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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Translating Pathos Past: Invitation to Read The Silent Bell If you're reading along in a book set in the Middle Ages, and a character is described as paranoid, does that bother you?...

axonfirings.com

Translating Pathos Past: Invitation to Read The Silent Bell

If you're reading along in a book set in the Middle Ages, and a character is described as paranoid, does that bother you?

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

My new Elvish language, Āoslāmi, with grammar and lexicon, is up on Patreon. Uamo, ā thigen neāos! Ceru sathūlle eu sanebēlu... Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild... www.patreon.com/u100... (Note the root "āos", fae, and its use in "neāos", human.) #fiction #fantasy #conlang

patreon.com

Āoslāmi, finished | Jeff Lilly

Āoslāmi, finished by Jeff Lilly on Patreon. Join Jeff Lilly's community for exclusive content and updates.

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Come away, little bird, Sing with us for all time, Among the green trees, in the spring, In the many golden great trees, in the autumn, Rest-songs under the winter snows. Sing with us for all time, Come away, little bird. 2/2

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Working on the Elvish language for my book The Silent Bell. A small song: Uamo, ā uothuic, Omalāll ocumenda ōla tanfi, Ag sasēne lothu, ag saellic, Ag sasēnail yaru mitha, ag saarillsō, Saomalēll rōbā um samases sasam. Omalāll ocumenda ōla tanfi, Uamo, ā uothuic. #fantasy #conlang 1/2

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Sharing great literature with the new generation #EveryoneOnThisTrainIsASuspect www.goodreads.com/bo...

A bearded man in a green hoodie sits by a fireplace, holding a fluffy black cat while reading the book Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect. The cat rests in his lap as he looks down at the open pages.

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Working on a map for my novel The Silent Bell, a Camelot cozy mystery set in Oxford in 1250. Everything in the city will be period accurate, except for the Bell itself. #amwriting #fiction #fantasy #cozymystery #map

Draft map of Oxford 1250 AD, just starting to get sketched in

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I love when cover art can do that kind of quiet work, carrying information that won't fully resolve until the reader is deep in the story. (Started with a colored pencil sketch, then built a mockup in Canva.) 3/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The aesthetic I want is woodcut meets Tarot card, something that feels old and symbolic rather than photographic. There are alchemical symbols in the four corners that point toward a major subplot. 2/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Working on cover art for The Silent Bell, the first in my cozy Arthurian mystery series. The image centers on a huge bronze bell suspended above a well, with Oxford visible in the background. #amwriting #coverart 1/3

Initial sketch of cover art in colored pencil

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

First full draft of my cozy Camelot mystery, The Silent Bell, available for Patreon subscribers. www.patreon.com/u100... Still a lot of revisions to be done! And a glossary! And a map!... (All the really fun stuff) #fiction #fantasy #cozymystery

patreon.com

Full Draft of the Silent Bell | Jeff Lilly

Full Draft of the Silent Bell by Jeff Lilly on Patreon. Join Jeff Lilly's community for exclusive content and updates.

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Yesterday I completed the first draft of my Camelot cozy mystery "The Silent Bell" (formerly the Changeling in the Tree). For fun, the first and final sentences: - "The fey girl slammed the heavy book upon the table." - "She couldn’t imagine ever leaving." And a possible draft of the cover art?

Watercolor sketch of a stone village well with a wooden frame and bell poised above it, set among shrubs with medieval village in background. Illegible Latin characters carved into its edge.

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Reposted by Jeff Lilly

Brian Weaver @brianitguy.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

"But the Silmarils in the crown on Morgoth's head blasted forth suddenly with a radiance of white flame" Always found this image of Morgoth quite disconcerting Great bit of art of Luthien as Thuringwethil before Morgoth by Lidia Postma @timbolton.bsky.social #TolkienTrewsday #Silmarillion #Tolkien

Luthien before Morgoth art by Lidia Postma

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Seahorse / selkie drawn for my journal last week.

Selkie drawn with ink and colored pencils.

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

A heron across the water hunted without much luck... The mossy rock under the old birch was dry, although the river had come right up to it, leaving its verge dark and slippery and edged with small sticks. She sat down, and put her feet in the cold water, and listened to the singing world. 3/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

...her shoes in her hands to protect them from the sopping grass, and found the river running high and brown and fast between the reeds... The frogs had a lot to say about it. As did the sparkfeathers, three of them arguing in the hawthorn over a drowned insect. 2/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

A sample from my Camelot cozy mystery I wrote yesterday. Quite pleased with it, ngl: #amwriting #fantasy #cozymystery The storm had scraped the world clean. Agnes came down the to bank of the Ysa a little after dawn... 1/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Ceruenand sasiluou rīdu. I am the one who walks the path. Building a language from scratch is restorative when the systems around you are broken. 2/2

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

An exhausting day of American healthcare: a doctor who didn't inspire confidence, three phone calls to determine whether a specialist is covered by our insurance (verdict still out), an hour in line at the pharmacy. But then... conlanging. #conlang #amwriting 1/2

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Almost done with my cozy Arthurian mystery serial. The court of Camelot has gathered in St. Mary's in Oxford to hear the killer confess, and all that remains is the King's judgment and, as cozies require, a quiet riverside conversation between the sleuth and her friends. #cozymystery #fantasy

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It's based on a campus statue called Silent Sam, said to fire his gun if a virgin walked by. 2/2

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Renamed my Camelot cozy mystery from "The Changeling in the Tree" to "The Silent Bell." The Bell wasn't in my original outline; but once it came in, it kept drawing other elements toward it until it became essential to both plot and theme. #AmWriting #Fantasy 1/2

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

New Patreon post for subscribers: a sample poem in my new language of the fae, Āoslāmi, with some notes on why I love it. Brēfe sō pod hila rāduand, brēfe sō pod hila garbānd, Brēfe sō pod hila uidānd eu ag sanol pod poūnand.

patreon.com

A Verse in Āoslāmi | Jeff Lilly on Patreon

A Verse in Āoslāmi by Jeff Lilly on Patreon. Join Jeff Lilly's community for exclusive content and updates.

