finnlongman

[finnlongman]

this is a man who just lived through bingo and is now questioning everything

#I'm not in this fandom #but this is exactly what being a first year phd student is like #i am on the edge of figuring some things out #but currently i just have. things.

[finnlongman]

One month today!

[full details / preorder links]

#moth to a flame #the butterfly assassin

[finnlongman]

This is not even one of those situations where the person in question died or left academia without publishing it. I emailed them in 2021 and they confirmed they were still working on it and implied that it was done but awaiting publication. It has yet to appear.

I'm meeting this person IRL this summer and I will be begging them to show me the forbidden edition because all the existing editions are so old and so terrible.

Love finding references to an in-progress edition in an academic work from 2006 and knowing it is still in-progress/unpublished. Sir, it has been 18 years. Your Oidheadh Chonlaioch is old enough to vote. (Unlike Connla.)

#finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

Love finding references to an in-progress edition in an academic work from 2006 and knowing it is still in-progress/unpublished. Sir, it has been 18 years. Your Oidheadh Chonlaioch is old enough to vote. (Unlike Connla.)

#please. save me. #finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

One of the reasons I'm so bad at promo is that I make a handful of graphics and then immediately want to post all of them everywhere, rather than spacing them out in a sensible manner, and this means everybody gets sick of me and also then I have to make new graphics two weeks later because I don't have anything new to post. Whoops.

Trying to make some promo images for social media because pictures get attention in the way text doesn't, and feeling very "graphic design is my passion" about it

#i mean. it would be easier if my publisher would make some graphics #since they have the assets to do that whereas i have to improvise a lot #but hey

[finnlongman]

Yay, thank you! I hope you enjoy it.

Went to make a post about Moth to a Flame and realised it comes out in one month and two days. Which is... soon. That is soon. And I have a major PhD deadline to meet and two conference papers to write and give between now and then. Yikes.

#if you don't that is also fine. not all books are for everyone #i extremely appreciate you checking it out though!

[finnlongman]

Trying to make some promo images for social media because pictures get attention in the way text doesn't, and feeling very "graphic design is my passion" about it

#I am so exceptionally un-visual that this is. challenging

[finnlongman]

I acknowledge that Tumblr is probably not the best platform for this kind of self promotion, but it's also the only social media platform I actually *like* at this point, so I hope everyone following me for queer werewolves and niche medievalism will be okay with it if I briefly deviate from regular programming to talk about my YA instead 😅

The Butterfly Assassin trilogy is not medieval (it's set in 2029-2032 in a world very similar to but not quite our own). It does not involve any werewolves, manuscripts, gay yearning, or Irish. This makes it pretty hard to loop in with my regular posts for some subtle marketing efforts.

Nevertheless, I see a lot of Tumblr posts saying "I wish more YA did X" or "it sucks that there's no YA where Y" or "these days all YA is Z", when The Butterfly Assassin does X and Y and is not Z. So I do think people here might like it, even if it's not the sort of thing that prompted them to follow me. Hence, please consider this A Marketing Post™. This is an upper YA trilogy with:

no romance

genuine moral ambiguity and complex ethical dilemmas

a lot of murder

critique of the military and the arms industry and the governments that enable them

street art

Esperanto

powerful friendships

an aroace protagonist (without being in any way a coming out story)

a northern England setting (Yorkshire)

librarians

multiple queer and trans secondary characters (whose identity isn't treated as a novelty or a plot point)

actual consequences and chronic symptoms following traumatic experiences

and many other things besides. It has been comped to The Hunger Games, which tracks, because it's about a teenage girl being used as a tool of violence who wants autonomy over her body and her life. The setting is somewhat less speculative, though, and as mentioned there is no romance. And I have been told by people who normally don't like books without romance that it didn't feel like it was lacking, because the friendships hit many of the same emotional beats.

Anyway. I am not very good at promotion, and I am not a big-name author so you'll probably never see an advert for my book online or in person, and I have a lot of academic deadlines in the next month, so please be patient with me. I am doing my best. And if this sounds like a series you'd enjoy, please do check them out. It would mean a lot to me.

(You can find all the details and links on my website.)

Went to make a post about Moth to a Flame and realised it comes out in one month and two days. Which is... soon. That is soon. And I have a major PhD deadline to meet and two conference papers to write and give between now and then. Yikes.

#the butterfly assassin #i am a full time phd student and under contract for multiple novels #so you can imagine the kind of pressure i am under

[finnlongman]

Went to make a post about Moth to a Flame and realised it comes out in one month and two days. Which is... soon. That is soon. And I have a major PhD deadline to meet and two conference papers to write and give between now and then. Yikes.

#promotion is never my strong point but oof #promotion while trying to do full time academia is much worse #at least i handed in my line edits i suppose

[finnlongman]

The first two are currently 99p on Kindle, and MTAF is only £2.99 to preorder! Which means you can get the whole trilogy for under £5 (not bad for something that occupied a decade of my life, lol)

You gotta admit, they look pretty good together.

