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I have nothing to do today. With the help of pharmaceuticals I've caught up on some of my hypomanic sleep deficit. (It remains a mystery to me how I can take an entire gram of lithium every day and still be... me, I guess.) I have friends coming over tonight. The new flat looks - not quite home. I seem to take a lot of time to feel, psychologically, like I've really moved. But it's beautiful and I still love it.

Hockey this week was extremely painful. It is just impossible to figure out what to do with my glasses. I had to sit out half the practice because of the pain of having your lenses trying to crush your nose.

My watch/rewatch of Shetland has got to season 6, which is a Lot; the plot for this season is, among other things, ( spoilers ) It is brilliantly written, wonderfully done, which is probably why I'm having such trouble watching it. Christ. I was half Jimmy's age when this happened to me and I keep wanting to reach into the TV and hug and maybe shake him.

(The thing that delights me, amid the pain: it's a two-bedroom house. We know this. We have seen it every episode for five previous seasons. I've seen it for real. Nevertheless, Jimmy, Duncan, Cassie and Jimmy's dad are somehow living in it. Marvellous.)


Anyway. Ask me anything, is the point of this post! Or give me a note for something you'd like me to write about at further length.

I’ve been feeling some kind of a way about this story! I’m reluctant to say I Am Writing Again, because this felt like a huge struggle and would’ve been impossible without the week on Shetland. But here it is, and I’m glad I’ve written it.

Also, if you’re not familiar, I really think you could read this one as an original m/m short story, no canon required. The tiny bit of backstory goes like this( goes like this )

No spoilers for the show here.

slung from the mast, a lantern (6075 words) by raven
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Relationships: Duncan Hunter/Jimmy Perez, Alison McIntosh & Jimmy Perez
Characters: Jimmy Perez, Duncan Hunter, Sandy Wilson, Alison McIntosh, Cassie Perez (Shetland)
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, why is "co-parents to lovers" not a canonical tag

Every few minutes Jimmy’s feet leave the ground, and it’s only Duncan’s weight that keeps him down. It’s terrifying, every time it happens. All of this, suddenly, is terrifying.

(Or––Jimmy grieves, Duncan loves him, things work out okay in the end)

So mostly these days I am obsessed with The Pitt! I love the show so much, for itself, and because it's such a natural successor to MASH and other shows I have loved. I've said on Bluesky that it's the only show I've ever come across that really understands how teaching and growth and mentoring happen in a professional environment - fandom is full of academia stories, and indeed academics, and school and high school stories, but not so much the grown-up, affirming, important work of teaching someone to do your job because you, they and the job all matter. (What do I teach people to do! Not save lives. But it matters. I had a lovely, lovely email from one of my team before she went off on maternity leave that said wonderful things about my teaching, about what she'd learned from me, how her practice had changed as a result of me, at which point I had to go and lie down and cry for a while. When Robby says with emphasis, "This is a teaching hospital", it makes me think of it.

(Brief outline: Robby, otherwise Dr Michael Robinavitch, is a warm, scathing, compassionate soul who runs an emergency department in Pittsburgh, it's an ensemble cast of interns, resident doctors, patients, nurses and others and Robby is the keystone of it all in a tired, mentally ill kind of a way. Each episode of the show covers an hour, so the entire season covers a single shift. It's very good. Also Robby is played by Noah Wyle - and, as the show's executive producers lost a litigation against the IP-holders for ER, he is emphatically not John Carter. I love this. Robby feels, and is, beautifully imagined: a working-class Jewish man, who wears a magen David necklace, all because Carter was a WASP with a trust fund.)

I also love Trinity Santos, a brilliant lovely Filipina asshole of a lesbian, and Jack Abbot, who is Robby's friend and also mirror image - being to the night shift what Robby is the day - and also fascinating for himself. He's a former MASH combat medic which is what decided me for sure that the show deliberately draws on its predecessor. The Pitt isn't a sitcom, but it has the warmth MASH had; and Abbot, who is a lower-leg amputee, embodies some of its ambivalence. (And! In s2 they have someone deliver Henry Blake's "young men die" speech, with the same blocking as the original. I love it.)

Anyway I love this show. It is so rich and funny and so fucking human, all the damn time. Robby's PTSD is from covid, and his nightmares are of full PPE - and I was like, okay, do I want to watch this. Robby has PTSD from treating covid patients but my dad died from treating covid patients. But I did want to watch it, because it takes what it does seriously. I want to write a fic, about Robby and ( s2 spoiler ), and I also want it to be a daemon AU, because I am insane. I haven't written anything good in a year and like I said I am insane. Maybe I should just ask people to give me fic prompts.

the inevitable daemon AU, omgggg.

your curious body sitting on the shore (5481 words) by raven
Fandom: Heated Rivalry (TV)
Relationships: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
Characters: Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, Rose Landry
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons

It’s not just that Ilya’s daemon is impressive. Like… a wolf. A fucking wolf. Yeah, Shane is impressed by that. It's that hockey players shouldn’t have daemons at all.

Here's a bit of admin I didn't manage to do while I was away. For yuletide this year, I got the following story from ryfkah:

More A Comment Than A Question (2285 words) by ryfkah
Fandom: The Day Before the Revolution - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
Characters: Laia Asieo Odo, Sadik (The Dispossessed)

Odo!

“I’m Laia.” If the voice wanted her father, she thought, crossly, it could go and get him; why was it bothering her?

Oh. The voice sounded startled. You’re too small. I got it wrong. Then, hopefully: Do you have any thoughts yet about anarchism and the necessity of constant revolution?

I was caught right in the maelstrom of the day 1 de-anonning - as in, had opened the tab with the author's name on it and then went back to the laptop every few minutes for an hour to look at the recipe in the next tab - and learned later that I had been an unwitting part of a greater scheme of deception! But honestly I was thrilled at the news Becca was writing me regardless, she is the best and this story is wonderful: does such a good job at catching on to the themes of the original, and does this via a funny little time travel scenario that fits brilliantly into the original. I highly recommend it.

I wrote the following stories:

Flowering (4850 words) by raven
Fandom: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Relationships: Cat Chant & Christopher Chant
Characters: Cat Chant, Christopher Chant, Millie Chant
Additional Tags: Coming of Age, Queer Themes
Summary:

“Keep the home fires burning, Cat, will you,” Chrestomanci says lazily, and Millie blows Cat a kiss before the portal shuts.

My assigned story, and a couple of people can attest how much I hated it, hated writing it, and how much I wanted to burn it to the ground. I'm in a phase right now where writing fiction is just beyond my ken. It's too hard and it makes my soul ache. But I had been on a podcast, Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, on an episode about The Lives of Christopher Chant, so I thought I was feeling Chrestomanci sufficiently much to write it. I was not and I could not. But then I missed the deadline for no-fault default, and felt masochistic enough to continue somehow. I eventually resolved to orphan the story once yuletide was over - I have not done this. Quite a lot of people liked it and I'm grateful to them for saying so! But I learned my lesson here about giving up when I'm ahead.

promises made to be broken, made to last (1988 words) by raven
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Relationships: Ruth Calder/Alison McIntosh
Characters: Ruth Calder, Alison McIntosh
Additional Tags: New Year's Eve, Romance, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft
Summary:

Ruth's not much of a witch, not really. Kneeling beside a corpse on the year’s turn is something any woman can do.

Here's one that was different! I've seen some of this show, I've been to the islands, but hadn't been particularly inspired to write for it. But then walkthegale was having a bad time just before Christmas, and I'd been promising her something for nearly a year, and, and. On the morning of 24 December I texted her lovely wife with a neverending slew of canon questions and scribbled and scribbled. I got this written finally an hour before the deadline and it was all worth it because C loved her gift and guessed it was me even before the de-anon. I was really pleased this whole thing came off.

ashes, ashes (2099 words) by raven
Fandom: The Incandescent - Emily Tesh
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sapphire “Saffy” Walden/Laura Kenning
Characters: Sapphire “Saffy” Walden, Laura Kenning
Additional Tags: Aftermath, Recovery, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

It was time to go, and Laura said, “Saffy, you could come with me”—and Saffy said maybe, and it meant something but neither of them knew yet what.

I don't know that I have much to say about this one! I wrote it a few months ago, before the creative void, so it was nice to have a story in the archive that I definitely liked that wasn't written in a mad hurry. The recipient didn't show up, but we can't have everything.

I’ve been rewatching Quatermass and the Pit for the last week, which is apparently something I do every few years and then never write anything about. It’s a black and white BBC serial from 1958, to our eyes science fiction horror though a massive leap beyond genre in its own time, and I love it very much. I honestly think it’s perfect. There isn’t anything I’d change except put more women in it and even so at least it does have one brave 1950s lady scientist academic trying her best. Could be worse if not by much.

So the Quatermass in the title is a person – named by writer Nigel Kneale with what he called the weirdest name in the phonebook; he’s Professor Bernard Quatermass, a restrained, charming British academic in charge of something called the British Experimental Rocket Group. By the time we meet him in the Pit, there aren’t so many rockets; Quatermass the pacifist is in the middle of being told the military are taking over his research; that his planned moonbase is going to be used as a place to build up armament. No one mentions Sputnik or the USSR, but no one has to. This was absolutely on-the-minute current when it was made. Quatermass is furiously angry and kind of heartbroken; then he discovers an old friend of his has a very similar problem, and decides to be a dick to his new employer while he solves it.

There really aren’t a lot of rockets in this story! Matthew Roney, Quatermass’s old friend, is a paleontologist, who has discovered an ancient site of prehistoric hominids in… Knightsbridge. (There’s been construction, ok.) But deep down in the pit there’s also an unexploded bomb (!) left over from 1944, so the military have taken over. Quatermass plays silly buggers with the army folk until they leave Roney alone, and then hangs around to see what happens next. That’s the set-up. And I love it, largely because Quatermass is incredibly charismatic (he was played by five different actors, but this one is my favourite) and also just… you can see here how the series was an influence on every SF, horror or fantasy thing to ever be on television. It’s so fucking interesting and intelligent.

But then. Everything that happens next is creepy in the best way. ( creep creep creep - rather than cut tag the most horrifying bit of the serial, I have simply not included it so this is cut for length not horrors )

I wanted to finish off this extremely long post about a seventy-year-old piece of television by posting a snippet of it, but I actually couldn’t find anything. Perhaps even better: this was the noise the Martians made inside people’s heads, courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop. And Hob’s Lane, where the Pit was dug, is in my icon.

Dear yuletide author,

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 Day After The Revolution", 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. Other festivals are marvellous.

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 Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones )

( The Day Before The Revolution - Ursula K. Le Guin )

( The Saint of Steel - T Kingfisher )

That's it - as above, I read many things, and I'm thrilled that you're writing for me! I hope you have a wonderful yuletide.

Cheers,
raven

I've told this story to so many people but I just. I cannot. I. Well. The new job is going pretty well, I'm really getting into it, I have a crush on my boss and I like everyone I've met so far.

Yesterday one of my new colleagues came into the office a little down-hearted after being out for a meeting. The meeting hadn't gone well, she explained. "I forgot to invite anyone."

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.

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.