... having been breathed out

Yuletide Dear Author letter

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 21:07:57 GMT

Hello Yuletide writer!

Note up-front: I'm requesting quite a few one-minute or ephemeral fandoms this year, so even if you match with me on a book or show, take a look at the tiny ones! (I include links under the fandom-specific cuts.) You might find something to pique your interest.

With that out of the way, thank you so much for making me a thing! I'm sure I'll love it. Particular loves of mine include: nuanced queerness and queer folks interacting with each other with nuance; formidable yet complex women being formidable and complex together; human trainwrecks colliding (either humorously or tragically); sex writing that is a character study and/or ratchets up the narrative tension more than it resolves it; unreliable narrators; atmospheric settings; lovely turns of phrase; strong narrative voices, and weird narrative tricks.

DNWs: My huge, body-horror-level squick is pregnancy and babies; please avoid them if at all possible. Also please avoid animal cruelty or death. My feelings about the institution of marriage are complex and fairly critical: feel free to include it, but I don't much fancy it as a prepackaged "happy ending"; more something that the involved parties continue to negotiate and evolve inside of as it goes on, much like any other relationship. Other than that, I'm up for pretty much whatever, including dub-con or even non-con as long as they're acknowledged as such within the context of the story. I write a ton of porn and I love to read it, but it's in no way required or expected, so just follow your muse!

Fandom-specific ramblings (for some reason DW would not let me put the "Karen & Wayne" section of my For All Mankind prompt under a cut... no idea why, sorry about that):

( Cotillion - Georgette Heyer: Freddy Standen, Kitty Charing, Lord Ledgerwood )

( Miss Marple (TV 1984): Shopper with hat in opening credits, Bareheaded shopper in opening credits, Woman at the window in opening credits, Curate in opening credits )

( France's language watchdog has told government officials to use French fetish terms... (News Satire) )

( Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre: Bill Haydon, Jim Prideaux, Connie Sachs )

( The Unequal Marriage (Painting) - Vasily Pukirev: First Wife's Ghost, Bride )

For All Mankind: Karen Baldwin, Tracy Stevens, Wayne Cobb

For All Mankind, though small, is currently my biggest or main fandom, so if you matched with me on this... hi, it's likely we already know each other, haha. In case we don't, here are some past prompts I've made relating to Karen, Wayne, & Tracy.

Karen & Wayne:
Karen & Wayne's friendship is my favorite, FAVORITE relationship in this show full of amazing rich relationships, and I just want SO much more of it. Peeks into how it developed over the years; key moments of self-disclosure from one to the other, helping each other deal with trauma. And also lighter moments: random non-space-related activities they might do together, for example. Do they introduce each other to new things? Do they try out together trends/activities that are new for both of them? What little rituals do they develop together (smoking weed, obviously LOL, but in addition to that)? Do they ever fight, & if so what about? How do they make up?

I'd also love more fic where Wayne has his own internal hangups & issues, rather than being solely an emotionally intelligent anchor for Karen. What is he getting out of this friendship? How does she help him as well as the other way around? What does Wayne find challenging about his marriage or other aspects of his life, that he discusses with Karen & gets some perspective on?

DNW: AUs, Any developing sexual or romantic relationship between Karen & Wayne.

( Karen & Tracy or Karen/Tracy )

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Ladies Bingo

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 07:23:43 GMT

I got a bingo card from these lovely people. Fun! Currently working on the "Chaos and Order" square.

Huddle for Warmth	Illness	Music	Radiation	Sanctuary / Safe Places
Mystery	Cool Colours	The Game's Afoot	Virtual Reality	Zealandia
First person narration	Supernatural Happenings	Wild Card	Mixed Media	We're Surrounded!
Getting Physical: touching, hugging and cuddling	Pre- Slash / Femslash / Het	Chaos and Order	Icy Politeness	That Moment (incident / chapter / episode) in detail
Injury	Places of Work	Seduction	Last Times / Farewells	Potatoes

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Yuletide Dear Author letter

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 04:34:59 GMT

Hello fantastic Yuletide author!

Thank you so much for making me a thing! I'm sure I'll 100% love it. I am a more-or-less lesbian bibliophile, originally from the Pacific NW and now resident in southern California. Copy/pasting the following from previous letters:

Particular loves of mine include: formidable yet complex women being formidable and complex together; human trainwrecks colliding (either humorously or tragically); sex writing that is emotionally nuanced and/or ratchets up the narrative tension more than it resolves it; unreliable narrators; atmospheric settings; lovely turns of phrase; strong narrative voices, and weird narrative tricks.

Squicks: My huge, body-horror-level squick is pregnancy and babies; please avoid them if at all possible. Also I'd love it if you'd avoid animal cruelty or death. As you might infer from my categories below, my feelings about the institution of marriage are also pretty critical & non-romantic, so feel free to include it but I don't much fancy it as a happy ending. Other than that, I'm up for pretty much whatever, including dub-con or even non-con as long as they're acknowledged as such within the context of the story. I write a ton of porn and I love to read it, but it's in no way required or expected, so just follow your muse!

Feel free to disregard fandom-specific ramblings; but if you're interested, I've gone into a bit more detail below. In previous years I've erred on the side of too few fandoms and they've had a hard time matching me, so this year I'm trying to spread myself a bit more broadly. This means I can't go into great detail about every fandom I'm requesting, but I've tried to do at least a little brainstorming about each one. I've divided the fandoms into three categories for easier reference.

HAUNTINGS; EXORCISMS

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson (Theodora, Eleanor)
Eleanor's evolving attachment to Theodora is so sudden, and conflicted, and eerie. I definitely don't want an everyone-lives fix-it of Hill House, but would love a missing scene or expansion of included scene between these two. What happened before or after the scene where they're clutching hands in the dark and cold between their two beds? Was there a moment Eleanor felt weird about the suddenness of romping through the forest two seconds after meeting Theo, then indulging in mutual tender face-touching by the stream? Were there moments Eleanor witnessed after she became the ghost/spirit of Hill House, that shed light for her or the reader on what happened earlier? Since all we get in canon is Eleanor's POV: what was Theodora thinking during one of the scenes narrated in the book?

Carmilla (Carmilla, Carmilla's mother)
The more times I read this novel, the more times I'm puzzled & intrigued by the relationship between Carmilla & her "mother." Are we talking about her human mother? The woman who made her into a vampire? Are these one & the same? If it's her human mother, how the fuck did their relative situation come about? I'd love some kind of Carmilla prequel, sequel, or missing scene exploring their dynamic. NB: I am not squicked by "incest" in this context (are they even actual flesh & blood mother & daughter?) but it's only one way of many interesting ones that I can picture their relationship.

The Waste Land - TS Eliot (Typist)
I first read The Waste Land when I was in middle school (LOL I made my own fun) and I remember reading the section about the typist and thinking "Mmm that sounds so relaxing." Having your own apartment, with a phonograph? Putting clothes to dry on the radiator? Taking a lover, then kicking him out of your place and putting on a record? In many subsequent readings I came to understand that for Eliot the typist and the young man carbuncular are a sort of nightmare visitation from the (to him) inherently mediocre and brainless lower-middle class, whose very existence threatens the ongoing power and quality of Art. But I don't buy into that. Not saying the typist is living her best life, necessarily, but she's doing OK and she can think for herself. Any kind of non-concescending moment of joy or satisfaction for her would be lovely.

