raven | Recent Entries

I was

loneraven on LiveJournal, and I have just (April 2017) stopped crossposting there.

Here are some things that I don't exactly assume you know about me, but might be useful/interesting; and here are my stories at the Archive of Our Own. I am entirely okay with people podficcing, translating, continuing, or otherwise-transforming my stories, but I'd love to see the end result if that's what you're doing, and please credit me as an original author.

Really, I'm pretty easy-going.

Sometimes I feel weird about letting this kind of thing take up space! But you've gotta give people a chance to know you. I've used they/them pronouns since 2018. That's still right, but it's she/her as well as they/them now. Both are fine, both in the same sentence especially fine.

( a bit more about it )

So I mentioned Disco Elysium, which I have now finished! Well - I've finished one playthrough, I feel like I could enjoy another half-dozen, but I have also spent literally all my evenings this week playing it so maybe I'm setting it down for a while in aid of... idk, literally anything else. (My book. gotta write a book, right.)

Anyway. I adore it. I really do. Disco Elysium is an RPG with that very traditional game mechanic where you put points into this thing or that thing and build your character that way. The thing is, none of these are combat-related or anything remotely sensible- they're things like "Electrochemistry" (how much does your character like drugs), "Shivers" (their wacky intuition), "Half-Light" (are they the sort of person who hauls off and kills people in a red haze), as well as some more normal things like coordination, perception, etc, but think logically consistent and also ridiculous. When they wake up at the start of the game, they're in a trashed hotel room with no memory, and it's your job to get them out of there and start figuring out who they are.

The thing is... well, spoilers, they're a cop. A mouldering, miserable alcoholic, who loves disco music - everyone who meets them that day complains about the volume of the night before - who's been sent to this place to solve the murder of a guy who was hanged in the backyard. The thing is: the murder is not about the murder. it's about Revachol; because this, this place, is a city called Revachol, on an island in the sixth distributary of a river. Revachol is under foreign control - its revolution a generation earlier was dismantled by coalition powers - and has been partitioned like West Berlin. And... what to say, really, to explain how impressive and lovely all this is? The game is about meeting the people of this city halfway between peace and war - more wars than one: there's a strike, also; there's the old communards who are grieving for what they lost; there's violence erupting between what the communards would call the anti-revolutionary forces of capitalism and the ordinary people of the city who are trying to get along in the Zone of Control- and also it's about one utterly hopeless human whose partner has left and whose world has collapsed. And it's very funny. It's extremely funny. You need take only one look at the wardrobe of the man whose body you are inhabiting to know this. There's a bit where Kim, his partner - not romantic partner, who as mentioned has left him, forever, ever, love is dead, all is lost, etc - intervenes in the middle of the whole crime-solving thing to tell him to maybe consider an outfit that matches. It is not typical of Kim to be concerned with other men's outfits. He's just extremely concerned.

Kim Kitsuragi, incidentally, is my boyfriend. He doesn't know we're getting married but we're going to be very happy together.

I am not doing a good job with explaining this game! It's just, it's so funny, and so weird, and ambitious, and beautiful as a watercolour painting, and totally unhinged. You can solve a murder. And another murder. You can also help a bunch of ravers start a nightclub, or a strange computer programmer find the secrets of the universe, or you can help the ravers with the secret of the universe and the programmer with the nightclub. You can help some doomed RPG writers finish their doomed RPG. You can sing karaoke. (Badly, says one of the audience members; he hasn't heard anything so bad since he last had his cluster headaches (I laughed so much I cried). You can add beauty to a wall, shoot the members of a tribunal, or put your face in a bunny rabbit and keep it there for a while. You can do all this wacky shit, and underneath it the game has so much to say about how people inhabit the places where they find themselves. I'm told there are lots of endings and whole cabinets of unhinged, but I suspect they all draw organic from Revachol. The city itself is the main character, and I love it. Though I do love [unnamed main character] and Kim, too. They are very good.

Anyway, I highly recommend it - and it's still £8 in the Steam sale, so it's a good time.

Different kind of writing post. I only wrote one thing for Yuletide this year:

never waste a Friday night on a first date (2113 words) by raven
Fandom: Casual - Chappell Roan (Music Video)
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Chappell Roan/The Siren
Characters: The Siren (Casual - Chappell Roan Music Video), Chappell Roan's Character (Casual - Chappell Roan Music Video)

The Siren likes tequila. Chappell gets wine for herself. So you made an app profile, she says. How funny.

It's a five-minute fandom - Chappell Roan's fantastic short-film-esque video for "Casual", which although the song sounds like it's about some random fuckboy is about a Siren. Who keeps killing sailors. And making Chappell jealous when she wanted her to herself. It's very silly and good.

Happy new year, folks. I have a book out today:

You Are Here: Nine More Stories

It is not a sin, to love a wild thing…

A witch falls out of the sky; a dragon joins the resistance; a smuggler of magical trifles loves a girl she can’t have. A spaceship lights up for Diwali; an arch in the woods leads to wonders; and in a small community in lunar orbit, for no reason understandable by normal people, romance has been abolished.

