chthonic_cassandra

Author's commentary for Complicity, part 11 of Compromise. Commentary includes some vague spoilers through the end of the series.

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Author's commentary for Distance, part 9 of Compromise. Commentary includes some vague spoilers through the end of the series.

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Author's commentary for Appraisal, part 7 of Compromise. Commentary includes spoilers through part 12.

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Author's commentary of Xena fic Craft Twined From Craft.

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Author's commentary of Dracula fic Keys, part 7 of Compromise

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Author's commentary of Dracula fic Collusion, part four of Compromise.

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Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you so very much for writing for me! I am a long-time YT participant (year 16, I think?) who looks forward to this exchange as one of my favorite parts of the year, and I am beyond grateful to you for writing a story for me this time. This year I am requesting three novels which I deeply love, and about which I would be thrilled to receive any kind of story about my requested character(s); I am excited to see what you come up with, and I'm sure that wherever your inspiration takes you will be a joy for me to find out.

Since treats are opt-in this year: yes, I'm happy to receive them! If you happen to read my requests and feel inspired by them, go right ahead.

If you are the kind of writer for whom more information about a recipient's tastes and interests is helpful, you can find me at AO3 of course here. I'm also on Tumblr, where I am probably most active, as chthonic-cassandra. I've previously said: “I tend to write meditative female character-centric gen about trauma recovery, and/or fucked-up dub-con darkfic, and those are both totally things I love to read about as well, but neither of those are your style, no worries! I also really, really love romance (particularly in poly relationships), sexy D/s stuff, and world-building or plot-heavy casefic; I’m just not as good at writing any of those.” This still goes! And I want to emphasize it especially because this year I've requested Dracula, which is also the fandom I've written in the most, so please don't look at my AO3 and feel like you for some reason need to match my own head canons and interpretations! Please, no pressure on that front!

Some things I like in fic: smart, prickly, messed-up characters especially when they’re interacting with other smart, prickly messed-up characters; complicated or tense relationship negotiation; power dynamics (sexual or not, and either set and formalized or in constant flux); poly relationships; moments of hope/resilience within suffering; canon divergence (‘what if?’ AUs), darkfic/horror, D/s and related kink (especially bondage, humiliation, pain - either healthy and negotiated kink or also fucked-up dub or non-con stuff); moral ambiguity, or characters dealing with situations where there are no good choices; depictions of trauma recovery or otherwise putting one’s life together after devastation; characters who are smart and competent and passionate about things; allusion, experimention, meta-fictional stuff, playfulness with form and language; historical details and world-building; pastiche; things in general being complicated and messy and nuanced

Some things I’d prefer not to read about: dub-con which involves ‘they secretly wanted it’ or ‘they didn’t want it at first but then learned they actually did’ tropes (other kinds of dub- or non-con are fine); any kind of "it was all in their head" mental illness AU; traumatic events treated as jokes or insignificant; setting-changing AUs; crossovers; slapstick humor; PWP (any level of explicit content is fine, but I’m in it mostly for the characters); heavy focus on bodily fluids other than blood; focus on animal harm, or meat preparation; focus on pregnancy or being a parent of young children; sexual content with anyone younger than late adolescence; dogs; explicit discussion of disordered eating

And prompts!

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Dear Yuletide Writer,

I can't believe it's time for Yuletide already! This has been the craziest of years, but I am so overjoyed to still have Yuletide as a constant in all of it (this is, I think, my 14th Yuletide?), and I so deeply appreciate you writing for me. Two of my prompts this year are repeats from previous years which I am still holding out hope for; the other two are for fandoms that I have newly gotten into this year, and with which I have fallen head-over-heels in love. I would be so amazingly thrilled to read a story about any of them.

In case you want more information about my tastes: My AO3 is of course here. I'm on Tumblr, where I am probably most active, as chthonic-cassandra. I’ve previously said: “I tend to write meditative female character-centric gen about trauma recovery, and/or fucked-up dub-con darkfic, and those are both totally things I love to read about as well, but neither of those are your style, no worries! I also really, really love romance (particularly in poly relationships), sexy D/s stuff, and world-building or plot-heavy casefic; I’m just not as good at writing any of those.” All that still goes, so if you read one of my own fics and think that it’s seriously not your style, please don’t worry about trying to match it! I am an omnivorous and ravenous reader.

