@raven-ink / raven-ink.tumblr.com
Did I daydream this, or was there a website for writers with like. A ridiculous quantity of descriptive aid. Like I remember clicking on " inside a cinema " or something like that. Then, BAM. Here's a list of smell and sounds. I can't remember it for the life of me, but if someone else can, help a bitch out <3
This is going to save me so much trouble in the future.
Okay this website belongs to @wordsnstuff do us both a favor and go to THEIR blog sksks
Me every time I begin writing a new book.
Every movie makes it look so easy to snap someone's neck by twisting their head really fast and hard, and it's used all the time, but it can't possibly be that easy or effective can it? It's not like every Joe Schmoe on the street can start going around snapping necks can they? They also love to have people snap necks between their thighs, I imagine that's even harder and less likely to work.
So, breaking someone's neck with your bare hands basicallyisn't a thing. Actually breaking your neck doesn't take a lot of force, but the whole neck snap thing takes an absolutely comical amount of force to work, and even if it did, it wouldn't necessarily be lethal. The idea is that it severs the spinal column or the brain stem, but in practice, all you'd be able to do is abuse some dense muscles and ligatures.
This is a real risk in auto accidents, particularly if the victim isn't properly belted, but the version you see in films is pure fiction.
Choking someone out is a lot more viable. This can either come from asphyxiation, or from obstructing blood flow to the brain. The former is slow, and is likely to cause the victim to panic while they slowly lose consciousness. The latter (sometimes called a blood choke, or triangle choke) can quickly lead to death, as you starve the brain of oxygen by cutting it off after it's been absorbed by the body. You do sometimes see these in film, though the amount of time needed to subdue someone is hilariously abbreviated. If you're just choking someone, that will take minutes before they'll lose consciousness, and they're going to seriously start to freak out once they realize they can't breath. Blood chokes, as mentioned earlier, are faster, but you're still looking at a long time in a fight.
Neck snapping with the thighs is about as plausible as the neck twist. Choking someone out with the thighs is slightly more credible. Legs can be used in submission holds while grappling. But, if we're being honest, I think we all know that this isn't used because it's realistic, it's the sex appeal. Without speaking from personal experience, I suspect thigh chokes are harder to get out of, simply because your legs are significantly stronger than your arms, but I'm speculating.
Also, importantly, suffering a broken neck isn't (usually) going to be immediately lethal. As mentioned earlier, unless the spinal chord is severed or the brain stem is damaged, they'll survive. This may result in a life altering injury, but it's not going to be an, “oh, they're instantly, and quietly, dead.”
I remember running across a news report, when we last covered this, where a couple of teens had decided to kill someone by snapping their neck. The victim ended up with some soreness in their neck, and the teens went away for attempted murder. Moral of the story, this doesn't work.
-Starke
You don't need to write your book in the order that people will read it.
Don't know the title? Doesn't matter. Have a steamy romance scene you're excited to write? Go ahead! Thought of the perfect closing line? Get it on the page!
Write what excites you. The rest will follow.
This pandemic project has been over 2 years in the making and we hope it will greatly assist any of our readers who are eager to conduct in-depth research but may be at a loss where to start.
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Writing tip #2: If you feel the urge to start a new WIP before finishing your old one, submit to it gleefully. There’s no rule that says writing can’t involve a joyous and frivolous pursuit of new & interesting story ideas.
You spend so much time creating a character because you want them to feel real. You want to connect with them and use them to create an experience for your readers. Their character arc is how that happens.
Don’t miss out on these essential turning points that make an arc feel not only whole, but complete.
Your inciting incident gets your plot moving. It isn’t going to be the first sentence of your story (also called your hook), although it could be if you crafted your first sentence for that purpose.
An inciting incident is a plot event that guides your character in a new direction. It’s the successful prison break, the meeting of instant rivals, or the moment your protagonist wins the lottery in your first chapter.
Without the inciting incident, your protagonist’s life would carry on as usual. They wouldn’t start the arc that makes them an interesting person for the reader to stick with throughout your story.
Every protagonist needs a primary flaw. Ideally, they’ll have more than one. People aren’t perfect and they rarely get close enough to only have one negative characteristic. Protagonists need that same level of humanity for readers to connect with them.
