How was your trip to Iceland? Is the world outside the US everything you'd hoped?
It was AMAZING, for serious. Like. The nature was just unreal. UNREAL. It is absurd how much nature there is and how unreal it looks. (I’m p sure Lindsay got sick of hearing me say, “THIS IS FUCKING ABSURD” as we drove around the countryside.) And people were very kind and next time I will DEFFO look into doing something about my credit card because my international transaction fees were ATROCIOUS.
But it was really lovely. We stayed at an AirBnb in Rekjavik and spent a lot of time wandering around the city. We went to a couple different hot springs and waterfalls and geysers and visited a cool museum and ate a lot of good food. There is so much public art in Rekjavik! And not even just of old white guys like we have in Boston! The city was also very clean and quiet, which I don’t think i fully realized/appreciated until we got out of the airport back home and the noise rolled in.
I have a zillion pictures (I posted some on Instagram) that I’ll put together eventually, but it was honestly a really lovely trip overall. I want to go back and to travel more in general! Except I have zero money ever and some major US trips in the next couple years (one of my BFFs is HAVING A BABY!!!! but in Mississippi, so there’s air travel involved in spoiling my future nibling), so it will probably be a long time until I can afford to go anywhere again /o\
enigmairi replied to your photoset: I’m grouping all of these together because…I never quite know what to...
Anyone who thinks you would send yourself fake anon compliments is being seriously rude. You're the kind of diligent person who would at least set up some rudimentary sock puppets to compliment yourself, and anyone who says otherwise is underestimating your work ethic/dedication to planning. (P.S. I am willing to go on the record about appreciating your work, and about not being a sock puppet).
To be fair, no one has (recently) accused me of anything, I am just NEUROTIC about things like that. In my last fandom I had a few issues with people being shitty and accusing me of things like that and being much more insecure than I am now and like, losing my shit over it a little? I had anon turned off for a long time to a) stem the rude messages and b) prove that people liked me even with their names attached? idk, it was several years ago, I was still trying to figure out how to transition from LJ and tumblr and be approachable and myself, etc.
ANYWAY, I appreciate it and I would absolutely put a lot more effort into making myself look better--I lived through the halcyon days of Fandom Wank, I know how to make my fake army of sycophants believable!
A niçe thing that happened today was a fox accompanied me from the bus stop to my front door. It just kept walking a couple of steps ahead of me, and if I stopped it stopped too. At one point it took a detour to investigate the bingo hall but didn't go past the front steps. I was a little nervous at first that it might bite (there's no rabies here, but I still don't want to get bitten), however it seemed pretty chill.
Awwww, your commute home sounds so much better than mine is gonna be, haha! And, you know, good on the fox for resisting the temptation to spend the afternoon gambling XD
enigmairi replied to your post: So, I might go here full time at this point, but I have had limited...
I will put my hand up to the "nothing like this happened in my previous fandoms" comment, but stand corrected after having done a bit of research (although Alix seems to have set a new bar for awful). I'm starting to think spending most of my 15+ years in fandom on the sidelines of the whole social aspects has saved me a lot of potential hurt.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think stuff on this magnitude happens in every fandom, but Harry Potter fandom, very specifically, is home to like...probably 2/3s of the most infamous fandom wanks of the past couple of decades. Like, nothing quite this big happened in X-Men fandom, though there was certainly SOME SHIT at times, but you can’t have been in a fandom with Cassie Claire and msscribe and Aja and all of them and tell me that this is the worst thing you’ve ever seen. (The general “you,” not you specifically XD)
I've seen the excerpt from the teenage-genius-Laurens letter before, but it's only with your tags that I realised he's one of those kids who was called "gifted" at school who struggles later in life and develops mental health issues. It's apparently common enough to be a Thing; I learned last week that Oxford University students jokingly refer to the local psychiatric hospital as one of the university's colleges because of the number of students who are admitted there.
First off, I 100% have to give credit to those tags to @philly-osopher–I was just linking to hers, I didn’t write them myself XD
But secondly, I’ve never thought about it that way, but you raise a good point. A lot of the elements that lead to that kind of burn-out are def things that the internet is always talking about and theorizing in regards to him and they’re also definitely things that I’ve folded into my characterization. Brilliant-oldest-child-with-expectations-and-legacy-on-their-shoulders tends to be a one-way ticket to imposter syndrome, self-doubt, guilt, shame, depression, perfectionism, etc once the inevitable failure hits. It’s a thing I went through to a lesser degree and a thing a lot of my friends went through as well and the bits of John’s history that we know definitely follow those beats.
