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

Recent: Finished various of the books in the last post.

At work this month I read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Thomas de Quincey was an ass), The Book of Tea (loved it, wish the 20th century had gone more like Okakura Kakuzo wanted it to), and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (which I'd never read all the way through before). I'm now onto Through the Looking-Glass, which I think I have read all of before. (My introduction to Carroll was the Collected Works, so it's all kind of mixed up together with math riddles and poetry.)

I also read eunnieboo's comic If You'll Have Me from the library, and then ordered it for consultingpiskies' birthday. (It arrived early, so I can post this.) Adorable fluffy lesbian college romance, just what I needed, also great visual storytelling.

Very little non-fanfic reading generally, mental health not doing great. However, I do now actually have a RWRB fic rec. It's not that I haven't enjoyed a lot of the fics I've read, it's that I have enjoyed them with caveats that I would want to discuss if I talk about them at all, and I'm not going to inflict that on someone who posted their work for free in fandom (even on my own public blog). But Let Loose Your Glow by athousandrooms is another adorable fluffy slowburn college romance, and I have no notes, also just what I needed, well done.

(That said, I have uncomplicatedly enjoyed a lot of RWRB fic that is not novel length, and usually also utterly filthy (laudatory), such as this and most of clottedcreamfudge's works.)

Current: I really really want to like this gay scifi Regency romance, but ... I don't. Oh well. Maybe I'll try a later one in the series.

I am enjoying T. R. Darling's Quiet Pine Trees (quietpinetrees), a collection of SFF microfiction that you may have seen on Twitter.

I'm several entries behind in my-pal-bertie (The Inimitable Jeeves by subscription, à la Dracula Daily), and I have a bunch more things I am halfway through which I'm not really picking up again.

Future: Everything is currently going very slowly so we'll see. Maybe I'll reread something.

I posted this on tumblr yesterday and then realized that today is Wednesday, so here it is here too.

I was tagged by breathedout to post recent, current, and future reading. Unfortunately it is the middle of January, when winter seems eternal and focus nonexistent. However, it occurred to me as I said that that the middle of January is certainly better than the beginning of January, so there’s that!

Recent: The last thing I finished at work was a collection of E. F. Benson’s ghost stories. (I am efficient enough at work that I have the spare time to work my way through public domain literature.) I’ve been reading a lot of Edwardian ghost stories recently and it’s just so nice watching terrible things happen to near respectable academics while I wait for the printer to go off. Benson has some interesting interactions with modern technology (his modern) but an annoying tendency to try to explain the metaphysics. I prefer M. R. James.

I also read the most recent installment of the further adventures of Madame C—, which was excellent as usual. In audio there was Dead Man’s Ransom by Ellis Peters—I find her work very one-note, but it’s a note I really want to hear sometimes.

I have also been reading a bunch of RWRB fanfic. (I skimmed the novel this summer because the gifsets were hot but it really isn’t my preferred tropes.) From the outside, it appears to be good in direct proportion to its smuttiness.

Current: At work I am now going through Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which I am enjoying as much as one can enjoy anything in January. It is kind of amusing how many of the “rules” of modern fiction writing it flat out has never heard of and doesn’t care about. I do find it somewhat stunning that Warner wrote this particular novel when she was only just over 30.

I have just started Time Was by Ian McDonald, which I hoped would be a gay version of This Is How You Lose the Time War, and it looks like it may even live up to that.

I am halfway through the audiobook of The Intrigue by Marion Chesney (aka M. C. Beaton), which is nice enough, but I don’t think I’ll feel the need to continue the series. Especially as the narrator is just okay.

Future: My hold on Paladin’s Faith by T. Kingfisher will hopefully come in by the end of the month. Other than that, I should probably see if I can focus better on nonfiction right now.

But I also have a skip-the-line copy of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher for a week. I don’t know if I’m in the best place to appreciate it but maybe it’ll be a nice counterweight.

And finally, on the way home today I read Cat Sebastian's "Bells Are Ringing," which is her free holiday epilogue to We Could Be So Good, and loved it, like I loved the novel. Also, today was already better than the last couple weeks mood-wise. Apparently next summer I'll be reading a baseball romance. Well, these things happen.