There are many potential flaws you could consider, but the primarily flaw must be the foundation for your character’s arc. It might even be the catalyst for the story’s peak.
Imagine a hero archetype. They’re great and well-intended, but they have a problem with boasting. Their arc features scenes where they learn to overcome their need to brag about themselves, but they get drunk and boast in a bar right before the story’s peak. The antagonist’s best friend hears this because they’re at the same bar, so they report the hero’s comment to the main villain. It thwarts the hero’s efforts and makes the climax more dramatic.
Other potential flaws to consider:
Everyone will fail at a goal eventually. Your protagonist should too. Their first failure could be big or small, but it helps define them. They either choose to continue pursuing that goal, they change their goal, or their worldview shatters.
Readers like watching a protagonist reshape their identity when they lose sight of what they wnat. They also like watching characters double down and pursue something harder. Failure is a necessary catalyst for making this happen during a character’s arc.
Most stories have a protagonist that hits their rock bottom. It could be when their antagonist defeats them or lose what matters most. There are numerous ways to write a rock-bottom moment. Yours will depend on what your character wants and what your story’s theme is.
If you forget to include a rock-bottom moment, the reader might feel like the protagonist never faced any real stakes. They had nothing to lose so their arc feels less realistic.
Rock bottoms don’t always mean earth-shattering consequences either. It might be the moment when your protagonist feels hopeless while taking an exam or recognizes that they just don’t know what to do. Either way, they’ll come to grips with losing something (hope, direction, or otherwise) and the reader will connect with that.
Protagonists have to accept the end of their arc. They return home from their hero’s journey to live in a life they accept as better than before. They find peace with their new fate due to their new community they found or skills they aquired.
Your protagonist may also accept a call to action. They return home from their journey only to find out that their antagonist inspired a new villain and the protagonist has to find the strength to overcome a new adversary. This typically leads into a second installment or sequel.
Accepting the end of their arc helps close the story for the reader. A protagonist who decides their arc wasn’t worth it makes the reader disgruntled with the story overall. There has to be a resolution, which means accepting whatever the protagonist’s life ended up as—or the next goal/challenge they’ll chase.
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Hopefully these points make character arcs feel more manageable for you. Defining each point might feel like naming your instincts, but it makes character creation and plotting easier.
Want more creative writing tips and tricks? I have plenty of other fun stuff on my website, including posts like Traits Every Protagonist Needs and Tips for Writing Subplots.
✨ It's okay to write fiction in a lot of different genres.
✨ It's okay to not have a personal "brand."
✨ It's okay to write lots of different types of stories.
✨ You do not need to feel like you are obligated to "create a brand" to "build and audience".
✨ Write the fiction that you are interested in writing.
✨ You do not need to worry about marketing when you are writing.
✨ It's better to focus on writing what you want to write instead of what a hypothetical audience will think of it.
✨ Write stories that you find interesting, appealing of fascinating.
✨ Do not feel like you need to limit the type of stories you write in order to appeal to an audience.
✨ You do not need to
worry about marketing
when you are writing.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
characters who did not die and are now forced to live with the knowledge that they shouldve, characters that had made peace with said death but it never came and they have to live on, character who despite their wishes will still fight to live should death come for them again
in a lot of zombie stories like The Walking Dead, the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain. Given that the skull is designed to protect one of our most important organs, how hard would this be on average? Would it be easier with bladed weapons like a hatchet vs blunt weapons like a baseball bat? And while killing anything is easier with a gun, I’ve heard headshots can be quite hard to nail. Is this something that can get better with practice, or will it always be something of a crapshoot?
Honestly? Thinking about it, destroying the brain to put down the zombie doesn't make that much sense. The first problem is the brain itself. The skull is pretty good at protecting the brain most of the time, but that's more impressive when you consider just how fragile the brain is. It's very soft tissue, suspended in fluid. It's also one of the first organs to really suffer from decomposition.
