bironic

Hello! It's been a weird week. Four days ago I was in Switzerland. More on that soon. Since then it's been a headfirst dive into apartment hunting and a work assignment I had a hard time with. At least the assignment is done now.

I.

Trying to find a satisfying new place to live on short notice in peak season in a rent-inflated city is stressful and I do not recommend it. I haven't learned yet how to set manageable goals for the search, i.e. when it's okay to stop each day or each session. I'm also trying to define when a listing is worth compromising on vs. what I've done so far, which is keep holding out for better. Not counting the awesome-looking place that went off the market literally two minutes after I set up an appointment to view it. I am feeling many negative feelings and reminding myself to simply feel them and keep going.

II.

A break in the clouds. Last night stultiloquentia and I popped down to Readercon's free first evening, since neither of us could make the official con Fri-Sun. I really wanted to hear Stephen Graham Jones, this year's co-Guest of Honor with Tananarive Due, and see if he would sign the copy of Mapping the Interior that gretchening sent last year as a gift. (He did!) And as luck would have it, SGJ's Thursday panel included our local writer and film critic sovay and moderator Darcie Little Badger a.k.a. shiningcomic, both of whom I started following a couple of Readercons ago, plus teri.zin and Paul Tremblay.

The topic was "Being Vague to Make Space for Horror," about how ambiguity rather than clarity serves the genre. Different kinds of ambiguity. The horror of not being believed, in life and in fiction. The discomfort of not being able to put names to things, in life and in fiction. How ambiguity can arise from an author struggling with disbelief in the supernatural while writing it. (Tremblay: 'I don't think it'd be a six-foot ghost. I'd try to explain away whatever it was. I'd keep thinking about it later. I'd be unsettled.') Ambiguity as a different thing from confusion or authorial laziness. (SGJ: 'I always commit to one or the other in my head. [i.e. Is this thing real or not?] I pick whichever is more fun. And then I entertain the opposite in the story.') What authors know about their characters and what happens offscreen and before and after the story, and what they don't. What happens in the rarer cases when providing an answer works for the story. (Examples cited: Get Out, Cat People, Scream, Midsommar, Hereditary, Visible Filth.) The satisfaction of dissatisfaction. The value of being unsettled, dislocated, wondering.

The fresh reading of Mapping the Interior proved an excellent lens through which to appreciate the discussion.

I also bumped into kate_nepveu on the way out and tried to help her right a faltering easel. And that's pretty much everybody I could have hoped to recognize at the con except yhlee. Sorry to miss you this year. Be safe down there.

Of course, seeing Tananarive Due would have been excellent too. Alas. At least stultiloquentia was able to go to her panel during the same slot: "Afrofuturism and Solarpunk in Dialogue."

III.

Before jetting off on the work trip, I did finish both stories for nonconathon! Like, just before jetting off. I cranked out the rest of the second story across something like six hours and two thunderstorms with one break to look at an apartment, posted it, took a shower and left for the airport, where I polished a few rough spots from my phone.

Almost 9,000 words total. I think they both could have used more work, being unplanned first drafts written across multiple sittings. But they exist, and that is what matters. One of them—the down-to-the-wire one—has done quite well. The other, at least the recipient liked, or politely pretended to, heh. Could also be a consequence of being buried toward the back of the 232-story collection.

Reveals are this weekend, I believe. Will post some recs after. I haven't read any fics since returning to work but I did enjoy a bunch on the flight home, pre-downloaded, largely in the Original Works category.

As a cis het, I experience Pride Month as a more concentrated than usual opportunity to celebrate friends*; identification feels like appropriation. Still, I've enjoyed wearing my stealth gray-ace necklace, courtesy of deelaundry, more than usual in June.

*and family and colleagues and strangers, and to help lobby for compassionate treatment of queer people globally and listen and otherwise be an ally

One of these years I'll wrestle out the post that's been tumbling in the back of my head about the ways the "gray asexuality" label does and doesn't fit. It's hard to define something by a partial and possibly temporary, even if longstanding, absence.