Some things I like in fic: smart, prickly, messed-up characters especially when they’re interacting with other smart, prickly messed-up characters; complicated or tense relationship negotiation; power dynamics (sexual or not, and either set and formalized or in constant flux); poly relationships; moments of hope/resilience within suffering; canon divergence (‘what if?’ AUs), darkfic/horror, D/s and related kink (especially bondage, humiliation, pain - either healthy and negotiated kink or also fucked-up dub or non-con stuff); moral ambiguity, or characters dealing with situations where there are no good choices; depictions of trauma recovery or otherwise putting one’s life together after devastation; characters who are smart and competent and passionate about things; allusion, experimention, meta-fictional stuff, playfulness with form and language; historical details and world-building; pastiche; things in general being complicated and messy and nuanced

Some things I’d prefer not to read about: dub-con which involves ‘they secretly wanted it’ or ‘they didn’t want it at first but then learned they actually did’ tropes (other kinds of dub- or non-con are fine); any kind of "it was all in their head" mental illness AU; traumatic events treated as jokes or insignificant; setting-changing AUs; crossovers (with the exception of Penny Dreadful, which is itself a crossover, and for which more gothic crossovers would be fine and welcome); slapstick humor; PWP (any level of explicit content is fine, but I’m in it mostly for the characters); heavy focus on bodily fluids other than blood; focus on animal harm, or meat preparation; focus on pregnancy or being a parent of young children; sexual content with anyone younger than late adolescence; dogs; explicit discussion of disordered eating

Now to the prompts!

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Title: Fate and Metaphysical Aid
Fandom: Penny Dreadful
Rating/Warnings: PG-13/T; some vampiric violence; deals with internalized homophobia.
Character/Pairing: Vanessa, Dracula, Mina, Vanessa/Mina, Vanessa/Dracula
Summary: Dracula offers another temptation to Vanessa. Slight AU of 3.07.

Also diving into another TV fandom, this one less intimidating to me. I have a lot of things I want to write for Penny Dreadful; this one felt easiest to start with, as a very slight, contained, single-scene canon rewrite.

What was trickiest about writing this was trying to shift to Penny Dreadful's characterization of Dracula characters after fic for the Stoker for novel for something like fifteen years now. I have strongly developed Dracula and Mina voices, and they aren't the characters from the show (also, let's be real, Penny Dreadful's Mina is obviously Lucy). Further complicating it, the dynamic in this particular fic is adjacent (but not identical) to one I've played with previous Dracula stories.

Twisting my head around changing it for these particular characters was lightly fun, even if I don't think I've totally succeeded - there a couple of lines here in particular where I think Alexander Sweet!Dracula sounds incontrovertibly like my novel!Dracula, but I'm going to let it stand.

Recent books -

Non-fiction:

- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World - Highly ambitious account of several thousand years of world history through the lens of Europe-Asia interactions, particularly travel through Central Asia and the Middle East. There was a lot that was fascinating in this, but it was too broad and moved too quickly. Frankopan’s expertise seems to be in the Byzantine period, and those sections were strongest; I think I would have gotten more out of a more tightly-focused history of a particular period.

- Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays - collection of varied autobiographical essays, mostly about Chee’s development as an author. As often with such collections, some pieces were noticeably stronger than others (somehow, the essay about Chee’s relationship to tarot felt really rich and thoughtful; the essay about his experience with an MFA program, not so much).

The center of the collection is composed by a few trauma-narrative essays, which are not so much about Chee’s own history of childhood sexual abuse, as about his journey to transmute it into his first novel. I haven’t read Edinburgh, the novel in question (I have read Chee’s second novel, Queen of the Night), and the essays didn’t hold up all that well without that context, but I appreciated the reflection on what it means to turn one’s own life into a story, how that is both part of healing and not. I was especially moved about Chee’s description of the regret he feels at previously minimizing his abuse, and specifically voicing that minimization in a documentary interview, the feeling of betraying himself and viewers.

- Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh - Biography of a romantic-era female architect, particularly known for her creation of an eccentric church in her home town of Wreay. I don’t know if it was the writing, which was meandering or unfocused, or my own lack of familiarity with Losh’s work, but I had a lot of difficulty getting into this, despite the fact that Losh’s life and work were quite interesting.

- Emma Reyes, The Book of Emma Reyes (trans. Daniel Alarcón) - Emma Reyes was a Columbian painter, contemporary of Frida Kahlo; this memoir takes the form of a collection of letters she wrote to a close friend describing memories of her childhood, which she spent in abject poverty and experiencing repeated neglect and abandonment. It’s a beautiful and painful memoir, with a certain delicacy and attention to detail which powerfully conveys both her suffering in childhood and the compassion with which she looks back on it as an adult. Excellent trauma memoir.

- Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America - Sociological study of mass incarceration, now ten years out of date; as it’s very focused on statistics, it ages quickly. It’s also interesting to see how different the discourse was before The New Jim Crow; there a lot of rhetorical moves Western doesn’t make that I now would take for granted in this conversation. He talks a lot about racism, but there isn’t the same kind of broad, structural focus that’s now a part of our conversations about criminal justice.

- Porochista Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir - Memoir of Khakpour’s decades-long struggles with Lyme disease, including immense difficulty obtaining a diagnosis. I wanted very much to like this, but it was almost impossible to follow, and lacks the kind of self-insight and deliberate structural choices needed to make a memoir like this work. I noticed this particularly in the way Khakpour writes about her parents; she repeatedly alludes to ways in which they’ve failed or let her down through her illness, but the reticence about discussing this further seems to demonstrate an ambivalence about the purpose of the memoir, how much is supposed to share. I also felt very weird about the way she writes about her social circle (weird exorcizing description of a friend who she learned was doing sex work, for example?). Not recommended.

Fiction:

- Ivan Bunin, Sunstroke: Selected Stories (trans. Graham Hettlinger) - Bunin was a Russian emigre author writing in the early twentieth century. These stories are brief, lyrical, and crystalline. I would say that they’re somewhere between Chekhov and Maupassant, but the romance is a little softer than anything either of them would write. I savored them a great deal.

- Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors (trans. Alfred H. Marks) - This is like mid-century Japanese Dangerous Liaisons, except all about internalized homophobia. It is sharp and brilliant and really unpleasant to read. An aging libertine writer cultivates a young gay man as his protege and encourages him in these loveless manipulative affairs with women. Mishima is just like this, I am finding?

- Michéle Roberts, Ignorance - Two childhood friends from different social strata survive the Nazi occupation of France in different ways. I enjoyed parts of this, but I think it would have worked a lot better if it had been kept to a tighter and more contained narrative frame; it alternates between the perspectives of not only the two protagonists but also their daughters, which was too much. The representation of child sexual abuse was also deeply weird, and I wasn’t really okay with it.

- Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities - I liked this a lot. I had read an been deeply impressed with Obioma’s first novel, The Fishermen, which had a rich and audacious mythic sweep; this one combines that same perspective and beautiful narrative voice with this very deep compassion for the characters. Loosely inspired by the Odyssey but very much rooted in Nigerian mythology, it is about a young chicken farmer who leaves Nigeria for the sake of the woman he loves, only to fall prey to a series of misfortunes. I still don’t know how I feel about the ending, but I was totally enthralled, and Obioma’s prose is astounding; I want to read everything he ever writes.

- Emma Glass, Peach - This was a slightly surreal, very much stream-of-consciousness novella about a teenage girl navigating the aftermath of a violent rape, which no one in her life seems to notice. I don’t know quite how I feel about it. A lot of readers seem to have found the horror and gore too much, and I didn’t quite feel that, but I also don’t think it really works as a trauma narrative. There were some details that made it weird to read from my particular perspective as a reader, like someone very inaccurately interpreting parts of my own life.