The Patrician leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair.
“I want to be clear about this,” he said coldly. “Are we to believe that you are asking for a petty wage increase and a domestic utensil?”
Carrot whispered in Colon’s other ear.
Colon turned two bulging, watery-rimmed eyes to the dignitaries. The rim of his helmet was passing through his fingers like a millwheel.
“Well,” he began, “sometimes, we thought, you know, when we has our dinner break, or when it’s quite, like, at the end of a watch as it may be, and we want to relax a bit, you know, wind down…” His voice trailed away.
“Yes?”
Colon took a deep breath.
“I suppose a dartboard would be out of the question–?”
hey I just want to talk about this bit for a sec cause it’s a favorite of mine
I wouldn’t say Guards! Guards! is the darkest Discworld book, but it’s up there. it’s a book about corruption and the abuse of power and the willingness of people to blindly follow any higher authority no matter how terrible. it’s a book that begins with its protagonists at their lowest: the last three remaining Watchmen, having just buried a comrade, who have seen their institution crumble into nothingness, who have no power left, who have nothing left, who are so beaten down by life they have given up everything but wandering drunkenly through the gutters, with no hope of affecting any change in their rotten city. it’s a book where the–largely accidental–saving of the day is capped off by Vetinari’s blisteringly cynical speech about how there are no good people, only bad people on different sides, which leaves even Vimes utterly speechless and unable to argue.
and then. and then this happens. the Watch are told that they can ask for any reward for saving the city. any reward. Vetinari and the assembled nobles clearly expect them to ask for something pretty big. this has, after all, been a story about how awful people will be if you give them any leeway.
…and the extravagant reward the Watchmen ask for is… for a five dollar raise, a new kettle, and a dartboard.
and Vetinari, the chessmaster, the manipulator, the man who always seems to be ten steps ahead, who seems to know everything and predict everything, who a few pages before outlined a world view so dark that “the only thing to hope for is that there is no life after death”–Vetinari is surprised. the man who anticipates everything did not anticipate this.
it’s this glorious little gleam of light, after a book full of associating mundane humanity with the awful, the humdrum evil and petty bigotry, that suddenly turns around and says sometimes mundane humanity is tea kettles and dartboards and silliness. sometimes people will do terrible things because it’s easy, but sometimes people will do great things because what the hell, someone had to.
Why stop at embarrassing Mr. Darcy when we can embarrass ALL the Austen heroes? I ask you.
SIR JAMES MARTIN: “Oh, is that why it pops up like that? How jolly!” REGINALD DE COURCY: No, but it was an accident. EDWARD FERRARS is a virgin on his wedding night on a technicality. COLONEL BRANDON, soldier, is not. And the less we inspect the Eliza timeline the better. GEORGE KNIGHTLEY is demisexual; doesn’t think about it much until, out of the blue, he’s staggeringly jealous of Frank Churchill. HENRY TILNEY was a benignly thoughtless fellow at university, who figured knowledge was better than ignorance, and pleasanter too. SIDNEY PARKER gets scooped up, to the envy of his friends, by a celebrated Drury Lane grande dame, who deflowers him expertly, but realizes in the process that the poor lad’s bent as a nine bob note. Unperturbed, she gives him the address of a discreet, exclusive molly house, which he never visits. FREDERICK WENTWORTH….It will not become us to speculate on what consolations Frederick Wentworth may have found upon leaving Somersetshire, in the year six. CHARLES BINGLEY:
Stulti: Am finally typing out answers to Lis’ “Which Austen dudes are virgins?” ask. Am stuck on Bingley. Feel like weighing in, Samwell Women’s Hockey chat? Lis: I was in the middle of typing something wishy-washy when the question “Does public-school gayness count?” hit me like a thunderbolt. It wasn’t Darcy; it’s over now; BUT IT WAS REAL WHILST IT LASTED. Stulti: OH MY GOD Lis: RIGHT? Lis: HE. HAS. LOVED. BEFORE. Stulti: HE CERTAINLY HAS. Stulti: And if it’s just fagging, it totally doesn’t count. Hardly registers. Bisexual, who, me? Haa Lis: probably an upperclassman he adored Stulti: (And still makes things go considerably better for Jane on her wedding night.) Stulti: YES. Stulti: Lord Somebodypumpy Stulti: Absolute whip Lis: Capital fellow Stulti: I’m transcribing this for Tumblr Lis: Oh yes
FITZWILLIAM DARCY has barely kissed a girl in a parlour game. He grew up into awareness of his own power and responsibility in lockstep with his awareness of his own sexuality: he’s too moral to seduce a servant, too fastidious for a prostitute, too wary of gossip and entrapment even to flirt within his social circle. One of his odd blind spots is that he’s far more aware of, and progressive about, issues of consent with regard to servants and dependents than with members of his own class, but on that subject Elizabeth is well able to school him. He comes to her with a certain amount of academic knowledge courtesy of Pemberley’s small erotica collection, alongside whatever bawdy nonsense he’s unavoidably overheard from peers, and between those and Elizabeth’s aunt’s kind matter-of-factness, they certainly could be worse off. EDMUND BERTRAM approaches his wedding bed the dubious beneficiary of two wildly different lectures from Sir Thomas and Tom that, put together, succeed in leaving him flatly mystified. Mansfield Park has no secret library that he knows of. Fanny, meanwhile, has been advised by her aunt to lie back and think of England, but, given recent events, she’s sure there’s more to the matter. HENRY CRAWFORD. Yikes.
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
Are you a pride and prejudice or jane eyre person? wuthering heights or sense and sensibility? dracula or frankenstein? 1984 or lord of the flies? the catcher in the rye or to kill a mockingbird?
So after so many months of hard work, The Vapor Variant is done. And I really, REALLY wanted something tangible that I could hold in my hands, so I started looking into book printing.
I used Lulu.com and got my book printed for $7 (with shipping!) I just got it for myself, just so I could have it, but wow, what a feeling!
I had originally printed a Cabin Pressure fic I’d written just to get practice printing with Lulu (laying it out in Word, designing a cover, etc.).
Thank you to @cecilia-gf for the beautiful cover art for TVV. Tidings cover art by me.
10/10 would recommend, if you have any questions, please feel free to message me, I’m super happy to help others get their stories printed. It is so cool to hold all that hard work in your hands!
With that being said… any authors out there who might be interested in like… a secret-Santa-style book swap?@elldotsee and I were throwing around ideas yesterday but it’s still sort of in its infancy, depending on how many people bite. In theory you’d print your own book and send it along to a person or people and get their fic-books in return. Kind of a neat way to fill our shelves with quality writing we can’t get at the bookshop 😉
Ever think about how the final twist of Persuasion relies so heavily on the pure intimacy and magnetism between Anne and Wentworth? Wentworth has to rely only on all his own quick ingenuity and intuition where Anne is concerned to have any certainty whatsoever that she will move to the spot where he was, that his ruse in returning to draw her eye to the papers on the table will be enough for her to understand that he has left something for her, even after everything that’s passed, after he departed without daring to say goodbye or look at her.
The whole novel is a long examination of Anne’s painful awareness of Wentworth–his proximity, his character, the way he thinks and moves.
This silent signalling to deliver his letter to her is the breaking of a dam–a clear sign that Wentworth has been aware of her, and her awareness of him, and that he is stepping back into the dance they once shared. Even before Anne has opened the letter, she can sense the portent of his action, alone.
Green Violin Bow 