Here are nine more stories, of hope and passion, grief and bureaucracy, and how you can’t go home again but it doesn’t mean you’ll never be found.

(In a white room, full of ghosts, a woman cries and will never be found.)

[The cover is absolutely gorgeous - I advise you click through just to see it, which I can confidently say as I had nothing to do with it. I love everything about it. Links to Amazon and other ebook buying options are at the link, ditto Goodreads, paperbacks are available but sadly only from Amazon - apologies.]

So, anyway, this is a short story collection containing all of my shorts from 2019-2023, plus a new novella, "Wish You Were Here". As this is my space I can tell you that "Wish You Were Here" in part, is intended to let me put some of my characters and worldbuilding out in the world even if the book they really belong to never sells. But it's a good story in itself, and I really like it - although it's a spaceship story, it's really a story about an odd friendship and all that follows from that fact. And it begins by being about a refugee girl, just out of her teens, who works as a cleaner in a psychiatric hospital. Once there, she meets a stranger - an inpatient who is being held anonymously, for Mysterious Reasons (although said stranger does not at any point describe herself as the Woman Without An Iron Mask it's only because I missed a trick) who likes the new girl, and in her tired, sad sort of way, wants to help this brave teenage refugee who comes in to clean every day. It gives her something to do while she contemplates how she's a washed-out failure who's ruined her own life and everyone else's. What she doesn't know is that her new teenage friend, who is busy thinking of herself as stupid and pathetic rather than brave, has never met anyone like her before: sick and miserable, sure but, a woman who's so casually brilliant she's forgotten about it herself, and vividly familiar with power.

So these two are friends, for a while; but of course, the Mysterious Reasons do strike back.

Anyway, so that's what you're getting, if you try it out! I hope you enjoy, if you do. And I hope 2025 is all you ask for.

✨ holiday love meme 2024 ✨
my thread here

Yet more answers!

asakiyume asked: if you yourself were to invent a weird museum, what are some ideas that cross your mind?

I am very interested in--and fond of--ephemera. I like old ticket stubs and postcards and letters. But most of all I like emphemeral ephemera, things that last less time than any of those things. I would like a Museum of Lists. Did the Apollo 11 astronauts make to-do lists in space? Did Napoleon have anything on his before "TAKE VIENNA"? Was there a daily checklist at Checkpoint Charlie? Were there prisoner lists at Ahmednagar Fort when Nehru was there?

...etc. I feel in all seriousness a museum of to-do lists, shopping lists, checklists, could have plenty to teach us about history, and maybe life, too; I don't know much about how they make shopping lists in Svalbard or the Amazon, but I do know they make them. There seems something very human about the whole concept.

china_shop asked: what would your ideal living-room harem look like? Is your living room big enough to encompass it?

And

chestnut_pod asked: in what primary ways are organizing a living-room harem and a notable speculative fiction collection the same, and in which ways are they most different?

I think I will answer these both at once! china, my living room is very large by north London standards, which means miniscule by anyone else's. It contains an L-shaped grey Ikea sofa, a matching armchair and ottoman, four large bookcases, four portable and two large medical grade oxygen canisters, a corner table with three red hurricane lamps, and a table next to the balcony door with a bunch of flowers that a girl I went on a date with last week gave me. If I had brought that girl home with me, it would have been ok, but more than one would have been troublesome. You could have rearranged the furniture I suppose.

Unfortunately, I love sex but not more than those three hurricane lampes and the books and space for flowers.

So I suspect I am stuck. There is an American girl who I hang out with occasionally, who looked around the living room the other night and made me realise I hadn't seen it through someone else's eyes in quite a while. That's the drawback of a living room harem. Scrutiny of your decorating choices. And your books.

chestnut_pod, I am going to be a bit of a wanker and give you a brief excerpt from a story that has not yet seen the light of day.

Nanni bustles forwards with enthusiastic warmth. Half-past ninety and in space for the first time, Eden thinks with pleasure, and taking it all in her small but determined stride.

“So you are Eden’s darogha,” Nanni says to Quarren, then clicks her tongue in annoyance when nobody knows what that word means. “A zenana must be run by a woman, yes?” she says impatiently, waving her hands around. “For an emperor’s zenana, with a thousand women, that woman is a darogha. An empire’s administrator.”

“Oh,” Quarren says, obviously flattened by this, and by Eden’s entire family. “I see. It’s good to meet you.”

“You too, beti,” Nanni says, kissing her on the cheek.

