edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
It's time for the continuing adventures of Liz and her reading list! These are the books I read in November and December of 2019. Click on the cuts for summaries and reactions. I reserve the right to spoil all hell out of any book if spoilery bits are what I feel like talking about.

The Edge of Worlds, by Martha Wells
-----thoughts )

Harbors of the Sun, by Martha Wells
-----thoughts )

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells
-----thoughts )

Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells
-----thoughts )

Rogue Protocol, by Martha Wells
-----thoughts )

Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells
-----thoughts )

This Star Shall Abide, by Sylvia Engdahl
-----thoughts )

Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, by Sylvia Engdahl
-----thoughts )

The Doors of the Universe, by Sylvia Engdahl
-----thoughts )

Opium: How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World, by John H. Halpern, MD, and David Blistein
-----thoughts )

Nine Goblins, by T. Kingfisher
-----thoughts )

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I'll get the audiobook post up later today, but right at the moment I am going to take a nap.
edenfalling: headshot of a raccoon, looking left (raccoon)
Today is Yuletide reveal day! Here is the story I wrote this year:

and wish her joy in the knowledge that her child will live (1745 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Children of the Star - Sylvia Louise Engdahl
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Noren/Talyra
Characters: Noren (Children of the Star), Beris (Children of the Star), Brek (Children of the Star)
Additional Tags: Childbirth, Medical Trauma, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fictional Religion & Theology, Physical Disability (discussed)

Summary: Talyra and the baby live. This changes nothing and everything.

(Written for [archiveofourown.org profile] primeideal)

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So, first of all this story will make approximately -5% sense if you don't know the canon, since it's a canon-divergence AU of the opening scene of book 3 in a trilogy. And the canon is pretty obscure, so, you know, not a big audience here. *wry* But that is what Yuletide is about!

I am a little annoyed at myself for not being able to run the AU further forward to show how the changes snowball, and also to get Talyra interacting with Lianne -- both because that would have let me hit more of [archiveofourown.org profile] primeideal's prompt seeds and because it would have been more accessible to the general fannish public -- but that would have required a minimum of 15,000 more words once I got the plot rolling so I left off at the proof-of-concept stage.

cut for length )

...

Someday I want to come back and write the novella I couldn't get to this year. It will have an audience of about three people on the planet, but I don't care. I think it's something that needs saying, and I want to say it.

We'll see if I can make good on that. :)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Well, at least my Yuletide fic is true to source canon?

...

By which I mean, for once in my life my tendency to default to interminable internal monologues about ethical dilemmas, not to mention the "faceless mannequins talking on a blank white screen" lack of sensory description, is actually a desirable effect. *wry*

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ETA: Bus version (aka, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and can't make any edits or additions, it's still a functional gift) is done and posted! \o/

I want to add some more scenes to carry the idea further forward in time (and also because I want to respectfully argue one specific point with canon), but if I don't, I am happy to stand by this as-is. :)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Things I have done Thursday and Friday:

1. Wrote and mailed all my holiday cards. (No cute doodles this year, alas. I am tired and my hands are sore.)

2. Bought gifts for Dad, Mom, and Nick. Also bought a birthday present for Mom. As part of this project, I signed up for a $1.99 one-week trial of Amazon Prime, which I will promptly unsubscribe from by next Thursday. I used to be able to get a whole month's trial for free, but times change. (This is my yearly plan to get free holiday shipping for basically nothing. It's super effective! *evil grin*)

3. Finished rereading my Yuletide source canon. (Yes, this is hideously late. Sue me.) In conclusion, it has not been visited by the suck fairy in terms of content (aside from the general "needs more women!" issue that applies to most work from that time period *sigh*), but the writing is significantly clunkier than I remembered on a word-and-sentence level. Also I had entirely forgotten massive chunks of plot stuff, though I'd retained the entirety of the thematic arc... which is fair, since I'm pretty sure the thematic arc was the author's main point of interest.

-----

Things I intend to do on Saturday:

1. Poke at Cat and Susan for gift suggestions. Order stuff if they provide ideas. Failing any clearly expressed desires on their parts, I will buy them interesting books from the local co-op bookstore. (Yes, Ithaca has a co-op bookstore. It's Ithaca. What ELSE were you expecting???)

2. Start writing my Yuletide fic, in which I intend to make a stab toward addressing the "needs more women!" thing, along with general thematic arc thoughts and explorations.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
I got my Yuletide assignment, which is (predictably) for a fandom I offered on a wave of "oh hey I remember loving that when I was a teen!" emotion and now am kind of going "...oh shit I haven't read the source for twenty-five years, thank god there's an ebook version now because it was SUPER out of print the last time I checked and I have SO MUCH REREADING to do." But it was the kind of source canon that I am pretty sure will not have been hit by the suck fairy in the intervening years, and my recipient's prompts are very promising, so. Here goes nothing!

