Ive Halfway Through The Queens Thief In Part Due To Your Sketches And My Mutuals, Could I Request A Sketch

I’ve halfway through The Queen’s Thief in part due to your sketches and my mutuals, could I request a sketch of someone from tqt? Maybe Gen?

BEST SERIES EVERRRRR. 🎉 I think I’ve only drawn Gen from later books, so I figured it was time for a sketch from The Thief?

One more drawing of a character from "The Queen's Thief" book series. Not as good as the previous one, but... :D

To everyone who has lush fields ripe with story ideas but is struggling to go out and actually harvest them with your writer’s scythe: that’s alright. There’s a reason.

I see writers despairing or making self-deprecating jokes about how many wips they have, as if the ability to come up with the idea is equal to the ability to finish it out into an end product.

It isn’t.

A lot of our ideas come about, not because we were determined to be productive writers, but because daydreaming is an internal escape from life’s demands.

Writing is a demand, too.

Resting and relaxing are basic needs, unlike the high level, abstract satisfaction of being creatively productive. That’s why you might daydream (which is a mild and normal form of dissociation) ideas that you feel good about, and then struggle to research, write the words, fill plotholes, check grammar, revise— all the critical thinking and executive function things involved in creation. Your basic needs must be satisfied before your higher needs can be met effectively.

So, if you’re daydreaming about your stories extensively to mitigate stress, it’s expecting a lot of your stressed self to return from fantasy land, sit down in the cold hard real world and do the hard work to write masterpieces of literature. Those operations are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Writing is hard. Making yourself feel guilty is only going to make it harder. You don’t have to atone for entertaining or distracting your mind by making that available to other people. Daydreaming is a valid end in itself.

Don’t feel bad about having ideas but not being able to write them. Scribble some notes if you can, if you want, but above all enjoy the escapism and take care of yourself first. The words will come after.

Hi, who would you fancast as Gen, Irene, Sophos and Helen? Also, what would you do if ROTT ever gets a movie adaptation, one depicting the war with the Mede anyway? 🙈 🥺👉👈

Hii!!!! Oh my gosh fancasting Tqt is NOT easy...

...especially since a couple fancasts have already been made that I am SO down to agree with. I hope you'll forgive me if I partly choose people that have already been named within the fandom before...?

[Insert: ARE YOU KIDDING ME YOU MADE ME CREATE WHOLE POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS FOR THEM I SPENT THE ENTIRE AFTERNOON ON THIS AND I DO NOT REGRET IT]

Eugenides: Luke Pasqualino

Who else. He could pull off Young Gen, King Gen, and God Gen. I love his chill mannerisms and his cheekiness. But whoever has watched BBC's "The Musketeers" knows he can portray a dark, rash and dangerous side as well. The actor has Italian roots btw.

Irene Attolia: Irene Papas

Sadly, this awesome actress died in 2022. She was Greek and played in "The Trojan Women" as well as "Iphigenia" - so, you know, she has the ideal Greek Aristocratic face. Isn't she the perfect Attolia?

Sophos - Christian Martyn

How I found this actor, I don't know. I am not familiar with him, though he played Gilbert Blythe in "Anne with an E". Look. LOOK. Bear with me. He seems innocent, is the definition of too Nice™ and has this precious aura of childlike chaos about him. But he is also able to glow up into a warrior when necessary O_O

Helen Eddis: Nathalie Emmanuel

Okay, look. While I'm personally highly satisfied with the above casts, I know full and well that this one isn't perfect. First of all, Emmanuel is far too thin and pretty to be Eddis. They'd have to change her nose at least, if not give her a rounder body type. But she is dark-skinned, her hair is short, her smile is fun and captivating, and I think this does reflect who Eddis is to some degree. I'm sorry I didn't find anything more accurate.

To comfort you, here are some more random character casts that I found/came up with while working on the others:

King of Sounis - Jack Black

Nahuseresh - Dev Patel. Imagine the reddish beard oh my gosh

Kamet - Riz Ahmed (that one was the author's choice, I believe)

Ambiades - Austin North. Like, come on. He's gotta be the evil version of Sophos and he would be perfect.

Costis - he's honestly just that one real life Kristoff edit from Frozen. No, he's really Channing Tatum in "The Eagle". Look him up.

As for what would happen if The Queen's Thief Series got turned into a movie, I would SCREAM YELL CRY HAPPY TEARS.

They could turn the 6 books into 3 movies, I believe.

The Thief & The Queen of Attolia (the story would have to be slightly changed, e.g. older Gen and different politics, but they can really pull together the whole 125 pages of travelling to the temple into a 5min montage)

The King of Attolia & A Conspiracy of Kings (how Costis became King isn't as important, but it could serve as a sideplot/what Gen is actually contributing politically behind the facade)

Thick as Thieves and Return of the Thief (again, how Kamet came to Attolia isn't as important as the message he brought.)

The Queen's Thief reminds me much of Narnia (the world, the values, the fashion, the colors), Percy Jackson (adventure Greek setting), and Sinbad (adventure + navigating the Gods). If they ever turned that into a movie, I'D WATCH THE HECK OUT OF IT.

Thank you very much for asking!!!

Can you please explain your dialogue theory of fanfiction?

In short, that dialogue, more than anything, makes or breaks a fanfic. What do posts like "He would not fucking say that" and "They would NOT have communication skills that good" have in common? Talk. Characters expressing themselves to one another. The faithful recreation of identifiable speech patterns is weighted heavily in the evaluation of a fic's quality. By "speech patterns" I do not just mean the semantic content of a given character's expression, but idiosyncrasies of style and slang, vocabulary and idiom, even gesture, musicality, and rhythm.

Of course believable dialogue is far from the only thing that makes a good fanfic Good. And there are forms of fic writing, particularly highly abbreviated ones like drabbles and ficlets, that in practice tend to de-emphasize its significance. But if we are talking about the romantic, erotic shippy stuff that is the meat and potatoes of online fandom, dialogue does the heaviest lifting short of the consummation itself. Arguably more so! It's the real keystone to the catharsis, and often the catalyst for it. Is there a confession occurring? A provocation? An evasion or ultimatum? Zoom out, big picture: What is the most potent and fundamental mechanic for developing complexity, tension, and transformation within a relationship, getting it to go from one thing to another? Making these two idiots talk to each other! Often clumsily and indirectly and maladaptively, at the worst possible time and in the worst possible situation, about anything or everything but what they should be — but talk they usually do.

What makes fanfic specifically so challenging and rewarding in this regard is that the talking is as much a feat of translation as invention, because both reader and writer are working off an existing model. Liberties taken with plot, form, and even narrative voice have wider buffer zones; you can get creative with circumventing the events of canon while still conforming to its emotional and substantive essence.

But the training wheels come off the moment you open your mouth to speak in another character's voice. And man, nothing will break a reader's immersion quite like he would not fucking say that.