"Zenana" usually means the women's half of a traditional Muslim household, where women may live in seclusion from men. But here, you could translate it as "harem" - the emperor in question is the Mughal emperor Akbar, and the women of his court, his concubines and wives and courtesans, would have lived together in essentially a little walled town of their own within the capital. What I find fascinating about this is just what Nanni is noting here - an emperor's darogha, the woman who was the administrator of the zenana (which was, as above, the emperor's harem), was one of the most powerful women in Akbar's court and possibly in the empire. These would have been high-born women, because they would need to be literate and numerate and able to meet many people on their own terms, but they weren't royalty, and they weren't separate. They were doing this out of the emperor's zenana, out of his harem; they lived among the other women and were part of that community. And yet: by modern standards, they might be CEO of a large organisation or permanent secretary to a government department. They held very significant civil administrative power, complete with spreadsheets and staff and complex finances and strategy.

So there are lots of ways in which organising a harem and putting together a notable short story collection are different, but one way in which they're the same is how sometimes women's traditions of scholarship, art and service of others are unseen, so it feels like you do a thing that hasn't often been done by people like you, and sometimes you're right about that, but sometimes it's just that no one ever told you about it.

More questions!

parauque asked: Why is your name raven?

Because, friend, dear friend, I am a teenage goth deep down in my deep, dark, teenage soul. Back when I actually was a newly-teenage goth making my first LiveJournal, it was 2001, and "raven" was my first choice. Ominous! Goth! Literary! Etc! Perfect.

...it was taken. So I decided I could be a cool lone wolf but only not a wolf I could be a lone raven instead. And that's what my principal LJ was, for all those years: "loneraven", even as I grew up and out from under it. As social media became a thing in other places of the internet, I got a bit of a sense of humour about my teenage goth handle and turned "lone raven" into "single crow" - which is what I usually am, everywhere on the internet including bluesky and AO3 and twitter-as-was. If I have an internet name, that's it. But when I migrated my LJ over to Dreamwidth a few years back it didn't feel right. Instead,

raven: as a wee kiss for my teenage goth self, almost a quarter-century later. I like seeing it. hi, dear heart, I'm glad I was you. <3

mssilverstar asked: What, if anything, can you say about maritime anything?

I can say very little about maritime anything, except s80 of the Merchant Shipping Act. I get seasick on small, flat bodies of water.

Oh, wait, the Merchant Shipping Act 1906, how about that! During its drafting and passage, the team of parliamentary counsel and drafting lawyers working on it kept a hand-annotated copy (I say hand-annotated; you could only mark things up by hand back then) that they added it iteratively during the parliamentary proceedings for the Bill. Detailed, beautiful, handwritten. When the Act passed, parliamentary counsel put it carefully away, in case someone in the future might find it useful.

Someone did, a hundred and fifteen years later, when some of my maritime colleagues found it at the back of their legislative nonsense cupboard under a box of Celebrations and some abandoned pairs of shoes, and in so doing won a hard-contested prize for "Most Arcane Item Found In Office Clearout". The National Archives thought it was a lovely object and wondered gently about the century-long delay in providing it. The department sent its apologies for its tardiness in this regard.

longwhitecoats asked: What, if anything, makes you feel gender euphoria?

A good an excuse as any to talk about this, I would say! I am in a new gender place these days. As you and most others reading know, a few years ago I decided I was done with cis womanhood; it had never fit, had never felt right, and while I wasn't moved towards physical transition, I knew I'd want documentary change if possible, and in the meantime please could I be they/them in English.

Quite a few years on I remain reasonably content with that. But it's more complicated, somehow (isn't it always?). I've been having a queer crisis of a sort. I was out as bi from earliest teenagehood; I always knew I liked men and women both. It turns out that it's man and women both. Probably; I mean, there are a lot of men in the world and who knows them all. But the sum of it is, I'm a lesbian. A bi lesbian, I've been saying, with sympathy for past me who hated the term so much but still: accurate. Bi in the sense I have been with men, I still am with one, and this is a bi4bi household, anyway, A's bisexuality is of more recent provenance but does make some of our relationship make sense in retrospect. But I only really feel right under the word lesbian, now. I've been dating a bit, bi women and lesbians both, and all it's done is emphasise it. Lesbians are a tonne of drama and I still want them.

This is a long preamble to: lesbian implies some kind of womanhood, doesn't it? And I find I feel okay with that; even good with it. Perhaps, to go with bi lesbian, I can be a nonbinary lesbian, or a nonbinary woman; I don't know if it matters, but I find it's nice to inhabit womanhood when it feels like I've been away for a while and have chosen it. I am, and have always been, femme; this is something in addition.

