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drchucktingle · 1 year

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Question for you, Mr. Drchucktingle sir, and I apologize for being lazy and not searching for the answer myself, but do you have an anthology of your stories that can be bought or should I just go out and start piecing what I can find together to form my own collection? I am interested in getting more familiar with your work before I get my copy of Camp Damascus in the summer and would love a good starting place.

yes bud there are a LOT of anthologies you can get but i will say FIRST THINGS FIRST if you would like to get to know the tingleverse before reading camp damascus you should read STRAIGHT which is chucks first horror novella (camp damascus is full novel)

When a strange tear in the cosmos appears within Earth’s annual path, the consequences are disastrous. For one night a year, the vast majority of humans now undergo a frightening mental change, transforming into hateful, rage-fueled zombies who will stop at nothing to satiate their desire for brutality.

While not much is understood about this horrific mass hysteria, the demographic it effects is very specific: cisgender straight people.

A few years after the first of these tragic events, four friends from across the queer spectrum look for safety in solitude, hunkering down in a remote desert cabin for what is now known as Saturation Day. With a vaccine available for straight people to curb their violent episodes, some predict the worst is over. Others aren’t so sure.

As night falls, it becomes clear that survival isn’t guaranteed this Saturation Day.

GET STRAIGHT AS A PAPERBACK HERE

the tingleverse is a stack of realities surrounded by THE VOID and this stack is infinite, but close realities share certain properties and ideas. so chucks erotica takes place in the ROMANCE TINGLEVERSE and the horror takes place in the HORROR TINGLEVERSE these are just reality clusters along the larger stack. so really you would not need to read the erotica or romance to understand the horror stack however if you look very very closely you could find some little easter eggs.

anyway if you still want to read chucks EROTICA TINGLEVERSE i will put some collections below

POUNDED BY THE CLASSICS COLLECTIONS

POUNDED BY THE CLASSICS

THE LESBIAN CLASSICS GET ME OFF

SENTIENT FOOD COLLECTIONS

HANDSOME SENTIENT FOOD POUNDS MY BUTT AND TURNS ME GAY

SENTIENT LESBIAN FOOD GETS ME OFF

NOT POUNDED BY ANYTHING COLLECTIONS

SERIES PAGE HERE

LADYBUCK ON LADYBUCK COLLECTIONS

SERIES PAGE HERE

BISEXUAL COLLECTIONS

SERIES PAGE HERE

TRANS BUCKAROO COLLECTION

ORDER HERE

there are more collections than this but i think it is a good starting place. LOVE IS REAL BUCKAROO

#chuck tingle #tingleverse #collections #love is real #buckaroo lifestyle

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slarpg · 1 month

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HI I'm currently brainstorming my own very lesbian RPG Maker game, and as kind of a casual gamer, I'm trying to familiarize myself with what lesbian games are already out there!! SLARPG looks amazing, I have a Mac but I'm dying to play it as soon as I can get set up to. But anyway. I was wondering if you know of any other notable games focused on lesbian stories, besides visual novels(I know theres lots of those, but I'm interested in RPGs and life sims.) Was there any other sapphic game that helped to inspire SLARPG perhaps?

Hey thanks for reading my ask anyway and hope to play SLARPG soon 😊

The thing is, I can't say I was particularly inspired by other sapphic games when I started making SLARPG

For one, there just weren't nearly as many sapphic games in the early 2010s as there are today. There was, like, Life is Strange and Gone Home, and some RPGs that had some F/F romance options like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and a small handful of niche indie games like Mighty Jill Off and Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars by Anna Anthropy, but there wasn't nearly as much out there as there is today. Just to name a few, you've now got indies like Butterfly Soup, Signalis, Get in the Car Loser, certain subplots in Undertale and Deltarune, the continued existence of RPGs with F/F options like Baldur's Gate 3, and many, many more games than I can list off the top of my head. There's a lot, especially in the indie space

There are also more AAA games with sapphic characters in them now, but I wouldn't exactly pitch The Last of Us to someone looking for a queer romance story just because Ellie is gay, nor would I tell you to play Overwatch 2 just because the lore says Tracer is a lesbian. And I know Aloy has a female love interest in Horizon: Forbidden West, but I couldn't tell you how much focus that's actually given

But also, SLARPG was based more on my own experiences and feelings, as opposed to being inspired by other works of queer fiction. There was very little out there that I felt I could relate to 100% at the time, so I felt the need to go and make it myself. And, in fact, I kind of avoided playing some other queer games by my peers in the indie scene while working on SLARPG because I didn't wanna be influenced too heavily by them and accidentally rip them off. I just wanted to tell my own story

#anon #ask

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flanaganfilm · 1 year

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Hey Mike! I'm really sorry to hear about your experience on Hill House. I do a lot of work in VFX in pre/prod/post and I know that sort of production that feels like a sinking ship day in and day out. I do hope you have found some catharsis now that it's over.

The show shook me. Changed me. Made me reckon with myself as a storyteller and as a person. All for the better, I assure you.

I hope to one day tell such an impactful story of my own, either through one of my short films, or through the novel series I'm writing/illustrating. Which brings me to my question: How do you navigate the complexities of having authored a work that did so much harm to yourself but also did a lot of good for others? What lessons do you hope aspiring storytellers like myself take from your difficult experience? Thanks :)

Thank you for saying this.

It's true, HILL HOUSE was a very negative experience to make - but I will always be profoundly proud of the finished product. It's some of my favorite work. I may never again face down something as challenging as episode 6, and I love the impact it has on a lot of its viewers.

There's a weird thing that happens when you finish a project - it really ceases to be yours in any way at all. It belongs immediately to the audience, and they're given an experience that you will never have. When HILL HOUSE came out, I didn't watch it - I'd seen it hundreds of times by that point, but at the same time, I've NEVER seen it.

Every frame of it is informed by my experience making it, or my intentions, or the compromises we made here, or the line we cut there that I wish we'd kept, or a bad day on set, or a problematic actor, or a visual effect we never quite got right (there are a LOT of those in HILL HOUSE, some of them still make me wince.) So I'm never able to WATCH the show. It's a tradeoff we make all the time - if you're lucky enough to make a movie, or a TV show, that's the price of it - you'll never be able to watch it.

But, I get to see how it affects other people. More than anything else I've made, HILL HOUSE seems to have the largest and most passionate fanbase. (BLY is a close second, though that's a whole other blog entry - I could write a book about the complicated, fascinating experience of the BLY fandom).

But with HILL HOUSE, I'd hear a lot from people who lost loved ones, who navigate complicated family dynamics, and who have wrestled with depression or grief. It means the world to me. It's a strange divide, as I'll never see the show that they saw - but I am so grateful that it touched them the way it did.

I'm just about at the point where I think I'm capable of sitting down and truly watching HILL HOUSE. It takes years sometimes. I've watched a lot of my early work, like HUSH or GERALD'S GAME, and finally had the experience of really SEEING it. But HILL HOUSE has always felt a little too raw, and my memories still overpower my ability to separate myself from it. Maybe that's changed. Maybe I'll give it a shot this year. Half a decade seems like enough time.

