★★★☆☆ A thrice-told tale

In That Sleep

Seanan McGuire

In That Sleep is Seanan McGuire's December 2024 Patreon reward. This came out twice, in a first post, then a corrected one. In the first post, 01-Dec-2024, she introduced it as follows,

(Image: Two blue classic tabby and white Maine Coons against an orange and pink background. One, Alice, is looking at the camera.)
We've had a few months of pretty short stories. So here is my Hogswatch present to you all, as I return one last time to the well of Titania's shitty version of Faerie, to see how August got on during the enchantment. Warning: quite long.
If you haven't read Sleep No More and The Innocent Sleep, this may not make much sense. I recommend picking them up if you can.
Enjoy!

The corrected post appeared 06-Dec-2024, with this introduction:

(Image: A very green frog sits on a brown houndstooth cane, against a background of blue.)
So "In That Sleep" is very long. As in, 60,000 words, as opposed to the normal 8,000 to 10,000 words we're usually looking at. And because of that length, some errors crept in. Many were introduced by the necessary copy and paste used to clone dialog from Sleep No More, but that doesn't make them less incorrect. We have gone through and corrected them, and converted fresh sets of files. Ta-da!
Now, that being said: 60,000 words is technically considered a short novel. It's literally more than halfway to being a full book. Of those 60,000 words, more than 30,000 are entirely new, which is still well over the 8,000 to 10,000 that I promise to provide. The rest are, yes, cloned from the books this story parallels: that's what happens when something is locked by having appeared in print. It was not a time or effort-saving measure; if anything, it introduced a lot more effort, for exactly the reasons that caused the errors.
If you have already downloaded this story, I suggest grabbing the new files, just for accuracy in future. If you have not, this is the version to download.

In That Sleep retells the story of Sleep No More from the point of view of Toby's sister August Torquill. It is indeed quite long -- a short novel. That's a good thing! Sadly, some of it is copy-pasted from Sleep No More, so if you've read that, as you must to have any real hope of understanding this, there will be a lot repeated here. I liked Sleep No More and it's been a long time since I read it, so the repetition didn't bother me as much as it might have.

In That Sleep is in fact the third telling of the story of Sleep No More. First we had it in Sleep No More from Toby herself -- that was novel 17 in the October Daye series. Then in novel 18, The Innocent Sleep we got the same story from the point of view of Toby's husband Tybalt. Now in this Patreon novella we get it again from Toby's sister August. At this point it is definitely Too Much Of A Good Thing.

In That Sleep on Patreon

Comments

★★★★☆ Where Peter Pan and Tiger Lilly come from

Tigerlilja Erin Michelle Sky, Steven Brown In J.M. Barrie 's Peter Pan Peter's great ally is Tiger Lily, who is introduced thus ...Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. There's obviously a lot there that's problematic in the 21st century. So she gets a rewrite in this Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown prequel to Tales of the Wendy . In addition, we get an origin story for Peter, something that to my knowledge Barrie never supplied. In fact, we start with Peter. Peter, it transpires, is descended from gods. Sky and Brown freely mix Norse and Greek gods here. In seeking to protect him from ancestral enemy Buri, Peter's mother accidentally curses him. You will forg...

★★★☆☆ Vanja comes to terms with her history

Holy Terrors Margaret Owen Vanja Ros has a long history of disappointing people. She was the thirteenth child of Marthe Ros, and therefore, Marthe believed, ill-fated. She asked Death and Fortune to take her daughter. Death promised her, "Only one of you will go home." Death and Fortune gave their God Daughter Vanja a home. Vanja's mother never returned home from the forest. Marthe, now a ghost, is still furious about this. And so it went. Vanja went into service in a noble house and there she disappointed. Eventually she ended up as a thief. And then things got serious. A brilliant young prefect (police detective) came after her. She fell in love with him, and he with her, but she left him. She found her family and deceived them. She even became a goddess and failed at that. Now, to be clear, none of that is fair. It is, however, far too accurate a picture of how Vanja sees herself. When Holy Terrors begins, Vanja is estranged from Emeric, the prefect she loves, and sh...

★★★★☆ Embrace the confusion!

Witch King Martha Wells In 1995 I saw the Film Ghost in the Shell . It was a formative experience for me. The film was incredibly confusing -- cyborgs and thermoptic camouflage and international plots and sentient net intelligences and wheels within plots within wheels within plots. When it was over I had only the vaguest idea what had happened. But I was mortally certain of one thing: I LOVED it! What I didn't know at the time was that This Was How It Was Going To Be From Now On. Since then all major science fiction and most fantasy novels have been like that. I expect when I read a new one not to know what's going on. (Consider recent reads Children of Memory , Myriad , or grand-prize winner, the entirety of Tamsyn Muir 's Locked Tomb Series .) In fact, it is now at the point where, if I understand a new F&SF novel on the first read, I feel cheated. Martha Wells 's Witch King does not disappoint in this regard. Hierarchs and Expositors and...

★★★★★ A scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady

Flashman: A novel George MacDonald Fraser No less an author than P.G. Wodehouse blurbed George MacDonald Fraser 's Flashman . This quote can be found on the cover of one edition, "If ever there was a time when I felt that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet-stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman." While acknowledging Wodehouse 's sneaky hedging ("If ever"), we can also acknowledge that this is a strong endorsement. And it is deserved. Harry Flashman, the protagonist (I will not say "hero") of the Flashman Papers , is, to my experience, unique in all of fiction. He describes himself as "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady" -- and that description is accurate. He is an utterly despicable guy. Now, you're probably thinking, "This is not unusual -- I can think of dozens of literary antiheroes who match this description." And of course you're right. But what all these antiheroes...

