a conspiracy of cartographers

Since I am apparently still having lots of Thoughts (& FEELINGS) About Narnia, I decided it was time for a poll. Have at it!


PS if you answered 'The Last Battle' to the first question, you will have to defend your answer in comments. DISCUSS.
PPS the order in which I listed the books is not in fact the order in which you should read them. Publication order all the way, yo.

I am pretty sure that if I was an advice tumblr (a la Advice Gerard or Advice Doctor) all of Advice Aria would be ridic pictures of my face with captions like GET DRUNK WITH FRIENDS, WATCH BLACK BOOKS.

Real update pending when it is not two in the morning and also when I am not a bit drunk. Mostly right now I am hoping that there are no typos in my html links. And that I can sleep very late.

It is Yuletide reveal time! I love Yuletide reveal time, because it means my flist is rife with awesome surprises. Meanwhile this entry is rife with things that are probably not very surprising.

My assignment: Aschesis, Young Wizards, Ronan & Darryl. The assignment itself made me giddy with joy, because while my recipient said she'd be happy with any story involving the two of them, what she really wanted was an exploration of what it meant for Ronan dealing with the consequences of Wizards at War in conjunction with Darryl the ex-autistic abdal, and -- someone was specifically asking me to write identity porn!! It was also great fun because while I love writing in the YW style, my comfort-zone POV characters are Nita and the local Seniors; writing snarky sullen Ronan while maintaining the essential optimism of the world was a lovely challenge.

My fic that wasn't assigned to me in any way but still happened and then grew into a goddamn novella because I apparently have a lot of unfinished business with this canon: No Second Coming, Dark is Rising, Will/Bran & the Drews. Apparently everyone has a lot of unfinished business with this canon, because I look at this fic's current hit count and then I have to go sit somewhere quietly for a while. I'm completely delighted with it, really; I wanted to give the characters their agency back, and I don't think there's anything cathartic in quite the same way as a fix-it fic. This one was nurtured to life and coherence by the combined efforts of fahye, schiarire, nextian, polarisnorth, and oliviacirce; if there's anyone else I threw a draft at in a panic and have forgotten to thank, just raise your hand and I will gladly add you to the list of praises.

My Yuletide Treat that actually stayed Treat-length: The Demon's Fun Day Out at the Park with a Picnic, Demon's Lexicon, Nick & Alan. The title started as a joke on SRB's journal re: why Nick can't have nice things, and when innocentsmith linked to the conversation in her request letter, I was so charmed by the title and by the notion of a story in which nothing seriously bad happens to the characters that I wanted to write a little something. It still turned out sort of melancholy and longing rather than fluffy, but Nick and Alan both smile, which is like a happy ending.

I ... should probably start replying to all the lovely comments I've received. DAUNTING.

The sun is shining, the snow is blindingly refusing to melt, I am wearing the world's fluffiest bathrobe, Yuletide continues amazing, and today I have successfully been in the world for twenty-three years.

My birthday this year is inconsequential, though, because, as near as I can calculate it, today also marks the day in which I have been in fandom for a whole fucking decade. For Christmas 2000, you see, my mother and I got this awesome new computer that could be hooked up to the dial-up modem and access the internet! I had occasionally gone onto the internet using my dad's computer before, and, if memory serves, had mostly waited for long patient minutes for .jpegs of Beanie Babies to load on the official site, or racked up perfect scores on some Harry Potter trivia game on the Scholastic page. Now that I had my own computer, though, I went straight to Google! I typed in 'Harry Potter'! Somewhere in the first page was the link to the Unofficial Harry Potter Fan Club, so off I went, to play games and to look at fanart. And around the 27th, I started reading fanfic.

I didn't start posting fic until early April 2001, but before that, I think I spent most of January writing the fifth Harry Potter book. (It was 87 pages long! Harry and Hermione became Animagi! There was this hilarious Mary Sue who was Dumbledore's granddaughter! And I think I mercifully figured out not to post it and instead started writing MWPP fic. IDK.) Anyway, my point is, I've been cheerfully muddling about here for ten years.

( Instead of an end-of-year fic meme, ten years of fic statistics for the curious, and also for my own reference )

...It's like Narnia out there. And by "out there" I mean North fucking Carolina.

Of course, this impression is made all the stronger because I have a woods behind my house. I expect some of the trees are reporting me to the White Witch for taking pictures even as we speak. ( Under the cut: SO MUCH SNOW. )

I am not sure how enthusiastic I can be right now, because I am still ragingly ill, but actually that is a perfectly good state in which to snuggle up in a bunch of blankets and read the whole Yuletide archive. Before I do that, though, I got a fic!

Well This Is Just Weird, Hark! A Vagrant, Holmes & Watsons
What it says on the tin, really! This fic is delightfully weird in a Beaton-esque, meta way: some Watsons go missing, and during their investigations Holmes and Watson discover something very strange. This fic made me laugh aloud, clearly knows its Holmes canon very well, and left me with a giant grin on my face. Also, let's be honest, deep down all I wanted for Yuletide was exactly this fandom and these characters, so I am one satisfied Aria.

