Importing a Meme from Tumblr
Dec. 13th, 2023 08:27 pmTagged by
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sanguinity , thank you! No clue who might want to take part so I'm not tagging anyone, but I promise, if you want to share then I want to read!
1. How many works do you have on AO3?
92, 10 of which are collections of multiple ficlets
2. What's your total AO3 wordcount?
163,717
3. What fandoms do you write for?
I don't really have a fandom I consider myself "in" right now; I've been struggling to write anything at all for a couple years, so any fandom that I have a solid idea for I'll try to see if I can get some words out. Most recently I've completed fics for Vorkosigan Saga, Criminal Minds, and D.K. Broster's Flight of the Heron; I've started but not completed fics for Stargate: Atlantis, White Collar, and Teen Wolf.
4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?
A Lonely, Lost Thing, MCU, Rhodey & Tony MIT gen/pre-slash
500 mL, MCU, Bruce/Tony watersports PWP
The Floor Under Our Feet Whispers, Teen Wolf, Sheriff/Derek fluffy get-together
The Tender Solemn Dawn-Time, MCU, Rhodey & Tony MIT fluffy pre-slash
Three Decades, Three Proposals, MCU, Rhodey/Tony sappiness
5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?
I try. I've failed a lot at it, though I do still intend to respond to all comments I haven't previously responded to. You know. Someday.
6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?
I don't write very much angst in general, and certainly don't write very many angsty endings! But I do have two breakup fics in my catalog:
my tired soul on fire, My Dearly Beloved Detective, Shirley Holmes/Jane Watson
Annul a Want, MCU, Melinda May/Natasha Romanov
7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?
This was a surprisingly hard question to answer! I think the majority of my fics are happy, overall, but I don't think of them as having happy *endings* because I don't actually picture them as having discreet endings at all. Much of what I write is sort of snapshot-like, deliberately constructed in a way that hopefully the reader leaves the fic with a sense of the world outside/before/beyond it.
So here, have the fic I've written that makes *me* happiest:
Get Their Good Tidings, MCU, Rhodey/Tony landscape porn reunion fic
8. Do you get hate on fics?
I don't think I've ever gotten anything I'd outright categorize as hate, luckily; I've gotten a couple fics where people objected to a narrative choice I made in a way that made it clear they felt it was morally objectionable, but they were reasonably polite about it.
9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?
Heck yes, it's what I consider my comfort zone as a writer. I particularly like kink fic, because I love smut that also serves as insight into the characters, and kink fic is GREAT for that. Plus I just like kink! Not all of my smut is cerebral, plenty of it is just designed to be hot.
10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?
Not really. I've written a couple fusions, but the only true crossover I've written is this ficlet:
11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?
I have. It was a weird experience. It happened here on tumblr! Someone let me know anonymously that they had seen someone post one of my fics as their own, in a different fandom (so all they had done was change the characters' names). I went to the person's tumblr, verified that it was mine, messaged the person asking them to take it down and messaging the few people that had reblogged it letting them know that it was stolen. (It had less than 20 notes at the time, I think.) I went back to the thief's blog later and they had deleted the post and then posted a bunch of text posts talking about how they were spiralling emotionally. Which. . . yeah, I still don't know what to do with that.
12. Have you ever had a fic translated?
Yes! My Elementary ficlets (those that existed in 2019) were translated into Russian, here. Which, of course, I can't read, but it's deeply flattering!
13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?
sanguinity and I have a joint project. Like she said in her post, it's great fun and I also hope we finish it one of these days!
14. What’s your all time favourite ship?
Nope.
15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?
All of them! Not only am I in this multi-year slump, even before that I had a terrible record of picking projects back up and finishing them once I initially set them down.
16. What are your writing strengths?
Characterization and the telling detail.
17. What are your writing weaknesses?
Plot. Generally making things happen, creating a sense of forward momentum.
18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?
I've never written a character where it was necessary for me to develop thoughts on writing dialogue in another language. Which is nice, because I have no doubt that I would completely overthink it!
19. First fandom you wrote for?
MCU/Iron Man movies
20. Favourite fic you’ve written?
Also nope. Look, I just don't really do favorites. Everything has its pluses and minuses, my favorite is totally dependent on mood and how I'm defining "favorite" in that particular moment.
AO3 Stats Meme
Aug. 20th, 2023 03:33 pmStolen from sanguinity .
Rules: Give us the links to your fics with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and least words.
Most Hits: 500mL, 17K+ hits
Kinky PWP for a large slash pairing in a megafandom, written as a response to a kinkmeme prompt back when the kinkmeme was really active - this one is not surprising at all. I'm still fond of it though! Avengers, Bruce/Tony, watersports + manhandling.