Particularly, the brain is the organ you have to really worry about when someone flatlines. It will start suffering serious damage within 30 seconds of being deprived of oxygen. Within minutes of death, it undergoes irreversible chemical changes and starts to break down, so, it follows that, the brain isn't going to be in a usable state by the time the zombie virus tries to claw its way back to the living.
This is a different kind of problem with living “zombies,” such as the 28 Days series or REC. Though, in those cases, the zombies would have a very limited shelf life, as the strain of the virus would kill them long before the second film rolled around. But, in those cases, massive trauma should still kill the zombie, so you don't really need headshots, when a shotgun, center mass, will get the job done.
For clarity, you know there's no way to answer that comment about headshots without sounding like a psychopath, right? The short answer is that, yeah, if you' know what you're doing, and you know your gun, you can hit a small, semi-mobile target at medium range. A sapient being? That's harder, people don't tend to present their head for a convenient bullet, like a video game shooting gallery, but, with practice, you can reliably hit a head sized target at about 30m. Landing that shot against a live person running for cover or shooting back might be a bit tricky, but against a shambling, reanimated, corpse, it should be pretty doable. Obviously, I don't have a lot of first hand experience shooting reanimated corpses, so I'm having to make some educated guesses here.
However, having just said that, I'm immediately reminded of something the Resident Evil 2 remake pointed out: Shooting someone in the head doesn't mean you destroyed their brain. Surprisingly, shooting someone in the head will only kill them about 98% of the time, so I can see some logic in the thought process.
That said, shooting zombies tends to run up against a problem, that doesn't make a lot of sense when you step back and think about it. Generally you don't want to shoot zombies because the sound will attract more zombies, and there are inevitably more zombies than you have bullets. This the exact scenario that The Walking Dead works with. So, I have one small question: How did we get here?
Before we go any further, and spoilers for a comic book that published 15 years ago, but The Walking Dead did answer that. (The TV series and comic have different answers. In the TV series it's a virus from space that reanimates corpses, in the comic book it was a presumably supernatural force reanimating the dead. Though, it might have become a space virus now. I stopped reading the comic when it just got too goddamn depressing.)
When you're looking at a city like Atlanta (from The Walking Dead), and you're facing something north of six million zombies, yeah, that's a serious problem. You can't headshot six million zombies. But how did you get six million zombies? Six million zombies is a problem that can't be solved with brute force. Six-hundred-thousand zombies is a problem that can't be solved with brute force. But, sixty-thousand zombies? That can be contained. Six thousand zombies is an orderly riot. Six hundred zombies can be locked in a building and disposed of. Sixty zombies can be easily contained and neutralized. Six zombies? You can send out animal control and nip that problem in bud before there's an outbreak. And without higher brain function, there's basically no chance of patient zero avoiding detection.
But, I know the answer to this one, “well, they sent cops to catch patient zero, and the cops got bitten, then they turned in the hospital, and...” this would be a lot more plausible if rabies didn't exist. Actually, with the reputation of American police, there's basically no chance a zombie gets within biting distance. But, even if they did get closer, you know what else likes to bite cops? Meth heads. You know who has more higher brain function than a zombie? Meth heads.
Is there zero chance of a first responder getting bitten by a zombie? No, there's a chance. There's basically zero chance of that zombie biting anyone else, and on the slim possibility that the infected first responder turns and manages to chomp on one of their coworkers, there is no chance that the infection daisy chains out from there.
There's also a real likelihood that any growing outbreak will suffer, “a negative biomass shift,” as it tries to expand. That is to say, if someone sends twenty soldiers to contain 100 zombies, and those soldiers are overrun and infected, you're not going to have 120 zombies. You probably won't have 100 zombies, after they're infected and turned. So long as those soldiers drop more than two zombies, the horde will experience negative population growth. Incidentally, it doesn't matter if this is a modern or medical fantasy setting, in either case, the zombies aren't going to be able to put up much of a fight against armed and armored troops. Militaries train to fight against sapient foes, while zombies are going to be little more than training dummies. Even if they are eventually overwhelmed by the hoard, the hoard only gets a few corpses to replace all the zombies it lost. (Note: This doesn't apply if you have necromancers raising undead forces, in those cases, the actual loss of zombies will be minimal, as they reanimate zombies that were damaged enough to break their previous reanimation, but could still be used on the battlefield, so in this specific case, the goal would need to be more egregious destruction of the corpses.)
