My Shame Is TL;DR

Yuletide 2016 Reveal!

2017-01-01T20:25:33Z

For this Yuletide, I was the delighted recipient of three stories! Two were for the song Devil Went Down to Georgia:

All Seven (1330 words) by Llwyden ferch Gyfrinach
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: The Devil/Johnny (Devil Went Down to Georgia)
Characters: The Devil, Johnny (Devil Went Down to Georgia)
Additional Tags: Seven Deadly Sins, Gambling, Pride
Summary:

Pride is the father of all sin, and the devil knows pride.

Johnny's got it in abundance.

The Devil went down to Georgia (and totally got off with Johnny) (4659 words) by wendymarlowe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: The Devil/Johnny
Characters: The Devil, Johnny (Devil Went Down to Georgia)
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Yuletide 2016, because this song deserves ALL THE SMUT
Summary:

The Devil went down to Georgia and got a lot more than he bargained for. (What he bargained for, in this case, being Johnny's soul. And what he got being sex. It was a good deal.)

And one was for the Murder Most Unladylike series:

Polka Dot Skulls (2878 words) by Metal_Chocobo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hazel Wong/Daisy Wells
Characters: Hazel Wong, Daisy Wells
Additional Tags: College, Canon-Typical Racism, Love Confessions, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

The plan has always been for Hazel and Daisy to attend university together.

I wrote one story:

Solid Copy (14668 words) by thefourthvine
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Losers (2010)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Carlos "Cougar" Alvarez/Jake Jensen
Additional Tags: Telepathy
Summary:

Jensen shifted his gaze to Cougar. “I really thought that if I ever had to say the words ‘telepathic disaster,’ it’d be a lot cooler than this is turning out to be.”

I'd like to thank my lovely recipient, minim_calibre, for giving me prompts that were basically a license to go full-bore ridiculous trope on this fandom; writing this was a fabulous distraction from the eleventh circle of hell, also known as the 2016 US election. I originally had plans for a slightly darker take, but then, well, reality occurred. So: froth and tropes! Froth and tropes EVERYWHERE.

It was a great Yuletide all the way around, basically.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Yuletide 2016: Dear Writer

2016-09-28T20:25:27Z

Dear Writer Person,

Hi!

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I hope to get from my recipient. But if details aren't your thing, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering to write in one of these tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

Me

I love so many things! Here is a small sample:

Happy endings. (Um, I mean of the everyone lives happily ever after kind. Although I am also a big fan of orgasms, not gonna lie.)
Humor.
Slow burn romances and slow build sex scenes.
Action and adventure.
Snappy dialogue.
Classic fan fiction tropes, whether played straight or inverted. (Soulbonds! Werewolves! Bodyswap! Arranged marriages! Fake dating! Amnesia! And so on.)
Families (found, biological, synthetic, hologrammatic, whatever) being good to each other.
Robots, spaceships, aliens, space opera, military science fiction.
Urban fantasy, magical politics, dryads in backwards Dodgers caps, parking spells, secret libraries full of Starbucks-sipping, bluetooth-headset-wearing magical theory students.
People who have problems with feelings.

I also have some DNWs:

Animal and child harm or death. These are my only deal-breaker squicks; I can't handle them at all.
Embarrassment and humiliation.
Rape.
The abuse of women.
Infidelity.
Zombies or cannibalism.
Character death or characters with cancer.
Pairings with big power imbalances -- teacher/student, doctor/patient, huge age gaps, etc -- or a male/female power imbalance with the woman on the less powerful end.

I am thefourthvine everywhere I am -- on AO3, DW, LJ, Twitter, Tumblr, and Imzy. I'm easy to find.

So that's the general stuff. Let's talk fandoms.

Basketball RPF, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Larry Bird

Request: I -- genuinely think Magic Johnson and Larry Bird might have soulbonded at the NCAA Championship in 1979. They certainly went from zero to intense, eternal focus pretty damn quickly. So what I want to know is -- what happened? Where did it go from there? How does that work, when you're playing against each other, when one of you doesn't even LIKE the other, when you're such incredibly different human beings?

If you go with the actual soulbond, there are lots of interesting possibilities here - Larry fighting the bond, the way it affected them and their game, how it drove them to play. Or you could talk about how they finally accepted the soulbond and what it's like now, being comfortable with it and each other, years after the fighting and the struggle finally ended. Just, anything.

And if you take the non-soulbond route (which is of course entirely welcome; this definitely doesn't have to be a literal soulbond), just what IS going on? They have SOME kind of bond, that much is clear, and I'd love to hear what it's like: forever friendship, repeating reincarnation as people obsessed with each other, multiverse-spanning romance, whatever. I just want more about this intense *thing* they have going.

I'm good with gen, slash, and poly. Just please no straight-up infidelity. There's always gen, or unmarried AUs, or setting the sex before the marriage, or spousal knowledge and consent (my favorite!), or spousal involvement. Or something else you come up with! LET THE MAGIC (hee!) OF BIRD AND JOHNSON GUIDE YOU, basically.

Okay, I am a trifle concerned that my request makes me sound like an exceptionally weird tinhat. No! No! I am merely reporting the truth, which is that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird appear to have a real-life soulbond!

...That didn't help my case. But I have solid evidence. The documentary A Courtship of Rivals (YouTube link to full documentary, but you only need to watch the first ten minutes to see the literal discussion of the soulbond) could not be clearer. These guys are bonded in some way. And I just find that fascinating. You could not have two more different guys (unless, like, one of them was a Vulcan - SHUSH NO WRONG FANDOM). You could not have a more intense rivalry. And yet it's abundantly clear they have a ton of respect for each other, a ton of very genuine love for each other, and they know each other so well - every appearance I've ever seen them in has just been so great for that. We have Magic, dude who loves people, hugs, and fame, and Larry, dude whose basic approach to life is "go away and leave me alone because I have a lot of very important scowling to do," and they love each other, and that is the greatest thing to me.

Basically, I adore these guys. And I am riveted by their great and weird relationship. Anything you write about them navigating that relationship while being their extremely awesome selves will be wonderful.

And if you're up for pairing fic, I would love that, any rating.

To pick this fandom up, watch that documentary. Marvel at its dedication to pushing the soulbond storyline!

The Devil Went down to Georgia (song), Johnny/Devil

Request: Yeah, I want Johnny and the Devil to fuck.

But, I mean, I have a lot of excellent reasons that are extensively supported by the canon! Johnny’s got that ego, which is clearly bigger than Hell itself, and he’s got enough cockiness and attitude he could bottle it by the gallon and still have enough left to star in every Tom Cruise movie ever. I think the Devil would be into that, I really do. Also, I suspect that after the whole gold fiddle thing, the Devil spent a lot of time fantasizing about taking down Johnny, who is probably on the very short list of People Who Patronized The Devil And Got Away With It. Plus the Devil clearly has a pretty stressful job, with quotas to meet and tight deadlines, and he needs to let off steam from time to time. And, I mean, Johnny was willing to bet his soul against a fiddle made of gold – this is clearly a dude who is bored and really likes a challenge, and what better challenge than seducing the Devil?

I just – I listen to this song and I think, “These dudes should bang.” So. There we are.

When I told my lovely wife, Best Beloved, that I was requesting this, she said, “So ‘rosining up his bow’ is a metaphor?”

To which I said, “No, no! Not at all. It’s more like...foreplay.”

I mean, these two guys would clearly be up for a rematch, but they’ve already covered fiddle playing. So, hmmmm. What else could they do? Wait, I know! Let’s see who can make the other beg first!

Or whatever. I’m not saying it has to be that. No, no, let your imagination go wherever it takes you. I’m just saying that these two have unfinished business and my personal theory is that that business is going to end in a lot of sex, with Johnny besting the Devil (in some way – I think he’s probably got, um, some tricks up his sleeve) yet again. This is my hypothesis.

If you want to pick up this canon, it is a 3.5 minute song, available on YouTube.

Oh, and a possibly relevant footnote: I’m Jewish, and I have no personal religious beliefs relating to the Devil at all, so blasphemy is not going to be a problem here.

Mars Evacuees series - Sophia McDougall, Any

Request: I have so many potential ideas for this, I don’t even know where to start.

I’d love a future adventure for the Plucky Kids of Mars. How do they get back to space? (Because you KNOW they’re going back to space.) What happens in space? Do they ever meet an alien race and have it go really well? Do they ever go back to Mars? What’s their future look like? Who do they grow up to be? How do their adventures (and the books about them) affect them as adults? (Or this can be about any single Plucky Kid, too, if you like. Or just a few!)

I’d also love a worldbuilding story. I’d love to know what it’s like on earth if you’re not a Plucky Kid of Mars. Earth has clearly changed a lot. There’s still countries, but also a much more powerful planetary government, seems like? Valerie Muldoon has clearly been up to quite a lot of whack-a-mole science, so there are probably some fairly different varieties of humans. Also, there’s aliens living there now. What is it LIKE? I would love to know.

And this is probably the most out-there one, but I’d really love a look at Stephanie Dare, mother, one-time bank teller, space war hero, and fighter spaceship pilot. We know from the climax of Space Hostages, she is fucking badass. How did her life go? Like, how was it before the war, being a someone who had that fighter spaceship pilot yen in her and no real outlet for it? How did she get to be the space war hero and extreme badass that she currently is? That would be a fascinating story, and I’d love it.

Also, I love the Goldfish extremely, so a future encounter with it would also be super great, in any of these stories (or in its own adventure, if you prefer!).

Pairings: I am mostly gen here, but if you do the adult versions of the Plucky Kids, I’d love some Alice/Josephine.

Okay, so I read these books this year and LOVED them. Then I read them out loud to my kid and loved them even more. They’re space adventures! With science! And humor! There’s danger and heroism and greatness! It’s kind of like if someone took Robert Heinlein’s juveniles, removed all the boring, gross, sexist, racist, or badly written bits, and replaced the now entirely-empty book with a really good story along similar lines. It’s optimistic middle-grade space adventure done RIGHT.

I requested “any” because I really do mean ANY. I love every single character in these books (even if I am deeply worried about Dr. Muldoon’s apparent lack of ethics), except Rasmus Trommler. I love Carl’s boundless enthusiasm, Josephine’s keen brain, Alice’s determination, Noel’s kindness, Thsaaa’s seriousness. I also love Stephanie’s heroism and torn allegiances, Christa’s complicated face turn, Lena’s intelligence and spacetoaster love for her sister, Dr. Muldoon’s worrying approach to applied science, the Krakkiluks' deeply unfortunate romantic soliloquies, the rebel Emalas’ valor, and the Goldfish’s very sincere commitment to curriculum-aligned fun.

I love the way the books are realistic about how people work and how science works and how intelligent races as a whole work. I don’t think there’s a story that could be written in this canon that I wouldn’t want to read. (Unless, well, rocks fall and everyone dies, that kind of thing.)

So please do whatever you fancy with these characters. I just want morrrrrrrre of them, and space, and joy.

Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens – Daisy Wells, Hazel Wong

Request: Please write the amazing continuing adventures of Daisy and Hazel!

I’ve been wondering about the fact that they’ll be coming of age during WWII, in England (I’m assuming Hazel will stay to finish her education at university); what do they do? Bletchley Park? Drive ambulances? Parachute into occupied territory and organize resistance units? Women in WWII is one of my interests, and obviously I adore Hazel and Daisy, so that would be a combination of delights for me.

Also, after the fourth book, I am definitely into the Daisy/Hazel pairing. I’d love to see them as adults, in university or after, figuring this out, navigating their relationship/friendship/whatever they end up having.

Most of all, wherever they are, I would love, love, love to see them still solving mysteries, detecting, and be their brilliant, dedicated selves. Mysteries at university! Mysteries at Bletchley Park! Mysteries in occupied France! Mysteries in small suburban towns! Mysteries when Daisy and Hazel go to visit Hazel's parents! Whatever setting you choose, in whatever part of their future you choose, I am here for it.

Okay, so, I have a special fondness for series that level up, and this series levels up AND HOW. Like, the first three are adorable middle-grade detection shenanigans, and then BAM along comes book four and just really complicates and deepens the whole thing. And it’s so great. Daisy and Hazel are at the age where people change and develop and grow as humans, and there they are! Changing and developing and growing as humans! I love that the author commits to that, and doesn’t let the characters or the series get stale. Book four is what tipped this series over from “fun read” to “NEED FIC NOW” for me, because – I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but it’s sort of impossible, so this will be a bit spoilery – the developments with Daisy that Hazel documents without understanding them suggest that more development and change is coming, and I just really need to know how it ends up.

That, I think, is why I’m mostly interested in future fic for these two – I would love a glimpse of them as they people they’re becoming in canon. It’s going to be a hardish road to get there, I think, and so I want to flip to past the end of the series and see how it all ends up.

I love Hazel for her kindness, her honesty, her intelligence, and her ability to figure out the squishy human sides of things, as well as for her self-doubt and outsider feelings. I love Daisy because she’s so damn smart and so completely clueless at the same time – she can solve every puzzle except feelings, and that. That is my favorite.

Any of that that you can show me in their future, I will love.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

RL: Losing Gus

2016-07-24T04:59:43Z

My father died of brain cancer a few years before the earthling was born. In fact, we bought the sperm that made the earthling using money my father left me; it was really important to me that that money pay for it. So my father, who loved babies, never got to meet his youngest daughter's baby, but he did at least have a part in that child's life. His death was awful and unfair and unacceptable, and nothing can change that, but we did manage to make something positive out of it. We made the earthling.

When the earthling was four, the mother of one of his preschool classmates died of metastatic brain cancer. The earthling came home the day after and said, "Mrs. Greyson said that Joycelyn's heart is sad because her mommy is gone, so we have to be kind to Joycelyn and help her with our hearts." (If you want to know why I could never be a preschool teacher: that was not the first time Mrs. Greyson had had to explain the death of a parent to a group of four year olds.) The earthling, being the earthling, had many questions. Where was Joycelyn's mommy? What happened to her? Was she really not ever coming back? What is cancer? How do you get it? How do you get better from it? Why didn't Joycelyn's mommy get better?

