. . . and then I got sick. Just a heavy cold with strong brainfog and sleeping all day components; nothing serious, unless I was planning to do anything that required attention to detail. Which, oops, I was. Yuletide, why can't you be every three months so that your valuable lessons about procrastination will have the chance to stick ( Read more... )

So, I love Yuletide because it dumps a pile of delicious perfect stories in my lap, of course. But I also like it because it forces me to do things that are hard, like writing stories I would otherwise never attempt, with a hard deadline and a ravenous pack of guilt-hounds to chomp at me if I fail ( Read more... )

Why did that take so long? I don't even know. I've been lost in a maze of unemployment, semi-employment, and fruitless job-searching. Well, anyway, here is Chapter 88.

The contrast between Emily's poetic sympathy with Mad Mr. Morrison and her spectacular coldness toward Evelyn (who, to be fair, has been a major pain -- but wait, so has the guy who ( Read more... )

Ok, I'm dragging this out because I've become too attached. But it is going to end. . . soon. Chapters 86 and 87 deal briefly with matters of importance, and 88 will be. . . probably in a couple weeks, since I have to go out of town again.

Anyway, despite what the Emily of New Moon cinematographers would have you believe, Prince Edward Island is ( Read more... )

I'm in Charlottetown for the L.M. Montgomery Conference! It's a real place with wandering late-night teenagers, perky hipsters, and a carmel-and-white cat who lives in a tree in the park across from the hostel. Fanfiction will resume in a couple days, if anyone is still reading (and even if no one is, per Mr.Carpenter's Rules of Writing).


( Read more... )

So all the Kindred Spirits Mailing List is aflutter at the news that a brand new Anne series is in the works, "this time in a more modern-day setting" Much wrath over the thought of Anne in skinny jeans and curmudgeonly wondering aloud what color she could possibly dye her hair that would be unacceptable to Kids These Days and jokes about Gilbert's ( Read more... )

In Chapter 81, I indulge my headcanon that Prof. Darcy chose A Legend of Abegweit over Emily's (allegedly obviously way better) Wild Grapes for patriotic reasons - - - as a Prince Edward Island poem with a robust sense of place, it suited his (never stated, but not improbably regional-literature-boosting) purposes better than the charming but non- ( Read more... )

"If the prize were for mathematics Kath Darcy should win it."

Mathematics doesn't come into the Emily books at all, except in the person of Kathleen "Kath" Darcy, about whom we will come to know only two things: She has an uncle who is a professor at McGill, which uncle gets it into his head to offer a poetry prize to Shrewsbury students (said ( Read more... )

There's really no reason at all for Chapter 71 from a storytelling perspective. One of my faithful commenters said that Evelyn should read Varney the Vampire next, so I decided to integrate its unnaturally wordy writing style into Ev's canonical attack of tonsillitis ( Read more... )

I got some comments a while back saying Evelyn was too mature for her age, so I gave her a vampire romance to read for Chapter 69. Teenagers like vampire romances, right? The past being Another Country, Carmilla is actually a lesbian vampire romance in which one of the telltale weaknesses of the titular vampire is that she can only use names that ( Read more... )