COVER REVEAL! My next novel, The Animals We Became, retells the medieval Welsh tale 'Math fab Mathonwy'. It's a book about gender, trauma, and compulsory heterosexuality expressed through non-consensual animal transformations and some deeply unreliable narration... finnlongman.com/books/the-an...

Heartening to see an adaptation put the most baroquely fucked-up bit of the tale right there in the blurb front and centre Been looking forward to this one!

Finn Longman is only here occasionally@finnlongman.com · yesterday

COVER REVEAL! My next novel, The Animals We Became, retells the medieval Welsh tale 'Math fab Mathonwy'. It's a book about gender, trauma, and compulsory heterosexuality expressed through non-consensual animal transformations and some deeply unreliable narration... finnlongman.com/books/the-an...

The sheer horror I just felt at seeing that my mum had seen the Instagram story where I mentioned Blodeuwedd pegging Gronw does not bode well for how I'll cope when my family and colleagues actually read this book

COVER REVEAL! My next novel, The Animals We Became, retells the medieval Welsh tale 'Math fab Mathonwy'. It's a book about gender, trauma, and compulsory heterosexuality expressed through non-consensual animal transformations and some deeply unreliable narration... finnlongman.com/books/the-an...

Yes, we strongly recommend PPE respiratory masks on public transport in England including at airports and on aircraft.

Anecdotally, a couple of people I know have tested positive recently or friends and relatives have, after a pause without that. I think summer travel, airports etc are the culprits in some cases. Highly recommend masking while travelling to minimise chances of catching or spreading anything.

BuDS Disability Service@buds-disability.bsky.social · yesterday

Covid infection levels in England have jumped this week, although remaining at historically low levels. With 1 in every 1549 people in England now infected as of 2 August, we have increased the BuDS Covid infection risk level from Low to Moderately Low. A thread 🧵 buds.org.uk/covid-19-ris...

Tried to send a parcel to France today. I'd looked it up in advance and had an idea of the costs for different options. The costs they quoted me in the post office started at double the cheapest I'd seen on their website (for in-store prices). Baffling. Didn't post it, will try another method.

Latest "AI ruins everything" issue: hairstyle photos. Looking for haircut inspo because I haven't had mine cut in eight months and it's becoming an issue. Listicles that used to use celebrity images now use AI. Sure, those other guys had stylists and product, but these don't even have real hair!

Genuinely. Keep going "maybe if my process was more Aesthetic, I could make videos about it and then people would care" and then immediately remember how much I hate feeling like a performing monkey when all I want to do is THE ACTUAL WORK. That's the bit I'm good at anyway.

Delilah S. Dawson@delilahsdawson.bsky.social · 5d ago

I hate how what I need to do is write books, and yet I keep thinking, "Maybe if I wore increasingly weird glasses and sat in front of my taxidermy with a bubble pipe and did unhinged houseplant reviews I could go viral and sell some books." Doing the work doesn't feel like enough, some days.

I could write flat prose and off-kilter metaphors for $2.4 million. I'd figure it out.

Further advantages of OCC over the Táin: still loads of Medb and the narrative treats her better; Emer gets an actual role; whole bunch of other female characters who also do stuff and aren't treated with misogynistic contempt by the story itself; also some older men and other non-combatants.

To be honest I think Oidheadh Con Culainn would be way better for a film adaptation than the Táin. The coalition of enemies – the sense of gathering doom – the set piece battles – the emotional death scene – Conall Cearnach going scorched earth in vengeance – ends with digging Cú Chulainn's grave...

Finn Longman is only here occasionally@finnlongman.com · last wk.

How about Laoidh na gCeann? Conall Cearnach wreaking bloody vengeance and killing hundreds to avenge the death of Cú Chulainn – that's a poem, even if there's a prose tale as well. And frankly Conall is pretty scary in that, so you could do something very bloody and violent with it...

"Oh so you wrote YA for a few years then switched to romantasy when that was trendy?" No, I wrote YA and what I thought was adult litfic concurrently, the adult book took ages to sell so the YA came out first, then it sold to a fantasy publisher, then some of the marketing leaned into the romance...

