So you filled your hands

I often like to carry around an emergency paperback novel when traveling, and for a recent while this was Joan Aiken's Smile of the Stranger, but then I had to take it out and read it because the emergency was that the book is from 1978 (this edition) and the cover was crumbling into pieces under the pressures of my purse.

Anyway, Joan Aiken's romance novels are usually either a Weird Disappointment or a Weird Delight; this one absolutely falls into the category of Weird Delight. The premise: it is the 1790s, the French Revolution has just broken out, and Our Heroine Juliana is living in genteel poverty with her father in Italy writing epic historical biographies, which has resulted in her vow to never marry a man unless he resembles her blorbo, King Charles I.

Juliana's father is dying, and that plus the ominous arrival of a Mysterious Woman decides him on fleeing them both across war-torn France to try to get back to his estranged British family, feverishly dictating the Blorbo Biography as they go. En route, Juliana rescues the life of a man that the mob is about to hang a la lanterne; he pays back the debt by smuggling Juliana and her father across the Channel on his hot-air balloon, along with a shipment of vintage porcelain chamber pots that he's been commissioned to recover from France by the Prince of Wales.

Alas! the hot air balloon chamber pot smuggler is round, pleasant, and looks nothing like Charles I, so Juliana immediately rejects him as a love interest;

Alas II! her father coughs his last and expires IMMEDIATELY upon crossing the threshold to the estranged family home;

Alas III! the estranged family consist of a Very Angry Grandfather who wants nothing to do with Juliana and a Mean and Foolish Aunt who wants to marry Juliana off to the elderly, evil, and syphilitic peer to whom she owes many gambling debts;

HOWEVER there does appear to be a New Guy in Town ... and he does in fact have Charles I moustaches?!

Juliana's further adventures include various kidnappings and elopements, accidentally adopting an angry urchin, accidentally being adopted by an middle-aged French aristocratic mistress and her polyamorous household, chasing a monkey all around a small English village, learning terrible truths about her long-lost mother, kidnappings AGAIN, and, perhaps, learning that winning a Charles I Lookalike Contest is not the only romantical factor worth considering when planning a happy future. Well, all's well that ends well!

Dear Songxuexiao-daozhang... fancy seeing you here.

I am stupid excited for whatever it is you make for me. It's going to be great — thank you! I hope my prompts aren't too vague — please feel free to reach out through the mods if you want any explication from me. I haven't been in the fandom for a minute, but my CQL works are here on AO3, and I've also got a phenomenally curated fic recs list here on DW.

Some things I love: Anything that answers the question (or asks more of the question!) Wait, who am I? Who are you? Who are we? Identity fuckery is the best kind of fuckery — that's anything that uses a conceit to ask who we really are and what that means, for oneself and in communities. Reincarnation, character bleed, disguise, code-switching, fear of exile alongside fear of belonging, monstrosity, all of that is my catnip. Nothing is sexier than being equals, which doesn't mean being all the same way.

I love transformations, strong commitments to voice, world and genre, enthusiastic bisexuals and anyone who loves ladies, true ensembles, people who Care Too Much about things, big feelings in general, Xue Yang's incredible creative genius, Song Lan's insistence that he's normal in direct proportion to how deranged he actually is, Xiao Xingchen's off-kilter but deeply held morality, everyone being outsiders, everyone being both peripheral and obsessively superlative at What They do, warped coping mechanisms with an internal logic and anything that focuses on all the senses. Please feel free to be funny, especially at the worst moments!

If you are comfortable with explicit stuff, have a blast! If you are not, also have a blast! I don't have, like, a list of sex acts I require, but I do love being very inside the body of the POV as a reader. This also applies to violence, which I also love!

Some things I don't care for: I am genuinely turned off by... caring about size differences. Yes, lol etc! I don't want Xue Yang tiny or anything like that. (He's not tiny, Wang Haoxuan is like, average to slightly tall, the other two are just huge!) Please also no bodily excretions stuff (scat/pissplay/omo, cum-eating/creampies, facials), sex worker/courtesan/concubine AUs, tentacles, A/B/O, sexual assault or denigrating female and non-male characters, even in character.

