the deep moans round with many voices

I was reading a post on asexual_fandom about writing asexuals in sexual situations and whether this was too prevalent in fandom (or not prevalent enough?) and in any case, was it often badly handled and so on and so forth, which had the interesting effect of making me go and write several hundred words of "The Body Politic," my Astrin-Ymris-is-asexual Riddle-Master fic. Said words are mostly a very long riddle about a woman who gets raped and is terrified her husband will blame her, rather than anything actually related to asexuality or, you know, the damn plot, but whatever. I needed to get the riddle out of the way at some point.

I think it is helpful to be slightly tipsy when writing McKillip-style riddles. At least, it's helpful for me. I don't think in riddles naturally, so I need to be able to bend my mind into someone else's thought patterns, and sleep deprivation or alcohol are the cheap and easy ways to do that. *wry*

...

I do have an actual plot for that story now. I'd always known where it was heading -- well, okay, once I'd decided which outline sketch to use, I knew where it was heading -- but I had only the vaguest idea how to get there. Now I have the middle to go with the beginning and the end.

...

In other news, Diana Wynne Jones did indeed stick the landing on the Dalemark Quartet. I may write a more detailed (and spoiler-filled) post about that later. I have read all the Yuletide Dalemark fic there is, and would really like to know if any more exists, because that series has so many wonderful characters and countless potential stories.

Also, and unrelatedly, I watched Inception a couple weeks ago and have been having far too much fun reading through all the fic I can get my hands on. I love stories about competent people being awesome. :-)

Apropos of nothing in particular:

There are two very important characters in Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy who are never directly given their proper, original names. One is the High One, whom we meet in various guises (each with its own name), but based on the words of the dead children under Isig Mountain and a few things he says near the end of Harpist in the Wind, one can work out his original name: Tir, Master of Earth and Wind.

The other is the woman who leads the shape-changers. She enters the story masquerading as a named human character and then is only ever referred to as "the woman you knew as So-and-So," "the dark, delicately beautiful Earth-Master," "a dark-haired woman," "the woman," and so on and so forth. My guess is that her original name is also one of the names provided by the dead children under Isig -- Edolen or Sec, in other words; one of "those from the sea" -- but unlike the High One's name, hers is never confirmed within the story.

This annoys me both from a feminist perspective and from a fic-writing perspective.

I'm doing thirtyforthree again, this time for Kira Sakuya/Mudo Setsuna/Mudo Sara from Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary. There will be spoilers in nearly every theme -- given the characters, it's nearly impossible to avoid them! -- and a lot of potentially objectionable content. This is because the source manga has a lot of potentially objectionable content. If incest squicks you, or you know you'll be bothered by some unusual and often negative interpretations of Judeo-Christian theology, you probably won't want to read any of these stories.

With that said...

Theme: #11 - Snowfall
Warnings: spoilers!
Notes: The main plot of this ficlet is set post-manga, in very late 2007. The flashbacks run from shortly after the First Holy War to shortly before Setsuna's birth, and are not all in chronological order. Setsuna is 24; Sara is 23. This falls between Talking Over Distance and "Looking" (which I have not yet finished).

It took me about three years to write this, mostly because I was never quite sure where it was going. I am still not sure it all hangs together logically, but whatever. (6,900 words)

( The Transient and the Eternal: Snowfall )

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In other news, I have obviously missed my posting date for lgbtfest. *sigh* I will try to get the story finished this week and post it next Wednesday, since Wednesdays are amnesty posting days this year. (The story has gone annoyingly political on me... by which I mean that I want to be writing about sexual orientations but the characters are determined to talk about inheritance rules and the political implications of tangled Ymris genealogy and marriage games. *headdesk* Astrin, for my sake, please stop being so private and just tell Rork your main reason for remaining single instead of arguing all the ancillary justifications!)

1. I went grocery shopping this evening and discovered that Tops has decided to close the P&C location on Hancock St. (Tops is a grocery chain that recently bought most of the old P&C grocery chain; what they didn't claim, Price Chopper did.) Either they were not able to negotiate rents with the couple who own the site, or they decided the store was not profitable enough.

It will close in mid-April.

This is unfortunate, as that store was the only grocery store within walking distance of my apartment, and all other stores require a twenty-minute walk into town and then a fifteen or thirty-minute bus ride (in other words, forget buying dairy products; they will curdle) or a ten minute walk and a five minute bus ride to the ultra-discount Aldi, and I don't really like discount stores; they have such awful selection.

So it looks as though I will be joining the Ithaca car share program and doing all my shopping once a week down at Wegmans. *sigh* Damn it all to hell.

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2. In a fit of madness, I signed up (at least, I think I signed up) for this year's lgbtfest. I found a prompt that really spoke to me in a fandom I know. I think it may have originally been intended to be about a man dealing with subsidiary issues of being gay, but it can be read equally validly as a man dealing with asexuality, and upon considering said character (Astrin Ymris, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master trilogy), I suddenly cannot see him as anything but asexual and cannot figure out why I didn't realize that before.

And the fest is allowing prompts and stories about asexual issues this year, so my interpretation is allowable. Yay!

I have realized over the years that while I see some characters as asexual and tend to write most people as not especially interested in sex and/or romance unless said desires are notable character traits or sex is the point of a given story, I have never really written about asexuality as an issue. It will be interesting to try. It's something weirdly personal, in a way that other issues aren't usually for me. (Not even feminism, because for me, being female and therefore part of a community of women and girls has never been a question, whereas being asexual is something it took me time to realize and start working out what the implications meant for me on a practical and emotional level. And I still have not told my family in so many words, though I have danced very pointedly up and down the edges of the issue.)

Of course, from another point of view a ridiculous amount of stuff I write is already dealing with asexuality and/or aromanticism, since even when I am writing sex and romance, my treatment of said elements is awfully dry and glossed over, and I place more importance on friendship and familial relationships anyway. But still, the one time I previously tried writing a story specifically about asexuality, I was still not down with the whole implications of the thing (I had identified myself as asexual, but not really connected that to there being other asexual people) and therefore tried to justify a character's planned asexuality as nerve damage or some-such instead of just letting his orientation be natural and normal. That pathologizing of my own orientation is probably as much a reason I abandoned that story as my growing lack of interest in Harry Potter in general.

Anyway, hopefully I will be working on both my issues and this new story, and have something presentable done at the end of May.

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3. I've been overdosing on Code Geass fanfic the past few days. (You may have noticed over the years that I have a thing for mind games and antiheroes, though I rarely write them. I also have a thing for explorations of morality and ethics, which I do write about. Also, war stories are cool.) The upshot of this is that I have added the series to my Netflix queue and am morbidly curious about whether I'll enjoy it.