We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

My comments on reading in April are a couple recs: firstly, The Executioner's Daughter by Ashley Warren. D&D level 3 solo adventure/CYOA story, very cool.

And I have also been greatly enjoying Ballarat National Theatre's podcast production of Persuasion. Highly recommended.

Okay, so last year when I was taking a break from writing I got an idea for a novel set in Toronto in 1920, and that’s been brewing ever since. Here’s my various posts about it on tumblr. (That link works on desktop but may not work if it tries to open in the app, because Tumblr Is A Functioning Website.) And then this October icannotreadcursive made a list of original character prompts, so I did a few of those, and generally it was a fun thing to think about at work even for the ones that didn’t get written down. Although they are also all in the tag above, here’s the links separately:

Day 3: In a cherished memory (Josie)

Day 4: Waking up from a nightmare (Fred and Tom)

Day 10: In a different time period (Modern AU, everyone)

Day 16: Expressing or exploring their spirituality (Verry, definitely not doing that)

Day 24: Being cared for by someone they love (Verry, Tom, and Fred)

And earlier this month I also posted a ficlet for Band Sinister by K. J. Charles.

I am also in trickortreatex, but I haven't opened my gifts yet so I will post about that after the anon period.

consultingpiskies is coming this evening and I just got a call from Elections Canada about working the election and I am so! happy!

Title: Like Racing an Engine
Rating: E
Universe: Sherlock Holmes
Character(s): Sherlock Holmes, John Watson
Summary: Holmes gets bored on a long train ride.
Warnings/Enticements: Train Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Smoking, Orgasm Denial, Dirty Talk, Fellatio, Mild D/s
Word Count: 3751

A.N.: For breathedout for the 2017 Fandom Trumps Hate auction, in exchange for a donation to the ACLU. Beta-read by the amazing oulfis.

On AO3

I got three lovely Yuletide gifts, and yes I am ridiculously lucky.

whistling through these driftwood bones by lady_peony, which is about Miranda (from The Tempest) and is magical and poetic and brilliant.

A Girl Worth Fighting For by prettysophist, which has Mulan! Managing to be perfect and realizing she doesn't have to be and cross-dressing and in love.

Thorns by wolfraven80, which has Morwen and Telemain being decidedly Morwen and Telemain -ish. It's so very much of the Enchanted Forest.

And I wrote one fic, and four drabbles.

My Assignment: Resources and Rescues for coyotegestalt - Cimorene and Morwen talk and run into someone. This was lots of fun.

Drabbles: 12 Dancing Princesses (angsty)
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015) (porn)
Howl's Moving Castle (parenting)
Scott Pilgrim (female friendship)

And they all seem to have been pretty well-received.

And I also wrote Mine Is Forever, a short sequel to Just How This Would End, for Consulting Piskies for Christmas. Because I have a girlfriend, you guys. <3_<3

And I have two BBC Sherlock ficlets hanging around that I think I haven't mentioned here. (I am writing this while pretending that half of my tumblr dash isn't off watching the special. I find the contrast between the Victorian trappings and the BBC actors and characterization to be really upsetting somehow.) Anyway. All Was Absolute Silence Behind Us is a missing scene for Faerymorstan's fix-it Johnlockary Biscuitverse, and Utility is basically a meta theory in drabble form.

Putting this on Dreamwidth as well as Tumblr:

So I’ve been thinking about soulmate AUs. The kind where your soulmate’s name is written on your skin. How would that start? When would that start?

Not with the beginning of writing. For centuries, in China, in Sumer, in Egypt, in Mesoamerica, writing was used for accounting or religion, and nothing else. Most people would never be able write their names or recognize them if they were written. Only royalty, gods, and perhaps some property owners would.

Individual scribes might have had signatures. For that matter, for all we know individual Paleolithic artists might have had signatures. But most people wouldn’t. What would happen the first time someone was born with an unknown symbol on their hand?

Probably it would be an isolated mystery. Remember, in most of these scenarios there’s no actual guarantee that you’ll ever meet your soulmate (although most people seem to end up with one from the same general area. Which is statistically unlikely). No one would know what it meant. Maybe people with symbols would be seen as special, or divine, or demonic.

And then it might start happening more often - or stop happening, if writing stopped being used (like in Greece after 1200 BCE). But most of the time still no one would know what the symbol meant. And most people wouldn’t have symbols, because most people’s soulmates wouldn’t know how to write.

(Sometimes I think the theory is that people would have a thumbprint instead of a soulmate mark? But this would be basically useless for matching purposes - you would have no idea where to start. So from that point of view the first people with actual names would just have them instead of the thumbprints that everyone else had and didn’t know the meaning of.

