entirely ruined her disposition with books

I was tagged over on Tumblr, but I'm bringing my answers over here too!

Rules: go through your last 5 fics and share the first and last line. No context.


the scent of orange and wildflowers

first: There was a small face watching her from between the leaves of the orange trees.

last: When she returned to her room, having made herself queen, Eugenides was waiting for her, and Irene ran into his arms.


the light of other suns

first: The Eight, the Harmonious Council of the Empire, met in Alterra, the city where Agat and Rolery, who birthed the first of the new Werelians, survived that bitterest Winter of the Tenth Year and forged a single people.

last: But that sun would still shine, white-gold like this, and when he closed his eyes, that light still hung in the darkness.


sweetness and salves:

first: The mason bees return first.

last: It is, all of Willowlands agree, an auspicious sign.


blood in the water, smoke in the sky

first: There is blood in the water.

last: But first: rest.


the dark, the light, the flame

first: The rumors are so horrifying that at first Lan Wangji simply…cannot believe them.

last: When their lips meet, Lan Wangji tastes salt and Wei Ying and the fire of hope.


Encouraging all the writers on my flist to do this!

rachelmanija invited me to talk a bit about writing my Yuletide fic, and it hadn't occurred to me to do so, but once I started, I found out I had a lot to say! I have literally never written in this much detail about a piece of my own writing, but it was fun! Thank you to rachelmanija  for mentioning that you'd be willing to read notes!


Let's start out talking about the canon itself:

I remember reading Chalice when it was first published--Robin McKinley is one of very, very, very few writers whose books I will buy without reading them. (This has only come back to bite me once, in the form of Pegasus, which I was not crazy about.) When I first read this one, I remember thinking that it was kind of a minor McKinley, along the lines of something like Shadows, which I very much enjoy, but which does send me swooning the way the best of McKinley can.

But on reread a few years ago, I realized how wrong I was. This book is so wonderful and rich!

[I do wish the book was a bit longer, but only because I want to spend more time in the story, in that world, with those characters! It's a good problem to have!]

The worldbuilding is the plot, which I absolutely adore: the world is divided up into demesnes, and people are bound to the land in the exact opposite of feudalism--the bond is literal, in that people whose families have lived in a certain place for a long time can actually sense the land, which has its own desires and emotions. This relationship, when properly nurtured, is beautiful and sustaining.

The land is kept (in the looking-after sense) by a Circle of people who are called to that responsibility, each with specific duties. Our main character is a Chalice, whose task it is to soothe the land and bind together the members of the Circle.

This is always a big responsibility, but it's soooo much higher stakes for Mirasol, because instead of being apprenticed to the previous Chalice, she is suddenly called to the position when the previous Chalice dies in a terrible incident that also kills the Master, the highest male authority figure in the Circle.

This is a Big Problem because the Mastership(? Masterdom? lol, all of these are terrible!) runs in bloodlines (unlike most of the other Circle positions) and the only other member of the family was sent by the previous master to join a religious order that basically renders him inhuman.

So Mirasol has to deal with the fact that she doesn't know anything about being a Chalice, the returned Master that the people of the demesne are scared of, and the trauma that the land itself has undergone after years under a bad Master. It's a lot!

The aesthetic is cottagecore, but without the treacley overtones--McKinley is, as always, way too interested in the everyday stuff of living to fall into that trap. And while the world is warm enough that I want to live in it in the same way I do the Shire, the central conflict of the book is serious enough that the story never becomes twee.

There's a darkness lurking around the edges of Mirasol's world--hints of all the ways in which people in power can abuse both the land and the people under their authority. We don't dive deeply into this--that's all backstory. But it keeps the setting from seeming saccharine, and the plot of the book is high-stakes enough within the boundaries of Mirasol's little world (literally a demesne) that we know it's going to take a lot of work to for everyone to heal. The book is the beginning of that work, and it's beautiful and I love it.

Also honey and bees.

And the worldbuilding is so wonderful! It very easily could have been slapdash or shallow--a vague "the land is living" kind of thing--but McKinley has always been so committed to exploring what the details of magic are like. What do you actually have to do to make magic work? How does it make you feel? What physical objects does it require? Etc.





