(This page is NSFW)
(It contains info and novel excepts on how to describe penises, nipples, and scrotums)
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Flamboyant Nipples & Wizard Testicles
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Update: This page got so long (18k words of article with over 160k words of excerpt scenes from the published books) that it is having trouble loading for most readers now, so book excerpts are being removed and, you'll just have to go buy the books to read the scenes now)
I found a question, that I thought would make for good inspiration for writing an article on how I write the character descriptions (or rather the distinctive lack there of) in the Quaraun series.
Do keep in mind that there are MANY ways to go about describing your characters, and I do not feel any one way is better than any other way, and in different series, I describe characters differently. I try to match character description techniques with the tone of the novel or short story in question, and this article, is here to take an in depth look at how I do it with the Quaraun series.
If you are a fan of the Quaraun series, you'll get to see how these characters get brought to life on the page and what goes into their creation.
If you are a writer looking for help on how to describe your own characters, know, that I do not say this is the CORRECT way to describe character, nor do I say it is the ONLY way to describe characters. This is simply how I describe MY characters, and it is what works for me in the series in question. You may find something here to help you figure out how to describe your characters or not.
I drive my readers batty with this. I keep getting emails asking "So, what exactly does Quaraun look like?"
All it ever says in the books is that he has silver-white hair that sweeps the floor, hypnotic blue eyes, he's shorter than most women, has the angelic features of an enthral beauty, and is mistaken for female, until he speaks and had a deep, distinctly male voice. I let the readers take it from there. However it is they envision an "enthral beauty" that's what he looks like. :P
And than, you get 7 to 10 pages of way to much detail of his clothes and his *couch* scars *cough*.
I sometimes think my scariest fans are the ones whom have reread the scenes of Quaraun's scars enough to the point they can describe them in detail... if you don't know, Quaraun's an unwilling eunuch, his genitals badly mutilated, and we're describing any part of him in detail, it's ALWAYS going to be because we are writing him monologue himself into a pity-party over his mutilated penis, and testicles, which is something he talks about constantly to and anyone and everyone who will listen, to him, while his sits in a tavern, drinking Absinthe (Green Fairy Wine) with LSD laced sugar cubes burned into it, washed down with Poppy Tea, while he smokes a hashish hookah.
Quaraun is the highest of the High Elves, and I'm far more likely to describe his emotions and feelings and sensory overloads, than I am to describe what he physically looks like.
Are there scenes that describe Quaraun's nose?
I can't think of any.
There are however scenes that mention his nose. Quite frequently actually, and if you know the series, you know why.
If you don't know the series well... Quaraun has 12 inch long, thin, pointed ears, which, normally are held down against his back, like a lop eared rabbit, hidden under his hair, and not noticeable.
Quaraun's ears are highly animated, and like fingers, he has quite a bit of control over moving them. You can tell his emotions by his ears. If he's calm and relaxed. his ears are not noticeable at all.
When startled, his ears go straight up over his head. When he's listening intently, his ears face forward. When scared, his ears face backward, and at a downward angle. When he feels threatened and starts growling and showing his sharp teeth, his ears go back at an angle.
Quaraun has an amazing sense of hearing, and can pick up on sounds up to a mile away. He can hear conversations spoken in houses down the street. Quaraun often prefers to live in isolated areas far from civilization, due to simply wanting peace and quiet.
Yes, I know, I'm talking about his ears, but this leads to his nose...
There are frequent descriptions of his ears changing movement as, this alerts the other characters to various dangers. Other character know to look to Quaraun's ears. And they don't have to see his hears to know they changed, they only have to listen...
Quaraun's nose.
Perhaps it is best, to just let you read a scene in which Quaraun's nose is in fact mentioned...
"Maybe map say we supposed to spend night in ruins?"
"Spend a night in ruins?"
"Aye."
"Let's keep walking," Quaraun said as he stood up, and went back to the road.
Unicorn followed him.
"Why for not stay in ruins?"
"Fresh ruins. With soot and ash..."
"Aye. Me forgetsing, me Elf can'na get dust on him perfectly pristine self."
“Why did you make this map?”
“Sos I never gets lost.”
“It never tells us anything useful.”
“Than why ya uses it?”
“I don't know, I...” Quaraun suddenly stopped walking.
Unicorn slammed into him.
"I wish ya would no stops like dat. Give me some warning before ya does dat."
"I heard something," Quaraun said nervously.
The Elf's eyes grew wide with fear, his long pointed ears pricked high and alert.
"Ya always hearing t'ings. Ya can hear a mile away wid those rabbit ears o'yars."
"No. I heard something."
"Dair ain't no t'ing out dair."
"There's always something out there."
"Aye. Frogs in trees. Birds in water. Fish in sky. Dair always be t'ings out dair. We does no have to panic over every one of dem, eh?"
"Yes we do."
"No we do'na."
"There's dangers around every corner."
"Aye. Un scared rabbity eared Elves waiting to runs from every one of dems."
Quaraun's long ears laid back fearfully.
"What was that?" He whispered.
"What were what?"
"Shut up."
Quaraun clamped his hand over Unicorn's mouth and perked up his long pointed ears to listen.
"I heard something."
Quaraun climbed up onto a log and continued to listen. His thin, pointed foot long ears twitched, nervously causing the chains connected back to his nose to shake and tinkle.
"Someone's hurt."
~From "The Summoner of Darkness" (Volume 11 of The Quaraun Series)
Quaraun has 24 earrings in each ear.
Quaraun has 3 nose rings, 1 in the center, and one in each side.
Each ring in his ear, has a tiny linked, delicate chain in it. Each chain, connects back to one of the rings in his nose.
Every few links of the chain has tiny pink watermelon tourmaline crystal points hanging from it.
Keeping in mind here that Quaraun is a priest and wears very distinctive robes and jewelry that are a part of his religion.
Quaraun is Persian and a transvestite. meaning he's dressed, not as a priest, but rather as a priestess. He wears very Muslim inspired clothes, including the fact that he wears a hijab style veil.
Quaraun is the only Elf member of his religion.
Quaraun's long ears make it difficult for him to wear the hijab style veiling properly. Thus you see him wearing these elaborate network of rings and chains, as a way to keep his face covered.
The jewelry acts as a veil.
MOST of Quaraun's face is obscured from view by of this massive network of jewelry. The chains act like veiling, with only his eyes and lips visible. The action of his ears constantly moving with his emotional, causes the crystal points and chains to make tinkling sounds when he moves his ears, thus this sound alerts his travelling companions to the fact that danger is near.
And thus you see the extent of descriptions of Quaraun's face, and why there are no descriptions of his face or his nose, seeing how neither can be seen.
But back to the OP we are answering...
We are being told, by someone who admits both to not being a reader and not being a writer, as well as being someone with no published books... we are being told by this person not to describe noses.
But as I stated in the beginning of this...I drive my readers batty with this. I keep getting emails asking "So, what exactly does Quaraun look like?"
These readers obviously DO want a description, otherwise wy would they ask for it?
This leaves me to wonder though...your advice to NOT describe... is it REALLY what readers want?
I mean, you are not a published author, so do you even know what readers want? You clearly are not telling us what YOUR readers want? You don't know from experience of writing for readers, what readers are looking for, soooo...
You know, this falls under the category of non-writers giving bad advice.
My question is:
What creditably do you have to be giving advice on how to describe a character?
You can't even give us examples of how you describe your own characters.
Look at the answers you've gotten here. Answers from writers. But not answers from either authors or readers. Have you checked te profiles of the people giving you these 100+ responses? Read their other comments and post throughout Reddit?
I did. And I recommend you do as well. Might be pretty eye opening.
A large percentage of the writers here (more than two thirds of them) openly admit several key factors:
And yet, here you have those very same people, who said those things, here telling you what you should or should not be doing when you write.
Do you REALLY want to take the advice of people who openly admitted elsewhere that they hate English classes, don't read, and think that the goal of publishing a book is stupid?
Think about it.
A lot of the advice being given on this sub is very bad and coming from people who are neither authors nor readers and are just trolling to see if they can get newbie writers who don't know any better to take their advice - some of them have said as much on other subs they are on.
Go look at their profiles and read the comments they made on other subs.
While there are writers here, most of them are unpublished, are not seeking publishing, and are taking out their ass when they give writing advice, most of it just something they heard someone else say and not anything they ever tried or tested for themselves.
This is not that bad. We all start somewhere. But if you've never published that, you don't know how to write a story that is good enough to be published, so you shouldn't be giving advice on writing, when you're NOT qualified to.
Again, not a bad thing. Not everyone writers to become published. The problem here is again, giving advice one is not qualified to give.
Okay, this one is just stupid. There is nothing wrong with publishing your work. There is nothing wrong with not publishing your work.
Uhm... oooo kaaaay... so why exactly are you on a writing forum giving writing advice when you hate writing?
Again... why are you on a writing forum giving writing advice when you hate writing?
I'm just gonna keep asking... why are you on a writing forum giving writing advice when you hate writing?
Yep... still asking... why are you on a writing forum giving writing advice when you hate writing?
Well, okay. That's fine, but it doesn't mean you have a clue how to teach writing.
And so you are teaching people to write books, why?
Not being published, means they also have no readers for their work, so they also have no clue what readers want.
Now sure every reader wants something different, but readers also tend to fall into groups. One genre will attract this type of reader while another genre attracts that other type of reader, and so on.
The goal is to find out what do YOUR readers want. And you can't do that until you know who your readers are, which until you are published and actually have readers, you'll never know.
Which means, any advice on "what readers want", that is given by any unpublished person, is null and void and should be completely ignored, unless that person is an avid reader telling "here's what I want to see more of and less of".
The problem with the bulk of the answers on this sub, is that many of it's most active members are neither readers nor writers and are just here to toss jokes around without giving any real or helpful advice. And I'm sorry to say, the trolls were out in full force on your thread tonight, which is why there are so very many answers on this thread, when most threads struggle to get even 4 or 5 answers. So I caution you to read the comments on this thread with a grain of salt as most of the comments were made by people who neither read nor write.
But back to your describe or don't describe point...
I say it depends on the genre and what readers want.
Different people like different things.
Some readers WANT the long descriptions.
Some readers want ZERO descriptions.
Some writers like writing descriptions over dialogue.
Some writers want to write only dialogue and no descriptions.
I say write what YOU WANT to read.
There is an audience for everything so it doesn't matter what you write or how you write it, there is going to be someone out there who wants it.
I have things I like to write. They are usually the same things I enjoy reading.
Some readers want lots of descriptions and others want no descriptions so that they can imagine the details themselves. And neither way is wrong. Each simply caters to a different audience is all.
Like I said at the beginning here, for most things, I drive my readers batty with the lack of detail. I write Epic Length Grimdark High Fantasy Bizarro Yaoi Absurdism in a Literary Slice of Life Style, using the Ernest Hemingway format. Which means the stories are:
That's why I keep getting emails asking "So, what exactly does Quaraun look like?"
All it ever says in the books is that he has silver-white hair that sweeps the floor, hypnotic blue eyes, and the angelic features of an enthral beauty. I let the readers take it from there. However it is they envision an "enthral beauty" that's what he looks like. :P
The funny thing is, the stuff I do describe, I go overboard with... GhoulSpawn's legs for example.
Raise your hand if you ever read a Quaraun novel and wanted me to stop describing GhoulSpawn's legs but the description infodump over his legs just kept going and going and going and going and... 10 or 12 pages later you were wondering when the story was going to start back up and when the author was going to stop gushing fangirl love over men with 8 inch long Cotswold sheep wool growing on their cloven hooved legs.
And if you didn't know GhoulSpawn was a sheep, well, what the hell were you reading when you thought you were reading the Quaraun series?
I mean, there IS a scene of Quaraun sheering GhoulSpawn and spinning his wool into thread, so he can embroider pink silk with GhoulSpawn's soft white wool.
Yeah.
Vague descriptions come into play, leaving readers often guessing if Quaraun is male or female. (Quaraun is in fact intersex and has both a penis and a vagina).
Quaraun’s adoptive father, ZooLock was court wizard to the Moon Elf Royal Family at the time of Quaraun’s birth. Quaraun’s father is the youngest brother of the Moon Elf Emperor and therefore had no royal rank.
Quaraun was a, in the womb, a pair of twins, one male and one female, whose fetus fused before birth, creating an “intersex chimera hermaphrodite”, meaning Quaraun has both a vagina/uterus/ovaries AND penis/testicles.
Quaraun’s intersex nature is rarely mentioned in the series, and the question of his transgender nature is mentioned only in the novel “BoomFuzzy” (yes, the one tat sold a million copies in 2016) where the event of his father’s attempt to kill him, results in Quaraun being dragged naked through the streets, as his father puts Quaraun on public display to show people what he really is.
The novel is deliberately written from Quaraun’s point of view, and told by his elderly self, resulting in the narration always uses the words “he” and “penis”, the words “she” and “vagina” deliberately blacked out of the text, and it is ONLY through the dialogue of Quaraun’s father, BoomFuzzy, and Beluna, that the reader is given enough information to find out Quaraun is intersex.
Specifically, an early scene, where The UnSeelie Court gangs up on Quaraun to rape him, and BoomFuzzy, who is leading the attack, suddenly calls off his men, giving a cryptic line about Quaraun not being what the men think he is, and ordering them to let Quaraun escape, a thing BoomFuzzy says upon seeing Quaraun naked for the first time.
Later in a scene with Beluna, Quaraun tells her of the attack, which leads to a conversation questioning if Quaraun is a virgin or not. The entire conversation carries out as though it was 2 teenage girls uncertain as to what sex even is, and it is made very clear at that point that Quaraun has no clue the functioning of the male body. It is utterly impossible for a reader to get through that scene without asking themselves “What a minute, is Quaraun a female? He doesn’t know men have erections, shouldn’t a man his age know that?”
