september

October 01, 2020

Things I enjoyed in the month of September:

Laini Taylor's, Strange the Dreamer:

On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.
Her skin was blue, her blood was red.
She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover's arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and torch ginger buds rained out of her long hair.
Later, they would say she hadn't shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths came, frantic, and tried to lift her away.
That was true. Only that.
[...] this girl [...] shaken from some pocket of the sky.
Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.
She was also blue.


No...
NO.

Have you ever been overwhelmed, stricken, or even paralysed by helplessness whilst reading someone else's imagined story?
Knowing full well you can't change anything. You can't alter the course of fictional history. You can't do anything but watch, powerless and barren behind an impenetrable wall cast in such wounding clarity.
And you can't look away.
As much as you may want to.
And you can't interfere.
As much as you may need to.
Like in a dream.
Like in a nightmare.
Have you ever felt that?
Helpless, and trapped, and enrapt?
You will, if you read Strange the Dreamer.
You will be invited into a world that feels almost like a memory and lured into playing an impotent god.
This isn't your story, you aren't part of it. You didn't didn't write it, you didn't live it.
You're nothing.
But you watch, you oversee, and you despair because before the story takes its first tentative breath, you're entrusted with the ending.
The horrible, unjust, inescapable conclusion to a story you don't yet know will tear you to pieces.
That will make you laugh, and root for the underdog, and believe, without shame or incredulity, in inconceivable love.
You don't know these things yet.
But you do know how it ends.
And you should be prepared.
But you never will be.
How could you be?
No one is, for that final untethering.

Strange the Dreamer is like a waking dream.
A dream I've had. You've had. Others will have.
It's familiar and alien and clear 'til the point of waking.
When you turn that final page and cannot fathom how it was all so real, or how a life could unfold in a single night of dreaming.
How the further you wake, the more unclear the life you lived mere seconds ago becomes.
How a girl born of blue and Lepidoptera could hold such dominion over other people's dreams and yet be so trapped.


Sarai was seventeen years old, a goddess and a girl. Half her blood was human, but it counted for nothing. She was blue. She was godspawn. She was anathema. She was young. She was lovely. She was afraid. She had russet hair and a slender neck, and wore a robe that belonged to the goddess of despair. It was too long, and trailed behind her, its hem worn to a sheen from dragging over the floor, back and forth. Pacing this terrace, Sarai might have walked as far as the moon and back.
Except, of course, that if she could walk to the moon, she wouldn't come back.


How a scholar of fairy tales with seemingly no power other than his innate goodness and unrivalled imagination can unknowingly possess the capacity to change everything.


It was midsummer, midmorning, in the full light of day. There were no books to hide behind, and no shadows―only Lazlo Strange in his worn gray robes, with his nose that had been broken by fairy tales, looking like the hero of no story ever told.
Or, no story yet told.


How their union is both the beginning and the end.
...
It's simple, really:

Because in dreams there are no rules.
There's only the unknown inside.

Laini Taylor knows this and with Strange the Dreamer she gifts us the dreams we've forgotten.
Those hazy unrealities we felt so acutely and couldn't hold onto, no matter how hard we tried.


...they were just two people sitting at a table regarding each other shyly through a wisp of tea steam.
Inside a dream.
Within a lost city.
In the shadow of an angel.
At the brink of calamity.


Normally, whilst reading, I'm not solely experiencing the story as it unfolds. At the back of mind I'll be forming thoughts and emotions to either put down in a review or to help fully accept what the story means to me when it's over.
This wasn't the case with Strange the Dreamer.
There was no reflection, no internal ponderings, there was only the story, and there was only forward.
As in a dream, you don't look back; you can't look back.
Moved by some invisible Virgil, both unstoppable and welcomed.
I didn't, couldn't think while I was reading this book.
I only felt.
But when I finished?
When I finished there was a hum of Dylan Thomas playing at the forefront of my mind:


A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.




Sarai, our soft, lapis goddess is that girl of nightmare and madness.
Lazlo, the dream-room she inhabits. The safety she finds refuge in.
The heaven-proof house her cage.
She, the scintillation that changes his everything.
I can't help but see them both in Dylan Thomas' words.
And what a fine synergy to find with a poem I've loved for years, and a book that's softly crept its way into my heart.
An unexpected somnambulism.
Ethereal and brutal.
A dream of blue-skinned goddesses and noses broken by fairy tales.
And the destruction that trails them.


