I made a playlist for my own fic! Both to help me write it, and just because I'm vain haha.

If you're curious you can listen to it on Spotify over here!

If you want an idea of what I was thinking in terms of "which songs go with which characters/chapters," see below (asterisks indicate songs that I think vibe particularly well with the fic):

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courtesy of this random article i stumbled upon, which i do not endorse in its entirety, but did bless me with these random game development tidbits, so it's good for that much at least:

Now, the Accidentally Lesbians.

There was a point in this two-year development cycle when the character of Fang was some other character. This character had had a romantic relationship in the past with Vanille – and the change to Fang was done with minimal change to Vanille and her dialogue with some lines not even being rewritten, and, according to some sources, not even being rerecorded (which, if true, suggests they were recording game audio before the story was finalised). Fang was going to be a dude, and Lightning was going to be flirty, and they decided to change that by putting the lines from Lightning into Fang, making Fang a girl, and then giving Fang a need to protect Vanille.

All of this resulting in Fang and Vanille being coded as extremely gay, the kind of gay that’s so comfortable and present that nobody remarks on it, creating a sort of gayness-beyond-gayness, punching through the normal representational boundary and standing on the other side in a world where heterosexuality is so much not the default that it is literally unremarkable to find that default abrogated. Now, you may be a big fan of this, and if you are, cool, go team lesbian, but this was absolutely a complete accident and budget constraints, and not a byproduct of this mythos creating a space to wave the lesbian flag.

god, that's so good. i say this as a huge fang/vanielle fan. you're telling me we got that ship due to a late-game "whatever let's just genderswap this bitch" development snafu? hell yes gimme more game design clusterfucks like that lmao

also, far much less momentously but still entertainingly:

Did you know back in the original design combat was meant to be seamlessly integrated with the live map and Lightning was meant to have anti-gravity powers that let her transform the battlefield?

god. amazing. amazing!!! i love this big stupid game!!!

Naesala moves in with Leanne—and his (presumptive) future in-laws.

Naesala/Leanne, ~12k words.

Read here on AO3.

misc warblings about it under the cut

( author's notes )

an annoying thing about Writing Advice™ is that, once you know the basics of “how to write a grammatical sentence” and some general protips like “this is what a plot arc looks like,” “here’s a couple style rules you should probably follow unless you know what you’re doing,” and so on… the most interesting tips sound kind of “wisdom-y” in a way that’s hard to put into practice, and often don’t make sense unless you struggle through writing some stuff yourself. (also, i do sincerely believe the correct answer for most writing questions is “go read a novel that does it well & think about it really hard,” and there’s no real shortcut around that, sorry!)

worse, once you’ve struggled through figuring out how to solve a particular writing problem, you often can’t really express what tip/trick you were using when you solved it. it’s like those veteran birdwatchers who, when you ask how they identified a particular oriole via a 0.5 second glance of a heavily backlit in-flight silhouette, will shrug and say “it just looked like one.” augh!

i think trying to formalize these tips/tricks, as you notice them, can prove useful down the line (as in: when i’m facing a plot dilemma, i’ve occasionally gone down a literal list of “stuff i’ve done that’s worked before” and tried using each and every one, like someone desperately trying to find which screw in the toolbox will fit into a particular bolt). so here’s three new ones i came up with recently; use as you see fit:

VIEWPOINT, PLOT, THEME: PICK TWO GET ONE FREE

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

THROW IN FUN BITS HERE AND THERE, I THINK? ESPECIALLY BIT CHARACTERS?

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

THREE IS THE BIGGEST NUMBER

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

okay those are the three formalisms i came up with. but i guess i’ll mention the other one that i did not come up with, but which i use all the time:

GIVE YOUR READERS WHAT THEY’RE EXPECTING, BUT NOT THE WAY THEY EXPECT IT

( makes some references to some of my original fiction, but lmao you definitely don't need to have read them before )

okay, that's the end of cringe writing advice from a random internet fanfiction person, you may resume your normal reading pages now :P

I picked up this book because one person whose taste I trust said they loved it, and another person whose taste I trust said they hated it.

That's gotta be the fastest way to get me to read a book, by the way. What can I say? I'm the kind of gal always who wants to stick her nose right in the middle of a dispute and suss out who's right!!!

And I think my opinion of this novel fell somewhere solidly in-between those two poles—well, at least until I read the afterword that was tucked into the back of my edition, but let's death-of-the-author that right outta here and come back to it later.

SO. The Last Samurai is a novel suffering from a very unfortunate name collision—it has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, nothing to do with Meiji-era Japan, nothing to do with war or battle or any such thing. (The novel came first, for what it's worth.)