A later argument between BeLuna and BoomFuzzy, reveals that BeLuna is protecting Quaraun’s secret, but does not outright say what the secret is, and demands BoomFuzzy stay away from Quaraun. BeLuna is aware that BoomFuzzy is gay, and in fact has a husband (Gibedon) whom BoomFuzzy thinks nothing of cheating on; and she is aware Quaraun is passing for a male, she outright tells BoomFuzzy that Quaraun is not what BoomFuzzy thinks he is, to which BoomFuzzy laughs and tells BeLuna, he’s already taken Quaraun into his bed and then did not have sex with Quaraun upon finding out what Quaraun was. This leads to a very bizarre conversation about candy canes (yep, the candy cane scene that lead readers to buy a million copies of this novel), which reveals a LOT of about Quaraun’s being intersex, without ever outright saying that Quaraun is intersex.
BoomFuzzy leaves BeLuna infuriated, when he tells her that yes he is gay and he loves Quaraun anyways, a line that should tell readers immediately that Quaraun is NOT male. BoomFuzzy explains he spent several years seducing Quaraun, and by the time he found out what Quaraun was, he was too in love with Quaraun for BoomFuzzy to care what Quaraun had between his legs…. implying that, BoomFuzzy is gay, but fell in love with a trans man who is biologically female.
When Quaraun is beaten into a coma by his father, BoomFuzzy kidnaps Quaraun and spends the next three years nursing the crippled Elf back to health. Quaraun never regains use of his hands and BoomFuzzy builds a pair of gold-plated prosthetic gloves to encase Quaraun's real hands. Quaraun is terrified to go back home, and devolops the infaninte amounts of massive phobias which plague him throughout the series. Quaraun ontinues to live with BoomFuzzy.
BoomFuzzy's husband, an army general, returns home from war to find Quaraun sleeping in BoomFuzzy's bed, immediatly assumes Quaraun to be male and believes BoomFuzzy has been cheating on him. When BoomFuzzy tries to explain, that Quaraun is a female Elf in hiding, he never gets the chance to explain, as Gibedon pulls out a knife and stabs BoomFuzzy. Quaraun tries to save BoomFuzzy.
At this exact moment, a mysterious Goat Demon shows up from a portal, no explanation who it is (it is GhoulSpawn from the future as readers realize later in a different story) and drags Quaraun away from the fight, saying "You have to let this happen. You stopped it before and it changed the world". By the time the Demon let's go of Quaraun and runs back through the portal, only seconds from arriving, Gibedon has gutted BoomFuzzy, leaving BoomFuzzy half dead. Quaraun grabs the knife from Gibedon and cuts off Gibedon's head.
Roles now reverse as Quaraun takes care of BoomFuzzy, but the wound is to bad, and becomes septic.
Fearing BoomFuzzy will die, Quaraun returns to his father's palace to seek medical help for BoomFuzzy, and is locked in a tower, as the story takes a retelling of Rapunzel, and the magic tower, causes Quaraun hair to mysteriously grow to twelve feet long.
Near the end of the novel, while still locked in the tower. Quaraun is tricked into an arranged marriage with a female Elf, and, all hell breaks lose, when BoomFuzzy believing Quaraun left him, commits suicide, on the belief that Quaraun had decided to break of the relationship with a gay man.
Quaraun meanwhile is horrifically tortured by his wife and her lovers, when Quaraun refuses to consummate the marriage and also refuses to say why. Quaraun and his wife live in seperate rooms, and are married for several years before a night arrives that she decides to rape Quaraun, and is horrified bt what she finds.
Quaraun, is presumably the next in line to be king, and his wife, has great plans of being queen. Those plans are shattered when she learns that, she hasn’t any chance of ever being Quen at all, because Quaraun will be queen, not king. The readers are told outright this is why she is upset.
As the novel winds to it’s conclusion, Quaraun’s wife devices a plot to get Quaraun pregnant, by highering 5 of her bodyguards to gang rape Quaraun. There is no question in reader minds at this point that Quaraun is a female, as Quaraun gives birth to twin daughters and his wife pretends they are hers.
The gang rape is repeated 2 years later and Quaraun gives birth to twin boys.
Once the 4 infants are weened, and no longer need Quaraun alive, the wife plots to have Quaraun killed, but Quaraun, fights back, killing the wife, his 4 children, and the king, then uses their souls to resurrect BoomFuzzy as a Lich. BoomFuzzy proceeds to kill off the rest of the village.
The novel “BoomFuzzy” ends with Quaraun vowing to never again be unfaithful to BoomFuzzy and, deciding to live as a man because BoomFuzzy is gay.
Quaraun is never again shown as a female in the series, though he is shown as pregnant several times throughout the series, sometimes by BoomFuzzy and other times by GhoulSpawn.
There are scenes which states that Quaraun once had female breasts but that they were “brutally removed by rapists” and scenes which say Quaraun has a penis but “that it is a small none functioning micro penis”, there are also scenes which state Quaraun is “bitchy from PMS”.
Quaraun is specifically called out as intersex only in one story: “Zebulon’s Captive” where a gang of Human slavers, capture Quaraun and use him in their Elf breeding farm, and discover that he can be used BOTH to get other females pregnent AND to be made pregnent himself.
Quaraun was the youngest child, all his siblings are female. In childhood Quaraun lived as a girl, much to his father’s outrage. His father wanted a son, and forced Quaraun to dress like a boy, act like a boy, and his father used public humiliation and gaslighting to convince the entire empire that Quaraun was born male.
At 9 years old, Quaraun’s mother had enough of her husband's abuse of Quaraun, the resulting fight lead to Quaraun’s father, murdering Quaraun’s mother. Quaraun witnessed the murder, as did ZooLock. Quaraun’s father turned on the child, trying to kill Quaraun as well, and ZooLock grabbed the child and fled the country.
ZooLock took Quaraun to Persia, where ZooLock raised Quaraun as though Quaraun was his daughter. Quaraun lived with ZooLock for 75 years, before returning to seek re-unition with his real father.
In the years later, Quaraun transitions to live as a male, but ZooLock never accepted this and continues to call Quaraun by female pronouns.
ZooLock eventually went insane, started The Cult of the Sacred Pink JellyFish, and went on to become one of the world’s most feared super villains.
Throughout the series Quaraun and ZooLock are seen at odd, going head to head against each other, but, both refusing to physically harm the other, and each will join forces with the other, against shared enemies.
Two of the only 4 books to feature a picture of Quaraun on the cover.
Every time Quaraun walks into a new town, a new tavern, a new place, he's greeted by people in shock and awe over what he looks like. Readers know immediately that this guy stands out. He doesn't look like your average Joe.
People stop and stare when he walks by.
Every one, men and women alike want to bed with him. There are scenes where women literally throw themselves at his feet while saying: "You are the most beautiful man I've ever seen, I want to have your baby."
Quaraun is described as being the single most beautiful man on the planet.
But beyond telling you he has blue eyes and insanely long silvery-white hair that in later novels drags on the ground, you are not told what exactly he looks like.
This was done deliberately to allow readers to very simply imagine him in whatever what they imaging the ultimate beauty to look like.
Every reader has a different idea of what a hypnotically beautiful man looks like.
Quaraun is also a man, who is difficult to live with, and most people who meet him, are soon greeted with his sharp tongue, rude manners, his arrogant ego, and his overbearing vanity.
Few can tolerate his company, or his whiny hissy fits and bitch fests.
He is selfish, crude, lewd, and expects everyone to wait on him hand and foot.
Quaraun has a beautiful body and an ugly personality.
He's also a serial killer.
The woman who was throwing herself at his feet begging to have his baby? He'll just as easily fuck her on one page then cut her head off on the next. Keep in mind, he is asexual and normally won't have sex with anyone, but piss him off and he won't think twice about raping you. Why? Because he hates sex and sees sex and the worst thing you can do to a person. He views sex as worse than death penalty, so he'll use sex to punish you.
When you get to know Quaraun, you realize, he is a dark, twisted person and his beauty is only skin deep.
I find it more effective, to simply describe him as being beautiful beyond belief, no physical description, show the townsfolk reacting to seeing him, let the reader draw their own conclusions as to what defines beauty on that level, and then let the reader see his personality, his bitterness, his bad attitude, his hostility, his uncaringly nature.
To me, his personality is far more important then describing his physical features. So you get LOTS of descriptions of his bitchy personality. Likewise with candy maker BoomFuzzy, you get lots of descriptions of the scents that waft around him and his perverted nature, but other than his claws and his dreadlocks, very few physical descriptions of him.
Here is the scene that introduces BoomFuzzy. Which also introduces Quaraun, as you will see, by interweaving Quaraun's actions and thoughts, with him total unawareness of his surroundings, because of being too aware of one thing: his wet shoes.
The scene that introduces BoomFuzzy for the first time, as King Gwallmaic:
And in the next chapter, introduces him again, as BoomFuzzy:
You can see how the description of BoomFizzy, what he looks like, his personality, his backstory, are woven in both to the narative and the dialogue and is PART OF the story itself, rather than a lone info dump in a single paragraph, as is commonly seen in most novels.
You see it a lot in the Quaraun series where, I don't use physical descriptions to tell you what the character looks like, but rather use character actions, thoughts, and emotions to describe the character's personality instead. In the Quaraun series, it is the characters' emotional states that are more important than what the characters actually look like.
Let's take for example 2 different scenes from Kelim and the Necromancer, where Quaraun is alone. He's not yet been reunited with Unicorn (BoomFuzzy) and he's not yet met GhoulSpawn. This is also when Quaraun is first starting to realize, something is terribly wrong with his health, and he doesn't know what to do about it.
In these 2 scenes, Quaraun is 750 years old, he's lived alone since BoomFuzzy commit suicide 300 years earlier. He's had no trouble living alone and taking care of himself, but, he now has Alzheimer's and in aware he has it, but he is aware something is seriously wrong.
Quaraun travels to a volcano, seeking a dragon, but when he gets there, while traversing an underground cave, he stops to take a nap, and... here's what happens, when he wakes:(Note, the entire chapter is one long monologue of Quaraun talking to himself, thus the 1st person PoV here, when usually you see 3rd person)
As you can see, he has completely forgotten that he went there himself AND he has also forgotten that he is carrying a lamp on his belt and so he never light's it.
Elsewhere in the same novel, we see Quaraun, has just killed a woman and has started drinking to try to forget it, but, Elves don't get drunk the same way Humans do, and we see this scene which again, described Quaraun's personality, not what he looks like:
>>My characters always start my works by looking in the mirror, studying each feature, and categorizing their features at length. Isn't that what people do in the real world?
LOL! I once had Quaraun do this, just to poke fun at the books who did it. He spends 4 pages, raving and ranting over how his corset won't fit right, then starts describing what he looks like, for no reason at all. Another character, Unicorn, comes over carrying another mirror and starts helping him describe everything. A 3rd character walks in and asks them what the hell they are doing. None of them knows. It's hysterical, because it doesn't fit the rest of the story at all.
It's not in the beginning of the book either, it's 200 pages into a 500 page novel.
I wrote it after a reader pointed out that every few chapters of every novel, Quaraun is constantly pulling his mirror out of his bag and fussing over his hair and make up, but not once in any of the several hundred scenes of Quaraun looking in a mirror does he ever describe himself while doing so, nor does the narrator describe him, and they wondered WHY, when every other author has their character talking to themself and describing what they look like while looking in a mirror.
Well, yeah, Quaraun is vain and arrogant and he puts what he looks like first and foremost over everything, he goes narcissism to the extreme, so he is always in front of a mirror every chance he can get. But, I do try to keep my character realistic, and, think about it, when was the last time YOU stood in front of the mirror and said: "Damn are my blue eyes gorgeous! I love my long this nose..."
I HATE it when authors stand the character in front of the mirror and have them talk about what they look like. No one does that.
Yes, vain people constantly look in the mirror, but they don't describe themselves while doing it. They talk about: "Oh my god! My mascara is smudged! I have to fix it!"
The worst part of authors writing characters describing themselves in the mirror is they do it with EVERY character, even characters who no logical reason to even own a mirror.
A mirror is a large expensive, luxury item, that only a very wealthy person is going to own. They are not common every day items. So it's utterly ridiculous to see every author, of every novel, write every character describing themselves in the mirror. And it's even MORE ridiculous when you write historical fiction that is pre-1920s, when mirrors were only owned by the ultra mega wealthy. Go make to the 1600s when only royalty had mirrors, and it's even more ridiculous.
But the fact remains, even in today's society, mirrors are relatively rare. Most houses have one over the sink in the bathroom and that's it. Wealthy families may have one over a dresser in the bed room. Only the super wealthy can afford to buy a full length mirror. They ain't cheap. And the only time you see a mirror in public is in some fancy law firm or super fancy hotel that caters to millionaires.
No one in real life carries a mirror on them.
It's so utterly beyond stupid to see every character in every novel, able to find a mirror no matter where they are, just so they can stand there and tell the reader what they look like.
Worst of all, is when it's done by characters who are supposedly meek, humble, or religious. The bulk of Christian religions forbid the owning of mirrors, and it's a red flag when the author says the character is such&such religion, and the reader is that religion, and the author clearly didn't know that religion forbid the owning of mirrors, and now here's the character supposedly a part of that religion and describing themselves while looking in a mirror!
The ONLY time it is logical for a character to be describing themselves in the mirror is if they are and incredibly self centered, mega vain character, who is stopping to look in the mirror multiple times a day.
