Flutterings

Y'all. Y'ALL. My habit of encouraging vegetable-adjacent crackfic continues to bear fruit! [g, d, r]

Candy (DBA beautifulduckweed) wrote this treat for me! It is brilliantly silly, and I cannot stop grinning.

Of All the Worlds of Mice and Men (9576 words) by beautifulduckweed
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Band Sinister - K. J. Charles, The Tsar's indecent hot sauerkraut wrestling ring - Ursula Vernon
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Lord Corvin/Guy Frisby/John Raven/Philip Rookwood, Lord Corvin/Guy Frisby/John Raven/Philip Rookwood & Ivan (Hot Sauerkraut Wrestling)
Characters: Ivan (Hot Sauerkraut Wrestling), Guy Frisby, Philip Rookwood, John Raven, Lord Corvin, Sorcerer of Never (Hot Sauerkraut Wrestling), Wolf (Hot Sauerkraut Wrestling), Firebird (Hot Sauerkraut Wrestling)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Magic, Crack Crossover, Possibly the stupidest thing I've written which is a pretty high bar to clear, If you wanted to see the Birdwits & Guy turned into fieldmice boy do I have the fic 4 u, The talking animals still sound like grizzled NYC cops from 80s procedurals for no reason
Summary:

Ivan, the most accomplished hot sauerkraut wrestler the world had ever known, returns to the strange land of Never to foil the evil plans of the Sorcerer who resides there—only to have his own plans foiled by the unexpected appearance of four strange men.

A flash of light accompanied by a loud boom shattered the tranquility of the night. Ivan covered his head and fell to his knees, then looked in the direction of the sound.

Not five feet away from him stood four men, all shouting at each other.

“Corvin, why the devil did you step through when I bloody well told you not to—”

“Look, how do you expect us to learn more about that strange hole in the air without—”

“Where the devil are we? Corvin, you cursed maggotbrain—”

“Oh good lord, is that a wolf?”

NOTE: Possible to read fandom-blind for Hot Sauerkraut; see prefatory notes.


[Past history, you may ask? Sadly, the archive with pixychelle's 2006 eggplant!Snape / carrot!Lupin smut is no longer extant, from what I can tell, but there have been some fine fun times indeed...]

The clock from Mus:



I am stupid tired -- as in, tired enough to do stupid things that end up having to be redone to undo the stupid -- but I also got in a walk before sundown, which in addition to improving my mood included petting a dog, buying a birthday card (and some other fun) at Gift Horse, and figuring out the first line of a fic that's been making like an unhookable trout.

I cooked chili with green tomatoes I canned back in November 2020 and the last of the red cherry tomatoes I canned this past September, and garlic nuggets homegrown and processed by big sister's "outlaw" (ex-sis-in-law). Two conference-organizing colleagues and I had a productive conversation on Slack about striving for inclusive language in Spanish. A friend and I chatted on Discord about Edwardian clothing and Purim costumes.

Mus also sent the sugar plum jam I just spread over half a bagel + 2 bites, for dessert.

The white hellebore looks much better now that I've given it a good trimming. Same with the geranium. I am pleased with myself for keeping the asparagus ferns alive all winter.



I am itemizing things, you realize, to stave off dread and despair maintain perspective.

There were three tiny tomatoes in the library room. I popped the one below into my mouth yesterday, and it was astonishingly sweet.

Reveals were this morning! It was a fun fest. I received two delicious gifts:

One Year is Paper (526 words) by The_Plaid_Slytherin
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: England Series - K. J. Charles
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Archie Curtis/Daniel da Silva
Characters: Archie Curtis, Daniel da Silva
Additional Tags: Dinner, Anniversary
Summary:

Archie tries to surprise Daniel with a special meal.

Handover (921 words) by Merit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Page & Sommers - Cat Sebastian
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James Sommers/Leonard Page, Cora Delacourt/Edith Pickering
Characters: James Sommers, Leonard Page, Cora Delacourt, Edith Pickering, Wendy Smythe
Summary:

Leo settles further into life at Wychcomb St. Mary.

And -- partly because I got caught up in the challenge to get the number of fandoms over 500 -- I ended up writing a dozen short fics. ( fandoms: Dark Is Rising, England Series, Will Darling Adventures, Band Sinister, Lord Peter Wimsey, Refund Sisters, The Midnight Bell, Cyrano de Bergerac )

Hello! I've seen kass squeeing about this exchange in her journal for years, and I'm looking forward to joining in the fun this time around. I'm "ribbons" on AO3, with a few fics under "mechaieh" as well.

Thank you so much for the goodies! What fun this is going to be. To start, with the only binding part: please avoid incest, underage, vomit/scat/urine/breath-play, and protagonist humiliation.

I'm sorry to say that I'll also be less than enthusiastic about crossovers with the Harry Potter universe (other than the Whomping Willow/Giant Squid, which will endure as my bulletproof OTP) and Tennis RPF (other than Alexander Davidovich Fokina rescuing puppies) -- I have dear friends still in those fandoms, but I'm not on board with where the canon creators have gone. But that still leaves a lot of universe to play around in . . .

As for potential ingredients and directions . . .
( Read more... )

I'm so looking forward to seeing/hearing what you come up with! Chag sameach!

Ribbons

[If you don't want to know anything about K.J. Charles's England World/Will Darling Adventures before reading them yourself, come back to this entry later. Since they're romance novels, I don't consider the mention of pairings = spoilers, especially given my lurid history of non-canonical shipping, but mileages do vary.]


Many things are going well -- sometimes astonishingly so -- but I have nonetheless been moody and apprehensive AF for more than a month, because, oh, I'm me (hello past sins and persistent demons) and the world abounds with supremacists and traitors and airheads. Good God almighty on a rusty skewer.

(The astonishing includes finally winning You Can't Win Jack, a tennis contest I'd been close-but-no-cigar in a number of times for more than a decade -- and you can tell I was moody off the charts because I didn't find out or see the congratulations for half a week, having silently taken a break from following either the second half of the USO or the forum.)

What I am congratulating myself on this morning is knowing my wiring well enough to know that if I could simply get an England World drabble posted, that would appease the bunny-chasing part of my brain that was opening my fic-scribbling folder every hour and let me get on with the other things that have to be thinged before I dive into full-barreled canon review and research. It ended up being 400 words . . .

Matter of Fact
G, Archie/Daniel, post-canon, doting, no plot

Until yesterday, the line I quote in the fic summary was arguably my favorite in Subtle Blood (hello, competence kink), but the one that has been ringing through my head the past two days is "You stupid bastard, you're true as steel." In Think of England, this speech may have been the first passage I bookmarked:

“Thirdly, and this is the important one: dead men. Dead men under the sun of Jacobsdal or floating down the Thames at night. Dead and smashed in the seas off Beachy Head, or in lonely rooms with a gun falling from their hands, or in the next war because of the secrets that have been sold. The Armstrongs have left a trail of blood for their own enrichment, and I intend to bring them to justice. And I am quite sure that you will stand with me to do it, whatever else happens, because if you are a man to put personal concerns before duty, then I have lost my judgement.”

"I intend to bring them to justice" is sharing the room in my brain that also has "Everyone who fought or resisted in World War I or II or the others had other things they could have done with their lives had it not been for supremacists, traitors, et al. Everyone who had the misfortune to be born in outright serfdom or slavery is a testament to the world being profoundly unfair" and "Your parents survived martial law and poverty. Get over yourself and get on with things."

But since I am also an unconquerably frivolous and hedonistic soul, there is also the Yuletide Fandom Promo post to be vastly amused by (I started laughing at the very first one and didn't stop, and I had been warned in advance that someone had nominated Sotheran's Twitter, but still... *wipes tears from eyes*). It occurred to me this morning that Yuletide is much like RPGs for me -- I'm too much of a control freak and hot mess to participate as a regular, but I love the lead-up (building characters, aye; actually playing them, nay) and once in a blue beaverish moon popping in to serve a morsel of mayhem.

Anyway, I've got to dedicate 14 hours to professional melodrama today (melodrama being the topic rather than the situation, fortunately), so off I go. I have a glass of water at hand and I slapped sunscreen on my face before sitting down, so that's at least two teensy steps toward getting back into a good groove.

I'm also wearing my phone as a pedometer, because my employer is dangling gift card raffle entries as an incentive to get in 7,000 per day. Which has not been happening with me yet, but it is helpfully informative to see just how sedentary I currently am, and to plot how I'm going to fix that once the melodrama has been curtained off.

Seeing these cookies at a Starbucks after today's workout reminded me of time spent laughing and drabbling with y'all -- especially valis2.livejournal.com. ;)



And the recent "36 hours" feature on Tokyo in a mainstream US newspaper brought to mind fics shared with geri_chan, lysanatt, and the rest of the Harudaki deep-divers.

(I have not cancelled my subscription to said paper, primarily because access to its archives remains essential for my work, but the defensive condescension displayed by various staff members -- see analyses at Fusion, Esquire, American Orthodox if you need context -- has me irritated enough to cease linking to or quoting from said paper for the time being. As I said in my note to its executive editor, "In publishing writers whose claims wouldn't make it beyond a New Yorker fact-checker, and headlines that not only soft-pedal but normalize the Trump administration's crimes, [your paper] has plummeted in reputation to the point that I can no longer link to or tag [any piece from the paper] -- even nonpolitical ones -- without asking myself to what degree my own credibility will take a hit.")

The subject line is from Alison Luterman's "Telling Your Own Fortune."




Elvis's shooting range, Graceland, Memphis, February 2012

I devoted most of my Saturday was to one of the tulip beds. There is more weeding and digging and hauling to be done -- it is not a large patch of dirt, but I have neglected it for several seasons. This year's shoots are looking scraggly, and I am not feeling confident about the two hollyhock seedlings I have been sheltering with pasta jars, but I shall start more plants after the cleaning and prepping, and spending time outside was my chief priority.

I also stopped by Woodland Wine Merchant for the Saturday tasting. Of today's samples, I liked the Domaine de Fontsainte Gris de Gris (a rosé) the best.

Over at nineveh_uk's DW and LJ, I'm enjoying the discussions about naff hymns and mondegreens and Boredom Increments for wedding singers.

#joyfuljan

Something I have been giving thanks for recently: living long enough to enjoy the company of people who share my interests, and to see some of those interests catch hold in larger circles and even get their fifteen minutes (and then some).

The John Laurens biography is a gift from around 15 years ago, from a friend I met back when our journals were on Diaryland. I first heard of Laurens during the 1984 miniseries on George Washington, and developed such a crush on the combination of his idealism + tragic fate (or, to be precise, Barry-Bostwick-as-Washington's reaction to it) + the actor portraying him (Kevin Conroy, since known mainly as the voice of Batman) that I ended up combing through all the Washington bios in the high school and local university library for any mention of Laurens, writing two papers on him and drafting a third ("Alexander Hamilton's Best Friend") in my 30s.

So it was a hoot for me to check in on Jen Talley's timeline yesterday, where she was live-tweeting about Hamilbrarians rapping (#alamw4ham #Lib4Ham #alamw16)...

Nothing quite like a roomful of librarians singing at the top of their lungs "When you knock me down I get the F*#% BACK UP AGAIN!" #lib4ham

— Jessica Storrs (@wanderingjess) January 9, 2016

...which is icing on top of my Hamilton-Laurens stocking stuffer having 1066 hits as of today.

If I'm remembering right, I "met" Jen through a Sayers mailing list and then stayed connected through Diaryland and now Twitter. I met dichroic through the same Sayers list, and this year she answered my yearning for the baby Loch Ness monster ladle in the photo above. A friend I met through Snupin fandom sent the sleeping dragon cake pan.

I mentioned both the ladle and the pan yesterday night at a party, having been greeted by the substantial Nessie sculpture in the host's front yard. During the course of the evening, the conversations also included Cthulhu, Doris Salcedo, earring backs, film processing, Stephen King, parks, bruxism, real estate, the High Museum, imaging tech, karaoke at the American Legion, cold water flats in Africa, and trying to finish art/craft projects begun mumble-mumble years ago.

And also cancer and health: one of the guests was a man younger than me with a newly installed replacement hip -- one of many surgeries resulting from cancer + treatment. He emphasized how glad he was to still be here. Another guest was a librarian who, as she put it, will be living with myeloma for the rest of her life. The day before, a friend from high school e-mailed me about a classmate who has just begun treatment for leukemia.

Which all ties back to feeling so immensely grateful that I am here, and you are here, and we together get to giggle and admire and obsess and shout out these things to each other and (if/when we choose) to those in the wider world longing for the spark and sizzle and solace of shared interests, and the things we make and send in celebration.

We've got us a ongoing sexual harassment problem in fandom. For context on this latest manifestation of it, see Natalie's post, "Readercon: Some Members Are More Equal Than Others."

Then, if you feel so moved, please sign the letter by Veronica Schanoes: http://vschanoes.livejournal.com/86558.html

The odds of me finishing a drabble for halfamoon today are looking iffy (have character, have concept, lack energy), but I think I've pinned down another strand of the plot for "Not As Dumb," so go me.

Also, marginaliana pointed her readers to the prompt post for the gen battle being organized by fox1013, and just reading it is a hoot and a half. (Including fox's intro: "I am in fandoms where bears and frogs go on road trips together and real people dive into human-sized bowls of pasta..."). Too many highlights to provide a comprehensive list, and I don't know if I'll manage anything for it at all (in spite of the short wordcount max), but I want to remember prompts like these anyway:

( People will cross over the Muppets with ANYTHING. I'm not even quoting most of those... )