Memento Morlys 🍉

Blankets, toys, and a pillow in a dog bed. only a pair of pointy brown ears pokes out

could have sworn there was a dog in here somewhere

A jack russell terrior wearing a Sherlock Holmes costume (hunting cap, shawl jacket) in a cluttered room vaguely full of books and finely tassled furniture. A candle burns behind him.

Fun fact: Wishbone lasted from 1995 to 1997. Its first episode was 29 years ago.

Soccer the Dog, who played Wishbone, died in 2001, 23 years ago.

it does have an orson scott card story i'd forgotten about, looking at the ToC, bleh

A small dog tells a woman, "Experiencing the world is beautiful and vivid for me. I smell shit piss and vomit and I love it. You are controlled by ceaseless disgust. You're stunted. Haha." The woman replies, "Yes. But I can read novels."

The debate.

i was thinking of Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, little more recent. some swings miss but they're all trying to do... something?

yeah it's not *none.* just i'd expect there to be more given the shadow it casts. especially given the ocean of weird shit to fish in. there was a good little anthology a few years ago with stories for grown-ups that at least featured some characters who weren't in the movie

Escalating Amazement Meme: Cool: Dinosaur Tracks: Dinosaur footprints: how do they form and what can they tell us? by Emily Osterloff for the Natural History Museum Very Cool: Fossilized Weaning in Neanderthal Teeth: Austin et al. 2013. Barium distributions in teeth reveal early-life dietary transitions in primates. Nature, 498(7453), 216-219. So Cool: Giant Sloth Hunt Tracks: Fossilized Human Footprint Found Nestled in a Giant Sloth Footprint by Ed Yong for the Atlantic AMAZING: Fossilized Mutual Destruction Nimravid Battle: The Dakota Badlands Used to Host Sabertoothed Pseudo-Cat Battles by Riley Black for the Smithsonian OH HOLY SHIT AMAZING: Fossilized Rock Hyrax Booty Skootch Tracks: Charles W. Helm et al, The unusual, unique ichnology of the rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) and possible Pleistocene tracks and traces from South Africa, Ichnos (2025). DOI: 10.1080/10420940.2025.2546373

Current Status: phys.org/news/2025-10...

now, a person? been staring at the same sentence for multiple minutes trying to think of a second facial feature

sometimes my mild face-blindness kicks me in the authorial shins. describe a tree? fuck yeah i will make that tree portentous and naturalistic both, wrap the metaphor around the literal. you will feel the bark against your shoulderblades and catch the resin in your nose.

slightly re-captioned meme: library: you are 5th in line for this hold me: (photoshopped picture of disney snow white pressing her face to the window like a goblin with "pakidge" in tiny text below her chin)

Subject line on an email from the slice app: you like weird stuff, don't you? No judgement - you do you (pizza emoji)

marketing department: you see it's almost impossible to sell pizza. nobody likes pizza, obviously. so we had to try negging and kinkshaming

You should read this, it's a cup of hot chocolate for your Friday evening 😊

thank you! it definitely came out as sensible fantasy, and it was fun to play with. all because as an 8 year old reading the blue fairy book, i didn't know what the fuck an "ell" was

i was just mulling over how, wicked notwithstanding, i'd expect there to be more oz stuff than there is (thanks for fighting the good fight). feels like there's more narnia with the serial numbers consciously filed off. is it just a shade too weird? too of its time? overshadowed by the movie?

I wrote a retelling of Blodeuwedd from Blodeuwedd's POV, leaning into the fact that she's not human - I initially thought of it as presenting the case for the defence, but then I realised I had a furious wood-wight on my hands, not a wronged woman.

bsky.app/profile/mjj-...

love a chance to get into an alien mind. i should really know my mabinogion better. i've only internalized bits and pieces through retellings

also wondering if this also applies to public domain novel retellings and where the line falls? is shakespeare functionally folklore? oz? don't know, just poking ideas with a stick, see if they move

if anyone wants to stalk each others' reading my reviews are definitely coherent and not pretentious and also I definitely don't read 25 books at a time

yeah it's fine to find out while you write but if you get to the end and don't know, it prolly isn't very good. and I suspect the act of retelling can kinda obscure that. it's about beauty and the beast, so obviously it's already about something!

actually I lied I get one great benefit in the form of a distant acquaintance with terrible taste. every time she gets incandescently angry at a book I know it's gonna slap

anyone else a storygraph person? I love to generate data, but I've never really got the hang of the social part. just stalking people's choices in books? I mean, kinda fun.

really lucky for me most drama recap youtubers are dreary black holes where charisma goes to die or they'd be really addictive.

anyway chime in with examples (self promo encouraged) and any broad categories of retellings I missed

I am not generally a writer of "everything works out for some nice lesbians" kinda stories (no shade to those who are) but at least I finally exorcised my childhood obsession with the troll princess with this one

...if you wanted you could read the only retelling I think I've ever published? a what-if/unpacking of easy of the sun west of the moon. it's much softer and nicer than I usually am and caught on more than most of my writing, so I feel it gives a slightly off impression? but I still kinda like it

don't think it matters if you change the story a lot or a little, it's all about intent

most successful if you combine it with one of the first three. I also considered parody but parody overlaps so much with subversion I don't think it stands alone

5. the "what if" is risky because it's not enough by itself, but so common I think it should be included. what if we heard the story from someone else's perspective, what if the inciting incident didn't happen, what if we were in space or 15th century japan

only irksome if it's billed as a liberatory act of feminist rebellion. be honest

4. for fun. honestly I won't read it but there's nothing wrong with fluff. I know enough people in romance and mystery space to see the edges of this, and if you wanna read gay cinderella meets war and peace in the style of newsies all power to you