if-we-only-dared

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Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

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the show narrative will have to keep Kaz in Ketterdam because if they add him to the events of the original trilogy he’d just kill The Darkling in like 10 minutes

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Just because I just got back from the bookstore...

As expected SHADOW AND BONE is sold out. No problem for me, I already have a copy, but I'm sure its sold out because people want to get into it due to the upcoming Netflix adaptation.

I have one thing to recommend to you guys:

BUY "SIX OF CROWS" TOO

I noticed SoC had an abundance of copies, and its probably because you guys DIDN'T KNOW that Netflix is blending BOTH Shadow and Bone and SoC into season one somehow.

Just trying to do you guys a favor so you're not mad when you watch the show and go "Kaz?? Inej? Jesper, etc? THEY WEREN'T IN THE BOOK??" lol

Welcome to the Grishaverse, newcomers. I hope you stick around :)

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*Shadowhunters in every series.*

*Church, the cat, in every series.*

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If only she was both

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the children of theresa gray

The woods and the gardens were full of memories, but so was their home. Jem and Tessa had put up pictures on the stone walls, black-and-white photographs carefully preserved: of Will, of James and Lucie, who were Mina’s half brother and half sister separated by a more than a century. Someday they could point out each face to Mina and tell her their names and that they would have loved her.

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ive said this before and ill continue to say it: absolutely clownery is thinking tessa loved will over jem and vice versa. she loved them equally. period.

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me everyday: i love jem carstairs so much what the fuck

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THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY + RAINBOW COLOR MEANINGS requested by @demigods-with-lightsabers

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I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story. 

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tua headcanon (vanya’s first concert after the apocalypse):

despite being an amazing violinist, vanya’s still a bit shy about performing in front of her family, mostly because–aside from five–she’s never done it before and partly because the last time she did it, she sucked the life out of four of them with energy tentacles and caused the end of the world. you know–just musician things

when she does land a solo, she takes extra care not to tell a single soul, only practicing when they’re nowhere nearby and never the same passage twice so they don’t realize just why she’s been rehearsing so much lately

they find out anyway when one day, diego does some small-time vigilantism in an alley behind the icarus theater and finds a poster advertising VANYA HARGREEVES PERFORMS SIBELIUS, MAY 21ST AT 8PM

he tells luther who tells allison who tells klaus who tells five and ben. they don’t breathe a single word of it to vanya, and all of them spend the next twenty minutes convincing the ticket seller to spare six tickets, despite the show having sold out a month ago

luther folds when the man tells him “no” and they practically have to wrestle the phone away from diego and five once it’s clear ben’s careful bargaining won’t work 

”he’s not gonna listen to you if you keep threatening to chop his fingers off!!!!!” “oH YEAH???? THEN I’M GONNA MAKE HIM–GIMME THAT PHONE I’M NOT DONE”

in the end, allison saves the day, as always. no rumoring, of course; just plain “hi, i’m allison hargreeves and–yes, i’m the lawyer in that movie, of course i’ll sign an autograph for you after the show. could we pick up our tickets tomorrow? four o’clock? that’d be great, jim. oh, can i call you jim? excellent.” 

she walks away with a cocky smirk while diego mutters “show-off” under his breath, but he says it fondly enough that she lets it slide

ben spends the week leading up to the concert reading about sibelius’ life and the inspiration for his only violin concerto. on some afternoons, five joins him, being the only other member of the family who actually listens to classical music

diego starts leaving dinner in the kitchen for vanya on the nights when she has to rehearse with her orchestra, and klaus drags ben to the mall one day to look for something that’ll help with vanya’s peeling calluses

luther brushes up on classical concert etiquette, making extra sure to tell his siblings not to clap after a movement ends and to give their sister a standing ovation