MARRIAGE, HUH? GOOD LUCK WITH THAT

The Unknown Ajax (Anthea, Hugo)
Hoo boy, Anthea, you're lucky he's rich and in love with you (I guess), because this man is going to tease you MERCILESSLY until the literal end of your days. Like don't get me wrong, I find him intensely charming to read, and I don't necessarily think they'll be unhappy, but I would not change places with Anthea for any consideration. I'd love a vignette from some years into their marriage, involving Hugo's loving yet infuriatingly unceasing teasing and Anthea's coping strategies.

Jeeves & Wooster (Bertie, Honoria, Jeeves) I am weak for the dynamic of sporty dyke Honoria and effete fop Bertie maturing into a mutually supportive (take your pick): friendship; fake relationship to pacify various aunts; lavender marriage in which Honoria romances an endless string of female tennis players while Bertie and Jeeves chill at home; other similar dynamic that is only now occurring to you. I think Honoria is the threatened suitor with whom (when they're not being forced into matrimony with one another) Bertie is able to have the most fun; they seem equally ill-suited to husbandly and wifely duties, and equally committed to their various flavors of queer existence. I'd love to see any kind of scenario where they help each other out with those existences, and enjoy each others' company. (As a note, I perceive Jeeves & Bertie in some kind of committed long-term emotional relation to one another, but whether or not it's sexual and/or romantic is up in the air. I can definitely see it either way.)

Anne of Green Gables (TV 1985 & 1987) (Katherine Brooke, Marilla Cuthbert)
Several of Anne's emotional conquests throughout the course of these stories are dedicated spinsters, including her adoptive mother Marilla—this is a marked contrast with Anne's own fervid romanticism and socially-sanctioned fertile marriage. I'm curious for more detail on what these various spinsters made of one another. When Katherine Brooke visited Green Gables, was there some kind of recognition between her and Marilla, in which Anne wasn't included or which wasn't accessible to Anne? What did they make of one another?

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Many endings can be happy, you know?

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 04:18:25 GMT

I've been ruminating over the past few days about the current state of, hm—narratives around queerness, traditional romance, and happy endings, I guess? Particularly vis-a-vis (1) the section of greywash's year-in-review writing post where she talks about procreation and the institution of marriage in post-S4 Magicians fandom, and (2) this making-of video in which some of the stars of Schitt's Creek discuss, among other things, Dan Levy's personal relationship to marriage. (At least... I think that's what they're discussing.)

My TL;DR here is: I desperately crave a paradigm shift toward a greater diversity in what we as a culture consider "happy" endings, queer and otherwise; and the continued forcible emphasis on traditional romantic relationships (+ weddings, sometimes + kids) as the only acceptable marker of happy endings makes me sad and alienated. None of which is exactly breaking news, ahahaha, but I'm still going to go on about it! At some length! So. Buckle up, if that's your thing.

( Breathedout Goes On At Some Length )

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Passchendaele Ficlet Cycle: Masterpost & Reflections

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 20:36:42 GMT

As I mentioned last night, throughout 2019 I wrote a cycle of 15 1000-word (or slightly less) ficlets as character and relationship studies for my larger novel project about WWI-era Canadians. I finished the last three ficlets yesterday, squeaking under the wire for the challenge that spawned this idea, so I thought I’d cross-post a little masterpost to various platforms, with links and reflections.

The ficlet cycle is structured around three F/F relationship arcs, each with four ficlets each in alternating POV, then a plus-one:

Rebecca Landry (Thompson)/Katherine Llewellyn (Murray) arc. Rebecca is my POV character for the war-front plotline of the larger novel, when she will be in her 50s and recently widowed, but these ficlets are largely set in her girlhood, before her marriage. It was extremely helpful to spend some time with baby Rebecca, since by 1916/1917 she will remember these events very differently, and they will have come mean very different things to a version of her with 30 more years life experience.

Cusp (1875, Rebecca POV)
Hue (1877, Katherine POV)
Fête (1878, Rebecca POV)
Pearls (1882, Katherine POV)
+1: Shelter (1924, Katherine POV, Katherine/her artist co-teacher Matty)

Emma Walsh Thompson/Maisie Thompson Adams arc. Emma is my POV character for the home-front plotline of the larger novel, which didn’t exist in my original outline and which I created this year explicitly because I fell so hard in love with Emma, Maisie, and their adulterous frenemies-as-lovers dynamic. (For those tracking the surnames: Maisie is Rebecca’s daughter; Emma is married to Rebecca’s elder son.) If it had resulted in nothing else, this challenge would have been MORE than worth it for the time it gave me with Emma and Maisie, and how much the Emma arc enriched the project as a whole.

And sympathy (October 1915, Emma POV)
Attire (November 1915, Maisie POV)
Bind (February 1916, Emma POV)
Lorn (June 1916, Maisie POV)
+1: Soiree (May 1907, Emma POV, Emma/her pre-War live-in girlfriend Annie)

Hazel Cameron/Louise Macdonald (b/w Hazel Cameron & Yves Ouellet) arc. Neither Hazel nor Louise are POV characters in the novel, but Hazel is a major character who becomes a friend and centering influence for Rebecca during her time at the front; knowing Hazel and observing Hazel’s BFF-ship with Yves and abortive passion for Louise helps recontextualize various things in Rebecca’s own life. It was super helpful to spend some time in both Hazel’s and Louise’s heads, and in particular (though this was a little tangential to the femslashficlets challenge) to start to explore the dynamic between Hazel and Yves.

Foolishness (March 1917, Louise POV)
Barynya (May 1917, Hazel POV)
Flight (June 1917, Louise POV)
Return (September 1917, Hazel POV)
+1: Lost (September 1912, Hazel POV, Hazel/her pre-War political organizing comrade Geneviève)

( Further reflections under the cut: )

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Ficlets: "Lost," "Soiree," "Shelter"

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 02:22:17 GMT

Squeaking under the wire with stories #13, #14, & #15 for the Passchendaele ficlet cycle (more information here), which is now complete! I have more reflections on this project, what it's taught me about writing 1,000-word stories, and how it's helped me in the novel-planning process... hopefully I can put that together soon, along with a masterpost linking through the various character and relationship arcs. For now, the final three, which are arguably also the best (turns out you get better at a thing if you write 15 of them):

Title: Lost
Fandom: Original Work
Relationships: Hazel Cameron/Geneviève Richard, Hazel Cameron & Yves Ouellet
Rating: Teen & Up
Prompt: "We'll make a million memories, all incredible"
Word Count: 979
Tags: Communism, Activism, Found family, Nostalgia, The retroactive shadow of, World War I, The persistence of memory, Argument as, Friendship, Foreplay, and, Falling in love

Summary:

Halifax, Nova Scotia: September 24, 1912

Later—it was odd what a person remembered—

Title: Soiree
Fandom: Original Work
Relationships: Emma Walsh/Annie Johnston, other pairings
Rating: Teen & Up
Prompt: "But I need to know if the world says it's time to go"
Word Count: 1000
Tags: Parties, Bohemianism, Domesticity, Engagements, Breakups, Successful cocktail engagements, Gals being pals

Summary:

Halifax, Nova Scotia: May 22, 1907

It was a perfect day.

