maggiehoneybite

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Die temu ad die

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FANDOM TRUMPS HATE ALERT!

For those who might have missed my earlier reblog of the post from @brunheiffer -- if you enjoy my work, you can now bid on a "misprint" fanbound copy of my Good Omens AU Lift Me Up, O Lord in the Brunheiffer's 2025 FTH auction.

An "errata" printing of Starstuff by @themoonmothwrites and @cassieoh (illustrator) is also available! Think of them as like Aziraphale's misprint Bibles -- unique volumes!

The auction also features the opportunity to have a fanwork of your choice bound, with the author's permission and within the following fandoms: Good Omens, Star Trek (any iteration), Marvel (any iteration), Sherlock Holmes (any iteration), The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings. Details and the bidding form are at Brunheiffer's Dreamwidth page, here.

Lift Me Up, O Lord is a series featuring most of the book/s1 cast (plus some OCs), and the binding includes all three posted installments: the original fic, a weightlifter/runner AU; Prized, an E-rated short vignette; and Objects In Motion, a wedding fic (bring your hanky).

Aziraphale Fell’s maintained a string of weightlifting victories, a strained relationship with his family, and his grandfather’s waistcoat right into his fifties. His personal life is little more than an album of brief and pleasant memories. It’s safer that way. Distance runner Anthony Crowley’s spent the last decade watching his racing career recede in the rearview, but it doesn’t stop him running, literally, away from his feelings. And now he’s fallen, equally literally, from grace. Someone’s about to lift him up.

Once again, Brunheiffer's auction stall is here. Go thou!

Tagging my usual readers list so as to reach everyone who might be interested! Don't worry, you won't be getting spammed on the regular.

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the number one reason I’m still active in the gomens fandom is how much I’ve learned—and continue to learn—about the diversity of the human experience from all of you. over the last 5+ years, gomens writers, artists, curators, meta-posters, etc. have helped me understand vastly more facets of identity than I was previously aware existed. and that’s because so much of this fandom has gloriously chosen to interpret two beings who were presented in canon as having no actual gender or sexuality as two beings who can have ANY gender presentation or sexuality, and the resulting works have filled me with joy and often blown my mind big time. it’s not that I came into this fandom with deep prejudices, but the simple fact of being exposed to so much incredible art (of all kinds) that takes two characters and turns them into representations for a million different ways of living has had a huge, huge impact on me.

case in point: five years ago, I was a straight, white cis woman living with my fiancé, who was a straight, white cis man. when said fiancé came to me mere months after the pandemic started and said, “hey, maybe I’m a woman, actually,” I had a basis for understanding how she felt—because of all of you. today, I live in the same place with the same person, except that now, we both identify as women, and I’ve figured out that I’m bisexual, and we publicly identify as lesbians. (oh, and we got married 🥰) throughout the whole process of my partner’s transition, I’ve been able to see and read these beautiful interpretations of what queer love can look like—and NONE of it came from the source material. it came from YOU. and I’m so grateful.

so anyway. that’s why I’m still here, despite the fact that one of the creators is the worst piece of shit. the world of good omens may have started with him, but it’s not his. we still have so much to teach each other, and if we can do that using a familiar framework without perpetuating real harm (like knowingly giving that fucker a single red cent), more power to us.

support the victims. take care of yourselves and each other. and fuck that guy. ❤️

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Okay this is still a fan art for the brilliant @a-tehta's great work of Glorthelion "Sparring" 🙈. It has been (and still is) a draft in my pad for months and I couldn't find the time to finish and polish the details 😮‍💨. But I still want to share it to show my great love to @a-tehta's masterpiece of "The Theban Band of Gondolin" 🫶😍💗❤️

The scene I drew was the beginning of the fic below

"Glorfindel joined Ecthelion at the ship's rail, leaning against it at a carefully considered distance. Not as close as he wished to stand–that would be too close for propriety, and possibly for Ecthelion, after all those years apart–but close enough for private conversation. Now all he needed was an opening line. Unfortunately, his mind was a tangled mess, full of odd contrasts: of the comforts of the ship as compared to the hardship of his first journey east; of the terrifying unknowns he had faced then, and the unknown unknowns he might face now; of the way he had once romanticised battle and deadly peril, and of his current awareness of their cost.  He longed to share all that confusion, to hear Ecthelion's own thoughts, which surely had to be running along similar lines–and yet… And yet, another contrast he was very much aware of was the one between all the pictures he had, over the years, painted of Ecthelion, and the real person now peering at him questioningly, whose brows were lifted in a way Glorfindel had never thought to portray. The contrast between memory and reality, which surely ran more than skin deep. He knew he would be reconciled to it, in time, but for now he felt paralysed, voiceless as one of his own paintings."

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Darlings.

I need fic recs.

