If you want to find my fic, the best place to look is at my user page at AO3, where all my fic is archived. There is also a chronological index of the Vorkosigan fic, which is most of it. Or you can look through the tags here.

I am no longer updating this list, but I will keep it in case it's useful to anyone.
( Fic hereCollapse )

Still not sick (and Philomythulus is much better) but self-isolation is proceeding on the one-good-day, one-bad-day cycle right now that I've seen other people report, and judging by the way this morning has started, it's Box Two today. So in the interests of distraction, the Top Five meme I've seen going around.

Ask me for my top five of anything, fannish or RL. Serious answers not guaranteed ;-)

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/172019.html. There are comments there.

On a lighter note, I have watched more of The Expanse and I can tell that I am going to be here 110% for the relationship between Avasarala and Bobbie. Terrifying political mastermind and terrifying space marine from opposite sides of a war bonding, and they're both women? I have waited all my life for this. I like Cotyar too, if you wanted to make it OT3 I could be convinced of that, but Avasarala was my favourite from the moment she appeared (I saw her described as the ultimate female power fantasy, and, yeah. Would give cash money to put her and Phryne Fisher in the same room, too, some kind of wardrobe singularity might occur). Bobbie grew on me slowly, but when she ran off to see the ocean I fell for her as well. And I adore Bobbie snapping right back at Avasarala, that is the best thing ever and Avasarala looks so delighted about it, like she's finally found someone tough enough to fight with her for fun.

But mostly I love Avasarala. I love her sitting on the roof, I love her swearing at important people, I love her listening innocently while people tell her things she already knows and then turning around and slapping them in the face with that, I love her sending little side messages that make other people dance the way she wants them to dance, I love her pushing and pushing and daring anyone to make her stop, I love her using her own sincere emotions as a trick and a trap, I love everything. I love Cotyar's long-suffering face when he tries to make her consider her security, and I love how she switched from wearing Earth colours to Mars colours when she woos Bobbie.

The rest of the show is good too, I like Holden and his increasingly disastrous crusade, I like Alex a lot, he is very cute, I like Naomi and Amos, I am just getting to know Prax but I like him too. And I'm enjoying the breadth of the storytelling and all the SF stuff and really all of it. I have bought the first of the books to read, but I'm still torn on wanting to experience the show as its own thing first or wanting to read along and do a compare and contrast in my head. Also I'm afraid that Avasarala in the books wouldn't be as awesome as on the screen, Shohreh Aghdashloo is amazing. Right now the forty minutes late in the evening when I can sit down with this show is definitely a bright spot in the day.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/171576.html. There are comments there.

So this is probably a good time to post completely plotless h/c fic that I wrote a while back and didn't post. If you ever wondered what my drawerfic looks like, this is a pretty representative sample of it. But writing these things makes me feel better, so maybe reading them will make other people feel better? IDK, it's worth a try.

Ariadne (1697 words) by Philomytha
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Simon Illyan/Alys Vorpatril
Characters: Alys Vorpatril, Simon Illyan
Additional Tags: Exhaustion, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort
Summary:

Alys leads Simon out of a maze.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/170947.html. There are comments there.

Dear h/c writer,

( fandoms are Endeavour, Flight of the Heron, Hamilton, Rivers of London, Star Trek Discovery and VorkosiganCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/170471.html. There are comments there.

So this is the other fic I wrote for Chocolate Box, for @karanguni, only a month late /o\. It would have been on time, but instead of a short action scene followed by a fairly straightforward sex scene, it turned out that Aral would. not. stop. talking, and it turned into a completely different story, with a lot less sex and a lot more of, well, everything else, but mostly angst.

Title: Brown Eyes, Silver Eyes
Length: 5000 words
Rating: M
Tags: suicidal character, alcohol, declaming revolution in iambic pentameter, hurt/comfort, competence, Escobar, angst
Summary: Aral goes drunk-flying in the Dendarii gorge. Illyan follows.

Brown Eyes, Silver Eyes on AO3

( Brown Eyes, Silver EyesCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/169919.html. There are comments there.

