netgirl_y2k

1. Fuckity fuck, it is cold. When I was a carer, I used to have the heating on all the time from about late September, for my grandmother's sake, you know. But as it's just me and I am young(ish) and a given value of healthy I thought I'd try to be a bit stoic, and leave the central heating off for as long as possible. Except at the point where I was in bed wearing jammies, a dressing gown, and elbow length gloves (so I could stick my hands out from under the covers to read, obviously) I remembered that I am not a stoic person and have no capacity for coping with even mild hardship. Millions of years of evolution have resulted in me; an organism perfectly designed to exist under an enormous duvet with a mug of hot tea. So on went the heating.

1a) btw, I blame my ill-advised experiment in stoicism for the apocalyptic death cold I've been fighting off for most of November.

2) Spent a frighteningly huge portion of yesterday reading about the Scottish independence white paper on various news sites. Slightly miffed to discover that an independent Scotland would lose the BBC but keep the monarchy, because switch those two around and you'd have my vote; what a wasted opportunity to get away from the over-sentimentalised, money-sucking, relic from a bygone era that is the British monarchy. If anyone's curious, I'm in the haven't really decided but leaning towards Yes camp. It's a little confusing, because I'm not sure if I really am in favour of an independent Scotland, or if I just want as much distance (and ideally one of those giant ice walls that they have in the opening credits of Game of Thrones) between me and the current Westminster government as possible. Although, this is probably the best time to to have a referendum; I mean, if you can't get a Yes vote with Cameron and that lot of robber-barons in power then you're probably never going to get one.

3) I walked past a Christmas market the other day. A Christmas market. How the hell did that happen? It was only January five minutes ago. On the other hand -- my kindle's on its last legs, I think, and refusing to hold a charge. I've started dropping hints as to how I'd quite like a new one; saying things like: oh no, my battery's died, and just when they were about to bomb Hitler. Drat. Too subtle, you think?

4) ( Elementary 2x9 )

I have a bloody nose after having been headbutted. By a puppy. Really, seriously.

There's a woman I sometimes meet on the dog walk of an evening, and she's got this lovely eight month old Staffie called Oscar (it's like this a lot with dog walkers; you know the dog's name but not the owner's, and these are people that you see almost every day; it's an odd little subculture, a lot like fandom in some ways.)

Anyway, Oscar is an affectionate little livewire, and full of the joys of spring. So I bend down to pet him and he leaps up trying to lick my face, and I get a nose full of Staffordshire Bull Terrier, skull first.

And, okay, so my shirt is soaking in the sink, I'm sitting here sniffling bloody snot into a hanky, and my entire face aches... but if you've got to get a bloody nose, then assault by overly affectionate puppy is the way to do it.

1. My Mum has taken herself off on a three month cruise, as a retirement present to herself. On her own, otherwise, she said, it'd be just like home, only on a boat, which is strange yet oddly unassailable logic.

She sent an e-mail the other day with the subject line Help!!!, we opened it and it turned out to be about how the memory card on her camera was full. Unnecessarily alarmist, that's my Mother. I mean, three exclamation marks, that's what you use when you've accidentally angered the Sea God Poseidon.

Before she went she made me, Dad, and my sister promise that we'd have dinner together as a family at least twice a week. Tonight's family meal was poppadoms and spiced onions consumed standing up over the kitchen sink. Despite both being mature, self-suficient women in our late twenties and early thirties my sister and I have quickly regressed to teenagers who have been left with the less strict parent.

2. My weird anxiety thing has been getting better, the last full blown panic attack I had was in May, I think. I have a system for dealing with them now, 1) I went to the doctor and got beta blockers for the heart palpitations (god bless the NHS and all who sail in her) 2) once I believe that I'm not actually going to die right this instant I can usually rationalise the brain weasels into stopping the spiral of panicky thoughts, and failing that, 3) singing, which sounds mad, I know, but singing out loud seems to stop my breathing freaking out too much and trying to remember the words distracts me. So if you're ever in a car park or train station somewhere in Scotland and you see a pale, nervous young woman singing Sex on Fire by the Kings of Leon (the most successful song for this purpose; believe me, I've experimented) that's quite possibly me, and that's why I'm doing it.

That said, yesterday was the most anxious I've been in ages, a result of watching and reading too much about George Osborne's speech at the Tory party conference. The only possible upshot that I can find is that I'm no longer being facetious when I saw George Osborne's politics, and indeed face, make me feel ill.

3. It's October already, how on earth did that happen? Later this month I've got to go and get fitted for a kilt etc. for Tequila Boy's wedding. And no offence to traditional femininity, but, dude, rented formalwear is the way of the future!

I've also started thinking about writing my best man person girl man speech, which I will probably run by the ye olde f-list for a humour check closer to the time. My Dad was the best man at his brother's wedding thirty odd years ago, and his tip for delivering the speech was, and I quote, "know what you're going to say before you stand up at the wedding." Thanks, Dad, very helpful.

Right now, I think I'm going to keep to the traditional theme of best man speeches, namely that it's difficult to believe that Tequila Boy has convinced such a lovely and seemingly intelligent young woman to commit to him for life, especially when compared to such self-evident things as the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot. Although, I can't be too horrible about him, I mean, single and wondering how one goes about becoming a cat person though I am, there's still an outside chance he may get to retaliate some day.

4. Elementary and Once Upon a Time started again this week (yippee!) I haven't watched either of them (anti-yippee) not because I haven't wanted to but because I don't think watching things hunched over a laptop is doing my back a world of good. For goodness sake, somebody get onto Help the Aged. Instead I've been trying to watch things that are actually on tv here.

I watched Agents of SHIELD which was a bit like if early Torchwood had a budget, and no I don't mean that in a good way. But it's very shiny and impressive looking, and as I don't come from comics or MCU fandom it's entirely possible that the lack is with me rather than the show.

I watched Atlantis too, a show that's mostly impressive for the sheer failure of creativity or imagination that's gone into it. It's like the BBC brief was: we want a show so like Merlin that casual viewers won't notice that Merlin's been cancelled. Again, not a good thing.

You know what, somewhere around here must be the means to connect the laptop to the telly; Elementary and Once it is.

5. My femslashex assignment arrived, and is smack bang in the middle of my comfort zone and I feel pretty good about what I'm planning to write, so that's good. Especially as I dropped out of a couple of multi-fandom exchanges earlier in the year by either misjudging what my comfort zone is or my ability to write outside it.

I don't know, I'm finding fic writing a bit weird at the moment, like, I want to write and there's things I want to write, but mostly I'm just staring at a blinking cursor and getting frustrated. Anyway, here is an incomplete list of fics I would like to write should I someday get my mojo back:

- GoT; Sansa/Margaery modern university AU, where Sansa's flatmates are Shae and Brienne, and Jaime Lannister is living on their sofa in some sort of protracted attempt to either annoy or woo Brienne.
-ASOIAF; the Sisterhood of the Night's Watch, where Lyanna Stark was sent to the Wall as a sort of a scapegoat after the Rebellion, Arya begs her aunt to let her join the Watch, and Castle Black is populated by assorted women of various degrees of unsuitability for life on the Wall.
-Merlin/Temeraire fusion; where Merlin is Kilgarrah's captain, and Morgana is Aithusa's.
-OUAT; Ruby and Belle as a version of Beauty and the Beast.
-DS9; Jadzia Dax/Lenara Kahn fixit where Lenara doesn't leave at the end of Rejoined.

-In different things to do of a Friday evening, tonight I peeled my mother off the floor of the pub. To be fair, it was her retirement do after thirty years as an infant school teacher; something that has left her with the unshakeable belief that young people should be muzzled and forced to wear electric shock collars until the age of twenty-five.

-I bought two pairs of jeans. I am much more sanguine about my weight than I used to be; I have good qualities, I'm funny and well-read, and these don't go away just because they're wrapped in a body with the general consistency of a victoria sponge. But buying jeans is one of those things that can still lead me to tears of self-loathing. But today I liked the first pair I tried on in the first shop. So I bought two. I also bought a jumper with a picture of a sheep wearing a gryffindor scarf on it for, um, reasons.

-My attempt to get together with tumblr as a platform, take 3: netgirl-y2k. There's not an awful lot there yet, and I'm not sure if there will be, to be honest. And I think I'll find it less frustrating if I use it mostly as a repository of pretty things I might want to look at again. But, yes, there I am.

-I've started writing those femslash ficlets. I shall try to write more over the weekend. I was having a bit of an experimental phase with these two. I'm over that now.

four times ysandre de la courcel thought about asking phèdre no delaunay to share her bed and one time she actually did
Kushiel's Legacy; Ysandre/Drustan, Ysandre/Phèdre; PG; 900 words

ysandre had never asked for naamah's blessing, or for kushiel's harsh mercy.

Song of Wolves
Once Upon a Time/Merlin; Ruby/Morgana; PG-13; 600 words

Red can't decide if Morgana is the Evil Queen without a kingdom, or the Dark One without Rumpelstiltskin's sense of mirth.

I am back at my mum's for a while because there are simultaneously more builders and fewer walls that I ideally like at my place.

It's weird being back, like, the first two or three days are nice when you're being looked after and treated like the prodigal returning daughter (even though I've prodigally returned from five miles down the road, and, frankly, I'm here most days anyway, in search of food and teabags and the faster wi-fi) but after that it's weird how quickly you regress to how it was when you were, say fifteen, hiding out in your room and venturing out periodically for tea and cheese on toast, like a very tall, very female hobbit.

So, I find myself in need of diversion, and the DVD commentary meme was always pleasingly self-indulgent and time consuming.

Pick a story I've written, and comment to this post with it. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that fic: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

I am back from my summer holidays. Yes, again. In my defense, I'm trying to think of it less as having two holidays in three months as having two holidays in six years, which allows me to keep feeling enjoyably martyred. I went to Berlin again, this time to visit fitz_y and her partner. And before I had always been a little, um... British about meeting fandom friends, but I came up lucky as they were two of the nicest, most easy to get along with people I have had the good fortune to meet in recent years. Plus, a friend is a person who will invite you to come visit when you say that the renovations being done on your house are making you want to weep angry tears, a true friend is a person who will invite you with no more evidence than your cheerful internet presence that you aren't a dangerously insufferable lunatic.

Things I really wanted to bring back included this adorably serious baby dyke bartender who would make you a cocktail based on your mood. Mine included gin, vermouth, white wine and blue bols; apply externally only.

And a high point (depending somewhat on your point of view) was staying up till silly o'clock drinking things and watching this truly terrible film about lesbian vampires, which google informs me was called Wir sind die Nacht. It's worth noting that I don't speak German, and frankly I think this improved the experience a little. The dubious result of this was my waking up the next morning full of intentions to write a paranormal lesbian romance featuring matriarchal vampires, because I couldn't do much worse. Who knows, I'll probably lose interest in it in a couple of weeks, but I did come back with notebooks full of character sketches and worldbuilding and am full of beans about the whole endeavour.

I also managed to give myself mild heatstroke in temperatures that would have been laughable to anyone raised in a climate with real weather, but as I attempted to explain like all Brits I am congenitally ill-equiped to deal with anything other than a constant miasma of rain and fog. I returned home to discover that the weather here has gone all un-civillised too. What is this giant yellow thing in the sky, and why does it pain me so? I really feel like in weather like this the thing to do is stay in and flop about like a Victorian heroine with consumption, but what I really want to do is go somewhere with air-conditioning and write, and what I really ought to do is go to the bank and see what the damage is. I mean, euros aren't real money, right? If they were they wouldn't look so much like monopoly money. Yeah, I don't much fancy my chances of convincing the royal bank of scotland to see it my way, either.

Thank you for all the good wishes, chaps! My 30th birthday went off without a hitch, and with the required amount of crying, rending of garments and shouting of "WHY ME!?" --and that was just the hangover.

By the way, there is a thing known as a whisky martini, which in retrospect I don't think I was meant to drink, I think I was just meant to sit near it and get buzzed off the fumes.

Let's see, what else. Unbeknown to me my friends had booked a table for dinner at a place so posh I almost wish I hadn't gone out in the clothes that I'd gotten for my birthday, which included a pair of Thundercats converse and a t-shirt with the words I Simply Walk into Mordor across the tits.

And Tequila Boy's Mrs. baked me a cake - red velvet with cream cheese icing - which fucking delighted me because I think the last time anyone made me a birthday cake I was three and it was in the shape of Thomas the Tank Engine.

I sort of feel like I should have been more miffed about turning thirty, but what the hell, LET THEM EAT CAKE!

Okay, you know you're out of shape when, when out for a walk, you get to a hilly bit, put the dog on his lead, and shout MUSH!

Thank you to everyone who offered advice on my last post about anxiety and panic attacks, it was very helpful, and not that I'm taking pleasure from your misery or anything, but I think there's a certain degree of "you are not alone-ness" that does help.

Between the sudden proliferation of brain-weasels and some kind of mutant flu thing that I still haven't managed to entirely shake most of February vanished right out from under me. The flu I blame in equal parts on Tequila Boy and the Scottish national rugby team.

See, we were watching the six nations and becoming confused by Scotland's sudden ability to win matches (once by playing really quite well against Italy, and once by playing rather badly against an Ireland side who couldn't find the try line with both hands and a map) and there was a lot of uncalled for hugging and sitting with our arms round each other. It turns out that twelve year old baby!lesbian me was right, close physical contact with boys will lead you to a bad end.

So, mostly I have been lying under a duvet, reading and feeling vaguely sorry for myself. Which brings me to my excuse for posting, really, February Booklog.

Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Chosen - Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey
Cold Days - Jim Butcher
So Much Pretty - Cara Hoffman
Etiquette and Espionage - Gail Carriger

So Etiquette and Espionage is a YA prequel to the Parasol Protectorate series, but I don't think you really have to have read the first series to follow this one, apart from the bit where you will be tickled pink when you recognise young Sidheag Maccon and baby Madame Lefoux. Basically it's about an all girls finishing school/secret academy for spies and assassins, with steampunk, and top hat wearing werewolves, and lines like "Who doesn't want an exploding wicker chicken?" I ate it up with a spoon and am already highly anticipating the next one.

So Much Pretty I picked up because of this review which was doing the rounds on tumblr. The review is excellent, the book sadly less so. It jumps around all over the place, different timelines, different tenses, different povs, and the ending is just one twist too far. It's strange, because I think that coming of age moment lots of girls have where you realise that with the best will in the world there will always be those who see you as ever so slightly less human than the boys is something that should be written about more rather than less, but in the end I thought it was an interesting novel, maybe even an important one, but not necessarily a very good one.

Cold Days is the first Dresden Files book I have really enjoyed in, well, quite a few books. It's also the first one in a while, what with Harry's sidestep into being a bit dead, where I felt like the overarching plot was moving on a bit. Although maybe that's just that the fae courts are my favourite part of that world, and I love the idea of Harry and Molly being more involved with them, also that I don't share a large part of the fandom's fascination with Marcone, so I didn't so much clock his absence.

The first Kushiel trilogy I read on a recommendation from a friend, and ended up liking it much more than I was expecting to. They were books I'd passed over before because of the bdsm themes (obligatory disclaimer: making no judgements, etc) but in the end I rattled through them. Loved the characters, adored the worldbuilding, loved that the driving conflict was between the heroine and her fascinatingly Machiavellian female lover. That said, I'm taking a break between the first trilogy and the second because there are lots of dub-con elements in there that, yes, are mostly pretty delicately handled, but after three long books have cumulatively gotten to me, so I'm going to read something completely different next.

-Comment with "Winter is Coming"
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-Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
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Questions provided by cleo and amaresu

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