Hello! Thank you for signing up to write one of my requests, I hope you have a wonderful time in the exchange and find something in my letter that inspires you. You don't have to incorporate everything or even most of what I talk about here, please find something that inspires you and write something you have a fun time making! I accept treats, and my fic and bookmarks are here if you want to get a sense of things I enjoy.

( Read more... )

Books

( Take A Hint, Dani Brown )

( Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow )

( The Fifth Head of Cereberus )

( Winter's Orbit )

( The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi )

( John Le Carre books )

( A Power Unbound )

( The Day of the Triffids )

Hello yuletide writer! Thanks for signing up to write one of my requests. I hope you have a wonderful yuletide and write something you enjoy - you don't have to incorporate everything or even most of what I talk about here, please find something that inspires you and write something you have a fun time making. My fic and bookmarks are here if you want to get a sense of things I enjoy. I also accept treats!

( cut for length )

I always love spelunking in the yuletide collection, and try and read as broadly and widely as I can, and did a lot of reccing at quaiching and on mastodon. But I'm compiling them here, by fandom. There were some real gems in the collection this year, so hopefully if you missed them, this gives you some fun things to open in tabs. My categories are extremely scientific.

( Wow!! This blew me away! )

( Fun and enjoyable sweet canon moments or additions )

( Sexy!! )

( I don't know what category to put these in but you should still read them )

Hi! Thanks so much for signing up for yuletide and offering one of of my requests. I hope you have a good time writing, and can find something in my letter that you will enjoy. Don’t feel you have to do everything, or even most of what I talk about here! Find an element that speaks to you. Please know that whatever you choose to write will be an amazing gift and I’ll be really pleased with it. Write something that you enjoy writing, and I’ll love it - my favorite fics are ones that the writers clearly had an amazing time writing, so please do what makes you happy.

( cut for length )

Been reading a weird grab bag of stuff, but some of it's been good!

Ship's Gossip (5748 words) by Spatz
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Rating: Mature
Relationships: William Laurence/Tenzing Tharkay
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Privateering, Post-Tongues of Serpents, Internalized Homophobia, Angst with a Happy Ending
Summary:

Laurence is beginning to enjoy life as a privateer - though he cannot figure out why Tharkay should still be sailing out with them - when Temeraire decides to ask him about sodomy.

This is a really sweet Temeraire story about the persistent theme - Laurence having some realisations. Lovely period feeling, great Temeraire.

Left Side Advantage (61150 words) by susiecarter
Fandom: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe, Man of Steel (2013)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Additional Tags: Superbat Reverse Bang, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Identity Porn, Bad Flirting, Bad Decisions, Antagonism, Self-Sacrifice
Summary:

Post-MoS AU: A year after Black Zero, the Metropolis city government decides to hold a commemorative gala, with Superman as a guest of honor. And after a year of trying to gather intelligence on Superman without all that much success to speak of, Bruce Wayne is definitely going to attend. Except it turns out he may not be the only one with plans for Superman, and there might be a few other pieces of the puzzle that he's been missing.

Very good plotty Superman/Batman that I enjoyed a great deal but please observe that they do not fuck at the end because I forgot and was disappointed! but if that doesn't matter to you, it's good

Twenty Questions (5023 words) by dexwebster
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: DC Cinematic Universe, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Additional Tags: Choking, Breathplay
Summary:

Clark tries to figure out why Bruce is asking him all of these questions.

This is a Superman/Batman where they do, in fact, fuck, and I liked it a lot. Dives into what it's like dating someone with as twisty a mind as Batman, which I liked

I was originally going to do another "talk to the voice recorder in my phone until I feel like stopping" commentary thing for the ghost and the garden, but then I realised I had way too many thoughts for audio (no one wants to listen to TWO HOURS of me rambling my way through the witcher canon) and also I wanted to include the outtakes that I eventually cut from the final text, but stil enjoyed writing and want to see the light of day.
( Pavetta )
( Witcher universe )
( witcher fairy stories )
( Geralt and Emhyr )

( Outtakes )

Very slowly losing my mind, but in a way that is very boring to talk about, even more boring to listen to, and boring to experience. Everything sucks! Let's take that as read.

In a spate of missing home and social interactions and being drunk at a party, I listened to ceilidh music for nearly two weeks without stopping. Ceilidh music doesn't have singing, but if you want to listen to some popular traditional Scottish music, I've been listening to Skipinnish a lot, especially like About You Now and Walking On The Waves.

I'm watching Lupin on netflix - I watch tv slowly because I only like watching it alone, but I'm really enjoying it. Good episodic structure but with an overarching story, Assane is a great character and Oscar Sy is really fun to watch. Love heist stuff, love a good show about Doing Crime For Good Reasons. There is NO fic but there's already some good pairing potential, and I'd also just read thousands of words about Assane's journey and his relationship with his kid and him and Benjamin's friendship. It's going on the "when your wips are done" list.

I'm almost finished by old guard exchange fic for the server exchange. It's fun! I like it. It'll be fun to share it with people. In fact, I'll probably finish it today, if I do my word count.