*

Either way, the kink remains! Heh.

1) 4,100 words and counting on two nonconathon fills.

2) I finally watched Professor Marston and the Wonder Women and came out of it with a general response of ♥. If I'd known before festivids that it focused so much on ( spoiler for the first half of the movie ) rather than being a straightforward biopic about a comics creator and the women who inspired him, I would have watched it sooner! Or maybe I did know at some point and then forgot, oops.

( Details )

How many of you posted about the movie when it came out? Link me?

*

I'd been thinking again about student/teacher and other relationships involving authority figures in fic, which is what led to the above. What I continue to love all these years later about stories like Sickness and Shame by recrudescence (doctor/patient), Bend It by Nellie (coach/athlete) and Maybe I'm Already Crazy by foxxcub (teacher/student)—all Inception, Arthur/Eames, FYI right at the cusp of underage in the U.S.—are that they thread the needle between coming too close to reality and going too far into fantasy.

By which I mean, if you swing too far in the realism direction, then either the adult/authority figure comes off as creepy or outright abusive, like what happens in the vast majority of cases IRL—I'm talking about fic involving consensual relationships in this case; when you're reading or writing noncon, then of course that kind of characterization tends to be the goal—or else the characters talk or think around the ethical issues and don't act on their feelings. (Are there any fics in that second category? Hm. I've struggled with it when writing before. 'Have sex already!' 'But we want to be in character and/or sympathetic, so how do we cross this line?' ETA: Oh, right, that's how things shook out in an old Willow/Giles WIP.)

Whereas if you swing too far in the fantasy direction, then as soon as the characters realize the attraction is mutual, they slide down the magical erotica chute into passionate sexytimes, no bumps along the way. And that's not satisfying for me. I want the characters to confront the issues—the power imbalance, the trickiness of consent, the potential consequences—before finding a way forward together. As you may recall, the glossing over of this stage is what prevented me from fully adoring many of alethia's Michael Burnham/Christopher Pike fics (captain/crew member, Star Trek: Discovery), which are otherwise so close to perfect. IIRC, Dating Wrong and A Light Touch handle it pretty well.

What drove me up the wall about a long fic someone recced the last time I asked around for student/teacher stories, More Than Just a Pair of Sinking Ships by Robespierre (Merlin/Arthur), is that, while student!Merlin is depicted as crushing just as hard as teacher!Arthur, Arthur, the POV character, does soon come across as a creep and loses sight of what is appropriate, adult behavior. If only it hadn't taken those wrong turns (IMO), the pining and catharsis could have been gorgeous.

Forever chasing more of the good ones.

You never know which story will call to you, or when. One of the documents I've been returning to lately is an old Stargate-movie Mary Sue story about one of Ra's body servants. It's different from other universes I've played in in that, while we the readers view Ra as an alien possessing a human body, to the protagonist, he is divine; so the narrative intermingles deity/worshipper and ruler/subject and lover/beloved, and because much of it is told from the young servant's point of view, she does not question--in fact, wholeheartedly devotes herself to--what we could label an exploitative relationship. After tweaking little bits here and there of a draft that has remained stagnant for perhaps a decade, this weekend I added 1,000 words of a new scene. I am happily bewildered.

Strange things happen regarding time. There's this whole batch of stories I started in my, I guess you'd call it golden years, from late high school through shortly after college, which still serve as the foundation for most of the Mary Sue writing I do that's technically fanfic but isn't likely to ever be posted. I still think of them as fairly new, except, on reflection, even the newest of them started more than 15 years ago. What the hell.

("What the hell have I been doing with my creative life in those 15 years" is a follow-on question it's best not to wallow in.)

I.

