So, I’m Getting To The Very End Of The Novel 镇魂 Guardian By Priest, And I Know That Everyone Is

Wei Wuxian | Ep.11

how to flirt with your crush 101: a guide by wei wuxian for anon 

Astronomy I-

I love Priest's supporting characters. I love how she started Stars of Chaos from supporting characters' POV, and then she keeps dropping in on them and making us love them more and more.

My one complaint is: why doesn't she write more (even more) Extras featuring her supporting characters? We care!

Brief Character Analyses and Spoilers for Stars of Chaos below...

Cao Chunhua 曹春花 / 曹娘子 Cao Niangzi:

曹春花， I love you! How did you get so good at languages and disguise and acting? Did you ever get to catch a nice young man? Or are you constantly catching nice young men in a serial fashion? Ahhh, our little 娘子 <3 I definitely want to read more about you and your adventures.

Li Feng 李丰, "Long An" Emperor, Chang Geng's unfortunate half-brother:

You tried so hard. I don't actually want to read more about you, but I want you to know that I appreciate that you did your best, and validate that you really were a lot better than your dad -- you were just unlucky, and, sadly, you had to die for it. Life is hard. And short, for you.

Fang Qin 方钦

Yah, life is unfair. I don't want to read more about you, either -- I just want to ruminate on how you were a fancy rich popular kid, but all you really wanted was to hang out with the nerds. The nerds were smart and fun and honest and doing cool things, but your fancy rich popular old-money family held you back. Too bad you didn't have any backbone.

Chen QingXu 陈轻絮 and Shen Yi 沈易

What an amazing couple. I feel like Chen QingXu is barely in the book at all, but every time she is mentioned it is with reverence and awe. My favorite scene with Chen QingXu is when she's chaining together Pipa melodies while a battle is literally going on in front of her, then elegantly floats away when her part of the battle is concluded...

And! And! When she figures out that the Spirit Mannequin is actually a "book" and clutches it "like she's never seen wood before," I swooned -- Chen QingXu is a scientist, through and through <3

Every time Shen Yi is mentioned, I know I'm going to have a good time, too. It is through his near-constant consternation at Gu Yun that we see how terribly fun (emphasis on the "terrible") Gu Yun is.

Poor Shen Yi, putting up with his crazy best friend. Accidentally rising to one of the highest positions in the land just because he doesn't want to go home and instead follows his best friend out to the far remote edges of the empire; and is totally willing to give it all up to be a house-husband for the girl he likes, once he gets up the courage to tell her he likes her. What a sweet guy <3

Yah, I want more Chen QingXu and more Shen Yi and more ChenYi.

Old Master Shen 沈老爷子

While we’re talking about the Shen family, I’d love to read more about Shen Laoyezi. He knows everything. His bird cusses out everyone. He’s pretty awesome.

Yao Zhen 姚镇 / 姚重泽 Yao ZhongZe (Chong Ze?) (I'm not so good when a word has multiple pronunciations)

I'm not super hungry for more Yao Zhen content, but I love every bit of Yao Zhen that I get to read. Poor man -- he just wants to hang out and enjoy life, but Gu Yun keeps giving him all these empire-critical, life-and-death-of-thousands responsibilities. The man knows what he wants! But Gu Yun just railroads past those clearly delineated desires and keeps raising him up to higher and higher positions of responsibility!

Living up to your true potential is overrated; sleeping 10 hours/day is the way to go :)

Huo Dan 霍郸

Oh, the stories that Huo Dan could tell... Poor man, having to put up with Gu Yun's peculiarities and Chang Geng's idiosyncrasies and I'm sure he learned very early on to always knock before entering any space that the two of them think they're alone in.

I want more Huo Dan stories ;)

That's pretty much it for me. I love Ge PangXiao 葛胖小 / 葛晨 Ge Chen, too, but I am satisfied with his story already. He's cool, he's sweet, but he's not mysterious like Cao ChunHua and Chen QingXu, or in an entertaining state of near-permanent exasperation because of Gu Yun's shenanigans like poor Shen Yi is. You do you, Ge Chen.

I’m looking forward to this (badly suppressed excitement I’m about to text this trailer to Everyone i know. Michelle Yeoh is and always has been a superhero!!!!!)

Everything Everywhere All At Once | A24

Starring Michelle Yeoh

Do your followers know about Libby? It's an app where, at least in the United States, you can listen to as many professionally recorded audio books as you'd like for FREE, so long as you have a library card. You don't even need to visit the library, you can just borrow the audiobooks from your phone.

I don't know. I hope they do. But perhaps a few more of them will after reading this.

Libby App

Download the Libby App: ebooks & audiobooks FREE from your library

Bring the library to you! Free digital books, magazines and more! Available for iOS and Android devices.

