Clever Manka is dressed and undressed

I'm making this a sticky post because I'm already tired of scrolling through my Guardian tag to get to it

As I continue to accumulate resources for This Fucking Show, I need somewhere to keep them other than in my Gmail drafts folder. So this post is mostly for my own resources but please please please feel free to hit me up with any others in comments.

( Cut to save y'all's reading pages.  )
I'll continue to add to this post as I come across stuff. I get the feeling I might be in this fandom for a while. ETA:  Oh I'm definitely gonna be in this fandom for a while

Wednesday's blahs were helped considerably by the fact that when the KC dentist vet's admin called to check on Miss Thing/Miette yesterday, the phone call went like this: ( Clicky click. )

Twitter:
The glisten of (likely fake) sweat on Zhu Yilong's clavicle is outrageously mesmerizing and how have we all become such Victorians over this man?
Already there's a preview of my commissioned piece for Ghost Story!

More importantly, though, Sundial Exchange works were revealed this morning, and I feel so warm and special after rolling around in my three gifts--a story and two art treats!

rlyqueer 's language in No Matter How Long is just gorgeous. Such a beautiful story, based on the Time Engraver ad, with tons of magic and love. Thank you thank you, bb! rlyqueer also gifted me with a moodboard that could absolutely pair up with my own fic (link below) and that just charmed the hell out of me. I kinda wanna link to it in the notes of my story? Is that allowed? And naye gave me lovely Time Engraver visual vignettes that I now want to write about.

And now, the fic I wrote for ranalore : 
Elsewhere (6,738 words)
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Thermos "Magic Cottage" commercial
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Characters:  Bai Yu/Zhu Yilong Character combinations
Additional Tags: Fairytale Elements
Summary: A different sort of Jack tale

ETA: whoops! I just realized I mixed up my treat and my gift from rlyqueer . The fic is a treat and the moodboard is my gift. This makes the fact that it so wonderfully matches my own gift to ranalore even more delightful!!!!

Twitter:
Weilan CEO/Secretary AU or Inception
bonibaru suggested an Untamed Pern AU and y'all I was tempted but thank dogs FayJay came through and yes, I am subscribed.
Kinda sad Weilan kisses
We don't often get Shen Wei surprising Zhao Yunlan with a kiss, so this is very nice.
Lipstick kisses

Not Guardian or Untamed (or Twitter, I guess): 
I mentioned in a comment on bonibaru's DW about how the RWA meltdown reminded me of the puppies and the Hugos and welp, CALLED IT.

Am ensconced at a friend's* for the week. You know those jokes about how black people and white people keep their houses at radically different temperatures? I might actually die here. *laugh-cry emoji* But oh god it's so good to be in a quiet space with no expectations on me. He's having an ex over for brunch and since the ex and I got along,  I'm invited to join. \o/ I started my henna extra early this morning so I wouldn't be sitting at the table with a head full of mud. I wasn't due to touch up until next week but I wanna look good for NYE. Head full of mud isn't helping the overheating.

* My former work BFF and upcoming NYE party partner

This week's snippet from Deconstruction:
He’d wanted to kiss Zhao Yunlan on that bench, so much. He always did, always had, but especially then, when he knew that sort of an unseen miracle, he was unlikely to survive the final confrontation with Ye Zun. His lips, teeth, and tongue had tingled with an ache he nearly couldn’t suppress. But what right had he to doom Zhao Yunlan to heartbreak? If he couldn’t offer the life Zhao Yunlan deserved, better that only one of them should suffer this lonely heartbreak.

OMG y'all, check out the gorgeous cover art naye made for bonibaru's podfic of Lollipop! I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR.

I figured out where to put the porn in Accidental Voyeur. Nobody is surprised.

Twitter finds:
Gentle affection in the SID office seen from above. (I like this artist and I love that piece in particular)
It's sad-making that Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu probably won't ever get another gig together.
Bai Yu cuddling Da Qing's cat actor.
Shen Wei is embarrassed and Zhao Yunlan loves it.
Why why why didn't I give Ghost Story's ZYL tattoos? 
I feel like maybe this piece is more reflective of novel!verse than drama!verse (idk I haven't read it), but I love the visual of Shen Wei literally coming apart in Zhao Yunlan's arms.
Thanks to this Twitter thread, there is no need to watch My True Friend for the Zhu Yilong parts.
"re: a certain article praising cql for its restraint in showing a slow burn romance: censorship and other restrictions cause a lot of interesting creative work as creators develop tactics to survive life under oppression. those tactics should not be credited to the oppressors."

Ghost Story is back from beta! *eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!*

I need to flesh out one scene (which I kinda knew already) and sent it to a second reader to see *cough* if she thinks there's too much sex. I mean...there is a lot of sex (bc lbr I love to write it) but I want to make sure it's not getting old by the end. I want that last sex scene to have a big emotional punch and not start with a feeling of "oh god, more sex?"

