Be There

The Exchange at Fic Corner is a gift exchange for fic based on children's and YA books and short stories from picture books to edgy teen novels. The FAQ can be found on Dreamwidth (and I think on LJ still).

So I had these dates ALL WRONG:

June 18th - June 27th - Sign-Ups
June 28th - Assignments Sent Out
August 21st - Deadline for Stories
August 28th - Collection Goes Live (Hmm, I need to ask the mod - it looks like they changed that date ... sometime the first week of September, at any rate)

Tag Set (on AO3)

Sign Up Form (on AO3)

Good timing for a Yuletide warmup, perhaps?

Yes, it's stereotypical marital sex roles all the way down, but it still sounds like summer to me:

So I have been re-reading "Books of the Raksura" (link to author's site), because Reasons. OK, one good non-secretive reason is that the final volume (*sob*), The Harbors of the Sun, is coming out soon. How could I have forgotten how involving these are? Also, I had forgotten a major plot development near the end of The Edge of Worlds (Spoiler; highlight to read: the young half-Fell queen who seemed to actually have good sense, plus her equally reasonable half-Fell followers ... I hope Malachite doesn't rip them all limb from limb before we find out what's up with that.)

I also read one of the Hugo novella finalists, The Ballad of Back Tom by Victor LaValle. It's a Lovecraft pastiche and critique, with an African American protagonist. It was pretty involving, but I wouldn't say I liked it. One of the other novella finalists, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, is also a Lovecraft pastiche and a bit of a critique too, in that it involves mostly female characters. I'm not sure what the deal is this year with Lovecraft pastiches. I read some of his stuff back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and got the general impression that he expected you to be horrified by describing things as too horrifying to describe. I was not impressed.

I might as well add that of the remaining novella finalists, I loved Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (although she didn't stick the landing) and Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold. Why do I really like Bujold's fantasy but am decidedly meh on her SF?

I still have two novella finalists to go: A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson and This Census-Taker by China Miéville.

lady_ganesh hooked me up with some really good stuff: Maggie Stiefvater's YA series The Raven Cycle. This consists of

• The Raven Boys (finished!)
• The Dream Thieves (finished!)
• Blue Lily, Lily Blue (finished!)
  and
• The Raven King (still reading, unlikely to finish tonight)

Also, apparently some extra-story authorial snippets exist (I only just discovered this while checking the titles of the main series).*

In the little town of Henrietta is a posh boarding school called Aglionby. The mascot of the school is a raven. Eccentric local girl Blue, the scion of a houseful of psychic women (including her mother, Maura), thinks Aglionby boys are nothing but trouble. Local wounded-at-the-core boy Adam is attending the school on scholarship; he has managed to become best buds with the charming and earnest Gansey (that's his last name), whose circle also includes the tough-but-brittle bad boy Ronan. And then there's Noah, who shows up somehow at the off-campus digs that Gansey and Ronan share in an old factory.

Gensey is obsessed with the local ley line, which he thinks will lead him to the tomb of the Welsh hero Owen Glendower. The others are drawn into his search—including Blue, who starts out as somewhat of a mascot but becomes something much more. There are dreams, magic, terror, and lots of fast cars.

Parts of this seem to be the love child of Alan Garner's The Owl Service and the better "After-School Special" types of teen novels, but it's very involving and tremendous fun. The writing has some weaknesses, especially when Stiefvater seems to be marking time until she can get to the Good Bits, but she's very good at action sequences and the spookier parts are truly chilling.

The weather service said is was only 55°F (not quite 13°C) on the walk back form the Metro, but it felt colder. My unlined Goretex rain jacket was not adequate, and I was glad to find a pair of fleece-type gloves I'd forgotten I had in the pockets.

Honestly, 90°F in April and 55 in May. I want a refund on this bogus weather. Spring is usually my favorite time of year.

I shudder to think of what this is doing to the local fruit farms. Local strawberries are usually a big thing in June. And it's too cold to put in tomatoes, which would normally be growing well by now.

So hey, I found this:

raksura_fans

They have a challenge that's going to close for signups real soon and like NO ONE has signed up for it.

Schedule
Sign-ups: April 24-May 1
Assignments sent out: May 3 (or earlier)
Assignments due: June 14
Assignments revealed: June 21
Creators revealed: June 28

I'm not sure what to do myself. The comm has 22 members. But there is NOTHING in the exchange tag set, which I'm not sure how that would work .

ETA: Ah, the mod says to use last year's tag set, which has a pile of characters and relationships under "Characters."

And this is way last minute, but I only tripped over the comm and the exchange yesterday, while browsing Tumblr.

Somehow, between one year and the next, most of folk singer Carrie Newcomer's ouevre has ended up on Youtube, so now I can subject you to my favorites (and maybe actually catch up on her newer albums).

"Betty's Diner" "Regulars and Refugees" was a concept album, with all but one or two of the sings supposedly sung by the owner and regulars of "Betty's Diner." The chorus to this really touches me ... even the parts of it that don't make sense:

"Sit right here and rest your bones,
No one's ever so alone,
You can take this world down off your shoulders.
I don't know why or how,
All I know is here and now,
You can take this world down off your shoulders ... ."

So actually I have been doing quite a lot of reading, much of it trying to get caught up to make Hugo nominations (which I did do, yay).

I'm going to be doing really quick write-ups here, because I'm covering several weeks. If anyone wants to discuss any of this in more detail, I'll do my best!

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers – Enjoyable ensemble cast SF: an accountant/business manager joins the crew of a small, independent working ship and finds a family of sorts. The setting is vaguely reminiscent of David Brin's Uplift series, in that Earth is a backwater planet joining a larger universe of many other sentient beings.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers – Nominally, the sequel to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, although it follows only two of the characters from the original book. A ship's AI ends up in a humanoid (robot/android) body and has to learn to live with all that this implies; alternate chapters follow the backstory of the AI's new mentor/engineer as she grows up as a child slave in a robot-run factory. I actually enjoyed this more than the first book, but YMMV.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett – Interesting fantasy of an emerging industrialized world (trains are pretty well established, but rifles are new) that until recently featured living, active gods. The action takes place in the lands that used to be god-protected, now conquered by its former slaves. The equivalent Earth civilizations used for the cultures seem to be Eastern Europe (formerly god-protected) and South Asia (former slaves), which gives a different flavor from the usual Extruded Fantasy Product. Diplomat and operative Shara Thivani, of the now-ascendant culture, investigates the murder of an academic in the central city of the former ruling nation and discovers something very disturbing. Strong female characters, including the lead. Warning: the opening scene is deadly dull … but it's meant to be, I think.

City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett – Takes place a few years after the previous novel. Former general Turyin Mulaghesh, an ally of Shara in the first book, is pulled out of her increasingly inebriated retirement to investigate the disappearance of an operative in backwater Voortyashtana, where an important new harbor is being built by the conquerors. Mulaghesh finds that the mysteries of what's happening in Voortyashtana have more significance to her than she could ever have imagined. I like Mulaghesh even better than Shara.

Natsume's Book of Friends, Vol. 20 by Yuki Midorikawa – This series remains its usual comforting, mildly spooky self, bless it. I do wonder whether the mangaka is ever again going to pick up the threads about the sinister exorcist Matoba, but he doesn't make an appearance in this volume.

Right now, I'm re-reading The Secret Garden as a break. Reading lots of new things tires me, even when I enjoy it. I have Cherryh's latest Foreigner book on my Kindle, and I'm still trying to make myself finish volume 1 of the manga A Case Study of Vanitas by Jun Mochizuki, which looks like something I *should* like (but as you can tell, it hasn't really grabbed me).

It's not that I haven't been reading actual books, but they have been re-reads: Gentemen of the Road,The Goblin Emperor. But the new stuff is manga and comics.

I got volumes 2 and 3 of Behind the Scenes!!; I have finished 2 and am about a third of the way through 3. I'm expecting that, like Ouran, this will eventually develop a running plotline, but at the moment, it remains episodic. Maasa, the girl who specialize in special effects makeup, is convinced that she ought to have a boyfriend, but her attempts in this direction always end in disaster because she's fascinated with gory horror flicks, and her interests always come out at inopportune moments. She tries again with a group date, fails, and drags herself back to the Art Squad, where her friends are sympathetic but not pitying. We also see more of Ranmaru's seemingly perfect and snooty cousin Soh (he lives with her family), a high school student: in fact, her life is not what it seems, and the Art Squad helps her find herself a little more. In vol. 3, the Art Squad participates in Film Camp, in which one of the uni film clubs goes to film full time on location while classes are on hiatus. The film features an actual paid actor: a 7-year-old prodigy who rubs Goda, the Chief, the wrong way. I'll have to see how this plays out.

I also read the latest Ms. Marvel volume, Civil War II. This series is certainly full of All the Feels. The first part of the story finds Kamala Kahn dealing with a squad of rather fascist-leaning do-gooders whose plans put Kamala's ethics through a veritable obstacle course. One of the pieces of fallout from this episode breaks Kamala's heart and sends her in search of a change of scene to Pakistan, her family's homeland, where she learns another lesson in why it can be tough to do good.

So on my way to work yesterday, I came up the escalator at the Metro station to find that a train was just pulling in. The guy ahead of me was going slow and blocking my way, so as soon as I got off the escalator, I ran around him and headed for the second car, which drops me off right at the bottom of the stairs at Union Station (where I get off).

As I bounded along, I felt something catch and then pop free at the bottom of my pelvis, where my butt joins my leg. Man, it hurt!

And still hurts, although it's a little better this morning, after some Alleve overnight. From info I found online, it looks like I may have slightly torn the tendon(s) at the top of the various hamstring muscles, which attach at that point.

So here I am, literally butt hurt. Ow.

Gotta remember that I'm too old (or at least, not in good enough shape) to be running for trains. :-(