AUs preferred, self hating Crowley and repressed Aziraphale also preferred. Mild sub/dum undertones also preferred if E, but will read anything well written, love good imagery and wanting and longing and pining that makes you want to claw your own feelings out of your chest. I want to read words that will make me want to vomit up my own heart, that will make me believe love is real.

If you know what I write, you have a vague idea of what I like - rec me. I’ve read all the classics, I need something new.

Help.

[maggiehoneybite]

Darlings.

I need fic recs.

AUs preferred, self hating Crowley and repressed Aziraphale also preferred. Mild sub/dum undertones also preferred if E, but will read anything well written, love good imagery and wanting and longing and pining that makes you want to claw your own feelings out of your chest. I want to read words that will make me want to vomit up my own heart, that will make me believe love is real.

If you know what I write, you have a vague idea of what I like - rec me. I’ve read all the classics, I need something new.

Help.

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A bit late xmas (kinda) picture... One of my Roman Empires - the Great Christmas Truce of 1914. Of course I couldn't help but imagine the azicrowley in this setting

Their first (and only, as they are sure for many years) meeting, the memory of which they will cherish for ages.

(Please please forgive me historians and all history fans. I diligently studied all the material, and then neglected it for the sake of artistic expression 😭)

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SSP: Which Lasts Longer than Kingdoms

Finally, I can share the last of my Scribbles and Drabbles pieces. It's very short (2.1k words), but it has several chapters and I dragged my feet on it a bit. Mostly because of the song. (If you read it, you will know what I mean.)

It is based on aprilertuile's inspiring artwork:

And, as the art suggests, it concerns a piece of music. A sea-shanty, in fact!

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Winter Songs - rated G, ~3000 words

Tenth in the series Absent Without Leave, in which a female presenting Beelzebub gets curious about Earth and Human things, has a spa day, makes a reluctant and nervous Crowley take her clubbing (Beelzebub’s Day Out), meets a fella, and well… several fics, more defections from Heaven and Hell, and a couple of weddings later, there’s a small person (Joy Is My Name), and an uneasy standoff with demons and angels that want a new Antichrist.

But they're not the only ones interested in the onetime Prince of Hell's daughter.

This story leads on from the events of Not So Very, Very Far Away, in which there is a brief missing-child crisis and we discover that a certain cottage in the South Downs has fairies at the bottom of the garden.

“So you wot – just struck a bargain with the bloody Summer Court, didn’t even put me in the loop? Thanks for the trust.”

“Dear, keep your voice down. People will think you’re a bit mad.”

“Nah, they’ll just think we’re Dungeon Masters arguin’ or whatever. Look, if we’ve got some bollocky bunch of Tinkerbells down the garden, least you could do is let me set the fear into ’em. You know how it put the wind up me, losin’ her that last visit – I’d’ve given ’em a piece of my mind –”

“You’re proving my point exactly, I fear. One does not prosper with he Fair Folk by a display of naked aggression."

Read On AO3

As always with new fic, tagging my past readers in the replies -- drop a note if you want on or off the list!

[maggiehoneybite]

Winter Songs - rated G, ~3000 words

Tenth in the series Absent Without Leave, in which a female presenting Beelzebub gets curious about Earth and Human things, has a spa day, makes a reluctant and nervous Crowley take her clubbing (Beelzebub’s Day Out), meets a fella, and well… several fics, more defections from Heaven and Hell, and a couple of weddings later, there’s a small person (Joy Is My Name), and an uneasy standoff with demons and angels that want a new Antichrist.

But they're not the only ones interested in the onetime Prince of Hell's daughter.

This story leads on from the events of Not So Very, Very Far Away, in which there is a brief missing-child crisis and we discover that a certain cottage in the South Downs has fairies at the bottom of the garden.

“So you wot – just struck a bargain with the bloody Summer Court, didn’t even put me in the loop? Thanks for the trust.”

“Dear, keep your voice down. People will think you’re a bit mad.”

“Nah, they’ll just think we’re Dungeon Masters arguin’ or whatever. Look, if we’ve got some bollocky bunch of Tinkerbells down the garden, least you could do is let me set the fear into ’em. You know how it put the wind up me, losin’ her that last visit – I’d’ve given ’em a piece of my mind –”

“You’re proving my point exactly, I fear. One does not prosper with he Fair Folk by a display of naked aggression."

Read On AO3

As always with new fic, tagging my past readers in the replies -- drop a note if you want on or off the list!

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SSP: Harp and Lute

My second Scribbles and Drabbles ficlet features an encounter between two of history's lost musicians, Maglor and Salgant. It was based on this lovely art prompt: https://www.tumblr.com/erdarieldraws/758184415550717952/and-where-they-wander-none-can-tell-a-little?source=share

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Finding Celebrían

For Tolkien Meta Week — an essay on autofiction, archives, healing, and why I moved across the country after finding out Elrond Peredhel had a wife. Being an essayist irl, believe me when I say I was thrilled to see @silmarillionwritersguild have the personal essay form as a format for Tolkien Meta Week! Here's something from the heart - warning for discussion of cPTSD and (non explicit) references to violence.

