nnozomi

I didn’t sign up for the Guardian Wishlist this year, but I did have a lot of fun with the many lovely things in the collection, and also wrote four short fics because I couldn’t resist; many thanks to trobadora and china_shop and everyone else for making it happen.

Latest Chinese vocabulary from the farmboys:

一筹莫展 at wits’ end, hitting a wall, up a creek without a paddle
个鬼 stuck onto words, verbs in particular, to indicate “my ass,” “the hell I will,” etc. (I’m glad this one snuck under the wire of the cursing allowed on the show, on account of it’s fun)
么么哒 mwah!, onomatopoeia for a kiss
社恐 short for 社会恐惧症, social phobia/social anxiety, but used colloquially to refer to general shyness/social awkwardness
呼噜 to snore (also to purr, if you’re a cat)
冰溜子 an icicle

Other Chinese-related bits and pieces. Dumb joke (actually doesn’t work in Chinese) for the day: so if someone made a version of the farmboy show that was just the same except in a xianxia setting, would they be cultivators practicing cultivation?
Today’s Chinese/Japanese confusion: me staring at 床の上 and thinking blankly “on the floor? on the bed? ???”. Solution: as long as the の is there it’s probably “on the floor,” if it’s just 床上 it’s probably “on the bed.” Goddamn 假朋友.
Serious question. In English (or in Chinese, for that matter), is there a simple way to refer to “people who sing in Sinophone languages/dialects” that isn’t linguistically/geopolitically difficult? I mean, if I’m talking about Zhou Shen I will say “a Chinese singer” without demur, but what happens when I add in, for instance, A-Mei, Wu Qingfeng, Stefanie Sun, Li Hao, Jike Junyi, Ayanga, Karen Mok…who cover a range of ethnicities/language groups/nationalities for which “Chinese” alone doesn’t seem sufficient, but what’s the alternative? “C-pop” seems awfully vague. Per a-Pei, “Chinese singers” would work when talking to mainlanders but wouldn’t fly with people from Taiwan or Singapore. “Sinophone singers” is kind of awkward (also elen pointed out that “Sinophone band” sounds like somebody invented a new instrument, as in “oh, cool, you played the sinophone in high school too?”). Ideas?

Japanese translation headaches: do I let these characters say “jeez”? I wouldn’t have them say “Jesus Christ” or “oh my God” (interestingly, I might feel okay about using “oh my God” for a text originally in Chinese/a fic for a cdrama, etc., having literally heard people say 我的老天爷 more than once, but the same does not apply in Japanese), but then again “gee” is also (I think?) derived from the same place and it certainly wouldn’t bother me. Where does the line fall?
Chinese translation headaches: in a word, or three, fucking sibling words! 哥 and 姐 in particular are so often used and so flexible that trying to come up with alternatives that do the same job and sound natural is a pain in the ass.
Original stuff: I’ve just hit 30K, which is about right for where I am in my outline; progress has been very slow because I keep putting off writing until the very last thing at night when I’m already sleepy, so I just want to hit my minimum and go to bed. I do not need to do that! I have time in my day I could use for it! but somehow I don’t. Currently I am listening to A asking all the people in her life weird questions and waiting to see what she’s going to do with the answers she gets, since I don’t know either.

I love academics with a sense of humor. Encountered for a work thing, the English-language website of a Peking University|北大 professor whose pocket bio reads “Ruixuan Chen is a man from Middle Earth. He seems to have received some education, and claims to have discovered something – but the details remain obscure and suspect. Little is known of his early life, even the last character of his given name is an issue of dispute. He is now working in Beijing as a translator of Buddhist texts from arcane languages. When he procrastinates, he considers himself a gourmet (de gustibus non est disputandum).”

Rereading Gregory Rabassa’s memoir of a career in literary translation from Spanish and Portuguese, which is very funny and occasionally thought-provoking.

“Then there are those people…who assert that God’s name is, in fact, Howard, as in ‘Our Father which art in Heaven, Howard be thy name.’ I can’t see how anyone could be an atheist with a God named Howard and it also might explain why the universe is such a mixed-up place.”
“There were two types of parlance that I encountered in the army. The first was official military-speak, which to my still-civilian ear seemed backwards and silly, as in ‘gloves wool olive-drab.’ The second was soldier-speak, much more colorful and inventive… I remember the posted outcome of some court-martial proceedings that combined the two aspects into a delightful linguistic merger. It seems that a soldier had been brought up on charges of insubordination and the specific charge said in part ‘…and upon being reprimanded by Sgt. [So-and-So] did call Sgt. [So-and-So] a mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch or words to that effect.’ The intriguing problem is trying to ascertain what other words might have had that same effect.”
“I’ve tried to figure out if [knowing an author personally] is of any help for a translator beyond direct questions, whether a sense of nearness lets me hear the voice of these particular people as I interpret their words. If I am the translator I am supposed to be, it really shouldn’t make any difference and yet I do hear their voices along with their personal pronunciations and intonations. This is that misty world of translation that is hard to describe.”
(Also Rabassa employs the neologism “tauroscatic” (referring to a particular manner of speech) which I find delightful.)

Photos: Bad smartphone photo of the full moon celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival dramatically; more morning-glories (no, my chili pepper plant is not actually blooming with morning glories, it just looks like it; more crepe myrtle and something else pink; a summer maple; a dinosaur in a company window; and the weirdest vending machine I’ve seen yet, which promises to squeeze you a glass of fresh orange juice on the spot.

Be safe and well.

okay, I’ve had a rotten week (nothing at all serious, I had a corona shot and it always gives me a multi-day headache, which wiped out a day and a half altogether this time plus subsequent tail-end), so this post is very self-indulgent. Comment and link me to two or three of your fics (or artwork, DW/elsewhere posts, anything you made, I always just think of fic first because it’s what I do) that you feel could use more attention, or that are among your favorites in general, I’m not fussy. I will guarantee, knock wood, to comment on at least one work in each comment within…let’s say within April, that seems realistic. Also feel free to ramble about each linked work in your comment!
Here are mine, then. I’ve been fortunate enough to get a good reception for all of them, so I can’t really say they didn’t get enough attention, but I feel like they’re the odd ones out that I’m particularly fond of.

The Language of the Enemy (The Rebel, 6K, Chen Moqun/Lin Nansheng, E)
This is hard to ask people to read because a) it’s a small fandom consisting of a 40+-episode Chinese Republican-era TV drama; b) the fic is unlikely to make sense if you don’t know the canon, but it’s also slightly canon-divergent; c) it’s just on the far side of explicit (so maybe too much sex for people who prefer it without, and not enough for people who prefer it with). Even so I think it’s one of the best things I’ve written.

Two Hearts (Guardian, 35K, Zhao Xinci, T)
Not only is this twice as long as the next longest fic I’ve ever written, it’s set post-canon with the canonical character deaths, meaning that Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan only appear in memory, and it focuses on the, er, not exactly universally beloved Zhao Xinci. For whatever reason I have always had a lot of Zhao Xinci feelings, though, and I needed to mop them up with something like this fic, which also contains a lot of discussion of and by other secondary characters and original characters, as well as Dixing and Haixing worldbuilding that crept in around the edges.

Internal Autonomies (Vorkosiverse, 13.5K, original characters, T)
This is a much older fic set in the Vorkosiverse but featuring entirely original characters, other than in reference. All worldbuilding and character-building and I’m still very fond of it.

Give me yours?

New orchestra music includes Sibelius 3, which I can do without—like so much of Sibelius, it’s both strenuous and unrewarding to play. On the other hand, I hated #7 the whole time we rehearsed it but now I quite like listening to it, so maybe there’s hope, we’ll see. The main symphony is the Rhine, Schumann 3, an old friend—I think this is the third, maybe fourth time I’ve played it, and while there isn’t much new to discover what’s there is wonderful, especially the exuberance of the first and fifth movements, and the sad, stately glory of the fourth (between the minor-key start and the counterpoint, I always think of it as if captioned with “The people mourn as Bach ascends into heaven”).
In other recent listening, Elis Regina singing Cartomante—I think I link to this here every time I listen to it, but it’s just that good. “Porque na verdade, eu te quero vivo…”
Also I went back to some half-forgotten William Bolcom songs recently—I have mixed feelings about Bolcom, but if you need something to make your day a little brighter try Amor. The linked recording is one I found more or less at random on YouTube, with Adèle Charvet singing; I looked her up and found that her grandfather, Charles Ewanjé Epée, is a singer-songwriter from Cameroon, this is one of his songs (watch out for flashes in the video).

Reading a nonfiction Japanese book about women graduates of the National Defense Academy (the college for the Self-Defense Forces). A little too much in the way of broad strokes and for-public-consumption (I also can’t help wonder if the women in the book would have been more natural and forthcoming if the author weren’t a man), but interesting, especially the account of daily life at the Academy itself, obviously modeled on West Point (I have a thing about unique educational environments and own a handful of books about West Point, where I’ve never set foot), and reacting in essentially similar ways to the initial introduction of women cadets (in 1992). Among the other points that strike me is that, while I’m not halfway through yet, three out of the four women profiled so far ended up divorced; the exception, married to a fellow SDF officer and stationed separately, is managing childcare with help from her father-in-law (not her mother-in-law), who moved in to share the load. Also, there’s a family of four sisters who all went to the Academy, good grief.

Rereading various things in English.

G. Willow Wilson’s The Butterfly Mosque, which is a gorgeously written account of becoming a Muslim, marrying an Egyptian man, and living in Cairo (not actually in that order). Her description of having learned all the things she needs to live as an adult in Cairo (shopping for live ducks for dinner, sharing Friday prayers with other women at a shrine, dancing at family weddings, mastering Egyptian Arabic idioms, choosing tomatoes without maggots), and how little she knows about living as an adult in the US, her home country, got to me.
Kate Gilmore’s Remembrance of the Sun is also about a romance in a Muslim country, this one a novel rather than a memoir: Iran on the eve of the revolution, where Jill and her pleasantly weird family are spending the year, and Jill meets the proto-revolutionary Shaheen because, improbably enough, they both play French horn in the high school band. Funny, sad, and romantic, full of incredibly evocative descriptions of the setting, pulling no punches about the fucked-up complexity of the political and social situation, using the Egmont Overture beautifully to link Shaheen’s revolutionary vision and the passions (for music as well as each other) he and Jill share.
Also a novel by Kate Gilmore but totally different is Jason and the Bard, set at a professional summer stock theater putting on a repertory of six Shakespeare plays, where the titular Jason is one of six high school apprentices taking part. There is a plot, having to do with a string of practical jokes and an actor with poor recall, and there is some romance, but basically they’re just excuses to write a whole book about the joy of Shakespeare summer stock, and it works. The discussion of the plays is sometimes really moving and always thoughtful, especially Antony and Cleopatra (the image of the dawn light shining onto the dying Cleopatra in the last exhausted moments of a tech rehearsal!), and the description of all these strong and disparate personalities—technicians as well as actors—coming together to make them happen is a delight. It’s a book from thirty years ago, but I think it stands up. Two of the major characters are Black; their characterization is not limited to being Not White, but the narrative is aware of the microaggressions they run into as well. Some of the adult actors and at least one teenage apprentice are heavily implied to be gay—in a 2024 edition I think this would be much more up-front. (The treatment of hapless twelve-year-old Colette, the villain of the piece in many ways, is pretty ruthless, but always makes me smile on account of I knew a dead ringer for her, who by her mid-teens had become a thoughtful, sardonic, attractive person with many talents, so I have hope for Colette too.)

I found some deleted scenes from one of my LTR fics (written when I thought the fic was going to be Bai Haotian/Huo Daofu/Liu Sang, which it ultimately refused to be), and actually I kind of like what they’re doing? I’m not in the habit of writing AUs of my own fic and also porn is not my forte, so this may never go anywhere, but here’s a bit to get it out of my system.

this part is more or less SFW

Bai Haotian perched on the windowsill, feeling the curtain ruffle her hair, and took the opportunity to wriggle out of her tights and panties while she watched the two men undress.
They were both dressed to the nines and it was a complicated process, not helped by the fact that both of them seemed constitutionally incapable of just dropping a piece of clothing to the floor once they took it off. When she saw Huo Daofu fold his waistcoat, crisp as new lettuce, and look up to make eye contact with Liu Sang, who was hanging his jacket carefully on a padded hanger, Bai Haotian started to giggle and didn’t even try to stop herself.
She was no longer concerned about whether either of them really wanted to do this: it was there in the heightened color across Liu Sang’s cheekbones, in Huo Daofu’s elevated breathing. He was the first to finish undressing, and Bai Haotian settled back on the palms of her hands to watch as, the last step, he took off his wristwatch with deliberate care and set it on the tidy pile of folded clothing.
Liu Sang, who had started by taking his watch off, was down to boxer shorts and undershirt. He hesitated, as if a little unnerved by suddenly finding someone else naked in his bedroom, and Huo Daofu went to him and slipped his glasses off.
“What--?”
“Take your shirt off,” the doctor said, in a reasonable facsimile of his usual crisp tones, and Liu Sang did. The color in his face was spreading down to his throat. He tried to reclaim his glasses and Huo Daofu pulled them away. “You’ll manage without them.”
“Then—” The one word came out husky and he cleared his throat. “Then you’re taking yours off.”
Huo Daofu hesitated.
“You heard him, Huo-ge,” Bai Haotian called from her windowsill perch.
Huo Daofu took a visibly deep breath and took his own glasses off, setting them carefully down along with Liu Sang’s on the bedside table. That meant neither of them had anything left to take off. Bai Haotian slid down from the windowsill and stood where she was, suddenly breathless with tension.

Photos: Various flowers, a canal, a very old photographer’s studio, a cat on a warm roof.

Be safe and well.

The little park nearby where I run in the mornings, adjacent to an elementary school, has some empty flower beds with construction-paper signs reading “Baby tulips are sleeping under here.” I’m incredibly tempted to add a little note saying “Colorless green ideas are sleeping furiously…”. (Contemplating the translation into Japanese, you’d have to decide whether green was 绿 or 青 to begin with, and then there kind of is a Japanese word that means “sleeping furiously,” 爆睡, “explosive sleep”—equivalent to sleeping like a log, being dead to the world.)
ETA: omigod, all I did with the Wikipedia article was remind myself of the pretty tulip bulb quote, I didn't even notice till now that in the section right above that my 偶像 Chao Yuen Ren is doing the same thing! Trust him.

Working at Book 3, trying to stay at about 500 words a day; sometimes yes, sometimes no. The best thing is when a path opens up somewhere I didn’t expect one. Yesterday and today I took time off to write a fic, more or less on the spur of the moment—sometimes I just miss Shen Wei.
What little random headcanons do you have, about favorite books/dramas/etc. etc.? I think I’ve written maybe half a dozen fics which touch in passing on glassmaking as a traditional Dixing craft—they have sand and fire, after all. Now I can’t shake the idea of it.

LannaMichaels was asking for fic prompts and I requested some more of her Vorkosigan radioverse, and got a truly fantastic new installment in the series—very canon-divergent, sort of epistolary, Greg(or), Duv, and Ekaterin. Highly recommended, along with the series as a whole.

Assorted musical notes
🎵Orchestra concert coming up in two weeks, so that we had an extra-long rehearsal including a complete run-through. By the time the Schubert symphony was finished, fifty minutes with practically no rests, everyone was in rags and tatters; I expect it’ll be somewhat less exhausting on the day, thanks to adrenaline, but jeez!
🎵Listening to Moszkowski’s Joan of Arc a lot, also very long (and probably just as tiring to play). Not as purely gorgeous as the E major piano concerto, but for some reason very satisfying for me, although I don’t know that I would recommend it to anyone not already fond of Romantic orchestral music.
🎵My mother had cause for some reason to quote the jazz pianist Hampton Hawes, upon being asked how he felt about electronica: “Man, I don’t put nothing down. If they want to play a cabbage, it’s all right with me.” (My mom had for some reason misremembered the phrase and its context as the even more liberal “If you want to fuck a cabbage, it’s all right with me.”)

Be safe and well.

A couple of days late: 中秋节快乐！ The full moon was looking over my morning glories early yesterday morning.