Wednesday's reading was fine.Two people read from stories not by them and they were both notoriously, famously bad fics. Everyone but me thought it was hilarious. I thought it was, idk, kinda shitty? I mean, we in fandom laugh at My Immortal but when you present it to the general public as something to be mocked I...didn't like it. I was, in fact, made really uncomfortable by it and I was glad I went first so I didn't have to read after one of them. In fact, only three of the six pieces read weren't presented in a satirical way. I'm going to tell the organizer that I won't participate in next semester's fanfic open mic night if people read stuff they didn't write as an opportunity to mock it. People might think I'm stick-in-the-mud about it, but oh well.

Another kinda weird thing I didn't think was cool was there was someone there from the student newspaper to cover the event but none of the readers were told ahead of time. The organizer said she hadn't told anyone "so nobody got nervous" but I'm kinda like...that's...not...consensual? She asked us afterward who didn't want their image/whatever to be used, but I'm like, couldn't they have done that to begin with? And just, you know, not covered the people who didn't want to be? 

IDK the whole thing seemed a little off from a fan perspective and the more I think about it the more I'm bothered by it.

Late addition but if I wait until tomorrow, everyone will have already linked to it:


A Chinese New Year multi-fanwork exchange at sundial_exchange. For Guardian and Guardian-related canons.

Mostly. I've been adding to this post for like four days. Time to just publish it.
( Cut to save your reading pages )

Oh, and I only got three paragraphs into the sex scene before I had to tap out. This is just not working for me and I'm pretty sure now it's not the ~issue with narrative~ like before (and unfortunately, is not as easy a fix). Taking today off from writing to fuck around in the craft room. Cover a couple more tea canisters and maybe make an art card or two. Anyone want an art card (similar to what I did for my Con*Strict name badge)? I don't mind mailing internationally. Heck, if you want a tea canister and are willing to help with shipping, I'll make you one of those too. I got my dSSS assignment, so I need to get my hand back in that game before I go producing an exchange gift. 

This Guardian Twitter thread is 100% accurate. The "don't you dare try to fckin sacrifice yourself again you stubborn mf" line could be the show's tagline (or, more appropriately and likely perhaps) an episode title.

The new OTW icon that showed up in my email this morning (see icon) made me laugh so hard I actually cried. Don't piss off the combo of lawyers and librarians, y'all. Especially lawyers and librarians who are mostly women.

Got my Bingo card!


This week's Tumblr collection is Tuesday, October 15: Floors.

I tried to put this under a cut but apparently DW doesn't let you paste a bullet list under a cut? IDK. LJ's cut tag function is the only thing I like better about that platform. le sigh Sorry this will take up a bit of real estate on your reading pages.

Found on Twitter:

• Kyoshi Warriors cosplay at New York Comic Con.
• Me, a bridge member of Gen X and a survivor of Windows 95: *watches while rocking back and forth, measuring the progress bar religiously at intervals, saying incantations for a safe install
• Weilan fanart that puts into perfect visual that moment in Lollipop when ZYL tips backward into the bed. I know the artist didn't purposefully illustrate my fic, but other than them wearing the wrong clothes, that's 100% how I pictured it.
• Super cute Zhu Jiu fanart
• Gorgeous Weilan fanart promoting a library event (?)
• This short Twitter thread from naye makes me happy for people in non-shithole countries with reasonable employment laws. When I got sick(er), my department chair at the time fought me every step of the way, including telling me I couldn't work from home any more than I already had (even though I could absolutely do at least 75% of my job remotely). When a new chair took over the department, she was supportive of my cautious return-to-work schedule but her efforts couldn't save me from being laid off (a university decision based, I'm sure, largely on my long absences despite stellar annual reviews and a spotless 20-year employment history in the job). 
• Fairy tale Weilan fanart. After loving FayJay's Guardian Gothic so much, I am here for more Guardian fairy AUs. I mean, I'm always up for fairy tales, especially ones with Actual Faerie Danger, so this isn't surprising. So who's up for writing them? It's not me! I have a Canadian Shack, a porny one-shot, and Garage Mechanic AU lined up. Get on it, folks!
• I love behind the scenes stuff (such a sucker for DVD extras) and this bts photo from Guardian cracks me up. That is exactly the Zhu Hong in Ghost Story's expression after Zhao Yunlan has made yet another spectacularly bad life choice. Poor thing looks So Done.

From Tumblr, can anyone explain to me what is happening in this with the nose-punch? This one's Chinese, not Korean, like the other fanart translation I was wondering about (which, btw, thank you, umadoshi <3 !). Yet another thing my job loss took--fun and simple access to people speaking loads of different language (a rarity here in the heartland of these fine united states).

