Beyond Selidor

This weekend has been a very welcome chance to catch my breath, after weeks of intense work, travel, and a lingering sense that I'd been trying to cram too many responsibilities into too little time. I feel physically and mentally rested for the first time in ages.

Of course, 'catching my breath' in my context still means that I went out three times to the market in the past two days, plus three times to the gym (or rather, two times to the gym and one time to the cinema which is in the same complex), did two loads of laundry, batch-cooked a bunch of stuff, and spent most of this morning doing little bits and pieces in the garden, so I haven't exactly been spending the weekend lounging around on the couch. I never want inactivity — I just want to feel that all this stuff fits easily into the time I have available.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I did the time-honoured Australian hot weather activity of decamping to the air conditioned comfort of the cinema, and watched Sinners. This is probably the first time in a year I've seen a film in a cinema, and it was well worth it! It's been a while since I've seen a movie that works so perfectly on all levels — narrative, acting, visual and aural storytelling, and the seamless interweaving thereof — and this was an absolute feast for the senses. There's so much going on: it's a story about Black American history, culture, and music, it's about cultural appropriation (particularly of Black music of all genres), and of the tenacity of Black people throughout the entirety of their presence on the American continents in building and creating and clawing their way to success and prosperity in the face of the full force of racism that will impede them every step of the way, and tear down everything they've built whenever possible, with zero consequences. In particular, it's about the immense trauma at the heart of the Black experience in the United States — on both an individual and communal level — of the rupture of slavery, and the way it robbed the descendents of the enslaved of knowledge of their history, and the way that, in spite of that, there is this incredible cultural continuity, particularly when it comes to music, that transcends and survives this traumatic rupture, resulting in this most exquisite music, from whose roots pretty much every popular musical genre has sprung. (And of course, all this exquisite musical talent and innovation has been plundered and whitewashed by non-Black musicians ever since mass entertainment became a thing, a point which the film weaves throughout its narrative.)

It's also a vampire horror movie.

There were some scenes that I can't describe without spoiling what really should be seen unspoilt, but which were so visually striking and emotionally arresting that they took my breath away. The music is incredible, and made me want to dance in the cinema. In other words, I was immersed and entranced, and it took away my cynicism about film as a storytelling medium (which, after a big dose of franchise/reboot/blockbuster fatigue, had been pretty high).

Other than movies, I've been slowly reading through the only kind of reading material I can handle at the moment: Consort of Fire (Kit Rocha), an undemanding, tropey romantasy that feels like the equivalent of junk food for the brain.

Beyond that, it's been a weekend of gardening. Last year, I planted an sweet pea seedling, which grew absolutely gigantic, and was laden with flowers of varying shades of pink and purple. It made me so happy, I was planning to get another seedling this year — until I went out to the vegetable patches and realised I didn't have to, as about five new sweet pea plants had self-seeded from last year's. I spent a bit of time this morning constructing frames from bamboo, and training the new seedlings to the frames so they'll grow upwards. I also planted a bunch of seeds in propagator trays: radishes, chili, spring onion, rocket, dill, parsley, chives, peas, marigolds, and nasturtiums. It really is too late for all this — see above for how rushed and lacking in time I've felt for weeks on end — so I'm philosophical about how successful any of these potential plants is likely to be. If anything sprouts and grows, I'll count that as a success. Benign neglect seems to be the route to success in our garden — without having planted any, we have masses of strawberry plants (including one that self-seeded in the cracks between two paving slabs in the patio), a bunch of supposedly dead foxgloves in the front garden suddenly revived (these are not meant to be perennials) and covered themselves with budding flowers, and the unkillable mint died back as it always did in winter, and sprang to life in spring, filling the entire herb garden. The wood pigeons have, as always, stripped half the leaves and unripe fruit from one of the cherry trees, but in a month or so, there should be a veritable feast of pinkish-white cherries nonetheless.

It's nice to have had a good stretch of time to devote to Dreamwidth this afternoon. I've missed this place.