I could swear I wrote one line of a super-rarepair fic many years ago. Last night I looked for it and couldn't find it; only the prompt turned up, in a document of many prompts. :/ It's possible I deleted the file, "knowing" I'd never flesh it out and/or letting fear of censure win because the source was, shall we say, problematic. If so, past!me has made present!me sad. Hoping I can find a My Documents backup of the right age to contain this file, if I'm not imagining its existence. The line probably isn't even that spectacular, but not being able to read it bothers me.

(It was John Dunbar/Wind In His Hair from Dances with Wolves. The line was written as part of an entry in Dunbar's diary. I know, I know.)

II.

People who've written a lot of fic, or who've been writing for a long time, or who, heh, maybe don't invest as much of their self-worth in their fic, talk about going back through their AO3 catalog or whatnot and discovering stories they'd forgotten. This was an alien concept to me as someone who obsessively rereads most of what I write and who has posted a small enough fic collection to be able to list a good portion of it from memory.

I say "was" because while combing through my fic subfolder called "abandoned" last night, which goes back about 12 years, I discovered unfinished Slashfest/Kink Bingo/Porn Battle/SGA kink meme prompt fills and other snippets that I had either forgotten about until reintroduced or had no recollection of writing. I hardly ever browse that folder, so frequency of contact must be a factor. Maybe length or idea development, too, but there are old, sketchy drafts of just a few lines in the regular "fic" folder that I haven't forgotten because I see the file names all the time. Fascinating!

III.

Having started learning to cook only in my twenties, having grown up in a recipe-following household, and not keeping the most well-stocked of pantries, I am happy whenever I throw together something spur-of-the-moment and it turns out tasty. Today it was a package of sausage and a bag of Brussels sprouts from the freezer, three overripe apples and a can of white beans. Autumn in a pot.

IV.

Hey, so that New Poets of Native Nations book I mentioned the other week? Heid Erdrich, the editor, is in town and giving a talk about it tomorrow! She's bringing two of the featured poets as well, Tacey Atsitty and Eric Gansworth. They weren't my favorites, but whatever, maybe their readings will change that. Excited to hear the presentations and to get the book signed.

V.

I donated three boxes of books to the library today. Small repayment for all the materials they have lent this resident over the past 5 years. Also, closet space reclaimed. One of those boxes has been hanging around since high school. (!)

(1)

How many of you are of an age and region to remember the BookIt! program, where kids get stickers for reading books and then trade them in for a Pizza Hut pizza? disgruntled_owl has organized a fall reading challenge for our local fan group that serves as BookIt! for grownups, and I am inordinately enthused about it. Need to do a books catch-up post.

(2)

Change of season—theoretically; summer hasn't let go yet—means replenishing fall work wardrobe and sprucing up the apartment. Clothes shopping is hard, but five hours' work yesterday yielded a pair of plaid pants, a tunic sweater with side grommets and a corduroy dress that I really like, and everything was on sale.

I also picked up a trio of fairy tale-inspired prints at a local art fair and hung them in the bedroom. ( pic )

It's funny because it turns out the artist is the same one who made a paper-doll Edgar Allan Poe pattern and various cute horror figure prints that caught my eye when I lived in D.C. The styles differ so much, I didn't make the connection.

(3)

I got a haircut and I think I don't like it. :/

(4)

Trying to decide whether to participate in trickortreatex or yuletide_admin for the first time or to sit out official signups, look at people's requests to see if anything sparks an idea, and concentrate on my own WsIP otherwise. I'm thinking no on Trick or Treat and maybe on Yuletide. Just in case on the latter, I nominated the fandoms I'd want to request stories for and/or that I feel most capable of writing. Three is not much when you don't expect to know most of the sources other people nominate.