When I first found Celebrían in a footnote, I wrapped up warm and followed, certain she'd lead me to where she truly lived in the text.

By that point, it had been a good decade or so since I first read Tolkien – I had been aware that Elrond had a wife, and assumed she was dead or hung up in some other cold meat locker alongside a procession of wives spanning literary history.

It was only years later that I properly came across her, and blinked, realising she was a cursory line which led to a footnote in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, one which referred to her torment in passing, meant to explain why the sons of Elrond and to an extent Elrond himself, were the way they were. 

Fridging was one thing, but torment was another entirely, I thought — and so casually! Tea and torment in the Third Age, tra-la-lally traumatised into "losing all joy" in Middle-Earth and leaving the year after, taking ship to Valinor and leaving behind a grieving family. It was simple curiosity, really, until it turned into a cold, familiar grasp: the clear-cut knowledge of exactly what sort of torment it would have been, that drove away the wife of a noble lord living in what was very clearly described as being one of the last great sanctuaries in a ravaged realm. 

But to understand why The Footnote stopped me in my tracks, I need to tell you about The Fields. 

When I speak of The Fields (which are of course not really fields and neither are they called The Fields anywhere but here), I refer to one of the most beautiful spots in the country. The Fields combined the peaceful pastoral with quaint urban charm, rustic without being remote, safe without being detached. I lived in The Fields for several years, and made a little life for myself that grew into something bigger. 

I had been an activist in The Fields — moved from scrappy student to card-carrying revolutionary — and I did it because I loved where I lived very, very much, enough to think I could kiss it better. And I was good, I was! I belonged on the stage in that sense, I was invited to panel after panel, talk after talk, and I stood on little podiums that grew alongside me. I knew how to carry myself, present myself, leveraged my palatability and conventionality in return for rights and bare-minimum environmental reparations. 

Such wonders, of course, came with a cost I hadn’t foreseen — an incident, a couple really, that tossed a diagnosis of cPTSD into my lap and turned my lovely home into The Fields. And because I had been so good at presenting myself and clambering on podiums with shiny hair, the incidents became the talk of the town, and I in turn very quickly became a subject, the walking, talking cost of resistance. 

A feature of cPTSD, one that sets it apart from PTSD, is the overarching dullness with which the emotional flashbacks grasp you. Not like being plucked off the surface of the earth by a monstrous thing, but rather drowning quietly in sludge you never realised was beneath your feet in the first place. There was never a thing that terrified me about The Fields, it was only ever a quiet, creeping mass taking over everything, and in being so — easy to ignore and disguise. 

I love The Fields, I told myself, even after. I loved The Fields, even though life had turned into air and static, and I had turned into an unfeeling thing. I lived in the middle of that little city but felt as though I was in a small hut on no-man's land, or a joint security area, suspended between towers. I couldn't stand the wonderful hills and valleys, so I tried my hardest to cling onto the reasons I loved them, tried to medicate them back into my heart with the forcefulness of a pacemaker. I shoved things down throats and up noses, walked back onto all those stages, turned myself into an electric hearse chasing a long-dead dragon. I would walk around The Fields on some nights, very cold and very young, the bleached bones left behind by something very promising. 

Can you see why I stopped still at Appendix A, at Celebrían? I tried to follow her, and see where her story began, and what wonders it would end in, because if Celebrían's story ended in wonder then maybe, there might be a chance, perhaps….. 

It would be easy, I thought, I was a writer, a journalist, a researcher - I trained in asking questions and knowing things, even sticky, stunted, back-of-the-throat things that you'd rather not catch sight of in a mirror. The History of Middle Earth book sets were ordered, fresh copies of all the old texts, magnifying glasses held over Unfinished Tales. 

I’d been so certain I would find her. That Celebrían would ramble across page after page, legs dangling over the edge and an indolent expression fizzing on her face. She would be stubborn and glorious and righteous in her fervor to change the world. I would find her in the flesh, and then no longer would I stand in The Fields each night, hollow-eyed, self-haunting spectre holding myself thrall to a single series of events in what has been, objectively, a lovely, loving life.

But a full month went by, and all I found was footnote after endnote after cursory mention, almost all of them clothing her in torment, growing stiff and sharp against the tooth of the page: vicious, like a blade angled backwards. For Celebrían and I, the richest text in the world turned into a landscape of loss. 

What a wonderful, rich, textured world you have!

All the better to swallow you whole, my dear. 

