Today is Ladystuck reveal day! I wrote four fics this year: my assignment, a pinch hit, and two treats just because. I will talk about each in a separate post.

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The Moons of Skaia: Twelve sweeps after the Collapse, Justiciar Redglare came to the moons of Skaia on the trail of Her Imperious Condescension. [2,450 words]

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This is my assignment, written for chthonianCrocuta (lovesthesoundof). I wrote a pinch hit for chthonianCrocuta last year because I fell in passionate infatuation with one of their prompts; apparently this trend holds true, because I wanted to write for all five of the prompts they made this year as well. In the event, "The Moons of Skaia" is only a response to three of them: one about linguistics, one about world-building a cultural melting-pot planet, and one about Redglare going about her life. I was going to squeeze in Redglare meeting Terezi as well -- that's kind of vaguely implied in the ending action of the fic -- but I realized that doing so would require me to write the whole plot of Redglare finding the Condesce, capturing or not capturing her, and so on. Sadly, I did not have time to do all of that by the exchange deadline, but I'd like to write more in this world someday, so... who knows!

I think the basic world-building is clear in the fic itself, but here are some details I wasn't able to make fully explicit on-page. This universe is a post-game mashup of the final iterations of both the humans' and trolls' universes, with some significant game-related additions. The Collapse is the name given to the moment when the new universe was created... except it came with a retroactive past, such that people remember both their lives in their old universes and in this one. (Also, people were taken and/or resurrected from all up and down their old universes' timelines.)

Skaia is a gas giant planet that orbits a massive yellow-white star. It has eight moons, which are slightly more scientifically plausible versions of the eight kids' Lands. I suspect Prospit is an inner world in a Venus-type orbit, and Derse is out in a Uranus-type orbit. The name of the star is Calamity. The debris out near its heliopause is a symbolic echo of the Möbius tangle that forms around a fully developed Battlefield in Sburb.

As for the players who were alive at the end of the game, I think they were offered the option of becoming gods of their newly created universe, and rejected that either as part of the price of defeating Lord English, or because they'd seen too much of power corrupting, or because that was incompatible with recreating bits of their old universes instead of creating a completely new slate. Whatever the reason, they retain some fraction of their game powers, but they live and age as normal members of their species.

Ladystuck 2014 (and Ladystuck Treats 2014) went live today! All works will be anonymous for a week, so I can't tell you what I wrote. But in the meantime, let me interest you in my two wonderful gifts:

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I Hate You (Don't Leave Me): Getting people in her quadrants has never been difficult for Porrim. But keeping them there? That's another story. Porrim<3<Damara. (1,800 words) [ETA: by inklesspen]

This is a lovely story about Porrim and Damara negotiating a rough spot in their black romance, with a focus on the need for respect and reciprocity. Also contains a pale one-night stand, interspecies flush-flirting, and bonus awesome AU worldbuilding about trolls living on Earth and integrating Alternian and human cultures. What are you waiting for? Go read this immediately!

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Picture This: There are no photographs of your childhood. (2,700 words) [ETA: by lovesthesoundof]

AKA, Roxy growing up among the carapacians. This story has a wonderful frame-structure -- it's told via the photographs of typical childhood scenes that Roxy doesn't have -- and is wonderfully kind and careful about the bonds between Roxy and her adopted family. It also contains some really neat world-building about the carapacians and the things they did and didn't know about Rose, about humans in general, and about the secrets of their habitat. Again, go read this immediately. You will be glad you did. :-)

1. I finished a rough draft of my Ladystuck fic and posted it to the collection. I will be editing it extensively over the coming week -- maybe extending it as well, because while it's a functionally complete thought as it stands, there's a bunch of world-building I wasn't able to get in, and I would also like to do some more in-depth character exploration. But still, I wrote a thing and it's up on the site, which is enough for tonight.

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2. I checked my work schedule this afternoon, and while I'm only on for one day this week, next week I seem to be scheduled for over twenty hours, and the week after that for over thirty hours. Very exciting! I need to update my resume now to take this job into account, because being employed makes a person look much more employable.

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3. A couple weeks ago I mentioned in passing that I've been getting into Hannibal, which is weird for me both because it's a television show and because it's nominally realistic rather than fantasy or science-fiction. In practice, it's so stylized and flat-out bizarre that it comes across as effectively a dark urban fantasy. And so far, it seems that watching via actual DVD disks rather than via streaming video is a decent way to sort of... concentrate my mind. I've been telling myself I have to watch an entire disk in one evening and send it back to Netflix the next day, so I'm not always finding excuses for stuff to do instead of carving out time to watch and listen.

I may try this method on some other TV shows and see if I can carry the pattern over, or whether it was an aberration born of temporary white-hot interest and therefore not sustainable or transferable.

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4. I just made a blood donation appointment for the 22nd. This was annoyingly difficult, because the Red Cross site refused to cough up local blood drive locations based on a ZIP code search. I had to find the advanced search link and look by city and state name. You would think that would call up the same search parameters, but apparently not!

I also looked at my account, out of curiosity, because at some point they digitized their records. I can see all the times I gave blood in New York, going back to 2001. One of the dates has to be wrong, because the Red Cross claims I donated twice in February 2002, which is obviously impossible. Then there's a gap between 2003 and 2005, which is probably when I was having issues with mild anemia, and after 2005 there's nothing for nine years until my church had a blood drive last January and I thought to myself, oh hey, I used to do that, didn't I...? And now the Red Cross keeps sending me emails and calling me at random hours of the day to ask if I've made a new appointment yet.

(I do think I gave blood once in 2006, since I'm fairly sure I once walked down the hill from Cornell with a bandage on my elbow and then worked a closing shift at the smoke shop, but perhaps that donation was the time they entered my name incorrectly into their system. Or perhaps one of the doubled Feb. 2002 entries really should have been Feb. 2006. It is a mystery!)

Anyway, I changed my work availability to ensure I won't have any scheduling conflicts that day.

Note: I am repurposing my stock Yuletide letter here, which is why some of the sections may seem slightly off-topic for a single fandom exchange.

Hi, and thank you in advance for creating a story or artwork for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene, I'll be thrilled just to get something in response to one of my prompts. Optional details are optional, after all! *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

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( General Information )

Okay. On to specific prompts.

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( Jade English's adventures in the Medium )

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( Terezi-Aradia-Vriska ashen porn )

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( Roxy's childhood among the carapacians )

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( Porrim in a (temporarily?) stable red or black relationship )

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So... yeah. This is what I want and I will love you forever for filling one of these prompts. ♥

It is Ladystuck reveal day! I wrote three fics this year: my assignment, a pinch hit, and a treat. I will discuss each in a separate post.

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Of Stone and of Sky: As the sun plummeted toward the western mountains' waiting teeth, the jagged terrain of the badlands fell away, stone dropping in layers of gray, gold, ochre, down to a vast, barren plain. This was Hammerfall, the cursed place where the gods struck the earth to raise the Anvil. No rain fell. No rivers ran. No life grew. Even the vultures avoided this place, knowing in their bones that it was both holy and inimical. Here the gathered holds of the northwest quarter came, every twenty years, to call the rain. Here they brought life from death. Rose<>Terezi, Roxy<>Latula. (5,300 words)

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This is a pinch hit, written for chthonianCrocuta in response to the prompt: I attempted to prompt something in this vein during the HSWC, and to nobody's surprise it didn't get taken up: Pyropes, Lalondes and *dragons*. I do not mind how this is achieved, just that it gets done. Somehow. Someday. By someone. A few possibilities, largely high fantasy:

[list of examples I didn't use]

Anything else you can come up with would also be fantastic, and as usual you can do with the relationships as you will. This one is not for the faint of heart, but if you can pull it off I'll be overjoyed. No downer endings, please!

