Vorpalgirl

thebibliosphere:

I actually worry a lot about Phangs because it’s not like most romances. And I don’t mean in an “I’m not like other girls” sort of way, I just mean structurally it’s fucking huge. From the world-building to the character arcs it has taken on a life of its own I never could have anticipated when I started all of this. And while I am still following the established and expected arcs of the Romance genre, I’ve taken the scenic route, wandering down the lanes of Austenian slow burn, and working my way up to what would normally be the end of an Austen novel, but is in fact, merely just the beginning. 

 And although I’ve had great feedback from betas and a few friends, it still makes me nervous af because it doesn’t scan like most romances I’ve read and worked on over the years. It scans more like a 100k fanfic, gratuitous, and luxuriant in emotional catharsis in a way most published work can’t afford to be, and while I am certain that will go down well with the majority of my audience, it still makes me feel like I’m doing something Wrong. And I wish it didn’t, because I’m actually really bloody proud of the damn thing.

Coming back from the void to say: Joy, you had me at “It scans more like a 100k fanfic, gratuitous, and luxuriant in emotional catharsis in a way most published work can’t afford to be” The older I get, the more that kind of read is what I want to read most, and the less easy it has seemed to find in the marketplace outside of, you know…fanfic. I love spec fic in general, and there’s plenty of novels and short stories I’ve read and enjoyed from established authors, but…I’m sick of fantasy and SF that is produced by people more concerned with being exciting and tense and “buzzworthy” than they are with making an enjoyable story- which seems to be the Big Thing these days. Down that road is a million gritty reboots that bore or even exhaust me, a thousand “gotta Shock the audience!!!” adaptations of novels and even comic books that make big bucks for HBO or Marvel, but at best make me go “well, that wasn’t a terrible couple of hours…….but now I want to see the fix it fics and aus”. Like, it’s not that I don’t enjoy mainstream fiction at all…it’s that these days 90% of the fiction I read as prose, especially, is some sort of fanfic, to the extent I’m in at least 2 fandoms BECAUSE the fanfic got me into them…technically before the canon did! And I don’t think that is an accident, and I don’t think it’s always the sense of semi-familiarity that one might think, because while that sometimes plays a part, like I said: there’s been cases where I wasn’t into the canon or barely remembered it, but a good fic writer pulled me in like a siren. It really is just that fanfic writers as a whole gravitate towards a more leisurely, more loosely structured, and VERY much more character-centered writing style. One that is driven more by the emotions and psychology of it all than by some sort of rigidly plot driven schematic for the “best”, allegedly universal, structures. And despite all the supposed logic suggesting that as a restless ADHD person I should get bored with “slow plots”…..I don’t?? Because when people say these things are “slow paced” plots, they’re ONLY talking about the external events around the characters, not the thoughts and emotions inside them. But it’s the latter I find most compelling! There are definitely people who don’t care for such work, because they care more about exciting Plot Events, and that’s fine. They can still enjoy that! It makes for, as an example, a fun action movie to kill a couple hours with. But I am so personally Tired of character development and character interactions and quietly enjoyable moments all being considered secondary and superfluous and REMOVABLE … compared to what most people consider “the” Plot. You don’t do that. Characters aren’t secondary to you; they’re CENTRAL. They drive everything (even if, occasionally, that drive is a leisurely Sunday one) And you know what? Not only is there nothing wrong with that, I think you’re part of a trend that I heartily welcome! Because I’m going to bring up, if you will forgive the tangent, another book. It’s one of the few audio books I’ve been able to listen to with zero problems, despite my ADHD making “focusing real hard on an audio only input” like that really difficult, usually. It was of a book called “Not Your Sidekick”…and I was struck, partway through, with the realization that a large part of why I loved it was it *felt* like fanfic, in all of the best, most *satisfying* of ways. The casual acceptance of queerness! lovely. The cute romance, complete with a long stretch of P I N I N G?! Oh, honey i am SO THERE. The thoughtful deconstruction of the setting, with humorous social commentary? Also nice, but!!! The focus!!! on!!! characters!!! ON their motivations and fears!!! and desires!!! YAAAAS. And dont get me wrong, there is in fact a Plot around all that, too, but… the *central* plot IS the character development. It IS how characters deal (or don’t) with their feelings, mostly about other people. Everything else feels pretty secondary and I was fine with that because what drew me in WAS the characters, and the other stuff was a fun bonus. But like…the reason i bring this up? 2 reasons, actually: for starters, it’s subtly obvious if you know what to look for, that the writer of the book is, much like you, One of Us. It was so absorbing that I was a huge chunk of the way into it before I realized it was written in present tense - a tense usually shunned by “mainstream” fiction, but at this point I barely noticed because I’m used to reading fanfic and meta, and it’s often used to great effect by writers of fanfic and meta. (We don’t experience life in “past tense”, so I have a personal theory that it works better than a lot of traditional editing advice would suggest, precisely because it mimics how life *feels*, especially in a limited, character specific POV) Also, TWICE the author uses the idiom “toeing off/out of” socks/shoes, a usage I had literally never seen outside of fanfic circles before then, despite being useful to describe that action. Secondly, though? I’m far from the only person who loved it, is the thing. I tried it in the first place because it came repeatedly reccomended! A lot!! So I think honestly mainstream publishing is too afraid of taking on these things (remember all the reasons you’re self-publishing??), but I think that’s too bad for them because there is clearly more of a market for it than they realize! You became a best-selling author pretty much overnight, and I think there’s more to it than “people just like you” (though a lot of us do, it’s not JUST that). I think it’s because you’re One of Us, and you know the kind of thing we love, and we *know* that. :D And we are just real excited to actually have something like that in Book Form that we can legally purchase lol. Also wow, mobile doesn’t give you tagging options?? Rude. No wonder so many people hate using blue hellsite on mobile…

