Rosebriars and ink

So clear back in 2009, Seanan McGuire had a story called Inspirations published in The Edge of Propinquity. Which is a magazine that only keeps stories online for a year or two, which I didn't realize at the time, and by the time I did it was no longer online. I actually emailed both her and the magazine to see if there was any way I could give someone money for a copy of it, but no dice. I gave up, I had given up for years, but I was just now idly googling to see if it was in the wayback machine somewhere that I'd missed, and I discovered that long after I'd given up IT WAS REPUBLISHED IN NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE IN 2016. I CAN READ IT AGAIN. THIS STORY HAS HAUNTED ME FOR A FUCKING DECADE AND I'M FREEEEEE

Inspirations, by Seanan McGuire, at Nightmare Magazine. (Fair warning that it's gory brutal horror full of despair and betrayal.)

Dustdaughter at Uncanny Magazine is lovely and intensely communal and--hopeful.

Deriving Life at Tor.com made me fucking sob my eyes out, be cautious with it if you have issues with self-hatred or suicidal ideation. A little too close to home, gave me a headache from crying.

Some Breakable Things by Cassandra Khaw warnings for suicide again, and parental abuse, and also this one doesn't really have a satisfactory conclusion ime.

Do Not Look Back, My Lion at Beneath Ceaseless Skies made me cry. The pitiless machine of war, and the helplessness of those within it.

Okay, Glory at Lightspeed Magazine I regret reading at 3am, I spent like half an hour unable to stop thinking about it while trying to sleep afterward. Brutal isolation and the psychological horror thereof after the narrator's AI smarthouse is hacked and turned against him.

Thirty-Three Percent Joe at Clarkesworld (via isis) is a scifi military thing narrated mostly by the autonomous AIs powering a not-very-good soldier's replacement body parts.

What is Eve? at Lightspeed Magazine (via isis) is a kind of terrifying piece that I can't say much about without spoiling everything, though I will, as Isis did, say that it has a happy ending.

Mildly irritated that chrome is willing to autofill 'linkspam' as a title but not 'linkdump', which I have used more times. Autofill is an arcane mystery.

Markdown Simplifies Formatting Your DW Posts--the only thing I have trouble remembering how to do in HTML is username links, so maybe I'll try markdown for that? Otherwise I just don't want to be bothered having to remember another type of formatting mostly. I know how to code a link in html! I sincerely doubt I can reliably remember how to do so in markdown. (I am notably terrible at remembering how to do things involving text commands, it's a large part of why I stopped using linux. GUIs are my friends. My DW posts I code the links and italics and bold manually, because that's something I can reliably remember, but I use the rich text editor to inset images because I can never remember how to code in the width restrictions, and also to include username links because how to do it just keeps falling out of my head.) Anyway, this being a 'silent feature' seems kinda... hm. Why do you have a formatting method that you have to hear about by word of mouth, that's weirdly exclusionary. I'd actually been looking for a page on what markdown DW supports because my friend lethe mentioned she thought it was supported, and I straight up could not find one or even any indication that it was supported. I mean, maybe I'm just bad at google now, but... nothing on the new post page itself mentions the feature or links to a page on being able to use the feature, soooo. Hm.

A lovely post about Buttercup (of The Princess Bride) as a poet, and how it improves the story

A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions is a disturbing investigation into an author who apparently lies constantly, about everything, and typing this has made my brain start playing why the fuck you lyin, why you always lyin, mmmm oh my god, stop fuckin lyin! Anyway this Dan Mallory dude sounds fuuuucking terrifying. Also, the fake emails from his "brother" about him being in hospital are so... this is a dude who would have stirred up drama and pseucided on lj, except he somehow managed to make masses of money doing it. Yikes. God, this story just keeps GOING. Also like, wow, this dude's novel was bought by the publishing house at whish he worked--I wonder just how much promotion money was poured into that book and how much that affected its #1 debut. Or if he pulled a more competent version of the Handbook for Mortals NYT scam--he's certainly got the money for it, christ.

via hellofriendsiminthedark, Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People is an interesting article about terrible translation attempts. ("It translates the alphabet!" Oh my god do you have any idea how slow and annoying it would be to fingerspell everything you wanted to say. No one talks like that.) (Reference point: I've taken ASL 1 and ASL 2; Alex, my housemate and best friend, is in the third year of a degree in ASL/English interpreting. I've gone to a fair few interpreting social events with him, even though my sign is pretty rudimentary.)