This weekend, and my final days of holiday preceding it (plus the first day back at work from home on Friday) have been as relaxing as I'd hoped and planned. I did a couple of swims (and walked back home in bitter cold), some short walks with Matthias along the river, and went out a handful of times to return or collect library books, or for coffee and drinks, but essentially remained in the house, feeling cosy. I made a massive batch of chickpea and vegetable soup, cooked a time-consuming (but straightforward) stodgy Ukrainian vegetable stew, did a lot of yoga, and read a lot of books. Matthias and I also watched the latest Wallace and Gromit film — an amusing (and easter egg-filled) caper involving sentient robotic garden gnomes and a 'car' chase on slow-moving canal houseboats.

It snowed in the early hours of the morning, but the whole lot had melted by about 10am, and then the torrential rain arrived. It's been nice to sit in the living room, drinking tea, finishing my book, and watching the rain on the window.

This year's reading is off to a fantastic start: three excellent books, and one excellent novella, each exquisitely good at doing what they're trying to do.

( More thoughts on books behind the cut )

Tonight will be the last night with the Christmas decorations. Tomorrow, the wreath will come off the door — I'm planning to burn the pine branches and holly in the wood-burning stove, the next time we use it — and our tiny little tree will go back out into the back garden, to be brought in again when it's December once more. The sky is still light at 4pm; the year moves on.

My weekend started (on Friday evening) meeting Matthias at his workplace in Keir Starmer's constituency, moving on for dinner and a concert (on which more later) in Jeremy Corbyn's constituency, then sleeping overnight in a hotel in Diane Abbott's constituency: the peak north London experience.

Dinner was a bunch of Malaysian starters at the always excellent sambalshiok, but we weren't able to linger, because we had to head down the road to a tiny (but cavernously ceilinged) venue for the gig. Uncharacteristically, we were there for the support acts — nnhmn_ and minuitmachine — and hadn't even heard of the main event, rebekawarrior. The former are female-fronted dark electro acts, the later a dark electro dj (and by the time we got to her set, I was astonished that I'd never heard of her), we danced our delighted, exhausted hearts out, and a fabulous time was had by all. We made our way into the night, and back to our hotel via the overground, and collapsed into sleep.

Saturday dawned cold and cloudy, and I was able at last to try the pastries at pophamsbakery for breakfast — a patisserie I've long been following on social media — and was pleased to discover that they lived up to the hype. We finished our 36 hours in London up with a visit to the British Library, to see their exhibition on Black British music (from Tudor times to the present), which I highly recommend. It's always a bit tricky to do a physical exhibition on a topic that relies so heavily on aural experiences, but they did a good job of telling this complex story. It would have been great if there had been a way to accompany the exhibition with a multipart documentary, just so that the music could have told more of its own story in sound, but I enjoyed things all the same.

After the exhibition, and a quick lunch, we headed back to Ely on the train, and had a lazy Saturday afternoon and evening at home.

Today has also been fairly lazy (apart from both of us doing a bunch of household chores) — slow cooking, slow yoga, lying around reading (Elusive, the second book in Genevieve Cogman's published self-insert Scarlet Pimpernel vampire AU trilogy, which was as swashbuckling good fun as the previous book, with the same reluctance to examine the inherent flaws of the source material's premise while adopting a smugly self-congratulatory assumption of having done so), and restoring energy before the advent of the next working week. I'm severely behind on Dreamwidth, but I'm going to do my best to catch up on my reading page before I go to bed tonight.

I hope everyone's had lovely weekends.

I've been really sick for the past few days, and have essentially spent all of today in bed up until now. I'm exhausted, my bones ache, and all I really want to do is sleep. I've cancelled everything non-essential, but I could definitely have done without being sick right at this specific moment.

In better news, I received a late gift for fandomtrees after the fest closed: this fic based on Welsh folklore/mythology by kalloway. That was definitely a lovely and welcome surprise!