glumshoe:

if you were reading a sci-fi story and an character mentioned closing their “translucent inner eyelids” how would you interpret that

Hey neat! That’s actually a really good description for… the word I can’t think of but for some reason inexplicably know that Spock from Star Trek is supposed to have, even though I’m not a huge Star Trek fan and only know shit like that by osmosis 90% of the time. 

I want to say the technical term is “nictating membrane”? 

*gives up and looks it up*

oh! it’s “nictitating”. No wonder I was a little off, that’s so awkward-looking. tbh maybe it’s just me and my ADHD, but my mind wants to skip over the word  or smush it (something about the length? the awkward pronunciation? the sheer number of vaguely similar letters such as t’s and i’s and n’s??? idk, all of the above prolly)

But yeah tldr @glumshoe​  I know what those are! I know they are a thing, and would definitely recognize it by the description. IMO, I think anybody who can picture them could get it from that, but that’s just an assumption on my part.

PS, total tangent I know but: seriously, I could SWEAR I was told Vulcans have these?? Which is not so wild per se, IIRC there’s physical features in humans that suggest our ancestors USED to have these at one point? So we’re prolly idk already just a couple genes away from being able to have them, kinda like how (supposedly, last I knew) we’re only a gene or two away from being able to regrow limbs like a lizard (actually IIRC it might not have even BEEN genes, it might have been epigenetic?? because the same genetic element that allows lizards to regrow a tail is used in-utero to generate limbs in the first place in mammals like us, it’s just that partway through gestation, that gene shuts off in favor of the largely more efficient gene(s) that allow normal scarring instead of outright limb regrowth, IIRC) 

but.BUT. the thing that gets me, if I may?

 is supposedly Vulcans also have copper based blood (that I’m more sure of since apparently they even bothered in TOS to give him vaguely greenish foundation makeup to indicate that! Nice).

How the fuck they reproduce with humans so easily as to create hybrids like Spock I have no effing clue though, then.

Because It’s one thing to reintroduce a previously-recently-selected-out trait like that where we already still have vestigial remnants of that trait in our physiology anyway, but it’s not like we can reproduce with horseshoe crabs. You’d think not having iron-based blood would interfere with having even an infertile hybrid offspring that survives to puberty, but I don’t know enough about WHY different elements get used for oxygen-carrying in the blood to really say for sure (though, copper-based does require breathing oxygen, since that’s why several species on Earth have copper-based blood: oxidation. so… there’s that I guess??)

