the magic which takes place when stupid meets badass

I was toying with the idea of signing up for the Unthemed Flash Exchange. I made some nominations, then sat down to cobble together a sign-up from my previous ones. ( cut for having feelings about fandom & fic exchanges )

OTW intransigence on anti-racism, and now its deeply weird shittiness around AI, is just sort of reinforcing/underlining a lot of this negativity on my part, I think. Sharing a hobby does not make a community: this is something I understood from the beginning wrt knitting, but I guess now 20 years on is the time to apply it to fanfic.

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Another fantastic essay about Jordan Neely: One Nation Under Fear - Part 1: Jordan Neely Was a Person by A.R. Moxon.

eta The Rambam's handwriting, holy shit!

I finished reading Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This earlier this week. It's phenomenal, both hilariously funny and hugely, deeply, moving; if I'm able, I'll try to write up my thoughts.

Now I'm reading David Copperfield and I honestly cannot get enough of it. Also Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, ditto.

I'm starting to realize that quitting meme, especially BFE, cold turkey was probably the best thing I did this year in terms of self-care. And that includes getting vaccinated. Just like Twitter, it was a timesuck and relentless firehose of terrible opinions that left me feeling alienated and lost and constantly on the defensive.

(Disclaimer: I'm sure individual posters are lovely people who are wonderfully thoughtful and take the time to craft interesting opinions. It's about the aggregate experience for me.)

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There are a couple interesting non-exchange things happening or getting underway:

• Rimming flash fest for the Feast of Ass? HMMMM?
  
• Now to Win at the Other Hugo: Digress like a 19th-Century Novelist, yearlong for 2022. Much like rimming, I approve of any and all digressions and tangents and, ah. Deep dives.
  
• sapphic stocking stuffers, femslashy, happening now.

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That stocking-stuffer fest, the recent opening of femslashex, and the chatter around the new rarefemslashexchange has reminded me how bad I am at the various streams of f/f fannishness. I was never into what I always thought of as Handsome Pantsuit Cops & Lawyers femslash fandom, like on L&O and Rizzoli & Isles; I'm too squeamish and over-sensitive for the much edgier "terrible beautiful, often high-femme women being terrible to each other, maybe with vivisection" vibe that's around now.

This is just weird and sad, given that I'm, you know. A lesbian. Then I thought about how a lot of lesbian lit doesn't work for me, either.

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I've been stupidly, yet profoundly, annoyed by the jokey SLANDER of Melville quoted in the promo post for the digression fest for a while now. This short piece from Nature is a pretty good rebuttal: Cetology: How science inspired Moby-Dick; the philosophical implications of classifications and monsters and the Unknowable from that one chapter alone are immeasurable. Not to mention the literary achievement!

But anyway who tf cares about this besides me. My nerd-rage has at least inspired me to sit down and reread Moby-Dick in the new year, along with the following two books, if not more. I began the phenomenal Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals this year but I will start over anew. Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of “Moby-Dick” looks amazing.

A/some fic(s) I wrote went live in a/some exchange(s) this weekend and my emotions are all over the map. I got a little burst of kudos and even comments at first, and I was over the moon. It's been a very long while since I got comments/interaction from anyone but a few friends, and I'd honestly forgotten just how great it feels. I made that! And people are telling me nice things about it!

(Insert disclaimer here about how ~art must be for yourself and the muse~ not craven comment-seeking blah blah. I know that; I kept writing and posting when even crickets weren't around.)

Then this morning my happiness crashed. Partly because I really fucked up the friendships with those few commenters, and I need to do something about that, and I don't know what to do because I am a coward. But also, even more immediately, because recs started getting made and my stuff wasn't mentioned. This reminded me of that Ask Metafilter recs thing that happened last summer with like 500 recs...

Anyway, I'm going to stop whining now. I feel like I forever need to sort out my various emotional needs (and problems) from the act of writing. Maybe that's very obvious?

I really should find a new hobby so I can whine about something different on here.

haha, I don't know how this keeps happening to me. Is it a function of writing in a large ship? Is it just because I'm unclear? I write what I think is dub-con, and it's dismissed as too fluffy. I write what's very clearly a character's rape fantasy, and I'm criticized for not including *aftercare*. I write what I assumed was a cheerful threesome and apparently it's *dub-con* because one guy wasn't AS into it as the others.

I know the answer is to stop caring but I've yet to figure out how to do that.

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Oh, hey, I can do Wednesday reading!

Stones, Timothy Findley. I'm about halfway through these stories. I haven't read any Findley in *ages*, which I regret. His style is nearly translucent, so clean, yet the subject matter invariably somehow squirmy and dark. I love this. I'd forgotten that short stories can be as surprising and full of unexpected turns as any novel, but I really needed the reminder.

Up next, new novels by my two favourite living lesbian authors - The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman and Heyday by Marnie Woodrow.

Feedback like that realllllllllly helps with my stupid hangups about fluff, yeah.

Another writing check-in:
I *think* my smutswap piece is just about finished. The beta said it was fine, phew. Without even meaning to, I then came up with something even darker and more non-conny over the weekend and kind of hate myself for it right now; I don't think I'll write *that* particular scene.

I keep looking at other smutswap requests for possible treat-writing. I guess I'm just still in a super-porny place.

The last several days, I've been working on weaving together those two Finn/Poe fics that (probably) want to be the same story. Christ, it's draining, sort of like editing turned up to 11, because I'm editing both at the same time (and they have *such* different tones) but also editing them toward the imaginary third, synthesis story they'll become. It's good experience, I guess. Character building.

There's a big hole right at the end, about two scenes from the end, where a lot of motivation pivots. And I have NO IDEA how to dramatize those changes. I'm setting it aside for a couple/several days to see if something stews or congeals in the back of my mind. It would be *fantastic* if the problem solved itself, but that's really dreaming big.

I should concentrate on the s2b2 hipsters fic this week, since it's due the 19th. As part of motivating/spurring myself, I actually contacted an artist to see if I could commission an illustration for it, eek. (Because clearly I'm rolling in money.) The vague overall idea I have for the story -- meet cute, then get pulled apart due to misunderstandings for almost two years, then meet up again with ~issues -- is decent, but I think it might be too complicated. Maybe they should just bang. Ironically. In between silkscreening t-shirts or whatever.

I did have something of an ~insight into contemporary aesthetics' references to past technology's effects - like all the cross-processing filters and Polaroid filters on Instagram, etc. - something about needing to feel like you've existed in a historical moment, and the *look* of history is better than nothing. But I don't think Finn or Poe are at all inclined that way to have an organic thought like that in the story itself. :/

eta artist turned me down; currently awash in self-loathing for ever even thinking of having asked. great.

I wrote a thing yesterday:
Molt DW | AO3
R, KStew/CTheron, secretly dragons

It was for the fan_flashworks transformation challenge. First thing I managed to finish and post in two months; it's short and not great but I felt okay about it. A post made five minutes later in the comm got an insta-rec from the mod. So that happened.

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I can't write my Yuletide letter. The prospect of saying what I like and what I want feels utterly impossible. GDI.

I have so many posts drafted and rejected, both in my head and in NoteTab, but it's all so negative. ( writing & reviewing )

I wrote something. I wasn't going to do Yuletide, but I am an inveterate pinch-hitter (because, despite my grouchiness, I am a big softie, too). I could not pass up emei's fantastic prompts.

I can be productive when it's anonymous, whether for kinkmemes or YT. That's weird.

Anyway.

A Magic World
Valerie Solanas, RPF, Adult, Lesbionic
"In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world."
Contains references to sexual and physical abuse as well as political/politicized violence.

Here at AO3. ( Navel-gazing )

More jumbled thoughts, foodish and foolish: ( ... )

This feels like an allegory of my life: ( boring household crap )

In other news, I think I do not understand, at a truly fundamental level, how to write idfic. This might well jeopardize the, uh. Idfic that's coming due.

I'm here but not, feeling alienated and off-key. The meta environment seems to have turned from obliviously exclusionary to actively hostile. I just don't trust my words to say what I think and I don't trust what I think to mean very much.

The rest of the ficlets I owe are coming, I promise. Apologies for the delay, truly.