Now it is time for ALL THE TEA and ALL THE ARCHIVE.

I am safely arrived and finally unpacked! Weather.com hazards snow tomorrow and promises it Sunday, which makes me pretty delighted; never once in my life have I actually had snow on Christmas. It would be nice, and slightly surreal.

This afternoon it is going to be all tree-decorating and cookie-baking and, if we're feeling up to it, the Unitarian Christmas mass tonight. I am determinedly dressing in festive things (by which I mean a red Irish step-dancing dress, not, say, a sweater with reindeer on) and ignoring the fact that I have my stupid annual Christmas head cold. Basically I am mainlining all the tea in the house. The cookies I bake will taste excellent, and I will have enough voice to sing Silent Night later.

...In between all of this, of course, I am also trying to write a million Yuletide Treats. Will I actually finish any of them? Who knows! I'm having fun anyway.

I realize this is not a real entry, but 'tis the season, and also, TEN METHOS A-LEAPING. I am extra fond of my interests right now.

Re: delicious shutting down, I am mildly heartbroken because it warms my fuzzy organizational heart, and massively heartbroken because [a] it's such a lovely convenient way to find fic by specifics like pairing! and [b] I'll be honest, one of my favorite features was the ability to plug in the URL for one of my fics and see the notes people had made on it. However, all is not lost! I've seen these links around, but I figured I'd signal-boost: go here to export your own delicious bookmarks so at least you won't lose years' accumulation of favorite fics, and go here for some encouraging brainstorming on the subject of a possible fan-friendly delicious clone.

Re: other things I am doing to cheer myself up, at the moment I am eating chocolate, as you do, and watching Narnia films, ostensibly in preparation for seeing Dawn Treader sometime in the next few days. The funny thing is that I have to be sure to really make time to watch the Narnia movies, because I am so FEELINGS FEELINGS FEELINGS about them. Seriously, I cry all the way through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Why? I'm not even sure! I sort of waffle between whether Lewis or Tolkien is responsible for my first really fannish whatever, because I made my mum endlessly reread The Hobbit to me when I was four and I had a hilarious Elven Mary Sue when I was ten (alas, she never made it to paper, but she was BFFs with Frodo and had a romance with Faramir and Eowyn's son, it was awesome); on the other hand, I actually remember having ~theories~ about the Narnia books when they were first being read to me, and I still vividly recall the sheer joyful anticipation of a week in first grade when my family had ordered the BBC Narnia series and I could watch them ALL THE TIME, and I believed in Aslan so, so much. Basically what this means is that when I watch these new films and they are all pure and earnest and Aslan resurrects triumphantly as the dawn breaks behind him, I am damn well going to happily cry all over everything.

Do -- do any of you get all FEELINGS FEELINGS FEELINGS about Narnia? Surely this is at least somewhat a shared experience.

Re: Yuletide: AHAHAHA WHAT YULETIDE, WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE TALKING ABOUT, FUCK OFF, I AM WATCHING NARNIA FILMS.

I have always possessed a weird sort of envy for those entries on my flist that say "You guys are all fired for not telling me about [x]!" I'm not sure why; maybe it's a weird mix of delight that my own flist does tell me when cool stuff is happening, and envy that this person's flist usually does the same. Or maybe it's just a great sentence! Either way, I finally have the opportunity to use it.

You guys are all fired for not telling me about The Ship's Closet. I distinctly recall at least a solid two weeks at the end of August when I would talk about almost nothing but Star Trek TOS and Kirk/Spock, and somehow I didn't come across this! The Ship's Closet is a YouTube show by brittanyksduh; she goes through bits of TOS Trek, some of the films, and occasionally things Roddenberry has said, and analyzes them for Kirk/Spock. Now, some of the things she says seem self-evident to me, or she hammers a point home for slightly too long, but I will allow that this is because I have been queering the text for ages and she doesn't have to do a lot to convince me. She also has great comedic timing, made me repeatedly choke with laughter, chooses some excellent clips, and argued some points that I hadn't thought of before. Let's face it, my analysis was mostly limited to, "And then they exchanged another LOOK, it was AMAZING," whereas now the glass in Wrath of Khan is even more likely to get me to burst into tears, and all of Amok Time is even more likely to make me clutch at my face, because HANDS, guys, HANDS.

This has put me in a very good mood, compounded by the fact that we've just had a blizzard blow through, the world is gorgeous, and I have barely crawled out of bed all day. My mum called a little while ago to find out how much snow had come through; I ended up telling her that we've had about six inches and that I was watching someone explain the Kirk/Spock love story to me. I don't know if she thought this was a perfectly normal way to spend my evening because she knows me or because Kirk/Spock is self-evident, but either way, I'm ridiculously happy right now.