Off the Cliff

The garbage pickup came early, or early for a recycle day, so my taxi didn't have to wait while the mastodons lumbered up the street; and my taxi came exactly when he was supposed to,  for a change, so the worst of my usual fears went unrealized. Was of two minds yesterday evening about transitting to the dentist but took the better part of valor, and was justified by the amber-coloured air in the morning. Actually today turned out to have better air quality than the last few days, and I had no trouble walking over to the University leg of the subway after my appointment. Still nearly went through the wrong gates at Queen's Park and  had to be redirected by one of the helpful attendants the TTC has placed in the stations to aid wandering American tourists, of whom there are many in and around Caribana weekend. 'Miss, Miss, I think you'd be better taking the elevator over there': since I'd forgotten that the elevators are indeed over there to the left and not past the main gates to the right.

But occurred to me as I was looking out over the TO landscape from the 15th floor dentist's office that the haze-filled sky was not unfamiliar from my childhood. Toronto in the 50s and 60s was equally polluted. Fewer cars, of course, but higher emissions. 'And everyone smoked!' my dentist added, and boy, did they.

Finished that Charles Finch mystery, and a couple of Inspector Lamb mysteries (Miss Silver without Miss Silver) and The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Also some JS&MN fics from AO3,  well enough in their way but not scratching my itch. A former yaoista must not complain that people write yaoi about unlikely charas because no one is unlikely in yaoi-land, but Norrell is truly not my first candidate for sexy fun times.

I should finish Zhang Dai and start on The Gates, but all I want to read in these housebound sofa-sitting fan-blown days is Persuasion. Even though Anne Elliott is really, oddly, getting up my nose. I suppose if you're constantly being ignored and taken advantage of by your relations, you can one-up those relations by reflecting how superior you are to them in taste and refinement and the elegance of your mind: and give them improving advice designed to make them, basically, less themselves. Oh, and warn them about scheming women worming their way into your family's good graces. Really, Anne, why do you care if your father marries a scheming woman? The two are perfectly suited to each other for a start, and it's actually none of your business to continue, and like the Carlyles, marrying each other will only ensure that two people are miserable rather than four. Or is Anne worrying that her own inheritance will be reduced by the addition of a stepmother? An Austen heroine with a mercenary motive? Perish the thort!

Well, maybe that's going a bit far. But really, Anne is sounding an awful lot like Mary Bennet to me. Is also of course one of Austen's Hideous Examples of what the cribbed cabined and confined existence of the Regency lady does to that lady's soul. Seriously, if all Austen's heroines are going to read completely different to me now than they did when I was 25, I may end up rereading Mansfield Park, which I swore never to do. Who knows? I might find that censorious twit Fanny an utter delight now.

Stayed up to 2 last night reading an old semi-formatted Eroica fic from 1995. Left a bad taste in the mouth for Reasons, most of which had to do with the fact that I wasn't writing it for my own pleasure but to try to appeal to the Eroica slash fandom. Whoever was talking over on tumblr about the early days of fandom and the joy of being all thieves together in this pocket universe that only fans knew about is, well, maybe that's the fandom she knew. I just kept running into gatekeepers with a rigid definition of what's permissible-- like that other famous essay that likened slash fandom to a potluck where everyone wound up bringing hummous because that's what was expected when you brought stuff to a potluck.

It was such a relief when there started to be yaoi fandoms over here because there were no rules in yaoi.

This is doubly odd because my comfort reading for the past six weeks has been another unfinished Eroica story that I started in 1996, worked at with increasing difficulty through '97 and '98, and gave up because I wanted it to be yaoi-- and as far as it went, it certainly was-- but Eroica fans wanted it to be slash, which it wasn't and couldn't be. I thought it a hot mess when I finally dropped it but now it reads better than any other of my Dorians including the ones I sweated blood to give a plot to.

Of course, now I skip the sex scenes because the hormoneless don't see the point of them, which leads to the odd experience of reading a yaoi fic, which is all about the sex, but skipping the sex when it happens. Such are the paradoxes of age.

 Somewhere on ao3 is fanfic for Kipling's poem Tomlinson, in the same metre and rhyming scheme, which involves Satan/ St. Peter slash.

