all among the nodding trees

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.

I've done a truly unreasonable amount of Yuletide writing (I mean... for me, please don't expect multiple 50k works of grandeur here) and I'm hyped to read what other people have written but I also need to not stress out about reveals, reveals bugs, whether I'm actually secretly a terrible writer and should flee humanity to live in a cave, etc. Pivoting to working on non-Yuletide stuff might make me feel better, but it's hard to switch gears. I'm thinking of backing up some of my DVD-commentary-type posts about writing from Tumblr ask memes on AO3, but I need to come up with the least obnoxious/tag-floody way of doing so and that's going to take some doing. It might end up involving posting here and then just linking on the relevant AO3 pages, but who knows if that will be any less annoying. I know DVD commentary-type meta is incredibly self-indulgent, but I love to talk about writing instead of writing, and I love to read about the behind-the-scenes stuff when other people write, so who cares.

(Scents update: still waiting for Yules to show up, bought a decant of AbdesSalaam Attar's Holy Water that ideally won't evaporate on me as quickly as the last one did. I didn't realize that that perfumer sells a tincture of ambergris, and I'm tempted, but also... shit costs money. Does anyone else think of the Tales from the Crypt episode Forever Ambergris when they're perfume-spiraling?)

Terror fandom has finally reached par with Richard II on my AO3 page for most works! I know Histories would still win out if considered with other sub-fandoms (the Henrys, Richard III, etc.) but The Terror is easy to write lots of drabbles for. I'm working on Yuletide treats in the home stretch here, but I have my wisdom teeth coming out tomorrow and I'm more than a little scared how that will go or how productive I will be in the aftermath.

Current reading:

I'm... super dissatisfied with Sarah Weinman's The Real Lolita, from the title on down -- it could be an okay book about the abduction of Horner and her later life, or a pretty good book about Nabokov's writing processes, but her way of writing about abuse is phenomenally awkward (I don't mean "awkward" as in "cringey and creepy", more like... clumsy, I guess) and I'm not pleased with other aspects either. I'm also listening to Pale Horse Rider by Mark Jacobson, a work about the conspiracy theory impresario William Cooper, which I'm finding much more satisfying if grim. Next up is Lindsey Fitzharris' The Butchering Art, which... I think I originally bookmarked for Goodsir fic purposes, or maybe for Romantic fic purposes, but my last ongoing medical-history read (Wendy Moore's The Knife Man) is just a little too full of surgical details for me to handle in audio.

BPAL's Yules have been up for a while now and a few of them are headed my way.

- Hearthflame and Incense: Crackling almond wood and the deep sweet smoke of burgundy pitch, Austrian amber resin, black copal, and frankincense.

- Vital Fluid: The breath and tears and pulse of all life; the fluid that flows through all creation, permeating space and time and spirit: olibanum, red benzoin absolute, labdanum, betel leaf, galbanum, mastic, and angelica.

- Eighth Lash: Matted fur, oakmoss, and clove.

I love the An Evening With The Spirits line, so I'm especially excited for that. I'm also looking into getting the goods to make decants/imps of my own perfume oils, so hopefully more on that topic will be coming later.

Do any of you like crystals, rocks, other cool natural phenomena, etc.? I'm looking to pick up a few, because I think they're neat, but I'm not sure where to shop and my previous hookup, Bekkathyst, doesn't have many of the things I'm looking for right now. Give me recs or tell me about your collection of neat rocks!