MDZS Volume 4 Annotations

Part 3, pages 89 - 151.

Some important (I feel) tonal tuning and a little more anti-slang.

More below the cut:

Terry Pratchett's 2001 Carnegie Medal Winner Speech

I’m pretty sure that the publicists for this award would be quite happy if I said something controversial, but it seems to me that giving me the Carnegie medal is controversial enough. This was my third attempt. Well, I say my third attempt, but in fact I just sat there in ignorance and someone else attempted it on my behalf, somewhat to my initial dismay.

The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is 'all about' wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, what everyone knows...is wrong.

Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting that the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.

In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It's not the whole meal. Don't get confused by the scenery.

A novel set in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881 is what– a Western? The scenery says so, the clothes say so, but the story does not automatically become a Western. Why let a few cactuses tell you what to think? It might be a counterfactual, or a historical novel, or a searing literary indictment of something or other, or a horror novel, or even, perhaps, a romance – although the young lovers would have to speak up a bit and possibly even hide under the table, because the gunfight at the OK corral was going on at the time.

We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Attwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.

This is not, on the whole, a complaint. But as I have said, it seems to me that dragons are not really the pure quill of fantasy, when properly done. Real fantasy is that a man with a printing press might defy an entire government because of some half-formed belief that there may be such a thing as the truth. Anyway, fantasy needs no defence now. As a genre it has become quite respectable in recent years. At least, it can demonstrably make lots and lots and lots of money, which passes for respectable these days. When you can by a plastic Gandalf with kung-fu grip and rocket launcher, you know fantasy has broken through.

But I’m a humourous writer too, and humour is a real problem.

It was interesting to see how Maurice was reviewed here and in the US. Over there, where I've only recently made much of an impression, the reviews tended to be quite serious and detailed with, as Maurice himself would have put it, 'long words, like "corrugated iron."' Over here, while being very nice, they tended towards the 'another wacky, zany book by comic author Terry Pratchett'. In fact Maurice has no wack and very little zane. It's quite a serious book. Only the scenery is funny.

The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke, old ideas can be given an added edge.

Which reminds me... Chesterton is not read much these days, and his style and approach belong to another time and, now, can irritate. You have to read in a slightly different language. And then, just when the 'ho, good landlord, a pint of your finest English ale!' style gets you down, you run across a gem, cogently expressed. He famously defended fairy stories against those who said they told children that there were monsters; children already know that there are monsters, he said, and fairy stories teach them that monsters can be killed. We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads.

In Maurice, the rats have to confront them all: real monsters, some of whom have many legs, some merely have two, but some, perhaps the worse, are the ones they invent. The rats are intelligent. They're the first rats in the world to be afraid of the dark, and they people the shadows with imaginary monsters. An act of extreme significance to them is the lighting of a flame.

People have already asked me if I had the current international situation in mind when I wrote the book. The answer is no. I wouldn't insult even rats by turning them into handy metaphors. It's just unfortunate that the current international situation is pretty much the same old dull, stupid international situation, in a world obsessed by the monsters it has made up, dragons that are hard to kill. We look around and see

foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It's a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for one hundred and fifty million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wonder wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid.

Of course, as the aforesaid writer of humourous fantasy I'm obsessed by wacky, zany ideas. One is that rats might talk. But sometimes I'm even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas, such the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I'm really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I'm just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo Sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we've tried everything else.

Writing for children is harder than writing for adults, if you're doing it right. What I thought was going to be a funny story about a cat organizing a swindle based on the Pied Piper legend turned out to be a major project, in which I was aided and encouraged and given hope by Philippa Dickinson and Sue Coates at Doubleday or whatever they're calling themselves this week, and Anne Hoppe of HarperCollins in New York, who waylaid me in an alley in Manhattan and insisted on publishing the book and even promised to protect me from that most feared of creatures, the American copy editor.

And I must thank you, the judges, in the hope that your sanity and critical faculties may speedily be returned to you. And finally, my thanks to the rest of you, the loose agglomeration of editors and teachers and librarians that I usually refer to, mostly with a smile, as the dirndl mafia. You keep the flame alive.

Terms You Might Want To Know For Your Wuxia/Xianxia Fic

MXTX's danmei are getting increasingly popular, and the fandoms are getting more fic-happy. I've noticed that some writers seem interested in writing their own fics but are concerned of making mistakes with niche honorifics and titles. I've noticed some that have jumped right in, but have made innocent errors that I'd like to correct but fear coming off as rude or presumptuous. And so I've made this list of terms that covers the basics and also some that are a little more niche since they're usually directly translated in cnovels.