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I genuinely cannot tell if this is a bit. 3/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

In the same book that spends most of its pages feeling sorry for orcs because of how Sauron treats them. Sauron has been attacking neighbors without provocation since the Second Age. "Multicultural" doesn't apply when the cultures are enslaved. 2/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Tally's Mismeasure of Orcs defends the Mouth of Sauron's demands (evacuation of Gondor and Rohan, eternal tribute, recognition of Sauron as absolute overlord) as "logical and reasonable" given the West's aggression. #tolkien #fantasy 1/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Went jogging Monday, and I ran right past a Douglas squirrel, which was spotted by my wife, who was, wisely, just enjoying a walk. #JoggingLife #DouglasSquirrel

static.klipy.com

Ann Perkins: Jogging is The Worst!

Alt: Ann Perkins: Jogging is The Worst!

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Reposted by Jeff Lilly

J. Alan Henning @jalanhenning.dice.camp.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

Inspired by Tamarian, here’s a modest proposal for a mythometaphorical conlang: Intermythic English. troypress.com/intermythic-english #StarTrek #Blaugust #conlang #Tamarian

troypress.com

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

My solution: the murderer escapes custody, and meets a fitting fate at the hands of... other folk. I won't say more than that. But the Matter of Britain is full of powers that aren't bound by the king's court, and some of them have their own ideas about justice. 3/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The guilty party is unmasked (usually via confession, avoiding a messy trial), handed over to the proper authorities, and the world order clicks back into place. But King Arthur IS the proper authority, and his justice involves things like hangings. That is not cozy. That is grim. 2/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Realized I have a problem with my cozy mystery set in Camelot. What happens at the end, when the murderer is brought before the king? In a standard cozy, justice is tidy and comforting... #cozymystery #amwriting, #fantasy #writing 1/3

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

It's elusive, but you can see its shadow in the data without being able to look at it directly. For a conlanger inventing a fey tongue, what could be better? The fey should sound like something half-remembered. #conlang #worldbuilding #Arthurian #fantasy #writing 4/4

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

And for the phonological and structural base, I'm looking at the Goidelic Substrate hypothesis: the idea that something pre-Celtic, something we can only partially reconstruct from loanwords and structural oddities, underlies Irish and Scottish Gaelic. 3/4

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Which meant I needed to build it. So now I'm designing proto-Elvish and five daughter languages, one for each of the main fey peoples in Welsh folklore. 2/4

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Working on the penultimate chapter of my Camelot cozy murder. I realized I need two spells in the language of the Gwragedd Annwn, the water-fey, the ones who become the Ladies of the Lake. Which meant I needed to know what that language sounded like. 1/4

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I feel like the ability of LLMs to assist people with language barriers is something that's too often left out of the discourse about AI. Which is not our fault. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google could all be putting disabilities front and center in their marketing.

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Reposted by Jeff Lilly

Mignon Fogarty @grammargirl.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

For my sociolinguistics friends. :)

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

So, no, it's not about race or class, even though Tolkien sometimes codes their speech that way. Uuuugh this might have to be a blog post. -- Which means, to be fair to Tally, I have to go back and finish the book. *sigh 5/5

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

They are happens when a being surrenders its will entirely, when the spark of personhood is extinguished through corruption or despair. This is why, while they can speak, and have a kind of "will" (although it is not *free* will, since it is compulsion), they can be killed without remorse. 4/5

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

What are they, then? I think they are something like hungry ghosts, or perhaps better, the Navajo chindi (the residual evil impulses left after a person dies). 3/5

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

...and what's there is consistently lifted out of context or misread. I'm not saying Tolkien was without blind spots when it came to race and class. He definitely did. But the specific claim that orcs are a racist or classist projection is just unsupported. 2/5

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I had to put down Robert Tally's "Mismeasure of Orcs" partway through. His thesis (that Tolkien's orcs encode racism and classism) is pursued with genuine dedication, but the evidence keeps coming up short... #tolkien #orcs #fantasy #mythology #worldbuilding #middleearth 1/5

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

POV: you've generated "Nestŕgadhŕ" in your conlang, it means Destroyer, you're pretty sure it's from a Spanish root, but you cannot for the life of you remember which. #conlang

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Registration opens today for Write on the Sound in Edmonds. One of the Pacific Northwest's best literary conferences, and I'll be there this fall. www.edmondswa.gov/go... #WritingCommunity

edmondswa.gov

Write on the Sound

Home page for WOTS

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Just came up with ideas for three more books in the Merlin Murders series. My muse plans to keep me busy well into old age, it seems.

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I'm 14.5 chapters into "Changeling in the Tree," the cozy Arthurian murder mystery I'm serializing on Patreon. 1.5 chapters to go. Targeting one week to finish drafting, revise, design a cover, and put it up for sale. The calendar WILL BEND TO MY WILL. #amwriting

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

I've let querying stagnate on my completed near-future literary thriller, "Axon, Inc." -- three queries in April, one in May, one rejection -- because every time I sit down to research agents, I end up working on the next book instead. Probably a mistake? #amwriting #amquerying

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Jeff Lilly @druidjournal.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

An experiment with colorizing one of my illustrations for Crown of Crows. Yes/no? #illustrations

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