there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try
the idea that every summer will be as hot if not hotter than this for the rest of my life is unbearable i need to (remembers suicide jokes are bad for my mental health) murder an oil executive
I wanted to stop by and say that you are truly mind-blowingly talented and I could (and have) read your works over and over. And because I love a good sock to the solar plexus I was wondering if there was a possibility you might be cooking up some more hollanov at the moment?
thanks for stopping by and sharing this lovely comment!!
am i cooking atm? great question. i do have a WIP for this fandom languishing at a low simmer at the back of the stove, in which irina rozanova leaves her horrible husband and becomes a skating rink coach in 1990s suburban ottawa. (you can guess what happens from there, i think.)
Ilyushka comes back from kindergarten one day with a very strange look on his little face. “Mama,” he says as he sits on the bench and ties on his skates, “I met a boy in my class who also skates every day after school.” He says this in Ukrainian; unlike Alyosha, he speaks almost no Russian. “He invited me to play ice hockey with him.”
“That’s nice,” Irina says absently as she unpacks the jumble of cones that her teenage assistant had been eager to collect for her. She begins to re-sort them by color. “Do you want to skate with him?”
“Of course I do!” Ilyushka says indignantly. “But I don’t have hockey skates.”
“We can rent some,” Irina says. “Why don’t you invite him to come here?” Because if they come here, Irina won’t need to actually rent the skates–one of the many perks of being on the rink’s coaching staff–and she’ll be able to feed them snacks from home instead of having to give Ilyushka pocket money. Things aren’t quite so dire now as they had been when she’d first immigrated to Canada, but Irina has found that penny-pinching, like her excellent posture, is a habit she can’t easily shake off. There’s always a little calculator running in her head, punching in numbers and comparing the sums to the bottom line she knows they need to make it to the end of the month.
“If we come here Alexei will be mean,” Ilyushka says sulkily, kicking his feet.
“Don’t kick when you’re wearing skates,” Irina says sharply without looking up. “You know that’s dangerous.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Ilyushka demands. “Alexei will be mean and then Shane won’t want to be my friend.”
“Tell me about your friend,” Irina encourages. She tries to say this name, Shane, and she can hear that she’s doing something to its syllables that Ilyushka is not. Alyosha is old enough now to be slightly embarrassed by Irina’s accented English so she’s been trying to practice more. “What’s he like?”
“He likes hockey and red crayons, but only the ones where the paper isn’t ripped,” Ilyushka says. “He can write his name two ways, just like me, except not like me because the letters are very weird. Did you know that Japanese people write their names in little houses?” He sketches a rectangle in the air with his forefinger.
“Is Shane Japanese?” Irina asks, surprised. She’s coached three little girls with older brothers named Shane, and they’ve all been bog standard Westerners—toothy white grins, floppy brown hair, crisp blue jeans.
“Sometimes,” Ilyushka says, by which Irina assumes he means partly.
Getting plowed is for the country folk. Here in the city we call it being taken to pound town. And if it's a place with decent public transit, getting railed.
i was reading an analysis of jane austen’s mansfield park of all things, written by nina auerbach, and she has a really interesting way of looking of fanny. she basically says fanny is a monster looking for its mate, a brother-mate… made me want to reread the book, with that perspective in mind
“the hunger of sibling for sibling, of kin for kind”
I love love love the way you write, particularly the really specific way you observe a characters physical and emotional responses to things, and the sense of realness and setting.
And I am so curious about your writing process. For example, do you do outlines and/or drafts? Do you write chronologically? And also were you producing 10k chapters of top tier quality and posting them as you went or did you have some good to go as you started posting? Either way you're a fucking rock star and I'm so glad you're sharing your writing with us.
aw thank you!! this is v lovely and was lovely to receive!!
this was a fun question to think about! i would say that my fic-writing process is influenced by the writing i have to do in my day job. the generally accepted best practice of science writing is to put everything on the page and then go back afterwards and cut for clarity and purpose and since many people & institutions including US taxpayers have invested in my education i have in turn done my best to master this art form. lol.
regarding your specific questions, i only post multi-chapter fics after i’ve finished a full first draft; chapters go up as editing is completed. in terms of that initial draft, i sort of outline and sort of write chronologically but for the most part stuff comes out as the spirit moves me. in terms of editing, usually the spirit moves me to shuffle sections around because it turns out i did not understand the pace or themes of my own work until the whole thing was out on the page. (sometimes, the spirit reminds me that He Would Not Say That.) each fic is a precious & unique snowflake tho so the process can be quite variable! i wrote clear to a hedgehog in a three-day haze like i had been fully possessed by the spirit of ilya rozanov himself. i know how to draw the line took weeks and a lot of that was spent editing, which is why the chapter count ended up increasing.
origamiaround
titsay
2087
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
stormborns
germansingergirl