In Quaraun's case, he IS mega vain and he DOES, look in the mirror every few minutes. And he owns several mirrors because he can afford them. Quaraun is a billionaire. His wealth is something akin to Scrooge McDuck's. He's an Emperor. That fact isn't brought up very often, because he's the last of his kind, his people all died, so he's a king with no kingdom now, but, before his people died he was exhorbantly wealthy and mega pampered. He has a bag of holding that contains EVERYTHING he owned from his palace, so, he's not as poor as he seems to strangers, and in fact he can and does buy anything he wants. Including lots of mirrors because he's mega vain.
But even being vain, wealthy, and looking in a mirror every few pages, you never see Quaraun describe what he looks like.
But when it comes to actually describing Quaraun, it usually is a pretty big info dump, that is written from the point of view of a character whom has never seen him before and is describing him in their mind. As can be seen in Kelim and The Necromancer when Kelim meets Quaraun face to face for the first time:... be warned... it takes an entire chapter to describe Quaraun completely, intermingled with dialogue, so here is, in it's entirety, this very long chapter:
So, there you have it... THAT is how I write my character descriptions.
It takes an entire chapter to describe a single character, because, well, a lot of it is done in the dialogue and character actions.
You can see how an info dump is placed at the start, telling us what is needed to know about Quaraun, for the story in question. And that blends into the scene, followed immediately by the dialogue/interaction between the character and Quaraun.
More descriptors are sprinkled throughout the dialogue and said tags and narration as the story moves forward, but they are done in such a way that there is no more exposition, outside of the initial 3 page infodump describing Quaraun.
If you pay attention to the word choices, I focus a lot on adverbs (yes, adverbs) and sensory words.
Sensory word are:
As a reader, I prefer writing that is full of sensory words, words that allow the reader t see, feel, smell, hear, and taste the sights, sounds, foods, and objects in the story.
You know not only what my characters look like, you know the feel of their skin, soft and smooth or rough and dry. You smell the scent of their body: the strong smell of Absinthe Anise on Quaraun's breath, the scent of rose water in his hair, the metallic pungent smell of blood.
>>If you're part of society, you'll have some level of worry about your appearance. Showering, shaving, brushing your teeth, doing your hair. You'll probably spending a decent chunk of every day of your life looking in a mirror to see if how you want to present yourself matches how others will see you.
>>I realize I'm being a little facetious and ignoring your point, but part of being human is being self-conscious of how you look.
>>Whether a story should include that routine...
tHESE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE important TO TALK ABOUT, BECAUSE MOST AUTHORS ARE JACkASSES ABOUT IT.
There you go, interesting cap lock for emphasis.
Why are these things important to talk about?
Well, authors like to put them in their novels, because they do these thing, but they fail to consider that these things usually were not yet invented during the time period of the book.
Showering... an invention of the 1950s
The shower was invented in 1933, but it was created to wash cars.
It was not realized that a shower could also wash PEOPLE until 1954.
If you character SHOWERS instead of bathes any year prior to 1954, well, yo didn't do your research very well, now did you?
Showering DAILY ... invented in 1987
Yeah. If your story is set before 1987, your character should NEVER bath more than ONCE PER MONTH.
Shaving... punishable by execution in the Bible, the greatest sin possible after eating pig (#1) and murder (#2) and shaving (#3) is more of a sin then adultery (#7 on the Bible's list of the most evil sins).
Shaving... from about the 800s to 1300s, Europeans did full body shaves - including eyebrows, head, and legs... this was a sign of wealth and cleanliness - because not only did it remove hair, but it also removed lice - it meant you could afford to have lice removed - it was also a way to publicly say "Look, I don't have lice like you filthy peasants do".
Shaving... taboo in the 1800s, most men sported huge beards, even gentlemen and noblemen in spite of what the Victorian era movies show you... try looking at some real photos of men from the era.
Shaving... face for men, legs for women, did not become a fashionable thing to do until the 1920s... armpits remained unsaved til the 1950s though.
Shaving... 1970s, as a sign that you stood for Human Rights, Equality, and Peace, NO HAIR anywhere on the body was shaved. You also walked around nude in public parks just to prove your pubic hair was long enough to hide everything.
Unimportant side note: I grew up in the 1970s and I find shaved pubs repulsive on both men and women. Shaved vaginas are ugly, as are shaved scrotums. Also, I hate penises, but I love testicles and have a unabashed fetish for castrated men who have no penis but still have their balls which is WHY I wrote Quaraun that way. I also have a fetish for shaggy fur, thus why BoomFuzzy doesn't shave and he and GhoulSpawn both have lots of long shaggy fur on their legs and balls.
Too much info? You should try reading the Quaraun novels... I literally have a scene in one of them, that spends 10 full pages talking about GhoulSpawn's luxuriant ivory coloured Cotswold wool growing on his legs, belly, scrotum, ass, yeah...
You don't have to read far into ANY Quaraun novel before you realize: WOW, she likes fur covered wizard testicles.
Yes. Fur covered, unshaved wizard testicles ARE a fetish with a following.
Rule 34... there is a fetish for everything, even unshaved wizard scrotums.
I am aware that being attracted to unshaved male genitals is considered strange.
I openly admit that I like strange things, especially unshaved wizard testicles, which the Quaraun series definitely spends way to much time focusing on.
Moving on...
Brushing your teeth... the concept of tooth care was invented by Native Americans who chewed on cinnamon bark after eating. This was not discovered by white men until the "Wild West Days" in the 1830s.
Brushing your teeth... toothbrushes were only available from doctors prior to the 1980s. No you could not buy them from the store. The first toothbrush to be sold in stores, appeared in 1984.
Brushing your teeth - DAILY... was an invention of the 1990s, yes - THE 1990s less than 30 years ago - so at no era before 1994, should you ever have a character who even knows to brush his teeth daily, let alone does.
Looking in the mirror... Mirrors were invented by the Ancient Egyptians... back then a mirror was large slab of mica (a shiny rock) that was polished smooth. Have you ever owned a mica mirror? I have one. You can ALMOST make out a blurry image of your face. It's like looking through fog and expecting to see a house across the street. You can see yourself better by looking into a fast moving river.
Looking in the mirror... Mirrors with more clarity existed in the 1400s... these were made out of black obsidian (volcanic glass) that was polished smooth. Like the mica mirror, this is not what we think of today when we think mirror. What you see looks like you wearing black-face paint, and smudge badly.
Looking in the mirror...Something similar to what we think of as a mirror, was invented in the 1700s (Rococo era) and was a very think (over an inch) piece of rolled pressed glass, with a layer of (highly toxic) "liquid silver" (mercury) painted to the back of it. Only royalty could afford this lethal object... just touching it could kill you if you rubbed your hand across the silvering, thus why mirrors were put in frames, so as to protect the viewer from a horrible death by mercury poisoning. These were called Silvering Looking Glasses.
Looking in the mirror...Around the 1830s, Silvering Looking Glasses, began to be made of thinner, smaller glass, making them accessible by the upper class working citizen for the first time.
Looking in the mirror...Mirrors did not become available to the general public until the 1920s. They were still made from highly toxic mercury coated on plates of glass.
Looking in the mirror...What we today think of as a mirror... came into existence in the 1950s. So if your character is looking in a mirror at any era before the 1950s, your story is suffering from server anachronism.
Let's look at it some more...
>>Showering,
Quaraun bathes daily, sometimes more then once, in a time period when bathing was punishable as witchcraft.
In the real world 1400s Europe, people were only allowed to bath once every 6 months, when the priest came to town for a public bathing ceremony. "Cleanliness is next to godliness" and thus, is was mandatory that people bath once every six months, no more, no less. If a person refused to bath in town square in front of the priest and everyone else, they were executed as a witch, and if they were found bathing in private any time of the year, or commited the sin of bathing more then once every 6 months, they were executed as a witch.
It was a medical breakthrough, in 1957 when doctors/scientists discovered it was okay to bath as often as once a month.
In 1978, science discovered you wouldn't die of pneumonia if you bathed as often as once a week, and this gave rise to the Saturday Morning Cartoon public service campaign of celebrities like Johnny Cash and Vincent Price saying: "Now remember, kids, tell you're parents it's okay for you to bath more then once a month, it's even okay to bath as often as once a week now!"
It wasn't until 1987 that the possibility of bathing daily was thought up and it wasn't until 1994 that it began to catch on.
It's 2018 right now... 1994 was only 24 years ago.
24 years ago, people didn't know it was safe to bath daily.
24 years ago, bathing daily was seen as weird and bad for your health.
From the 1940s into the 1980s DOCTORS told people NOT to bath more than once a month, because bathing too often could make you sick.
And yet, how many authors write Medieval Fantasy showing a person bathing daily, and no other character bats an eye, and the law doesn't punish them either?
Yes, you see descriptions of Quaraun bathing daily, AND you see wanted posters that list his heinous crimes: murder, necromancy, rape, bathing daily.... yeah.
There's not much historically accuracy in the Quaraun series, but, when there is, it's done right.
>>shaving,
Quaraun doesn't shave. He's an Elf. And as he puts it: A High Elf, not a Common Elf. Thus he has no facial hair to shave. His body is described as hairless.
He has his super long hair, and as Unicorn puts it "his balls are covered in apricot fuzz", but the rest of his body is hairless. There are scenes where he paints on his eyebrows, indicating he has none. There are scenes where he is gluing feathers to his eyelids, indicating he has no eyelashes either.
GhoulSpawn is described similarly... he being a half-Elf. However, from the waist down, GhoulSpawn is a sheep, and his lower body and legs are covered in thick, shaggy wool, that is described as being thick, curly, 6 inches long, and the texture of Cotswold Wool. He also has cloven hooves instead of feet and there are scenes of him polishing, cleaning, and trimming his hooves.
GhoulSpawn, also, because of his hooves, can not walk on smooth, shinny, polished, or waxed surfaces. He slips and falls on his back.
On the other hand, because of his hooves, GhoulSpawn can run on rocky terrain that trips up others. He can climb steep inclines up the side of a mountain, like a mountain goat.
Unicorn/BoomFuzzy, is described as being covered in thick black hair, that is turned grizzled grey with age. He's never shaved anything. His massive dreadlocks go past him bum, and his public hair is long enough to completely hide is genitals.
Quaraun stats in several stories that he finds a hair covered body exotic and attractive, due to his coming from a race of hairless bodies. In the case of both Unicorn and GhoulSpawn, Quaraun ignored their initial advances. In both cases it was not until seeing them naked and discovering they had unusually hairy bodies, that Quaraun became lustfully attracted to them.
Again, you don't have to read far into any Quaraun to realize, I like hairy men. A lot.
>>brushing your teeth,
It's the 1400s. No one did this yet.
GhoulSpawn is from the current future stuck in the past, he does brush his teeth, when he can find something he can do so with back in the 1400s.
>>doing your hair.
Quaraun's hair is 4 feet long at the beginning of the series. Later in the series it is 12 feet long - more than twice his body length. Doing his hairs takes 3 to 5 hours each and every day.
I am someone with bum length hair in real life, I know from experience the amount of hours it takes to care for super long hair. I've had dreadlocks since 2013 (so 5 years as of 2018) and it takes 2 hours to wash my bum length dreadlocks, and 8 hours to dry them. Before my hair was dreaded, it took 2 to 3 hours to brush it smooth every morning.
GhoulSpawn's hair, which is neon yellow and glows in the dark (because he's a Demon) comes down to his waist and while requires quite a bit of care, is far more marginable then Quaraun's hair, except that it also grows in thick woolly curls, because he's a sheep-man.
Unicorn likes to brag that he has not brushed his hair in 2,000 years. Unicorn, has massive dread locks, which are longer then GloulSpawn's hair, but not nearly as long as Quaraun's hair. Unicorn's hair is bum length, and other then washing it from time to time, he does absolutely nothing with it.
But also:
Quaraun's is not tentacle-like.
Quaraun's hair IS ACTUALLY tentacles, stringing, venomous, deadly, JellyFish tentacles, similar to the tentacles of a Portuguese Man O War JellyFish.
The tentacles of the Portuguese man-of-war Physaliaphysalis, are called dactylozooids and contain nematocysts, which are microscopic capsules that deliver venom. The tentacles are used for stinging and paralyzing prey, and for defense against predators.
The tentacles have nematocysts, which are microscopic capsules that contain coiled, barbed tubes.
When a nematocyst is triggered, it injects venom that paralyzes and kills prey.
The tentacles contract to pull prey towards the gastrozooids, which surround and digest the prey.
And his twelve foot long "hair" is very, very, very deadly.
Quaraun is a Moon Elf possessed by a JellyFish Demon, and his hair is literally actual JellyFish tentacles, which are sentient/prehensile, respond to his emotions, and give him a deadly twelve foot reach, allowing him to kill anyone who gets within reach of them.
His being part Elf and part alien JellyFish is the reason for his nickname "JellyElf".
And yes, each of them, their hair does become important to the plot, thus you do see descriptions of their hair. In fact, you see A LOT of descriptions of their hair, and rarely anything else.
And to see what exactly those look like, here are a few of them:
>>You'll probably spending a decent chunk of every day of your life looking in a mirror to see if how you want to present yourself matches how others will see you.
>>Every morning, fully naked. And I always write down this description of myself and show it to everyone I meet during the day, just so they know.
You know, I'm gonna have to write a scene where Quaraun does this. Or rather, Unicorn. Unicorn is likely to do this sort of thing to make fun of Quaraun's cleanliness habits.
Unicorn/BoomFuzzy is likely to not describe himself, but rather describe Quaraun and then hand descriptions out to everyone they meet.
Now to figure out which story to add this to.
One of the on going problems with describing Quaraun is his intersex nature. Meaning Quaraun has both a penis and a vagina.
I write gay/f2m-trans/bi/poly novels, novellas, short stories, and poetry, following the life of main character Quaraun, and his husband, BoomFuzzy. And while sometimes it is sad or deals with haters, more than 89% of my poems are lighthearted, joyful, humorous, uplifting, inspirational, and features LGBTQAI+ couples/trios in everyday situations, just living life.
