work; recs; miscellany

[raven]

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:

1. Work. This is the big one. I've been at my new job for about a fortnight now, and it's an incredible mindset shift. First things first: it's okay. I'm okay. The job is terrifying, immensely stressful and very tiring - but I'm okay. I'm getting out of bed, I'm going to work, I'm coming home and managing to unwind a little (point 2, infra). My colleagues are actually very nice. There are eight (and a half - it's a long story) trainees, and I like them all, which I wasn't expecting. They've been sweet and interesting and we get along, and I had a conversation about Quark and Odo with one of them, which was cheering.

But it's hard. It's really, really hard, and over and above the whole, new-job new-mindset new-everything thing. I work in the agricultural department of a large rural firm, and am at the centre of a perfect storm: as well as being new, I am in the unenviable position of being in a difficult department, that's understaffed and features a lot of dragons. One of these is unregistered land.

Now, if you have been to law school in England I'm sorry for explaining this, but for the last hundred years or so, there has been an ongoing scheme in England and Wales to register all land. Land that is registered is elegantly easy to deal with. To transfer it, you fill out a form and sign it as a deed. To note on its title, you fill out another form and send it to the Land Registry office. They even have customer services you can call. It's good. And to find land in the first place, you just search their databases, and they find it for you. But if land is not registered, it involves deeds. Boxes of deeds. Boxes and files and packets of deeds. Deeds since 1802. Deeds. Agricultural land tends to be unregistered. And for someone with no experience, this is very difficult to handle.

So... I am busy, I am stressed, I am very very very anxious, to a level I haven't been in years; I am in this department until March, barring accidents. So that's why I'm not around.

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.]

Comments

[ghostrunner7.livejournal.com]

Civil Wars! I have tickets to see them, too! They put on a great show, they're fun people.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, awesome! Which venue?

[ghostrunner7.livejournal.com]

Um, I saw them a couple of months ago at the Great American Music Hall, and I'm seeing them sometime soon at... the Fillmore, maybe? I go to a lot of concerts.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, in CA! /feels thick I was going to ask which London venue. :)