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It’s been a minute {{firstname_title | Valthakai}}, autumn undertone-havers, pumpkin spice lovers, and leaf rakers…
Among the High Holidays, family visits, personal health issues, and a new job, it’s been incredibly busy for both the Crone and her vessel; here’s what you may have missed.
Livestreaming
After some gentle bullying from resident Discord members, Erry and Lav, we are now fully set up on Twitch and repping our proper new Partner status.
Our next goal: The Bleed Purple Award Milestones. Literal trophies for hitting 5, 50, and 250 million cumulative watch hours on our channel.
Check it out and throw us a follow.
Also, subs receive Discord access, ad-free viewing, and a merch discount!
CroneCon 2026
It’s finally happening, guys!
This Thursday, the Discord and I are headed to Toronto to witness either the most elaborate long-haul ritual sacrifice of a content creator in living memory and/or have a lovely time among the maple syrup lovers.
Let’s find out!
Short Stories
Obviously, our schedule with Tales of the Crone has been… wrecked, to say the least, but we hope to get back on track this week.
Also, (and to the surprise of the Discord members reading this), we’re going to introduce some other works that won’t necessarily exist in the Orrery.
Longform Content
While our shortform postings should resume at their usual frequency, our longform scripting and development will be on the back burner because of our upcoming trips.
Don’t worry, you will get more of My Roommate the Crone and whatever other ideas Daniel can throw together in his apartment.
The New Posting Style
So, it has technically been a month, which is why this was emailed out rather than posted on the site; however, more than a few people asked if they had missed anything in their inbox, so I wanted to include a reminder and a second poll.
To keep email inboxes uncluttered, we planned to set three of four posts per month to web-only and send a single monthly email to summarize and expand on them.
If this sounds good to you, great, but if you’d prefer the old method, let us know below.
Welcome back.
Enjoy!
Love,
The Crone and Daniel
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Daniel’s Books of the Month
The world is full of the Unknown.
There’s the quantifiable that’s contained, cataloged, and kept separate from the rest of humanity.
And then, there are the memetically bizarre.
Creatures that are unmemorable as an evolutionary adaptation, ideas that spread like viruses, and concepts that must remain forgotten for humanity's sake.
This secondary class of Unknowns falls under the purview of the Antimemetics Division… or they would if it existed.
Murder is a small price to pay for the sake of your sister.
Or at least, that’s Elle’s logic after she makes a deal with the devil to save Liney.
As the lighthouse keeper, Elle must now steer men to their deaths, paying in blood for the fiendish bargain.
But when a survivor washes ashore, and worse, starts to get closer to Liney, Elle is faced with an impossible decision.
Sacrifice her soul, or break her sister’s heart.
Following the tale of his beloved hero, Sir Una Everlasting, Owen Mallory finds himself thrown into the past alongside her.
Their stories are intertwined, retelling the same story over and over, and not everything in the history books is accurate.
Nothing quite captures the real deal, but if they want a better ending to this tale, they’ll have to rewrite history itself.
Simple enough, right?
Dan’s Rants
I Don’t Give a SHIT What Tropes You’re Writing
I say this with love to everyone who's ever reached out to me about their own novels.
I say this with love to every content creator who has ever spoken about a book on their page, vlog, blog, or in their fevered visions from the beyond.
I don’t give a shit about the tropes in your novel.
Well, not that I don’t care completely, but it shouldn’t be a selling point!
When a book first catches my eye, I only want to know the stakes.
What will the characters be dealing with, in the least spoiler-y way possible?
Slapping enemies-to-lovers on the cover means at least one major plot point is already a done deal, and it makes me far less likely to read it.
I’m not denying that readers nowadays lack… critical processing skills, and may, perhaps, need to be spoonfed certain details. I’m asking you to make those people suffer on my behalf.
If they can’t spot a trope right in front of them, leave ‘em behind; it’s for the best, I promise. You don’t want to curtail your own writing for the person least likely to understand it in the first place.
On the opposite end of that, it’s YOUR BLOODY JOB to make certain relationships among your characters apparent.
If they go from “She smells citrusy” to banging so hard the walls peel within three pages (actual novel I DNF’d), you haven’t laid enough groundwork to justify any relationship, much less a known trope.
It is literally your only responsibility to pace and establish connections among your characters well enough to justify any ensuing dynamic, and whatever you choose, whether it’s a combination of tropes or some archaic alternative, I’ll figure it out.
My frustration with this latest trend is up there with my whole “homosexuality for the sake of gay” rant that I wrote a long time ago.
There’s a massive difference between a book summary stating “Sapphira must traverse the stars for clues behind her wife’s disappearance” and “Sapphira, a gay, must lesbianly traverse the stars in her cosmic Subaru in order to find her wife (a woman).”
I know I’m exaggerating, but I also know you know what I mean.
A character’s most important facet should not be their sexuality (barring distinctive stories and time periods) any more than a book’s most important facet should be the specific tropes within it!
In both cases, the reader should be able to figure it out, and the author should be able to establish it without telling us!
Boom.
Mic Drop.
Ow, my foot.
Daniel out.
