(sound of howling husky)

Nonesuch

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:27:41 GMT

I read more than one book in April, but I think I only have a full review in me of Francis Spufford's Nonesuch, the first half of an urban fantasy duology set in WWII England during the Blitz. I like and admire Spufford's prose a great deal and am always hoping that his next book will be the book that I find fully realized in its invariably complex project; unfortunately, if I were to graph the trajectory of my reactions to his writing across time-of-publication, it would look like... um, honestly, a steadily downward trend for "percentage of thematic and dramatic intention actually executed on," although a more seasick up and down for "how much my personal shit X title was," with spikes for Golden Hill and Cahokia Jazz and a mighty trough on Light Perpetual.

( cut for premise/rising action spoilers + much reluctantly compelled griping )

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Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:56:51 GMT

In March the single book I finished was Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, by K. J. Parker, one of many popular and successful fantasy authors working today that I had never heard of until G mentioned him. I like 1) low- or no-magic pre-modern historical fantasy 2) snarky narrators if I find them genuinely funny, so I was immediately curious about the premise: Orhan, a Colonel of Engineers from the fantasy underclass of "milkfaces"--a significant minority of light-skinned people (mostly war slaves or poor freedmen) in the Robur Empire, which is just mumblemumble handwaved Byzantium except with a very dark-skinned, racially homogenous elite, resented as "blueskins" in their turn--finds himself the highest surviving authority in the capital after a well-planned ambush wipes out the Imperial garrison, and has to lead the defense of the city during a protracted siege as they wait for rescue by the navy.

( cut for spoilers & some discussion of IPV and rape in fiction )

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Dear Yuletide Author

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 22:55:03 GMT

Thank you very much for writing for me! It's been a few years since I did Yuletide and I'm really delighted to be back to it--I can say in advance that your gift will be one of the highlights of my holiday season, and I'm honored by your effort and time. Take my prompts and commentary as suggestions only, with the exception of my DNWs below and those included in the requests; I would love to read any story you feel passionate about telling.

General likes: character-driven writing and character study, humor, casefic, missing scenes, intrigue, worldbuilding exploration, tone-matching with canon, bittersweetness and conflicting or contradictory emotions of all kinds

DNWs: setting AUs, fluff

( Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu - Legend of the Galactic Heroes )

( Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon )

( La Passe-Miroir - The Mirror Visitor )

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Tabletop one-shot writeups, long and less long overdue!

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:42:24 GMT

I'm about a year in the red on one of these and under 24 hours distant from the other. I played both with my partner, uskglass, over video call.

The first was ECH0, a GM-less storygame by Role Over Play Dead first introduced to me by Friends at the Table, in a worldbuilding episode for their third sci-fi/mecha campaign, Partizan.

( ECH0 )

The second, "Debrief," by Paracelsus Games, is a LARP that requires players to go in unspoiled, the better to play characters working from limited information to achieve competing goals. If you're interested, it's available online for free here. I think the website description is pretty complete; it's spy noir with a side of urban fantasy, relationship-driven, and a hell of a lot of emotionally harrowing fun if that's your cup of tea, as it is mine.

( Debrief, with spoilers )

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Dear Yuletide Writer:

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 07:39:33 GMT

Hello, and thank you so much for writing for me! I'm really looking forward to whatever you come up with; the fact that we have one of these fandoms in common is enough to tell me that I'll adore your gift. I'm on tumblr at gurguliare, where I spend most of my time talking about the Silmarillion--but I have tags for all my requests this year. ODAO: you're welcome to adopt these prompts or ignore them, whatever suits.

General likes: Interesting setting details/flavor text, plot, porn, nonsexual intimacy, humor, violent and dramatic happenstance, moments of conscious introspection, moments of total obliviousness, character dialogue that touches on weird friction in the relationship (or surprising affinities!), intense or difficult friendships, sustained action sequences, interactive fiction, pastiche

Dislikes: setting AUs (at least for these canons), fluff

( 7 Seeds )

( Friends at the Table )

( 80 Days )

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Dear Yuletide writer:

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 05:42:15 GMT

Thank you for becoming my secret favorite person for the next two months; at other times of year rankings ambiguity can prove a minor but significant source of stress. Also, thank you for taking the time to make me something awesome! I love all these fandoms and I can't overstate how much I'm looking forward to the fic. Optional details are peak optional; Yuletide letters have somehow become my annual excuse to air a bunch of excitable, contradictory half-opinions at once, which means you're only encouraged to pick, choose, and throw the whole thing out where necessary.

