loneraven, posts by tag: fandom: gentleman bastards - LiveJournal

I'm back. The wedding was a success, Singapore and Bali were wonderful. Shim and I are now as married as we're gonna be. (And it shows; on the flight back we both requested the non-veg meal option, and my nice white boy partner got given a kind of white-sauce-gooey-chicken-broccoli thing, and looked despairingly over at the sensible, homely, decent chicken-curry-with-tadka-dal they'd given me; when faced with Balinese public transport a few days ago he was heard to remark, "I miss India, where things make sense."

Quite.)

Anyway, I will tell y'all about the wedding and the subsequent meanderings across Southeast Asia when not at work just coming off a terrible head cold and fifteen hours' flying time. In the meantime, let me just tell you all what I wrote for yuletide. I think I might have mentioned before that I wrote five stories in four different fandoms? A couple of people did come close to guessing! Here they are:

Stand In The Place Where You Live [Parks and Recreation, for soupytwist]
Snapshots from the Knope presidential campaign.

So I've had this story in my head since I saw my very first episode of Parks and Rec, and soupytwist and I have been talking about it forever, so I really wanted to finally sit down and write it for her, but it wasn't coming together. Then, quite by chance, hedda62 introduced me to a song she thought I'd like - "Half-Acre", by Hem - and after I'd listened to that 65 times in a couple of days (that's... something I do, okay), it came together bit by bit. I am amazed no one guessed outright that I wrote this, it has my narrative kinks spread incriminatingly all over it - politics! science fiction! documentary format! - and while it isn't a departure for me, either in style or content, I think I'm pleased with how it came out. The hardest part was the science fiction aspect, unsurprisingly; Parks and Rec and hard SF don't really go together, but I found myself really invested in making Leslie's 2024 a real place, not just a future of slightly shinier iPhones. Runaway climate change seemed the obvious, if depressing, way forwards.

everyone says this love will change you and I ask, isn't that what love's supposed to do [Parks and Recreation, for doyle]
"Who hasn't had gay thoughts?"

Years ago, when it was a smallish fandom - seriously, I know - I used to run Doctor Who ficathons. I ran three of them, small enough to hand-match, and the one perk you get running hand-matched ficathons is to choose your favourite author of those who signed up to write for you. Which is how Doyle ended up writing a lovely Doctor/Rose/Jack story just for me, and why eight years later, when I realised Doyle wanted a story about Ben's gay thoughts for yuletide, I thought it might be time to return the favour. I had enormous fun writing this and again, I'm amazed no one guessed outright it was mine - people working out their own queerness in adulthood is one of my favourite things to explore in fic and Parks and Rec, with its lovely mixture of political themes and ordinary small-town life, is basically the perfect fandom to explore it in.

(What I found kind of darkly amusing about this story is that Ben is the POV character throughout, it's a tight third-person POV, and Ben spends it drunk, then delirious, then in various elevating states of hysterical, then drunk again, and tied up, turned on, kind of weirdly-subspaced, post-coital and finally, for the last 500w, reasonable, rational and in his right mind, all at the same time. I really did have a lot of fun writing it.)

Epiphany [The Middleman, for metonymy]
"Hey, what do I get my boss for Christmas-Epiphany-general-festival-of-expressing-love-through-capitalism-whatever?"

MIDDLEMAN YAY. I've never written Middleman fic because I just, the show is perfect, who can add to it. So this is not long, or plotty, or profound, it's just 1200w of SPARKLY SPARKLY LOVE. This stupid show.

a glass poured to air [Gentleman Bastards, for labellementeuse]
There comes a day months afterwards, almost enough to begin counting in years, when Locke Lamora stops in front of a mirror and says, "Lamor Acanthus."

The funny thing about this story is that it's sort of not true to what I think? With regard to the revelation in The Republic of Thieves, I fully believe that it won't turn out to be either true or complete bullshit; it'll be some elegant halfway-there method for Patience to fuck with Locke, and watching her do so will be enormous fun. But I read the novel on a plane and basically wrote this straight after, waiting for my ride in a cafe in Heathrow Terminal 4 arrivals: I just really wanted to explore the idea of what might happen if it were true. And if it is true, then that's what I love about this series - it's still epiphenomenal. Locke is still Locke, because as the narrative continues to remind us, Locke is Locke, Locke is Jean and Sabetha and Chains and the city of Camorr and what all those things made him. If the novels as a whole have a theme, it's that, surely: that there's no such thing as caste, or place in society, even in this high-fantasy setting complete with nobility and high magic. What there is, is communities built up from nothing and how they shape their people. I like that a lot, hence this story.

Things That Are Really There [Parks and Recreation/Welcome To Night Vale for grangerbutstranger]
The hooded figures tried to stop Leslie from going into the dog park.


...yes. That was a thing I did. It was a good Yuletide for me this year! I really should go and read the stories written for me a mere two weeks late. The next thing on the list.

More on the year's writing, the year as a whole, wedding no. 2, general flail, the meme answers I haven't done... at some point. Some point soon! But on the other side of sleep and some nice peaceful days of doing my actual job and hammering my to-do list until it fits on one page. Oww.

raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are comment(s). Comment there or here.

Happy Diwali, all. Thank you, everyone who came to the party last night - it was a lovely time - and everyone else, I hope your days and nights are full of light.



This is our living room, from last night. Everything there is a gift - the candelabra and candles are from the wedding, the bookends were a gift from my colleagues, the little stone candle-holders are Diwali gifts from previous years - which seems oddly fitting. In lieu of other gifts for y'all, I offer four short stories, on the usual theme:


building normal
Deep Space Nine, Sisko, Kira, Dax et al.

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hope
Welcome to Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos.

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comparative religion
Parks and Recreation, Tom, April, Leslie, gen.

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love in a hopeless place
Gentleman Bastards, Locke and Jean, gen(ish). No spoilers for The Republic of Thieves!

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raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are comment(s). Comment there or here.

I can't write, I'm too hot and have a banging headache, so let me write about writing.

First of all, I just finished Red Seas Under Red Skies, and I loved it. It's Scott Lynch's second novel, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I liked and didn't love. With Red Skies, though, andrew notes that it's as though he wrote 350 pages and then someone said, dude, where are the women? So he thought about that, and after not passing the Bechdel test at all the novel then passes it continuously for another hundred pages. It's very cheering. And there is so much else to like about it - wacky adventures, pirates, ridiculously complex plots, really fucking awesome dialogue. And then, there is a scene in this book, right. ( Collapse ) Where is the fic. Seriously. A03 has a little, but where is the fic, someone write me fic, I am DEMANDING. Bah. Yuletide soon.

And now for the other thing, which I have been pondering. (I miss, sometimes, having people around who write. I know a lot of you do, and it is very nice to have you on the internet - but it has been a long time since I had meatspace people close by who write, and write in the same sort of way I do, idly, without a great deal of ambition-to-go-pro but a regard for the craft, nonetheless.)

Anyway. A little while back gavagai asked me for a bit of fic: Komal/Preeti, from Chak De! India, or something about Garak and Mila from Deep Space Nine. Chak De! India - I've written about it at greater length here, but in short: it's a marvellous film about the Indian women's hockey team, and their rise to meteoric stardom. I have much love for it.

Anyway, I found both ideas equally possible, so while I've never written for the fandom, I opened up a blank document to have a bash at it.

...and then stopped and thought, huh. The problem - CDI is in Hindi. And for me, fanfiction is about voices - it's about hearing those characters' voices in your head. Sometimes it's about other things, sometimes it's about a plot or a mood or a particular thematic study, but when I sit down to write a fic for someone else at the tip of a hat, it's about seeing if I can evoke the source material for that person.

And, well. How to write it? I couldn't write a story about them with them speaking in English. They don't - they're Indian women, they're Hindi speakers. I couldn't write about them in Hindi I think. Perhaps I could, with a great deal of time and patience. (I wonder - is a feel for language language-locked, like software to an operating system? One day I plan to learn enough of my native tongue to find out.)

But even if I could have written about them in Hindi, that would be no use to gavagai. And while I could possibly have written them in English with only the dialogue in Hindi, footnoted, that strikes me as messy.

I do wonder, also, if the matter is complicated by the fact that I am, myself, a Hindi speaker. If I didn't speak a word of the language, would that help? Could I, say, write Amelie fic in English? (Let us please put aside my incredibly limited French.) Might it also help if the subtitles for CDI were not so incredibly, laughably, hilariously awful, and were written in such a way to convey a "feel" for each speaker? I don't know.

I really don't know, and I'm not writing this to lead up to any particular conclusion. I'm just wondering if you all have any thoughts on the matter. I mean, people writing fic in English for anime and manga fandoms have surely hit this problem before, and I'm sure people wrote fic for Chak De! India itself a couple of yuletides ago. I'm just wondering.

raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are comment(s). Comment there or here.

Oh, flist, I am blue. My to-do list wants to eat me, my books want to topple over and land painfully on my head, my life is a little bit moved-out-moving-soon upside-down. I'll get over it soon, I hope.

Things, things and stuff. Shim and I went to Copenhagen, which was marvellous, and more on that anon; we came back and I had a leaving party, which was also marvellous; and then I moved myself and all my stuff back up north, where my to-do list now features things like "enumerate all clothes have not worn for five years and GIVE TO OXFAM". I don't know how I accumulate so much debris, I really don't. Why, for example, do I own a pair of plastic sunglasses. I wear prescription glasses and never found a contact lens I didn't despise on sight. Why.

Party, yes. My leaving party was themed, originally, "Stuff Iona Likes" - and my guests all took me at my word and dressed up. jacinthsong and I did Kira and Dax, with Laura meticulously doing my Trill spots in brown eyeliner; teh_elb came as the Doctor saving the world with glam; darwinian_woman came as an xkcd stick figure complete with "citation needed" sign; lilka came as girl_doctor, which filled me with joy. (She looked exactly right! It was eerie, especially when you consider girl!Doctor only has ever existed inside my head.)

Oh, and sebastienne, her young man, and deathbyshinies were Remus, Tonks and Sirius, in that order, and my tongue fell out the instant I saw them and insisted on hanging out shamelessly the rest of the night. They looked so gorgeous, I wanted to smush them all and never let them go. And Shim wore a kilt, to please me, and because Scottish geeks are among the things I like; he looked very nice in it, and danced me around the kitchen in the quiet after it all.

Oh, it was a lovely party, but shot through with a little melancholy - okay, a lot, when you consider my tendency to drink and then get maudlin - because, well, I'm leaving. I'm only leaving the UK for a year but I am leaving Oxford, and it is my home. It has become my home, without my noticing, it has become the background landscape of my mind. I wrote here, in June 2004, that I had been on an Oxford open day and had a good time, but everyone talked funny there - and I can no longer hear that. It's the first place I have ever loved, and maybe five years isn't that long, but five years is my entire adult life, isn't it?

Ah, I don't know. I'm ready to leave, I think, as I wasn't when I graduated the first time; I really am ready for new things. But that won't stop me missing it painfully, and coming out in blue.

Okay, other things, other things. I am now home for three weeks. I'm pottering about packing and whatnot, and will pop back to Oxford in early August to see my beloved, and also, we hope, we hope, to see Vienna Teng with jacinthsong in London. (I may have to break this to my parents gently.)

I am still writing ficlets, and some full-length fic, hopefully (again), and I'm reading novels, now I finally have some space and time to read things other than law. Today I bought the new Audrey Niffenegger novel, which is finally out in paperback, and also Small Island by Andrea Levy, which I've heard great things about. Right now I'm reading Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch's sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, and again I keep thinking I should hate it and am actually really, really loving it. Still no Bechdel test (the last book only passed it in the very last few pages, but when it did it was awesome), but I live in hope. They're really good fun, actually: heist novels, complete with vaults of money and wisecracking conmen, against a nicely-imagined high-fantasy backdrop of sorcery and alchemical marvels. Also, the dialogue is fabulous, and Lynch has a great flair for insults. "I hope a shark sucks your cock" is still my favourite.

(Note to self: check for yuletide fandom.)

I'm also making a list of books to take to America, which isn't going so well; I've been telling myself sternly that I need the Oxford Dictionary of Law, and I need my quick-reference guide for drafting, and I probably could justify the dictionary of philosophy, also. But on top of that I am allowing myself only eight more books - four I love enough not to leave behind, and four I haven't read. I suspect the four I've read will be Prisoner of Azkaban, Night Watch, Three Men In A Boat, and The Winds of Marble Arch (which is an 800-page hardback, so help me god). I always say I don't do favourite books, but these are probably the closest I get to it. I don't know what they say about me.

This has become a a post about books. This is not meant to be a post about books.

Tomorrow, I am going to the post office. And then I am going to the bank. It is very thrilling, being me.