all among the nodding trees

( Likes: Fic, Art, Smut; DNWs )

( Fandoms: Black Mirror Bandersnatch, Dune, BBC Ghosts, The Green Knight 2021, The Magnus Archives, HBO Rome, A Warning To The Curious )

Happy Yuletide! In accordance with the seasons, here is my annual tl;dr Yuletide letter -- feel free to incorporate as little of it as you like. I'm skazka @ AO3 and my past letters can be found here. This year I am requesting Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw, Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly, HBO's Rome (2005-2007), and Lolah Burford's Edward Edward

( Yuletide 2020: or, Ghosts, Gothic Heroines, And Rich Weirdos )

What follows is my customary fic exchange tl;dr; feel free to disregard, turn prompts upside-down and inside-out, or mix and match whatever you like! Also, lots and lots of consent issues prompts follow; if that's not your bag, steer clear.

( Likes, Dislikes, DNWs )
( Fandoms: The King (2019), A Field In England (2014), Arthurian Mythology )

I received three fics this Yuletide, and they are all absolutely bangin' -- shit got very Victorian in here, and that's what I love most.

Flora's Adventures In Ghostland by RobberBaroness

Fandom: The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Characters: Flora (The Turn of the Screw), The Governess (The Turn of the Screw)
Additional Tags: Pastiche
Summary: An excerpt from the beloved children's novel.

Cure for Sting of Wasp or Bee by scioscribe

Fandoms: Mary Reilly - Valerie Martin; Mary Reilly - All Media Types
Relationship: Henry Jekyll/Mary Reilly
Characters: Mary Reilly, Henry Jekyll
Additional Tags: Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Moral Tension, Missing Scene
Summary: Mary resorts to odd scraps of paper to document a rather odd occurrence.

A Bloody Husband by libralien

Fandom: The Terror (TV 2018)
Relationship: Harry D. S. Goodsir/Cornelius Hickey
Characters: Cornelius Hickey, Harry D. S. Goodsir
Additional Tags: Oral Sex, Torture, Circumcision, Yuleporn, Crueltide
Summary: Hickey will make a believer of Goodsir yet.

*

I wrote five fics this year, most of them on a theme of midcentury homoerotica with a few exciting asides into late medieval homoerotica between people who should absolutely not have sex with each other. It will absolutely shock you to find that I like writing about weird hard-to-articulate trauma almost as much as big burly men.

Eclogue for Elfgrandfather

Fandom: The Browning Version - Terence Rattigan
Relationships: Frank Hunter/Andrew Crocker-Harris, Andrew Crocker-Harris/OMC(s) (past)
Characters: Frank Hunter, Andrew Crocker-Harris, OMC(s), Millie Crocker-Harris
Additional Tags: Character Study, 20th Century, Fainting, Chronic Illness
Summary: Andrew Crocker-Harris, in fragments.

This was a brand-new fandom for me this year and a really kickass opportunity to be very sad. The play is just exquisitely agonizing and loaded with the kind of midcentury queer subtext I would pay an arm and a leg just to channel, so I felt a lot of feeling writing this.

To Drag The Block for kutsushita

Fandom: The Folly of the World - Jesse Bullington
Relationship: Sander Himbrecht/Jan Tieselen
Characters: Sander Himbrecht, Jan Tieselen
Additional Tags: Gaslighting, Rope Bondage, Established Relationship, Consent Issues, Edgeplay, Past Sexual Assault, Breathplay, Not Safe Not Sane, Strangulation
Summary: The love of Sander’s life still manages to surprise him.

I've been meaning to get into this book for years and I finally did. All the historical politicking was a little hard for me to follow but damn, I loved the incredibly complicated Jan-Sander-Jolanda emotional triangulations and backstabbing. If canon-review and time had allowed I'd have written a matching Jan/Jolanda mindfuck to go with this one -- maybe that will be my new year's resolution.

Food For The Greedy for education

Fandom: Another Country (1984)
Relationship: Fowler/Guy Bennett
Characters: Fowler (Another Country), Guy Bennett
Additional Tags: Rough Sex, Taunting, Espionage, 1930s, Post-Canon, Hate Sex, Additional Warnings Apply
Summary: Fowler and Bennett lock horns, again.

I've written Another Country fic for education before and their prompts are always an incredible treat, but I decided to go off my (weirdly OTP-minded) beaten track here for some horny nonsense.

