Beginning

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away fifteen vintage, ‘60s-era Penguin Classics by Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Voltaire, Plato, and others! It took me three years to accumulate these books one by one, and I’m already starting to have separation issues. *sigh* But I know they will go to a good home. Won’t this collection look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on August 27, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

Artist Documents Tender Notes Over Acrylic Illustrations From Her Travels on a Moleskine Notebook

American artist Missy H. Dunaway documents her travels across the US, Europe, Turkey, and Morocco with extreme romanticism and poetry. Dunaway illustrates on her Moleskine journal a beautiful scenery with acrylic paint from her time in a specific location, then autographs each painting with a sweet excerpt of nostalgia.

She often composes goodbye notes on her journals, as she bids adieu to each city. Each cityscape portrait reveals a tender thought or memory of heartbreak or a desire for wanderlust.

Some of the lovely anecdotes read:

“Standing in Asia. Looking at Europe. Thinking of New York.”

“I moved to Istanbul (alone). I’ve been looking out my window more than usual.”

“I’ve discovered I have the gift to feel at home jus about anywhere.”

“I’ll press you in a book.”

“I was staring at the blinking lights  of an airplane and waiting for sleep when a shooting star passed across my view, clear as day. I haven’t seen a shooting star in a whole decade.”

We highly urge everyone to click on each image to read the stunning passages. You can find these notebooks and more of her original work in her Etsy shop.

View similar posts here!

Women have more power and agency in Shakespeare’s comedies than in his tragedies, and usually there are more of them with more speaking time, so I’m pretty sure what Shakespeare’s saying is “men ruin everything” because everyone fucking dies when men are in charge but when women are in charge you get married and live happily ever after

黒子のバスケ 〜扉の向こう〜 special tip-off act

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

Ficlet: The Little Fox

The new vampire, Honda Kiku, reforges some old bonds with a young and unusual friend. AU based on this picture, which has England and Japan swap their 2010 Hetaween outfits, and has England as a chibi. So, vampire!Kiku, and kitsune!Arthur.

        After the bite heals, after the long night of bloody pain when he Turns – after all that, and after coming to terms with the new fangs in his mouth and his new preternaturally keen senses, Honda Kiku hides under the covers on his futon for three days straight and does not move. He knows– he is (was) a well-read man and knows what he has become by the dreams and longings that run through his mind, by the fact he can smell the (hot fresh) blood pumping beneath the (vulnerable) skin of his servants as they go about their business in his home.

(Vampire, whisper the old tomes in his library, echoing the bite of Kiku’s fangs into his lips. Self-control – he is an honourable Japanese man, and he will have some self-control. Anything else is inconceivable. Anything else will make him go mad. Blood-drinker. Life-taker. Vampire.)

When the three days are done and Kiku has regained some of his rational thinking he sits up, pulls his blanket around his shoulders, and takes stock of all the things he will miss about being human.

The list is almost distressingly small.

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An old practice sketch of my own hand