For years and years, JKR teased that we would find out why Harry's eyes were green.

And it always struck me as a strange that was never a Revelation, beyond their significance to Snape. Which is, at best a Doylian reason and not a Watsonian one. Doylian: As pertaining to Doyle, the author. The metatextual reason for something being the way it is.

Watsonian: As pertaining to Watson, the narrator. This is all your in-universe stuff.

Almond milk is milk.

I'm surprised how angry I am about this, but the claim that almond milk is some sort of new invention that is tricking the unsuspecting public is just wrong.

A thread where I rant about medieval uses of almond milk.

vox.com/2018/8/31/1776… It's been called almond milk for hundreds of years. And been around for just as long as an alternative to animal milk.

It's first mentioned in a 13thC cookbook in Iraq. It's also used throughout Middle Ages in Europe.

There's also a lot to be said about how so many of the "mysteries" of the house are simply conveniences and comforts for an old woman.

Not strange, not weird, just not built for ableds.

https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1032080421767409664

The narrow passages, the low ceiling, the ramps and shallow steps, the elevator, the multiple fireplaces (warmth helps with arthritis): all of this paints a portrait of an old woman who was eccentric and very into architecture, but above all, she built for herself and no one else

#livetweet thread of Women who Out Steampunked Steampunk, opening with a note about how diverse the Victorian era is and that women of colour very much existed Straw poll on interest of the room of soldiers and inventors. Talking about how women were soldiers, that there were lots of reasons to go to war, that lgbtq erasure is real and that some women returned and went on lecture circuit;

My problem with how many use the monomyth is this: it confuses what is common in stories with what gives a story meaning.

The MONOMEAL: a thread where I contrive food analogy to explain what I mean

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It is possible to look at the vast array of meals out there and say they all broadly fit into the framework of Carbohydrate, One Meat, Two Veg.

This may be a useful observation to someone analysing meals across cultures looking for commonalities.

Let's talk KILL YOUR DARLINGS and other such self-censoring self-limiting rules about writing.

This is gonna be a thread.

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The majority of writing advice out there is predicated in the idea of Story over Prose, much of are guidelines to write relatively minimalistic (but not too minimalistic) text that will be a transparent window to the story and characters.

This isn't itself a bad thing.

A thread of non representative anecdotes about being #bilingual (I speak Cantonese, Mandarin and English):

- slang based on literal translations of words ("that guy so inch") or phrases I occasionally forget which language has which idiom (because some exist in both Chinese and English) so I end up in a conversation of explaining why I just called someone's muscles a really cute mouse 🐁

Language Choice, aka art of making making familiar things alien, making beautiful things ugly, making lovely things creepy: a thread

(Illustrated here with an article from LA weekly describing tang yuan in most unpleasant terms possible.) Writing is more than just listing its physical traits, a reproduction of a picture in the mind of a writer: the car is red, the door is wide, the cat is small.

Writing can frame those images. Show the reader how to feel, how they should feel.

I don't think I've tweeted about my love for fashion designer Guo Pei ever, so here is a bit of a pix and linkspam.

I would summarise her aesthetic as EVIL QUEENS, but that might just be me. This is the inimitable Debra Shaw in just the most.... it's just so jaw droppingly *gold*

I think part of this sort of world building comes from the way we teach history as static eras, as How Things Are.

I do it still conversationally "this is what the Victorians thought", "this is what they did", all of which implicitly centres the powerful.

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And thus when I come to take ideas from those eras, I end up stapling airships onto the most conservative, static parts of it.

I say this as someone who has written way too many essays on corn laws.

The categories and methods we learn in childhood follow us.

Because everyone eats. Almost all cultures have rituals, recipes and idiosyncrasies about & around food.

How we eat & what we eat (& what we don't eat) tells us mountains about us.

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A lot of fantasy worldbuilding focuses on where farms are and the food chain, which is important, but I also find fascinating the rituals around food.

Rewriting marriage and other social constructs, a thread on worldbuilding.

So it's a common temptation to reach for sexism (etc) as a way of generating conflict in the world, after all, stories are conflict.

Here is me talking through some systems we wrote recently. These are drawn from live role play games I've helped run and/or going to run in the near future.

But the principles apply to writing fiction as well.

SO JUST HOW QUEER WERE THE NORSE MEN?, aka yes, LGBTQ themes existed in the originals and that decidedly means Loki: a thread First things first, the practice of sorcery & magic (seiðr) is considered feminine so Odin and Loki being adepts at it makes them inherently queer to Viking eyes.

A STORY IS NOT A LOGIC PUZZLE, aka why "nitpicking" criticisms like CinemaSins can miss the point of a larger narrative.
A thread. A cacophony of voices have been piling on CinemaSins and I'm throwing mine in as well: nitpicking can be excellent fun, but if you get too caught up in "logic" you lose narrative.

Drawing Maps for your Fantasy World,
aka Maps Aren’t Always About Landscape Geography:
A thread. First if you’re looking for discussion of geographical accuracy, nose over to below link. This is not a refutation.
katsudon.net/?p=5700