Couple days ago I saw this headline about China breeding pigs "the size of polar bears" and then yesterday I saw this one about pigs using tools. Maybe this is the sign of the true end times. In this, the worst timeline, we're going to be taken over by my favorite animal for eating. I always suspected it might be the case, but it appears that yes, I probably am going to be one of the first against the wall in this age's revolution.

Before the revolution comes, though, I want to go back and comment to so many fics I've read lately. I have three that I want to leave oodles of glowing praise for, but my brain cells are currently occupied elsewhere. It's good consolation to know that it's always fun to get comments weeks after posting.

Everyone and their dog (including people I usually agree with) is raving about that damn Atlantic article so I feel like I need to go read it again. See what/how I read it wrong. That's absolutely taking second priority to the comment-leaving though, for reasons which can be (ironically?) inferred from the article itself. Hard to get motivated to do so, though, when this article by Laurie Penny (I love her so much y'all, she has yet to disappoint me with anything) is fucking brilliant and moving. I'm including it in this week's dump, but it pairs well as a companion piece to the Atlantic one, imo.

Waiting for mckitterick to get up so I can start cooking. Probably the best way to do that is start working on Ghost Story...

Discovered on Monday that 30 minutes at anything other than minimum resistance on the stationary bike is too much. Got home feeling mostly okay, but halfway through a bowl of soup I got hit with the Fatigue Bat and wound up sleeping for an hour and a half. *sigh* So Tuesday I didn't gym, but I did 90 minutes of deep tissue work a friend who's going through some shit. It's still early so I'm going to see how I feel after the sun comes up before I make the decision to gym today.

I don't enjoy being reminded that recovery is not linear, and for some problems it's only over when everything else is. =\

Writing is going better now, but I had a rough time this weekend. Everything was a fuckin' slog. Even the actual fuckin'  was more of an exercise in (my) stamina than an indulgence. I'm itching to start Canadian Shack, and fanart like this Is Not Helping.

Speaking of fic, fan responses to the AO3 Hugo continue to be fantastic.
I am done with listening to gatekeeping men who want to put lines around our creativity, who want to declare that while yes, two authors can both win for "best novella" and a team of 6 can win a "best fanzine" or "best podcast" award, a team of a million can't possibly win the "best related work" award.

I have such a smoking kink, y'all. Have some Bai Yu as Detective L pushing A LOT of my buttons. 

If you don't already subscribe to R. Eric Thomas's newsletter, I highly recommend it. This week's made me seriously and for real laugh out loud more than once.

Literal. Ice. Knives. Thanks, naye ! Speaking of OUCH, frith_in_thorns  has a great h/c conversation on their DW that focuses on the hurt aspect. It's not Guardian-specific, so for those (few) of you not in the fandom can still appreciate the discussion. That said, if you, too, are in the Hurts So Pretty camp, I can't recommend the show enough.

Wishing (for several reasons) that there was any hope I could finish Ghost Story this month to fulfill October's theme of Full Moons, Hauntings, and Harvests at brush_and_lantern . I started it August 20, and the only days I haven't written something were August 28 and 29 for a current total of 50,042 words. That's (I think--math is not my strong suit and tbh my ability to count reliably above fourteen is questionable), twenty-nine days of writing, with an average of 1,725 words a day. So in theory I could finish writing it (I'm just over halfway through the story's nine-month timeline) but let's get real, I do have something of a life to live, minimal though it be, and I wouldn't ever expect a beta to get through this monster before the 31st. Kinda fun to think about, though!

A less expensive version of this happened in every. single. restaurant (oh, except for the pizzaria in Venice) we went to in Italy (back in 2007). We eventually stopped eating in actual restaurants and stuck to taking advantage of bars that served food (which was usually better and less expensive).

ETA: just saw on sid_guardian  that Guardian is good to go for Yuletide and it frustrates me that this might be the only time I can participate (I'm rarely this involved in a fandom, much less a small one) and I don't think I can because of energy resources. I'm still waffling on signing up for due South Sekrit Santa, even. /o\

Jaw-droppingly good Weilan cosplay found on Twitter. Just...that third pic especially ? Good Lord.

Haven't written anything since I sent the third fic to beta and am actually feeling a little...at sea? It's weird. I I want to start on the Space Poem but idk, my brain isn't being cooperative. I have lots of good lines for it--just need the inspiration to put them together.

But today I have a headache and what I want to do is veg out on the couch with fic and food and Kpop music videos in between. What I am  going to do, though, is peel myself away from this computer and go work in the kitchen since we have literally nothing to eat in this house that doesn't require extensive food prep. So....

*channeling my inner Shen Wei for cooking inspiration*