So how did we get to six million zombies? Any zombie outbreak will be at its most vulnerable when there are only a handful of infected. This even applies, to some extent, when you're looking at non-traditional zombie scenarios, such as fungal infections. Zombies are generally not very stealthy. (Ignoring The Walking Dead (TV)'s ninja zombies for the moment.) So, if you have a biohazard situation like that, unless there's a very long incubation period (which most zombies don't exhibit), then the danger of them going undetected and reaching critical mass is pretty limited.
Also, once you start looking at urban environments, that's not a great space for zombies to navigate. Things like storm drains and security barriers can effectively stop zombie advancement through an urban environment. Sure, zombies might be a threat to massive glass windows on the ground floor, but how are they going to operate the elevators, or the keycard reader to get into the stairs? Much less climb multiple flights of stairs to find the survivors? They might be able to chase them up the stairs, but getting there under their own initiative? Not so much. Same problem with any structure that puts steel bars on the windows. Zombies can't get in, or out.
After that, there's still the problem of decomposition. Dead bodies don't typically hold up particularly well. Maybe there's an embalmed zombie out there somewhere, shambling around, years after the outbreak, but most of the corpses will, quite literally, fall apart in a couple weeks. (Probably less, if they're chasing after survivors and slamming into walls.)
Having said all of that, I don't hate zombie fiction. Zombies can be a fantastic metaphor. You can even come up with compelling and interesting zombie scenarios. I know I just said it was implausible, but I don't hate The Last of Us's scenario, even if I do have some issues with some of the writing (specifically in the last few levels of the first game, before anyone asks.)
So, would it be hard to kill a zombie? Usually no. You might have some exceptions, such as magically reanimated corpses that really don't need to be intact to continue trying to kill you. Dead Space's necromorphs come to mind as an excellent example of creative zombie assembly.
The issue is usually the volume of zombies, just the sheer number threatening to pour out onto the street at any moment. Which requires that things went exceptionally wrong in ways that don't really make a lot of sense when you step back and think about it.
The issue wasn't shooting one zombie in the head, it was the next ten, and the next hundred, and the next thousand. Because, in those numbers, it doesn't really matter if they're easy to kill, there will always be more.
-Starke
As the writeblrsphere has changed so much since WelcomeToWriteblr’s inception more than three years ago, we will be reduxing old prompt events for the community to take part in once again! To start off, we will be hosting a character introduction prompt week.
From AUGUST 25TH TO AUGUST 31ST create something in response to that day’s prompt and post it. You’re welcome to do absolutely anything for the prompt of the day, whether it be a drawing, an excerpt, a playlist, or a moodboard. This event is aimed to get everyone involved and we will accept all submissions!
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
PROMPT LIST
WELCOME TO WRITEBLR, JOIN OUR SERVER HERE! (discord.gg/earlgrey)
okay so im struggling to word this, but like, eye (descriptions?) but not like color or looks, i mean like when books says "her eyes fluttered closed", "half lidded" and stuff like that. i have no idea how to use these, and no idea how they work
Eyes and eye movements, along with other aspects of facial expression and body language, can play a big role in indicating the emotion a character might be feeling in response to something they're thinking or experiencing.