Reading has not been going great, on account of the aforementioned losing my mind, but I did finish one back issue of Uncanny I've had on my kindle for ages. Unfortunately, the many other back issues of Uncanny remain.

I'm in a kind of fic rutt right now, mostly just rereading old things, which is kind of frustrating since they're good, but they're not very satisyfing because I've read them before. If you have a rec for a fic you've read recently that you really liked, especially anything over 7k, I'd really appreciate it!

We're all dealing with lockdown/winter in our own way:

I dealt with it by writing 37k in under four weeks, and re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the one thousandth time. It's a good book to read at winter time - all the yearning and nearly freezing to death in the snow. I hadn't reread it in a couple years, but a year or so ago I went to The Second Shelf, which is a rare bookstore for books by women, and spent the most I've ever spent on a single book to buy a rare-ish (not very rare! I'm not rich. Just a little rare) copy of it, so I finally have a paper copy and I very carefully read my expensive copy and finished a couple days ago. I've also been listening to Meg Myers' cover of Running Up That Hill constantly.

Everyone who follows me on twitter knows I've basically only been talking about LHoD and the fic I've been writing for several days. The fic is done and getting read by other people to confirm it's not completely unhinged and will get posted soon! I'm currently experiencing a lot of existential dread about picking a title for it. It's post-canon Witcher 3 (game, not show) Geralt/Emhyr fic with ghost stories and a mystery and lots of talking about grief and past lives etc. I've really enjoyed writing it and hope people like it too!

Left Hand of Darkness is still amazing - it still pulls me in absolutely and completely. Leguin really could imagine such complete and alien worlds, and Genly is so lovely as a character. You feel so attached and connected to him, his loneliness, his struggle to understand Gethen, his stuggle to make himself understood. It's such a familiar feeling, but also so located in the alien world he's in. You feel so close and attached to him, especially as he's so vulnerable.

Also SO MUCH weird stuff happens in the book that everyone FORGETS ABOUT because of the space gender distraction. Eyeball licking!! Telepathy!! Incest! Mystical space religion! Literally actually seeing the future! Rereading it is always an exercise in "well I'd completely forgotten that happened".

The ice journey that is the last third or so of the book is so, I don't know, powerful and all-encompassing, and both practical and mystical all at once. All of the book is good but that's the really the killer part. Leguin goes for the jugular there. Obviously I've never lived somewhere that cold, but it made me miss home, the way the sky will be totally bright and blue, completely empty and cloudless, and the air viciously bitingly cold. It doesn't get properly cold here, or ever properly empty of people, and there is this part of me that misses it so desperately.

This time I was really struck by the back and forth between Estraven and Genly's POVs. The bit when Genly talks about trying not to cry and later Estraven notices how Genly always looks away when he cries, and it must be shameful in his culture. God, bullseye. Estraven is such a wonderful character, so understandable and yet with this complete backstory to their life, fully realised. They're so bitten by grief, so defined by being an exile, from their home, from their country, from their dead lover, and maybe that's why they're so read and willing to accept the Ekumen and other worlds. They've been an exile so much, what is it to be an alien as well?

I had kind of forgotten how incomprehensible the book is about women. There's a scene where Estraven asks Genly to describe women and Genly actually cannot come up with anything sensible. Urusla Leguin, 0 faith in men's ability to relate to women, even in her utopian space federation future. Obviously, thinking about how the thinking behind the book has changed over time is really interesting too. Comparing it to its "successors", like Ammonite by Nicola Griffith, or Ancillary Justice, which take really different approaches to science-fictional gender, and I like seeing fic take different approches too.

I've skimmed big chunks of the Left Hand of Darkness tag and enjoyed these:
( left hand of darkness recs )

This is an open call to please tell me your thoughts and opinions about Left Hand of Darkness (and any other related ~science fiction gender books!) because I could happily talk about it forever and I unfortunately live with two people absolutely fundamentally disinterested in science fiction, which is killing me.

A meme I saw going around: the first line of every fic I posted in 2020

to watch the moon eat the sun - The Witcher (TV), Yennefer/Geralt/Jaskier
Geralt had gotten too used to running into Yennefer on the road to be suspicious when they were both guests at the Coach and Horses on the border of Temeria.

honey on a spoon - Hockey RPF, Andre/Tom
It was early morning when Andre woke up and saw the tag on insta.

wholeness cascades into many shapes - Hockey RPF, Tyson/Freddie/Auston
Tyson came over to his just before everything went down.

stand up in my holy terrain - The Old Guard, gen
Nile woke with a start, shaken gently by a hand on her shoulder.

beneath the hip and plow - The Old Guard, Joe/Nicky
"I got you something," Yusuf said, when he came home from the market that evening.

convergent evolution - Hockey RPF, Nolan/TK
Fucking around with Patty was, like, the best thing ever.

unique in beauty - The Old Guard, Joe/Nicky
When they lay in bed together that night, Joe traced his fingers over the growing stubble on Nicky's jaw.

mud in the heart - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, gen
The Bajoran trade fair on the station was a nuisance in a lot of ways, but it had its benefits.

suddenly grown green - Tortall, Daine/Numair
Daine woke up early, to the sound of Numair snoring and the familiar, annoying feeling of her mouth full of his hair.