General dos and don'ts: I love hurt/comfort, humor, dramatic friendships, plotty violence, low-key body horror/gore/close-and-unsentimental descriptions of pain--I wouldn't be giving this one so much emphasis, but it's relevant to a couple of fandoms, ish..., uh, big theoretical enterprises undercut by petty human feelings, hypocrisy, dumb slapstick, offbeat emotional arcs--so things like stagnation, backsliding, recurrence rather than recovery; but also compassion in weird places and solidarity where least looked-for. .5% less pretentiously, I like it when people fuck up, and the world doesn't end, and it's still pretty bad. Porn is good! Nonessential, but good. Fluff is lower on my list of likes, but if it's funny and true to character I'm not about to turn my nose up at that, either. I did request some more than usually adorable canons.

SPEAKING OF THE CANONS, and without further ado--

( Hamilton, Alliance-Union, The Lie Tree, and Sorcerer to the Crown )

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3 LINES WIP what if i just leaked a little spinal fluid instead

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 01:31:51 GMT

Hi. Anyway.

1. (WORKING DOCUMENT TITLE: the stupidest crossover in the world. dot odt.)

“Do you like Los Angeles?” Utena asks her, one morning when they're both kicking their heels outside a pentagon of police tape.

Anthy says, “Let me see.” She licks a finger and raises it to the nonexistent breeze. Utena doesn't seem to notice. “It's like this: there's an old story about a man named Pliny, who wanted to help rescue the survivors of a volcanic eruption. He sailed across the windy bay to an ash-shrouded far shore, where the same wind that had carried him there barred him from a swift return. Gazing upon the destruction, he fell over and died. His companions say that he was poisoned by the fumes—but if that was really so, how did his companions survive?”

Utena, young as ever, taps her chin. “Gas masks?”

2. The day Ned and Lord Baratheon arrived was almost wholly golden. This was 277, the end of summer, and the leaves of the trees showed a growing flush at time's impertinence. The same high color every fall, like a whore paid well for modesty. Lyanna had known that winter was coming since almost before she could speak, but she found little evidence of it in the indifferent, gambolling world, which bred and putrefied without regard for its peril, and accepted the rigid order of frost like a cat submitting to a collar. Lyanna had lived through just one winter then.

She remembered: three years of storms, the wolfswood a white Kingsguard, not seven but seven thousand strong—her mother, dying—but the town outside the castle had been, throughout, alert and jolly; the hot springs bubbled, the roses grew, and at the end of it all her father strode out to receive Oldtown's blind ravens. Already, tougher flowers were nudging through the snow. Lyanna was a spirited child, her loyalties pledged to frenetic life; but she bore a tenderness for the cold's black hand, which was beaten back by fire. She sympathized with anything paid courtesies and then overruled.

and the last one is just me dumping this entire fic-stump here because I'm never going to finish it ever, yayyyy. actually I might have posted it somewhere before but oh well

( 3. Mikasa noticed Annie for the first time when Annie asked if Mikasa could snuff out the lantern. )

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DEAR YULETIDE AUTHOR

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 21:23:34 GMT

Hi! I'm a dreadful person and neglected to actually include any optional details in my sign-up before closing time, so hopefully you've found this letter and don't mind getting only the longer-winded version. Probably this is where I should note--with extra emphasis this year--that everything I put down here amounts to no more than a wild suggestion. Thank you in advance for the gift!

As far as overall preferences go, I'm a pretty eclectic reader, and if you're into it I probably will be too. I like humor? Most of the fandoms I'm requesting this year have canons that I think of as very funny, on a level that's hard to disentangle from the content; therefore I will appreciate anything you include by way of either canon-esque jokes or your own personal comedic spin. On the other hand, if you'd rather exploit the differences in medium and take your fic down a more introspective or dramatic route than the tonal parameters of anime/Disney cartoons/Susanna Clarke's footnotes permit, I'd be down for that, too.