(”as if we wouldn’t have already. she’s brilliant,” five assures him)

allison takes them all shopping for suits and to her surprise, none of them grumble because they’re all doing it for vanya and they’ve got thirty-two years of missed concerts and recitals to make up for

on the day itself, ben ‘accidentally’ makes too much bacon and eggs and blueberry pancakes, and he loads most of it onto vanya’s plate so she’ll have enough energy to power through all three movements of her concerto tonight. vanya’s so nervous that she doesn’t even notice

when she leaves around noon, violin case on her shoulders, they all file into allison’s room and start getting changed

vanya’s nervous as fuck of course, and fifteen minutes before she goes on, she starts regretting the fact that she never told them, it would’ve been nice to have familiar faces in the audience, but hey she’s here now and she’ll simply play the best she can because damn it she’s earned it and worked too hard on this entire thing for her to chicken out now

when she steps out, she actually thinks she’s seeing things when she spots all six of her siblings sitting in the front row, wearing the largest shit-eating grins she’s ever seen in her life

out of the corner for her eye, she sees klaus giving her two thumbs-up and mouthing “you got this” as she tunes, and it’s more than enough to make her relax completely

vanya takes a deep breath, and as soon as she starts with that familiar “sol-la-re” motif, the entire audience–her family included–is captivated 

halfway through the first movement’s cadenza, ben turns to luther and whispers “how come we never went before? she’s incredible” and five’s face hardens when he replies with “because dad never let us”

diego actually sheds a tear during the second movement; allison subtly passes him a tissue, her own dark eyes damp with emotion

they’re all at the edge of their seats when vanya starts the third movement, it’s brisk tempo and syncopation more than enough to catch their attention

there’s a brief moment where vanya drops her bow and–to an outside viewer–miraculously catches it right before it falls, but her siblings see the way her eyes pulse white for a second as she levitates the bow back into her hand and resumes playing as if nothing happened, and they all trade knowing smiles afterwards

when she finally plays the final note, the audience simply lets it ring throughout the hall for a few seconds before they’re on their feet

even so, she can hear her family’s voices above the din and they look so proud and allison is crying happy tears, diego shouting “brava! bravissima!” over and over, and her other brothers all have matching grins on their faces, and oh gosh, she’s really done it, hasn’t she

they meet her in the lobby with tons of bear hugs, the largest sunflower bouquet she’s ever seen, and half-meant scolding about “why the heck didn’t you invite us, vanny? you were amazing!!!” and while five and diego argue about who gets to carry her case on the way to griddy’s, ben simply rolls his eyes and plops it onto his back

halfway to the donut shop, luther presses close to her and gives her a one-armed hug that’s slightly awkward because they’re both walking and he’s obviously the size of a house compared to her, but vanya leans into him all the same, grateful for his quiet comfort. he keeps his arm around her all the way to the shop and only lets go when klaus drags him away to look for a booth that can accomodate all seven of them

they buy her all the donuts she wants and tell her which parts of her concerto they loved best, and vanya just feels so warm, down to the tips of her toes, and it’s all because she has never felt this much love in her life before

she’s getting ready for bed that night when diego knocks on her door and pokes his head in long enough to say “i’m proud of you, you know? like really, really proud” and gives her a long hug to boot

after that day, her siblings start sitting in whichever room she’s practicing in to hear her play, and the attention is overwhelming at first, but eventually, vanya just gets used to ben reading while she slogs over tchaikovsky or luther munching on a bowl of cereal as she works on her etudes

she invites them to every concert from then on, and vanya makes something of a ritual out of plucking petals from the bouquets she receives afterwards, pressing them into a notebook and running her fingers over every single one before a show to calm her down

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“If she lived until the sun died, there would never be any other for her besides Will and Jem, those twin souls, the only souls she had ever loved”

— Tessa Gray, Ghosts of the Shadow Market

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The Louvre.

35mm Film

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wearing the oversized jacket, always having a book with yourself, walking a lot, reading in the empty cafe while drinking the black coffee, writing love letters and never sending them, and spending evening alone listening to vynils

p.s: photos are not mine! If you know the owner, write me, please!

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TANGLED ROOTS BY PHILLIPE FARAUT | 2008 Earthenware clay sculpture by Philippe Faraut, 2008. Click Images to Enlarge

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Me actively participating in my own love-life:

Me reading the 100th angsty fanfiction about my otp falling in love: