Streets are filled with --

'Tis that time of the year again! Hello to anyone who's wandering over from AO3 - feel free to drop in and say hi if you want :)

No The Culture this year from me ): But an oddball collection of other things nearly out of my wheelhouse, but not quite! This year'll have a bit of a DVD-extra commentary: I'm trying to get back into the swing of journalling, as I do every Yuletide.

Writing-wise, I badly wanted to get done in October, and ended up writing down to the wire in December. Pro-tip: if you have family over for the whole of one month, then nothing but travel and work explosions for the next two, and no vacation days left leading up to Christmas and the New Year... You're going to have an interesting time of it. I was saved by going on a writing meetup with another local Yuletider, which forced me to stop being needlessly distracted.

Assignment: Machineries of Empire - Meditative Aids
For meguri_aite. 11K casefic of Mikodez running around the Academy.

I'm usually astonishingly bad at writing length for my main assignment, even when I want to, but this went from "I'll bang out about 5K" to "oh... crap" pretty rapidly. I wanted to stay true to canon without trying to imitate it, all things considered, so I threw pastiche out the window and went for Mikodez barrelling his way to being the youngest Shuos Hexarche.

I'm finding, more and more, than matching to single character Yuletide prompts where I go on to write backstory can be terrifying: I'm a decent writer, but these things sometimes have to carry their own weight without much interaction with any other canonical characters and that's a challenge. I'm constantly wondering if it's too navel-gazey, or too tell-not-show, and there's this propensity to rely on the strength of style or prose over actual content. Throw in the fact that my brain melted when trying to render my usual stylistic... stuff and this one was a bit of a gamble. Solid core of canonical support aside, Mikodez doesn't actually talk to anyone else from the canon for most of 9,000 words. ?!?!? Here's where a second pair of eyes is always helpful, and I'm grateful to Sath for making sure I wasn't just tilting at windmills the whole time.

Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu - Smoke
For pi. 1K, Kikuhiko and magical realism.

Rhea has done so many wonderful podfics for me over the years that when I saw them request Rakugo I made a little fist-pump of despair while trapped in one airport or another and avowed to try my best to get something out there. This fandom is a giant snakepit for me because I'm always tempted to go back to Japanese language source materials that I really, really don't need to go to and that I really, really shouldn't use as a crutch. I sat there about 48 hours to the deadline clutching at this tiny volume of rakugo stories, staring at its iteration of shinigami, and had to force myself to shut it and just write. Ironically, I think that was for the better: after a real struggle of a Yuletide, I hit my style stride somewhere in here. (Or at least I hope so.)

Vorkosigan Saga - Defensive Tactics
For yhlee. 3K, Ges/Aral pre-canon.

/waves to yhlee *g* Ges/Aral! A great place to wander in Vorkosigan fandom, because it's where angels fear to tread. But I was determined to treat back, dang it, so HERE YOU GO FOR THE SECOND YEAR RUNNING. I plead jetlag for throwing Ges' canon birth order out of the window, but I was quite beyond trawling the Vorkosigan BB - the important part was that Aral, even in a state of Ultimate Shitasticness, probably wasn't attracted to Ges just because he was a good roll in the hay. I aimed for yhlee's prompt of "high school prom night" and ended up with Aral and Ges dance circles around each other... for years. That's almost the same thing, right?

As a belated rec, I highly recommend philomytha's political-intrigue laced drunken Vor beach party of a Ges/Aral fic, A Marvellous Party. Philomytha is a much, much defter hand at Vor politics than I.

Tang Dynasty RPF - go out the door
For quillori. Li He... in space.

One of the many interesting things to come out of coding the tagset app and - at some points - manually massaging six-thousand-and-mumble prompts into JSON submission is that I incidentally laid eyes on fandoms that I never would have thought of searching for. I am far from familiar with Chinese (nevermind Tang) poetry, compared to my usual Japanese schtick; I have about a handful of poets and some broad historiographical understanding of Chinese literary history, partially from a forced education 10 years ago and partially from college. But Quillori's letter had an excellent set of English-language sources for Li He, and my god. I read one and couldn't turn back. Very few poets come across so strongly in translation, but I read the King of Qin Drinks Wine and fell instantly in love. While on vacation. Trapped on top of a mountain range. In another country.

But, seriously, look at this:

The king of Qin tours the cosmos on tigerback,
his sword's glimmer illuminating the clear, blue heavens.
As Xihe whips the sun, glass is chiming;
ashes of the old world, burnt asunder, flit about; peace reigns eternal.
Drinking wine from a dragon-flask, he invites the god of wine to join him,
his gold-set pipa twanging dyang-dyang in the night.
The pitter-patter of the rain on Dongting Lake sounds like the blowing of a flute,
deep in his wine, the King shouts at the moon, causing it to change direction.
Silver clouds piled high, dawn comes to the bejeweled palace;
the doorman announces the coming of night.
In the flower palace, with its jade phoenixes, a woman's charming voice;
a robe made of merfolk's thread and decorated with a crimson pattern, tinged with a faint scent,
is worn by a yellow-robed serving girl who dances a dance of wishing for the king's reign to last a thousand years.
The candles burn light smoke;
the handmaiden's eyes well up with tears of purest water.

I don't know how I went from "who the hell is Li He" to "WHY ARE THERE NO AUDIO RECORDINGS OF THIS; THE SPOKEN RHYME IN THESE POEMS IS SO SUBLIME" to "oh shit" in a matter of hours, but... somehow it ended up with Li He in space talking to the lady on the moon. Okay, brain. Sure.

This makes it the second year in a row I've gone and done "what?" research into fandoms written in non-modern East Asian languages which I am certainly not fluent in, then taken said research and thrown it into space. I regret nothing. (I was beyond chuffed to see my recip from last year, for whom I wrote equally-unlikely Tale of Heike space opera, show up during the anon period! Ahhh!)

On the non-writing end, I spent a little coding time and a few too many hours of maintenance spinning up the tagset/letters/prompts app, or whatever you want to call it.

It started out as a little exercise in wanting to get the comma-separated hell that is the AO3 tagset into something that didn't sear my eyes out, and expanded out into a little bit of everything. I'm glad that people found it useful, and am super fortunate that many generous souls donated a dollar here and there to help with hosting costs when we collectively hammered the thing to death in October/November.

Another day of snowflake_challenge. As part of it, I'm going to do my damnedest to comment on everyone's entries who are on my reading list. If you've dropped in recently and want to expand your circle, drop me a subscribe and I'll do the same.

Under cut: Le Guin's Left Hand.

( Day 2: In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. )

On a separate note, I'm going to ping off of yhlee's Pay It Forward meme:

Let's start 2017 off in a positive way with a Pay It Forward meme. The first 6 people to comment (and more if I can manage it) will receive a surprise from me at some point in 2017 - anything from a book, a ticket, something home-grown or made, a postcard, absolutely any surprise! It will happen when the mood comes over me and I find something that I believe would suit you and make you happy.

(If you don't like surprises and would rather have something off a wishlist and/or some warning, let me know in your comment. The goal is to make you happy.)

If you can, post this in your own journal and pay it forward. Let's do more kind and loving things for each other in 2017, without any reason other than to make each other smile and show that we think of each other.

I would be more than happy to buy The Left Hand of Darkness (or one of Le Guin's short story collections featuring the Hainish Cycle; it's not that I don't like Earthsea - I've just never read it) - physical or digital - for someone as part of it.

Not Prime Time letter here, move along.

( Read more... )

Sudden urge to go back to my old school, attach myself to my teachers, and never let go. These people have changed my life in ways they - and I - can't even imagine. What I am is 50% part of what they made me. The rest is just what I did with that 50% in the time that's come after. How do I ever say good-bye to these people, now that some of the really important ones are leaving? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute. They've change the course of my life; it seems illogical to just float on.

Tell me your stories, guys? Who has changed your lives? Did you keep in touch afterwards, if you parted ways? Or did you keep quiet, your silence your sort of tribute? What did you say? Anon comments, as always, are on. ♥

Today all I did was run around doing work. Now I'm doing storyboards. This? Sucks. Storyboards. Work. No pay. Macs for lunch. That's not lunch. That's dumpster diving, except that you're paying to dive. DDDDDDDDD:

IN OTHER NEWS, finally set up the thing-where-I-collect-non-fiction-bits-of-useless-knowledge, aka bromatheon! If you're bored and want to listen to me ramble, feel free to stalk me creepily! :D

\o\ Tsengfic coming later in the depths of this night.