Eye movements can be divided into three types:
- eyeballs - eyelids - eyebrows
Eyes that brighten – acceptance
Eye contact – acceptance, admiration/adoration (prolonged eye contact), agitation (avoiding eye contact)
Eyes that twinkle – mischief, adoration
Eyes that harden – anger
Eyes that glaze over – boredom
Eyes that dart back and forth – anxiety, fear, disbelief
Eye that gleams – confidence
Eyes that glance furtively – desire, romantic interest
Eyes filled with tears – intense sadness or happiness
Eyes that look down/away – discomfort, guilt, uncertainty
Eyes that wander – boredom, indifference
Eye contact that’s broken – insecurity, discomfort, guilt
Eye contact that’s unsteady – vulnerable
Eyes that gaze longingly – loneliness, wistfulness, nostalgia
Eyes that seem to flicker or spark – rage
Eyes that are “doe-like” – innocence
Eyes that appear dull – stunned, exhaustion
Eyes that roll - annoyance, disbelief
Eyes that stare into the middle distance - deep in thought
Eyes that glance upward to right or left - thought
Eyelids that widen – amazement/surprise/shock
Eyelids that narrow – suspicion, scorn
Eyelids that blink rapidly – appalled, disbelief
Eyelids that don’t blink – courage, determination
Eyelids that flutter – pleasure, coy
Eyelids that close – defeat, frustration,
Eyelids that clamp shut – anger
Eyelids that are half-lidded – pleasure, lust, desire, exhaustion
Eyelids that squeeze shut – panic, intense fear
Eyelids that close gently, lightly – relief
Eyebrows that rise together – amazement/surprise/shock
Eyebrows that wiggle – teasing, suggestive
Eyebrows that draw/knit together – concern
Eyebrows that crumple/furrow – confusion
Eyebrows that rise in question – hopefulness
Eyebrow that rises alone – skepticism, satisfaction
Eyebrows that lower – wariness
Eyebrows that wrinkle or crease – worry
...
I hope that helps!
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Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!
How do I describe a character when they’re angry and just “so done”? How would they act?
It’s the hot-blooded, ever-challenging, angry character that often steals a scene and captivates readers’ hearts. From the brooding protagonist to the volatile villain, anger introduces a heightened element of emotive dynamism. Anger is a powerful emotion that can define a character's behaviour, interactions, body language, and attitude.
I don't know when "plot progression" came to mean "scenes of action driving the story forward" instead of "scenes relevant to driving the story" but, when writing advice says things like "scenes should always include plot progression" that can (and does!) also refer to the subplots as well, which include character development arcs, relationship arcs, arcs relevant to the setting etc. not just the singular "main" plot, and it is decent advice, honestly
"plot progression" does not mean non-stop action. plot progression can include flashbacks, "downtime"/breather scenes, time spent enveloped in the setting, even detours to the main plot if the detour dedicates time to arcs/subplots within the story
Typically, what it means is, don't waste words on scenes which add nothing to the story/plots/subplots. Everything should count.
psst
I get a lot of asks about wards and recently it's been a FAQ. So here's a quick guide to warding.
Warding was a tradition in which a noble it royal family would take in a child from another family to their home for the purpose of educating them and preparing them for adulthood or to protect their interests. Warding was seen as a big compliment to the family of the foster child, especially if the family that fosters their child is much higher ranking. However, warding could also be in response to the family's misbehavior and insubordination or in some cases their death. Warding isn't adoption. Warding does not entitle the child to inherit anything. They cannot inherit a place in the succession, they cannot inherit lands or money or titles.
The ward was usually a child of a lower ranking family, between the ages of seven to maturity at 16 or so. Wards usually had parents in which case the foster family was charged with the child's physical and educational welfare. The ward could return to their parents at any time either at their insistence or with the blessing of their foster family. Wards were raised alongside the host family's children as well as other wards. They were fed, clothed and educated by their foster family as essentially treated as part of the family. However, wards that come from unfriendly or rebellious families were essentially used as chips for good behaviour. If their parents or kin act up, they could be killed. Wards could also be orphaned. In this case, their foster father would have control their lands and money which is why an overlord would seek to claim warship over a vassal heir to ensure peace. Wards could also be adopted by family.
The family were nearly always higher ranking and usually had another motive other than charity for taking in the ward. Sometimes the child could be used as collateral against an untrustworthy family or sometimes they were prospective spouses for the family's heirs. It was the responsibility of the foster family to discipline, educate and protect the ward. They would be charged with teaching the ward all the trappings of their position from warfare to statecraft to etiquette.
In some cases, a ward might strike gold and be warded at court by the monarch. Wards would live at court but would be unlikely to be taught the skills by the monarch or Consort personally but would be provided with the best tutors. Wards could be brought in to be companions to the Royal children or in order to ensure their inheritances were not subjected to disputes if they were orphans or again, if their family were likely to commit trouble. Royal wards were always nobility but in some rare and extreme cases they could also be total themselves, usually of displaced and exiled families or as prospective matches to royal children.