- I have been reading Victorian instruction manuals for household servants. The one for nursemaids has surprisingly sound advice on teaching kids good table manners, and also advice about feeding infants that makes me amazed that infant mortality wasn't higher. The one on being a good lady's maid is full of gems like 'it is a blessing to the heart and to the mind to have some one to love and serve' and lengthy digressions about lady's maids who started their careers of dishonesty by taking a pin from their mistress's workbox and ended by cooperating with jewel thieves and languished for the rest of their days in prison. Very Victorian, much moral, surprisingly good on the subject of keeping your temper when provoked and how to tell the difference between occasional annoyances and a complete personality clash. Also a brief mention of what to do if your mistress is subject to domestic violence, which is to say, pretend not to see too much and comfort her as you can. The one on being a laundry maid is utterly horrifying and makes me want to hug and kiss my washing machine. My dad's into family history and apparently many of my ancestors were washerwomen, god it must have been a shit life. There's no moral edification in the book for laundry maids, just a detailed description of the correct order for two women working together to wash about ten people's laundry in one day, with times for each task, instructions on when you pour out the dirty water and when you pour it into the next load of washing, and a note that at some point you have to stop and eat and rest but not for long. That one's peppered with advertorials for new Patent Machines for trying to make the process easier. I have to say, I have considered this and I would sacrifice my computer, tv, freezer, fridge, central heating boiler and oven before I sacrificed my washing machine.

- also just started reading the Hamilton biography, which is fantastic, and I never knew that Britain considered trying to swap the entire of Canada for Guadeloupe, but France considered that Guadeloupe was worth an awful lot more than Canada... Anyway, I've only read a bit of it so far, but I am deeply impressed with how Miranda turned it into a musical.

- still watching The Expanse and I love it, I adored Chrisjen's visit to Holden's mother and really everything she does is magic, surprisingly interested in Fred Johnson, still underwhelmed with Detective Hat but the rest of the cast is great and the plotting is wonderfully complicated

- after reccing The Flight of the Heron I suddenly had to reread it, and I still adore it. I'm now halfway through The Gleam in the North, which I haven't reread for ages because it's so painful and hence I've forgotten lots of it. I usually skip it and just read The Dark Mile which is a sweet romance and has a happy ending.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/169576.html. There are comments there.

Okay, False Value, notes as I went along. This is not an intelligent review of the book, this is more a look inside my head as I was reading it :-P

( spoilers hereCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/169303.html. There are comments there.

I wrote a fic! For Chocolate Box, where loads of people left fantastic Vorkosigan prompts. I really wanted to write more treats but I had the flu half the time so not so much writing happened. And then when I did have writing time, well, my brain has a frustrating tendency to hare off in the wrong direction when I see a prompt: viz lots of people wanted Ivan interacting with any of Miles, Gregor, Aral, Laisa, Ekaterin, By... so I stared at those prompts for a while, and then came up with a plot bunny for Ivan talking to his mother instead.

But anyway, I finally got to use my favourite Aral/Simon quote as a fic summary for lean on aka the time Aral tells Simon not to use Miles as an assassin please. Because when I saw that conversation referenced in ACC, I went OUCH, and have been meaning to write it up as a fic sometime and finally did it. And I hope to finish the Ivan & Alys fic, and also something for @karanguni who continues to have the best Aral/Simon prompts and who I really hope isn't tired of me writing them yet.

And in my other fandom, False Value is out, I have read it, I love it, and I don't think it's spoilery to say: if you were frustrated by the lack of Peter-Nightingale interaction in some of the previous books, you are going to like this one. Longer review when I finish rereading it.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/169166.html. There are comments there.

A couple of things I have read/watched/etc recently.

