Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 59

My Chocolate Box Stories

I wrote seven stories for this Chocolate Box!

Dragonlance - Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

Kitiara and Laurana’s Baby Dragon Café. Kitiara/Laurana. 1099 words. It made perfect sense for Kitiara and Laurana to open a baby dragon café.

In which Kitiara discovers that some things are too evil even for her. I cannot even tell you how much delight it gave me to write yhlee 's prompt "Kitiara and Laurana open a baby dragon petting coffee shop."

Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey

The Colors of the South. Brekke & Wirenth. 541 words. Brekke needs a break. Wirenth makes sure she gets one.

Those two really needed a day at the beach in which nothing terrible happens.

Vanity Fair. Menolly & fire lizards. 889 words. Menolly's fire lizards are sometimes very helpful. Other times, not so much.

scioscribe suggested the fire lizards helping Menolly with her chores, a la Disney Princess animals. (This is actually more-or-less canon given the time they fetch her pipes.) I figured it might be more like "helping."

Dune (2021 movie)

Sand and Water, Spice and Blood. Liet Kynes & Shai Hulud. A girl and her sandworm.

Dr. Liet Kynes was my absolute favorite part of the recent movies. I was very happy to see that I wasn't the only Chocolate Box participant who wanted more of her.

Miss Mack - Michael McDowell. (Short story online.)

A Lifetime of Saturdays. Miss Mack/Janice Faulk. 1666 words (yes, on purpose). Janice to the rescue!

I wanted to write a fix-it for the unique and charming canon couple, Miss Mack and Janice, while keeping it a horror story. Horror doesn't have to mean that the heroes meet a terrible fate. Sometimes the villains do.

Star Trek: The Original Series.

The Seven-Year Booty Call. T'Pring/Uhura. 1686 words.

What would it be like to meld minds with a powerful telepath in the grip of a raw, irresistible, hormone-driven sexual frenzy?

“I understand if you decline,” T’Pring began. “Logically, for a human, such a thing would be—”

“Incredibly hot,” said Uhura, and closed the distance between them.

X-Men (Comics)

A Grace Too Powerful To Name. Illyana Rasputin & Rachel Summers. 3472 words. Illyana intercepts Rachel at a crucial moment.

Writing this story, a fix-it for Rachel's absolute lowest moment in a life full of them, was SO SATISFYING. I think it's been in the back of my mind ever since I was sixteen.

I initially meant to write X-Men/New Mutants treats for everyone who requested them, but alas, it didn't happen. So I'm really glad this was my assignment!

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Chocolate Box Recs

the Chocolate Box collection is open!

I got SIX gifts for Chocolate Box, and I wrote SIX treats!

I highly recommend my wonderful gifts, and will be happily going through the rest of the collection.

Star Trek: The Original Series

Creature Comforts. 2170 words. Janice Rand/Nyota Uhura. Uhura and Rand still have to spend two more weeks stranded on this swamp planet. They're safe enough--but it's the little things, or their absence, that get to you.

Hurt-comfort! Wilderness survival! Hair kink! Delicious alien foods!

True Detective (Season One)

The Gleam of His Skin. 1226 words. Rust Cohle/Marty Hart. This happened later. Or before, maybe.

Sharply written, pitch-dark Lovecraftian AU, horror shot through with an aching grasp at human connection.

Wheel of Time (TV)

Steady as the Mountains. 1553 words. Moiraine and Lan, one day, one year, and twenty years into their bond.

A beautiful look at Moiraine and Lan's soulbond and enduring relationship, which goes far beyond the magic of the bond.

X-Men (Comics)

I got THREE fantastic pieces of art for my favorite F/F X-Men ships! Someone was very, very kind to me. They're all worksafe.

swept up. Kitty Pryde/Rachel Summers. Just some shameless smooching!

A sexy, exuberant Excalibur-era pin-up.

recovery & recuperation. Illyana Rasputin/Kitty Pryde/Rachel Summers. In which Kitty’s girlfriends take care of HER, for a change. Whether she likes it or not.

A delightful h/c comic strip, full of adorable little details.

(only) reflections. Ororo & Illyana. A shopping trip at the mall, entirely sans demons.

OMFG, someone made art from one of my stories! A gorgeous illustration with a whole lot of thought, full of amazing details and 80s fashion.

If you enjoy these, please kudos or comment!

How has your Chocolate Box experience been? What have you enjoyed in the collection so far?

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Shameless Solicitation of a Hugo Nomination

Just FYI, my book reviews here, neatly sorted by genre and all accessible by clicking the "book review" tag, are eligible for a best fan writer nomination.

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Please Rec me Sex Books

Please rec me some how-to books on sex. Please read my criteria carefully!

1. I am looking for ALL of the following: general how-to books on sex that are queer/trans-centric or queer/trans-inclusive, AND books that are aimed at specific audiences like gay, lesbian, transmasc, autistic, disabled, genderfluid, etc, while still at least acknowledging the existence of other groups.

2. I am not looking for academic books. These books should be aimed at a general audience of people who are looking for sex ed.

3. The more recent or recently updated, the better. Please don't rec something published in 1990 and never updated unless it's REALLY great and does not feel dated.

Please feel free to pass this on!

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Six Months of My Own House

I moved into my house in mid-July, which makes it just over six months that I've been living in my own house.

I chose to front-load as much of the home improvements as possible, with the result that I have not done much in those six months other than house stuff. Realistically I'm not sure the next six months will be that much less house-centric, as I can start planting my garden in May. (Everyone warns direly against planting before Mother's Day.)

I had no idea how much difference owning a house makes on an emotional level, as opposed to renting. I don't think it's about possession in a capitalist sense, but more than you can't be kicked out and you have the right to make it what you want.

I used to think people who were constantly going on about their mortgages and remodeling their kitchens were incredibly boring. Now I get it. (But if you find this boring, I am helpfully tagging these posts so if you're a paid member of Dreamwidth, you can blacklist and never see them.) It's a glorious combination of so many of my new and lifelong obsessions: gardening, chicken keeping, homesteading, emergency preparedness, forests, wildlife, cozy places, crafting, arranging, and dollhouses.

It's even worked the miracle of getting me to genuinely enjoy housecleaning.

50s Housewife or Life-Size Dollhouse?. If you can't see Instagram, it's a photo of a sink, with this text:

"Commemorating the occasion of an almost perfectly clean sink, since it may not happen again for another year. I scrubbed the living daylights out of that sucker. I'm 90% sure it's a lot whiter now than when I moved in.

Either I've turned into an incredibly boring middle aged stereotype or I'm still nine years old at heart, living the dream of a little house in the big woods."

Sadly, I still hate washing dishes.

I have been working on the house largely by doing stuff when I feel like doing it RIGHT NOW. This morning I was particularly bugged by the stained sink and the weird toothbrush holder attached to the wall that I don't use, so I scrubbed the hell out of the sink and pried out the toothbrush holder. (Note to self: buy spackle.)

This is also how I cleared an entire terrace of invasive ivy. Every time I walked by it and felt like yanking out some ivy, I yanked out some ivy. It's possibly not the most efficient method, but hey, it gets the job done with zero resentment.

By the same method, this week I hung a Charles Vess calendar over my bed, put together a standing lamp for the living room, organized my largest closet so I can actually find stuff, sorted my DVDs and discovered a bunch of empty cases which I will now toss, filled my new bookcases that I commissioned to fill a weirdly shaped space in the living room, and hauled a ton of empty cardboard boxes up to the deck so I can rip out the tape and labels at my leisure while listening to permaculture podcasts and then have biodegradable cardboard to cover the de-ivied ground so I can dump dirt on top of it and plant with vegetables or native plants.

I have finally reached the point where any further major projects that require other people are too big to do right now. A whole-house generator, solar panels, better lighting beyond lamps I can install myself, deck refinishing, and a wood-burning stove will have to wait.

My next big project is putting in my garden, which I am doing entirely by myself. But I can't plant till May, so I have three months of nothing but prep. This consists of maintaining my compost heap, amending the soil by mixing in compost with the bad soil, and removing the ivy that covers large portions of the land. Goddamn ivy! It's so hard to yank out, and there's so much of it.

But it's also often pretty cold - too cold to want to work outside. So I am returning to my original house project, which is Marie Kondo style decluttering. Here's my original post about the first time I did that, on my LA apartment: Don't Forget to Propitiate the Sandals

Note that this is not about asking whether your hammer sparks joy. The questions are "Is this something I need or am likely to need in the future?" If no, then you go to "Does this spark joy?"

In my case, I have been buying a LOT of stuff because it is useful or will be useful in the future. I have limited storage space, so I need to go through a lot of random non-useful stuff to see if it sparks joy, because if not, I want it gone so I have more room for firewood, chicken feed, garden implements, etc - all of which genuinely spark joy.

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Bawk!

Improvised chicken tractor.

I had Clarissa in the cage to break her of broodiness a while back. Apparently some grain spilled and grew, so I popped Darrell, Bill, and Mary Lou in the cage to enjoy the fresh greens. First caught, first served.

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Underrunners, by Margaret Mahy

Tris, an eleven-year-old boy in New Zealand, lives with his father in a beautiful but ramshackle house in a beautiful but treacherous piece of land threaded with underrunners--tunnels that can trap a car or become secret hideouts for a child. His mother left years ago, and he worries that he's losing touch with her memory.

When he's walking home from school past a children's home, narrating the adventures of his imaginary friend and intergalactic adventurer Selsey Firebone, he's startled when a girl from the home speaks to him through the fence. Winola is digging a tunnel under the fence, and joins in with his imaginary games. But Tris has the uneasy sense that her own imaginary game, in which she's pursued by a vague evil figure, isn't just a game...

Like all of Margaret Mahy's realistic novels that I've read, Underrunners has the content of a problem novel and the shimmery, otherworldly feel of a fantasy novel. It's beautifully written, moves easily from slice of life to farce to thriller, has several extremely well-done plot twists, and is proof that even Mahy's minor works are well worth reading.

The idea of "underrunners" -- secret gaps and tunnels -- is threaded through the novel, appearing in multiple guises, literal and metaphorical, sinister and hopeful: a worm tunneling through an apple, a gap in memory, a bond between people, the secret heartbeat of a land.

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Cool Chooks of the Day

Scroll to the bottom of the pages for more pics.

Meet the most metal of chickens, the Deathlayer.

Meet the Ayam Cemani, also known as Darth Chicken.

Meet the legendary Indio Gigante of Brazil, the world’s tallest chicken breed that battens the gap between chicken and velociraptor.

Meet the Barbu de Watermael, the hobbit of chickens.

Some day I will need to get more chickens. By then maybe the places selling these awesome breeds will have found someone who can sex them.

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His Everlasting Love, by Theodora Taylor

If the author's name isn't ringing a bell, she's the one who wrote the nonfiction book about tropes (which she calls "butter") and the novel about the time-traveling Viking werewolf and the Black werewolf homesteading vlogger.

Willa, a physical therapist and one of exactly five Black people in her small Virginia town, can see ghosts. Sawyer, her white former high school bully, is now a veteran amputee in desperate need of physical therapy for his totally literal phantom limb, which only Willa can see.

Many years ago, Willa's mother Marian, who can also see ghosts, sued Sawyer's dad for ownership of their house, which is refurbished former slave quarters. She won and then went around saying she was the only Black person to ever get reparations in Alabama. She's known as the Mad Librarian, and has a habit of buying and occasionally stealing valuable books on the suggestion of spirits.

While the book is overall pretty light, the spirits Willa knows are often of Black people who died because of racism, whether violently or because of general bad conditions; the history of the area is all around her. Her interactions with spirits feel more like magical realism than what you normally find in paranormal romance. It's really well-done.

Very unusually for a romance novel, which is not a genre in which spoilers typically matter, this is best read as unspoiled as possible. All I knew about it was that the heroine could see ghosts, and going in cold was a delightful experience which I would highly recommend. It has several plot twists that I enjoyed being surprised by, and a high quotient of absolute batshit that I also enjoyed being surprised by.

Spoilers! Seriously, if there's any chance you will read this book, pick it up and read it cold rather than clicking.

( Read more... )

And that isn't even all the bonkers content in this book. I didn't even get into the WTF storyline about her sister Thel (not short for Thelma), or the subplot about Sawyer's parents, their housekeeper, and a book about Winston Churchill.

Like Taylor's other romance I read, this has a fantastic setup and middle section, but a hurried conclusion. I could have done without one of the plot complications, in which there's a bizarre misunderstanding that leads to the hero briefly kidnapping someone, but overall I enjoyed the hell out of this book and would like to spread the joy.

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House & Garden Report

Got tired of people running over my wild strawberry patch beside my driveway, so I made a little border out of scrap wood.

The previous owners had hideous NO TRESPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY signs everywhere. I've been removing those when I remember (I need a hammer to pry them off whatever they've been nailed to). It's obviously private property, it has a house on it and fences around it. Only three or four left to go!

Snow is melted, sun is out. But the ground got nicely softened up, so I'm embarking on a couple projects to prepare for spring planting.

When the chicken run was built, a lot of dirt and jackhammered bit of rock were left over. I had the guys dump them in an area that gets lots of sun, where I plan to put in some vegetables. It promptly turned into a rock-solid mass. Now that it's finally soft enough to dig, I'm digging it up, spreading it around, and removing the bigger rocks. When it's all in an even layer, I'm going to mix it with chicken manure and chicken run hay, then let it sit till spring. In a couple months, it should be nicely fertilized earth. I hope.

The previous owners used English ivy (a non-native plant) as ground cover. I'm slowly yanking it up by the roots so I can replace it with either vegetables or native plants that will attract birds, bees, and butterflies. Once I yank up as much as I can find, I'm going to cover the area with a tarp or cardboard till I'm ready to plant, which I hope will kill any I missed.

My ultimate goal for the land is for everything on it to be one or, ideally, more than one of the following: edible, native, or pretty. Ivy is pretty enough and I'm not touching the ivy growing on fences, but I can do better for ground cover.

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