In other news, today is a day of Many Errands, while tomorrow will be a day of driving to Vestal (argh) for a six-hour mandatory training session for Not the IRS. At least I'm pretty sure it's paid training? I would have gone to the Ithaca session, except this is the only one that fit into my work schedule. On the one hand, I like my schedule at the rental office -- I get three days off per week and two of them are weekdays rather than weekends which is more useful for errand purposes -- but on the other hand, the long hours mean it's hard to do stuff on work days even at times that are notionally "after work" because I'm at the office until 7pm instead of getting off at 5 or 6. *sigh*

Anyway, I am now going to go vote in local elections and then get started on my Day of Errands.
edenfalling: headshot of a raccoon, looking left (raccoon)
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Master List of Elizabeth Culmer's Fanfiction: Miscellaneous Fandoms
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Organization: This list is organized alphabetically by fandom. Within each fandom, it's arranged first by associated story cycles (if applicable) and then by date. Word counts and writing dates are approximations.

Content/Warning Policy: 1) I am not consistent about warnings! I use them when I remember, for a few relatively broad categories of potentially problematic content, but if something is off-page, non-explicit, or generally backgrounded, I probably won't think to note it in the metadata. 2) The things I try to warn for are explicit sex, rape, murder, torture, cannibalism, incest, depression/suicide, familial dysfunction, and occasionally also societal dysfunction (aka dystopia). Sometimes I just slap a general content warning on all my fic for a given fandom and don't label each individual fic. I also don't generally warn for violence, unless the violence in a fic is dramatically out-of-step with the violence in its source canon. 3) I don't use any content rating system unless I'm posting to a site or community that requires or encourages ratings, because I find movie-style ratings counter-intuitive when applied to written fiction, and not particularly useful for anything other than denoting the presence of explicit sex, which I already note in the metadata.

Quality Rating System: I've marked my favorite stories with asterisks, on a scale of 1 to 4. The more asterisks, the more I like the story. This doesn't necessarily mean that stories without asterisks are bad, just that I don't like them as much. Also, I am not claiming to be an arbiter of taste; you may love stories I dislike, and vice versa. I am just providing a heads-up about the ones that I think are best written and/or most interesting.

Notes: Outside of my main fandoms, my fanfiction writing tends toward resolving plotholes and other canon problems, the creation of backstory (which is itself a form of problem-solving, where the problem is a gap in canon information about a character or an event), or prompt responses (often for Yuletide). Therefore, almost all the stories on this page are an expression of dissatisfaction with canon, of curiosity about what lies behind the canon we see, or of an attempt to satisfy somebody else's heart's desire. Once I've resolved a problem, filled a gap to my own satisfaction, or answered a prompt, I generally have nothing further to write in that fandom, which is why these subsections have so few stories.

Anyway, there's a lot of random stuff on this page, and some of it I look back on and wonder what on earth I was thinking, but overall I do like most of these stories -- probably because when something bugs me so much that I write a story to fix or explain it, or when I am writing to make someone else happy, I care enough to give my best effort.

Where To Read: As always, if an AO3 version exists, it is definitive. FF.net versions are definitive in the absence of an AO3 version. Journal versions are the equivalent of beta drafts, though the shorter and/or fragmentary works may never be posted anywhere else.

Contents: American Gods, An Ash-Blonde Witch, Arthurian Mythology, Batman, the Bible, the Black Jewels series, the Bourne trilogy, Chalion, Charlotte's Web, Children of the Star, Code Geass, Damar, Death Note, Discworld, Doctor Who, Dragonball Z, fairy tales, Girl Genius, The Girl with the Silver Eyes, Glee, Gormenghast, Hamilton, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Hexwood,The Homeward Bounders, Howl's Moving Castle, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings, Lucifer (comics), Mad Max, Merlin, Murderbot Diaries, the Oz books, Pern, Ranma 1/2, Rise of the Guardians, Sailor Moon, Saiyuki, Seaward, Shakespeare, Stargate: SG-1, Star Wars, Tam Lin (Pamela Dean), Vorkosigan Saga, White Collar, Wolf Hall, X-Men, and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

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American Gods )

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An Ash-Blonde Witch )

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Arthurian Mythology )

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Batman )

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The Bible )

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Black Jewels )

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Bourne trilogy )

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Chalion )

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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

May 2025

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