But yes, it is complicated and strange with all of them. I so badly want to watch MIDNIGHT MASS, the project that was the most personal to me - but it flew off into the world just like they all do. I spent a decade working on it, and felt it flowing through me every day - like it was a part of me. But the moment the show was done and released into the world, it wasn't mine anymore, just like all the others. I remember feeling almost knocked over when it departed, for some reason I thought that one would always feel like a part of me... but no. They're like children, they all have to go live their own lives, and they don't belong to you. Not really.

#the haunting of hill house #the haunting of bly manor #midnight mass

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fantasiawandering · 6 months

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@belphegor1982 tagged me 20 questions for writers thingy, and I don't know if I'm a writer again yet, but I don't think there's anything here I can't answer. Thank you for thinking of me! I'm going to tag in anyone who sees this and goes "oooh!" But also @dawntreaderflynne especially.

How many works do you have on AO3?

29, but some of those are novel length.

What's your total AO3 word count?

553,402. Whoof.

What fandoms do you write for?

Mostly TMNT and Undertale, with solitary forays into Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Transformers Prime.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

A Shield Against the Dark - Part one of the Undertale odyssey that started out as trying to work out a couple of things before getting the story I actually wanted to write. Which has yet to be written.

Adventures in Human Sitting - Undertale shenanigans exploring what happens when a human is raised by a bunch of well-meaning monsters who don't quite know what they're doing.

The Monster Files - What happens when human authorities attempt to investigate these strange new monstrous arrivals in the overworld by hacking into the Monster Embassy computer networks, with predictably unpredictable (and occasionally pasta-filled) results.

Hushabye - Undertale fluff between Frisk and Sans, originally written as an exercise to hammer out the weird tonal push and pull of their platonic soulmate thing.

To Heir is Human - More Undertale fluff (yeah there's a theme) in which Asgore and Toriel have to deal with their incredibly complex feelings when Frisk falls ill (featuring Sans's reaction as well by request).

I'm honestly really surprised there's no TMNT on this, actually.

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yes. Unless it's something that's un-respond-able, I do try to respond to everything. When my brain breaks I tend to avoid the inbox out of guilt, but I do get there eventually. Even if it takes a few years.

What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

That Which Is Not Done, for sure. It's the prequel story about the parents of the four turtle kids from the Children of the Forest TMNT AU I started writing with @nicollini, and since the turtles are orphans being raised by Splinter, the ending was already written for me, and I think I cried more writing this one than any other. It's far enough removed from the source material that it could read as a standalone, and there's still hope to be found in it, but it's definitely a tougher read than most of my fluff.

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I don't think I can pick. Most of what I write tends to end on a high note (if it ends at all -- my brain rewiring itself to deal with stress and paving over the writing parts kind of put a lot on indefinite hiatus). If I have to pick, probably Little Gifts because it's also full of holiday fluff.

Do you get hate on fics?

Generally no, and not on AO3. There was one several-hundred-word hit piece on That Other Site about how my story was trash and so was I, and if I'm being honest, it's a big part of why my cross-posting to that site kind of fell off a bit.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Not really. I tend to do fade-to-black if anything, because I tend to write what interests me, and my little ace heart is just way more interested in platonic soulmates than anything else. There is a ridiculous amount of platonic cuddling though.

Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

Generally no, with the very notable exception of the TMNT/Pacific Rim crossover series. I had also intended the big Undertale story to be a crossover with another property, but I'm not actually sure if I want to go that route any more. Time will tell (I hope).

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don't actually know. I think someone reposted Falling without permission once.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not to my knowledge.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not to completion (not for lack of trying -- brains are fickle), but there are a lot of collaborations and pieces of fics that started out as co-written stories and/or roleplays and/or art that were repurposed (with permission) into stories on the TMNT side of things.

What's your all-time favorite ship?

It takes a lot for me to actually ship something, but notable ones are Shepard/Garrus, John Crichton/Aeryn Sun, and I got a huge kick out of Luz and Amity on Owl House.

What's the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I'm not going to answer this one because I don't want to curse anything. I really do hope to tie off all the loose ends eventually. That said, the one that's a massive mashup of ALL THE TMNT AUS AT ONCE will probably stay at one chapter, just because it's so dang hard to write.

What are your writing strengths?

Before the brain break, probably dialogue, largely because it would just happen in my head and I'd frantically write to keep up. I like to think exploring relationships that don't get that much focus in canon is also something I'm pretty good at, but I may just think that because it takes up so much space in my head.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Finishing things. Curse of the ADHD brain even before the break.

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Only if necessary for the mechanics of the story, and then I try to find someone who actually speaks the language to help (and now that I'm older and wiser, hire).

First fandom you wrote for?

TMNT 2012. There had been countless stories in my head since I was a wee Fantasia, but that was the first one that wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it down. There were just so many spaces between canon scenes that made me want to see what fit in there, and since they weren't getting explored in the show, I ended up writing Falling, and that led me to everything else.

Favorite fic you've ever written?

I can't choose. It depends on my mood. Whichever one is the one I need most to read at the time (which also happens to be my rationale for writing order).

#questions answered

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twstunes · 2 months

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I am OBSESSED with your colored in manga pages!!! They’re beautiful I can’t stop thinking about them, how do you do your TWST page edits??? I’m really wanting to color the chapters too! It looks so fun!

I downloaded the pages (of chp1) straight from where I read them, and edited over (im using krita! Maybe photoshop would be better??) but I can’t seem to make them look the way I want them to. The line quality is nowhere near yours, yours looks so professional! I hope I’m not stepping on your toes by asking but I feel like I’m missing something 😭 would you mind explaining where/how you download the pages with such high quality? Do you turn them transparent like coloring books or edit overtop of them? I hope this ask isn’t too much!!

XOXOXOXO I hope you’re doing well!! You’re easily one of my fav twst blogs!

kicking my feet and giggling,,,,,, I hope you're doing well too!! you're not stepping on my toes at all, don't worry!

The pages I've been using for color edits are from turtlesoupscans' uploads – they're a scanlation group focused on TWST, and currently have stuff up for the manga (both the main story + anthology comic) as well as translations for the official novel. To my understanding, their scans ARE okay to use for color edits, but not for re-translations or mass-reuploads.

I do all my edits in photoshop using a lot of multiply & lighten layers! The coloring book method u mentioned is so enticing yet so traitorous…in photoshop, the selection + erasing method tends to damage the lineart, and the inverted channel method for removing white backgrounds quickly will keep a 'film' if the background isn't pure #ffffff. (Maybe krita has a more effective solution? 👀)

(Also bc I brought up using photoshop I'm ethically obligated to mention that photopea, an online equivalent to photoshop, exists and is free to use)

I've never used krita before, but from what I'm seeing of its layout/capabilities, the process I use should translate over fairly well–

(Added a black bg to the "fill" portion to make it easier to see)

First come the "fill" layers, which are for covering up halftones & similar shading techniques. This step isn't super necessary (and sometimes involves a lot more editing to replicate halftone gradients/patterns), but I heavily recommend it for scenes that involve a lot of dark colors. Leaving halftones in can cause colors to look darker & grayer than they should, the latter of which you specifically want to avoid when making color edits of darker-skinned characters. (They can also be really good for conveying texture tho, which is why I left the statues' shading alone in this example.)