Most Kudos & Bookmarks: A Lonely, Lost Thing, 689 kudos, 152 bookmarks
Technically gen fic, but it was pre-slash. Again, in a megafandom and written as a response to a kinkmeme prompt back when the kinkmeme was active, but this time a rare pair! This was conceived as the first fic in a giant sprawling poly series, but I only ever got to some of my Rhodey/Tony pieces before I lost confidence in it.
Most Comment Threads: Sudden and Silent in its Arrival, 39 comment threads.
This one was a multi-chapter fic posted in installments, which does increase comment threads. Still Avengers, but Pepper/Rhodey/Tony AU fic that I banged out in my most successful NaNoWriMo, so I was quite pleased with the reception.
Most Words: Sudden and Silent in its Arrival again, 24K words.
The longest thing I've ever written, by a lot! Someday I would really like to write something lengthy again. It was such a different feeling experience, to get so immersed in the world of the fic. My little ficlets don't take up anywhere near that amount of brain space!
Least Words: Killers, 150 words
Mad Max: Fury Road fic! I'm quite fond of it, actually, though I was never very deep in the fandom and only wrote this one fic for it. Written for Drabbletag6 in the femslash100 community on LiveJournal. You will notice, it is not actually a drabble! I love ficlets, but 100 words is just SO short. My ideas I think most comfortably fit in 300-500 word range.
Because I am very multi-fannish, I cannot let this post stand with almost exclusively Avengers fic on it! So I'm also going to post the first non-Avengers fic in each category:
Most Hits (non-Avengers): Control, 5.6K hits, 8th most hits overall
Inception, Arthur/Saito, watersports PWP. Apparently the key to hits is slash watersports PWPs? I like this one better than the Bruce/Tony one, though, because it's one of those fics that turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. That's a rare thing!
Most Kudos & Bookmarks (non-Avengers): The Floor Under Our Feet Whispers, 456 kudos, 104 bookmarks, 3rd most kudos & bookmarks overall
Teen Wolf, Derek Hale/Sheriff Stilinski, fluffy get-together fic with a hint of praise kink. Very rare pair in a mega fandom; I had no idea how this one would be received, but I was pleasantly surprised! I think I successfully tapped into the fandom's desire for Derek to have nice things.
Most Comment Threads (non-Avengers): In the Shape of You, 15 comment threads, 5th most comment threads overall
Okay, I cheated. It's the Teen Wolf fic again. But this Warehouse 13 fic is just below it! And since it's femslash, I'm going to exclude the TW fic to get more diversity on my board here. Besides, I'm very fond of how this came out - it was experimental for me, writing a ficlet for each of 10 prompts, each of which can stand on its own, but together they tell a complete story. Myka/Helena, angst with a happy(ish) ending.
Most Words (non-Avengers): Your Want is Bigger Than You, 6K words, 3rd most words overall
Elementary, Joan/Ms. Hudson, most important tag here is "Everything is Better with Dragons." I'm very happy with this fic too, because it gave me the opportunity to put a bunch of ideas I had floating around in my head about Ms. Hudson's role as a muse and how possessiveness works in polyamorous relationships onto paper. And the audience that found the fic seemed to resonate with those thoughts! Which is a lovely feeling.
sanguinity .Rules: Give us the links to your fics with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and least words.
Most Hits: 500mL, 17K+ hits
Kinky PWP for a large slash pairing in a megafandom, written as a response to a kinkmeme prompt back when the kinkmeme was really active - this one is not surprising at all. I'm still fond of it though! Avengers, Bruce/Tony, watersports + manhandling.
Most Kudos & Bookmarks: A Lonely, Lost Thing, 689 kudos, 152 bookmarks
Technically gen fic, but it was pre-slash. Again, in a megafandom and written as a response to a kinkmeme prompt back when the kinkmeme was active, but this time a rare pair! This was conceived as the first fic in a giant sprawling poly series, but I only ever got to some of my Rhodey/Tony pieces before I lost confidence in it.
Most Comment Threads: Sudden and Silent in its Arrival, 39 comment threads.
This one was a multi-chapter fic posted in installments, which does increase comment threads. Still Avengers, but Pepper/Rhodey/Tony AU fic that I banged out in my most successful NaNoWriMo, so I was quite pleased with the reception.
Most Words: Sudden and Silent in its Arrival again, 24K words.
The longest thing I've ever written, by a lot! Someday I would really like to write something lengthy again. It was such a different feeling experience, to get so immersed in the world of the fic. My little ficlets don't take up anywhere near that amount of brain space!
Least Words: Killers, 150 words
Mad Max: Fury Road fic! I'm quite fond of it, actually, though I was never very deep in the fandom and only wrote this one fic for it. Written for Drabbletag6 in the femslash100 community on LiveJournal. You will notice, it is not actually a drabble! I love ficlets, but 100 words is just SO short. My ideas I think most comfortably fit in 300-500 word range.
