i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back
someone should remake lord of the rings as a grandfather telling a fantasy story to his grand child with flashbacks to world war one showing the dead boys and men the characters were based on. grandpa why didn’t they just fly. because they didn’t. they didn’t.
i’m fine
I will never get over how Tolkien & Lewis took the horrors of war and spun them into fantasy.
Shivering in the trenches dreaming of cozy hobbit holes, shaking as bombs pockmark a forest and imagining each shallow mud-filled crater contains a new world—that maybe there are still as many beautiful things in the universe as there are bombs—that maybe the world is bigger than this moment and this ugliness and one day this will be a peaceful forest again full of small ponds.
I mean look at these photos of the shell craters in Sanctuary Woods, near Ypres Belgium and tell me it’s not the Wood Between The Worlds:
A human woman willing to risk it all for a taste of power.
In a land ruled by ruthless Fae, twenty-one-year-old Lore Alemeyu’s village is trapped in a forested prison. Lore knows that any escape attempt is futile–her scars are a testament to her past failures. But when her village is threatened, Lore makes a desperate deal with a fae lord.
She convinces him that she will risk her life for wealth, but really she’s after the one thing the Fae covet above all: magic of her own.
As Lore navigates the hostile world outside, she’s forced to rely on two fae males to survive. When undeniable chemistry ignites, she’s not just in danger of losing her life, but her heart to the very creatures she can never trust.
More pre-order links are incoming as they generate.
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Hey booklr! I’m posting this on behalf of my friend Analeigh Sbrana (@literaryxqueen on insta), who doesn’t have a Tumblr. Her debut novel, Lore of the Wilds, went live for pre-order this morning, and I’d love it if we could show it some love.
Analeigh tried for two years to sell her story to trad-pub, but the vibe was that trad-pub didn’t want to take the risk on a Black Fae fantasy adventure set in a breathtakingly descriptive magic kingdom in a market currently flooded with white fairy romances. So, she took matters into her own hands and joined the ranks of self-pub.
Full disclosure: I worked on this book as a proofreader, and I loved every minute of it. I kept forgetting I was supposed to be working and reading ahead. I scheduled a week to finish reading it in did it in 3 days, and the only reason it took so long was that I had to actually pause and work on it 😅.
So, if you like:
-🍄cottage core -✨fairy core -📚light/dark academia vibes -🌈a diverse cast of lgbtqia+ Black characters -💘romance -🧝🏾♀️ being kidnapped by a fairy prince to tidy up his cursed/enchanted library and coming into your own magical powers as a result, then Lore of the Wilds might just be for you!
Here, have a sneak peek of what the physical books will look like:
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(ID in alt) The book will eventually be available in eBook, paperback, and hardback–Ana’s just having a time getting the links to generate. I’ll post them as soon as they’re live.
Please do consider giving LoTW some love. It’s such a fantastic book, and I’d love to see it thrive where trad-pub left it to fail. Thank you 💖
@thebibliosphere My pre-order was just canceled with the comment that this book can no longer be preordered through Amazon - do you know anything perchance?
Aah this actually be a good thing. So due to the success of the pre-order numbers, Ana actually got picked up by an agent who has been shopping her work around to a lot of big publishers who previously rejected her.
If the Amazon links just got cancelled, then that means a publisher finally bought it and they’ll be relaunching again at a different time via their print.
I’ll message Ana and see if she has a new release date, but I suspect that may take a while. Trad-pub moves slower than molasses compared to self-pub.
But yeah, thanks everybody who contributed to Ana’s numbers and made trad-pub sweat.
So much for there not being a market for Balck fairytales!!
Is there someplace we can watch for updates? Would love to show support once it’s available.
Ana is on both Instagram and TikTok as LiteraryxQueen, those are her two main (active) social medias and probably the best place to get updates while the dust is settling.
Rest assured, though, I’ll be posting the new links when they pop up. Trad-pub needs to knows Black fantasy stories have a market. And I’m so excited for my friend. Aaah!
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(Obviously I meant to write Black fairytales up above but I hit post too fast 😅 It’s corrected on the og post, just not in this reblog because that’s how Tumblr is.)
oh damn, okay, so literally last night i was talking with friends about how unrealistic the golden horse in tears of the kingdom is and how it feels like they were just trying to one-up the white horse in breath of the wild, and then i run across this post, do a tiny bit of looking, and—no really gold horses are actually literally a real-world thing!
I remember reading about this breed in horse books. They’re indeed very very old (over 3000 years old) and come from the deserts in turkmenistan. The way their hair is built helps them with the extreme temperature changes in the desert.
They’re tough, with high endurance and intelligence, friendly and sensitive.
Oh my god if 8 year old me had known about this it would have been OVER
6 year old me would have conniptions and then immediately imagined them with wings and a horn.
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