Next are the color layers, where the bulk of the editing happens. As I mentioned above, I use a ton of multiply layers for this so I can just draw over the image. Darken layers also work, but I've found they tend to affect line density & smoothness. The shading and highlighting here is done using masking layers for individual objects/structures – I think quick group + choosing inherit alpha for the mask layer is the krita equivalent? Layers for darkening the overall lighting (like for nighttime scenes) would also go in this section.

Finally, the lighten layers are solely for the lineart. This is to help "soften" the the lineart, so to speak, making the scene feel a little more 3D/fleshed-out. This step is especially important when dealing with hard shadows, like on the Dark Mirror's frame, Pomefiore's windows, and Ignihyde's central pillar-thing. What I do is put down a bunch of lighten layers, typically at 50% or 75% opacity, and color-pick the darkest part of whatever feature I'm editing the lineart for. Because I'm using a darker color, the surrounding multiply layers will usually go unaffected by the lighten layers – if not, I just gotta zoom in and be careful about it. These layers need to be on top of/closer to the 'front' than the color layers, or else the multiply effect of the color layers will apply to the lighten layers as well.

Thanks for bearing with my kinda long-winded explanation! I've been learning as I go, so there might be easier/better ways of doing things that I haven't stumbled across yet.

I hope this helps & that you have fun doing color edits!!

#ask #anonymous #twst #twisted wonderland #twst manga #manga editing #color editing #twstuned edits #sorry for the delay on answering btw i was rereading it 20+ times to make sure i didn't forget anything fgjhgfjh

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ur-friendly-nbhd-cardassian · 2 months

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Hello there!

a little "about me" post

I'm a very long-winded person and when I like doing something, I like doing A LOT of it. I recently moved to Tumblr full-time after being stuck with 200-symbol posts on Twitter (ugh), so I'm using the full power of this blogging platform. I'm concerned about the AI, so it's all switched off on all my blogs. I hope Tumblr will wise up and survive, because I love it here so far 💛

I have a lot of fandoms, I like pretty art, I write and muse about stuff - it's all a huge mess if I put it one place. So that's why I decided to split my obsessions into several neat piles, so people could have an easier time decining whether to follow, ignore or block my stuff according to their preferences.

Here are my blogs which you're free to explore and follow as you like:

» ur-friendly-nbhd-cardassian

The main blog where I shout into nothingness. But where I also post lots of Star Trek, mainly about Cardassians (bc I love them). I do not do Garashir, tho, look for that particular bit elsewhere (not bc I don't ship them, but bc I'm severely overfed to the point of having an allergic rection). My focus Cardassian is Damar, followed by Dukat. I'm super open to reblogging your OCs, though. My other favorite fandoms you might come across on this blog (which I don't post enough about to make a separate blog): Mass Effect, Discworld, Tolkien, Detroit: Become Human, Apex Legends, Marvel/DC, Hunger Games. I also ramble, post about writing in general, reblog some fitting memes and pets/animals, share my own photography, reblog art etc.

» pixie-in-a-moonlantern

The initiated already know: Baldur's Gate 3 brainrot blog. I post my OC screenshots, maybe some stories, perhaps one day I will even finish a fic (started one, didn't finish). My all-time favorites are: Halsin, Gale, Rolan, Emperor. I do not have any VP tools, so my screens are only lightly edited to be prettier, and that's it. I do not draw or paint (tho I so want to). It's mainly reblogs and discussions so far, with my screenshots sprinkled in between.

» shaved-wampa

Diehard fans surely got the joke: Star Wars brainrot, and that goes for every conceivable piece of the fandom, even the bits you might not agree with - I don't discriminate. My all-time favorites are: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Bode Akuna. Yes, just the two, because I also have a huge pile of characters I love, but don't really focus on: Padmé, Ahsoka, Ventress, Plo Koon, Kit Fisto, Din Djarin, lil Grogu, Cody, infinite number of other Clones, ... soooo many. My top two are just the guys I actually write about. Bode is getting his fic right now, Obi-Wan's is on hold.

» cyber-vianne-77

As the name suggests, this is my Cyberpunk 2077 blog. I used to do a lot of virtual photography in that one - and yes, this time I mean real VP, though still no paid tools, just vanilla and free mods. I love Goro Takemura and ship my fem V with him heavily - wrote a dope fanfiction about them, too. I reblog other cp77 vp (especially of Goro) and fanart. I don't currently play the game or shoot photos, but I have a large collection I plan to drizzle over the next few months, until I maybe decide to go back to cp77 for a while again and finally play Phantom Liberty that's been waiting for me for a long time now xD.

» goodness-all-around

My "assorted dopeness" reblogs. I love pretty pictures and I love supporting artists in my own small way, so it'll be reblogs of general beautiful things I can't stuff into my other blogs, and reblogs of commission offers. Perhaps even some theory and discussion if I happen to like any.

I will update the list if I happen to change things or add/remove blogs. Thanks for your attention and see you in the activity notifs! 💛

Bits of trivia: I'm Czech, cis woman (bi & poly and, frankly, hyper), 32, in a relationship, mom to a 5yo boy, a writer struggling to finish and publish her first original novel, drowning her sorrows in fanfic instead :). I got to most of my fandoms quite late in life, because where I live this info only started to properly flow in with the coming of the internet. I'm usually a casual fan, though when I hit a gold vein I can get a bit obsessed. I love writing fanfiction, which is mostly why I'm here on this site. I self-insert a lot (therapy writing) and usually ship us, with the rare occasion of finding a couple where I can identify with one of them (or mold them to my image because I like or even fancy them). I've spent my life believing I was hetero and discovered I'm not only once I (finally) was in a hetero relationship and had a kid, so... my ships are also hetero. It's a habit, not hating, I don't discredit any gay ships (maybe quietly to myself when they don't make any sense to me character-wise, lol). My AO3 account: XindiChick I usually try to write even the most niche of my ships in a way that doesn't require much knowledge of the original, so you're welcome to browse and read to your heart's content if you happen to like my style. I welcome any interactions, especially comments, because I don't get many.

I think it's something everyone should always be aware of, but I've also seen many people ignoring this unsaid rule:

HATERS NEED NOT INTERACT

- lest they get blocked. I'm not here to argue with you about why I like certain characters and why you think I shouldn't. Go simp for your own top picks on your own blogs and leave me alone. Same goes for any of my personal trivia I shared.

Also:

DISCLAIMER: My blogs are a safe space for everyone who doesn't go around hating on everyone else. I will block assholes of every shape, color, faith, gender, orientation etc. indiscriminantly, just as I will happily interact with good people of any kind. Idc what your deal is, I just wanna enjoy being on this platform, so if you plan to rain on it, don't expect me to indulge you.

Icons by: @rpschtuff

By the way, a fun fact known only to people aware of my main fanfic novel, The Casualty, the Cardassian in my username was actually born Bajoran, but raised Cardassian, which is why she's a Cardassian in heart and spirit. She's your friendly reminder that not all Cardies are the same and as a nation have the capacity to be much better than how they were presented in the DS9, which is what she's trying to achieve.

