wolffyluna

Hello, person who has matched with me, or is treating me! No matter what you make, I'm probably going to really like it, but I know it's much easier to come up with an idea if you've got some guidance.

Length of prompts is not related to how much I like any character or group, and more related to how much I can ramble about them off the top of my head. Also, feel free to do whatever you want. If for example, I mention wanting fluff for a character, but you have an angsty idea you really want to do, go for it!

My ao3 account and my tumblr are both wolffyluna, if you want to have a look at them to get ideas.

Notes To Potential Pinch Hitters: If my requests go to pinch hits, and you are a pinch hitter who is looking to pick up one of the canons I requested, thank you! And I hope you like whatever you end up picking up.

The fandoms most able to be picked up quickly are:

We Know The Devil is a visual novel available for $8 USD, and is 1.5-3 hours long depending on how fast you read.

Original Works, which don't have a canon to consume.

Less quick:

Heaven Will Be Mine is a visual novel available for 15 USD and is about 6 hours long depending on how fast you read.

While I would of course be delighted by Baldur's Gate 3 or Imperial Coroner pinch hits, these are an ~80 hour rpg and 36 episode tv series, so I don't expect anyone to pick up those canons specifically for a pinch hit.

Contents

Likes:

General Likes
Art Likes
Smut Likes
DNWs

Fandoms:

Baldur’s Gate
Heaven Will Be Mine
The Imperial Coroner
Original Works
We Know The Devil

( Likes and DNWS )

( Baldur’s Gate )

( Heaven Will Be Mine )

( The Imperial Coroner )

( Original Works )

( We Know the Devil )

Books

The Silent Blade by RA Salvatore

I'm back on the Drizzt grind. This one was a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand: a major character who is male rape victim! Portrayed sensitively! In a pulpy fantasy book! (Salvatore never uses the word 'rape', but I get the impression that's less because he doesn't know what he wrote and more because he had to be pg-13.)

On the other: Surprisingly little Drizzt! And also some truly impressive whorephobia and fatphobia, culminating in someone being mercy killed for being fat???

Yeah. Uh. That was a reading experience?

The Ladies Rewrite the Rules by Suzanne Allain

It's a Regency romance about a young wealthy widow who discovers she's been put on a list of marriage wealthy women, for the purposes of fortune hunting young men to court them. She informs the other women on the list, and they realise: what if they used this opportunity to use their power to get the men dancing to their tune for once?

It's very much a Fluffgency, revolving around the idea of "but what if a bunch of (relatively) powerful women got together and pushed back against the social mores? and it straightforwardly worked?" but it was a very charming example of the type. The relationship between the female lead and her best friend was very fun. (But, alas, the male lead was a little bit of a chivalrous nothingburger.)

Vengeance of the Pirate Queen by Tricia Levenseller

A DNF, because I realised I could not appreciate it on the correct level. It's part of a series of fantasy romance books, centering around fantasy pirates.

And I kept finding it unintentionally funny. Because the setting was filled with, for lack of a better phrase, Social Justice Pirates. Everyone kept having very earnest discussions about rape culture. People knew about trauma, and even the least emotionally intelligent characters could identify someone in in need of grounding and knew grounding techniques.

Which lead to a beautifully hilarious scene. The female lead notices the male lead going spacy, and thinks "Hmm, I need to ground this guy. No, I can't shout his name, that would startle him in a bad way. I better draw a weapon instead." and proceeds to draw her sword to distract him with how shiny it is.

And it works!

After that I just. I just couldn't. I could no longer read it with the lens that was intended to be read. (Also not helping: I have accidentally developed opinions about media representation of PTSD, and the standard fanfic way of portraying it makes me, for lack of a better word, cringe, because I used to write it like that before I developed further opinions. And. Uh. This story matched the Standard Fanfic Model to a T.)

Unsafe by Cathy Glass* Another Cathy Glass foster memoir, but a different flavour than usual. The gap between the events and publishing them was a lot smaller, and well. It wasn't "Here's how I helped this kid, while optionally discovering why their family is Like That." It was "and here is why I retired from foster caring." It's a good portrait of why exactly she got disillusioned.

A House By The Sea and The Ones Who Come At Last by PH Lee Two short stories, both responses to Omelas. The first is "what happens when the forsaken children grow up" and the second is "what if refugees came to Omelas." Both very good examples of the genre, and both free.

Still Life With Bones by Alexa Haggerty

This one is about the experiences of an anthropologist exhuming bodies from mass graves from genocides, and thus discussion is going under the cut.

( Read more... )

WTF Is Tarot by Baraka Wintner

I will preface this by saying that I'm coming at this from a weird angle: 1. I think Tarot works, but for mundane and non-supernatural reasons. 2. I'm refreshing my Tarot knowledge because I like to use it as a randomisation tool to generate ideas for stories.

I'm of two minds about recommending this book. It is a very readable book, and I do like the author's willingness to swear and use anecdote to explain cards instead of dry lists. I think there's also some useful ideas in her specific practice: for example, The Fool card features a picture of someone leaping off a cliff. She uses what card The Fool is leaping towards as a tool for analysis. Is it leaping towards a positive card? Be a holy fool, no thoughts head empty, just go for it! Is it leaping towards a negative card? COMMON SENSE IS COMMON FOR A REASON AND YOU SHOULD USE IT.

But I have two big caveats.

(And this is under a cut just because it is long)

( Read more... )

I watched the Wicked movie, and greatly enjoyed it.

I'm about to say something that sounds like an insult, but I assure you it's not: the choreographer worked on Disney Channel Movies, and you can tell.

There's a distinctive style of choreography that lives on in the Disney channel, of "we have hired one hundred of the best dancers we can find, and we are having them all dance at once, all hitting their marks, even when they are not the focus of the shot."

And it is glorious.

The Wicked movie understood the assignment: that it is about singing and dancing and it should be utterly shameless about it.

Books

The Mongol Storm by Nicholas Morton

It's a book about the geopolitical affects of the Mongol Empire especially in the Middle East/ North Africa/ Eastern Europe. I quite enjoyed it, though I kept having moments of "alas, history is not written by the victors... it's written by the literate people who decided to write down history."* It's mostly about how it affected the other empires and kingdoms in the region, so I know a lot more about the Crusader States (bad at things unless they were the Templars, thought the Mongols were Coming to Help) and the Abayyid Empire (descendants of Saladin, had particularly chaotic inheritance policies.) Also I found about exactly how horrifying the sack of Baghdad was, so that's... fun.

( content warnings for mass death and sexual assault )

*The Mongol Empire did write things, they just tended to be, uh. prosaic. Unless they were threats. Sometimes they wrote those down!

Bride's Story volume 1 by Kaoru Mori

This is a very pretty historical romance manga with pretty clothes and horses, about a 20 year old steppe nomad woman in an arranged marriage to a 12 year old boy in a settled town in Central Asia. I mostly enjoyed it? The art is very nice, and there's a good sense of atmosphere which is what I like in a historical. There's just the... let's be charitable and call it 'the age gap.' The manga doesn't ogle the boy, but it does ogle him ogling her, you know what I mean? I'm not sure if I'm going to read the later volumes, we'll see.

Mummy Told Me Not To Tell by Cathy Glass

Cathy Glass is an experience foster mother who has written so many memoirs about her fostering children. They're very readable brain candy; I read this one in one day. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's her best. Some of this is just 'real life does not always give you good arcs, even if you try hard to squash it into one,' some of this is me having an allergy to hiding information from children to avoid "sullying" them, especially when you have good reason to believe the child already knows.

Links:

I'm going to avoid having too much angsting about the US Election, but sometimes, in times of trouble, you just need to be reminded that you can buy a malaria net
a blog post about how to run horror ttrpgs
how google maps made itself work in India, which doesn't have street names in a lot of places
you know that super homoerotic poem about Chicago?
a series of short videos about making an art exhibit in a dumpster
timely: there is attempts to block under 16 year olds in Australia from accessing social media. I ended up making a submission to the Senate committee, and am having major 'the enemy of my enemy' feelings about Elon Musk and Pauline Hanson encouraging people to do put in submissions. (Hipster voice) I found out about the submissions before it was cool, via Denise of Dreamwidth.

I just realised I hadn't posted this here: but my novel! I have finished editing it! It's not done yet, but the ways it's not done are all things like "I need to make a cover," or "I need to write acknowledgements and blurb," or "I need to fight the ebook formatting." But the main body of the thing is done!

I'm planning on spending the rest of November working on ~~anything else~~ other projects. I have shared a poll with tumblr and discord, and it's only fair I share it with the dreamwidth peeps as well.

➕ attempt Amperslash treat 🇨 attempt consent issues treat (probably bg3) 🍬 FengLian polyamory and casual sex, out of spite ⚔️ Lae'zel/F!Tav not understanding this thing you call 'compassion' 🧛 the people want Wyllstarion h/c, and by people I mean 'my muse, for some reason?' 🎮 original f/f vr streamers in not a death game 🙊 original lovecraftian cia operative becomes nonconsensually monolingual

I went sword fighting for the first time a few days ago!

In a shock revelation, I am not a secret sword fighting prodigy, and walked into a sword multiple times.

I'm not sure whether I enjoyed it, but I'm going to give it a couple more tries. It's one of those things where either I will suck but in a way I find fun to improve from, or I will find the sucking demotivating and I don't which it will be yet.

Hmm, I need to decide whether I want to do something dumb or not.

So, some context about my schedule (a topic which everyone finds fascinating): I usually borrow some books from my home city library to take with me when I'm travelling for work, and then I return them when I get back. The return length is basically perfect for doing this.

I have one more work swing this year, and I thought I would not be able to borrow any library books, because the day I arrive back from my work swing, I fly out Childhood City to see family.

But, I have just realised: I have six hour layover between flying Mining Town -> Home City and then Home City -> Childhood City. Which is enough time to return books to a library.

So now I need to decide: do I simplify my life and avoid book returning logistics by going "you have books at home, Wolffy," or do I give into the book goblin and go "but none of those books are the next ones in the Drizzt series! or about the Knights Templar! or are foster mother autobiographies!"

Fyi: Peach Flower House, a company that translated danmei into English, is closing its store on Nov 15. https://www.peachflowerhouse.com/closing

Which is an issue for me because I was planning to buy some of those books... later... and not all at once.

And now I need to decide whether to buy them at all, or buy the whole series at once and hope I'll like it enough to justify that purchasing decision.

"Wolffy, aren't you doing arbitrary novel editing November? Presumably this means you have less books and links than usual." Uhhh.

Books

The Truth, Men At Arms and Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

I fell on a bunch of Terry Pratchett audio books these past few days. I don't have much to say about them as individuals? They're Terry Pratchett books.

But. Reading them has reminded me of a bug bear I have about the Pratchett fandom.

( 90s British Author Compare and Contrast )

On Editing by Helen Corner-Bryant and Kathryn Price

This is a book about the persnickety details of line editing, things like not head hopping and avoiding homoerotic POV weirdnesses (no, really, that's an example they used) and showing not telling. It's a lot of fairly standard advice, in an exhaustive and methodical manner.

Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell

This is one of the plotting books I've read recently that I've found the most useful. I should warn that Bell is really obviously a Thriller author, and it shows in his advice? He treats 'everyman' protagonists as a viable option, and does not really grok Romance which makes his advice for it a little weird.

But overall, it's a good broad scale overview of plot structure, and also has some good technique advice. There's a whole chapter on different outlining method for various levels of plotting and pantsing, which I cannot summarise that would be too close to just copying chapter. But it's really good. (Also, the method I use is described as 'The Borg Method' which, fuck you, Bell [affectionate.])

There's also some really good writerly psychological advice. I'm putting his advice for getting past the Mid Point Blues, because it is really good:

Go somewhere quiet and just chill for half an hour. No writing, no talking, no reading. Just chill, alone
Do something fun. Go to the movies! Go window shopping! Do something of some sort.
Fall asleep with a warm glass of milk and your favourite book.
and when you wake up, IMMEDIATELY WRITE SOMETHING. DO NOT STOP. DO NOT PASS GO. WRITE

Which I can see working on me.

Links

Bret Devereaux is [annoyed at oaths in fantasy literature]( https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-work/)
K Klein defends linguistic prescriptivism as good, somethimes
New AcapellaScience song! About eels!
and a spoileriffic Baldur's Gate 3 video, that I am sharing in the spirit of the laugh rule, because these are some very funny animation crimes

But, like. If I had to pick a genre to get plotting advice from a successful writer of it from, thriller is at the top of the list.

I made progress on my novel. Not as much as I would like, and not for as long as I would like, but-- editing is not the easy part, for me.
(To give myself some number to throw myself out, arbitrarily decided to track time. I'm trying to work on the novel for 40 hours this month.)
(Which means I need to do ~1 hour and 20 mins of work on it everyday, which I juuuuust did today.)

Bee tee dubs: I am possibly going to get eaten by Arbitrary Novel Editing Month, so if you don't see me around much, that's why.

~~[whining] I thought I was done with structural edits, but noooo...~~

I have, against my better judgement, have become someone who goes on runs at 5am. I’m out working and living in the bush somewhere where the temperature after work is 40C, but before work its a much more reasonable 25C. And for various reasons it cashes out that 5am is the best time to go for a run.

Today’s run… raised my heart rate more than intended.

You see, 5am is colder!... because it's before dawn. So a) animals are more active and b) I have to use a head torch to see.

I was running along, and up ahead, just outside the torchlight, was a mysterious grey lump. I squinted at it suspiciously. Dead tree I forgot about. Optical illusion.

The mysterious lump hopped into the bushes.

That was the Kangaroo of Foreshadowing.

I kept running. I crossed the cattle grid, ran for a bit more

And then I heard a Noise.

I cannot describe it to you. I did not parse it consciously. Something deep in my mammal programming, the bit that handles 'an owl is swooping towards you' and 'something behind you is staring at you' went “sudden movement, in grass.”

I stopped dead.

Now, it could have been a snake. The snakes here are dangerous, but you can run past them. It could be a kangaroo. It would probably run away, but if it chose fight instead of flight, I did not want to fight a kangaroo.

But. It could have been a dingo.

I’m a bit big for a dingo. Wouldn’t want to test that though.

I tried to think of what you were meant to do when you encountered a dingo.I started clapping above my head while yelling towards the dark “I’M A BIG SCARY HUMAN. YOU DON’T WANT TO FUCK WITH ME. DON’T MESS WITH THE BEST. I’M BIG! HUMAN! I GOTTA PHONE I CAN USE TO CALL ALL MY BIGGER AND SCARIER HUMAN FRIENDS!”

I started backing away gingerly. I didn’t want to show my back to a possible dingo, but also I didn’t want to walk backwards into a cattle grid.

Once I crossed the cattle grid safely, I went “can a dingo walk over a cattle grid?” decided probably not, and speed walked back to the accommodation.

Short Stories

The V*mpire by PH Lee: Really good! Can read it for free! Mind the warnings! It's about the very particular viper pit of 2010s queer tumblr. It's about abusive relationships. It's about abusive vampires in 2010s queer tumblr. I spent the whole day after reading it with a mental red string board. It's great.

Links: - Why is my TV saying it hates me? - a guide on small talk written for nurses.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

It's this year's Hugo Best Novel! It's also written by the person who is why Nirvana in Fire and the Silmarillion's orphan_account fic is weirdly good!

After Earth is destroyed in an alien invasion, the last few true patriots mutiny and take ships to an uninhabited system, to build a new society to avenge the Earth. Kyr grew up on Gaea Station as one of the best of her mess, and she is ready to do what ever it takes to serve Gaea Station.

..Kyr learns just how wrong she is.

The book is about patriarchy and child abuse and generational trauma and the sort of society's abusers set up, and, most importantly, Why Sparta Sucks So Bad and Do Not Build The Laconic Torment Nexus.

It's really good, and it's also best to go into it with as few spoilers as possible, other than "it contains all the content warnings."

...but I can't resist talking about the ending.

( Read more... )

This book made me cry at the end and so few books do that.

Links

I have decided to have themed links this time, namely, I'm going to share all the Wyll fan songs I have been listening to on loop.

Ballad of the Blade by Eldritch Phoenix
Blade of Frontiers by Jonathan Young
and my personal favourite, A Patriar's Born But A Hero's Made by Lyv.

I have, for the past week and a bit of my break, tried without success to buy a Fancy Hot Chocolate. I have just had my last plausible attempt to buy one, and it failed (the store had run out of fancy hot chocolate powder, and I'm probably not going there again this break.)

So I think I'm going to have to make myself a Fancy Hot Chocolate. The problem is that I... don't know how.

I do not know how to make something that tastes of chocolate and something else

... maybe the dried osmanthus didn't get lost in the move? Steal rose petals from my tea? Maybe putting black sapote in would work? Who knows!

Hmm, it's only about 11 days until Arbitrary Novel November. I need to decide what to do. Silly, but Tempting: I have written 50k words in a month. I have written a fanfic novella in a month. I have not written an original novel in a month. But this November, I could try. Let's up the challenge, for no good reason! For added silliness, I could also do the "I'm drawing a tarot spread for the plot, and the characters are made by putting my music on to shuffle to create bizarre character playlists."

Not Silly, Not That Tempting: I can finish my current novel project-- the f/f arranged marriage between a cavalry general and an embroidery mage-- and get it to a self publishable stage. Pros: I have never finished an original novel before. Cons: I don't know how to turn editing it into Numbers, and my previous NaNo success required Awakening the Numbers Gremlin. Also, I have no idea if it will take more or less than a month to edit?

Fan Fic Free Space I have written 50k of fan fiction before. And I have a lot of WIPs hanging over my head. The flaws with this plan are a) I already know I can do it, and maybe it would be nice to challenge myself more and b) doing NaNo has never decreased my number of WIPs and it may be foolishness to believe it will work this time.

Books

The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

This is a funny one, because I simultaneously really enjoyed it, and did not finish it. Some of that was running out of time before I had to return it to the library... but a lot of it was mere going 'I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THE MODERN ERA. NOTHING HAPPENED AFTER THE 14TH CENTURY. SCREW YOU.'

Anyway, it has a lot of interesting things, if you want to learn more about the Sassanian or Mongol empires, or the Golden Age of Islam. Just... only the first third of the book is before the modern era. Still good, though!

Links

What researching historically inspired fantasy is like.
A video essay about Spec Ops: The Line, and what people don't say about it. Note: it's an analysis of the war crimes in the game and the ways it is commenting on real life war crimes. There is real life footage. There's no blood that I can see, but there's fire and people being carried to ambulances, so. Consider yourself forewarned.
an article about cargo theft

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears: do you know of advice/resources/essays/etc for writing Description That Exists, or, hopefully, Description That Is Good And Not Bad?

(I have been reading the beta notes on my novel, and when two different people are like "this appears to be happening in a blank void populated by formless, gaseous beings," that's when you know you got to fix that >.>)