something queer going on

1) I am legally in possession of a new name!

The process was more awkward than it should have been, because I foolishly relied on information from a co-worker who had just changed his name, rather than calling the court to check. Co-worker told me that (a) all the hearings are over Google Meet only, and when I checked the form I was sent, it did say in small print on the bottom "All hearings are on Google Meet," and (b) the judge wouldn't ask me any detailed reasons for the change, and "personal reasons" was sufficient, which was also what the clerk told me when I was filling out the form.

I'm sure nobody deliberately misled me (my guess is that my co-worker saw a different judge with different procedures), but neither thing turned out to be quite true.

( Click for more )

2) Not much else is going on. My life is dull, apart from looking at the news in ever-mounting horror.

I want to stop getting my news from Twitter, in part because I'm in the process of leaving Twitter altogether. I'd like to support actual journalism by subscribing to an actual newspaper, but my god, the options are grim. ( Click for more )

3) I'm not even reading much. I buy a zillion books (on sale, on Kindle, yes I know), but the general state of everything everywhere is making me hugely risk-averse when I can be. So I re-read, or look at YouTube videos of Dylan Hollis baking or the chocolate guy making fully-functional superconducting supercolliders filled with raspberry ganache, or I watch low-stakes British comedy panel shows.

However, I am reading one thing I've never read before: The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's translation. Recently Twitter had another round of ignorant right-wing douchebros giving her shit about how bad and woke her translations of Homer are, so I bought one.

( Click for more )

3) A bit late to mention this, but I wrote a thing for Yuletide.

Puppets (2312 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Astreiant Series - Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Philip Eslingen/Nicolas Rathe
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding
Summary: It's only an old story.


This is a story idea I may revisit at some point; there are things I'd like to explore about Astreiant's matriarchy without having a deadline at the most exhausting time of the year for me, and also not needing to keep the result suitable for gift-giving. (Basically: what if Astreiant had a men's rights movement? But even in the very different context of an actual matriarchy where men actually do have fewer rights than women, I realize that "men's rights movement" is not a phrase to necessarily spark joy.)

I don't know if it's perverse of me to want to focus on that (maybe? I tend to have the urge to pick a canon up and shake it). And I don't think Scott presents Astreiant as a utopia at all; I do however think some fans see it as one. Which requires a certain effort of will--while men in Astreiant have a lot more rights than European women did at the period the Points series is based on, the inequalities are still clear. (To be fair to utopian readers, though, the canon of the Points books is shall we say variable, so some picking and choosing is inevitable.)

If I ever actually wrote all the fics I intend to write someday . . . I'd have a lot more fics.

Within about 12 of hours of my telling myself, "I would love to read some Taskmaster fic once I'm caught up on the show, and maybe I'll request it for Yuletide, but I don't think I'll ever write any," I of course got a story idea.

The initial idea proved unworkable, but now I have a different idea that I'm liking a lot.

Thinking a bit about RPF and major real-world events in fic; under the spoiler cut thing.

I haven't written any RPF in a while, and now I'm thinking again about method. My current preference is to treat the show essentially as fiction: what's on screen is canon, while off-screen information such as interviews is not (though it can be incorporated if useful). It's a little bit tricky because I'm really really interested in the boundaries and bleed-through between stage personas and real life. But a lot of that is in the text already: onscreen we have Greg's adoring personal assistant Little Alex Horne, and sometimes something closer to what is presumably the actual Alex Horne who has a wife and kids and who is pretty much in charge of the show, plus a whole lot of gradations between them.

Maybe it's partly laziness: I don't want to do a research deep dive into Alex and Greg. Partly it's ostrich-ness: I don't want to find out that either of them is actually terrible (e.g. a homophobe, a TERF, a Tory). Partly it's my own preferences as a writer: I like having enough canon to inspire and not enough to constrain.

I used to be much more of a research fiend. Maybe I've been influenced by Our Flag Means Death to use what's interesting and leave the rest.

Another thing I've been musing on is how we include real life tragedies in fic. I just watched S10, the first season filmed during the COVID pandemic, and the story I want to write is, in part, about COVID. Specifically about COVID-related changes to how the show is made, and the effects COVID precautions have had on all our lives. It's not going to be about anybody getting sick. (And I did a cursory google to see if either Alex or Greg had family who died of COVID, and it seems they didn't. I would have shelved the idea if they had.)

On the one hand: using a mass death event as background to a story about other things, oh dear. On the other hand: COVID happened to all of us. A COVID fic isn't a disaster-tourism fic. COVID is, within certain boundaries, my story to tell as much as anyone else's. And I'm finding that I want to write about COVID. I want to begin reckoning with it. It's not over; its effects are ongoing, not just what looks like a new surge but the constant emergence of new long-COVID and post-COVID medical problems. But it's been three and a half years, and for better or worse, we have moved out of "beat the pandemic" mode and into "the pandemic is part of our lives forever." Many of us aren't the same people we were before, even if we were lucky enough to neither lose someone nor get seriously sick ourselves. We've had to consider togetherness and isolation, social ties and what they mean and what makes them real, in a way many of us never have before.

Thoughts welcome on any of this as I continue to ponder.

A quick final note: I finally realized what it is about Little Alex Horne that feels so familiar and appealing to me. The light dawned when Greg Davies made a joke about Alex's love for admin: LAH-Alex is Drumknott.* Or at least of the Drumknott type, with enough differences to keep it interesting.

(*Rufus Drumknott is secretary to the benevolent-ish tyrant Lord Vetinari in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I wrote both a Drumknott/Vetinari ship manifesto and a longish fic about them. Admin is Drumknott's superpower; the climax of one novel involves him conducting an audit of a villain's business. I love him.)

For the purposes of writing an incredibly self-indulgent bit of fluff, I would like to know about day spas, beauty treatments, that kind of thing--ones done for fun, relaxation, or "self care," not so much the medical/medicalized ones. It's not something I have personal experience with.

I know I can google what sorts of treatments exist, but I also want to know what they're like subjectively, and I can't easily google that.

If you can help out, I've got three questions:

(1) What spa/massage/beauty treatment type things have you experienced?

(2) Which ones felt especially luxurious or pampering?

(3) Which ones, if any, were weird, uncomfortable, or unpleasant?


All replies welcome, whether we know each other or not. Anon commenting is on if you prefer. And signal-boosting would be great!

8. Squicks - What are some things that squick you in fandom - not necessarily "icky", though it can be. From anything involving blood, to bad grammar.

I'm squicked in general by gory/graphically violent/icky of the kind that squicks a lot of people.

Specific to fanfic, which I think is where the question was heading, and taking squick to mean "strong aversion without a moral component"--so not quite my own more limited definition of squick, and also not meaning serious bad stuff like if the fic is racist--I think my biggest squick is the dread Out of Character. I'm very there for interpretation of character, but when the changes are so extreme that I can't see how the author got there from canon, I'm not interested in reading it. (I read fic because I like, or am interested in, the characters, so why bother with what are essentially different characters using the same names?)

Similarly, I tend to be perhaps irrationally irritated by most AUs. When someone's circumstances are completely different, you're unlikely to get the same kind of person. In OFMD, just to pick an example completely at random, Ed has been shaped by a lifetime of piracy. If he'd spent the last 35 years being a baker, he wouldn't be Ed! Not all AUs are implausible, of course, but a lot of them are. And to be blunt, I don't understand the impulse to take the characters out of an interesting world and put them in a mundane one. A pirate ship is a lot more interesting than a bakery! (Of course a good writer can make a bakery interesting. But (a) I'd rather in that case that it was a story set in a bakery from the start, and (b) I'd still rather read about pirates.) I can understand the urge in the opposite direction, taking characters from a mundane setting and giving them superpowers or putting them on a generation ship headed for the next galaxy. But the fandoms I interact with tend to be genre shows and the AUs go away from sff instead of towards it.

I sometimes have fandom-specific squicks, which are usually bits of fanon I particularly dislike. For instance, I will back out of OFMD fics where Ed uses lots of endearments for Stede (or even if Stede uses them for Ed, if it's a lot). And it's a popular thing because people think it's sweet, even though canonically Ed never says that kind of thing and Stede uses an endearment exactly once that I recall, when he calls his wife "darling" at the moment of their incredibly awkward, pained reunion.

Other squicks, for this loose definition of squicks that's more like pet peeves: the trope overriding the character, too many fannish or pop culture in-jokes*, not bothering to do even a little research, and, yes, bad grammar. I know people say that the ability to write correct grammar and the ability to tell a good story don't necessarily correlate, but in my experience, they do. (Perhaps because good writers who know they have trouble with grammar get their stories beta read. Writers who put them up unbeta-ed aren't bothering about other details either.)


*I understand the temptation of in-jokes. I put a few (I like to think of them as Easter eggs) into Also Known as Blackbeard, because I spent a huge amount of time working on that story in a very disciplined way and I had to indulge myself somehow. I have no idea if anybody's noticed any of them.


Full list of questions ( under the cut )

I've seen this in various places around my timelines--don't know the origin--and I thought it was interesting.

1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.

A sad middle-aged man falls in love with another sad middle-aged man. Together they become slightly less sad, but not completely un-sad because they have Regrets, and also because eventually they will die.

There are variations (sometimes a sad young man falls in love with a sad middle-aged man! or even another sad young man!), but this basic pattern is in many, many of my fics.


2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

I don't really think of tropes that way. Which isn't to say my fic doesn't have tropes, but they tend to turn up spontaneously as I write rather than being something I set out to write.

Nevertheless, I've been toying for a while now with the idea of a marriage (or probably matelotage) fic for Our Flag Means Death. Not, alas for my very faint hopes of becoming a big name in the fandom, because I have anything very romantic in mind, but because I don't. Matelotage seems to have been fundamentally a property arrangement, and so was marriage in this period, and I'm interested in how that works with/against ideas of romantic love. Particularly in a Stede/Ed context, because Stede has been through a marriage that was entirely about property and it made him (and his wife) miserable--would he actually want to marry again?

If I'm consciously, deliberately invoking a trope I'm probably trying to subvert it.


3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

Lots of them. Omegaverse springs immediately to mind, and its cousin mpreg. Soulbonds, especially the kind where destined partners get a visible mark to help them find each other. None of it's really my thing.

Having said this, I will now probably get a burning urge to write 100% sincere soulbond mpreg omegaverse, but I will try to fight it off.


4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

There's the fic I'm writing, which is about witchcraft and queerness and the ocean, and there's the marriage/matelotage vague idea mentioned above, and that's about it. I seldom overflow with fic ideas.

1) This will be the first weekend* in three months when I'm not working on the fic. (*Sunday-Monday is my weekend.)

It feels weird. I kind of wish I had a new fic to work on. I don't have any ideas yet, though, apart from maybe a short and massively depressing fic about Ed's mother, because when I was writing the big story I acquired head-canon about her life. Or, alternatively, I've found myself strongly tempted to take certain tropes I see a lot in the fandom and write something better than what I've seen elsewhere. But what I really want is another huge, hugely absorbing monster of a story, because while it was enormously hard work, it was so much fun!!

. . . Izzy? Izzy Hands, and how he got that way, and what happened next? He's the character who interests me most after Ed and Stede, and I definitely have ideas/thoughts about him. But, damn, my Ed fic is plenty dark already. An Izzy story would be like "yeah, let's wander down to the pit of despair and STAY THERE FOREVER, tormented and tormenting others. 'This is hell, nor am I out of it.'"

Stuff to contemplate, I guess. Meanwhile, my plans for the weekend involve further re-reading of the Aubrey & Maturin novels, and reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home which I picked up a couple of weeks ago, and maybe re-watching OFMD again, and maybe trying out the Sandman series. I'm a bit nervous about that, because I think the comics were mostly great, sometimes transcendent, and I worry that the show will be less wild and weird, all tamed down a bit to be comprehensible to a mainstream TV audience.


2) I've rewarded myself for finishing the story with stuff. This ring, and some teas from Tea Source, whose shop I used to frequent when I lived in Minneapolis/St. Paul. (I got gyokuro, genmaicha, and some otsuka saemidori, which I've never had but which sounds intriguing--I love the brothy quality of some Japanese green teas.)


3) Still on the subject of buying myself treats, I've been wanting to try scents again. I thought about buying more BPAL stuff, and actually had a virtual cart full of samples (including some I've tried before that I wanted to see what they were like fresh--a lot of my old BPAL stuff came secondhand from other people--and how they would work on me now that my body chemistry has changed due to testosterone). But I couldn't get past the fact that I feel like BPAL is over-rated. The company's aesthetic, their general fan-friendliness in several senses, tends to overwhelm what I feel is the mediocrity of their fragrances. (By "mediocrity" I don't mean in any objective sense--I have no knowledge of perfumery whatsoever. I just mean that I've tried 30-50 of their scents, and while I liked some of them quite a bit, not one has ever made me go "wow." I've never loved a BPAL scent as much as, say, I loved Chanel No. 19 back in the long-ago day. Actually I've thought about re-trying Chanel No. 19, which is widely considered a unisex scent, but apparently it's been reformulated a lot since ca. 1988 when I wore it.) Also, my experience with BPAL has been that almost all their stuff skews very sweet and feminine, even when the promo text claims it's masculine/fresh/herbal/whatever.

