icysilverthread | Recent Entries

Hi!

This is my first Yuletide and also my first fan exchange. I don't actually know what details are helpful or not, so this is my best guess and hopefully its close enough. One thing I love about fandom is getting to see all of the great ideas and directions that people take things; don't be afraid to write the story that you want to write. I'm icysilverthread everywhere I have a fandom identity: here, on AO3, on Discord, and possibly a few obsolete accounts.

DNWs

- Explicit sexual content / porn (E-rated fic)
- Noncon, canon-atypical graphic violence, A/B/O
- Infidelity (mutually consenting polyamory is OK!)
- Alternate Universe X Setting (eg coffeshop AU, in space AU, high school AU)
- Time Travel

General Likes:
- Non-canon OCs you made up for the story
- Casefic, banter, adventures
- Friendship, found family
- Missing scenes and alternative points of view on existing scenes
- Queerness and queer and trans characters

Chalion Saga (Iselle and Betriz)

Its about the childhood friendship turned into adult trust and devotion. It's about the mischief and fun and keeping each other safe. It's about Iselle's deep water port and Betriz's hand-knitted mittens. I would be delighted by a platonic or romantic fill for these two.

InCryptid (Antimony and James)

(specific DNW: Annie/James romantic shipping fic)

Its about the nerdery! The mutual imposter syndrome and magic geeking out and experimenting, and teaching each other what they know. It's about Annie's ever-present homesickness and James's desire to leave and never look back. It's the whirlwind life changes that take time to settle into. It's about them adopting each other as siblings and never letting go. It's James going "how is this my life now" and Annie not knowing how the world looks to someone who doesn't make their own luck.

Emelan (Worldbuilding)

(specific DNW: shipping any of Sandry/Daja/Briar/Tris with each other)
(specific DNW: exploration of Namornese bride kidnapping beyond canonical events)

I am leaning into the fact that Worldbuilding is on offer here to pose my most pressing questions about the fascinating magic system. Feel free to pick one of these, or make up your own; feel free to make up characters to explore them, or pick a canon character to go with. My favorites from canon are all of the main four: Daja, Sandry, Briar, and Tris, in case it matters, but I am requesting specifically Worldbuilding on purpose.

What does it look like to practice and master a craft without having ~magic~? How does that work socially?
What's something that would be really weird to be an ambient mage of?
Did anyone before Sandry manipulate magic directly, the way she spun the Four together? Did she ever teach that skill to a later student of hers? In either case, what did they do with it?
What might have happened if Sandry was less successful in separating their magics back out again, in Daja's book?

How did Winding Circle become such a center for ambient magic? Is that recent? Does it date back to the origin of the temple, whatever that was?
What was going on around Honored Huath (and associates?) that led to the earthquake?
Have people other than Daja become trangshi? What did they do afterwards; what was their story?

So I signed up for trope_bingo.

FIRST TIME / LAST TIME	SONG (INSPIRED) FIC	FLUFF	NON-CANONICAL RELATIONSHIP	SEINFELDIAN CONVERSATION
BIRDS OF A FEATHER	METAFICTION	SECRET IDENTITIES	SHARING A BED	SINS / VIRTUES
CROSSOVER	FROM THE HEADLINES	FREE SPACE	SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS	HUDDLE FOR WARMTH
LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP	RITES OF PASSAGE / COMING OF AGE	TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE	LOSS OF POWER	LOVE INTEREST
EPISTOLARY	TELEPATHY / MIND MELD	INSPIRED BY ART	FIX-IT FIC	FAKE RELATIONSHIP

Yesterday I tried to register to vote, only to discover that I was already registered. Odd, cause I thought I'd looked myself up, but hey that was a win.

Today, I:
- cleaned the kitchen (mostly)
- took trash out
- grocery shopped
- called family
- picked out and ordered a table + chairs
- put back up the goddamn curtain with the spring-loaded rod that keeps falling down
- emailed my senators
- ate two meals

I don't usually win adulthood over the weekends, but today I think I managed.