So, uh. Confession time. Way back in the day, like nearly twenty years ago, I had a dream that contained a high fantasy-type story. This is not unusual. I tend to dream in stories, and most of those stories have heavy science fiction and/or fantasy elements. What is somewhat unusual is that I attempted to use that dream as the seed of a secondary world, which I named Kerr. Along the way, I completely lost the original characters and plot, to the point where I had to relocate them into an entirely different secondary world. (That would be Ashes, for any who might be interested.) And Kerr itself was... well, I was thirteen. It was very derivative of Tolkien and his less talented imitators, not to mention a hell of a lot of Dragonlance. The cultures were Frankenstein mish-mashes of badly regurgitated elements of Earthly cultures that I thought were cool; the geography and climatology made no sense; and the time scale of world history was ridiculously implausible.

I did realize those problems a few years later, at which point I redrew some of my maps, threw out a bunch of my old files, and extensively reworked the rest.

What I kept, mostly, was the dragons. I really like the dragons. And in particular, I like the dragons of west-central Sarala, the high, barren, desert plateau and badland region known as the Anvil, which is one of the few places in the world where humans and dragons have not simply learned to live and let live, but have actively formed an integrated society. Of course, nothing is ever entirely sweetness and light -- that newly integrated people spent the next three hundred years, give or take, conquering large swathes of the outer world. Imagine Genghis Khan, only with an air force instead of horses. Oh, and the airplanes are sentient. And don't like you. *evil grin*

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that when I saw a prompt with dragons, Lalondes, and Pyropes, I just leapt at the pinch hit. The kin structures and loyalty conflicts of the Anvil were an obvious connection to the Lalondes' already troubled family ties, the general danger and violence of that culture were an easy match to the equally dangerous Homestuck characters, and frankly, I could not resist the chance to get some use out of my ancient world-building. I have dreamed of these dragons for years. Now I have written them for the first time. Hopefully, it will not also be the last.

This story didn't flow as easily as "Raiders of the Deep Caverns," but I knew from the start what incidents I wanted to center it around -- the raincalling, the chance of breaking down barriers between holds and recreating an alliance like the one that led to the old empire -- and from there it was just a matter of finding the right words and images to convey the story. I also edited it heavily after throwing up the first draft to meet the posting deadline, because I needed to include other members of Dry Falls Hold to show that Rose had ties to her new home as well as her old, to make the setting feel a bit more lived-in and functional, and to stick Dave and Aradia into Roxy's POV section to show that she wasn't isolated either. The language is a bit more formal and... not flowery, exactly; maybe poetic? Anyway, not quite my usual narrative voice. But it fits the sense of ritual that weaves all through the fic; I don't think the story would work as well without it.

FYI, the working title of this fic was "Dragons!!!" The initial posting title was "Raincalling." The first was unusable for obvious reasons. The second one I changed because I wanted to emphasize the desert and dragons aspect a bit more, and because the characters' conception of themselves as those who defy the gods is vital to their eventual choice to attempt to change the pattern their culture has fallen into since the Empire's collapse.

These works are from page 8 of the Ladystuck 2013 archive, as sorted chronologically. I meant to finish page 7 as well, but I got a bit distracted by other things, whoops. [ETA: Now with creator names attached!]

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Ladystuck 2013 rec list, part 2
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( WRITING - 5 fics )

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ART

1. i will never look away: Artwork for Homestuck Ladyfest 2013. Calliope/Roxy. (by schellibie)

To quote the prompt: 'shy, tall, calliopes and confident, small, roxys just warm my heart when they're together'

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Hmm. Possibly I should write up my reveal day posts? Yes, I think I will go do that.

These works are from pages 9 & 10 of the Ladystuck 2013 archive, as sorted chronologically. I will try to get another post for the next two or three pages up by Friday evening, and will plow duly onward until I finish, even after authors are revealed. I am not posting AO3 warnings and tags; you will have to read them in the header information of the works themselves and decide whether to scroll down from there. [ETA: Now with creator names attached!]

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Ladystuck 2013 rec list, part 1
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( WRITING - 8 fics )

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( ART - 6 works )

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And now to bed, since I have a lot of errands to run in the morning. :-)

The Ladystuck 2013 and Ladystuck Treats archives are open!

I got two gifts -- one fic and one picture, interestingly in response to the same prompt -- and they are both glorious.

