have you read the queen's thief series? your goblin emperor posting got me to read that, and in my p

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I have not! I’ll add it to my list of Things What I Should Get To. :)

I’m glad people have been enjoying the Goblin Emperor stuff, I’ve been a little self-conscious that I went radio silent and then suddenly All TGE All The Time. (i have been posting more on Dreamwidth, I’m not really radio silent.) (Farm shit’s gonna start back up this week!)

I haven’t stopped with the Goblin Emperor yet, though. I’m gonna! I’m gonna get myself out of this weird little spiral.

Yesterday I saw two fantastic Twitter threads and one of them was a bunch of professional authors, including the current Hugo nominee Brooke Bolander, admitting that they love to write fanfiction and it helps them recharge their batteries sometimes, and it made me feel better that I’m periodically like this. I’d feel better if I’d actually, you know, ever published an original novel, but. Whatever.

I’m clearly working through a lot of shit, writing this, but it’s a little bewildering sometimes where my brain takes me, y’know?

Beshelar moved so easily with Ino on his hip, it was clear he was used to children, and it struck Cala that he’d never pried much into the man’s background. Once they were clear of the crowd, Edrehasivar did it for him.

“Almost we would think you had your own children, Beshelar,” Himself said.

Beshelar glanced over at him. Ino was completely unconscious, long legs dangling. She was too heavy for the nursemaid to carry thus without struggle, Cala realized, looking at the relative sizes of the two individuals; Ino was not a baby, and probably weighed a good third of what the nursemaid did. “Serenity,” Beshelar said, “we are the eighth of ten children, and our oldest sister married when we were seven and lived in the house with us and her husband, and once her babies were born we had much of the looking-after of them, so if once you are married you decide to dismiss us as your nohecharis, still we could be of service to your household as nursemaid.”

Everyone laughed at that, and Himself said, “We shall have to keep that in mind, Beshelar,” and then because he was a being of pure light, he added warmly, “but we cannot imagine ever wishing to dispense with your services as nohecharis,” and Beshelar glowed a little too.
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seriesofnonsequiturs replied to your post

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seriesofnonsequiturs replied to your post “goblin emperor”

sorry don’t mean to blast your page but OMG THE GOBLIN EMPEROR seriously one of the best worldbuilding fantasy books i’ve read - i also love the biracial dynamics like when he walks into the goblin embassy and he almost cries because he finds people who look like him - and also his realization that FRIENDS ARE GOOD and he’s allowed to mutually care about his guards - and his whole thing about his mother and his faith -the question of radical anarchy and THE WHOLE BOOK

omg, that aspect of Maia being an unreliable narrator and reading through the lines to his trauma was so f*ing well-written in the book - not to mention Csevet’s competing trauma too omg

— yes the scene where he’s nearly crying in the goblin embassy was so lovely, all of that is like– *chef’s kiss*

don’t feel bad about blasting my page, i don’t post enough anymore to have so many notification’s that i’m not delighted for more. 

And yes– Csevet’s trauma also is like, a layer there, I’m not super articulate at the moment but I am In Agreement.

seriesofnonsequiturs replied to your post “yet more goblin emperor wittering don’t worry it’s almost out of my…”

omg that sleeping system bothered me as well!! i’m like dude, on duty for 12 hours does not an effective guard make

I have now had very serious conversations about this on at least three different social media platforms with like five different people, it seems to me that there’s literally nobody who read the book and was like “seems rational” so like. should we start a letter-writing campaign? “we want the nohecharei to unionize” 

Although as I pointed out on Dreamwidth in the last iteration of this discussion, I mean, how many shifts are you really going to want in a job where if your coworkers fuck up even during a shift you’re not present for, you’re expected to commit ritual suicide? It’s gonna keep your pool of applicants small, I think. So like. Balance that. 

But what gets me– even if you assume they really do nap while the Emperor’s sleeping, so like, ok, if they do an overnight shift every other night, they can get 2-3 hours sleep apiece while he’s out depending on whether they’ll sleep concurrently or not, and while it’s just a light doze, still it’s not like they’re breaking rocks for 12 hours, and if you assume kind of a monk-like devotion to their work where leisure time becomes important, you still run into a separate issue: you want your guard to have good reflexes, right? and good weapons and fighting skills? that means ongoing practice. When is that supposed to happen, when the vast majority of his shift guarding you is spent standing motionless as part of the scenery??? how are they supposed to stay sharp? even if maza skills are largely mental, they need to be fit, and the guards are gonna really suffer if they can’t work out sometimes. so like. When! When is their cardio! I must know.

girderednerve replied to your post “have you read the queen’s thief series? your goblin emperor posting…”

beshelar is So Adorable, oh my gosh, your goblin emperor posting has brought me sheer delight

I don’t know why I’m so into Beshelar but he has accidentally become my Relatable Everyman here. He’s just so… like, he’s an uptight kind of jerk, and I Get That, ok. 

This whole fanfic I’ve written has literally 0 Maia POV, I decided that was my weird trope that I was gonna stick with, and so it bounces around but it’s got a lot of dear Beshelar realizing he’s in a little bit over his head and attempting to Deal With It.

Also I just wrote Maia semi-losing his virginity from Csethiro’s POV, and it was enormously satisfying, so. I mean, for me, I don’t know how he felt about it, we haven’t really gotten to the reaction part. (cut for slightly nsfw text, describing a male orgasm, and i love Csethiro because she is a fkn nerd, so this is maybe less sexy than you’d think but she is definitely enjoying herself a lot. no this is just a tiny snippet, i promise the rest will be worth waiting for.) I don’t think I could write it from Maia’s POV, I think he’s so shy he’d fade to black even to describe it to himself. But Csethiro has never really balked from anything in her life and isn’t about to start now. 
( now improved with actual cut )

First Farm Visit Of The Official Season

(For anyone who's new around here, I spend my winters working retail but in the summers I split my time between the retail job-- it's online retail, so they don't need me every day, I mostly do product photography for the online listings so I can do a bunch of work and then not show up for a while and then come back and do a bunch more, it's shitty pay but ideal schedule-wise-- and my sister's organic farm, which is a 300-mile drive straight east of my house. On the farm, I live in a yurt but it's not set up yet, so at the moment I'm in the guest bedroom; the farm only has the one guest-bedroom tho and Brother In Law's from the Midwest so there's frequently family staying there. My folks live like 10 miles away and I got tired of that commute on top of the 300 mile drive, so I got a lil yurt and store it in the barn attic over the winters. Might set it up this visit, might wait for the next one. General TWs in farm-related posts for discussion of livestock farming and such, I'll try to tag them as such but if that's something you're not into, I may not always be super up on realizing what's gonna be jarring or gross to you so y'all might want to give these entries a pass, I'm not trying to freak anybody out but sausage comes from somewhere, y'know, and I'm gonna be frank about it, har har get it? frank? ok no.)

Got up this morning intending to immediately pack up and drive, but I had stopped writing last night at an exciting part in the bit I was working on, and I wanted to continue, so I let myself sit for an hour and keep writing. (Sex scene, it was a sex scene. listen sometimes they take forever to write and sometimes they just go, and this one was ready to just go. i had choreographed it weeks ago, as it happens, and it just took this long to get to it. these things have to ferment a little sometimes. hard to describe, idk if that's the right word, but there it is.)

But I did get myself together and out the door, and got on the highway. my personal observation is that if I bring a cup of coffee with me, I have to stop and pee somewhere along the route; I weighed my options, and since I had a full tank of gas I wouldn't otherwise have to stop, and I thought about it but decided I wanted coffee, so I brought some with me. and then didn't have to stop. so, go Bladder Of Steel, I guess.

Hit some snow by Syracuse, but it wasn't sticking. Just meant my car got entirely crusted with salt. blech. Traffic was fine except at one point there was a plow and literally nobody handled it well. Like, every single person on the road in front of me dealt poorly with it, especially the giant pickup truck pulling a truck with what looked like a howitzer on it, who cut me off and then I couldn't see what was going on or why everyone was suddenly driving like a dumbfuck. Spoiler alert: a snowplow, fuckin' imagine that, get over you idiots there's only a giant blinky yellow arrow on the back to show you where to fucking go! Argh. Jeez you'd think it was the first snow of the season or something, what month is it again?

Arrived at the farm just as Farmsister, BIL, and Veg Manager were finishing up their Monthly Management Meeting. There's an apprentice, now, so they're not the entire staff of the farm anymore, but all winter long it's kind of funny because they're it, they're the whole staff, and yet they still have these meetings. I mean, it's justified, it's important, the different areas of the farm can get pretty segregated and it's easy to lose track of the overarching stuff, and there's so goddamn much going on all the time that it's impossible to keep up without regular meetings and whatnot. But still.

So I got there just as they were done, and just in time to accompany Sister over to the granary to make more bouquets. She'd actually been procrastinating them, hoping I'd show up, so she was gratifyingly delighted to see me.
I asked what the deal was with the piglets-- a while back she'd posted a photo of one of the sows with piglets, then nothing, then another post with another sow-- and it's sort of weird, but not dire. (I'd worried something had happened to the first one.) The thing is, they got the new boar only about three months ago, and he went in with these sows then. ... Sows gestate for 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days.
The old boar has to have sired Red's piglets. Their coloring, too-- they're his. They had to get rid of him because none of the sows farrowed and so the common factor has to have been him, and yet-- these have to have been sired, like, his last day of life, given the timing. Which is weird. Just-- weird. Super weird. (Maybe he'd sustained an injury he only recovered from right at the end? but? or maybe there was something in their pasturage that made the sows all not able to conceive or something and it wasn't his fault anyway??? IDK! It's fine, he was too big for the younger sows, he wouldn't have lived a lot longer anyway-- but-- weird. Super goddamn weird.) Also, Red usually farrows 7-10 pigs, and this farrowing was... three. So. Also weird. But they're fine! It was just super odd. The new sow, the pigs have to be the new boar's because she was absolutely never pastured anywhere near the old boar (also he was her sire, and apparently in animal husbandry you can do that for one generation but we have... not, it's a little icky), it's just... how... could she have... had them so quickly. We don't know! They're perfectly fine and normal piglets, they're just sort of impossible.
Maybe that new barn has some sort of weird time dilation situation going on, or like, an extra piglet dimension, or something. We're really not sure.
Rocky's ready to pop probably, and Merlot should be along soon enough. That leaves Pepper, but we don't know her that well so it's hard to tell what's normal for her. (It is darn difficult to tell when a hog is pregnant, they're sort of... hog-shaped at all times, and how many piglets are inside a hog is a thing of mystery.) We actually had the vet come today to look at Merlot, who had a wound that might have abscessed-- turned out it was fine, mostly we wanted to meet the vet. Hard to find large animal vets; she mostly works with dogs and cats but is trying to build up a large animal client base, so we were glad to meet her. BIL felt really good that she was willing to work partly for trade-- she took some pork products as payment, which is like, extra good testimony, that she'd just worked on the pigs and was still willing to eat them. Made him feel proud of his facilities and standard of care, and such. She told him he should be proud, which was sweet.
They were going to have her come back to, uhh, fix the new piglets but she herself is about nine months pregnant at the moment and will be not wanting to hang around in barns dealing with that sort of nonsense. But it's good to know her, for future reference.

Dinner was pizza with mom and dad and middle-little sister and the new apprentice, along with the usual occupants of the house, and it was lovely-- also we got to test out a bunch of cakes from unicornduke, which was really fantastic, and we had long serious discussions about the merits of the various cakes. I think the new apprentice might think we're all insane but she's hard to read, so far; she did seem to be enjoying some of the conversation, anyway.
And then Sister and i stayed up late to carton eggs for the farmer's market tomorrow. Cartoning eggs is one of those jobs... like, I never really thought about how eggs get into cartons before, but someone's gotta put 'em there. Think on that, folks. I'm going to bed.