Because I am very multi-fannish, I cannot let this post stand with almost exclusively Avengers fic on it! So I'm also going to post the first non-Avengers fic in each category:
Most Hits (non-Avengers): Control, 5.6K hits, 8th most hits overall
Inception, Arthur/Saito, watersports PWP. Apparently the key to hits is slash watersports PWPs? I like this one better than the Bruce/Tony one, though, because it's one of those fics that turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. That's a rare thing!
Most Kudos & Bookmarks (non-Avengers): The Floor Under Our Feet Whispers, 456 kudos, 104 bookmarks, 3rd most kudos & bookmarks overall
Teen Wolf, Derek Hale/Sheriff Stilinski, fluffy get-together fic with a hint of praise kink. Very rare pair in a mega fandom; I had no idea how this one would be received, but I was pleasantly surprised! I think I successfully tapped into the fandom's desire for Derek to have nice things.
Most Comment Threads (non-Avengers): In the Shape of You, 15 comment threads, 5th most comment threads overall
Okay, I cheated. It's the Teen Wolf fic again. But this Warehouse 13 fic is just below it! And since it's femslash, I'm going to exclude the TW fic to get more diversity on my board here. Besides, I'm very fond of how this came out - it was experimental for me, writing a ficlet for each of 10 prompts, each of which can stand on its own, but together they tell a complete story. Myka/Helena, angst with a happy(ish) ending.
Most Words (non-Avengers): Your Want is Bigger Than You, 6K words, 3rd most words overall
Elementary, Joan/Ms. Hudson, most important tag here is "Everything is Better with Dragons." I'm very happy with this fic too, because it gave me the opportunity to put a bunch of ideas I had floating around in my head about Ms. Hudson's role as a muse and how possessiveness works in polyamorous relationships onto paper. And the audience that found the fic seemed to resonate with those thoughts! Which is a lovely feeling.
AO3 Fic Stats Meme!
Mar. 12th, 2019 06:18 pmStolen from enemyofperfect.
Go to your AO3 works page, expand all the filters, and answer the following questions.
Total fics?
83, but 8 of those are ficlet collections, so it's really 75 fics and a whole lot more than 8 ficlets.
What're your first and second most common work ratings?
General Audiences (29)
Explicit (28)
Time to write more porn I guess! Luckily, it's Smut Swap season. ;D
What's your most common archive warning?
No Archive Warnings Apply (75)
Excluding that, because it's boring:
Choose Not To Warn (5)
Which is not terribly informative, so I'll note that I use CNTW when I think I've entered dubiously consensual territory. Of the actual mandatory archive warnings (Underage, Non-Con, Major Character Death), the only one that pops up is:
Underage (3)
That's what writing pre-canon Rhodey/Tony will do!
Do you consider yourself an adventurous writer?
I. . . have no idea? That does not feel like an appropriate adjective to describe the activity of writing. So I guess no?
How many fics have you written or podficced in each pairing category?
F/F - 29
F/M - 25
M/M - 25
Gen - 20
Multi - 14
Other - 1
Is that accidental, or does it reflect your preferences?
Every time I check this, I'm surprised at how much het I've written. I think of my fandom preferences as being strongly femslash & slash oriented, but my writing clearly does not reflect this. I suppose it's because it's extremely rare for me to be really into a canon without at least one female character that I adore, and it's just plain hard to find canons that have no male characters, some of which I will invariably enjoy, so as an inveterate multi-shipper I end up writing more het than I expect to!
What are your top 4 fandoms by numbers?
Not counting the MCU sub-fandoms, the list is:
Marvel Cinematic Universe (32)
Elementary (16)
Warehouse 13 (7)
Person of Interest (5)
What are your top 4 relationship tags?
James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Tony Stark (11)
Pepper Potts/Tony Stark (7)
Myka Bering/Helena "H.G." Wells (4)
Pepper Potts/James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Tony Stark (4)
Does this match how you feel about the characters, or are you puzzled?
WHERE IS JOAN WATSON.
So I'm adding a question!
What are your top 4 character tags?
Tony Stark (23)
James "Rhodey" Rhodes (16)
Pepper Potts (14)
Joan Watson (12)
There she is! Going into works tagged for her, apparently the problem is I ship her with everybody? So no one relationship for her makes my top four. (Her most common ship of mine is Marcus Bell/Joan Watson, which is just outside the top 4 ships at (3) fics tagged.)
What are your top 2 most used additional tags, and your bottom 2?
I'm confused by this question? Because I can't figure out how to get my true bottom 2 additional tags, only the bottom 2 out of my top 10. (I'm sure the true bottom 2 would be a multi-way tie between all the tags I've used exactly once, which I am not going to try and figure out.) So have my 1st-most-used, 2nd-most-used, 9th-most-used, and 10th-most-used tags:
POV Character of Color (15)
Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot (12)
Alternate Universe (5)
BDSM (5)
What would happen if you combined all 4 of these into a fic?
I would get a D/s AU PWP from probably Rhodey or Joan's perspective. Which. . . I actually do not like D/s AUs? There are things I can enjoy about A/B/O universes, but somehow D/s AUs get all the gender essentialism that I dislike and non of the weirdo biology worldbuilding that I do like about A/B/O, so I've never found one that worked for me, and I have no idea how I would approach writing one that worked for me. I'd have to subvert it, obviously, maybe by doing something ridiculous like having your orientation assigned by coin flip and then building a world where it was nonetheless treated as an immutable fact about your identity. But to then justify tagging it a PWP I guess I'd have to establish all that in a couple paragraphs and then make the fic just two people deliberately having sex as their opposite orientation because it's forbidden? But I wouldn't want them to have super-good sex because it turns out they truly belong to their opposite orientation, because that would still end up in a weird gender essentialist place, so I'd probably end up writing bad sex that they end up laughing at followed by improving sex as they discover that being Dominant/submissive is a bit of a learned skill? I don't know. I suspect there would be an audience of exactly zero for the fic I would write.
How many WIPs do you have currently running on AO3? Any you don’t plan on finishing?
The filter finds 9, but as previously established 8 of them are my ficlet collections (which I would only mark complete if I had decided definitively never to write in that fandom again), so really it's only 1. Which I have no intention of finishing, because it's part of my Just As They Wished It To be 'verse which I've abandoned for reasons mentioned in this post.
enemyofperfect.Go to your AO3 works page, expand all the filters, and answer the following questions.
Total fics?
83, but 8 of those are ficlet collections, so it's really 75 fics and a whole lot more than 8 ficlets.
What're your first and second most common work ratings?
General Audiences (29)
Explicit (28)
Time to write more porn I guess! Luckily, it's Smut Swap season. ;D
What's your most common archive warning?
No Archive Warnings Apply (75)
Excluding that, because it's boring:
Choose Not To Warn (5)
Which is not terribly informative, so I'll note that I use CNTW when I think I've entered dubiously consensual territory. Of the actual mandatory archive warnings (Underage, Non-Con, Major Character Death), the only one that pops up is:
Underage (3)
That's what writing pre-canon Rhodey/Tony will do!
Do you consider yourself an adventurous writer?
I. . . have no idea? That does not feel like an appropriate adjective to describe the activity of writing. So I guess no?
How many fics have you written or podficced in each pairing category?
F/F - 29
F/M - 25
M/M - 25
Gen - 20
Multi - 14
Other - 1
Is that accidental, or does it reflect your preferences?
Every time I check this, I'm surprised at how much het I've written. I think of my fandom preferences as being strongly femslash & slash oriented, but my writing clearly does not reflect this. I suppose it's because it's extremely rare for me to be really into a canon without at least one female character that I adore, and it's just plain hard to find canons that have no male characters, some of which I will invariably enjoy, so as an inveterate multi-shipper I end up writing more het than I expect to!
What are your top 4 fandoms by numbers?
Not counting the MCU sub-fandoms, the list is:
Marvel Cinematic Universe (32)
Elementary (16)
Warehouse 13 (7)
Person of Interest (5)
What are your top 4 relationship tags?
James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Tony Stark (11)
Pepper Potts/Tony Stark (7)
Myka Bering/Helena "H.G." Wells (4)
Pepper Potts/James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Tony Stark (4)
Does this match how you feel about the characters, or are you puzzled?
WHERE IS JOAN WATSON.
So I'm adding a question!
What are your top 4 character tags?
Tony Stark (23)
James "Rhodey" Rhodes (16)
Pepper Potts (14)
Joan Watson (12)
There she is! Going into works tagged for her, apparently the problem is I ship her with everybody? So no one relationship for her makes my top four. (Her most common ship of mine is Marcus Bell/Joan Watson, which is just outside the top 4 ships at (3) fics tagged.)
What are your top 2 most used additional tags, and your bottom 2?
I'm confused by this question? Because I can't figure out how to get my true bottom 2 additional tags, only the bottom 2 out of my top 10. (I'm sure the true bottom 2 would be a multi-way tie between all the tags I've used exactly once, which I am not going to try and figure out.) So have my 1st-most-used, 2nd-most-used, 9th-most-used, and 10th-most-used tags:
POV Character of Color (15)
Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot (12)
Alternate Universe (5)
BDSM (5)
What would happen if you combined all 4 of these into a fic?