One fest closes, another is opening tomorrow: halfamoon, which is a fest focusing on female characters. The full list of prompts is already available.

once_upon_fic is now open for nominations, with details and the full schedule available in a recent post.

snowflake_challenge is doing its post-challenge friending meme. Click on the poster to join in:




It seems a waste to write a (rare) post on a Wednesday and not talk about my recent reading, which consists of a single book: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco. This is in some ways the vampire novel of my dreams — when I'm seeking out stories about vampires, this is essentially exactly what I want. Our hero, Remy, is a vampire hunter in a world in which aristocratic families of vampire hunters coexist uneasily in alliances with aristocratic kingdoms of vampires, teaming up against the unspecified threat both of rogue, unaligned gangs of newly-turned vampires, and more established vampire kingdoms.

Remy's backstory piles on the angst — there's a cloud surrounding the circumstances of his birth (which killed his mother), his father treats him as a weapon to be wielded, the other vampire hunters either distrust or use him, etc, etc. Through an escalating series of dangerous circumstances, Remy ends up working with a powerful vampire couple, he ends up falling in love with both of them (and they with him), and a good time is had by all, against a backdrop of epic battles, political machinations, and huge heapings of angst. The worldbuilding is contradictory and at times nonsensical, but that doesn't really matter to me since the draw of the book is the characters and their relationships, which are very much my thing.

If that were all I had to say about the book, I would have given it an enthusiastic five-star rating and moved on (since I give that kind of rating on the basis of how well I think a book has achieved what it set out to achieve, rather than any objective scale of 'good quality literature'). However, it has serious problems on a copyediting level, to the extent that at times I wondered if it had even been professionally edited at all. This is a book professionally published by Hodder & Stoughton — hardly a dinky little small press — the sequel is coming out later this year, and yet there are multiple instances of tense changes not just from sentence to sentence, but sometimes within a single sentence.

This is not the first time I've noticed serious problems with editing (either on the level of copyediting/proofreading, or on the level of the actual structure and content of the book) in professionally published works of fiction, and I'm definitely not the only one to have raised it within my Dreamwidth circle. Without knowing the ins and outs of the publishing industry, my impression is of an industry cut to the bone, with the effects of these cuts and lack of resources starting to be felt in areas that are noticeable to the reader — namely, editing (or lack thereof). My assumption (and this is just a theory; I don't work in publishing) is that it is more cost effective to do book deals with a large number of authors (often with quite low advances), larger than the publisher has the capacity (both financially and in terms of staffing) to edit well, and get all those books out there and published. More books, bought cheaply from more authors, means the potential for more sales, and most readers of these books aren't going to notice or care about poor quality editorial work — and those of us who do have already bought the books, have already given our money, and aren't necessarily going to remember the typos and grammatical errors by the time we attempt to buy another book from the same author or publisher. As I say, just a theory, but whatever the cause, this poor quality editing is something I've noticed frequently, and it's a shame it affected this book as well.

Happy New Year to everyone! Matthias and I saw out 2023 in our usual way — with canapes, champagne, and films at home, and it was cheerful and relaxing and cosy. I wasn't quite intending to wake up at 7am, but in the end it was nice to be up and about in the very first sliver of the morning, drinking tea, eating a cooked breakfast, and chatting about which books with which we planned to start our 2024 reading. We then went out for a looping, 5km walk along the river and through the sleepy suburban streets, and back — via the coffee rig in the market square — past the cathedral, drenched in silvery sunlight, watching the canal boats and swans drift by. Here's a little photoset of the transition from one year to the next.

It being 1st January means two things: Yuletide reveals, and the start of snowflake_challenge. I'm planning to participate in a low key way in the challenge this year: I'll do all the prompts, but I'm not going to link them in the comm. I know this goes somewhat against the spirit of the thing, but I found dealing with the increased replies overwhelming at times last year, and this feels like a compromise that will keep things manageable. But more on Snowflake later: let's get to the Yuletide recs!

I only make rec posts for the exchange once authors have been revealed, because it feels unfair to share all these things I've enjoyed without the authors getting credit, hence why I always wait until 1st January. I'm pleased to see that several of my favourite fics that I'm reccing from this year's collection are written by friends!