I answered all his questions, and then I spent some time crying in the bathroom.

This launched the hardest week of parenting I've had to date, as the earthling played out funeral after funeral with his trucks – one truck would get sick, and then it would die. The others would be very sad and there would be a funeral. And then a few minutes later we'd do it all again. Every truck he owned, and he had many, died at least a few times. And several times each day, he'd repeat all those questions about Joycelyn's mommy again. I cried a lot that week.

But I understood why he was doing it. He was trying to make it make sense, trying to adapt his worldview to encompass this weird, unacceptable truth: his classmate's parent was gone forever, taken away by a disease. That's not easy to do. I still don't entirely accept that my father is dead, and he died when his children were grown up, not in preschool.

The kids in Mrs. Greyson's class had an in-class birthday party for Joycelyn, because she turned five right after her mother died and her family wasn't feeling very much like having a party. And then a neighbor had another party for Joycelyn, and we all went to that. We celebrated what Joycelyn's mother left behind. We tried to help, to find some part of the tragedy that was still good. It's what you do when the unacceptable happens.

The unacceptable happened again this year. Last week, I explained to my eight year old that a kid a year younger than he is is going to die.

That kid's name is Gus. He's the son of my friend Sasha, who I met through a shared adoration of Mounties and the Chicago cops who love them, years before there was an earthling or a Gus. Gus loves documentaries and dinosaurs and playing outside. He wears sparkly pink nightgowns to bed. He has a brother one year younger who he shares his room, his life, his whole self with. And Gus is dying.

Gus was diagnosed with brain cancer at three. (I wrote this post for Sasha back then.) We talked about him a lot, the earthling and me, when Joycelyn's mother died. Back then, I could say, "Gus has lots of options. Gus is probably going to be fine."

That's not true anymore. Gus's cancer came back. It metastasized. He doesn't have any options left. He's feeling okay right now, but he's not going to be fine. Now, when the earthling asks about Gus, he climbs into my lap and says quietly, "There's not any chance at all that he will stay alive?"

And I have to say no.

My sister asked why I would even tell my kid something like this. But I had to. I'm sad for my friend and I'm sad for Gus, and my kid, who is around me all the time, of course noticed and wondered and asked why, and I'm not going to lie to him. I tell him the truth about the world, even when the truth is awful, because this is his world, this is the world we gave him: a world that has Legos and ice cream and children dying of brain cancer. I can't make it not so. I would if I could, believe me, but the best I can do is try to explain it.

But the reflex to protect my kid remains. When I have to tell the earthling something bad about the world, I also try to tell him how we can help. Something we can do to make things better.

There's not a lot we can do to make this better. This is the kind of bad we can't fix. Gus belongs in this world. He should be fixing this world right alongside the earthling, for decades to come. His awesome, irreplaceable self should be there in twenty and forty and sixty years, making things better, teaching new generations, loving his family, just living his life. But that won't happen. And, as the earthling would say, that is not fair. Not right.

So here's the only positive thing we can think of to do. The earthling and I are doing what Sasha asked and trying to raise money to help the next kids who get brain cancer like Gus. We made a jar to put change in, to send to the Tanner Seebaum Foundation, which helps fund research into Gus's kind of cancer. And I'm also asking you: if you can, if you have a little bit of your time or your money to give, could you give it in honor of Gus? Send this link to people, or visit it yourself, and donate. Or link people to this post.

Please help us make some small good out of the unimaginable.

Out of the loss of Gus.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

All the Ships I've Loved Before 4

2016-07-12T03:12:20Z

The One That Proves That What Actually Felled the Roman Empire Was a Lack of Sartorial Adaptability.Chosen Man, by Sineala. The Eagle, Marcus Flavius Aquila/Esca Mac Cunoval.

Can you love a ship without ever knowing the canon? Well, if you can't, this project is in some serious trouble, because, uh, I don't watch a lot of canon. (I have now reached the point in my life where I'm getting judged by my own son for not watching enough canon. Child, I did not bring you into this world so you could say in wondering tones, "You've only seen NINE episodes of Doctor Who?" And anyway it's more like 11, thank you.) But in some cases, I don't need to see the canon. And by "don't need," I mean, "Shhhh, just let me sit here and pretend that this is canon, because it should be. It should be."

So, the Canon, to the Best of My Knowledge: there are these dudes named Marcus and Esca. Marcus is a Roman soldier. Esca is his slave. And...I think they're in love? I don't know. I read a couple of recaps of the movie and was like, wow, if there's another explanation for this than "they're committed life partners," it's not coming through here. And to be honest, even if you take it as read that it's Marcus and Esca, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, the recaps of the movie aren't the easiest thing in the world to follow. I'm guessing it probably makes more sense if you watch it.

But I am okay with not understanding it, because the fic, well. The fic makes it all so clear! And this is the perfect, Platonic ideal of Eagle fic, at least for me. Ridiculous devotion? Yup, we have it. Culture clash? Indeed. Being really good at stuff? Present! Working together to do important things? Hail, hail, the gang's all here, let's get this show on the road. And, yes, okay, it does take like 100,000 words of longing and adventure and lying the mud for them to get the show on the road, but that is a plus. I like slow burns, okay? We already discussed this. I am Team Slower Is Better, and If It Takes Five Years I Am Fine with That, Maybe They Can Have Adventures While They Pine and/or Yearn.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that this whole Ships I Have Loved project is going to reveal a lot of terrible things about my id. Which – like – I am braced for that, but to be honest I am hoping I don't notice and nobody tells me. I definitely don't want to look into the abyss, but I also don't particularly want it or anything else to look into me, if that makes sense. My id probably cannot stand up to abyssal scrutiny.)

So, this fic – yes, I am now back to that – is an AU in which Marcus and Esca are both soldiers in the Roman Army, with Marcus in command of the Actual Worst Unit in the Entire Empire, except really they're not; the Roman Empire is just not prepared to deal with their kind of awesomeness. So there's competence and learning the ropes and a slow burn and battle and complications, and basically if I could I would read versions of this story every day for the rest of my life. Like, this story, but in SPACE! Or this story, but with DRAGONS! What I'm saying is that this should really be a genre all of its own, and I shake my fist at the publishing industry for not understanding that.

But unfortunately it is not a whole genre, so I have no choice but to re-read this one. A lot. But carefully, so I don't wear it out. I assume everyone in the world has already read this story, but if you have, now is a good time to read it again! And if you haven't, good news: now is your time to be alive.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

All the Ships I've Loved Before 3

2016-06-19T23:07:40Z

The One I Really Shouldn't Have Re-Read While Reading Rick Riordan's Work Aloud to the Earthling. I Keep Waiting for Percy to Manifest His Mutant Powers Now. Pantheon, by Yahtzee. X-Men First Class, Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr. (Plus Emma Frost/Scott Summers and Rogue/Wolverine.)

I warned you these wouldn't be in any kind of order, and we've definitely diverged from my shipping history timeline now. But this is still a very old ship of mine. Okay, sure, XMFC came out in 2011, and, uh, I still haven't seen it. (Look, I'm not going to make any more excuses; let's all just accept that I live in culture-free zone and only know of modern movies/TV shows/comics because people tweet about them.) No matter. I've been shipping Professor X and Magneto since before I knew what fic was. They are one of my original No Heterosexual Explanation pairings, and their many-decades-long thing where they were probably lovers, and then definitely enemies, and then possibly lovers and enemies at the same time, and then there were visits in prison, and battles, and speeches, and elections, and I think someone built a vigilante team and someone else built a country – look, all I'm saying is these dudes have a lot of history together, and in that entire extremely lengthy history, they were always either pining for each other or banging each other, regardless of what else they were doing. This is my firm belief. I wear this tinhat proudly.

It's a very compelling ship, is what I'm saying. It deserves very compelling fic. Fortunately, it has so, so many stories, so many that picking just one wasn't easy. But this fic. THIS FIC.

This a fantastic AU – the characters fit so perfectly into the world of Ancient Rome, but they also stay perfectly themselves. (In fact, given the nature of comics canon, they're probably more themselves than they are in like 90% of their actual canon appearances. Comics: actual published fic since like 1966. And some of it is not such great fic, either.) But, also, I love this story because it doesn't precisely follow any of the canon stories I know about, but it still captures this pairing absolutely – all the ways they fit together (yes, fine, take a moment to be twelve, I'll wait) and all the ways they differ. In short, this is an AU doing what AUs do best: distilling these people and their story to their essence, and making that essence all the more visible.

Plus, I love the worldbuilding. (Show me good worldbuilding and you have my undivided attention, for sure.) I love the way the mutants and their mutations fit into the time's worldview and cultures. It's worth reading for that alone. Or, hey, read it for the 130k words of glorious plot, or the excellence of a slave rebellion, or – look, it's worth reading from pretty much every perspective. I'm always thrilled with I share a fandom with Yahtzee, and stories like this are the reason why.

(If you can read it, that is. Warnings: This story has rape, graphic violence, and animal harm. I'm not kidding about any of that, but for me, this story is worth it.)

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

All the Ships I've Loved Before 2

2016-06-06T04:27:45Z

The One with the Matchmaking Robots. Pro Tip: Everything Everywhere Is Better with Matchmaking Robots. Nice Work If You Can Get It, by astolat. Mike Donovan/Greg Powell, I, Robot (book).

So. Harriet and Peter set my expectations for het romance. What did it for queer romance? It should have been Jeeves and Wooster. I spent years obsessively collecting everything PG Wodehouse ever wrote, and I read each of his books at least twenty times and giggled helplessly through every reading. But somehow they never tripped the ship circuit in my brain. No. What did that – and this is so stereotypically me I can hardly stand it – was I, Robot.

Specifically, Greg Powell and Mike Donovan. Twelve-year-old me did not understand precisely why she was re-reading the Powell and Donovan stories so obsessively; she just knew she couldn't stop.

But adult me knows why.

The Powell and Donovan stories taught me that fictional queer romance occurs between two people who depend on each other, care about each other, and look after each other, and that there will need to be robots and also me to imagine the kissing part for any kind of consummation to be achieved. So, yeah, thanks, Asimov. You formatted my brain for fic. (And robots. And fic about robots.) In fact, I discovered while writing this rec that one of the things I spent my adult life believing was I, Robot canon is, in fact, actually fic I told myself at the age of 13. Proud of you, teenage me!

Sadly, telling myself fic was for many years the only way to get my fix for this pairing. For mysterious reasons – or, okay, possibly for the entirely understandable reason that it's a book of short stories first published in 1950 – there's not a whole lot of I, Robot fic out there. But what is there comes mostly from Yuletide, and one of those stories was written for me. I love it helplessly.

See, Asimov had many good traits – amazing work ethic, solid scientific knowledge, an entirely reasonable dislike of wide open spaces – but many of his stories are kind of, um. Forever locked in the world of 1950. So I deeply love how this story is so very much an Asimov story – it has the messed-up robots, the frantic problem-solving, and the feel of the canon - but it's also a story with an actual human relationship between actual humans, something Asimov did not always remember to put in his stories. (Fun Asimov fact: at least two of his most human, likable, realistic characters are robots.) And, of course, this story has the kissing that Asimov inexplicably forgot to put in.

Basically, when I read this story ten years ago (holy shit, an actual decade ago), my inner teenager smiled blissfully, finally satisfied. And when I read it now, I feel exactly the same way: all's right with the world. Everything is as I always knew it should be. The ur-ship is manifest at last.

Do you need to know the fandom to read this? Oh my god, so much no. Here's a complete primer: there's these two dudes. They work on robots in remote locations in the solar system. Shit always goes wrong and they always fix it. And they should kiss. There. That's the whole fandom. And this is a before-the-canon story that gives you considerably more background than Asimov ever managed. Go! Read!

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

All the Ships I've Loved Before 1

2016-05-31T03:26:14Z

So, uh. Mistakes were made. See, there was this neat meme going around on Twitter – one like equals one ship – and I was really enjoying seeing what everyone had stored deep in the depths of their pairing wardrobe. Except most people were tweeting pictures, and the last thing I want to do is google a whole bunch of names and spend time squinting at the screen going, "But is that the actual Jim and Blair from the Sentinel? ...What did they look like, even?" So instead I thought I'd do fic recs. I could easily come up with a dozen or so pairings and a dozen or so recs, and I didn't expect to get more likes than that.

Instead, I ended up with 66 likes.

So, over the next, uh, probably months, possibly years, I will be doing a very deep dive into my pairing wardrobe. (Yes, I do have 66 pairings. I counted. The sad truth is that even this will not empty my pockets of all pairings. I'm a ship magpie, apparently.) No particular order, because honestly this project is already ridiculous enough. I'll try not to use stories I've recommended before, but in some cases I'll do it anyway, because some pairings have to be mentioned, even if I've already recommended every story about them.

Are you ready for this? I am definitely not ready for this. There should be a special name for a meme that gets way out of hand. Memelanche? Whatever. Here comes my memelanche of pairings, one fic rec at a time.

Let's start with a classic.

The One That Made Me Realize the Horror of Having a Soulmate with a Really Long Name in a Wristname AU. (Like, Jarome Arthur-Leigh Adekunle Tig Junior Elvis Iginla's Soulmate Presumably Has a Full Sleeve Wristname, So I Hope They Like Tattoos.) Gentle Antidote, by x_los. Harriet Vane/Peter Wimsey, Lord Peter Wimsey series.

Okay, so, if I'm doing an All the Ships I've Loved Before meme, let's start off with one of the ones that formatted my brain. I read the Peter Wimsey novels as an impressionable 12 year old, and I tell you what: that's the wrong damn time to read them. Developing brains and Dorothy Sayers are a potent, terrible mix; I will never stop expecting fictional het romances to require five years, five hundred pages of persiflage, and at minimum two dead bodies before any sort of consummation can be achieved. This is why I am terrible at reading published het romances. The characters meet and kiss and fall in love and bang in the space of like a week, and my hindbrain goes, "Nope. This is not how straight romance goes. I know this from my learnings. Where are the corpses? Where is the part where she refuses him fifty times and walks across England to avoid dealing with her feelings? Where's the banter and telegrams and Latin proposals?" My brain knows what it is due and just won't accept less. Sayers has a lot to answer for, basically.