I write a series about a married couple and their live-in lover. The married couple have been together for decades. So there is no “young love” or “finding love” any of that sort of Romance.
So, you see them doing things like sitting by a campfire talking about the day, at a food truck ordering food, in a shop bickering over what to buy, out in the salt marsh digging for clams, or doing other things.
My main character is The Pink Necromancer, Quaraun, who is the court mage and husband of King Gwallmaiic aka BoomFuzzy, King of The UnSeelie Court.In short, it’s a gay couple, with a long lasting established relationship, living a fairly peaceful, contented life, doing so in a place free of persecution, and just being a normal married (gay) couple who lead a (mostly) normal married life.
For those who asked why I write homeless tent dwelling Gypsy characters:
CONTEXT NOTE: It is the year 3999 — Quaraun is the last Moon Elf, and possibly the last Elf of any type, left on Planet Vesonta, after two apocalypses wiped out the planet.
EDITED TO ADD: (January 22, 2025)Seeing how this story is pinned to every story, I am adding this “Trigger Warning Intro” to the start of this story, because a reader had a rant about their hatred of all things gay, transgender, etc and felt I had deceived them into reading my stories, by not warning them ahead of time that the characters were gay, married, or transgender… apparently they did not read either the kicker above the title or the footer at the end, which is completely identical on all 1,200+ pages published here on Medium…. sooooo… here you go:TW NOTE: This is an MPreg Yaoi series:
Here are a few of the more then 500 lists, where you can see the stories that heavily feature these topics:
Sweet Yaoi — Gay Romance (Short Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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Why Choose Sweet Poly Romance (Shorts & Poetry — Fiction)
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Dark Romance (Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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Lover’s Triangle Dark Romance (Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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MPreg/Pregnant Male Yaoi (Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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MPreg Yaoi, Family Stories, with the children, after birth
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Author’s note — context for readers whom have not read the novels:
Quaraun is a transman who wears boob bindings, but also has had a forced against his will double mastectomy as a form of punishment, in his youth which heavily contributed to his becoming transgender transitioning to become a man.
Quaraun was the youngest child of a deranged Seelie Court Elf king who had all daughters and wanted a son.
Quaraun was born intersex, having both male and female genitals, and is able to both father children in others and give birth to children himself.
As a teenager, Quaraun was identifying as a female and was one of the favourite princesses of the Elf’s royal court.
When Quaraun attracted the romantic attention of the UnSeelie Court Faerie King, her father, infuriated, cut off her breasts and mutilated her vagina, in a brutal attempt to force his intersex child to become his son. When Quaraun tried to fight back to defend himself, his father crushed his hands in the grinding wheel of a millstone, which is why Quaraun now has metal prosthetic hands.
Quaraun left The Seelie Court, joined forced with the UnSeelie Court, and continued wearing the royal pink gowns of a Seelie Elven princess, but took to binding his mutilated breasts, using male pronouns and identify as a male, and went on to marry the UnSeelie Court Faerie King becoming his court mage.
All of that information can be found in the novels.
TW NOTE: This is an MPreg Yaoi series:
Here are a few of the more then 500 lists, where you can see the stories that heavily feature these topics:
Sweet Yaoi — Gay Romance (Short Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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Why Choose Sweet Poly Romance (Shorts & Poetry — Fiction)
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Dark Romance (Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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Lover’s Triangle Dark Romance (Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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MPreg/Pregnant Male Yaoi (Stories & Poems — Fiction)
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MPreg Yaoi, Family Stories, with the children, after birth
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I have been informed by an outraged reader that they would liked to have known that ahead if time before reading the series — — even though it IS literally mentioned on EVERY page of the series, apparently the note is not well stated as it says the series is Sweet Poly MPreg Furry Yaoi even though it says that is what the series is, in both the KICKER and FOOTER of EVERY SINGLE of over ONE THOUSAND stories here on Medium…, but apparently some people do know know what Sweet Poly MPreg Furry Yaoi means:
There you go. end of edit.
The 3 main characters are the world’s three most powerful mages, each of whom were not born as royalty, but went power crazy and became the three reigning kings of the planet, because no one could stop them. The series is told from their perspective, and thus they are rarely shown as the super villains they truly are, because they do not see themselves as evil.
MOST stories in the series do NOT have “happy endings”, and instead are dealing with very dark topics such as:For those unfamiliar with my series:There is an additional side story sub plot:
Usually the stories/poems are 3rd person past tense by a omni narrator, who is giving the reader a bird’s eye view of what every character is doing.
However… SOME poems are “written by” the main character.
See, in the novels, it is a common scene for main character Quaraun to be described as “sitting in a tavern, smoking his hookah, drinking absinthe, and writing poetry”, quickly followed by something interrupts him and he goes off on whatever adventure the plot has for him.
You almost never see the poem itself. And it was a common thing for readers to ask me to include the poems in the novels. So, in more recent novels and novellas, I started including the poem, Quaraun was writing, in the story itself so that readers could read the poem he had written.
It slows down the plot, takes the reader out of the main story, to put them in a different mini-story within the story, the mini-story being written by the character. This in turn gives readers incite into his personality, because now they can see the sorts of things he writes about.
And while the main story tends to be more upbeat and cheerful, the poems written by the main character are dismal, gloomy, depressed, and take very dark turns, showing readers that Quaraun is in a very bad place mentally, he’s very depressed, he’s thinking of suicide, he’s the last Elf after an apocalypse whipped out most of the planet, his husband is dead, he is biologically a female but is living as a male because of having been gang raped and now lives in mortal terror of letting anyone know he has a vagina,… these are things that the reader does not see in the main story, and only sees in the poetry written by the main character.
…and these mega EMO, deep delve EdgeLord super Goth depression filled poems written by Quaraun, for some reason have always been beloved by fans of my books…
…thus why I started writing a mini-series that was JUST the poems themselves, not in novels.
In this case, here on Medium… I divided those poems off into thier own separate series… identified by adding the phrase:
Poems by Quaraun
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Transgender Characters In Fiction
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High Elves & Their Drugs (Stories &Poems-fiction)
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The Green Fairy Wine-Absinthe (Stories & Poems - Fiction)
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Quaraun Being Psychotic (Stories & Poems - Fiction)
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King Gwallmaiic aka BoomFuzzy the Unicorn: Quaraun’s husband, BoomFuzzy aka King Gwallmaiic, a Scottish Phooka, who is King of The UnSeelie Court. BoomFuzzy is a “classic fantasy type” Necromancer who uses sorcery to raise the dead. Being a Faerie he is also an illusionist and master of trickster magic. By profession he is a Master Chef, owning the global monopoly on restaurants, taverns, pubs, and food trucks. Until his death, BoomFuzzy was regarded as the world’s most powerful wizard. He is now a Lich. BoomFuzzy is also half-Human. His mother was a Mongolian/Chinese Human, which is why he wears distinctively Asian outfits. along with a great kilt worn as a cape. Known as BoomFuzzy the Unicorn, he often takes the form of a purple Unicorn. BoomFuzzy’s exact age is unknown, though he was well over two thousand years old at the time of his death, and Quaraun resurrected him as a Lich around 500+ years ago, making him close to 3,000 years old. In his BlackBird form he is fifteen thousand years old. Art by Wendy Christine Allen
Cooking w/BoomFuzzy (Evil Phookan Faerie Chef)
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EDITED TO ADD:
You know I think it is weird that this needs to be said, BoomFuzzy is not African American, because he’s neither African nor American. Of course he’s not Human nor real either, but you know how some people are in their inability to distinguish fiction from reality.BoomFuzzy is what is known as a Black Gypsy, Black Chinese, or Black Mongolian, (which are all different names for the same race) which is a vastly different DNA bloodline, ethnicity, and culture then African American.I made him this mix of races and ethnicity because it is the real mix of races and ethnicity I am.
My great-grandfather was a pygmy Black man from Sepik River Valley of Papua New Guinea.
My great-grandmother is Mongolian Chinese.
My grandmother was born in Scotland and spoke Scottish and wore a tartan over traditional Mongolian dress. She raised me until her death when I was 8 years old.
I still speak Scottish. The language BoomFuzzy speaks in the stories the the exact same language I speak. How BoomFuzzy talks is same as how I talk if you ever meet me face to face offline.
I am one quarter Black and one quarter Mongolian.
— END OF UPDATE… WHICH I ADD BECAUSE SOMEONE WAS HAVING A HISSY FIT.
Glinta aka GhoulSpawn the Crazed: Their on again/off again mad scientist golden fleeced Sheep Demon lover: GhoulSpawn with his 1974 AMC Gremlin time machine. GhoulSpawn was born on a boiling, fire planet, but as a small child was summoned to 1959 Earth by Humans with a ouija board. He lived among Humans, getting a PhDs in Quantum Physic and AstroPhysics, invented time travel, built a time machine, and then in 1978, fell through a portal, and is now trapped in 40th century Maine. Being a Demon from literal Hell, he has natural elemental abilities with fire and can summon hell creatures. He is Quaraun’s apprentice, and feared by Humans to be on a fast track to becoming more powerful than either BoomFuzzy or Quaraun. Due to his messing around with time travel, there are 5 different versions of him which appear throughout the series, each from different dimensions and alternate time lines, each one uses a different name (Glinta, GhoulSpawn, Gremlin, Checka, ZooLock — while GhoulSpawn is the one seen most often, Gremlin is in fact the correct original one). GhoulSpawn is very young, not yet 50 years old. The Gremlin version of him is around 500 years old, while the Checka version of him is thirteen thousand years old, and the ZooLock version of him is stated to be “old as time”. GhoulSpawn is a Sheep Demon, similar to a satyr. GhoulSpawn, Quaraun’s secondary husband and BoomFuzzy’s lover. GhoulSpawn’s father was an Electric Eel Merman and his mother was a Sun Elf. He was born an actual baby lamb, and gets progressively more “human like” as he gets older. GhoulSpawn is always reading or thinking science thoughts. GhoulSpawn enjoys fixing things. GhoulSpawn likes working on cars, especially car engines. He turned his 1974 AMC Gremlin into a time machine. Art by Wendy Christine Allen. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜💗♂️ ♂️ ♂️
GhoulSpawn Being a Klutz (Stories & Poems - Fiction)
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*(ADDED NOTE: It was pointed out that people who do not read Furry Fiction, likely never heard the word isekia/isekiaed before. It is a Japanese word which means “accidentally teleported to an alternate dimension, arriving in place that the teleported character did not intend to go to and did not know existed”. It is a common theme/word/trope in the Furry Genre, the Yaoi Genre, and The Omegaverse Genre, but is uncommon elsewhere.)*GhoulSpawn does not appear in every story, all stories on Medium featuring GhoulSpawn can be found here:
Stories With GhoulSpawn
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Etiole:
Quaraun’s great-great-grandson. Youngest son of Sir Roderic (Lord of The Twighlight Manor), and youngest brother to The Dazzling Razzbury. Etiole’s mother was Lady Melneeva, an Eel Siren who is GhoulSpawn’s half sister by the same father but different mother.
Etiole was the main character of the series from 1978 through 2006, when the series was still known as The Twighlight Manor series and was not yet called The Quaraun Series.
I have not written a story featuring Etiole as a character, since “Love, Lust, Madness” in November 2006…until June 2024, when I started writing new stories about him for Medium.
Oddly, there are weird rumours throughout Maine, of people believing this character to be a real person, which, yeah, Google it, and you’ll see how deranged some people are about him. They even started calling my 1964 Dodge 330 “The Golden Eagle” after him, and claiming he haunts my car.
A real local man, did in fact model for several paintings I made of Etiole, in the 1980s, and he is the same homeless man I let sleep in my car at night.
For some unknown reason, locals have built up many wild conspiracy theories about the homeless man, dubbing hi8m “Etiole”, claiming he is a UFO alien, and some of them even make the claim that I was abducted by aliens!
Yeah, just Google “Golden Eagle EelKat’s Car” or “Etiole Amphibious Aliens” and you’ll see how deep down the rabbit hole fantasy prone delusional conspiracy theorists went with their rumours about this FICTIONAL character, that they believe to be a real cryptid/demon/alien/whatever.
Etiole has long been, hands down, the number one fan favourite character from the series, and is the character whom I get the most fan mail about, the most fan requests for more stories of, and to date, he is the character who’s name single handedly drives the most Google search result traffic to my website- to the tune of over THREE MILLION visitors PER MONTH just for that one search term “Etiole”!!!
Stories With Etiole
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FarDarrig:
FarDarrig is a vampire leprechaun, who delights in mass murdering entire villages, then using Human skins to make his leather coats, which he paints red with Human blood. Similar to a Red Cap, FarDarrig is an Elvil Faerie who sees Humans the same way Humans see cows: tasty with ketchup.
FarDarrig is the driver of Quaraun’s vardo, and is BoomFuzzy’s butler ad manservant. BoomFuzzy being blind requires assistance for many things, and FarDarrig is the one who does the assisting.
Being a Leprechaun, FarDarrig is also gold crazy, and hoards up vast treasures full of gold.
He is always armed with way too many swords, knives, daggers, guns, pistils, flintlocks, and blunderbuss.
He always refers to BoomFuzzy as King Gwallmaiic, and takes his job as bodyguard to the King of the Realm of Fae VERY seriously.
ZooLock:
ZooLock is a Thullid.
Quaraun’s adoptive father, ZooLock was court wizard to the Moon Elf Royal Family at the time of Quaraun’s birth. Quaraun’s father is the youngest brother of the Moon Elf Emperor and therefore had no royal rank.
Quaraun was a, in the womb, a pair of twins, one male and one female, whose fetus fused before birth, creating an “intersex chimera hermaphrodite”, meaning Quaraun has both a vagina/uterus/ovaries AND penis/testicles.