#ur-friendly-nbhd-cardassian blog masterlist

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mae-i-scribble · 2 years

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Random thoughts about the orv epilogue pt. 1/??? After finishing orv a few days ago I have so many thoughts circling around my head and I’m hoping by posting them I can help internalize the mass of emotions sitting in my chest because this novel has fucking destroyed me. First thing up on the chopping block: kdj scattering his soul and how it seems that hsy and yjh misinterpret it initially.

From the moment we see kdj get on the train, we know that above anything else, he wants to be with everyone and the only reason he’s becoming the oldest dream is to keep the universe working so that they can keep on living. He sends out the memories he thinks will be needed (and even then he isn’t able to give away all of the memories, he cherishes them too much to make it a 50/50 split). It’s so incredibly telling that even when he supposedly sent away all his memories of their time together, the very first thing kdj does after breaking down is to go watch their story, the one of his companions. And then immediately has to pull himself back out because the *longing* is so strong it literally manifests in a physical breakdown. He distracts himself by going back to the story he’s always loved, ways of survival, and spends his probability to make everyone as happy as he possibly can (notably yjh bc yeah they are the emotional core of this novel but i digress), even if it doesn’t matter, even if no one will remember it besides him, he does it anyways.

On the other side of things, kimcom is eternally torn up about this choice. Hsy and yjh want kdj back whole, while others seem to be okay with just having the part of kdj that remembers them, because it was the choice he made and they want to respect it. Here they understand that kdj becoming od was done for their sake, and they despise it. They decide to get him back because they cannot have kdj if he isn’t whole. However, when they finally manage to get there, to see kdj as od, they can’t get him back. The fourth wall says it’s because they were greedy, and that kdj knew they would come for him and scattered his soul to prevent them from ever finding him. And hsy and yjh *believe it.* Not only do they come home empty handed, they come home thinking that the person they did this all for never wanted them to do so in the first place. It’s reflected in the way that yjh says “Do you think that fool has become a little bit happier” after he and hsy fight at the museum. At first yjh saw it as another sacrifice kdj made on their behalf, but even after 2 years, he’s still questioning, still wondering if this isn’t what kdj wanted all along. It’s not enough to stop him from trying to get kdj back, but it’s enough to leave him questioning.

With hsy on the other hand, she comes to terms with that same idea very differently. She puts all thoughts of saving kdj to the side, because she can’t deal with the idea of trying and failing once more, it almost seems that to her, failing again would only solidify what the fourth wall said. But even more so it shows in her eventual plan to get kdj back. She wants to read him his story in the hopes that it will make him *want* to be with them, and thus come back to his original body.

Both reactions show that everyone is missing a fundamental portion to kdj’s motivations: the reason why he scattered his soul is because he wanted to be with them too much. The loss of his memories and the scattering of his soul was a natural effect of being od, but he makes the choice to scatter his soul so that he won’t have to deal with the agony of being alone for any longer. It’s also why hsy’s plan is destined to work. The epilogue to her story is the same one kdj has always truly wanted to see, but never allowed himself to imagine.

Part 2 | Part 3

#orv #omniscient reader #omniscient reader's viewpoint #orv spoilers #omniscient reader spoilers #kim dokja #yoo joonghyuk #han sooyoung #anyways throwing myself into the nearest river im so emo #im not being very smart or eloquent but yknow #this is mostly just me screaming about emotions #if i was being serious i would have looked up novel quotations exactly #im so normal about the ending of orv #obviously

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nebylitsa · 7 months

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The Offstage Adventures of Prince Hamlet

Hamlet’s birthday

On his birthday, Hamlet writes to Horatio, “I’m getting older and I have nothing to do. Nothing to show for it.” As if he hasn’t just been heroically dragged offstage. As if he hasn’t played his role perfectly. Horatio only sighs and writes a few lines of consolation – his only job, it seems, these days. Ophelia, still abroad after her surreptitious exit, would know how to deal with the prince’s moods more effectively, but she refuses to send even so much as a picture postcard with a cathedral or a monument on it. She needed some time to be a hermit, she’d said before she left.

•

Hamlet and his friends

Soon after their first acquaintance at Wittenberg, Hamlet writes Horatio an instruction manual containing all the rules necessary for a good friendship. The rules apply to them both, he says. Don’t gossip about each other. Do treat vows of undying love with the seriousness they deserve. Don’t turn a blind eye to self-destructive habits, like drinking or reading romantic novels. Do remember the phrase “contra mundum.” Don’t wear a mask. Don’t break your friend’s heart. Don’t flinch when your friend breaks yours. Horatio reads the entire thing, scribbles wry comments in the margins, learns the precepts by heart. To Ophelia, Hamlet sends a book about mysticism – its seven chapters have titles like “Vengeful Ghosts,” “Tricks of the Light,” and “Secret Societies.” He tells her not to read it in order, but to open it at random and see what meanings reveal themselves to her. She follows his advice and comes across a passage on plant symbolism. How curious, she thinks, that so many different flowers signify loyalty. That night, the three of them all have the same dream: they’re in a garden, kissing each other.

•

Hamlet in Italy

This is what the three of them do when they travel to Italy. Ophelia tears up a garden, thieving every single violet and lilac, deaf to the hotelier’s protestations. Horatio, his nose in a book, falls into a canal. Hamlet casts his nighted color off and buys an embroidered suit. Ophelia makes Hamlet a nosegay from her stolen flowers. Horatio considers running off with the proprietor of an antique shop. Hamlet puts the flowers in his pocket, their petals peeking out over the fabric like eyes. Ophelia insults a priest during high mass thanks to a shoddy phrasebook. Horatio is found fondling a bust of Marcus Aurelius. Hamlet throws the flowers into a canal. Ophelia kisses Horatio on the mouth and wonders what it would be like if he were a woman. Horatio forgets all about the ancient ruins he saw that day. Hamlet sits for a portrait in his new suit, his hand positioned on a table as if ready for a bloodletting. Hamlet gets marvellously drunk and tells a ghost story. Hamlet finds out Laertes is staying in the same hotel. Hamlet challenges Laertes to a duel during breakfast, which consists of lemon biscotti and black tea. Hamlet hears the duel’s been called off. Hamlet and Laertes laugh about it and get drunk together. Hamlet loses his luggage at the train station. Ophelia breaks a window. Horatio burns his travel diary. Hamlet receives a letter edged in black.

•

Hamlet and family

When Hamlet meets Horatio’s family, he’s struck by how very ordinary love is. A cup of tea is offered with extra sugar for no reason other than that sugar is sweet. There are flowers on the windowsill and it doesn’t seem to matter that soon they will wilt. Nobody in this family feels the need to dig up secrets: and so there are no secrets. The caged parrot in the parlor sings words of reassurance. Horatio’s mother opens the golden latch; the bird flies out and away into the garden. It always comes back. Hamlet is amazed. Like a traveler in a faraway land, he finds himself getting used to the strange customs and manners here – small smiles, evenings together by the fireplace, little notes passed back and forth, no dissembling. He wants to stay here forever. He can’t.

