sophia_sol | Entries tagged with anent: writing

one

I love the kind of friend who feels comfortable being like, "we have hangouts scheduled tonight and I really need to clean my kitchen, want to come keep me company while I do that?" yes! I will absolutely come do that!

two

me like: how many ling wen relationships can I nominate for danmei fanworks exchange.

(answer: ling wen sweep! ALL my noms are ling wen related!)

three

I've decided to change all my bookmarking tags in my linkding to use words as prefixes for type of tag, instead of using symbols like I've done for the last decade or so

the way that linkding displays tags with the hash in front makes it just that extra bit too busy for me to be able to parse the symbols at a glance

and also unlike pinboard, it doesn't alphabetize tags on your bookmark, but displays them in the order you added them. so I can't expect where in the list of tags a particular type of tag will fall on a bookmark, because all my old bookmarks have tags that I added in a variety of haphazard orders, because at the time it didn't matter.

this change is doable! there's a very robust bulk editor system in linkding, which I love! but it will take time to get all my old tags changed, and time to get used to using the new ones. When I'm creating new bookmarks I really do just think in my symbols these days

it is interesting how much one's cataloguing choices are dependent on the infrastructure you use. I had to make changes to how I used tags when I first went to pinboard too!

four

biggest takeaway from mdzs book club this week: autistic nie bros. especially nmj. canon autism right here is all I'm saying:

Women, liquor, riches—[Nie Mingjue] touched none; art, calligraphy, antiques—a pile of ink and mud; the finest green tea leaves and dregs from a roadside booth—there was no difference. Meng Yao tried everything he could think of yet still couldn’t find if he was interested in anything beside training his saberwork and killing Wen-dogs. He really was a wall made of iron, impenetrable by even the sharpest blades.

nmj doesn't need a hobby, he already has one! and that's all he needs. <3

(meanwhile jgy needs a better hobby. like getting overly invested in the interpersonal drama of a historical reenactment club along the lines of the sca. you just KNOW he would get involved in sca politics in a big way! a safe outlet for him, though I apologize to everyone in his canton/barony/shire/whatever his local group is. and also his kingdom.)

five

SCUM VILLAIN EXTRAS ZINE TIME!!! IT'S REAL.

Preorders are up on tshirt's bigcartel shop!

my contribution towards this zine is a 4.6k word fic about the svsss questions extra, featuring sqq and lbh experimenting sexually. I think it's a really good fic! and I cannot wait to see the rest of the zine!

once the zine is fully out, I will be posting my fic to ao3, so if for whatever reason you aren't able to get the zine, you'll still get to read my fic eventually :)

one

since I've gotten to the episodes of the Master of Demon Gorge podcast where the host has abandoned the format of telling things off-the-cuff to a friend, and instead it's polished and prepared explanations of the topics at hand, it has easily become my favourite chinese history podcast. Interesting topics, well-explained, by someone who has thought about the ways in which the past is relevant to today but without overdoing that aspect. and it's by someone who thinks critically about questions of empire, which I particularly appreciate.

some podcasts excel at the conversational banter between hosts and some excel at straightforward lectures and it's good when podcasts figure out how to do what they're best at!

I have lots of MoDG archive to go through yet and I'm looking forward to listening to all of it

two

body things I've successfully re-trained myself on: how to sit/stand up straight without rounded shoulders, how to hold a pen in a better grip, how to stand/walk without pronating my ankles

body things I have not successfully re-trained myself on (yet): using my glutes as evolution intended.

SOMEDAY I will properly harness their power and then I will be unstoppable

three

my svsss extras zine fic is finished and submitted!!! final word count: about 4.5k. I love it very much and I can't wait for folks to get to read it. and I can't wait to read the rest of the zine myself!

I have immediately started working on a new fic, about a character I haven't written before. I say that like it's not the norm lol, most of my fic writing history has been me writing something about a new-to-me character, it's unusual actually that I just wrote two fics in a row about the same ship! (for both mdzs remix and svsss extras zine, I wrote bingqiu)

My new fic is about mo xuanyu, and I really need to review all the mxy parts of mdzs more closely, taking notes of any relevant details, before I continue working on this fic. I'm sure that there are things in my mind that are misremembered details, and that there's interesting stuff that hasn't stuck with me

I do always like it when I can ground things more fully in the context of what the canon actually says!

four

please consider this very important wangningxian thought: https://www.tumblr.com/gravitywonagain/718830771835666432/the-thing-about-wen-ning-being-a-fierce-corpse-is

five

this week I discovered that musicolet is very diligent about finding all audio files on my phone and has integrated all my Merlin Sound ID recordings of birds into my music library. yes, a file that's, say, 23 minutes of listening to me walk interspersed with the calls of canada geese and red-winged blackbirds is exactly what I want when I put my music library on shuffle 😂

one

It's been about two months now of spending a bit of time working on my writing every evening at bedtime, and it continually amazes me how well it works and how much I like it. I enjoy the process of writing so much more like this! I never expected to be the kind of person with a daily writing habit; that seemed like it would never work for me and I thought people who did it were fascinatingly alien. guess I'm an alien lol!

my word count goal for each day is tiny (100-200 words) but I love to see my fic increase in size bit by bit, and to look over what I've written and see how much I like the story I'm telling

every time I stop writing for the night, it's at a point where I have no idea where I'm going next. all the next day I continue to not know, but I don't stress about it. and having so much time for my subconscious to process it between sessions of writing means that when I get back into bed for the night and open my fic to write the day's words, I'm able to figure out what to write next! and it feels so good

two

I have never gotten any tattoos before due to being afraid of needles, but I worked on that phobia and it's much less of a problem now....and I have a tattoo idea I love.

which is:

description of dinosaur-themed tattoo idea

dinosaurs are cool, right? and the scientific process is cool, and paleoart is cool! what if we take an example of a dinosaur which has gone through significant evolutions in our understanding of its appearance over time, and create line drawings of the scientifically accepted understanding of the dinosaur at two different points in the past plus our current most up to date understanding, and then line up the three versions of the dinosaur in a row on my forearm.... with space left for an even more up to date version to add onto it in the future as our understanding continues to grow

the thing is. I need to be able to get this art drawn by someone who has an art style I like, and has sufficient paleo background to know what they're doing in depicting these dinosaur variations, and is taking commissions!

I would definitely want this dinosaur to be a theropod dinosaur, one of the ones we're now sure had feathers. and I'm feeling fond of oviraptor in specific! not because it's my fave kind of dinosaur (I don't have just one fave!) but because it's particularly interesting in terms of its history in scientific misunderstandings of it, so it would be thematically resonant in this tattoo context

three

I just! am so fond of bingqiu! the way they're incapable of normal healthy emotional communication but are so crazy with respect to each other that they can yes-and each other into truly wild displays of horny possessiveness!

it's endlessly fun to play with. characters who WILL hold the idiot ball but only in extremely specific ways that nobody else could ever match. but they match each other! 🥰

four

"x character makes a different choice at a significant canon moment" is a fairly popular type of canon divergence au, and it's interesting to me to think about how it often doesn't work for me. in most contexts in a canon there's a reason the character makes the choice they did, so if the story changes their choice out of nowhere, it doesn't feel grounded in the narrative and in the character.

often these fics are about making things nicer for the characters in question because the canonical choice is ouchy, and I get why that's popular, but I usually find it boring!

Details on what I find more interesting than that

I think I'm just more interested in the question of why people make the choices they do. and less interested in "let's turn this story into straight-up fluff," though there is of course a spectrum of how much this kind of story is interested in going straight for the fluff.

I think to do this type of fic in a way I'm most likely to be into, is to write it so that there's a small but significant change BEFORE the moment of decision, which allows the situation to be just different enough that the character would make a different choice. and even then I'm more interested in exploring the things that lead up to that moment of decision, what makes the character choose what they do, how the change to canon has affected things. Ending the story with "they made the good choice" rather than beginning with it; that's the happy ending right there!

or make the fic an exploration of how you'd think that this choice would be immediate happy ending times, but actually has its own complications and problems as well.

or make it a time loop!

five

As you may or may not know, I have been a power user of online bookmarking services for nearly my entire time in fandom. I was of course on delicious back in the day, until it got altered into unusability, and then I switched to pinboard. I've been trucking along with pinboard ever since.

But I heard that the pinboard guy is a jk rowling supporter these days, and I'd been thinking about trying to leave pinboard anyway because it seems to be basically abandonware at this point. But the jkr support was the tipping point on overcoming the inertia of staying with what I know.

Extended description of my efforts and successes in setting up a self-hosted bookmark manager after finding no other good options online

I'd heard good things about raindrop.io but when I gave it a try, despite some interesting features, I ran into major problems. My biggest problems with it were 1. that it truncates all bookmark descriptions and tags after a certain length, to save space, and I use a LOT of tags and description space; and 2. that I couldn't actually get the website to let me log in on firefox. So that was a deeply disappointing result for something that had seemed promising.

I also took a look at larder.io because it looked intriguing, but it failed to import the description field from my pinboard export, so that was a nope right out of the gate!

After a bunch of reading articles and listicles about other bookmarking service options, all the other online bookmarking services I could find were even less suitable for my needs, and I was getting pretty disheartened.

But then I learned from a friend about the option of setting up Linkding on a personal website as a way to self-host bookmarks, so that you don't have to rely on a service provided by someone else anymore, and it was so exciting to think of having personal control over my own bookmarks like that! I knew I had to give it a try.

I am very glad I went down that rabbit-hole of teaching myself css earlier this year for the purpose of ao3 site skin development, because it made me feel a lot more confident in my ability to try out unfamiliar tech things, and indeed my rudimentary css knowledge was helpful in keeping me from feeling quite so lost in the process.

Linkding has particular requirements around getting it integrated into a website, so I gather this means that what I did to get it set up is playing "my first website" on hardmode. But here's what I did:

I followed the "start a website" steps at https://landchad.net/

And then the linkding instructions here: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-own-bookmark-manager-with-linkding/

It definitely involved some moments of deep confusion, but I figured it out eventually, and I'm super happy with the result! You can see my public bookmarks here: https://linkding.aviansoph.com/bookmarks/shared

Having my very own website with my very own bookmarking instance feels very "I am learning the forbidden magic" in a gleeful way tbh

But just because I have this set up does not mean I am done! For I would like to CUSTOMIZE my linkding instance!

Linkding has a built-in way to customize a user's view of it using custom CSS, but that's only for what that specific logged-in user sees, rather than changing the appearance of the public bookmarks page for visitors, so that doesn't quite accomplish what I'm wanting to do. I am investigating how to make more direct changes to my linkding instance but I'm still on shaky ground there. (if you have any useful advice, I'm all ears!!)

Also I want to do things with the rest of my website, aviansoph.com. As I mentioned above, I'm playing create-a-website on hardmode for the sake of linkding, so I can't follow most of the guides you find online for building a personal website. But it looks like if I set up an FTP server on my VPS I should be able to make a reasonable system for doing my website? I haven't had time to try this yet but we shall see!!

I can't believe it took me until my mid-thirties to become the kind of nerd who has their own website for the purposes of cataloguing information. I feel like this is one of the kinds of nerd I was destined to be all along.

one

I really appreciate that on the lingthusiasm podcast, one of the two hosts is also canadian, so when they're talking about accent stuff then one of the points of reference will definitely involve canadian english

today I learned what the cot-caught merger actually entails, for example! and how most canadians have that merger but pronounce it distinctly differently from the US people with the merger, and so trying to figure out from written descriptions how to modulate your vowels to create the split doesn't make sense to the canadian ear when the explanations are written with a US accent in mind

(thank you also to the second host for being australian, without the cot-caught merger)

also! the bath-trap merger! which canadian english also has, and which specifically gets in the way of trying to figure out how to do british accents, lol.

because Gretchen, like me, knows that many varieties of british pronounce SOME "a" vowels more like "aw" but when you have this merger there's no sense of the distinction of which vowels get that pronunciation and which don't, so you're just kind of throwing "aw" at the wall when you're trying to imitate a british accent, without knowing which words to apply it to.

this makes SO much sense out of my struggle with parsing how british accents work. if you have a bath-trap split, there is a to-your-ear logical way of distinguishing which words get which vowel sound! it's not just random, and it's not that all of them are the same just with a different vowel sound than canadian english!

and then, the most interesting part of the recent episode about vowel sounds, they got into gender differences in how vowels are produced in english.

and cis straight men have less variance between their vowel spaces than all other populations - their vowels are mostly all closer to the middle!

so one of the features that makes a voice read male to english speakers is to not give your vowels any flair or flavour, lol

they also talked about trans men and women, gay men, lesbians, bisexual men and women, and nonbinary people, and how they approach their vowel sounds. (nonbinary people: we just do whatever we want!) I do wish they'd gone into more detail about EXACTLY what each of them does with their vowels, rather than what impressions people have of them and what other groups they're most like. because this is a fascinating subject. I also want to know more about the OTHER things these different gender and sexuality populations do differently from a linguistics perspective!

(and then I found a fascinating academic paper that covered a few more things about trans voices and it was great: http://lalzimman.org/PDFs/Zimman2018TransgenderVoices.pdf)

two

I briefly ventured a little back into the world of twitter and like, a) there's still some amazing fanart there! and cool people saying things! but b) dear god being psychically attacked by the sheer volume of ads/sponsored posts, plus the context collapse of graphic photos of rl atrocities next to cute fandom posts. all power to those of you who still make it work for you, but I don't know how I used to manage being there regularly.

three

there's a birding podcast where I've been enjoying going through the backlog of episodes, but I just got to an episode where the host and his guest of the week spend a large part of the episode talking about info they're getting specifically from chatgpt. they made a brief disclaimer that not all of it might be right, but then they went on to talk about it all at length without once doing any further research to back up what chatgpt told them, just taking it at face value. I found it so frustrating I had to skip the rest of the episode.

I was talking with a colleague earlier this week about chatgpt, and she's someone I both respect and like, but she had literally never considered that you can't trust the facts that generative ai gives you to be correct, and her mind was a little bit blown by that idea.

I think generative ai has applications where it can be a useful tool! providing facts is not one of them! I wish I knew how we could change the public discourse around what it is and what it can be used for .

four

I love writing fic, it's so much fun!!

five

personal complaint about omegaverse

I don't want to yuck anyone's yum around omegaverse, but for me.....ugh I HATE how it's a universe that is usually predicated on a notion of "the instinctual biological drive towards sex or need for sex is so powerful it cannot be overridden or denied"

like I get why that's hot and/or compelling to a lot of people, but for me as an ace person who has less than zero interest in having sex with anyone ever, it's such an othering universe to immerse myself in that it has a real lowering effect on my headspace whenever I try to read it

and I know that not all omegaverse does this, but so much of it does that it's a bit of a minefield to try to find the exceptions. and I have a mild to moderate dislike of sufficient other aspects of the omegaverse trope bouquet for it to not be worth it for me to try reading omegaverse fics

whoops this week you get five things, I couldn't narrow it down!

one

the current state of research into feathers on dinosaurs (and pterosaurs!) is so INTERESTING, we keep learning new things that complicate our understanding, and it's possible that proto-feathers are a basal trait to the archosaur ancestor of both dinosaurs and pterosaurs?!! OR that feather-like structures convergently evolved like 4 or 5 times within archosaurs, which is ALSO super cool. either option is just so exciting!!!

we do know though that all coelurosaurs -- this includes tyrannosaurs -- are from a feathered lineage. so any coelurosaur either had feathers or was an oddity who evolved from feathered relatives to no longer have feathers.

It's hard to say for sure though about a lot of specific species because feathers don't preserve well in most contexts so we just don't have evidence.

but still. LOTS of feathered dinosaurs for sure.

so many feathery possibilities out there!

two

did you know! you could be a discovery type of writer and still find outlines helpful? it's just that you write the outline to cover the parts of the story you've ALREADY written, so you can better see your structure and remember your story beats as you keep going!

three

I love.... friendship 💖

I love all the different kinds of friendship one can have, and how they each bring a different kind of wonderfulness to your life!

four

in retrospect it was very trans egg of me in high school to be like "idk why this is but it is very emotionally important to me that I be allowed to sing in my school's men's chorus; I have a decent tenor voice and my gender shouldn't be a barrier"

AND to be able to TELL people I was in a men's chorus! I got so much satisfaction out of that!

(yes the men's chorus did let me in. thank you to the director for being a terrifying teacher but a decent person.)

five

a thought from 2022 when I was attempting to have a fandom-specific twitter presence:

pidw mobing is just.....so good to think about

I think they don't talk about it, they don't act on it, they maybe don't even realise they feel it, but they are each other's most stable and reliable connection, no backstabbing or politicking or pretense

even when they're angry with each other it feels like a relief. no secrets between them. lbh can safely let all his worst qualities be visible, no need to turn on the seductive charm. mbj can relax in the knowledge he's not being played by someone who pretends to care.

mbj will do whatever his lord requires of him. lbh will protect his trusted lieutenant.

any other feelings are unnecessary for them to analyse or pay attention to

So. Uh. I started out this evening with the intention of responding to all the comments and posts that I have been intending to respond to for a while, and then...got distracted partway through. Because Essie wrote a continuation of my Darcy-and-Loki fic in the comments, and now she and I are apparently doing back-and-forth comment-fic with each other. Um. A new experience to cross off my fannish bucket-list!

(If you want to read it, you can find it here, though beware of the fact that it is pretty raw and unedited. And we will, of course, post a shiny version of the thing when we finish. Whatever "finish" will turn out to mean.)

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/102861.html

So there is a fic I am making vague stabs at trying to write. It is not going very well. This is in part because I lack some crucial information! Namely, what is it like to experience sexual attraction?

And so I turn to you for help! Are you a person who experiences sexual attraction? I would like to hear from you! What does sexual attraction feel like for you (physically? mentally? emotionally?)? When do you experience it? How often do you experience it? Do you experience it every time you see a person you would categorize as "hot" or just people you are interested in, or some third option? Do you enjoy the experience? Do you ever wish it would just go away? Is there anything else that I'm not thinking to ask because I don't know enough to ask it?

Basically I just would love anything you could tell me about what sexual attraction is like for you. And it would be wonderful to get responses from multiple people, so I can try to extrapolate outwards from multiple data points to get a fuller picture of what it is like! I am happy with long or short answers, with or without TMI, and you can of course comment anonymously if you wish.

(Also, while I'm at it, just for my own interest, would you be able to explain what it is that is enjoyable/appealing about kissing? I'm just so curious!)

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/99106.html

Today I was reading a WIP of mine I'd kind of forgotten about. I actually didn't even remember how far I'd gotten in the story. So I was reading along, happily fascinated by what I'd accomplished thus far, and then I unceremoniously reached the end of the completed stuff. And now I feel all bitter, like I would if I'd read an abandoned WIP by someone else on the internet. I mean, I know equally as much about what would happen next.... C'mon, author! Finish the damn fic already! Except the damn author is me, and I haven't a clue what to write.

I think my problem is that I really like my premise, and I've got some plotty stuff, but I don't know what the climax of the fic is. And without knowing that, I have nothing that I'm building towards, it's just "and then stuff happened", and I'm all out of stuff that I know happens.

(this would, in case you're curious, be The Who Wants To Live Forever Affair that I talked about back in this post.)

In other news, OMG TORCHWOOD. By which I mean, they've released the name and premise of the upcoming series of Torchwood, and it looks FASCINATING and exciting and I am all shivery in anticipation. Also, now I really want to read Highlander fic based on this premise. I know, I know, I have a weakness. Highlander crossovers well with EVERYTHING!

Speaking of which. Highlander/Dresden Files crossovers? SHOULD EXIST. Just saying.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/77551.html

Third post in my "but THIS should be my first post upon returning from vacation!" series: YULETIDE!

So I was lucky enough to two full-length stories AND a treat this Yuletide, for three different fandoms -- so basically I got fic for ALL of the reasonably-accessible fandoms I requested this Yuletide!

My assigned fic was The Redemption of Sam McGee, by

Isis, and it totally thrilled me. I'd managed to figure out before the 25th that my fic was going to be for Cremation of Sam McGee, given that when a "mystery work" appeared under my gifts there was exactly one fic each for two of the fandoms I'd requested, and I knew that the day before, there'd been exactly one fic for one of the fandoms I'd requested. But it was still a mystery to me just what would be done with it -- and I can say unequivocally that this was not what I expected, though I really should have expected to be surprised, given how open-ended my request for this fandom was! This fic is a lovely look at Robert Service the author, and the real-life dude from whom Service borrowed the name "Sam McGee", and the ways in which the poem haunted McGee.

It's clear from the fic that the author wrote with a strong knowledge of Service, and that made me happy. Because as much as I love Cremation of Sam McGee (AND I LOVE IT!), I also just plain love Service. Yay!

AND, as a bonus, the fic ended with an extra two stanzas to act as a coda to the original poem, and those stanzas are just PERFECT.

My surprise extra yuletide fic was Wedding Day, by

chiana606, for Little Women. And -- Little Women fic! About all sorts of favourite characters of mine from the sequels! Featuring an asexual Nan, who is a competent and awesome doctor! (NAN ILU) And female friendships! And Tommy/Dora! And hints at Bess/Dan (or at least Bess/Dan angst...!) Getting to wallow with joy in spending time with these characters is awesome. *happy sigh*

And then my treat was Long Distance, by

AriadnesThread, for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, just a short little look at Arabella and Jonathan's relationship after the novel: HE DOESN'T FORGET HER, despite wandering off to be all magicy and academicy with Norrell! YAY! (the only tragic thing is that it is so short, because now I want to know MORE. But it is a nicely self-contained ficlet, and that is just me being selfish.)

I also wrote a fic this yuletide (obviously), and now I can reveal it! My fic was As The Sea Will Allow, written for

echoinautumn, for Fairy Tales, and it's a modern day Canadian femslash adaption of the story of the selkie. (I know -- I said after my last fic that I would never again title a fic after a song. I lied.)

It was SO WONDERFUL to get to spend all this time in a fandom in which I last wrote anything probably at LEAST five years ago, a fandom that was my FIRST EVER FANNISH LOVE (Oh fairy tales how I love you!). It's nice to write for it with a bit of actual, you know, writing skill. I was pleased with how it came out! Though mildly distressed the whole time at how long the thing insisted on being. I started writing it and knew almost immediately that it would end up longer than my then-longest fic (my 5000ish word long Inception fic), and I was a bit worried it would end up being more in the range of 10,000 words. Thankfully the latter didn't happen, but I was right about it becoming my longest fic.

I found this fic really hard and really easy to write in multiple ways. ( cut for minor spoilers for the fic )

It helped that my recipient was really easygoing, and basically wanted ANYTHING about one of the four fairytales they'd requested. That might have been intimidatingly open-ended to me in another fandom, but the idea for this fic just dropped into my mind (because: FAIRY TALES! YAY!) and OFF I WENT.

In conclusion: Yuletide is awesome, both in the giving and the receiving. AS ADVERTISED!