Been a while since I bookblogged here, huh? This isn't EVERYTHING, but this post already took me fucking hours to type up, so, let's get into it—

Jhereg by Steven Brust
Mickey7 by Ashton Edward

Both of these books were romps, though the former is the more compelling overall package.

( Jhereg )

( Mickey7 )

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (DNF, 48%)
Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson (DNF, 54%)
Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thích Nhất Hạnh (DNF, 24%)
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright

Look, to tip my hand, I'm in the (very!) early phase of writing a weird fantasy/historical/pastiche-y novel that dares to ask questions like "damn what was it like to be The Greatest Haterliest Poaster Of All Time" and also "what if Martin Luther was a chick" and "what if Martin Luther was two people instead of one" and "what if those people kissed failed to kiss" and "what if Martin Luther were a radical pacifist on top of all the other crazy shit he was doing" and "what if sacred music was actually efficacious and had geopolitical implications" and so on. I blame Lyndal Roper specifically for presenting a portrait of Martin Luther so vivid and intriguing that I could not help but go patently insane over him thereafter.

The logical next step for researching such a novel would be to read up on the theology and history of that period, because even if I'm VERY heavy on the pastiche aspects, it's nice to understand the historical context and some contemporaneous sources/writings for the period of history I'm interested in, if only for riffing purposes, yaknow.

Alas, however, I'm a magpie with no self-control, and thus easily beguiled by Every Other Book I Trip Over On The Way To The Stuff I Should Actually Be Reading, which is how I wound up with this grab-bag of rather more contemporary theology.

All of which I am entirely unqualified to properly evaluate, to be clear, as someone who's variously identified as "Southern Baptist," "Christian agnostic," "deist," "Quaker," "neopagan," "animist," and "some weird woo bullshit syncretic thing ig, sorry it's cringe I know" at various points in my life. But that sure won't stop me from prattling about 'em on my blog.

( That All Shall Be Saved )

( Honest to God )

( Living Buddha, Living Christ )

( Surprised By Hope )

Aside: all of these books felt pretty repetitive. Something to do with the genre, I guess? No way to theology-y people to feel like they've gotten your point across without restating it three different ways? IDK.

ANYWAY. I should probably quit dicking around with these books for a bit, since, y'know, novel. I gotta read more Martin Luther himself and also probably some John Calvin. (Alas this means my copy of Kosuke Koyama's Five Mile an Hour God will likely remain mostly-unread on my shelf. Did I mention I'm a magpie. Books pile up in my home whenever I get on a weird pseudo-reasearch-y kick, and I am blessed with an indulgent partner who just keeps buying me more bookshelves instead of telling me to cut it the hell out, which is very sweet of him, but also I could really use someone to stop me before I commit more Irresponsible Spending Crimes... though I saw someone the other day comparing book-buying to wine-buying, e.g. hey it's valid and normal to let some of them age in the cellar & have more than you'll be able to drink; you want to have good wine when the time is right! and UNFORTUNATELY this is very effective for allowing me to continue in my profligate ways. RIP me.)

...okay yeah I couldn't find any way to fit Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik into all of this. Spinning Silver was very good, but I don't have much to say! The primary romance was a total nothingburger, but that's fine because mostly the book is about Miryem girlbossing her way through Rumpelstiltskin and that shit totally rules. I would like to read several more books about moneylenders Being Incredibly Good At Their Job. The book gets a bit bloated and flabbier as it goes along (though the parts with secondary-girlboss Irina and horrible little man Mirnatius can stay; those bits were great) but never enough to knock it down from the "very good" tier. Fairytale retellings aren't normally my thing but this one was solid.

I was having a chat with someone recently about different theories of soteriology—as a former Southern Baptist amongst a bunch of thoroughly-secular-from-birth jackrabbits, I get a charge out of explaining weirdo protestant folk-theology stuff when it comes up—and when I mentioned there's a set of Christians who believe "hell is real, but people in hell are free to repent & be saved from it at any time they choose," he was surprised and puzzled.