I would get a D/s AU PWP from probably Rhodey or Joan's perspective. Which. . . I actually do not like D/s AUs? There are things I can enjoy about A/B/O universes, but somehow D/s AUs get all the gender essentialism that I dislike and non of the weirdo biology worldbuilding that I do like about A/B/O, so I've never found one that worked for me, and I have no idea how I would approach writing one that worked for me. I'd have to subvert it, obviously, maybe by doing something ridiculous like having your orientation assigned by coin flip and then building a world where it was nonetheless treated as an immutable fact about your identity. But to then justify tagging it a PWP I guess I'd have to establish all that in a couple paragraphs and then make the fic just two people deliberately having sex as their opposite orientation because it's forbidden? But I wouldn't want them to have super-good sex because it turns out they truly belong to their opposite orientation, because that would still end up in a weird gender essentialist place, so I'd probably end up writing bad sex that they end up laughing at followed by improving sex as they discover that being Dominant/submissive is a bit of a learned skill? I don't know. I suspect there would be an audience of exactly zero for the fic I would write.
How many WIPs do you have currently running on AO3? Any you don’t plan on finishing?
The filter finds 9, but as previously established 8 of them are my ficlet collections (which I would only mark complete if I had decided definitively never to write in that fandom again), so really it's only 1. Which I have no intention of finishing, because it's part of my Just As They Wished It To be 'verse which I've abandoned for reasons mentioned in this post.
Fic Tropes
Feb. 9th, 2019 04:18 pmsanguinity did it, and I couldn't resist: Ultimate Fanfic Trope ShowdownMy results:
( Tropes! )
Surprisingly granular! Though I would have pegged Vampires/Werewolves AU and Magic Connection lower, more like 12. And soulmate marks is only as high as it is because I was envisioning my best-case-scenario for the trope, which I really like a lot, instead of the most-common-scenario for the trope, which I kind of hate. The ones at the bottom of the list are right on though, those are the tropes I don't touch with a ten-foot pole, for various idiosyncratic reasons. (I have never been able to explain why reincarnation AUs squick me so hard, but I can't scroll past the summaries of them fast enough.)
Also, I didn't see the instruction to try not to use the "I like both" or "No opinion" boxes until halfway through, and then I changed my behavior, so I might have gotten slightly different results if I had bothered to read the whole page before starting.
Update: I took it again, refusing to use the "I like both" or "No opinion" boxes -- I gave in only once, when it gave me Daemons vs Hogwarts AU, which are two things that fit in exactly the same box in my head (really popular AUs that I have negative interest in, because I haven't read -- have in fact refused to read -- the source material, and whose popularity I thus resent) and I really couldn't choose between them. The test took a lot longer that way, I suspect because I kept giving it conflicting information! But at the end, I got a list with only one tie on it:
( Tropes, redux! )
And you know, I think that's pretty much accurate!
December Posting Meme: Influential Reads
Jan. 20th, 2019 10:09 amamindamazed asked: [Do you have any] particularly memorable or influential reads?I must admit, I laughed. So much of my identity is wrapped up in books -- in reading, and rereading, and analyzing, and daydreaming, and writing about, and writing in conversation with -- that the list of "memorable or influential" could easily be triple digits. Still, I can't resist a book-related prompt, so here are the books that I think helped form core parts of who I am.
( Miss Rumphius, Barbara Cooney )
( Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery )
( Three Novels by Louisa May Alcott )
( Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card )
( Various Darkover Novels, Marion Zimmer Bradley (TW: child sexual assault, pedophilia) )
( A Theory of Shopping, Daniel Miller )
( Kushiel's Legacy, Jacqueline Carey )
The James Davis Nicoll List Thingy
Jan. 13th, 2019 06:18 pmFine I'll do the thing. There's only so many times I can see people talk (even briefly!) about all these SFF books without throwing my own two cents into the ring.
So:
Bold means I've read it
Underlined means I've read something else by the author
*Asterisked means I own it but have not yet read it
( It's 100 books, be warned! )
So it took someone snarking in the comments on the post for me to realize the list is 96% female authors -- I knew that women were well-represented, but hadn't quite clicked that there were only three men (all non-white). (Someone in the comments claimed to count only 92 female authors, but I think they're confused by a few of the distinctly male pseudonyms.) Also, I got all the way to the "W"s before I realized it was alphabetical by author! Clearly I am not at my most observant today.
I've only read fourteen, which seems very low for me. I can only add ten more counting the entries where I've read other books by that author, just not the specific one on the list. Another fifteen are waiting patiently to be read on my bookshelves, but that still doesn't bring me to even half. If I included books I have access to via my parents' library, which is chock full of SFF paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, I think I'd finally break the halfway point.
But looking through the entries where I have nothing marked. . . there's a lot of subgenres I'm just not into. Apocalypses, dystopias, cyberpunk. . . they just really aren't my thing, and I'm not going to be adding these books to my to-be-read pile when there are so many more books that *are* more my thing already on it.
Which is to say, while I very much admire the intent behind the list to highlight non-white, non-male authors (in contrast to all the other year-end lists that are invariably overwhelmingly white and male), it still is not the list *I* would make, if I were to make a list of a hundred SFF titles people should consider reading in the coming year. :)
So:
Bold means I've read it
Underlined means I've read something else by the author
*Asterisked means I own it but have not yet read it
( It's 100 books, be warned! )
So it took someone snarking in the comments on the post for me to realize the list is 96% female authors -- I knew that women were well-represented, but hadn't quite clicked that there were only three men (all non-white). (Someone in the comments claimed to count only 92 female authors, but I think they're confused by a few of the distinctly male pseudonyms.) Also, I got all the way to the "W"s before I realized it was alphabetical by author! Clearly I am not at my most observant today.
I've only read fourteen, which seems very low for me. I can only add ten more counting the entries where I've read other books by that author, just not the specific one on the list. Another fifteen are waiting patiently to be read on my bookshelves, but that still doesn't bring me to even half. If I included books I have access to via my parents' library, which is chock full of SFF paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, I think I'd finally break the halfway point.
But looking through the entries where I have nothing marked. . . there's a lot of subgenres I'm just not into. Apocalypses, dystopias, cyberpunk. . . they just really aren't my thing, and I'm not going to be adding these books to my to-be-read pile when there are so many more books that *are* more my thing already on it.
Which is to say, while I very much admire the intent behind the list to highlight non-white, non-male authors (in contrast to all the other year-end lists that are invariably overwhelmingly white and male), it still is not the list *I* would make, if I were to make a list of a hundred SFF titles people should consider reading in the coming year. :)
December Posting Meme: Music
Jan. 12th, 2019 08:55 pmsanguinity asked: "What's the role of music in your life?"Music is not quite in the tier of things that I would not know how to exist without (like stories, the written word, are), but it's the very next tier down, where I theoretically could exist without it, but my life would lose so much.
This is mostly because I don't like silence. I need background sound, and the normal city sounds (the distant hum of traffic, the occasional siren screaming by, my neighbors' chatter) do not qualify. When I'm home, the background noise is more often television than I'd like - I have a tendency to turn on Food Network while I'm doing things on the internet or bedroom-based chores, and once the TV is on I feel a strange resistance to turning it off - but when I'm in my car (a place I spend about 15 hours a week due to my commute) or in my kitchen (a place I keep trying to spend more time, because I do enjoy cooking and feel healthier when I cook more) I listen to music.
I like albums. I'm just old enough that I still prefer buying CDs and listening to whole albums to putting on Pandora or another streaming site, and while I have plenty of mp3s on my computer from back when Napster and LimeWire were a thing, I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from iTunes. (Actually, I don't have mp3s on my computer anymore, because this newest laptop doesn't have a disc drive and so I wasn't able to use my backup cds to load my music onto it like I did with my previous laptops. But! I finally decided to buy an external disc drive! So, soon!)
In particular, I like listening to one album on repeat until I can sing along to all the words, until I know it inside and out. As a result, certain albums are very strongly associated with the time period in my life when I was listening to them, and putting them on after the fact immediately transports me back to whatever feelings I most associate with them. The Wallflowers' Breach is the afternoon I spent studying for my AP Calculus exam with one of my important female crushes; Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing is the soundtrack of my Chicago dorm room, the pallid sun setting over snow-covered rooftops far too early for my SoCal raised time sense; more recently, the Lumineers' Cleopatra is what I was listening to the last time -- possibly the only time in my life -- I was actively happy, secure in my romantic relationship and fulfilled in my work.
(Because my romantic relationship fell apart pretty much immediately afterward, putting the album on now has a tendency to make me cry. But I hope that at some point that association will fade and I will be able to return to the uncomplicated happiness it was associated with before, singing along at the top of my lungs as I drove my winding canyon route to and from work with the windows down.)
So that's listening to music. There is, of course, also the matter of making music.
I grew up in a house with a piano -- a beat-up second-hand upright, perennially out of tune. My father played, having grown up taking piano lessons like so many middle-class American kids of his generation; my mother put up with his playing, not being particularly musical herself and not appreciating the way that he played with more gusto than skill.
I wanted to play. But my parents had many fine theories about how to raise children better than their parents did (as I suspect most moderately self-aware people who become parents do), and one of those was that they didn't want to force their children into enrichment activities that they would end up hating. So I asked for piano lessons in vain for what felt like forever (it probably wasn't more than a year) and finally they gave me a "Teach Yourself Piano" book and challenged me to prove that I was serious about learning.
So I did exactly that. I worked through all the exercises in the book, gamely playing simplistic versions of Frère Jacques and When the Saints Go Marching In until our neighbors must have been ready to shoot me. And when I finished the book, mastered all eleven or twelve of its songs and knew the C major scale and major chords, I got my piano lessons.
I had four years of weekly piano lessons, until I graduated high school. I took my music books with me to college in Chicago, and played in the ballroom/lobby of my dorm, on another perennially out-of-tune piano. But since then I haven't had ready access to a piano, and so only play occasionally when visiting my parents. My fingers still remember all my old favorites -- I like Beethoven and showtunes -- but I haven't learned anything new in a decade and a half.