Gender euphoria, then, your actual question! I'm in a place where femme is right, but artful femme: chosen femme. So, as is the way for me, that comes out in being even-more-than-usual obsessive about clothes. I got a £20 dress at the the Traidcraft charity warehouse in Hackney - the tags are cut out but I think it's a piece by Urban Renewal, and it's this green floral chiffon overlay thing with full lining, halterneck and sewn-in boning. It fits me like it was made for me. I think the gender euphoria comes from that perfect fit. It's such an incredibly femme confection - chiffon! flowers! - but wearing it doesn't feel like, oh you could be beautiful; you could be a real woman. Its bones follow my bones. It follows the lines of the body I really have. Is that gender euphoria? I don't know, but it feels like it. I'm seeing it a lot with my clothes, recently; typically I don't buy or wear bras, and going to M&S to look at racks and racks of something I'm supposed to like and want, but don't, hasn't sat nicely with me. But I got a couple from Traidcraft and a few off Vinted recently. Measured in centimetres. Pretty, perfect fit. It's the fit, I think, and I think there's also a bit about capitalism in there. These things have not been sold to me in packages and bullshit women's sizing. They're things I went out and found myself and knew they would fit my body because I measured my body in centimetres.

(Also, the Urban Renewal dress is fancy but I've been wearing it styled down with cycling shorts and butch goth boots, and butch-and-femme together is my one-way ticket to gender euphoria but I just mistyped it as "bitch-and-femme" and I think maybe I just found an even quicker route.)

sewn asked What's your experience with (hypo)manic episodes, do you feel them coming on or do you only see it afterwards?

OH FRIEND FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK. When you posted this I hadn't been able to sleep till 4am for four nights in a row, and I just couldn't understand WHY.

God, aren't we funny. All of us. In answer: I don't see them coming, and it always takes me a while to realise they're here, but I do usually spot it before they go away. I have a reasonably traditional type of (hypo)mania - I'm awake, all the time! and I don't wanna eat! and sometimes I want to write a lot of fiction!! (though not always, which is disappointing) and also everyone annoys me! And I always find it vaguely humiliating, but there's that thing we do, when we talk. Where you know what you're thinking, and how it connects to thing 2 and then thing 3, but you never said thing 2 out loud because you're just thinking so quickly, and the person you're with is staring at you funny because from their perspective your brain is skipping from thing to thing with nothing in between. Sigh.

And you also asked: What is your favourite medication, and why is it lamotrigine?? (:D)

Heeeee you're not wrong. Actually, what fucking kills me these days is that cluster has ruined my bipolar control. All that time, carefully establishing my levels, titrating up and down, discovering that, as you say, lovely lovely lamotrigine is the dream, and now--eh. All my bipolar meds are cluster meds too, so they've been fussed with and raised and forgotten about, and who gives a damn about my mental health these days anyway, right? I tend to treat lamotrigine like vitamins at the moment - I know some amount is good, I guess I'll take a couple of tablets today? Is that good? Who knows??

Oh, this may amuse you - I'm still tending manic on 1000g/day of lithium carbonate. WHO DOES THAT. WHOSE BRAIN IS THAT BROKEN. we just don't know. But, no, you're right, lamotrigine is my favourite, it's everyone's favourite, they should build a statue of it, I've no doubt it is still keeping my bipolar under control even now I'm its crazy ex-girlfriend who's mean to it.

I asked you all to ask me questions! Here are the answers to some of them.

musesfool asked: If you could plan your dream trip, money and time being no object, what would it be?

I have an odd relationship to travel these days; I've been enormously privileged as far as it goes (depending on how you count, I've lived in three countries and been to 30) but post-pandemic I've become much more someone who wants to take things slow and close. I've seen more of the UK since 2019 than I had in pretty much the 20 years before that.

But also in 2019 I went to Japan, and that sort of lit my imagination. My friends and I went to Tokyo, Nagoya and Kyoto, all of which are on the island of Honshu and not that far apart, and that was great. But while I loved the cities, and loved being immersed in Japanese urban culture, we did spend a few nights in Hakone, an onsen resort town which while I was there was having a distinctively cold snap. What I would like to do is see Japan more like that: slowly, northerly, under snow and ice. Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, the northernmost island, holds an ice sculpture festival every year which I would love to see, and even Tokyo in the winter was beautiful inasfar as I saw it.

Also I saw this picture and I don't think I've got over it yet.

sophia_sol asked: do you like birds more generally, or mostly crows/ravens? do you have good memories of particular times you've seen birds you love?

I like birds in general - definitely I much prefer a place with birds to one without - but corvids are my love! Not quite what you asked, but the ones I think of as "my" crows are such a joy that they cheer me up every time I see them. They live outside my flat, on the main road, which is a proper main road - four lanes of traffic, people, noise, lorries, constant disturbance etc. My crows like the bins. They like the binbags. Not the clear plastic ones; they don't like those, they know those are the recycling; not the big plastic boxes, they know that's the commercial waste. They're not the pigeons and gulls who waste time precious birdly time pecking those. No, they like proper black binbags and nothing else will do, and once they have them they sit on the lamp-posts and caw at passers by, or they perch on fancy cars and make rude little wingtip gestures, or they just flutter into the trees with entire racks of defrosting spare ribs. They're so funny and clever and glossy, I love them.

toft asked: If you had responsibility for naming a cat, what would you name it?

I have maintained for many years that if I got a cat I would call it the Middlecat!! after the Middleman and the jazz hands would be obligatory. A. says I am not allowed to do this. Failing that, a friend of mine had a cat called the Narrator, which I've always wanted to steal. I feel like because cats don't know their names you should call them the silliest thing you can think of. But in practice every cat I have ever known has been consistently referred to as kiss-kiss-kiss, so.

nnozomi asked: How has your language learning experience felt different among the different languages you've studied? (Either in personal/emotional terms, or more along the lines of "why does this way of conjugating verbs make perfect sense to me and this one doesn't AT ALL" and so on).

So I have written about this elsewhere, but I have been formally taught, at one point or another, French, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Latin, and Ancient Greek, and I have a small grasp of Bengali without ever having been taught it. Welsh and Italian I was taught as a small child and remember nothing of except the pronunciation rules, although I think I do remember the pleasure of being taught them, and, well, I'm good at language and languages, and surely that can't have nothing to do with having been exposed to six Indo-European languages before I was eight. (I was way too old before I realised what an incredible privilege that was.)

But - yes. Hindi is my mother tongue, I spoke my first words in it; it's where my mind goes first, or tries to go. Learning it formally felt freeing, rich, liberating, intellectually satisfying and the worst fucking thing that had ever happened, usually all at the same time.

Gaelic is a gift I gave myself. And its stupidly fiendish grammar flows like water for me, either because it's in my blood somehow (which I believe does happen! people just have a language in them like it was always meant to be there, cf. Jhumpa Lahiri on Italian) or maybe because I was taught a different Celtic language at an age when my mind was more plastic. I think it's both of those. Anyway, to learn Gaelic feels beautiful, and also fiendish.

Latin and Greek suited my mind. I regret not having studied either of them for longer; I had all of three years of Latin and one of Greek at school, but there wasn't time and space for everything I wanted to do and they had to be the thing to go. Both appeal to the rigorous, logical part of my mind, that these days I apply to statutory interpretation.

I don't care enough about French culture to speak French. Isn't that damning? But it's the one I should speak fluently - I learned it in a formal setting from the ages of five to sixteen - and I just... don't. It's just, if my Hindi were perfect I'd read Premchand, if my Bengali were I'd read Tagore and also a bunch of magazine SF, if I had the Gaelic for it I'd read Sòmhairle Mac Illeathain, if I'd spent 11 years on Spanish I'd read Borges an Angelica Gorodischer, in French there's just not really a text I dream of reading or a person in my life I'd understand better, so I carry on not speaking it.

skygiants asked: What are all the museum exhibits and gigs you are going to see?

I like this question! Well the gigs I went to see were the Siobhan Miller Band, and Capercailie. Siobhan Miller was great fun, a seated thing at King's Place so all terribly middle-class rather than people actually up and dancing, but I enjoyed it. The support act was a 21yo singer-songwriter from Kirkcaldy who'd never performed in London before. (My fave part: "I'll be out in the foyer after the show. I won't be selling merch, because I don't have any. No albums either. Because I haven't recorded any. But I'll have a piece of paper! For my mailing list!")

Capercailie - hmm. Well, Union Chapel. I love Union Chapel, of course: it's a converted church a short walk from my house with glorious stained-glass acoustics where every remotely folksy-Americanish band in town ends up playing, and it's always stupidly beautiful regardless of who's performing. Venue immaculate, vibes also. And Capercailie are legendary (this was their 40th anniversary tour!). Still. It was a little... fine. Not the same verve and energy as 21yo Niamh the day before, who has not been touring for 40 years, and who is very excited, and not fine.

And it wasn't a museum exhibit exactly, so much as the permanent collections of the London Canal Museum. It's a very small museum with a fabulous setting - it looks out over Regent's Canal, of course, and it looks down into a scary, giant stone walled well, used for large-scale storage of shipped-in ice before refrigeration. It still feels cold. You're walking around the museum and thinking, why is it so COLD. The museum itself is a bit amateurish but fascinating on the history of the waterways and how they co-existed with rail, until they didn't. My friend P and I have an ongoing arrangement where we want to make an effort to hang out one-on-one so every few weeks we go to a weird museum. We've done canals, we've done transport in general, we've done the Hunterian, the Vagina Museum, a weeeeeird exhibit at the Wellcome about milk, of all things. I think we could probably go to a different weird museum every month for a decade in this city without trouble.

The next thing I'm going to see, or someone is taking me to see, is this at the Tate Modern. I've no idea what to expect! We shall see.

Feel free to ask me more things!

A. is in New Zealand for almost the whole month of November. This is a good idea. It really is. He gets to see his brother and sister-in-law, and his two nephews who he has never met at all because the oldest was born a month before pandemic. All good and wholesome. Yes.