The Guardian wishlist fest revealed on schedule—many thanks to trobadora and china_shop who always make it happen—and I got three gorgeous fics with which I couldn’t be happier. no navy to speak of either is elenothar’s remix of my fic about Shen Wei and language, while mjsakurea’s Mother Tongue also looks at similar themes, and they’re both fascinating in the way they look at language (and very painful, in the good sense, in the way they look at Shen Wei). And mumblemutter wrote me a fantastic Huo Daofu/Bai Haotian fic in not only the sugar, but the days!
ETA: actually I got FOUR fics, now including a lovely, tender bit of worldbuilding and Weilan from sakana17, What its name had been. <3
As for the writing end, I got somewhat carried away and wrote five fics (four as nnozomi, one as scherzanda); for some reason involving a lot of “mid-canon, potential canon divergence” stuff this time. I got to play with favorite characters like Lin Jing and Bai Haotian, do some outsider POV, explore a bit more Dixing worldbuilding, and give the complicated fucked-up relationships of The Rebel one more try, and had a wonderful time.

As if to mark the Mid-Autumn festival, the weather has done that weird thing it does where someone suddenly notices the calendar and pushes the temperature down by 5 degrees C, with no transition period. I am so happy to see the back of summer, I can’t tell you.

I’m very behind on DW reading/comments…as per usual…hopefully today.

Recent posts in senzenwomen include the doctor Kusumoto Ine and the tea merchant Oura Kei.

Translating excerpts from a “Fantasy Science Reader,” using characters and scenes from popular manga/anime etc. to present various basic scientific concepts; the science part is a little too much for humanities person me, even though it’s aimed at kids, but the ideas are fun, and there’s something definitely surreal about looking up anime series details for work purposes.

We’re doing the Brahms Violin Concerto in orchestra and I can’t stop listening to it, Taka’s version (which I can’t link because it’s never been uploaded) and that of Shoji Sayaka, a violinist I’m particularly fond of for her playing itself, because she likes Brahms, and because I’ve seen interviews where she seems shy, soft-spoken, and of few words except when she gets going about music (it’s not like I have a type or anything), and also for her cute round face. (As a bonus, here she is playing the Brahms Double Concerto with Tatjana Vassiljeva. It’s a problem—I can’t just keep listening to these two pieces over and over, but nothing else lives up to them!)

(Re)reading this and that but no decent writeups right now, hopefully next post.

Chinese: Playing around with a couple of fannish-related bits of translation for my own amusement, which may or may not ever get anywhere but they’re fun; watch this space, I guess. Also pleased because Liu Chang’s weekly livestreams are back after a hiatus when he was off filming something (another Liu Sang thing, I think, because he’s grown out his hair again). I wish there were more Liu Chang fans around; I just find him a lot of fun, and his singing in particular blows me away every time.

Writing: After writing a ridiculous quantity of fic words in July through September, I now have a few blank weeks before Yuletide starts; it’s high time I got to grips with the various advice received from kind beta readers for my original thing. Ideally I can revise books 1 and 2 over the fall, alongside Yuletide writing, and start on book 3 properly in the new year… .

Photos: Record of a short trip a bit down south. Two cats and one flower (you can’t tell from the picture, but the hibiscus blossom was larger than my spread hand); a complex of railway, stairs, and gate, a typical shrine tree (camphor, I think), and a dawn castle with bonus station; the sea on the cliffs below a temple, some charms from the temple itself (dedicated to childbirth and featuring lots and lots of symbolic breast images, which I did not photograph for reasons), and a sea-and-islands image of pure fantasy. Also, from the sublime to the ridiculous, a shop sign I could not resist. I think the apostrophe makes it.

Be safe and well.

I wrote another fic, oh dear me. (Best writing motivation: have a playlist of my favorite pieces/songs and only permit myself to listen to it when I’m writing.) This one is entirely thanks to elenothar, who got me to watch Under the Skin; about 8K worth of my favorite character (Lu Haizhou) plus Shen Yi, Du Cheng and ensemble.

In other fannish news, the Guardian Wishlist is still open for signups (or for creating things without signing up). Also I owe a bunch of DW comments that I haven’t gotten to yet…

Speaking of music, here’s my obscure-composer-of-the-moment recommendation, Quartet No. 1 by Vitězslav Novak: introduced to me posthumously by Taka and I think it’s very good indeed. His CD (not the recording linked here, sadly pre-YouTube) pairs it with Beethoven’s Opus 130, which needs no introduction.

Another project, not fannish, that I’m thinking about. Would people be interested in reading a collection of biographical notes on prewar Japanese women (and occasionally Korean/Taiwanese/etc.), posted one person at a time weekly or so to a Dreamwidth account? Specifics: “prewar” here is my catch-all term for the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods, ie 1868 or thereabouts through 1945 ditto. I have a list of about 200 women who were active in that period, including novelists, doctors, murderers, religious figures, educators, activists, actresses, poets, politicians, and princesses, among others. Some lived past the three-figure mark, others didn’t even make it to twenty but made themselves remembered anyway.
Each entry would probably range from 500 to 1500 words or so, based largely on the various reference books I own (from various eras and standpoints, so I wouldn’t guarantee absolute historical accuracy, but it should come pretty close). Potted history of the woman in question and brief discussions of important historical issues/events relevant to her life; as many links as possible among entries, to create a cross-referenceable collection. Hopefully interesting to read as well as informative!

Reading Emily Post on etiquette via Gutenberg, as one does, and being struck here and there by her turn of phrase.

Lengthy selection from Emily Post, with occasional commentary

It would seem that the variability of the weather was purposely devised to furnish mankind with unfailing material for conversation.
[I]t is unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache! To have him open the door collarless and in shirt-sleeves is scarcely worse!
A head can be shaken politely or rudely. To be courteously polite, and yet keep one's walls up is a thing every thoroughbred person knows how to do—and a thing that everyone who is trying to become such must learn to do.Rules for online interactions?
Introspective people who are fearful of others, fearful of themselves, are never successfully popular hosts or hostesses. If you for instance, are one of these, if you are really afraid of knowing some one who might some day prove unpleasant, if you are such a snob that you can't take people at their face value, then why make the effort to bother with people at all? Why not shut your front door tight and pull down the blinds and, sitting before a mirror in your own drawing-room, order tea for two? Yes, why not? Sounds nice to me.
The endeavor of a hostess, when seating her table, is to put those together who are likely to be interesting to each other. Professor Bugge might bore you to tears, but Mrs. Entomoid would probably delight in him; just as Mr. Stocksan Bonds and Mrs. Rich would probably have interests in common. Here I feel “Professor Bugge” is obviously Enrique Borgos. Would the intervention of Emily Vorpost have saved Miles’ disastrous dinner party?
One inexorable rule of etiquette is that you must talk to your next door neighbor at a dinner table. You must, that is all there is about it! Even if you are placed next to some one with whom you have had a bitter quarrel, consideration for your hostess ,,, and further consideration for the rest of the table exacts that you give no outward sign of your repugnance and that you make a pretence at least for a little while, of talking together. At dinner once, Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, "I shall not talk to you—because I don't care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four——" and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her. As soon as she politely could she turned again to her other companion. Making him alternate them with her!!
A very young girl may motor around the country alone with a man, with her father's consent, or sit with him on the rocks by the sea or on a log in the woods; but she must not sit with him in a restaurant. All of which is about as upside down as it can very well be.
If [a baby] cries in church it just has to cry! …It is trying to a young mother who is proud of her baby's looks, to go to no end of trouble to get exquisite clothes for it, and ask all her friends in, and then have it look exactly like a tragedy mask carved in a beet!
No one declined [to spend a week “camping out” with few amenities], not even the Worldlys, though there is a fly in the amber of their perfect satisfaction. Mrs. Kindhart wrote "not to bring a maid." Mrs. Worldly is very much disturbed, because she cannot do her hair herself. Mr. Worldly is even more perturbed at the thought of going without his valet. He has never in the twenty years since he left college been twenty-four hours away from Ernest. He knows perfectly well that Ernest is not expected. But he means to take him—he will say nothing about it; he can surely find a place for Ernest to stay somewhere. Result: Ernest was found a place to stay, made himself supremely useful, and was specifically invited back the next year. Mr. Worldly/Ernest?
The difference though, between letter-writers of the past and of the present, is that in other days they all tried to write, and to express themselves the very best they knew how—to-day people don't care a bit whether they write well or ill. Plus ça change…
Never put a single clinging tentacle into writing. No comment.
A very beautiful Chicago woman who is always perfectly dressed for every occasion, worked out the cost of her own clothes this way: On a sheet of paper, thumb-tacked on the inside of her closet door, she put a complete typewritten list of her dresses and hats, and the cost of each. Every time she put on a dress she made a pencil mark. By and by when a dress was discarded, she divided the cost of it by the number of times it had been worn. In this way she found out accurately which were her cheapest and which her most expensive clothes.This actually sounds kind of practical! Maybe not for evening dresses, but you know.
And if you happen to like to be talked to by strangers, and if they in turn like to talk to you, it can not be said that there is any rule of etiquette against it.

Photos: crepe myrtle/百日紅, which is nice this time of year but very hard to photograph well. Also a grape arbor, the gas bulbs and a passing train, an old house, some stealth figs, a deco-tora, and a lurking cat.

Be safe and well.

·I made (?) two things. The Guardian fic which is basically all my Zhao Xinci feelings in one place is now complete and ended up running to 35K, twice as long as the next longest fic I’ve ever written, which I did not expect. (Wish to hell I could write 35K of even vaguely coherent original work in six weeks!) I think maybe I’ve gotten Zhao Xinci out of my system for a while, but who knows. The fic is also, inevitably, another entry in my administration-saves-the-world series.
Also I’ve spent, oh dear, almost two months poking at another Chinese translation for fun, this one of an interview of Zhu Yilong and Ni Ni, to be found here (on the 0630 sheet), while the original interview is here (via the blessed Wenella; I don’t think she’s posted a proper translation of it, but I may just have missed it). Please note that it is spoilery for 消失的她|Lost in the Stars. Rife with my mistakes as usual, although a-Pei and Xi-laoshi helped me with some of the stickiest places. Notable for very sweet chemistry between them, Ni Ni doing about 2/3 of the talking (see also: all Zhu Yilong’s other shared interviews ever), Ni Ni explaining why she respects him as an actor and also giving him hell (“this from you, Mr. character bleed?”) when she feels he needs it.

·In other cdrama news, elen and I just finished watching Under the Skin, which I enjoyed a lot—good leads, good ensemble cast, lots of competence kink and interesting plot writing. Typically, I fell for a character who only appears in four episodes (Lu Haizhou, played by Zhang Tao), at first because he reminded me of a younger Chen Moqun, and then I kept liking him more the more I saw of him. Am I going to do anything with this? Who knows.

·Listening to San-San-San as it’s known in Japanese, more properly the St.-Saëns Third Symphony, which I’m never gonna get a chance to perform because amateur orchestras can’t afford to do pieces with organs in them, but it’s one of my very favorites and blows me away every single time. I realized that the first measures, the premonitory muttering of the strings, invariably come with a very strong sensory memory: standing on the upper balcony of the vast auditorium where my father’s orchestra rehearsed, listening to them play it, and eating something nougaty and delicious (not white nougat like Toblerones, German-style nougat like this).

·The high school baseball tournament is on—almost over, actually—and I’ve been following it on TV (every game in the national tournament is broadcast on national TV in full, it’s Japan’s national religion, you only think I’m joking) and hoping the Keio team wins, because I’m shallow: unlike almost all the other teams, whose players wear regulated buzz cuts, they’re allowed to have proper hair. Would like to think this also means that they’re somewhat free of the oppressively regulated culture of high school baseball (the fictional Nishiura High School being a shining exception, come to think of it they also have no hair rules), but who knows.

·Reading a couple of Japanese books about language learning experiences.

This got quite long

One is by one of those journalists whose motto is to go places nobody else does and do things nobody else has done, in the course of which he ended up learning bits of French, Lingala, Bomitaba, Spanish, Thai, Burmese, Shan, Chinese, and Wa (three of which I had to look up how to spell in English). His accounts of how to get a working knowledge of a language from scratch on the ground are really interesting (get a native speaker to come up with a bunch of similar but not identical sentences, ie “I eat, you eat, he eats” or “She goes, she went, she will go” etc., and figure out the grammar empirically), and tempt one to go learn a brand-new language somewhere. He talks about having difficulty connecting with French speakers from France, even when having a grasp of the language: “If only the French had different ethnolanguages!” referencing how a sure way to get into conversation in the Congo countries was to ask someone “So what’s your native language?” given the plethora of possible answers. (He really doesn’t like French: I was tickled by the complaint that in French “not only do all the consonants at the ends of words disappear, when there’s a vowel placed after them all these presumed-dead consonants rise up like zombies, it’s a horror show”). He also put me on to “Yokohama Pidgin Japanese,” apparently used for communication among foreigners and Japanese in Meiji-era Yokohama, as summed up in a comical/alarming “dictionary” published in 1879 which has to be seen to be believed (Orientalist all to hell but with not much mercy for foreigners either, and containing an appendix contrasting Chinese and Western pronunciations of Japanese). Weirdly, one of the sites that came up when I looked it up belongs to a university professor whose linguistics research I became familiar with after having met him in a completely different context (friend of a friend of a friend, it’s complicated, he got me some wonderful recordings I couldn’t have found elsewhere). Finally, this journalist describes spending a year in a remote village in the Wa State, speaking three languages (or a language and two dialects, depending on who you ask) none of which he was fluent in. He talks about someone in the village receiving a letter with news that their correspondent was in good health—mailed two years and four months ago, the time lag making him think of communication among different solar systems.
The other book, which I’m actually still working my way through, is by a younger guy who talks about learning Romanian and becoming a published author in Romanian while hardly ever leaving his apartment in Tokyo. I am really turned off by the linguistic tone, which is a sort of heavy forced colloquial style, with 俺 (casual male pronoun) instead of one of the more neutral ones, って instead of と (as in speech, not writing), and だよ thrown in at the end of every sentence, like having “I mean…” or “y’know?” scattered everywhere. (It could be that it grates on me because the latter in particular is very East Japan, and clashes with my West Japan-assimilated ears, but who knows.) He does have some interesting things to say, though, including a discussion of how to translate the title of Usami Rin’s novel 推し、燃ゆ into Romanian, without losing the distinction of the online slang, the comma, and the archaic verb declension (the English title is apparently Idol, Burning; I think My Fave, Aflame might work). Will report further later if he comes up with anything else to the point by the time I finish the book.

Be safe and well.

·Reading a Japanese book on Qing- and Republican-era Chinese SF (for work, believe it or not). Some neat things. Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was first translated into Chinese (via English) in 1900 as 八十日环游记, by the husband-and-wife team of Chen Shoupeng and Xue Shaohui (she quite a bit the more distinguished of the two): he read a translation out loud and she wrote it down in Wenyan, the literary written language of the time. Then there’s the Chinese novel 冰山雪海 (Icebergs and Snowy Seas), published pseudonymously in 1906, in which—among a very long and complex plot—some would-be colonists flee poor conditions in China and end up at the South Pole, where they are joined by several ships full of Black and Jewish Americans fleeing prejudice in the US. What next, I say. Also, “Tarzan” was first serialized in a Chinese magazine in 1923, translated as 野人记 by Hu Xiansheng, with letters from readers proving that anxiety about ongoing WIPs is a constant: “I’m most moved by and most interested in reading Tarzan. …The first section has just finished, but for some reason the second section hasn’t been serialized yet. This is making me very anxious and I can’t enjoy anything. When will the second half come out and bring me joy again?”

·Speaking of WIPs, I have just started posting a fic as a WIP for the first time ever, hoping not to disappoint: the long Zhao Xinci fic I’ve had bits of in my head for a while now. With my original thing with beta readers just now, plus guardian-wishlist not starting until late August and Yuletide, of course, not till Octoberish, I need something to be writing… .
It has occurred to me that if I were more serious about becoming a published author, I would—like one or two people on my f-list—be using this time to write not fic but (theoretically) publishable short stories, among other methods of getting my name out there. And maybe I should, but I’m very resistant to the idea. With only very occasional exceptions, I’ve never been a reader or writer of short stories (fanfic seems different somehow), and I’m not enthusiastic about trying to become one. If I could spend, say, two years writing and submitting short stories and definitely end up with a contract for a published novel, I would certainly give it my best shot, but God knows there is no such guarantee. So, well, it might happen sometime, but not this year.

·A possibly relevant quote in regard to the above, from the one and only Captain Nancy Blackett (I’ve been rereading Swallows and Amazons): “So mother told us he was writing a book and had to be left alone. But we thought it wasn’t his fault to be writing a book, and that we would show him we didn’t think any worse of him for it. But he wasn’t pleased at all.”

·One of the saving graces of summer: frozen tea. Do people do this outside Japan? Take a 500ml bottle of tea (or water), drink a gulp and close it up again, and then put it in the freezer. When it’s thoroughly frozen, wrap it in a towel or similar (so it doesn’t drip everywhere) and sip at lovely cold tea as it gradually melts again.

·Chinese: playing with more interview translations just for fun, no results yet. Because I can’t copy-paste subtitles, I have to apply to the mdbg dictionary to look up characters I can’t read, a process which reminds me nostalgically of using the enormous New Nelson when I was studying Japanese in college. The character 飒 annoys the hell out of me because all reasonable practice would suggest that the radical is 立, but it’s not, it’s 风. Whose good idea was that?

·Orchestra concert next month; Nielsen and Borodin (oh yeah, and Mozart, the Magic Flute overture, which is fine). Borodin usually annoys me with the sentimental melodies, but he also does wild things with rhythm, as noted here before. The second movement opens with just second violins, cello pizzicato, and woodwinds, and then the whole orchestra comes crashing in and the rush of sound is immensely satisfying, especially when seated right in the middle of it. I never think people just listening can have anything like such an immediate experience.

·Photos: A canal in Kyoto and one in Osaka for contrast, some 百日紅, um, crape myrtle? which I always find an underappreciated flower, and some random other stuff.

Be safe and well.

So out of frustration with various (relatively minor) RL stuff I took a half day off from revisions hell and wrote some extremely self-indulgent Guardian fic. The fic proper is canon-compliant; the coda is not, and has a very different mood, so read or not as preferred.

Shen Wei should have known better than to fall asleep.

Set the day after the video game/bomb sequence. Warning for minor (imaginary) gore. Also please note that Shen Wei apparently doesn’t know what printer toner is.

It started as the kind of mundane anxiety dream that Shen Wei had read about and heard about (Cheng Xinyan’s descriptions of her dreams early on in med school had been particularly vivid) but rarely experienced. He was on his knees on the hard linoleum floor of the Bioengineering Department copy room, both hands inside the hard plastic and metal nest of the big copier, trying to find and ease out the wads of torn, crumpled paper so that the machine would forgive him his wrongs and return to its smooth thud-bang-slide processing. But the paper kept tearing away in his hands, leaving him with thin useless shreds while the rest remained clamped within the machine, and it was almost time for class and he had to finish preparing his handouts—

He heard Li Qian’s step behind him and sighed a little with relief. She knew how to handle the copier; she would have everything fixed in no time, and he’d pack her a lunch tomorrow in thanks—“Li Qian?” he said, and turned his head a little to look at her.

The copy machine rumbled into motion, trapping his right hand so that he couldn’t turn, sinking aluminum jaws into his left wrist. Shen Wei caught his breath as pain ran down to his fingertips. Behind him he heard Li Qian scream, a long wail of anger and despair, shredding into nothing as if someone was tearing her away. “Li Qian!” he called out, yanking at his uninjured hand desperately as if he could get some kind of purchase on the machine’s innards.

“Shen Wei, don’t move!” Zhao Yunlan shouted, right behind him.

Shen Wei froze. Something was trickling along the inside of his wrist, maddeningly ticklish, and he couldn’t tell if it was blood or printing ink. “Zhao Yunlan,” he said, hating that he couldn’t turn around.

“Shen Wei, do you know that’s a bomb? Pull it just the slightest bit out of alignment and it’ll go up.”

Of course it was a bomb; what else was he doing here? He had to get it away from Zhao Yunlan, that was the only thing that mattered. Shen Wei twisted his good wrist against the machine’s grip, finding the right angle to set dark energy pooling in his palm. Metal screamed around his hands.

“Shen Wei!”

“It’s all right,” Shen Wei told him, wishing he could see his face, “I’m used to being hurt,” and the bomb went off, taking most of his left hand with it.

He couldn’t see Zhao Yunlan. He couldn’t see anything. He was blind now—it was all right, he had Zhao Yunlan’s blind eyes and Zhao Yunlan had his seeing ones—no—

Shen Wei clawed his glasses, coated in jets of printing ink, off his face and blinked his vision clear. His left wrist was bleeding gouts of dark energy, big sickening arterial pulses. The fingers of his left hand were ghost-white and he couldn’t close them when he tried. First he had to heal the jagged tear in his wrist—

Agony shot from fingertips to shoulder, the clean terrible burn of light energy. Shen Wei staggered, barely caught himself on the kitchen counter. Something crunched under his foot. His glasses.

He couldn’t leave broken glass underfoot for Zhao Yunlan to step on in the morning. Shen Wei sank clumsily to his knees and began to sweep together the sparkling fragments, using his right hand to collect them in the palm of his numb, shaking left hand. He kept seeing more twinkles of glass and then finding nothing there, as the pain-tears refracted in his eyelashes.

Finally the glass was all there in his palm; now all he had to do was fit the shards back into the lenses so that he could be Professor Shen again. His hands shook. The glass sang and shifted, eluding him, until the tears on his face were of frustration as much as pain. It was almost time for class, and he had to finish preparing—he had to—He couldn’t go to class without his glasses, or they’d see he was afraid. No, that was wrong, that was the other mask—without his glasses, the students would see he was Dixingren, they’d—

He turned to correct the spelling on the blackboard, feeling his throat tighten with fear and frustration. Chalk stained the sleeves of his robe, standing out ludicrously against the eponymous Black Cloak. Jiajia had her hand up again. “Professor Shen,” she said, “could you take off the mask, please? We can’t hear.” Shen Wei dropped the chalk, hearing it crunch underfoot. The other students were talking too, all at once, he couldn’t follow the Haixing accents any more.

“Enough!” said Zhao Yunlan from the door, and grinned at Shen Wei in the sudden silence. “Professor Shen, you dropped something.” My glasses, Shen Wei thought with huge, disproportionate relief, and then watched helplessly as Zhao Yunlan held up a gun.

He pressed the muzzle to his own temple, eyes closed and lips moving. Before Shen Wei could read the words on his mouth, the gun went off.

Shen Wei was sitting bolt upright in his desk chair, out of breath, tasting his heartbeat. His left arm throbbed fiercely, hot and tight-swollen the way he remembered from a wound he had taken in his teens, too young yet to have mastered healing himself before the slash got infected. He couldn’t bend his fingers.

Reluctantly he looked at the arm and hand, and found—nothing out of the ordinary. No sign of redness or swelling, no unusual heat, no unhealed wound. The savage ache was already fading, whether it had been the light energy or an artifact of his dream. Or both.

He had been too tense—what Zhao Yunlan would call, ironically in this case, wired—to sleep the night before, only to lie close against Zhao Yunlan, listening to his breathing. Da Qing had lain across their feet for a while, he thought. It had been a long night, and come the morning Shen Wei could feel the light energy outlining every one of his bones. The last thing he’d meant to do was fall asleep at his desk, but he was so tired.

He made himself a cup of heicha, the strong black tea that Professor Shen rarely drank (because it was the closest approximation to Dixing teas, and Professor Shen was a Haixingren) and drank one cup and then a second slowly, leaning against his desk where he could see out the window. Then he set the pot and cup carefully aside for later washing, checked the knot of his tie and the hang of his jacket, and picked up the folder of handouts and notes lying on his desk, marked as usual with a sticky note labeled Junior Seminar 3/21. It was almost time for class.

Coda

(Set in the plum’verse, in which Lu Ruomei survived and Li Qian remained a DCU student.)

“Are you sure you weren’t the one asleep?” said Jiajia dubiously. “I mean, you said it was right after lunch.”

“Absolutely not!” Xiao Quan only went a little red. “I know what I heard. He was snoring.”

“Never!”

“Snoring is caused in part by the sleep position, degree of fatigue, et cetera—”

“—I know, I took intro bio with you—”

“—it’s a physiological reaction. Even Professor Shen has them.”

“I’m not always so sure of that,” said Li Qian, coming up quietly behind them. “Which physiological reaction are you talking about?”

“Snoring,” said Jiajia and Xiao Quan together, and snickered.

Li Qian blinked. “Professor Shen? But he never sleeps in his office.”

“And even if he did, I’m sure he wouldn’t snore,” Lu Ruomei added from her left, leaning in to Jiajia for a high five.

But Jiajia was biting her lip, looking at Xiao Quan. “Do you remember last week’s class…?”