Okay, turning to individual fandoms:

( Ghost Trick, Fate/Zero, Madoka, JSMN, and Gravity Falls )

And that's it for my input. Thank you again for taking the time out to do this; I really look forward to reading your fic.

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blows dust off blogtop; surreptitiously replaces dust after a moment's thought

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 22:39:43 GMT

So today I went with my mother to the town of Fiesole, which overlooks Florence from the north side and is generally a cool place to drop things off of, if you're in the mood for that. It was lovely! My favorite part of the visit was the local monastery, apparently the one-time haunt of Saint Bernardino of Siena--looking him up now, he preached against "gambling, witchcraft, sodomy, and usury," so I'm not sure how many interests we have in common, but his cell was interesting. My mom and I went in and took a picture of ourselves standing in front of the horrible plank bed and I called it a CELLfie. And she said she would lock me in there, which was very cruel.

...okay, I'm severely out of practice with macroblogging, but let me try on a transition. The other thing about Fiesole is that, because it is very high up and you can see all the way down to the city, it reminded me of a favorite book I had not read in a very long time--Dr. Seuss's esteemed The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Which as you literati will know begins with a description of a view from a considerable summit. Not the point! The point is, after being reminded of that, I began to reflect on the mystery that is my enormous affection for Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, not only as a feat of revisionism and prose styling, but as an object to drag around rereading constantly. I mean, I don't exactly have high standards for that category! I will reread anything. I have made countless treks through David Clement-Davies' masterwork of Christian wolf iconography, The Sight. But still, Wolf Hall is probably the one I've come back to most of recent reads, and it's definite comfort food at this point, I just find it soothing to nestle down into its luxurious descriptions of taxes and death. And today I also realized that it is basically a retelling of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins! Where the hats are "skillsets mastered in Italy," or "feelings of despair and a desire for vengeance against the cardinal's murderers," or "possible women for Henry to speed-date." You know?

I kind of like the last one because it captures the end-game love interest swap that occurs between Cromwell and Henry and Jane. The mental images, though, are a little precarious. (Bring Up The Bodies, subtitled: Bartholomew and the Adultery.)

WAIT. DON'T LEAVE. I have so many more absurd comparisons to get through. No, actually, the last thing I told myself I would talk about in this embarrassingly premeditated blog post, as I strolled down the Tuscan mountainside... well, it is a set of absurd comparisons. Specifically, I've been thinking about this issue in fiction of Tradition Vs. Progress, or ( fate and free will. )

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Dear Yuletide Writer,

Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:36:46 GMT

omfg I'm so late on this; my apologies if you, whoever you are, have already followed this link and found it vacant. But thank you! for offering one of my fandoms, for having committed yourself to be my mind slave in this one task over the next couple of months, etc. Nothing I write here should be taken as more than a vague proposal to be added to the primordial fic-soup: I like throwing ideas out, but I will be delighted with whatever story you choose to tell.

Some narrative elements I have historically enjoyed include jokes of all kinds, the power of friendship as an efficacious if not always positive force in the world, extended flights of introspection, rough sex, weird scenery, characters thinking about their loved ones in less than flattering terms, dreamy mind control, moments of humor in somber scenes, moments of melancholy in the midst of glib good cheer, and pirates. There's not much I would strongly urge you to avoid, although I would appreciate it if you skipped any lengthy and accurate conversations about feelings or relationships--as noted above, I'm happy to see the characters meditate on their emotional connection to others and their personal struggles, but, well. Talking about your issues. Who does that?? Probably a lot of people. Nevertheless. In the same vein, if you do end up writing porn for me, I'd prefer that the focus not be on negotiating kinks and safety and the like, unless you think it's absolutely necessary for the characters (and kinks) involved.

And that's it for the general info, I think. On to the fandoms!

( Aubrey-Maturin, Oxford Time Travel, Hilary Tamar, and JSAMN )

That's all I got. Take inspiration from or ignore these scattered directives at your leisure, and, please, have fun with satisfying my wildest desires. <3

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what do you mean, June

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 23:34:12 GMT

Let's see if I can remember how to do the DW bit, haha. Um, things I've finished recently: the Revolutionary Girl Utena anime, the Hilary Tamar books, and season one of Elementary. My plan is to talk about all of them at once and then be quiet for another three months.

