psocoptera

Also I never posted more Yuletide recs and at this point I'm probably not going to, but, hey, if anyone was curious, here's what I wrote. you cannot kill me in a way that matters, What Moves the Dead from the perspective of the fungus. Muahaha.

Recently reskimmed the LMM Pat books, of which I could remember very little. (*Wow* are they dominated by the housekeeper, Judy "hope you like dialect" Plum. Some fascinating tidbits about how rural life/period life was changing, though - a shift from home cheesemaking to all milk going to the factory, dresses becoming lower cut in back and exposing spines and shoulderblades, someone has apparently done a leg of their travel by air?)

One of the things I had forgotten was that Pat has an Engagement To The Wrong Man very much like Emily's - David Kirk is older and well-read and well-traveled like Dean, although he doesn't have nearly as much personality. (We're always hearing how much Pat likes to talk to him but we never actually see any of those conversations, and their eventual breakup is more of a fizzle with none of the bitterness and passion of Dean and Emily's.) Once might be coincidence, but I suspect that twice is a ship war. Of course it could be some other agenda - personal wish fulfillment, or possibly just plot recycling - but I think the most fun read is that LMM was a Jo/Laurie shipper and really wanted to trash the Jo/Bhaer ship a couple of times. Teddy and Jingle both feel very Laurie - affection-starved, artistic, childhood neighbors - and Jingle especially is straightforwardly in love with Pat his whole life, with none of the hot-and-cold drama between Emily and Teddy. Pat even has friends and sisters in all the other Little Women roles - big sister Winnie, who gets married first and starts having babies, best friend Bets, who dies of the flu, and little sister Rae, who is a total Amy type except nicer, but conveniently gets whirlwind-engaged to a guy who's moving to China.

Anyways, the arrow of time being what it is, Alcott never got to know about any of this, but it's fun to imagine the literary feud they might have had if they had lived at the same time. Escalating back and forth with increasingly caricatured takes on each other's preferred ships, salvos of brokenhearted young and older men.

Or the meta take - Dean and David, desperate to get out of LMM stories and into an Alcott world where they can end up with their girls, Laurie equally desperate to get out of Alcott and over to the LMMiverse. The shock and confusion when all the barriers are shattered and Pollyanna gets free to terrorize everyone. Etc.

This was written for me! Three Times Kamala Thought About Revealing Her Identity And One Time She Didn't, Ms. Marvel, really good character voices and perfect small missing scenes.

Stuff I liked, in no particular order:

she gets you on her wavelength, Blue Castle, post-canon in Montreal.

The Blue Barn, the Blue Castle hockey AU I never knew I needed.

Kristy and the Worst Year Ever, a Kristy-centric BSC story in the TVverse.

something borrowed, Kristy has a tie crisis.

dear fellow traveler, Goblin Emperor, a ceremony.

they say love is a virtue (don't they?), Scholomance, post-canon.

This Eternal City, Call Me By Your Name, post-canon.

Shelter from the Storm, Earthsea, Yarrow and Vetch.

never taken for granite, Everything Everywhere All at Once, post-canon, rocks, relationships.

Making Nothing, Everything Everywhere All at Once, bagels.

empty hands, Left Hand of Darkness. I am sometimes a hard sell for fix-it fic in this canon (and there's an interesting pronoun choice where Genly Ai thinks of most Gethenians as they but Estraven as he, which on the one hand does feel like exactly what Genly Ai might do, but also, hmm) but there's some moments of it I really like.

The Ordinary Queen and the Amethyst Revolution, Ordinary Princess, cute post-canon. (But Algernon accidentally becomes Alphonse partway through, oops.)

Heuristic Analysis, Murderbot Diaries, post-Network Effect.

the weight at the center of the world, Queen's Thief, an AU.

as the wind turns, Queen's Thief, Kamet.

my wife doesn't know I hench, the evil sex ray made my employees do it, and more, Hench/Ask A Manager fic that went viral.

ETA: Here Won, Fire & Hemlock post-canon epistolary.

And this is me: Relocation Costs, "Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self".

I wrote a thing: Old Guard gen, 9500 words, Nile & Andy, background Joe/Nicky. (The rest of the tags: Found Family, Team Bonding, immortality lessons, Climate Change, mixed feelings about the Anthropocene)

All Things Shall Perish on AO3. It's about civilizational collapse and planning to outlive the Industrial Revolution, although all that actually happens on-screen is a road trip.

If you haven't watched the Old Guard but are curious about this story anyways, here's a brief but highly spoilery summary of the movie/explanation of who these characters are behind the cut. ( Read more... )

One more rec from Yuletide Madness: In All Its Guises, Raven Tower, under 1K.

I wrote How to Break a Curse, Fence comic fandom, Nicholas/Seiji, 4.8K.

And also a Treat, Travelers, Chronin, post-canon, details are spoilery, 1K.

I've been dragging my feet on trying to turn my feelings into actual words but the IIHF officiating fiasco this afternoon has reminded me that there will always be new competitive-sports developments to be pissed off about (FINLAND WAS ROBBED) and so I should probably get on with it before it's ancient news.

To sort of come at this backwards, the experience of baffled opposition to what I consider a nonsensical nomination has not been a lot of fun. Most of the discussion about it that I've seen - certainly all of the fannish glee - seems to assume that the only people who aren't happy about this are people who dislike or disapprove of fanfiction (or perhaps are cishet men who dislike that AO3 is mostly women/LGBTQ). Chuck Tingle wrote a story in which a dude is "belligerent with jealousy" until he "begins to see that his anger towards this handsome website might have more to do with his own shortcomings than anyone else's." Ha, ha. I'm not the only person with a foot in both worlds who's not thrilled about it (and boy do I appreciate that, thank you) but I have been feeling at a loss for how to talk about this in fannish space without just getting bogged down in "no look I'm not saying the AO3 isn't a shining beacon of awesomeness, but."

I've tried to reach out to a couple of people to see if someone would be willing to talk about the thinking behind nominating it as a Related Work specifically, but I've had no success engaging anyone about that. I feel like you could maybe make the case for fanzine, if you wanted to - fanzines have founders, volunteer labor, contributors, they're often ongoing projects, whereas works are usually something cohesive and finite - but I can only assume that this was considered and rejected for reasons that I can't independently come up with but might make sense if someone explained them. I did look in the WSFS constitution and as far as I can tell we don't ever actually *define* "work" so I will accept that if enough Hugo voters think something is a "work" then it technically is one, in the same way that if enough voters think something is science fiction or fantasy then it is, but I think that stretching the definition of work this way is unfortunate and incoherent.

Beyond that, though, I feel like it's a weird subjugation of fic-writing fandom to put one of our major organs up for a single award in a parallel fannish universe, and since most people don't seem to share that sense of inherent incongruity, I wrote a short fic about it, to try to translate it into a different frame of reference.

Imagine that the Vulcans give out the Vulcan Design Awards every year for spacecraft designs. There's a starship category, a sub-warp category, an atmosphere-capable category, there's even a "related designs" category for things like space docks and space elevators. And one year, a while after first contact, we hear that Earth's aerospace industry has been nominated as a related design.

"Wait, what?"

"Yeah, isn't it so exciting? The Vulcans are recognizing all the amazing spaceship work that's been happening here on Earth! It's an incredible honor!"

"But... 'Earth's aerospace industry'. Like, the whole thing."

"Yeah! NASA, Zefram Cochrane, all the recent developments, there's been so much innovation, and dedication..."

"No kidding, we're talking about, uh, two hundred years? Three hundred? Doesn't that seem like... a lot?"

"Well, it's not like they're including thousands of years of boats and land vehicles and stuff."

"But isn't Vulcan kind of sparsely populated, compared with Earth? I would guess there are actually way more people working in Earth's aerospace industry than in Vulcan's."

"Hm, maybe... so what?"

"So... doesn't it seem weird to you that they're nominating Earth's entire aerospace industry for one award? What else is nominated?"

"Let's see, there's a shuttle bay on a Vulcan moon base, a warp core design, and a new airlock cycling protocol."

"So the judges are comparing everything humans build in space to a shuttle bay and some airlock code."

"Really elegant and efficient airlock code, actually. I think Ceres is already adopting it."

"... so Earth's entire aerospace industry might lose to airlock code."

"Well, sure, you know, lots of Vulcans are prejudiced against humans and all our touchy-feely emotions and stuff. But there are lots of pro-collaboration Vulcans too."

"So Earth's entire aerospace industry might win. And then we'd be, what. The best related design of 2118, and then next year there'd be a different shuttle bay and some different code up for it?"

"Sure, I guess. We can always decline if we keep getting nominated. You know, they checked with United Earth Star Command and they accepted the nomination. I guess they think it's pretty neat."

"Neat. Okay, I give up. I guess this is just how interplanetary diplomacy works! Let's start a move to nominate Vulcan's music industry for this year's World Music Grammy."

"What, all of it? The Grammys are for albums."

And, scene. I know this isn't an exact analogy... in the actual circumstances, lots of Vulcans are also Earthlings (and don't think I haven't been trying to figure out how we can possibly estimate that number... traditionally Vulcans do not let on that they spend their vacation time on Earth, it makes it tricky), but, like, the idea that we are two planets, both alike in dignity, if different in customs, and big, exciting, important things are going on all the time on both planets... I don't know, is this really how interplanetary diplomacy works?

Hi! I'm so excited to be participating in this exchange!

Mostly this letter reiterates what was in my description sections but I figured I should have one. :) Behind the cut! ( Read more... )

So I finished the 30Fic project. 30 stories, finished before I was out of my 30s. :)

I haven't posted about fic much, in the past couple years, except for Yuletide. But I started this project on LJ and I wanted to wrap it up here, and also do some self-indulgent poking at numbers and discussion of choices I made and that sort of thing.

I'm going to say this again at the end, but a giant thank-you to everyone who was interested in my stories, or happy to see me writing again, back at the very beginning of the project. To the people who commented on the first three, ccommack, snarkyshark2, Michael, eclectic_boy, emsariel, ruthling, uncleamos, belecrivain, and sofer: this whole thing is your fault for encouraging me.

The AO3 page for the series is here.

Way more about it behind the cut: ( Read more... )

Fed by Fables. I liked this Philadelphia Story story in which Tracy Lord's little sister is a newly-published writer corresponding with Mike Connor.

A Change of Allegiance. I like this little Persuasion postscript.

Scenes From A Marriage: The Hundred Days. Do you want Anne Elliot taking up arms in an Age of Sail nautical adventure and also negotiating some sexual exploration with Wentworth? Hell yes you do.

Long Live the King. An Old Kingdoms story about Touchstone, immediately after the events of Sabriel, struggling with kingship. Well-written and vivid, highly recommended.

Home (Is the Place You Return To). I don't really like Nimona stories that forget that Nimona is a monster, but this one is so well-constructed and charming I'm recommending it anyways.

Black Flag, and this one, which focuses on Ballister and Goldenloin.

"Just because it says READ ME". I have no idea if this is any good but it's a Nethack story and so I'm leaving it here for Chaos.

sea of islands, Moon, Sam/Sam.

mine own and not mine own, Midsummer Night's Dream OT4 morning-after modern AU.

And a story by me: Pas De Trois. Leviathan, Deryn/Lilit with background Deryn/Alek. A prison break caper story.

I seem to have one story in me per Marvel movie these days? Or at least I wrote about Maria Hill, after Avengers, and I wrote about SHIELD, after Winter Soldier.

This is about Tony, after Age of Ultron.
there the true Silence is. 400 words, angst, movie spoilers.