Wrote up recs for a couple webcomic collections, and got them into this 13 Best Books With Gay Protagonists list! (Pretty sure it’s not “13 best” so much as “the only 13 recs we got,” but still. A little good publicity never hurts.)
“The numbers just look worse with every new change, and Diamond didn’t change the things that I think most [local comic shops] actually are concerned about the most (like shipping costs) ” From 2022, but the nerdy business details are enlightening.
Ranking of the top 50 most-trafficked Arts & Entertainment websites in the world. A couple years ago, AO3 was #7 (topped only by Youtube, Netflix, Wikia, Spotify, IMDB, and the Chinese entertainment site Bilibili). Now it’s down to #12 (bumped by HBO, MiguVideo, Aniwave, DisneyPlus, and Pixiv). Can’t begrudge Pixiv the traffic, and AO3 is still #1 in terms of Sites To Read Fiction On. (Wattpad is a ways below, fanfiction.net no longer shows up in the top 50.)
Other people get candy or toys in their stockings, I got the Omicron variant. Lucky me.
…seriously, though, it was the better kind of COVID experience. No hospital, no breathing problems, no need for any of the expensive treatments that are in short supply. I just canceled holiday plans, spent a few days sleeping a lot, had a friend drop off some chicken soup, and used over-the-counter fever/cough/etc meds to keep the symptoms in check.
Over a week of doing that, my immune system wrestled it steadily down from “thoroughly miserable” to “minor sniffles.”
And if you’ve been hearing people on the news panic about how Booster Shots Wear Off In Weeks And Then Omicron Can Kill Us All…listen, I didn’t even have a booster. Probably could’ve had milder symptoms if I did? But even un-boosted, the two regular Pfizer doses I got back in summer had the virus handled.
(The cat helped, I’m sure. He was very fierce at it. Scared it right off.)
I had almost wrestled my Marked For Later list down to 5 pages when Yuletide dropped, and now it’s overflowing. At least reading has been easy for most of the COVID recovery period, so I’ve had time to start making a dent again.
I got 2 gifts!
A delightful comedy about Gideon, Harrow, and associates having low-stakes adventures, with Earth artifacts and attempted wrestling:
fifteen percent concentrated power of will (9120 words) by Anonymous Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth Series – Tamsyn Muir Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus Characters: Gideon Nav, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Coronabeth Tridentarius, Judith Deuteros, Camilla Hect Additional Tags: 5 things (kind of), gideon nav: personal trainer Summary:
Teaching someone to do a push-up is a love language, when that person is very annoying.
And a treat about Dorothy learning some finer details of Oz magic:
A Long Winter in Oz (14928 words) by Anonymous Chapters: 5/5 Fandom: Oz – L. Frank Baum Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Dorothy Gale & Glinda the Good, Dorothy Gale/Princess Ozma Characters: Dorothy Gale, Glinda the Good Additional Tags: Magic, Friendship, Minor Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, no canon character deaths, Romance is a minor element, Worldbuilding Summary:
Dorothy decides that she ought to learn about magic properly and there just so happens to be a long winter approaching.
Hello, prospective future Yuletide writer! I am erinptah on the AO3, and here is my gift!fic wishlist this year.
General likes:
hurt/comfort
time travel
culture clashes, especially one character in a fish-out-of-water situation
taking a weird fantasy/SF situation and earnestly thinking through the logistics
crossovers
crossdressing + gender-nonconformity
General DNWs:
joyless issuefic
character-bashing
hurt where the hurt character's close family/friends/loved ones never care about offering comfort
mundane AUs for fantasy/SF canons
references to the current state of US politics (a fic with a pandemic in it would be fine, as long as the context is different)
zombies (other than canon-typical necromancy, if applicable)
Oz books
Characters: Dorothy
Likes: Dorothy coming into her own as a magic-user. The developing magitech of Oz. Diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, especially Ev (Ozma of Oz) and the country of the Great Jinjin (Tik-Tok of Oz). Toto's deep nonverbal connection with Dorothy.
Shippy or gen is fine! Please don't pair up Dorothy or Ozma with anyone but each other; aside from that, any pairings are good.
If you include Ozma, any take on her Gender Feelings is fine, but I'd like to see her after the "trying to figure it out" phase. I've already read (and received) (and written!) a good amount of "uncertain Ozma does gender-related experiments" fics -- show me an Ozma who already found a comfortable gender space and is joyfully inhabiting it.
I did a major Baum reread a few years ago; there are reaction posts on my land-of-Oz tag. Feel free to mine that for other canon feelings/potential story hooks.