Hunger Makes Me, on women being expected to want nothing

On Fandom and the "culture of selling"--money quote, which I read aloud to Alex: If you look at the proliferation of gofundmes and patreons and think, "ugh, why do people keep asking me for money?" and not "how can we burn late capitalism to the ground and salt the remains?" then I think you're not seeing the big picture.

Show vs. Tell: Lessons from Wake of Vultures has an interesting take on the well-worn adage "Show, don't tell": If something important changes, render it on the page (show). If nothing changes, summarize it (tell). It claims to illustrate with examples, but ime they're too spare to demonstrate anything. I'll have to think about this more.

An interesting twitter thread about How Not To Write Supporting Characters In Shipfic (or, in her own words, "How to Avoid Making Your Main Couple Accidental Psychopaths")

The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why We Need Stories to Make Sense at Tor.com is a very interesting piece about how stories work. I think I'll want to muse on it more. the audience has a set of shared communal knowledge makes me think of how Alex's interpreting program discusses extra-linguistic knowledge (which has become something of a household catchphrase). They seem to be fairly conceptually similar.

Tor.com is offering a new short fiction newsletter

The Wii Shop Channel's closure marks the death of a piece of Nintendo magic-- I'm not that surprised about the channel shuttering, because over christmas helping my mom I discovered that the YouTube app for the wii no longer works and the NetFlix app stopped working this month, but wow. That's the end of some kind of era. (I ended up helping my mom buy and set up a Roku, since she could no longer use her wii as a hilariously low-res set top box. Seriously, it was like 480p, on like a 60" television, it was so funny.)

The Story About The Story: Or, How Writers Talk About Their Books by Chuck Wendig

25 Steps To Being A Traditionally Published Author: Lazy Bastard Edition (Guest Post By Delilah S. Dawson). I just like reading about writing, even if posts like this make me increasingly sure that I am not cut out to be an author (of novels, anyway, I still harbor dreams of short fiction publication). (Though it's entirely possible that my badly managed mental health is the one saying that and I'd be more up for it if I was less A Mess With No Insurance To Do Anything About It.)

25 Humpalicious Steps For Writing Your First Sex Scene, By Delilah S. Dawson (Author Of Wicked As She Wants). When I wrote my first sex scene, the hero accidentally removed the heroine’s corset three times, which made me sound like an idiot with a corset fetish. AS IF. I'm amused. Also (partially) potentially applicable to fanfic sex scenes.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips interviews Ursula Vernon is a website with truly abysmal formatting, fucking pale grey text on a white background, what the fuck. I used the 'white background with black font' bookmarklet from this incredibly useful page to render it bloody readable. Anyway: And a lot of the messages that do come across by what I’m retelling I choose to change, like in the snow queen version I did, if there’s a moral to the story it was the dude chosen by Hans Christian Anderson was an absolute douche bag and you could do better. I guess that’s a moral. Love me some Ursula Vernon. And The Raven and the Reindeer was a great book, with lesbians, A+ highly recommended. This is a fun interview because Ursula is inherently interesting and hilarious, if you can get past the TERRIBLE DAMNED WEBSITE. God, who the fuck chose this font color. Why.

silver-tipped swallow: "scene" by Topaz Winters is haunting and lyrical and heartbroken and I adored it. But my god, her hands made me want to play the piano again. That’s always how I know I’m fucked, when their hands are something music.