Incidentally, using thumbprints for recognition isn’t universal in non-literate societies either. European society didn’t realize that fingerprints were unique until the late 19th century. In a lot of places, they weren’t used until people were already using signatures, and needed an option for illiterate people. Also, while they are an identifying mark, they really have no relation at all to your name. For most of human existence, having a physical marker of your identity really wasn’t that important.)

Only somewhere with at least moderately widespread literacy would someone be able to look at a mark and go “Oh, that’s my friend Imhotep’s name. What a coincidence!” And only somewhere with widespread literacy would Imhotep’s soulmate also be able to write their name. Most early languages were logographic, and in cuneiform names specifically were almost always logographic, so you wouldn’t even be able to sound it out.

Phoenician (starting 1050 BCE) was the first widespread writing system, and was simple enough and common enough that sailors could write in it. It was also the first phoenetic script which would allow you to easily approximate the pronounciation of the writing on your skin.

But still, most people wouldn’t have symbols. Most people would never meet anyone with their name on their skin.

This would be a problem in AUs where you never feel sexual attraction to anyone who isn’t your soulmate. Imagine religion and culture in a world where almost everyone is functionally asexual.

How long would it take, until someone realized that if people’s names matched up, they had some kind of bond? How long would it take before this was a generally accepted theory?

Also, how long before this was seen as at all important, given that most people with the status to know how to read would also have arranged marriages?

But once it was generally accepted, suddenly literacy would become a lot more important. People would demand to learn how to write. (Some people would learn that their soulmate’s name wasn’t in the local writing system. What happens then?) People would want to give their children more unique names (ancient Rome had about thirty given names for men total, and they named their daughters “first Julia” and “second Julia.”)

Anyway, around ancient Rome or so, when there would not only be a lot of literate people but also a lot of people able to recognize foreign alphabets, suddenly there would be a huge drive for 1) more literacy and 2) better long distance communication, so you could find the Caius or Ξανθίππη or שָׂרָה who had your name on their skin. And as this idea became more and more widespread, so would this desire. The same thing would be happening in China and Ethiopia and India.

This would revolutionize world history. There would be strong motivations both for exploration and for making peace with foreign cultures. Everyone in Rome with a Jewish soulmate would want to make sure they wouldn’t be killed before they could meet them. Everyone with a soulmate in a strange language would want to know at least what language it was.

Come to think of it, these are also all good reasons for why people wouldn’t believe in soulmates. Your soulmate can’t be one of the hated barbarians, so that symbol doesn’t mean anything!

And that’s leaving out the fact that lots of people still wouldn’t have a soulmate who could write, and completely ignoring the existence of polyamory.

So getting to a modern society with everyone just knowing that that was your soulmate’s name would involve a really complicated history, probably nothing at all like ours. And there would be huge pressure to ignore the existence of soulmates at all.

No conclusions here, just taking an illogical premise way too logically.

Title: Overwhelming
Author: Violsva
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Rating: E. E E E.
Warnings/Enticements: Oral Sex, did I mention Explicit?, Threesomes
Word Count: 451
Summary: Holmes is trying something new. Watson offers some expert assistance.

On AO3.

And this, which I could queue on tumblr when I wasn't feeling fragile and then went ack when I was about to repost it but look, people, I know Greek.

Sappho; translated by, um, me

That man seems equal to the gods
to me, who sits across from you
and from so close can hear your sweet
speaking

and lovely laughter, as they force
my heart to shudder in my chest.
For when I briefly look at you,
speaking is lost,

instead my tongue sticks, subtly
a fire runs under my skin,
my eyes see nothing, roaring fills
my ears,

cold sweat pours over me, trembling
grips all of me, and pale as grass
I am; I seem to be so close
to dying.

But all must be endured, since
a poor and [

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex,
Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at
For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat
Are well aware of shadowy this and that
In me, that’s neither noble nor complex.
Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From what I had to build with: honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

From Tumblr, going here because I don't trust Tumblr not to lose stuff:

you know what we need? we need queer romcoms. we don’t need any more sad lifetime movies about queers who end up dead or heartbroken. we don’t need any more real life stories. we need queer romcoms.

ladies falling in love after they stumble against each other on the subway.
guys who work for opposite companies and bicker at the meetings until one of them kisses the other.
a trans lady bartender who always ends up having deep philosophical chats with a drunk girl who gets dumped every week by a different person.
an asexual journalist falling in love with the football player xie interviews every week after the matches, and having cute make outs and a lot of awkwardness around the ace thing with the fight and the ridiculous gesture of love and the make up.
happy fluffy endings after a lot of dumb cute shit happening.
queer rom coms !!!

-- Queerhawkeye