"Wouldn't everyone simply choose to leave hell, in that case? Like, if I died and woke up in hell, pretty quick I'd be like... welp, I sure called that shot wrong. Guess I'd better repent."

I pointed out that repentance, in Christian thought, isn't just an acknowledgment of "well, Jesus was right after all." It entails a change of character, an act of submission: ye shall know them by their fruits.

He shrugged. "I mean. I'm still in hell. Repentance seems like the better alternative?"

I mean, yeah, sure seems that way! But the intuitive comparison that made sense to me, back when I was a Christian, was: have you ever done something wrong, and you knew you did something wrong, but you dragged and dragged your feet on making amends and apologizing, because the horribleness of standing face-to-face with the person you wronged felt impossibly painful, even worse than just choking down your own shame and getting on as best as possible? The people in hell feel that way, I imagine.

Anyone who's experienced an act of undeserved mercy knows the surprise and the sheer relief of the thing, I think. All the moreso if it's granted without fuss, without fanfare, plainly and automatically and wholly. But I think they also know how horrible and humiliating it is to get there—to drag yourself before someone else's judgment, to admit plainly what you've done, to face their pain and feel it as your own, and to make yourself vulnerable to whatever judgment they wish to render. I mean, provided you knew and expected and accepted the worst possible judgment as a just and plausible outcome. So you take that feeling, ratchet it up to a cosmic scale, think of how often in our own lives we ghost or avoid or talk around our transgressions and wounds and trespasses, because that's easier than saying the words—yeah, given that particular theological framework, I could imagine someone nursing their wounds unto eternity.

Home by Marilynne Robinson is not about soteriology, not directly, though the characters, being all of a 1950s-Iowa-Protestant bent, do discuss the nature of salvation at length a few times. It is about forgiveness, though—and I don't think I've ever read another book that so keenly captures the pain and complexity of the thing.

( Read more... )

In Daein, Ambassador Naesala of Serenes spots a weakness in Pelleas, and takes him under his wing.

Pelleas & Naesala, Pelleas/Micaiah/Sothe, ~18k words.

Read here on AO3.

Author's notes are below the following cuts; please note they contain pretty big spoilers for the entire fic!

( earnest dweeby tangent )

( nitty gritty shop talk )

( odds & ends )

I made a playlist for my own fic! Both to help me write it, and just because I'm vain haha.

If you're curious you can listen to it on Spotify over here!

If you want an idea of what I was thinking in terms of "which songs go with which characters/chapters," see below (asterisks indicate songs that I think vibe particularly well with the fic):

( Read more... )

courtesy of this random article i stumbled upon, which i do not endorse in its entirety, but did bless me with these random game development tidbits, so it's good for that much at least:

Now, the Accidentally Lesbians.

There was a point in this two-year development cycle when the character of Fang was some other character. This character had had a romantic relationship in the past with Vanille – and the change to Fang was done with minimal change to Vanille and her dialogue with some lines not even being rewritten, and, according to some sources, not even being rerecorded (which, if true, suggests they were recording game audio before the story was finalised). Fang was going to be a dude, and Lightning was going to be flirty, and they decided to change that by putting the lines from Lightning into Fang, making Fang a girl, and then giving Fang a need to protect Vanille.

All of this resulting in Fang and Vanille being coded as extremely gay, the kind of gay that’s so comfortable and present that nobody remarks on it, creating a sort of gayness-beyond-gayness, punching through the normal representational boundary and standing on the other side in a world where heterosexuality is so much not the default that it is literally unremarkable to find that default abrogated. Now, you may be a big fan of this, and if you are, cool, go team lesbian, but this was absolutely a complete accident and budget constraints, and not a byproduct of this mythos creating a space to wave the lesbian flag.

god, that's so good. i say this as a huge fang/vanielle fan. you're telling me we got that ship due to a late-game "whatever let's just genderswap this bitch" development snafu? hell yes gimme more game design clusterfucks like that lmao

also, far much less momentously but still entertainingly:

Did you know back in the original design combat was meant to be seamlessly integrated with the live map and Lightning was meant to have anti-gravity powers that let her transform the battlefield?

god. amazing. amazing!!! i love this big stupid game!!!