So here are all the Ravening War meta bits I've posted on tumblr. I'm not cross-posting most of the liveblogging, though. Assume they all have spoilers.

( On Karna after episode 2 )

( On Amangeaux after episode 3 )

( On Fructera and Vegetania )

( On Karna post-season )

( Short meta in liveblogging posts )

And my tag on tumblr has a bunch of other people's meta and fic recs and art.

So this year threesentenceficathon has its own community and we've already filled up the first post. Second post open over here!

( The Little Mermaid )

( Marvel (2) )

( The Old Guard (2) )

( Goncharov (1973) (2) )

( Narnia (2) )

So on Tumblr there was a Tiktok video going around, about Pride and whether gay people face discrimination anymore, which I don't want to hunt down the link for. But the video was a response by one queer man to another video by a much younger gay man, and it got me thinking about differences in campus queer communities in the past fifteen years.

( Read more... )

So I don't know if it's the phrasing or that I'm finally ready to hear it or what; I suspect the latter.

But all of that "face your fears" "do one thing every day that scares you" "the only way to conquer fear is to face it" etc. never made any sense to me.

And then today I saw this tumblr post (ETA) and suddenly it did.

tbh a lot of my advice boils down to “hey you know that terrible horrible looming thing you’re doing your best to avoid and distract and escape as much as possible but no matter what you do it just keeps looming and looming and ruining your life”

“just, fuckign, run straight at it screaming.”

( Actually let's cut this. ) It's been so much nicer inside my head since I drifted away from Tumblr.

Title: Scribblings of the Fifth City
Rating: T
Universe: Fallen London
Summary: I cannot promise that everything here happened in Fallen London, but it wouldn't have happened without Fallen London.
Warnings/Enticements: Vignettes
Word Count: 1938
Author's Note: Originally posted at vortigraine.tumblr.com.

On AO3

So I’ve been sketching a lot recently.

And one of the things I’ve noticed, and that I remember, is an extreme reluctance to keep going sometimes. When you’ve drawn something that looks perfect to you, you start getting worried that anything else you do is going to ruin what you have so far. This leg is perfect, what if I can’t get the body right. Or even worse, this arm is perfect except that it’s too small for the rest of the body, and it needs to be done again. Now what?

It’s a disbelief in one’s ability to replicate one’s own work. You can’t just erase it and draw another one, or flip the page and try again, because that one won’t be as good.

Ursula Vernon talks about giving yourself permission to make bad art, because that’s the only way you learn. That applies to writing as well, and I have practice with letting myself write badly. But this doesn’t apply, quite, because there’s no way you’ll ruin already-written prose. You might end up with nowhere to put it in your story, but you’re not going to make it worse. Everything is fixable after the fact. Drawing, even in pencil, feels a lot more immutable.

But the thing about drawing, which helps, is that there is no way to get better except to practice. (And reading art books and looking at other art, sure. But that doesn’t actually improve, for example, your fine motor skills.) And that half-done sketch where I eventually gave up because her shoulders looked wrong is still practice, and the one that looks perfect except that the head is way too small is still practice, and my utter and repeated failure to draw cats is still practice. And if I had kept going and erased the shoulders and redrawn them, that would just have been more practice. More practice is good.

The other thing for me, though, is that I don’t actually want to be sketching. I want to paint. But (until the bank actually does their job) I don’t have paints. I have pencils and notebooks, so dammit, I’m doing this instead. So that makes it easier to accept that it’s not going to be perfect.

Okay, self. The reason we do not get into discussions of the thing is because it triggers perseveration which makes us unhappy. If we do get in a discussion of the thing, even if it’s because we have something important to say, the reblogs etc. will probably add to that. (Also, the vast majority of my followers: do not, thankfully, care about the thing at all.) You came up with a whole bunch of fic ideas during July. It is probably better to focus on those. If that means staying away from anywhere that is not highly curated, by me, then we will have to do that.

I don’t seek out posts about how Gifted kids are all spoiled brats, and I’m not going to seek out posts about this. It can go on without my involvement. If other people aren’t saying what I think should be said, I’ll live, and so will they.

(oh, fandom)