( Nine recs behind the cut — mainly book fandoms )

I wrote four fics this year — my main assignment, two treats in the main collection, and one treat in the Madness collection, which seem to have been well received, so from my perspective, this has been a good Yuletide all around: a great gift, a good reception for my own writing, and a collection with some fantastic pieces of work.

( My four fics behind the cut )



Today's prompt is:

In your own space, update your fandom information.

My intro post remains up to date, which is pleasing. Something which I had been intending to do for last year's challenge, but which never happened, was writing a template post for fanwork exchange letters, with prompts for all the fandoms I'm likely to request. The idea was that this would save me time and avoid the need to go trawling back through multiple previous letters. I can obviously update it with new fandoms if I decide to request them. I'm really happy that the template letter post is all set up — it should save me a huge amount of time in the future.

And that's snowflake_challenge Day 1 completed!

This post is a couple of days late, due to the incredibly busy weekend I've been having (of which more in a later post). We finished watching five TV shows this month. All were excellent, although I'd have to say that some of them ruined things somewhat by very disatisfying endings. The shows in question were:

Blue Lights, a contemporary crime drama set in Belfast, following a number of new police recruits as they undergo their training and become caught up in trying to solve a high-profile case involving organised crime. It's a good social portrait of Northern Ireland in general, and Belfast in particular.

Interview with the Vampire, an adaptation (part of) the first book in Anne Rice's series. I came to the books at exactly the right age and demeaner — eighteen years old, and very melodramatic — and loved them a lot during the time I read them. The changes the showrunners made from the books in terms of Louis's backstory and ethnicity work really well, and serve to even better emphasise the unequal, messed up, codependent relationship between Lestat and Louis, and later Lestat, Louis and Claudia. I'm less convinced that the changes made to the timeframe — pushing everything forward in time from the mid-1800s to the early twentieth century — works well, although I assume it was necessary if the show wanted Louis to be Black, but to have been born free rather than enslaved. In any case, the show hit exactly the right tone — the same purple prose, the same self-absorbed melodrama, the same lurid excess, and is to my mind a fantastic adaptation.

Daisy Jones and the Six, another adaptation from a book, and another story about self-destructive codependent relationships. This is the story about the titular band, and Daisy Jones, a singer who joins them later, and their journey as they make it big as rock stars in the 1970s. The cast in this is fabulous, the songs are great (and are sung and performed by the actors), and it's thoughtfully done portrait of a very specific time and place, and of the beauty that can be created by incredibly damaged people, and the damage that they can do to themselves and each other. The one sour note is the show's ending, which pulls the rug out from under the viewer in terms of the frame narrative (of a retrospective series of interviews for a documentary about the band) in a way that I found sentimental and unsatisfying.

Infiniti, a French drama about astronauts travelling to the International Space Station, and a strange series of murders taking place in Baikonur (the city in Kazakhstan that is home to the Cosmodrome spaceport from which Russian- and international-crewed human space flights were launched until very recently). I really liked the portrayal of space flight (although I had to switch off the part of my brain that knew no country's space program would send such psychologically unstable people as the show's characters into space), life in Kazakhstan, and the weird social and political tensions that come from the region's Soviet legacy, and the Cosmodrome's weird political status as an entity on Kazakh territory, but leased to Russia until 2050. However, I wished that the show had stayed in the realms of crime drama and geopolitical thriller, whereas instead ( spoilers )

Other than that, a very good show, and I enjoyed its multilingualism.

Count Abdullah, another comedy from the same writers who brought us We Are Lady Parts. In this show, a young NHS doctor of British Pakistani descent ends up transformed into a vampire, making his already complicated and stressful life even more complicated and stressful. As with We Are Lady Parts, this is a comedy about British Muslim life made by people from that community, and I found it laugh-out-loud hilarious.

June was definitely a high point in terms of TV shows, that's for sure!

Miracle of miracles, I have the time and energy to do some book-logging on an actual Wednesday for once!

