work; recs; miscellany

Hello, all. So, I am aware I have been a bad friend and quiet fannish citizen for around two or three weeks now, and I want to apologise for that.

Here's the bad news. I am likely to continue being both of those things until March, and I apologise for that.

Here's what's going on in my life:

( work )

For the most part, though, I'm happy living in Cambridge, and living with Shim is working out well. I miss the States, but I always will and it's nice here. It's just work that's making me miserable at the moment. I'm told it gets better; I hope it will.

2. Possibly unwisely, I have tickets for The Civil Wars in a couple of weeks. I haven't seen live music for years, I'm very excited.

3. So, a few weeks back gavagai made me watch X-Men, and I really enjoyed it; then I watched some of the other films, finishing with X-Men: First Class. I think y'all knew this. I think some of you also knew I had got fed up with trying to fix the movie to suit me, and decided to write Charles/Erik in a cake shop AU instead.

Well, 17,500 words later I have finally got that story out to beta. (happydork is to blame - it was going to be a story about, y'know, cake. And maybe some kissing. Then she said, "Shouldn't it be a kosher bakery?" - and the rest is a great deal of history.)

The problem, y'see, that work has taken away all of my critical faculties. (And everything else, too: I went out for dinner with some of my colleagues on Thursday night, and we'd gone to a Nando's which, I believe, has the sort of menu where you pick things from column A, B, C, etc. The problem is that schedules of deeds are also in columns marked A, B and C. I couldn't order. Someone had to do it for me.) So while I had all sorts of issues with XMFC - and still do - I ship Charles/Erik. I really do. I ship them like I'm twelve and it's Sirius/Remus.

(I mean. Sirius/Remus. I only stopped shipping them when I had done all the shipping - when you didn't need to ship them, they had been shipped.)

So here are some recs of what I've been reading, in lieu of anything approaching original content:

Call Me By His Name, by sinuous_curve
Charles wakes from the absence of noise. Charles and Erik, afterwards. It's beautiful, this, and thoughtful, and just, very very good.

The Emperor's New Clothes, by ignipes
Ignipes used to write fantastic HP fic, I remember; this one has a lot of what I loved about that, it's subtle and clever and also really hilarious. Emma and Mystique try to stop Magneto wearing rubbish outfits! It's awesome. [via gavagai]

all the fears you left behind by londondrowning
He angles the gun [...] and suddenly there is nothing funny here, nothing at all. This is totally fascinating in that it really gets inside Erik's head - what it's like to be him. I thought it was very well-done.

Not So Much the Teacup by thehoyden
IT'S A WEDDING PLANNER AU. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED. She also wrote What Not To Expect When You're Not Expecting It, hilarious and adorable well-written mpreg. (I know, I know. See above re: twelve. Via wildestranger.)

The Winter of Banked Fires, by yahtzee63.
My favourite, here. I'm fond of all Yahtzee's writing - her way of seeing characters and relationships is a lot like mine - and this one's no exception. It's basically a gigantic fix-it that's sort of set after the first trilogy of films, and it's lovely, novel-length and just what I wanted to read. Logan and Rogue get together, gently, realistically, in a way that I totally didn't expect to find interesting and then did; and Charles and Erik fight, make up, put to rest fifty years of demons and make fun of disco. It is just lovely.

[I just figured something out! This is JUST LIKE SIRIUS/REMUS. THEIR LOVE IS PURE AND TRUE AND DOOMED.

okay, you carry on with your day.]