The Spy and the Traitor, Ben Macintyre
Macintyre has a great line in tell-all real-life spy dramas; he's written several for WW2 and they're all very readable and fascinating, so when I saw this on the shelf in Sainsbury's I knew it wouldn't disappoint, and it hasn't. This is the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel turned MI6 spy, and his ridiculously dramatic and amazing life. Macintyre makes a pretty good case for him having saved the world from nuclear apocalypse. I fell quite a lot in love with him in this, and I suspect Macintyre did too. Also Thatcher did, which is almost makes me question my taste, but still, he was pretty incredible. The story of how he made a summit between Gorbachev and Thatcher a complete success because he was briefing both sides as the KGB's senior man in London and MI6's window into the KGB - if that was fiction it would be unbelievable. He literally took the Foreign Office's agenda for the meeting and fed it to Gorbachev and took Gorbachev's agenda and fed it to the Foreign Office, and Gorbachev was very surprised to find that it was easy for him to understand what Thatcher wanted and what she would do. Thatcher, meanwhile, knew that her briefings were going to Gorbachev, so she wasn't surprised. All this on its own would be pretty amazing, but then there's the story of how the KGB found him out, and how M16 activated a frankly ridiculous escape plan to rescue him and smuggle him back to England, which - well, I take my hat off to the woman known in the book as Caroline Ascot (a pseudonym). She was the wife of the MI6 chief in Russia, who foiled the KGB sniffer dogs on the Russia-Finland border by dropping some cheese and onion crisps on the ground by them, and then CHANGING HER BABY'S DIRTY NAPPY on the lid of the car's boot. Inside the boot, sedated and wrapped in space blankets, was Gordievsky. Because of course if you're smuggling the most wanted man in Russia out of the country, you take your baby with you.

*

Coriolanus (2011)
As recommended by absolutely everyone, and holy shit was this amazing or what. It is hands-down the best Shakespeare film adaptation I've seen. I adored the conceit of it all, modern-Roman-AU as only the Beeb could do it, using the same sets they use for political shows and just to finish it off, a cameo from Jon Snow somehow managing to give Shakespeare the exact intonation he uses for the news. I loved all the modern war-torn state feel to it all, it's such a fresh take on Rome and it feels true. I also got strong New Labour vibes from the tribunes, which I presume was intentional, and Menenius felt like he'd somehow walked out of The West Wing into this. But Fiennes as Coriolanus knocked my socks off, his power, his rage, his warrior spirit, totally and predictably failing as a politican. And the UST with Aufidius was off the charts, in their first duel, and then in the scene where Coriolanus offers him his throat, wow. You don't need to write the slash, Shakespeare's done it for you. And I adored Voluminia too, you can see exactly how she is his mother and exactly how hard as nails she is. I loved her attacking the tribunes and then walking off arm in arm with his wife.

Also, wow, is this the most Barrayaran play ever? I want to know how they stage it on Barrayar, and also the overlap between Aral and Coriolanus is striking.

*

The Expanse
I have just started watching this, I am three episodes in, I am not sure of anyone's names or what's going on, and I love it. I saw it recced as near-future space politics and drama and complexity, and so far it's delivering. It's set in a future in which Mars is colonised and independent and seems to be Space Russia, the asteroid belt is the Space Wild West, and Earth is Earth, crowded and running out of resources and considerably more underwater than it is now, and there's a cold war between Mars and Earth with the asteroid belt as their ping-pong ball. So far we've got three sets of characters, none of whose names I can remember: there's Detective Hat who is investigating a missing person case on Ceres that his boss told him to forget about. There's the crew of the Canterbury, currently prisoners on a Martian warship and trying to work out who blew up their ship and whether or not Smart Navigator Lady is a sleeper agent for terrorists. And there's Lady Alys But Really Scary, the powerful UN politician who likes torturing people, double-crossing people, and trying to prevent wars. (I like her a lot.)

Oh, and there are still Mormons in the future and they travel out to the asteroid belt and try to get people to come to their meetings. The whole show seems to have this level of background worldbiulding detail, I especially love the way the people on Ceres use water when they're having meetings, how they ostentatiously pour each other glasses of water or help themselves to water as a character thing, it fits so nicely. So far I am utterly curious about Mars and the Martians and what they're doing, and I really want to see Mars like we've seen Earth and Ceres.

*

And finally, I am probably the last person on the planet to listen to the soundtrack for Hamilton. But I have a trip to London planned later in the spring and then I realised we could go to a show and that Hamilton was playing and tickets were available, so I am going to go and see it live in the West End, and I thought I'd listen to it and find out what it was all about. And so I did, and by the time I got to rhyming 'Lancelot' with 'pants look hot' I knew that I was in for a wild ride. Mr P refuses to let me play it around him, he wants to see it completely cold without any clue at all what's going on (or any knowledge of American history) but I have had it on repeat for the past week whenever he's not around, though it's lucky some of the lyrics go by too fast for Cub to hear them properly ;-)

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/168640.html. There are comments there.

