netgirl_y2k

The femmeremix author reveals were last night, hurrah, and the remix of my fic is:

Her Father's Daughter (Visited on the Son Remix) by originally

and it's awesome to me on three levels.

1. It's a remix of Abu el Banat, which is my Oberyn character study, and, I think, one of my best fics in asoiaf fandom. And you know how sometimes you get remixes that are perfectly lovely but it's a fandom you're no longer in, or of a fic you don't necessarily want to call attention to. So it was lovely that this was the fic my remixer chose.

2. It's a really good remix, with a lot of reflections and refractions of my fic, which were delightful to me as the original author.

3. It's also a brilliant stand alone fic. Instead of Oberyn, the focus is on Sarella Sand, and if you don't think you need a character study about a woman crossdressing to become a philosopher priest in your life then I just don't know what to say to you.

Basically, it's awesome and you should all read it.

I was assigned pendrecarc to remix, and this was very exciting to me because they are the author of Code Indigo which is one of my very favourite Person of Interest fics ever, an AU where it was Shaw who Finch met first, and I wasted ages failing to remix that. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that the reason I wasn't getting anywhere was that I love that fic so much that I didn't want to change anything about it. So I changed tack and remixed Electric, a circa S2 character study about Root's childhood and the origins of the taser as her weapon of choice.

Like, I don't know how other people approach a remix, but my approach is to try and work out what I think the fic is about at its most basic level and then try to figure out how I would write a fic from those basic building blocks. This, by the way, was why I couldn't remix Code Indigo because if I was going to write an AU where Finch had met Shaw first I would have tried to write Code Indigo. To me, I though that at it's most basic level Electric was a fic about Root's relationship with the physical world, and post season 5 the most bittersweet thing about that is that Root no longer has a relationship to the physical world. There was a careful what you wish for thing that appealed to me.

What I ended up writing was a four things fic that spanned Root's childhood to the end of the show, and because I took the female character remix thing a bit literally I tried to hit all the important female relationships in Root's life (Hanna, her mom, Shaw, the Machine.)

Sing The Body (Electric Remix) (Person of Interest)
"What the hell kind of leet speak name is Root?"

I have spent an outrageous amount of time this week trying to process my feelings on this last episode of Person of Interest. It's really thrown me, and I don't think I'll know exactly how I feel until I see the final three episodes.

( The Day The World Went Away )

tl;dr? Here are my feelings in the form of fic about the low-key, underrated friendship between Sameen Shaw and Lionel Fusco; also an AI with multiple personalities: You Are Part Of A Machine (you are not a human being)

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins
Dark Places - Gillian Flynn
Three Weeks with Lady X - Eloisa James
Under the Banner of Heaven - Jon Krakauer
Last First Snow - Max Gladstone

The Girl on the Train is being held up by all and sundry as the next Gone Girl, and it's easy to see where the comparison comes from, with the revolving POVs and unlikable female characters. I certainly had a similar reading experience with both books, where I wolfed them down in a sitting or two without ever being sure if I was enjoying them.

The thing I thought that was really well done aboutThe Girl on the Train though, were the scenes where Rachel's drunk, which were cringey and hard to read in the exact way that remembering being that drunk is. I was less impressed with the thing that pushed her from being a drinker into a drunk (I was a bit haunted by the bit where Rachel talks about how easy it is to go from one to the other; there but for the grace of god and all that...) was her infertility. I do lack a bit of natural sympathy for that trope, nevertheless I think it is overdone in the extreme as a way of motivating female characters. (Hi, last Avengers movie!)

Dark Places was about a woman revisiting the murders of her mother and sisters by her brother during the "satanic panic" of the eighties. I may be less impressed by Gillian Flynn's writing than some, but by God, the woman knows how to write a page turner, and how to rock a plot twist.

Three Weeks with Lady X is a regency romance where the bastard son is endeavoring to woo a society lady in order to make himself respectable and instead falls in love with his interior decorator. It's elevated above the generic by the epistolary sections, which are laugh out loud funny. Will probably read more Eloisa James.

I read Under the Banner of Heaven mostly because I wanted to check out Krakauer's writing/journalism before deciding if I wanted to read his book about campus rape. Sorry, but if you're a dude writing about rape culture, I want a taste of your style and credentials on a subject that's less personally fraught. I read this history of mormon extremism cumulating in the murder of a woman and her baby in horrified fascination, and I probably will read Missoula.

I will rec Max Gladstone's Craft sequence to all and sundry - it's a magic!punk world where the Gods were beaten in a series of wars by craftspeople, who are like a cross between magicians and lawyers, and it's awesome - but Last First Snow was not my favourite installment. I think because even though it's the fourth one published it's the first chronologically, and I didn't know that before I picked it up. Also it's been two years since I read Two Serpents Rise and I'm a bit hazy on the plot details, so I spent a lot of this one going, okay, I know I think Temoc's a dick, but I can't remember why I think he's a dick. I do still recommend the series wholeheartedly, though.

I'm currently failing to be gripped by the first Benjamin January novel, which is a shame because I'm in the market for a new long series that I can dip in and out of, but I'm only about 10% in, so I guess I'll give it another fifty or so pages to grab me before dropping it.

*

I have the cast off my broken ankle, another week off work, and instructions to start trying to walk on it. The unexpected boon of not having a desk job. On the up side, I've had five weeks off work in the height of summer; on the down, it's been the wettest Scottish summer since records began, which, frankly, is saying something, and I have a sneaking suspicion that when I do get back I'm going to find myself scheduled for every awkward, antisocial shift from now until Christmas.

*

While I was laid up I binge watched Person of Interest; four seasons of more than twenty episodes apiece in a little over a month.

At first I kept hitting next episode because it wasn't like I was going anywhere, and a by the numbers procedural was just what my tea and painkiller numbed brain ordered. Around about Season Three I got really into it. I kind of admire the showrunners, who probably could have kept the show on the air for ten years as a fairly unmemorable crime of the week show, committed to the AI God War direction. Even if all it nets them is another half a season to wrap things up, I think it was a bold choice.

I was surprised by how much I came out of it shipping Root/Shaw. It was If-Then-Else that really sold me on it, up until then I'd been going: well, I get what everyone else is seeing, but this isn't the sort of show where I ship people or want to consume fanworks... Er, yeah, right.

Basically, I am having many Root/Shaw and I Love Everyone In This Bar emotions, and I would like to soothe my binge watch battered brain with fic, if anyone has any recs?

Thus far I have enjoyed this apocalypse AU and this Mrs & Mrs Smith AU.