touch my face and watch me try to breathe again
Reading Wednesday on a Thursday:
I'm not going to split it out because I am still rereading my way through the Amelia Peabody series. I finished The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog, though I was wrong about the identity of the kidnapper, it does introduce Bertha (I kept thinking her name was Bettina or Bethany - I knew it was a B but I couldn't remember Bertha) the woman who falls in love with Emerson and becomes a criminal mastermind. Then I read The Hippopotamus Pool and Seeing a Large Cat, which is the one where Cyrus meets his future wife, the con artist/medium lady. I also thought there was an implication that Mrs. Fraser deflowered Ramses while they were rehearsing her act as the Egyptian princess, but I either misremembered or just didn't catch it this time around. Or I'm thinking of something else from another book. Anyway. I'm on The Ape Who Guards the Balance now. I liked this one a lot as well, iirc. I suppose I'll work my way through and then get back to reading new things. We'll see.
***
I posted a story yesterday!
I'll give you my heart to make a place (@ AO3)
Captain America; Steve/Bucky; adult; 5,725 words
The one thing Bucky knows is that he never wants to hurt Steve.
It's basically a bunch of sex scenes strung together, but at least it's something? I mean, okay, I did write two remixes in late April/early May, but those were like pulling teeth as well, and I couldn't even deal with any of my Marvel wsip. I worked so hard to finish three of the four major ones I'd had hanging around before Cap 2 opened (I still have the MCU/DCU crossover in progress, though maybe by my birthday it'll be done?), though two of them were actually finished after I saw the movie, since I saw it on March 20.
But as much as I loved the movie - and boy howdy did I ever love it - it kind of totally messed with my head for writing. Not just the whole HYDRA within SHIELD thing - WHICH THEY ARE ALREADY WALKING BACK ON SHIELD, WHICH PISSES ME OFF TO NO END+ - ahem - though that makes things a little trickier plot-wise, but mostly the apparent removal of the Bucky/Natasha backstory, which I don't care what anybody says about retcons, is a thing I love (the backstory, I mean, not the removal, obv.), and even more importantly, the jossing of the idea that Steve and Bucky met as kids in an orphanage, which came from the original movie tie-in comics and which was the sort of gray canon that I completely glommed onto. Finding out that Steve was at least 18 and maybe older when his mother died, and that Bucky's family (oldest of 4 if that Smithsonian piece is to be believed, though it got a number of other things wrong, I don't even know if it should be) was both still around (I mean, I had no problem with using the comics backstory of him having a younger sister who'd been taken in by relatives while he was cast upon the tender mercies of an orphanage upon his father's death) and, by the look of Bucky's suit and the reference to a car, not desperately poor.
[My mother's family was of Irish extraction (I believe my maternal grandfather was born in the US but nobody talks about him so I don't really know; before that, his family was from County Mayo) and desperately poor in Brooklyn during the 30s and 40s. My maternal grandfather was a subway motorman but he apparently drank away quite a lot of his paycheck (with attendant violence/alcoholism etc. which is why nobody talks about him, because all of the stories I have heard are bad). Whereas my father's family - Italian immigrants with their own furniture shop [my paternal grandfather was a cabinet-maker; he came to NYC from Palermo in 1911, and brought my grandmother, his third {!!! - this was a bit of a family scandal, as we didn't discover he'd been married a second time - and divorced!!! - to a woman in Philadelphia before he went back to Italy and married my grandmother - until my grandmother died} wife, over from Palermo in 1935, when she was heavily pregnant with my father; her sister, my Aunt Jean, came over after the war] - were pretty middle class - my grandfather bought the house I grew up in - in Queens - in 1941 [he also eventually converted it to a two-family house when my dad first got married in 1965. Also, they owned a car, and all of the women in my father's family had fur coats - see the two my sister and I inherited - though I think those were of a post-war vintage. ANYWAY. I don't know why I felt the need to go into family history here, but at least some of the stuff that shows up in my stories about 1940s Brooklyn comes from my family.]
Anyway! Work keeps interrupting so I guess what I wanted to say is that it took me a while to get my head around all that change in the backstory I'd gotten attached to in my head, which I think contributed to being unable to write. Along with life being super busy and stuff. And possibly just being burned out from finishing three big wsip in the space of three weeks. Hopefully now I can get back to it more regularly. Though I spent last night working on my potential condo/co-ops spreadsheet. I just want to be ready when the sale of the house is final because I have a really short turnaround time! But that's a whole separate post.
--
+ 1. NO. TAKING SHIELD DOWN WAS BRILLIANT AND REBUILDING IT WITH EVEN LESS TRANSPARENCY AND OVERSIGHT IS TERRIBLE. AND COULSON HAS NO REAL MANDATE OR LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY. WHAT THE HELL. I'm not actually sure how SHIELD was structured, since it was allegedly an international organization despite being headquartered in the US and headed up by a US cabinet member (Pierce was referred to as Secretary of Defense, wasn't he?), but there was in addition to the World Security Council (who at least had some kind of official standing and authority, despite their awful use of it, i.e., nuking NYC in Avengers), also apparently Congressional oversight in the US at least (I'm pretty sure Pierce tells Fury that delaying Project Insight would require a Congressional hearing; certainly his talk about earmarks means there was a shit-ton of govt funding involved.), but it at least had some authority to act. Coulson's team now is just a bunch of vigilantes with no actual legal backing, which would be FINE if the show acknowledges that going forward, but I would be surprised if it did.
1a. GOING FROM HAVING A BLACK MAN WITH A VISIBLE DISABILITY AND A WOMAN RUNNING THINGS TO A MIDDLE-AGED WHITE GUY IN A SUIT = DNW. (as an aside in this extra-long set of footnotes, I know they couldn't have given us a half-hour comedy about intern Darcy and her misadventures among scientists and Asgardians because Kat Dennings already has a day job, but I would have preferred that to SHIELD for most of the season.) (ALSO, FUCK NO IS COULSON AN AVENGER. WHAT THE FUCK. NO. IF HE IS THAN PEPPER AND RHODEY AND SAM BETTER BE, IS ALL I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THAT. Well, and also that I choose to think it was just Fury greasing his griddle and he didn't really mean it, he just knew it was the best way to get around Coulson's objections to his obviously very sketchy use of alien goop to revive him.)
2. COULSON, HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING FROM CAPTAIN AMERICA? I feel like they could have done some interesting things with Coulson's characterization as an agent cut lose from his agency and who is he without that? And while the show maybe kinda did a little of that, it didn't do it very well. Or maybe I feel like it tried to vindicate his terrible decisions rather than calling him out for them. It's like all the ambiguity in CA:TWS where you could read that they were really trying to show how shady SHIELD was even if the execution didn't quite bring it off is being walked back into SHIELD is a righteous organization so Coulson can be its righteous new head. And I say pfui to that. Pfui. Of course, I'm sure I'll be hatewatching in September just so I know what everyone's talking about. Ugh.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/670952.html.
people have commented there.
I'm not going to split it out because I am still rereading my way through the Amelia Peabody series. I finished The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog, though I was wrong about the identity of the kidnapper, it does introduce Bertha (I kept thinking her name was Bettina or Bethany - I knew it was a B but I couldn't remember Bertha) the woman who falls in love with Emerson and becomes a criminal mastermind. Then I read The Hippopotamus Pool and Seeing a Large Cat, which is the one where Cyrus meets his future wife, the con artist/medium lady. I also thought there was an implication that Mrs. Fraser deflowered Ramses while they were rehearsing her act as the Egyptian princess, but I either misremembered or just didn't catch it this time around. Or I'm thinking of something else from another book. Anyway. I'm on The Ape Who Guards the Balance now. I liked this one a lot as well, iirc. I suppose I'll work my way through and then get back to reading new things. We'll see.
***
I posted a story yesterday!
I'll give you my heart to make a place (@ AO3)
Captain America; Steve/Bucky; adult; 5,725 words
The one thing Bucky knows is that he never wants to hurt Steve.
It's basically a bunch of sex scenes strung together, but at least it's something? I mean, okay, I did write two remixes in late April/early May, but those were like pulling teeth as well, and I couldn't even deal with any of my Marvel wsip. I worked so hard to finish three of the four major ones I'd had hanging around before Cap 2 opened (I still have the MCU/DCU crossover in progress, though maybe by my birthday it'll be done?), though two of them were actually finished after I saw the movie, since I saw it on March 20.
But as much as I loved the movie - and boy howdy did I ever love it - it kind of totally messed with my head for writing. Not just the whole HYDRA within SHIELD thing - WHICH THEY ARE ALREADY WALKING BACK ON SHIELD, WHICH PISSES ME OFF TO NO END+ - ahem - though that makes things a little trickier plot-wise, but mostly the apparent removal of the Bucky/Natasha backstory, which I don't care what anybody says about retcons, is a thing I love (the backstory, I mean, not the removal, obv.), and even more importantly, the jossing of the idea that Steve and Bucky met as kids in an orphanage, which came from the original movie tie-in comics and which was the sort of gray canon that I completely glommed onto. Finding out that Steve was at least 18 and maybe older when his mother died, and that Bucky's family (oldest of 4 if that Smithsonian piece is to be believed, though it got a number of other things wrong, I don't even know if it should be) was both still around (I mean, I had no problem with using the comics backstory of him having a younger sister who'd been taken in by relatives while he was cast upon the tender mercies of an orphanage upon his father's death) and, by the look of Bucky's suit and the reference to a car, not desperately poor.
[My mother's family was of Irish extraction (I believe my maternal grandfather was born in the US but nobody talks about him so I don't really know; before that, his family was from County Mayo) and desperately poor in Brooklyn during the 30s and 40s. My maternal grandfather was a subway motorman but he apparently drank away quite a lot of his paycheck (with attendant violence/alcoholism etc. which is why nobody talks about him, because all of the stories I have heard are bad). Whereas my father's family - Italian immigrants with their own furniture shop [my paternal grandfather was a cabinet-maker; he came to NYC from Palermo in 1911, and brought my grandmother, his third {!!! - this was a bit of a family scandal, as we didn't discover he'd been married a second time - and divorced!!! - to a woman in Philadelphia before he went back to Italy and married my grandmother - until my grandmother died} wife, over from Palermo in 1935, when she was heavily pregnant with my father; her sister, my Aunt Jean, came over after the war] - were pretty middle class - my grandfather bought the house I grew up in - in Queens - in 1941 [he also eventually converted it to a two-family house when my dad first got married in 1965. Also, they owned a car, and all of the women in my father's family had fur coats - see the two my sister and I inherited - though I think those were of a post-war vintage. ANYWAY. I don't know why I felt the need to go into family history here, but at least some of the stuff that shows up in my stories about 1940s Brooklyn comes from my family.]
Anyway! Work keeps interrupting so I guess what I wanted to say is that it took me a while to get my head around all that change in the backstory I'd gotten attached to in my head, which I think contributed to being unable to write. Along with life being super busy and stuff. And possibly just being burned out from finishing three big wsip in the space of three weeks. Hopefully now I can get back to it more regularly. Though I spent last night working on my potential condo/co-ops spreadsheet. I just want to be ready when the sale of the house is final because I have a really short turnaround time! But that's a whole separate post.
--
+ 1. NO. TAKING SHIELD DOWN WAS BRILLIANT AND REBUILDING IT WITH EVEN LESS TRANSPARENCY AND OVERSIGHT IS TERRIBLE. AND COULSON HAS NO REAL MANDATE OR LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY. WHAT THE HELL. I'm not actually sure how SHIELD was structured, since it was allegedly an international organization despite being headquartered in the US and headed up by a US cabinet member (Pierce was referred to as Secretary of Defense, wasn't he?), but there was in addition to the World Security Council (who at least had some kind of official standing and authority, despite their awful use of it, i.e., nuking NYC in Avengers), also apparently Congressional oversight in the US at least (I'm pretty sure Pierce tells Fury that delaying Project Insight would require a Congressional hearing; certainly his talk about earmarks means there was a shit-ton of govt funding involved.), but it at least had some authority to act. Coulson's team now is just a bunch of vigilantes with no actual legal backing, which would be FINE if the show acknowledges that going forward, but I would be surprised if it did.
1a. GOING FROM HAVING A BLACK MAN WITH A VISIBLE DISABILITY AND A WOMAN RUNNING THINGS TO A MIDDLE-AGED WHITE GUY IN A SUIT = DNW. (as an aside in this extra-long set of footnotes, I know they couldn't have given us a half-hour comedy about intern Darcy and her misadventures among scientists and Asgardians because Kat Dennings already has a day job, but I would have preferred that to SHIELD for most of the season.) (ALSO, FUCK NO IS COULSON AN AVENGER. WHAT THE FUCK. NO. IF HE IS THAN PEPPER AND RHODEY AND SAM BETTER BE, IS ALL I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THAT. Well, and also that I choose to think it was just Fury greasing his griddle and he didn't really mean it, he just knew it was the best way to get around Coulson's objections to his obviously very sketchy use of alien goop to revive him.)
2. COULSON, HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING FROM CAPTAIN AMERICA? I feel like they could have done some interesting things with Coulson's characterization as an agent cut lose from his agency and who is he without that? And while the show maybe kinda did a little of that, it didn't do it very well. Or maybe I feel like it tried to vindicate his terrible decisions rather than calling him out for them. It's like all the ambiguity in CA:TWS where you could read that they were really trying to show how shady SHIELD was even if the execution didn't quite bring it off is being walked back into SHIELD is a righteous organization so Coulson can be its righteous new head. And I say pfui to that. Pfui. Of course, I'm sure I'll be hatewatching in September just so I know what everyone's talking about. Ugh.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/670952.html.
people have commented there.