Someday I will own a piano again. Until then, I will content myself with listening.
December Posting Meme (not really)
Dec. 6th, 2018 09:15 pm There appears to be a December posting meme going around; I'm not entirely sure what the actual meme entails, but the gist seems to be regular (daily?) posting on (possibly) suggested topics? I don't know.
In any case, while I'm not up to daily posting, I *would* like to post more regularly, especially if DW is going to be becoming more active with some portion of the exodus from tumblr. And I like the idea of soliciting ideas for posts! So, here's my variant:
Suggest a topic, ask me a question, nothing off limits (though of course I reserve the right to be only as forthcoming as I feel comfortable with!). I will post. . . I'd say at a rate of at least once per week, until the topics run out. No time limit on when a topic can be suggested in this post -- as long as the post is up, feel free to drop a line. And feel free to leave me multiple topic suggestions!
So in summation: Ask me a question, or leave me a topic you'd like to hear me talk about, and I will write up a post in response at some point relatively soon after receiving it. :)
In any case, while I'm not up to daily posting, I *would* like to post more regularly, especially if DW is going to be becoming more active with some portion of the exodus from tumblr. And I like the idea of soliciting ideas for posts! So, here's my variant:
Suggest a topic, ask me a question, nothing off limits (though of course I reserve the right to be only as forthcoming as I feel comfortable with!). I will post. . . I'd say at a rate of at least once per week, until the topics run out. No time limit on when a topic can be suggested in this post -- as long as the post is up, feel free to drop a line. And feel free to leave me multiple topic suggestions!
So in summation: Ask me a question, or leave me a topic you'd like to hear me talk about, and I will write up a post in response at some point relatively soon after receiving it. :)
Five Questions Meme
Oct. 15th, 2018 10:48 pm With thanks to enemyofperfect , who posed these questions to me:
1. What is your favorite Lois McMaster Bujold book?
GAH. Probably Memory? Except it's the one book in the whole Vorkosigan saga that you really can't read as a stand-alone, because it's where everything that Miles has been doing for years catches up to him and all his spinning plates come crashing down. It's so deeply satisfying, even though I adored watching Miles keep all those plates in motion for so long. And I love the Barrayar-set based books best overall anyway -- everything matters more, in those, than in the galactic adventure novels.
But almost everyone says Memory is their favorite, so to give a slightly less-common favorite, I also really love Komarr. I adore Ekaterin's perspective, and I wish we got so much more of her in the later books. Her perspective is so much the opposite of Miles's, inward-focused, very domestic, and she grounds that book so beautifully.
Once upon a time, A Civil Campaign was my hands-down favorite; but since I read the Harriet Vane arc of Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels that Bujold was clearly emulating, it's gone down quite a bit in my estimation. Bujold essentially skipped from Strong Poison to Gaudy Night when she went from Komarr to A Civil Campaign, and I think the romance really needs that middle book of Have His Carcase to work.
2. Do you have any pets, or would you like to?
I do not currently have any pets. I had a veritable menagerie a year ago, several snakes, lizards, fish, and a bird; but they were more my ex's than mine, so when we broke up he took them all, and I moved into an apartment that doesn't allow pets. I have some herbs on my balcony?
Part of me really wants a dog and/or cat, when I next move. But another part of me is extremely morbid and can't help but think that if something happened to me, there's no one who would think of or be able to come to the rescue of my poor pet, so it would probably die miserably trapped in my apartment. (Because at the moment I have neither friends nor family anywhere closer than a thousand miles from me, so if I were to die suddenly it would take time for anyone to notice.)
This answer got really depressing. I'm sorry?
3. If you had to give up written works or television and film, which one would you keep?
Written word, no question. I enjoy those newfangled moving pictures, but words are my go-to. They're how my brain processes stories, and stories are definitely vital to my continued well-being. I read pretty much constantly, even while I'm watching television. :)
4. What's a language you would like to learn?
I'd like to go back to learning ASL (American Sign Language). I took a couple quarters of it in college, before I transferred to a school that didn't offer it, and I really enjoyed it. I found it really rewarding to learn something of the Deaf community through my classes, and the language itself. . . I don't think of myself as being particularly good with spatial relationships, because I never scored particularly well on those parts of my standardized tests in school, but as I've tried teaching random things to other people (and as I've had to pack things into small-ish cars) I think I've underestimated my facility with that kind of thinking? Concepts have shapes in my head, in a way that they don't seem to for other people that I've interacted with. And so I found ASL surprisingly intuitive, when I was learning it -- I picked up vocabulary much more quickly than I did when I was learning Latin and Spanish.
So anyway, yeah. ASL. Which I'm actually very well positioned to learn, because I work just a few miles from a university that my old ASL professor said was basically the center of the Deaf academic community on the west coast? And yet. . . I just don't have TIME. Stupid work.
5. Are there any personality sorting systems -- like astrology, Enneagram, Hogwarts houses, etc. -- that you find interesting or meaningful?
I find all of them interesting. i love taking personality quizzes! Even utterly absurd ones! I've never figured out my Hogwarts house because I've never actually read (or watched) Harry Potter, but I've taken probably thousands of various other personality quizzes in my life. I have little interest in astrology, in part because I have a family member who makes his living doing it, and in part because I'm a Gemini and I fit very, very few of the common Gemini traits. But beyond that, I like categories, and I like figuring out which categories fit me, and I like arguing with the survey when I get categories that *don't* seem to fit me. But I don't take any of them particularly seriously, enough to say that I find them "meaningful."
(This is why my family member who is an astrologer means that I can't get into astrology -- I find personality quizzes predominantly fun, and my family member is deadly Serious about astrology, so it's not fun for me.)
Anyone else who wants five questions to answer, let me know in the comments!
enemyofperfect , who posed these questions to me:1. What is your favorite Lois McMaster Bujold book?
GAH. Probably Memory? Except it's the one book in the whole Vorkosigan saga that you really can't read as a stand-alone, because it's where everything that Miles has been doing for years catches up to him and all his spinning plates come crashing down. It's so deeply satisfying, even though I adored watching Miles keep all those plates in motion for so long. And I love the Barrayar-set based books best overall anyway -- everything matters more, in those, than in the galactic adventure novels.
But almost everyone says Memory is their favorite, so to give a slightly less-common favorite, I also really love Komarr. I adore Ekaterin's perspective, and I wish we got so much more of her in the later books. Her perspective is so much the opposite of Miles's, inward-focused, very domestic, and she grounds that book so beautifully.
Once upon a time, A Civil Campaign was my hands-down favorite; but since I read the Harriet Vane arc of Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels that Bujold was clearly emulating, it's gone down quite a bit in my estimation. Bujold essentially skipped from Strong Poison to Gaudy Night when she went from Komarr to A Civil Campaign, and I think the romance really needs that middle book of Have His Carcase to work.
2. Do you have any pets, or would you like to?
I do not currently have any pets. I had a veritable menagerie a year ago, several snakes, lizards, fish, and a bird; but they were more my ex's than mine, so when we broke up he took them all, and I moved into an apartment that doesn't allow pets. I have some herbs on my balcony?
Part of me really wants a dog and/or cat, when I next move. But another part of me is extremely morbid and can't help but think that if something happened to me, there's no one who would think of or be able to come to the rescue of my poor pet, so it would probably die miserably trapped in my apartment. (Because at the moment I have neither friends nor family anywhere closer than a thousand miles from me, so if I were to die suddenly it would take time for anyone to notice.)
This answer got really depressing. I'm sorry?
3. If you had to give up written works or television and film, which one would you keep?
Written word, no question. I enjoy those newfangled moving pictures, but words are my go-to. They're how my brain processes stories, and stories are definitely vital to my continued well-being. I read pretty much constantly, even while I'm watching television. :)
4. What's a language you would like to learn?
I'd like to go back to learning ASL (American Sign Language). I took a couple quarters of it in college, before I transferred to a school that didn't offer it, and I really enjoyed it. I found it really rewarding to learn something of the Deaf community through my classes, and the language itself. . . I don't think of myself as being particularly good with spatial relationships, because I never scored particularly well on those parts of my standardized tests in school, but as I've tried teaching random things to other people (and as I've had to pack things into small-ish cars) I think I've underestimated my facility with that kind of thinking? Concepts have shapes in my head, in a way that they don't seem to for other people that I've interacted with. And so I found ASL surprisingly intuitive, when I was learning it -- I picked up vocabulary much more quickly than I did when I was learning Latin and Spanish.
So anyway, yeah. ASL. Which I'm actually very well positioned to learn, because I work just a few miles from a university that my old ASL professor said was basically the center of the Deaf academic community on the west coast? And yet. . . I just don't have TIME. Stupid work.
5. Are there any personality sorting systems -- like astrology, Enneagram, Hogwarts houses, etc. -- that you find interesting or meaningful?
I find all of them interesting. i love taking personality quizzes! Even utterly absurd ones! I've never figured out my Hogwarts house because I've never actually read (or watched) Harry Potter, but I've taken probably thousands of various other personality quizzes in my life. I have little interest in astrology, in part because I have a family member who makes his living doing it, and in part because I'm a Gemini and I fit very, very few of the common Gemini traits. But beyond that, I like categories, and I like figuring out which categories fit me, and I like arguing with the survey when I get categories that *don't* seem to fit me. But I don't take any of them particularly seriously, enough to say that I find them "meaningful."
(This is why my family member who is an astrologer means that I can't get into astrology -- I find personality quizzes predominantly fun, and my family member is deadly Serious about astrology, so it's not fun for me.)
Anyone else who wants five questions to answer, let me know in the comments!