•

Hamlet’s new hobby

He needs something to while away the long nights at Elsinore, so Hamlet takes up building miniature castles. Each one is an exercise in fancy: each window no bigger than an eye, each ballroom small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. He paints the castles with a tiny brush, hands never shaking though he’s hardly slept. He wonders if this is what it feels like to be a god. Did the demiurge entrusted with the creation of all the fragile things in the world also stay up late like this, minutely toiling away through the night? How did it decide which paint to use? Did it, too, grieve that it could never see its handiwork from the perspective of a toy soldier?

•

Hamlet and his elders

The king and the queen are so alike, they might as well be the same person. This is a change that Hamlet had not foreseen, but perhaps it’s a natural consequence of marriage. His mother now takes her coffee black like his uncle does; his uncle’s acquired his mother’s habit of descending staircases with extraordinary slowness like an aging tragedienne. Gertrude now has a permanent predatory twinkle in her eye, inspects the regiments every morning, wears epaulettes and gleaming black boots, sleeps with every officer in the kingdom. Claudius now drinks less, makes plans to open a school for intelligent bourgeois girls who are down on their luck, uses words like “motherland” in his speeches to the senate, kisses Hamlet on the cheek. No, they’re not the same person – rather, they’ve exchanged natures. How far will this misrule go? Hamlet worries that soon he won’t be able to tell the difference between himself and Laertes, of all people.

•

Hamlet visits the capital

The manager of the theater flat out refuses to put on any revenge tragedies while the prince is in the capital. He says the idea of such a performance would be a bigger spectacle than the show itself – good for ticket sales, maybe, but not for politics. Bookshops, too, replace all their Gothic novels with pamphlets on Stoic philosophy. Public monuments are covered up with tarp. Even the fountains in the parks are drained, now nothing but heaps of dry marble. People are advised to stay indoors. It’s as if another great plague is coming to the city. In spite of this, crowds of children, actors, fishwives, and gravediggers fill the streets to get a glimpse of Hamlet. He takes hand after hand, answers each breathless greeting with a smile. This is how his uncle must feel when he goes on a royal progress through the country. Horatio stays close to Hamlet, glasses askew. Ophelia, draped in green silk, dances in a circle with a gaggle of prostitutes – silly girls who can’t possibly be older than she is. Because all the church bells have been dismantled in anticipation of Hamlet’s visit, nobody knows what time it is until the night watchmen show up.

•

Hamlet goes to war

Ophelia laughs at him for going. She guesses it’s all part of some scheme of his to be more like Fortinbras, but she simply can’t imagine Hamlet marching to the beat of a drum, a rifle on his shoulder, unflinching as he trudges through snow. War won’t chase the bad dreams away, she says. He knows this. He goes anyway. It’s only when she sees him putting on his uniform that Ophelia realizes he’s serious – she chases him all the way to the barracks, silk shawl unfurling like a flag, still laughing through her tears but begging him to stay. Horatio worries himself sick. He pores over maps and Roman military manuals, listens for gunshots, writes Hamlet three letters a day. When he returns, Hamlet puts all his toy soldiers in a box.

•

Hamlet’s coronation

At what point does Prince Hamlet become Julius Caesar? How many times should he refuse the crown? Should he take a different regnal name, so as to avoid being compared to his father in odes and elegies alike? Horatio will come with him, of course, but will Ophelia be there? Can he bring a sword into the cathedral, or will he have to leave it by the door? How long until his subjects give him a subversive nickname? How long until his subjects see who he really is? How long until his subjects decide they don’t like him? Is chivalry still relevant? If at some point he finds he’s turned into Julius Caesar, which of his friends will play Brutus?

•

The death of Hamlet

Many years have passed since the death of Hamlet. He doesn’t remember his last lines – only that he was betrayed. Only that he never got to grow old, that he was never crowned, that for a few wild moments he held a sword in each hand, that one of the swords was envenomed. He doesn’t remember if he became a ghost afterwards. He doubts it; he isn’t the haunting type. The miniature castles gather dust in his study. The embroidered suit, immaculate except for a bloodstain near the heart, lies folded in a chest. All the letters he ever received are locked in a drawer somewhere. He can’t bring himself to throw all these useless things away.

#mp #shakespeare #hamlet #writeblr #writers on tumblr #i wrote this back in college and am still really proud of it

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justforbooks · 5 months

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In her Reith lecture of 2017, recently published for the first time in a posthumous collection of nonfiction, A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel recalled the beginnings of her career as a novelist. It was the 1970s. “In those days historical fiction wasn’t respectable or respected,” she recalled. “It meant historical romance. If you read a brilliant novel like I, Claudius, you didn’t taint it with the genre label, you just thought of it as literature. So, I was shy about naming what I was doing. All the same, I began. I wanted to find a novel I liked, about the French Revolution. I couldn’t, so I started making one.”

She made A Place of Greater Safety, an exceptional ensemble portrayal of the revolutionaries Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins, but although the novel was completed in 1979, it wasn’t published until 1992 – widely rejected, as she later explained, because although she thought the French Revolution was the most interesting thing in the world, the reading public didn’t agree, or publishers had concluded they didn’t. She decided to write a contemporary novel – Every Day Is Mother’s Day – purely to get published; A Place of Greater Safety emerged only when she contributed to a Guardian piece about writers’ unpublished first novels.

Genre is a confining madness; it says nothing about how writers write or readers read, and everything about how publishers, retailers and commentators would like them to. This is not to criticise the many talented personnel in those areas, who valiantly swim against the labels their industry has alighted on to shift units as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Consider the worst offender: not crime, horror, thriller, science fiction, espionage or romance, but “literary fiction”. It can and does contain many of the elements of the others, but is ultimately meaningless except as a confused shorthand: for what is thought clever or ambitious or beyond the comprehension of readers more suited to “mass market” or “commercial” fiction. What would happen if we dispensed with this non-category category altogether? Very little, except that we might meet a book on its own terms.

Is last year’s Booker prize winner, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a ghost story because its central character is dead, or a thriller because he has to work out who has murdered him? A historical novel because it is set during the Sri Lankan civil war, or speculative fiction because it contains scenes of the afterlife? And where do we place previous winners such as Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders or A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James?

Finding ways to describe narratives is not itself the problem, and nor is genre in the wider sense. An understanding of literary traditions that have formed over centuries and across cultures is not essential to the enjoyment of an individual book, but helpful to a broader appreciation of how texts interact with one another through recurring styles and motifs. The urge to categorise has had a deadening effect, reinforcing hierarchies that rely on an idea of what is “serious” and what is not, and by the genuinely liberating understanding of literature, in all its forms, as a playful, thoughtful, experimental tussle with words and ideas.

None of that means one mightn’t enjoy wandering down the forking paths of the literary woods. During the lockdowns, I found great comfort in psychological thrillers of a particular cast: a form of domestic noir in which the usually female protagonist’s apparently enviable life was undermined by a combination of unresolved dissatisfactions (a distant or otherwise problematic husband, a house renovation gone wrong, bills piling up, recalcitrant or troubled children) and an interloper, often in the form of a glamorous new neighbour. I was fascinated by the way these novels articulated a set of contemporary bourgeois anxieties – property values, long-term monogamy, school places, stalled careers – and then imagined how they might be alleviated by the arrival of a disruptor, only to discover that the status quo isn’t all that bad. Often set in smartish London suburbs, these books occasionally packed their casts off on holiday to a rented villa that not every participant could comfortably afford, and in which a body would quickly turn up amid the abandoned plates of tzatziki and glasses of retsina. I began to imagine that if I had the wit and skill to write a parodic mashup, I might call it Kitchen Island. But I don’t, because these efficient entertainments were also, at their most successful, impressively executed feats of plotting and atmosphere.

That I might feel these novels were, in that grimly joyless phrase, “guilty pleasures” because I read them more quickly than I might read the work of Jon Fosse or James Baldwin or Isabel Waidner is to misunderstand the potential of variousness. They were simply another facet of my reading life, speaking to a different impulse, yielding a different reward. I might eat a boiled egg for lunch and immerse myself in a complicated recipe of unfamiliar ingredients at dinner time; finish a cheerful romcom and then turn to a painstakingly detailed documentary. These are not perceived as contradictions, but as perfectly reasonable options available to those of us lucky enough to have them.

I’m returning now to a new novel, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, one of my favourite contemporary novelists. It is set in space, on board a craft circling the Earth, filled with astronauts from different countries and cultures, undergoing physical, mental and emotional changes. Her last novel, The Western Wind, was set in 1491, and she has also written about Alzheimer’s disease, Socrates, infidelity and insomnia. Categorise that.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books

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agaycabbage · 1 year

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hi, tumblr

I never actually did an intro post, and I realize I have none of my links or info here so...probably time to change that.

I’m Charlie. They/them pronouns, please. Super queer, super nerdy, super awkward and apologizing for that in advance. I’m an editor and an author, a gamer, a brand new narrative designer trying to break into game writing, and a bit of a chaos demon. But in the fun way. I hope.

I'm an editor for indie authors with +10 years of experience and actually affordable rates. You have stories to tell! Money shouldn’t be what keeps you from the professional editor you deserve. Find me and learn more: cknightwrites.com

I write! As of now: I have a very large, very smutty, angsty as hell Shakarian fic that is posted every week. Best friends to lovers kicking ass in space—you don't ever need to have played Mass Effect to get into this story. Read that here.

I also have a Dragon Age: Inquisition fic and (less frequently updated, sorry) Horizon Forbidden West fic.

My debut novel is coming out in 2023, too! RISE OF THE TEMPEST (the novel formerly known as Butt Pirates) is a low-stakes, high heat fantasy romance features two trans MCs. More on this later, but you can see character arc on my blog already and a little more here!

On my Patreon, I provide customized and functional editing and writing advice, education, and coaching. I've covered everything from how to use em dashes properly to world building and purple prose. New posts weekly!

My Patreon also has an Editor in Training tier! I'm delivering education on what being a freelance editor is actually like (and how to make it work for you), building that business, and hands-on coaching on editing practices.

(And as a bonus, my Patreon is how I pay for chemo, so subscribe here.)

I am disabled and sick, which is a costly life, and my editing rates are set to be more affordable for you than profitable for me. My Patreon goes directly to my medical bills every month, and my ko-fi is another great way to help with that.

I will cheer on and help my mutuals however I can. My messages are always open, and I encourage you to use them if I can help you with anything. But you're not welcome here if you gatekeep the writing or queer communities in any way. I'm not nice to bullies.

FIND ME ELSEWHERE!

IG, TikTok, Bluesky, & Twitter: @ CKnightWrites Discord: enbycabbage#0401 linktr.ee/cknightwrites

Any support is appreciated, but just getting to know my mutuals is a damn joy. I want to know your characters, your hyperfixations, and your favorite kind of pie.

#indie author #intro #writer #writing community #writeblr #bookblr #talking about myself is a nightmare #i have no idea what im doing with tumblr #sorry in advance #im awkward #its the neurodivergency

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ac-liveblogs · 1 month

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Penacony 2.1

Penacony is endlessly frustrating. The main takeaway I have is that parts of Penacony's world-building and character design are exceptionally well thought-out, but the main quest utterly fails to make use of any of it in an interesting or engaging way.

I'm reminded of Fontaine in that, like with the 'Ace Attorney' style trials, HYV is once again trying to ape a narrative style that they don't know how to write. In this case, it's... a lot of things.

Penacony makes a lot of allusions through its chapter titles, especially in 2.1. 2.0's final chapter is called "Whodunit" and ends with two impossible murders and at least 3 suspects. 2.1's chapter titles are a grab bag - there's detective novels, movies, music, a psychological gothic horror, a psychological thriller, philosophy, film noir, a children's book and references to depression-era America and the disillusionment experienced by the masses following WW1 (the Lost Generation), with a few other literary shoutouts scattered throughout the mission.

While I think these concepts were woven together rather effectively in concept and Penacony sounds like a really fun and fascinating place that I'd like to explore in a game made by someone else, I also think that the main quest we did get utterly fails to make use of them in any compelling or competent way either due to technical limitations or an unfamiliarity with what they're referencing.

There are no hard rules for writing any kind of story, but there are genre conventions for a reason - as a detective story, be it as a Whodunit (which this isn't) or a Howdunit (that's closer to the truth), I think Penacony failed to make the mystery here engaging in the slightest.

The Whodunit disintegrates when all three of your suspects say they ain't dunit and the player doesn't investigate any of them in any capacity whatsoever, and the Howdunit doesn't work when the player doesn't get to go to the scenes of any crime to try and find clues. The main way the mysteries are progressed is by rotating through one of four POVs and going to find the right person to talk to, who will then dump a bunch of exposition on you - rinse/repeat.

This information is sometimes repeated over routes, too, which feels especially tedious - the amount of time you spend in conversations feels pretty disproportionate to how much you learn and or see of the world. It's also really not helped by how verbose and repetitive HYVs dialogue style is.

Unlike the previous patch there's no real attempt at horror (unless you count the documents Acheron finds or Aventurine's backstory, which I don't), and I don't really consider Aventurine's long-winded gem gambit particularly interesting or compelling given how poorly defined the Cornerstones even are in both ability and significance.

(HSR unfortunately didn't really make good use of Topaz to establish that back in Belobog.)

Despite this entire story supposedly being a thrilling web of people with different motivations, it doesn't really play out that way either. Aventurine is supposed to be manipulating you, but you barely engage with him and you always broadly know what his plans are (especially if you're familiar with his motifs), and no-one else really... does much. There's theoretically off-screen politics with The Family, but Sunday and Gallagher are the only real reps there - the other three branches may as well not exist, and Sam just fucks right off. It feels like the complexity is being saved for later or there's just a lot less going on here than the game wants you to think there is.

A lot of Penacony's remaining world-building - mostly things that tie into the allusions to the Lost Generation, the disillusionment and abuse of Penacony's underclass etc. is mostly conveyed to you by either Acheron or Gallagher - you don't get to see it and it doesn't factor into the mystery outside of (probably) Gallagher's exposition. It will probably factor in next patch in some capacity but... come on. We're 2/3 done.

What the allusions in Penacony do accomplish are either loosely tying to the contents of a chapter or near explicitly outlining what's going to happen; A Cat Amongst the Pigeons, Double Indemnity or When the Sacred Ginmill Closes being the former, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Statue of the Happy Prince being the latter.

