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difeisheng · 14 days

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Fang Duobing wakes up with the dawn on the five thousandth morning since his life fractured, then restarted, and there is silver in Di Feisheng's hair.

"Go back to sleep," he feels Di Feisheng rumble, where Fang Duobing's chest is pressed to his back. His hand doesn't pause, continuing to feel through the long river of Di Feisheng's hair. He can't help it, that it's still striking even after these years since the first hint of grey appeared. Early light glows through the window, glinting off the streak woven in through the dark strands. Vein of precious metal set in stone.

Di Feisheng has survived four decades of defiant existence in this world, and now he wears something proud to show for it.

"You're getting old," Fang Duobing says, and smiles into the back of Di Feisheng's neck. "What happened to rising with the sun to train every morning?"

"You and your sleeping in happened, you spoiled brat." The words are softened by the fact that Di Feisheng doesn't counter the hand Fang Duobing moves from his hair to his waist, only letting out a deep sigh. "And now you won't even let me do that."

"It's called having variation. Keeps you sharp."

"Keeps me tired."

"You'll start getting slow next if you settle into your ways like this, lao-lang."

"If you insist on calling me old, then you should have some respect for your elders," Di Feisheng declares, and now Fang Duobing can hear the glare in his voice. "Be quiet."

Fang Duobing has cheerfully never listened to this particular request, and isn't about to start now. "I show my respect for you nearly every day. Maybe you'd even call it appreciation." He lets his hand on Di Feisheng's waist drift lower, under the blanket thrown over both of them. "I could demonstrate again though, if you'd like?"

This time Di Feisheng catches him, gently dragging his hand away before Fang Duobing can reach for his trousers. "Later," he says, and the words are low enough to be a growl. "Go. Back. To. Sleep."

"Fine." Fang Duobing replaces his hand, arm reaching over Di Feisheng's torso instead. Di Feisheng's own hand stays curled overtop his, stilling as Fang Duobing settles down again behind him, sword calluses rough against his knuckles. "But I'll hold you to it."

It's impulse that causes Fang Duobing to brush at Di Feisheng's hair one last time, sweeping the silver aside to touch his lips to his neck.

Di Feisheng is, seemingly, by the fall of his breath and the curve of his body into Fang Duobing's, already asleep once more.

#yes i do mean the nickname as in 老狼 #also hi. the prompt i gave myself for this was just 'write difang happy'#and get myself out of my usual angst/bittersweet territory #so here we are #mysterious lotus casebook #difang #di feisheng #fang duobing #ashton writes fic #fic

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drstrangewillseeyounow · 4 years

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Creative Year in Review 2019

Total number of creations? (Or a rough guess!)

14 stories for a total of 116,020 words across six fandoms, all of which can be found on AO3 (strangeallure)

Nine for Star Trek: Discovery and one each for Star Trek AOS, Star Trek Voyager, Penny Dreadful, Star Wars Legends and Venom (Movie)

up from 12 stories and 50,537 words total in 2018

What characters or ships have you created the most content for this year?

Michael Burnham/Ash Tyler: 78,446 words (7 stories)

I’ve only written more than one story for one other ship, namely

Paul Stamets/Hugh Culber: 3,443 words (2 stories)

but my longest non-Ashburn fic was this

Nyota Uhura/Gaila (AOS): 16,560 words (1 story)

Everything that wasn’t Ashburn (68%) was written for challenges or as a gift (38k, 32%).

Was there a project that you didn’t get around to?

Too many, as always. Out of the four WIPs I said I wanted to come to fruition last time, two did (Back to Where We’ve Never Been and What If We Would Stay?), and I never wrote that Ashburn remix of Franipani’s fic I meant to do.

What was the creation you had the most fun making?

In every longer (and most shorter) fics, there’s usually a time where I feel like I’m hitting a wall, either can’t get started, can’t start up again or feel like editing is just not working out, but eventually, I reach a point where it all comes together, where I know what to let go and change to make the story better (I’m a big fan of cutting things), and in the end, that is a very rewarding state while it lasts.

I have a very distinct memory of getting into the flow for What If We Would Stay? and since I had worked on it forever, that was a great place to be.

On the Line came together quickly, over two days or so (I wrote it when I felt completely stuck on my WIP), so that was nice, too.

You’re the Chance I Want to Take (Nyota Uhura/Gaila) was a lot of fun to write because it’s an on-planet sci-fi adventure, which is something I hadn’t really written before. The characters crash-land in a desert and make their way through a cave system and a rain forest, so there’s exploration, tech jerry-rigging and team work. It felt a lot like writing an episode for one of the episodic-era Treks.

Any surprises? (E.g. a character or ship you never thought you’d create for or a project that came out of nowhere?)

The two biggest surprises are both Frangipani’s fault.

She had wanted a Venom OT3 fic, which I started (since the movie was surprisingly good fun) but never finished in 2018, but when Cupidsbow declared a “Venomtimes Day” challenge in early 2019, that gave me the boost to finish You’re A Snack, But You’re Much More Than That. Although I have to say, it’s mainly on the cracky romance side of things (Venom coaxes Eddie into wooing Anne), not explicit.

The other surprise was writing Star Wars Legends and somnophilia - in one fic, no less. I only know Legends (and Mara Jade) through beta’ing a few of Frangi’s amazing fics, and her Mara is a layered, complex and intriguing character. I’m more of a romantic shipper myself (with canon-induced angst where applicable, but ultimately, I write to get my characters in a good, healthy place), but since Frangi loves fucked up things, I tried to go all out and write Mara as a horrible person, which lead me to somnophilia. It was an interesting and fun challenge to write, and I usually like my writing better the darker the subject matter is (which is unfortunate when you want your characters to be happy, but well …).

Oh, one more: I started posting my first real chaptered fic in June (and I posted my first fanfic in the late 90s). I had a complete first draft of about 18k words and thought I could be done posting it as a WIP within a month. Instead it took me 45k and until the end of December. I’m proud of Object Lessons, but I don’t think I’ll ever begin posting again before I have at least a more polished second draft and a chapter breakdown. It was definitely a learning experience.

What was the hardest creation to make?

Object Lessons because it kept growing and I wanted for it to be coherent and combine character and relationship growth. I even made a scene-by-scene breakdown Excel sheet.

What inspired you the most this year?

The chemistry and dynamics between Michael Burnham and Ash Tyler and all the questionable narrative choices made by the people writing and plotting Discovery season two (and one).

What are you most proud of? (A creation, something you learned, etc)

Not gonna lie, I am probably most proud of my Object Lessons Excel sheet. It has word counts for scenes and chapters, notes location and a quick summary for every scene, flags if a scene takes place in the main location or somewhere else (so there’s a balance between tight relationship focus and broader world), and indicates “breadcrumbs”, i.e. things related to the two main points of conflict.

Also proud I managed to hit two (out of five) goals I set last year:

Write an episode reaction fic before the next episode airs: A Moment out of Time

Participate in three challenges: actually wrote fic for five challenges/exchanges (time travel challenge, star trek secret santa, poetry challenge, venomtime’s day and femslash exchange)

Any goals/plans/ideas for next year?

I have a lot of other stuff on my plate this year, so I want fandom to be fun and not set myself concrete goals to fall short off and then feel bad about.

That said, I’ll try and sign up for a few challenges, and if I go into longfic territory again, I’ll try and learn from Object Lessons and start posting only when it’s more polished than a first draft.

Also, should Ash Tyler return to the Star Trek universe this year, all bets are off.

Pick your favourite creations! (Post links and tell us why you love them!)

Object Lessons, my magnum opus, and as of this moment the longest Ashburn fic on AO3.

Your Voice Still Sounds Like Home is a melancholy, bittersweet fic about Ash sending Michael secret messages from Qo’noS and when I read it now, ten months after I wrote it, I can still very much feel the longing.

You’re the Chance I Want to Take (Nyota Uhura/Gaila) because it’s a fun and sweet adventure - and shockingly enough my only femslash fic this year

Everyone who created/posted art, fic, gif-sets, vids, cosplay, etc., consider yourself tagged if you’d like to be. I’m curious! <3

#year in review #creative year in review #me me me me me

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

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23 boxes of tissues on the Jellicoe Road

by Wardog

Thursday, 05 February 2009Wardog tops off her run of utterly amazing books with On the Jellicoe Road.~

My father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die. I counted. It happened on the Jellicoe Road. The prettiest road I'd ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-La. We were going to the ocean, hundreds of miles away, because I wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, "What's the difference between a trip and a journey?" and my father said, "Narnie, my love, when we get there, you'll understand," and that was the last thing he ever said.

Are you in tears, yet? On the Jellicoe Road (or Jellicoe Road, as it was published over here, for some inexplicable reason) is an incredible book, a perfectly judged juxtaposition of beauty and pain, like the Jellicoe road itself introduced here in the prologue. I'm probably failing to sell this from the get go book: On the Jellico Road is not an easy book - in fact, sometimes, it's almost unbearable - but it's also superb in every conceivable way, and so full of hope and wonder that if I believed in books could change lives, this would be one of those books. It's a buy and give to everyone you know sort of book.

On the Jellicoe Road is a complex book, with complex characters and you'll spend at least the first hundred pages faintly bewildered because it just throws you straight into the action of the story, but it's incredibly carefully structured and comes together in remarkably coherent and satisfying way. Everything that happens, everything it tells you, is there for a reason. There are two storylines, one set in the past and one in the present; they seem to run in parallel but, as the book unfolds, they turn out to be intimately connected. The Past tells the story of five teenagers who were brought together in tragedy on the Jellicoe Road. In the present, we have Taylor Markham, a teenage girl who was abandoned at 7/11 by her mother on the Jellicoe Road. She becomes the reluctant leader of her school in the annual territory wars between the Jellicoe school students, the Townies and the Cadets, who come in for six weeks from the city, but she's really searching for family she's lost and a sense of belonging in a world she thinks is "just a tad low on the reliable adult quota."

I've deliberately kept my attempt at a plot summary sparse: there is no way I can do such an intricate book justice in a summary and a large part of the pleasure of reading it comes from piecing the past and the present together, and learning how the one informs and influences the other. The sections of the novel set in the present are told in the first person from Taylor's point of view; the past comes to us in fragments from the novel written by Hannah, the woman who has acted somewhat as a surrogate parent for Taylor. I can't say simply what On the Jellicoe Road is about: it's about love, I think, love and pain, and hope, and how to find it. I'm not a sentimental person, and it's not in any way a sentimental book, but I cried all the way through it. I'm kind of welling up a bit writing this review, and remembering. The thing is, because I am not the sort of person who cries at things, I usually get quite angry by books that try to make me. I feel resentful and manipulated: although it is impossible to read On the Jellicoe Road without being moved, the emotion it never fails to evoke feels natural and cathartic.

There isn't much more to say about On the Jellicoe Road without starting to pick it apart in order to look at why it's so wonderful. But it's a sublime butterfly of a book and I have no wish to stick a pin through its heart. I simply can't remember the last time I was so profoundly affected by something in fiction. It's quite a slow-paced read and far from easy but it's undoubtedly worth it. It's such a powerful story, beautifully written, elegantly structured and full of flawed, complex well-drawn characters. And although it's full of grief and pain and despair, the darkness is never absolute: hope and love are always there when you are sure they can't possibly be. And, if you can possibly believe it, it's far from a grueling emotion-fest. It's also extremely funny (Taylor, for example, has a dry, sarcastic narrative voice that suits her difficult, lonely character perfectly) and there's plenty of adolescent bickering and flirting and relating to keep the book grounded. On the Jellicoe Road is quite simply an essential read. It makes me want to have children so I could give them copy when they got to be teenagers. Even though I hate children. It's that good.Themes:

Young Adult / Children

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Isabel

at 09:42 on 2009-05-23Kyra thanks SO much for writing this review. Just finished it (was anal enough to get my cousin in Australia to buy and post me a copy because I don't like UK edition) and would never of heard of it if you hadn't written this. Fucking LOVE this book. It's just amazing.

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Wardog

at 10:51 on 2009-05-23Thank you so much - I'm glad somebody else has read it because it's such an amazing book. And I have no idea what they were thinking of with the UK cover (big red poppy of pointlessness??).

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Isabel

at 19:04 on 2009-05-25And especially renaming it Jellicoe Road – that really irked me!

I think what I really loved was the way that everything in it was there for a reason and also because the big points or important sentences and moments didn’t stick in my mind because they were obviously This Is Significant (something which after five seasons of Lost is really. Pissing. Me. Off.) but just because they were the most beautiful – opening paragraph and the ‘more’ stuff being the case in point.

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Guy

at 06:59 on 2009-07-29Hey Kyra, just wanted to add my thanks to Isabel's because I just finished reading this book and it was amazing. If you hadn't written this review I never would have given this book a second glance because I would have (shamefully) misjudged it on the basis of having seen the film of Alibrandi and sort-of liked it and thought that was all I needed to know about Melina Marchetta. I'm half-tempted to write a review of this book in which I ramble endlessly about the hundred and one things that it makes me think of, but I guess the succinct thing I'd say about it is that it's the kind of book that I remember reading that made me Believe In Literature when I was younger and that's an experience I've missed for a long long time.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2009-09-09Oh my god.

Oh my

god

(I promised myself I'd restrict this comment to just the one repetition.)

By great good fortune, my library system has this on Playaway (a sort of combination audiobook and player, just add headphones) and I just happened to stumble across it when browsing the online catalogue (I'm pretty sure I didn't go out looking for it).

I listened to it over the summer and was completely blown away. Easily one of the best books I've read in years. Maybe

the

best.

This story is so incredibly beautiful. Tragedy and I have been on difficult terms for a long time, and once or twice I've considered issuing a restraining order. This summer it feels like I've been saturated with more angsty melodrama than at any time since I gave up

Legacy of the Force

in disgust. (At some point when I've got my thoughts better collected I'll have to write a post about the peculiar penchant in the entertainment industry to assume more angst = more literate.) Then again, that may've mostly been due to the third and fourth seasons of

Battlestar Galactica

, a show which must've been pitched like this: “We've got to show the Brits we can produce something even

angsty than their new version of

Doctor Who

.” (Ooh, look at all the pretty tangents.)

'Course, some of the tragedy was better than that. I listened to both Jodi Picoult's

My Sister's Keeper

and Audrey Niffenegger's

The Time-Traveler's

(which, incidentally, also had a major character die in a car crash and accidentally shot by a loved one, respectively) this spring and they were all right, but even they felt somewhat forced and melodramatic.

On the Jellicoe Road

singlehandedly restored my faith in tragedy, and reminded me that yes, it can be an intensely beautiful thing. (Anybody else here think tragedy is a lot harder to pull off satisfactorily than happy stories?)

Which is not to say, I hasten to add for the benefit of anyone who hasn't yet read the book, that it's all tragedy. The ending is bittersweet: tragedy and joy blended to perfection and served in a porcelain bowl with luscious fudge topping.

It's hard enough to get my eyes to tear up, but I was crying all through the last three chapters. The epilogue was such a downer note that I just kept on listening and got the prologue and first nine chapters all over again. (Approximately one million things leaped out at me and had me going “Oh, so

that's

what that part's about. Another sign of excellent writing.)

And though it's sad, the story is also uplifting. I think this is because at the end of the road, despite all of the pain, all of the heartache, all of the betrayals and perceived betrayals, everyone is forgiven, everyone is loved. I'm tearing up again just writing that.

In terms of plotting, the book is effing fantastic. To borrow a line from Kyra's

“Incarceron” review

Read it and weep, JK Rowling, this what a backstory should be.

(Also what tragedy should be.)

Even the serial killer plot thread managed to tie into the whole in the most perfectly unexpected way. *David Tennant voice* Brilliant.

I attended a Young Adult Fiction panel at a Convention this weekend, and at one point realized they were having recommendations from the audience. I gave this book a special shout-out (and Catherine Fisher, too).

Unfortunately, my youngest sisters are too young to read this—I just know it would break their hearts—and the older one has already expressed her disinclination to let me tell her how much

loved the book, let alone recommend it to her (which I wasn't going to do anyway, because teenager though she is, I suspect she'd find it overwhelmingly sad as well).

My version had the red poppy too, but it's so abstract I didn't mind, because the Australian cover looks like some kind of ghost story of only middling quality to me. As for the title—I got both versions. The US cover has the truncated title, but the dramatization is Australian and the reader gave it in full.

May I also just give a shout-out to the audio version, by the way? Narration can primarily enhance a story experience, detract from it, or execute it neutrally (I say “primarily” because most have at least a little of each). Rebecca Macauley's reading of

On the Jellicoe Road

lands squarely in the first category. Her Taylor is flawless, and the other voices are good-to-amazing. With her narration, she brings the rich emotions of the book to life.

(Although due to only listening to the book, I was momentarily thrown off rereading this post to learn that Webb's sister is called “Narnie” rather than “Nani.”)

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Wardog

at 12:58 on 2009-09-10I am increasingly pleased I wrote this review - the book had such an impact on me that I'm glad other people reading it as a consquence.

I'm so glad it effected you as strongly as it did me - it's a truly remarkable and wonderful book. I did cry pretty much the whole way through it but I never resented the fact it made me do that, nor did I find it was unpleasant, the way strong emotions can sometimes be.

It's such a hard book to recommend to people because it is such an emotional read.

But, God, yes it's remarkable - and you for commenting, I really think everyone should read this book.

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Robinson L

at 22:02 on 2009-09-10Thank

you

for reviewing it, and putting me on to such a fabulous thing.

(Yes, it is a hard book to recommend, although I seem to be getting the unshakable urge to proselytize it now.)

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:59 on 2017-07-13This review has really stuck in my mind for all these years, so much so that I've come to remember it as possibly the first thing I ever read on Ferretbrain – which is clearly wrong because I'd been not only reading but contributing to the site for over a year before the review was posted. I also remembered 'On the Jellicoe Road' as being the first book I put on my 'to read' list when I got a Goodreads account (over two years after reading this review) and that memory does turn out to be right.

And after all that, I recently got round to actually tracking down a copy and reading it! No need to say any more than that I completely agree with everything you said about it, Kyra, and thank you for the recommendation.

#Ferretbrain #On the Jellicoe Road #Wardog #Jellicoe Road #Melina Marchetta

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