"The Muse of Nightmares," he said. "It sounds like a poem."
A poem? Sarai detected nothing mocking in his voice, but she had to see his face to confirm it, which meant sitting up and breaking the embrace. Regretfully, she did. She saw no mockery, but only . . . witchlight, still witchlight, and she wanted to live in it forever.
She asked in a hesitant whisper, "Do you still think I'm a . . . singularly unhorrible demon?"
"No," he said, smiling. "I think you're a fairy tale. I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And . . ." His voice grew bashful. Only in a dream could he be so bold and speak such words. "I hope you'll let me be in your story."


Strange the Dreamer isn't a book you can easily describe and I'm not sure I'd even want to.
Sometimes a book is better read than described.
I could tell you of the world it inhabits, with its musty, collegiate libraries, uncrossable deserts laced with chitinous deathtraps slumbering in wait of a good meal.
Or of lost-named cities oppressed by metallic, lofty divinities, burnished in blood and avengement.
I could wax lyrical over Laini Taylor's prose which embraces the poetical yet somehow doesn't venture into floridness. It instead begs the question: why aren't all thoughts expressed the way Taylor expresses them?


It was time. She closed her eyes. She closed them tight. Her gift was ugly. She never let anyone see her call it forth. [...] She took a deep breath. [...] And screamed.
It was clearly a scream―the rictus tension in her face, head thrust forward, throat stretched taut―but no sound came out. Sarai didn't scream sound. She screamed something else. It issued forth: a soft, boiling darkness.
[...]
Streaming forth into the night, the darkness fractured into a hundred fluttering bits like windblown scraps of velvet. A hundred smithereens of darkness, they broke apart and re-formed and siphoned themselves into a little typhoon that swept down toward the rooftops of Weep, whirling and wheeling on soft twilight wings.
Sarai screamed moths. Moths and her own mind, pulled into a hundred pieces and flung out into the world.


I could clumsily explain the inescapable reality of prejudice that runs explicitly through Sarai and Lazlo's worlds.


And so Grief and Shame abided in adjoining rooms with the door shut between them, holding their pain in their arms instead of each other.


How it's a stark reflection of our own existences.
I could tell you these things. I could go into more detail.
But I won't.
Because like I said, some things are better read than described.
And Strange the Dreamer is one of these things.
And it's not over.
Even though we're given the ending before the beginning, it's only the ending of one half of the story.
A dream to be continued.
All you have to do is fall asleep.
All you have to do is turn the first page.


Half tangled in the remnants of his dream, Lazlo was still seeing the wide blue eyes of the beautiful blue girl, and he was frustrated to have wakened and lost her so abruptly. If he could get back to the dream, he wondered, might he find her again? He laid the dead moth on the bedside table and fell back to sleep.



Let's fanart:
Gabriella Bujdoso
(I'm deeply in love with these)

https://lesyablackbird.tumblr.com/post/185816845073/bridge-the-divide-done-for-illumicrate-book
https://lesyablackbird.tumblr.com/post/159268769543/minya-from-strange-the-dreamer-by-laini-taylor-i
https://lesyablackbird.tumblr.com/post/180567334588/sarai-and-lazlo-when-i-read-this-scene-i-knew-i
https://lesyablackbird.tumblr.com/post/180448082333/chains-of-the-past-this-was-done-for
Lesya BlackBird

C. J. Merwild
(All hail)

https://meliescribbles.tumblr.com/post/179082900336/strange-the-dreamer-had-me-on-page-one-took-me-a
Melanie Bourgeois
(This was the first piece of fanart I saw for Strange the Dreamer and I couldn't get it out of my mind)

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Dreamy dresses by Chotronette:
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Celestial 🌙✨ by @adambirdyy

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Watercolor Cupcake

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Red Velvet Cake ❤️

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Working on this golden beauty ✨

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1, 2, 3, 4 or 5? ✨

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I've always thought if I could afford a proper fairy tale dress, it'd be an Elie Saab creation but I don't know, these Chotronette sparklies are lusting my brain out pretty hard.