Quaraun’s intersex nature is rarely mentioned in the series, and the question of his transgender nature is mentioned only in the novel “BoomFuzzy” (yes, the one tat sold a million copies in 2016) where the event of his father’s attempt to kill him, results in Quaraun being dragged naked through the streets, as his father puts Quaraun on public display to show people what he really is.
BoomFuzzy: A Bizarro Fantasy (The Pink Necromancer: The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane aka The…
The novel is deliberately written from Quaraun’s point of view, and told by his elderly self, resulting in the narration always uses the words “he” and “penis”, the words “she” and “vagina” deliberately blacked out of the text, and it is ONLY through the dialogue of Quaraun’s father, BoomFuzzy, and Beluna, that the reader is given enough information to find out Quaraun is intersex.
Specifically, an early scene, where The UnSeelie Court gangs up on Quaraun to rape him, and BoomFuzzy, who is leading the attack, suddenly calls off his men, giving a cryptic line about Quaraun not being what the men think he is, and ordering them to let Quaraun escape, a thing BoomFuzzy says upon seeing Quaraun naked for the first time.
Later in a scene with BeLuna, Quaraun tells her of the attack, which leads to a conversation questioning if Quaraun is a virgin or not. The entire conversation carries out as though it was 2 teenage girls uncertain as to what sex even is, and it is made very clear at that point that Quaraun has no clue the functioning of the male body. It is utterly impossible for a reader to get through that scene without asking themselves “What a minute, is Quaraun a female? He doesn’t know men have erections, shouldn’t a man his age know that?”
A later argument between BeLuna and BoomFuzzy, reveals that BeLuna is protecting Quaraun’s secret, but does not outright say what the secret is, and demands BoomFuzzy stay away from Quaraun. BeLuna is aware that BoomFuzzy is gay, and in fact has a husband (Gibedon) whom BoomFuzzy thinks nothing of cheating on; and she is aware Quaraun is passing for a male, she outright tells BoomFuzzy that Quaraun is not what BoomFuzzy thinks he is, to which BoomFuzzy laughs and tells BeLuna, he’s already taken Quaraun into his bed and then did not have sex with Quaraun upon finding out what Quaraun was. This leads to a very bizarre conversation about candy canes (yep, the candy cane scene that lead readers to buy a million copies of this novel), which reveals a LOT of about Quaraun’s being intersex, without ever outright saying that Quaraun is intersex.
BoomFuzzy leaves BeLuna infuriated, when he tells her that yes he is gay and he loves Quaraun anyways, a line that should tell readers immediately that Quaraun is NOT male. BoomFuzzy explains he spent several years seducing Quaraun, and by the time he found out what Quaraun was, he was too in love with Quaraun for BoomFuzzy to care what Quaraun had between his legs…. implying that, BoomFuzzy is gay, but fell in love with a trans man who is biologically female.
When Quaraun is beaten into a coma by his father, BoomFuzzy kidnaps Quaraun and spends the next three years nursing the crippled Elf back to health. Quaraun never regains use of his hands and BoomFuzzy builds a pair of gold-plated prosthetic gloves to encase Quaraun’s real hands. Quaraun is terrified to go back home, and develops the infinite amounts of massive phobias which plague him throughout the series. Quaraun continues to live with BoomFuzzy.
BoomFuzzy’s husband, an army general, returns home from war to find Quaraun sleeping in BoomFuzzy’s bed, immediately assumes Quaraun to be male and believes BoomFuzzy has been cheating on him. When BoomFuzzy tries to explain, that Quaraun is a female Elf in hiding, he never gets the chance to explain, as Gibedon pulls out a knife and stabs BoomFuzzy. Quaraun tries to save BoomFuzzy.
At this exact moment, a mysterious Goat Demon shows up from a portal, no explanation who it is (it is GhoulSpawn from the future as readers realize later in a different story) and drags Quaraun away from the fight, saying “You have to let this happen. You stopped it before and it changed the world”. By the time the Demon let’s go of Quaraun and runs back through the portal, only seconds from arriving, Gibedon has gutted BoomFuzzy, leaving BoomFuzzy half dead. Quaraun grabs the knife from Gibedon and cuts off Gibedon’s head.
Roles now reverse as Quaraun takes care of BoomFuzzy, but the wound is to bad, and becomes septic.
Fearing BoomFuzzy will die, Quaraun returns to his father’s palace to seek medical help for BoomFuzzy, and is locked in a tower, as the story takes a retelling of Rapunzel, and the magic tower, causes Quaraun hair to mysteriously grow to twelve feet long.
Near the end of the novel, while still locked in the tower. Quaraun is tricked into an arranged marriage with a female Elf, and, all hell breaks lose, when BoomFuzzy believing Quaraun left him, commits suicide, on the belief that Quaraun had decided to break of the relationship with a gay man.
Quaraun meanwhile is horrifically tortured by his wife and her lovers, when Quaraun refuses to consummate the marriage and also refuses to say why. Quaraun and his wife live in separate rooms, and are married for several years before a night arrives that she decides to rape Quaraun, and is horrified bt what she finds.
Quaraun, is presumably the next in line to be king, and his wife, has great plans of being queen. Those plans are shattered when she learns that, she hasn’t any chance of ever being Quen at all, because Quaraun will be queen, not king. The readers are told outright this is why she is upset.
As the novel winds to it’s conclusion, Quaraun’s wife devices a plot to get Quaraun pregnant, by highering 5 of her bodyguards to gang rape Quaraun. There is no question in reader minds at this point that Quaraun is a female, as Quaraun gives birth to twin daughters and his wife pretends they are hers.
The gang rape is repeated 2 years later and Quaraun gives birth to twin boys.
Once the 4 infants are weened, and no longer need Quaraun alive, the wife plots to have Quaraun killed, but Quaraun, fights back, killing the wife, his 4 children, and the king, then uses their souls to resurrect BoomFuzzy as a Lich. BoomFuzzy proceeds to kill off the rest of the village.
The novel “BoomFuzzy” ends with Quaraun vowing to never again be unfaithful to BoomFuzzy and, deciding to live as a man because BoomFuzzy is gay.
Quaraun is never again shown as a female in the series, though he is shown as pregnant several times throughout the series, sometimes by BoomFuzzy and other times by GhoulSpawn.
There are scenes which states that Quaraun once had female breasts but that they were “brutally removed by rapists” and scenes which say Quaraun has a penis but “that it is a small none functioning micro penis”, there are also scenes which state Quaraun is “bitchy from PMS”.
Quaraun is specifically called out as intersex only in one story: “Zebulon’s Captive” where a gang of Human slavers, capture Quaraun and use him in their Elf breeding farm, and discover that he can be used BOTH to get other females pregnant AND to be made pregnant himself.
Quaraun was the youngest child, all his siblings are female. In childhood Quaraun lived as a girl, much to his father’s outrage. His father wanted a son, and forced Quaraun to dress like a boy, act like a boy, and his father used public humiliation and gaslighting to convince the entire empire that Quaraun was born male.
At 9 years old, Quaraun’s mother had enough of her husband's abuse of Quaraun, the resulting fight lead to Quaraun’s father, murdering Quaraun’s mother. Quaraun witnessed the murder, as did ZooLock. Quaraun’s father turned on the child, trying to kill Quaraun as well, and ZooLock grabbed the child and fled the country.
ZooLock took Quaraun to Persia, where ZooLock raised Quaraun as though Quaraun was his daughter. Quaraun lived with ZooLock for 75 years, before returning to seek re-unition with his real father.
In the years later, Quaraun transitions to live as a male, but ZooLock never accepted this and continues to call Quaraun by female pronouns.
ZooLock eventually went insane, started The Cult of the Sacred Pink JellyFish, and went on to become one of the world’s most feared super villains.
Throughout the series Quaraun and ZooLock are seen at odds, going head to head against each other, but, both refusing to physically harm the other, and each will join forces with the other, against shared enemies.
>>Maybe this is why I find Tolkien and much fantasy to be mind-numbing descriptions of settings and people that have little to do with moving the story along. If I want visuals then I will watch a movie.
I tried reading Tolkien once. I made it to the 24 page long song, being sung by the Hobbits who were dancing on the table. And I barely made it that far, because I first had to slog through pages describing the Shire first, pages describing the Hobbestes, and the only thing that kept me moving forward were the pages describing a grey wizard...
I put up with the descriptions because I kept telling myself somewhere along the line the story would start... but tat 24 page long poem was the killer. I wanted to get to the story, and after 40 pages of description, instead of starting the story he threw a 24 page long song in.
>>Why stop at the nose? There are cheekbones, temples, shoulders, and elbows you could also be describing.
OMG! Yes! Yes! Yes! I describe them all.
You know EVERY wrinkle of my characters.
Heck, I have readers who have re-read certain scene so many times, that they have every wrinkle of Quaraun's scrotum committed to memory.
Kind of scary, when you think about it.
I kind of have a fetish for wizard testicles, so I often spend 10 pages or more just on describing them, for no reason at all, other than I'm the biggest screaming fangirl of my characters and he, why write fanfiction for characters others created when I can write fanfiction of my own characters, you know?
You know... years ago, I used to do this. And it was only as little as ten years ago, that I wrote an article advising writers to do exactly that! The article is still out there if you want to read it.
But in that article I actually advocated taking every single body part of your character and writing a 5 page long description of it.
So, the goal was to write 5 pages describing their nose, 5 pages describing their cheekbones, 5 pages describing their shoulders, etc.
Funny thing was some people took that to mean, then put those 5 pages in your story. People once in a while read that article then email me and say: "That's bad advice!"... but those complainers actually did not read the full article or they would have also seen, the part where I said to do this as a writing exercise to cure writer's block, to build a character profile, to help YOU figure out who your character is. It was not advice to write those things as scene for your story.
In actual story writing, you rarely see me include descriptions at all. Until, you know... wizard testicles.... yeah.
And GhoulSpawn's... uhm... well... GhoulSpawn. You know what GhoulSpawn is.
Sheep, fabulous and flamboyant! Who knew?
Specific characters, you are going to know EVERY inch of their bodies.
Landscapes, settings, towns, I leave those mostly undescribed. But the 3 main characters? Description overload.
>>Let the reader use their imagination.
And this is why.
No.
My characters look a specific way and I don't want readers imagining them looking like something else.
>>Why bother with gender?
I do feel gender is important, at least in my own stories, because the characters live in a time when males dominate and females are deeply prejudiced against.
The main character being a transvestite, a man who dresses like a woman, means he's constantly running up against people who treat him like a worthless, good for nothing female, often without realizing he is male. Some once learning he is male, stop treating him like shit, but most upon discovering he is male dressed as female, lash out on him tens times worse.
So in the case of my own series, gender is important to the plot.
I have however read stories where you never know the characters' gender, and if done well, it's a very fascinating thing to read because you the reader are left not knowing what to think anyone is.
If you want to read this well done, I highly recommend Sanctuary, a Science Fiction novel about a crew of 3 men, who crash land on a planet that shuns gender roles and the 3 men never know if they are talking to men or women. It's a fascinating concept.
>>Why bother with age?
My main character, Quaraun, doesn't know how old he is and neither does the reader. Only in the flashback novel, BoomFuzzy, is he given a definite age. At 9 he witnesses his mother murdered. Shortly after he is kidnapped by priests for torture him as part of a cult ritual to train young and unwilling boys into wizards. At 35 he kills the priests and finds his way back home. He casts off his wizard training because he never wanted to be a wizard and becomes a tailor. At 75 his lover commits suicide, Quaraun finds the body, and Quaraun's mind snaps, resulting in him spending the next 100 years perfecting becoming a Necromancer, then at age 175 he murders his sister-wife and the 4 children he had with her, to put their souls in an ice golem that he uses to resurrect his dead lover.
In Night of the Screaming Unicorn, readers are told that it has now been 300 years since he murdered his wife and children, making him now 475.
The rest of the series takes place in the years following Night of the Screaming Unicorn, but never again is specific about how old Quaraun is, again, until the two part story in Zebulon's Captive and My Two Favorite People, which state that Quaraun is now 750 years old. Quaraun is murdered shortly after this, thus the reader knows he lived 750 years.
The bulk of the 130 novels that make up the series take place between his being 450 and 750 without ever telling the reader which story happens in which year.
Quaraun can't remember his age from one novel to the next, because can never remember what age I said he was from one story to the next, so his age is listed different in every single chapter to make the lack of accuracy in his age a running gag.
>>Ethnicity?
Again, as with gender, ethnicity plays important plot roles in the series. Quaraun, Unicorn, and GhoulSpawn are all Gypsies of various types and get a lot of bigoted flack from other characters because of this.
>>Body type?
Not as important to the series, but readers are told body types on some level.
For example, readers know that Quaraun is very short and that this bothers him. Quaraun is 5'6" tall. He also lives in Maine, where real world men are all well over 6' tall.
In the series, you see Quaraun, constantly overshadowed by men who are 2 or 3 full heads taller then he is. He barely comes up to the shoulders of most men around him.
He's also a little hellfire that won't take shit from the 6 foot tall bullies.
Quaraun was suddenly jolted awake by a loud noise. He looked around wondering where he was, then remembered Mallac and the map.
Mallac had slammed his fist on the table and was now yelling angrily at Quaraun.
Elwin now had a stranglehold on Quaraun's neck and was crying frantically, terrified of the screaming soldier.
"Shhhhhh," Quaraun hushed the toddler, stroking his hair and rocking back and forth. "It's alright. Ignore the crazy Human." To Mallac he said: "You're scaring the child."
"You refuse to stay awake!"
"I've been awake for the past 7 days. I need some sleep."
"You have a job to do."
"No, Mallac. You do! You have a job to do and you're too damned lazy to do it yourself so you're trying to pass it off on me instead."
"It is your responsibility..."
