(no subject)

Friday reccs!

This is hilarious and narcissistic. Half of the reccs I have for you today are inspired by my fic. So here's the three that AREN'T first, two Night Vale and one Avengers:

Bad Habits by winterhill: Carlos/Cecil, Teen and Up. Cecil and Carlos have moved in together and are dealing with little personal habits like Cecil moulting and Carlos slurping his food. This fic is so romantic and charming and totally gross, I <3 it.

Night Vale Broadcast by jonaht: Gen, General Audiences. There is a strange wind blowing in Night Vale. I think jonaht really nailed the voice of the podcasts, so I encouraged her to put it up on AO3.

Wilt Thou Exchange by twentysomething: Explicit, Steve/Toni. This is a genderbent-Tony story but it's really a lot more than that -- it's like a story about the Avengers coming together which just happens to have a genderbend in it. Witty and fun, and I was almost late to work this morning reading it.

And now the ego fest:

Music: Meg Bodoun by Kila9Nishika: Not Rated. This is a pair of manips to go with the Music section from my story A Partial Dictionary Of The 21st Century. It's a great set of images; I like to think of them as screengrabs from the music video.

Podfic of BlackAmex: G, Gen. A lovely podfic of my fanfic Black AmEx, read by Vertiga. Black AmEx is the "Bruce and Steve go shopping because Tony is a sugar daddy" fic.

Podfic of Pas De Deux by AshesandGhost: Explicit, Carlos/Cecil. This is a great and very evociative podfic of my fic Pas De Deux, in which Cecil has two penises and a complex about it.

Also just in general, the other day I went through and approved a bunch of podfics of my work on AO3, and then realised that I hadn't actually made note of which ones were new and should be linked here. Argh. But if you're into podfic and/or into my fic, there's a long list of podfics and other inspired works here that you may enjoy.

(no subject)

Man, it has been a long time since I made an announcement about Stealing Harry on this journal. But Stealing Harry is now posted to AO3. It's listed under the Stealing Harryverse collection, where you can find all the fics in chronological order, including the notes about books 4-7 that never got written.

Stealing Harry is apparently 99937 words long. Just 63 more words and I would have cracked 100K...

On the other hand the 'verse as a whole is 443,300 words long, so I can't complain too loudly about a lack of verbage. Or prettily rounded numbers if it comes to that.

(no subject)

SOMETIMES I FAIL TO READ BOOKS.

I make the attempt! But for whatever reason, I can't get through them. And it's kind of ludicrous, because of what I do manage to get through.

Recently jonaht recommended a book to me called Heads In Beds, about the hospitality industry. And it really is quite interesting reading when it's about the hospitality industry, though a) it makes me think all humans are disgusting and b) it makes me glad I rarely stay in hotels. But it's really an autobiography of one man's journey through the hospitality industry -- and that wouldn't be a problem except he's kind of a bro. He's a little douchey, a little bro-y, and there came a point where I just couldn't go on. (Also I think he's kind of racist.) But it was a good recommendation because normally, authorial issues aside, that kind of book is right up my street.

The other book I have recently been unable to finish fills me with more regret. I think I found it on a list of "trashy beach reads with real literary value"; it's called The Lord Won't Mind by Gordon Merrick, the first volume in what's called the Peter-Charlie trilogy. The Lord Won't Mind is a really important piece of literature, actually, one of the first major works of literature to portray gay relationships as both positive and unlikely to end in death.

When I was describing it to someone the other day I said, "You know how when you were in your early teens you heard about how scandalous Lady Chatterly's Lover was, so you went and found it in the library and it turned out to be super tame? This is the book you were looking for." It is chockablock full of nearly continuous gay sex, to which I have no objection though it did make reading it on the bus somewhat awkward. There are little kids around, yo, and sometimes they try to read what I'm reading, I don't pretend to understand why.

But yes. The Lord Won't Mind actually is really important and at least according to many reviews on many sites it was a huge touchstone for queer kids in the seventies and remains so for queer kids without access to much other queer media. And I get that, and it's very well written, so I respect this book.

But man, Charlie is an asshole. He's a racist, rapey, partner-beating asshole. I'm told that by the end of the book he's learning about what an asshole he is, and that's good, but I didn't have the fortitude to keep reading about a sweet, desperately naive kid getting entangled with this giant asshole.

Apparently, you guys, I have a problem with assholes in books.

I did manage to finish Andrew Caldwell's "Their Last Suppers", which is a book about the last meals of famous historical figures. (And, for some reason, John Candy. Not that he's not awesome, but...he's not exactly Napoleon or Alexander the Great.) I have to admit I wasn't that impressed with this one either; the historical blurbs that precede the menus aren't as much about the food of the era, as I'd hoped they would be, but rather are sort of high-school level historical essays on the people in question. The recipes themselves are often rather shoddily assembled, with poor cooking instructions which frequently ignore how to plate or consume the more unusual dishes. There were also three women, out of 21 profiles, which seemed a bit sketch.

So it has not been a banner week for books. But I've got another little stack of books waiting for me to read, and a lot of travel coming up, so we shall see.