones meets The Hunger Games with really pretty dresses.

Delirium: Romeo & Juliet in a dystopian world where love is considered to be a mental illness.

Great (by Sara J. Benincasa): an adaptation of The Great Gatsby in modern day except with lesbians.

The Selection: The Bachelor, royal edition, with mild civil war (also borrowed/paraphrased from @polandbananas20)

So like, if I wanted to do elevator pitches for some of my books, I might write them something like this:

Eidolon: Edgar Allan Poe meets Batman when Jack the Ripper stalks a neo-Victorian kingdom of half-human magicians.

The Silver Princess: royal Elf twins fall in love with a young doctor while their nations teeter on the brink of civil war.

Frost & Fire: a vindictive brother and sister try to ruin the lives of their fellow students at magic school.

Make sense?

Why Did I Decide to Write Fanfiction?

When I found out fanfiction was a thing, I realized I’d been writing fanfiction in my head since I was about 4 years old - for Power Rangers. And I figured it would be good practice for writing a novel if I could do fanfiction. Especially since there are, in some ways, more restrictions in the sort of fanfiction people post on FF.net than there are in writing original novels.

Also because it's fun. :)