halfcactus

Write This in the Sky (3646 words) by DoreyG
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars: Rebels
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hera Syndulla/Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo, background Hera Syndulla/Kanan Jarrus
Characters: Hera Syndulla, Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Mild Femdom, Cunnilingus, Blow Jobs, Vaginal Sex, Woman on Top, Multiple Orgasms, Anonymous Sex, One Night Stands, Implied Open Relationships
Summary:

“Is this perhaps the point where we exchange names?”

“Hm, let’s stick to aliases for now,” Hera said, not carried away by lust enough - A Twi’lek could never quite afford that - to forget all her senses. “You can call me Ghost.”

“A charming alias. I am Chimaera,” the man - Chimaera, an interesting choice - said with every appearance of relief; stepped in against her, the force of his stare even more gloriously intimate from up close. “Do you kiss?”

Current Mood: hot

skygiants

lest you think that having returned The Pushcart War to its rightful owner I went away with my bookshelves lighter! I did NOT, as she pushed 84, Charing Cross Road into my hands at the airport as I was leaving again with strict instructions to read it ASAP.

This is another one that's been on my list for years -- specifically, since I read Between Silk and Cyanide, as cryptography wunderkind Leo Marks chronicling the desperate heroism and impossible failures of the SOE is of course the son of the owner of Marks & Co., the bookstore featuring in 84, Charing Cross Road, because the whole of England contains approximately fifteen people tops.

84, Charing Cross Road collects the correspondence between jobbing writer Helene Hanff -- who started ordering various idiosyncratic books at Marks & Co. in 1949 -- and the various bookstore employees, primarily but not exclusively chief buyer Frank Doel. Not only does Hanff has strong and funny opinions about the books she wants to read and the editions she's being sent, she also spends much of the late forties and early fifties expressing her appreciation by sending parcels of rationed items to the store employees. A friendship develops, and the store employees enthusiastically invite Hanff to visit them in England, but there always seems to be something that comes up to prevent it. Hanff gets and loses jobs, and some of the staff move on. Rationing ends, and Hanff doesn't send so many parcels, but keeps buying books. Twenty years go by like this.

Since 84, Charing Cross Road was a bestseller in 1970 and subsequently multiply adapted to stage and screen, and Between Silk and Cyanide did not receive publication permission until 1998, I think most people familiar with these two books have read them in the reverse order that I did. I think it did make sort of a difference to feel the shadow of Between Silk and Cyanide hanging over this charming correspondence -- not for the worse, as an experience, just certain elements emphasized. Something about the strength and fragility of a letter or a telegram as a thread to connect people, and how much of a story it does and doesn't tell.

As a sidenote, in looking up specific publication dates I have also learned by way of Wikipedia that there is apparently a Chinese romcom about two people who both independently read 84, Charing Cross Road, decide that the book has ruined their lives for reasons that are obscure to me in the Wikipedia summary, write angry letters to the address 84 Charing Cross Road, and then get matchmade by the man who lives there now. Extremely funny and I kind of do want to watch it.

maju

I almost didn't go to parkrun this morning because there was a slight chance of rain, plus the humidity was very high, plus I had a slight headache. However, I got myself into gear and went along, planning to walk the whole thing, but I ended up doing 1 minute walk/30 second run intervals and not being much slower than when I run more. Sweat was dripping off me by the end, but my headache disappeared at some point.

My sister, less than two weeks after her operation, is now up to walking 5 km/3 miles in slightly more than an hour (about half her usual pace). So much for the doctor who told her she should aim to be walking for about half an hour within 2 to 6 weeks. She is finding it hard to keep to such a slow pace.

I'm reading the book "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn Williams, and now I feel dirty if I look at Facebook. In case you haven't heard of it, the author worked at Facebook for about seven years and it's basically an expose of all the horrible behind the scenes practices, and how little any of the senior people including Zuckerberg care about the damage it does in the world. I would close my FB account except that some of my family members still post there, but it's changed so much in the last few years that I already spend a lot less time there than I used to.

LJ is still not working properly. Today it is refusing to load my friends' feed.

oursin

Walkouts, feuds and broken friendships: when book clubs go bad. I don't think I've ever been in a book club of this kind. Many years ago at My Place Of Work there used to be an informal monthly reading group which would discuss some work of relevance to the academic mission of the institution, very broadly defined, and that was quite congenial, and I am currently in an online group read-through and discussion of A Dance to the Music of Time, but both these have rather more focus perhaps? certainly I do not perceive that they have people turning up without having reading the actual books....

Mind you, I am given the ick, and this is I will concede My Garbage, by those Reading Group Suggestions that some books have at the end, or that were flashed up during an online book group discussion of a book in which I was interested.

Going to book groups without Doing The Reading perhaps goes under the heading of Faking It, which has been in the news a lot lately (I assume everybody has heard about The Salt Roads thing): and here are a couple of furthe instances:

(This one is rather beautifully recursive) What if every artwork you’ve ever seen is a fake?:

Many years ago, I met a man in a pub in Bloomsbury who said he worked at the British Museum. He told me that every single item on display in the museum was a replica, and that all the original artefacts were locked away in storage for preservation.
....
Later, Googling, I discovered that none of what the man had told me was true. The artefacts in the British Museum are original, unless otherwise explicitly stated. It was the man who claimed to work there who was a fake.

This one is more complex, and about masquerade and fantasy as much as 'hoax' perhaps: The schoolteacher who spawned a Highland literary hoax

This is not so much about fakery but about areas of doubt: We still do not understand family resemblance which suggests that GENES are by no means the whole story.

turps

I've had a very lazy day today as James has been off doing a community overtime event for work. So, I've been tidying up indoors, given the garden a good soak and got caught up online. Well, the DW posts anyway, I've still got so much TV to watch, and yes, I know, the tiniest violin needed for me.

Tomorrow we're taking my MiL out for a belated birthday lunch, so I've enjoyed the quiet do very little day. Even enjoying the sunshine and the heat, due to not having to actually do anything but waft around in it.

Sunshine revival challenge prompt now.

Journaling prompt: What are your favorite summer-associated foods?
Creative prompt: Draw art of or make graphics of summer foods, or post your favorite summer recipes. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

The first thing that came to mind here was beach sandwiches. Which were the chopped salad cream, egg and tomato sandwiches my mam used to make for us when I was a kidlet. We'd head off to the beach, and have a picnic, and the sandwiches were always soggy, flat, and always had sand in them, no matter how carefully they were handled. But, at the same time, they always tasted delicious, especially so as mam used to buy a carton of chips to share while eating them.

A more up to date summer food. I was in the garden picking strawberries, raspberries, chillis and pea pods yesterday. There aren't that many of them as I only have a small garden, and the tomatoes haven't started to ripen yet. But, I thought the bowl looked pretty.

feurioo posting in

tv_talk

Assortment of black and white speech bubbles

Welcome to the weekly roundup post! What are you watching this week? What are you excited about?

rynling

( Read more... )

Oh man. It’s been a week. The horrors persist, but so do I.

meteordust

The story I wrote for st_yves was:

Title: The Cage of Dread and Desire
Fandom: The Elric Saga - Michael Moorcock
Relationships: Elric & Alternate Universe Elric
Characters: Elric of Melniboné, Alternate Universe Elric
Rating: Teen
Tags: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Being Tormented By An Evil Alternate Version of Yourself, Held Captive in a Cage, Multiverse
Summary: Elric meets himself. It does not go well.

Thank you again to opalmatrix for your wonderful Chronicles of Morgaine story, Safely Rest, which gave me such beautiful Roh and Vanye conflict and comforting.

Current Mood: geeky

landingtree

Until I turn thirty, in about a year's time, I will not buy any books for myself unless they are:

-audiobooks.
-by a personal friend.
-for a book club.
-by Gene Wolfe or Tanith Lee.

Other people may buy me books, and I may buy books for other people, but I am not allowed to cheat using either of these facts.

~
Free-writing #2
~

First pope blue, tall, scowling. Second pope smaller and cursed. Third pope rotated, screaming, then popped. At this point the equipment was recalibrated. Fourth pope knew nothing of sin; this pope was kept. Fifth pope explained all real politics as a cheese factory and seemed promising but was terminated when its growth became exponential. The committee is worried about the sixth pope as its termination process was interrupted; it is suspected that this pope was rescued and taken home by employee Angela Smythe and investigations into her disappearance and a series of murders around Crabtree Lake are ongoing. Equipment was reset to most conservative values. Seventh pope resembled a pope. Eighth pope specifically identical to Pope Benedict XVI. Greater deviation was introduced. Eighth pope blue, porridge-flavoured. Ninth pope entered radioactive fusion and damaged main test chamber. Experimental protocols mandated a shutdown for re-evaluation and the entire project was deemed a failure, with no return on investment and no product saleable to the client. During this time it is now known that a further twelve popes were generated by Dr Alvarez using a sophisticated procedure for zeroing all sensor readouts; the committee was informed of the problem when one of its members read the manifesto co-written by Alvarez in the morning news. It is the position of the committee that Alvarez had not been an extremist Collyridionite prior to his joining the Institute but had instead neglected exposure procedures clearly stated in the safety manual. Background checks performed by the Institute’s hiring department are vigorous and no atheist or extremist staff members can have been admitted to the papal generation chamber.

The committee can guarantee that all equipment related to the project has been rendered nonfunctional. The advance of the Alvarian Popes toward Rome continues, but the government of Italy has the complete co-operation of the Institute and effective countermeasures will have been deployed by this report’s time of issue. The identity of our client remains confidential at this time.

sholio

I wrote another Murderbot 1x10 episode missing scene.

Echoes (gen, 2500 words, Gurathin-centric)
Summary redacted because of spoilers; basically Gurathin's POV on some of the events of the finale.

A few notes on the fic (spoilery for both fic and episode):

under here

• I kept tweaking Gura's final line to Murderbot, so it might be a bit different if you read an earlier version. (I felt like I needed to soften it from how it originally was. They are hard to write! Especially keeping their edge when they're so soft in the final scene.)

• We know Murderbot has trouble figuring out what it's feeling, but I also think it's very plausible that Gurathin has the same problem, if not as badly. He's repressed so much for so long. Asking himself to identify exactly what emotions he's feeling is something that some therapist or other taught him to do.

• This is not necessary context for the fic and it's entirely subject to interpretation, but what I was thinking when it wrote it is that Murderbot using "its" for augmented humans in its last line of dialogue to Gurathin is actually MB doing roughly the same thing (except more emotionally positive) that Gurathin is doing in the episode of the show where he's arguing with Mensah and calls it "he" and then corrects himself to "it." It's over-identifying and doesn't even realize that it's doing so; I mean, it's worried about Gurathin, obviously, and that's why it's here, but there's also a certain amount of "we are the same kind of creature" going on here, even though it doesn't realize it's relating to him on that level. It knows that he might have damaged himself with the data overload because it also knows that it might damage itself in a similar way, and he has much less storage to handle it. And it's just kind of subconsciously being concerned about him as it might be concerned about a fellow construct, or itself, having taken damage. Of course neither of them parses all of that consciously.

In other events, Terrible Temperature Troubles Flash Exchange revealed gifts tonight! I got two absolutely delightful gifts - An Official Complaint Against the Universe (Babylon 5, Vir & Londo, hypothermia and h/c) and Consequences of Cold (Biggles, Biggles/EvS, snuggling when chilled). I loved them!

And finally,

hurtcomfortex author reveals were tonight. I wrote Sleepover (MASH, 1700 words, Margaret POV) with huddling for warmth and light comfort after nightmares.

wonhope posting in

fandom_icons

here @

inappropirates

misura posting in

smallfandomfest

Title: Sweet Delilah
Author: misura
Fandom: The Alienist (TV)
Pairing/Characters: John/Laszlo
Rating/Category: PG13/slash
Prompt: Laszlo overhears a conversation and finds out what really happened to John at Paresis Hall
Spoilers: first season, second episode
Summary: In which John and Laszlo fail to have a conversation about what happened at Paresis Hall.
Notes/Warnings: posted to the AO3

misura posting in

smallfandomfest

Title: Two Birds in the Bush
Author: misura
Fandom: King Arthur (2004)
Pairing/Characters: Tristan/Galahad
Rating/Category: G/slash
Prompt: Galahad is determined to gain Tristan’s hawk’s trust
Spoilers: nope
Summary: Galahad comes up with a cunning plan to win Tristan's affection.
Notes/Warnings: posted to the AO3

longficmod posting in

fandom5k

Hi, all--we're so close to the finish line! I'm announcing a 1 week delay at this time to ensure all our pinch hits are covered. The new reveals date is 26 July at 23:59 US Eastern. We have one pinch hit currently available, with upcoming deadlines on the 13th and the 18th.

Anyone who isn't signed up but is only pinch hitting can leave prompts at our treats for pinch hitters post! This is a great place to look if you're interested in creating treats.

This pinch hit is due 25 July at 23:59 US Eastern time, one day before our new reveals date.

If you can claim this pinch hit, please comment with your AO3 name. All comments are screened.

( PDPH 10 - The West Wing, Neko no Ongaeshi | The Cat Returns, Severance (TV) )

settiai

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: tired

lil_1337

( Review )

troisoiseaux

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of formative 2000s YA with A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper, a novel about the impoverished, eccentric royal family of a very small island - think Gibraltar, but legally independent, mostly abandoned, and on the other side of Spain? - in the years before WWII, in the form of the diary of 16-year-old princess Sophia FitzOsborne. (I only realized years after originally reading this how much it owes to Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle, which I've still never actually read.) This holds up delightfully, although it feels almost embarrassingly self-indulgent, in terms of realizing how precisely it's calibrated to appeal to a certain type of teenage girl and how precisely I was part of that target audience, which might be best described as "former American Girl and Dear America girlies." (And, I suspect, Samantha girlies in particular?) Like, it's just sooo.... she's an orphan living in a crumbling castle (with secret tunnels, a slightly unhinged housekeeper, and possibly ghosts) on an isolated island! She feels herself the too-ordinary middle child among her more talented/charming/outrageous/etc. siblings and cousins, but she's our protagonist, of course she has hidden depths! Plot threads include Sophie's crush on slightly older family friend Simon,* whether to move to London to be Presented Into Society as her aunt insists,** and the looming specter of real-world 1930s geopolitics— the boiling-pot build-up to, you know, WWII - a reference to the fascist sympathies of the British upper class in one of Sophie's brother's letters here, a piece of news there - is chilling, but things get dramatic very quickly when two lost German "historians" (or so they claim) wash ashore.

( Footnotes (100% spoilers) )

rocky41_7 posting in

fffriday

Today I finished the latest book in the Baru Cormorant series (fourth book remains to-be-released), The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Y'all, Baru is so back.

! Spoilers for books 1 & 2 below !

If you've looked at other reviews for the series, you may have seen book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, referred to as the series' "sophomore slump." I disagree, but I understand where the feeling comes from. The Monster feels like a prelude, a setting of the board, for The Tyrant. The Monster puts all the pieces in place for the cascade of schemes and plays that come in The Tyrant. They almost feel like one book split into two (which is fair—taken together, they represent about a thousand pages and would make for one mammoth novel).

If you felt like Baru was too passive in The Monster and that there wasn't enough scheming going on, I can happily report those things are wholly rectified in The Tyrant. Having located the infamous and quasi-mythological Cancrioth at the end of The Monster, Baru wastes no time in whipping into full savant plotting mode.

( Read more... )

helloladies posting in

ladybusiness

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.

( Read more... )

case posting in

fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #6762 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #965.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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doreyg - Fic: Write This in the Sky [Star Wars: Rebels, Hera/Thrawn]
skygiants - (no subject)
maju - (no subject)
oursin - Assortment
turps - (no subject)
feurioo in tv_talk - Speak Up Saturday
rynling - 2025 Writing Log, Part 27
meteordust - Hurt/Comfort Exchange reveals
landingtree - Book-buying vow + thing I wrote before Popes became topical
sholio - Another Murderbot TV fic, Temperature Flash, and Hurt/Comfort-Ex
wonhope in fandom_icons - Kpop Demon Hunters: Zoey [115 icons]
misura in smallfandomfest - fanfic, The Alienist (tv), John/Laszlo, Laszlo finds out what really happened at Paresis Hall
misura in smallfandomfest - fanfic, King Arthur (2004), Tristan/Galahad, Galahad is determined to gain Tristan’s hawk’s trust
longficmod in fandom5k - 1 week delay & 1 current pinch hit
settiai - Pyra Cantha D&D: Summary for 7/11 Game
lil_1337 - [Review] Thus With a Kiss I Die - Christina Dodd
troisoiseaux - A Brief History of Montmaray - Michelle Cooper
rocky41_7 in fffriday - Book review: "The Tyrant Baru Cormorant"
helloladies in ladybusiness - Sidetracks - July 11, 2025
case in fandomsecrets - [ SECRET POST #6762 ]

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Fic: Write This in the Sky [Star Wars: Rebels, Hera/Thrawn]

(no subject)

(no subject)

Assortment

(no subject)

Speak Up Saturday

2025 Writing Log, Part 27

Hurt/Comfort Exchange reveals

Book-buying vow + thing I wrote before Popes became topical

Another Murderbot TV fic, Temperature Flash, and Hurt/Comfort-Ex

Kpop Demon Hunters: Zoey [115 icons]

fanfic, The Alienist (tv), John/Laszlo, Laszlo finds out what really happened at Paresis Hall

fanfic, King Arthur (2004), Tristan/Galahad, Galahad is determined to gain Tristan’s hawk’s trust

1 week delay & 1 current pinch hit

Pyra Cantha D&D: Summary for 7/11 Game

[Review] Thus With a Kiss I Die - Christina Dodd

A Brief History of Montmaray - Michelle Cooper

Book review: "The Tyrant Baru Cormorant"

Sidetracks - July 11, 2025

[ SECRET POST #6762 ]

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