Aubade For a Nonexistent Child at Half Mystic Press is full of bloody, violent grief and terror, and it's beautiful.

Topaz Winters again, The Year We Fell In Love & the Forest Happened Around It is a fairy tale and a love story and girls finding their own way somewhere new and it's gorgeous. & maybe I’d always had a bit of crush on her, older girl with fresh bruises, smoking cigarettes I was never allowed to touch, pink & fractured, eating boys’ hearts with a side of fries. I was all clean-cut quiet sun, but she was a dangerous thing, gun before the firing, smile like a promise or a warning: go ahead. Underestimate me.

I subscribed to Jane Yolen's Poem A Day newsletter, and I'm amazed all over again at how prolific she is. I have entirely lost the page where I signed up, but I'll try and track it down if anyone is interested. She does ask that if you subscribe you commit to either buy one of her books or check one out from a library every month. December 14th's, Sarai/Sarah, is short but brutal/lovely.

Speaking of daily poems, I am quite desperately behind on Seanan McGuire's patreon poetry. Perhaps I'll catch up on that after I go home. They're wonderful and I highly recommend, I'm just a disorganized mess, and after she moved them onto their own site I completely lost the plot.

Elegy for Our Impossible Lesbian Wedding at The Brown Orient (third one down on the page) is a gorgeous lyrical queer heartbreak, all three of Gita's poems are wonderful. The works in this issue of The Brown Orient will be taken offline when the physical issues come out in mid-January, so read before then if you're going to.

Proserpina is a petal-soft, sad, sweet queer take on Persephone and who she leaves behind.

Misc

I highly recommend this twitter thread wherein Ursula Vernon, with increasing incredulity, livetweets reading an unnamed and truly bizarre sounding medieval romance that apparently involves sexy falconry roleplay. That's a new one on me.

in which I am greedy by sciatrix, an older post complaining about the Pure and Wholesome femslash brigade. I have definitely felt the same frustrations.

ON WRITING: Part 1. Editing. by jamethiel, because Jame's a great friend and I'm always happy to think about the nitty gritty of language. And I love editing. I've been too much of a mess for a while to beta anything, but I miss it. I am also left musing--after reading the comments--on the fact that I'm quite useless as a structure/plot beta, and I don't know how to develop that skillset.

I saw Bohemian Rhapsody, the Freddie Mercury biopic, on Tuesday night. It was goddamn incredible. I fumbled out a notebook in the dark in the middle of the movie and started scribbling poetry. That was a religious experience of a movie. If you like music or art or Queen or... You should see it. It's so so good. And they didn't erase his sexuality, he said the word bisexual and everything. I had so many feelings and I'm listening to Queen right now and Queen has been stuck in my head for the last three days.

On Wednesday afternoon, I saw a live performance of The Music Man with my mother, which I cannot recommend you attend unless you live in an area serviced by the Arizona Theatre Company, but it was a great show. The actors were all fabulous. Good sets, too. According to my mother (who also saw it in previews) the set designer has won seven Tonys. Also I discovered the actress who played Eulalie Shinn toured in Fiddler on the Roof with Topol! (Also she was apparently in Red Dead Redemption 2, that was weird to read in a play program. Crossing the streams or something.)

Fanfic

I've been visiting my parents and spending this week with my mom and have had very little time to read, so I'm still slowly picking at An Aunt's Love, which continues to be really engaging and also just increasingly batshit. Mental institution! Good Petunia! Merlin's teacher! Dracula! For some reason the thing I'm having the hardest time with is Harry forgiving Albus Dumbledore, probably because the author has not bothered to explain this decision on his part and I have no idea why he's done a 180 on that point! Please include your character's internal motivations if they're going to start calling a primary antagonist 'granddad', thanks! (I am still enjoying it, I'm just really fucking baffled by that choice. And I haven't had time to read farther past it to get distracted by a new batshit so I'm hung up on that one.)