Title: Shelter
Fandom: Original Work
Relationships: Katherine Llewellyn Murray/Mathilda "Matty" Sutton
Rating: Teen & Up
Prompt: "Dance in the trees paint mysteries"
Word Count: 999
Tags: Post-WWI, Visual artists, Teachers, Bohemianism, Domesticity, Divorce, Art partners as life partners, Just a couple of aging lady-loves, Having a chat, It would be anachronistic to call Matty and Katherine, Butch/Femme, so let's say, there's a little Stein/Toklas dynamic going on

Summary:

Toronto, Ontario: October 9, 1924

"I saw your former liege lord," Matty said, taking the cup from Katherine.

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Fic: How to See Lexington, Kentucky on Twenty Dollars A Day

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 15:18:40 GMT

I wrote a thing! This ties with my Archer story for the goofiest story-with-occasional-feelings I've ever written; I had a ton of fun with it and hope you will too. Bonus: lovely art by Kazhig.

Title: How to See Lexington, Kentucky on Twenty Dollars A Day
Fandom: The Magicians
Relationships: Penny Adiyodi/Frankie Gallo
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 34k
Tags: Luck Magic, Curse Magic, Zany hijinx, Prickly Strangers to, Friends With Benefits, Stranded in Middle America, Only one room at the inn, Feelings porn, Porn Porn, Complementarity, Casual Sex, For Science!, This entire story is an excuse for, Semi-Erotic Bible-Themed Miniature Golf, Not Really Romance, Foot Fetish, Foot Massage, Frottage, Anal Fingering, Coming Untouched, Blowjobs, Mildly Unsafe Sex, Inadvertent property destruction, Passing allusions to the existence of systemic racism homophobia and fatphobia, Mild poking of fun at the cultural hegemony of Christianity, Walks in the woods, Childhood discussions, Dance contests, Casual alcohol use and overuse, Mutually amicable breakups are still hard

Summary:

It's not just the hangover, or his fiancée leaving him the literal day before the California vacation they'd planned together: Penny Adiyodi is legitimately cursed. Magically; metaphysically; possibly demonically: the whole deal. He has been his entire life, so there's no point in fighting it: least of all when sitting next to a weirdly entitled stranger on a packed cross-country flight, two days before a culturally compulsory holiday he doesn't even celebrate. But when the plane is grounded in Lexington, Kentucky, and Penny's seat-mate, Frankie Gallo, is somehow able to effortlessly secure the two of them the last hotel room in town, Penny starts to think something even stranger than usual is going on. Strange enough to suck it up and endure the dude's presence for a night, anyway—just to see what he's about.

And honestly, the more time Penny spends holed up with Frankie in suburban Lexington, the stranger it gets. But Penny has to admit it also gets more interesting. And better, too, actually. A lot better. So there's that.

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Fic: And the way back is worse

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 01:32:58 GMT

*Stumbles into the room, bleary-eyed in mules and lounging pajamas, waving around a mostly-empty martini glass and muttering about what month it is*

Sooooooooooo.

We don't, as the man said, have time to unpack all that. Instead, as alluded to back in September, please enjoy 7k of truth serum and Swiss train sex between Natasha Romanova and Yelena Belova. I know I did.

Title: And the way back is worse
Fandom: Black Widow (comics), Marvel 616
Relationships: Natasha Romanova/Yelena Belova
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 7k
Tags: Consent Issues, References to canon-typical past trauma, Truth Serum, Accidental Drugging, 18th Century Automata, Train Sex, The Swiss Alps, Established Relationship, ... of a sort, and that sort is:, Reluctant allies with benefits, Natasha is one hundred percent the person you want with you, if you ever unexpectedly get dosed with truth serum, Age Gap, Rough Sex, Potential but not actual voyeurism, Caretaking, Damage Control, via, Cunnilingus, Anilingus, Spanking, Fingering, Hair Pulling, Breath Play, Forced Confessions, Light Age Play, Inadequacy, Humiliation, Fear of (im)mortality, SO YOU KNOW THE USUAL

Summary:

In the first place: an extended mission in a remote and scenic locale did not—to understate the case—play to Yelena's strengths.

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Sensitivity readers requested

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 04:51:13 GMT

Hi friends,

I'm getting very close to a draft on my MHHE story; when it's done I'll have a round of pacing-related editing and then will need a sensitivity reader or two, so I wanted to post this well ahead of time in case folks were interested. The details:

Canon for this story is, roughly, The Magicians, although no very in-depth show knowledge is necessary to understand and enjoy the conceit (also it's a semi-unpowered AU, and the two protagonists are narratively isolated from the other characters, so... really, seriously, not much canon knowledge is required. I can provide any relevant background info. I’m not worried about canon compliance; I have a super reliable source for that).

Main characters are (a: POV character) a bi man of Desi descent, born in the US and adopted by a F/F couple, one of whom is also US-born Desi and the other of whom is US-born Jewish, and (b) a queer US-born man whose ethnic heritage is half-Black, half-white, and who was raised by his biological parents.

The overall tone of the story is that of a madcap comedy/farce, although with moments that are more serious or emotionally resonant.

Content warnings include: Passing allusions to the existence of institutional racism and homophobia, Casual references to alcohol abuse, Mutually amicable breakups are still hard. (Again: the overall tone is extremely light, especially as compared with most of the things I write.)

Timing: This story is about 35k words (a long short story or short novella). I hope to have a working draft of it by 10/31. I can then share it with sensitivity readers in the hope they can give it a read and get back to me with feedback by 11/15.

Let me know if you'd be willing to give it a read!

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The breakneck speed of life continues apace

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 01:18:16 GMT

Although! The office move I've been working toward for over a year, and which I've been intensely project-managing for months, finally actually happened on Tuesday! Hooray! There are still a ton of details to follow up on before we're settled in at the new place, but the big push is over at last. And it went very smoothly, and people were incredibly appreciative. Which is not a reaction you get a lot of in my line of work, so that was nice. And once the follow-up tasks taper off, I will be back to only project-managing one huge logistical moving/renovation project on top of my regular job, rather than two! PROGRESS! I do feel like the walking dead.

Mostly, though, I'm logging in to post my accountability list for tomorrow, which I'm taking off work as a comp day and must accomplish ALL THE THINGS:

~~Order stuff from IKEA for new office~~
~~Send asbestos form to asbestos contractor for sign-off~~
~~Call general contractor re: electrician balance; removing bathroom light fixture, confirm appropriate circuits were added for HVAC~~
~~Call ADT re: re-install in partially-completed house~~
~~Make credit card payment~~
Write check for joint bills
~~Drop dog off at daycare~~
~~Drop by store to pay materials balance on flooring~~
~~Drop boots off to be re-heeled~~
~~Pick up products from salon~~
Go to the gym (ennnnh I accidentally washed my hair already today so I think this'll wait until tomorrow)
~~Go to the local grocery literally just for wine~~
~~Scan/archive flooring paperwork~~
Write 750+ words of Natasha & Yelena in a Swiss automata museum
~~Pick up IKEA order in-store~~
~~Pick up dog~~
~~Wash dog~~
~~Tuck in dog for the evening~~
Celebratory dinner out with greywash

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A writing carrot. What could possibly go wrong?