But, while NZ is a fine place, I don't feel the need to visit it for a month. So I am here, and in early December I fly out to Singapore to meet him on his way back, so the two of us can have our first holiday just the two of us in quite a long while. (We were in Singapore for our honeymoon, with a truly wonderful experience on the way: somewhere over the Bay of Bengal, they came round everyone with champagne: you've left more than India behind, said the flight crew; that dark out there is 1 Jan.)

So what will I do while you're gone, I said. You could build a small harem in our living room, he said. I have tried. A friend set me up with another friend, who I did meet at the Lamplighter and I do like her style and if that story comes to its conclusion I will not only tell it, I'll put it in a book, but all of that happens in mid-December if it does; my brown girl friend seems to have ghosted me en route to her terribly important work union organising in Pune or Patna or Pondicherry (it is very important I'm sure! but she could TEXT is this the most lesbian of parentheses quite possibly); and there's another one maybe but I have My Doubts.

Why am I telling you all this. There is no harem in my living room. I am actually working more than I was before, trying to work in the office more for the pleasure of people's company (and actually the day after I get back from Singapore I have to teach, I'm delivering a hands-on workshop to rail, maritime and aviation as the precursor to the Christmas do, what, no) and obviously my wonderful-beyond-measure friends have made a suspiciously large number of plans to take me to dinner, drinks, museum exhibits, gigs and and long walks.

But still the evenings are quite long! Ask me things. I mean it. I've seen that the interview meme is going around again where people ask each other questions, and there are a bunch of new people following me here too who may not know me from a plank of wood right now. So honestly. AMA. I'd love to answer, and it will keep me sociable and occupied. And really, feel free to ask whatever you like (inc about the numerous inanities in this post), if I can't answer I'll say, otherwise have at it.

(I am occupied. I have done my washing. I have eaten food. I have done some legislative checks. I've even written fiction, at least a bit. But I could do with all your company.)

Some more book reviews.

( Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree )

( The Wedding People, Alison Espach )

( DallerGut Dream Department Store, Miye Lee )

( North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher )

Dear yuletide writer,

I'm

singlecrow on the AO3. Thank you very much for writing for me, I will be happy and excited about whatever you write! I am also open to and excited about treats, should anyone wish to write me any.

My general do not wants are violence against women and omegaverse, with a caveat about The Water Outlaws for which see below. But that aside, I read very broadly. I enjoy sad and dark stories, happy stories, love stories, stories with sex in, stories without. I don't do Christmas, so would prefer a story not be entirely about the characters celebrating it, but I don't think that comes up in any of my requested fandoms this year. Other festivals are very good, I like those.

One thing I really love, in sad and happy stories alike, is people being quietly kind to one another. I also really like people being competent, and found families of all sorts.

Fandom-specific stuff follows.

( The Saint of Steel - T Kingfisher )

( The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi - Shannon Chakraborty )

( The Water Outlaws - S.L. Huang )

That's it! Have a nice time writing it and I will have a lovely time reading it. Thank you again.

I saw Come From Away this week, on its last day but one in London, and I'm still thinking about it. It's a musical based on a real bit of history: on 9/11, as we know, all US airspace was closed with no notice, meaning any inbound aircraft already over the Atlantic had to either turn back towards Europe or set down in at the nearest airport outside the US. In practice, that meant one of a number of Canadian airports, of which the most significant was Gander, Newfoundland. Fifty years earlier, all transatlantic aircraft used to stop at Gander or Keflavik for refuelling, and the Gander airport is still one of the world's largest for all it only hosts a handful of flights.

So thirty-eight aircraft and their 7000 passengers landed in Gander, a town of 10,000 people, on a wild, remote, storm-shattered island. And Come From Away is a true story of what happens when that happens: how the 10,000 people took care of the 7000 people, with no notion or who they were, what they'd want or need, while around them the world had irrevocably changed. It's full of rich, beautiful detail, no story as such but textured historical documentary that works so well as a musical. There's a little romance, a little break-up, and other, more complicated little tales. One of the songs is about Beverly Bass, the first woman to captain a commercial airliner, and the first woman to lead an all female flight crew in the history of commercial aviation. Another song is about passengers from north Africa who are forced to get off a bus in a dark forest of strangers, that they think must be soldiers. But the passengers don't speak English, and their hosts don't even know what language they speak. And violence feels unutterably close - until one of the Newfoundlanders takes a Bible from one of the passengers, and looks up a verse that he can only find by number and points it out to everyone: be anxious for nothing. Be not afraid.

Another little story is about one of the Newfoundlanders visiting one of the passengers, an Orthodox rabbi, to say, I was born in Poland, I think. My parents sent me here and said I should never tell anyone I was Jewish, not ever. Not even my wife. But now I'm an old man, and now you've come. Here you are.

That's the motif that occurs over and over. "you are here" - you are on this impossibly remote island that you've never heard of, but also, you are here. Here, after everything that's happened. Here, encased by space and time and selfhood. You are here. I really love it.