So it's perfect for a worldbuilding fic, which is what my Yuletide recipient requested. I was so excited and also intimidated to see my assignment. Because there's so much potential, but also: I don't want it to be twee or vague!

I immediately knew that I wanted to write something that explored different kinds of Chalices--their magic is based in a liquid of some kind, most often water or wine, but sometimes milk, brine, or even blood--and their different demesnes. I chose the three least-common liquids (besides Mirasol's honey) and, unlike with 90% of the fics I write, the title and the summary were both right there. A triptych. Portraits of three Chalices in brine, milk, and blood.

I knew I wanted to keep the focus on the things that the book is most focused on: the Chalice's relationships with her land and with the Master. And it only made sense to take a page from the book and focus on different moments of crisis for each Chalice I wrote about. I wanted to write about women at different points in their lives (an old, wise woman; a girl just starting out and intimidated by her position; and a middle-aged woman).

The book is very uninterested in the world outside of Mirasol's demesne of Willowlands (except in what she can learn from other Chalices' experiences, though that is limited) which makes perfect sense because it's a wonderful first-person narrative and Mirasol a) has always been just a simple woodskeeper and would have no way of knowing about the outside world and b) is really, really busy with just trying to stay afloat!

But that means that there's no way to know how pervasive this demesne system is in that world. Is it just the way a certain area is set up? Do they do things differently elsewhere?

I immediately rejected the idea that the living-land thing is particular to Mirasol's corner of the world. Obviously, the whole world is living!

So that gave me room to move outside of the English countryside feel of the book and explore some other corners.

I knew I wanted to go furthest afield for the brine section, which ended up being the first part. I thought about something Jeju Island inspired with the old lady pearl divers, etc. but I ended up going with a world that's more Polynesian and tropical. This was the opportunity to go to a completely different direction than the book. So! Tropical island! Okay! How would that demesne communicate crisis? Volcano! Yes!

With part two, I wanted to pull it back to something much closer to the setting of the book. I chose a Scottish inspiration for this section--a place that can be cottagecore-y, too, but that also is distinct enough from the Shire-esque setting of the book. As soon as I thought about writing a milk Chalice, I was like, "This is a woman who takes goats with her everywhere she goes." The book has a tossed-off line about milk Chalices coming from a woman who receives her Chalicehood when she's either pregnant or nursing, so I was like, "Of course this woman is a mother." But also, I wanted an old lady in one of these sections, and that wasn't appropriate for blood, so milk needed to be the one that explored age a bit.

Blood was the hardest to write. We get a few lines in the book about a blood Chalice who had a terrible time of it but brought her demesne through a series of wars that destroyed neighboring demesnes, so I had to stick with that. I pictured a woman in her 30s or 40s, between the poles of the other two, but who is incredibly tired and worn down by all she's been through. I thought that something more Norse/Germanic-inspired would work well for this--it's closer geographically and culturally to the setting of the book, but a little colder and harsher in my mind.


And from there...I wrote. I write mostly by instinct. I like to have a vague scaffolding to hang the story on (see above), but the details, the themes, etc. are all things that emerge as I write. I don't know where they come from! It's like magic, the way they emerge from my fingers without conscious planning! But that's the way I work!

I used to try to plan a lot more and I'd just get frustrated. For the past few years, I have given myself permission to start with a skeleton of a story and flesh everything else in as I write. It just flows better for me.

Of course, this results in lots of surprises! I knew that I was going to have Orra, the Scottish Chalice, be dealing with the death of a Master, but the idea of the new Master being a small boy came in the writing. And I was like, "Oh, that's perfect!" I don't know where that inspiration come from! But it was a gift!

Also when you write off the cuff like that, you end up having to go back and edit quite a bit when things arise out of nowhere and you need to lay the foundation for them. For example: I was halfway through Orra's section when I realized that of course she would have an apprentice and that that apprentice absolutely needed to be present in what's happening. So I had to go back and rewrite that apprentice as present and make some references to her before she shows up.

I wanted the three Chalices to have three very different kinds of relationships with their Masters. I knew even before I realized how young Orra's master would be that she would be the mentor in that relationship--and in a very maternal (she's a milk Chalice!) way. To balance that, it made sense that Harawai would be roughly the same age as her own Master and that he would be pretty new too--they're starting out on more even footing. But Chalices and Masters can't have romantic relationships so I wanted to make it very clear that they wouldn't--easy! Give him a husband! (I didn't figure out a way to work into the text that Harawai is gay too, but she is!)

As I mentioned before, I had the least idea what I was doing with the blood section (her name is Syn--I literally just scrolled through lists of characters from Norse mythology and when I saw that one, I went, "That's her!!!"), but then it just came to me: she's on her fourth Master. Each of the other three was eaten by the war and each failed to bring peace for different reasons. I didn't have a ton of room to go into details, but a line or two about each works. And then I realized that Syn's section is all about the unexpected Circle members and something clicked.

A blood Chalice is considered unlucky, but we know from the book that she is the one who succeeds where other Chalices failed. So I realized that the Master needed to be disabled in some way--physically unable to fight, because surely that would also be considered unlucky for a people at war. And then the whole joy their situation is that no: they're not unlucky. This demesne needed a blood Chalice and a disabled Master, and only they could lead it through war into peace. The unexpected is the point!




I wrote each of the three sections in basically one sitting each, which I think was the right way to do it. The first two sections I felt pretty confident in going in, but I was really intimidated by the blood section and was surprised that the writing of it was not as much of a labor as I thought it would be.

I was pretty satisfied with what I wrote!sophia_sol  gave me confidence that it was good andchestnut_pod  was hugely helpful in cleaning up my prose (too many sentences beginning with conjunctions! Too many commas in some places and not enough in others! Clunky phrasing!). But there wasn't a ton of rewriting to do of the plot/characters/substance after that second draft wherein I did things like give Harawai's Master a husband and make Orra's apprentice show up.



I was so excited to post it! And the recipient seemed to really enjoy it, which is such a joy! It got a good reception from the people who commented! I am generally very happy with it!

But of course you can always do better. One thing that I wish I could have done better on is coming up with different names for things. As I mentioned in my author's note, obviously the people of a Pacific Island would not use the same labels that the people in the English countryside would. I didn't do the work of coming up with the labels both because I didn't feel like there was room to do that in such short sections and also because it would have required some research that I just wasn't prepared to do. But a better writer would have done that work, I think.

Another thing I think I could have done better with is the culture of the blood section. It's pretty vague? I think the character herself and her immediate context works. I like what I did with exploring how terrible it would be to be a blood Chalice. But I could have done more with that to make her culture more distinct. I can kind of excuse myself by saying, "The focus is on war. War is totalizing and has a way of obliterating everything else," which is a decent argument, but I still wish I'd done more! Especially in comparison with the brine section, in which I researched flora and shells of the Pacific and Indian Islands in order to be really specific.

I am not pleased about the new film that's coming out soon that purports to be about Emily Bronte. I am not pleased about how it invents whole-cloth a romance that never happened. I am not pleased about how it implies that women's stories are not worth telling unless they contain a romance. [I've said it before and I'll say it again, the only romances the Bronte sisters needed was with writing. CHARLOTTE/WRITING OTP. EMILY/WRITING OTP. ANNE/WRITING OTP.] I am not pleased about how it seems to center men ~encouraging her~ to be a writer as though she needed men to nurture her genius. Above all, I am not pleased at the implication that she had to experience something in order to write about it.

I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate the cultural inability to understand that writing is a work of imagination and that it does not have to be built on experience. The idea that of course Jane Austen must have had some star-crossed romance or she wouldn't have been able to write her novels is just so stupid and insulting. It's so reductive that pretty much every story about a real writer becomes, "Here's how that writer lived the thing they wrote!"

NO! That's not how writing works! Not every work is a thinly veiled roman à clef! Some things are just made up! And that is a skill and it takes work! It is so lazy to just assume that anything some (especially historical) writer wrote about was a variation on something they experienced! It makes me so mad!

Maybe this pisses me off in particular as an asexual person who sometimes writes romance (and occasionally porn). I have zero experience with romance, but I don't need it. And frankly I'm offended that you think I and Emily Bronte and Jane Austen and whoever are not good enough writers to come up with that stuff all on our own.

I find myself quoting Terence over and over and over again: I am human and nothing human is alien to me.

I am also irked by the idea that only people of one demographic can write characters of that demographic. I realize that this tendency at the moment is a pendulum swing--for so long, writers of color were so marginalized that it was really necessary for people to say, "Uh, can you let us write about our experiences? And actually publish us?" I get that! That is a good thing! We need lots more writers from all kinds of diverse backgrounds and perspectives getting published!

But it does not therefore follow that people should only write about characters who are just like them. Anyone can write about anything! They just have a moral responsibility to do that as truthfully as they can and to do the research necessary not to perpetuate lies or hurt readers. And of course they have to be prepared for criticism if/when they get it wrong.

But just because publishing companies tend to let mediocre white writers who haven't done their research and have underdeveloped empathy publish nonsense that hurts people DOES NOT mean that white people should only write about white people or only queer people should be allowed to write about queer people. For god's sake, the entire point of the novel as an art form--regardless of whether you're the writer or the reader!--is to practice radical empathy and climb inside the head of someone who is not you.

NOT EVERYTHING THAT'S GOOD IS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. UGH!

In closing, the perfect Bronte biopic already exists and it's called To Walk Invisible thank you and good night

So everybody's doing the AO3 stats meme, so I'll throw mine out there.

Top 5 by kudos:

1. On Hairpins. The only thing surprising about this is that it's managed to accrue so many kudos so fast (this was written this past December). It's a Yuletide fic--they always get the most hits/kudos. It's for a fandom (Queen's Thief) that is insanely beloved and it focuses on the main characters. It's shortish and very readable and really I'm not at all surprised it's at the top of the list.

2. Celestial Mechanics. My first Infinite novel to be posted to AO3 as it was being written and post-kpop people figuring out that AO3 exists. Looooong fic of many chapters plus lots of guests following it on AO3 equals lots of kudos.

3. they that go down to the sea in ships. Another Yuletide fic, this time for a beloved YA book (The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I was quite proud of it, so it makes sense it's at the top of the list.

4. the heaviness of all things. Yuletide, Luther, sociopaths in love.

5. how the heart approaches what it yearns. This was a Yuletide Madness drabble I wrote on a whim. When I wrote it, Downton Abbey S1 had just aired, everyone still loved that show, and everyone shipped Sybil/Tom. It was very zeitgeisty.

Top 5 by hits:

1. one more song about moving along the highway. This baffles me. It's a William Miller from Almost Famous/Lux Lisbon from The Virgin Suicides crossover! A CROSSOVER. The only thing I can think of is that people are looking for fics from those two fandoms and end up clicking on it? I have no idea. It's very strange to me.

2. how the heart approaches what it yearns. See above. And it's very short, which means people are more likely to finish it.

3. Celestial Mechanics. See above. I'd be interested if you could separate unique hits--I suspect it would be much, much lower.

4. Of Ill-Advised Imprints and Rather Fetching Ewok Queens. My first Yuletide fic. No surprise that over time it's managed to rise to the top--it's had the most time to accrue hits.

5. Commas and Ampersands. I had actually totally forgotten about this fic. My one and only Gilmore Girls fic. From 2007. I remember being totally, totally proud of it. (It's also how I met Izi, who was one of my first fandom friends on lj. HI IZI.) Apparently the Jess/Rory shippers are still out there. Who knew?


Things that are predictable: Yuletide and longest-fic-ever get the most hits/kudos.

Surprises: Crossovers and Gilmore Girls apparently?????

as usual, nothing all that exciting since Vienna, but we'll do it anyway (and I will endeavor to use capitals because this is not tumblr):

+ INFINITE CONCERT PENDING. OMG. It seems Jamie will not get to go with me (I can't talk about this because DESPAIR), so I'm thinking of the DC one? I just need to find someone to go with, to room with/sit with/sing-along-on-the-top-of-my-lungs with. Warning: if Woohyun and/or Dongwoo start crying, I will probably cry my eyes out too. So. You've been warned.

+ In case I haven’t talked to you since then, the Vienna trip was great. Nearly perfect except for the heat which was EXTREME and Europeans don’t know how to use air conditioning (they say they have it, but it doesn’t ever seem like they actually use it!) and also you can’t get a big glass of cold tap water anywhere + there are almost no water fountains anywhere so it was a very thirsty trip. But we had a great time, everything went smoothly, I was the tour guide and arranged EVERYTHING (which was partly stressful but also kind of awesome?) and the parents loved it, so I’m very happy.

+ The little sister is in Ecuador. For almost a year. I am living alone. I LOVE living alone (even though it enables my anti-social behavior in ways that probably aren't healthy), but I miss her a lot.

+ Working on a new novel. AGAIN. Because, no, I am not physically capable of just sticking to one. But I feel really good about this one? Let’s ignore that that’s often the case when I start a new one. I literally had a dream about it and woke up with it fully-formed in my head. Often when I dream, I find myself thinking, “This would be a great book,” but then I wake up and realize the dream made no sense. But this one actually did! Also in the dream the love interest was Sunggyu. I kid you not.

It’s set in a fantasy version of like…late 18th century/early 19th century Madagascar? And you would not believe how hard it is to get ahold of a book on Malagasy history. Our library is fantastic, but the only history books they have are either A) for children or B) natural history. I get that the place has all sorts of flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth and that’s awesome BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE?

Anyway. I’m really trying to work on it. I want to make it work. I do.

+ So fic is going on hold for a bit. I have signed up for an OT3 bigbang and also for Infinite’s secret santa (and I will for Yuletide), but honestly I think it’s time to put fic on the back burner for just a bit until I get some actual work done on the novel. It’s time for discipline.

+ I did a remix fic for kpop-ficmix and I AM SO HAPPY WITH IT. I can’t wait till it’s posted and writers are revealed and I can tell you about it.

+ The job keeps requiring people to work mandatory overtime, and I am SO GLAD I took the time to fill out my FMLA paperwork so I don’t have to do it too. The company just all-around sucks with the way it treats employees, and yet I can’t bring myself to find something else because I can’t find anything else I’m actually interested in or a place that lets me spend as much time writing/interneting as this one does.

+ On Saturday I had my mama come over and we did some serious overhaul cleaning. Like, went through all the clothes I had and I took like five garbage bags full to goodwill. Which sounds ridiculous and like I have massive amounts of clothes, but honestly I still had some stuff from high school. High school. It was just a matter of actually removing them from my home.

Also went through closets and things and organized. Still have some to do, but I'm feeling good about it. I have a tendency to drive everyone around me crazy with my clutter because I live so totally in my head that it doesn't bother me but it bothers everyone else. But getting rid of stuff feels good.

+ I really need to stop reading about polygamist Mormon cults, but y'all, I can't stop. At this point, I feel like I know more about the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints than any person should know. BUT I CAN'T STOP READING.

+ Also reading The Family by Jeff Sharlet and it keeps plunging me into despair re: fundamentalist Christians. Since I'm also a Christian I feel like it is my job to battle the fundamentalist ones but that is a lot for one person to take on. I need some perspective.

+ I haven't been good at actually watching things lately? Slooooowly watching I Hear Your Voice and weeping over Lee Jung Suk's everything. It's so good. But I only manage one episode every few days. I need to finish You're the Best Lee Soon Shin and watch the last episode of Monstar and start Master's Sun, but for some reason my attention span when it comes to TV is very short right now.

+ And I was thinking about kdramas and how they seem bent on giving me a schoolboy kink. Oh, let's put Sung Joon and Myungsoo in school uniforms. Let's put Lee Jung Suk and Kim Woo Bin in school uniforms. Let's put Seo In Guk and Hoya in school uniforms. WHAT NEXT? I am trying not to be a dirty old lady, but kdramas are making it really hard.

+ I...do not really go to church anymore because it's just too hard for me to go and yet never actually talk to anyone. I know I should, but I don't. However, I read progressive theology blogs like ALL THE TIME. I have zero interest in ever going into ministry, but man, I would love to go to seminary just so I could geek out about theology. Nothing more fun.

+ Oh, and I’ve been thinking and I want some advice. ( cut for overexplaining and rambling )

Gah. For someone who leads an incredibly quiet life, this got long. Kudos to you if you managed to make it through that, and I totally understand if you didn't!

Stories are going up on infinitesanta and I want to shriek and clap my hands at all the goodies, and I wanted to come in here and yell, "IT'S LIKE CHRISTMAS!" except that I'm silly because it actually is Christmas that's the point.

BUT ANYWAY.

I'm halfway tempted to offer a drabble of your choice to whoever can guess which one's mine (not saying if it's up yet or if it'll be up later) but I think I'm way too obvious, so I won't do that. But Infinite people should go read because I am sure there's some glorious stuff over there.

SO EXCITED.

But I am not letting myself read right now no matter how badly I want to because I must finish my Yuletide fic which I may have not even started yet because I've been too busy writing all the Infinite fic but maybe it'll be okay because I really do work better under pressure.

+ First of all: I have been really, really bad at checking my flist lately. Sometimes I go to do it and it just feels like to much to scroll through it all. But the thing is: I want to engage with y'all, so if you ever have anything that you post that you think I might be interested in/that you want me to check out PLEASE tell me. Don't think of it as imposing on me at all--it isn't. As a matter of fact, it's so much easier for me to be given a link or even a "I just posted something new; you should check it out!" and get to your entry that way. So leave a comment on any post in my journal, send me a private message, email me, nudge me on tumblr--anything! I've been embarrassingly late to several posts lately because of my mental health stuff and I feel bad.

+ As always, the worst part of being an adult is the never-endingness of it all. As soon as I take care of this responsibility or that one, another three pop up. It's not like I can do everything I need to do get caught up and then take a breather for a while before the next thing comes. IT'S EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME. And my mental health issues make it so much harder to deal with because I have to have time to psych myself up before I do anything--even paying a bill online. It makes no sense but it is what it is. And since I'm edging perilously close to 26 (which seems so much more adult to me than 25 for some reason--maybe because I'm no longer in my early-20s omg that's terrifying I still feel exactly like I did when I was 16) I just feel like I'm never going to breeze through the adulthood thing the way I wish I could. Ugh.

+ So while I have obviously abandoned my original-novel-writing for NaNo, I did write 50,000 words this month! I mean, it was all fic (most of it gender!swap porn because I am me), but still! That's a lot of words! I'm proud of me! Now if only I could fuel all of that into my original fiction...bleck.

+ All of a sudden I cannot log into tumblr at work. Every time I click on the login link, it pops up briefly and before I can even type in my email address much less my password, it flips back to the homepage. IT IS SO FRUSTRATING. UUUUUUGH. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that we're still on IE here at work (which would be hilarious if it weren't ridiculous), but it just happened so suddenly--yesterday it was fine and now it isn't. I cleared out the cache and that still didn't help. And I am reminded of just how awful my tumblr-addiction is and this is probably a good thing. But I really wanted to tell Infinite fandom something!

+ I really hate the new updates page here. I'm using the old one till they pry it from my cold dead hands. Why do they think adding flash (or whatever it is) to everything is a good idea?

+ THE HOUR IS SO GOOD OMG SO GOOD SO GOOD SO GOOD. I just love that show so much and I thought there was no way it would be as good as last season but it totally is (plus bonus new ship and Marnie being a hbic!). Glorious show!

+ New Girl is also still good and Jess and Nick should just get married already. And Happy Endings continues to be crazy and delightful. The Good Wife is still pretty solid, Kalinda plotline aside (I hear they're going to be writing that one out quickly which THANK YOU). I think those are all the things I'm watching consistently at the moment?

+ Totally caught up on Lizzie Bennet Diaries and if you aren't watching it you definitely should be. I lovelovelove all the choices they're making adaptation-wise (especially with updating modern things that you wouldn't think would translate well to the new setting) and the actors are all so endearing and it's smart without being pretentious. Even if you're not an Austen fan, I think you'll still enjoy it. I like Austen but am not crazy about her, but I'm crazy about this.

Here are my three favorite (non-spoilery) things about it so far:

1. The fact that it's basically a study in introvert vs. extrovert. I don't think that any other version has done such a good job showing that the basic problem in the Lizzie-Darcy relationship is that Darcy is HUGELY SOCIALLY AWKWARD and doesn't know how to put people at their ease (because he's not at ease) and Lizzie misunderstands how aloofness and thinks it comes from arrogance and THAT IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM. I lovelovelove it.

2. The characterizations. For one thing, Lizzie is lovely and wonderful but she also makes BIG MISTAKES and can be mean sometimes. I love that they really show her flaws instead of making her some perfect heroine. On the other end of the spectrum we have the characters who are treated so very well--Lydia's always been a vivid character, but here she's lovable and adorbs(!) and you see so much more going on with her and I just love her to death. And Caroline! Instead of just being a stuck-up villain, she seems very real to me--even when she's not being nice, I still really understand her and care about her. And Ricky Collins is hysterical omg instead of odious. Basically it's all sunshine and lollipops.

3. The lady relationships!!!! SO MANY OF THEM. THEY'RE SO IMPORTANT. YAY!

+ Saw Skyfall, had some problems with it, but I still really enjoyed the overall experience even though I understand why some people weren't happy with it. Want a Moneypenny movie. Ben Wishaw should be in everything.

+ Question: is Idris Elba really officially being considered to be the next Bond or is that just an internet thing that ran away with itself? Because YES PLEASE.

+ Thanksgiving was good. A nice break and REALLY GOOD FOOD and some quieter family times.

+ Here, have a song off of Sunggyu's solo album. It's not even slightly kpop-y and is also excellent! Featuring a badass lady bassist and Kim Myungsoo's stupid face/horrible acting! Everything I love in life, pretty much!

Y'all, one of my readers I've been talking to on aff is twelve years old. How did I find this out? She mentioned she wished she could write as well as I do (aww!) and I told her to just keep writing--I've been writing almost every day for over twelve years now, and after that time you do get better. And she said, "Would you believe that's how long I've been alive?" And I was like



When I told her I was 25, she was like, "Wow, most k-stans aren't that. Uh. Age." TELLING ME I'M ANCIENT. I was so amused, I had to mention that I come from a fandom where I have friends who are grandmas and they're lovely.

But I feel kind of guilty that this twelve-year-old is out there ready my Infinite porn. I have to remind myself that most of my fandom friends started reading smutty stuff that young--I didn't, actually, because I was just in one fandom for so long and that fandom was centered around a series of message boards where you really couldn't post anything higher than PG-13 (and I was really innocent in real life, too). So I was seventeen or so when I stumbled upon the smutty side of fandom. But y'all are all fine! And I feel like it's better that she's reading stuff that was written for her gaze than it would be her watching mainstream porn that tells her she's just an object.

Still, I'm currently feeling very maternal, wanting to pat her on the head and tell her to stick to the PG-rated stuff. Not that I will. But it feels different knowing there are twelve-year-olds reading my smut!



Speaking of which, the other day lil sis and I had the "if I die, make sure to burn my laptop before our parents can see it" conversation. And she was like, "What do you have on there?" And I said, "Just stuff I'm not comfortable with them seeing." And she said, "You don't write porn, do you? Please tell me you don't write porn. Please."

YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN HOW COOL I PLAYED THAT. I was like, "Does that sound like me?" with a perfectly straight face.

And she thought about it and said, "No, it really doesn't," and wandered off quite happy. SO I DIDN'T LIE. But I wasn't going to say yes when I knew she'd be completely horrified by it.

And to think: six months ago, I could have said, "No, I don't" and meant it. And now I'm completely corrupted. I blame this guy:






And now I need to go write for NaNo. It's only three days in, but I've only written 1,000 words because I've been too busy writing lots of thousands of words of Infinite fic. I've been telling myself I'll actually buckles down and write when I get ONE MORE COMMENT on my last chapter, but it's been a while and that hasn't happened yet, so I need to just actually do it.

Tonight I was going to go to a potluck with the single's group from church (not a meet-someone-to-marry singles group, just a we-hang-out-and-we-aren't-married-like-everyone-else group). I should have gone. I really should have. But I stayed home instead and continued to write, and I'm telling myself that when I get published I can look back at this and think, "That was a good decision because it gave me more practice which made me a better writer."

I'm choosing to ignore the fact that what I wrote was 7,000 words of cracky gender!swap Infinite fic where Sungyeol wakes up as a girl. Because that is irrelevant.

Y'all, I am so, so bad at socializing. So bad. I am also bad at not writing weird fic.

I wanna write some WooYeol fic before I have to drop everything for NaNo. So...prompt me? We'll see if anything gets me writing?