I would find this a lot cuter if the mystery hadn't already been spoonfed to me, figured out the murderer and Aventurine's exact trajectory by the time I got to play as Acheron. As it is...

To clarify, I really don't consider 90% of the clues being info-dumped to you 'engaging with a mystery' in a videogame. I'd like to walk around and investigate myself - even in books, detectives tend to visit the scene of the crime and I don't see why I should have to take someone else's word on what a place is like or how sad the people there are in an interactive medium where I should be able to go to those places and talk to those people myself.

Especially not in a trippy dreamworld where you can enter people's thoughts, mess with their emotions, see into their dreams, interact with invisible cartoon characters and have a weird cult that's sort of vaguely able to make you part of... a collective consciousness? I think? In a vague and nebulous way?

The dungeons were just the road to get to a location! What is this! I don't think I've ever played a mystery game so unwilling to let you solve a damn mystery!

I hated sitting around and listening to the characters tell me things I'd rather go find myself - I can take some of that, but not all of that, eapecially when barely anything else is happening in the meantime. It's a shame, too - the deaths outlined in the documents Acheron found sound like fun horror elements I'd like to see.

But thats just it. I'd rather have gone to try and find the traitor than have him reveal himself in the last minute. I'd rather confront Aventurine in some freaky Emoscape or nightmare caused by the Harmony rather than just get flashbacked everything really, really slowly. I'd have rathered done a lot of other things this game could've chosen to do, but didn't despite the possibility being very real.

Unfortunately, as usual, I get the sense that HYV took the easy way out again and that the story and gameplay weren't really made with each other in mind - and as such, I don't think this patch did very well with either.

Anyway, the secret main character. Aventurine. In concept he's really good and I think his motifs and literary allusions chain together really cohesively, but he was let down by the main quest again. I didn't find him very compelling. He didn't do much given how much screentime he had and way too much was revealed about him without me ever feeling like that time was spent productively.

I would've happily cut some of his segments to keep some mystery about him and had more Express exploration - I don't think he or Acheron needed to be playable, honestly. That time would've been better spent having them interact with the protagonist.

I feel if I'd been better able to connect to Aventurine as a character and was wondering what on earth he was planning then identifying his tragic motifs might have resonated with me more. Unfortunately despite the patch really wanting me to buy Aventurine as a sad, tragic meow meow who is secretly a paranoid nervous wreck, scared at all times and relying on his own luck, the way it chose to convey those personality traits to me was by having a dream-version of Aventurine show up and explain that to me.

Instead of like. Actually showing any of those traits at all. In a strssful situation. Like the one he was in. How'd we spend so much time with him and not get any of that? Seriously???

You can't put a character in front of me and say 'look he's sad. be sad for him.' You have to make me like him first. And I ended 2.0 on "oh, maybe I could like him. If they do more of this with him next patch".

I swear it's not that hard to make me like a character! You just have to do something interesting with them!! I'm not that bad!! I'm not really a heartless shrew! I can feel emotion, I swear, HYV is just really bad at pulling it out of me because they are terrible at writing characters feeling genuine and compelling, I feel like that's not too much to ask!

Can you show and not tell like, one thing? Is it that hard?! You couldn't even avoid having Sunday and Ratio explain Aventurine's really simple gem gambit to death!

I could've liked him. I really could've. And don't even get me started on Acheron and Black Swans stupid trailers.

So, yeah, I guess my final takeaway is that Penacony could've been really really fun and good and cool and I love the concepts here. I just wish literally any other company had written it.

Do you think next time they have Nasu over to visit, they can get him to punch up their scripts?

Other Notes

I was very disappointed that the game focused more on Aventurine's time on his homeworld than his relationship with the IPC, given what a major factor the IPC is going to be next patch and... that he just died for them.

It also kind of sucked that Acheron didn't have much to do beyond her cool showing at the end, and the Trailblazer's grand contribution was chatting to a DILF at a bar then doing a truly obnoxious boss fight.

Aventurine's sad tragic backstory also reminded me a lot of Scaramouche's quest in Genshin, which I hated. Guy calmly reacts to his horrific backstory, which is being shown to him, and doesn't actually concretely affect him, the characters around him or the story in any way is not fun, and it feels like a really cheap attempt to make the audience feel sad. This isn't to say that Aventurine's backstory didnt affect him; its that it coming back up in the final dungeon to haunt him didn't.

Aventurine's motifs are really cool and flow into each other nicely in concept but it really does suck that the danse macabre connection with the Trailblazer seriously fizzled out the way it did.

Sam fucking off and coming back to reveal his true identity the way he did was lazy and sucked. Have him run around being mysterious more, jeez.

The Bloodhound statues around the place were a cool touch and I liked them.

Black Swan's segments all sucked and were tedious. Should've cut 'em and let us investigate Acheron given, you know, she's a confirmed murderer and we really dismissed her as a threat super easily given that fact! What the hell was that! Why did we just take everyone's word on them not being the killer, what kind of murder mystery is this! If you didnt want to deal with any of that why even pretend this was a Whodunit!

How do you copy a genre designed to let you investigate characters to learn what their deal is. And just. Not do that. Hello? Hello???

I'd like to go to Clockie's Dreamville. That sounds fun. I want to go.

Can I have Penacony, actually? I'd have a lot of fun writing this place. It's so cool. It is my exact jam. Holy shit someone at HYV went hard coming up with the concept for this place, it's so good. Some of the side quests here are super cool too. God damn the main quest sucks though.

Aventurine is fun to play with. His boss battle fuckin sucked though.

i miss dan heng :(

#replies #ac plays hsr

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squigglysquidd · 5 months

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Just wanted to pop in and say:

Fibonacci (Mass Effect Fantasy Shakarian AU) is not dead 😁

I just need to take a hiatus so I can write my own, original fantasy novel. I'm excited to get back to Fibo and finish it up someday but I'm really focused on producing an original story that may be inspired by my fandom interests but is all mine

❤️Thank you for your patience and if you ever want to chat Fibo, I'm always here!❤️

#mass effect #fibonacci #mass effect au #garrus vakarian #fantasy au #shakarian #female shepard #my fic #femshep x garrus #maleshep x tali #shali #fanfiction

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flanaganfilm · 1 year

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Hey Mike, can you talk about your work on Revival? What was it like reading the book, writing the script, making it all work? I know people thought it was going to be like Midnight Mass, but King is tackling religion far differently & I would have loved to see your adaptation of that. Furthermore, why did you decide to leave the project? I read somewhere it had to do with the film rights, but I’m sure there’s more to that story & id love to hear your side of it.

Also, Life of Chuck…. 1.85:1 or Scope? C’mon, Mike! Spill the beans!

Thanks!

I was very excited about Revival. King had given me the rights after I finished the script for Doctor Sleep, and we took it around town as a pitch. Warner Bros. picked up the project and commissioned the script.

I wrote a script I love, and turned it in to Warner Bros. It couldn't be more different than Midnight Mass; that was always a very weird and unfair comparison. The only thing they have in common is that each story features a priest; any comparisons wouldn't have survived opening weekend, that was never really a thing.