Instead, The Last Samurai is the story of Sibylla, a young, charmingly-lowkey-deranged multilingual humanities academic in late-1980s Oxford, who gets PISSED OFF after putting in a lot of work to translate some scholarship that turns out to be SHODDY and ILL-FOUNDED, and in fact she is so pissed off by this that she decides to (1) fuck off from academia entirely, (2) hooks up with a foppish, callow, pseudointellectual guy she meets at a party, (3) gets pregnant, (4) decides to keep the kid but doesn't tell the dad about it, and (5) works a really-poorly-paid typing/editing job from home so she can raise the kid, Ludo, to be a piano/language/etc prodigy, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill.

( the good )

( the bad )

And, see, since that came right at the end this is making me sound way more negative about the book than I actually am. It was a fun ride! particularly in the first half! I'm glad I read it! but skip the afterword, jeez.

whenever i'm editing a piece that i'm being somewhat-to-very tryhard about, i usually make an effort to read the piece aloud to myself. ideally i'd read the whole thing, slowly, audiobook-style, but more often i'm doing some mix of that + "just muttering passages quietly to myself." it's pretty good for catching the sorts of errors that the brain's too good at "filtering out" while reading (e.g. repeating a word, an awkward dialogue tag, etc).

but, i got curious the other night about the state of text-to-speech software, because hey, that's one of the few domains where "just throw more GPUs at it" does seem pretty useful, and i ran out of podcasts for this week's commute, and yeah i'm absolutely vain enough to make a computer audiobookify my own shit haha.

so, lo, here's the random software i decided to play with after a google search. cursory observations:

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Apparently, back in the late-1990s-to-early-2010s, Seattle had its very own bona fide megachurch—a fact that shocked me when I learned about it, a few years after the collapse of said megachurch, because you'd be hard-pressed to find a less churchy city in the US. Where I grew up in Kentucky, "where do you go to church?" was considered a perfectly normal, polite question to ask someone at a barbeque or a book club, roughly equivalent to "so what school do your kids go to?"—Christianity was so culturally assumed that this was just a way of making conversation and orienting someone in space, and there were plenty of megachurches (and smaller churches) to choose from. In the circles I run in in Seattle, though, asking that kind of question would earn either an icy glare or total bafflement—it's just not part of the mainstream culture here.

Which is how I prefer it, all else being equal, but apparently Mars Hill, during its 18-year run, managed to attract over 10,000 attendees per week at its main Seattle location alone, preaching a distinctly "macho" brand of Christianity that would seem pretty at odds with the surroundings. (The church's founder and head pastor, Mark Driscoll, wasn't even doing this in the suburbs, which tend more conservative than Seattle proper, but in the Ballard neighborhood, which tends to be younger, queerer, and more progressive than the city as a whole.)

And then it collapsed, almost at quickly as it rose—it turned out the superstar pastor, behind closed doors, had been a bully, had been abusive and manipulative toward his staff and his wider congregation, and had badly mismanaged church funds. The church elders finally bit back, compelling Driscoll to leave abruptly, and he never returned to Seattle again. (The church, being largely a cult of personality, fell apart soon thereafter.)

So when I saw The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, I was curious to hear about how this historic curiosity took root, and why it fell apart, and I got that—but, man, I got so much more.

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The setup for this novel is deliciously fun: Jhanvi, a trans woman working a dead-end job in Sacramento, decides to foist herself upon her college-buddy-slash-sexting-partner Henry, who lives in one of those Burning-Man-y polycule-y group houses in San Francisco. The plan: Jhanvi will show up on their doorstep, invite herself into their lives, manipulate Henry into marrying her, and then use those sweet sweet healthcare benefits he gets from his BigTech employer to pay for all the feminization surgeries she's interested in.

You'd expect this to be a perfect setup for some good satirical skewering of the Burning-Man-y polycule-y group house, and you'd be right (there's a really funny running bit where Katie, the ardent police abolitionist, is determined to figure out who's been calling the cops on the street-harasser guy near their house; Jhanvi knows it's the townie bartender at a place down the road, but sure isn't telling Katie because who needs a self-righteous Burning Man person giving her shit; also, the dynamics of Who Ferries The Drugs Around For Our Outdoor Naked Party Weekend had me in absolute stitches).

But Jhavni's absolutely relentless cynicism does start to wear after a while—an intended effect, I think. Yeah, the group house people are kinda shallow and willfully naive, but Jhanvi is trying to worm her way into their circle, and she thinks and acts in some pretty appalling ways to that end. It helps that she's pretty self-aware about what she's doing—there's a particularly delicious bit where Jhanvi rolls into Katie's room and we get a blow-by-blow account of "here's how I'm going to manipulate this chick in exactly this specific way"—but, still. Doesn't feel right to use people that way so relentlessly, right? and they do have some virtues of their own, right?

