the deep moans round with many voices

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 Rule of Threes: The day Aradia Megido arrived in New York, three important things happened, though she only noted two at the time. [1,375 words]

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This is a treat, written for ChameleonSerket. They requested a humanstuck modern magic AU with the following elements:

-Aradia, a hedgewitch in a small town with a talent for fortune telling and prediction, moves to a big seaside city to seek fame and fortune (or something like that anyway).
-Feferi, a very rich noble who is the most powerful seawitch that has been seen for decades.
-Jade, a mysterious witch living in Aradia's apartment block who may or may not have space altering powers.
-Finally, Rose who is a seer plagued by horrible rage filled episodes (possession?) with an affinity for both light and dark magics.

I didn't get Feferi on-page, but I managed the rest. As with "The Moons of Skaia," there's a much larger story I didn't have time to write -- in a very real sense, "The Rule of Threes" acts as the opening chapter for that unwritten fic. And again, maybe someday I will come back and see where the threads I laid will take me. :-)

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. ♥