Optional specific prompts:
- Dorothy/Ozma wedding fic. If Ozma's birthday was a book-defining event, the Royal Wedding of Oz must be even more extravagant. What are the Oz traditions here? What elements do Henry and Em suggest from Kansas-style weddings? How many more different magical countries (maybe from crossover series -- Narnia, Labyrinth, Wonderland, Arendelle) send guests? Who tries and fails to crash the party?
- A mini-adventure with Dorothy and the Patchwork Girl. Something that shows off how Scraps has brains as good as the Scarecrow, she's just a lot more whimsical in how she uses them.
- Dorothy goes back to the US for a visit (maybe to see all-grown-up Cousin Zeb? or his descendants?), and it's nothing but culture clashes now that she's grown up with Oz norms. Extra bonus points if she brings Ozma, who has it even worse.
The Locked Tomb Trilogy - Tamsyn Muir
Characters: Harrow, Gideon
Likes: Gideon in all her sarcastic, obstinate, sword jock lesbian glory. Gideon/Harrow with their weird hostile loyalty. Little details about space travel and the different living conditions/worldbuilding necessities on different planets. The casual absence of homophobia. Other favorite characters include Camilla and Palamedes, Isaac and Jeannemary, Abigail and Magnus.
Optional specific prompts:
- AU where the main characters are adults, came together as a group voluntarily, and are working toward a common goal. (Just not a mundane AU, as per DNWs.) They can still be dysfunctional and antagonistic, I just want more time to roll around in the Team Feelings, you know?
- Comedy with Gideon and Harrow doing something low-stakes together. Baking a cake? Playing a video game? Going for a boat ride? The important thing is, it's not life-or-death stakes if they fail. Up to you whether they pull it together and succeed, bicker and sabotage each other until it all goes down in flames, and/or end up making out and get too distracted to finish.
Long-Shot Crossover Prompt 1: the mining ship Red Dwarf finally returns to our solar system, only to find that in the past 3 million years it's been...overrun with necromancers? Rimmer is immediately on the "great, give me a new body" train, Kryten tries to prove to Harrow that he's not totally obsolete compared to her skeletons, Gideon and Lister bond over the horror of being isolated in the far reaches of space with nothing to get off to except porn mags and your insufferable best frenemy...
Long-Shot Crossover Prompt 2:The Secret Garden but Mary is a necromancer, who (unwittingly?) used her powers to survive the plague that wiped out her family. Meanwhile, everyone expects Colin to have inherited the power, and therefore of course he's supposed to be frail and sickly, why would he get to be anything else? Lovingly detailed scenes of Mary manipulating and restoring dead flowers/branches/roots. Colin shapes up to be a fine Cavalier Primary once everyone stops pushing him to use bones and just lets him have a rapier.
If you write that one, feel free to have canon characters (including Gideon + Harrow) appear in background roles, or not at all. (I would've put TSG itself in my fandom requests, but that didn't seem fair when the only fic I really want for it is the fusion...)
Mage & Demon Queen (Webcomic)
Characters: Malori
Likes: Malori's shameless thirst. The other demons' shameless shipping. The comedy in general. I loved the long-term slow-burn of Vel coming to accept Malori's feelings, but I'm also delighted that they Actually Got Together and the comic is still going. Not super gripped by the political intrigue, other than hoping it all works out. I do like Leora, though.
Optional specific prompts:
- Vel/Malori, sex with hijinks! Are they trying to hide from a nosy underling? Are human and demon kinks/erogenous zones/basic sexual functions different in surprising ways? Does Vel uncontrollably turn into a dragon when she's turned-on enough? Make it magic, make it weird, make it fun.
- Reverse isekai where Malori gets summoned into Cerik's world. Maybe she has some form of communication with her friends back home, so Cerik can give advice (and everyone else can try to give advice)? But the fish-out-of-water awkwardness is strong.
- Setting AU that give Malori/Vel a different dynamic than human/demon. Sci-fi where Vel is the alien queen? Cyberpunk where Vel is a sentient virus? Superhero where Vel is that one powerful politician who's trying to get heroes canceled? (Does "Locked Tomb AU where Vel is a Resurrection Beast" even make any sense or)
I gave New Computer another update — this time making a point of backing up a bunch of stuff, just in case I had to do another reinstall from scratch.
Not only did the process go fine, the camera works again!
(This update was only released a couple weeks ago, and the camera-breaking update was a couple months ago, so it’s not like I could’ve just done that from the start. Someone on the development end had to fix what they broke.)
…so, ah, fingers crossed that it’ll fix the other weird problem, where the computer spontaneously decides it wants to reboot into a diagnostic scan. Which always finds no problems, just like all the previous scans.
Plot twist: I paid more attention to when these happen, and the last 3 times were on Thursday afternoon. So this past Thursday morning, I shut down the computer completely, then headed out to work.
I get home, and it’s on this screen again. Something in here didn’t just reboot the OS, it autonomously powered the machine on.
I mean. What even does that?
The camera-fixing update was later that evening, so I guess we’ll find out “did it also fix the spontaneous diagnostics?” next Thursday.
Had an extensive dream that was an AU of The Secret Garden, but Mary Lennox was a tween necromancer, Gideon the Ninth style.
…and now that I think about it, the parallels are there? Not to Harrow, I mean to Gideon’s backstory of “was a small child when a fatal affliction swept through the whole group around her, later retrieved after being discovered surrounded by bodies.”
Maybe I’ll request it for Yuletide, or something.
It’s that magical time of year when I put Kickstarter logos in all my social-media icons, re-re-proofread all my ad copy, and anxiously look up how much it costs to ship a 5-pound box to Germany.
Please click that link and hit the “Notify me on launch” button, if you haven’t already!
And folks, I am so close to the weight where, if someone wants All The Leif & Thorn Books, the cheapest method is to pack them in a Flat Rate box. 4 books isn’t quite there — but at 5 books the flat rate is cheaper, and at 6 it’ll be much cheaper, and once we get up to 9 it’ll be astronomically cheaper.
…when we get to 10, they won’t all fit in a single box. But that’s a future problem.
(Not that I’m going to do this, but: there would be something really satisfying about drawing enough to fill 9 books, and then stopping the comic, just so it’s a perfect fit for the boxes.)
There’s a thing I regularly hear people say about Terry Pratchett, even across wildly different contexts…
“Was he always perfectly sensitive about my identity? No. Would he even really understand my life and experiences? Probably not. But if I got to sit down and talk with him, it feels like he would genuinely listen. And take what I said to heart. And support my right to live an authentic and fulfilling way, whether he got it or not.”
Life goals, seriously. I can only hope readers in 50+ years will be saying the same about me.
N.K. Jemisen, 2013: “All mythological creatures have a real-world root. Dryads are trees + humans + magic. Mermaids are fish + humans + magic, or maybe porpoises + magic. Unicorns are deer or horses + magic, maybe with a bit of narwhal glued on. Dragons are reptiles + magic, or maybe dinosaur bones + magic – paleontology. So again: what are orcs supposed to be?”
Tamsyn Muir is doing a whole extra Locked Tomb novel. We're getting a 4-part trilogy, folks. Can't think of another ongoing series I'd be happier to hear it for.
It started snowing on the night before Christmas, and kept going on-and-off ever since, so everything outside the window is carpeted with perfect winter scenery. Seeing as I don't have anywhere to go, this has been great.
I got an absolutely heartwarming Yuletide fic, a new take on "Ozma decides to spend some time in Tip form", featuring some quality Worried Dorothy and Protective Aunt Em:
Homecoming (6127 words) by Anonymous Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Oz - L. Frank Baum Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Dorothy Gale/Princess Ozma Characters: Princess Ozma, Dorothy Gale, Aunt Em Additional Tags: Comfort, Genderqueer Character, genderqueer character misread as male, mentions of past emotional / physical abuse, aunt em has a bunch of unexamined gender and class biases Summary:
A nice young person with experience on a farm comes to help Aunt Em with the chores for a celebration. Meanwhile, Ozma isn't in the Palace, and Dorothy goes looking for them.
More rec posts to come. I've been churning my way through all the promising-looking fandoms, trying to read everything in-the-moment instead of letting it disappear into marked For Later.
...with the exception of a bunch of Locked Tomb fics, because I'm still only 80% through Harrow the Ninth (the second novel), and any time I've looked at post-Harrow writing for more than 5 seconds I've been spoiled for something. (Fortunately, there are So Many wild and unpredictable twists that it's turned out I was still unspoiled for most of them.)
On less fandom-y notes:
Half my family is being scrupulous and careful about COVID restrictions, and the other half is...not. I don't know what to say. They've already had two scares (notable COVID-like symptoms that ended up testing negative), you'd think that would make them more cautious, not less. The hospitals are full of people who thought "oh, nothing bad will happen to me." And by "full" I mean record-breaking cases, record-breaking deaths, "lining up beds in the hallways because all the rooms are occupied" full.
This Week In Virology had a good discussion of the new COVID variant that's developed in the UK, including a breakdown of why it's not likely to be more vaccine-resistant than any other variant. There is a serious chance it's more transmissible, but even if that's true, it's not so transmissible that it can overcome all the usual measures -- keeping distances, wearing masks, washing hands.
So we just have to stay serious about doing those.
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