(There's a specific mode of thought Jhanvi has, an absolute dogged realism-bordering-on-reductionism, which means she's often the person speaking up to the effect of, "Look, let's be real, this party is not about ~*~liberation and justice~*~, it's about hot rich people having sex"—seeing through layers of bullshit to get to the heart of a matter. I know plenty of people like this IRL, and I'm lucky enough to call some of them my friends—that clarity of thought is an intensely admirable thing, and rare and hard to find! But there's a flipside to it—they can become very determined that their read is the 100% correct one, and become pretty dismissive of nuance or alternate perspectives in cases where they may be warranted. It's not the main thing Jhanvi's going on, but I thought I'd mention it specifically here, since I'm not sure I've seen this specific style-of-thought so vividly portrayed in fiction before, and I'd be really curious to see how other readers responded to it / what they thought about it; I found it really interesting!)

So you've got Jhanvi's gradual turnaround, from grifter-we're-cheering-for to grifter-we're-still-cheering-for-but-girl-can-you-tamp-down-on-the-grifting-just-a-little-bit. The book has a final arc and conclusion in which Jhanvi does have a change of heart, does something sudden and altruistic and selfless that's meant to stand for a larger shift in her character—but the stakes of that decision feel too low, almost abstract, and the payoff feels rushed in a way that didn't quite make me buy that shift.

I suspect if Kanakia had leaned all the way into the overthinking-social-class-dynamics-in-every-single-conversation angle, Death Note/Yukio Mishima/battle-anime-where-some-sidekick-character-is-overthinking-every-punch-aloud style, with even more excruciating detail, I could've bought that shift more readily, because I'd be agonizingly familiar with the contours of Jhanvi's mind. Or, if that final arc had a little bit more buildup/denouement/heft to it, I might've appreciated it a little more. As the book stands, it sort of awkwardly in-between those poles, so it ended up falling a little flat for me as a whole, even though I really enjoyed all the component pieces.

I would definitely read the next book by this author, though. It read very breezily and was a lot of fun and there's some interesting layers I'm still chewing on.

(Oh, shouts to Roshie, the weird, earnest, unsexy, way-too-good-at-her-job nerd who lives upstairs. It's kinda obvious Kanakia loves her too much, and you know what? So do I.)

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #1)

This book started out so delightfully and totally and completely my shit that they may as well have stamped "FOR LUA INTERNETPERSON" on the cover. All of these characters are screwed up in ways ranging from "severe" to "absolutely god-awful." The narrative voice is witty and snarky as hell.* It's all even pointing toward culminating in a godawful dinner party. Yes!!! Yes!!!

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Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #2)

This one I liked rather less. It's another quick read, playing out over the course of either twenty-four or forty-eight in-universe hours—my memory of the exact timing is a little fuzzy, as it is to the protagonist himself. You see, young Patrick from the first novel is now twenty-two, hates his father (very understandably), is pretty well fucked up from his childhood, and now is a kinda-functional drug addict. Luckily his family's rich, so he can simply use money to avoid some of the worst possible pitfalls (he's dropping money on fancy dinners and nice hotels without so much as a blink), but it turns out even the life of a rich drug addict is a fucking mess. The book opens with Patrick on a flight from London to New York—his father's died, and he's tasked with crossing the Atlantic to bring back the body. While in New York, Patrick spends that bewildering twenty-four-or-forty-eight-hour period briefly visiting the funeral home with his father's remains and a friend from the first novel... before promptly calling up his old drug dealer, failing to track down his old drug dealer, taking a taxi to the sketchy part of Manhattan in an attempt to score some drugs, being high, coming down from a high, fucking up a few interpersonal relationships, doing yet more drugs, and finally flying home.

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After I read Gilead, I found myself thumbing through my phone contacts and texting anyone and everyone who I even vaguely suspected might've read this book. And it's a weird, specific kind of book, so the list of people I wound up texting looked something like "my mom, a friend of my mom's whom I remembered vaguely from book clubs at our house when I was little, and an acquaintance from undergrad who studied folklore & mythology." I asked each of them: did you read this? can we talk about it, please, I'm d e s p e r a t e to talk about this book with someone???

And I couldn't find anyone who'd read the damn thing! So I was left wrestling with it by myself these past few weeks.

See, the whole reason I was desperate to talk to someone is: this novel has a lot going on, multiple threads that pull together in a satisfying way—but by the end, I found myself puzzling over what to make of the whole?

I'm still puzzling, but I've got at least some notion now, I think.

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Weird book. Not at all what I expected! If you've read it, PLEASE sound off in the comments; I Wish To Talk With You About It

(a couple other reviews I found interesting while puzzling over this: [x], [y], [z])