I am now almost halfway through Dresden Files canon. And almost halfway through dueSouth canon, which partly explains why DF is taking so long.

And, OMG: the RayK episodes: that is nearly up to Boston Legal levels of slashy. I mean, I know the dS ptb had admitted to playing up on purpose by that point, but !!!! (And hey now they can even get civil-unioned too!)

Also, I watched Call of the Wild, so now I have written my official, obligatory post-CotW dogsledding fic. It has the Winter Lady and her court in it, but you don't really need to know Dresden Files for this, as long as you buy that RayK could go meet a fairy queen in Chicago's undercity.

Title: One Warm Line
Summary: Ray Kowalski meets the Winter Lady. And the Winter Lady meets Ray Kowalski.
Notes: If other people don't write more dS/DF crossover I shall still be forced to keep doing it myself. (This is now my first official series on AO3, omg.) ~4000 words, post-CotW for Rayk, early in her canon timeline for Maeve, nothing that needs warning for. Also, yes, you still have to completely ignore relative timelines to make this work; just pretend some fair folk got their hands on it? ETA: This story hits 37 of my 101 fic kinks. In less than 5,000 words. Um, \o/?
AO3 link: One Warm Line

( Maeve, of course, knew about the mortal policeman as soon as he started poking around the edges of the Undercity. )

I am back from my annual Winter Holiday away-from-internets-ness! I have not even started catching up on the DW posts I have missed, or the hundreds and hundreds of Yuletide recs, but I *did* get to my stories.

And as seems to be a trend, I have an embarrassment of riches again this year: three stories!

My assigned story is The End of the Enlightenment, based on A Night in the Lonesome October, and Awesome Author took up the challenge of writing about a Game other than the one in the book, and it is amazing! Alas, I am not knowledgeable enough about the place & time that author chose to recognize the characters immediately, but that is okay, because not really knowing just makes it creepier, plus! That means there is research to be done! Which is always a good thing!

I also got The Story of Elihu Yale, which fleshes out John Hodgman's account of the founding of Yale University, featuring Elihu Yale and his wise prostitute, and it is adorable!

And finally, there is Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, which is Myssmo/Law and Srafen/Hedgyt and comes in chapters, OMG. Author took up the challenge of writing queer lamnviin! And in a way that fills me with joy!

...also, while all the above stories are amazing on their own, two of the authors left notes to the effect that they plan to write more, which a) means more story for me someday YAY! and b) makes me feel slightly better about the fact that I did the same thing to my yuletide recipient. :/ Dear recipient: You seemed to like the story, and I hope you could not tell that I only wrote 1/4 of what I intended (and instead just assumed I'm not a very good writer) but I *do* still intend to write you the other 3/4. Hopefully by the time the archive opens again. Maybe?

Meanwhile, apropos of you-really-don't-want-to-know, here is a song I have written:
( I want a Necronomicon for Solstice (only a Necronomicon will do.) )

Ah. Of course I wore my voice out the day before Reformation Sunday, when we sing all the good old traditional hymns.

Anyway, to make me less depressed after listening to Pastor's Reformation Day sermon, which was all about the deeply disappointing way the ELCA is (slowly, politely, quietly) attempting to schism itself over the issue of same-sex partnerships (which our Churchwide Assembly decided they approved of last year), here is an embed of the video our Presiding Bishop posted as part of the It Gets Better project, which beatrice_otter linked to a few days ago:
( Video + transcript )
And, wow, I'd never really thought about the fact that Lutheran pastors have a specifically recognizable style, but it is so very painfully obvious what denomination he's from even without the intro. Which is to say: it's not by any means a perfect statement, but I am *so proud* of my Bishop for deciding to join the project, especially given the way his Church is spasming over it right now, and the cultural Lutheran more that you avoid divisiveness at all cost.

***

...oh, is there another holiday on 31 October? Sorry, you know how tunnel-vision us Christians can get about other folks' holidays. :P

I have very specific tastes when it comes to horror, I have come to realize.

The horror I find nicely shivery brings in a few particular factors: the unseen monster and the unknown fate; the incomprehensible but malignant outsider sentience; and the shift of ordinary things and places into sudden objects of fear.

The first horror-y fiction I ever read that I actually both found scary and liked was the classic fantasy novel The Face In The Frost, by John Bellairs. It's a short novel which combines parody/humor, classic quest fantasy with evil wizards, and that sort of deep horror of the mundane and unknowable. It stars two wizards named Prospero (but not the one you're thinking of) and Roger Bacon (also not the one you're thinking of) as they try to stop Melichus (a old schoomate of Prospero's) from evoking a formless, all-encompassing alien evil out of a mysterious book.

The book was clearly inspired by the Voynich manuscript, a deeply creepy Medieval book full of drawings of cyborg women, strangely biological-looking circle diagrams, and alien plants, which is written in a mysterious script that has never been decrypted. Melichus' book from The Face in the Frost is very similar, but it is finally read - by Melichus - after he discovers that, when you study the book obsessively, sleeplessly, compulsively, staring only at the pages of the book until all the rest of the world seems unreal - suddenly it wavers into something readable. Something alive, strange, something that wobbles between not quite real and too real to exist, but readable.

I've always wanted to mock up some pages of the book, properly bespelled, and since I finally found my stylus, I drew them for All Hallows. Here it is, a two-page spread from Melichus's evil book:

And yes, if you figure out how to read it properly, it really does decrypt by itself, one slow letter at a time, alive and wavering but readable, like the evil book in the story: there is proper magic in it.

The plaintext I used was a nonsense poem from later in the book. The marginals are directly inspired by the Voynich manuscript - luckily the artist of the Voynich wasn't a particularly good draftsman either.

If you figure it out or try try and fail, let me know? I've never really tested this method on anyone else, so I'd love to know how well it works. Anybody posting a full decryption within the next few days gets their comment screened, but discussion of methods is strongly encouraged. :D

ETA: If you want to know how this encryption works, siegeofangels worked out the cheating decryption method, and I give the rest of it away in comments to her entry.

So, as I do live in, you know, the place that has just broken about half of their all-time snow records, we were without power for about twelve hours today, and we're now hoping it will stay on.

I was expecting that when I got back online you would be flooded with snow pictures and sick of them! But no, there hasn't even been anything on urban_nature. So you get to look at mine.

We got very close to exactly 24 inches before it stopped in late afternoon, as near as I can tell, though it's drifted as high as three feet in a lot of places. The landscape passed Thomas Kinkade levels of threat quite a while ago and is now well in to what can only be described as Seussian.

*Nice* snow-fort making conditions, too. I think we may be attempting to build a full-domed snow shelter tomorrow if the freeze holds like it's meant to. Today was half shoveling and half just wandering around marveling at things.

( 20 photos under cut + 2 more )

Yep, it's got to that time of year where I start picking out my clothes the night before. So I can sleep with them under the covers with me and they'll be warm in the morning.

Though it's also the time of year to sign up for yuletide! I offered less than 100 fandoms this year, which I think is a record for me. (It seemed a lot lighter on '80s and '90s YA than usual, though, which is maybe why.)

I may have to go back in and offer more, though.

Yay spring!

Actually, what was brought to my attention today, which wasn't nearly as relevant in winter, when I generally wear several petticoats, bloomers, and/or stockings under a heavy skirt, and a long coat over it - is that the airflow patterns in and around train stations leave me feeling an awful lot like Marilyn Monroe. Especially, for some reason, the New Carrollton subway station - coming up the stairs it generally looks like I'm wearing a hoop skirt.

I would have gone with not wearing any shoes, either, if the sun had contrived to stay out long enough to warm the sidewalks. Is it normal for going barefoot outside for the first time in spring to feel *that good*? (I'd say 'better than sex', but I have no real basis for comparison. Although the moany noises I was making while wiggling my toes in the grass this afternoon might have led someone to come to a different conclusion.)

And since it's barefoot/sandals time again, time to paint my toenails! I was going to do it during Bones, but alas no Bones. I hates reality shows, yes I does, precious. So I did it during this immensely stupid documentary about the Ten Commandments, instead. They're alternating brown-and-pink on one side, and all pink on the other, for that fetching assymetrical look! With gold glitter on top. And I have new sandals that are exactly like my old ones, and a double-breasted plum-colored suit that Mom bought at Goodwill that matches my plaid fedora.

And speaking of toenail polish - last night's House. I scanned a few community's flists after the episode (as you do) and I'm puzzled by the reaction to the toenail polish. That is, everybody seems to think that he's wearing it *voluntarily*. For eris' sake, this is a guy who's rooming with House! I'd say there's a 50% chance he lost a bet, a 30% chance House did it to him in his sleep, and a 20% chance he got talked into agreeing to it without realizing what was going on, with an accompanying 15% chance that House is currently wearing a complimentary shade. Plus, I totally came out of that ep squealing "House/Cuddy/Wilson" OT3, which also seems to be a unique reaction. House fandom is not nearly cracked enough, considering the canon.

... on that note, the I-can't-believe-it's-not-mpreg House/SG crossover finally hit the length limit for Notepad. Yay! (Not that that's ... very long at all, but for me it is.)

And while I'm doing a very boring entry, might as well go for meme thingy: Stuff that happened on my birthday: Root beer was invented. Star Wars Episode II came out. Star Wars Episode III came out. Liberace was born. David Boreanaz was born. Elliot Ness died. The Feast Day of St. Brendan the Navigator.

*yawn*

This afternoon a cacophony of grackles descended on our back yard and the neighbors'. They must come by our yard every year at about this time - it is not that I have any memory of them doing so, but when I think of 'large numbers of loud black birds' the image that comes to mind is of grackles settling restlessy in the tops of scraggy sycamore and cherry trees, which look tattered and gawky in their last few rumpled yellow leaves, as the birds lift and settle in constant arrowing flights of two or three birds, scrawking among themselves ceaselessly.

Grackles are also what populate fantasy novels in my head when large numbers of crows are called for. American crows, in my experience, simply don't act like the fantasy ones, but grackles are abundant, gluttonous, and, if not ill-omened, certainly unwelcomed. (My favorite songbirds are starlings and grackles. They are beautiful like oil spills in parking lots.)

***

( Yuletide wishes )

***

The dentist said I passed! Yay!

The trees have all turned over the past week. We have four maples in our yard, and it's so *pretty* that I have no motivation to rake the leaves yet, so the whole yard is the approximate colors of this icon. I have this image in my head of Arisia and Hal Jordan under a green pavilion, the roof covered with red and orange and purple maple leaves, the yellow ones drifting through and around them like sakura petals in anime ... alas that my art skills could not do it justice.

***

I signed up for yuletide t'other day; wish me luck. I'm just waiting anxiously for my assignment. Cryptic doublespeak and random enthusiasm and terrified burbling: Yuletide is like a chance to suddenly get more of all the books I loved as a kid, without having to write it myself; whlie at the same time I get to write the same thing for somebody else, only in fandoms that aren't so dear to me that I can't write them. Whee! Only now, I'm afraid that I volunteered for a few that I won't be qualified to write, o alas! Everybody is posting their proclamations about what you *must* be willing to do ion orer to volunteer for a fandom. Me? While I'd be overjoyed if somebody wrote a perfect story tailored to my tastes, personal history, and corpus of work, these are fandoms that are mostly virgin territory for fic, and I'm satisfied with anything that mostly fulfills the request and is well-written. If I get actual Lucky Starr fic or Riddle-master fic? I'm happy, man.

***

I found it interesting that when we went to see Serenity, all of the previews, and the movie, were about a scrappy band of rebels trying to overthrow a supposedly beneficial tyrrany which maintains power through lies and propaganda. Well, all of them except Narnia, and I don't actually remember how the White Witch kept power, althought the revolution theme is the same. It's an interesting trend, after a stretch where most of the big SF epics were about either maintaining the status quo or fighting off an outside evil.

***

We've just got home from a visit to my aunt and uncle's to play with my little cousins, the Duchess and the Kangaroo . If I'd stayed home, I would have gone outside to play in the leaves, so instead I went out in my uncle's yard with the Duchess. We played with leaves and jumped and looked at trees and pulled apart acorns (I have been noticing acorns a lot more this year. The road behind the train station is covered with bright orange scars from acorns being crushed; it looks like pumpkin meat. I tempted to try acorn flour someday) and picked up an entire skirtful of pinecones, which Grandma put in a plastic bag to take home. We also looked at a big Marbled Orb Weaver. The Duchess had an eww response but when I refused to act scared she came up and looked at him a little. She wouldn't sing Eensy Weensy spider with us, though. Or I'm a Little Teapot. ( And I got to meet the Kangaroo for the first time! )

Speaking of that, I need to stop being a coward and accept one of the many special-ed sub calls I get every night. But I just want to get in a few standard jobs first. I have another one at a high school tomorrow, which means getting up at o-dark-hundred again. I should post a subbing update tomorrow afternoon, if I survive.