Either way, the "Original Works" prompts for trickortreatex are a lot of fun to peruse. They're listed under "Other Media" here. (I copy-pasted into a Word doc and added line breaks to make them readable.) Some faves:

- Actor Cast As A Vampire Who Is Actually A Vampire
- Businessman Who's Obviously A Poorly-Disguised Tentacle Monster
- Demon Who Has Accidentally Locked Himself Out Of Hell And Just Wants To Go Home
- Ghost of a Dried Up River
- Ghost of Highly Intelligent Octopus that Escaped From Its Tank
- Giant Robot Who Just Wants to Know Love
- Haunted Yarn From An Evil Sheep
- A Reader's Digest Condensed Book that Slowly Devours the Reader's Soul
- Reanimated Egyptian Mummy With A BA In Film Studies From USC

(5)

Wait, I thought of a fifth thing. I booked a flight to see my longtime friend A. in Tucson, AZ in November. She moved there five years ago and it took this long to visit, whoops. Recommendations welcome if you know the area. So far: Sonoran Desert Museum, Saguaro National Park, drive up Mt. Lemmon, a Mexican restaurant her family likes.

Which reminds me: This week marks five years since I moved back to Boston! It seems simultaneously like less and more. 2013 was the summer jetpack_monkey made the Starships! remix. Kink Bingo was still running. This is the longest I have stayed at a single job or school. While there are annoyances and stressful periods, I don't at the moment have plans to look around. I miss my D.C. friends (and my NY friends before that) but am glad for my Boston ones.

Feeling

I need a vacation. I just want to sit in a room that is not mine for a few days and work on stories and let my mind wander without having to yank it back to take care of responsibilities. That’s what last month’s trip to my mom’s hotel in Worcester was supposed to provide, except I ended up needing to work. Now I keep going to the office and not really doing anything.

The silly part is that the only thing stopping me from taking time off is planning it.

Doing

My favorite college friend, R., is in town for a few days. We spent a good chunk of the weekend together. Due to a couple of near misses, we hadn’t met since 2015, and not in Boston since the year before that. I was all nerves leading up to dinner on Saturday, in part because he has "succeeded" more than me on multiple fronts and I do not have great self-esteem these days, in part because I’ve always had half a crush on him and want to make sure he still likes me too, and in part because it was a certain time of the month when anxiety peaks no matter what’s going on—but, to my great relief, I was reminded within the first few minutes that there’s a reason we became friends 17 years ago (!) and remain so now. He makes conversation easy, albeit with a hint of the know-it-all one-upmanship that tinges a lot of the relationships I had at school and still have with some coworkers. I was reminded once again that his life isn’t perfect either, and it matters a lot to me that he is comfortable talking about the challenges and disappointments we are dealing with as well as sharing joy in the things that are going well.

In any case, we ate interesting Italian/Peruvian fusion, enjoyed a breezy boat ride out to the Boston Harbor Islands, had a picnic, walked around some of the new developments on the waterfront despite being two very pale people in the summer sun, and talked a lot. <3

Later this week there will be dinner with a former coworker and a Star Trek-themed burlesque show with friends.

Writing

Zahn McClarnon characters continue to rev my creative engines.

750 words and counting of Hanzee/Constance (Fargo TV show, season two)
+ 2,240 Mathias/OFC (Longmire)
+ 1,940 Mike/Rachel and Kopus/Rachel (The Red Road)
+ 670 Zachariah/Pia/Lemuel (Midnight, Texas)
= 5,600 words since the beginning of July. \o/

Nothing is finished yet, and based on past experience, I’m worried about losing momentum and leaving everything incomplete. Even so, as maralenenok said last week, words is words, and as I said in reply, I’m pleased with how all four stories depict very different characters and have different structures and narrative voices.

Vidding

Planning three vids; waiting to see which gets started first.

Festivids approaches. I’m pondering requests old and new. The other day, I spur-of-the-moment gathered links to all the Longmire vids I could find on YouTube & the AO3 to confirm there aren’t too many for it to qualify.