( The Prompts! )

Disclaimer, fuck Dropout to the moon and back (derogatory). However: woof, time is a lion, or something.

Man, shit's happened over the last... two months?? I was driven off the road while biking to my first kickball game at the end of August, but the driver turned out to be a super embarrassed and new-to-driving-in-Chicago baby physician assistant–to-be, so despite my super gnarly cuts and bruises, she took me to Walgreens, bought a bunch of first aid supplies, ~dressed my wounds and drove me to the game on time. I needed her to calm down and stop apologizing, so we talked about kdramas on the ride down and hugged and exchanged numbers. Only I would turn a bike accident into a friend??

It's just been that kind of time over here. ( But wait, there's more! )

The good news is that I am taking today off work to do as much nothing as possible, with a side helping of household organization that has eluded me this busy fall so far. Next step, I guess, is figuring out what I'm going to do for Thanksgiving and The Holidays, but in between that, I am reading books, I am loving on Gingko, I am decorating my living space, I am planning to use my rowing machine, I am working my way back to my banjo and accordion, I am giving myself a goddamn break. ✶

I don't think Frances Hardinge's latest, Traitor's Nest, is going to end up one of my all-time favorites of her books, but I'm really interested in it as an interesting creative stretch from her -- an ambitious book and in some ways a bigger one than she usually writes.

The premise of Traitor's Nest is that we are in medieval not!England, and the place is studded with castles, most of which usually hang out in one place most of the time but any of which can, without warning, be swapped with each other to put into a different location as part of the Great War Game being played by [demigods/the Them/in this book they are called Players]. This is somewhat unfortunate if you are a medieval peasant whose life depends on the lord of your lands understanding how much time, tithe and labor you can safely give to said lord while still putting in enough work on your own lands to survive the winter without starving. If the lord of the castle suddenly gets swapped out for a new lord who does not really care if enough of his tenants survive the winter to provide time, tithe, and labor next year because his castle is going to be somewhere else by then with different tenants then anyway, things can go Badly.

Burr, the book's protagonist, is one of said unfortunate medieval peasants, a teenager whose family and community end up caught between the rock of starvation and the hard place of rebellion. After a series of escalations, Burr and his village sort-of-accidentally end up in possession of a cursed castle of their own, complete with highborn maiden (who doesn't want to be there), knight in shining armor (who's been deeply complicit in exploiting the peasantry but is also the only one present who understands medieval warfare), court politics (everyone in the village is Very Stressed about their new moving castle and has Very Different ideas for what they ought to do about it) and feudal responsibilities (what happens when you are poaching peasants and your castle arrives in a new area that has been patiently awaiting the arrival of an authority who can pass judgment on their poaching peasants?)

Frances Hardinge is very, very good at setting up a Situation, ratcheting up the tension unbearably, and then flipping it over to examine it from a completely different angle which relieves one tension while abruptly escalating another. Usually she is also doing this while putting highly specific pressure on one or two very intense interpersonal relationships between feral and/or traumatized teens and their morally ambiguous mentors. Traitor's Nest does most of this, but her palette is both bigger and a bit more diffuse -- instead of laser focusing on a couple of freaks [laudatory], Traitor's Nest puts an entire community of largely normal people into the pressure cooker to see what happens. Burr is one of the most nice, normal and responsible young men that Hardinge has ever written; he has several adults available who are also mostly nice and responsible but deeply in over their heads; and while there is a morally ambiguous mentor present, he is sort of attempting to morally-ambiguous-mentor the whole village while Burr glowers responsibly from across the room. There are of course a couple of classic Hardinge feral little girls present getting into classic Hardinge feral-little-girl situations, but they are just a couple of threads of the broader tapestry.

I appreciated this book a lot; I enjoyed the portrait of a community in crisis where every member of that community mattered to somebody, the careful examination of the medieval feudal system from the bottom up, and the meticulous escalation of its own worldbuilding. The counterbalance is that I found I didn't feel as deeply about any of the characters and relationships as I usually do when Hardinge herself goes into them more deeply. I'm curious if she can do both at once, broad and deep, and I have a lot of faith that the answer is yes -- I'll be very interested to see where she goes next from here.

Now, I do also think it's very funny that this is a book that ( spoilers )