teach me the art of war

After a long creative fallow period, my writing mojo has suddenly come back all in a rush. I've published 32k of fic in the last few weeks, which is more than I've managed in the last three years combined. It feels amazing! And maddening, because I have so many fucking ideas right now and not actually all that much time to work on them. But it's the good kind of maddening. I'm having a blast!

Candy Hearts exchange
My Candy Hearts assignment is what set everything off. 'It'll be fine,' I told myself, signing up. 'My last few exchange experiences have been highly stressful scrambles to get anything written by deadline, but this time I'll take it super chill and write a modest little ficlet for a ship I'm already super confident with. What could go wrong?'

And then instead of doing that I got way too inspired by my recip's excellent prompts and wrote, uh. Nearly 15k of Kylo Ren getting beaten up by a giant slug and having frottage with Finn about it (here, if you're game). The words all just came rushing out, I was writing a few thousand per sitting and having so much fun. My starting concept was 'Finnlo h/c and huddling for warmth on Hoth', but it felt like nerfing Kylo a bit too much to have him rendered helpless and dependent on his stormtrooper escort's mercy by just a wampa, so I was browsing Wookieepedia for inspiration as I puzzled it out and that's how I learnt that these bad boys canonically exist on Hoth (never change, Star Wars). After that everything just fell into place.

After that I thought I was done with CH, but then reveals got delayed and a treat idea came blazing fully formed into my brain. So I wrote another 5k of teenaged Poe, Jacen and Ben getting into trouble at Luke's Jedi temple, all in one frantic sitting the day before work reveals. I was putting in typo fixes down to the minute on that one, lol. Live fast die young. :D

Bad Sex Bingo
I've also gone absolutely mental for my Bad Sex Bingo card. I've been tracking my progress at the linked post, but to summarise: eight fics so far, bingo in two directions, ideas in reserve for every remaining square. Kylo Ren has been having SO much bad sex, you guys. :DDD I'm trying to rein myself in now to save some energy for May the Fourth, but I'm really enjoying having something of my own to just noodle away at.

It's actually made me realise how long it's been since I wrote for myself instead of putting all my effort into exchange fic. No regrets - exchanges have been really good for me for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they seem to have cured me of a long-running insecurity about feedback stats. I'm generally pretty confident about my writing itself (I know my strengths, I'm working on my weaknesses, and I'm good enough that I can always make the words say at least a close approximation of what I want them to, which to me is the most important part) but I used to feel so self-conscious and vulnerable about the social side of things. I felt like I needed "permission" to share my writing publicly, and permission could mean a small close-knit fannish friend group or a bunch of kudos from strangers but it always had to come from other people, if that makes sense. Writing for exchange requests was about the most explicit permission possible, and it seems to have acted as an interim step in weaning me off a need for public approval? Because I've gotten used to writing all sorts of niche stuff that I haven't felt embarrassed to publish so long as one person wants it, and from there it's a much easier jump to "well, I myself am one person, I can publish things just because I want them" and I just...don't feel worried about it anymore? So now I'm posting all this niche Bad Sex Bingo fic written solely to amuse myself, and some of it is attracting lots of readers and some of it isn't, and I'm feeling able to just enjoy whatever feedback I get for what it is without needing it to reassure me that I haven't made a fool of myself by being That Loser Who Posts Fic No One Wants And Who We All Just Wish Would Shut Up.

...anyway. That's me done navelgazing for now. Although, derailing a smutfic project into a big introspection session on my own issues feels very on brand for a Kylo Ren's Sex Life Is an Angst-Fueled Disaster project. The point is I am having a LOT OF FUN and feeling really comfortable in my own fannish skin right now, and it's nice.

Snagged from, like, everybody at this point: The last five fics I wrote with song lyric titles. Are they all going to be Iron Maiden? There's a chance they're all going to be Iron Maiden.

1. the earth will turn to a funeral pyre, The Acolyte, Osha/Qimir, <1k. Title is from Deadlock's The Arsonist, because the song is about fire and the ficlet is full of heavy-handed fire imagery and, well, yeah. This one doesn't really go any deeper than that. But hey! It's not Iron Maiden!

2. say a prayer on the book of the dead, Star Wars, Poe/Finn/Rey/Ben/Jacen, 13.5k. From Blood Brothers by Iron Maiden (theeeeere we go!), pretty much every single lyric of which is perfect 'redeemed Ben Solo searches for new purpose in life while trying to make sense of his hideous past and leaning heavily on his new friends/lovers/allies for support' material.

3. a cross to bear, a heavy faith, Star Wars, Reylo, 1.1k. From Stratego by (wait for it) Iron Maiden, which is about a warrior who can't stop fighting. The warrior seems less enthusiastic about the endless violence than Ben/Kylo, but I liked the vibe of it, and the suggestion of deep existential misery that Ben (ever the unreliable narrator) mistakenly thinks he has put behind him now that he's a Good Guy (TM).

4. we fly just like birds of a feather, I won't tell no lie, Star Wars, Reylo and Han/Leia/Luke, 3.9k. A clumsy misquote (I'm literally just now noticing - should be flock, not fly) from We Are Family by Sister Sledge. This fic is a riff on The Birdcage, in which this song features prominently - link goes to a scene from the film, instead of the official music video. I wanted a title that nodded at the song without being completely on the nose, and I liked that lyric in particular for its adjacency to the two related themes of Rey finding her people and Ben learning to fully accept the ones he's got.

5. self-loathing before you awoke me, Star Wars, Finn/Kylo, 1.5k. From This World Can't Tear Us Apart by Trivium, which Kylo (again, not always the most reliable of narrators) might well pick for his and Finn's theme song: he was alone in a miasma of violent hatred towards himself and everyone else, until Finn broke through like a sunbeam and showed him the way, the truth and the light. (Poor Finn has an awful lot on his plate in this fic.)

Look at that - only two-fifths were Iron Maiden songs! I am the very model of lyrical diversity.

1loulu5 is running Obscure Sorrows, a prompt challenge based on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I've been assigned the prompt agnosthesia:

n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

Signups are open throughout the writing period (until 29 July), if you guys fancy it!

This year's Sunshine Challenge is also up and running. I'm not Committing(TM) to completing the whole challenge, but I'm going to keep an eye on the prompts and see if anything sparks an idea.

- Shadow and Bone s2 was eight hours of my life that I'm never getting back. I don't understand and don't want to understand the choices they made about pacing, or the rationale for trying to cover THREE NOVELS worth of content in a single season along with great piles of extra stuff they just made up all by themselves. Ben Barnes' performance and the excellent Nikolai casting were bright spots, but they weren't worth the mess that was everything else.

- I'm also not enjoying Ted Lasso s3, though less because it’s actually bad and more because it just isn’t giving me what I want. I’m here for feelgood escapism and nothing but feelgood escapism, whereas I feel like this and the last season have been leaning a lot more into being a serious TV drama about mental health and interpersonal conflict and what have you. Happy for the fandom that they’ve got so much toothy stuff to work with, but at this point I think I’m only continuing to watch out of curiosity + a bit of sunk cost fallacy. It just doesn’t spark joy like s1 did.

- On the other hand none of that reeeeeally matters because The Mandalorian is eating my ENTIRE brain. If the writers had all sat down at the first meeting and said, 'right, priority number one is to tell a story that lucymonster will love', they could hardly done a better job nailing everything I want out of this canon. Baby Yoda is now fully fledged Toddler Yoda, with the trail of wreckage behind him to prove it! The ex-Empire/proto-First Order stuff is endlessly absorbing to me, as is the nuanced exploration of what it means to be Mandalorian. Bo-Katan's involvement has exceeded my wildest dreams - she's basically the deuteragonist at this point? And the chemistry between her and Din has been nothing short of scorching. My teeny-tiny little little ship is suddenly the Hot New Thing and there's more art and fic to enjoy than I can possibly keep up with. Every other show in the world can jump the shark, for all I care. I'm getting all my needs met right here and I'm over the moon about it. :DDDDDDD

 - In writing news, I'm once again relearning the eternal truth that the Venn diagram of 'music I want to listen to for myself' and 'music I want to listen to for fic purposes' is very close to being two separate circles. As soon as I'm trying to brainstorm, my taste goes belly-up and all I want is the whiniest post-hardcore and metalcore in my library. I want Bullet For My Valentine, I want A Skylit Drive, I want breakdowns and high-pitched vocals and painfully confessional lyrics about some dude's inability to find or keep a girlfriend. Nothing else gets the creative juices flowing the same way, man, idek.

Fannish update: I am not doing Chocolate Box this year after all, because Chocolate Box mods are taking a (by the sound of it, badly needed) year off. Instead I'm doing candyheartsex! It's a one-off replacement exchange running on exactly the same schedule and I'm super excited for it.

I admit I'm also a little anxious about taking part in a gift exchange again, after having a go at writing the little ficlet I was talking about. It went really really badly. I'm so rusty: my prose felt sloppy, but worse than that, my thinking was all clouded. I couldn't seem to get the characters to do what I wanted, or even answer 'what the hell is this story about' to a satisfying extent, even though it felt so clear until I started trying to put it in words. Just, a mess. Fucking baby's first fanfic all over again. I don't want to ruin anyone's Valentine's Day by accidentally gifting them legolas by lucy, so I have to sort my shit out before signups, but right now I kind of feel like deleting gdocs and never looking at it again. Gah.

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Bret Devereaux, of in-depth military historian's analysis of LotR fame, is back again with a deeply satisfying breakdown of what made the worldbuilding in Rings of Power so broken. I have complicated feelings about RoP: it gave me a shiny new blorbo who I love to pieces (Adar, bby <33333) and I'm defensive of it thanks to all the ridiculous right-wing outrage about Black elves and female leads, but it was also just really bad, and not even in a fun trashy way, but in a borderline unwatchable way. I never put much thought into exactly what made it bad - the extent of my critical engagement was nodding along angrily with Erik Kain's coverage and ranting to my sister about how bugfuck crazy it was that Amazon put two guys with zero IMDB credits in charge of such a massive production - so I really enjoyed seeing all my vague 'something's off here' feelings laid out in Devereaux's trademark pedantic detail.

But I'm not just linking the article for RoP hatewatch reasons. It has interesting things to say about writing craft and the 'rules' of worldbuilding in general, and also some very interesting facts about volcanoes.

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Some great new metal finds this week!

All That Was Promised by Hath got recommended in a 2022 best-of that Bandcamp emailed me, and was good enough to make me forgive the fact that I've opted out of Bandcamp promo emails multiple times now so shouldn't have received it in the first place. It's blistering, richly emotive death metal with strong blackened and melodic elements. My days of being hopelessly weak for harsh vocals seasoned with just a tiny pinch of cleans are clearly coming to a middle.

Freedom of Fear win massive bonus points for being 1) Aussie and 2) female-fronted, but they honestly don't need the help. Per AMG: "influences including 90’s symphonic black metal, traces of the classic Gothenburg sound, and a heavy dose of blistering tech death". I hope they tour near me soon. I already know I won't go, but it would be nice to entertain the fantasy that I might.

Just Before Dawn fill a hole in my collection of bleak war-themed death metal that I didn't even know was there. Seriously, it feels like I should have been listening to these guys for years. They remind me a lot of Hail of Bullets, minus the really distinctive vocals but no weaker for it. Link goes to one of their newer songs about the Vietnam War. I've got WWI, WWII and plenty of War Not Otherwise Specified in rotation, but I don't think I've ever listened to metal about Vietnam.

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Edit, I almost forgot: new trailer for Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Fallen Order! IT LOOKS AMAZING OMG.

The other day I cheerfully wasted a whole day's allowance of downtime rereading The Ms Scribe Story, as I can't resist doing every now and then. As legendary fandom wanks go, it's probably my all-time favourite for the sheer amount of effort that went into the fuckery.

But despite its being a horrible story about horrible people, my main takeaway this time is a weird nostalgia for those days - I mean, the days when single-fandom archives, forums, and LJ were the main hubs of fannish activity. I coped well enough with the move to tumblr, but twitter is basically the perfect polar opposite of what I want from a fandom space (Speed! Impermanence! Overlap with the non-fannish world!); discord, doubly so. I don't think LJ was any more or less wanky than other platforms - it really just depends on who you hang out with, or I guess who you're unlucky enough to get noticed by. (I was a nobody, so most of the drama sailed right on by me.) But it was definitely better at fostering the kind of interactions I enjoy. I love it here on DW, but we're not exactly in the room where it happens.

Anyway, the upshot of this nostalgia binge is that I've wasted today's downtime tinkering with my icons, which I haven't touched in forever. I've found some I really like, and I'll whittle and adjust based on what I actually end up using. Today's is for great flaming wankstorms lol. Let's hope I don't need it.

I'm home and recovered from my visit home over Easter. Family holidays are always equal parts restorative and draining, but mostly I'm just glad I got to GO this year. The dogs were great; the horses were great; the birds were a bit unfriendly, but that's normal. Also my folks have a cat now, despite the fact that they and all their children are painfully allergic. She's an absolute darling and well worth the industrial quantities of antihistamines I had to take to be able to pet her. I took my rats, who found the change of scene alarming in a way that's probably good for them. Shake off the ennui a bit. Change their sleepy little lives up.

Anyway, I have some flist catch-up to do soon. I also have updates on both fandom stuff and media consumption. It's all a bit of a hodgepodge.


Fandom

My exchange, kinkluckydip, is all wrapped up! I'm really happy with how it went and still working my way through the collection of amazing works people produced for it. I got six (!!!) gifts, all of which I adored and can whole-heartedly recommend:

a little egg transfer between friends by snickfic  - MCU, Minn-Erva/Valkyrie - oviposition and alien heat/breeding cycles with belly kink, cervix penetration and tentacles. This fic was WILD in the greatest way, and I enjoyed the fun, carefree dynamic between Minn-Erva and Val every bit as much as the iddy kink content.

Feeling Zabimaru by cherryontop - Bleach, Byakuya/Renji - insanely hot, manga-accurate art with bondage and weapon play (because we ALL AGREE every shinigami has at one point or other fucked their zanpakuto, right??).

In the Middle by ambiguityisnoonesfriend  - Star Wars, Poe/Finn/Ben with background Poe/Finn/Ben/Rey - double penetration and inappropriate use of the Force. The balance of attraction and resentment was perfect, and the smut blew my tiny mind, it was SO HOT omg.

Lady Lion by filigranka - Star Wars, Leia/Phasma - beautifully callous First Order Wins noncon. This late treat came in right when I already thought I'd been spoilt to perfection, and made everything even perfect-er. Fair warning it is DARK, but that's why I love it.

lay him down on a bed of thorns by lamiacalls - Star Wars, Ben/Rose - needleplay, skin-sewing and some bloodplay. This was my first time reading anything of the sort, and I was blown away by both how sensual it was and how well it suited the characters. Angst and self-hatred and aaall the good shit.

Sketches by TheseusInTheMaze - Descendants, Evie/Mal - foot kink, clothing kink and loyalty. This was the perfect, kinky Descendants-for-grown-ups treat that captured everything I love about the ship while making feet hotter to me than they've ever been before.


Viewing

Hobbs & Shaw and The Fate of the Furious - I've now seen every single Fast & Furious movie, which is unfortunately the price I pay for marital harmony, only this time I wasn't even mad because Hobbs & Shaw is actually GREAT. No shade on Vin Diesel, but there's only so many hours I can watch him brood before it starts to get old. I liked having him out of the way for a movie. The Rock and his one-liners never get old. I don't think there was a single joke in whole thing I didn't laugh at (yes, I laughed my arse off at Mike Oxmaul and Hugh Janus; yes, there's a chance I'm closer to the target audience for these ridiculous movies than I like to pretend). Seeing Jason Statham shoot up terrorists while nursing a tiny baby also bypassed my entire neocortex and went straight for the lizard brain. 10/10, will almost definitely watch again with friends, pizza and large amounts of beer.

SCP: Overlord - I know next to nothing about the whole SCP thing, but this short film piqued my interest. It was exactly my kind of horror, creepy and atmospheric and mercifully gore-free. I don't have much to say about it except that I loved the concept, thought the execution was really impressive, and would like to see more.

Traffic Cops - I know. I KNOW. My mum, a lifelong fan of police procedurals, has been branching out into reality TV. I decided to take a polite interest. Next thing I knew, I'd spent two full days of the Easter long weekend parked on the couch with every other female family member, white-knuckling it through car chase after car chase and thirsting over Derbyshire PCs Jason Potts and Alex Boniface. Fucking hypnotic, I'm telling you. They've made 21 seasons of this shit. God help me.


Reading

What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro - I went into this book with a healthy amount of skepticism, because I associate the study of body language mostly with dumb urban myths about how if you touch your nose or glance to the right then it proves you're a lying liar who lies. Actually, Navarro is emphatic that there's no reliable way to detect dishonesty through nonverbal behaviour. What you can detect is discomfort, which might mean someone is lying to you but might just as well mean they're afraid they left the stove on or your perfume reminds them of a hated ex. I hope this knowledge reaches the general pop-psych enthusiast community soon. I have heaps of involuntary behaviours straight off one of those 'how to tell you're being lied to' lists, and they're all purely social anxiety related. No, I'm not lying to you because I broke eye contact and put my hand on my neck! I'm just replaying the last joke I told on loop, trying to crystal-ball discern if your laughter was fake and you actually think I'm an unfunny loser.

Overall it was a good book. A lot of it boils down to putting labels on the kinds of subtle physical cues we often pick up on instinctively, but labels can be helpful, I think. 'Jim spent the whole meeting thinning his lips and angling towards the exit' is a lot more compelling than 'Iunno, boss, I just get the vibe we don't have full team buy-in yet'.


Listening

I've set myself a mini-project to include more female vocals in my music - harsh female vocals, especially. I gravitate towards genres that are unfortunately still a bit of a sausagefest, but there are some amazing women out there making metal just as raw and heavy as any male growler.

This week I've had For I Am King on repeat a lot. They're melodic and catchy and have a cool backstory: Alma Alizadeh is an Iranian refugee who started her music career on bass and taught herself to scream on a whim. I'm completely obsessed with their whole second album, I. Prey, Forever Blind and Misery are particularly my jam.