1. Last week's FMK winner was Lumberjanes! It was a close-fought battle between it and Code Name Verity, but Verity siphoned off a lot more M votes, so Lumberjanes took it.

None of the frontrunners for K had a majority of K votes, but a couple of the overall-low-scoring ones did, and they were books I was planning to read and dump anyway, so they may just go.

I haven't finished any more this week because -

2. I got my intoabar fic posted, just under deadline! I say "posted" not "finished", because it's supposed to have 2.5 more scenes, but between not getting the new canon until the middle of the week it was due, and a beach emergency (beach emergency here defined as "it was the last weekend before nonresident use fees go into effect for season and also the first sunny day after a week straight of rain"), I was writing right up against the deadline, and apparently I am now too old to keep writing up until 3 AM when I have to be at work the next morning.

I haven't put it on AO3 yet, but the community post is Lacunae: Highlander/Murderbot Diaries.

Hopefully I will get another couple thousand words written, and then post a version I am happier about to AO3, but it may be a little while because -

3. I went with a bunch of friends went to see Deadpool 2 last weekend. I never saw Deadpool 1, because ultraviolence is not my thing, and Deadpool is a character who in theory I enjoy, but in practice would immediately dump me into needing to read a pile of comics that I actively dislike. But the movie does seem to have managed to pull out all the reasons I want to like Deadpool and change all the reasons I don't, and it was really well done, so now I am reading Deadpool fanfic?

I am glad there's a nice backlog of Deadpool/Cable still out there from before they got divorced, though, because all the recent stuff seems to be Deadpool/Peter Parker and I'm not really feeling that right now. I've been hanging out mostly with the Avengers lately, though, and I'd forgotten how... X-Men X-Men fandom gets.

So anyway--

4. I am apparently writing movieverse Deadpool mpreg now.

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dancer (4318 words) by melannen
Relationships: Vanessa Carlysle/Wade Wilson
Additional Tags: Mpreg, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Found Family, Team, not post-credits-scene compliant, not reality compliant, content warning: deadpool, but all the really bad stuff is just referenced, except the vomit so much, Vomiting, I'm pretty sure Wade is reading these tags so I'm not going into detail in them
Summary: "That's stage four, depression," Al said, sitting on his ankles and chewing very loudly on her sandwich. "But I don't know how the hell you'd tell the difference with you. Besides, vomiting isn't any stage of grief." She thought that over, then added, "Except for the stage that comes after the drinking stage, but you already did that one."

Possibly there will be more chapters - I have another 3000 words already written, and it will take at least another 4000 to get to the part where Wade and Yukio go shopping for cute maternity dresses - but on the other hand, the chances of me hanging onto character voice for a movie I've seen once long enough to write multiple chapters is... low, and that came to a good stopping point, so I posted it complete and guess I will see how getting fanfic posted on the first week of a new movie feels.

Anyway, I shouldn't be doing that because -

5. I'm going on vacation next week! A week in the country with probably minimal internet access. Hopefully I will get many books read and much writing done. But in the meantime I have SO MUCH TO DO before I leave, I don't need Wade Wilson suddenly in my head all the time >:|

Last week's F winner was the Tiptree, but commenters were unaminous that it is the wrong Tiptree to start with, so now I'm undecided whether to let than win or to fallback to second place ("Empire of Bones"). There was also a tie for K, and I broke it in favor of the one with the less boring title, so Castaways of Tanagar goes away.

Also, I missed that the last poll was the one-year anniversary of FMK! Folks, I have been doing this since last February, and with that in mind, it's not that bad that I only have 18 still in the backlog to read. Right? Right. (It also means that if I'd managed a poll a week, as originally planned, we would now be done! Instead there are about three months' worth left. Oops.)

(I am considering what to do if I finish this. Options include: stop already; start over again with the Ms; poll one section of the Dewey Decimal System a week in my 1200 NF unreads; or read & review all my unread comics, which would probably not require voting because there's only a couple hundred of them and they read fast.)

Anyway, since I finally finished the cat mysteries books, it's time for Mysteries 2: History Mysteries!

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Blair, Buckley, Christie, Collins, Corby, Hahn, Hammet, Little, Mosley, Queen, Roe, Sayers, Zelazny, etc. )

Look, it's an FMK response! I bet you forgot those existed! I almost did!

The good news is, my copy (a 1950s vintage paperback "Best Seller Classics" edition featuring a bright green "handsome leatherette cover") survived me reading it! The leatherette cover was actually more protective than expected (it's fully waterproof, don't ask me why I now know that) and I enjoyed it as a physical object enough that I might keep it even if I'd hated the text.

But I did not hate the text! Kipling remains a very good writer - the music in his poetry comes through in his prose and I love that he's so unashamed about letting his language be baroquely beautiful.

Somehow I had managed to miss the fact that the Jungle Book is an anthology rather than a novel until I actually started reading it, so if you, like me, had not realized this, there are three Mowgli stories, one story about a seal, and some stories about domesticated animals under the British Raj in India, interspersed with poems related to the stories. The Mowgli stories and poems were by far the best.

rushthatspeaks said in the original poll comments that "The Jungle Book is Kipling's least-racist work in which POC appear. I am aware that this is extremely faint praise, and it is intended to be," and that's a pretty accurate summation on that front. (Also, I found the Mowgli stories better than the others race-wise, but that's probably just because no white people appear in them, so without context you can pretend that he's disparaging all humans in comparison to the jungle, rather than Indian culture in particular.)

It's been a long, long, long time since I've seen the Jungle Book movie, but I think I liked the stories in comparison to them. Mowgli's life in the jungle, and particularly his problems navigating between his birth culture and the one where he was raised, are addressed in a actually fairly complicated way! As is the way the jungle creatures accommodate and adapt to the human settlements constantly encroaching on their homes. Also, at no point does it imply that sexual attraction to women is the fundamental thing makes you a human being, so that's good.

Also, I really liked that Bagheera, in the books, was raised by humans. I don't remember that coming up in the movies, but it makes his relationship with Mowgli even more interesting. (Also, if you came out of watching a movie version shipping Bagheera/Baloo, well, yeah, that's there in the book too. What is it with adventure stories giving their main character two dads who love each other very much? Minimizes the yucky female influence in their childhood, I guess?)

On the other stories - the one about the elephant dance was by far the most racist. The one about the seal was interesting, as a viewpoint on extinction via overhunting far earlier than most people think about it, and also I do believe in a secret enclave of Steller's Sea Cows somewhere in the North Pacific, I do I do. The one about the warhorses was mostly interesting as a view of what war was like when armies were at least half animals, which is becoming forgotten these days, really. If there were others they did not make enough of an impression that I remember them.

Seeing the influence these stories have had - not just on generations of children's literature, but on generations of English-speaking children - was really interesting, too. Reading the story about the war-horses, I felt less like I was getting a glimpse of a 19th century army in India, and more like I was getting a glimpse into the imaginary inner lives of hundreds of British children in cold stuffy nurseries for generation after generation, and that was its own sort of absorbing experience. (I'm sure the handsome leatherette cover helped with that, too.)

Last week's F winner - in a close-fought battle with Hambly - was Patricia Wrede's The Seven Towers. The K winner was the Stasheff. Y'all really hate Stasheff!

The bad news is, I still haven't finished reading anything. The good news is, it's the end of January and I'm only seven books behind on my Goodreads challenge!

In the interest of getting even farther behind, this week's theme is Omnibi.

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Anderson, Bear, Blish, Bova, Brackett, Brust, Busby, Cherryh, Harrison, Huff, Lee, Leiber, McIntyre, McKillip, O'Donnell, Robinson, Scarborough, Zebrowski )

Last week's F winner was the Asimov! The K winner was a multiple-item tie, but the Hamilton had the least number of non-K votes, so it goes.

Over the weekend, instead of catching up on my reading, I wrote a javascript toy that lets me take any arbitrary list and rank it using pairwise comparisons. I feel like this was a good life choice and thus I can tell you that my subconscious definitely, clearly, mathematically provably wants this week's poll to be kids' chapter books.

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Adler, Alcock, Arthur, Babbitt, Cushman, Hildick, Hinton, Howe, Kinney, Konigsburg, Korman, Kroeber, Leeds, Lindgren, MAC, Paulsen, Ransome, Regan, Sutcliff, Townsend )

Sorry, all! I think I am going to declare a hiatus on FMK polls at least until the YT deadline - I am super behind on writing reviews and reading as it is, and I really need to not get distracted from [redacted] until then. We are exactly 2/3 of the way through! And I promise I will bring it back once my YT fic is posted!

Meanwhile I will try to catch up on FMK reviews and maybe even post some non-FMK stuff????

First up: Thor: Ragnarok: super fun, there has not been nearly enough Valkyrie/Bruce/Hulk fic being posted yet. And I keep kind of going *headtilt* at ( all the commentary about it being anticolonialist )

Also I can't make the demographics of Asgard make ANY SENSE. Is the entire on-planet population of Asgard supposed to be on that ship with Thor? Because there were AT MOST 2000 people crossing the Bridge. Which is pretty much in line with the population size we see in the comics, but that says really specific things about how Asgard's culture and its empire work; "King over less people than went to my high school and some vassals in other lands" frankly sets him well below Tony Stark in real power even before Ragnarok. Or were there still people in the city at the end and Thor and Loki just killed them all? That actually makes more sense in terms of the movie's timeline - because there were still a lot of people there when Hela discovered the location of the hideaway, and the time-gap between that and when everyone was on the bridge was at most an hour or so, which was not enough to finish a larger evacuation. But the emotional note of the ending was really, really not "we just killed a bunch of our own people."

Fanfic seems to be split on whether they saved most of the civilians or killed most of them. What do y'all think?

I mean, the real answer is probably "they didn't want computer-generated crowd scenes and you can only handle so many extras". And I did think the way they seem to have used computer animation only for the stuff that really needed it was pretty cool - the fact that I looked at the crowd scenes and though "oh, they ran out of extras" somehow made the amazing floating space city they were in *more* real, because my mind was reading it as an on-location shoot. Which was pretty cool.

The mysteries F winner was the cat detectives. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. I have already read one of the stories in it, and there were not nearly as many cats as advertised. :( The K winner was the Garrison Keillor, which is helpful because it means I don't have to keep wondering if I want to read it or not, you people have informed me I don't.

I have not read any other new FMK this week because I have been catching up on comics and other stuff. Also I saw Thor 3! That was an EPICALLY silly movie. I approve. EPICALLY silly is the only register in which Marvel Thor stuff ever works and they don't hit it nearly as often as I'd wish.

Today's is a mixed batch on the rather nebulous theme of Someone On The Internet Said I Should Read This. Will the internet contradict itself? Let's find out!

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

( Poll: Butler, Doctorow, Eager, Graham, Hines, Hodgell, Juster, Lovecraft, Pierce, Renault, Russell, Scalzi, Shea & Wilson, Tolkien, Wrede )

Han of Iceland is due back to the library in a week and I can't renew it anymore. :/ I'm just over 1/3 of the way through. Four chapters ago, Hans snuck up on Spaguidry and did something offscreen that involved a lot of screaming, but meanwhile we've had many pages of Ethel's dad failing to recognize that the person he is talking to is also the person he is talking about (not even any disguises required! he just wouldn't stop talking long enough to allow an introduction, and by the time he did, it was just awkward), some revolutionaries conspiring over a bonfire, and many many pages of Ordener mooning over the distant light in Ethel's window.

I have hopes for onscreen violence before much longer, though.

Last week's F winner was Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell, and K was Better to beg forgiveness.... In other good news, I went through the boxes of fmk-eligible books as part of my "clean everything" project, and thanks to ya'll, we have gone from six boxes + a small shelf + overflow to no more overflow! \o/ (And so far, all the fmk keepers have managed to fit into existing space on the keeper shelves.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

This week's theme: It's Halloween, so let's do something proper scary: OUR INEVITABLE SLIDE INTO DYSTOPIA

( Poll: Burgess, Butler, Collins, Dixon, George, Huxley, Karig, Maine, More, Pohl & Kornbluth, Steinbeck, Wibberley, Zamyatin )

Last week's winners were not what I expected! But F goes to The Red Tent and K goes to The Magicians (which is WAY more hated than I had realized! For good reason apparently.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

This week's theme: I have no idea what this book is about, I'm pretty sure I only have it for the title.

( Poll: Bail, Capote, Carey, Collins, Connors, Corliss, Ericson, Galloway, Gould, Morse, Shann, Shreve, Townsend, Wodehouse )

#26! The projected halfway point of a year's worth of reading the backlog! And in fact I went in over the last couple weeks and sorted all of the remaining into piles, so I didn't end up stuck with just a bunch of boring mismatched ones toward the end, and it looks like it might actually come out to exactly 52 weeks without me having to try too hard?

It looks like there will be more non-spec-fic weeks coming up, though, I ended up with 8 more weeks worth of that. I know fewer of you get excited about those but that's what I have on my shelves. There's also four more anthology weeks.

This week's anthologies also did not garner a huge number of votes. I will reiterate you don't have to know anything about the books to vote! A lot of these I bought just 'cause I liked the title so you do not have to feel bad if you vote that way. I suspect last week's voting was on that basis, given that it was a dead heat between Carmen Miranda's ghost is haunting space station three and Brave New Girls: Girls and Gadgets. Brave New Girls won F in the end! Cats In Space won K. Surely... surely ya'll don't have something about Cats in Space? I read all the Catfantastics back in the day; I will have to at least check that one to see how much overlap there is.

I finally finished Locke Lamora, so I have three reviews to get through; IDK if I'll do that first, or a proper yuletide letter...

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

For the midway point, we have a very special theme this week: PEOPLE GETTING PAID PRO RATES FOR FANFIC! Hoorah!

( Poll: Anderson, de Camp, Diamant, Fraser, Grossman, Lewis, Maguire, Maney, McCullough, Murphy, Niven, Scalzi, Stevenson, anthologies )