And the other thing I find kind of... I don't know if funny is the word, but. I love the constant repetition of the theme, that this place is at the far north of a continent, on the edge of the Atlantic, on this storm-shattered island where a river meets the sea. Gander is; but so are we. We are here. You are here.

Anyway. It is truly lovely, and I'm so glad I saw it and I don't know why I didn't years ago. I think I'll actually have to wait for a revival to see it again, but I will.

For some reason I spent most of yesterday mad about what they did to Elizabeth Weir (and then mad that she was younger than I am now) and then

parauque reminded me that

bbtp_challenge is still a thing, and although you can only post to it on 1 September, it remains 1 September some distance west of Alaska until about five minutes from now.

Anyway here's Wonderwall.

a single piece of cloth (1036 words) by raven
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Relationships: Teyla Emmagan/Elizabeth Weir
Characters: Elizabeth Weir, Teyla Emmagan
Additional Tags: Fluff

“Also,” Elizabeth says, blurrily. “This place is hard on panties. You’re not supposed to laugh when I say things like that.”

A recent series, where I cross-post any Goodreads reviews I've written recently that I think are worth keeping here, with a bit of context for those who haven't come across the books.

( The Water Outlaws, SL Huang )

( The Lantern and the Night Moths, Yiilin Wang )

( The Golden Girls Road Trip, Kate Galley )

( The Inhumans and Other Stories, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay )

I've also been rereading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (the John Le Carré classic spy novel), without feeling the need to tell Goodreads about it. I think I've only read it once and that only in the last few years, which is odd, as it was my dad's favourite book by his favourite author. (He was always vaguely disappointed that I was never tapped on the shoulder at Oxford. I did tell him, well, maybe I'm lying to you about it. I applied to MI6 in the ordinary way a little later but he said it wasn't the same.) It's very good! If... weird, now. Misogynist as hell, and sometimes just too wildly frustrating in terms of what stunted humans the main characters are. But what I have always wanted to do is a fantasy novella rewrite of the story with a woman in the lead role who's rather cleverer than Alec Leamas, in terms of what use she could make of the girl who's in love with her. (In my mental version of the story, it's this same lead who becomes Control: at least her successor, as perestroika begins.)

And, the thing is, the original is, also, a fantasy. Both because of the passage of time--the flat where Leamas ends up is grotty and cheap and miserable, in Bayswater; see also making your living as a down-and-out homosexual by translating pieces about English country life for the German press--and because the Circus, as Le Carré described it, could never have existed. Human people have human emotions. Sorry, Smiley and co. I'm pretty sure there were dour British intelligence agents throughout the twentieth century and I'm pretty sure at least some of them had feelings, kisses, favourite books, good days where they didn't worry too much, and children.

Anyway. Not sure that one will see the light of day, but I'd like it to.

I've also just read another book by Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, which comes out May of next year, and went on Bluesky to express all my thoughts and feelings about it, but the takeaway message for that was: brilliant, absurdly relevant to me in particular, but honestly just brilliant. I read it twice in three days. A gift.

This is a little first-time story for Una Chin-Riley (otherwise Number One, my love) and Erica from Strange New Worlds. I love SNW but never talk about it, because honestly it is just sweet and good and I would change almost nothing about it. Also, it has about six female main characters and you get to like them all for different reasons! what a change from nineties Star Trek.

we still had hours (2923 words) by raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (TV)
Relationships: Number One | Una Chin-Riley/Erica Ortegas
Characters: Number One | Una Chin-Riley (Star Trek), Erica Ortegas
Additional Tags: First Time, Strap-Ons, Blindfolds

What Erica is sorry about is a novelty chiffon blindfold from Risa with cocks from a dozen species embroidered in ritually significant pentagrams.

"You’re the one who actually has to look at it,” Una points out, and it's that sort of command-level thinking that means she's in charge around here.

Hiding everything you are for decades isn't great for your sex life. Erica helps.

After my last post about book reviews, here are some of mine to be going on with. I've picked some of the longer ones, in no order, and linked to the Goodreads pages. I've also tried to add a word or two of context for each - unlike the Goodreads versions, you don't have the blurb for the book in front of you here - but you can click through, of course.

( Stars Collide Rachel Lacey )

( Hijab Butch Blues, Layla H. )

( Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh )

( Nobody Told Me, Hollie McNish )

( Arthur and Teddy Are Coming Out, Ryan Love )

( Maybe Next Time, Cesca Major )

I'm not sure if I'll stick to this, but it's nice to see all of these in one place so I'll try to.

One thing I'm having to remind myself of lately is that I very much enjoy Dreamwidth as a social media platform but am not much like a lot of the people who find this format useful! I don't make lists, or follow routines, or write out all my goals for the year or set myself homework. I very much admire people who do! But I was getting a bit--but why don't I go swimming three times a week/read all the Hugo nominees/make spreadsheets about the recipes I tried/save all my tabs/etc?