This is my YA trilogy about a traumatised teenage assassin trying and failing to live a normal life in a fictional closed city in Yorkshire. If you've been looking for YA with no romance, morally ambiguous (or outright terrible) characters, tons of murder, revolutionary librarians, poison, Esperanto, loving descriptions of street art, and varying degrees of critique of the military and the arms industry (from subtle to overt as the trilogy continues), then this might be the series for you. The Butterfly Assassin and The Hummingbird Killer are out now; Moth to a Flame will be released on 23rd May. Full details of all of them are on my website.

[finnlongman]

Ooh, I have just seen that The Butterfly Assassin and The Hummingbird Killer have both been reduced to 99p on Kindle! Great time to nab them ahead of book 3, Moth to a Flame, coming out next month.

(Links above are affiliate links, I earn a couple of pennies from qualifying purchases, etc, usual disclaimers apply.)

#weekend reblog if anyone is looking for something to read #featuring zero romance and lots of murder

[finnlongman]

What's your favorite medieval stories with suspiciously queer themes?

ALL medieval stories or just medieval irish ones? because if we go for all medieval stories i think we will be here all night lol

but for irish ones... well, i'm basic, i'm an ulster cycle bitch, no matter how many times i've read táin bó cúailnge and specifically the 'comrac fir diad' episode, i never get over it (and i have read it dozens and dozens of times at this point)

i think the thing about CFD is that, yes, it's very homoerotic, but it's sort of more than that: it's about the conflict between a bond of love that you (mostly) chose, and the bonds of obligation and family loyalty that you were born into. and it's about the way that those youthful relationships get obliterated by adult responsibilities and obligations. for me there's something deeply tragic and deeply queer about that tension and the way it juxtaposes different types of relationship? idk i'm explaining this really, really badly right now but it's a story that says "would you turn your back on your family and your people for a man you loved" and the answer is "no"! love does not win! sometimes the other bonds in your life not only tear you away from someone you care about but make you do the tearing!

and yet cú chulainn's lament for fer diad really articulates the fact that there was love there. it wasn't nothing and it wasn't easily abandoned. and it sort of functions almost as a protest against the narrative, and an act of defiance against the people who set up that situation, and an ultimate expression of feeling that comes too late to be heard by its subject. which is a lot. and i think it is a big turning point for cú chulainn himself in terms of understanding violence as violence, as damage that can't be undone, as something that has a cost

and i think all of that has more weight if you read into the homoerotics of it but i think the weight of it is still there even if you don't. it's about love vs duty and duty wins – and that absolutely sucks for everyone. it's powerful.

i also love just like, everything cú chulainn and láeg have got going on, frankly. i think you see it the most clearly in texts like oidheadh con culainn and tóruigheacht gruaidhe griansholus because late texts actually let their characters express emotions out loud, but there's so much there even in earlier texts if you're willing to read between the lines. and plenty of it in táin bó cúailnge, even

so really the general message here is that we should all read the táin and have feelings about it

#comrac fir diad #to run with the hound

[finnlongman]

Ooh, I have just seen that The Butterfly Assassin and The Hummingbird Killer have both been reduced to 99p on Kindle! Great time to nab them ahead of book 3, Moth to a Flame, coming out next month.

(Links above are affiliate links, I earn a couple of pennies from qualifying purchases, etc, usual disclaimers apply.)

#the butterfly assassin #the hummingbird killer #moth to a flame #books #booklr

[finnlongman]

Found a new edition of a text that I could previously only find in an edition from 1909 but when I say "new" I mean 1935, and when I say "found" I mean "theoretically I know the book it's in, and I could pay £25 for a secondhand copy, but also it's in the seanchló and I cba, however it is available digitally as a single webpage and if you paste it into a Word doc it renders it in Roman type and then you can ctrl+f all the lenition marks to make the orthography slightly easier"

Given that the 1909 edition was also only available to me as a dodgy webpage that I pasted into a Word document, this is possibly an improvement, but also now I have 98 pages to manually re-space and correct, so, hmm. Have we gained anything? That is, indeed, the question.

#finn is not doing a phd #i am tired. so tired. #PLEASE can ruairi o huiginn publish the edition he promised me in 2021

[finnlongman]

Become a medieval literature specialist, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

Anyway this is how different versions of Táin Bó Cúailnge relate to each other. Clear as mud.

#recension hell #tain bo cuailnge #finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

Recension II is earlier (in surviving form) than Recension I. There are sub variants of all three. Aspects of Recension IVa may predate Recension IIb. IVa is not closely related to IVb-IVf, but both IVc and IVd may derive from IVb and should probably be relabelled to reflect that. Also the two manuscripts of IVa may be sufficiently different to count as two versions, at which point I suppose we'd start calling them IVa1 and IVa2.

Are you confused yet? I'm confused. We should just throw out 130 years of scholarship on this tale and start again with a sensible system.

Ah yes, the three recensions of Comrac Fir Diad: I, II, and IV.

#comrac fir diad #finn is not doing a phd

[finnlongman]

Ah yes, the three recensions of Comrac Fir Diad: I, II, and IV.

#there are also ten of them. #comrac fir diad #finn is not doing a phd