Anyway, I ended up checking out Luckyscent and discovered that a lot of their samples of serious high-end fragrances are about the same price as BPAL imps. So yesterday I ordered some stuff, despite the fact that the 10% off coupon code I was promised in exchange for giving them my email address never arrived. When my samples arrive and I start trying them out, I'll post about it.


4) In vastly less self-indulgent news, I've been called for jury duty. It starts at the end of this month and could potentially last until mid-November. I am not delighted. It won't cause any financial hardship--my job actually makes up the pay differential for any normal working hours you spent on jury duty--but I will have to use my legal name, which I haven't used voluntarily in years. I don't want to out myself at trans to the whole goddamn court, so I'll have to go "girl mode," which will be interesting considering I don't own any women's clothes, my haircut is very masc, etc. I tend to be seen, correctly, as male these days at least until I speak, so the bathroom situation is likely to be interesting.

Plus, if I actually get placed on a jury, it'll likely mean working 6 days a week, since court days are M-F and Saturday is a working day for me.

No love for this. I guess it's a kick in the pants to finally get my legal name change?

Second draft of the fic is finished: it now stands at just shy of 48,000 words. I started writing it almost exactly two months ago, on April 29. (At least, that's when it first got saved on here as an unfinished draft, for backup.)

This is the point where I had planned to get a beta-reader, or several. And now I don't know if I will. I've made so many huge changes already that, honestly, the last thing I want is to be told that it needs more. And I wouldn't ask for a line-by-line beta of a fic this long.

Anybody have thoughts on the question? Bear in mind that this thing has no plot. It's 48,000 words of Things That Happened to Ed and His Feelings About Them. But it does (I hope) have structure and emotional coherence, which is certainly something a beta could read for. And I really like the ending, which works for me, but I'd like to be more sure it'll work for other people.

I'm planning to give it one more pass regardless to tidy up some sentences, fix typos, avoid using the same word eight times in a row, and that kind of thing. (How to tell that the word you've decided your character uses for a body part is not really "transparent"--you start to wonder if you're overusing it. But does it need to be transparent in that way? I dunno, I have no brain left.)


ETA: I've decided to put on my big boy pants and get a beta reader. It would be silly, after so much work, to let the fic go out without making it as good as possible.

I'm about 3/4 done with the second draft of the fic, and beginning to think about how I'll post it to AO3. I've never posted anything this long before and I'm wondering what the most reader-friendly (and also, because I'm greedy, comment- and kudos-friendly) way to do it is.

Please feel free to respond even if you don't know/care about this fandom or this particular fic. I'm interested in general reading preferences.

I will note that the fic has a natural break point about halfway through, but there aren't natural/obvious break points for 3, 4, or more pieces.

I've just read a very good fic that demonstrates (among other things) that consent and good communication can be extremely sexy indeed.

But (and this is not a criticism of that fic, to be clear), it occurs to me that in every fic I've seen do that, the communication is always ultimately yes, and the consent is always ultimately given. Maybe there are issues, maybe someone's traumatized about something or just plain nervous, and overcoming that to get to a place of joyous consent and pleasure is the point.

What I don't think I've ever seen--and I admit I haven't been looking for it, or indeed reading much fic at all for a long time--is a fic that's focused on communication and consent, but where the communication is no. No, I don't want to do this specific act. No I don't want this, I don't enjoy this. And (this is the key part) where the result is still good joyous loving consensual sex. (NB I'm not talking about fic where a character is asexual and doesn't want to have sex at all. That's its own category; I mean characters who want to have sex together but where certain things are off-limits.)

No doubt it exists, because everything exists somewhere in fanfic. But I'll bet it isn't nearly as common as the other kind.


By the way, the very good fic in question is this one. ( Details and rec under the cut )

And the draft is done. 31,630 words. 66 manuscript pages.

It needs so much editing. (Including for things like, oh crap, I forgot these two characters were still on the ship and I have to thread mentions of them back through the last several scenes.) But for now, it's done.

I may actually leave the house and buy myself a present.