did i ever tell u guys that in fifth grade my class wrote a play bc we were studying ancient greece? it was called persephone and the (not so hot) heroes. i played demeter. basically, persephone got kidnapped by kronos and i strong armed hades into giving me 3 heroes from the underworld to get her back but they were actually terrible and i forget how she was actually saved but bottom line is that you wish you were my fifth grade class
this wasn’t little either, we used the town hall and we wore togas and shit
me as demeter
some lines (this was a joint effort of a bunch of greek-savvy 10/11 year olds):
athena: ‘im the goddess of wisdom but you don’t notice me telling everyone. i’m too smart for that’
–
aphrodite: is zeus chasing some mortal woman again?
athena: no this time he and hera have gone for marriage counselling
–
athena: we can ask hades to let them out of the underworld to help
aphrodite: he’ll never agree, he’s such a deadly bore (we made a fucking pun im so angry)
–
demeter: hades wont pick up. he’s too busy torturing the dead in tartarus
–
hades: i can’t undo the laws of death. just think of the paperwork.
–
aphrodite: the humidity is messing up my hair. it’s getting all frizzy
athena: is that all you care about?
aphrodite: no, it’s also messing up my dress
–
demeter: it’s so dark, and there aren’t any trees or flowers
hades: what do we need trees for, everybody’s dead
–
paris: yeah, and i can shoot straight! isn’t that right, achilles?
–
(hades enters)
paris: who are you? do we know you?
–
achilles: im mighty achilles
odysseus: im wily odysseus
paris: and im hungry paris
–
kronos: i really am awesome, aren’t i
–
aeton: one wrong move and you’re history
odysseus: fool! we already are history!
–
demeter: where are those mortals? i left them right there.
athena: are you sure? this isnt the first time you’ve lost someone.
I suddenly have the need for the entire screenplay, and to direct it at my college.
It’s really important to remember that Diana Wynne Jones was dyslexic and that when she was a little girl and said she wanted to be a writer, people told her that she couldn’t be a writer because of her dyslexia. She became an incredibly popular author.
She actually became the greatest writer in the English language of the 20th century. It’ll take a couple of hundred years for academia to recognize this because she was female, she was funny, and she wrote for children, but – seriously. Try it. Read the best Jones alongside the best Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nobokov, anybody whose life overlapped hers who is canonized in literature courses, she will win handily on any criterion you care to use; style, theme, structure, characterization, sheer reading pleasure. Hell, the worst Jones will stand up against the best of some of them! (I leave you to name your own names, but I bet someone’s already occurred to you.)
I love her books so much. Every single one I’ve read is so vibrant and colorful and whimsical and memorable. She created such beautiful worlds that children and adults alike could find an escape in. She was brilliant.
She really was. I attended a talk/lecture of hers entirely on accident and it was one of the best days of my life.
When I was in second grade we had to practice writing letters by writing to our favorite authors. Everyone else wrote to RL Stein or the like, while I wrote to DWJ. Everyone else got a form letter. I got a typewriter’ed note from her responding to my letter and adding her own thoughts.
Honestly I have this suspicion that DWJ doesn’t get recognized for how brilliant her writing is cause it’s TOO brilliant. Like, she’s just too good at making it too easy. And her work can be read at a deep or shallow level and all sorts between, so you can read Howl’s as a generic fantasy without realizing it’s an absolute send-up, or a social commentary, or a feminist manifesto, or a fucking razor sharp psychological character study. And you’d be having a marvelous good time reading it.
Good Literature got this Rule that it needs to be unpleasureable to be Good, that it must be Difficult or Uncomfortable or Ugly. I could go off on why but I’ll leave it at gatekeeping. Make Good Literature so nasty and not fun that finishing a book becomes some sort of litmus test of Who’s In. If Good Literature was something just anybody could get through how would we know who was important? /ugh
The thing about DWJ is that you can read her in any way: as genre or even as mainstream literature, as a children’s book or an adult’s book. And she doesn’t rely on tropes to make her point. So many of her characters seem real. Especially the teenagers.
I suspect DWJ would have very much agreed with this accurate assessment of “Good Litearture.”
I agree with all this, but also, I wanted to add that I got a letter back from her too when I wrote a fan letter; she wrote back and apologised for taking so long because she’d been laid up with an illness like in Hexwood, and said that all her books had a way of coming true for her eventually but it was very inconvenient that this one had.
I recently picked up Howl’s Moving Castle on reread and I realized something I never had before, which certainly isn’t in the Ghibli movie, so I hate to spoil people who haven’t read it, but I just have to mention it. As a young American child I simply accepted the bit where they RANDOMLY visit Howl’s home. But as an adult I just started laughing my ass off because I SUDDENLY GOT IT. what a fucking hilarious swerve in a High Fantasyland story.
Basically, Howl is an adventure-comedy set in a sort of medieval-ish High Fantasyland, like a generic Disney story. At one point the characters make a brief visit to Howl’s home. Howl is…. NOT from High Fictional Fantasyland. He is FAR more exotic than that.
He is… in fact… Welsh. And worse: modern. He is, in fact, a grad student. He is a flippant Welsh fuckup with a PhD, who keeps his car at his sister’s house because he’s incapable of adulting properly. Reading between the lines, he may be maintaining an ENTIRE life in the magical medieval land of Ingary simply in order to escape the bother of finding a job in academia. Fuckin relatable, am I right?
who the FUCK told society that depression and awkwardness is cute and adorable
bad screenwriters
John Green
john green is not the problem john green’s fans are the problem
Reblogging SO fast.
With the added caveat that no author is or will ever be perfect.
Stop Blaming John Green for Stuff He’s Not Guilty Of 2kForever
John Green is the biggest example of “tumblr turning on people it used to love to reach for and literally invent call outs for no reason other than its apparently cool to shit on things that are popular.”