The author-date citations in this book are driving me up the wall. They're hyperlinked in one direction so I can get to the bibliography to find out what they are for reference, but there's no way back to the page I was on, I just have to scroll back every time. Footnotes wouldn't hurt me like this.

There are several rare books I have alerts out for; one is part of a series of edited volumes, and I managed to get its pair, but the seller told me this one had already been bought. Since very few other people are interested in this topic, I've been wondering ever since who might have bought it.

There's a known scam on Tumblr where accounts claiming to be beta readers will come into your replies when you post about your writing and try to get you to hire them as a beta reader. Except they just look for the word "manuscript". Yes, please do beta-read this 18th century Irish scribe.

Evergreen post:

Finn Longman is only here occasionally@finnlongman.com · last wk.

do I just want more people to care about Oidheadh Con Culainn? yes hire me to talk about Oidheadh Con Culainn I'll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Oidheadh Con Culainn

"If you were making a film of Oidheadh Con Culainn, which variant would you adapt?" all of them. There'd be like ten different cuts of the film and they'd release simultaneously and everyone would argue about what happens in it because they got a sliiiightly different film depending on the cinema.

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

To be honest I think Oidheadh Con Culainn would be way better for a film adaptation than the Táin. The coalition of enemies – the sense of gathering doom – the set piece battles – the emotional death scene – Conall Cearnach going scorched earth in vengeance – ends with digging Cú Chulainn's grave...

Finn Longman is only here occasionally@finnlongman.com · last wk.

How about Laoidh na gCeann? Conall Cearnach wreaking bloody vengeance and killing hundreds to avenge the death of Cú Chulainn – that's a poem, even if there's a prose tale as well. And frankly Conall is pretty scary in that, so you could do something very bloody and violent with it...

Been sitting on this one but I must ask. When did fanfic & romance authors decide that werewolves were code for budget omegaverse, because I have to say, that is Knot why I am here

I'm late to Disability Pride Month, but I have Fantasy recs to make up for it! Including 🐺 Wolves from @kvjohansen.bsky.social AND @finnlongman.com! 🐢 giant talking turtles in underwater realms by @seananmcguire.bsky.social! and @wiswell.bsky.social's disabled dragon!🐉

Disability Pride Isn't Fantasy: Fantasy Recs For Disability Pride! - Every Book a Doorway

12 of my favourite Fantasy books with disabled protagonists!

buff.ly

A July news bulletin: paperbacks, French translation, The Animals We Became, scheduling for To Run With The Hound, Welsh, thesis stuff, etc: finnlongman.com/a-july-news-...

Finn Longman: A July News Bulletin

I have done an exceptionally poor job of staying on top of my promise to blog more this year while I was taking a break from social media like Instagram the last few months. I wish that was because…

finnlongman.com

as a rule, I think if I'm using the search function on a website for books — bookstore, library, review site like Storygraph — and I type a book title into the search bar, books with that title should show up first in the results. not random other books that have some of those words in their blurb.

🗣️ where is the WHIMSY where is the FUN where is the WEIRD GUY WHO IS ALSO A BIRD

I hate that pop medievalisms have created this idea of the Middle Ages as some sort of staid, serious, gloomy, sexless, grey time. There's so much literature that's fun and silly and goofy and irreverent and sexual and full of color but noooo we live in grimdark muddy grey Serious Medievalisms World

It's paperback day! You can now get my melancholy medieval book in a more pocket sized format!

Bookish Scifi & Fantasy@bookishsff.bsky.social · 2w ago

As we're all excited about retellings at the moment, I must recommend The Wolf and His King by @finnlongman.com, newly out in paperback: An excellent queer retelling of Bisclavret the werewolf, beautifully written, set in medieval Brittany following a man who longs to be a knight to the king... 💙📚🪐

Fated mates but in the naval sense. This is the person you're going to sea with now.

Periodically people float the idea of a film adaptation of medieval Irish texts like Táin Bó Cúailnge, but increasingly I feel like a musical would be its most natural form of adaptation. For starters, it's prosimetric and the most emotional bits are all in verse already, half the work's done.

Periodically people float the idea of a film adaptation of medieval Irish texts like Táin Bó Cúailnge, but increasingly I feel like a musical would be its most natural form of adaptation. For starters, it's prosimetric and the most emotional bits are all in verse already, half the work's done.