There's a special kind of joy in reading a book, enjoying it very much, then discovering it has a sequel, then realising it is the first in a series of nine books so far. My only problem now is that I have a lot of other things I'm supposed to be doing. Still, thanks to @sholio's post about spy thrillers, I remembered that I had At Risk, the first novel by Stella Rimington, ie the retired director of MI5, sitting on my shelf waiting for me to have some time for it. So I read it and loved it. It's a great thriller: the plot unfolds cleverly, the twists are good, the characters are briefly but vividly drawn, there's lots of detail about how the intelligence organisations work and it all feels, as you'd expect, very authentic. Liz Carlyle is an excellent main character, and my one complaint about the first book, that Liz felt a bit of a lone woman in a sea of men, was improved in the second book in which she has a female sidekick too. And I want to go and buy the third one right away, but I am going to hold it in reserve as a reward for me finishing some of the more tedious jobs I have piling up.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/167888.html. There are comments there.

My first fic of the decade, and it's the one where Simon fast-pentas Alys. This one involved a sudden panic this morning when I realised I'd messed up some of the canon details, but working out what really happens in canon has helped me figure out a bit more of what was going on, so that was helpful in the end.

So here it is:

dark clouds gathering (6805 words) by Philomytha
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Simon Illyan/Alys Vorpatril
Characters: Alys Vorpatril, Simon Illyan, Count Vordrozda, Count Vorhalas
Additional Tags: Barrayaran politics, Interrogation, truth drugs, Angst, Book: The Warrior's Apprentice
Summary:

The close relatives of suspected traitors must be questioned by ImpSec. For the most high-ranking, the Chief of ImpSec performs the interrogations himself. And everyone knows that Lord Ivan Vorpatril is ruled by his mother.

( dark clouds gatheringCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/167674.html. There are comments there.

I wrote Peelian Principles, a Nightingale-centric missing scene set during Lies Sleeping for @luthien. Luthien's requests were perfectly up my alley, wanting missing scenes and Nightingale's perspective on Peter. I started writing this not sure exactly where it was going, with just the first line with Seawoll as a key to the story. The conversation with Chorley came out of nowhere, but after re-reading the section where Peter gets kidnapped and Chorley's efforts to persuade him to change sides, I wondered if Chorley might have thought Nightingale should be his natural ally, and made some efforts in that direction. And then I wasn't sure where the ending was for this, I overshot and started trying to write another scene of Nightingale clearing the warehouse and finding the prison where Peter had been held, but it wasn't working, and then I went back and edited the scene with Sahra and the whole thread about Nightingale's hair popped into my head and it just worked. So that's where that story came from. I keep thinking I don't have anything much to say about RoL, and then I keep getting these exchange assignments and discovering I have lots more, which is nice.

And my lovely Wimsey gifts, Good Morrow to our Waking Soules and As Their Wimsey Takes Him were by Jay Tryfanstone and tinx_r respectively. Thank you both so much for writing for me!

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/167384.html. There are comments there.

A silly ficlet from Tumblr again, this time sparked by a post about which, if any, of Ezar/Piotr and Dorca/Pierre le Sanguinaire would scatter their bed with rose petals...

( Ezar/Piotr, 600 words, fade-to-blackCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/166508.html. There are comments there.

I seem to be doing a lot of finishing things off at the moment, which is making me happy. I suspect that procrastination about Philomythulus's DLA form is the reason - it's amazing how much writing I can do when I have something to procrastinate on, and the DLA form is a thing of horror and nightmares and I can only cope with it in small doses.

Anyway, I have finished another fic, this time fluffy and short and gen as a contrast to the last. Next up, if I can keep my momentum going, is probably the one where Simon fast-pentas Alys...

Four Swords (737 words) by Philomytha
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Aral Vorkosigan, Miles Vorkosigan, Ivan Vorpatril
Additional Tags: Kid Fic, Mostly Fluff
Summary:

Miles and Ivan play duelling.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/166274.html. There are comments there.

