skygiants

So a few weeks back, jothra had come down to visit and we were hanging out in my living room, and the conversation turned to Mercedes Lackey and other books that we read when we were thirteen, as it so often does.

The relevant dialogue went something like this:

"Remember how she had all those animal people as love interests? Part-animal people? But somehow it was never a problem for sexytimes, because they were only part animal, and -"
"JUST ENOUGH DUDE!"
"YES! JUST ENOUGH DUDE in the place where it counted!"

And then we proceeded to shriek "JUST ENOUGH DUDE!" at each other all the rest of the week, because we are twelve.

The best example of this phenomenon was definitely The Fire Rose, in which the hero gets cursed with a terrible hairy wolfy appearance . . . from the nipples up and the knees down. In between, he's totally normal!

I have sadly lost my copy of The Fire Rose, but, as it happens, I do have my copy of The Eagle and the Nightingale, the one where the hero is basically a man-sized raptor who happens to have a penis. Not only that, but some strange impulse had prompted me to bring it up from me when I came back from Philadelphia the day before Jo actually arrived in New York. Jo also had her copy at home, so the path before us had clearly been prepared.

I am now going to present ( a book review via VERY SERIOUS text message. )

This Yuletide I read a pretty excellent, novella-length Blossom Culp fic that, among other things, managed to send the kid who sees ghosts to WWI, and make it both plausible and not awesomely depressing. It's called As Our Roads Converge and if you have some time to kill, you should read it! I barely remembered the Blossom Culp books and I enjoyed it a lot.

Anyway, because I did in fact barely remember the Blossom Culp books, I was sort of thinking about rereading, and then genarti and I happened across one of the books on sale for a quarter at a grocery-store book sale and I decided that a reread was clearly in my destiny.

. . . but I have to wait for the first one to come in at the library, so while I was waiting instead I read the one other Richard Peck book I did own, Voices After Midnight.

Voices After Midnight is a weird, matter-of-fact little ghost story. It starts with our fourteen-year-old protagonist's family -- including boy-crazy big sister Heidi and weird and eerily self-possessed little brother Luke -- moving to New York for a two-week vacation.

(Our protagonist's name is Chad, but fortunately, since it was a first-person story, I was able to forget that mostly.)

Anyway, the book would be worth reading for me just from the suburban California family's hilarious culture shock at their visit to eighties New York; it's all "OMG THERE ARE NO SUPERMARKETS, JUST BODEGAS, HOW WEIRD" and "WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN A WALK AS A FAMILY ON SIDEWALKS BEFORE." However, the kids are also running into a bigger problem, which is that New York is full of history and all of them keep accidentally time-slipping into it.


CHAD: Maybe this is just a dietary thing! Maybe it's a chemical imbalance. MAYBE IT'S PUBERTY.
LUKE: Obviously we have some business in the past we need to fix.
CHAD: How do you know this! You're EIGHT!
LUKE: Have I not mentioned this has been happening to me all my life? I mean, did the fact that I have always been a weird and and eerily self-possessed child not give you any signs? Seriously, I'm curious.
HEIDI: So, uh . . . who's the hot Gilded Age guy hanging out in my bedroom?

Heidi is kind of a caricature of an eighties teenaged girl, but she does get her moments of awesome. The ghost story, meanwhile, is actually pretty creepy, and turns out to be the reason I always get vague premonitions of doom every time I get into the hand-cranked old elevator at Housing Works.

I also spent the whole book trying to think of other examples of eerie and otherworldly younger brothers in YA fiction. (I find it such a weird trope because it is so not my experience of having a little brother!) I mean, Charles Wallace is a gimme, and I know there are more, but I'm drawing a blank. Help me out? (Moril from the Dalemark Quartet might also count, if the story weren't told from inside his own head.)

So I saw some movies over break!

The usual family-holiday-movie-compromises resulted in:

War Horse: It's a heartwarming animal story about World War I. This . . . really says all that needs to be said, I think.

Oh, also, for fandom's reference, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch are both in it, and I was like 'hey, it surprises me that I haven't seen some parts of my flist talking about that!' and then ( spoilers )

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: My deepest thought about the feature film Sherlock Holmes franchise is that somehow, although Jude Law always looks annoying and smarmy to me, put him in a lulzy Victorian moustache and suddenly he's totally endearing! I don't know what mysterious law of physics causes this to occur.

No, but basically, this was more of the same: lulzy hijinks, enjoyable set pieces, plot that doesn't really make any sense when you squint at it too hard, Mary Morstan being awesome for the ten seconds she's on screen. Would I rather watch 'Mary Morstan and Stephen Fry As Mycroft Holmes Break Ciphers'? Yes, probably, but oh well. As for ( that spoilery thing )

X-Men: First Class: The funniest part is that when we were trying to settle on a Christmas Eve-ish movie, my mom tried to sell us on Sarah's Key and my brother nixed it: "no Nazis on Christmas Eve!"

Then, of course, we fire up X-Men: First Class and get ten straight minutes of Nazis.

. . . then when that was over, we turned off the movie and landed on Bedknobs and Broomsticks just in time to watch Angela Lansbury fight some Nazis. So, uh, yes. (But it did make me wish that X-Men: First Class had been "Angela Lansbury leads some teenaged X-Babies in fighting Nazis." Look, there's a lot of awesome movies in my head, all right?)

Hugo: This was not actually a family compromise, I saw it before break with obopolsk, and it was seriously gorgeous. The cinematography was beautiful, the kids were adorable, it was about OLD FILM PRESERVATION and so I got tiny dorky frissons of glee throughout the whole thing -- it wasn't actually fabulist or fantastical, but it was very much in the style of those just-on-the-verge-of-fantastical films like Amelie, where there's no magic per se but it makes you see the world as magical. Like that. It would have been the best movie I saw over the past few months, hands down, except then rushin_doll and jothra and I went down to the Studio Ghibli festival to go see . . .

Whisper of the Heart: OH MY GOD, GUYS. I fell in love with this movie so hard! It is now rivaling Spirited Away for my favorite Studio Ghibli film, and I don't say that lightly.

Whisper of the Heart is a coming-of-age movie about a girl who reads. She gets a crush on the boy whose name she sees on the library cards above her own, because he's checked out all the same books she has; she negotiates friendships that are suddenly becoming more complicated; and she tries to see if she has what it takes to write stories, if she has the passion and the work ethic to create something instead of just taking it in, to figure out who and what she wants to be.

So basically Studio Ghibli made a movie for me, and it's just - ahh! Guys! Jo and I both staggered out of the theater clutching our hearts going "FEELINGS." I am still kind of clutching my heart and going "FEELINGS" a week later.

Also I can't stop listening to the movie's theme song on repeat, which is Our Heroine's arduous and adorable translation of John Denver's "Country Roads" into Japanese. IT'S A PROBLEM.

Over the past month or so I have been making my roommates watch Sunkyunkwan Scandal with me. We're about halfway through the twenty episodes now, and at this point it is FILLING ME WITH DELIGHT, which means that it's time to tell you guys about it to preserve this feeling of joy in case it takes the kdrama nosedive over the next ten episodes into gloom and misery!

Sunkyunkwan Scandal is basically a lulzy college-hijinks drama! . . . set in eighteenth-century Korea.

( Cut for picspam! )

Yuletide reveals are live! I wrote three fics this year, thus officially ending my streak of writing one more fic each year than the year previous, ah well.

My main assigned fic was Nice Holystone Remains Unafraid To Throw Herself Into Explosive Situations, a Baccano! fic about Nice and Jacuzzi, and Eve Genoard, and Al Capone, and obviously a whole lot of bombs.

I got called out as the author of this almost the first day the archive opened, which, I will admit I was sort of expecting, given that it is exactly like all my other Baccano! fics in being enormously long and having a ridiculously convoluted plot full of lulzy cameos and too many puns. In short, I AM THE SNEAKIEST NINJA. (Although I laughed so hard when I saw the comment -- nextian, it's not fair, I didn't even know you'd seen Baccano! I guess you have probably earned some sort of fic-shaped prize if you want one though, so let me know!) One way in which this is not exactly like all my other fics: people actually make out onscreen! THIS IS A STRANGE AND PERPLEXING THING FOR ME. Generally as far as I get is people hanging around not making out due to their issues. So go me, I guess?

The other full-length fic I wrote was And Every Homestead Holds a Ghost, a Downton Abbey pinch-hit I grabbed for newredshoes, because a.) I love her and I wanted to write something for her and b.) I'd been eyeing her prompts for the past two months. So, uh, HAPPY YULETIDE, ESTHER! :D

I think I may have been slightly more successfully sneaky on this one,even though it's much more the kind of thing I usually write - gen, ensemble-fic, and what genarti called a very Diana Wynne Jonesish ghost, although thinking back it was probably based more on the Shirley Jackson I'd been reading than anything else. I spent a few days complaining to my long-suffering betas about my extreme frustration with the fact that the Downton Abbey Christmas special was not going to air until the day after fics were due; then it did air and ( spoilers! )

Lastly, I wrote Barriers for Hexwood as a Yuletide treat, mostly because dictator_duck and I had been talking about Hexwood a lot recently and I had it on the brain.

Barriers was a weird fic for me to write. Basically, it was my effort to show some of Mordion's severe and complex psychological trauma, while keeping a DWJ-ish style, and also trying to deal with the fact that Hexwood -- while containing absolutely nothing sexual and barely even romantic onscreen -- is nonetheless one of the most strangely sexual of DWJ's books. (ALIENS TRY TO MAKE THEM DO IT. Still not over that one.) I have no idea if I succeeded in any of this, and basically what it boils down to is a proud return to form of people hanging around not making out due to their issues, so, uh . . . happy Yuletide, world!

Edited to add: I forgot that I was also going to use this time to talk about what I wrote for Kaleidoscope, since I never did that! I wrote Soulmates Never Go Out of Fashion, a Capital Scandal backstory fic about Cha Song Joo and Woo Wan being lulzy friends that officially means that 50% of the Capital Scandal fic in existence was written either for or by me! CAPITAL SCANDAL-INATING THE COUNTRYSIDE, ONE FIC AT A TIME.

Also now I can say thank you to everyone who took the time to listen to my Yuletide (and Kaleidoscope) flailing and read my fics in their proto-form: genarti, thewickedlady, agonistes, saramily, rushin_doll, and dictator_duck. (Special kudos go out to Gen, who refused to let technology defeat her and wrote out a detailed line beta for my fourteen thousand word Baccano! fic THREE TIMES OVER. That is dedication far above and beyond the call of duty.)

Speaking of Gen: I may have forgotten to mention it, but I kidnapped her for an awesome weekend that included hijinks and fic-planning and the lovely aquamirage, and today she's driving me back up to New York, where we will proceed to kidnap jothra! So I have been scarce and will probably continue to be for a few days, and you can all spend your time being jealous. :D

At the recommendation of my friend Rahul over at Blotter Paper, I read my first two Shirley Jackson books over the past month or so: The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

I have lots of thoughts, obviously, but my strongest and most envious thought is that Shirley Jackson is one of the best writer of first sentences and paragraphs that I have ever come across.

Look at the opening of We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantaganet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

DOES THIS OR DOES THIS NOT make you instantly want to know everything else about Mary Katherine Blackwood and her sister Constance and her dead family? It does me! (Everything else about Mary Katherine Blackwood and her sister Constance and her dead family is not that hard to guess in terms of the facts of what went down just from that first paragraph, but it's the way that it plays out that's so creepy.)

Then there is the first sentence of The Haunting of Hill House:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

I liked The Haunting of Hill House a lot - it's the kind of book that features four people in a situation together and starting to like and trust each other and then the psychological horror turning everything wrong, which is probably the kind of that gets me worst - but to be honest, the rest of the book, however excellent, couldn't quite live up to that sentence.

-- although seriously, the book is really good. The heart of it is the relationship between Eleanor, who's lived her whole life without doing anything for herself until she gets the invitation to participate in a psychic experiment, and Theodora, a lighthearted lesbian artist who pretty much only ever does things for herself. Eleanor is the POV character, and the horror is horrible because of how much hope it dangles at first.

Anyway, the thing is, I honestly can't do that kind of opening at all. I always feel like the beginnings of my stories are the weakest part.

. . . well, and the endings. Actually there are a lot of weak parts, ah well. But I've never had that gift of launching in and grabbing the reader's attention with a stunning start; I usually just kind of fumble my way in to what I want to talk about. What about you guys? Do you find brilliant openings jumping into your head, or is an opening just a chore to get through to the meat of the story?

So shati and I watched the first couple episodes of Mawaru Penguindrum together this summer, and ever since then, Shati has been periodically asking me whether she should catch up.

For the first few episodes, my answer was: "I don't know! There is a lot of stalking! But I'm still watching?"

For the five or six episodes after that, my answer was: "I don't know! There's a lot of attempted date rape and also someone made a frog spawn on somebody else's back and it was really disturbing! But I can't seem to stop watching . . .?"

For the five or six episodes after that, my answer was: "I don't know! There's a lot of child abuse! But I think it's actually going somewhere really interesting, and . . . I seem to have feelings . . . about everyone?"

And now the last episode has gone by, and all I can say is ;ajlsdk;fkjds;HOW IS MY HEART BREAKING FOR THIS SHOW I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I LIKED UNTIL HALFWAY THROUGH.

So: Mawaru Penguin Drum! It's about a girl who is dying, and her brothers who are sort of obsessed with her, and the magical penguins that come to save the day, except it isn't, actually, at all.

( Picspam under the cut! )

. . . . this is the most incoherent write-up of a show ever. I blame Ikuhara. But, yes! If you're easily triggered: BEWARE, because this show hits just about every trigger you can name, from attempted date rape to incest to severe child abuse. But if you're not, and you like Ikuhara's style, and you're interested in stories about families and damaged kids trying to figure out how to save themselves . . . then, yeah. It's worth it.

(PS: If you are like 'but it's an Ikuhara show! Where are the lesbians?' then -- well, there are not as many lesbians as in Utena, but . . . Yuri's name is not irrelevant. Nor is the ending song with Himari in. AND THAT'S ALL I'M GONNA SAY.)

ceitfianna recommended me The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Navigate the Globe. Which she was quite right to do, since, in addition to SCIENCE and ADVENTURES and AWESOME HISTORICAL WOMEN this particular bit of history also features CROSS-DRESSING and as we all know that is my kryptonite.

The basic historic facts about Jeanne Baret that seem to be undeniably true:

1. She was the housekeeper and probable-mistress of naturalist Philibert Commercon before he joined an expedition around the world . . .
2. . . . and his plucky botanist assistant 'Jean' while on that expedition.

(COMMERCON, after her disguise was exposed: Gosh, how astounding that my plucky assistant should turn out to have been a girl! Can't think how that happened!)

3. At some point or another on the expedition, everybody pretty much figured out something was up with 'Jean', although accounts are a little conflicted about when.

(CAPTAIN BOUGAINVILLE: Well, here we are on Tahiti, and all of a sudden those wacky Tahitians start telling us that our naturalist's assistant has been a girl this whole time! BIZARRE. Oh well, back to captain-ing.

TWO PASSENGERS KEEPING ACCOUNTS: Well, here we are on New Ireland, and the men on the ship seem to have figured out that the naturalist's assistant is a girl. That was probably pretty tough!

SURGEON VIVES: Hahahahaha come on guys, like anyone ever believed that story about 'Jean' being a eunuch.)

4. Commercon and Jeanne took off at Mauritius and did some more botanizing; Commercon named a bush after her; Commercon died, and a few years later Jeanne Baret married a non-com officer in the French army and got her ticket home.

5. Eventually the government granted her a pension for General Being Awesome On a Famous Voyage-ness which is actually a pretty happy ending for a real-life cross-dressing story, all things considered.

And this is all interesting and I am glad to know it! The problem is that it's not really enough to make up a book. No worries, though! Glynis Radley is more than happy to make up the difference by . . . . wildly speculating about things and then cheerfully assuming them to be true for the rest of the book?

( Cut for ranting! Some of it about possibly triggering things. )

. . . wow, I was more frustrated than I thought by all of this. I think it's -- well, partly because bad scholarship is frustrating, but also partly because the story in its bare-bone-facts version is such an awesome one -- and one that I am glad to know about! -- and yet this book seems so determined to take away as much awesome and provide as much depressing and angsty and cliched speculation as humanly possible.

AND SPEAKING OF things that are making people angry and frustrated: apparently LJ has fallen into its own ass again and done something to the comment pages? If anyone's switching over to DW who hasn't before, say hi over here/there so I know who you are!

I am done everything for school this semester! After classes ended yesterday I went to a bar with classmates, then to the departmental holiday party, then waltzing for a few hours with innerbrat, then back to meet up with my classmates for alcoholic milkshakes and copious group hugs and tipsy announcements of undying friendship and respect for everyone in this program. BEST SEMESTER-END EVER.

Today: Hugo with obopolsk, and working on Yuletide!

Tomorrow: brunch with my dad somewhere in the city, but I can't decide where! New Yorkers, tell me about somewhere awesome that I haven't been before? (That really was the whole point of this post. I guess this is really what people use Twitter for . . .)

Many, many years after falling in love with the Night of the Solstice books, I have finally gotten around to reading some more L.J. Smith!

The Forbidden Game trilogy is not anywhere near as close to my heart as Night of the Solstice and Heart of Valor. I mean, it could not possibly be, in my opinion, because a.) not enough siblings being hilariously squabbly and b.) not enough ridiculous Arthuriana and c.) too much boyfriend and d.) I did not first read it when I was ten.

THAT SAID, as an example of the archetype "an SEXY EVIL SUPERNATURAL FELLOW has fallen in LOVE with a BEAUTIFUL TEENAGED GIRL," The Forbidden Game is way more entertaining and delightful than most! It's actually -- okay, I have Labyrinth on the brain, but it really does remind me of Labyrinth! Except instead of a baby brother our heroine Jenny, she of the honey-colored hair and innate goodness etc., has to run around rescuing all her friends instead, which means ensemble dynamics and character growth for all.

The first book basically goes like this:

EVIL SEXY SUPERNATURAL JULIAN: Jenny, I have been watching you creepily for your whole life, and I am madly in love with you.
JENNY: . . . you are hot . . . but I have a boyfriend . . . and also, that is really creepy?
EVIL SEXY SUPERNATURAL JULIAN: Now I have trapped you and all your friends in this creepy nightmare house, and if you don't find your way out by the end of my arbitrary time limit . . .

JENNY: Oh dear, maybe I should just give in and go off with him after all to save my friends . . .
JENNY'S FRIENDS: Jenny, we will brave dangers untold and hardships unnumbered if we have to, but seriously, NO MARRYING THE EVIL SEXY DEMON LORD.
JENNY: Awww, you guys are the best!

Jenny's friends really are the best part of the book. I mean, they are all a bit Breakfast Club, or possibly Babysitter's Club -- there's the badass black martial arts girl, and the haughty European fashionista who's dating the insecure nerdy Jewish one, and the weird spacey girl, and the antisocial artsy guy, and then Jenny's varsity sports player jock boyfriend. None of them are exactly revolutionary character archetypes and it's sort of unclear why they all hang out together except that they all like Jenny. But they all get at least a little bit character growth in the middle of Jenny's bizrre supernatural experiences, and all of them consistently maintain a strict NO DATING EVIL SEXY DEMON LORDS stance, which I appreciate! GOOD JOB, JENNY'S FRIENDS.

Anyway, the first book is really the Labyrinth one, where Jenny wanders around and collects her friends from their nightmares and gamely tries to ignore Julian as he pops up to make neener-neener faces at her and tell her her friends are all going to die, she should just give in and love him and he will be her slave! In the second book there is a new game where Julian makes more neener-neener faces and kidnaps her friends one by one. In the third book there is an evil carnival! It is all highly entertaining and ( spoilers )