achray

Challenge #4

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

If anyone hasn't seen KinnPorsche it's a significant spoiler, hence the cut. It's probably also a spoiler for the WIP I'm writing, come to think of it, if it's possible to spoil something that doesn't exist yet.

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I keep meaning to do these, and then I forget! And one goal is definitely to remember that DW exists and to post here, so....

Challenge #2

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Fannish (and related) goals

- Keep learning Mandarin, and depending on how this is going, maybe take a formal exam (this would be HSK2, which I think I might be able to try in the summer or autumn). I made a significant step by signing up for private lessons in December, which are a pretty intensive 2 hours a week. It's been a huge boost to my confidence to realise that watching a ton of TV plus lots of Duolingo and minimal other apps means that I can say some things in Mandarin and my Chinese teacher understands them! I didn't think I'd ever be able to speak Mandarin and it's very exciting to be able to say even a basic sentence. Also exciting is rewatching shows I watched this time last year, and finding that I understand simple exchanges and phrases. Sometimes now when I write a fic, I pause because I know what phrase the character would be saying in this moment, and it's not in English.

- Finish my WIPs, especially the long co-authored Guardian fic which is a lot of fun but also long

- Be better at leaving comments and appreciation for other authors, as I often read fic very quickly on my phone and then never remember to go back and comment on it.

- Maybe expand more into k-drama and learn more about what's going on there? The shows are good but the episodes are very long.

- Keep signing up for/participating in challenges! 2021 was the first year that I participated to this extent and it meant that I wrote things I wouldn't have thought of writing myself, and enjoyed them.

- Attempt to be marginally more sociable on DW and Tumblr and in larger Discord groups, maybe even Twitter. Very marginally.

- Consider learning to vid? I would love to be able to make vids, but it seems so far beyond my technical capacities that idk if I could. Maybe??

Non-fannish goals

- Commit more to my current job and place of work, and stop feeling irritable at my colleagues/employer for reasons that are largely to do with being stuck working from home for nearly 2 years, which is not their fault. Recently I applied for other jobs, none of which I am likely to get (or would make me happy if I did get them). So when I don't get them, I need to let this go and stop fantasising that the grass is greener elsewhere, when the fact is that I have an interesting, well-paid job and the things that are annoying about it are sector-wide and endemic, not about where I work. I would say, I also need not to feel resentful when useless men failing upwards get the jobs I applied for instead of me, but that's not a realistic goal.

- Relatedly, re-engage more with work events and colleagues I like around the world, sign up for stuff, get things done rather than doomscrolling the news feeds and procrastinating, sigh.

- I managed to go to the gym and exercise more or less consistently all last year, for the first time ever, so keep this up.

- Try to be better at connecting with RL friends and making more of an effort to see them, and try to leave the house more. Covid-19 has killed my ability to remember what it was like to want to go to the theatre and cinema and concerts, and to make active efforts to do stuff with people. It would be nice to feel able to go to even a few live events again.

- Read some highbrow fiction occasionally as well as large quantities of popular fiction and fic. And maybe watch some of the many Western TV shows that everyone has been telling me to watch for years and I haven't got round to. (This is quite possibly also an unrealistic goal given my reading/TV habits in the last year...)

- Pay more attention to older kid's schoolwork and maybe find someone who could tutor him in something he'll want to engage with, like, idk, programming. Be more proactive in organising younger kid's social life.

- Find some new stuff to cook. Maybe experiment more with Chinese cookery?

- Give more to charity and/or invest savings in a useful and ethical way.

Honestly so many of my smaller goals are work-related, it's slightly depressing. But I'm sure there have been years when they were ALL work-related, so at least I have some non-work plans. Partly due to feeling unmotivated by work, I've been very motivated in fandom and 2021 was a very fun and active year. I'd like to keep that up <3

A Lunar New Year multi-fanwork exchange at sundial_exchange. For Guardian and Guardian-related canons.

I have signed up for this! Some 'dear creator' notes below the cut.

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I haven't done an exchange in many years, I'm excited about it.

For work-related purposes I happen to be reading about the Gentleman's Magazine of Fashion (big in the 1820s), and the critic has quoted this typical editorial:

‘saunter not of a morning into Crockford’s, unless your “builder” has fitted you, sans wrinkle, with a coat fumée de Navarin, (smoky brown) setting tight round the waist, and, (that it may give a resemblance in the male form to that of the female,) being very full in the skirts. It should be left (as if carelessly) open in the front, so as to discover a pale silk under-waistcoat with gold buttons…'

Entire Eliot Waugh fashion magazine Regency AU springs into head, fully formed.

This week the best thing I read BY MILES was the Lumberjanes comic that M decided the kids were old enough to read. He knows about such things. Probably everyone else is already aware of/has read this comic since it's been around a while, but I had not, since I know nothing about such things, and I unreservedly ADORE it. The 10 year old loved it, the 8 year old loved it, and I'm currently considering whether I can legitimately invest £100 upwards in the entire series to date.

And it would be totally legitimate because this is such a great feminist and queer series, with an all-female central cast, a delightful gay romance, a character the internet tells me later comes out as trans, and packed with people shouting things like 'Holy bell hooks!' It was like a ray of sunshine in the midst of everything else going on at the moment.

[Other comics I've enjoyed recently, suitable for children 7 upwards or adults looking for escapism: Dungeon Fun - the whole playground was acting this one out for a week - and the Tamsin series from The Phoenix, or indeed everything from The Phoenix which is a very fine independent children's comic.]

I wrote a very tiny Marina drabble for the challenge greywash set up, on A03 (T, no archive warnings apply):

'Now and Then Giving'

Very, very short. I enjoy Marina, though, let's see where she is at the end of S4 and maybe I'll be inspired to do something longer and with actual plot. Although the number of words of f/f I have written is still very little, comparatively, I'm pleased I've finished my only two f/f stories in the last month. Must be the good influence of dreamwidth.

Since Saturday I've had an acutely painful mouth ulcer thing, which means that I can't talk, eat, or smile without wincing horribly and/or involuntarily crying, and I wake up in the night every time the painkillers wear off. This feels like a particularly stupid and pointless way to be unwell, especially since I am not visibly ill enough to cancel all my work meetings and stay in bed.

I'm also just embarrassed by the heavy-handed literalness of this, like - could it be that I am feeling silenced and plunged into a constant state of misery by the current political disaster?? I knew that already, thanks, I did not need to embody it.

I think that I owe various people comments, or replies, or fic. Oddly, though, trying to be very quiet in real life also translates into being quiet online rather than the reverse.

On the bright side I have concluded that Isle of Harris gin, drunk neat with lots of ice, is medicine, on the grounds that it is made with sea kelp, is very very expensive, and comes in a blue glass bottle.

I came across an obscure writer in the archives the other day that I didn't know, Michael Fairless (Margaret Fairless Barber) and who I want to post about here because I'm interested in what you smart people think about the commentary in her biography below and how to read it [side note: I'm using 'she/her' because I have no evidence not to, and all sources do so, but I feel slightly uneasy about this]. And because, she seems intriguing.

Information on Fairless is thin. She lived from 1869-1901 in England and wrote one popular novel, and various poems, loosely mystical writings typical of the 1890s, and so forth. She liked to entertain tramps and to adopt a 'tramping' persona in her work. Most of the information about her seems to come from the biographical note written by M. E. Dowson with some of her collected works, posted posthumously.

Fairless trained as a nurse and at one point worked in the East End. Dowson - can't find much on her, but I think that her family had befriended and sort of adopted Fairless - tells us:

There she was known, I am told, as the Fighting Sister, partly because she knocked a man down who was forcing his way into his sick wife's room, partly because she could and did force her way into street fights and stop them. She was very tall and very expressive. In such cases there could never have been any doubt as to her meaning, her courage and power, or her purpose; and the slums knew her and respected her. But her wild-animal-like swiftness of action and reaction must have gone far with those people.

When I see commentary like this, my eyes narrow. I sit up a bit. But not as much as I sat up when I read this passage, about the 'resignation' that Fairless achieved right before she died of long-term illness:

There had been bitter conflict, not so well understood then, either by its victim, or by those who watched her, as it would be now. Light has been cast on hidden places of the mind since Michael Fairless died; and now we may read more clearly than ever before the unwitting self-revelation of artists in their work. Science has shown how native powers, more or less thwarted, and urgent desire, more or less concealed, declare their history symbolically in artistic creation. We know better than before that the desire and powers of a man are not blotted out when they are unfulfilled, they remain to prey upon him as the eagle preyed upon Prometheus.

So this was written in 1913. Quite a lot happened between the 1890s and 1913, or indeed 1901 and 1913 - psychoanalysis, sexology, Havelock Ellis, just for example. I mean, 'urgent desire, more or less concealed?' ('More or less'??) 'Unwitting self-revelation' by a female artist who always figured herself as male in her work? A sudden switch into vaguely suggestive scientific language and images of male suffering, right at the point when trying to explain the 'bitter conflict' that your friend had gone through?

Is it just me, or does this seem like language that is not even all that coded about what it is trying to tell us?

So this week I read for pleasure something which was not Magicians fic, astoundingly: Tana French's new novel, The Wych Elm, which is just available. I like very high-quality detective fiction, but not in an omnivorous way, I generally find one author I enjoy every few years and then I read everything they write over and over again.

French is Irish and her books are the kind of dark and twisted detective fiction that reflects on the state of contemporary Ireland (I also really like Jane Harper, who isn't entirely dissimilar in relation to Australia). She writes detective fiction in which things go wrong, people break down, and endings are unresolved, and she's extremely sharp at writing convincing descents into paranoia and suspicion. All of her books have an edge of the supernatural or lean towards magical realism, partly because of her prose style and partly in terms of content, and one explicitly includes it. But she's also one of those detective fiction writers who is excellent at writing interactions within the police force, especially what it's like to be a woman or a working-class man in an elite team, and sometimes as part of this and sometimes separately, she can write outstandingly about male-female friendships and professional partnerships.

Apparently ranking Tana French's novels in order of preference is something that her fans like to do. This newest novel probably won't be in my top three. She has a set of interrelated novels in which the same Dublin detectives recur, and this one is, unusually, a standalone with a narrator who is not in the police. It takes up a highly familiar French theme in which things go horribly wrong for an outwardly happy and privileged person who is the first-person narrator - he is badly injured in a burglary, a skull then shows up in the garden of the family home - and consequently he begins to unravel mentally and physically. After the AMAZING first-person Antoinette Conway of her last book, The Trespasser, I was less sympathetic to this narrator (I miss Antoinette, though I could see and appreciate what French was doing with this particular narrator and themes of white male privilege). And though I'm always engaged by French's fascination for old houses and how this links into older and newer discourse about Irish housing, and into themes of the uncanny more generally, I did feel that finding a skull in the garden of one's ancestral home Has Been Done. That said, there were a couple of twists which were genuinely unexpected and once I got past the opening, I read until I finished the book without stopping for breath.

If you haven't read any French, I wouldn't start here, I'd start with her earlier Broken Harbour or Into the Woods. I definitely would start though.

The Magicians starts season 4 this week: as far as I can tell, I've got no way to watch it, but here's a post about my new-found fannish love for this show, just in case the new season rips this into pieces and then stamps all over it.

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So....more people should be writing in this fandom, is what I'm saying. Great characters, excellent premise, and literally anything goes with this one.