I wrote another fic! One of my stranger ones: I feel like this story needs some explanation. I started it last year when I was writing Aral/Simon for Not Prime Time for @karanguni and found this prompt: Aral and Simon watch pornography together for SERIOUS security reasons. And I stared at that prompt and wondered, what security reasons could be serious enough that Simon doesn't just give Aral the precis? And then I thought, Escobar. And then I thought, this would be even more fun if Simon was both watching AND participating in the pornographic video. And then I thought about my favourite new ship from CVA: Simon/adrenalin. And then I wrote a lot and the plot got horribly tangled up and I gave up and wrote something different for NPT. But I untangled the plot recently and finished it off and now we have it, the worst way to negotiate a poly relationship ever seen.

Anyway, @karanguni, it's gone a bit off-piste from your original prompt, but here it is anyway:

Adrenalin Trap (7631 words) by Philomytha
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Simon Illyan/OFC, Simon Illyan/Aral Vorkosigan
Characters: Simon Illyan, Aral Vorkosigan
Additional Tags: Espionage, Drugs, Interrogation, Dubious Consent, Barrayaran consent issues, Time Period: Vorkosigan Regency, the largest collection of pornography on Barrayar, Escobar
Summary:

Simon Illyan likes to live dangerously. It's a bad habit for the Chief of ImpSec.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/166046.html. There are comments there.

I wrote a fic for Trick or Treat as a treat for the lovely @frith_in_thorns, since I can hardly be expected to resist a request for Simon Illyan, h/c and loyalty. I also threw in Cordelia being Betan at people, kid!Miles, and Count Piotr, just in case there was any worry about whether or not it would be obvious who wrote this :-D

Rising Tide (4038 words) by Philomytha
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Simon Illyan, Piotr Pierre Vorkosigan, Miles Vorkosigan
Additional Tags: Barrayaran politics, Storms And Floods, Hurt/Comfort
Summary:

Cordelia deals with the aftermath of a violent protest.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/165716.html. There are comments there.

Dear Yuletide Author,

( fandoms are Bonnie Dundee - Rosemary Sutcliff, Upstairs Downstair (1971), Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L SayersCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/165210.html. There are comments there.

So I have two fics inspired by posts on tumblr lately.

The first is inspired by a post someone made a while back saying that Illyan should have reported immediately to his second in command when he started to have things go wrong with his memory chip. And I thought, yeah, but his second in command is Haroche. So that's the story of this fic:

Error State
Illyan attempts to report his chip problems to Haroche.

*

The other is a ficlet as requested by twicelivedsummer here.

( Miles travels to Jackson's Whole instead of Tau Verde and meets a very familiar faceCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/164741.html. There are comments there.

Sometimes living in the future is great.

The seal on our shower screen is giving up the will to live. On my most recent trip to B&Q - a regular occurrence when you have all unknowing married someone whose favourite words are 'no, we don't need to call anyone out, I can fix that myself' - I was instructed to find a new one and given dimensions. Of course they don't have anything with the precise dimensions, so I get the closest of the four available options and bring it home. It doesn't fit, and so Mr P suggests there's probably a website called shower seals dotcom where I can find every possible variety of shower seal and they'll have one that fits our shower. I laugh in his face, because this is obviously ridiculous.

My friends, there is such a website, with a trifling variation of name (just in case you are ever in this particular situation, it's showersealuk.com) and they do have every possible shape and style of shower seal. Including one that will fit our shower, which is now in the post to us. I am just delighted that this is a sufficiently common problem that some enterprising person has discovered that he can buy up stock of every kind of shower seal imaginable, list them all on one easy-to-use website, and sell them across the country in sufficient numbers to, presumably, make a living. There are times when I am annoyed by the modern world, like when Philomythulus discovered that if he types the words on his favourite marble run box into Google image search he can find 10,000 other marble runs that he would like me to buy, but this, I have to say, is excellent.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/163734.html. There are comments there.

Guardian
Which I've already talked about a lot, but hey, how often do you find an amazingly tropey sf/crime drama that's this much fun and also has a delightful active fandom on DW? This is basically a long casefic-type slashfic that got filmed in its entirety and then had all the actual sex and kissing deleted but everything else kept in. Especially the h/c, you've never seen anything like this show for long, long, delightful h/c sequences and more protectiveness than you can shake a stick at. Tearjerker ending, subtitles much more painful than Nirvana in Fire, but well worth it. Oh, and the leads are beautiful. Also watching it is expanding my knowledge of Chinese, which is currently very un-useful due to NiF: I know lots of phrases like 'yes, your highness' and 'princess' and 'the emperor is leaving' and 'KILL! KILL! KILL!' but a bit less on the 'thank you' and what you say when you answer a phone.