DISCLAIMER: This is by no means a comprehensive list of everything one needs to know or would want to know concerning ancient Chinese honorifics and titles, merely what I myself consider useful to keep in mind.

Titles

Shifu: 'Martial father'; gender-neutral

Shizun: 'Martial father'; more formal than 'shifu'; gender-neutral

Shimu: ‘Martial mother’; wife of your martial teacher

Shiniang: ‘Martial mother’; wife of your martial teacher who is also a martial teacher

Shibo: elder apprentice-brother of your shifu; gender-neutral

Shishu: younger apprentice-brother of your shifu; gender-neutral

Shigu: apprentice-sister of your shifu

Shizhi: your martial nephew/niece

Shimei: younger female apprentice of the same generation as you

Shijie: elder female apprentice of the same generation as you

Shidi: younger male apprentice of the same generation as you

Shixiong: elder male apprentice of the same generation as you

Shige: elder male apprentice of the same generation as you, specifically one who has the same shifu as you or is the son of your shifu

Zhanglao: an elder of your sect

Zhangbei: a senior of your sect

Qianbei: a senior not of your sect

Wanbei: a junior not of your sect

Zongzhu: Address for a clan leader

Zhangmen: address for a sect leader

Daozhang: Daoist priests or simply a cultivator in general; gender-neutral

Daogu: Daoist priestess or a female cultivator; not as commonly used as 'daozhang'

Xiangu: Daoist priestess or a female cultivator; not as commonly used as 'daogu'

Sanren: a wandering cultivator

Xianren: 'Immortal Official'; a title of respect and power like 'General'

Xiuzhe: 'Cultivator', can be shortened to 'Xiu'

Xianjun: 'Immortal Master/Lord'

Xianshi: 'Immortal Master/Teacher'

Dashi: 'Great Teacher', address for monks

Xiansheng: Teacher/Sir; in ancient China, the connotation is very scholastic

Houye: address for a duke

Jueye: address for a noble lord, ei. a duke, marquess, earl, etc.

Wangye: address for king/imperial prince

Daren: address for imperial officials

Furen: Madam; the wife of an imperial official/nobleman OR a married woman granted a rank by the royal family

Nushi: Madam; the counterpart of 'xiansheng', connotation is scholastic

Taitai: Madam; address for an old married woman of the gentry, either wife or mother to head of household

Laoye: Old Lord; Address for an adult man with adult children of the gentry; possibly head of household

Nainai: Madam; Address for a married woman of the gentry, possibly wife of head of household

Ye: Lord; address for an adult man of the gentry, possibly head of household

Shaonainai: Young Madam; address for a woman married to a young man of the gentry

Shaoye: Young Lord; address for a young man or boy of the gentry, generation lower than head of household

Xiaoye: Little Lord; can be a synonym for ‘shaoye’ OR the son of a shaoye if ‘shaoye’ is already being used within the family

Xiaojie: Young Mistress; address for an unmarried woman or young girl of . . . the gentry and only the gentry, I believe. Correct me if you know for certain this is incorrect. (WARNING - It's an archaic term that should really only be used in an archaic setting if being used as a title instead of a suffix, because the modern vernacular has it as a term for a prostitute in mainland China. [Surname]-xiaojie is fine; Xiaojie by itself should be avoided.)

Gongzi: ‘Young Master/Lord/Sir'; ‘Childe’; young man from a household of the noble or gentry class

Guniang: 'Young Master/Lady/Miss'; ‘Maiden’; an unmarried woman or young girl from a household of the noble or gentry class

Laozhang: 'Old battle'; polite address for an unrelated old man of lower status than you

Laobo: polite address for an unrelated old man of a higher status that you

Laotou: 'Old man'; informal but not derogatory, implies fondness/closeness

Laopopo: 'Old woman'; informal but not derogatory, implies fondness/closeness

Please note that all of these listed above can be used as stand-alone titles or as suffixed honorifics.

Strictly Prefix/Suffix

-shi: 'Clan'; the suffix for a married woman, essentially means 'née'. (ex. Say Wei Wuxian was a woman and married into the Lan clan through a standard marriage. She would be called 'Wei-shi' by her husband's contemporaries and elders when not in a formal setting. It implies lack of closeness; used by acquaintances.)

a-: A prefix that shows affection or intimacy.

-er: A suffix that shows affection or intimacy; typically for children or those younger than you

-jun: 'Nobleman'; a suffix for a greatly respected man

-zun: 'Revered One'; a suffix for a greatly respected man

-ji: A suffix for a female friend

-bo: A suffix for an older man of your grandparents' generation

-po: A suffix for an older woman of your grandparents' generation

Linktree

@purpletophat | Linktree

Linktree. Make your link do more.

And now I figure out where to hang my mermen and unicorn-man…