"I am not one of your soldiers," Quaraun said as he set Elwin on the seat and stood up to yell back at the soldier who was yelling at him. "I don't take orders from you. I didn't mind helping, because you were in trouble, but you are taking advantage of that. You have no right to boss me around. I'm not one of your men!"
Elwin was crying frantically now. Seeing Quaraun arguing with the solider, scared the little boy who clambered to Unicorn and was now hugging the Phooka's neck. Poor Elwin was traumatized more then any of them realized. He had just witnessed his mother murdered by an angry yelling man, and did not want to see yet another murder.
Mallac continued yelling at Quaraun.
"You're scaring the boy," Quaraun yelled back at the soldier.
"I don't know why you bother fussing over that child. He ain't nothing but an ingrate half-Elf."
"I am fed up with the way you arrogant, piss ant Humans treat the half-Elves around here!"
Mallac opened his mouth to respond, but before he could get a word out Quaraun punched him in the face, throwing every bit of his tiny five foot six inch body into the punch. Mallac, not expecting the Elf to attack him, was easily knocked off balance. The soldier went tumbling to the floor. Unicorn stood up, carrying the child and looking back and forth from Quaraun to each of the soldiers. He knew that punch was about all the fight Quaraun had in him. Should the rest of the Humans decide to defend their leader and attack Quaraun, he didn't stand a chance.
But none of the Humans did anything. In fact, they looked like they were about to drop their weapons and run.
"That barmaid were right," Unicorn said to Quaraun.
"Gi'me, Elwin," Quaraun said as took the child from Unicorn.
Mallac was sprawled on the floor holding his nose and looking like he was about to start crying.
"I don't like bullies," Quaraun said to Mallac. "And I especially don't like grown men who pick on innocent children. You people in this town ought to be ashamed of yourselves. If the half-Elves are rising up to kill you all, well, then it's because you damned well deserve it. What is wrong with you people? I didn't come here to be pushed around by you. I came here to rest. I'm wounded and need to heal. It's terrible what is happening to your people, but it's not my responsibility to fix it, and from what I've seen it's your own damned fault. You treat the half-Elves like shit. They aren't being allowed to buy, sell, or trade. They are not being allowed to have jobs. When they go off by themselves, not bothering a damn one of you, what do you do? You murder their families and raze their farms. I've seen the half-Elf camps for myself. They are starving to death. They have no shelter. And winter is coming. You kill their livestock, destroy their crops, burn down their houses, simply because you don't like the colour of their blood. Then you complain because they are forced to steal food to survive. You brought this uprising on yourselves, and now you want me to clean up your damned mess? I'm not here to do your job for you. Had I not gotten wounded, I wouldn't even be here at all and you'd be stuck doing this all on your own."
With the orphan half-Elf toddler still in one arm, Quaraun took a map of the town and laid it out on the table. He began marking where each murder had occurred.
~From "The Summoner of Darkness" (Volume 11 of The Quaraun Series)
Perhaps in most novel's a character's body type is not important. But we seen in the Quaraun series, time and time again, Quaraun being pushed around by men bigger then he is and him trying to ignore it, but then as in the case of the scene above, him finally getting fed up with it. In that particular scene, readers have already seen Mallac, a man described as being 6'2" tall, spend the past 7 days hounded Quaraun, largely because Quaraun is small and easy to push around. Quaraun spends the first 7 days, not putting up much of a protest to the bully, at first thinking if he agreed to help Mallac, the situation would quickly blow over.
However, seeing that Quaraun takes orders easily, Mallac sudden;y start taking advantage of that. And in the pages leading up to this scene, he begins to tease Quaraun about his lack of height, calling him short on many occasions and making an issue about Quaraun's being to small to stand up to anyone.
Being a stranger in the town, not planning to stay very long, and not wishing to start trouble. Quaraun keeps his mouth shut and tries to ignore the soldier's words, but in private, when alone with Unicorn, he expresses his hurt and frustration over how Mallac is treating him. In the scene above where he finally has had enough, his outburst is triggered, not by Mallac attacking his height, but rather by Mallac's bad mouthing a 3 year old boy who had hours earlier witnessed his mother's brutal murder. However, in this scene, the reader is reminded of the fact that Quaraun is 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and that, though he's reacting over one thing, he's fueled by another. He's protecting the child, but he's also still pissed over what Mallac had earlier said about his height.
This is why you see the phrase:
"Mallac opened his mouth to respond, but before he could get a word out Quaraun punched him in the face, throwing every bit of his tiny five foot six inch body into the punch. Mallac, not expecting the Elf to attack him, was easily knocked off balance."
The reader does not need to be told how tall Quaraun is, as the reader already knows how tall he is. It has been said previously in the story. In this scene, this line is added, not to show his height, but rather to remind the reader that Quaraun is still mad at Mallac for having called him short the night before.
This is a case where describing body type then becomes important to the plot and is not there to describe the character's appearance, but rather is there to show how the character is feeling.
Now, perhaps, you might say that assigning a character's height is unnecessary. And indeed, that is what this commenter is suggesting when they said:
>>Why stop at the nose? There are cheekbones, temples, shoulders, and elbows you could also be describing. Let the reader use their imagination. Why bother with gender? Why bother with age? Ethnicity? Body type? Hell, why bother even establishing if they're human or not? Those are impediments putting your characters into a box. They could just as easily be formless titles with the reader throwing in the rest.
Indeed, we could do that. We could avoid descriptions completely...
...but have you ever talked to a man who was 5'6" tall?
When a man is short, especially, when a man is considerably short to the point that children are often taller then he is, as is the case with Quaraun, he will be quick to tell you that height is very important, because it causes people to treat him different.
Men under 5'10 often report being pushed around and bullied by bigger men, while being passed up and ignored by beautiful women. They will tell you finding dates becomes more difficult, the shorter a man us. If a short man is interested in sports, he's left to watch as a spectator, not even allowed to try out for the team because of height requirements. What happens when his friends head to the amusement park and all the rides say you must be so tall, and the marker is over his head, leaving him on the ground while his friends enjoy the ride?
Quaraun's being short has a horrible effect on his self esteem. He often feels excluded, unloved, and unwanted, and blames his being short on his not being able to fit in.
In one story there is a scene, where he states that he started dressing like a woman because he found that at his very short height, he had a better chance of being including if men thought he was a woman. Readers are left to wonder if Quaraun were a normal height, would he also not be a transvestite?
Now, you can say, that I've written Quaraun to be overly dramatic and that real short men are not that upset over their height...
But then on Quora we find this:
Interesting… is that statistic new? In the 1980s anyone under 5′10″ in America was considered short. 5′7″ is quite short. There are also no men in my family under 6′2″.
I have 12 uncles. The shortest is 6'4" the tallest is 7'3".
Are we tall in Maine? I’m a 5′6″ female I’m VERY short, most women around here are 5′8″ or more, and most men are 6′2″ or more. A 5′6″ male would be the same height as me and thus he’s be INCREEDLY TINY! Child sized. Most 10 year olds are taller then that. But reading these posts, sounds like maybe a regional thing?
I'm a woman 5'6" and EVERYONE, men, women, AND children are taller than me.
You are hard pressed to find a child not 5'6" by the time they are 10, a woman under 5'8" and a man under 6'.
My partner, is 5'10" and I'm with him largely because he is short. At 5'10" he is often picked on and bullied by other men in the area, because he is so very short.
Quaraun at 5'6" is incredibly tiny, by comparison to men in Maine.
But were he Mexican or Asian, his height would be normal, or so the men of Quora and Reddit say...
Here on Reddit we see these comments:
All three main characters get their height mentioned.
As short as Quaraun is, he can often be heard saying he likes spending time with Gwallmaiic aka BoomFuzzy the Unicorn, because it makes him feel tall.
Well, you know right there that if a 5'6" tall man feels tall around someone else, that means the someone else is TINY.
King Gwallmaiic, Elf Eater of Pepper Valley, aka BoomFuzzy the Unicorn, or just Unicorn for short, is one of the shortest characters in the series, measuring in at only 5'1"
Other short characters in the series include Roderic at 5'4" and his son Etiole at 5'3".
The shortest male of the series however is FarDarrig at 4'8".
With the lone exception of GhoulSpawn, you will notice that Quaraun has a tendency to befriend men who are shorter then he himself is.
GhoulSpawn, towers over Quaraun, and while his exact height is never said, it is stated many times that most Humans fear GhoulSpawn for his ungainly height. And as many Humans in the series are said to be 6 feet tall or more, the reader can then safely assume that GhoulSpawn is somewhere in the range of being about 6'4"
While one of the tallest men in the series, GhoulSpawn is not the tallest, as Luke stands at 6'8" and Crown Prince Talska ranks as the tallest male in the series, standing 7'2" tall.
And back to this comment...
>>Why stop at the nose? There are cheekbones, temples, shoulders, and elbows you could also be describing. Let the reader use their imagination. Why bother with gender? Why bother with age? Ethnicity? Body type? Hell, why bother even establishing if they're human or not? Those are impediments putting your characters into a box. They could just as easily be formless titles with the reader throwing in the rest.
specifically...
>>Body type?
Height is only one aspect of Quaraun's body type. And if you are a fan of the series, you know all to well, that as much as being short bothers him, there is something else about his body, that upsets him far more...
The scars.
If you are not familiar with the series, in the novel BoomFuzzy, is a scene known as "The Hanging Tree".
Before you read any further, I should probably add a note here, that I write CBT Yaoi Horror Gorn Fantasy.
That's cock and ball torture that's VERY extreme.
Quaraun comes from a culture that outlaws same sex couples and is hiding that fact that he has a male lover. When he is accused of bedding with other males, he does not deny it and openly admits to having sex with other men, not realizing that this will incit his accusers into an angry mob, that next strips him naked, drags him to the center of town and publically tortures him, with most of the village coming forward to join in.
The infamous highly detail, incredibly grizzly scene that got the series banned off FanFiction.net followed, as one Elf, pulled out a knife and forces it up into Quaraun's penis, then ripped the knife in a backward motion, slicing Quaraun's penis completely in half, leaving behind a scar known as "a sub penal incision". Following this Elf's example, other village slash Quaraun, belly, thighs, and groin with knives, leaving him horribly scarred for life.
When they finished torturing him, Quaraun is left for dead, his bloody remains used as bait to capture The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley.
Unknown to the Elves however is the fact that it was the Elf Eater himself who is Quaraun's lover, and upon discovering what the Elves did to Quaraun, the Elf Eater slaughtered the Moon Elves, then takes Quaraun and spends the next several months nursing the dying Elf back to health. Quaraun eventually recovered, but he is left with a crippled leg, severe PTSD, rampant phobia that cripple his ability to function in society, and the horrific scars that he often bemoans.
Quaraun's mutilated penis, leaves him with self esteem issues far above and beyond any caused by his being short.
Quaraun is bi-sexual, having both male and female lovers, but after the attack, he rarely has sexual intercourse with anyone, citing that doing so is both embarrassing and painful for him.
As previously stated, Quaraun is incredibly beautiful and women are constantly throwing themselves at him... and then I told you how, he'll just as easily fuck her on one page then cut her head off on the next.... here's why...
Quaraun, will have sex with women who approach him asking to do so, but almost no one is aware of his scars, or his badly mutilated penis. And most women, once they see this, are quick to no longer desire him. Many are quick to tease him or cide him. If the woman simply says she changed her mind and leaves quietly, that's be the end of it. But when a woman laughs at him, or worse teases him he's quick to pull a knife on her, rape her, then slit her throat.
And thus yet again,we see that descriptions of body type become important to the story. Knowing that Quaraun is scared and mutilated, that he goes to great extreme to keep this hidden, and knowing that otherwise he is highly sought after gorgeous beauty, shows the reader the duel side of his personality.
Quaraun loves the company of women. He is often seen sitting in taverns with multiple prostitutes on his lap and in his arms. He's quick to dote on beautiful women, buying them gifts, hugging and kissing them... but he's also just as quick to push them away should their hand stray to reach for his cock. He's quick to pay prostitutes to lay in bed with him, and NOT have sex with him.
The reader, knowing about his scars, knowing how badly his penis is damaged, knows why he does these things, he loves women, he loves being with women, he desires to fuck women, but he also fears women, and won't let them see him naked, won't let them touch him, and refuses to fuck them, resulting in his often being hurt by the women then calling him arrogate, when in fact, he's very shy.
While the women in the story do not understand is strange sexless nature, the reader, having already be told, knows why Quaraun acts as he does. But had the description of his mutilated genitals not been there, the reader would be as clueless as the women in the story.
In GhoulSpawn and The Lich Lord's Lover, we see a scene which described both the scars and the penis rings and also explains the function of the rings and why they are there:
And there you go.
Now you can see how I write descriptions of what a character looks like, weaving it into the dialogue and actions so that descriptions are part of the story and not just stand alone exposition that brings the reader out of the immersion.
But this commenter said:
>>Body type?
And by body type people often mean something like:
Rarely does someone say body type and mean tall or short or scars or not.
In my own books you rarely see these sorts of descriptions, unless it becomes important.
For example, in The Obsidian Idol of The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley, we have the story when Quaraun and Unicorn's lover's spat fighting, gets out of control, the two becoming very violent towards one another, resulting in Quaraun, letting his villainous nature show, when he plots to murder Unicorn, and then carries out that plot, nearly killing his long time lover.
Terrified that Quaraun will try again and succeed at killing him, Unicorn leaves. Runs away, and we see one of the brief periods of the series where stories exist with Quaraun alone, without Unicorn with him.
At first this seems like it does not fit what we are talking about... however... Unicorn is highly suicidal and in every single novel he is in, there is always a suicide scene where he kills himself. Being a Lich, he always resurrects the next day.
