... having been breathed out

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.