So, I'm going to take a minute and squee about my Yuletide gift, for truly, it is an excellent gift.

...Actually, I'm just going to post the link and then quote bits of my comment at you by way of advertising, because I don't have the spoons to write up a separate rec post. *wry* But seriously, go read it!

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White Rooms (10654 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Daredevil (Comics)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Relationships: Milla Donovan/Matt Murdock, Matt Murdock/Karen Page, Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios
Characters: Karen Page, Milla Donovan, Elektra Natchios, Larry Cranston
Additional Tags: Character Death Fix, Mental Institutions, Prison, Resurrection, background rape, Mind Control

Summary: Karen Page, resurrected by Elektra, withdraws from the world until she learns of Milla Donovan's fate at the hands of Mr Fear.

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I love this! Elektra gives Karen a new chance at life, and then Karen takes that and gives Milla a new chance too. I really like Karen's perspective on Matt and hero drama in general, that it's this big sweeping thing where everyone has to be center stage and both she and Milla (and Elektra too, in a sense) were seen as interchangeable sacrificial pieces rather than people in their own right. It makes perfect sense that she doesn't go back to Matt but instead takes time to figure out who she is on her own, and who she wants to be. And the person she wants to be is someone who helps instead of hurts.

I like Elektra's ambiguity, and the way it seems like she feels responsible for what happened to Karen, the same way Karen feels sort of responsible for what happened to Milla, and Milla still feels responsible for shoving that poor man in front of the train. Even if they don't actually have direct responsibility, the emotion is still there and it shapes how they interact.

I'm also really proud of Karen for [spoiler], and of Milla for [spoiler].

Thank you so much for this gift! ♥

Iiiiiiiiiii... am about 2/3 of my way to minimum Yuletide wordcount, and I think I've acquired a plot? Which is nice, since the plot I meant to write kind of blew away in a tattered mist of "nope" when I started writing yesterday and left me with nothing but a completely unexpected scenario. And a scenario is not a plot, and can't sustain a thousand words. *headdesk*

Anyway, I'm going to blunder onward and see where this new maybe-a-plot takes me. It seems like it might be somewhere interesting. :)

Tomorrow's plan:

1. Get up an hour earlier than my usual Saturday schedule.

2. Drive into town and get a haircut. (Withdraw some cash?)

3. Walk to the library and pick up my interlibrary loan hold.

4. Drive to work.

5. Work 10am to 6pm. (Ugh.)

6. Start working on a winter display? I can probably repurpose the trees, just change the "ground" from brown paper to white paper and remove all the leaves in favor of snowflakes.

7. Continue Yuletide canon review. Possibly begin brainstorming story ideas?

8. Gov't class discussion post.

And we'll see how I feel from there. :)

Thinking aloud about various things:

1. I believe federal health plan enrollment for 2019 has opened as of today (GO APPLY FOR HEALTH INSURANCE!) but New York runs its own health exchange website and that doesn't open until November 15. So I have two weeks to pull together some numbers and see whether I agree with their estimate that I will make too much money next year to qualify for the Essential Plan, though I'd still qualify for a pretty big Premium Tax Credit and also reduced copays and deductibles and stuff. The thing is, they have my new pay scale at the rental company, but they probably haven't adjusted my Not the IRS income to account for me working only two days per week in 2019 rather than the three days per week I worked in 2018.

2. I was going to write something cute and simple for my next mini-ficlet prompt meme fill, and then I tripped myself up on AU canon divergence worldbuilding and at this point I kind of want to keep fighting my way through the tangle just to pin it all down, dammit, even if I end up using none of that background/backstory and writing something completely unrelated. Nrgh.

3. I'm still working through Yuletide canon review. I'm about 2/3 done with the single book (life keeps getting in the way *sigh*), and I have figured out which parts of the other canon I need to read to refresh my memory of my recipient's requested character.

4. TC3's December graduation isn't a big Thing like spring commencement, but there's a little honors ceremony and refreshments on December 7, so I think I'll RSVP and make an effort to go. Mom, Dad, and Vicky may come as well.

Yuletide assignments just went out, and it turns out I matched my recipient on two fandoms! ...both of which I need to do canon review on, because although I love them passionately, it's been a while since I read them.

(Or reread them, or re-reread them, or re-re-reread... well, you get the picture. These are old favorites.)

And then, of course, I'll have to decide which prompt to fill. In an ideal world, I could write both! But I am about 90% sure I won't have the requisite time or spoons, so alas, I shall have to neglect one, much though it pains me. *sigh*

Things and stuff:

1. I decided not to try getting a haircut on September 29th because that weekend was Apple Harvest Festival and just no. Last weekend my hair place was tragically closed. But! I called this morning to check, and my hair guy promised to be in at 9:00am tomorrow morning, so I will finally get rid of this infernally annoying shagginess around my temples and on the back of my neck! \o/

2. Prof. G gave the Spanish class amnesty on assignments over fall break, so they were all collectively due on Tuesday instead of on their original due dates. Which was good, because there were a bunch of partner dialogues and M (my partner) and I can only meet online to record them around 9:30pm, which is kind of awkward and means we're both a little punch-drunk tired while trying to think in another language. *wry* Anyway, I am now one day ahead on my assignments, and am slowly attempting to increase that to two or three days of padding... which will be super-useful for future partner dialogues since I'll be able to schedule them with M in advance.

3. My government class continues to be the easiest goddamn thing I have done in well over a decade. It's basically, read one 20- to 25-page chapter a week, take the world's most ridiculously easy 10-question multiple choice quiz, make three posts in the weekly discussion thread, and every fourth week write the world's dinkiest essay. I could have aced this course when I was freaking eight years old. *pauses* *considers* Well, no, I had no work ethic when I was eight. And probably not when I was ten, either, since my fourth grade teacher managed to destroy the fragile work ethic I'd been starting to scrape together under Mrs Skrypa's gentle guidance. But when I was nine, yeah, I would've eaten this class for breakfast.

4. I need to sign up for Yuletide, but that requires a good few hours sorting through the tagset and pondering prompts and offers, which I don't have the spoons for right now. Perhaps tomorrow night, perhaps Sunday. We'll see.

5. Proper autumn weather at last!!!

6. Still not done with my first solo rental office counter display (which is two maple trees with colorful autumn foliage, for those who don't follow me on Tumblr, where I posted a draft photo on Monday). I put up an additional branch yesterday, and finished cutting out the additional 45 leaves today, but I still need to tape all the new leaves onto the trees. I will definitely get that done tomorrow though.

7. I kind of miss being involved in RE, but I am so glad I'm not trying to facilitate the youth group this year. There is no way on earth I would have the time or the energy. Maybe next fall I'll volunteer for a younger age group again. I always did like the K-2 age range. :)

8. Mom is coming to visit Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The plan is to A) remove my AC from the front window, B) drop off some Halloween candy for my inevitable deluge of trick-or-treaters, C) eat dinner out, D) eat breakfast out, E) talk and hang out, and F) pack the unfortunately unsuitable gift chair in Mom's car for transport to NJ.

(Chair backstory: I had a violently purple computer chair that I nabbed from an apartment trash room back in... 2005, I think? which had long since worn out and desperately needed replacing. So Mom and Dad bought me a new chair last year, but because they were working sight unseen, the chair they purchased ended up not working for me for various reasons. I have since acquired a new chair that does work -- by nabbing it from the verge of a house several blocks down the street (this is perfectly reasonable! leaving stuff out on the verge is the Ithaca way of telling people to take it if they want it! it's like a city-wide unofficial free garage sale!) and then giving it a thorough vacuum and scrub to remove absurd amounts of cat hair -- so it's not as if this will leave me chairless. And hopefully the chair will turn out to be useful for Mom, who could probably use a replacement for her own computer chair.)

9. Someday I will figure out why people traveling (and often on various forms of public/communal transportation) is such a common recurring theme in my dreams. I mean, I know why the "lost my map," "lost my ticket," "lost my passport," "got delayed by traffic jam," "bus stop was moved," etc. elements are common -- those are hallmarks of frustration and/or stress -- but I don't know why travel is the medium through which that frustration expresses itself most often. And I tend to have travel elements in all my other kinds of dreams, too. In fact, I'm now trying to think of dreams that didn't have a travel element, and I'm having a hard time coming up with any. Even the ones that exist mostly in one setting tend to have travel in the backstory.

Which is really weird because I'm a homebody. *hands* Brains man. Brains are weird.

(This last item brought to you by the two dreams about trains and the one very long dream about airports/airplanes I had last night.)

