edenfalling: circular blue mosaic depicting stylized waves (ocean mosaic)
So clearly I failed at [livejournal.com profile] lgbtfest this year. I knew I was nuts to sign up.

However! I do have 1,300 words written toward the prompt I chose, and a clear idea where the story is going. It's just been... well, it keeps trying to be about semi-feudal politics and not about sexual orientations. I am not sure how much of that is because Astrin Ymris is a very private person, and how much is because I am apparently less comfortable than I thought writing specifically about my own sexual orientation (aromantic asexual).

Fortunately there will apparently be an option to write to prompts outside of the official fest timeframe, and a place to post links to those stories.

So I am going to keep writing, because I think "The Body Politic" is both a story worth telling in its own right, and something I need to work on as part of dealing with my own issues.
edenfalling: stained-glass butterfly in a purple frame (butterfly)
I'm doing [livejournal.com profile] 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 )

---------------------------------------------

In other news, I have obviously missed my posting date for [livejournal.com profile] 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!)
edenfalling: stained-glass butterfly in a purple frame (butterfly)
1. I have written 100 words of my [livejournal.com profile] lgbtfest story. The first line came to me when I was falling asleep last night, as ideas often do, and I picked a little at the idea on my way to work this morning. However, now that I have started writing it, there seem to be strange echoes of Queen Elizabeth I of England cropping up. I hope my subconscious has some idea what it's doing... (I am using the short outline, incidentally, as there is no way to make the long outline work by Monday.)

2. As I walked home after closing the smoke shop tonight, I went through the Commons rather than heading down Aurora St., and spent a happy five minutes listening to a man and a woman playing hammered dulcimer and cello, respectively, where Bank Alley intersects State St. They call themselves the Nomadic Minstrels, and they have a MySpace page wherein you can listen to some of their work. I adore hammered dulcimer, so this makes me very happy. :-D

3. Remix reveal day tomorrow! *twitches in anticipation*
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.
---Michel de Montaigne



In other news, here are some things I have done today:

1. write a post about remixing in preparation for the reveal on Sunday
2. buy groceries
3. buy two black fabric pens for drawing flowers, curlicues, and other patterns to disguise bleach marks on some of my t-shirts
4. deposit my paycheck and get a roll of quarters for laundry on Sunday
5. buy Guy Gavriel Kay's newest book, wherein he shifts his attention from faux-European and Byzantine equivalents to a faux-China equivalent; we shall see how this plays out in practice

Here is a very important thing I have not done today:

1. write my lgbtfest story

*headdesk*

I should really get to work on that...
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
So, having successfully defeated Remix Redux 8, I now have to write my [livejournal.com profile] lgbtfest story in less than a week, as it is due Monday the 31st. *headdesk*

For the record, I expected to have two weeks to write this story, since I thought I'd be done with my remix on the 16th instead of fighting it down to the absolute last wire on the 23rd, but still. A tight schedule.

Therefore, I have two outlines. The long one has five scenes and covers, oh, a bit less than 15 years. The short one has only one scene and covers only one conversation, with judicious one-paragraph flashbacks to incidents that would be the first four scenes in the long outline.

Today I went back and read through canon, and...

You know, it occurs to me that I can actually talk about this story; it's not anonymous. *grin* So. I am writing about Astrin Ymris, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, being asexual, based on the following prompt: Riddle of Stars, Astrin Ymris, 'Your son is the only land-heir I want or need, Rork,' Astrin said quietly. 'So stop trying to marry me off.' I realize that could also be read as Astrin being gay and maybe in a relationship with Rork (which is justifiable from canon), but I prefer to read it as Astrin being asexual and Rork just being a good and worried friend (which is also justifiable from canon, and doesn't require me to either kill Rork's OC wife or make him cheat on said wife during the years Astrin spent living on Wind Plain, neither of which appeals to me).

So today I sat down and skimmed through The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and Harpist in the Wind to find every time Astrin appears or is mentioned, and also read several other sections just because I got caught up in the story. I have adjusted my outline to fix things I had misremembered and to work in neat details I had completely forgotten (like Astrin being a student at Caithnard for a year).

Tomorrow I will start writing, and we shall see how it goes.

*crosses fingers*
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
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.

-----

2. In a fit of madness, I signed up (at least, I think I signed up) for this year's [livejournal.com profile] 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.

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Elizabeth Culmer

May 2025

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