Before that I read Calculation, which was an even weirder 'the Sorting Hat sorts Harry real special' than I usually encounter. It sorted him as... Headmaster. 11yo Harry whose only difference from canon is supposedly that he likes math, and now he's in charge of (and apparently wildly competent at) managing an entire school, and also he acts like a 50yo accountant with paranoia. It was very strange. But only 18k, so eh. Not very long to spend going 'wait, what?!'

I also caught up on, by which I mean reread the first two chapters so I could read the new third while having any idea what was going on because my memory is garbage and I cannot keep track of WIPs, inwardtransience's A Crash Course in Enchanting and Interdimensional Mechanics. I watched like two episodes of RWBY shortly after it came out and I remember nothing, so I'm going to be learning about this world alongside Ellie, I guess! I love inwardtransience's f!Harrys, but I don't know if this fic would appeal if you don't? Ellie's not as sociopathic as Charissa or as repressed as Melantha, but she's still pretty cold. I'm having fun, though, anyway. I haven't read her Star Wars stuff yet because I don't like Star Wars but I'll probably read it eventually anyway because... inwardtransience. I love her overwrought worldbuilding and linguistic rejiggering! (Which are definitely on display in her Dragon Age fic, which I did read.)

I read Almagest, but I have basically no idea what I thought of that. It was very dark and intricate and confusing and Harry was fucking Voldemort who used to fuck Albus and Voldemort and Albus were trying to go to the moon to... something about destroying state surveillance? I really have no idea what happened in that fic.

Benefits of Old Laws has updated but given my aforementioned rotten memory for WIPs I'm going to have to reread the whole thing to read any new content, so I should probably just wait for more updates and also for my trip to finish so I have like... any time to read. But it's fantastic and recommended. I started going on rereading it but then I got sidetracked by An Aunt's Love (thanks for that, lethe) and totally lost track, so. Later.

Profic

In the realm of profic, I reread Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword, and Spindle's End while flying. I started The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert (on a recommendation from jamethiel) but I was in my dad's hot tub reading on my phone and then it got dark and I had to get out and go inside and take a shower and I got sidetracked and my ebook loan ran out, but I'll probably take it out again and finish it. During the day. Really, probably after I'm home and can hug my dog and be in a room with Alex.

I snagged Jane Yolen's Finding Baba Yaga and enjoyed it quite a bit, though as it was my first verse novel I didn't realize they went by quite so fast. (Especially at my reading speed.)

Short fiction... lord, I definitely need to start keeping track of this, because I can't even think what I've read recently, and I know I've read stuff. Combing back through my history and my twitter to jog my memory. (Unfortunately, I think a fair portion of it was clicking links in twitter on my phone. Note to self: in the future, if you do this, retweet the story.)

I read Talk to your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy in November. Well written and thoroughly disturbing. And all too real feeling. There's no room for ethics in a results-focused algorithm, as we would all do well to remember.

Monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end was lovely, Cassandra Khaw is great. Very interesting POV.

The Thing About Ghost Stories felt incredibly real, the details were beautifully rendered and the end was incredibly satisfying.

Say It With Mastodons was a really sweet science fiction love story, surprisingly found in the journal Nature. Do they usually publish spec fic and I didn't know about it? So it seems. I need to check out more of that later.

Blessings by Naomi Novik is a fun little brief thing, though I'm kind of surprised it didn't explicitly have the child turn out some kind of dark overlord. I mean, clearly she still could, but it's not text. It was clearly meant to be open-ended, but it just felt kind of un-ended to me? Or like the setup for a much more interesting story. Hm.

The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society is a delight, but really, has Ursula Vernon ever written anything that isn't? I've never seen the cold hillside turned on its head like that and I am just quite thoroughly pleased by it.

Theodora Goss's poem The Gold Spinner is an incredibly satisfying take on Rumplestiltskin.