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As a swear-happy monster, this article made me happy.
But the best part?
Watching the cursing elite take down the puritans in the comments section.
...

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...

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Sweet lord, the details.

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I love words created for a particular thing/situation.
Like defenestration and vellichor.
Pediculous may be kinda gross but it is pleasingly specific.

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Chris Sickels of Red Nose Studio for TJ Klune:

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The House in the Cerulean Sea is now out! I loved putting character into this cover without any characters. Special thanks to Peter Lutjen at @torbooks for trusting in my work for this project. AND to @tjklunebooks for creating this magical world. from the publisher: Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light. The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.

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Cover art design for books is something I'm mildly obsessed with.
Be it traditional, digital, a mixture of both, it doesn't matter.
If it works, I want to know how.
And when I first saw the cover for the first book in TJ Klune's new series, I went a little apeshit.
Because look at it.
Sculpture? Painted backgrounds? Old school stop-motion vibes?
Uhm...

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https://llstarcasterll.tumblr.com/post/157040947047
https://llstarcasterll.tumblr.com/post/157177044987
https://llstarcasterll.tumblr.com/post/170481024372
Marci Klugiewicz

Aurelia aka. artgent

https://rosiethorns88.tumblr.com/post/624081397753200640/my-things-part-2-of-this-project-complete-if
rosiethorns88

https://lnmei.tumblr.com/post/145435988254/andrew-carrying-his-exy-junkie-boyfriends-who
Ellen Mei

https://chemdoodles.tumblr.com/post/617245503155044352/ship-4-neilandrew
https://chemdoodles.tumblr.com/post/619410219416649728/flirting-insp
https://chemdoodles.tumblr.com/post/618785728055443456/hush-nicky-theyre-having-a-moment-insp
https://chemdoodles.tumblr.com/post/625602068264206336/sweater-paw-attack-brilliant-idea-from-people-on
https://chemdoodles.tumblr.com/post/618435179208474624/please-secure-your-tiny-angry-boyfriends-insp
https://chemdoodles.tumblr.com/post/617621517365297152/the-rest-of-the-team-the-size-is-the-problem
https://chemdoodles.tumblr.com/post/624153567427805184/neil-sleeping
chemdoodles

https://fighto-art.tumblr.com/post/182667620340/rooftops-and-cigarettes
https://fighto-art.tumblr.com/post/177249866525/all-that-time-fighting-and-you-never-learned-how
https://fighto-art.tumblr.com/post/186057840165/ive-always-wanted-to-draw-a-smol-comic-for-tfc
https://fighto-art.tumblr.com/post/614778951379927040/after-four-hundred-years-i-finally-gathered-the
https://fighto-art.tumblr.com/post/627282902921691136/ive-decided-that-my-new-aesthetic-consists-of
Irene

I've only read the first in the All for the Game trilogy, annnnnd... it was okay.
But the fanart?
Oh, the fanart.
Can you say: Cute. as. fuck?

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Who's gonna drive you home, tonight?:

This thread made me so happy because I can't drive.
I've never taken a single lesson.
I have no great desire to change that.
And I've felt guilty and shamed over it since I turned seventeen.
Because, y'know, society says you should do certain things at a certain time when society tells you to.
...
Mmmmmmnope, no thanks.
Having HSP means I overload on sensory information just walking down the street, so how the fuck am I meant to navigate high speed traffic with boundless idiots on the road and not recreate a scene from Mad Max?
...
I'm not, that's how.
Even though speeding away from Doof Warrior and his bungee cords would be kinda epic...

Who am I kidding?
I'd probably wet myself before I even got the engine started.
That fucker's terrifying.

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I have a lot of feelings about this.
Most of them being about damn time, the little emo fucker only brought it on himself, and of course, the classic, fuck the patriarchy.


Ps. check out binah's Dante Alighieri series for 2018's inktober:
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october. #dantealighieri

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It's quite beautiful.
Just look at this gem:

Swipe.
You must swipe it.

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I got caught in a loop.
I still fucking love this stuff.
And I still can't sing Clarkson's mutant vocal range for shit.
She mutilates my poor mortal larynx.
...
Here's some Avril to really cement the first decade of the 2000s into your brainpan:

I still know all the words.
...
I STILL KNOW ALL THE WORDS.

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Raj Brueggemann and Snorlax:
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Snorlax visits a Korean spa: a Journey

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Snorlax Makes Too Many Friends: A Journey

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Snorlax Goes to the Gym!

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Snorlax fights COVID-19

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Snorlax Goes to Art School: A Journey

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I've wanted a giant Snorlax pillow for a while.
Brueggemann isn't making that desire any fucking easier with this adorable bullshit.
Maybe I can convince my sister to make me one...

Also, this:

Yeah, Brueggemann.
Yeah.

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God's Little Cow and the Business Goose:

I don't think I can get over this.

Business goose...

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CuddlyVeedles', Veterinary:

The drama in the black and white scene is mind-blowing.
A zoic Night Watch.
...
I can't get over CuddlyVeedles' characterisation.
I just can't:

I think my favourite part, though, is the way they leave the editing functions in the background:

You'd think it'd take the life out of the image but actually, it's the opposite.

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Many kinds of toast:
...

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I don't even know if I ship this ship, but I am so here for the fanart.
That second image?

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A gift for my birthday from the rentals.
He just sits at the end of my bed and quietly ruins my life with his stubby appendages.
...

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...

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Other people listen to ASMR, I watch watercolour watermelons.
...
FUCK, this is satisfying.

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Some sense from the Twitter oracles:

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Already wanting to read something and then getting positive reinforcement from the people you follow is up there with surprise Pop Tarts and the sweet, weird pain of a split lip.
...
Is that last part just me?

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There's a fluffy goblin in my house.
He knows of this behaviour.
He knows it well.

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Shameless season 9:

Our last season with Emmy Rossum (which adorably autocorrected to possum ... she's such a possum) and I am going to miss the shit out her.

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Meatier... Meteor... Meatier...

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The things you come to understand just by reading other people's stories.

I haven't read any Tessa Gratton yet but I can already tell her writing is going to peel away those layers and find my hidden scales.

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A short comic based on Hoagy Carmichael’s Song, I Get Along without You Very Well (Except Sometimes). My favorite rendition of the song is by Chet Baker. I think Chet captures tender emotions really well. A very underappreciated musician. What are some songs that just capture your emotions so well? Created this for a promo material with @the_cat_agency. #illustrationwork #illustration_best #illustrationdaily #illustrationgram #drawingaday #art_we_inspire #editorialillustrator #magazineillustration #illustagram #editorialillustration #editorialillustrations #artistspotlight #childrenstorybook #kidslitart #illustrationforkids #childrenillustrations #illustration #instaart #picame #illustree #procreateartist #ipadproart #inkillustration #artspotlight #artsoninstagram #illo #digitalillustrator #drawing

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I didn't think it was possible to make this song any more beautiful.

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Behold!
A new comfort watch featuring a handsome tree, a precocious sprite, and a cantankerous moustache.

And some bloopers for your pleasure:

And a little Giada Carboni, the current queen of my fangirl heart:

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Ibon's Ghibli appreciation:

Speaking of Ghibli:

And everything else Merasgar:

There's so much talent on the internet, it's making me mad.
...
In a good way.

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Shallow as fuck.
But oh so pretty.

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You beautiful, foul-mouthed salamander.

Never, ever change.

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Would you like to make a Mandragora, as powerful as the homunculus (little man in a bottle) so praised by Paracelsus? Then find a root of the plant called bryony. Take it out of the ground on a Monday (the day of the moon), a little time after the vernal equinox. Cut off the ends of the root and bury it at night in some country churchyard in a dead man's grave. For 30 days, water it with cow's milk in which three bats have been drowned. When the 31st day arrives, take out the root in the middle of the night and dry it in an oven heated with branches of verbena; then wrap it up in a piece of a dead man's winding-sheet and carry it with you everywhere.

- Jean-Baptiste Pitois aka. Paul Christian
The History and Practice of Magic


The siblings bought me this HP Mandrake print for my birthday and i'm kind of obsessed with it.

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And it's amazing...

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Sometimes brevity is key.

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