“Of course I do. You didn’t really need to pick him up on that spelling mistake, you know.”

“But he’d rather know then than—Oh, I’m not having this argument all over again. I mean, that wasn’t like Professor Shen, wasn’t it? Maybe he’s not getting enough sleep at night.”

“Let’s go and see if he’s in, his junior class should be done by now,” said Lu Ruomei practically, and they trooped down the hall to Professor Shen’s office.

The door was closed and no sound came from within. “The light’s on,” Jiajia noticed, looking at the window onto the hallway with its closed venetian blinds.

Li Qian brushed her knuckles across the door, and then opened it a crack. “P--?” she began, swallowing the word as it came out. Beckoning the others frantically with one hand, she put the first finger of the other to her lips.

Professor Shen had folded his jacket tidily, laid it on his blotter, and used it as a pillow, face buried in his folded arms. His tie, equally neatly folded, lay on the desk next to his glasses. He was not (quite) snoring.

They regrouped hurriedly in the hallway, while Li Qian closed the door very gently. “I told you—” from Xiao Quan and “He was tired—” from Jiajia mingled. “Should we leave him to sleep?” Lu Ruomei wondered.

Li Qian had her phone out. “I’m texting Chief Zhao—he’ll come and take Professor Shen home.”

“I’ll make sure everything is ready,” Lu Ruomei said, turning back toward the office. She shooed Jiajia and Xiao Quan back when they tried to follow. “Let xuejie. You two are noisy.”

She got two identical glares from two very different faces in reply. “You think we can’t be quiet if it’s for Professor Shen?”

Shen Wei woke slowly, stiff but less exhausted than he had been. The second nap had taken away some of the aftertaste of the first.

It took him a moment to realize that the room was not quite as he had left it. His teacup was clean and dry; the teapot on its little stand was hot to the touch. The untidy pile of student response papers which he had brought back from class was squared off and, he saw, placed in order by student number. Next to his glasses was a sticky note that had not been there before.

Professor Shen (in Li Qian’s tidy handwriting): Please don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Chief Zhao is coming to pick you up. From your students, and she had signed her name, along with Xiao Quan’s comical 100% mark, Jiajia’s 佳², and the petalled swirl of pink highlighter that was Lu Ruomei’s plum blossom.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Words that almost no one would have dreamed of saying to the Black-Cloaked Envoy.

If Professor Shen was so much a part of Haixing as to have students like these, perhaps there was some way still for Haixing and its light energy to become a part of him.

Shen Wei tucked the little note safely under his blotter, hearing Zhao Yunlan’s knock on the door.

(Name silliness: Jiajia is written as 佳佳, so 佳². Xiao Quan’s family name means “all,” so 100%. The “mei” in Ruomei means “plum.”)

Be safe and well.

·Y and I treated ourselves at a new gelato shop recently, with outlandish flavors: coconut, praline/gianduja (always a favorite), blood orange, gorgonzola.

·I think the busy season is winding down; I still have a lot of deadlines for Monday but I'm taking the evening to catch up on DW. Translating a long, very technical paper about the Okinawan Kunigami dialect; most of it is clearly a close relation to Japanese, but there are occasional words like ma (to scold) or oshan (danger) that sound as if they wandered over from Chinese instead, geographically not unlikely.

·For the last few days I've been plotting rather than writing with regard to book 2; every time I think I know how the rest of it is supposed to go, I have to work it out all again, fractally. There are still a lot of gaps, but I think I have a structure that should let me get writing again from today on. I've given up on alternating POVs one for one for one; surely it makes more sense to have A a little bit in the background here, because that's where she is in this book, right? She's at the bottom of her arc while K is at the top of his and R is on his way back up, sort of. To simplify drastically. Oh dear.

·Funny to see YouTube recommending me “Zhou Shen: Sleeping Music” right next to the “Goldberg Variations.” If you can't fall asleep one way, try the other? In other musical news, we're doing Borodin's 3rd (partial) Symphony in orchestra, with a second movement in 5/8, one-two one-two-three, and it always brings to mind Blue Rondo a la Turk. (Rather have an a cappella version, which is how I first discovered it, but I can't find one on YouTube where they're scatting instead of singing the lyrics.)

·Another of my LTR fics (in my scherzanda guise) was kindly recorded by Thimblerig; it's always an honor to have someone spend the time to make a podfic, and she does really nice things with it. (Also it's always kind of a trip to hear something I wrote in a completely different accent from the one inside my head; makes it sound like it's not me?! Neat.)

·Bits of Guardian, listening as background Chinese: wow, Zhu Hong’s speech in episode 31 has to be the longest unbroken piece of dialogue in the whole show, that is A LOT in one place (580 characters, I checked). And Gao Yu'er pulls it off beautifully.
Also, listening to the audio of ep 29 breaks my heart; Zhao Yunlan makes more emotion felt in ten seconds of silence and one laugh than Wang Xiangyang does in all that crying and yelling.

·Rereading two books about dragons: E.K. Johnston's The Story of Owen duology vs Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven.

may contain spoilers

(E.K. Johnston has written three books I like and one I detest, and the latter kind of influences my view of the former now, but I still enjoy them. Also, nobody including McKinley seems to consider Dragonhaven among her best work, but I do like it.) Really the dragons in the two books are only comparable in being large flying things that breathe fire; Johnston's are mindless toxic menaces, and McKinley's are sentient, mindful, language-using and with vast emotional reserves. Johnston uses them to talk about (if generalizations of this kind are meaningful) grass-roots community organizing/collaboration, making sacrificial choices, and how storytelling changes what happens; McKinley is talking about being a parent, being a parent's child, and the long slow process of building communication. In terms of problems, people who know more about it than me have criticized Johnston's use of Canadian First Nations content; as for McKinley I don't much like the way she uses (or doesn't use) Martha and Katie in the storyline, even though I can see how it works thematically. Things I do like--I love the way Johnston's Siobhan thinks in music, especially with instruments, and I like what she does with the character of Owen himself. McKinley makes me care about her weird cast of characters, human and dragon, and the way she works through the dragon language (?) is really fascinating. Anyway. Maybe I should go back and read my ur-dragon books, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, for a parallax view...

Photos: weeping plums, daffodils, two cats in striking settings, and a bridge.

Be safe and well.

Mostly little language-related things:

·One of my Guardian fics, "a language without an army," was translated into French by Loaric; it's an honor to have any fic translated, especially this one, which is all about language anyway. My French is only just about good enough to follow along, but there are some lines which sound far more gorgeous in the translation--"les consonnes coulissant les unes dans les autres," "égrainant du Haixinghua vif et aiguisé," and the rhythm of the last line, "sans l’accent, Zhao Yunlan aurait compris."

·Still very slowly organizing the Chinese Guardian script; amused by a passing moment in episode 30 when you can see Minister Gao think “one Zhao is more than enough stress, now I have to cope with two of them at once?”

·The meta-ness of translating a text that's all about the value of transcribing versus the value of writing (the meaning of creativity, especially for women), with reference to a Tawada Yoko story. (Tawada Yoko's novels are too weird for me, but I like her essays about language a lot.)

·(mildly icky content) The irony of writing in my original thing about magic done with a drop of the caster's blood, when my actual real-life hands are cracking and bleeding here and there (nothing serious, cold weather + frequent handwashing). Inspiration where we can get it!
So far, knock wood, writing is going well, a fairly steady 500+ words a day (minus one day when I just fell stone asleep). Well over 40K now, getting into the second half when basically there's always something dramatic happening; I don't know if I can make it work but it's fun to try, and I love the way that the more I write, the more ideas and themes seem to fall into place.

·New Chinese conversation partner, Xi-laoshi, a friend of a friend in Beijing. Sadly she had not heard of Zhu Yilong; she was coaching me through pronouncing his name correctly (shows you how terrible my accent is, you'd think that's one word I could get right) when I remembered that interview clip of Z1L and Bai Yu teaching each other to say their names in dialect ("Zhu-laoshi? Ju-laoshi?"), and had a hard time keeping a straight face... .

·Music: A YouTube channel based on the history of music compiled by Otto Maria Carpeaux, an Austrian-Brazilian Jew who seems to have been a piece of work. I don't necessarily agree with all his choices of major works in the history of Western classical music, but there is a lot of good stuff in there, and if you want a playlist of almost 400 pieces in chronological order from 13-something to 1962, this is where to go. (The one thing I object to is that the performers aren't cited; that needs fixed.)

Photos: just a few. The year's first 梅通信, letter from the plums; they're hell to take good pictures of but I can never resist trying. Also my four-season strawberries, living up to their name in a modest way; if they survive into a second year maybe they'll be bigger?
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

Because I’m procrastinating on work and writing, my Yuletide post.

My gift: What Tomorrow Brings, by teyla, for The Rebel. Post-canon, a meeting again. Not a context for Chen Moqun and Lin Nansheng that it would have occurred to me to imagine, but it really works, the characterization is excellent, punches are not pulled but at the same time there’s a hint of hope and care. In general I’ve had three wonderful gift fics in a row for this fandom and I feel very fortunate. (The same applies to Yuletide in general, where I’ve always been very well done by.)

Things I wrote: I had three very kind recipients, all with fascinating prompts that really deserve way more fic… .
the casting-forward of desire, Teixcalaan duology. I found this a lot of fun but VERY difficult to write, I think partly because, while I love the Teixcalaan books a lot, they are relatively new to me, and so the tone isn’t embedded in my brain the way older favorites are; I had to keep on going back to the books to check both details and general atmosphere, and I kept finding more things that made me think, I can’t do that! Also I ended up writing THREE examples of Teixcalaan poetry, talk about playing to my weaknesses.
From where she stands to where I stand, Steerswoman series. This allowed me to try out one of my favorite characters, Reeder (and, offstage, his father), and to lean into experimentation with the steerswomen’s principles. Writing post-canon Steerswoman fic always makes me LONG for more canon, when, but that’s inevitable. (Also, a dash of pure unintended Yuletide comedy. My fic title, from an in-canon lyric: “From where she stands to where I stand.” The title of my recipient’s additional treat, not by me and in a completely different fandom: “There she stands.”)
not one jot less than I am, The Rebel. The idea for this came together in one neat sentence or so the day before Yuletide reveals, and I started writing at 11 at night and finished, 4K words later, at 4 am the next morning. This is not my usual writing practice at all and I don’t plan to make a habit of it, but it was fun. That being the case it is not the most polished or the best conceived of anything I’ve ever written, but there are a few lines I really like.

Other things I read, ie especial recs (among a larger number of really good fics):

The Dark is Rising
What Sweeter Music, by sylviarachel The Will/Bran is very nice but the best part is Will as put-upon (but fulfilled) music teacher, obviously written by someone who’s been there.

Diana Wynne Jones
Gently Rise and Softly Fall, by liseuse. Post-The Lives of Christopher Chant, Tacroy and Rosalie work out some trust issues. Funny and also gently moving and thoughtful.
A Castle for a Romantic Poet and a Very Practical Witch, by redsnake05 Sophie and Howl get comfortable in the castle post-canon. Very good Sophie voice (“She very nearly forgave him”), sweet, romantic and funny.
Addendums, by ryfkah. The Homeward Bounders: letters to Jamie from his friends. PERFECT HELEN.
Waymarkers, by Izilen. Dalemark Quartet, Maewen growing up and learning how to live in both worlds. I like the modern-day worldbuilding, and the writing is lovely, just the right kind of spare.

Disco Elysium [I’ve never even played this game, just read enough about it to enjoy the fic]
Commute, by pomfret. Kim moves to the 41st Precinct, with some help. Lovely small moments of warmth and kindness.
Meticulous Attachment, by AntigravityDevice. Harry and Kim have an evening of intimate moments, involving sex, painfully attained shared understanding, and weird sandwiches. Gorgeous.

Lord Peter Wimsey
Some Like it Lukewarm, by Persiflager. Lord Peter and Charles Parker undercover in drag, finding their drab boarding-house-and-drag-show life unexpectedly memorable. Nice little cameos by canon and original characters, too.

Lost Tomb Reboot
Relatedly, by elenothar. Post-canon, Wu Xie spends some time with his uncle while Wu Erbai is recovering, and they practice communication in various languages. Such a good start on all the post-canon Wu Erbai fic I’d like.

Swallows and Amazons
all this covert of the blessed, by lastwingedthing. Nancy POV on a family vacation long after canon, with the torch passed to new pirates, and creative work continuing among the adults.

Tam Lin (Pamela Dean)
What’s to Come is Still Unsure, by edenfalling. A little bit of post-canon Molly and Robin, with a perfect Molly voice.

Teixcalaan duology
Yaotlek: A Retrospective, by poppyseedheart. Long after canon, Nine Hibiscus is officially, and unofficially, remembered. Really appealing original characters, elegant use of language and imagery, exciting ideas.

(should I be worried about putting the word “porn” in a DW post title? will it attract unwelcome visitors?) Anyway. This is, um, a notice for anyone concerned that for a while I’ve been posting fics (Lost Tomb Reboot and MDZS/CQL) on AO3 under the name scherzanda, distinct from my usual nnozomi account. (The reasons* I had for doing so, not very dramatic, no longer seem to be relevant at this point.) A few people who know me here have been kind enough to comment over there as well; thank you again and please accept my apologies for lies of omission… .
I decided this was good timing to own up, on account of having just posted an LTR fic there inspired by some discussion here. Depending on circumstances I may go on posting in both places but will not be especially secret about it! (Also, this means I can now draw attention to the three lovely podfics done for me in that guise by Thimblerig, a kind and gifted reader.)
On reflection, it’s not like my interests or my writing style are in any way different between the two names, so some people may have cottoned on long ago; if so, thank you for your forbearance :) <3.

*Reasons include: I wanted to write (and post) some MDZS/CQL fics, but it can be a troubled fandom and I wanted an extra layer of pseudonymity; also I was committing the minor fandom sin of writing fic without consuming the actual canon(s) properly… that one I still have to cop to, but knock wood the only reception I’ve gotten has been very pleasant. And then I wanted to write an LTR fic to a prompt which I knew was going to end up both explicit and a bit kinky, and I was too shy to do that on my usual account, but here I had this useful other one… (I was right to be shy about it; I couldn’t bring myself to think about the sex parts clearly enough and they’re not very well done, although I think the fic in question is overall pretty good.) And then I just had these two accounts and they stayed that way.

This is something I wrote a while ago and for some reason didn't feel like posting on AO3; it feels a bit...slight? But I still kind of like it so I'm throwing it on here just for fun.

( Zhao Yunlan, Li Qian, post-canon, locked-room not-mystery, friendship )

Be safe and well.

・The Guardian wishlist fest happened (thank you, trobadora and china_shop!) and I got two gorgeous fics, a gentle quasi-fixit for The Rebel by elenothar and a lovely Guo Changcheng-and-language drabble by Amedia, along with all the other amazing things posted. I wrote about 10K-odd spread over a handful of fics and had a lot of fun doing so, as well as trying out a translation of a (C-subtitled) interview with some help from presumenothing. (Conclusion: Bai Yu likes to begin almost every sentence with 就 and end it with 嘛.)

・One of my wishlist fics focused on (the aftereffects of) Shen Wei kneeling in the rain, and I belatedly found the perfect epigraph for it while reading this week's Shakespeare with yaaurens and company: "Who cannot feel nor see the rain, being in ’t,/Knows neither wet nor dry."

・Listening to a couple of favorites on the radio. Jenůfa is still breathtaking. The Strauss oboe concerto is delightful, and always takes me back to hearing it for the first time at a summer concert in high school with my crush of the time, an oboe player himself (I have a long history of falling for oboists lol).

・Speaking of double reeds, I had my first bassoon lesson! Now I have a reed to toot on and a fiendishly complicated fingering chart to do my best to memorize before the next one. I discovered that the standard bassoonist's chest/shoulder harness (just like Lin Nansheng's shoulder holster, only not such nice leather) is not designed for, um, well-endowed female figures, and if I do decide to get my own instrument I'm gonna have to work something out. But it's neat to actually make sounds on it. I've learned, what, all told about 2.8 foreign languages, I should be able to memorize some fingerings?

・Rereading: the diaries of Jean Lucey Pratt, unfulfilled and lonely and sometimes, poor lady, a bit sentimental and tiresome, but not without humor. "I am an idle, vain, pea-brained, vacillating, silly wench, and have eaten too much sweet cake." Too close to home! "I hunger and thirst for an encouraging comment [on her newly published book] from a reputable quarter." Just like us upon posting fics etc.... "To every one of my friends I give what I can, but with each individual...I withhold some part of myself," a phrase that interests me in its Venn diagram of friendships.
Also Stephanie Wellen Levine on Brooklyn Lubavitcher girls, a non-fiction book that reads like a gorgeously vivid set of linked short stories, recommended for anyone interested in women and Judaism.

・Photos: one zillion photos today, mostly because of a visit Y and I made to the wind chime temple this week, where we listened to the glass chimes sing in the wind and visited their tearoom, he had shaved ice and I drank rose juice. Note the little frog (painted) and the camouflaged turtle (alive). Also various sky and light scenes, a nice voluptuous building, and the living room pothos in the sun.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

・I am just really tired of endlessly unresolved small miserable ailments. I'm still a lot better off than most people, but ugh.

・There's a kind of Japanese ice cream called Pino, a little box containing six little circles of vanilla ice cream (occasionally other flavors as a seasonal special) dipped in chocolate. Yesterday I had the proverbial four-leaf-clover stroke of good fortune, finding not just a crown/star shape in the box I opened but also a heart shape, a super-rare occurrence which is supposed to be lucky? Here's hoping!

・I have been finding Take 6's A Quiet Place very soothing to listen to lately.

・Back at one of the nighttime junior high schools for the first time in ages, a class of about a dozen highly motivated Korean-Japanese ajummas, very energizing: they introduced themselves to me with a rundown of their favorite things, from earrings to kimchi to Tolstoy to that kdrama about the South Korean girl who parachutes into the North...? I'm going to have to work to keep up.

・My mother taught me a new word in passing, "zygomatic." Look it up; I choose to believe it's no accident that the first two letters are ZY.

・Working on Guardian episode 13 for the script project: the moment when Minister Gao fawns on Shen Wei and he and Zhao Yunlan momentarily abandon their angry tension to exchange a glance of mutual wtf?? is always funny. Also, my Lin Jing/Cong Bo thing: the first hand Cong Bo grabs when he’s doing his “you have to believe me!” thing is Lin Jing’s, and Lin Jing promptly invites him to go get some coffee... .

・A little bit more of my nonexistent Zhao Xinci post-canon fic wrote itself today:
( Read more... )

・Photos: lantanas, hydrangeas, roses (I realized that my taste in roses invariably runs in the yellow-to-orange-to-pink range; there's one that reminds me of the "broken" tulips of yore), a while fluffy thing, also a nighttime canal.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

・Visiting a park in a nearby city (all due precautions taken) where a kiosk was lending out those little half-tent things? not big enough to stand up or lie down in, but enough to have a bit of a picnic in the shade? and also free-standing hammocks. We didn’t have time, but I was so tempted. Can you imagine?

・Being proactive: I have sent some emails on spec and gotten myself a tentative volunteer gig translating for one of the children’s-cafeteria projects here, as well as an agreement to do some beta reading for a writer I like (not someone I know from fandom, although I’d be surprised if they’re not on AO3 somewhere under a different name). I’m looking forward to both. As we used to say, be careful what you don’t ask for, you may not get it.

・I’ve been pretty good about doing five or ten minutes of very easy yoga a day, and it does feel like I’m having fewer headaches, even on low-atmospheric-pressure days when I normally would?

・Veranda status: The pansies are still flowering, amazingly enough. All the other fruits/veg are also putting out flowers (tomatoes → yellow, chili peppers and habaneros → white, strawberries → bright pink), which is a hopeful sign? The strawberry flowers have little proto-strawberries in the middle of them, very spiky, like a hedgehog plant.

・Have a very short excerpt from the world’s-grumpiest-buddy-cops AU that I’m still not writing, brought to you by the fact that I just noticed Lao Chu calls Zhao Yunlan “boss” (I think) but not the same word as Lin Jing uses, 头 instead of 老大:
( Read more... )

・Photos: A view from on high and a tramway that used to offer access there, some homemade koi-nobori flags, some nice tree scenes and a lot of roses.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

So at guardian_learning the phrase 打电话 came up and I quoted Zhao Yunlan’s teasing use of it in Old Haixing, and then I thought about it and this happened. I’m sorry for ongoing Shen Wei angst, but this is actually kind of happy-ish on the whole?

Shen Wei doesn’t figure it out until much, much later.
It’s the third week of his life in the guise of a modern-day Haixingren. The number of corrections that his assignment has come back with is so alarming that he goes to visit Professor Lin in her office hours (if he can’t keep up at the university, if he can’t manage to be the person he’s pretending to be, he’ll...he...). It turns out that he has still done significantly better than the two or three other students also visiting her office: they are asking him for advice, and Professor Lin is smiling in amusement and letting him talk, when there is a sharp ringing noise from her desk.
The telephone. Dianhua, he knows the word, one of the many he has learned since he emerged into the latter-day world. He understands its derivation, has seen them before...
Professor Lin rolls her eyes companionably at her students and picks up the receiver. “Wéi?” she says, and the room flashes into darkness as Shen Wei’s brain suddenly makes sense of that long-ago small mystery.
He says something to the other students, unable to hear his own voice, and slips out of the office. Two doors down there is an empty classroom. Shen Wei lets himself in quietly and stands with his back pressed to the wall next to the blackboard, where he will not be immediately visible from the door. There wouldn’t be much to see; only that his breath is coming too fast, his cheeks and forehead hot against his fingers. His eyes are watering, but not with grief.
People call me Wéi, he had said, ashamed at having nothing more than a use-name to offer, and Kunlun had spluttered with teasing laughter. Wéi? Da dianhua ne? Like you’re on the phone?
Shen Wei had not understood him, of course, had not thought of it again until the two words came together just now. He had known that Kunlun had looked at him and thought, you are more than this small name, you deserve better, you must be better, and that had been enough to drive the unfamiliar word out of his head.
He had known...guessed...understood through instinct that Kunlun came from the future. And now he is living in that future himself, complete with telephones. With a name that no one will take for a telephone hello. “My name is Shen Wēi,” he says aloud, hearing his voice break into laughter on the tone Kunlun gave him, in a moment of joy at Kunlun’s irreverence, his silliness, the joke Shen Wei has only now understood.
Maybe one day soon he will pick up the telephone and it will be Kunlun on the other end of the line. Shen Wei will not say wéi? to him. He will say “It’s me.”

*Tone markings used to distinguish the “Wei” pronunciations.
*Shen Wei does say “It’s me” on the phone to Zhao Yunlan near the end of episode 1, calling him on Li Qian’s phone.

I seem to have committed stress fic. At the Market in Hibiscus Square, Guardian, about 2K of Shen Wei pining and some minor Dixingren worldbuilding, in other words on brand for me, oh dear. Why is Guardian fic so much easier for me to write than anything else?

(I didn't put it in the fic notes, and it really isn't anything along the lines of a songfic, but it goes well with 何の変哲もない Love Song, which is mostly about daydreaming about the ordinary joys of love. Caution, the volume on the link is a bit high.)

...a day or so late, but close enough for jazz. 新春快乐，祝大家很幸福的一年，happy new year!

More relatable words on writing, this time from Jessica Mitford, whose letters I have been rereading (highly recommended, Decca was a HANDFUL but/and her letters are enthralling):
"I’m getting on with it but in my own way--bits and pieces, which I hope will one day clatter together into a book. (Mary said she had told you that’s NOT the way to write a book; sorry, but it’s my way...” (November 22, 1985).

Watching bits of livestreams of the Prix de Lausanne ballet concours; ballet really is a foreign language for me but the kids' dancing is so beautiful, lighter than air. (There's an interpreter on hand for some of the competitors who don't speak English or French, and I'm curious about the specialized knowledge needed to be a ballet interpreter, maybe they're all former dancers, like baseball interpreters.)

Writing a bit of Zhao Xinci for stress relief (mine, if not his). This is the beginning of what I think of as the world's-grumpiest-buddy-cops AU. ( Read more... )

Photos: Accidentally auspicious for the Lunar New Year: a lemon tree (大吉大利 = 大桔大利 or so I'm told), some red lanterns, and a silver-dollar tree. The cat (on a warm tin roof?) is a bonus, I'm pretty sure it chose that location to nap for maximum aesthetic effect.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

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nnozomi

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Entries tagged with fanfic: mine

mostly language stuff

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conosco até o pescoço

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the amber of their perfect satisfaction

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is that all you blighters can do?

post-Yuletide post [palindrome title?]

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