Because I am not remotely that sort of person, that's why, and that's fine. I do log the books I read in a year, and otherwise have not followed a routine or done things in a set order since 2005, and that really is fine.

On a sort of similar note, I've been wondering about cross-posting my Goodreads reviews here just so I have a better way of keeping them together than... well, than Goodrads. I read a lot of romance and women's fiction as we know, plus a significant slice of SFF, detective fiction, poetry and a very little non-fiction. (I try not to read depressing non-fiction, which limits me to some pop science and pop engineering, some twentieth/twenty-first century history, and the odd memoir. History, politics and climate change being closed off to you does sort of limit your participation in the genre.) I don't read anything ever described as literary fiction, or horror, and I don't read books by men (I mean, not very much; I'm sometimes persuaded). I always used to like to think I read widely! I mean, I probably do compared to some and not at all compared to others.

Anyway, I may post them, because I think I am funny (sometimes). The last books I read were a Sophie Ranald romance, Out With The Ex In With The New (fun but clearly her early work), When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain (the second Singing Hills book by Nghi Vo, I've just discovered this series and just love it, love it, could eat every word like candy) and right now it's These Burning Stars (space opera by Bethany Jacobs), and another Ranald. My next after these is either The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty (I liked The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, the fantasy pirate book, so much that I've decided to check out the author's back catalogue) or it's a reread of Ancillary Justice, which oddly I had as an ARC and haven't reread since. And poetry is an ongoing thing, for me, I've got one Brian Bilston book and also the collected works of Kathleen Jamie on the side table to dip into before bed.

(Kathleen Jamie! Maybe my most favourite poet, in moods and lights. Other than all the others who are my favourite poets.) Speaking of going to bed, which I hate these days for reasons.

little Sunday-afternoon story, from that episode of Lower Decks where Mariner runs away from home to become a maybe bounty hunter with Petra the British archaeologist after all her friends and her family have wholeheartedly screwed her over. Sad hopeless bisexual Mariner, I love her.

lying if I told you (1919 words) by raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Lower Decks (Cartoon)
Relationships: Petra Aberdeen/Beckett Mariner
Characters: Petra Aberdeen, Beckett Mariner
Additional Tags: PWP, Canon Bisexual Character, Oral Sex, Episode: s03e10 The Stars at Night (Star Trek: Lower Decks)

“Hey, Petra,” she says. Petra, swinging around in her pilot’s chair, all long legs and lazy eyes and drawl for days. “You like chicks, right?”

(Mariner, making good decisions.)

I have sent my agent the final (touch wood) manuscript of the book I don't really like, which allows me to work on the one I do like. This is a bit of it, that stands alone-ish? This book is low-key SF about a very large orbital spaceship called the Night Service that's basically a small town, run by Chief Administrator Quarren, who is a tired thirty-something woman in a position of institutional power. (I know, right. Such a shock.) In this bit, Quarren's girlfriend Eden has gone away for a while, and Quarren is coping fine. Fine. She's fine.

(The one thing I am proudest of, with Quarren, is that I killed several men for her character development. And, also, that she and a bunch of nuns run an NHS district general hospital in space, because why the hell not.)

If you have read the previous section, though, this one does follow straight on.

( no NHS biscuits for anyone! )

Some of you may recall Quarren and Eden, last heard of falling cluelessly in love as the clueless leads of a spaceship romantic comedy?

That's a yuletide story that's basically original SF f/f, and enjoyed writing it so much that I decided they should have their own book. I have written a first draft of that book! It is a full 100k, surprisingly, and quite a lot more serious. "spirit falling" is for sure a romcom; this is a love story, but a big, sad, dramatic one, with a backdrop of old wars and trauma, and ghosts and homegoing and all manner of things. Quarren is a hopeless lesbian. It does still have jokes in it, and the two main characters are the same people.

The 100k is barely readable, of course, but here is a standalone bit that is.

[NB - if you've read spirit falling, note the ship's name has changed - in that, it was Spirit Falling because the town in the original piece was called Spirit Falls. Quarren now efficiently administrates the Luna Central Command community ship Night Service.]

( a melancholy love story, featuring flowers, starlight and clueless lesbians )

Profile

raven

raven@ao3

March 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Propaganda for Funky Circles by ninetydegrees
Resources: Am i brave enough?

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Aug. 1st, 2025 11:36 am

philosophy supernatural nude

still crazy after all these years

Recent Entries

Sticky: introductory notes

(no subject)

un jour je serai de retour prés de toi

(no subject)

You Are Here: Nine More Stories

it's that time

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

ask me things

book reviews

dear yuletide writer

on the northeast tip of North America

fic: a single piece of cloth (SGA, f/f)

book reviews

fic: we still had hours (f/f, Star Trek, SNW)

book reviews

(no subject)

fic: lying if I told you [Star Trek: Lower Decks]

(no subject)

the reluctant warship Night Service

Profile

March 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags