serakit

The impetus for it in the fic I was reading is actually quite tragic, but on an abstract level I'm really amused by the notion of the birds and bees talk being bad enough but much worse than that is when every single adult in your life, apparently without having consulted each other, separately sits down to have a brutal heart-to-heart about the dangers of magical oaths.

(Without providing any of the context for why they felt this was necessary--it was hellish and none of them like to talk about it--so from his perspective it just looks like everyone is really weirdly emphatic about this subject.)

I saw someone making a comment about how Jonathan Sims would have done dropped into Jonathan Harker's place and OH SOMEONE PLEASE write this fic. Or Trevor and Julia encountering Dracula in England. Or Harker coming to the Institute to make a statement. Adelard Dekker meeting Van Helsing.

There are SO MANY CROSSOVER POSSIBILITIES HERE. AO3 has NONE OF THEM. I'm hoping Dracula Daily results in more Dracula fic. But seriously, I want this crossover!

Yes, I know, you have to timeshift one of the two to make it work. Someone write this fic anyway.

("But Kit," you say, "are you not a writer? Should you not set the example?" "Yes, I am!" I reply. "But I am in the middle of writing an epically long fic for which I wrote a 20,000-word outline in the span of approximately three days before any of this happened and I am also writing original work to submission deadlines. Thus I do not have time to do this thing just now!")
 
Also there are a lot of people saying that Dracula's obsession with England marks him out as a proto-SuperWhoLock, and I do not know enough about SuperWhoLock to write that one, but I would totally read "Dracula gets into fandom." Or "Dracula crosses over with Doctor Who or Sherlock." (I was never a Supernatural fan.)

What might I eventually write? The "except where the doors are locked" Dracula/Bluebeard crossover. Mainly because I've been trying and failing to write Bluebeard stories for years.

(Yes, I am going to be posting a lot about Dracula for a bit. Almost I am tempted to get a Tumblr so I can participate in the squeeful memery, but there are reasons many and good that I am not there. Dreamwidth, alas, does not appear to have a community for this.)

(There are also a lot of people suggesting what book we should do next, after Dracula. And someone suggested Dangerous Liaisons. I am SO THERE for other people joining me in fervent Dangerous Liaisons fandom. SO THERE.)

So there is no King Arthur AP flour in the Market Basket. Now, this sort of thing is why I have a big plastic bucket filled with extra baking supplies-- I am looking for AP flour because I just moved a bag of it from that into the plastic "in use" container, not because I am about to run out. This is not going to keep me from baking just yet. But I offer it up as a shortage data point if anyone's collecting such.

Also, the correct time to go to the Market Basket is apparently 11AM on a Thursday.

Ann Reardon is a delight in general. She's a food scientist who is famed on the internet for her debunking of various internet hacks and videos about channels like Five-Minute Crafts (which has given me a disinformation talking point: non-political disinformation exists), but she does other cooking things online too, and now she's gone and baked an AI generated cake recipe, which you can watch here. This was just too good not to share; I laughed so hard at the cake recipe. Like so much AI stuff, it reads like it was written by someone who kind of had the idea of cake, but no practical experience with it.

And the cake manages to be notably easier on her kitchen than the internet food hacks; at no point is there an explosion all over the inside of her microwave. (It is a running gag in the debunking videos that they are very rough on her microwave and she always winds up having to spend a lot of time cleaning out the inside of it, sometimes multiple times if she needs to try something with several different starting conditions.)

It is super funny; go check it out.

Jowl bacon is delicious.

I mean, I wasn't actually expecting to get an entire 2-pound whole pig cheek when I ordered it, but it worked out very well-- for once I planned ahead what I was going to defrost for Mathfiend's visit and bought avocados ahead of time and made sure I had potatoes, and then he brought tortillas and scallions and limes and we made tacos. And I have lots of bacon in the fridge and freezer and between that and the frozen meat pies I am probably doing okay as far as meals for a bit. I mean, I still need to bake some bread so I can have bacon-and-avocaodo-toast with my remaining avocado, but that's easy.

It's very good bacon, significantly better tastewise than any other bacon I have ever had. We did some thin cut on the stove and some thicker cut in the oven.

I also had not considered limes as seasoning, but dripping some lime juice over the tacos really did add a lot, and I'm now looking forward to trying the limeade recipe in Lemonade with Zest. (A cookbook I got out of the library thinking I was going to look at it, think it was cute, and shrug and be done with it. This is not what happened. I now own a copy I can't wait to play with.)

And the not missing a beat line of the day: "Once I've moved and I'm not a ball of anxiety anymore--" "I'm going to hold you to that!"

But the actual thing I was suggesting we do after I've moved is actually try some of the recipes from A Cowboy in the Kitchen, which we haven't done yet because altering them so I can eat them is going to be a tremendous amount of work. We kept it even though there's not a single recipe I can eat without heavy modification because they all looked good enough to be worth the effort... so we should find the time to actually make the effort. (I mark up my cookbooks a bit as is, but that one is likely to wind up significantly more heavily annotated than I usually do.)

Interesting writer milestone: having enough accomplishments under your pen name that you bite the bullet and mention it on a job application, because for this particular job the writing and podcast experience are actually major qualifying factors without which you'd have a hard time demonstrating that you're a competitive candidate.

So that's new and different.

And now they're "deporting" civilians to Russia. While they're already committing war crimes. And they may have poisoned a Ukrainian peace negotiator.

I said it before: Crimea was Sudentenland. Ukraine is Czechoslovakia.

We're going to find out they're torturing and killing those civilians.

Our world leaders will be remembered as Chamberlain, as "peace in our time."

And we see what "never again" is worth, as the world stands by and lets Russia go down a path that very clearly ends at it happening again.

Yes, I am suggesting we put troops on the ground. I am suggesting we enforce that no-fly zone. Because the alternative is appeasement. The alternative is the occupied regions become North Korea. Russia has vast quantities of natural resources and there's no way China sides against them when they want to use this as an excuse to go after Taiwan. And there's no way Russia stops with Ukraine when they can achieve what they want by destroying it with missiles-- "killing everybody" works just as well for Putin as actually controlling it. And they won't stop at Ukraine, unless we stop them at Ukraine.

The only choice here is how many people we let them kill before we take an actual stand.

I've mentioned Sharon Astyk on here a few times before-- and I'm definitely paying attention to her feed far more for her essays than the links she shares. And today she's written this horrifying essay on the subject of what Putin's actual endgame is.

It is terrifyingly plausible. And, well, just flat-out terrifying: essentially, that Putin is playing the really, really long game and banking on the Russia having "we endure horrible things" baked into their national mythos so much that if he can damage the global economy enough-- and sanctions on Russia are damaging the rest of the global economy, and as long as China will still trade with Russia, Russia can actually survive that-- Russia will pull through the chaos on that austere-tradition-and-endurance thing while the rest of the globe falls into energy-crisis-and-famine chaos and eventually come out on top in the end.

Really, click through and read it.

This one feels a bit trivial in the grand scheme of things, but... Hannah Gadsby is coming to Boston. I want so, so badly to go. And there's allegedly a mask-and-vaccination requirement.

But I'm high risk, it's a very big theater, and benign_cremator tells me the specific theater being used doesn't have great airflow. Plus it's in April and with all the masking requirements being removed around here and precautions going down we'll probably be right in the middle of an upswing in April.

It was making finalist at the NESFA contest at Boskone 57 that spurred me to take my writing career seriously. I had written a story called "Deathtree" which I have never really done anything else with (I really ought to rewrite it and try publishing it, because I very much like the concept) and they had all of the finalists do a joint reading. As soon as I heard Mary Alexandra Agner read her story I thought "Well, she's going to win," as indeed she did, but I found I liked being at the front of the room, having people listen as I spoke and be interested in my work. And I realized that if I got things published, I would then have the requisite qualifications to volunteer to be on convention panels, and thereby be at the front of the room again.

I set some hard numbers for myself: 10 total fiction and/or poetry publications in any sort of paid market, and I would be a Real Writer and start putting myself forward to volunteer for this sort of thing. And then, as an afterthought, "Or I suppose if I qualify for the SFWA, that would also count," in the tones of someone who believed that of course that one could not possibly happen first.

So I count the progress of my writing career from Boskone to Boskone, as that was the point at which I began taking my writing seriously. As we are now on the eve of another Boskone-- one at which I will sadly not be present because of the ongoing pandemic-- it is time to take a look at the progress of my career over the last year. Because of the way publishing timelines are, I've divided this into "appearances" and "accomplishments." Appearances are publications actually showing up; accomplishments are the point at which the acceptance was sent.

Accomplishments: 1 pro sale, 2 semi-pro sales, participation in an indie charity anthology, one paid book review

Appearances: 2 stories in pro markets, 2 stories in semiprozines, 1 story in an indie charity anthology, one book review in a small independent online magazine.

In terms of total stories published as progress towards the "Real Writer" thing, I've had two pro sales and four semi-pro ones since I began, leaving me starting to wonder if SFWA qualification might happen first after all. Which amuses me, given how firmly I was thinking "but of course that will never happen" when I set my parameters. (I will note that I'm thinking of this in terms of the original SFWA qualifications; they're just in the middle of updating how you qualify, allegedly to make it clearer. I do not think they have in fact made it clearer.)

A very different sort of accomplishment: I made enough money off my writing that I'm going to have to figure out how to report it on my 2021 taxes, which I suppose is a milestone of sorts.

Other milestones: first illustrated story, which I did not even know I wanted until I got it. I think it is a thing that will never cease to amaze and delight, no matter how many more illustrated stories I get. The idea that someone has drawn your words into a picture...

Then there was the lemonade-from-lemons that was a lot of writers from the New England horror community pulling together after the Almost Definitely A Scam submission call by taking the highly-specifically-themed stories we'd written for that and making our own anthology, with the proceeds going to benefit another writer in need. I felt very much a part of the local writing community, participating in that. And it seems to have sold pretty well.

There is an extent to which I'm looking at that list going "Wow, all of that was just one year?" It seems like it should be longer. Overall I've actually managed to accomplish a good bit in the last year. I have not burst out of the chrysalis fully formed, but if you took Past Kit who set these parameters in the first place and told her what I've accomplished, she'd be shocked that any of it happened at all. Which in turn shows how much you evolve as your writing does, because I look on it now and go "but I didn't accomplish that much." Except, of course, for the fact that I'm now someone with a spreadsheet who actively tracks which markets have submission windows and which markets have what preferences and has markets that seem to like my writing and markets that absolutely do not. All of which is a dramatic increase in professionalization.

I accomplished some things on other projects, as well. I've been contributing to Young People Read Old SFF very regularly, and WNXS News (my podcast) has been going on for more than a year now. It's the first long-term collaborative creative project I've ever worked on, and while I had a very active hand in shaping the show's style, it's been fascinating watching as I merge concepts and ideas with my cowriter until we get something that's more than the sum of its parts and much more than either of us could have done alone.

What about future goals? Well, I still haven't finished my initial parameter number. Let's see if I can do that this year. Maybe as an and instead of an or-- hit at least ten stories published somewhere paying and qualify for the SFWA. I want to make a dent in actually writing my novel instead of endlessly worldbuilding it. I want to get started on writing a more detailed concept and scripts for the hypothetical second podcast project. (And from a standpoint of not-pro but still writing, I want to get my epic MtG fanfic finished and posted.)

I want to be on a convention panel. Given the givens, probably a virtual one, but still. That was what kicked off this whole thing in the first place.

I wonder what this year will bring?