something queer going on

Dear creator,

Thank you for writing for me! I'm about to tell you a bit about things I generally like and generally don't like in stories. But before I get to that: please write a story that you think is interesting and worth telling, even if it doesn't match what I say here, or the prompts I offered in my sign-up. My prompts aren't recipes, they're suggestions to help get your ideas flowing.

And so ( here are some things I like or don't much care for )

The Cephaloparty Exchange 2023 is live, with 38 fics in 26 fandoms. All things tentacular and terrific* are within.

The exchange was tentacle-centric but not tentacle-porn-centric, so not all the stories have explicit sexual content. But, you know, read the ratings, tags, etc.

Special mention to The Mascot of Cephaloparty Exchange, an adorable and completely worksafe art piece.


*In the modern sense and sometimes the historical one too.

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!

This is a cool thing: The Invisible Ficathon: Fan Fiction From Stories That Never Were. Eligible fandoms include books, TV shows, movies, etc. that canonically exist within a source text but don't exist in real life.

I don't know if I'll actually write for this, but I definitely want to nominate some things in the hopes that other people will write them. Some possibilities:

The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, which is from the Library of Dreams in The Sandman. Or maybe Raymond Chandler's Love Can Be Murder, from the same source. Or P. G. Wodehouse's Psmith and Jeeves.

The Aja'ib, a Thousand and One Nights-ish book of adventure stories from Paul Magrs's Eighth Doctor novels. The Aja'ib may be a mythic retelling of the Doctor's life, but there are things in it that the Doctor insists never happened; plus when Fitz reads it in The Blue Angel the stories seem to change every time.

Inspector Spacetime from Community, maybe, although apparently it's become practically a real fandom at this point.

The Library, the fictional TV show from Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners." Except there are actually two of them--the story is itself supposed to be a TV show, and then the people in the story which is a TV show are fans of a TV show called The Library. I'm interested in the most nested one, the one with Fox who is never played by the same actor twice, and which has an entire episode set inside a drawer of the card catalog of the eponymous library. Complicated to nominate, but so so cool.

Probably one of the fictional squid-related books in Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen. There's a whole bibliography of them!

Just a heads-up for anyone who is interested in kink_bingo: the mods have announced that after this round they'll be taking a break in 2014. KB will be on hiatus, with no 2014 round, but the mods plan to resume in 2015.

So, if you've been thinking of participating in Kink Bingo, this is your last chance for a while. Everyone can play this year, even if you previously defaulted and were made ineligible for the next round. Also, this year requesting a card does not commit you to anything--there is no requirement to post a fanwork. All fandoms, all characters, all genders and sexualities and types of pairings (or no pairing at all), and all levels of sexual content are welcome. You can post fanfic, fanart, meta, recs list, icons, picspams, fanmixes, and probably other things I'm forgetting in order to fill a square on your bingo card.

I encourage you to sign up for a card if you're at all interested. Almost all of the kinks are so flexible that you don't have to be very into kink in the traditional sense to write them; I managed a bingo last year with five fics, only one of which was kinky in the conventional sense (and even that one didn't include anything more extreme than gentle spanking). Plus, you can request a card that includes only kinks that can be readily written about a solo character, or a card of only kinks that don't necessarily involve orgasms or sexual penetration, or a solo no-orgasm no-penetration combined card. (Kinks on these cards can also be written with two or more characters, with orgasms, with penetration, but there's nothing in the nature of the kinks that will require that.) The whole kink list for this round is here if you want to check out what you might be getting into. I also recommend looking at the Kink Wiki to see the considerable degree of flexibility that's allowed/encouraged in interpreting the kinks.

Last year I signed up with some trepidation, having defaulted two years earlier, but I ended up enjoying it a lot.

1) There is, or was, an X-Men cologne.

I am both intrigued and horrified to see my two newest interests collide.

2) In other perfume news, today I spent a happy ten minutes in the "aromatherapy" aisle of the hippie grocery store sniffing testers of a bunch of essential oils. Now I know a lot more about a lot of basic notes, from the difference between lemongrass and lemon to unusual things like frankincense and hyssop. I discovered the geranium smells totally different from how I thought (it's much earthier and deeper, barely recognizable as floral) and that patchouli really does make me feel nauseated.

3) Unrelated, although I could make a metaphor about drowning out the stink of homophobia, gileonnen has responded to Orson Scott Card's "gay men are hellbound pedophiles" rewrite of Hamlet by hosting The Big Gay Hamlet ficathon (actually a prompt-and-fill challenge), for Hamlet fic with queer themes. In the spirit of not doing what Card did, stories about pedophilia, rape, and abusive relationships are off-limits; there's not a requirement that stories be "positive," in the sense of not talking about homophobia or other problems, just that queer characters and queer sexualities (including asexuality) not be demonized. It's a cool thing and I hope lots of folks participate.

ETA: 4) Returning to frivolities, I always thought I was immune to shoe-lust. And then I saw these glorious steampunk-y boots. I'm not buying them, because even discounted they are $100, but I want them more than I can begin to tell you.

Hoist the anchor, set the sails, and plot your course for...



Any seafaring or related historical fandom: Hornblower, Master and Commander, Temeraire, Sharpe, Pirates of the Caribbean, Jane Austen, Lord John Grey, Georgette Heyer, historical RPS...

Any genre or kink: slash, het, gen, threesomes, moresomes, pwp, kink, angst, schmoop, crackfic, AU...

Join us at age_of_sail!

1) If you've ever thought of giving Blake's 7 a try, now is a good time, because a rewatch-and-discussion has just begun at b7rewatch. Discussion for each episode will be split into two posts: one general and one designed to accommodate new viewers, in which spoilers past the episode under discussion are not allowed. The general post for episode 1x01, "The Way Back," is here, and the spoiler-free post is here.

Blake's 7 is a show that deserves a larger following. Yes, the sets are wobbly; yes, the costumes and hairstyles are dated. But the worldbuilding, characterization, and dialogue are first-rate, especially in S1 and S2. The show explores genuinely difficult political and ethical questions without preaching, platitudes, or any guarantee that the good guys will win. Or even that the good guys are good. At its best, it blows every other science fiction show out of the water.

The DVDs are available at amazon.co.uk. Feel free to PM me if you have questions about, you know, stuff.

2) The wonderful DW community queerlygen has begun its multi-fandom, prompts-claim ficathon of gen stories about queer characters. The definitions of both "queer" and "gen" are well thought-out and flexible, and the characters you write about don't have to be shown as queer in canon. The prompts post is here.

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