Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 109

Alternate Universe Exchange!

It's time for the AU Exchange! Open for both art and fic. Sign-ups are open till July 14.

Here's the tagset, which shows what canons and tags are available for requests and offers.

AU Exchange is especially fun because it lends itself so well to serious explorations of what might have happened (canon divergence AUs), changes of settings, and absolute crack. Here are a few of my favorite freeform tags:

All: 1930s science fiction writers AU

All: Amateur theatre group AU. I am requesting this for Punisher. The moment I saw it I realized how well the characters would fit into that milieu, no seriously. Moody method actor Frank! Put-upon stage manager David!

ALL: Character deals with a canonical difficult situation better than in canon. Is there any canon this wouldn't change radically?

ALL: Character(s) forced into circus run by evil being

ALL: Future Arranged Spouses are Forbidden To Meet But Able To Study One Another's Hobbies

ALL: Fuck/Marry/Kill Is Sometimes Legally Binding

ALL: Merpeople & Octopeople

ALL: Major Canon Location is haunted

ALL: Shadows of the Apt fusion

ALL: Soulmate or 1000 Roaches

ALL: Yarn store AU

Crossover: Eliot Spencer’s Remedial Cooking Class for Underfed Spies and Secret Agents

Greek Myth: Zeus is not an asshole

Marvel Comics: Madelyne Pryor Doesn't Choose The Evil Fingernail

Marvel Comics: Scott Summers Pissed Off The Goddesses & Now His Love Life Is What It Is

Marvel Comics: Supervillainy Is A Venereal Disease & Scott Summers Is A Carrier

MCU: Everything is the same except Tony Stark is a goldfish

Game of Thrones: Everything is the same except Jon Snow is a chicken

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Reflex, by Steven Gould (DNF)

Davy gets kidnapped and given an implant that makes him vomit and lose control of bladder and bowels. DNF due to sympathetic nausea.

Also, apparently if you're transported by a teleporter often enough, it will teach you to teleport or alter you to enable you to teleport yourself. I've never come across this idea before and found it interesting but insufficient.

Reflex (Jumper Book 2)[image error]

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Uncertain Voyage, by Dorothy Gilman

Post-divorce and mental hospital stay, Melissa goes on a trip to Europe. On a cruise ship, a man claiming to be a secret agent gives her a package to deliver; when he drops dead, she’s left to ponder whether he really was a secret agent and whether she should deliver it.

This book sounded more fun and more like her Mrs. Pollifax series than it was. It’s not a thriller, but a psychological novel and a character study. There’s a little action but it’s 90% Melissa contemplating herself and her post-therapy insights. Gilman writes beautifully but I found Melissa uninteresting and her insights a bit navel-gazey. This is so far the only book by Gilman I didn’t really enjoy.

Uncertain Voyage by Dorothy Gilman[image error]

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Jumper, by Steven Gould

A classic teleportation novel. Teenage Davy teleports for the first time to escape his abusive father, ending up in a place he sees as safe: the public library. He takes the opportunity to run away, and promptly teleports again (back to the library) when a gang of truckers try to rape him.

The first half of the book is a meticulous working out of how a smart teenager could do cool things with teleportation but no ID or street smarts. The second half is about him doing cool things with teleportation to foil hijackers and evade government agents. Both parts involve a whole lot of dealing with trauma, in an unsubtle but realistic way. There's a romance that never shows why Davy and Millie are into each other specifically, though it's pretty realistic about how undealt-with trauma is not good for relationships.

I found it maddening that Davy often makes no attempt to hide the fact that he can teleport and repeatedly does it in front of random people without ever thinking through the implications of that, even though he thinks through the implications of practically everything else. By the end of the book, the government knows all about him, he’s threatened to kidnap the President, and he can be stopped if he gets drugged or cuffed to something heavy. There’s a sequel in which I assume that comes back to haunt him.

The book was notably dated in two ways: New York City is a hellhole of crime where you can’t step outside without getting mugged, and a plane or ship gets hijacked about once a month.

I liked the first part of the book better than the second. The hijacking stuff was ostensibly higher stakes, but I found it dull and implausible. The teleportation mechanics were fun, though since they're so meticulously detailed that it bugged me a bit that there is no energy cost in teleporting. He can do it as much as he likes, as far as he likes, to any place he’s seen in person, and it never makes him tired. Where does the energy for that come from?

It never addresses the question of why Davy can teleport, other than to confirm that his parents can't. I'm guessing spontaneous mutation.

I read this years and years ago, and recall having basically the same reaction. I re-read it because someone (Layla?) said I should read the sequel, which I never picked up. On to the sequel! (I see that there are actually four sequels, one of which is a movie spinoff.)

Linking to paper version of book. I don't recommend the Kindle, which I read, as it loses the spaces to indicate transitions. Without them, the book seems to often jump, as it were, to a completely different time and space within the same scene.

Jumper: A Novel[image error] (I see that this version has been graced with "A Novel.")

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In Mariposa

Raspberry bushes.



My lunch yesterday. Eggs from Kebi's chickens, raspberries I picked myself 10 minutes before I put the whole thing together.



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I'm fine!

I felt the quake all the way in Mariposa. It was in the middle of nowhere so hopefully did not do much damage.

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Darkness on his Bones, by Barbara Hambly (James Asher Vampire # 6)

All of Hambly's books in long series are hard for me to read in order due to multiple publishers and similar titles, but I have the most trouble with her vampire books, and accidentally read this one out of order. This is the one where James falls from a height, breaks multiple bones, and gets pneumonia; also WWI begins. The next one (which I read before it) is the one where he's still recovering from pneumonia and Lydia is at the front. I just thought there had been an awful lot going on between books!

In this one, James is in the hospital having strangely vivid dreams of Simon's past, while Simon and Lydia try to find out who attacked him. While the past story was interesting, it was so jumbled and feverish that I was way more into the present story, which was satisfyingly dark, exciting, and emotionally tangled.

Hambly has some recurring themes that I don't see often in fiction. One of them is the human tendency to value the lives of those we know and love above the lives of strangers, and how incredibly damaging yet inescapable this is. This is probably the theme in these books, in which Lydia and James can't help loving and rescuing Simon, despite knowing that every day he exists means another death of someone they don't know. In turn, Simon loves and rescues them, while knowing that some day their delicate balance of morality against love might tip and reward him with a stake through the heart.

Darkness on His Bones: A vampire mystery (A James Asher Vampire Novel Book 6)[image error]

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Decluttering update

I got sidelined a bit by breaking my foot, which meant that I couldn't carry stuff and walk at the same time for three months. Nevertheless, I persisted!

Also I finally gave in and paid to have my 10-year-old gross carpet replaced since my landlord said he'd do it, but he'd raise my rent if he did. Since I had to move everything out of my bedroom, I took the opportunity to not move stuff back in if I didn't want it in there.

If you have moral objections to decluttering or do not wish to declutter your own place, please do not share those sentiments in comments.

Photos below cut. ( Read more... )

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Dolores Claiborne, by Stephen King (audiobook read by Frances Sternhagen)

When Dolores Claiborne becomes a suspect in the death of Vera Donovan, for whom she'd been a paid companion, she sits down at the police station and confesses to the murder of... her own husband, many years ago.

I have a lot of difficulty reading any kind of dialect-type narration, so I bounced off this repeatedly before trying the audio version - which was perfect, as the book is written in the form of a monologue. Once I was over that hump, the book was engrossing and moving. It's got elements of suspense and mystery, but it's mostly a character portrait of Dolores, Vera Donovan, and their relationship, which feels incredibly real.

Early on Dolores keeps referring to Vera as "that bitch." The way that gets recontextualized as the story goes on, accreting layers of meaning and emotion, is just beautifully orchestrated. It's a story about two very specific women who have a lot of flaws and unlikable aspects, but are also human and lovable in a way that nobody has ever seen but each other. Dolores Claiborne gives you a God's eye view of them in all their grossness and pettiness and endurance and heroism and love.

Dolores Claiborne[image error]

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We won! We won! We won! We won!

Yesterday I attended a Culver City Council meeting to agitate for rent control. The lack of it is a big problem in the area, with landlords frequently forcing tenants to pay for all maintenance themselves by raising their rent every time they make a maintenance request. This is why I recently paid to have my own gross carpeting replaced, even though it's been there for over 10 years and should have been done by the landlord.

The City Council took TWO HOURS before they even started on rent control, which was what everyone was there for, discussing stuff like amortizations and pension plans. I was with Yana, my five-year-old former neighbor who still drops by sometimes to visit my cats, her older brother (age nine), and her parents. At one point Yana leaned over and whispered, "I'm bored." I whispered back, "Me too."

I ended up spending two hours entertaining her via photo editing on my camera. I also fed her and her brother with bison jerky and peanut butter granola bars, as each parent had thought the other brought snacks. After her mom spoke, the kids, their dad, and I bailed as it was past 9:00 and there were 150 speakers at 2 minutes each and I hadn't had dinner other than my share of the bison jerky and granola bars.

My emergency supplies were extremely useful! I call a bored and hungry five-year-old and eight-year-old sitting through two hours of the city council discussing pension plan percentages an emergency.

The meeting went till 1:30 AM! The rent freeze was passed 4-1.

And that was not my only in-person activism this month! Last week I registered voters at Orange County Pride.

Here is a Yana-decorated photo of me doing so (note my rainbow shirt AND hair):



Also, have a rainbow unicorn:



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