But it turns out I do not require the years/persiflage/bodies in every single case, and, oddly, this pairing is one of the cases where I don't. At least in the hands of a writer as skilled as this, in a story as good as "Gentle Antidote." This is honestly everything I've ever wanted from a Harriet/Peter story – them, being so completely them, which will always be enough for me – and also everything I've ever wanted from a wristname AU – good worldbuilding, sensible reactions, total buy-in to the concept, wristnames that don't solve every problem and actually create a few, a happy ending.

This story makes me as happy as any two of the books it took Sayers to accomplish the feat of getting these extremely difficult people together. Partly that happiness comes from the sheer perfection of every word, and partly it's from my knowledge of everything the characters are going to avoid and accomplish, thanks to wristnames. (Hail, wristnames! I welcome our tropey overlord.) And while I think the former joy will be available to anyone who knows what a wristname is, the second pleasure is probably only for those who have read Sayers's Harriet Vane stories. (Which, I mean, is not time wasted or anything.)

But whether you've read Sayers or not, I recommend this story; it's the perfect story for the ur-ship. (Or one of them. But, well, we're going to get there. One pairing down, 65 to go.)

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

[RL] Chris, the Ghost, and Mono

2016-04-15T15:34:11Z

The other night, I told this story to my sister, who had somehow never heard it before. She demanded that I write it down. (I sincerely hope she's not planning to use this as some kind of college life advice for my nephew.)

There are three things you need to know to understand this story, provided you are not my sister:

I started college at 15.
I almost immediately got mono and didn't realize it, assuming that I was sleeping 16 hours a day because sleep was the best thing in the world and I'd suddenly gotten really good at it.
I made most of my bad decisions – like, most of the bad decisions I would ever make, and almost all the ones I could think of – before starting college.

These were not things I had in common with my freshman cohort. Any of them, as far as I could tell. They were all older than I was, they seemed to have all the energy in the world, and they had come to college to make those bad decisions they'd been dreaming of all these years but apparently couldn't quite commit to until they were away from parental backup and support.

At the first party I went to, before classes even started, someone dared a guy named Fernando to take a random handful of pills on top of the lots of alcohol he'd already had. (Note to impressionable people: don't do this.) I said to the dude I was apparently dating, "This is not going to end well and I'm leaving before it gets disgusting." And I went to my room, which was blissfully free of intoxicated people.

About half an hour later, there was pounding on my door. When I eventually answered it, someone who seemed to know me said breathlessly, "Fernando's going to die! Come quick!"

"If he's going to die, you should call 911," I said grouchily. "I'm not a doctor."

"But what if he's not dying? He could get in trouble!" the someone said.

"Which is worse, being wrong about him dying or being wrong about him not dying?" I asked. But the person was adamant. Somehow, in my absence, I had been elected the Person Who Is Going to Know If Fernando Is Actually Dying. (I suspect the dude I was apparently dating nominated me.) So I went back to the floor the party was on and into the men's bathroom. I inspected Fernando, who was retching miserably in the shower, but conscious and oriented. Assembled spectators told me, in as dramatic, hushed voices as were possible in a shower room, everything he'd taken and every detail of his behavior since then.

But I had seen much worse decisions being made -- made a number of them myself, in fact -- and I was 15 and didn't actually know anything. Also I didn't have any social skills and was snotty as hell. So I sighed heavily, pointed out the various reasons why Fernando would probably be fine aside from a hangover, advised his roommate not to let him drown in the shower and to put him to sleep on his side, and stomped back up to bed. (Note to impressionable people: don't do this. Call 911. We were all very lucky that Fernando was indeed fine, aside from the massive hangover.)

Unfortunately, that turned out to be the perfect way to become everyone's Person Who Knows Stuff. I got asked a lot of questions and woken up from a lot of naps by people who I felt should know better, what with them being older than me and also not newly arrived on the planet.

Which takes us to Halloween. On Halloween, a group of my friends decided to do an expedition to the local ~~haunted graveyard~~ and invited me along. I said no. In every woman's life there comes a point when she's done all the fooling around in graveyards she's ever going to do, and I'd reached it the year before. (That is a totally other story.) Plus, my bed was calling to me, and it was going to take more than some gravestones and weed to keep me from it. "It will be stupid," I predicted, and told them to have fun without me. (The future Mrs. Vine, Best Beloved, did go, and confirms that it was in fact stupid. She wandered off after a bit because the gravestones were more entertaining. It's a pity I didn't go, since then she would've had company in being disgusted with the proceedings.)

The next morning I learned that Drama Had Occurred and mentally patted myself on the back for missing it. "Chris got possessed by a ghost!" someone told me.

"Oh. Really?" I said. I probably rolled my eyes, because: possessed. By a ghost.

"He lay down on a grave and invited the grave's spirit to possess him and his whole body twitched and it was really creepy!"

I imagine there was some further eye rolling at this point. (I told you I was snotty.) I definitely said, "Did you guys take acid?"

"Yes, some of us, but Chris didn't have any!"

"Okay," I said.

That afternoon, Chris asked me to come to his dorm room. We sat on his bed while he told me about the possession, and how he didn't feel right, and how he could feel the ghost eating away at his resistance, and he wasn't sure how much longer he could hold out. Chris was a great guy, but very prone to theatrics, and it took him more than an hour to go through all this. I could see that I was likely to have to listen to a lot more of it in the near future.

Here's the thing about having mono: you are suddenly very motivated to draw the straightest possible line between point A and point B, where point B is your bed. So that's what I did.

"Okay, don't worry," I told Chris. "I know how to do an exorcism." By which I meant that I knew the basic idea of it, it didn't seem like there were many potential pitfalls, and it was either that or listen to his feelings about ghosts some more. You'd have done the same.

He grabbed my hand. "I knew you'd know what to do."

"Yup," I said, removing my hand from his. "Okay, here's what I'm gonna need." I made a respectable list of things that seemed vaguely exorcism-y and that people would probably have to go to the next town to get, and then I went to my room to "prepare," by which I meant nap.

An hour later, Kelly knocked politely on my door and announced that they had acquired all the things on the list. "Are the candles real beeswax?" I asked suspiciously. "It doesn't work if they're not real beeswax." She assured me that they were.

I went up to Chris's room, where a number of people had gathered to listen to Chris talk about how the ghost was eating away at his resistance, and also talk to each other about the Great Graveyard Trip, and also just generally be loud. I do not like loud. "You have to be totally quiet," I announced to the assembled audience. "If you talk, you could draw the ghost to you, and you're not prepared to deal with it."

Everyone shut up instantly. It was extremely gratifying.

Then I set about improvising some random, vaguely arcane-ish actions. I burned some stuff and put the ashes in the mortar and pestle. I added a little of my blood and Chris's blood and put all that in the mortar and pestle, too. I ripped up some herbs, added those, then muddled everything together. I had Chris lie down and drew a circle of salt around us. I lit the beeswax candles and placed them carefully at randomly-determined points that definitely looked significant.

Then I rubbed the ash mixture on Chris's forehead, sternum, and stomach, and recited as much as I could remember of Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars. (Mrs. Scher, you were absolutely right: Latin did turn out to be knowledge that would come in handy in the future. My belated but very sincere thanks.)

When I realized I was running out of memorized faulty Latin, I made my voice get a bit louder and deeper, and then I stopped suddenly and blew out the candles.

Chris's body twitched all over. ("Just like--" someone whispered, and I shot her a warning look.) He made some distressed whale noises. He jerked some more.

Then he opened his eyes and said, "I felt it! I felt it leaving my body!"

He thanked me sincerely, hugged me, and burst into tears on my shoulder, which is a hell of a thing to do to someone who made up an exorcism out of whole cloth for you, but whatever. I advised him not to go to graveyards in the future. "You're not up to it," I explained, which was the literal truth. Someone that suggestible should stay indoors and take up an improving hobby. Maybe model-making.

"I know, I know, I should never have gone," he said.

"Well, it all worked out," I said briskly, and got off the floor. "Wow. That's exhausting," I added, and then, after a pause, "My energy is totally depleted. I need to go recover."

As I left, a girl said to me, "How did you learn to do exorcisms?"

"I can't answer that," I told her, and went off to get some more sleep.

Just in case my sister does have some extremely misguided plans to use this as college life advice for Z, here are the take-home lessons of this story:

If the amount of sleep you need triples, go to Student Health immediately.
If there's an outing, like to a graveyard, go on it; if I'd gone on that one I would've met Best Beloved a year earlier, and I also would have been able to put a stop to the possession nonsense before it got to in-dorm-exorcism levels of ridiculous.
Just in case, memorize a chunk of something in a dead language. You never know when it will come in handy.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

College Stuff! (Not for Earthling, Thank God)

2016-04-10T13:25:16Z

The redoubtable Cousin Z, my oldest nephew, is -- oh god oh god -- going to college next fall. He applied to many schools and got into most of them, and now, through assiduous research, careful internal debate, and, very likely, a color-coded spreadsheet with many tabs, he's narrowed down his options to Reed and Whitman. And now he's trying to make that final choice.

Z had very good experiences visiting both schools, including talking with a Whitman admissions officer who described the school in Harry Potter house terms. He also went to an accepted-students reception for Reed where he went to hide in the kitchen because people, and then so many other guests (and also the host) had the same idea that it ended up being a reception-within-the-reception for people who hate receptions, all of them hiding in the kitchen and talking about how much they wished they weren't there.

Z is a very introverted person who is interested in applied math (his intended major), Doctor Who, social justice, Harry Potter, politics, Game of Thrones, and economics. His hobbies are reading fic, playing and writing music for his cello, and spending many hours at Starbucks with his study groups. (Also making color-coded spreadsheets.) He likes both Reed and Whitman because they're smaller schools where he felt comfortable on the campus, in large part because the students seemed like geeky introverts and giant weirdos, so pretty much his people.

It seems like either school could be a happy place for him. But this is Z, so he is in hardcore information-gathering mode. He could use more data. (Z could always use more data.) He needs to know the differences between the two! Find a way to make a choice! My question for you is: do you know anything about Reed or Whitman? Do you have any experiences to relate or any data Z can gather? It would help.

Thank you!

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Yuletide!

2015-12-26T19:56:02Z

I am an extremely lucky Yuletider once again, because this year I got four gifts. (Thank you, wonderful writers!) Three delightful Historical Farm stories:

Wizardry Most Humble & High (1007 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Historical Farm (UK TV), Kate and Cecelia - Caroline Stevermer & Patricia Wrede
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn
Additional Tags: Historical Reenactment, Alternate Universe - Magic, Footnotes, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Fragments of Tudor Monastery Farm: With Magic Edition. Now with extra footnotes and my 'I co-majored in history and at the moment I am Really Into The Tudor Era' feelings. Thank you oh thefourthvine for the opportunity to write this treat - I hope it is enjoyable and non terrible. Happy Yule! Note: This particular magic au is a crossover with a book series but it's not something you need to be familiar with to read this story (there are some little things in here for people who have though)

Marstober (1861 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands, Ruth Goodman
Additional Tags: Historical Farm RPF in the Future, Not much farming unfortunately, Peter is from Earth, Ruth is from Mars, Alex is from Space, preslash
Summary:

Mars is stripping the suavity from Alex's bones.

Alien Invasion Farm (1041 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction
Summary:

Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn go back in time to relive the day-to-day life of a farmer during the alien invasion.

So if you share my love of Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn, and Alex Langlands being extremely them while farming on Mars or with magic or during the alien invasion that is just around the corner, go! Read.

And if you share my love of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson soulbonding (and how could you not?), let me introduce you to my wonderful fourth gift, which I am entirely sure is documenting what really happened:

No-Look Pass (1138 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Retired Basketball Player RPF, Basketball RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Larry Bird & Earvin "Magic" Johnson
Characters: Larry Bird, Earvin "Magic" Johnson
Additional Tags: Soul Bond, Basketball, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Blind Pass: Also known as a no-look pass, the blind pass is performed when a player looks in one direction but passes the ball to his target in another direction. Blind passes are risky and infrequently attempted, but when done correctly, can confuse the defense.

- “Basketball Moves: Blind Pass,” Wikipedia.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

[Rant] You Don't Owe Anyone Your Queer Story

2015-12-15T22:16:04Z

So, today over lunch I decided to read some stuff that wasn't mathematical economics, just to sort of remember there are other words out there.

Annnnnd so I read this Ask Bear column, and then I stewed for a while, and then I wrote this rushed, angry rant before I went back to my mathematical economics.

The letter in that column comes from a questioning 22 year old who is potentially starting down that "hang on, am I -- queer?" path that a lot of us have walked. I've walked it myself! It is scenic and has many twists and turns. The letter writer is in a very traditional and appropriate place for starting on that path: he (I'm assuming) has many questions and is not sure what comes next or what he has to do to be a good possibly queer person.

Bear's response, summarized: you can absolutely be queer, sounds like you might be, and oh, by the way, before you explore that queer identity at all, you'd better come out. To everyone. You have to, to be a good human.

I really wanted to believe Bear didn't tell a questioning 22 year old that he had to come out of the closet before he is allowed to see if he might potentially be queer. But I tweeted my rage (as is the custom of my people), and several Twitter friends got the same read from it, so I just want to remind everyone of something important.

No one can tell you that you have to come out. Not if they're queer, not if they're out, not if they're an activist, not if they are the Fairy Queen of the Queer Isles (my dream job!), never. (The one exception to this: your partner(s) in queerness get a say. But even they don't get to issue a fiat like Bear did in this letter.)

There are three major reasons for this.