1. I have been graduated from school for nearly a year and a half. I am relaxing by inches into the idea that I will never need to do school again. I rather feel I am bucking the Ancestral Tradition of an academic life, but so it goes when one half of the family cares deeply about Ancestors and the other half about University. I am trying to remember that my choices are my own.

2. When my boss compliments my work, he says that I'm very good at X for a new grad. I tense up at the first half and relax at the second. For the first time in my life, I have mentors I can learn from. I am growing into my strength and being given the space to grow as hard as I please, but not expected to do more than I wish. No one is looking at me like I'm a threat if I know too much. I am at least mostly sure that I'm not being measured with a four-foot yardstick. I have at least mostly relaxed enough to have opinions and judgements, and for the most part those opinions are trusted and respected.

I have had too many storybooks and relatives both tell me that the best intellectual work of one's life is done by twenty. I never expected to be growing into my life now.

There are lots of reasons that I am still living in a city where I have not one personal friend, and 90% of the answer is that my workplace is such a marvel of interpersonal functionality. I haven't the faintest notion how I got so lucky, but I am going to run with it as far as I can.

3. The California wildfires are both horrifying and horrible, and it's difficult to look away. The news is, of course, filled with people who can't fathom that an event might have multiple aggravating causes. Not least of which being that if you build in a floodplain, only a fool would be surprised when it floods; likewise, if you build in a dry-side forest or scrubland, you shouldn't be surprised when it burns.

California can't fix climate change alone, although it is at least trying. Urban sprawl, mismanaged forests, and decades worth of indiscriminate fire suppression are not easy problems to solve, but I am hoping that they do not prove intractable.

I have too much to say on the subject and it is all filled with grief.

4. The journey from late teenagehood to adulthood has felt rather like a cable-car, swinging perilously on a single rope that one dare not let go or slow down. I don't yet think I've made it to solid ground, but I imagine I can see the ground ahead.

I went to visit my family the past week. August is when the tomatoes are taller than I am just starting to come in and the blueberries near gone; alas but the raspberries came and went. The strawberries are a new addition to the garden, and most welcome. There haven't been strawberries planted there since my earliest memories. The oregano looked like it was taking over rather more of its corner than it should; I think no one has paid it all that much attention in years. It's my mother's and aunt's garden and it is astonishing how much they manage to grow in the middle of the city. Someday I shall have my own garden and tell stories about how much better theirs was, just as they tell stories about my granny's garden that is no longer.

5. Its uncomfortable to be neck deep in a political argument and realize that one is looking at one's own opinions from a different branch of the Trousers of Time. Not surprising, since [redacted] and I are very like the same personality born in different circumstances and we both like to argue. Still, a bit disconcerting.

6. There is something fundamentally right about looking across the water to islands on the other side. I have water here where I live (thankfully) but no islands and I still feel the lack of a too-empty horizon. The pity of falling in love with an ocean is that it is very unwilling to move, and equally I am unwilling to figure out how the fuck boats so we meander along in parallel and not as close as we might be. I am too poetic and sentimental about my ocean, and she too inhuman for kindness and too unexpected for promises.

Day after tomorrow.

No sign because it'd've been a few too many spoons. But I will be there, with hat + boots, awake, before noon, on a Saturday. And I might have talked the parental contingent into showing up to their local rally [although I'm not counting my chickens yet].

-------------------
( Personal Details. )

-------------------

[Horrified screaming.]

My name is Crow,

I swear it true

with flap of wings

of darky hue.

The draygon sleep.

It claw are hid.

I caw a song -

I trik the kid.

( poem )

Well, not so much a hiatus as that I never really used this account. (Details, details ... )

N.B. My brain is a bag of angry cats that occasionally approximates sanity. I sometimes suspect it of using the monkeys-and-Shakespeare method of approximation. But that's possibly too critical of me.

An abbreviated account of my life, the past year:

1. Graduated college. (Hurrah, thank fuck, never have to do that again.)

2. Moved across the country to live with long-distance Partner and Metamour. I will maintain that this was not, actually, a bad plan.

3. Started new job. T'was splendid.

4. Partner and Metamour got married. (Yeah, yeah, I know. No one is interested if *I* thought it was a good idea.)

5. Partner broke up with me. By ghosting. For six weeks. Need I remind you that we live in the same apartment? (Mistakes were made ...)

