Finn Longman's Blog, page 6

TBA Readalong Starting This Sunday!

Hi friends,

This is just a heads-up to let you know that I’ll be starting the readalong of The Butterfly Assassin on Sunday 17th September. This was an idea I proposed in my last post, following the timeline of the book to discuss each chapter/scene in real time. It will be running at a fairly breakneck place for the first three weeks, as the first half of the book all goes down in pretty close succession, but we’ll have a little more breathing room after that.

For those who plan to join u...

Blogging At The End Of The (Twitter) World

I have been on Twitter since 2009. It was a very different place in those days. There was no retweet button, but retweets existed, in the form of copy-and-pasting somebody’s tweet with the words “RT @[their username]” beforehand. You couldn’t upload pictures, either; you’d have to upload them to TweetPic and include a link. The …

Publish and Persist

This post requires some introduction, because I originally wrote it in late March, and left it in my drafts until now. This was mostly because I was afraid of backlash, whether in the form of direct harassment on social media, or in the form of not getting the PhD funding I was then waiting for. …

On Learning Irish (Slowly)

A couple of weeks ago, Timehop reminded me that it was eight years since I bought my first Irish-language book: Ulchabháin Óga, Gabriel Rosenstock’s translation of Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson’s Owl Babies. This was one of my favourite picture books as a small child, and is often quoted in my family, so when I …

The Early Modern Irish For “Stress Relief”

(Disclaimer so that nobody gets their hopes up: I don’t think there is an early modern Irish phrase for “stress relief”. If there is, I haven’t yet encountered it. This blog post will not give you that information. I apologise if that’s why you’re here.) At the weekend I resumed one of my most niche …

Pronouns and the Twelfth-Century Werewolf Renaissance

Below is the text of a thread I tweeted on 17th May 2023. I’ve copied it here for a few reasons: firstly, because I know that Twitter threads are not the most accessible format but I would rather people don’t use third-party Thread Reader apps which will monetise my content with their ads; secondly, because …

Crime, Pronouns, and the Twelfth-Century Werewolf Renaissance

Below is the text of a thread I tweeted on 17th May 2023. I’ve copied it here for a few reasons: firstly, because I know that Twitter threads are not the most accessible format but I would rather people don’t use third-party Thread Reader apps which will monetise my content with their ads; secondly, because …

Lament, Protest, and Letting Men Cry

This Wednesday, I attended a symposium about Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, ‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’. Even if you don’t know much else about early modern Irish literature, you might be familiar with this lament if you’ve read A Ghost in the Throat, which revolves around the act of translating it. Before this week, that …

To Watch The Year Turning

From September 2020 until November 2021, I lived alone in a small one-bedroom flat in Cork. I could count on my fingers the number of people I knew in the city — indeed, the country — and for the majority of the time I lived there, none of them were allowed in my house. This …

Matters of Books and Life

Today is International Asexuality Day, which seems like an appropriate excuse to give a few pieces of news and updates. (Because I am ace and so is the protagonist of The Butterfly Assassin, in case that wasn’t abundantly clear from context.) A Matter of Art and Death I’ve been hard at work on a short …