Coming out is a dangerous endeavor for many people in this world. And you are the best evaluator of your physical, emotional, and social safety. I think Bear may just have forgotten, since he apparently lives in a polytransqueer wonderland, that coming out can be risky. That his letter writer may have to face familial rejection, social rejection, harassment, homelessness, abuse -- that, in short, a lot of bad things might happen to the LW if he comes out. (Queer folks struggling with this issue, take heart: it is apparently entirely possible to get to a place in your life where you can forget this!) Bear may also have forgotten that those same things may also happen to the dude LW is into, and that they may together choose to be closeted for safety reasons, and that is absolutely fine. (It isn't fine that people have to make that choice, of course, but blaming people for picking the best of a number of bad options is classic oppressor bullshit, and I'm embarrassed to see any of my fellow queers doing it.)
Coming out is a process, and the LW is at the very beginning of it. (People can be at the very beginning at any point in their lives. They can go back to the beginning at any point in their lives. And they can spend as long as they need to there. This is not some sort of board game, folks, where you can just pass go and collect your Queer Person ID.) Bear ordered him to go straight from starting college to taking the Bar Exam, without going through any of the intervening bits. But those bits are important, and they make you ready for the later bits, and only you, the queer person, know how you're doing in the process, or what you're ready for right now.
You don't owe anyone your story. Let me repeat that, slightly louder: you don't owe anyone your story. Bear strongly implies that his questioning letter writer should come out because social justice. And, no, that is not a burden queer folks have to bear; we do not have to build a bridge to our own equality with our bare hands using bricks made out of our lives, our bodies, and our hearts. (Unless, of course, we choose to. Many of us make that choice, in big ways and small. But it's our choice to do that.)

Many, many of our straight allies say the same thing in other words. For example, they say that gay people who come out are heroes, and gay people who make choices other than absolute and total openness are weak, and that is bullshit, and it's extremely harmful bullshit. You are not required to come out to Make the World Safe for Queers, you are not required to come out to Be a Good Queer, you are not required to come out for any reason at all ever except that you want to and are ready to. Your story is yours. You tell it how you want to, when you want to, if you want to

So, Bear's Letter Writer, if you're out there, here is some alternate advice from a different middle-aged queer who has come out a whole, whole, whole bunch:

Letter Writer, you can do whatever you want to with your guy (provided he consents, of course), with whatever level of disclosure you both agree on. It's important to be honest with him about where you are with respect to coming out, whether that is "I will actually have a panic attack if you touch me in public" or "I am totally okay with our friends knowing, but I cannot face having some kind of formal announcement right now" or "let's tell everyone including our extremely homophobic extended family members and then POST LOTS OF TOPLESS MAKING OUT PHOTOS ON FACEBOOK HA HA HA." (You may be in a different place than any of these, or experiencing a combination of all three. That's normal.) Then it's important to listen to what he says about where he is. If there's a big difference -- if you're at panic attacks and he's at Facebook, say -- then be aware that that is going to be an issue in your relationship, and be prepared to work on it.

Your queer journey is belongs to you, Letter Writer. You and those you choose to share it with are the only people who get to say how it goes, and that includes coming out, if you decide to do that. Speaking as a supportive bystander, though, I hope your queer journey is awesome. Good luck!

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Yuletide 2015 Dear Author Letter

2015-10-18T21:27:50Z

Dear Writer Person,

We matched! So first know that I am extremely fond of you already, because clearly you are a person of taste and discernment, loving one of these small fandoms as much as I do.

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I hope to get from my recipient. But if details aren't your thing, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering for one of my tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

Me

I love so many things, Yuletide author. Here is a small sample:

Happy endings. (Um, I mean of the everyone lives happily ever after kind. Although I am also a big fan of orgasms, not gonna lie.)
Humor.
Stories that earn their payoff.
Slow build romances and slow build sex scenes.
Action and adventure.
Snappy dialogue.
Classic fan fiction tropes, whether played straight or inverted. (Soulbonds! Werewolves! Bodyswap! Arranged marriages! Amnesia! And so on.)
Robots, spaceships, aliens, space opera, military science fiction.
Urban fantasy, magical politics, dryads in backwards Dodgers caps, parking spells, secret libraries full of Starbucks-sipping, iPod-wearing magical theory students.
People who have problems with feelings.

I also have some DNWs:

Animal and child harm or death. These are my only deal-breaker squicks; I can't handle them at all.
Embarrassment and humiliation.
Rape.
The abuse of women.
Infidelity.
Zombies or cannibalism.
Grimdarkness.
Pairings with big power imbalances -- teacher/student, doctor/patient, huge age gaps, etc -- or a male/female power imbalance with the woman on the less powerful end.

I am thefourthvine everywhere -- on AO3, DW, LJ, Twitter, and Tumblr. I'm easy to find.

So that's the general stuff. Let's talk fandoms.

Historical Farm (UK TV), Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands

Request: Oh man there are so many things I'd be delighted to read in this fandom! Basically, if there's Ruth being super competent and awesome and whichever pair of guys you choose being -- you know how they are, sort of hapless but enthusiastic and really trying hard -- I will be all over it. But if you want more detailed prompts, I have many!

How about putting some fantasy in the historical farm series? I'd love something akin to an episode from an alternate universe farm series, like the Post-Magical-Uprising Farm or the Pre-Aetherian Period Farm, or maybe something about how the introduction of airships, taming of dragons, or discovery of the eighth principal of alchemy changed farming in 1899. Ruth demonstrating how to store dragon eggs! Tom and Peter arguing over how to build a basic airship transport basket! Alex attempting to follow an old spell for breeding cockatrices!

Or what about science fiction? I'd be thrilled with a future farm, or a farm on the moon, or an asteroid, or a spaceship. Ruth meticulously reconstructing zero-g recipes from early colonists! Alex geeking out about bees bred for asteroid farms! Peter attempting to rebuild a feed synthesizer that was actually used on an early moon farm!

Or maybe a crossover? If you know Connie Willis's Oxford time travel universe -- well, I think Ruth would be the most careful, detailed, helpful prepper of new historians ever, with many detailed resource pamphlets entitled things like "Useful Undergarments, 1344 -1960." Or hearing about any character's actual time travel would also be delightful.

I found this show this year and watched all the canon, which is unheard of for me. But it's just so amazing! So compelling! I could not stop watching. I love pretty much everything about this show, but I think it's mostly carried by the presenters -- by their sincere enthusiasm and geekery for the past, balanced with their intensely realistic understanding of it.

I love Ruth because she clearly loves the people of the past without romanticizing them, and because she's so fucking competent. I love watching her master old cooking equipment and make old recipes without either a "tee-hee, people ate such gross stuff!" or a "the Glorious Wisdom of the Past" tone. I love seeing her grimly haul herself out of bed in the dark to get the range going, or her sort of "I have no idea how I'm going to manage this, but I'm for sure going to manage it" attitude when she sees their new home at the start of a series.

I love the guys -- and I do not care which two you pick; I requested Peter and Alex because they've been in more series, but, as I said, feel free to do Peter and Tom instead -- because they are sort of the bumbling adolescent Labrador Retrievers of the farm. I love watching them get better at farming and stock-keeping over time, and develop their interests (like Alex's slightly weird love of chickens), and I also love watching them try hard and totally screw up, which shows just how difficult this shit really is.

And I love this view of the past, where we get a chance to see what it was like -- not through a rose-tinted lens, or focusing on the life lived by the luckiest 1%, but just. The ordinary lives of ordinary people, like us, but in a different time and place.

In this one, I'm good with any pairing, any rating, or gen, totally up to you. And, as my prompts probably indicate, I'm pretty flexible. Basically, if there's a story that you want to write in this fandom, write that story. I just want to read more about my beloved historical farmers, doing their thing.

(DNW note: this is a farming series. Obviously, a lot of animal death occurs, because it's a farm. If you could keep it off the page as much possible, I would greatly appreciate it, but if you've got them eating their own sheep/asteroid cows/whatever, or some tension about if an animal is going to make it (and it does), that's fine.)

To pick up this series, click on one of these links and then just keep on. Be riveted by the magic of historical farming!
Edwardian Farm, episode 1.
Tudor Monastery Farm, episode 1.
Wartime Farm, episode 1.
Victorian Farm, episode 1.
Bonus:
Tales from the Green Valley playlist. (This is the pilot and fun, but it's older and not like the others.
Secrets of the Castle, episode 1. (Not a farm, but still fun. Unfortunately, the one I watched is no longer up, and this upload isn't great quality. Sorry!)

Retired Basketball Player RPF - Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Larry Bird

Request: I -- genuinely think Magic Johnson and Larry Bird might have soulbonded at the NCAA Championship in 1979. They certainly went from zero to intense, eternal focus pretty damn quickly. So what I want to know is - what happened? Where did it go from there? How does that work, when you're playing against each other, when at least one of you doesn't even LIKE the other, when you're such incredibly different human beings?

If you go with the actual soulbond, there are lots of interesting possibilities here - Larry fighting the bond, the way it affected them and their game, how it drove them to play. Or there's Magic's HIV diagnosis and how they dealt with that. Or there's the question of dealing with marriage (to other people) and being soulbonded. Or you could talk about how they finally accepted the soulbond and what it's like now, being comfortable with it and each other, years after the fighting and the struggle finally ended. Just, anything.

And if you take the non-soulbond route (which is of course fine; this definitely doesn't have to be a literal soulbond), just what IS going on? They have SOME kind of bond, that much is clear, and I'd love to hear what it's like: forever friendship, repeating reincarnation as people obsessed with each other, multiverse-spanning romance, whatever. I just want more about this intense *thing* they have going.

I'm good with gen, slash, and poly. Just please no straight-up infidelity. There's always gen, or AUs, or setting the sex before the marriage, or spousal knowledge and consent (my favorite!), or spousal involvement. Or something else you come up with! LET THE MAGIC (hee!) OF BIRD AND JOHNSON GUIDE YOU, basically.

Okay, I am a trifle concerned that my request makes me sound like a delusional tinhat. No! No! I am merely reporting the truth, which is that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird appear to have a real-life soulbond!

...That didn't help my case. But I have solid evidence. The documentary A Courtship of Rivals (YouTube link to full documentary in HD, but you only need to watch the first ten minutes to see the literal discussion of the soulbond) could not be clearer. These guys are bonded in some way. And I just find that fascinating. You could not have two more different guys (unless, like, one of them was a Vulcan - SHUSH NO WRONG FANDOM). You could not have a more intense rivalry. And yet it's abundantly clear they have a ton of respect for each other, a ton of very genuine love for each other, and they know each other so well - every appearance I've ever seen them in has just been so great for that. We have Magic, dude who loves people, hugs, and fame, and Larry, dude whose basic motto is "go away and leave me alone," and they love each other, and that is the greatest thing to me.

Basically, I adore these guys. And I am riveted by their great and weird relationship. Anything you write about them navigating that relationship while being their extremely awesome selves will be wonderful.

And if you're up for pairing fic, I would love that, any rating.

To pick this fandom up, watch that documentary. Marvel at its dedication to pushing the soulbond storyline!

Schusev State Museum of Architecture Discover the Full Story ad campaign, Any

Request: Worldbuilding! Please please worldbuilding. I want to know what the underground parts of the building(s) (any of the three or all, I don't care) are for. Who lives in them, uses them, works in them? What kind of performances go on in that part of the Bolshoi? What degrees can you earn in that part of the University? Is the bottom part of the Cathedral still for religious purposes? The same religious purposes, or…something else?

I am intrigued by the way the extensions are clearly parts of, but different from, the above-ground parts, and also by the fact that they're so much bigger than the tops -- they're like building icebergs! -- which suggests that whatever they're doing in the bottom parts, a lot more people are involved than in the top parts. Is there a whole alternate civilization down there, or are the bottom parts of the buildings also for surface people, just different ones? Is it like this all over the world, or just under Russia, or just under Moscow?

Basically, I'm hoping for answers, theories, ideas, strange delusions…whatever you've got for these buildings.

Okay, first: I definitely want this fandom just as much as the other two! But there's going to be less information here because they're, you know, three pictures, so we've got a lot less to talk about.

I saw these and immediately went, "Whoa. Yuletide fandom." There's something about them that implies there's a lot going on here that we don't know, and I want to know. I want to know who uses these buildings and what they do there. I want to discover the full story!

It might be fun to do some sort of document-based fic for this -- letters home from a student in the university, or diary entries written by a dancer, whatever. Or interactive fiction! I'm open to whatever you want to write.

Crossover note: welcome on this one, but in no way required. Like, if you've got an idea from the drawings alone, go for it! But if you're thinking in terms of a crossover, feel equally free. I am very familiar with Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, and Fallen London (the game), which are both secret-underground-world fandoms, so I suspect they might come readily to mind. But no need to limit yourself! If you want to cross this over with any given fandom, go for it. It's fine by me if I don't know it as long as I can pick it up from context, but if you'd rather be sure I do know it, my sidebar lists fandoms I've recommended, or of course you can always ask the mods to ask me, or if you feel awkward about that you can consult norah for "does she know x?" (She's good at keeping secrets, knows me very well, and can text my wife if necessary. Her email: miss.ella.norah@gmail.com.)

To pick this up, look how pretty!

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Goodreads and Me: Not a Love Story

2015-03-30T07:03:58Z

I read Brenna Clarke Grey's post on why she quit Goodreads and decided to write up my own recent unfun experience there. (I haven't quit the site, but I'm on hiatus from it. Again.)

In January 2015 I was hungry for fiction and had run through my friends' recommendations, so I started looking through Goodreads. I found a book called Flight of the Silvers, by Daniel Price. The reviews were largely positive and the summary seemed interesting. I downloaded a sample and decided it was engaging enough to buy.

Trouble began shortly thereafter. At the 20% mark, I knew this book and I would never be friends. The story wasn't right for me for many reasons, ranging from Science Doesn't WORK That Way to These Women Are Like No Human I've Ever Known to Please Stop Using That Word Please Stop PLEASE JUST STOP. The pacing fell off as the author tried to manage more characters and a more divided plot than he knew how to handle. There were long chunks of text that desperately needed editing. And I was frustrated by the fact that one of the characters, Hannah, was described pretty much only by her boobs. Her characterization could be summarized as "the attractive one with the giant hooters." Her plot role was "the mobile boobs that everyone either admires or is jealous of." The obsession with her breasts was like a dripping tap: ignorable right up until it becomes all you can think about it. I read distractedly, waiting grimly for the next mention of Hannah and Her Boobs. (As there were typically multiple mentions per page in any section she was in, it was never a long wait.)

