[ text ID: I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there? ]
finishing a series but still being attached to the story and its characters
100% me after finishing Super Powereds. I feel like Drew Hayes is a box of really good chocolates that I want to savor. But here I am listening to another book series of his already.
The fact that Dante created the most popular image of the afterlife with absolutely no theological basis for it will still be the funniest thing to me
Church: Heaven is eternal connection with God, while Hell is total separation from Him. Anything else is only speculation.
Dante: Actually Hell has layers like an onion, and the devil is big and mean and also frozen. People are fighting and there’s a mountain to get to Heaven and a nice place for babies. Also I know this because I went there with my friend :)
Dante: I had a dream where I astral projected into hell with the famous poet Virgil who I am totally Best Bros with. I wrote a poem about it if you wanna read it idk
Several Popes: Thank you king I am commissioning fan art of you
Dante didn’t createthis image. To write Divine Comedy he used islamic eschatology (which, among other things, gave him the very idea of structuring his poem like this) and preexisting christian folk beliefs. Not to mention all the religious, philosophical and classical sources ne used for reference. Medieval writers in general preferred reinterpreting and assembling together preexisting material over original invention.
You can’t really get mad at ppl calling Divine Comedy fanfiction when you yourself say the most innacurate thing immaginable about it.
For advanced Finnish speakers: Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s latest novel, Sielut kulkevat sateessa (”Souls walk in the rain”) can be downloaded for free until 6th June from this site: http://www.kolumbus.fi/pasi.jaaskelainen/
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen is a well-known contemporary Finnish fiction writer, whose style is mainly characterised by the fusion of realism and fantastic elements. His latest novel tells the story of Judit, a nurse, who, after realising the shortness of life, decides to leave her husband and to change job. She ends up working for a world-famous celebrity with a high salary and she often finds herself walking home late at night, roaming the rainy streets of Helsinki. Despite all the oddities, she sticks to her job in order to be able to spend more time with her ill godson, but as the rain starts to spread to all parts of Europe, she is forced to investigate the truth…
With this free distribution, the author is hoping to draw more attention to his novel, as nowadays in the harsh and highly competitive literary environment it is quite hard to stay noticed.
I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him
This is all true. What happened more specifically is that one fan fiction got really really popular and since people weren’t all that familiar with how novels worked (because there weren’t really any other novels in Europe yet), a lot of people just took this as a valid sequel. Cervantes (the original author) had pretty much stopped working on any kind of sequel to the original at point, but he got really pissed that people were reading this fan fic and assuming it was as legit as his canon. So he got off his butt and wrote this sequel, which academics call big words like “meta-textual” when really it was Cervantes trying to make sure people understood his canon correctly and didn’t get carried away with their silly fan theories based on this one fic writer’s interpretation.
Now-a-days, the “true sequel” is normally just lumped in and stuck onto the end as a “part II,” in case you are wondering why you’ve never heard of a Don Quixote the Sequel. By all accounts, the fan fic was pretty bad, which makes it’s a perfect beginning to the grand tradition of fanfiction.
Calling this the first instance of fanfiction, though, comes from the fact that this was the first time, as far as we know, that the author of the original stepped in to officially denounce fan work as not canon. For most of history (at least western history) there wasn’t really an idea that stories had ownership. Most famous greek plays and poems are based on other works. Virgil’s Aeneid can easily be called Homer fan fiction (we have no real way of knowing how much of the story existed in folk tradition and how much he made up). Most of the versions of greek myths you know come from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is largely his short fics about other myths. Moving out of the classical world, bible fic constitutes a lot of what literature is for a while. Dante’s Inferno, specifically, (which is, lets be clear, a self insert fic where the author meets his fave author - so it’s also RPF - and they take a tour through a crossover fic between the Bible, historical fic, and greek myth) was so popular that it’s kind of crossed over into fanon (quick - biblically how many cicles does Hell have? Answer: none, they all come from Dante and in turn Virgil, and eventually Homer…) On the run up to Don Quixote, we have Shakespeare, who adapted most of his plays directly from other works by other people, from which he asked no permission (nor was he expected to.)
The real move that makes this false sequel the first official fan fiction is that the author of the canon material asserted his ownership of the intellectual property that was the characters and the story. Not in the legal sense - there was nothing illegal about this sequel - but in the sense that you could call this sequel “unauthorized.” It’s the beginning of thinking of characters and stories as belonging to a specific person, rather than simply being created by said person.
In light of the Coronavirus outbreak, I have decided to offer my book for free until this coming Saturday, March 21. So please feel free to take advantage of this!! All I ask is that you leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
If you plan on reading, these might be -mild- spoilers? Not for the big mystery of the book, though. I wouldn’t do that to y’all.
BUT–
OKAY SO IS THERE ANYONE IN THIS BOOK WHO ISN’T A COMPLETE JERK X’D
Like.
So freaking the main character, Tessa, she has the ability to change her appearance to any person regardless of size/race/age/gender. Anybody. And she has a thing for this dude named Alec.
Problem? Alec is dating a girl named Kate. The narrative presents -this- as a problem on the grounds that Kate is just a total rhymes-with-witch….The thing is….that doesn’t freaking matter?? Alec is taken? End of discussion??
But Alec is clearly into Tessa. So freaking he’s emotionally cheating all. the. time. Tessa’s best friend is like ‘hey so, disguise yourself as Kate so you can go kiss up on Alec’.
WTF?? HOW ABOUT NOOOOO??
But then to my surprise Tessa thinks it’s a good idea? Again, on the grounds that Kate is just ~so~ awful. I mean she’s done such terrible things like….
…. …. .. insult Tessa’s fashion choices. What a biznatch right?
So anyway. Tessa is going to go through with it and I’m cringing so hard. Because not only did she NOT say no, she is now actively going to do it and I’m like ‘please at least turn back around and be like ‘what am i doing I can’t do this’’.
N O P E
So then Tessa is up in his room, gets nervous because he’s questioning her because she (as Kate) isn’t acting normal. Then she shifts out of the form and -that’s- what stops her from tricking him into kissing her.
On what grounds is this supposed to be remotely okay? What if the story was being told from Alec’s POV? Then it’d be creepy! It’d be creepy right?
If you haven’t read my last few posts - that’s okay! That’s fine! I *totally* get it. But if you’d like to do that, I *just* made them and they might lend context this post.
For a long time - since its creation, really - this blog has been dedicated to one book series.
Mind you, it’s a great book series. I love it. But like…it’s over. You know? It’s great. But there’s nothing new that’s coming from it. It’s a complete story. There’s no new content.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I don’t want to just leave you guys high and dry. We’ve been through it together! …And by it I mean the fictional ups and downs of the Lunar Chronicles cast. =D =D =D …ah jeez…I am so self conscious… =D =D =D
Would you guys be interested if I made this a straight up bookish tumblr? I could bring up -other- books I mean? Like maybe books I really like?
Or maybe I could rant about books I don’t like??
Whichever? Both?
I already have a book in mind I’d love to share with you guys.
Maybe I could talk about my book? If you guys would be cool with that I mean. I’d love to share my creative process with y’all.
Anyway I *SUPER* hope I’ll get some answers to this because I want to take all of you into consideration about this!
AS ALWAYS, I SUPER LOVE *ALL* OF YOU.
THANK YOU *SO FUCKING MUCH*, HONESTLY, FOR STILL BEING WITH ME EVEN THOUGH I WAS INACTIVE.
Here’s my big old 2021 book roundup . I think graphic novels and nonfiction (!) really stood out this year (and a handful of picture books, which I didn’t draw each month because I’d be painting for another entire year).