After the poll on my last post, I ended up reading The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain. The book was a lot of fun — it reminded me of the folklore encyclopedias I used to read as a child — moving around Britain and Northern Ireland, cataloguing various myths and legends associated with landmarks and other notable places. There were a lot of commonalities from region to region — standing stones and Neolithic tombs, portals to fairy otherworlds, supernatural dogs, various local people said to have made pacts with the Devil, witch trials, haunted manor houses and so on. It's history as written into the land, and as understood by people who didn't read, and who didn't travel widely — local history that recognises the priorities of such people.

I did think it was a bit cheeky to bill the book as a guide to Britain, and then devote 3/4 of the book to England, and the remaining 1/4 to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (the latter of which isn't even in Britain), though!

I continued my habit of reading short fiction during my lunchbreak in the office yesterday — just one story this time:

'Time: Marked and Mended' (Carrie Vaughn): Graff isn’t quite human. His people move through the galaxy collecting memories and experiences, recording their lives and passing them on. Then, one day, he breaks: he discovers a chunk of his memory is missing. This should be impossible—he’s never forgotten a moment in his life. Now, he has to learn to forget, and to remember, and this has consequences for all his people, his culture, and his whole world.

Matthias and I saw two films on the weekend, both of which had relationships between fathers and daughters at their heart, although there the similarities ended.

Troll is a deeply silly Norwegian film in which roadworks through a mountain awaken an ancient troll from its slumber, at which point it starts roaming the land and terrorising the people. An archaeologist and her folklorist father get roped into the government's response, and wacky scenarios ensue. If you saw the earlier Troll Hunter film, it has a similar vibe.

Aftersun is a meandering, melancholy film in which a father and his eleven-year-old daughter go on holiday in the 1990s to a beach resort in Turkey, and not much else happens. Piece by piece, their history and relationship get fleshed out in all their complicated, messy detail — it's clear that the father became a parent very young, that he is no longer together with the girl's mother (and possibly never was), and that he is having a difficult time. The girl, on the other hand, is poised on the threshold of adolescence and is equal parts curious, scared, and confused about what this might entail. What this film is about will depend on which character you believe is the protagnist — I have firm opinions about this, but it's the sort of thing that is better to work out on your own. It's got minimal dialogue, and the two actors work very well together.

On to yesterday's snowflake_challenge: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, time you spent in the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.



I am really pleased at the reception of one of my four Yuletide fics from 2022, and at myself for pushing through and writing it. I've been participating in Yuletide for many years, and every year up to 2021, I wrote multiple treats in addition to my assigned gift. It was important to me to do this — I needed to feel as if I was putting in more to the exchange than I would necessarily get back, and I myself would be delighted to get additional treats so I wanted to give other exchange participants that opportunity. When 2021 rolled around, I was so burned out that I was only able to write my main assignment, and while this of course is the sole requirement of the exchange, I felt like I wasn't meeting the standards I set myself in terms of number of treats.

So I was relieved in 2022 to have my energy and inspiration return to me, meaning I was able to write three treats in addition to my main assignment. The last of these treats was one I wasn't sure I'd have the time and energy to do justice, but it ended up being the best received, which was a wonderful feeling, and a reminder that my own feelings of doubt should normally be ignored in these sorts of situations. This is the fic in question:

This marigold run (3037 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, Constantine (Sunshine), Yolande (Sunshine)
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, 5+1 Things
Summary:

Five times Con gave Sunshine an object of power, and one time she returned the favour.

The level of engagement is obviously not huge if you're used to writing for megafandoms, but I only write for small book fandoms, and by those standards, this fic is doing well! (Especially considering it's for a book that was published in 2003, is standalone so will never get new installments, and generally only gets remembered around Yuletide.) Its reception made me really happy, and was a great note on which to end the fannish year and carry me through into 2023.

I've got salted caramel fudge from the Christmas market, and a cup of smokey tea, and it's been a very satisfying weekend.

I've spent much of my time doing nothing but writing — I've now got a complete draft of my Yuletide assignment fic, which I'm going to sit on for a couple of days before getting stuck into editing. At this point, therefore, it looks likely that I'll be able to complete at least two of the three treats I've been planning since I first browsed the letters app.

I also finally broke my reading drought with House of Hunger (Alexis Henderson), a melodramatic gothic novel loosely drawn from the real-world historical figure of Elizabeth Báthory. (When I say 'loosely,' I mean that the setting has been changed from early modern Hungary to a sort of featureless generic industrial fantasylandia, and that all nobility in the world are literal vampires, with an entire social ecosystem of exploitation set up to meet their need for blood.) It was exactly the ludicrous sort of thing I wanted to read on a cold, dark November afternoon, so it suited me perfectly.

I know I promised a roundup of links to all the various new newsletters to which I have subscribed, but it's going to have to wait. I have, however, put together something of a linkpost, as my number of currently open tabs really needs to decrease!

I've heard that some people have fled Twitter for Dreamwidth, and, as always, there's a lot of (hopefully) helpful advice floating around about how to get the most out of our little community here:

Via several people in my circle, galadhir's post about how to get established on Dreamwidth, and a Twitter exodus friending meme hosted by xancredible.

I enjoyed this interview with Ada Palmer — it teased out some interesting elements about the Terra Ignota series, and the things that motivate and intrigue Palmer as a writer, academic, reader and fan. (It also unintentionally reinforced several of my frustrations with the Utopians in the Terra Ignota series — or perhaps more specifically the reception of them by readers — but that's nothing new.)

The fandomtrees fest is happening again this year, with signups running until 7th December. If you want a fairly low pressure fanworks fest, I'd highly recommend it, and you've still got a few weeks before making a firm decision.

One of the newsletters to which I recently subscribed was Griefbacon, on the recommendation of Amal El-Mohtar. The most recent post (issue?), An Incomplete List of Things That Twitter Was showed me that I had made the right decision. I can't relate to a lot of the specifics listed in the post, but the overall sentiment resonates.

I really enjoyed this collection of Hebrew and Arabic poems by Jewish women living in Al Andalus (note that they appear at the second half of a longer newsletter post; the first half is all about reproductive rights in the United States, so if you prefer not to read about that, you'll need to scroll down to the second half of the page)

My mum sent me this incredible video of a huge hailstorm in Sydney, in slow motion.

My stocks of both links and fudge are running low, so I'll leave things here, finishing my tea and watching the birds flitting around the back garden.

'And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.'

As with many people who loved the writing of Anne Rice, her books came to me at a time in my life when I was really struggling, and her loquacious, histrionic vampires spoke to me, and helped me keep going. Her writing meant a lot to me when I was a young adult, and I can still quote whole passages from memory.

I have a great deal of affection for the time I first devoured her books, over a period of about three weeks, when I believe I trekked out to every single branch of the City of Sydney public libraries, tracking down each extant copy of the then ten-book Vampire Chronicles series. (I read so quickly as an eighteen-year-old that waiting for holds to be delivered to my local branch would have taken longer than simply walking to Newtown, Glebe, Ultimo, Waterloo, etc, picking up the book, and reading it in a couple of hours.)

She always seemed as immortal as her creations. From what I could tell, hers was a life of deep griefs, and — for better or fanfic-banning, negative-reviewer-berating worse — intense emotions, lived to its vibrant fullest. Although I hadn't read any of her books for years, I continued to admire (and boggle at) her give-no-fucks attitude, and her wholehearted commitment to living every moment of her life entirely on her own terms. She must have been exhausting to work with, to be close to, but she always seemed to be having the time of her life.

May her words remain immortal, continuing to to speak to the hearts of every vampire-loving, melodramatic teenager.

Today I ended up having to teach two classes, even though I'm still on holiday, but it only took up two hours of the day and I don't mind too much. It's grim and grey, and the idea of leaving the house was not hugely appealling.

Today's book meme asks for:

9. A book that reminds you of someone

( My answer )

( The other days )