Snowflake Challenge #8
Jan. 15th, 2025 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
florianschild
Challenge #8
In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
Here we goooooo!
The Rifter - Fandom Promo
Elevator Pitch for the Series
The Rifter is an epic portal fantasy featuring dual POV gay MCs, slow-burn romance, incredibly creative world building, and a mysterious plot full of twists and questions that will keep you confused but very interested.
Logistics - How Do I Get My Hands on This?
The Rifter is a book series of 10 novellas by Ginn Hale. The series is currently only available in ebook - either from Amazon.com or Weightless Books (DRM free). They are published by the indie publisher Blind Eye Books. You can buy the whole set or you can purchase each volume individually (although I'd recommend buying the whole set because it's a bit more affordable and you are going to want to read the whole thing because it's amazing).
Spoiler-Free Summary
It's a little tricky to discuss this series without spoilers but I'm going to try and pique your interest while being vague and mysterious.
The Rifter begins with John Toffler and his strange roommate Kyle. John is an ecology major in a grad program and Kyle is a milkman. Or so he says. They live together in a rented house in the Pacific Northwest, but John is kind of weirded out by his tattooed, scarred, and bandaged roommate who disappears often and carries knives on his person at all times. John is also a little confused about his roommate because he happened to spot him at a bathhouse, but Kyle disappeared before John could say anything to him. After that incident, John hasn't seen Kyle for weeks. Just when he's pondering having to pay Kyle's half of the rent, he finds a really weird looking letter addressed to Kyle in the mail containing a very strange looking key.
Meanwhile Kyle - who is actually called Kahlil - is dodging fire and gunsmoke in his home world of Basawar, carrying on his back a skeleton of living bones that speak to him as they make their escape. After narrowly escaping, Kahlil and the bones travel through a searing portal of white light to land on his bed upstairs in the house he shares with John.
So that's where we start, but things quickly spiral way out of control for both John and Kahlil. To tell you more would start to get into spoiler territory.
The Fandom
Most of the fandom currently lives on Tumblr and Discord.
There are quite a few talented fanartists who have done Rifter fanart. You can see some that I've reblogged on tumblr (as well as other Rifter content) at my blog: Notes from Nayeshi. I don't update there anymore but there's a pretty good backlog.
There are currently 14 works for The Rifter on AO3 - including a few by yours truly. Check them out!
There is a dreamwidth community for
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ginnhale that is not currently active, but I have some plans to crosspost my own meta from tumblr over there soon so if you're interested in reading my overly analytical thoughts about the series you can subscribe for future content.There's also a subreddit that is occasionally active - you can find that here.
And a discord where some people hang out. Invite here.
10 Reasons to Read The Rifter
1. You enjoy being dropped into the middle of a plot that's a little confusing but you trust the author to make it work.
2. You want slow-burn romance that features lots of conflict with the world around them but never with each other.
3. You like it when your faves get put through the absolute ringer - suffering abounds.
4. If you collect books, the paperbacks are out of print and hard to find. It's a rewarding experience to snag one when they do occasionally go up for sale.
5. You enjoy super creative world building that includes a fictional language and marsupial weasels.
6. You'd like to support a wonderful lesbian indie author who's entire social media presence consists of beautiful pictures of nature.
7. You like reading survival stories with hyper-competent protagonists. John's not Bear Grylls, but he is a rugged outdoorsman and it helps him survive in the very crapsack world he ends up in.
8. If you enjoy a friendship-version of Grumpy/Sunshine, John and his best friends have that kind of vibe going.
9. The quality of the writing, especially given that this is basically self-published, is incredible. Ginn Hale is just so talented and criminally unknown.
10. The fandom is truly one of the nicest and most welcoming and fun I've ever been a part of. It's obviously very tiny, but it feels big because the fans are so lovely and passionate and have so much to say about this series. I've made my best fandom friends in this fandom and I really want more of us to have that same experience!
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 01:39 pm (UTC)I've never heard of A.M. Dellamonica, but I just looked her up. Her covers are gorgeous and I'm definitely easily swayed by a beautiful cover! Do you recommend her?
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-25 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-28 06:47 pm (UTC)I listened to a preview of the audiobook and I agree it was not too bad considering. If you want to, you can join the discord while you're reading. There's a special spoiler-free channel for first-time readers. :)
no subject
Date: 2025-03-07 04:09 am (UTC)