six sentence sunday

The WIP continues to be in progress; I finished the draft a while ago and I'm slowly revising.

Our Flag Means Death, Buttons POV, set just after S1, so potentially spoilery.

( Under the cut )

other updates

1) I managed to get vaxed yesterday (bivalent COVID booster and flu) after last week's fiasco. The guy who took my information was kind of rude, and I was quietly seething about it while I waited. But then this customer (a man, 60-something, white) starts yelling and swearing at the pharmacist for not being able to fill a prescription for his wife, and I tried to have a little more sympathy for what it must be like working in a retail pharmacy these days.

This being the United States, as Angry Man was stomping out, I heard one of the other customers mutter "I hope he doesn't have a gun." I guess he didn't, as nothing further happened. Those few minutes of helpless fear were great, though!

I was expecting to feel awful today while my immune system threw a party, but I'm surprisingly okay. Tired, both arms sore (the pharmacist insisted on each vax in a different arm, "so that if you have a reaction we know which one it was"), but no noticeable fever or anything, unlike after my last booster.

ETA: I was the only person in the place masking properly. Other people were coming in unmasked for their COVID boosters. The pharmacist and one of the techs had their masks on their chins unless they were directly talking with a customer, and Rude Tech had no mask at all. *sigh*


2) I continue to be only interested in Our Flag Means Death. But also afraid to read most fanfic for it, especially after a chaptered fic I was following with some eagerness failed to stick the landing. I'm avoiding most fannish interaction, in fact, except here, because there has been Discourse. Oh, has there been Discourse. I hear about it third-hand on Twitter, and that's plenty.

But having said that . . .


2a) I'm probably going to participate in Our Flag Means Gifts, a Yuletide-ish fic exchange just for OFMD. I'm a bit nervous about the fact that it's being run out of Tumblr (that is, the info posts are there, but the actual exchange is on AO3), but, well, it seems worth a shot. I want to trying writing to a prompt, now that I'm writing again, and since I'm monofannish at the moment, Yuletide is right out. (Anyway, OFMD probably ceased to be Yuletide-eligible before S1 even ended.) More info about Our Flag Means Gifts here, in case you're interested.


2b) Since I'm finding it easier to try OFMD-adjacent things than actual OFMD fanfic, I read Rose Lerner's m/m romance Sailor's Delight, about a Jewish naval agent and the British officer he hopelessly--he thinks--loves. I wanted to love this book, but I didn't. I never thought I'd say of a romance novel that there wasn't enough romance in it, but that was the case here. The main characters had weirdly little interaction and no chemistry, and the personality of Augustus Brine (for that is the woefully Dickensian name inflicted on the love interest) in particular was sketched-in and undeveloped. The whole book felt like it didn't want to be a romance, it wanted to be the story of an extended Jewish family in Regency England--which would be awesome, I'd read that!--but, because the romance was still technically central and the book was the standard very short length of a self-pub romance, it didn't succeed in doing that either. Alas.


2c) I continue my re-read of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin novels, which continue to be a joy. I'm just finishing The Far Side of the World, part of the delightful middle stretch of books where O'Brian had settled into his story, no longer felt the need to give us every single detail of real naval actions in each book, and just carried along improvising like Jack and Stephen playing music together.

It's odd . . . the stereotype is that people who like genre fiction like tightly plotted stories, full of action, where every scene moves the adventure along. I adore genre fiction, but often what I want from it is plotless or near-plotless wanders, full of interesting incidents and lovely character exploration that do not Serve The Plot. Refuse to serve the plot, writers! Overthrow the plot! No plots, no masters!