Spoilers ahead, especially for the Elementary finale.

( Revolutionary Girl Utena )

( Hilary Tamar, the Laziest Sleuth )

( Elementary S1 )

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every quote is pistols now

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 04:38:49 GMT

‘There is something in the misfortunes of others that does not altogether displease us,’ said Stephen, but nobody heard him in the general cry of ‘There she goes’ as the now distant Liberty slipped beneath the grey surface of the ocean.

‘No, sir,’ said Mr Dalgleish again, ‘you can sleep easy now. And so can Mrs – so can your betrothed, your financy. I forget the lady’s name. I hope she has not been disturbed by all the banging and calling out.’

'I doubt it,’ said Stephen, ‘but I will go down and see.’

He was mistaken. Diana was very much disturbed indeed. The first discharge of artillery had wiped out her already waning seasickness; she had misinterpreted the later gunfire and the uproar on deck, and Stephen found her dressed, sitting on a locker with a cocked pistol in either hand, looking as fierce as a wild cat in a trap.

‘Put those pistols down at once,’ he said coldly. ‘Do not you know it is very rude to point a pistol at a person you do not mean to kill? For shame, Villiers. Where were you brought up?’

The story of my Aubrey-Maturin affliction goes something like this: believe I am coming for best friends and handclasping; believe I have arrived at a place of best friends and handclasping; discover that I am actually here for the soap opera romance that everyone hates. Stephen and Diana are so great, though! I mean, by the time of The Yellow Admiral they're just this generically friendly couple who actually know how orgasms work, but man, the whole arc through Fortune of War to The Ionian Mission where Stephen falls out of love and Diana almost gets him killed through grand passionate attempts to save him from really confusing French authorities--that's… my favorite part of the series… yes. I can say that now. Because I'm done, and I know where the parts are.

( further spoilers below )

.../downloads Horatio Hornblower

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Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:58:40 GMT

I celebrated reaching the halfway point in my readthrough of the Aubrey-Maturin novels by watching the movie--okay, no, that's a lie, I loaded up the movie two weeks ago and then forced myself to wait until I'd actually gotten to the book it was based on before playing it. Scruples were pretty much unnecessary; the plot bore only a family resemblance, and there certainly weren't any spoilers as such. But at least I'm proceeding symmetrically.

It was a fun movie. Not what I was expecting, at all, despite having been told about the Discovery channel documentary interlude in advance: it's interested in a lot of the same territory as the books, but it really distributes its weight differently. ( cut for detail and longwindedness )

On the other hand, O'Brian definitely flirts with similar questions about patriotism and violence without ever committing himself too hard on a material critique, and gets away with it just because he has so much other stuff going on that he can, for example, bring up Stephen's mutinous heart again and again without it putting unreasonable strain on his and Jack's friendship or the reader's patience. Because they're busy adults, with lots of representational pudding on their plates, and an enemy whose flaws are much more evident when conveyed through thousands of pages of intricate historical fiction than through a title card about Napoleon, Master of Europe. Maybe… what I'm really saying here… is that I wish there were more movies. :( Maybe I just want every series I like to go on for way too long and then end with a terrible lack of resolution, more adventures implied to come. Is that so much to ask?? Yes. Yes, it is.

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Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:51:00 GMT

‘Let me look to your pistols,’ said Jack, as the trees came closer to the road. ‘You have no notion of hammering your flints.’

‘They are very well,’ said Stephen, unwilling to open his holsters (a teratoma in one, a bottled Arabian dormouse in the other). ‘Do you apprehend any danger?’

‘This is an ugly stretch of road, with all these disbanded soldiers turned loose. They made an attempt upon the mail not far from Aker’s Cross. Come, let me have your pistols. I thought as much: what is this?’

‘A teratoma,’ said Stephen sulkily.

‘What is a teratoma?’ asked Jack, holding the object in his hand. ‘A kind of grenado?’

‘It is an inward wen, a tumour: we find them, occasionally, in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes they contain long black hair, sometimes a set of teeth: this has both hair and teeth. It belonged to a Mr Elkins of the City, an eminent cheese-monger. I prize it much.’