After the lovers break up, Unicorn become more depressed and more suicidal than ever. His inability to kill himself and stay dead, makes him even more depressed, resulting in him going to extremes to try to find ways to kill himself and stay dead.
After they break up, the next time the reader sees Unicorn is in the novel The Vulgar Alchemist Inn, where, Quaraun, GeaLuna, and Bullgaar set out looking for Unicorn, and find him in a horrific state. Several years have passed between Obsidian Idol and Vulgar Alchemist,, and in that entire time, Unicorn has refused to eat anything, in an attempt to starve himself to death.
This becomes one of the few times you see a character body type description in the series. Unicorn is here described as skeletal, his flesh and muscles melted away, his skin clinging to his bones, a horrific side effect of his having not eaten anything in the past 3 years. But he, being a Lich, is still alive. But humger has also driven him mad and this skeleton like monster rises up and attacks his friends. It's the first time in the series when the read sees the Lich, turn into a blue flaming skeleton, revealing to them all that a skeleton is in fact the Lich's true form and everything else was just illusions.
This skeleton is seen on the cover art of GhoulSpawn and the Lich Lord's Lover, another volume in witch Unicorn's skeletal body type is described.
While never described in detail or narrative, one can make assumptions about Quaraun's figure, by reading Unicorn's dialogue.
Early in the series when Quaraun is young, Unicorn makes statements like "You need to eat more" often telling Quaraun you could stand to gain a few pounds" or "here eat another cake, you need to fat on your bones".
These early novels clue the reader in on the fact that Quaraun is thin, skinny, and possably underweight... or at least Unicorn thinks so.
You also hear Unicorn say he likes "plump Elves" and you see him making lewd, lust filled, highly sexual remarks to overweight women, indicating he likes his lovers to be on the heavier side, which also tells the reader that while Unicorn thinks Quaraun is too skinny, it's possible that Quaraun is in fact not skinny at all, seeing how Unicorn prefers fatter sex partners.
In the later novels of the series when Quaraun is older, you see that over time Quaraun's body has changed, because Unicorn begins to refer to Quaraun has "chubby" and having "luscious curves", cluing the reader in to the fact that as he go older, Quaraun gained weight.
How much Quaraun weight is never said, and if he actually ever is fat or skinny is also never stated. You only ever see Unicorn's statements, and anyone who reads the series, knows how little trust they can put in anything a Trickster Fae like Unicorn says.
Only twice in the series do you ever see a description of Quaraun's body, and again, this is because it is important to the plot. In the two parl story that makes up Zebulon's Captive and My Two Favourite People, we see Quaraun captured by slave traders and sold to an Elf Breeding farm where at first he is treated well, but his refusal to breed with the females given to him, results in his receiving progressively harsher treatment until eventually he is beaten by Zebulon, in a drunk rage.
Quaraun, now 750 years old, is very weak, an elderly Elf that has lived far past the typical 500 year lifespan of Elves. His body is physically weak, his metabolism malfunctioning, and the old Elf is no longer able to withstand much of a beaten.
Depressed, and now living shackled in chains in a cage barely big enough for him to either stand or lay down in, Quaraun begins refusing to eat. As the months move forward the reader now sees descriptions telling them, that yes indeed, as he got older he did become overweight, but now, refusing to eat and with his ancient organs no longer functioning properly, he starts losing weight rapidly.
Quaraun is Zebulon's captive for a grueling 70 years, before finally escaping and finding his way back to his own time. Once reunited to Unicorn, the reader sees conflicting descriptions, of a young, healthy, plumper Quaraun, that they know, simply does not exist, as Quaraun is now using glimmer spells and illusions to hide from Unicorn what he looks like after so many decades enslaved by Zebulon.
Unicorn immediately realizes something is wrong, because Quaraun now looks younger and healthier then the had in centuries.
In this case once again, describing these changes in appearance are important to the plot, thus you see them described.
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>>Hell, why bother even establishing if they're human or not?
Racism is a dominant theme in the Quaraun series, with Elves, Humans, Half-Elves, Faeries, and Demons at constant odds with one another. Knowing who is what, becomes important to the plot.
>>Those are impediments putting your characters into a box.
Yes. And that box is a little thing with authors like to call a plot and a storyline.
>>They could just as easily be formless titles with the reader throwing in the rest.
I read a book like this once. It fell flat.
>>I totally misread that as "formless titties".
ROTFLMAO!
>>I'm reading a book at the moment with little character description, but I can tell you that the main character has a small chicken pox scar on her left cheek that she plays with when she's nervous.
>>To me, that provides more insight into the character than a detailed description of hair/eye colour, etc. It's something memorable and personal to that character.
I agree with this, which is why, I focus more on habits then physical descriptions.
A roll of the eyes says more then the eyes being a certain colour.
I also realize that readers are often quick to forget lengthy descriptions.
If you open the book, describing the character then never mention what they look like again, you end up with the reader forgetting what they look like anyways.
This is why you don't see me writing the lengthy descriptions at all, and instead see constant reminders of important features.
Let's for example, go to The Night of The Screaming Unicorn, and see how many times the reader is told that Quaraun has blue eyes...
I just used the find.replace feature to search the manuscript of the finished book, and we find that Quaraun's blue eyes have been described Five times.
Now, let's look in BoomFuzzy and see how many times his blue eyes are described there...
And so here we find Quaraun's eyes described as blue, four times.
And how many times can we find Quaraun's blue eyes in Swamp of death?
Seven times here.
I've done this, to show you how often I remind the reader of certain features of a character, and to show you that I don't use info dumps of just one big long description of the character at the beginning, either.
I find this method to be a much better way of describing a character's features, as it is done through the story, in the conversations and naraton, without stopping the story to have the character go look in a mirror and yap about themselves.
>>I feel like you can really paint a mental image of a character by describing a unique feature, something that stands out to the narrator, or just broad strokes. I like to know if a character has a big bushy lumberjack beard, or long hair down to their waist.
>>Sure. A unique feature like that strikes me as something that would be important. Other characters would react to it or it can tell readers something about the character.
>>I think each char should have a recognisable feature.
Yep, me too.
Quaraun has his mega long, floor sweeping Rapunzel hair, that trips him and everyone around him, while getting stuck in every tree branch, dragged through the mud, enemies easily catch him by grabbing his hair,....but he won't cut it because he's the world's most powerful wizard and he swears up and down that never having cut his hair is the source of his power.
His insanely long hair becomes so important to the plot that it almost becomes a character itself on it's own.
With the reader focused on his daily struggle to get through life as his hair continually gets longer and (eventually later in the series reaching 12 feet long) more and more un-manageable.
Showing what he looks like becomes unimportant, because this one feature about him, says more about who he is, then all the physical descriptions of his face, I could ever write.
>>I generally go by the rule of one paragraph for person, and maybe one for outfit. The idea is to make it easy for a reader to determine if they're in a description paragraph and to skip to the next if they're simply not interested.
>>In truth, I recognize descriptions are like the vast majority of sex scenes - they're really just in there for interested readers, and typically don't add much if anything to the characters or the story.
>>I generally go by the rule of one paragraph for person, and maybe one for outfit.
not when your main character is a drag queen (mine is) then you spend 2 or 3 pages of every chapter describing what he has changed into, because Quaraun is a germaphobe and changes his dresses a dozen or more times a day. (No, I'm not joking, I actually write these clothing change scenes in every single novel.)
I also describe the scenes of him putting on his make-up, because he's constantly doing that, to the point that it annoys the other characters.
His hair also touches the ground and he spends 3 hours every day brushing it, which stops the plot to a dead halt, every time he does, because those scenes are described as well.
It shows him as the most annoyingly, self-centered narcissist that he is, and leaves other people wondering how the hell did he become the most evil and most powerful Necromancer of all time, when he's too busy screaming over a broken nail to get anything done.
he also carries a bag of holding in which he keeps a full length mirror and he pulls it out every few pages to fuss over his feather boas.
>>Everything should be there for a reason, I'd say.
>>My last novel was about sex, but I can say without hesitation and there wasn't a single sex scene in that book that wasn't there because it changed the characters, and the specifics of the scene was central to that change.
Ah... but what if you are writing a character driven story?
You know, the type that has no plot, and exists only for entertaining the reader?
And thus contains sex scenes simply because the readers wants to read a sex scene?
A scene that exists for entertainment value, is a reason for existing after all.
Plots are overrated.
>>And see, the problem with arguing the importance of sex scenes is that most writers think their sex scenes are important.
I don't.
I'm fully aware that the sex scenes in my novels have absolutely no importance at all and could easily be removed without affecting the plot.
If there is sex in the story, it's because the character got horny while I was writing. It's almost never important to the plot and is added simply because the characters are going to refuse to let me write them any further into the story until they's relieved their tensions.
In other words, I'm fully aware that the sex scene isn't important and exists because I wanted to write a pair of dicks.
Of course then there are scenes like this...
This scene doesn't actually show a sex scene, but rather describes a sex scene. It is very much telling instead of showing. The reason is because unlike scenes meant simply to be sex for sex's sake, this scene actually is important to the plot, thus why it is written different.
This would be a sex scene told through exposition, which is a bit none standard, but in this instance, done this way because the scene is being described by a 3rd party who is watching the two lovers.
You see the sex scene itself, intermingled with GhoulSpawn's thoughts, because the reader is seeing his reaction to what is going on.
Likewise this sex scene spans only these 3 paragraphs of text, whereas other sex scenes in the series go on for page after page after page of detail and is told from the perspective of one of the lovers.
Most sex scenes in the Quaraun series are more sensual, but this one, you see as more brisk and gruff, less about trying to titillate the reader and more about GhoulSpawn trying to come to terms with what he is witnessing.
Quaraun and GhoulSpawn are both Elves, but Unicorn, is a Unicorn, and though GhoulSpawn was aware that Quaraun and Unicorn were lovers, just exactly want that means, is finally starting to sink in.
Thus you have a sex scene that is written, not to simply be sex for the sake of sex, but rather a sex scene written to show GhoulSpawn becoming upset over the fact that the man he loves (Quaraun) is not only in love with, but also has sex with, a horse.
Up until this point in the series, GhoulSpawn has made it known that he was interested in Quaraun, but he's held back on doing anything about it because he didn't want to break up Quaraun and Unicorn's relationship. However, Unicorn being a shape shifter, GhoulSpawn always saw him in a Human-like bi-pedal form. This is the first time GhoulSpawn is seeing Unicorn NOT in a Human form, while the lovers are engaged in sex. And the realization that: "OMG! That thing really is an animal" has just hit him, and results in his actions the following day.
His actions the following day being to get Quaraun alone, seduce him, and fuck the daylights out of him, in the first scene of the series where Quaraun and GhoulSpawn have sex.
>>And see, the problem with arguing the importance of sex scenes is that most writers think their sex scenes are important.
So, there you go, an instance where a sex scene actually is important to the plot.
But, as you said, usually sex scenes in the Quaraun series have no plot importance and are just there to be there.
>>My best guess as to how many react to this: To many people it's like hearing a friend discuss how they banged their SO in excruciating detail.
YES.
That's exactly why instead of writing sex scenes, I write scenes of men sitting around describing their sex lives in excruciating detail. You don't know if they are exaggerating their sex lives or not because you didn't see the sex itself, you only have his word on how great of a love god he is.
This actually makes for fun writing, because you can describe the sex in some utterly insane way, and then have another character speak up in the middle of it and say: "That's not physically possible" then have them arguing over what they can and can not do in bed.
I find scenes like this much more interesting because you see more of the guy's personality and how he sees himself, whereas in a sex scenes all you get is A inserted into B, and not much character development.
>>So kinda like dicks when you're writing a sex scene?
I have to comment on this... because... I write Yaoi... yep... that's what I write.
How do I explain this?
There are 75 men in the series... not one of them ever gets his face described. Not once.
Dicks... that's another matter.
I write Yaoi... I can write (and have written) a 20 page essay on the description of one man's testicals, 20 more pages on his foreskin...and then do this same thing for 74 other characters and then write full essay comparing the differences of each.... and all 75 men in my books have very different balls. And they are all described in detail.
There isn't a reader of my novels who doesn't know in detail what Quaraun's genitals look like...including the scars, and the 52 piercings. Including Albert, Philip, and Edward piercings. This guy loves getting his dick pierced. A LOT. Scenes of him getting his dick pierced read like Erotica sex scenes.
I write CBT (Cock and Ball Torture) it's my job to know how to describe every detail possible of my characters' scrotums.
Describing noses, nope. Scrotums, yep.
Quaraun's genitals get described more then most, partly because he is the main character, but also because he has a fetish for penis and testical torture and also because when he's not letting Unicorn do freaky shit to him, he wears an insane amount of various style penis and scrotum and nipple jewelry.
And if you didn't know Quaraun loved sounding. He's addicted to having objects, like unicorn horns and candy canes, inserted into his penis. Which is why he has not 1, but 2 penis piercings which feature a steel rod permanently inserted in his penis.
If you've never seen a Prince Albert peircing, it's a long steel sounding rod, inserted into the uthera, with a hopp ring on the end, that pierces through the top and bottom of the foreskin, holding the ring in place.
Here is what they look like not inserted:
He also wears cock rings, which are these:
My main character, Quaraun, is a Moon Elf who was raised by Demons, so he wears a lot of jewelry, and very flamboyant colours, and is seen by the other Elves as insane because of the way he dresses, thus why they call him "Quaraun the Insane". People (Elves and Humans) tend to tease him and bully him quite a lot because of it, thinking he's a vain, arrogant prissy, not really realizing there is an actual reason behind how he dresses that has nothing to do with vanity.
A list of his piercings/etc are as follows:
Scrotum rings are bar style nipple rings, that are pieced through the thin flesh of the ball sac without piercing the testicles themselves. By completely covering the scrotum with them, it gives the effect of having a disco ball hanging between the man's legs, which is what Quaraun has done.