Revival is one of King's scariest and most effective books, and I was madly in love with the movie. I stayed very true to the book, and the story spanned over decades. It was a character-forward epic about mortality, and the futility of hope, dealing with themes of lost love, addiction, and hubris. In fact, it has way more in common with Frankenstein than Midnight Mass, and I was stoked to make it. It wasn't cheap, though - the set pieces were big, the VFX budget was intimidating, and it fit into a type of budget that isn't typically made these days.

For those reasons, ultimately, after Doctor Sleep's disappointing performance at the box office, Warner Bros. didn't want to pursue the movie. They had really liked the Frankenstein comparisons, but that only comes into play at the very end of the story. Their pitch was to start the story there, and jettison most of the actual novel in favor of a new, heavily Frankenstein inspired narrative. It was a bridge too far, and changed the source material too radically.

Warner Bros. faith in the project had been seriously damaged by the box office performance of Doctor Sleep, and the character-forward epic I was pitching was just too risky given the hefty price tag. Ultimately, I wasn't willing to change the story as drastically as they wanted to, and it just didn't make sense to make it for that budget - so they opted not to make the film, and that was that. I didn't leave the project at all - the studio just didn't want to move forward with it. Revival is not the most obvious project. It is more expensive than a lot of comparable horror titles, and we didn't want to do it as a streaming movie - we bet the farm on a theatrical feature, and the cards didn't fall in our favor this time. My window of availability as a director rapidly closed. I was heading fast into Midnight Club and Fall of the House of Usher for Netflix, so without a viable attachment from me for at least a few years, the project couldn't move forward at all, and the rights reverted back to Stephen King. We discussed whether we wanted to try to keep it alive, but we were already deep into talks about The Dark Tower, whose rights were about to become available after years of being tied up. Steve doesn't like to give the same person multiple rights as a general rule, because he doesn't want his projects to stall out in development, which makes good sense. Given the choice, we absolutely wanted to focus on The Dark Tower. We let Revival go, and last I heard, some other people were developing it as a TV project. I absolutely love the script I wrote, and I'm disappointed that Warner Bros. didn't want to make it, but it's their studio and their prerogative. I can't say I blame their reasoning. In fact, I completely see their point. I could have dug in and fought harder to keep it, but that might mean I wouldn't have gotten the rights to The Dark Tower.

And I hate to say it, but Revival would have taken a similar narrative approach to Doctor Sleep, and - well - audiences just didn't show up for that movie. It's entirely likely that the same would have happened here - this was another long, character-centric story that wasn't entirely a mainstream horror tale, and it was expensive. And this didn't have The Shining connection to lean on. I am so sorry to say this, but I don't have a lot of faith that audiences would have supported us if we'd bet the farm on a theatrical release of Revival as I wanted to make it. So honestly, I think it all worked out for the best. You win some and you lose some in this business. Who knows, maybe it'll come back some day - I also lost the rights to Gerald's Game back in 2014 when we couldn't find a partner who wanted to make the movie. They eventually came around again, and the timing worked out. The same could happen here - maybe we get another chance, or may we revisit it down the line as a limited series. Stranger things have happened. Ka is a wheel. Or, maybe this new television production of Revival will get off the ground, and if it does I wish them nothing but the best with it. It's a phenomenal story, and I'll be first in line to see it.

#revival #in another life

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senseandaccountability · 7 months

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twenty questions for fic writers

tagged by @mightymizora (thank youuu)

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 94.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count? 1,108,787, ahahaha. I’ve been at it for like 20 years though. 3. What fandoms do you write for? Baldur’sGate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Lucifer make up the bulk of my fics but I’ve dabbled in some more fandoms. 4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

There are names for what binds us - (DAI; Blackwall/Trevelyan) The free parking jackpot rule - (Lucifer; Lucifer/Chloe) Blaze Me a Sun - (BG3; Astarion/Tav) And Hate the Idle Pleasures of These Days - (Lucifer; Michael/Ella) Kiss by Kiss I Cover Your Small Infinity - (Lucifer; Lucifer/Chloe)

5. Do you respond to comments? I always try to!

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? All of my A Song of Ice and Fire fics are angsty since they’re about women who die in various horrible ways. But I’m generally more of a bittersweet writer, I think. 7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Like I said, I lean towards the bittersweet and most endings are more sweet than bitter.Compared to canon outcomes I’d say my Michael fics for the Lucifer fandom are the happiest ones because you can’t give me a wretched, bitter, jealous mirror to Most Loved Boi Lucifer and not expect me to root for him in some way. 8. Do you get hate on fics? Not since my Jamie/Brienne drabbles ended up on a rabid Jamie/Cersei reclist. I also had some snippy comments/PMs on a Michael fic where I closed down Hell because Lucifer the show gave me an American Dream ending with self-improvement through therapy in Hell instead of questioning revenge as a moral solution. 9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Gods, I used to. Not so much now, no. It’s just not that interesting to me anymore, I rather write around the smut. The kind of smut I like to write is emotionally intense and/or angsty, at any rate.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? Very, very rarely. I’m uninterested in reading them myself but I’ve used crossover as a concept in two stories: Troy Lies in Ruins (Cyberpunk 2077) in which Johnny is the Clementine inside V’s head and I use Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as inspiration for their post-game quest to find each other again.

The Gods That Answer After Dark (Lucifer) in which I crossover Deckerstar with the novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and had a chance to shut down that damned hell again.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Yes, someone more or less paraphrased my Johnny/V fic And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire by posting their own fic with pretty much entire paragraphs stolen from mine. I didn’t do anything about it, though, it had no comments/kudos at the time.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Yes, it was flattering.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? I don’t think so, not that I can recall. I’d be up for it, though, it would be kind of cool to co-write a romance story where two authors write two different characters.

14. What’s your all-time favorite ship? I don’t think I can pick just one.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? I always intend to finish the WIPs. That said, it would require a lot of willpower to return to the oldest WIPs I have, by now. 16. What are your writing strengths? I think I’m good at concepts, characters and hopefully keeping a distinct sort of style. I used to be more pretentious. I think my writing has become better by dropping some of the most literary concepts in favour of focusing on emotions and social dynamics.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Plot? I think I could write plot - I like to plan stories out - but I don’t really want to dedicate time to write it. I’m also really bored by action and exposition. Ugh at having to explain and describe shit beyond a tightly packed sentence or two.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I don’t even understand this question and will blame it on English being my second language.

19. First fandom you wrote for? The Legend of the Ice People, oh my lord. If only for my desk drawer. https://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-of-the-Ice-People-19-book-series/dp/B075TY2F5M The US version of the covers have removed ALL suggestive and thrillingly forbidden vibe from the original though. What 13 year old me loved about them was that the first book was about a horny 16 year old girl who falls in love with a 40 something demonic and cursed (also solitary and very angsty) dude after having intense sex dreams about him as Satan. Every book after that just added to the cocktail of sex, history and ancient curses and for years so much of what I wrote was fanfic versions of this series. 20. Favorite fic you’ve ever written? I’m rather fond of this Aeducan/Gorim story: so I wait for you like a lonely house

I'm tagging @wanderingaldecaldo, @thievinghippo, @icescrabblerjerky and @threewhiskeylunch if you're up for it. Otherwise feel free to ignore.

#my writing #memes

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