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First, the picture:

Cat Up a Tr33: Terezi and Nepeta have adventures in the forest. (High resolution version)

This is beautiful and dreamlike, with sort of ghostly sketch lines and an impressionistic treatment of background textures and colors. Nepeta's body language is pitch-perfect feline, and despite the blood -- these girls play hard -- there is a sense of camaraderie.

Go heap praises upon the artist!

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Second, the fic:

I See A Wasp With Her Wings Outstretched: You know you can't keep her here furrever. But you've never heard a live troll talking before. (4,050 words)

The author says this started out as "Five Times Nepeta Decided Not To Eat Terezi." That's not quite where it ended up, but that should give you an idea of their first meeting; that they finish as possibly each other's best friend, doing their best to be there for each other within the limits of Alternian culture, is amazing, beautiful, and in the final scene, painfully perfect.

Go heap praises upon the writer, too!

I hate deadlines.

Nevertheless, a rough draft of my Ladystuck pinch hit is now complete and posted to the archive, and I will edit the (inevitable) mountain of mistakes, omissions, and general wtf-was-I-thinking passages tomorrow.

For now? Bed. Because while I slept a good nine hours last night, I was still operating on zombie mode all through my shift at the smoke shop, and I'm pretty sure if I am similarly zoned out on Friday, Boss Lady will be seriously pissed off. Bleh, jobs.

(On the bright side, my assignment and pinch hit alone have kicked me over 10,000 words for January -- that being the per-month minimum needed to write 120,000 words a year. I try to take pleasure where I can. *grin*)

1. The Commons reconstruction project, which was hoped for lo these many years and finally manifested in 2013, is apparently on track. Which means that phase 1 -- rip up the central "street" part of the pedestrian zone and do lots of cool-but-invisible utility work -- is more or less done, and phase 2 -- resurface the whole shebang, put in new lampposts, plant new trees and hedges, and build pavilions, benches, and other features -- will commence in the spring once the weather isn't vicious evil cold. But for the moment, the whole area is a giant unfinished construction site, and that has discouraged a lot of casual foot traffic to the smoke shop.

In response, we are now closing at 7pm until spring -- which means sometime in March or April, exact dates yet to be determined. Boss Lady and I are doing some sales analysis to hopefully convince Mr. Speakerphone that this should only be a temporary measure and not a permanent shift, but for the moment all my sense of time has been thrown off. Also, all my shifts now start at 11am instead of noon. It's weird.

On the bright side, it does mean that if things go wrong, I have oodles of spare time after I lock the doors and cash out my register. So if, say, a couple comes in and wants to buy a pack of cigarettes with eight dollars in loose pennies -- which happened tonight, and I gritted my teeth and said, "You really have to stop doing this, but I will let you slide this one last time" -- I can do half my closing checklist after 7pm instead of before it, without making my work day feel like it's eleven hours long.

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2. Last night I picked up a Ladystuck pinch hit, mostly because one highly specific prompt from the recipient's list pinged me exactly where I live. I'm not sure the resulting story will be obvious, because the element I leapt upon is something from an original fiction world that I've never managed to write an actual story in, nor have I posted any world-building files online. But oh man, talk about your childhood dreams! (Literally, come to think of it. *wry*)

I made some basic edits to my assigned Ladystuck fic tonight, and have begun a preliminary outline for the pinch hit. I have Wednesday off work, so I should be able to get a bunch of solid writing time, even though I will be in and out of the apartment doing laundry during the afternoon.

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3. My mom will probably be coming up for a brief visit this weekend, ostensibly to attend a Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble concert for which I have two tickets. The exact scheduling will depend on weather, but conceivably she could arrive Saturday evening and stay until Monday morning. (The concert is Sunday afternoon.) I have removed myself from the RE teaching roster on the 12th in preparation, and already arranged to have Saturday evening and all day Sunday off from work. I'm not sure what we will do between church Sunday morning and the concert at 4pm, but I'm sure we'll think of something.

Oh, hey, I should check the Johnson Museum and see if they have any exhibitions that sound interesting. :-)