Gentleman Jack
Only watched the first three episodes so far but I am absolutely delighted with it and I so, so, so need Anne's coat. I love all the shots of her striding around Yorkshire in it so much, and I love everything about her really and she can break all the hearts she likes as far as I'm concerned. Also I really like how Marion is shown: we see that she's annoying Anne, but at the same time, she's definitely a person of her own with her own opinions and abilities.

Crazy Rich Asians
Good popcorn fun, and the chemistry between Rachel and Eleanor was fantastic. The romance between Rachel and Nick was okay, but come on, Rachel only accepts Nick's proposal when he uses Eleanor's ring, and all the most interesting scenes in the film involved Eleanor. I was very pleased when I looked at the tiny fandom and saw it shared my opinion on this. The mahjong scene was amazing too.

The Favourite
I was surprised by how much I liked this. It seemed like it was going to go off into the cringe/gross side of comic, but it didn't, and instead it was fantastic, a bit surreal, but somehow felt more like real period life than your average period drama. Also I am so in love with the Duchess of Marlborough that I don't even know how to describe it. If I was Anne I'd let her do whatever the hell she wanted too. The scene where she shot Abigail! Mostly, though, I loved seeing women having recognisable-to-me emotions all over the place, and a story in which men were entirely painted and frilly accessories to a complex and fierce emotional three-way tug-of-war between women.

Smiley's People
A 80s tv drama that I saw on a list of really good TV. I am not convinced, and by not convinced I mean the pace was so leisurely that I struggled to stay awake and had no idea what was happening at any point during the story. Admittedly this is my usual response to Le Carre; I never can make head or tail of any of the plots he writes even when they get filtered through a scriptwriter first, I had the same reaction to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and while I've read a lot of his books I don't understand any of them. I guess it's a testament to the fact that he does something right that I keep reading them anyway. I did sort of understand The Constant Gardener, I guess? Anyway, the show was very atmospheric and Smiley was fantastic and I really enjoyed the scene at the end when he breaks the Russian diplomat, but I spent the vast majority of the time wondering what was going on and why.

Also I have just finished a slow rewatch of Nirvana in Fire, this time with my husband, and he has never, ever, ever done this before, but as soon as we got to the end he said we had to watch it again so we're now back on episode 2.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/163415.html. There are comments there.

Sorry to be suddenly all Guardian all the time, but I have just watched episode 34 and 35 and I am officially DEAD now. ( cut in case anyone wants to watch this show unspoiledCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/163042.html. There are comments there.

So I have been watching Guardian whenever I get a spare moment, and wow, I really am enjoying how it doesn't spare the tropes. An episode without half a dozen delicious protective affectionate moments between Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan - well, that hasn't happened yet. Some highlights from what I've seen so far:

( not really very spoileryCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/162764.html. There are comments there.

To my COMPLETE SURPRISE, my wonderful gift Reportedly Missing was written by the lovely frith_in_thorns, who has such excellent taste in h/c that I had to write her a treat as well.

My assignment was for Rivers of London, and I wrote both Recovery Position and Beside the Seaside for esteliel, whose requests have left me with a WIP file full of attempts to write something for practically every tag they requested. In the end I managed sharing a bed for the first, because I've wanted Peter/Nightingale sharing a bed since forever, and shipwrecks and huddling for warmth for the second because I love ridiculous magical adventures. And I should really apologise to the Thames Barrier and the RNLI for the second fic, since I am certain that sea serpents would not give either of them a moment's bother in reality.

So there was that, and then of course I had to write something for frith, so that was Inversion featuring Aral comforting a drunk Illyan, hence the inversion.

And then there was my new fandom love, Disco, and I've been wanting to write more for that, and rosecake gave me an excuse with their excellent requests, so that turned into Faithful Wounds about Michael and mirror!Saru.

***

And separately, raven said I would like Guardian and they were completely right, it is adorable and lovely and a complete delight. I have only watched a few episodes as it is half term so time is limited, but I love Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan and their ridiculous adventures very very much. Also you should all go read raven’s fic meditations ex post facto which is why I started watching it and which doesn’t need any canon knowledge to enjoy.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/162305.html. There are comments there.