From 25% on, my notes in the ebook consist of:

Increasingly sarcastic comments on some of the mentions of Hannah's boobs (they come too often to note all of them).
Complaints about overuse of the word "shined." (Three months after reading the book, I'm still flinching when I see it. It was really overused.)
Lengthy strings of question marks after some of the seriously, um, interesting word choices in the book. (After a while, I started to slip some exclamation points in these, too.)

Here's an example. At one point, one of the characters describes a pseudoscience substance as "both airy and dense." A male character (one of the good guys, of course; misogyny is a noted good guy trait) responds, "Huh. Just like Hannah." The next part, a direct quote: "More people laughed as the actress irreverently narrowed her eyes at Zack. He shined a preening smirk." Okay, so I think we can see that this is, just in general, really bad writing (he shined a preening smirk?), but what the hell is irreverently doing in that sentence? It makes no sense. My note on this one: "????? wtf wtf wtf EW also shined NO." As you can probably tell, the book was getting to me.

We all know how this goes. The bad writing distracted me from the, you know, actual story. (I probably missed a lot of it, which is what bad writing does: it gets between you and what the writer is trying to convey.) The pacing, already flawed, entirely stopped carrying me. I reached the point where I was looking for things to do instead of reading, which is weird for me. I'd read a page, spend five minutes on twitter, and come back and realize I had no memory of what I'd read, also very weird for me.

I should have walked away. I didn't.

When I was done (so very done) with the book, I went to Goodreads and reviewed it. I have to either adore or truly despise a book to churn out a 3000-word review of it. Flight of the Silvers didn't seem worth that, so instead of detailing all my problems with it, I wrote a description of what reading it felt like to me. The word "boobs" is featured very heavily. And that was it. Two people read my review, I think. No one really pays attention to that stuff.

All of this is textbook standard reader behavior. I bought a book, I read it, I didn't like it, I complained about it to my friends. And that should have been the end of it.

Except. Then Daniel Price read my review. And he got mad, which is totally understandable; someone slamming your work is always tough to swallow. (I'm going to guess that most authors know better than to read one-star reviews for this reason.) And then he decided to respond, which was probably not the best choice he could have made. His response makes me so embarrassed on his behalf that I've never read it all the way through; I get maybe a quarter of the way through skimming it and my brain just shuts down. But, basically, as far as I can tell, he was trying to be funny. He missed that mark for me, but maybe that was because I was, you know, writhing in secondhand embarrassment. Or maybe that's because I was his target rather than his audience. Hard to say.

And then a few of his fans got involved, which was inevitable -- they love his work, they saw him doing this, they assumed it was okay. (Guess how many comments it took before someone accused me of being his ex-girlfriend. GUESS.) He also started complaining about me on Twitter, which encouraged more of his followers to comment angrily on my review.

In response, I did a Dumb Thing (because not responding is the only way to deal with this stuff) and complained about this situation on Twitter myself, which meant that my friends started reading my review and Price's response. (This is how my review ended up the first one on the book's page on Goodreads. Authors, if you're looking for motivation not to get into it with a reviewer, there's a point to consider.) My friends also started searching through the other reviews. And noticing stuff. Several of them pointed out that while other reviewers complained about the boob fixation, Price only got publically mad at the lady who did. This may not be a coincidence.

The commenters on my review got personally insulting (remember, folks, it's not that you disagree with the reviewer, it's that the reviewer is a terrible person and a troll or simply a bitch) and kind of gross. I stopped visiting the page, which kept me from getting notifications about further comments. My friends kept on following them, though, so I got occasional updates on the situation. It apparently took Price a week or two to stop complaining about me on Twitter. (Or, I guess, for my friends to stop looking.) It took longer before his fans stopped insulting me on Goodreads. (If they ever have.)

And here's the thing: this is, by itself, a minor incident. But it isn't fun. It isn't how I want to interact with a community, or something I want to deal with. And I realized that using Goodreads meant accepting a chance of this kind of bullshit every time I posted a less than five-star review. There is a lot I like about Goodreads, but I am not that invested in reviewing in that space, not enough that it's actually worth being harassed by an author and his fans. So I finished my self-assigned challenge (rate the first 24 books I read this year) in February and started avoiding Goodreads again. I'll maybe try again next year. Who can say?

Is there a way to avoid this? I don't know. But Goodreads doesn't seem interested in trying. And, in the end, this part of the internet isn't important enough to me to wade through the sewage.

Wanted: a mostly sewageless place to review and discuss books.

(Also wanted, always wanted: recommendations for great books you've read lately.)

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

[RL] Team Angry Cat

2015-02-25T00:18:06Z

Last year, I went to a con in Chicago. On Saturday morning, I took the elevator from my room (fourth floor) to the con suite (second floor). Also on that elevator: a dude taking it to the first floor. As soon as I pressed the button, he said chidingly, "Two floors! Should've walked it." And then he literally, actually tutted at me. "Tut tut tut" went the arbiter of everyone else's body and abilities. Just so I'd know for sure that I'd been bad and been judged for it.

Now. There were a couple of conversations we could have had at this point. I could have told elevator dude the truth: that I have lupus (please please don't make the House joke; you have no idea how many times I've heard the House joke, and I promise you that sometimes it is in fact lupus), so I keep an eye on my energy and pain levels and try to save some of whatever ability I have for later. That I'm especially careful to do that when I'm at an event or traveling, because I don't want to be in my room exhausted or in pain when a thing I really wanted to do is happening two floors away, and I really don't want to be in pain and out of energy while traveling in modern American airports (apparent motto: "If you can't stand for four hours and run two miles full-tilt while carrying two weeks' supplies, lol no go fuck yourself"). So I'm careful. I don't push it. In the mornings, I might take the elevator, which the hotel did, after all, install for people to use.

I could also have told elevator dude to go fuck himself, which is the other honest conversation we could have had at that point. It is seriously none of his business whether I use the stairs, or the elevator, or rappel down the outside of the building, or maybe just dissolve into primordial ooze and drip down the walls.

But, you know, confrontation is another energy burner. I wanted to save my energy for having fun with my friends, the people I came to see. So I said something non-committal. Elevator dude wasn't done, though. "You should always find the stairs, first thing when you check into a hotel," this dude who was maybe ten years older than me and in no way my father said. "Did you know you're not allowed to use the elevator during a fire? Whenever you check into a hotel, you should think: what if there's a fire?"

Indeed, elevator dude. What if? What if, in my second decade of staying alone in hotels, you had not come along to tell me how to do it? I might have done it wrong, and then I would surely have burned to death in a fiery inferno, just as I have at least once a year throughout my adulthood, despite my mother giving me pretty much exactly those instructions back when I was seven and actually needed them.

Fortunately, at that point, we arrived at the second floor. I headed to the con suite and settled in. Some minutes later, I mentioned the mansplainer in the elevator and his profound concern for my well-being in case of fire. I didn't complain about the "should've walked" comment, largely because I didn't expect any support for it; I know an apparently able-bodied (and fat!) woman taking the elevator is cause for judgment in this world. (In some places, going by the general response, it's borderline actionable.) And most people at that particular table didn't know the details of my medical status, since in general, when given the choice between talking with my friends about lupus or talking with them about people banging, or being unicorn space eagles, or both, I tend to choose the pointy space birds and their sexytimes.

"Why would anyone say that to you?" one of the women at the table asked, in that mystified dudes-why-are-you? tone. "How does that even come up?"

So I explained about how we got on the topic of elevators. As soon as I said, "He said I should've taken the stairs," ten women around the table looked up and angry cat hissed in unison. It was like they'd rehearsed it for weeks after months of watching angry cats and studying their motivations. Truly a beautiful moment.

From this experience I learned some things:

Support matters. Those women and their instinctive and audible anger didn't just make me feel better; they actually changed the way I remember the event. They became what was important about it rather than elevator dude. His judgment has become small and insignificant to me, and in fact I smile when I think about him, because he's inextricably linked to that moment ten people became Team Angry Cat for me.
A lot of times, I don't reach for support because I don't expect it. I don't talk about the random elevator dude type aggravations of life, because I assume there's a good chance most people will side with the elevator dudes of the world. It's worth it to find the places where that isn't true. And it's worth it to reach for support when I can.
I need to look for more chances to be on other people's Team Angry Cat. I don't need to know about that person's life or judge their worthiness; if they've experienced harassment or microaggressions, I'm gonna try to support them.
I'd pay significant money for a YouTube series that was just ten women angry cat hissing at ability enforcers and mansplainers and dudes shouting "smile, baby!" at random ladies and so on.

Oh, yeah, and to the ten members of that particular Team Angry Cat: thank you. You're the best, and I will hiss for you anytime.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Happy Valentine's Day! Don't Be Me.

2015-02-14T17:46:42Z

It's Valentine's Day, so I would like to share a Cautionary Tale for the Youth of Today.

Once upon a time, my wife and I were teenaged college students who did not think before we got together, and by "got together," I mean "had sex for the first time," because did I mention we were teenagers in college? We did not bother with dating. So, you know, we let our passions overwhelm us, and didn't think before we had sex, and guess what happened? We checked the calendar the next day, noticed it was 2/15, and realized we had had sex for the first time on Valentine's Day.

Obviously this creates serious lifelong problems in terms of celebrating our anniversary. All because we were careless. Don't be like us.

"But TFV," I hear you saying. "You said she's your wife. Why not celebrate the anniversary of your marriage instead?"

Now, I could give you all kinds of excellent reasons, like that we couldn't get legally married until long after we were de facto married, because of governmental concern that allowing two people of the same sex to get married might cause a small black hole to form at the center of our planet and end the world. (Their caution is understandable considering the grave risks.) But that's not actually why. Let me tell you about our wedding.

We had a baby the year we got married, and also we are the least romantic people and least party-oriented people on earth, so we selected the "cheap courthouse wedding" option. We had a limited choice of dates, because we could only get married in the registrar's office on Fridays, and the election at which California voters would take away our civil rights was coming up fast. So we took the single reservation slot that was available when we got our marriage license.

On the day, we drove to the courthouse, met up with my mother, sister, brother-in-law (who had to be there to hold our baby), and oldest nephew, and had a five-minute civil ceremony conducted by a dude who finished with "and don't forget to file as married filing jointly on your state taxes next year." And then we left and the next couple and their friends and family came in.

And they were all in Viking costumes, because Best Beloved and I got married on 10/31. Our wedding anniversary is on Halloween.

What I'm saying is, youth of today, if there is a single message of wisdom I can share with you, it is check your fucking calendar before you fuck for the first time, and if it's a major holiday, wait. Otherwise you might end up like us, celebrating an anniversary that is not actually on any of the major dates of your relationship. (If you're really entirely like us, you will also never remember exactly what day you picked out to celebrate your pretend anniversary, but that's another story.)

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

The Magic of Yuletide, Revealed

2015-01-01T06:11:15Z

You guys YOU GUYS I have been the recipient of a Yuletide miracle! Let me tell you my awesome Yuletide tale.

Okay, so some months ago I started playing 80 Days, the amazing interactive fiction game (on iOs and Android, not that I am suggesting you go download and play it immediately, except of course I totally am), and it was great. So great. So so so great.

I tried to convince all my friends to play it, as is the custom of my people. Most of them were like, "Well, uh, it sounds…interesting. I will definitely play it. Sometime." But that's mostly what happens when you try to persuade people to try the things you love, so I wasn't downcast. I just waited like a sea lion (although I hope I was slightly less annoying), ready to casually insert 80 Days into any conversation that seemed even marginally relevant. (I was probably not actually less annoying.)

One of the people I thought would love it immensely was norah. I've known her since I was just getting into fandom, and she is my real-life and fandom BFF, and I know her tastes, just as she knows mine. But, sadly, she did not bite on my delightful hook, baited with inclusive steampunk and robots and joy.

Well, she's very busy. Later, I figured. Someday I'd persuade her. I vowed not to give up. (Being friends with me is awesome, folks.)

A couple of months later, I requested 80 Days for Yuletide. And I got it, and it was amazing. I think I got two paragraphs in before I said to Best Beloved, "Wow. This is really good." Halfway through, I corrected myself: "This is really, really, really good. This is great." It was. Also it seemed tailored for me, well beyond Yuletide typical, as I noted in my incoherent and flailing comment to my Mystery Author.

There was much Yuletide joy in my heart.

And then. And then. Today, at 4:25, I got a text from Norah. She said, essentially, "Hey so stories are revealed and GUESS WHAT I WROTE YOURS."

I texted back, entirely coherently, "UM OMG WHAAAAAAAAT EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" (Text with me and get all the extra letters, free of charge!)

See, Norah and I exchange assignment emails every year, and support each other through Yuletide, and generally are all up in each other's Yuletide-y business. (One year we ended up co-writing both our assignments.) So I knew she was writing Moby Dick this year. I knew her recipient and everything! Her recipient wasn't me!

Except I did not know. She got a fake assignment from the Yuletide mods so she could conceal her true one. And then she spent two months pretend-complaining to me about her pretend assignment while actually writing her real assignment. And -- seriously -- sending said real assignment TO MY WIFE.

About two months ago, my wife apparently got a phone call at work from Norah. ("At first I thought someone had died," BB told me today.) Norah said, "Hey, I have TFV as my Yuletide assignment, so can you alpha-read?"

BB said, "I don't keep secrets from her! I'm really bad at keeping secrets from her! But -- okay, yes, I will. I will do my best." AND SHE DID. For two months, as she read and my actual Yuletide gift and cheered on my actual Yuletide writer, she gamely acted like she had no idea who was assigned to me or what I would be getting. (She even emailed Norah a play-by-play of me reading the story for the first time. Recruit your recipient's spouse(s) and profit, Yuletiders.)

Tl;dr: TWO OF MY MOST FAVORITE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD CONSPIRED TO MAKE ME THE PERFECT YULETIDE GIFT AND I AM SO HAPPY.