Naesala moves in with Leanne—and his (presumptive) future in-laws.

Naesala/Leanne, ~12k words.

Read here on AO3.

misc warblings about it under the cut

( author's notes )

an annoying thing about Writing Advice™ is that, once you know the basics of “how to write a grammatical sentence” and some general protips like “this is what a plot arc looks like,” “here’s a couple style rules you should probably follow unless you know what you’re doing,” and so on… the most interesting tips sound kind of “wisdom-y” in a way that’s hard to put into practice, and often don’t make sense unless you struggle through writing some stuff yourself. (also, i do sincerely believe the correct answer for most writing questions is “go read a novel that does it well & think about it really hard,” and there’s no real shortcut around that, sorry!)

worse, once you’ve struggled through figuring out how to solve a particular writing problem, you often can’t really express what tip/trick you were using when you solved it. it’s like those veteran birdwatchers who, when you ask how they identified a particular oriole via a 0.5 second glance of a heavily backlit in-flight silhouette, will shrug and say “it just looked like one.” augh!

i think trying to formalize these tips/tricks, as you notice them, can prove useful down the line (as in: when i’m facing a plot dilemma, i’ve occasionally gone down a literal list of “stuff i’ve done that’s worked before” and tried using each and every one, like someone desperately trying to find which screw in the toolbox will fit into a particular bolt). so here’s three new ones i came up with recently; use as you see fit:

VIEWPOINT, PLOT, THEME: PICK TWO GET ONE FREE

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

THROW IN FUN BITS HERE AND THERE, I THINK? ESPECIALLY BIT CHARACTERS?

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

THREE IS THE BIGGEST NUMBER

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

okay those are the three formalisms i came up with. but i guess i’ll mention the other one that i did not come up with, but which i use all the time:

GIVE YOUR READERS WHAT THEY’RE EXPECTING, BUT NOT THE WAY THEY EXPECT IT

( makes some references to some of my original fiction, but lmao you definitely don't need to have read them before )

okay, that's the end of cringe writing advice from a random internet fanfiction person, you may resume your normal reading pages now :P

I picked up this book because one person whose taste I trust said they loved it, and another person whose taste I trust said they hated it.

That's gotta be the fastest way to get me to read a book, by the way. What can I say? I'm the kind of gal always who wants to stick her nose right in the middle of a dispute and suss out who's right!!!

And I think my opinion of this novel fell somewhere solidly in-between those two poles—well, at least until I read the afterword that was tucked into the back of my edition, but let's death-of-the-author that right outta here and come back to it later.

SO. The Last Samurai is a novel suffering from a very unfortunate name collision—it has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, nothing to do with Meiji-era Japan, nothing to do with war or battle or any such thing. (The novel came first, for what it's worth.)

Instead, The Last Samurai is the story of Sibylla, a young, charmingly-lowkey-deranged multilingual humanities academic in late-1980s Oxford, who gets PISSED OFF after putting in a lot of work to translate some scholarship that turns out to be SHODDY and ILL-FOUNDED, and in fact she is so pissed off by this that she decides to (1) fuck off from academia entirely, (2) hooks up with a foppish, callow, pseudointellectual guy she meets at a party, (3) gets pregnant, (4) decides to keep the kid but doesn't tell the dad about it, and (5) works a really-poorly-paid typing/editing job from home so she can raise the kid, Ludo, to be a piano/language/etc prodigy, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill.

( the good )

( the bad )

And, see, since that came right at the end this is making me sound way more negative about the book than I actually am. It was a fun ride! particularly in the first half! I'm glad I read it! but skip the afterword, jeez.