'By God,’ cried Jack, thrusting it back into the holster and wiping his hand vehemently upon the horse, ‘I do wish you would leave people’s bellies alone. So you have no pistols at all, I collect?’

No one ever gives me sufficient warning of cuteness in advance.

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Tue, 22 Jan 2013 06:34:09 GMT

Through careful experimentation, I've determined that my levels of Vorkosigan fannishness are primarily founded on "how long has it been since I read the part of Brothers in Arms where Miles and Galeni are held prisoner", despite the fact that there are a number of other characters that I'm sincerely attached to, and it's not even my favorite in the series.

.../rereads Brothers in Arms

It's just so delightful. What a great book about secret clones. What a satisfying execution of like four of my favorite tropes--let's see, that's "previously wary characters open up to each other because they have nothing to do all day but sit around and wait to get interrogated/killed", "characters get hit with the best inhibition-lowering type truth drug in literature", "character expresses non-pointless but hilarious defiance towards their former loved one and present torturer", and "character resists said truth drug through sheer manic overresponse." Like hitting cans on a fence. The only depressing thing is that in my memory it's always longer. Oh, and I could do with more Mark in the mix. But otherwise: perfect idfic, go directly to Komarran secret-terrorist-cell jail, do not pass Go.

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on this blog: JSAMN crossovers and nothing else, for some reason

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 07:02:24 GMT

No, but: it's surprisingly easy to cross-cast Sweeney Todd with Clarke's characters, if you go loosely and start with Todd as an uncharacteristically active, go-getting Norrell. Lovett as Childermass, Johanna as Arabella, Lucy poss. Emma Pole, and Anthony becomes the silliest Strange ever to go 'wigmaker' rather than 'eternally grimdark'. Cue final scene in which Todd slashes his loyal, dark, mysterious, pie-making mistress across the face with a razor and runs off with Anthony to start a cosplay boudoir.

...

Look, this is why I don't post much. Except on Tumblr, where everyone gets this kind of life-altering revelation dribbled out to them at a rate of one three-word text update per minute.

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Sat, 01 Dec 2012 04:02:01 GMT

I spent my Thanksgiving break tearing through the Temeraire books, which I dabbled in a few years ago but never really fell in love with. This time I had no such luck-- I have been scouring the internet for fic ever since.

Anyway, since they happen to be set in proximity with the Napoleonic wars, also the backdrop for one of my favorite fantasy novels, I… wrote a badly thought-out crossover, with a footnote taken straight from the Discworld series for good measure. It's a good thing I signed up for like three different holiday exchanges this year, none of which I have started the fics for yet, or I might feel like I was procrastinating!

( Childermass did not at once hit upon the idea that dragons could be relevant to his translation of the Book. )

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DEAR YULETIDE AUTHOR:

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 23:23:20 GMT

Thank you so much for writing for me! This will be my first year actively participating in Yuletide, and I am pretty dang excited to read what you make. This letter is more me trying to pre-emptively hitch a ride on your brainstorming process than anything else: anything I say in it you can feel free to ignore, if it does not jive with your ideas and ficcing desires.

I'm demagogol on tumblr, should you desire a more complete portrait of my tastes than this spanking new blog will provide you with, although actually my tumblr is less a portrait of my tastes than a portrait of a young woman untimely sacrificed to the homestuck altar, so go forth with latex gloves at ready. I like a lot of things. I like humor and tragedy and character pieces, and I am totally down for porn, whether it be anthropomorphic cats going at it in an alley or, uh… anything that's not anthropomorphic cats going at it in an alley. I like AUs, too, in whatever degree of remove or detail you care to make them.

What else? I don't have any triggers; probably the only thing I would ask is that you not, if you can avoid it, write a story that centers around a character being deeply embarrassed or humiliated. Unless it's a character like Mordecai, for whom embarrassed vexation is probably baseline.

And on that note, to the fandoms!

( Wolf Hall )

( Luther (BBC) )

( Oxford Time Travel )

( Lackadaisy )

And that's it, I think. Thank you again! I look forward to sticking my eyes to your story.

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