★★★★★ King of the Cats, Alice and Thomas, Fairies, bogeymen, and assorted entertainments

Patreon Year 5 Seanan McGuire I will begin by clarifying what I am reviewing here. Seanan McGuire has a Patreon Creator page. Patreon is a website where artists can share their work with subscribers. Subscribers pay a certain amount (usually monthly, but that varies from artist to artist), and in return get access to things ("rewards" in Patreon-speak) that the artist posts on Patreon. "Things" can mean images, videos, or (most relevantly in this case) eBooks. Typically there are multiple reward tiers -- the more you pay, the more you get. McGuire set up her Patreon page in June 2016 and has posted a story every month since then, which makes 64 now (September 30, 2021, when I am writing this), plus a few one-time extras. These "stories" can be pretty substantial literary works. For instance, the reward for July 2021 was an 80,000-word novel. The way Patreon works, if you subscribe to a tier, you typically get access to everything that was posted for th...

★★★★☆ A good and intelligent goose girl

Thorn Intisar Khanani The Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd in the Grimm brothers ' original German) is one of the more obscure Grimm's Fairy Tales, by which I mean that it has never, to my knowledge, been made into a Disney Feature Film. This obscurity, I suspect, is because it is a disturbingly modern story, in the sense of not having clear heroes and villains. (The Grimm brothers , however, perceived no such ambiguity. For them the princess is unequivocally good and the maid bad, in part because the princess has noble blood and the maid is common. Values have changed since those days.) The central story is that a princess takes off to marry the prince of a nearby kingdom, to whom she has long been engaged. She is accompanied by a maid. On the trip the maid forcibly swaps places with the princess and makes the princess, on pain of death, swear not to expose her. The princess takes this compelled oath much more seriously than any legal expert would advise. Arrived at the dest...

★★★★☆ An intelligent debut

The Last Bloodcarver Vanessa Le I bought this book because of the spectacular cover, . Judge this book by its cover! Of course you want to know what a Bloodcarver is. The best place to begin is Vanessa Le 's author biography Vanessa Le graduated from Brown University with a degree in Health and Human Biology and now resides in Portland, Oregon. Her writing is an expression of her love for medicine and her Vietnamese heritage. When not writing, she can be found studying medicine, spoiling her two Shiba Inus, or wishing she were writing. A heartsooth, we learn, is a healer who communicates and affects the body through touch. "Bloodcarver" is a sort of slur used for a heartsooth by those who don't understand. One suspects that Le herself aspires to be something like a heartsooth. Although Nhika grew up in Central Theumas and knows no other place, her mother and father escaped from the conquered and oppressed Island of Yarong, where all heartsooths came ...

★★★☆☆ Velveteen returns!

Velveteen vs Gainful Employment Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs Gainful Employment is Seanan McGuire 's October 2023 Patreon reward. Velveteen is the hero of a series of quite old stories by Seanan McGuire , notionally published in three books: Velveteen vs The Junior Super Patriots , Velveteen vs The Multiverse , and Velveteen vs The Seasons . I say "notionally published" because most of these books are no longer available as books. You can still find the stories online however. If you click on the links for the books in the previous sentence, they will take you to my reviews of the books on Goodreads, and in each review there is a list of links to free online copies of the chapters. They are a lot of fun. Velveteen, AKA Velma Martinez, is a superhero whose superpower is the ability to animate dolls, stuffed animals, etc, and make them do her bidding. Used imaginatively this is a pretty awesome superpower that has allowed Velveteen to win most of her battles. The last sto...

★★★☆☆ The Handmaid’s Tale meets MAS*H.

Manacled senlinyu Some candid reactions as I read: 22%: "Make it stop. Please." 54%: "Once more unto the breach! Took a short break to read Bookshops & Bonedust , which was released yesterday. To my surprise, I feel some eagerness to return to Manacled after the somewhat flaccid plot of B&B ." 67%: "To be fair, a lot is done right. The characters are well drawn and the plot, as far as I've gotten, is very good, intricate and well-thought-out". 100% (last night): Thank God that's over. So, mixed reactions. This one is unusual for me. Usually I read fiction for enjoyment. If a book has a lot of stuff I like in it, that's a good book and gets all the stars. This is unlike most Goodreads reviewers. Judging from the reviews I read, most GR reviewers read books looking for things they don't like, then make a list and if there are lots of things they don't like, then no stars. (Or maybe that's just the way they write reviews.) ...

★★★★★ Attention to details

2022 Hyundai Tucson Hybrid Owner's Manual Original So, I am buying a new car. I decided on a Hybrid SUV, and, based mostly on /Consumer Reports/, narrowed my choices down to the Honda CRV Hybrid, the Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, and the Hyundai Tucson Hybrid. I looked at a CRV Tuesday, a Tucson yesterday, and will see a RAV4 today. To prep for each viewing I read (skim, really) the manual. In rating these, I am not rating the manual itself. Obviously the manuals are terribly boring. Instead, I am rating the cars, based just on the manual and a single viewing. The Tucson made my list because /Consumer Reports/ gave it a rave review. Based on the manual and my look at it yesterday, I also give it the coveted L-five-star rating. What is impressive about the Tucson (here I'm talking about the highest trim level, the Utltimate Hybrid AWD) is the attention to detail. It is as if a bunch of auto engineers kept notes, every time they drove their cars, of all the times they thought to themselves...

Search This Blog