Here are what those style rings look like:
Penis rings, the type that go through the glans head and sit on top of the slit, covering it, are also known as belly button rings. They look like this:
The style nipple rings that Quaraun wears, have a bar that pierces behind the nipple, making it stand out more, while having a drop charm underneath to highlight the nipple. They look like this:
To describe the jewelry he's wearing, I simply go to Amazon and look for jewelry and describe what it looks like, then describe his reactions to what it feels like to wear them.
Perhaps these scene come off as Erotica in the minds of readers, but, being someone who reads ACTUAL Erotica, I've never seen the Quaraun books as being anything even close to Erotica at all.
When compared to Erotica, the Quaraun books are actually rather tame and very vanilla.
I would like to be there when a person who calls my Quaraun books Erotica, reads some ACTUAL Erotica and gets blown for a major mind fuck when they realize what exactly Erotica ACTUALLY is.
If you think the Quaraun books are Erotica, I HIGHLY recommend you read THESE books, which ARE Erotica, than you come back to me and tell me you STILL think my Quaraun books are Erotica:
The thing you got to remember, the thing people who came here looking for sex, bdsm, and Erotica seem to be overlooking, is you can't write about something you know nothing about. So HOW does anyone expect me to even attempt to write a sex scene at all, is beyond me. Like all authors, I write what I know.
I know murder of children, and I know that no one cares about murdered children. I know saw up children stuffed into trash bags and tossed in ravines, and and I know that no one cares about those sawed up children, that's why their murders to this day walk free. I know suicide and no one cares about the 39 suicides I have witnessed, their swept under a rug and ignored. I know what it feels like to be years old, and held down by 2 uncles while a 3rd smashed a glass bottle and uses it to carvings in your flesh.
People often ask, why I write my characters sleeping on piles hay and fur, why do they never sleep in a bed. Because I don't know what sleeping in a bed feels like. I've never been allowed to sleep in a bed.
I write what I know.
I know what it feels to live for years on end, being allowed to have only 1 salted herring to eat, once every 12 days.
I know what it's like to be so skinny, that I couldn't stand up, because I was so close to death from starvation.
I write so many scenes of characters locked in cages because more them 80% of my life was spent locked in a cage. I don't know how to write about what life outside of rusted wires must be like. I've not been outside of a cage long enough to know. Even now in 2021, I'm still only learned how to eat daily. I've not yet been able to train my body into being able to eat every day.
I'm still learning how to talk. Right now in 2021. I was 42 years old when the surgery to reconstruct my jaw happened. That was only 3 years ago. I've only been able to talk the last 3 years. I've not yet even fully learned how to speak.
>>"Hawkish" is the descriptor all the cool kids are using.
I always see everybody using "Roman" and I've yet to figure out the heck a Roman nose looks like.
>>>Identifying race. Necessary? Called for? Helpful?
.No.
No.
And no.
I don't think it is.
Not for every story at least.
It depends on the story.
In the Quaraun series, the main characters are various types of Gypsies and are based largely off my actual real world family. The characters are heavily effected by Gypsy culture, Gypsy morals, Gypsy rituals, Gypsy religion, etc. The entire plot of the entire series revolves around them being Gypsies and their interactions with non-Gypsies. So in the case of the Quaraun series, race is integral to the plot and the story itself relies on race to function.
But than you look at most of my work that is NOT connected to the Quaraun series, you RARELY see race mentioned, because for those story plots, race doesn't matter. Character descriptions are none existent because what the character looks like has no bearing on the story.
So, I feel that wither or not you need to describe race, gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, is dependant partly on if it's important to the plot and partly on if the authors wants to use it or not.
So authors like writing lots of details, other writers don't. Neither is good or bad, right or wrong, they are just doing what they feel is best for the story in question.
Every story will be different. Do which every way you feel is best for your current story.
That's the beauty of writing a novel.
>>>In readers reception of media, people talk a lot about whitewashing characters, taking implicitly minority characters and making them white. For instance, in The Martian, there is a character named Mindy Park. I, for whatever reason, assumed that she was of Asian decent when I read the book. In the movie, she is played by a white actress. Is this a big deal? Not really. Was I a bit annoyed, expecting something else, yes.
Yes, this annoys me a lot.
It annoys me so much that I dread watching the Witcher Netflix series and may never watch it at all.
The author went WAAAY overboard in describing his characters and I have trouble seeing them as different from how he wrote them.
Just look at how different they are in the games from the novels, can you imagine how much more different the NetFlix series will be?
My feeling is, that if the author gave us a description, we need to stick with it. That's why I go so overboard in being accurate with the CosPlays I sew. I want to stay true to the author's vision.
I HATE it when fans/directors/etc go "It's my creative liberty to make changes"... NO! It's NOT!
If you want to make changes, than create your own damned character.
The author wanted the character to look a specific way and you're a fucking jackass if you think you have the right to change them.
>>>The thing is, a lot of my characters are, in my mind, implictly white. It seems ham-handed to me to go around pointing out race, skin color, or other non-personal identifying characteristics. But I don't want it to seem like there are no characters that are non-white either.
It doesn't matter what you write, readers will always see what they WANT to see anyways. So, just write your characters YOUR way.
I do think there is a trend in far too many writers spending way to much time worrying about sensitivity, inclusion, and offending readers.
Someone is ALWAYS going to feel offended, no matter what you write. So just write it your way and stop worrying about offending people.
Someone is ALWAYS going to feel their race/gender/culture/religion was excluded. I mean they are more then 15,000 religions and twice as many cultures and ethnicities... you'd at minimum have to put 45,000 characters in your story to include everyone. It's not REASONABLE to be all inclusive, nor is it realistic for your inclusion to always ONLY be the black friend or the gay friend... there are 45,000 ethnicities and only 12% of them are black.
Think about THAT for a few minutes.
Just accept that you can not include every culture ad stop worrying about trying to include them all. If you are white and have a Cherokee friend, then write a white main character who has a Cherokee friend. You may not know hat t is to BE Native American, but you DO know what it is to be a friend to one. Write what you know.
Should characters have descriptions of physical appearance, or should you keep it vague?
>>>Should characters have descriptions of physical appearance, or should you keep it vague?.I ask this question out of curiosity from a debate my brother and I are having on the subject. I believe a character should have detailed, or even minimal, descriptions of their physical appearance. My brother believes that you should keep the descriptions as vague as possible, or have none at all. Although I don't quite agree with him, I am interested to see the thoughts and opinions of other writers on the subject.Should characters have descriptions of physical appearance, or not? Let me know what you think!
.
I feel it's not a yes or no, right or wrong answer, to have or not have descriptions.
ALL of my 1st person stories have 100% ZERO description of the main character and none or almost no descriptions of minor characters.
Those are not the Quaraun series, of course.
The Quaraun series fluctuates: the 3 main characters are described a lot, everyone else, only when something needs describing.
Take HellBorne for example. He appears in only 1 Quaraun novel and was sort-of the primary villain. He was an only half-Human wizard, living in a tower, that was actually a lighthouse. People in the tavern and around the village talk about him in fear. But no one ever says what he looks like. Turns out everyone knows OF him, but no one has ever actually seen him.
One day Quaraun and Unicorn are out walking around the town, picking roses by moonlight (a common habit of Quaraun''s) when a blood soaked toddler runs by crying. Quaraun tries to find out what happened to the child and concludes his mother was murdered. Quaraun is interrupted by an elderly man asking if they need help, and Quaraun hands to child to Unicorn and asks him to leave, take the boy somewhere safe.
Quaraun immediately addresses the old man as HellBorne and HellBorne is surprised and wondering how Quaraun knew who he was. To which Quaraun explains everyone in the village is young, 20s to 40. They all described HellBorne as a reclusive old man. Quaraun points out that others in the village are bullied for their disabilities. There had been several scenes of cripples bullied previous to this scene.
Quaraun points out the old man has only one arm, and explains, cripples in this town tend to be reclusive, so he had assumed HellBorne must have a deformity of some sort. and no one else in the village is old, as he is the only old man and his is deformed, Quaraun has assumed - correctly - that he is HellBorne.
It is the ONLY scene describing HellBorne. And it tells us only this:
That's it.
Whatever else HellBorne looks like is left up to the reader's imagination.
And this is how MOST characters in the Quaraun series are described.
A basic old or young or child, male or female, what they are wearing (often vague and only the colour described), and any characteristic that stands out (like Quaraun's Rapunzel length hair or HellBorne's having only one arm or BoomFuzzy's huge dreadlocks or GhoulSpawn's woolly sheep legs and cloven hooved feet).
MOST characters in the Quaraun series are described as HellBorne is and left nearly not described at all.
>>>I'm not a writer, but can I add one thing? If you are going to describe your character, can you do it fairly early on?
>>>One thing I hate, is when I have built my own image of a character in my mind, and then a different description is given 100-200 pages into the book. I find this very jarring, even if it's something as simple as a different hair colour or body shape. It just snaps me out of the story for a while.
Do you know what the sad part is? Most authors DO tell the reader early on what race, gender, etc the character is, and most readers just ignore it.
It's like how there are people who call the Quaraun books Erotica, just because Quaraun bathes nude in the river... yeah, that scene got the novel it was in called Erotica. It was a 2 page scene.
>>>Counterpoint: Please don't give us the encyclopedic description on the character before we've actually been given a reason to care. Enough to get a general picture is fine. If you spend the first ten pages giving me the height, hairstyle, and eye color of every single person in the book, I'll forget because I won't know who I'm supposed to remember.
This is very true for me as a reader as well.
I want the basics at first: hair color, eye color, race (if important to know), and anything that is immediately relevant and can be said all in 3 sentences or less.
Everything else can be woven in bits and pieces, here and there, throughout the rest of the story.
Side Note: I judge people based on how they dress. Real people. Fictional people. Clothes are VERY important to me. You can tell a lot about people by what they wear, what colours they choose. And I WILL be VERY upset if the author DOES NOT tell me what the characters are wearing in full detail, right down to the color of the buttons and how many buttons there are.
And yes, as a writer I DO put massive attention of what my characters wear, and in the Quaraun series, there are not only entire chapters, there are entire novels, that a fully devoted to the topic of Quaraun's pink wardrobe.
Yes, Quaraun's pink dresses are often the primary plot of the story and you will see 200+ pages that do NOTHING but talk about his clothes.
I have very low opinions of people who don't try to look and dress respectable.
The average American wears T and jeans and looks revoltingly disgusting. I have no respect for people who care so little about their outward appearance that they dress like they just rolled out of the welfare bum gutter.
Arrogant?
Vain?
Oh yes. I am that.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, a lot of Quaraun's personality is based off of my very real personality.
Nope.
The word porn is short for pornography.
The word pornography means "OBSESSION", and has nothing to do with sex at all, whatsoever.
Yes, stupid, welfare bum, illiterate Americans who don't know how to use words correctly do use the word porn in a slang manner in reference to sex BUT, that is an urban slang meaning of the word and is NOT the DICTIONARY definition of the word.
This is why someone who is obsessed with food, is said to love FOOD PORN.
The genre Monster Porn means "OBSESSED WITH MONSTERS" and does not mean that the story contains sex. Quite the contrary MOST stories in the Monster Porn genre in fact DO NOT contain sex or romance at all.
Within the Monster Porn genre is a sub-genre called Monster Erotica. THIS is the one you are thinking of. Monster Erotica s all about having sex with monsters. The genre has existed since the 1830s, but did not become mainstream popular until 2013 and the release of Virginia Wade's Cum 4 BigFoot series.
The Quaraun series classifies as Monster Porn, aka "OBSESSED WITH MONSTERS" but it does NOT classify as Monster Erotica aka "SEX WITH MONSTERS".
Also, in 2015, America passed a law banning the sale of books featuring sex with non-humans. Thus why 200k Monster Erotica novels were deleted from Amazon that same year. If you want to write Monster Erotica today, and publish it in America, the law requires the Monster to be a shifter and shapeshift into a Human form during sex scenes.
Yep. The American government regulates what you can and can not put in your sex scenes in your novels.
The Quaraun series in Unicorn Porn, aka Quaraun is obsessed with Unicorns, to the point that when he resurrects is dead lover, he resurrects him as a Unicorn. Thus how BoomFuzzy became a Unicorn.
I always find it hilarious when I get hate mail about Quaraun being white and his lover being black. They rave and rant and throw the N-word around and make is very clear they hate black PEOPLE very much and are upset that Quaraun's lover is a black MAN...
...uhm...
BoomFuzzy the Unicorn is a UNICORN.... you know... a HORSE.
Quaraun's lover is NOT a black MAN, Quaraun's lover is a black HORSE.
Haters hating on black people so much, they didn't noticed it was a black HORSE not a black MAN they were hating on.
But, what can you expect from someone retarded enough to be a bigot?
As Ricky Nelson said: "You can't please everyone, so you might as well please yourself."
So, I was over on Reddit, you like I often am, and found this question. And answered it, like I do. However, the answer I initially gave was a simple generic answer. If you want to read my original answer unaltered, simply click on Reddit's embed feature links which Reddit provides for webmasters to be able to post their answers on their websites, while linking back to the original thread on Reddit (if you didn't know Reddit offered and encouraged the use of this feature, look for it in the "share" features underneath every post, comment, and reply on Reddit).
I am answering random questions today about world building, over on Reddit and decided to take my answers from there and expand upon them even further over here. So that's what this page is. Me rambling on about various aspects of world building techniques I use when writing the Quaraun series. The questions I am answering are embedded here. Clicking the link in the embedded question will take you to the original Reddit page where you can see the original answer along with other people's answers. If you wish to comment, you can do so on the Reddit page where a place to do so is provided.
In any case, as with all of my Reddit answers found on my site here, my original post on Reddit is much shorter then the article here.