Serpentello for bloodletter

Fandom: Wolf Hall Series - Hilary Mantel
Relationship: Henry VIII of England/Thomas Cromwell, canon-typical Henry VIII of England/Anne Boleyn with some Anne/Henry/Crom vibes
Characters: Henry VIII of England, Thomas Cromwell
Additional Tags: Power Dynamics, Hand Jobs, Pining
Summary: Spóglia: a spoiling, a robbing, a stripping. Also a raiment, a clothing or weede. Also a mans mortall vaile or bodie. Also the skinne that any Serpent or Snake leaues off. Also a coffin of paste made for a Pie, a Tarte, or a Custard. Also any pillage, praie, bootie, prize, reprisall or spoile taken from an enemie. Also the outward skinne of any thing.

This fic ate my brain, but that was pretty convenient because I've been audiobook-marathoning the Wolf Hall books and Diarmaid MacCulloch's Cromwell biography back to back. I really really like writing gratuitous Crom monologue, even if I do mix my units of textile measure in here.

good boys do fine always for borevidal

Fandom: Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Relationship: Jack Merridew/Ralph
Characters: Jack Merridew, Ralph (Lord of the Flies)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Post-World War Three, Trauma
Summary: Merridew is Merridew once more. Ralph is something else.

I had a lot of weird stuff to synthesize in writing this fic -- I thought about including section break text drawn from English civil defense manuals from the period LotF is presumably set in, and held off because that seemed like a bit much even by the standards of "hey, technically it's canon" canon-level darkness.

I got home from holiday travel and immediately got sick as a dog, so I'm recovering by reading trashy novels and watching Netflix's The Witcher with my glasses off. The disability politics in this show are fuckin' weird and I keep thinking the randy little bard is Thomas Jopson.

Season's greetings, Trick Or Treat creators! I have a bad habit of going way over the top with prompts and likes, especially for short exchanges where the following might be serious overkill, but feel free to disregard any of the following prompts, follow your own dreams, or to mix and match prompts/elements as you desire.

( Treats & Tricks )

( Fandoms: Get Out (2017), Duchess of Malfi - Webster, The Little Stranger - Waters, AMC's The Terror )

I'm prepping for one sewing project with visions of other ones dancing in my head and hoo boy, I'm going to regret this, probably. It's been on my to-do list to find other ways of passing the time that don't involve spending 15+ hours a day plugged in to a computer, and hand-sewing is one way to do that, but with all the luck I've had in the past sewing big puffy shirts... woof. Lately there's been a ton of bullshit stress in my life, and I've been really burned-out, so being able to get excited about sewing is at least a nicer feeling than being in the complete pits about everything else.

Does anyone have recs for historical sewing books and/or blogs? I've got The Tudor Tailor and that one American Duchess 18th century dress-sewing book to go through, but I'm having a hard time finding blogs that aren't Gowns! Gowns! Gowns! 24/7. (Though gowns are amazing eye candy, so I'll also accept blogs in that vein.) I love the history of cosmetics and hairdressing, as well as all the funky layers that go into dressmaking, but I don't really wear much women's clothing and I'm not that comfortable in Full Fancy Lady Mode, so blogs and books that cover menswear and working-class people's clothing would also be rad.

And since perfume seems to be most of what I blog about here besides fic... I'd like to recommend the indie perfume oils of Seance Perfumes. I'm trying to widen my horizon beyond BPAL, and while For Strange Women has turned out too rich for my blood I've been wearing and adoring Seance's Spirit Trumpet as I go down a book spiral on 19th century spiritualism and mourning culture. Next up to try is Whisper Sisters scents, which look fantastic (I... uh... love resins too much) but will have to wait until the next time I get paid. What are you smelling? What are you window-shopping wistfully?

Podcast-wise, I've been enjoying the infectious disease podcast This Podcast Will Kill You a whole lot -- the name had my hackles up expecting something with a more faux-inflammatory tone, but the hosts are two grad students who love bibliographies and academic research and medical history and their approach to their subject matter is right up my alley. (I'd also love medical-history reading recs, jsyk.) I've been out of the movies-and-TV loop for a few weeks now due to technical difficulties (and, I mean... burnout) but I liked Jordan Peele's Us very much and I was pleasantly surprised by the 1995 HBO original movie Citizen X about the detection and identification of Soviet-era serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Books-wise I'm swamped with a bunch of shit but I will one day finish Northanger Abbey.