Vyvre Argent, epic fantasy with 🌈 characters

💜💜💜this is a great thread and something I think about a lot in writing masculinity in my own books!

Yeah the goddess of death is very gay and sort of bad with social cues 😂😂😂

The gods of my sapphic pirates book once ruled the world as a bunch of theocratic states. They were hunted and killed by the leaders of the revolution. The goddess of death had her soul ripped into multiple pieces; each fragment took on an identity of their own, and one of them is the main character

outlining a plot twist based on the depressing reality that someone would have absolutely tried to put Fire Lord Ozai back in power

Try it!

And I feel like publishing has overcorrected by pushing authors to cut words and plotlines. I miss the levels of detail we got in the previous style.

Lots of people make fun of this style of epic fantasy for spending too much time detailing what people eat at feasts, which is a very CinemaSins approach to genre. You can certainly nitpick this (or any) style of writing, but those levels of detail also enhance the story for many readers.

I’ll often talk about my love for Jaqueline Carey and how her books will follow characters and their friends for decades. Stuff like “Who was X’s childhood first crush” May not be plot related but it makes characters feel human and the story feel wider and more real

I think what I’m missing in so much epic fantasy published today is that, to slim down the page count, subplots and backstories get the axe. Which makes books more streamlined, but they feel less real.

600+!

Honestly would love to find more book/author community for books that like, take the big chonky (but also intricately plotted and worldbuilt) fantasy epics of the late 90s and early 00s and do that but queer

And I’m not speaking as a massive fan, though I’ve enjoyed a number of his books; I just think you have to acknowledge that hard magic systems can be a creative tool that *adds* to the readers’ ability to engage with the wonders of a secondary world

Like a hard magic system would be silly in an Arthurian fantasy, but he doesn’t write that sort of book. Game of Thrones can leave lots of mystery and mysticism around the White Walkers, but that’s because the world is steeped in a pseudo-historic Ren-Faire aesthetic we already feel grounded in.

I feel like a lot of people misinterpret what Sanderson uses hard magic systems *for.* His worldbuilding tends to be a bit more distant from our world than most fantasy authors’. Hard magic systems help readers feel more grounded in these very settings and opens more possibilities in worldbuilding.

Ooooooh yes!

It’s really remarkable how much better my work is when I don’t have a publisher pushing me to finish on a short timeline and to cut my work down to save on paper costs.

I’m in the middle of final edits for my lesbian pirate book and it feels SO SLOW but I’m glad for all the years I’ve worked on this because they let me write the best book possible

Found this on TikTok and it made me emotional ❤️

Artists create universes from nothing.

Being an animator is an intimate understanding of life, environments, physics, what it MEANS to be alive, and the ability to convey the beauty within our world in seconds.

Honestly, all of them, but Nick/Sean and Rosalie/Juliette were the main ones

Haha I used to write so much gay fanfic of this show and it is TERRIBLE

their kids are clueless six year old and also prophecized to revive an empire

one’s a scheming politician, one’s a buff warrior dude, yes they’ve fucked, no they haven’t gone to therapy

the plot of my sci fi book is two men competing for this title:

Great thread. You know who else talks? Those of us tangential to publishing like critics and reviewers. Don't think we haven't noticed who gets ARCs and splashy swag boxes and who doesn't.

Oh boy I feel that! I’m just like…do you want your investments to do well? Do you want to make money?

I went to every B&N in my region to get my first fantasy novel stocked because my publisher didn’t bother. That was only one factor that pushed me to go indie!

Seriously! For my last trad book I started emailing my publisher links to my posts about my books asking if they could repost them to their much larger feeds. I had to push so hard to get them to make a single post, on release day

"Awwww gosh we just don't know what sells books!" Bullshit; otherwise, everyone would get the exact same marketing (to roll more dice) or nobody would get anything (if nothing works anyway). But there's an awful lot of picking and choosing going on, not guessing. Squid pro row.

In Soladisean society, the politics of reproduction are less concerned with biology and more with the creation of Soladisean identities that adopted youth are pushed to aspire toward. In Sea People society, the politics of reproduction are concerned with protecting children from the Soladiseans

One Sea People character on the pirate crew is a man who took up piracy to support his young son, who is back home with his mother—not because they believe this is the best or fairest way to divide reproductive labor, but because the Soladisean colonial economy makes this the safest way