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 04:02:14 GMT

Well due, probably, to some combination of (a) sheer, life-and-house-related exhaustion, (b) being 80% done with it (always a tough place to be in a long-ish project), and (c) the story in question being a madcap comedy, which is a genre that often gets less enchanting as it nears resolution, I have kind of ground to a motivational halt on my MHHE fic. I only have two and a half scenes left to write of what for the first 20,000 words was easily the fastest/easiest story I've ever put out. Yet somehow, now, whenever I try to bend my brain to the task of composition, it comes up instead with a plethora of writing-related distractions that it would be DELIGHTED to be working on instead. So... my thought was, that since I have a fair amount of time before a complete draft is due to my artist, I could bribe myself: one quick, instant-gratification one-shot for every newly-completed MHHE scene.

(Yes, I also see many possible downsides of this plan, starting with that thing that tends to happen when I try to write "quick, instant-gratification one-shots." Idk what to tell you, man. Desperate, exhausted times.)

Anyway, as a place to corral the current, proliferating list of potential "treat" stories, and a motivation for myself tomorrow morning, here's the current list of smallish projects clamoring for attention:

Black Widow/616: Natasha/Yelena truth serum train sex story
MCU: Tony/Pepper ~missionary position~ story (with about a 5% possibility this would be Zoe/John from Person of Interest instead—thanks to everyone for your A+++ suggestions on this one)
Leverage: Tara/Sophie/Parker threesome con story, recently and delightfully seeded in my brain by starshipfox
The Magicians: Opening scene of Margo/Fen anticolonialism language death story (this story as a whole is too substantial to be a quick palate-cleanser, but the opening scene would be fun to write on its own)
Killing Eve: Villanelle/various 5+1
Black Sails: Max & Jack metamours story

Let's see... what happens... *JAZZ HANDS*

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Help me cast some porn?

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 15:34:23 GMT

I have a plot bunny (for a certain definition of "plot") which originally arose in my brain out of meta pettiness, but which I've become attached to in its own right, maybe enough to actually write it someday.

However, I need help with the casting. As such, taking suggestions:

What are your favorite fannish F/M pairings to write/read/imagine with a fem!domme/male!sub dynamic?

I could write it as original fiction, but since the original impetus came out of commentary on fannish norms, I'd prefer it to be fanfic.

(If it's useful, other AO3 tags likely to appear on this story: Predicament Bondage, Humiliation Kink, Clothing Disparity. Ideally it would take place in a world modern enough to contain smartphones.)

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Gertrude Issue 30

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 00:36:13 GMT

The Fall 2019 issue of queer literary journal Gertrude Press is out; personal highlights include the lovely, lyrical creative nonfiction piece Floor, by Emily Jaeger, and the equally reflective poem "Leap/Bound", by Emily Van Kley.

People not named Emily contributed some really great & interesting things, too, but those are my favorites. I swear I'm not biased.

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Ficlet: "Pearls"

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:39:12 GMT

Story #12 for the Passchendaele ficlet cycle (more information here), run in concurrence with femslashficlets Janelle Monáe lyrics prompt table challenge.

Title: Pearls
Fandom: Original Work
Pairing: Rebecca Landry/Katherine Llewellyn
Rating: Teen & Up
Prompt: "The stories of a land you divide and conquer"
Word Count: 1000
Tags: Engagement, Presents, Memory, Bittersweet Goodbyes, Visual Art, Art School, Leaving the small town for the big city, and its brand new fine art academy, and also marriage!, When it Rains It Pours

Summary:

Antigonish, Nova Scotia: August 14, 1882

"I brought—a wedding present, I suppose," Rebecca said, and then gave an odd little laugh.

(I was feeling a bit bored of working on my 75%-complete MHHE story, which is a zany comedy about men; so I ducked back into my original fic Passchendaele universe, where things are all bittersweet women, all the time.)

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That the person they had once been

Sun, 15 Sep 2019 23:38:47 GMT

I knew how easily it could happen, the past at hand, like the helpless cognitive slip of an optical illusion. The tone of a day linked to some particular item: my mother's chiffon scarf, the humidity of a cut pumpkin. Certain patterns of shade. Even the flash of sunlight on the hood of a white car could cause a momentary ripple in me, allowing a slim space of return. I'd seen old Yardley slickers—the makeup now just a waxy crumble—sell for almost one hundred dollars on the Internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it—to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.

—Emma Cline, from The Girls

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Reading Thursday 9.12.19

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 13:46:51 GMT

I actually have been clawing some reading (and more writing) time back into my schedule. Largely by waking up at 4:15am so that I can either shoehorn an hour of writing time in before yoga (on Monday/Wednesday) or be showered/made-up/dressed/dog-walked-and-fed/dishwasher-emptied by 6 so that I can write from 6-8 and read from 8-9, before work at 9:30 (Tuesday/Thursday/Friday, with a third yoga class on Thursday nights). Is this sustainable long-term? I mean probably not, but quite possibly it doesn't need to be, since once the house is done and the dog's a little older my life will hopefully become more low-key. And both of those are things that WILL happen, as I have to remind myself every hour on the hour. ANYWAY, here are some things I've been reading!

I picked up Manuel Muñoz's The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue collection while greywash and I were on our road trip down through the Central Valley and then back up the coast of California, and then continued to graze on it when we got back. These are extremely finely-crafted stories, but/and they are also unremittingly bleak: quiet, grief-soaked, superbly-observed portraits of queer (specifically gay-male) Latinx life in small Central Valley towns. And I mean small: those with a context for the geography will understand what I mean when I say that for many characters in this collection Bakersfield is conceived of as a big city, Fresno is an almost overwhelming metropolis, and even Kettleman City has a whiff of the cosmopolitan about it. Muñoz's is not a vision that romanticizes or even recuperates small town life: most of his narrators have either left the Valley and then had to return due to family tragedy or financial setbacks, or they dream of leaving or are trying to leave, and those who don't are living a painfully circumscribed, claustrophobic existence. This is also a collection obsessed with grief and mourning; almost all the stories deal with the aftermath of deaths either figurative, literal or both.

So it's not light reading, and even if I wasn't so strapped for time right now I think I'd have taken the approach I did, of reading a story here and a story there over the course of several weeks rather than powering through cover to cover. That said, they're such finely-crafted little gems of works, and deeply human, and there were all these little moments that I keep thinking about, a week after finishing it. In one story, the main character's long-term boyfriend has left him and moved to San Francisco; a year later the ex-boyfriend returns with his current boyfriend, because his (the ex's) father is dying. In one flashback scene, the narrator remembers visiting his ex's parents the day after the split: the parents are monolingual Spanish speakers with moral objections to their son's homosexuality, but with whom the main character has gradually developed a relationship over many years, including acting as their English-Spanish translator and interpreter when one was needed. He remembers the father speechifying about how disgraceful it was when one spouse leaves or cheats on the other after many years—the mother nodding along even though everyone present knows that her husband has his own mistress of long standing. All the triangulations of loyalty and disloyalty, choosing to love and not-choosing to love, the subtleties of what constitute family ties, and the often-inadequate expressions of all this—it's so incisively rendered, in so few words; and I keep coming back to it in my mind and kind of aching with it. That's a particularly transcendent moment, but the entire collection is similarly affecting and well-wrought. I highly recommend it in small doses.

