fingerpaint the sky

The Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network does a lot of vitally important work supporting immigrants in and around and from Massachusetts, including paying bond (the immigration detention equivalent of bail) to get people released from ICE detention. So much so, in fact, that after paying out over $1.5 million in 2026 alone (!!), they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for their bond fund. They urgently need more money to keep up this work. This is an all-volunteer organization -- I volunteer with them, and can vouch that aside from a tiny bit of overhead, every penny goes to helping immigrants.

I know times are tight and there are a million worthy causes around right now, but if you happen to have some spare funds you'd like to toss at a good cause, this is a really good one and a really good time to donate. Every little bit helps.

(And if you're not in a position to donate, no shame and no judgment.)

This year for Yuletide, I wrote one fic:

The Doorway to Home (3677 words) by genarti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Changeling - Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Martha Abbott/Ivy Carson
Characters: Josie Carson (The Changeling)

I'd never actually read The Changeling before, so it wasn't what my recipient and I matched on. But when I saw it on deifire's requests, I suddenly remembered seeing Author of The Changeling! on the cover of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game as a kid. I loved and reread The Egypt Game multiple times, EVEN THOUGH it had betrayed me on the first read by not actually being about ancient Egypt, so that's a mark of its quality, and I thought, "Well, these prompts sound interesting and I do like Zilpha Keatley Snyder, so maybe I should take this as impetus to read it!" And I did, and I loved it to bits, and here we are.

This fall ended up being very busy, between assorted travels and illnesses and upheavals, and so what I actually did was read the book and then let it marinate in the back of my head for a while, and then do a reread as I put together a timeline of what happened when throughout the book, and then write the entire thing in a frantic rush right before the deadline. But I had a wonderful time nonetheless! It was one of those experiences where you start writing and it just flows. skygiants as usual was a last-minute rock star about betaing, DESPITE AS I HAVE JUST LEARNED WRITING AN INCREDIBLE GIFT FIC FOR ME IN A SNEAKY NINJA WAY--

This is just a quick drive-by post to say: hello! I hope that those of you who are celebrating Christmas have had a lovely one, and that those of you who aren't have had a nice Thursday.

We're at my parents' place having a pleasantly low-key celebration (lots of joy! but also, us plus two elderly people = a lot of lying around on the couch reading, and not a lot of impetus to go all-out for the decorations and feasting), and meanwhile the weather is giving us scenic snow all around.

And also! I got an INCREDIBLY GOOD Yuletide fic!

The Villainous Princess Saves Her Kingdom is a note-perfect post-canon story for Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born. I mostly enjoyed the heck out of that kdrama, in which everyone is a dramatic lesbian who cares deeply about their all-female melodramatic theater, but the heroine makes many incredibly stupid choices and there were various things that frustrated me about the ending. This story focuses on Seo Hyerang, a secondary character who does not care at all about our beloved stupid heroine (and that's beautiful to me), and it deftly and delightfully fixes almost all of my complaints, and made me cackle several times. It's everything I hoped and dreamed for in a Jeongnyeon fic! I'm so happy!!!

I think it's readable without canon knowledge, but you'll have to do a certain amount of piecing things together as you go, and the emotions won't hit as hard. I had many emotions, though. What a treat, what a delight!

A Letter to the Luminous Deep is a book that should have been so far up my alley it was knocking on my back door ready to come in for a cup of tea, and instead it didn't work for me at all. I'm writing it up partly because I think the ways it (imo) failed are interesting, and partly because tastes differ and I suspect some of you may enjoy it very much.

Okay, so. The premise, which is what hooked me initially, is that this is an epistolary story about fantasy deep sea exploration and sibling bonds. It's set in a world in which there is no land except a single atoll; long ago, people lived in sky cities, but some kind of cataclysm ended that, and now everyone lives either on the atoll, on floating residences of various sorts, or (fairly recently) in underwater habitations. One of these is the Deep House, the deepest underwater home yet made.

A year before the start of the book, reclusive E. Cidnosin began writing to shy scholar Henery Clel; E. lives in the Deep House, which her mother built, and Henery is fascinated by the Deep House and the largely unexplored depths of the ocean. The two of them grow increasingly close, and then, at some point and in some way, die or vanish -- it's not initially clear which. Whatever it was, a year later, E.'s sister Sophy and Henerey's brother Vyerin strike up a correspondence and begin to trade their siblings' letters and journal entries and so on, along with their own letters, bonding as they try to discover what happened to their beloved siblings. The story thus unfolds in two timelines, as Sophy and Vyerin go through E. and Henerey's writings sequentially and share their own thoughts and reactions. Some of the letters they're sharing are their own from a year ago, written to their siblings at the time, so for Sophy in particular we get past and present events intertwined. (In the one-year-ago timeline, Sophy was on a scientific expedition to a deep marine trench, though busily writing letters to E. about it.)

It's a really cool conceit! Other things I like: ( very mild spoilers )

...And unfortunately, that's pretty much where it stops, in terms of what worked for me. ( from here on out this gets more negative, with some vague but not detailed spoilers )

I think part of my problem here is that I love domestic stories, and I love books with very low, personal-level stakes, and I love books about ordinary people having everyday struggles, and I love books about hope and the restorative power of kindness... but I also believe in the power of misunderstandings and petty frustrations and supply chain logistics and all the bits of sand in the gears of life, and so I absolutely bounce hard off a lot of the books currently being written as "cozy," and this is another victim of that. I wanted a domestic epistolary story about siblings and the material culture and scientific inquiries of an ocean world; I got coziness that, unfortunately, felt like cloying cotton candy to me. I suspect that some of you would react similarly, and for others, what I found cloying would be charming and relaxing coziness. And that's clearly what the book is aiming for, so if you're in the latter camp, I hope you have a great time with it!

Me, I'll just spend a moment pining for the book I wanted it to be, which is not the same as the book Sylvie Cathrall wanted to write.

I've read various books recently that I have a lot of thoughts about, and want to write up as they deserve. (A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Alien Clay, and The Ministry of Time are currently clamoring loudest.) In the meantime, though, here are some recent reads that I managed to be less longwinded about!

( 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff )

( The Twelve Chairs, by Ilf and Petrov, translated by Anne O. Fisher )

( The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington )

( Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn )

1. Roméo et Juliette at the Boston Ballet

This was incredible???

( More rambling about that )

If you're in the Boston area and interested, it's open through June 8 and I highly recommend it.

(ETA: skygiants has also written this up in a much more detailed blow-by-blow way!)

2. Fun Home with The Burlington Players

Another great show, although this one isn't still going; we saw one of the last performances of the run, a couple weeks ago.

( More thoughts (briefer) )

...And I'll leave this post there, because it's already long and the hour is late. I was going to add in an art show that I had a pottery piece in (!?!?! I'm delighted and that still feels fake) but that'll get its own post, instead, in a day or two. I'm mentioning it all the same to remind myself to follow through.

I have an art sideblog now! birch-shark-art. I say "art sideblog," but it's something like 95% a pottery pictures sideblog, and that's likely to continue.

Because I've gotten very into pottery! This has actually been true for a while now -- I started taking classes the better part of a year ago -- but the impressive thing is that the interest has stuck around. I'm normally a dabbler, a distractable butterfly, a jack of many trades but master of none, which has its pros and its cons. And I'm certainly not a master of this, of course! But I'm having a great time, and fully planning to continue indefinitely.

( some longer musing )

( a few pictures )

Relatedly, I've thrown my hat into the ring for this year's Fandom Trumps Hate Craft Bazaar! I'm offering a custom pottery piece, fannish or otherwise, to the top bidder. There's a bunch of other stuff on offer there too, so go check out fth2025craftbazaar sometime between now and March 10 if you're interested and have some donation money to spare.

That was also part of the impetus for getting the art sideblog up -- I wanted to have enough stuff up there for people to look at before the charity auction, so they could see whether they liked my stuff. (I also spent a little while checking in with friends about whether I was jumping the gun, skill-wise; this was like 30% neuroses but 70% genuine "I think it's good enough but please give me an outside reality check," really.) I like the idea of making a piece for someone to their requested design -- it seems like a fun challenge! the art version of Yuletide! -- and also, more importantly, the idea of using this to help bring about a donation to one of the many, many worthy and cash-needing causes in the world at the moment. At the moment the top bid is more than I could personally have afforded to throw at a cause right now, too, which is humbling and exciting. Mostly exciting!

[Edited because I moved a sentence around and apparently forgot to delete its old version while I was at it, lol.]

I'm still hoping/planning to post more booklog roundups in the coming days, whether or not I actually manage all of these. But still, here's the list! If there are any you want to ask me about, comment and I'll happily ramble forth.

Asterisks = rereads, strikeouts = books or comics I actively decided not to finish. (I'm usually reading multiple books at once and I often just sort of quietly fail to finish a book, whether because I'm not into it or because it's just not the right mood for it or whatever, so I rarely officially decide to DNF something. It does happen occasionally, though.)

Also, I'm very consistent about tracking the books and paper comics I read, but it's entirely possible that I've forgotten to list a webcomic or three somewhere. Honestly, webcomics are sort of a weird and fuzzy boundary between the stuff I record and the stuff I don't, but midway through this year I decided hey, why not.

( Books )

( Comics and graphic novels )

This year, I told myself on many occasions that I was going to booklog a bunch. And then, although I did a few, mostly I did not. So, a few days ago, I broke my list down into groups of 10 and told myself I was going to catch up with a bunch of mini-booklogs in batches!

...They're variably mini, because I'm longwinded. Also, apparently books 1-3 on this list I already booklogged, and forgot about (I remembered talking about them, but thought it had just been in comments), but I've already written them up again here, so we're going with the repetitiveness. Anyway, here, in under the new year's wire, is at least the first batch of 10!

( System Collapse -- Martha Wells )

( Dinosaur Planet -- Anne McCaffrey )

( The Silence of Bones -- June Hur )

( Max Carrados -- Ernest Bramah )

( Worrals Flies Again -- Capt. W.E. Johns )

( The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman: The Arabic Epic of Dhat al-Himma -- ed. & tr. Melanie Magidow )

( Murder at Merisham Lodge: Miss Hart and Miss Hunter Investigate: Book 1 -- Celina Grace )

( Worrals Carries On -- Capt. W.E. Johns )

( The Water Outlaws -- S.L. Huang )

( Mammoths at the Gates -- Nghi Vo )

Placeholder! Letter to follow.