Belated Yuletide reveal post!

Patience, Tenacity, Luck: Some months after Penric's Fox, Thala investigates the disappearance of a trainee shaman. (5,075 words, written for DesertVixen)

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I signed up to write for Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion series on something of a whim, so naturally that was the only one of my recipient's fandoms I recognized. Such is the way of Yuletide! Anyway, her other fandoms seemed to lean toward female detectives and/or amateur sleuths, which the details of her Chalion prompt corroborated, so I wrote a case!fic centered on Thala, the junior locator of the Father's order we meet in Penric's Fox (and then, alas, see no more since the Penric novellas do a significant time- and location-jump immediately thereafter).

I flatter myself that these days my attempts at whodunnits are somewhat less dire than they were when I was twelve years old, but mysteries have never been my personal cup of tea (nothing against them; they just don't grab me) and they're annoying to construct on a technical level. But it's a good kind of annoying -- the sort of finicky logistical challenge that makes you say "HA!" and throw your hands up in glee when you get the last stubborn piece to click into place. :)

I did initially want this to be a longer story, with ( minor spoilers; go read the fic first ), but my time management skills have not appreciably grown less dire over the years. So I picked a logistically and thematically reasonable endpoint and called it a year. *wry*

Success!

...Okay, technically partial success, but whatever. I posted a subsection of my planned story that can stand coherently on its own without the rest, and will finish the other parts over the next couple-three days. (The subsection is at best a quarter of the full story, so you can see why I called it a day at that point.)

And now, SLEEP.

*flops exhaustedly into bed*

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi, and thank you in advance for writing a story for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene, I'll be thrilled just to get a fic in one of the fandoms I asked for. *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 fandoms.

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( The Lions of Al-Rassan )

( Saga of the Skolian Empire )

( Daredevil (Comics) )

( The Dispossessed )

And that is that. Thank you again, and happy writing!

Today is Yuletide reveal day! Here is the story I wrote this year:

The Morn Is Hallowday: Halfway through the walk from Forbes to Ericson, Molly realized that if Tina hadn't returned already from her folk dancing, she certainly would very soon, and in either case Janet's absence would require some explanation. (2,450 words, written for nnozomi)

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This is not the fandom nnozomi and I matched on. That was Diana Wynne Jones's Dalemark Quartet... but the thing is, the prompt was centered around Navis Hadson, in whom I have approximately zero fannish interest. I like him, but I am perfectly satisfied with his role in canon and feel no need to explore him further. (His kids, maybe, but not him.) And it happened that nnozomi had also requested two fandoms I know but hadn't signed up for (because I figured the chances of getting stuck with something I flatly couldn't write were too high, and also there comes a point of diminishing returns in bucket offers), and the prompts for those fandoms fell squarely into my personal wheelhouse.

So I wrote one of them instead. :)

I first read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin when I was fifteen or sixteen, and just starting to think about college as a thing that would probably happen in my future. In the event, the book bears almost no resemblance to my own college experiences, but I treasure it as something that told me, "Yes, becoming an adult is messy and hard and tiring, but there are also joys, and if Janet Carter can do it, so can you." It was one of my touchstones that growing up didn't have to mean giving up all the things I loved. There were, of course, other stories featuring adult characters with rich inner lives and interest in books, but this one went into the most detail about the process of getting there from here.

(It was also a book I enjoyed much more on the second, third, and tenth readings, partly because I was no longer expecting it to go full secondary-world fantasy on me; the magic is subtle and mostly not the point.)

( cut for length, and also spoilers (assuming a twenty-year-old book can still have spoilers) )

Random trivia: the section where Molly muses about mermaids really being lures for some kind of giant anglerfish was inspired by various Tumblr posts I've seen discussing similar theories, though it does not directly quote any of them. I actually wanted to do more with the deep sea analogy since Molly is studying to be a marine biologist, but when I tried to work in a more extended riff on that theme, it completely derailed the emotional logic of the fic -- and so, with regret, I killed that particular darling. *wry*

I had a bit of an adventure finding a beta on short notice, and I would like to thank both isis for hippo services and snickfic for exemplary editing services. :)

...

If I'd been more on top of things in November and the first half of December, I would have liked to also fill nnozomi's prompt about Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan's Sergyar support staff, but alas, time management has never been my forte. *wry*