In some cases, an unmarried woman or a widow could be placed in the protection of an overlord or male relative in order to protective her interests. If a woman was the heir to a grand title or vast fortune and had no father or brother, the monarch or overlord would insist that a male relative or her overlord would take her in lest her claim put her in danger. Usually, it would be up to their host to arrange a match or aid her in brokering one herself.
One of the questions I get hit with a lot is “If I’m getting into Irish Mythology, what sources do you recommend?” It’s a sad, sad truth about the field that a lot of really valuable info is kept locked away in books and journals that the lay person wouldn’t know about (and then we wonder why information about the field is so bad.) So, I decided to compile a list of sources that I’ve personally used and found helpful in my time. It’s not a complete bibliography because, frankly, that would take up a TREMENDOUS amount of space and you’d be scrolling forever to find what you wanted, and I don’t AGREE with every single thing they say, and it’s by no means exhaustive (keep in mind: scholars from all over the field use mythological texts to study things as diverse as law, geography, tribal names, material culture, etc. and here I’m mainly focusing on sources that are JUST mythological-focused) but they’re a good starting point to forming your own opinions. The journal articles are, tragically, generally kept confined to academia, but….perhaps….if you were to ask around, someone might be able to provide you with a copy. As a whole, Celticists tend to be quite generous when it comes to sharing articles.
List subject to change, check back as time goes on to see if I’ve added anything. Also, as always, feel free to either drop me an ask or a pm if you’re curious about digging further into a given text/figure. I can’t act as a consultant on a religious question; I’m a very firm atheist with all the spirituality of a dull spoon, except with the existence of ghosts. My interest in the Tuatha Dé is purely scholarly; all that I can say is what I know about these topics from the perspective of the medieval sources, but I can definitely do my best on that one front, and I won’t reject anyone who has a different interest in the Tuatha Dé from contacting me.
This list only deals with the Mythological Cycle, not the other strands of the literary tradition that is generally if not uncontroversially referred to as “Irish Mythology”. For Fenian Cycle traditions, a similar bibliography has been compiled by Dr. Natasha Sumner of Harvard, here.
Editions/Translations of Texts (many of these are available at UCC’s CELT archive or on Irish Sagas Online):
Tochmarc Étaíne, Osborn Bergin and Richard Best
Cath Maige Tuired, Elizabeth Gray (If you can and you’re serious about the field, I highly recommend getting the actual Irish Text Society Edition, which includes a wonderful index of every time a given figure shows up in other sources. An absolute must for a mythographer.)
Lebor Gabála Érenn, J.R.S Macalister, 5 vols. (The entirety of this is available on archive.org. Personally…while the rest of it is obviously important and worthy of study, if you’re interested in just the mythological stuff, I recommend Volume IV, which includes both the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha Dé. Unless you really, really want to read five volumes of medieval Irish pseudohistory, the last volume of which was finished posthumously.) i ii iii iv v
The Metrical Dinshenchas, Edward Gwynn. (5 vols.) (These are difficult, with many scholars outright ignoring them except when absolutely necessary. These are in a later form of Irish, which means that, while some of the contents in them could very well be Pre-Christian in nature, they very much do reflect a later medieval world. Some of them are just as much about contemporary politics as they are about mythology, and many of them also bring in content from the Ulster Cycle and the Fenian Cycle. My personal favorites to look up are Tailtiu, Carn Hui Néit, Duirgen, and Carmun, though there are MANY others.) i ii iii iv v
“The First Battle of Moytura”, John Fraser (Note: It’s a VERY late text, with the question of the Fir Bolg/Tuatha Dé battle and how far the tradition really goes back being one that’s very important to keep in mind. It’s a personal favorite of mine. But it’s very late.)
Baile in Scáil, Kevin Murray (Thurneyson also did an older edition that’s more readily accessible, hence why I linked it here, but Murray is the most recent and up to date.)
“How the Dagda got his magic staff”, Osborn Bergin
Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann, Richard Duffy (This is an Early Modern Irish text, so it was written down comparatively late. That doesn’t mean that there’s NO mythological content here, it’s a personal favorite of mine, but it means that it very much reflects the cultural context of around….the 15th-17th century or thereabouts. It’s very chaotic, very violent, and the heroic figures are….not….heroic.)
Scél Tuáin Meic Chairill, John Carey
Echtra Nerai, it’s available in a fairly recent translation by John Carey in Celtic Heroic Age (pub. 2003) , listed below, though Kuno Meyer also did an edition/translation for it that I’ve linked to here.
Books:
Proinsias Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology (Personally, I’d recommend this one first - It’s designed for someone who isn’t a specialist and, while a lot of what he’s saying has been disputed back and forth, it’s still a handy primer and will get you into the myths.)
John Koch and John Carey, The Celtic Heroic Age (Once you have an idea of what you’re looking at, I recommend this one, since it’s a sourcebook. A TON of material from across the Celtic world, featuring classical sources, medieval Irish sources, and Welsh, all of it in one place.)
Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals (I personally recommend you read this one after you read CHA, giving you a bit of context for what Williams is saying here.)
O’Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology (note: A lot of what he says here is no longer considered recent in the field, but his knowledge of his own sources is, frankly, without any other peer. Use with a grain of salt)
John Carey, The Mythological Cycle of Medieval Irish Literature
Kim McCone, Pagan Past, Christian Present
Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia
Articles:
John Carey, “Myth and Mythography in ‘Cath Magh Tuired’”
John Carey, “Donn, Amairgen, Ith and the Prehistory of Irish Pseudohistory”
Proinsias Mac Cana, “Aspects of the theme of King and Goddess in Irish Literature”
Máire Herbert, “Goddess and king: the sacred marriage in early Ireland.”
Gregory Toner, “Macha and the invention of myth”
Elizabeth A. Gray, “Cath Maige Tuired: myth and structure“
Thomas Charles-Edwards, “Tochmarc Étaíne: a literal interpretation”
Tómas O’Cathasaigh, “Cath Maige Tuired as Exemplary Myth”
Joseph Nagy, “Close encounters of the traditional kind in medieval Irish literature”
Mark Scowcroft, “Leabhar Gabhála. Part I: the growth of the text”
Mark Scowcroft, “Leabhar Gabhála. Part II: the growth of the tradition”
Joseph Nagy, “‘Talking myth’ in medieval Irish literature.”
John Carey, “The Location of the Otherworld in Irish Tradition”
Máire Bhreathnach, “The sovereignty goddess as goddess of death?“
John Carey, “Notes on the Irish war-goddess.”
Veronica Philipps, “Exile and authority in Lebor gabála Érenn”
Alistair Rooney cannot dream. It was the first thing he bargained away to the Goblin Market, twelve years old and finally able to put a name to the creatures he's been able to see his entire life. Fae. Fair Folk. Faeries.
Now nineteen and thoroughly disillusioned to the strange and often cruel nature of the Folk, Alistair has been working for the Goblin Market since that fateful day, paying off his mother's debt and stubbornly refusing to take the same road of oblivion to cope with living the half life of a mortal who can See; unnatural in both worlds, wanted by none.
But then his younger sister is taken by the Folk as the last repayment of his mother's debt and Alistair is forced to use all he has learnt of the Folk to get her back. Can a liar in Faery, made a pawn in the cruel games of the Courts, outwit immortal kings and queens? Can a mortal enter the Court of the Carrion King and leave with their humanity in tact? Can Alistair get his sister back without sacrificing the entirety of himself to do it?
TITLE: Court of the Carrion King
GENRE: Folkloric Modern Fantasy
POV: Third Person Limited
STATUS: Writing First Draft
Found/Chosen Family, Depictions of Dichotomy, The Older Brother, Love as a Driving Force, Twisted Nature, Cyclical Motifs, The Hero's Journey, Spring as Rebirth, Portal Fantasy, Queer Romance, The Nature of Truth, Quest Narrative, Intergenerational Trauma, Oaths and Promises, Identity and Self, The Lone Wolf, Addiction, The Other, Personification of Nature/The Seasons, Civilisation vs The Wild