(I had more thoughts about this when I first saw it at 9am, but it’s been A DAY, and now I’ve forgotten most of them. If it has not been SUPER CLEAR, Everyone Has A Shitty Summer includes a lot of stuff about John’s deteriorating mental health, so it’s something that’s been on my mind lately anyway, and yesterday @lisapizza was kind enough to let me sit in her living room and talk out the story for like, two hours. I have a lot of Thoughts about how this particularly pertains to my John, but they’re all kind of tangled together at the moment.)
For the fic summary meme: 'We Get The Job Done', Lams.
This is a sort of detective noir pastiche, but since I know me and my obsessive need to research, if I were to write it, it would lean heavy on the pastiche. It would have a sort of 1940s/50s flair and the vague trappings of that time period, but there would be a long author’s note at the beginning about how this was supposed to be half-farcical and not necessarily period accurate.
Alexander Hamilton is a private eye trying to establish himself in a city that seems to be full of equal thirds lowlifes, aspiring good guys, and people who want nothing to do with any of it. He was a promising young patrol officer under the old Police Commissioner, George Washington, but after Washington retired unexpectedly, his successor made it clear that he was no great fan of Alex’s. After two months of desk duty, he got sick of the inactivity and corruption and quit. He thought he could get more done on his own then by working under Commissioner Adams, who was barely hiding the fact that he was taking bribes from half the crime bosses in town.
He set up his own office with the help of John Laurens, his partner in every sense of the word (yes, this is established relationship, because it’s my bread and butter), a former public defender who now spends most of his time and his father’s money working with Alex after quitting his own job for similar reasons. (Though not necessarily in a similar manner–John’s exit from civic employment involved his fist and Assistant District Attorney Lee’s face.)
So, that’s all in the past. At the real start of our story, it’s been about a year since they started this venture and business has been…okay. They have a steady stream of clients, mostly the ignored and underserved, people turned away by the more expensive PIs. Alex is a sucker for a sweet face and a sob story and is willing to take on clients who can’t exactly pay them their day rate. Plus, John’s not hurting as far as money goes, and while Alex might have spurned his gifts and help at the start of their courtship, he’s pretty much living in John’s penthouse when he’s not sleeping at the office at this point, so money’s not necessarily a huge issue. They have a good reputation for working tirelessly until the investigation is complete, getting results for their clients and then helping them with their next steps. (John swore up and down when Alex bailed him out of lock-up after he punched Lee that he was never setting foot in a courtroom again, but it turns out he’s a soft touch for a sweet face and a sob story too–he’s usually quick to offer legal advice and representation to their clients who need it.)
They’re doing okay, is the point, getting by, but Alex is sure they’re just one high profile case away from notoriety, from a steady stream of actually profitable cases, more high-profile legitimacy, and maybe the ability to hire someone to do the paperwork they both hate so much. That case walks into their office in the form of George Washington, Alex’s former boss. Alex is sure it’s a social call, at first, until Washington admits that he’s there on business: his ward has been kidnapped.
Alex and John are both shocked–they knew Washington’s ward, an orphaned French aristocrat who went cheerfully by his surname, Lafayette, and passed more than one boring police charity ball drinking in the corner with Alex and John. Washington tells them that he’s been missing for a week, now, and the ransom came yesterday–he’s to bring a sizable amount of money to a particular warehouse in three days’ time. He’s sure that someone from the force is involved, so he’s hesitant to go to the police, but he trusts Alex and John. He’s willing to pay well, too–half the ransom demanded by Lafayette’s captors if they bring him home unharmed.
Once Washington leaves, they get to work. Alexander is positive that Thomas Jefferson, his one-time fellow officer who’s been promoted to Head Detective under Adams, is behind it. He’s always been a little too interested in Lafayette and discussing his French heritage. John reminds Alex that he blames Jefferson for everything, from corruption in the police force to his expired milk.
“That doesn’t mean he’s not guilty,” Alex mutters, but rips out that page of his notebook and starts fresh anyway.
Their first stop is Mulligan’s, a bar downtown known for its scandalous clientele. It’s just seedy enough to attract the upper echelons of the crime world, but just legitimate enough to be safe for uptown trustfund rebels looking for a thrill. The owner, Mulligan, knows everything about everyone’s business and is always willing to throw Alex and John a bone, thanks to a few personal cases they’ve solved for him. Mulligan admits he hasn’t heard much, but Jefferson, Adams, Deputy Mayor James Madison, and a few other suspicious parties were in last week in a private room. He sends them to talk to Maria Reynolds, the waitress who was working that room that night, for some more information.
From here, the rest of the story is them hunting down leads. Maria tells the that the men assembled that night kept talking about the “package” being delivered to the warehouse district in three days’ time, but they think she’s acting suspicious, so they add her to a list of possible accomplices. They talk to Lafayette’s girlfriend, who doesn’t remember much about the night he was taken, except that one of the men had a silver-tipped cane. Jefferson sometimes uses a cane as an affectation, so Alex is fucking over the moon and John tries to reign him in, but things keep making him look bad.
Blah blah blah, a bunch of other leads that I would put a lot of thought and careful plotting into that would make it look more and more like Jefferson was the one who did it, but he’s obviously the red herring here. Along the way, they keep crossing paths with Angelica Schuyler, another PI who’s on a different case that keeps intersecting with theirs. Eventually, at the urging of Angelica’s sister and secretary, the three of them sit down to talk about their different purposes and suspects and such.
It’s during this meeting that things start to become clear. Angelica is working on behalf of Maria Reynolds, who thinks that her abusive husband is cheating on her. She wants evidence, which would give her grounds for divorce. But James Reynolds seems to be involved with something deeper (although he’s also totes cheating on her), which is what Angelica has been digging into. He’s been having a lot of meetings with people at town hall after hours. Town hall is where the police headquarters is located, which is why she’s been looking into Jefferson and Adams, since they seem shady as fuck.
Eventually they put enough pieces together that they are SURE that Jefferson and Adams must be behind this. Alex has Washington set up a fake ransom drop and he, John, and Angelica go to the warehouse early to try and intercept the delivery of Lafayette.
Except that “package” they intercept isn’t Lafayette. Jefferson and Adams are there, sure, but it’s drugs that they’re smuggling in, not Lafayette. They tie Jefferson and Adams up and confront them, but they claim to have no evidence as to where Lafayette is. Alex throws the cane thing and a few other seemingly obvious “it’s Jefferson!” bits of evidence at them, but Jefferson refutes them–his cane isn’t silver tipped and he has a passing familiarity with whatever other evidence, but the only reason he does is because his best friend, Deputy Mayor James Madison, likes them. He also uses a silver-tipped cane when his various illnesses are flaring up and making it difficult for him to move about easily.
So, then it’s a race for the three of them to get to Madison before he figures out the ransom drop was fake and does something to Lafayette. They get there just in time and save him and Madison does some “and I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” monologuing at them, explaining that the whole thing was a ploy to discredit Adams and Jefferson, while also seeking revenge on Washington, who wronged him for plot reasons. Something something, bringing them down would disgrace the current mayor, Madison would come out strongly against him and become mayor in his place, blah blah blah power, whatever. Also, James Reynolds was working for him, thus going to Town Hall, etc.
So, case solved, Lafayette returned to the Washingtons, Alex only slightly annoyed that he wasn’t right about Jefferson being behind everything (but mostly overjoyed that he was being arrested for something else), etc. The boys are flush and hire Angelica’s other sister, Eliza, as their secretary, leaving everything open for a sequel where something something the boys get kidnapped and Eliza does the sleuthing, everyone lives happily ever after.
No, it's totally not twisted at all, not anymore twisted than how much I'm enjoying writing it XD
There's a lot of angst and stress and shitty things happening in this story, but craft-wise, building the story has been a really fun process. I’ll probably take that back in a week and a half when I’m stressing myself out trying to get it finished “on time,” but laying all the groundwork for this story has been kind of cool. There are a lot of little flourishes and building blocks that I really like. The different indicators in the text that trace John and Alex’s mental states and the complexity of the situation that they have themselves in and the psychology of why they’re acting the way they do is fun to work with, even though a lot of it is also just...really sad.
But it has a happy ending! Which also helps. If I was pouring all this energy into a story where everyone is messed up and depressed and then it ended poorly, I don’t think I’d be nearly as sanguine about it XD
Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?
I don’t know that I could say I have any guilty reading pleasures? I’m not a big fan of ~*~guilty pleasures~*~ in general because there’s not a whole lot I feel guilty for liking? Also a lot of things that I feel like lots of people list as “guilty pleasures”–kidfic, curtain fic, etc–is stuff that is unashamedly my favorite.
For writing, idk if this is a guilty pleasure, but I def do not kill nearly enough of my darlings in fic. I wrote a whole thing about editing profic vs editing fanfic, the short version being that fanfic is fanfic and if you want to keep that long bit in for a stupid punchline, even if it doesn’t add anything to the story, go for it. I do that A LOT. There is a lot of fat in my stories that I feel no need to trim.
A character you want to protect.
Right this second it’s a tie between ghosthunters John and Alex. John is Going Through Some Shit and needs a hug and Alex is trying his best to handle said shit, but he’s not sure what he’s doing or how to help and he feels very alone.
Anyway, this story is really sad, I’m sorry in advance /o\