Then I palate-cleansed with Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War, which oulfis recommended to me as an entry point to sci-fi, a genre I often struggle with. My library hold came in and I zipped through it in a couple of days: an extremely clever, hopeful little novella about sapphic spies on opposite sides in a war across time and space, who strike up an unusual correspondence and then fall in love. Some of the prose in this was a little clunky and/or purple, self-consciously shooting for something it didn't quite pull off; but the premise was so fun and the execution so energetic and charming that I didn't care. I would say this is "sci fi" to the same extent that, e.g., shippy fanfic in a canon involving a detective could be said to fall into the "mystery" genre: there is a futuristic sci-fi-ish concept, but most of the ins and outs of the war, the societies these women live in, the other people they know, etc. etc., are going on incidentally in the background, while the relationship between the two spies is heavily foregrounded. One catches glimpses of various missions as the agents infiltrate times and places, nudging civilizations and histories this way or that, but the larger whys and wherefores of each mission, let alone the war or world as a whole, feature barely at all—they're only present to the extent that they support the developing relationship. What the novella cares about is being a clever epistolary spy v. spy love story, which it does well. As such, I found it a lot easier going than most sci fi! Ahahaha. Well spotted, oulfis, it was a good starting point for the world-building-averse. :-)

In my Tu/Th/Fri post-writing morning hour, which I've set aside for writing-project-related research reading, I've been making my way through K. David Harrison's When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge, which is extremely sobering (especially since it was written in 2006, so some of the moribund languages he discusses are now almost certainly extinct) but also fascinating. I excerpted a bit from this this other day and may well want to preserve more of it. It does come from a white, discipline-of-sociology perspective, with the assumptions and training that that implies—and let's not fail to mention that I'm reading it in English!—but Harrison makes an effort to include case studies of individual speakers of these languages with whom he has actually worked and lived, including their own words about the experience of language death. And he brings up quite a few issues that wouldn't have occurred to me, but which I think will be really useful in writing the story for which I'm reading this book (an explicitly anticolonialist Margo/Fen Magicians short story the idea for which randomly bit me in the shower one morning, and which I hope to start work on after I finish my MHHE fic, now about 75% drafted). After I finish up the Harrison, the plan is to return to research reading for my original-fiction novel, starting with a return to Eric Thomas Chester's The Wobblies in their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era.

Lastly, I just started Emma Cline's The Girls and Claudia Salazar Jiménez's Blood of the Dawn. The former is a holdover from the reading I downloaded for our roadtrip—it's a fictionalized version of the Manson cult, moved disconcertingly north to the Bay (but the narrator's grandmother was still a movie star? And it's hot in early June? This novel is geographically confusing; it really seems like it should just... be set in LA)—the latter something I read about on Asymptote. Will report back! Maybe! I miss interacting on the internet and feel much more human when I can eke out time to read, so here's hoping.

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Language suppression & preservation in Soviet-era Siberia

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 15:33:20 GMT

Mr. Vasya Gabov (born 1951), the youngest fluent speaker of [Siberian language] Ös and our expedition guide, felt particularly pained by the fact that Ös had never been allowed to have an alphabet. Like Sequoyah, the native Cherokee scholar who invented writing for his people in 1809, Vasya was determined to bring the technology of writing to his people in their own language. In the Soviet Union, alphabets were designed and bestowed by Russian scientists, and the political decisions about which minority peoples could have letters were made in Moscow. It would have been a punishable offense to invent your own alphabet, so the Ös did without.

Vasya and his peers told us how they had been made fun of for being dark-skinned native children among blond Russians in elementary school. They had also, he recounted, been made to feel ashamed of their language and forbidden to speak it. Under such pressures, he and his generation made the decision [...] to avoid using Ös and speak exclusively in Russian. Ös children like Vasya made this decision at the very young age of 5 or 6, not realizing it presaged the loss of their ancestral language. They were concerned with how to fit in, be accepted, and avoid ridicule for being different.

Vasya grew up to be a successful worker in Soviet society, married and had children, and worked as a truck driver. A born outdoorsman, he never lost his love of hunting and would spend weeks at a time out hunting bears, moose, and other animals. At night, sitting alone in a small log cabin in the forest, he made an audacious decision—he would keep a hunting journal in his own native Ös language. Of course, he—like all Ös adults—knew how to read and write in Russian. But Ös has four sounds not found in Russian. Since Vasya was not a trained linguist, he decided that he would not invent four new letters for these sounds, but would simply use new combinations of Russian letters he already knew.

After some time Vasya worked out his new writing system and began to make regular entries in his journal. He was motivated in part by something his mother had said to him as a young boy: "My mother told me that it is necessary to speak our Ös language... let the Russians speak Russian and let the Ös speak Ös." This expression of linguistic pride inspired him to keep writing and perhaps even dare to think that Ös might be passed on to his children's generation. But Vasya's journal was ill fated.

One day Vasya got up his courage and showed his journal—containing three years' worth of entries painstakingly written—to a Russian friend. The Russian's reaction was devastating for him. "What are you writing there, in what language?" the friend demanded. "Why would you write in Ös?" When Vasya yeard these disdainful words, he felt as if he had done something wrong. The shame of the schoolyard and stigma of being different came back to him. In a fit of pique, he threw his journal—the first and only book ever written in his native Ös tongue—out into the forest to rot. "I might have wanted to show it to you," he told me in 2003, "but it's not here, it's still there where I threw it away."

—K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge

(Gabov does go on to resuscitate his Ös orthography and collaborates with Harrison and local (Russian-monolingual) Ös kids on a children's book in his language, the first and possibly only ever published Ös book. However: still an incredibly sad story.)

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Sunday (more than) Six

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 22:28:27 GMT

Since I couldn't post about this before the reveals, and I similarly can't post about what I'm working on now because it's for another fest, have a snippet from one of the scenes I mentioned earlier, in my latest Killing Eve story:

"Where have you been all afternoon?" [Anna] said, dropping cubes of potato into the bowl. She actually smiled a little, at Villanelle, and jerked her chin down at the notebook, which was—spun away from Anna, toward Villanelle. It wasn't a recipe, anyway.

"Sightseeing," Villanelle told her, as she read: I am wearing a microphone; she is listening. "When they excavated Zaryadye there were arrows still stuck in the walls, did you know? For nine hundred years."

Villanelle read: She thinks I am still in love with you, in Anna's neat hand, but that I will inform on you in exchange for a new life. Thunk, thunk went the knife through the potatoes. "Yes," Anna said. "The children love the exhibit where you learn to load a gun."

With enough time we could convince her you deserve one, too, the note read.

"Psht," said Villanelle. "I already know how to load a gun."

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Life is TOO MUCH!! But I did write a story

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 18:00:12 GMT

Friends, this summer has been nuts. Totally, unsustainably, in-every-way overwhelmingly nuts, on the work front and the home-renovation front and the dog-getting-bronchitis-and-then-having-to-get-seventeen-teeth-removed front, and the mental/physical health front, it's just. A Lot. The fall promises to continue being A Lot, so I might continue to be basically silent on social media; these days I can occasionally get myself together for long enough to manage a tweet, but that's about it.

HOWEVER! femslashafterdark author reveals happened, so I wanted to note both what I received and what I wrote. My gift:

An Evening at the Woodshed by thinlizzy2 (2k, Explicit), a hot little quasi-established-relationship Lou/Nine Ball Ocean's 8 story in which Nine Ball is bratty because insecure/jealous about Lou's relationship with Debbie, and Lou... sorta-kinda reassures her. In a way that involves anal fingering. As so much quality reassurance does. \o/

And what I wrote, for fiachairecht:

Title: Dictionaries of the printed heart
Fandom: Killing Eve
Relationships: Anna/Villanelle, Anna/Eve/Villanelle, Eve/Villanelle, hints of Anna/Eve
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 15k
Tags: Consent Issues, Graphic references to (canonical) past sex between a teenager and an adult, (Although everyone is now of age, The power differential involved in the underage sex does play a role in this story), Past teacher/student, Triangular relationship, Asymmetrical relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical voyeurism, References to canon-typical mutilation, Language Kink, Lies and the liars that tell them, Knife Play, written on the body, Stationery supplies as BDSM kit, Mean Sex, Crying During Sex, (seriously Anna cries a lot in this), Slapping, pain play, Fucked-up metamours, Bondage, Double-crosses, Revenge, Performative Self-Presentation, Villanelle's lovers are just as bananas as Villanelle

Summary:

"You see?" Villanelle told her. "You can't do it."

"You're right," Anna said. "I can't do it. But—I can do this."

(Canon-divergent AU in which Anna, rather than killing herself, tries her hand as hostage, blackmailer, and diplomatic liaison.)

I was suuuuper psyched when I saw my recipient was kimaracretak, because I knew she'd be into, as she put in her comment, "'character who died in canon lives and NOTHING IS BETTER' fic," which is—exactly what this story is. (In case you didn't gather from the tags, it's very dark! Maybe even darker than the canon. Please read the warnings.) This concept was something that had been percolating at the back of my brain for some time vis-à-vis Killing Eve: a situation that allowed Anna and Eve to interact in a more extended way, and also provided room to explore the life-curdling effects on Anna of the years Villanelle's spent in prison and after. As well as... a bunch of other themes that I won't go too much into depth on for fear of spoiling the fic.

I will note, from a writer's diary point of view: there were some elements of this story that turned out to be extremely interesting technical challenges. Anna spends a significant part of the story wearing a wire, for example, so Eve can hear all her interactions with Villanelle—and Villanelle knows this, but Eve doesn't know Villanelle knows. Writing dialogue and exchanges between Anna and Villanelle under these conditions, when they're also both lying to each other to further their own agendas, was a LOT of fun and also a writing muscle I hadn't exactly flexed before. I feel like I learned some things in the process about writing in this particular generic niche (call it "Spies with Disordered Worldviews"), which is one I totally love reading. So that feels good.

Anyway I really appreciated this exchange as a space specifically devoted to Explicit-rated and/or dark-themed F/F, because so much of the time female subjectivity isn't allowed to be as troubled or troubling as male subjectivity, and romantic relationships between or among women often have their sharp edges sanded away. I love a spiky, difficult, and/or troubling female character, so thanks to the FAD organizers for putting this together. <3

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Proust Day Celebrations

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 15:51:32 GMT

I posted this as a Twitter thread originally, but thought I would cross-post since I expect there are more people in my circle here who have read the books. Add your own should you desire!

I used to celebrate Anaïs Nin's bday every year by handing out flowers & poetry to strangers. Just realized yesterday was Proust's bday and was trying to think of a fitting way to spend it. Potential Proust Day celebrations:

Go to a party. Spend the whole evening thinking about the superior caliber of amusement undoubtedly being had by people at a different party, to which you were also invited but decided not to go.

Have tea with a great beauty who was always standoffish when you loved them but who, now that you find them rather tiresome, actively solicits your company. Later, in the afternoon, take a melancholy carriage ride through the Bois. Make notes on the hats.

Concoct an elaborate ritual of heterosexuality in order to closet yourself to your society friends—most of whom, unbeknownst to you, are either queer themselves or have been trying to communicate their acceptance for decades.

Accidentally befriend your childhood artistic hero, whose art you no longer hold in high esteem. Wow, are they a piece of work!

Go for a walk. If you are in the mood to be a voyeur to sexual sadism, peek in literally any window you pass & observe at your leisure. If not, keep walking. Arrive at a place you remember from childhood, but which you believed to be located elsewhere.

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Thoughts on Tales of the City

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 15:56:18 GMT

greywash and I have been watching the new Tales of the City miniseries (we're through the fourth episode), and I'm having a lot of interesting-to-me reactions to it.

It seems that in the current moment the dominant narratives of both New York City and particularly of San Francisco are ones of loss and nostalgia. For people who lived in both cities pre-gentrification and especially pre-AIDS—but even for a more recent batch of transplants, like my transfeminine friend/lover who moved to San Francisco in the 90s, got involved in the lesbian-feminist organizing world here, and then witnessed the way the schism between the trans-inclusive and trans-exclusive branches of lesbian feminism fragmented and de-vitalized that community—the city seems to feel like a palimpsest, with the present day overwriting all the things they've lost. Reading something like Rabih Alameddine's Angel of History or Sarah Schulman's Maggie Terry, or just walking around the Mission with my friend, it sometimes feels like, for them, the landscape is more populated by ghosts (of establishments, buildings, people) than it is by things and people that are still around.

This is a strange feeling for someone like me, who not only has just moved here, but who honestly had no particular emotional investment in the mythos of San Francisco in the first place. My reasons for moving to the Bay were almost entirely logistical/practical. I like the city well enough, although on a day-to-day basis I prefer the more laid-back smaller-city vibe of the East Bay. I certainly value the proximity to world-class museums, restaurants, cultural events, etc., but I'm not in love with San Francisco the way I have been with other cities, both from afar (London) and via an intimate, long-term family & lived connection (Portland). I don't even feel the sort of intense but unsustainable fascination for it that I feel for LA. But so many people are invested in that Story of San Francisco, in a way that I can totally relate to even if I don't share those feelings about this particular place. And it's a strange sensation to feel like an outsider to the grief and tenderness of a mass of people who are all around me, every day. (Of course, as greywash pointed out, this sense of nostalgia & loss also becomes performative at some point: many of the folks loudly lamenting the loss of some kind of prelapsarian San Francisco literally could not have been around in the pre-AIDS/pre-gentrification days; they're just too young; and if they're also white and working in tech, well. Not that one can't genuinely lament the loss of a community one never had access to, but it's also true that certain people's deeply-felt loss has become other people's fashion of the moment.)

Anyway, Tales of the City actually doesn't traffic too heavily in the loss/grief part of that equation (although it touches on it, for sure). But it's definitely in love with San Francisco, and what "San Francisco" has come to stand for to its characters; and that feeling is part of the reaction it's trying—pretty successfully, I think—to evoke in the viewer. It's interesting to observe my reactions to this, because a lot of the buttons they're pushing in terms of the things with which they're equating "San Francisco" are ones that really get me: queer found family, intergenerational friendships and support structures, relationships that shift and change and need repair but overall last over time, the erasure and endurance of queer history. I feel a lot of feelings about all that stuff! But I still don't feel any particular feelings about San Francisco itself. Give it a decade, I guess.

On the other hand, I am having a lot of feelings about the Mary Ann character, and just in general about the ways all the middle-aged characters are allowed to be trainwrecks. Media is so skewed toward characters in their 20s and 30s; you hardly ever see characters in their 50s & 60s who are allowed to struggle, enter new phases of life, fumble to find their footing, etc. Mary Ann is A Lot, and she's frankly embarrassing to watch a lot of the time, but as a portrait of someone on the verge of a divorce, returning to a place she was previously happy in a painfully awkward bid to escape her unhappiness, I find her extremely convincing. (I speak from experience.) I am a bit surprised at myself that the character I most relate to in this almost-exclusively-queer narrative is the one straight lady, but that's how it goes sometimes.

I'm also very much enjoying the way they're subverting a bunch of romance tropes in their depiction of Mary Ann's relationship with her estranged non-biological daughter Shawna (a delightfully pansexual Ellen Page). Both Shawna and Mary Ann spend a lot of time thinking about the other person; questioning their mutual friends about what the other person said about them; and just digging for dirt about the other person in general. Shawna is understandably prickly with Mary Ann, who left her when Shawna was two years old; she repeatedly pushes her away and then, when she's alone, visibly pines after a connection with her: watching footage of Mary Ann's TV show, which she has on tape; playing the LP that Mary Ann gave her. There's the classic "they break through their barriers enough to connect over drinks; one of them gets too drunk and the other one tenderly covers her with a blanket to sleep it off" scene, but with the care-taking would-be lover re-cast instead as the daughter(/friend). I'm just really loving the way they're using those tropes to, as usual, create relationship tension, but instead of romantic relationship tension it's semi-familial, semi-friendship relational tension. In particular the mutual-pining trope, which I normally find a bit boring in a romantic context, is shockingly affecting to me here—maybe because it's not the kind of relationship with which one generally associates that sense of deep yearning, so drawing on tropes normally associated with romance becomes a really effective way to access those feelings in the viewer.

Anyway! Good stuff, good stuff.

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FemslashAfterDark Dear Creator Letter

Sat, 22 Jun 2019 05:36:41 GMT

Hello, dear creator!

Thanks so much for making me a thing! I'm sure I will love it. Lady/lady smut is one of my fave things, so we're already off to a fabulous start.

I am a bookish, mostly-lesbian, 38-year-old lady living in the East Bay (Northern California). General fictional loves of mine include: formidable yet complex women being formidable and complex together; sex writing that is emotionally nuanced and/or ratchets up the narrative tension more than it resolves it; unreliable narrators; atmospheric settings; lovely turns of phrase; strong narrative voices and weird narrative experiments. Art-wise I love beautiful clothes, gorgeous light, poses that capture a particular dynamic, mood, or tension between or among characters, or which make you wonder what is about to happen. Style-wise a lot of the stuff I read & write is grounded in the 1890s through 1920s, so any Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Expressionist, Cubist, or otherwise Modernist influences are always delightful to me.

If you are a visual artist, I apologize that my wants/do not wants sections and the fandom-specific prompts are more geared toward fic than art. I am a writer and that's kind of the way my brain works. But I've tried to include some elements that would translate to visual art, especially in the "Likes (sexual)" section. And rest assured that I love receiving visual art in these kinds of exchanges; it seems so magical & wonderful to me, I can't even tell you.

Also, I'm aware that a lot of my narrative likes & fandom-specific prompts tend toward the in-depth character study, and that that might require a longer word count than you really want to commit to on this relatively short short time scale. Rest assured that 1,000 words of porn sans deep character insight will be very welcome. The in-depth character dynamics stuff is just where my brain goes, so I've included it in case you do want to go that route.

Likes (general): Navigating difficult relationships and not doing a super great job of it; elements of con artistry or keeping things from one another; growing emotional/sexual attachment which is neither negated by nor negates the baggage characters may have with each other; putting in the work to repair, or even just be present with, damaged relationships; unexpected moments of tenderness that surprise and perhaps dismay the participants; established relationships; asymmetrical three-way relationships, or triangular formations where two people are fucking about a third person; characters who have a lot of history together and are doing their best to navigate that; relationships which are sexual but not necessarily romantic, or which straddle the line between romance and something else (friendship, enemyship, collegialism, etc.) and are thus difficult to accurately define.

Likes (sexual): rough sex; fight sex; D/s and S/M elements that are more spontaneous rather than super ritualized or formalized (see "Do Not Want" section for more detail—note that "spontaneous" doesn't have to mean "poorly negotiated," although if less-than-model kink negotiation is what works best for the story you're telling, please feel free: imperfect communication happens all the time in real life and realistic imperfection is part of what makes porn hot IMO); pain play; spanking & impact play; biting; finger-sucking; clothing porn (I adore clothes and fabric: feel free to dwell on them); improvised restraints, especially using clothing items; fisting; edging; dry-humping/scissoring; anal play (so often neglected in F/F porn!), oral through clothing; knife play (especially in Killing Eve, or Fen-related Magicians pairings).

Do not want (combined): Babies, small children, or pregnancy; animal death or violence/cruelty toward animals; scat; erasure of canonical bisexuality; rape that is passed off by the narrative as consensual sex (exploring problematic consent in a thoughtful way is fine); omegaverse; soulmate AUs. With a partial exception for The Magicians (more detail below), in stories that deal with canonical trauma or grief, I'd prefer that those elements be taken seriously rather than papered over. Since we're talking specifically about M- or E-rated stories here, I'd rather read about sex that's a messy part of the messy relationship negotiation or healing process, than sex that only happens after the characters have completely resolved all their issues and come out the other side. Super ritualized BDSM elements (elaborate scenes with lots of setup; codified rules about how submissives must act/address their dominants, with agreed-upon punishment for infringement of said rules, all-BDSM AUs) don't really do it for me, although less formalized power-exchange or power-struggle definitely do.

Requests

( Killing Eve (any): )

( The Magicians (Marina/anyone, Margo/anyone, Julia/Kady, Zelda/Sheila, Zelda/Sheila/Alice): )

( The Good Place (any): )

( Ocean's 8 (any): )

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Fic: Not this, nor any flower (Killing Eve)

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 21:39:39 GMT

So anyway, here's that 8k of post-S1 shoehorn-all-my-personal-kinks-into-a-single-story Killing Eve id fic I mentioned...

Title: Not this, nor any flower
Fandom: Killing Eve
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 8k
Tags: Non-canon-compliant after S1, (Not because I decided to write an AU just because I haven't seen S2 yet), Canon-typical violence, Injury and recovery, Nonadherence to medical best practices, Self-harm, Rough sex, Knifeplay, Clothing Porn, Clothing destruction, Possessiveness, Fantasies, Identity crises, Consent Issues, though more for the less overtly sexual parts of the story than for the fucking, Pain Play, Fingering, Teasing, Not-quite-fisting, Face-sitting, Dirty Talk

Summary:

"Would it help if I broke something of yours?"

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Reading/Writing... mumblemumble 05.20.19

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 19:19:12 GMT

I've been home sick from work the past few days: not even sure if I'm actually ill or whether I'm just intensely tired, or some combination of the two. For one thing I'm coming off (hopefully) a couple of months of anxiety more intense and life-disrupting than I think mine has ever been (interfering with sleep almost every night, lots of violently intrusive thoughts, physiological symptoms like chest/stomach tightness & elevated heart rate basically all the time): this now seems to be chilling out a little, but as a result I feel like all the rest and sleep I haven't been getting over those months is catching up with me, in a huge swamping wave of exhaustion. Anyway I am very lucky to work for an org with a generous sick-leave policy, so. Here's to that.

On the reading front, I finished Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall on Tuesday, and it was quick, beautiful, yet also disturbing/thought-provoking read. Content warnings for non-sexual physical and mental domestic abuse, including viscerally-depicted thought patterns of a habitually abused narrator, but it deals in a very interesting way with the link between patriarchal violence, nationalism/xenophobia, and certain kinds of veneration/romanticization of the past. As such it's a timely book, both for British and American readers, but it doesn't come off as annoyingly topical: the ways in which the subject matter intersects with, say, Brexit or Trumpism, are definitely there, and there's a lot to be unpacked in them, but neither political crisis is mentioned by name, and the underlying issues extend far beyond our immediate circumstances. I was saying to greywash and some other folks, that Ghost Wall would be interesting to read against Golding's classic Lord of the Flies: both speak to toxic British masculinity (albeit very different classes of it) and how that manifests in a return-to-the-land scenario with increased consciousness of proximity to mortality. But Golding does this by excising all female characters from his narrative, whereas Moss does it by not only making her first-person narrator a queer teenage girl, but putting agency for change in the hands of another teenage girl (and a couple of adult women).

I'm also FINALLY narrowing in on finishing Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, ugh, apologies to tellitslant for my tardiness on finishing this. Life has been nuts! But I continue to enjoy it a ton. More to say when I finish.

I've also been reading some great fanfic lately, which I realized I haven't recced on here! celestialskiff's "Although We Are Faithless" is an excellent Kady/Julia Magicians story about being together with another person in a messy, traumatized place in your life while they are also in a messy, traumatized place in their life, and trying to work toward a better condition together but also just witnessing the mess and sitting with them in it. I love how Celestialskiff allows the issues between the two women to remain really pretty unresolved and uncertain even through the end of the story, while still allowing the two of them some emotional movement toward a more solid and hopeful future state. (I also really like how those dynamics play out in the—very hot—sex scenes.) On totally the other end of the seriousness scale, tiltedsyllogism's "Consider the Fairer Sex" is a delightfully frothy and absurd time-travel selfcest story in which Phryne Fisher of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries travels back in time to teach her boarding-school self the joys of sapphism. It's every kind of delightful you might expect from that description, including wonderful moments of young!Phryne's nascent detective instincts, and, of course, attention to older!Phryne's luxe wardrobe.

Writing-wise I'm finally watching Killing Eve, a show which was apparently channeled directly from my id onto the screen; and took a short break after finishing Season 1 to write some Eve/Villanelle porn (currently in beta revisions; coming shortly). I've also signed up or am about to sign up for a couple of fests/exchanges; femslashafterdark signups open tomorrow (F/F exchange where all works are M- or E- rated; I am excite!), and I grabbed a very me-ish prompt for the themagicianshhe fest, for which I just finished drafting an outline which promises to be goofy fun and just enough deconstruction to keep me occupied while continuing to dig into WWI research for the novel.

Speaking of which... the research process is SO iterative, y'all. On the Passchendaele novel project I now have a full outline, but need to make a plan for staggering my drafting of new prose with my continued research reading to fill in specifics & flesh out various parts of that outline. I'm now about 2/3 through a draft of Chapter 1 (I'm looking at 30 chapters of differing lengths, some quite long, others short), but as I hit various sections there's still a lot of reading I'll need to do: at least six full-length books, a bunch of articles, and some review and open-ended research questions. I'm hoping that today, between naps, I can make a plan about what to read first, and how to plan out my reading and drafting. As I look at the amount of research still before me I'm realizing it's probably good that I'm signing up for other, shorter stories so that I'll get to actually write some prose between now and several months from now.

For anyone interested, here's what the general novel-research schedule/syllabus looks like:
( Read more... )

So. That should keep me busy, anyway.

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Doesn't it feel strange

Tue, 18 Jun 2019 14:13:57 GMT

Doesn't it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she's been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not anymore, anyway, I'm always trying to do what dead people tell me. And especially when I'm making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I'm kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn't it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind's doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did. I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the reenactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds. It's a shame I couldn't bring a loom, Louise was saying, it would have been interesting for you to see, perhaps I should ask Jim to arrange a session in my studio next term.

—Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

I am thus far enjoying this novella not only (predictably) for the meditations on hauntings and the ways in which our interactions with artefacts of a past world interface with our perceptions of our own world, but also for the painful but believable psychology of the first-person narrator, a 17-year-old girl bullied into submission by her father. Also for the portrait of said father's British-nativist xenophobia as filtered through the lens of a daughter who has maybe 2/3 of an analysis of what's going on there. It's very well done.

(Also, hello! Apologies for vanishing; the social media and meatspace-life juggle continues apace. How have you been, friends?)

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... having been breathed out

Yuletide Dear Author letter

Ladies Bingo

Yuletide Dear Author letter

HAUNTINGS; EXORCISMS

MARRIAGE, HUH? GOOD LUCK WITH THAT

Many endings can be happy, you know?

Passchendaele Ficlet Cycle: Masterpost & Reflections

Ficlets: "Lost," "Soiree," "Shelter"

Fic: How to See Lexington, Kentucky on Twenty Dollars A Day

Fic: And the way back is worse

Sensitivity readers requested

The breakneck speed of life continues apace

A writing carrot. What could possibly go wrong?

Help me cast some porn?

Gertrude Issue 30

Ficlet: "Pearls"

That the person they had once been

Reading Thursday 9.12.19

Language suppression & preservation in Soviet-era Siberia

Sunday (more than) Six

Life is TOO MUCH!! But I did write a story

Proust Day Celebrations

Thoughts on Tales of the City

FemslashAfterDark Dear Creator Letter

Fic: Not this, nor any flower (Killing Eve)

Reading/Writing... *mumblemumble* 05.20.19

Doesn't it feel strange

Reading/Writing... mumblemumble 05.20.19