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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sciatrix, an older post complaining about the Pure and Wholesome femslash brigade. I have definitely felt the same frustrations.
ON WRITING: Part 1. Editing. byjamethiel, 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 fromjamethiel) 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.
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.