It's a great story. I mean, it's lesbian robot airship pirates, which is, honestly, basically everything I look for in fiction and also would be my entire bucket list if I had one. (So far I've only managed the lesbian part, but look out, airships. I'm coming for you.) And now, every time I read it, in addition to reveling in the gorgeous story, I'm going to remember that I am loved, and by amazing, talented, kind, and generous people.

Truly, it is a Yuletide miracle, wrapped in secrecy, with a sweet and chewy lesbian robot pirate center.

My heart grew three sizes today.

Beside me singing in the Wilderness (15998 words) by norah
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 80 Days (Video Game 2014)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Behiye bint Kasim, Bulbul, Manussiha
Additional Tags: Steampunk, Robot Harm, Character of Color, Action/Adventure, Misses Clause Challenge, Pirates
Summary:

The adventures of Behiye bint Kasim, Captain of the pirate ship Canavar, and her engineer and companion Bulbul.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Yuletide Gift for Me!

2014-12-26T05:47:02Z

I am the luckiest Yuletider, because I got a story featuring ROBOTS and AIRSHIP PIRATES and SWASHBUCKLING and I am basically swooning over its amazingness.

And you totally don't need to know the fandom to read this! The canon is 80 Days, an interactive fiction game that reimagines Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in an inclusive, non-England-centered steampunk universe. There, now you know everything you need to know to read the story, and you totally should, because it is great.

Beside me singing in the Wilderness (15992 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 80 Days (Video Game 2014)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Behiye bint Kasim, Bulbul, Manussiha
Additional Tags: Steampunk, Robot Harm, Character of Color, Action/Adventure, Misses Clause Challenge, Pirates
Summary:

The adventures of Behiye bint Kasim, Captain of the pirate ship Canavar, and her engineer and companion Bulbul.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Dear Yuletide Writer Letter

2014-10-18T06:31:24Z

Dear Writer Person,

We matched! So basically know that I am extremely fond of you already, because clearly you are a person of taste and discernment, loving one of these small fandoms as much as I do.

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I always hope to get from my recipient. But if that's not you, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering for one of my tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

Me

I love so many things, Yuletide author. Here is a small sample:

Happy endings. (Um, I mean of the happily ever after kind. Although I am also a big fan of orgasms, not gonna lie.)
Humor.
Stories that earn their payoff.
Slow build romances and slow build sex scenes.
Action and adventure.
Snappy dialogue.
Classic fan fiction tropes, whether played straight or inverted. (Soulbonds! Werewolves! Bodyswap! Arranged marriages! Amnesia! And so on.)
Robots, spaceships, aliens, space opera, military science fiction.
Urban fantasy.
People who have problems with feelings.

I also have some DNWs:

Animal and child harm or death. These are my only deal-breaker squicks; I can't handle them at all.
Embarrassment and humiliation.
Rape.
Misogyny, the abuse of women.
Infidelity.
Grimdarkness.
Big power imbalances -- teacher/student, doctor/patient, huge age gaps, etc -- or a male/female power imbalance with the woman on the less powerful end.

I am thefourthvine everywhere -- on AO3, DW, LJ, Twitter, and Tumblr. I'm easy to find.

So that's the general stuff. Let's talk fandoms.

80 Days, Manussiha

Request: It's fine if you don't want to write Manussiha, for the record. I love this world and just want more of it, via any of the nominated characters or any other you want to use instead. Some of my favorite characters are Manussiha (in Rangoon), Cetshwayo (in the Zulu Empire), Ranavalona (in Antananrivo), Octave (in New Orleans), and Daya (in Agra, and Agra is also one of my favorite locations) -- I'd love to hear more about any of them. I'm also great with OCs if you want to do pure worldbuilding -- something about Belgrade, or about what life is like in the Zulu Empire, or about what's up in the places we can't visit in the game. Or, heck, take a different adventure, like space exploration, and tell me about that in this universe, with these characters. I'm easy.

If you want to write slash, I'd love Octave/Passepartout -- maybe Passepartout returns to New Orleans and they meet again? If you want to write het, I'd love Cetshwayo/Ranavalona and their past -- how did they become allies? how did they become who they are? -- or their future that’s hinted about in the game. If you want to write gen, I'd love to hear about Manussiha in Rangoon -- how he made himself, what his future looks like, what it's like to be him. Or Daya in Agra -- what is Agra like? What is living there like? Or, if you're more of a history person, I'd love to hear about this world's future, in 1900 or 1915 or 1950 (or, heck, 2050). Basically: pick your spot. Pick your time. Pick your topic. Tell me more and I will be delighted.

(If you want to pick this up, it takes about four hours to do a playthrough, and it's available for iOS.)

80 Days is my favorite new media experience of 2014. Better than any book I read, better than, uh, all three of the movies I watched, better than any podcast I found. It's amazing. The game developers were trying to make a choose-your-own-adventure that was replayable and engrossing, and they succeeded, but what I really love about this game, what made it incredible, is Meg Jayanth's writing.

Jayanth describes some of her motivations in this article, and maybe even better than that as a summary of what I love is her alternate title for the article: "Rejecting the White Saviour Myth, one choice at a time." I love that this is what I think of as "inclusive steampunk" -- Victorian in tone, steampunk in nature, but expansive and balanced, with room for everyone. And all of those everyones are people, not just objects for Passepartout to meet. It's a world full of people living real lives that happen to intersect briefly with Passepartout's. Many of the non-player characters are more interesting and have more compelling stories than Fogg and Passepartout. I'd be thrilled to learn more about most of them.

I haven't done everything you can do in the game, but I have done at least 50 playthroughs, which included some of the rare events. I've been to most cities and I've met most people. There are few things you can spoil me for. So, basically, choose what works best for you, because it's all going to work so, so well for me.

Basketball RPF - Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Larry Bird

Request: I -- genuinely think Magic Johnson and Larry Bird might have soulbonded at the NCAA Championship in 1979. They certainly went from zero to intense, eternal focus pretty damn quickly. So what I want to know is - what happened? Where did it go from there? How does that work, when you're playing against each other, when at least one of you doesn't even LIKE the other, when you're such incredibly different human beings?

If you go with the actual soulbond, there are lots of interesting possibilities here - Larry fighting the bond, the way it affected them and their game, how it drove them to play. Or there's Magic's HIV diagnosis and how they dealt with that. Or there's the question of dealing with marriage (to other people) and being soulbonded. Or you could talk about how they finally accepted the soulbond and what it's like now, being comfortable with it and each other, years after the fighting and the struggle finally ended. Just, anything.

And if you take the non-soulbond route (which is fine; this definitely doesn't have to be a literal soulbond), just what IS going on? They have SOME kind of bond, that much is clear, so tell me about what it is and what it's like: forever friendship, repeating reincarnation as people obsessed with each other, multiverse-spanning romance, whatever. I just want more about this intense *thing* they have going.

I'm good with gen, slash, and poly. Just please no straight-up infidelity. There's always gen, or AUs, or setting the sex before the marriage, or spousal knowledge and consent (my favorite!), or spousal involvement. Or something else you come up with! LET THE MAGIC (hee!) OF BIRD AND JOHNSON GUIDE YOU, basically.

(If you want to pick this up, I'd start with the documentary linked below. That's where it all started for me. Warning: this slope is very slippery.)

Okay, I am a trifle concerned that my request makes me sound like a delusional tinhat. No! No! I am merely reporting the truth, which is that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird appear to have a real-life soulbond!

...That didn't help my case. But I have solid evidence. The documentary A Courtship of Rivals (YouTube link to full documentary in HD, but you only need to watch the first ten minutes to see the literal discussion of the soulbond) could not be clearer. These guys are bonded in some way. And I just find that fascinating. You could not have two more different guys (unless, like, one of them was a Vulcan - SHUSH NO WRONG FANDOM). You could not have a more intense rivalry. And yet it's abundantly clear they have a ton of respect for each other, a ton of very genuine love for each other, and they know each other so well - every appearance I've ever seen them in has just been so great for that.

Basically, I adore these guys. And I am riveted by their great and weird relationship. Anything you write about them navigating that relationship while being their extremely awesome selves will be wonderful for me.

Tour of the Merrimack -- R. M. Meluch, Augustus/John Farragut

I love Augustus. He's a gay decadent cyborg from the Roman Empire with a feelings dysfunction! Like. I was basically born to love him, I think. And what I'm hoping for here is more Augustus, either paired with John Farragut (that KISS oh HELP) or by himself.

If you're going with the gen option, I'd love to see what it's like to be Augustus, or especially what it's like to *become* Augustus. (This is a classic "a human being learns what it means to be a robot" scenario, and I am so completely there for that I have no words.) Worldbuilding of the Roman Empire would also be awesome -- I'd love to see Rome through Augustus's eyes, find out what it's like from the point of view of someone who actually likes it. (Because, well, it's not just that Farragut doesn't; Meluch doesn't, either.) Basically: I'd love some Augustus in which he sounds like himself and I learn more about him, whether that's his world, his history, or his -- well, future, to the extent that he has one or that you can give him one.

If you're going with the slash aspect, obviously I'd love to see Augustus and Farragut together. Somehow. Maybe it's post-canon but Augustus has a surprise comeback? Or maybe it's in the Myriad's continuity? Or -- maybe something else? I am totally flexible on this. If you can get them together at any point, with them still being themselves and having the kinds of interactions they do, I will be there for it and reading with absolute fascination. Because the thing is, I think they meet each other's needs. I think they are a mutual fascination society, and they are so obviously drawn to each other. And I also think they'd prefer to die than admit any of that. So if you can get them to admit it and not die -- wow, I will love you forever.

Note: I haven't read the fifth book.

(If you want to pick this up, it's -- well, it's a book series. It's available on Kindle? Or maybe at the library?)

Oh man this book series. brown_betty originally got me into them years ago, and I plowed through them as fast as I could get my hands on them, with a weekend of total agony when I could not get more and nearly died of it. I was obsessed. But I tried to move on. I did.

And then this year I, uh, spread the infection. And ended up discussing the series via Twitter and email in a manner that used up most of my supply of capslock and exclamation points for the rest of the year. I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS SERIES, is the thing. (!!!!) And I'm so weak to it. I basically just have to look at the titles to get sucked back in to a complete reread, because the pacing is so compelling, and because I love Augustus and his relationship with John Farragut, and also certain plot devices and settings so very, very much.

So much, in fact, that I ignore the, uh, really not wonderful aspects of these books. (Jo Walton perfectly describes my very mixed feelings about this series in her review. Basically, they're the most fun books I've read that I can't in good conscience recommend without a full page of caveats.) And I'm hoping you will, too, Yuletide Writer, unless you want to invert or address some of the more problematic aspects of the canon, in which case do that thing.

But, no matter what you do, whether you get Augustus and Farragut together or take Augustus apart and show what makes him work or fix something that's broken, I will be delighted.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

You're Always Coming Out

2014-04-02T01:59:44Z

Recently, I started thinking about the moments of being openly gay that I never see in fic. This was supposed to be a list of those.

It isn't.

~

Ever since we moved to this house, I've gone to the same pharmacy several times a month to pick up prescriptions. In the beginning, the earthling was with me in the sling, and later he'd accompany me walking on his own feet. There was a cashier, Maria, who always talked to him and me, who was friendly and remembered us and grabbed our prescriptions before we even got to the front of the line.

One day about a year ago I went to the pharmacy after the earthling was in bed. "Oh, where's your son?" Maria asked.

"He's at home with my wife. It's after his bedtime."

"…Oh," she said.

Since then, when I go, she still recognizes me, earthling or no, but she's all business. No chat, no talking about how big the earthling has gotten, no asking me about my day. There are a thousand possible reasons for this. At least. Most of them have nothing to do with me. Maybe she got yelled at for chatting with customers too much. Maybe she's been having a bad year. It could be anything. I know that.

But I will always wonder if it's because I'm queer. I can't not wonder. My queerness inflects every interaction I have like this, whether I acknowledge it ("my wife") or avoid it ("my partner"). And because queerness is not visible, cannot be known until I make it known, I often have situations like this, where there was a before and there is now an after and things are different. This is one of the minor costs of being openly queer: the voice in the back of your head that is always going, is this because I'm gay?

~

Coming out is supposed to happen in One Big Moment. Usually your One Big Moment involves coming out to your parents; sometimes, especially in fiction, it's coming out at a press conference or in front of an audience or something. But wherever it happens, the concept is the same: in that moment, your whole life changes. Before, you were closeted and ashamed, and after, you become open and honest. You have chewed your way out of the cocoon of secrecy to emerge as a beautiful gay butterfly!

My family doesn't do big moments well. I was in college, I was 19, I was in the apartment I shared with Best Beloved. And my mother called. After some chat, she got around to the purpose of her call.

"Last year," she said, "you told me you'd never get married. And I'm worrying about that. You're young and I don't want you to be alone forever."

"I won't be alone," I said. "I just won't be married because it's not legal for me to be. But I already consider myself married."

I should, at this (big and momentous!) point, mention a few things: this call was taking place in the morning, and my sister, Laura, was living with our mother at this time.

"Oh," my mother said. And right then, Laura, who is not and never has been entirely human in the mornings, came into the room.

"Is there milk?" she said crankily.

"In the refrigerator," my mother said to her. To me, she said, "Who are you married to?"

"[Best Beloved]," I said, honestly bewildered. (I thought they knew! Like -- why did they think we lived together? I assumed we'd been on the same page for years.)

"Oh," my mother said, reaching for a suitable reaction.

"No, there isn't," Laura said, attaining new heights of crankiness. "Are we out?"

"Your sister's a lesbian," my mother snapped at Laura. I think she meant: shut up about milk for a second. I'm trying to have a significant conversation and you're making it difficult.

Laura has never given a shit about anyone's sexual preference first thing in the morning. "That's nice," she said, summoning up every single fuck she could give about something before breakfast. "Are we out of milk or what?"

And at that point I think we all gave up on pretending this was a significant moment and just kind of moved on with our lives. I accepted that "That's nice. Are we out of milk or what?" would be my family's main reaction to my sexuality. Later that day, just to be sure we were all in the loop -- since my parents seemed strangely slow and clueless about these things -- I told my father in email. The paragraph dedicated to that revelation took a backseat to four paragraphs of discussion about my stupid physics professor. Those were my priorities.

He probably read it and wondered if he was out of milk.

Just to top things off, that night I realized to my eternal embarrassment that this all took place on National Coming Out Day, a "holiday" I don't even support. (Come out. Don't come out. Whatever you want, on your own terms. I'm not going to pressure you and no one else should, either. It's a bullshit concept.)

So my One Big Moment was -- not. It was not big. It was not dramatic. It was, to be honest, pretty comical. The most emotion experienced by anyone was Laura's sincere and honest anger about my mother using the last of the milk without even considering whether other people had had breakfast yet. It didn't even manage to be a single moment, since I spread it over most of a day.

This was probably much better preparation for the rest of my life than I thought at the time.

~

"Are you sisters?"

"No. No, we're… not sisters."

"Oh. Haha! You look just like each other."

~

In college, I fainted outside the student union building during finals week and ended up at student health. The nurse practitioner had only one question for me, phrased two dozen different ways: "Could you be pregnant?"

"No," I said. "I can't be pregnant."

She was already starting her next question before I finished my answer. "But did you have sex recently?"

I hesitated. Back then, coming out still felt like a big thing every time I did it. And, yes, I'd had sex with Best Beloved many times that month, but I knew she meant sex that involved a penis in my vagina. Did I really need to get into my current sexual history in detail with this woman? "No," I finally said, but my hesitation had convinced her.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Not at all?"

"No."

"Not even a teeny weeny bit?" she wheedled.

I just stared at her, trying to figure out how you have a teeny weeny bit of sex.

She moved on. "Did you black out, or take any drugs, or wake up and not know where you were at all recently?"

She'd accurately described most of my high school career, but those days were long gone. And I didn't think accidentally falling asleep after midnight in the bone lab counted. Dead people can't get you pregnant. "No."

We went around and around. After fifteen minutes, she was still finding new ways to ask if I might be pregnant, and I was watching time tick by and just yearning for a diagnosis already. Finally, she said, "What are you using for birth control?"

I gave up. My desire not to come out to her had lost out to my desire to be done with this question forever. "Lesbianism," I said. "I'm using lesbianism for birth control."

She nodded but did not deviate from her script. "So you're not on the pill? Did you have sex this month?"

"I only have sex with my girlfriend," I said, trying to make this whole lesbianism thing clearer. "She can't get me pregnant."

She sent me to get some blood tests. One of them was for hCG: a pregnancy test. I got it then and I get it now. The number of college girls who claim they can't possibly be pregnant and are wrong is greater than the number of college girls who have stress-induced fainting.

But I came out! It was an effort! And… she didn't even listen to me. Back then, it didn't matter to her the way it mattered to me.

~

After a while, it stops mattering. You do it so many times that it just gets old and dull and meaningless. But you don't get to stop there. Coming out is endless. I've done it thousands of times by now, each moment of coming out blurring together in my head until it's just a lifetime of saying over and over: "I'm a lesbian. I have a wife. I'm queer. I'm not straight." I don't play the pronoun game anymore, I don't reach for the careful, neutral phrasing, and so I'm coming out all the time, without even thinking about it. And it's so boring that I sometimes forget that it's new information, and sometimes a brand-new experience, for the person I'm coming out to.

"Is your husband Jewish?" the earthling's friend's mother asked me.

"My wife, actually. No, she's not."

And I was ready to move on, but she was freezing up. I've done this so many times I can monitor people's thoughts as they have them -- I can read them like thought bubbles.

She's a lesbian.

Wait. What do I say?

Oh no, I've waited too long and she thinks I'm a horrible bigot, even though I'm Canadian.

"Oh," she said, clearly wishing she was saying something else. But what? But what?

The earthling's friend, David, looked up at me. "Girls can't have a wife," he said confidently.

David's mother made a tiny horrified noise. I didn't even need to look at her to know that she was thinking now she thinks my children are horrible and bigoted too.

But children are easy. Children are never any problem. "Yes, they can," I said to David. "Men can marry men and women can marry women, and I'm married to [earthling]'s mommy." (Straight parents, a tip for you: The key is to sound blandly confident. Use the same tone you'd use to say, "Actually, the capital of California is Sacramento.")

David took the conversation back to what matters to small children: themselves. "My mommy is married to my daddy," he informed me, and he and the earthling went back to playing with leaves and sticks.

A minute later, David's mother, having processed her horror and figured out what to say, chimed in with, "Of course women and women can be married!" She pretty clearly had a whole speech ready, but too late. Small children learn hundreds of new things every week, and they just don't have a lot of time to spend on any single irrelevant, unimportant new fact, like that women can be married to women. David had already filed this away, and he wasn't listening anymore.

David's mother left the conversation embarrassed and worried. She was the only person involved who had any feelings about it at all. These days, it doesn't matter to me the way it matters to other people.

~

My family is pretty basic: two adults and a child. But even now, when we can legally be married, legally file taxes together, legally be co-parents -- even now, forms almost never have room for us. There's the basic ones that assume that each child has a mother and a father, of course, but recently we filled out some for the school distract that had a ton of options: mother/grandmother/legal guardian/caregiver/foster parent/other. And father/grandfather/legal guardian/caregiver/foster parent/other. The only possibility that seemed not to have occurred to the school was two parents of the same sex.

I always cross out "father" and write "mother" over it. I cross out "husband" and write "wife." Often, this leads to unhappiness on the part of a receptionist or records keeper somewhere. "But the computer doesn't have a place for that! Can I just put sister?"

"She's not my sister, and she is responsible for my medical bills if I die."

"I'll just put sister."

But then sometimes I pick up a form that says Parent 1 and Parent 2, or Spouse 1 and Spouse 2, or something along those lines.

As soon as I see that, I look behind the desk, analyzing. Who works in this office who is queer? I want to ask. Because we only ever fit on forms designed by people like us.

~

"Are you sisters?"

"No, we're not related."

"Oh, just really good friends then, huh? You look so much alike! You must get that a lot."

"Yeah, we get it a lot."

~

In college, I had a therapist. One day, she asked, "Are you still together with [Best Beloved]?"

"Yeah," I said, confused. I mean. I'd been with BB for years. Surely it would have come up in therapy if we'd broken up? I figured I'd have some feelings about it and all.

"Huh," she said. "I'm surprised. I guess I just see lesbian relationships as more ephemeral than straight ones." She continued on thoughtfully, "I don't know why that is. You'd think I'd know better; my sister's been with her partner for a decade, after all. Well. I'll have to do some work on that, won't I?"

For the record, she was a very good therapist.

This week, I took the earthling to his pediatrician, Dr. G. Dr. G has known him since he was born, and she's known us since I was six months pregnant. BB and I met her together at the pre-birth interview thing, and BB was there in the hospital when the earthling was born, and BB comes to appointments when she can.

As Dr. G entered some data about the earthling into her computer, she asked, "Are you still with [BB]?"

I blinked at her. "We just celebrated our twenty-first anniversary," I said, after a moment's pause.

"Oh! Wow! Congratulations," she said, and we moved on.

I really doubt she's ever asked my sister, whose kids also see this doctor, if she's still married to her husband. I've been married longer; BB was at my sister's wedding. But, hey, my marriage is ephemeral, right? It could end at any time. Unremarked upon, even.

For the record, Dr. G is a very good pediatrician.

~

"Are you twins?"

"…What?"

"You look like twins!"

"No, we're not related."

"Wow! You look just like each other. How crazy is that, huh?"

~

It's just a reflex by now.

We were checking in for a spa day that my mother schedule for us: me, my sister (except technically not my sister, who is always late), and Best Beloved. "Oh, are you all Ruth's daughters?" the receptionist asked.

"No. Laura and I are. [BB] is my wife," I said.

And I could, of course, see her thoughts as they happened:

Oh, they're lesbians!

I am entirely and sincerely pro-gay, and so is my workplace. I voted against Prop 8! Yay, gay people!

…But what do I say now?

"Oh," she said, straightening up a little.

Wait, that sounds dismissive. Say something else! Say a better thing! Say the right thing!

"That's great!" she said.

I glanced up at her. "Yes, it is." And then I went back to texting my sister to find out where she was.

~

"Are you twins?"

"No. She's my wife."

"…Oh. Um."

~

Straight people, I will tell you a secret: there is no right response. Just listen and get on with your lives. I've learned to.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

[Rant] In Defense of Bad Writing

2013-11-12T18:49:02Z

A long time ago, I had a lot to say in rants about how people were DOING IT WRONG and should NOT WRITE THIS WAY but rather THIS OTHER WAY. (And, if I'm gonna be honest, those rants are all still there, just waiting for me to type them. Let me tell you about the Should You Use the Pluperfect? flowchart I made the other day. Or not, because honestly, TFV, nobody wants to hear that.) I was all, "People! Write better!"

Sorry, past me -- you were wrong. What I should have been saying was, "People! Write more! (Even if it's really bad!)"

Because, yes, I still think the word sensitized needs to be left to lie fallow for a decade. Where it can maybe cavort with its friend, lave. I still sometimes want to ban thesauruses. I still feel like maybe those weeping cocks should see a doctor, or perhaps a therapist.

But these days, I also think we're lucky to have those stories. I probably won't be reading them, but I'm happy they exist, for three reasons.

Writing is good. People are writing! For fun! Good news! Seriously, if I had spent more time writing down the hideously painful Mary Sue fan fiction I dreamed up when I was a wee teen, I might have spent less time on, you know, drugs and sucking the cocks of random strangers without protection. I'm always happy to see someone making better choices than I made.

Maybe you're now saying, "Okay, fine, but do they have to post those Mary Sue stories where I can see them?" If so, you're being a dick. Cut it out. The Archive of Our Own is not the Archive of Just What You Want to Read. It's the Archive of Fanworks. Is it a fanwork? Then it belongs there! And if you're incapable of scrolling past something, it's not that the Mary Sue writers are in the wrong place, it's that you are. (Also, I'm sorry, but I don't know where would be the right place for you. Everywhere is going to have stuff you don't like, because tastes are individual and all that. Maybe the internet just isn't for you.)

Crap is important. Sturgeon's law is right, but it misses the point. Ninety percent of everything has to be shit. That's how you get the 10% that's good.

Your favorite writers, fan fiction, published fiction, published fan fiction, whatever -- they didn't start out writing that way. There was a time when they wrote unspeakably awful crap. Writing unspeakably awful crap is how you learn to write only moderately awful crap, and then eventually maybe decent stuff, and then, if you're lucky, actually good things. There are not two classes of people, those who are good writers and those who are bad writers, so that all you have to do to have only great stuff is scare away all the bad writers. There are people who used to write bad stuff, and there are people who are currently writing bad stuff, and there's a lot of crossover between the two. Some of the second category will one day be the first category. (Also, tomorrow some of the first category will move back to the second. No one hits it out of ballpark every time.) If you want to read new good stuff tomorrow, encourage the people writing bad stuff today. (And also maybe help them get betas. Betas are great.)

And, no, those people don't have to hide their work away until it gets better. They can share it with anyone who wants to read it. If they want to post it, they should. Wanting to is reason enough. (Although if you want another reason -- posting is how community happens. Which is how things like betas happen. People who share their work get better faster.)

Crap is a sign of life. New bad stories are a sign that this genre -- fan fiction, the genre I adore the most - is alive and well. Bad stories mean new people are trying to write in it, and people are trying to do new things with it, and maybe new people are joining the audience, too. When only the best and most popular are writing in a genre, it's on its deathbed. (See: Westerns and Louis L'Amour.) I want this genre to be here forever, because I want to read it forever. So I'm happy that teenagers are posting Mary Sue stories to the Archive of Our Own.

Does that mean you have to be happy? Nope. I can't make you do anything. (I can think you're wrong, but hey, being wrong on the internet is a time-honored tradition among our people.) But when you start making fun of a writer and bullying her in the comments of her story, simply because she's writing something you think is bad and embarrassing, well, that's when I say: shut the fuck up or get the fuck out. Because she's not a problem. She's just doing what we're all doing -- having fun, playing with words, throwing something out there on the internet to see if other people like it.

But you. You're trying to stop someone from having fun. You're trying to shame people into not writing anymore. And that, folks -- that is the definition of shitty behavior. (Mary Sue fantasies, on the other hand, are just the definition of human behavior.) It's bad for people, it's bad for the future, and it's bad for the genre. So you're a problem.

Please go away, problems, and let all of us write out our ids out in peace.

(And, yes, this was triggered by one specific story and some of the responses it's getting on the AO3. But it applies to all of them, all the fan fiction we don't like out there. Okay, I'm done.)

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

T-shirts!

2013-10-23T17:44:08Z

Okay, this is totally self-interested. Shinny Studio is considering printing a run of t-shirts with this on them:

And I really, really want one. But she can only print them if she gets enough orders. So if you're a Penguins fan (or, I guess, just a fan of helmeted lowercase penguins), check out the order information post. (More pictures there, including an actual shirt on an actual person!)

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

New Story! (Hockey RPF, Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin)

2013-10-11T23:15:01Z

This story was written for pentapus's Treehouse Reversebang challenge - she drew artwork for me, and I wrote a story inspired by it.

The unicorn came as a mild surprise. The length - the story was supposed to be a thousand words long - came as a more major one, and I'd like to thank pentapus for being patient as I battled my way to the end of this.

This was an incredible challenge, delightful to do, and even if you don't read the story, you should at least visit to see the artwork, which I have mentally titled "Sidney Crosby Confronts an Unimpressed Unicorn."

Highway Unicorn (20133 words) by thefourthvine, pentapus
Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin
Additional Tags: Urban Fantasy, Treehouse Reversebang
Summary:

He saw the horn poking out from the pony's head, golden and straight and somehow delicate-looking despite the empty tuna can hanging off of it. The unicorn horn. "The fuck," Sidney said out loud, his eye skipping from the horn over the greyish-white body to the graceful gold-toned hooves.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Yuletide 2013 Dear Author Letter

2013-10-11T22:39:35Z

Dear Author Person,

We matched! So basically know that I am extremely fond of you already, because clearly you are a person of taste and discernment, loving one of these small fandoms as much as I do.

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I hope to get from my recipient. But if that's not you, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering for one of my tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Me

I love so many things, Yuletide author. Here is a small sample:

Happy endings. (Um, I mean of the happily ever after kind. Although I am also a big fan of orgasms, not gonna lie.)
Humor.
Stories that earn their payoff.
Slow build romances and slow build sex scenes.
Action and adventure.
Snappy dialogue.
Classic fan fiction tropes.

Sadly, I also have some squicks:

Animal and child harm or death. These are my deal-breaker squicks; I can't handle them at all.
Embarrassment and humiliation.
Misogyny, sexism, the abuse of women.
Racism.
Incest.
Sex involving children (by which I mean people under 13ish) in any way).

So that's the general stuff. Let's talk fandoms.

Baseball RPF - Jose Fernandez, Yasiel Puig

Request: Oh god I just want to smoosh these guys together. Please smoosh them together.

I love how neatly they've subverted the Rookie of the Year rivalry narrative, I love how adorable they are separately and together, and I love how much they mean to their communities. I'd love to see them paired up, whether in the present or the future; I'd also love to read something about what they mean to the Cuban-American community, or about how they interact away from the diamond, the media, and the fans.

I'm a sucker for tropes and happy endings, and these guys seem perfect for both of those. However, I'm mostly interested in them as baseball players, so while AUs are great, I'd prefer it to be the kind where they still play.

I've spent this season slowly being suckered into following baseball, basically against my will, and these guys are like 75% of the reason. (Well, no, breakeveryclock is 75% of the reason. These guys were the tools she used to break me, though.) I just really love them.

I love Fernandez's entire life, basically, from his relationship with his family (He loves his grandma! He posts pictures of himself with his adorable baby sister! He took his mom to the All-Star Game!) to his giant grin to his entire history. (Dude didn't just defect from Cuba. He did it four times. He went to jail for it. He had to jump in the ocean to save his mother. And he still said his first six months in the US were worse than all of that.) And I love his attitude.

And attitude, of course, takes us to Yasiel Puig. I am fascinated by Puig, who has attracted a bucketload of criticism despite his gorgeous (if risky) play and his cautious media behavior. I love that he is determined to be who he is, and I'd love it if a story showed me just who that is; his public persona is, to me, pretty occluded by all the media crap.

Most of all, I love how neatly these guys subverted the media narrative about their rivalry. The media was all - good boy Fernandez! Bad boy Puig! WHO WILL WIN? And meanwhile Fernandez and Puig were hugging each other and talking excitedly and becoming buddies. I think it's pretty obvious why I ship the hell out of it. And ship it I do. But if slash isn't your thing, I'd also be happy with gen.

Basketball RPF - Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Larry Bird

Request: Magic Johnson and Larry Bird soulbonded at the NCAA Championship in 1979. That is CANON. So what I want to know is - where did it go from there? What happened? How does that work, when you're playing against each other, when at least one of you is clearly fighting the bond, when you're such incredibly different human beings? There are lots of interesting possibilities here - Larry fighting the bond, the way it affected them and their game, how it drove them to play. Or there's Magic's HIV diagnosis and how they dealt with that. Or there's the question of dealing with marriage (to other people) and being soulbonded. Or you could talk about how they finally accepted the soulbond and what it's like now, being comfortable with it and each other, years after the fighting and the struggle finally ended. Just, anything. (And in case you're panicking: it doesn't have to be about a literal soulbond. They have SOME kind of bond, that much is clear; if you don't see it as a soulbond, go with whatever you do see it as.)

I'm good with gen (just because you have a soulbond doesn't mean you have to have sex), slash, and poly. Just please do not erase their wives, particularly the amazing Cookie Johnson, or do straight-up infidelity. There's always gen, or setting the sex before the marriage, or spousal knowledge and consent (my favorite!), or spousal involvement. Or something else you come up with! LET THE MAGIC (hee!) OF BIRD AND JOHNSON GUIDE YOU, basically.

Okay, I am a trifle concerned that my request makes me sound like a delusional tinhat loon. No! No! I am merely reporting the truth, which is that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird have a real-life soulbond!

...That didn't help my case. But I have solid evidence. Behold, the amazing documentary A Courtship of Rivals:

(You only need to watch the first ten minutes to see the literal discussion of the soulbond. And, if you're curious, here's the hysterical-in-every-sense-of-the-word breakdown I had the first time I watched it.)

This could not be clearer. These guys are bonded. And I just find that fascinating. You could not have two more different guys (unless, like, one of them was a Vulcan - SHUSH NO WRONG FANDOM). You could not have a more intense rivalry. And yet it's abundantly clear they have a ton of respect for each other, a ton of very genuine love for each other, and they know each other so well - every appearance I've ever seen them in has just been so great for that. (I have a boatload of links that I am not putting here for reasons of dignity. Anyone who wants to see them, though, is welcome to comment, anon or otherwise. I AM HERE FOR ANYONE WHO IS INTERESTED IN MAGIC AND LARRY.)

Basically, I adore these guys. And I am riveted by their relationship. Anything you write about them navigating that relationship while being their extremely awesome selves will be wonderful for me.

Flotsam

Request: OH MY GOD WORLD-BUILDING PLEASE WORLD-BUILDING. Tell me more about this gorgeous, wonderful world. Beyond that, write about whatever you want - the kids who have had the camera in the past or who will have it in the future, or the kid who has it in the book. Write about the undersea world the camera documents - what are those octopuses up to? Who built the clockwork fish? Who lives on the back of the turtle? Where did those aliens come from, and what are the seahorses doing? Basically there's no page where you can't find questions I'd love to see answered. Or you could write about who made the camera and how this all got started. I genuinely don't care; I just want to see this world expanded, because I'm utterly entranced by it.

I'm pretty sure we didn't match on this, since as of this writing no one has offered it. But if you're looking to jump ship on another request, or just looking for a gorgeous, fascinating children's book, this would be an excellent thing to explore! It's a wordless picture book about a kid who finds a camera filled with pictures of really fascinating undersea life. And it is amazing. It's in print, so there's no trouble finding it.

Here are some sample pages, just to whet your appetite: seahorses and aliens, clockwork fish.

And if you do decide to write it - I wasn't kidding. Anything to do with this world and world-building and I will be thrilled.

Want You Bad (song) - Narrator, Narrator's girlfriend

Request: Okay, so I think we can agree no one signed up for this song expecting to write gen (although if you did, wow, just write whatever you had in mind, because you are clearly extremely creative and I want to read your vision). Basically, what I see here is a dude who needs to learn an important lesson about the difference between the surface and the interior. He's conflating how his girlfriend dresses with how kinky she is, and he thinks that how she acts out in the world is a reflection of how she will be in the bedroom. Which is obviously bullshit, and I want him to learn that.

Or, to put it more succinctly: I want him to learn that she can dominate the fuck out of him and give him all the kink he yearns for while still looking and living exactly how she wants to, highlights and niceness and all. And if he'd rather she looked to the world the way she looks to him? Well, he's going to want a lot of things he doesn't get to have. But he's going to be happy with what she gives him.

Again, at this point no one has offered this, but if you're looking for another prompt and gen about undersea mysteries isn't your thing, may I offer you het kink instead? Here's the song (ignore the video):

Annnnd I think that the request says it all. Our hero is confused. He needs to learn the difference between a book and its cover. Or, in this case, between how a woman chooses to look to the world and how a woman chooses to own her fucking partner in bed.

I'm guessing he will thoroughly enjoy learning this lesson, but possibly not as much as she'll enjoy teaching it.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

Hockey RPF fandom poll!

2013-09-28T00:12:10Z

Over on Twitter, people had questions about hockery RPF fandom folks, so we put together a poll. (When in doubt, TICKYBOXES. That is my motto.) If you've read/watched/listened to hockey RPF fanworks, please come take the poll! (And if you know anyone who's in the fandom, please tell them about it, too. Some data good, more data better.)

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.

[Meta] Permissions Statements Are Awesome

2013-08-24T19:03:46Z

Okay, so a recent casual mention of blanket permission statements on Twitter taught me that:

There are a lot of authors who would love to be podficced who don't have blanket permission statements. (If you're in this boat: a permissions statement doesn't guarantee anything, but the lack of one certainly lessens your chances considerably.)
Many of these authors don't necessarily know what a BP statement is, or how to write one. (Spoiler: I'm going to cover this in considerable detail starting in about three paragraphs.)
A lot of people don't know that podficcers keep track of who has a blanket permission statement and refer to the list regularly. (In other words, you basically only have to do it once, and then you're done unless something changes. Good deal! Also, good idea to check to be sure you're on it if you want to be.)
A lot of people don't know how important having a statement - any statement, even if it's "no" or "maybe" - is to other fans.

So I thought I would talk about permission statements, since they are the greatest thing ever and I want everyone to have one.

Many years ago, I used to have the following experience:

PM arrives from a person I don't know.
I cringe and recoil and try to pretend it hasn't arrived, because PMs freak me right out.
I avoid with varying levels of success for varying levels of time.
Eventually I open it (maybe).
It is a podfic request! That's awesome!
...Now I have to PM the podficcer back. Oh no.
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. Because communication is hard.
If I don't, guilt.
If I do, podfic!

It was an elaborate and moderately horrible process, obviously made that way entirely by my own idiosyncratic brain, and I loved that podfic happened but wished there was a way to tell podficcers to JUST DO IT PLEASE DON'T ASK JUST DO IT. For a while I tried putting JUST DO IT in my profile, but my profile was wordy and no one ever read all the way through it, so it didn't help (that I know of).

And then someone told me of the concept of blanket permission. And it was like the sun had risen. There was a way! A way to say yes, fine, go transform with my very best wishes, no need to ask! So I left a comment on some long-ago post saying so, and my relationship with podfic became a guilt- and stress-free one. Bliss.

Blanket permission is wonderful, is what I'm saying. Since I know podficcers now, I know that the stress was not entirely or even mostly on my side during my long, drawn-out struggles with my brain; the podficcer, who I used to sort of blithely assume had sent the PM and then forgotten about it, was actually probably checking her email reeeeeally regularly and hoping hoping hoping and oh god just GET BACK TO ME I just want to KNOW either WAY oh god are you even ALIVE? So blanket permission saves considerable wear and tear on both sides.

I am a big fan, basically. So, first, here's an example blanket permission statement. If you're already sold on permissions statements, go write one or modify this or just copy it and add it to your AO3 profile or wherever else you post your stories (if you comment here saying you've done so, I can make sure you're on the BP list, even!) and you're done.

"If you want to podfic any of my stories, go right ahead - no need to ask permission. Just please link back to the original story when you post your work, and let me know so I can go revel in whatever awesome thing you've done. Same goes for art or other creative or transformative works you might feel inspired to do. Just don't use my work for anything commercial, please!"

If you want to know more, or you aren't sure, or you have special circumstances, read on!

If you're thinking, yes, but I don't actually just want to say yes to everything, fear not! Blanket permission is a misnomer. (Or, okay, it isn't - it just means "this is the statement that covers everything you need to know." But it sort of sounds like you have to say yes to everything, no limits, no conditions when you give one. You don't!) You can say "sure, do what thou wilt" in one, but you can also be more specific. It's more like negotiated consent, actually - you say what you're comfortable with and what you want and need, and then a podficcer who is thinking about doing one of your stories can read it and decide if it matches what she wants and needs, making the process safer and easier for everyone.

So, for example, you can say, "Feel free to podfic anything except any story I've tagged juvenilia." Or you can say, "Feel free to podfic anything, but if it's posted archive-locked, I would like the podfic to also be archive-locked." Or whatever! State your conditions up front, basically.

You can even say, "I'm very open to podfic, and I will mostly say yes, but I still would like you to ask." This seems like a useless statement, but it includes two very important points: you are open to podfic and you will probably say yes. Many podficcers spend time trying to figure out if an author is potentially podfic-friendly before they ask permission. I have seen people do a LOT trying to figure this out, including:

Checking the blanket permission list
Checking all the author's profiles and masterlists everywhere, hoping one got missed (it happens, which is why it's a good idea for you to check, too)
Checking to see if there are other podfics of the author's work (which means she gave permission before and thus might again)
Checking to see if the author has pro-podfic friends
Asking the author's pro-podfic friends or betas if they know how the author feels about it
Asking other podficcers to see if they've ever asked the author for permission
And so on

Seriously. This process is a tense one for podficcers. Many of them work really hard to alleviate that tension somewhat before they take the leap of emailing a stranger for permission to do a fanwork. (Many of them have given up entirely and only podfic people with permissions statements, which is why not having one really reduces your chances of getting podficced.) So just saying somewhere public that you're into it is useful.

Your blanket permission statement can even look like this: "Please do not podfic any of my stories." (Or, in other words, a blanket no.) If you're going to say no to every request you get, why not just say that no in front and spare everyone, including you, the extra work? Plus, if you put yourself on the blanket no list, it will apply forever. Podficcers keep track. (Truth. When I started modifying my blanket permission statement, I was surprised to discover that the exact comment I'd left on that long-ago post had been carefully copy-pasted to Fanlore, which started years after that comment was made.) If you make a public statement of blanket no, you're done with podfic (unless you change your mind), and you've made everyone's lives easier. GO THERE, is my suggestion.

If you have other questions, I'm here to help. (Or more likely just ask people who know the answers, actually, but I stand willing to do that.) I want everyone to have a permissions statement, so we can have a world of blissfully consensual transformative works! (And don't forget to comment if you've added one, or if you've got one already but you're not on the list.)

YAY PERMISSIONS.

Thanks to ParakaPodfic for reading over this and giving me a podficcer perspective on it. Further viewpoints welcome, of course, from podficcers, authors, lurkers, fanknitters, all kinds of people - comment away. But please don't say "podfic is creepy" or similar. I want this to be a place of fanwork acceptance. Thank you!

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments.