48k

this is in continuity with meet death sitting, but i almost feel like we're sliding into another series here, well we'll see what it comes out as

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So I’ve been noodling furiously away for a while now, interspersed with work on other stuff, on this story, which turned into kind of a series, and then the sidebar, and now I’ve folded that back in, and it turns out I currently have 48,000 words that basically boil down to “geralt’s brothers are sort of fucked-up at the end of W3 and I want them to have a happy ending”.

but like

48,000 wordsand there’s nothing I’m ready to post yet, and about 20k of it is going to have to be entirely rewritten in light of the things I’ve been figuring out about Keira’s gender-or-not, and I just had to go back and add Li’l Bleater in but don’t worry I didn’t forget her.

[It was Eskel’s damn goat. Lambert forgotten they’d brought her here. Li’l… something. Probably not Li’l Shitter. Li’l… something-er. Fuck. Well, it didn’t matter, goats didn’t care what you called them. He fed her a turnip, and tried not to think about Eskel, who was out there somewhere as lonely as he was. Where would Eskel go for the winter? Fuck. He went back to his horse. ]

Maybe I’ll get this beaten into some kind of shape soon, and maybe it won’t ever be anything, but dang, I definitely wrote a bunch of it.

Well, here’s a snippet of Eskel and the succubus, anyway. Her name is Karima and I love her.

Karima huddled in on herself and he gave her one of his blankets from his bedroll, which she wrapped around herself until nothing showed but her horns and nose at the top, and her hooves at the bottom. “Thanks,” she said, muffled. An owl hooted and she flinched a little, lowering the blanket to peer over her shoulder.

“Not much hunts Witchers,” Eskel said placidly.

She eyed him instead, the fire gleaming in her rectangular pupils. “What’s it like being an apex predator?” she asked.

“Not great,” Eskel said. “You’d think it’d be nice but it’s really not. Just means whatever’s dumb enough to come after you has absolutely no sense whatsoever.”

… not that much hunts succubi, who apparently can throw fire and also fuck you up with their hooves, but like. (apparently they’re distantly related to chorts. that’s fuckin sweet.) (I’m working up my own headcanons about how they reproduce and I think they spend a while pretty little so maybe they’re fierce as adults but they don’t forget they started out as prey.)

inkskinned: she asked me if i believed in god and i told her that when i was four i almost drowned..

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inkskinned http://inkskinned.tumblr.com/post/110168182534:

she asked me if i believed in god and i told her that when i was four i almost drowned in a public pool and in my panic mistook a stranger for my father. i clawed my way up his leg. four years later he’d send my parents a picture of the scars alongside a tin of cookies. he said, “i hope she’s still okay. i carry her with me. it isn’t every day you save a life. it isn’t every day you feel like you were here for a reason. when it does happen, you have to cherish that memory. for once, i had a purpose. just being there was enough. she tore me open but she taught me a lot about love.”

10 things you need to know to stop a coup

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10 things you need to know to stop a coup https://wagingnonviolence.org/2020/09/10-things-you-need-to-know-to-stop-a-coup/:

A fascinating article, and good reading if you’re frightened by the President’s recent bluster. I haven’t heard of the author or the org before but it’s all sound, reasonable-sounding advice.

Let’s aim for calm and avoid hyperbole. Be a reliable source by double-checking rumors and spreading high-quality facts. Sure, read social media… but spend some time, you know, doing real things that ground you.

Breathe deeply.

Remember how you handle fear.

Play out scenarios, but don’t become captured by them.

We’re doing this to prepare, just in case.

for the ask meme it is a bunch of things!! probably bucky barnes on his bathroom floor and kes killi

grace, kes dameron, girderednerve

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oh man yeah bucky barnes on his bathroom floor. i wrote that so long ago, i vividly remember working it out while staying in my childhood bedroom during the season I was helping on the farm before I got the yurt. That’s from Full of Grace https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583718, which possibly has the honor of being my last really long unfinished WIP before I realized I had to plan shit out and have an exit strategy, LOL. But there was some good stuff in there anyway…

His voice wavered again, and he stopped, and after a moment he rolled his head back to full profile, and closed his eyes. “But that don’t make it any easier to get up off this fuckin’ floor,” he said unsteadily, voice thick. “It don’t— God! It fuckin’ hurts! It just, it hurts, all the time, all day, all night, every day, every week, there’s no fuckin’ end to it, and I can’t, I can’t fix it and I can’t ignore it and I can’t make it stop and I’m just so fuckin’ tired. I’m so tired.” He lifted his hand and rubbed his face, and his hand was visibly shaking. His breath hitched, then stopped, and he let it out slowly after a moment, and took a breath in.

“I don’t wanna lie here alone,” he said. “But I’m not. I’m not alone. Statistically, there’s a fuckload of you lyin’ here with me, thinkin’ the same thing. Hurtin’ the same way. It fuckin’ sucks, don’t it?” He laughed bitterly, and glanced over at the camera, teeth bared.

But Kes killing stormtroopers, that’s a deep cut! I spent so long on Lost Kings https://archiveofourown.org/series/510541 and by the end there were so few people reading it but I loved it so much anyway. It was tricky, because it was sort of halfway between what people want to read and what the subject matter actually realistically calls for– the thing about Star Wars is that the implications of literally every careless plot point are so fucking dark and the actual IP holder never wants to go that dark so you wind up with these fluffy stories set in like, horrorshow settings that nobody has thought through. Anyway. I wanted to tell a fluffy backstory and wound up with a too-young man surviving genocide and being forced to fight as a guerrilla, but like, there were five seconds of adorable baby Poe, at least?

Hard to find a quote because he spends the entirety of Fourteen https://archiveofourown.org/works/11972607 killing Stormtroopers and feeling fucked-up about it. (Did I put a graphic violence tag on that one? I really ought to have. Oh yeah, I did.)

There was a pause. The leader’s voice came back on with the tail end of a sigh. “You’d better,” he said. “All hold position, I’ll bring my group up to your location, Twenty-Two. We need all sensors functioning.”

That would bring the guy past all the patrols that Kes had killed, surely. Shit, shit, shit.

“Why don’t I come back to you,” Kes said into Twenty-two’s comm. “Then you can see if my sensor’s moving or not.”

There was a pause, and Kes hauled out his own, issued comm. “Guys,” he said urgently.

“Fuck’s sake, Dameron,” someone said, and he was pretty sure it was Corporal Nella, “there are fucking corpses everywhere, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Not getting fucking captured,” Kes said, with more emphasis than he’d strictly intended to.

orange pop and tamarind chutney

the road

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someone left a can of orange pop by the curb in front of our house.

we do live directly across from a high school. some kid parked in front of our house briefly, during the time between dude going out to pick up takeout dinner and coming back, so he had to park in the driveway behind me. when we left later to go shopping (we went to the liquor store, in our first joint outing in weeks), he noticed the can by the curb. when we came home it was still there.

it’s unopened. i refused to touch it, but he picked it up and brought it inside and put it into the fridge. it’s unopened, which means it’s perfectly good.

at some point he is going to drink orange pop he found in the road. this is fine.

on to my other big topic of discussion for tonight:

so. Indian takeout. (We ordered from India Star on Delaware Ave up by the Pizza Hut.) Fantastic food, quite spicy tonight. We got samosas and they came with the two little tubs of Mystery Sauce that samosas always come with when you order them as takeout– one green, one dark red. This version was tastier than normal, and had like, actual ingredients, instead of the very homogenous substances I’m used to– the red had visible bits of citrus peel, and the green was obviously comprised at least in part of some kind of leafy herb that had been through a food processor.

WHAT ARE THOSE SAUCES. I have literally never seen them mentioned or explained on any menu. We Googled it and were informed that the red is tamarind chutney and the green is “green chutney”. So I Googled more. Cilantro-Mint Chutney https://pipingpotcurry.com/mint-cilantro-chutney/, Tamarind Chutney https://pipingpotcurry.com/tamarind-date-chutney-pressure-cooker/. So like…

I don’t know, that didn’t have to be a mystery for my entire adult life. But I’ve never looked it up before. To be honest, I’ve never had those sauces be so good before, so if you’re local consider that a plug for India Star https://www.google.com/maps/place/India+Star/@42.968621,-78.8690587,15z/data=!4m19!1m13!4m12!1m4!2m2!1d-78.8495883!2d42.9676887!4e1!1m6!1m2!1s0x89d36d0fc207835d:0x48483608f13f4d5a!2sstar+of+india+kenmore!2m2!1d-78.8707122!2d42.9705754!3m4!1s0x89d36d0fc207835d:0x48483608f13f4d5a!8m2!3d42.9705754!4d-78.8707122 I guess.

If I had a good source for tamarinds or dates I’d consider making my own but IDK how to fit that in with the prevailing locavore aesthetic… VegMan has a couple of date trees but he never gets more than like four dates a year. They’re just not suited to the climate.