Watching

Re: the above, I’ve been going through more of Zahn’s film & TV catalog and taking notes. In the last… week, OMG, I have seen or skimmed:

Fargo: Year Two - surprisingly engaging
Searchers 2.0 - golfing outfit!
Bone Tomahawk - dapper suit and walking stick, but only one scene
The Son - tiresome and cliché-ridden but at least he had a sizeable role

Started Into the West last night, also a skim. Spielberg tries to capitalize on the success of Dances with Wolves with a miniseries in the mid-’90s ETA: 2005, wow, the music and casting definitely feel a decade earlier. (Skeet Ulrich?!) So Zahn McClarnon was my current age when he filmed it.

Movie theater-wise, got together with various friend clusters to see Crazy Rich Asians, which was excellent, and Mission Impossible: Fallout, made by people who’ve mastered the art of the mainstream action film and more enjoyable than any James Bond movie I’ve seen. So many other movies to see; I keep running out of time.

Reading

Has been slow this past little while. Partly because I’ve wanted to do other things and partly because of the books themselves, I think. Right now I’m halfway through Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, which is fascinating in its combination of carnality and lyricism.

Thinking

About how, despite what roundup posts like this imply, I can write OR vid OR watch a lot of movies OR plow through a lot of books OR do in-depth media reviews OR go full-tilt at work OR be very social OR do everything I’m supposed to do food- and activity-wise to manage my health condition… but not more than one, maybe two, at a time. Thirty-six years old and I’m finally learning to accept the need for priorities and compromises and moderation instead of fighting against it, and to admit that I am not a machine running at 100 percent efficiency, and to see the rise and fall of different categories over the months as something that keeps life interesting rather than a flaw.

I do recognize the privileges that allow me to have even this much spare time and, more or less, the energy to do something with it. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not sad about not being able to do all the things, always.

I churned through the short story collection The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories (2017) in the past few days because it was due back at the library. A decent read with lots of Middle Eastern, Asian and cross-cultural perspectives. Hardly any romance despite the title, which was fine. The first story, Kamila Shamsie's "The Congregation," came perhaps closest with its human protagonist longing for his lost djinn brother. A few authors had fun riffing on the mythology in sci fi and future-dystopian settings (E.J. Swift, Saad Z. Hossain, Jamal Mahjoub). I also particularly liked Kirsty Logan's "The Spite House," in which a djinn struggles with the simultaneous power and entrapment of finding they can grant wishes, and Sami Shah's "Reap," in which U.S. military staffers remote-monitoring a neighborhood with a Taliban operative witness a possession they can't explain. IMO the reprinting of Neil Gaiman's American Gods chapter on Salim and the ifrit was unnecessary, especially since another white author who'd notably written about djinn, Helene Wecker, came up with a new story for this volume.

Having djinn on the brain motivated me last night to open that languishing Jinni/Dustfinger crossover fic I swore to finish this year. It's not even long; I just lost the initial momentum in, er, 2016. Added a few lines, bridged a gap that had been bothering me, wrote a sentence that restored a little bit of my confidence that I can still do this fiction-writing thing.

I also finished a poorly acted movie called Dot the I (2003) that featured an infuriating plot about three men manipulating a woman plus an "edgy" message about the ethics and trickeries of moviemaking. However, as it also starred baby James D'Arcy, baby Gael Garcia Bernal and baby Tom Hardy, I couldn't look away. It has a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems fair. One critic praised an "unpredictable twist" toward the end of the film that you could only not see coming if you believe the main character would go out of her way to resume a relationship with a man after finding out [spoiler] he followed and filmed her for months without her knowledge despite her history of being stalked, swapped a marriage certificate for a release form and faked his own death to obtain an ~authentic performance~ from her. Bleh.

Anyway. The fic and the movie are clearly to blame -- or rather, to be credited -- for a nice dream I had this morning about kissing Tom Hardy for a long time on a couch. It carried me through a busy workday and another spate of depressing national news. Now, speed skating and snowboarding on TV.

How are/were your Tuesdays?

(-) My mom is having semi-elective abdominal surgery next week. If all goes as planned, I'll drive down to NY when she's discharged from the hospital to help with the initial recovery at home, which is supposed to be slow but smooth -- but things never seem to go as planned when it comes to her health. Wish us luck?