The h/c exchange is live! And I have a delightful plotty fic featuring Simon Illyan being an idiot. And I have an idea as to who might have written it, so thank you again <3

Reportedly Missing (2836 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Simon Illyan, Aral Vorkosigan, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Alys Vorpatril
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Time Period: Vorkosigan Regency, Poison, nefarious plots, Sometimes Simon is extremely unhelpful
Summary:

"So, Simon," Aral said. "Would you like to tell me why you're hiding under my desk?"

I wrote about 15,000 words for this across four fics, and maybe one of them will take 5 minutes to guess instead of 0.5 seconds, but they're all pretty obvious. What can I do if people request characters and situations I love writing h/c for? Though actually I spent most of the writing period despairing at my inability to come up with ideas or write even the most boring of sentences, and then in the last three weeks it all came unstuck and I got four of them done in the end. This has been a really fun exchange and now I get to go and read all the h/c fics :-)

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/162294.html. There are comments there.

I am having such fun watching the original Upstairs Downstairs, and it is not at all what I expected. I mean, it has a lot of doffing hats and servants getting lectured on knowing their place. But it is aware of class and questions it in a way that something like Downton Abbey never even tries to do, and it really plays for keeps, compared to a lot of modern TV.

( vague spoilers for a TV show that's older than I amCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/161883.html. There are comments there.

I am reading my way through the Miss Fisher novels by Kerry Greenwood, and they are fantastic good fun, very tropey in the best way - Phryne has a wonderful tendency to pick up wounded and beautiful young men, bandage them up and then have enthusiastic sex with them until they feel better. And feed them delicious meals, this is not a good series to read when you're hungry. They're also shockingly full of cameos and in-jokes. Miss Mary Mead featured in one, and she was exactly who you'd expect her to be, but the one I'm reading at the moment is a full-blown Sherlock crossover with Phryne as matchmaker, it's incredible and is almost as much a Sherlock fic as it is a Miss Fisher story. Also I'm pretty sure I saw a hat-tip to MFU in there too, and I'm only surprised Lord Peter hasn't strolled around in the background at any point.

They are quite like the TV series, but with some interesting differences, mainly that Phryne and Jack have absolutely zero chemistry in the books; apart from Mr Butler, he's about the only man she never so much as contemplates taking to bed. Instead they have a rather lovely calm and placid friendship with zero sparks, and Phryne's true love is Lin Chung, though this in no way prevents her from sleeping with at least one other beautiful man per book. And I love Phryne/Jack in the show, they about set fire to the screen in every episode, but in the books, Phryne/Lin Chung is absolutely electric. I've enjoyed all the books in the series, but the latest one, Murder and Mendelssohn, is the Sherlock crossover and it is absolutely delightful.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/161525.html. There are comments there.

Wow, this episode was full of Stuff

( spoilersCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/161270.html. There are comments there.

Just finished watching the latest season of Endeavour and I don’t think I’ve ever had a character I changed my opinion of so strongly as Bright. In the first seasons I thought he was awful. Then he turned out to be unexpectedly brave and decent, but this most recent season!

( spoilersCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/160984.html. There are comments there.

A bit of random liveblogging, because I kept being interrupted while watching this anyway so why not make notes:

( spoilers ahoyCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/160045.html. There are comments there.

Posting this here since I also put it on tumblr, a rough drabble inspired by the description of the Third Cetagandan War from GJRQ.

*

Sending Aral off to lead the Home Fleet felt odd. Simon was supposed to be there, a half-step behind his left shoulder for his every waking hour. Instead, he was left holding the baby. And the wife. And the planet. And, of course, the Emperor. Aral hadn’t even said goodbye, just deposited that pile of valuables on Simon’s lap and soared off to make sure there would still be an Empire. Simon hadn’t been mistaken about the look on his face: it was joy. Given a straight choice between leading a space fleet into a wormhole slugging match, or staying at his post here on Barrayar, Aral hadn’t taken more than thirty seconds to make up his mind.

It made sense. Of course you left your guard dog at home when you went away. Simon supposed he couldn’t, in all decency, lie down on his stomach at the spaceport and howl until Aral returned.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/159816.html. There are comments there.

I am now all caught up on Disco, and I like it a lot so far.

( S2 spoilers belowCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/159670.html. There are comments there.

I mentioned something about falling headfirst into a new fandom? Have another fic, something a bit more substantial this time. I don't think it's going to be all Saru all the time here forever, but, well, I'm not out of ideas yet :-). I feel like I'm still getting to grips with their voices, and Trek is such a gigantic canon that I only know bits of - the only Trek I've watched all the way through is DS9 - so it's a bit intimidating to write for this, and writing for visual fandoms really isn't natural for me at all. But I have a whole lot of thoughts and headcanon about the mirror universe and Kelpiens and what was going on with everything to do with Saru in S1, and because I don't really do nonfiction meta, it's coming out in stories :-)

***

Title: The Lion and the Unicorn
Summary: Saru visits the Terran Emperor aboard Discovery. An extra scene from 1.14

( The Lion and the UnicornCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/159265.html. There are comments there.

I appear to have fallen headfirst into a new fandom, if the sudden, er, mushrooming of 6000 words of fic in a new DISCO.TXT file on my computer is anything to go by. And that's just from the past day or two. There is some fun fic out there for Discovery on AO3, but there is a shocking lack of what I want, which is ALL the Shenzhou-era fic about Captain Georgiou and her two misfit proteges, all the stories of Michael and Saru sparring with each other while both being desperately loyal to her. Away missions gone wrong! Moral dilemmas! All the classic Trek tropes with those three, please! Also I want everything about Saru more generally, because after seeing his little backstory thing I am even more fascinated by him and how he went from primitive village boy to XO on Starfleet's shiniest science vessel. I haven't watched S2 yet, though I am thoroughly spoiled for all the major plot twists so far since I have no self-restraint. And as I said, I've been writing fic, on the basis that if you want to read it, you've got to write it first. And the first thing I've finished is a little triple drabble featuring Michael and Mirror!Saru. Warning for slavery and general mirrorverse angst.

( the regard of the proudCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/158983.html. There are comments there.

There is a new Bujold novella out and nobody mentioned it to me! Knife Children, a Sharing Knife sequel or epilogue, a sweet little tale about Barr and his daughter. I inhaled it and am reminded of how much I love the Sharing Knife series, every bit as much as I love the Vorkosigan series. They do different things, and TSK is such a gorgeous world, I love spending time in it. And now I'm going to have to go back and reread the whole series. I often do in the spring, it feels like a spring series somehow, I think it's because of the setting of the last book. Anyway, that was a good thing to find yesterday.

And on the general theme of spring, or end-of-winter, I am going to go out today and plant another plum tree, a cherry tree, some raspberries, currants and a loganberry. I've never tried growing loganberries before, but given how blackberries and raspberries thrive on this soil, I think it'll do just fine.

*

Oh, and I have finished Discovery and then rewatched it with a bad cold, and I think Saru is my favourite by a hair, he is such a lovely brave Space Gazelle. But Michael! Michael learning how to human is fantastic, and I hope she gets to be happy some more. And Tilly, oh dear me I adore Tilly, and Georgiou too in both her incarnations, and I am pleased to hear that the second season is more ensemble with the bridge crew because I missed that. I was not particularly interested in Ash/Voq and his tribulations, he managed to be dull even when being tortured. I liked Lorca even though he was evil, and Stamets is fun. I feel like it's still finding its feet, but I hope it has a good seven seasons to find them in. I'd like to see more monster-of-the-week, those were the best episodes of the first series.

Due to the aforementioned bad cold I picked up a few of the tie-in novels and they were readable enough. A bit heavy on the milsf/science bafflegab in a David Weber sort of way, but some good storytelling in there too. If they were fics on AO3 I'd have left kudos on both and a comment on the Saru-centric one which had some genuinely fun worldbuilding with alien races and mysteries and all sorts. The other one would probably have been more compelling to me if I was more interested in Spock and Michael having a mindmeld to save the day, also the author started a subplot and then lost interest in it at the end and just cut it off. Still, they were exactly right for reading while dosed on cold medicine.

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/158830.html. There are comments there.

I know there's a second season out of this now, but because I am always, always late with these things, I'm only just halfway through the first season. But I love it!

( spoilers for the first part of season oneCollapse )

Crossposted at https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/158220.html. There are comments there.