Elves are highly adaptable to their local terrain, hence the differing characteristics of Wood Elves and Sea Elves. In more recent times this adaptability has given rise to newer Elf types such as Mall Elves, Cubicle Elves, Hardware Store Lighting Section Elves, Skate Park Elves, and Highway Elves.
“As we read a story (let’s imagine) we’re dragging along a cart labeled ‘Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing’ (TICHN). As we read, we’re noticing–surface-level, plot-type things ('Romeo really seems to like Juliet’), but quieter things too: aspects of the language, say ('Tons of alliteration in the first three pages’), structural features ('It’s being told in reverse chronological order!’), patterns of color, flashbacks or flash-forwards, changes in point of view. I’m not saying that we’re consciously noticing. Often, we’re not. We’re 'noticing’ with our bodies and our quality of attention and may overtly 'notice’ only afterward, as we analyze the story.
What we’re adding to our TICHN cart are, let’s say, 'non-normative’ aspects of the story–aspects that seem to be calling attention to themselves through some sort of presentational excess.
If you closely observe your reading mind, you’ll find that as you encounter an excess in a story (some non-normative aspect), you enter into a transactional relationship with the writer. When Kafka writes, 'Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams…changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin,’ you don’t say, 'No, he didn’t, Franz,’ and throw the book across the room. You add 'impossible incident: man just turned into bug’ to your TICHN cart, then enter a period of 'waiting to see.’ What’s Kafka going to do with that? Your reading state has been affected. You are, let’s say, 'beginning to resist.’ You have 'registered a mild objection.’ But we readers will tolerate all kinds of reading states, even negative-seeming ones: periods of boredom, of perplexity, periods during which we are really hating Character X and wondering if the writer knows just how much. What we are saying, essentially, is: 'Well, Franz, that bug thing is excessive but I’m going to allow it. Proceed. What are you going to do with that thing I couldn’t help noticing? I hope you’re going to make it pay off.’
When a writer subjects us to a non-normative event–a physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turn–he pays a price: our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan–if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he 'meant to do that’)–then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.
The goal is not to keep the TICHN cart empty and thus write a 'perfectly normal’ story. A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.”
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, pp. 84-85
Looking at American English vowel mergers, and I’ve finally found one which I do *not* have:
“Card–cord merger The merger is found in some Caribbean English accents, in some West Country accents in England, and in some accents of Southern American English.”
Demons who obey human commands, but instead of being absolutely controlled or compelled by the signs, salt lines and sigils that people draw, they treat it like the rules of a sport game - they’d never injure another demon while doing it, but they’ll humour the humans and have fun coming up with rules-lawyering their “anti-demon” wards purely for the challenge.
Like imagine if you were suddenly summoned by a gang of squirrels who offer you a bag of sugar, a bottle of whiskey and a request: find this one specific squirrel and use your mighty kicking power to punt him across a room. His home is warded by a shit ton of silly string but we have full confidence in your magnificient power.
And then you go to this other squirrel’s location and find his fortress being protrcted with a lot of silly string, glitter, and the neighbour’s 6-year-old kid who takes this a lot more seriously than you do. He, too, is vulnerable to silly string (you respect this rule) but immune to glitter due to not giving a shit. Your own aversion to getting glitter on you is very real. And to the squirrels, of course, whatever wild drama they’ve got going on is a battle of good and evil, and a matter of life and death.
