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certified gay menace, manufactured in america. cannot be exchanged or sold. opening casing voids warranty. contains purely carbon-based material except for after-market modifications.
Do you want to read a very specific fic from me – one I haven’t actually written? Maybe you want to see my take on a particular trope or pairing, or you really want a sequel or missing scene from one of my works?
Starting this month, I’m offering one slot per month to prompt a fic in return for proof of donating at least $10 USD (or equivalent) to a pro-choice organization. (List below; includes both US and international options).
Status: January slot closed, check back February first.
I become frustrated, sometimes, with both members of the public and historians with no personal background in gender history who criticize work on women’s history for being too optimistic or apologetic, even though I agree this is often an issue. The thing is that due to source issues you have to do some speculative guessing about what women are doing most of the time (it was certainly not sitting silently in isolation while producing and consuming no resources whatsoever). That speculation has to be informed by what sources do exist, of course, but it’s not always appropriate to be as negative as possible either.
For example, population work on the Ottoman Empire can sometimes be surprisingly detailed, depending on whether detailed tax registers have survived and been located for a given area and time. However, we have to make guesses about the female population, because they tend to list population by the number of male heads of households, male bachelors, and male officials exempt from taxes by profession. (Though not always - practice changed over time and region, and there were always idiosyncracies per the scribes and officials involved.) There are some exceptions where Christian widows are listed as tax liable heads of households, but it’s not everywhere and it’s generally only Christians.
However, in this one situation, the source difficulty is not because of concerns about female modesty or because women couldn’t live independently or be heads of their own household - it’s because in recognition of the fact that it was fucking hard for adult women to make a living and so they were at high risk of poverty,* they were generally exempt from having to pay taxes in the first place. So, of course they’re not listed as sources of tax revenue, but the state policies involved are fairly unambiguously pro-women (in, of course, a very unequal background environment). Occasiionally the state went to even more efforts in this regard, for example, by setting up special women’s seller markets in order to avoid accidentally charging female artisans taxes they weren’t liable for. So, the female artisans definitely existed!
*iirc it’s a specific-interpretation-in-shari'a thing but this is the logic behind the shari'a thing.
600 words on secret exchange fic; 1.3k on orion’s dating history. Snippet from latter:
He opened his eyes, squinting against the possibility of light, but the curtains were still shut and he didn’t see anything but the vague shadow of Rhoeo’s shoulder curving against the green backdrop. She either hadn’t noticed he was awake or was ignoring him. “Rhoeo?” said Orion, grateful that it was her: there weren’t many girls her height with hair that long, and none of the others had the same muscles from quidditch.
i’m going to argue that chronically online and chronically on phone are two different things actually. the phone internet is different from the real internet and companies are trying desperately to make the real internet more like the phone internet… and they’re sadly succeeding. hope this makes sense and if it doesn’t oh well
Project in less than two weeks: most recent bobbin lace piece:
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And finish a lingering wip, uuuh this embroidery project has been sitting since either 2020 or 2021 actually! Here it is, completed and sewn into a pouch for my scissors:
…Yesterday, for the first time, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, admitted that “several thousands” have been killed since the protests began three weeks ago.
In a broadcast to the nation on state TV, he blamed protesters themselves, describing them as “foot-soldiers of the United States” and claiming that “rioters were armed with live ammunition that was imported from abroad”.
But The Sunday Times has obtained a new report from doctors on the ground, which says at least 16,500 protesters have died and 330,000 have been injured, most of them in two days of utter slaughter in the most brutal crackdown by the clerical regime in its 47-year existence….
1.1k on annatar celebrimbor marriage; 600 words on secret exchange fic. Snippet from former:
What Annatar did when he made dinner was not, exactly, cooking, or at least not cooking as any elf nor mortal could. He didn’t need conventional ingredients, either, and so while Annatar was resistant to providing any general service to the city or Gwaith-i-Mirdain at large, Celebrimbor had become shamefully accustomed to and dependent on to having coffee again, for the first time since the Exile of the Noldor. Apparently what Annatar did was directly manipulate the base chemistry that went into food to match it to various culinary experiences, something he assured them hardly any ainu would bother learning to do. It had inspired a full decade of increasingly despairing experimentation by a few of the more homesick and food-motivated members a century or so back. In the end, and after full volumes of notes taken from interviewing a bemused Annatar, they’d synthesized (technically – allegedly) edible protein in a sort of hunk, universally voted inferior to lembas as a desperate travel food. The notes were still available for anybody who wanted to go back to trying, but in the meantime, the skill was Annatar’s alone; and so Celebrimbor was the only one who frequently enjoyed it.
prep on secret exchange fic; posted an (already-written) silm peggy sue snippet earlier, and 600 words on setting sun sequel:
Putting Grimmauld Place to rights was either an actually productive thing to do or a plausible distraction; so Druella kept up with the uncursing and repairing and pest-dispersing in the private rooms, when she took breaks from childcare. In the process she was accumulating a store of objects that needed repair, nonfunctional clocks and ripped tapestries and the like, which was a useful secondary distraction. Andromeda had worked for her husband’s enchanting business, so Druella could dump broken magical objects on her to keep her sober for the occasional afternoon, carpentry and silverware and such gave her a reason to look at the paper’s classified section and write letters, and the textiles, she usually fixed herself. Sometimes, Andromeda even joined her in sewing voluntarily.
Here’s the start of the currently in progress chapter from silm peggy sue AU, 2.6k below the cut (and reminder this blog is choose not to warn):
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Gold light mixed with silver, shining through the rafters and down onto the bedding and floor. Tyelkormo drifted in half-sleep, pinned in any case to the bed by the heavy hand on the back of his neck, until the silver predominated. Then he blinked, and cleared his eyes.
Lord Orome still hadn’t moved, which wasn’t usual. The Valar manifested fully in one location at a time, generally, and it was rare that he would dedicate so much of himself to Tyelkormo as to stay in bed with him almost for a full period of rest. This instance balanced somewhere between flattering and concerning. “My lord?” said Tyelkormo cautiously.
anyway the luthien oneshot did not happen, or any other writing, because I’ve spent the last two days mostly incapacitated by trauma nightmare hangover turning into migraine from hell. I am crossing my fingers that the emergency coat face and neck in capsaicin cream measures will help enough I can like. run my scheduled errands and possibly even work today, but goddammit.
I view reading fantasy/sci-fi stuff as “this work of fiction is being translated into english so that I can understand it, meaning some phrases should not be taken literally” lord of the rings style, and then I meet people who nitpick every word or phrase that “shouldn’t exist in this story” and I’m like wow you guys are truly miserable and unimaginative. and also you tend to assume that english words all popped up in the 19th century and you never bother to check the etymology of the words you’re claiming “shouldn’t exist in this universe”
like sorry but in an apocalyptic alternate-universe earth, the phrase “train of thought” is plausible even in a world without locomotives, because the word “train” comes from the 14th century, and it meant “to drag”
that’s why we call dress trains “trains”. because they drag. the word wasn’t invented for locomotives.
y'all say shit so definitively like idk man I think it depends. the english language is OLD AS FUCK. a lot of words you believe are modern just aren’t
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