I’ll forever be bitter about what this ignorant ass site did to him after his books had so much fucking impact on my life.
This is a legitimately fine poem. I say so with my BA in English and Philosophy and my PhD. It’s DAMN HARD to write something like this. Be impressed, yo.
this is DOCTOR SEUSS levels of word and rhyme alchemy
Absolutely! I’m glad you asked, because this is one of my favorite genres as well. Here are some of my favorite urban fantasy books:
1. Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
This book really encompasses what I love about both authors: you have Pratchett’s razor-sharp satirical wit and intelligence, coupled with the lovingly researched devotion to mythology of Gaiman.
It also has some of the best and most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered, and a lot of quiet wisdom wrapped up in a fun and irreverent package. One of my all-time favorite novels.
This is the kind of book you really can’t forget. Simultaneously dark and colorful, with rich visuals, three-dimensional characters, and a truly unique take on gods in modern society, this book is haunting in the best possible way.
There’s also some great rep for characters of color, queer people, and non-Western religious mythology, in both the book and the show. I highly recommend them both.
(Fair warning, however, that there are child murders, undead wives, and a scene in which a prostitute/love goddess eats a man through her cooch, so it’s definitely not for the faint of heart.)
3. The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman.
Okay, I really love Neil Gaiman. His take on urban fantasy is almost everything I aspire to be with my own writing.
As such, it’s really no surprise that this book is awesome: it’s essentially a wonderfully macabre retelling of the Jungle Book, in which a little boy wanders into a graveyard after the murder of his family and is taken in by the ghosts and creatures living there. A bittersweet and surprisingly profound ride.
4. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman.
I’ll try to make this the last Neil Gaiman one, I promise. That said, this book seamlessly encounters the trials, tribulations, and profound beauty of being a child in a world made for adults.
That said, though the central plot is about the unnamed narrator recalling the supernatural events of his childhood while returning home for a funeral, the most gut-wrenching aspects of this book are the painfully real and mundane: from child abuse at the hands of a nanny/Eldritch Horror and alienation from his family as a result of it, to his father nearly drowning him in the bathtub for accusing her, Gaiman manages to make these events rooted in reality enough to feel both painful and realistic.
It can be triggering to some, so be warned.
5. The Percy Jackson series (and its successors), by Rick Riordan.
I first read this series when I was around twelve to fourteen, and I’ve been in love ever since: with faithfulness to Greek mythology that will please both bona fide nerds and laymen alike and a charismatic first person narrative, it’s a ride that even the most reluctant reader will be happy to go on.
I’ve been even more pleased by Riordan’s other series, such as the Kane Chronicles and Trials of Apollo, in which he gives spotlight time to some truly amazing characters of color, queer characters, and more.
I give all his work two thumbs up, and recommend readers of all ages check it out.
6. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency series, by Douglas Adams.
Douglas Adams is probably my favorite science fiction author of all time, so it really doesn’t surprise me that he made it onto this list as well.
My personal favorite of this series is probably The Long Dark Tea-Time of the soul, which features the Norse god Thor blowing up an airport in frustration while trying to book a flight. Miraculously, this is not the most absurd thing to happen over the course of the book.
I highly recommend it.
8. The Colour of Magic (and the rest of the Discworld series), by Terry Pratchett.
Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors of all time, and the Discworld series is a pretty good example as to why. Featuring Death as a recurring character, satirical takes on every tried-and-true trope of the fantasy genre, and one hilarious and unexpected subversion after another, these books are a delight to read.
My favorite installment might be the Hogfather, in which Death takes on the role of Santa Clause with priceless results. It’s amazing, and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves urban fantasy and satire.
That’s all I can think of for now, but encourage my followers to contribute with their own favorite books and series from the urban fantasy genre.
I still think it’s funny that so many people treat “though she be but little, she is fierce” as a line promoting the badassery of small women but in the original context it was more like “yeah my friend is a hussy and she has anger problems. Also she’s short.”
Also petition for there to be cute Shakespeare merchandise with ANY OTHER FUCKING LINE BESIDES THAT ONE
Now I want some merch with “But since the heavens have shaped my body so, let hell make crook’d my mind to answer it.”
Personally I need “masters, remember that I am an ass” as fair warning on everything
-An angel who is so goddamn lazy that he makes a deal with the demon he’s supposed to be thwarting so that neither of them have to do any work and he has more time to spend running his bookshop, and who wants to stop the Apocalypse because he loves sushi
-A demon who pretends to be suave and cool but who really just geeks out over his car and loves James Bond and listens to nothing but Queen and thinks gluing coins to the sidewalk is proper demonic activity
-This angel and demon are probably not gay for each other but I mean they’re holding hands on the cover art.
-This angel and demon try to stop the apocalypse but they fuck up so badly that they do literally nothing useful the whole book and somehow it’s still all about them.
-Technically it was the Satanic Nuns who fucked up, but we don’t really talk about that.
-Death (the horseperson) playing a trivia videogame in a diner.
-The four extra horsepersons that were never mentioned in Revelation.
-The antichrist who almost destroys the world because he wants to save the whales
-The only piece of fiction I have ever seen besides Supernatural that somehow manages to include both the Christian apocalypse and space aliens.
-The context of the phrase “gayer than a tree full of monkeys high on nitrous oxide.”
bigger brain: lord of the flies wouldn’t work with girls because they’d work together and get off the island
expanding brain: girls and women are capable of violence and cruelty too
galaxy brain: young girls could build an equally hellish micro-society but it wouldn’t be function the same because of differing socialization and men aren’t qualified to write it anyway
sparksoffandommagic 