Sorry, didn't save the link. Found it while googling the poem in hopes of learning what the significance of Berkeley Square was. It seems that maybe Kipling was having a go at the arties of his time, but given how upscale the place has always been (Clive of India cut his throat there; Walpole and William Pitt the Younger and William Waldorf Astor lived there) it hardly sounds like a hotbed of conformist middle-class thinking.

Otherwise- I vaguely recall that when I read LotR in '02 my Ballantine copy of the middle volume gave up the ghost and I had to buy a new one. But I was sure I had vol. 3 intact. Only it's vanished as well, and of the original set only vol. 1 remains. I mean yes I have a duplicate RotK, but the typeface is tiny, and anyway I want my colourful covers back.

And of course, now that libraries have reopened for curbside pickup, two of my holds have come in. Am afraid to put RotK on hold while I read them in case I lose the momentum, but maybe I have to. Which of course is why I started a Kinsey Millhone mystery tonight.

Found in the course of my wanderings, a Sam and Sibyl Vimes story with a difference.

incandescens's Librarians strike me as an oddly incurious bunch, at least where things that fascinate me are concerned. Maybe it's because the junior librarians, at least, are kept with their noses to the grindstone and their attention focussed on what it'd be focussed on anyway-- books.

But what if- purely as speculation, naturally- someone a bit more inquisitive should visit the Library?
( No really, this is pure speculation )

So there exists a Lost Library fic exchange, where to quote skygiants, "you write a bit of a book or play or movie that's implied or stated to exist in another book or movie."

Selden has taken the JS&MN (footnote) ball and run with it.

And Rivers of London, as run through google and semi-deciphered by Lesley.

Because I can't parse words on a screen or view a story at all holistically, unless in fact I wrote it myself. (But that's down to the many re-readings a fic goes through in the writing and editing process.) That poetry discussion amongst Vale and Singh and Kai and Irene stuns me by turning up in the first Library book in the course of a cab ride, while I recall it happening in someone's apartment in an early draft of book 3.

And it's not like this is my first reading of Book one, either.

No idea why I pulled up one of my ancient Papuwa fics this afternoon, written nearly 20 years ago in Japan and never reformatted out of word perfect. I know I was lonely and sniffly a lot in Tokyo, but I'd forgotten how that got written large into my characters' chronic longing for whichever other character it was that didn't love them back.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

(The psychic gestalt of Me-in-Tokyo is as much a place as the physical city, and a very odd place indeed when viewed from here. Thrilling and amazing at times, but it weirds me out when I visit it again by chance.)

When you write nothing for four years (well, three and a half if you count squibs) you forget how to write. So I'm sorry for the feebleness of this; it had a much better ending when I was telling it to myself at the laundromat, but I forgot that by the time I got home.

However, 31_days is using that list of 'foreign words that don't have English counterparts but should' and today's prompt is mamihlapinatapei-- supposedly Tierra del Fuegan for 'the look shared by two who desire to start something yet are reluctant to.' Hence the following, which happens after book two.
( Read more... )

When there is major Wrong Stuff in life, as there is now, even though I have no connection at all to the SFWA, minor frets tend to fade in importance. That they aren't doing so is, oh well, something to do with head colds and June. Thus, Something Nice to offset the latter:

Ayalesca will be updating her Madness of Angels/ Sherlock fusion fic weekly from now on. Didn't know how a fusion differed from a crossover, discovered precisely at the end of ch 1, think this is perfect. Bonus appearance by the Rivers of London. What more could one ask?

Aside from time to reread the entire series again, I mean.

There's a family of Danish nobles somewhere in one of Isak Dinesen's short stories who are, she says, champion dreamers. 'Their days were a disappointment but their nights were glorious.' Well, and so are mine on occasion. As last night, when I dreamed an A/U fanfic of my own A/U fanfic, The Garden Of Prosperpine. Alas, all that remains is the memory of Sergei roughing out an advertisement for the school he was going to claim to be running, for some devious Servis-like reason.

But then! But then! My former co-worker S turned it into an all-colour comic book! Alas again, only a page and a half, and then he had to go do other things. And the dream ended, as all my dreams do, with putting children down for their naps.

(I dreamed a CLAMP manga last night, or anime, I suppose, because there was action. But *CLAMP*, all big eyes and feathers. I am displeased with my subconscious.)
( News from the tech wars )

qwerty has been playing the icon game, and wrote me a chilling Saiyuuki vignette based on, no shit, LOLcats and sweetpeas-- yeah, those ones at the top.

She also gave me three of my own to play with, which, well, I played with.
( Dragons on the bridge )

Been picking at this shortie (2000 words) on and off for half a year now, hoping some great revelation would appear in the final paragraph. It didn't. Such sadness.
( In which I make Adashino share my obsessions )

Found my paper 2000 diary while rummaging around for something else. Discovered a Saiyuki story I'd forgotten I wrote, probably the second one started and the first finished, that I'd somehow failed to note in the index.htm file for my story page back, oh, six years ago when I coded the thing. This feels very odd.

I will note that the fall of 2000 was a very nice time indeed, as drugged episodes are wont to be.

My personal mythology says 2003 was the best year of the decade, maybe even better than the Saiyuki heydays (August 2000- May or thereabouts '01); and that nothing afterwards even came near. But that's not true. I have extremely fond memories of 2008, even with all the snow-- the Woxin natter, the Pratchett reads, the Chinese films I was watching around this time in the bright March sun. But that was a calmer kind of happiness, more adult by comparison to either '03 or '00. And high time too, I suppose. 'You're not a giddy fifty year old any more.' Alas. Giddy fifty-year-old-dom was such fun.

(I have a sinus infection, again; hence the melancholy.)

Spend half the afternoon squeezing out 239 reluctant words on the long-since petrified Kaiei story. Rolling stones uphill. Start bindertwine headache as a result. Then dash off 640 words of Hakkai POV for 31_days.

Life is not fair.

Story I wrote for nekonexus' Christmas stocking:

Here is no water but only rock

--Goujun, Tenpou and the squad

And a Goujun drabble:
( Under the cut )

One must write, to write. Hence this meme, ganked from all over.

1. Write down the names of 10 characters.
2. Write a fic of fifteen words or less for every prompt, using the characters determined by the numbers. Do NOT read the prompts before you do step 1.

1. Hakkai (Saiyuki)
2. Seimei (from the Onmyouji films)
3. Goujun (Saiyuki Gaiden)
4. Hiromasa (from the Onmyouji manga)
5. Keiki (12 Kingdoms)
6. Iason (Ai no Kusabi)
7. Ryuugyoku/ Dragon Gem (Youmi Henjou Yawa)
8. Kanzeon (Gaiden)
9. Sanzou (Saiyuki)
10. Wen Zhong (Woxin Changdan)
( May have fudged that 15 words thing )

Via toft_froggy, and I quote:

"Lord Peter Wimsey/Sherlock Holmes crossover kidfic snippet by... Dorothy L Sayers. YES I KNOW. YES."

Context, as they say, has lots more where that came from.
( Cut for unrelated personal musing )

Have been having writer's block. Silly 17" screen, silly pixellated fonts. (Though of course the fonts on this old monitor are equally pixellated and bothered me immensely five years ago. Now of course I'm used to them.) So I write on my old machine and at least *something* comes once I have a squarish screen to work with. A double-double draggle, with a missing scene from Pipang.
( There is a guest at the Southern Ocean )

Title: A modest revolution
Day/Theme: April 15: 'how long have I been walking down this road?'
Series: Woxinchangdan
Character/Pairing: Gou Jian, Fu Chai

Possibly approaching a fork in the trousers of time, or possibly this is the end. ( Long. Probably should link-not-cut, but am cutting anyway. )

Ahh, this thing goes slowly. This was supposed to be merely the first part of the next chapter. Maybe tomorrow.

Title: Catch the Wind
Day/Theme: April 14. 'you were born to be betrayed'
Series: Woxinchangdan
Character/Pairing: Gou Jian, Ya Yu
( Read more... )

Title: Lips that would kiss
Day/Theme: March 22. 'lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone'
Series: Woxinchangdan
Character/Pairing: Fu Chai, Gou Jian

( In which Fu Chai grows marginally in Clue )

Was going to stop using prompts for this series, but today's was too apropos of the thing I've been writing all week.

Prompt: Feb 20 The gravitational constant
Characters: Fu Chai and his several ministers
( What keeps the world steady )

Title: Jesting Pilate
Day/Theme: Tues Feb.10 - I know it well, the nakedness of truth
Series: Woxin Changdan AU cont'd
Character/Pairing: Fu Chai, Fan Li

'What is truth, asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer'