#sioirsebhan

[fyeahcindie]

From the previous post, I think the name is written here. (the first 3 characters on the bottom)

I don't need the name translated, I just need the name for a Google search. Thanks! =)

UPDATE: Big Thank You to @sioirsebhan for the info:

"the name is 陳家儀! says she’s from 私立康橋高中 too"

Here is another angle of her performance (possibly from an earlier round of the competition?:

[the-everqueen]

🌹 :)

Her name is like a melody. Orpheus hums, feeling out the pitches. Matte crimson, or perhaps a shade quieter and warmer like embers; brilliant flecks of gold, like the tarnished, exposed ribs of his home, poking out from its ruined flesh; flashes of pearlescent silver, like drops of water, or eyes in the darkness, or the sometime glitter of night sky through the ceiling. What is Eurydice? These pitches in his throat. These colors dancing in his head.

This body, curled small and secret, in his shelter, his home-within-Home.

send me an ask, get a snippet of WIP

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

6, 18 and 19 for the book ask? :-)

6: Which book was the last one you really, really loved?

it’s got to be either “a school for fools” by sasha sokolov or “nights at the circus” by angela carter. i think both are masterpieces but they vary massively in what i reckon they are trying to achieve. sokolov’s book is stylistically abstract and imagistic. i think it shares something with joyce’s “ulysses” in the sense that the abstraction needs to be “translated,” so to speak, or worked over to figure it out. (obviously there are different ways of readings but i prefer to grind out details over, say, letting a book wash over me as the secondary method is a bit too mystical for me and affords certain books a sacredness that i just don’t think gets at the beating heart of the book. if anything i think it leads to lazy reading over the more active variety that grants me the very specific reasons i like reading.) it is a magical and enchanting book and is worth the work.

i think the carter book is equally transcendent but her writing is more clearly defined as the book’s surreality embodies the book’s carnivalesque themes of appearance, performance, artifice, and gender. my problem with a lot of scholarship on carter is that they too often, in my opinion, pay heed to what might be called the “content” of her work over its very specific and superlative form whereas other (LET’S JUST SAY IT) male writers are overly valued for their, shall we say, stylistic virtuosity. martin amis, for example, is forever being bandied around as the heir of all manner of great “stylists” when i think carter more faithfully and more successfully weaves together a voice. “NATC” is a perfect example of her dexterity and ingenuity as a writer (she was a MASTER intertextualist).

18: Which character from a book is the most like you?

i think i’d have to pick jude from “a little life” by hanya yanagihara. no way do i share any of his personal strife or abusive childhood experiences but i like to think of myself as thoughtful, considerate and attentive to others and i really try to extend empathy to others, even when i find it difficult to understand their decisions or predicament. but i think, like jude, i am also terrible at extending that sympathy to myself and the expectation others have of me weighs me down terribly sometimes. even if another person has negative feelings about me that i don’t feel is fair i can’t seem to help letting that affect me acutely. this is how i understand jude’s characterization anyway.

19: Which character from a book is the least like you?

cop out answer: literally any character who is well adjusted

[chocochipbiscuit]

hellmouth diner & fraud squad? :)

OKAY SO.

The Hellmouth Diner idea is loosely based off reading Gil's All Fright Diner and thinking about so many of the vibes I loved (and the things I disliked) and how much better it would have been with lesbians. Then it morphed!

Nutshell synopsis: Butch werewolf rolls into a 24-hour Chinese take-out/diner that's unfortunately situated over a hellmouth. The manager's a manic vampire who was turned sometime in the 1800s and been helping her family run the restaurant ever since.

A group of cultists and/or monster-hunters (not sure which) try attacking the diner, and events unfold!

Here are a few choice lines:

On how the werewolf became a lycanthrope:

“I accidentally drank from a dude’s water bottle at the gym and he freaked. Turns out that lycanthropy’s like herpes. Instead of cold sores, I caught being a werewolf. He tried inviting me into his pack, but they were all ‘bros, bros, bros!’ and I just couldn’t deal.”

And on why the diner is such a weirdness magnet:

Realities layered like paper, the hellmouth both a staple and a puncture. It pierced the boundaries, but also held them tight.

As for The Fraud Squad... I fully admit this was absolute brain candy for me and that there's room for more nuanced criticism, but I had fun and sometimes I just want the candy! :P

The actual book: The Fraud Squad is Crazy Rich Asians x The Devil Wears Prada, set in Singapore. Working-class Samantha Song wants to write for a prestigious style magazine, and with the help of her wealthy socialite friends Anya Chen and Timothy Kingston, she infiltrates the high-level parties and starts using her new social connections to get closer to her goal.

The actual fanfic: this is a hatemance between Anya (who had all of one breezy line saying she couldn't stand heterosexual drama) and one of Sam's college friends, a lawyer named Raina. They don't actually interact at all in the book, but I just latched on to them because...sometimes the heart wants what it wants! And sometimes I just want to write F/F!

[chocochipbiscuit]

for the fic writer ask - 36, 37, 42

36. Do you visualize what you read/write?

I like to daydream and imagine certain scenes like scenes from a movie, adjusting details and immersing myself in the POV. I don’t think of myself as having a very strong visual sense (I have difficulty imagining faces, for example) but it helps me write the scene. When reading, I’m more likely to get immersed in the way I’m feeling about the characters.

…but yes to both.

37. Promote one of your own “deep cut” fics (an underrated one, or one that never got as much traction as you think it deserves!). What do you like about it?

Answered here but WHAT THE HECK LET ME LINK ANOTHER ONE!

Coin Tricks (Isabela/Merrill) is 2.2k words of nattering about coins, currency, and the easy warmth of being in love with your best friend and making your own luck! I like this one because I had a very simple idea in my head (Isabela teaches Merrill coin tricks!) and embroidered around it to try and make it more of a character study, as well as adding texture and world-building.

42. Have you ever received a comment that particularly stood out to you for whatever reason?

I have been fortunate to receive very kind and analytical comments! All comments are fabulous, but the ones that stick out and make me want to engage are the ones written almost like book reports: pointing out character themes and analysis, or quoting bits back to me and why they resonated. It helps me understand what chords I’m striking. (Plus just…stories run on emotion for me. Knowing what emotions they evoke, and understanding why they evokes those emotions, is just the best feeling.)

(from Questions for Fic Writers!)

[the-everqueen]

🌹 unleash that weirdness!

Sandoz doesn’t start changing until months—years—after Rahkat.

Later, scientists and doctors will hypothesize that his body needed time to heal before it could undertake the full transformation, but no one can really pin down the reason for the delay. Emilio thinks it’s part of God’s joke. Let him get comfortable, start to adjust to being back on Earth, then deliver the punchline. What could be more hilarious, more horrific, than turning him into one of the aliens he failed to save, the ones he has recurring nightmares about?

But that’s later, when they’ve all had time to consider what happened. In the present, the Society is hovering anxiously for him to recover enough that they can hold a trial, the Father General is prying at his seams for some kind of confession, and Sandoz is just trying to remember which planet he’s on at any given moment.

[the-everqueen]

tagged by @sioirsebhan to list 9 books i want to read in 2022! i don’t usually have a TBR list for the year: i kinda let the spirit lead me when it comes to what i feel like reading at any given time, unless i have to read the thing for work. this does include academic texts, which i have an unfortunate fondness for. that being said, i DO have books i’m looking forward to in 2022 and also a backlog i want to delve into:

1) nona the ninth - tasmyn muir 2) greywaren - maggie stiefvater 3) disorientation - elain hsieh chou 4) aesthetics of excess: the art and politics of black and latina embodiment - jillian hernandez 5) lote - shola von reinhold 6) remembering our intimacies - jamaica heolimeleikalani osorio 7) little manila is in the heart - dawn bohulano mabalon 8) critique of pure reason - immanuel kant 9) the hurting kind - ada limon

that’s...four novels, three recent academic press books, one philosophy text, and one poetry text. fairly on brand for me.

tagging @dieinct, @therobotreader, @klaproos and whoever else wants to share their reading lists. no pressure, i’d just be interested in seeing what ppl have on their TBR piles. 

[chocochipbiscuit]

ooh 7, 23, 24 for the writer ask if you want to? :>

TRICK QUESTION BECAUSE I ALWAYS WANT TO ANSWER ASK MEMES!!!!

7) What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

Emphasis on emotions and connections between characters, usually with an attempt at making it sound pretty or poetical along the way. Also inclined towards including food, sensory detail, and quiet ‘beats’ of rest to let the characters inhabit a particular space/mood before continuing the story.

23) What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

I’ve had a couple!!! The longest one, at this point, is probably the Preston/Madison/Virgil idea, which I occasionally dust off and add bits towards, but is in desperate need of an actual Ending so I can write it.

Nutshell summary: Madison Li is Patriot, the Minutemen ally with the Railroad to take down the Institute, and Virgil never got cured. Madison hears about Virgil being stuck in the Glowing Sea and decides it’s a waste of resources to leave an accomplished scientist on his own, so Preston comes to ask Virgil to join the settlements. They work towards being a throuple, talk about grief, loss, what it means to allow grief to make a monster out of you, and the costs of survival.

…then eventually they hear about a prewar seed vault (using the Svalbard Seed Vault as inspiration) and decide to go find it. They pick up various ex-Institute and ex-Brotherhood companions along the way, because everyone deserves a second chance at making a better future.

Also, it’s my excuse to include Rosalind Orman’s idol-crush on Madison, and that Proctor Ingram and Madison Li probably knew each other back when Madison had been briefly working with the Brotherhood back in the Capital Wasteland!

At this point it’s just long, raw, and has no real resolution. So it’s sitting in a very long bullet-point outline form.

24) Would you say your writing has changed over time?

Absolutely. I’m more self-conscious now, which isn’t always a bad thing; I catch more of my sentence fragments and trim some of the excess language. I try to be more intentional with my words, and to balance when I’m writing something just for the sake of being pretty vs for the sake of telling a story. Sometimes I’m willing to sacrifice one for the other, but I’d rather have them work in tandem.

So that’s stylistically. Subject-wise, I have shifted from writing short PWP type fic fills towards trying longer stories (not always successfully!) or ones in which there is a change in status quo, whether emotional or plot-wise. Sometimes both! Smut can be a self-contained story, where two characters want to have a good time and work together to get it. I started out writing more F/M fic (mostly Very Big Dudes and ladies, because I am a sucker for size difference) but have shifted towards predominantly F/F. I’m also trying to work on writing more group fics, whether that’s OT3 or more.

I also post less than I used to. Part of that’s just that my spare time has shifted, but also because I take longer in revisions and edits. I’ve become more comfortable letting a draft sit for a week or two before I revise it, or with allowing a draft to sit incomplete or unrevised for months if I don’t have time to get to it. When I was only writing short works, it was much easier to write a story, let it sit while I wrote another one, go back to revise, post, repeat. Now that I have drafts or fics over 15k or 20k words, it requires more patience.

I enjoyed answering, thank you for the asks! <3

(Questions are from this ask game!)