[Mutters to self: Positives, positives, focus on positives.]

(+) First Festivid submitted! Other drafts continue apace.

(+) I signed up to offer a vid through FandomTrumpsHate. They say more than 500 fan creators are participating! Bidding will run Jan. 12-20.

(+) My officemate's departure means I now get the window side of the room. I'm all moved in, and I and my spider plants are enjoying the light.

(+) I got to do lunch, brunch, Christmas light ogling and first-night-of-Hanukkah activities with roga, who came to the U.S. over the holidays, and thedeadparrot, who hosted her. We lit a well-traveled menorah and made many potato latkes and caught up on everyone's lives. ♥

(+) Saw Moana with windtheme. ( Brief faves: ) Hanging with windtheme was lovely. I have an informal goal this year to spend more time with a few Boston-area fan people I'd like to get to know better, if the feeling is mutual.

(+) Visited deelaundry and family, which I used to do all the time when I lived in DC and had been missing since coming up north. A lovely respite filled with friend time, good food (that I didn't have to cook myself), movies & TV, and a bit of touristing. One highlight was seeing the restored original model of the U.S.S. Enterprise at the Air & Space Museum! They turn on the blinky lights every few hours and everything.

We also watched Rogue One, which I liked fine* and which I thought really enriched the story of A New Hope; the current season so far of Brooklyn 99, good fun; and a pair of AMAZING early '70s horror-comedies, Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein. ( More details, pix, fic idea )

*Except this and that and the other thing, but now is not the time.

(-) Yuletide as usual made me crabby, #UnpopularFannishOpinion, although there is a promising Grantchester fic I'd like to try. However, the universe separately provided a second fic by that Vampire Chronicles author who made me happy the other week: In the Trials of the Heart by monstersinthecosmos (10,500 words, rated M), Armand/Daniel, Daniel/Marius and combinations thereof.

...Sorry, stored up too many things for one post!

1. Having synn for a friend. She waited in yet another line at the SPN con she's attending this weekend to get me Sebastian Roché's autograph on an 8x10 I mailed her with a homemade montage of his late '90s roles on Roar and Odyssey 5, and she took the time to email a description of how he reacted to it. ♥Longinus♥ ♥synn♥

2. Friends in general. This week included a Boston tourism day with alpheratz and seascribe, a small dinner party at a grad school classmate's house, the usual wonderful deep conversation with M. (hereafter disgruntledowl; she got an LJ for Yuletide!), and heckling the latest pair of Project Runway episodes with thedeadparrot.

Next weekend there will be a deelaundry; we're going to see Robert Sean Leonard in Connecticut in his latest play: Camelot.

alpheratz's visit reminded me to get out more to parts of the city I don't usually visit. The South End and the Back Bay segment of Comm Ave are so lovely this time of year.



3. Roasting trays of zucchini, eggplant, yam and cabbage for meal sides this week. ♥autumn♥

4. Playing with a few vids. One is an Elf vid for Xmas that I've been wanting to make for years. The others will be Festivids; TBD if assignments or treats. They are among the five-and-counting requests from people that I'd love to make, and there are still a couple of movies to watch before signups close in case they can be added to my offers. Much better than last year at this time.

5. Books to read. One enjoyable SF series: the Young Miles compendium by Bujold, beginning tomorrow, having finished Shards of Honor and Barrayar a week ago and NK Jemisin's The Obelisk Gate on Friday. One guilty pleasure: Vampire Romance 2 by assorted contributors, begun last night. (You may recall an anecdote about volume 1.) The first two stories weren't anything special, but since they were apparently publishable quality, they did make me think optimistic thoughts about generating simple beginning-middle-end ideas for marketable het paranormal romance or erotica short stories: a possible goal in the not-so-distant future. (Though it's mysterious why I think I can write a short story when I can't even finish a "one-shot" fic WIP... maybe because I wouldn't have such personal investment in the short story. TBD.)