philosophy supernatural nude

Happy Diwali.



That's me in the background; that was Diwali in 2008. I took mithai into work today, and another lawyer stopped by my desk to wish me a happy Diwali, and to thank me because I had reminded her to write to her daughter's girlfriend to wish her a happy Diwali too. What a wonderful world.

As in previous years, I am sorry I cannot ask you all round to my house for food and sparklers and lights. Here are some stories, instead.

home
Vorkosigan, Ekaterin, gen.

( she wouldn't bump her head on things )

*

making light
Fringe, Peter, Olivia, Astrid, gen.

( Peter is eyeing up a jar of Red Vines )

*

all that you let in
HP, Hermione, gen.

( Hermione gave up writing with quill pens )

*

Extract from public meeting on Utopia Planitia budgetary requirements, 22 October 2364, Earth Shipbuilding and Public Works Commission, United Federation of Planets
Star Trek, gen.

( once upon a time )


In the spirit of that last story, here is an image that has been floating around Tumblr and Facebook as "India on Diwali night, as seen from space" and variations thereof. I can't find a source for it and to be honest I have my doubts about whether it really is that.

But - well. There are so many Indians - there are so many religions, there are so many languages, there is so much, there is even this chilly brown diaspora out here in Ultima Thule - that every day, on the ordinary days, we make a lot of light.

I got linked to the Damn, Fandom is Good At What You Do idea by such_heights, whose "Women in Western Political Thought" is very charming.

This is my contribution. Don't explain, don't apologise, say the guidelines. I can only say, nevertheless, that this really is what I did all day until recently, and it was bureaucratic and tedious and frustrating as all hell and I loved it, I loved it.

fic:: scenes from an impractical courtship (measurements scaled from this plan may not match measurements between the same points on the ground)
by Raven
1500w, Harry Potter, Hermione/Luna, AU. ""You're not," Hermione says, furiously, the instant she recognises the voice. "You're not Her Majesty's Land Registry, you are a cabal of common criminals."

( measurements scaled from this plan )

Today is my day at bat for rs_small_gifts! I wrote this for such_heights, who asked for a non-Christian seasonal tradition, and Remus and Sirius as part of a larger queer society.

Fic:: Evergreen
by Raven
PG, Harry Potter, Sirius/Remus, 3000 words. It's winter in wartime.

( Late in the afternoon... )

Credit where credit's due - to these people!

Also, come on, don't look at me like that, at least it's not Clegg/Cameron RPF. Although I keep watching this and trying very hard not to chew my fingers.

ficlet:: a historic and seismic shift
by Raven
PG, gen, HP/RPF. David Cameron's first night in office.

( the sun's gone down and not on Portillo )

For dogdaysofsummer, day 27.

ficlet:: keeping off the furniture
by Raven
PG-13, Harry Potter, Sirius/Remus. An August full moon, many years on.

( nightfall )

I have returned from Edinburgh, which was truly lovely, if endlessly wet: mostly there was bookshopping and staying in bed all day, and on a miracle of a dry and a clear night, Shim and I were a breathless cliché and went out into the fields to watch the Perseids shoot overhead. I was very sorry to come home.

That said, I have just spent a very pleasant couple of days with hathy_col and tau_sigma, who arrived on Monday afternoon in a flurry of generalised geekery. I was not doing any of the driving on this visit - as usual, I have no car to do any driving in, and Colleen's Devil Car is being devillish, so we agreed that Tali would do the driving and I would direct her. This went entirely as planned until I said, blithely, "Go left!" at a roundabout, there were shrieks of horror from the backseat and suddenly, no road.

....luckily, the tide was out. We took a brief turn on the sands and returned to the tarmac. The assembled party have agreed to never let me do anything again, up to and including leaving the house unaccompanied.

Anyway, we were actually going to see Half Blood Prince again, and I'm glad we did - every time I read about it, people are complaining about how much they disliked it. Whereas I loved it - the aesthetic, the character bits, the way the very long book has been fitted into a not-so-long film. Colleen had ( things to say about the one and only Remus Lupin ) I was also sorry about the lack of Bill and Fleur, as the lack of them necessarily takes away ( the best line in the book )

For some reason, after that we watched "The Mind Robber", which is a second Doctor story featuring Jamie and Zoe, and it is kind of amazingly bizarre. Jamie, incidentally, is great. As we all three jointly remarked, he does not actually wear a kilt. It's not a kilt. It's a tartan miniskirt. (For those who don't believe me: picture where it would reach if he were kneeling. Exactly.) And then fell into bed, and slept well into the following afternon. (I remember doing this sort of thing as a teenager and people trying to get me up before nine am. Dear world: thank you for not doing this any more. I really appreciate it.)

So, yesterday the three of us and the Devil Car went to Blackpool for the Doctor Who Exhbition, which is just as I remember it: gloomy, amateurish, kitsch, but with that kind of old-school charm that so many things pertaining to Doctor Who have. They have not, much to my approval, got rid of the enormous Gallifreyan headdresses; they have added David Tennant, grudgingly, to their list of Doctors past; you can still sit and watch all the Doctors die one by one on quick fast-forward; and they still have a Dalek you can sit in and menace yourself in the mirror.

Colleen did not buy a life-size cardboard cutout of John Simm; we did not get arrrested. I call this success.

Blackpool itself has not changed, either. It's still trying to reinvent itself as a kind of British Las Vegas - but I've been to Vegas and I'm seeing the differences. I'm cruel to it, perhaps; it does not, at least, pretend to be anything it's not, it does not pretend to anything other than be a seaside resort selling seaside rock, plastic buckets and palmistry, and we did go there on a grey weekday in August, but nevertheless, the decay is very evident. The same goes for Southport, which does not have the redeeming feature of, at least, a beautiful beach - and, oh, yes, the beach at Blackpool was beautiful, really beautiful, with shades of grey becoming blue becoming purple becoming Cumbria, great swathes of sunset heading in from the west. The only person I could see from where I was standing was a man throwing sticks for a dog at the edge of the waves. I have a weird, palpable sense of August, these days; like the month has a presence at the edge of things, and nowhere more so in Blackpool, where everything depends on "the season" and the height of it sees one man and his dog on the whole length of sand.

(Perhaps I should not complain about Southport's lack of a proper beach. Otherwise this post would mostly consist of, "So, hey, we invited tau_sigma up for a visit and DROWNED HER.")

But it was a weekday, it was quiet, and it is true we contributed rather less to the local economy than we would have otherwise done because I did not let either Colleen or Tali visit an establishment called The Museum of the Universe: An Alternative Explanation For The Evolution of Mankind (Supported By Maths, Geography Geometry and Plain Common Sense!) They were critical of my morals. Nevertheless, I prevailed. I bought Shim a stick of rock, and we went home with our pedestrian notions about the scientific method unchallenged.

Colleen left us for paid employment; Tali and I watched most of the last series of Torchwood, Children of Earth, and here is what I have to say about that: ( ... ) It chilled me a little before bed, though, and today I have mostly pottered around and not done a great deal, although I don't think the two things are related.

Next week, I am in London again - the law firm from last week have called me back for a second interview, and again I am theoretically delighted if practically terrified. Mostly, fingers stay crossed.

Hi, I am a crazy person. I spent Thursday afternoon sitting by the river, under the bridge where the people take their canoes down, watching the geese and the pleasure craft and the occasional solemn, athletic canoeist. One of the large passenger boats from Iffley had cut power and drifted into the middle of the river in order to turn around; there was also an elderly, very fit man sculling furiously. Backwards. After the shouting and crashing were over, I sat back against my tree on the bank and though, huh, I am the only person in the world who saw that coming, maybe I should have said something.. And then started cackling like a loon. I related this story to my long-suffering headshrink dude the next day, and he noted that was very healthy, sitting by the water watching the boats go by. I may have, um, shouted at him.

Basically: I am not very well, I am in that place where you don't think life is worth living at all, blah blah blah whatever.

There are still quite a few days of posting for lgbtfest, but I thought it was worth noting a few of my favourites while we go:

We Few, We Happy Few by toujours_nigel, Harry Potter.
Aurors, and institutionalised homophobia. This is stylish.

Time (of change), by soft_princess, Merlin.
Uther prefers not to father bastards. It's all very logical. Unexpectedly sweet and lovely.

The Rules, by gilesonnen, Discworld.
A new wizard at Unseen University has questions about the celibacy policy. Ridcully is very literal. The story is a gentle, rollicking delight.

Love Like A Djelibeybian, by gehayi, Discworld.
Ptraci is enjoying being queen. But people have strange ideas about what handmaidens ought and ought not to do.

And these two you must read, if nothing else:

Modern Love, by penknife, Discworld.
Show me something of Penknife's I haven't loved, but this is special. This is the Disc's dwarfs getting used to gender, and sex, and not getting used to it, and embracing the human notions, and rejecting the human notions, and it is... not beautiful, but right, and shaped perfectly into a few thousand words. It's a wonderful, wonderful piece of writing, and something I hope Pratchett nods at, later.

The Pattern of the Process, by raedbard, The West Wing.
This is about Toby's babies-who-come-with-hats, Huck and Molly, only they're not babies, any more - and more than that I wouldn't want to say, because this story is perfect and complete and self-contained. It's immaculately thought-out and immaculately executed, and at something like 19,000 words, an astonishing achievement for a few months' work.

It was an unsettled night. At seven am I woke up after a violent nightmare involving someone moving into the Mousehole with a snake. (I am, as previously noted, severely ophidiophobic.) I remember quite clearly telling chiasmata that it wasn't poisonous, it was a kingsnake, and its coloration pattern is in a different order from venomous coral snakes. (Wikipedia, with images turned off, tells me that this is absolutely true [note for other phobics: there is probably a picture of a kingsnake on that page]. Once again I am amazed by my dream-self's capacity for perfect trivia recall. So I wandered around the house, read some of dreadful Germaine Greer and her dreadful book, and went back to sleep.

And woke up again at one in the afternoon, when shimgray decided I would probably sleep until Doomsday unless he intervened. In my defence, I was awake at 3.42am - because that's when I finished my yuletide. It has been sent off for beta, and I'm pleased. Not just with it, but in general, because here is December, and I was all ready to just opt out of the fannish round-up memes this year, because I have been so staggeringly unprolific. But! What I wrote this year:

Changes in Sea Level, TOS, 1000 words;
Autochthony, TOS, 10,000 words;
interlude, Slings & Arrows ficlet, 400 words;
things fall apart, Doctor Who, 500 words;
Dirty Witch Doctors, HP, 645 words, co-written.

And also, thirteen photographs (the via crucis remix), 4500 words for Remix, and my 6000 words of Yuletide.

So, a total of about 22,500, which is about two thirds of what I usually do, and, well, for a year which had both my Finals and six months of clinical depression in it, I figure that's not so bad. And, well, I'm not much with the writing-when-I-don't-want-to, but it is pretty much the only hobby I've consistently stuck to for a decade, so I ought to keep track. (Ye gods, 2009 - it really is ten years of writing fiction, isn't it? I seem to remember trying to write a novel when I was twelve, which was 1999. Oh dear.)

I also have two half-finished stories on my hard drive - well, at any given moment I have hundreds of half-finished stories on my hard drive, but these two are of note because I fully intend to finish them. One is Merlin/Arthur, a short and not very happy love story, and the other is a gen HP story about Hermione keeping Remus's books in trust for Teddy. I like both of them, and they might see the light of day, er, sometime.

And, one other thing. Whilst writing 6000 words in two days is a bad thing - seriously, children, do not do as I have done, especially when you have exams in January - it is fun. Yeah, writing is fun. Sitting up to all hours of the night crafting something is one of my favourite things to do. This was a plot-driven story, rather than character, which made me worry about it: I'm worried it has no heart to it, it's just, stuff happened. But the process is the fun part, and I guess, well, I'm not an artist, I don't do crafts or hobbies, I don't do very much other than law, except this. I fangirl! I write! I am entirely socially unacceptable! It's awesome!

I really don't like Sundays. Especially the Sunday before I have to resit my driving theory test. Groan. Anyway, the first of the prompt fics.

thunderemerald wanted ( spoilery for DH )

now is the winter of our discontent, HP, gen.

( Read more... )

insaneizzi wanted girl!Doctor/Jamie, which I can't oblige with because I've never seen any Jamie eps, but dressedindeath wanted just girl!Doctor. This is a piece I have had flying around for a while, but I've never been able to finish.

( Read more... )

More to come.

Okay, what follows under the cut is not a review of Harry Potter. It is, however, massively spoilery, and I think anyone who has both a) read the book and b) known me for any length of time, will know what it's about.

( MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY SPOILERY )

So this is me raising a late-night toast - to Harry Potter, and the stories, characters and friends I've met through him, and to ten years of my life. Cheers.