Snowflake Challenge: Three Fic Recs

Day Two: Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I went through my Ao3 bookmarks looking for a matched set, but I think these three unmatched ones appeal to me more today. They’re all long, and in fact I need to reread them– but I trust Past Grrlpup’s bookmarking enough to list them now.

  1. Perfect voices! One of the few fics I subscribed to as it was published, and I always made time for it immediately when a new chapter appeared.
    The Best Of It (73580 words) by dollsome
    Chapters: 20/20
    Fandom: Gilmore Girls
    Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Relationships: Paris Geller/Rory Gilmore
    Characters: Rory Gilmore, Paris Geller, Lorelai Gilmore, Luke Danes, Emily Gilmore, Richard Gilmore, Madeline Lynn, Louise Grant, Jess Mariano, Kirk Gleason
    Additional Tags: Fake/Pretend Relationship
    Summary:Paris outs herself and Rory during a televised argument with Michele Bachmann. Peskiest of all is the fact that Paris and Rory aren’t actually dating. A documentary crew wants to make Paris And Rory’s Modern Stars Hollow Family anyway. Meanwhile, Rory goes slowly and quietly nuts. (And doesn’t like Paris like that — why would you even suggest such a thing?? Not that … anyone did.)
  2. I love The Woman in the Wall so much, its deadpan surrealism and domesticity. How fortunate that there is this excellent sequel fic.
    A House For Me (12120 words) by psocoptera
    Chapters: 1/1
    Fandom: The Woman in the Wall – Patrice Kindl
    Rating: General Audiences
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Relationships: Anna Newland/F | Francis Albright
    Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Growing Up, Chicago (City), romance between stepsiblings
    Summary:How Anna Newland made herself at home in Chicago.
  3. This is the one I most need to reread. But I’m a sucker for most things Susan Pevensie, and love her appearance here with Mary Malone’s academia.
    The Ivory Horn (12811 words) by kaydeefalls
    Chapters: 1/1
    Fandom: His Dark Materials – Pullman, Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
    Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Characters: Will Parry, Mary Malone, Kirjava, Susan Pevensie
    Additional Tags: Yuletide, recipient:Tris B., challenge:Yuletide 2007, Crossover, Coming of Age, Action/Adventure, Plotty
    Summary:If there’s a way back out of this world, Will is determined to find it. At any cost.

 

First of December

At this convergence of the death of 41 and World AIDS Day, Bob Rafsky’s Bury Me Furiously curse is on my mind.

I pulled out the first sentence for each month in this blog for the traditional First Line Meme, but many are unsatisfyingly memes themselves, or the title of a book I already wrote about, and so on. So here are facts, updates, or other riffs on them instead. I was silent in February, April, and November.

  • Number of books currently checked out from the library: 97. Currently reading: All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung. Also due back within a week and not renewable– I may or may not get to them: Geek Out: A Collection of Trans and Genderqueer Romance; My Year In the Middle; The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationery Obsession.
  • I just asked Sanguinity if we need our “it’s getting dark” walk now. It is a few minutes after four p.m. I generally need to get out under the sky second thing in the morning (after coffee & internet) for mental health; Sang can go later in the day, but doesn’t like to witness the gloom gathering in the  house.
  • I maintained once-a-week bike commuting in November. I get off work early on Wednesdays, so I can have a ride home that’s not in the dark. Soon the mornings will require supplemental lighting. When I bought my helmet I was between two sizes and went with the larger one; now I’m glad because the hood of my thin hoodie fits underneath, keeping rain off the back of my neck and warming my ears.
  • Logging my mileage on foot at Dailymile has become quite spotty– I don’t like having one more thing to fiddle with online. But I still want to keep track for the Million Mile Ultra, at least until I complete the 10,000-mile fun run (it will be a few years). So maybe….paper? Also, I was poking around the NaNo forums, and Dunx has logged a million words over the years!
  • language_escapes alerted me to The Claudia Kishi Club, a documentary in progress now raising funds on Kickstarter.
  • Most recent convenience-store purchase: sugar wafers, because they were 99 cents and everything else was $1.29 or more.
  • I daydream about painting a lot, but hardly ever do it.

Friday Five: Not Off the Wall

I didn’t have access to Friday Five prompts when I felt like answering them today, so I started my own set: What (if anything) have you had on your walls, as a kid and now? But then I wrote until I had five parts of an answer to this one question, so I’m doing it wrong, oh well!

  1. My mom likes French Impressionist painting, so my sister and I had Renoir prints on the wall of our room. Mine was Girl With a Hoop and my sister’s was A Girl With a Watering Can.
    Girl With a Hoop, oil painting by Renoir

    me

    Girl With a Watering Can, oil painting by Renoir

    my sister

    In my head, Girl With a Hoop’s name was Louisa and she wasn’t that nice– a bit stuck-up when we talked. I never spoke to Girl With a Watering Can.

  2. I chose light blue when I moved into my own bedroom (formerly my mom’s sewing room) and got to pick the color. Later I wished I’d picked a glossier cream color, to go with the dark brown furniture. But I was five, five-year-olds don’t think about cream as a color or know about semi-gloss paint.
  3. Kidspirational posters (Hang In There!) that teachers gave away at the end of the year, calendar pictures, maps from National Geographic (Space and The Crusades were my favorites), magazine collages. I think I chose the magazine portraits for size and look as much as subject, which is why Philip Glass’ face is weirdly prominent in my mental landscape. (There was also Cher and… Steve Jobs?!)
  4. When I first arrived in Portland, my college orientation group rode the bus downtown (look for the brown beaver icon to find your way back!) and went to a cheap-imports store to get stuff for our dorm rooms. I knew I wanted a poster, but what would I not regret or tire of? Thus I spent my college years looking at a big photo of vegetables in a basket.
  5. Now the art on our walls is mostly pieces by Sanguinity and me and our friends and family. Sang’s yarn sheepdog over the bed (soft in case an earthquake dumps it on our heads), my portrait of her and Louie the dog as Athena and owl, Sang’s college drawings of a downtown church, a painting by her grandmother, a signed Dr. Eldritch comic, 3D pieces by Bookherd and Nicole hanging inside the IKEA bookshelves. I feel very rich in art. The living room also has a world map (but you have to stand on the sofa arm to read it closely) and a laminated periodic table. I think if our house has a decor, it’s “Classroom,” down to the clock.

Friday Five: Condiments

Oh wait, they’re not all about condiments. Still,

What is your favorite condiment?

Are pickles a condiment? I like pickles. I like pickle relish. On a hot dog I like yellow mustard, ketchup, and pickle relish.

Sour cream is also a great condiment.

What is your favorite spice?

Perhaps cumin, it’s so versatile. Although life without cinnamon is hard to imagine. But “favorite” is different from “hard to imagine life without it.”

I like the incursions smoked paprika has been making.

If herbs count, I’m excited about dill lately and have a dill plant out back in a flowerpot. I don’t know if it will get enough sun though.

What is your favorite cooking oil? (Canola oil, sesame oil, butter, etc)

I like butter. I also appreciate dishes with bacon where the bacon fat is used to cook other stuff in the dish.

What is your favorite starchy food? (Bread, rice, potatoes, noodles, etc)

Noodles! And crackers if those count. Noodles and crackers will get me through a lot.

What is your favorite flavor for candy?

Chocolate and mint together, maybe? I’m thinking Junior Mints. I also like licorice (including salted), pseudo-licorice like Red Vines, and candies involving peanut butter.

Five Things Meme

Five things you’ll find in my bag backpack:

  1. my fleece winter hat that I use as a cushioned pouch for lunch food
  2. ziploc “possibles bag” (i.e. things I might possibly need), currently has teabags, binder clip, quarter, bandaids, ibuprofen, antihistamine, dental floss
  3. eyeglass case containing tampons, ibuprofen, and spare pair of contacts in case I break my glasses and still need to drive somewhere
  4. drawing supplies: blue non-photo pencils, extra-fine sharpie, blank 4×6 index cards in a ziploc bag
  5. spare deodorant: Old Spice Deodorant for Nocturnal Creatures: Wolfthorn, which oddly smells exactly like lemon-lime soda

Five things you’ll find in my room:

  1. my alarm clock, a small battery-powered cheapie
  2. photo of sang and me in our opera duds in 1993, a stand-in for a wedding photo since we don’t have one. She’s in white tie (head shaved), I’m in her former prom dress.
  3. the small cedar box I made in woodshop in eighth grade, with a rose wood-burned on top: currently holds jewelry, much of it broken
  4. “rice socks” that are actually nicely sewn bags with slipcovers even, but we still call them that from when we used tube socks. Filled with rice for microwaving, essential for cold bedtimes.
  5. the Box of All Tapes (scotch tape, masking tape, painter’s tape, packing tape, doublestick tape) that got moved onto the bureau when the windows were being refurbished and never found another home.

Five of my favorite things:

  1. dogs
  2. trees
  3. chocolate milk
  4. library books
  5. mac and cheese

Five things I’m currently into:

  1. learning Japanese kanji and vocab at http://wanikani.com
  2. Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series. I’ve reread the first four and have now gotten to the one I haven’t read yet!
  3. berry season
  4. the front porch
  5. using https://checkvist.com for weekend and evening to-do lists

Five things on my to-do list:

  1. clean the gutters, figure out what the deal is with that one, and trim back encroaching tree limbs. Save bay leaves for shellynoir.
  2. email my parents. (a frequently listed item)
  3. finish that 1940s children’s book that’s overdue at the university library
  4. dishes (frequently listed item)
  5. try that barre workout DVD I checked out from the library

 

belated Friday Five

Questions courtesy of littledupont at LJ:

Would you rather shop or sunbathe?

Sunbathe, but there must be short duration or ample shade, because I burn easily.

I am surprisingly fond of shopping online, and do it for Sanguinity sometimes. Most recently, workout capris from SparkleSkirts— love their stuff.

Would you rather dance or sing?

Sing, probably. You can do other stuff while singing. And in public I’m probably less self-conscious singing than dancing. And I like the vibrations of singing.

Would you rather watch college football or watch NFL?

Um. Is it like basketball where college ball has more evident defense? I don’t watch much football, just study up on the Broncos a bit if I’m going to be visiting my folks, so I can follow the chitchat among my relatives. The moneyed interests and policies in both the NCAA and NFL may be incompatible with my values.

Would you rather write or read?

Oh, read. Hundred to one, reading.

Would you rather chat online with friends or hang out with friends?

Hang out with friends. I don’t like chat at all and very rarely do it. I just can’t get the hang of it, I always end up waiting around for the other person to say something or feeling very rude for going away mid-chat. That said, I do love seeing my friends’ blogs and social media go by and interacting asynchrously as the spirit moves me.

Friday Five

The Friday Five post isn’t up yet at LiveJournal/Dreamwidth, so let’s use the f.riday5.com questions this week:

1. What’s a good movie for October that has nothing to do with monsters or Halloween?

After Life (1998), a Japanese movie that’s contemplative and quirky in just the way I like.

2. What’s a good couple of songs for October that have nothing to do with monsters or Halloween?

Wynton Marsalis and Sarah Vaughan doing Autumn Leaves together. Cat Stevens’ Moonshadow.

3. What are some reasons to love October?

Monsters and Halloween, of course! Also fresh apple cider. Chilly mornings so I don’t get to work all sweaty if I walk. Sunshine with golden leaves and deep blue sky.

4. Radio stations sometimes call this month Rocktober, doing special playlists or giveaways in celebration of rock music. What would be a better rhyming name for this month, and how might it be celebrated?

We have local Walktober promotions. But I’ll go with Socktober, because having enough cozy warm socks without holes is a great feeling.

5. What would be a good holiday to establish in October for those U.S. states not commemorating Columbus Day?

Portland celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day on that Monday; I’m good with that.

rabbit rabbit!

2013 First Lines meme. This post is to be excluded from the 2014 First Lines meme!

January: I had a lovely holiday season with family and friends and road trips.

February: This is far from the first time I’ve meant to participate in the Wednesday reading meme, but the first time I’ve gotten as far as starting a post.

March: Just finished: Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, a mix of personal stories, history, and analysis.

April: Yesterday I went to see Eileen Myles at Reed.

May: To my surprise, I was invited to a Jeopardy audition after all!

June: ALL I wanted my dad to do was sign the Reba McIntyre CD so I could send it in and get… um, I don’t remember now.

July: I signed up for my first fic exchange, The Exchange at Fic Corner 2013!

August: [no entries]

September: I replaced my damaged Scarlatti keyboard sonatas CD with one by Dubravka Tomsic.

October: Remember how I was rereading all the Ramona books to get ready for a fic exchange?

November: Last weekend I took Friday and Monday off work, and Sang and I drove out to Stub Stewart State Park to stay in a one-room cabin, sans internet.

December: When I’m idly googling hot fudge sauce, most of the recipes call for cream or evaporated milk, neither of which I keep around.

Time Lord meme

From Tumblr, apparently, via owlectomy:

You are now a Time Lord. The object closest to your left hand is your Sonic item. One of your parents’ occupations is your title. Your last text is your catchphrase

I am The Secretary. I have a Sonic Oatmeal Bowl. My catchphrase is, “Someone should tell them about the Idea Fairy in the shower.”

If I do say so myself, I would totally watch a holiday special about Time Lord Me.

Wednesday Reading Meme, Lesbian Edition

Just finished: Sorry, Tree, poems by Eileen Myles. Most have short lines and are from one to three pages long. I like how their associations reach farther than my logical mind, but somehow I don’t feel lost. The endings feel like endings, but not overly tidy.

Here’s a bit from “Fifty-Three” that reminded me of my own desire to just look at trees and hang out with them:

I desire a big book about
this not better than them but
their friend.
Who doesn’t love the text?
a book about trees
it’s like a park
except that all its windows
face outside
you look up at the world &
go: oh

a book is
a web I suppose

saying you come
here to go
out an
incessant
trembling bridge
which a tree
is
I imagine
a tree
my best friend

By happy coincidence, Myles will be reading at Reed! On Thursday, April 4, 6:30 PM in the chapel.

And also, though non-thematic: Sara Pennypacker’s Clementine and The Talented Clementine. I picked up Clementine because someone said it was reminiscent of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. Well. Clementine doesn’t name her doll Chevrolet, she names her cats after things in the bathroom. She isn’t told to “sit here for the present,” but she notes that being in gifted class has not resulted in getting any gifts yet. She gets in trouble for messing with the hair of the overachiever girl. And there’s a definite Henry-Huggins/Ramona dynamic between her and that girl’s older brother. It wasn’t reminiscent, it was downright distracting in its parallels.

I got past it, though. It is a little strange how the Clementine books are written in first person, but have more knowing smiles over the main character’s head than the Ramona books do in third person. But there are funny moments and Clementine has a great set of parents. I’m going to keep going with the series.

Reading now: the draft of a friend’s novel. I like the main character’s heartfelt voice, which reminds me of Madeleine L’Engle’s Vicky or Poly a bit. And I’m getting a glimpse of a cultural moment I missed but not by much– a decade, a degree or two of church immersion. Such a luxury to read an editor’s draft, too…hardly any typos or grammatical clunks!

About to read: A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet, by Judy Grahn. I read a little, not much, of Grahn’s work when I was in college. I dunno, I’m having a fling with the old-skool. Lesbiate and Smash the State!

The reason I know I’m about to read A Simple Revolution (and also What If All the Kids Are White?), or at least give them a try, is that I got them through interlibrary loan and therefore can’t renew them. Which brings us to

Sadly must return mostly unread: Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, by Heather Love. More academic than my usual reads, but I was intrigued by its focus on the shadow side of queer identity. Pride is compulsory, but what about the feelings it demands we get rid of, like shame, loneliness, and regret? Not that those are my favorite things to feel, but they’re key to our collective history, (see The Well of Loneliness and so on) and certainly part of most (?) of our individual and family coming-out histories.

What really made me take this book home was that I opened it to a quote from another book, José Esteban Muñoz’ Disidentifications, that I found fascinating and spooky in equal measures. Disidentifications is probably also too much theory for me, but here. “Recounting a joke that he shares with a friend, Muñoz describes plans for a ‘gay shame day parade’:

This parade, unlike the sunny gay pride march, would be held in February…Loud colors would be discouraged; gay men and lesbians would instead be asked to wear drab browns and grays. Shame marchers would be asked to carry signs no bigger than a business card. Chanting would be prohibited. Parade participants would be asked to parade single file. Finally, the parade would not be held on a central city street but on some backstreet, preferably by the river.

So now that’s here, and I can go to the book return tomorrow with a light heart.