I probbably shouldn’t reply to things like this at 1 in the morning when I’m groggy but oh well, hopefully the beginning of the reply was at least useful??

ariaste:

mormonfries:

mormonfries:

fortooate:

i refuse to believe the obvious fact that sandwiches weren’t a mode of food construction for the vast majority of human history because i hate thinking about it. it’s so obvious. i need to yell at my distant ancestors about how they’re using bread suboptimally

Counterpoint: they figured out dumplings pretty early which are basically just improved sandwiches which take a lil longer but then you make em in batches and it all works out

To expand on this: in order for sandwiches to really work in practice you have to have efficient refrigeration and quick heating, both easily accessible, for small batches of sandwich toppings. For most of history, most food would have been cooked and stored in large batches to prevent spoiling, which is ideal for dumplings but not for sandwiches. Hence the early development of sandwiches as convenience foods for the wealthy. The economic conditions were not sufficient for mass ensandwichment until less than a couple centuries ago

mmmmmmmmm I don’t think i agree with the last person. We’ve been smoking and preserving meats for A WHILE, for example. Same with cheese. Those both let you you just shave off a couple bits, slap them on some bread, and be good to go. Same with pickles (and pickle variants, like saurkraut). You make a big jar, yeah, but you don’t use the jar all at once. Same with garum, aka Roman ketchup.

Ooh! Ooh! @ariaste I actually know this one!!

I was literally reading just today, a book about history that, funnily enough, tangentially mentioned the Earl of Sandwich, and it actually clarified he IS NOT thought to have “invented" the ….idea of sticking food between a couple slices of bread (which….should probably be obvious in hindsight but him “inventing” the practice is such a common cultural myth that it’s easy to forget how silly the idea really is, huh?).

It’s more that he became SO well known for doing so habitually as a matter of personal convenience (most famously for wanting to play cards and eat at the same time, but probably also in other situations), that the practice wound up nicknamed after him in English, to the extent that we eventually just…called it that, I guess? Especially since apparently it became ~fashionable~ to do it like he did, among the British aristocracy, around that time. 

So…what did we call it before then? Well, I’ll be a tad lazy here and use wikipedia’s quotes on the matter, from the article on “Sandwich”:

Before being known as sandwiches, this food combination seems to simply have been known as “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese”.^[6] These two phrases are found throughout English drama from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[6]

In other words, it “seems” to at least some historians like we had them for a quite a while before him, we just didn’t have a specific singular noun for the style of food in English, until the Earl of Sandwich came along.


In fact, the same article notes that the same or very similar concept was found in numerous cultures around the world:

The ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder is said to have wrapped meat from the Paschal lamb and bitter herbs in a soft matzah—flat, unleavened bread—during Passover in the manner of a modern wrap made with flatbread.^[9] 

I’d also like to point out this, which might go a long way to explaining why it FEELS like we “didn’t invent” the sandwich as we know it, until recent centuries…namely that the format the Earl of Sandwich used (two slices of thicker, leavened bread, with food stuff between it) works a lot better with the kind of bread Europeans eventually took to favoring, while a lot of the world prefers or preferred unleavened flatbread which is WAY easier to use in a similar manner:

Flat breads of only slightly varying kinds have long been used to scoop or wrap small amounts of food en route from platter to mouth throughout Western Asia and northern Africa. From Morocco to Ethiopia to India, bread is baked in flat rounds, contrasting with the European loaf tradition.

(So basically, wraps have always existed probably, since we invented bread lol)

Additionally, the article mentions at some times and places in European history, they literally straight up used stale or low-quality bread slices as an edible plate (apparently called a “trencher”?), which is pretty much an open-faced sandwich if you ask me? And there’s also this assertion:

The immediate culinary precursor with a direct connection to the English sandwich was to be found in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, where the naturalist John Ray observed^[11][12] that in the taverns beef hung from the rafters “which they cut into thin slices and eat with bread and butter laying the slices upon the butter"—explanatory specifications that reveal the Dutch belegde broodje, open-faced sandwich, was as yet unfamiliar in England.

So what have I learned today about sandwiches?

tldr:

Plenty of our ancestors used bread in ways that either were, or were VERY similar to the sandwich, or failing that, an open-faced sandwich, or a wrap.  They’ve been doing it for arguably millenia! The Earl of Sandwich just got a couple of those things named after him in English language usage, because he made it come into ~vogue~ as a convenience meal type among the UK’s aristocracy and also probably because English (a fairly young language at the time, mind) didn’t have a distinct, separate noun for the practice yet. 

That, and relatively modern, European “loaf style” bread is more conducive to the kind of sandwich the Earl of Sandwich liked, compared to flatbreads, which are much better for making wraps and also much more common in human cultures, especially if you go further back in history..