6. I break up with Ex, because fuck no I am not (well okay I will still fix Ex's shit, love is inconvenient.) (I am making all of my decisions selfishly, though. Just, y'know, the selfishness that says that I get to love imperfect people ...). I am definitely and emphatically broken up, because it sure is clear that I can't really trust Ex on interpersonal things at all, so like.

We are all three of us still living together. And will be for at least the next four-five months, possibly longer. Inconveniently enough, living alone is a bad solution for me, living with roommates I don't know well is worse, and living with these people isn't great but I think it probably beats living alone. Not sure yet though, still have time to decide. Moving back to parents would also work, except that requires quitting the job, and I like the job.

Relationship drama aside, I have a really excellent and splendid job, with a really excellent boss and coworkers, and everyone thinks I am doing excellently at it! Me included. I am part of everybody. So that's actually not-sarcastically great. Also my (mostly male) coworkers will in fact call me on it when I'm being too nice. It's wonderful.

I have fallen face-first into HP fandom (again), and my Lily-Lives AU has come back to eat my brain. Therefore, instead of homework, have 5 (+1) facts about Lily Potter, mother of the Boy Who Lived.

(1) It was years before she stopped wishing that she could shoot people, if only because then the world would be a lot simpler.

(2) She wondered when on Earth she became the one with the best social and emotional skills. Oh, right, when James died. A few years later, once Remus has managed to piece back together the trust he lost when the Marauders fell apart, she cedes the title of Emotionally Mature Adult with no small amount of relief.

(3) She took a short look at the political situation and decided that she couldn’t actually protect Harry in the magical world, and besides, growing up as a Muggle would do him good. But she made very sure that Harry knew why, and had all the tools she could give him to deal with his fame, because she knew that he would eventually need to.

(3 a) She hadn’t been able to save Sirius from Azkaban. She isn’t sure if she should save him, because, well, he did kill thirteen people and his best friend in revenge. She knows that he’s capable of murder, and she also knows that if they want to make peace and live under a rule of law, than actions have to have consequences.

(4) Sometime, years and years later, she finds advice on the Muggle internet about what to do when your friends S.O. is an abusive a-hole. She laughs and laughs, because taking away the insignificant details like who’s sleeping with who, this is exactly her and Severus (and Dumbledore). She never does forgive Dumbledore for how he treated Sev, and files him regretfully as ally of necessity, not trusted.

(5) She hasn’t spoken to Petunia since their parents were killed by Voldemort’s forces, years ago. At this distance, living through not just the war and death and grief but also the bizarrely paradoxical nature of peacetime, she thinks she understands Tuney’s reasons a little better. She isn’t sure if she should visit, though. If nothing else, any criticism of James will make her lose her temper, and that does no one any kindness. Tuney might have many talents, but keeping her mouth closed on her racist opinions was never one of them. So in the end, Lily doesn’t go. (She can’t avoid losing her temper, but she can try to avoid situations which will make her lose her temper. Sometimes.)

(5 a) She would never admit it in a million years, but Lily is deeply, deeply jealous of her pen-friend Kate, another Muggle-born in her Hogwarts year, who left Hogwarts after OWLs and took her family to Australia. They are all alive and happy, and they still have each other.

(+ 1) She has never been prouder when she hears that her son was sorted into Slytherin. About time that people realized that Slytherins were more than just Dark Wizards. Apparently, Harry had made a Muggle-born friend on the train, who was also a new Slytherin. Lily breathed a prayer of luck for the girl, because lord knew she’d need it.

(Yes, Harry and Hermione both end up as Slytherins in this one. This does not end well for the blood purists. At all.)

Hello and welcome, anyone and everyone who may be reading this post. Good afternoon, morning, evening, or whichever time it may be in your corner of the world on whichever day you happen to read this.

I have a DW account now. Well, I suppose that's obvious, seeing as I'm posting this with it, but I've only had one for about 3 minutes or so. I have no idea, as yet, what I plan to do with it, or how I'm going to use it, or really anything. I suppose I'll find out as I go.

Thats about it, really. Have a good day.