kannaophelia

 AO3 username: KannaOPhelia

Dear Yuletide Writer:

Thank you so much for writing for me! I hope you are happy with your assignment. I’ve been doing Yuletide since the beginning, and always had a fun experience.  I want you to have fun, too. Trust me, the moment you made your offer of a fandom I adore, or put your hand up for the pinch hit, you pretty much guaranteed that I am going to love what you write.

You may have noticed that I love f/f, and my requests tend to skew that way. However, if you don’t feel the femslash love, I would much prefer you write me lovely gen than force yourself to write f/f.  

Please feel free to see my prompts as optional suggestions, if  you already have another idea in mind you want to write. I will be delighted to see whatever you come up with. This letter  is mostly to say hello and to give some clarity if you have any questions.

I’m happy with any POV and tense that works for you. I've signed up to express my delight with interactive fiction.  I especially love fic that captures the canon feel, or is full of little fannish details, fic in which the love of canon shines through.  I’m fine with OCs.  I love world building and plot, but I also love emotionally intimate close-up fics. I am a shameless romantic, but I also  love enemy ships.  I love humour, I love big emotions, I love exploration of issues. My tastes are pretty vanilla, and I prefer any sex to arise in the context of a story, rather than as the total focus.

Here’s a totally non-comprehensive list of tropes and themes that I shamelessly love and never get tired of:

o   Going through the process of figuring out that womanly/girlish  devotion is *more* than socially acceptable straight bff/”sisterly” relationships

o   First confessions/first kisses/first times

o   Womanly chivalry and protectiveness

o   Really serious, burning jealousy

o   Forced to pretend they are in love when at least one secretly already is

o   Slow burn

o   Socially self conscious awkwardness/uselessness

o   Lesbian true love/marriage/optional kids  (by magical fpreg, adoption or genetic donation as canon-appropriate)

o   Canon-divergent AUs.

DNWs: rape/noncon/dubcon, child/adult,  appearance bashing,  toys and strap-ons, mundane AU, crack, different setting AU, crossovers A/B/O, bdsm, PWP,  genderswapping, body-shaming.

Triggers: I don't think it will come up,  except possibly in the case of Dr Mac, but just in case,  because of my personal history I find anything to do with infertility, miscarriage, abortion, traumatic childbirth, stillbirth or other harm to babies and children incredibly triggering.

Okay, that’s it! Please feel free to contact me through the mods if you need to. My requests are below for reference, along with some info on availability, some more specific (and COMPLETELY optional) prompts if you feel a bit lost for inspiration, and some pretty pictures.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble (Video Game) –Any
Availability: http://www.mousechief.com/dhsg/index.html (website), Steam

( Prompts )

Just William - Richmal Crompton --Any 

Availability: Just William and More William are available for free on Project Gutenberg.

( Prompts )

Mapp and Lucia series-E. F. Benson - Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas



Availability: Mapp and Lucia, Trouble for Lucia and Lucia's Progress, as well as the earlier Lucia-only books, are available on the Australian Project Gutenberg. 
 

( Prompts )

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries – Phryne Fisher / Elizabeth “Mac” Macmillan

Availability:  For the US (and those of us who have US accounts anyway) it’s available on both Netflix and Hulu. And a lovely person in the comments has let me know that it's also on Acorn.tv internationally, with a free trial month.

( Prompts )

Long live the Queen- Charlotte

Availability: http://www.hanakogames.com/llq.shtml, Steam.

( Prompts )

Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Itsuka Kakumeisareru Monogatari | Some Day My Revolution Will Come – Protagonist/Sanjouin Chigusa

Availability:  Unless you can get hold of the original Sega Saturn game, I’m not aware of any current sources. There are Let’s Plays on the ohtori.nu forum, however, starting here: http://forums.ohtori.nu/viewtopic.php?id=2111

 

( Prompts )

 Tell me this is not the cutest baby in the world.

The Cai baby helping Mama with her writing.

Some of you asked about recommendations for selfpubbed YA, so here you go. :) They are all great reads, and all free or dead cheap, and you have nothing to lose by downloading samples in any case.

The pick of the bunch, my seriously, just go and  READ THIS pick is the Magnificent Devices series by Shelley Adina (steampunk). I nearly gave up on the first one because I thought it was going to be Georgette Heyer like romance with a "spirited heroine" in a steampunk setting, but I'm so glad I persisted. The narrative takes a couple of really unexpected twists, and it is just so incredibly enjoyable and creative and awesome and gleefully fun. Both of us are reading the series right now, and enjoying every minute. The fifth book is coming out soon, and all four in one volume are currently under a dollar, so it's an awfully good time to give it a whirl for small change. 

Coming close is the start to a very different series, The Sekhmet Bed by Lavender Ironsides (Yeah. I know. Don't judge it by the pseud) (historical fantasy). I should say that the author is horrified by it being called YA, but it's my list, and I consider it YA, so there. It's the story of the adolescence of Hatshupset's mother, of all the fabulous characters, and it's a mix of coming of age in Ancient Egypt, powerplay and intrigue between the protagonist and her ambitious, sexy sister, and fantasy built around Egyptian mythology. It's brilliant. Waiting eagerly on the sequel, which will be about Hapshutset her/himself.

Less well written, but definitely super fun is the Causal Enchantments series by K. A Tucker (vampires). They are vampire teen novels, clearly Anne Rice inspired, with an alternate universe and a war between witches and vampires. The storytelling is great (better than the technique, to be honest) and they are addictively easy to rip through, with the special fun of predicting what is going to happen next, omg. Also there are huge psychic, surprisingly cuddly  hell hound things. They also have the most stupid heroine I've ever met, Evangeline. This may be a drawback for you, but Izzy and I found it a feature not a bug. Evangeline is hilariously dense. She's great. The first book is free, and we went and bought all the others.

daynight by Megan Thomason (dystopian) has brilliant and fascinating world-building, so much so that I swallowed it in a gulp. It has all the expected ingredients, such as a love triangle and "we must pretend to be in a relationship omg" (actually, that's one of my ironcast tropes, I love it), but it really has a different world than any dystopian I've read. (There's a prequel, cleanslatecomplex, but I wouldn't suggest reading it first.) I have one major caveat, a recurring problem in selfpubbed YA, in that the heroine's emotions seem WAY off. She experiences the most startling or horrendous things and they don't seem to phase her in the slightest, she's straight back to "Hi, hot boy!" or dozing off. If you can cope with her bizarrely flat emotions, however, this is fantastic. Another one where I want the sequel NOW.

I have more recommendations, but this will do for a start. :)

Tracking the last fiction books I have bought, from most recent to least...

Reached (Matched vol. 3, Ally Condie)
Seven: a Lesbian Snow White (Jennifer Diemer)
Fugly (K. Z. Snow)
The Sekhmet Bed (Lavender Ironsides)
The Blemished (Sarah Dalton)
Cinderella and the Lady (K. T. Grant)
The Fox's Mask (Anna Grant)

So. That's three e-first or e-only commercial/trade small or micropress books and three entirely selfpublished books. And a single one from a Big Six (Four?) trade/commercial publisher - and only because I already had the first two books in the trilogy. That is a MASSIVE change in my purchasing habits from two years ago. And it doesn't even count all the free downloads (mostly limited time offers or "first book in series is free") and samples sitting on my ereader or my tablet - there's a lot, and if I enjoy them, I do go on and buy full books, sequels and other books from the authors. I never would have even looked at Spencer Baum's vampire books if his/her unrelated The Demon Queen and the Locksmith hadn't been a random/temporarily free download that became one of my favourite books of the year. (It's free again, I recommend you grab it.) These are only books I've spent actual money on lately.

It's not just price. It's not that I used to spend a lot on individual books anyway, although I was constantly buying them, at least not in a way that sent money to the author in any meaningful way. I was a remainder book store junky - do you mean I can get 8 books for ten quid? LET ME AT THEM. I don't really do that any more, though. So it's not just that Reached was $10 now the antitrade judgement has gone through and would have been even more without it and Sarah Dalton's book was 99 cents. Don't get me wrong, I love buying a book for less than a cup of coffee. But I was cheap anyway, unless it was a high priority book for some reason, mostly series or author loyalty related.

Here's the thing. People who are very pro Big Six/4 and anti alternatives (and let's make it clear, being published by the Big Six is still an awesome dream and a great path if you can pull it off) like to lament that with the rise of self-publishing and micro epresses, we all are reading the slushpile instead of being protected by gatekeepers and have no way to choose books with any quality. All they do is reveal that they have no actual idea of how ebooks are chosen and purchased.

I have bought far, far more duds, in print or ebook, from big publishers than from Smashwords or little epresses. The last books I was really, really upset that I'd wasted money on were "proper" books - generally expensively purchased. My other books? Not so much so. And there is a very big reason for this.

SAMPLES.

It takes me only a couple of sample pages and about two minutes, in general, to decide that a book on, say, Smashwords, is better off left on the slushpile. Some are truly awful, but really? I tend to abandon them pretty much as soon as opening the sample. The amount of time I spend looking at dreck that the author was delusional to put out there is actually very, very small.

On the other hand, if I'm reading a decently sized sample on Smashwords or somewhere and I get deeply drawn in, I generally hit "purchase" long before I reach the end of the sample. Small e-first presses tend to give generous samples, too - at least enough to judge the quality of the writing and editing. Some don't; I'm less likely to buy from them. (Small press editing issues: they are all technically as much trade publishers as, say, Penguin, but that is absolutely no guarantee of decent editing. Cinderella and the Lady desperately required better editing, but what the hell, I felt like reading lesbian fairy tale erotica and it was $5. Some selfpubbed authors actually do a much better job through their betas than some trade publishers. I still don't know what Malindo Lo's editor is paid for, apart from spellchecking.*) I don't judge books by covers, either - after all, specialist lesbian presses tend to have horrendous covers. It tells you nothing about the quality of the book, only about budget. I judge by a) concept and b) words.

The big publishers? Arrgh. Part of the reason I wasted so much money on a book about dealing with anxiety and depression in pregnancy is that the free sample consisted of an introduction by someone else telling me how amazing it was plus part of a first chapter saying the same - not enough to judge that it was nothing but bog-standard CBT workbook stuff (which is clinically demonstrated, as well as by my own experience, to make OCD related anxiety WORSE long term, unlike DBT) with a pregnancy theme inadequately pasted on. The Daisy Dalrymple books, or Sarah Water's latest? I just couldn't pick up enough info through flicking through a paperback copy to realise I'd hate them. Reading samples is by far my favourite method of deciding on book purchases.

It's not always true that big publishers fail at this, of course. I bought The Hunger Games because I ended up on Suzanne Collins' website through TV Tropes and there was a lengthy enough sample - ending right when Prim is chosen - to make me realise that Katniss was a hell of an interesting heroine. In general, though, the samples are too much front matter and not enough content to sell me.

And then there's the issue of if you can get books as ebooks at all... or in your region... or charging differentially dependent on region.

Then there's the issue of author payment. When I bought remaindered and second hand books, the author didn't see a cent AFAIK. Small epresses generally give generous royalties to balance out the tiny or nonexistent advances, and selfpubbing even more so. I will always try to buy from a small press site directly or from Smashwords to maximise what they get. I like the idea of my money, little as it is, going directly to the author. And it costs me the same as an Australian, no markup for not being from the US, unlike a lot of books with major releases.

Finally... I'm a lesbian. It is much, much easier to find the kind of book I want to read in the world of selfpubbing and small epresses, many of which have GLBT and, increasingly, YA GLBT imprints, which don't necessarily have the "gay characters written for straight readers" thing that seems needed to get an agent and publishing deal elsewhere.

There are small presses that just suck, too. Hello, most of the older and more established lesbian publishers, who charge a fortune for badly produced and unattractively written and edited paperbacks and ebooks priced higher than blockbusters. Or Girls Gone By, who tie up school story classic copyrights in overpriced paperback editions and refuse to release them as ebooks, leading to stupid secondary market prices. (Bettany Press, OTOH, do it right, if kind of expensively.) There are very, very many incompetent, scam or just useless small and micropresses, who seem to take author royalties and give them nothing in the way of editing or high quality cover art or distribution or marketing in return. And evils like iUniverse and Publish America. But there are also gems like Musa Publishing and Star Moon Press. And so, so many DIY authors believing in themselves and their writing.

I'll still buy Big 6-4 books, although mostly out of series or author loyalty. I'll buy the Jasper Fforde Shades of Grey prequel the day it comes out, for instance, even though I'm gutted that it is not the promised sequel. (I suspect he has no clue how to dig Jane and Eddy - haha, fellow Jane Eyre fan - out of their hole.) I'll buy loads of picture books for Ponyo - as well as some locally written selfpubbed books about diverse families. I think getting a big publishing contract with a huge marketing budget behind it is still the most fab thing ever. And libraries still mostly stock books from big publishers, and I love libraries.

It's hard to talk about this stuff without being accused of prematurely dancing on the grave of traditional publishing or believing everything Konrath says or whatever. I was just thinking about the huge change in my own buying habits, as someone who buys books a LOT, and the fact that I can't be the only one to completely reassess how and when they plonk down money for a book.

( Read more... )

I'm not returning to work after Ponyo is born. (Which is, OMG imminent, and also prodormal labour is the most unfair thing in the world, we thought we'd be mothers by today, part of the reason I'm posting here is to take my mind off painful contractions that have started AGAIN but I have no faith will lead to active labour.)  It feels a little strange, as a feminist who has all often been described as a feminazi bitch, to say that - but after all, I always believed in choice.

I really, really loathe the term "full-time mother". It implies that working mothers are somehow only part-time mothers, which is crap, Romana will be just as full-time a mother as I am even though she will be working full-time as well. The term (deliberately, politically) sets up an unfair bias against women who work outside the home.

I have nothing against mothers working outside the home. My mother, who was always a working mother, was also  the best mother imaginable. I know everyone says they have a special relationship with their mother, but I do think Mum and I are genuinely much, much closer than most mother-child relationships, so much so that other people don't always understand our bond. My Nanna was, quite frankly, angelic, the most loving and giving woman imaginable, and she was also a working mother. My Grandma was a housewife, and I don't think anyone envies having her as a mother.

Mem Fox drives me to fury, and not just because of her support for a convicted pedophile or because Koala Lou is toxic. (I am really hoping no one gives Ponyo any Mem Fox books. No matter how beautifully her illustrators do their jobs, they will have to go straight in the charity donations bag, because, RAGE.)

I'm staying home at least the first few years, rent allowing, because - oh, because I'm selfish. Because I am lucky enough to have an amazing wife who will support me despite the financial sacrifice it entails. Because my career is not currently fulfilling and I just don't wnat to go back there. Because my health is rubbish and I have never really dealt with full-time work well because of it. Because I want the chance to have more time to focus on my writing. I suspect none of these reasons are acceptable to the kind of woman who says things like "Working mothers only work 9-5, I have a 24 hour seven day a week job!" as if it matters at  2am with a vomiting toddler whether your day is spent on laundry* or on being a corporate executive, or call childcare child abuse.

So just for the record. I am not making any sacrifices for Ponyo by staying home. I hope he will like having me around, but I also think there are real advantages in socialisation and stimulation etc in outside childcare. It's not that one model is better than another, it's a case of swings and roundabouts.

I need to find a title that doesn't imply that I'm guilt-tripping working mothers. Housewife probably suggests far more interest in housework than I actually have. (I can learn to vaccuum. It's like riding a bike, right? I've done it before. I do like cooking.) Homemaker, again, implies that single-working or dual-income homes aren't really homes. I suppose I could be really anticipatory and use full-time writer, even if I don't end up making any useful money from it... But that seems, um. Presumptuous.

* I AM LEARNING ABOUT THE WASHING MACHINE AND HOW IT WORKS, OKAY? I'm sure nappies will give me lots of practice... Actually, I'm going to practice now by prewashing some nappies.