I couldn't find her in the story. I spent weeks and weeks on her, and I couldn't find her in the story and by then I had already fancied myself and Celebrían to be counterparts, like if she laughed, I would laugh too, like if she ran, then I would run too, and if she was lost, then… well. I suppose it shows the power of an enduring text. I had a PhD, at that point I had just gotten my publishing deal through, I'd spoken on all those podiums and done all those real-world, adult things, and still I was not immune to the indulgent tether of a good old self-insert. And then it turned out we were not counterparts but rather more akin to co-morbidities, that The Footnote and its friends were all I would ever know of Celebrían. 

It was summer, I remember, but my hands were cold — autopsy-fingers, my partner called them. Archive-fingers, autopsy-fingers, scrabbling around to find nothing, no indication as to how Celebrían's story truly ended and why I was the person I was. The texts shifted uneasily under my hands, like the Professor himself was turning out his pockets and shrugging, reminding me that it was neither Celebrían's nor my story, not really. Pointed me back to The Footnote like it was a pacifier, and still I turned in circles like a dog chasing its tail, looking for other instances of her name. I found nothing. I began to fear that I had wasted my life.

The Footnote started to blur across weeks, and soon it turned itself into My Footnote. The one I had found, a year or so before the hunt, in a fantastic, recently published book that spoke about activism in The Fields, where I came face to face with myself. But there, I hadn't been standing on a podium or being interviewed or writing pressure pieces or anything I had really, truly done, but I was instead a single footnote — condensed into the things that had happened to me, as opposed to the things I had made happen. As the months went on, I looked for references to myself in new books, newspapers, magazines — and I would find myself, but in the same scrap of footnote, wearing the same costume of torment, tragic poster children of a violent world. 

I sat there looking at the thousands and thousands of pages in the legendarium, the stack of books on things I had worked upon, statutes I had pulled down and little laws I had changed. And then at the scraps of Celebrían and I, reduced to scribbles and crossing outs in the margins. It was like we never lived at all. It seems a rather childish reaction, perhaps, to not finding the story you want in a book you bought. Still, that afternoon, when I put down the last page of HoME I had access to, I crawled into bed and stayed there for a very long time, trying very hard to not touch even the bedclothes around me.

But I think that was always what drew me to her, that absence. I didn't find myself in Celebrían, but in the footnote that gestured to her presence. It wasn't that I understood her so much as I knew how to decrypt the desperate scratches left behind by someone who drowned on dry land. That was how she and I were truly alike: people who wanted to change the world, or a little part of it, and did, did something good — and had all of it forgotten, crammed into a footnote read with a tender, pitying fret. 

But that's not canonical, is it? Yes, her absence shaped the story of the Ring War in certain regards. But who said Celebrían, Celebrían the Person, not Celebrían the Footnote — had ever changed anything, let alone the world in which she lived?

Simple – I did.

My Celebrían was a complete nutcase. I wrote her as a daughter born to a borderline-squirrel of a wood elf, who herself hated small creatures with a passion. I had her take off her shoe and beat earwigs to death, had her talk the ear off a perpetually grieving mother, irritate a kinslayer into planting a pine forest, and threaten the High King with a shovel. She would shove cotton in her ears to block out her husband's snoring, and put four teaspoons of sugar in her tea. She bribed her sons to dispose of a snake, and demanded magical healing for a little scrape on her forehead. 

I cut her into familiar shapes: the shape of someone who spent months unable to bear the slightest touch, whose loved one slept on the floor beside the bed, clinging to a listless hand dangled off the side. The shape of a small house in a forest, and the shape of a wonderful ending, in which she truly did change the world in all the ways she could. I don't know, if I'm being honest, whether Celebrían changed me, or if I changed her. Whether change was an instant or a process, whether this version of almost-Celebrían mattered to anyone but myself. I knew one thing though — my Celebrían is a thousand footnotes long, and counting. 

Footnotes, like most things in the archive, are of course caging things: keeping unpalatable violence in the past, or at least elsewhere, keeping the here and now good and quiet. It's easier to outsource healing and rediscovery to other places, to archives and museums and books and Valinor. Was being a footnote a punishment? What’s worse, being pickled wrongly or never being pickled at all? Was this yet another installment of the cautionary tale stretching all the way through time and reality from Celebrían to me; footnotes about women who held themselves thrall to the memory of violence, who lived as well as they could, till they couldn’t? Would it have been better if she never existed at all?

I don't know. All I know for certain is this: at some point between finding Celebrían and writing her, I moved out of The Fields and across the country.

It had been a long time coming. But for years, I had thought I would weather living in The Fields because even after the Torment, the Footnote, the Diagnosis, I never felt a disconnect from the place, because I was still extroverted and irritating and fizzing with the desire to stay in the Fields and love it, as I had always done. And then suddenly, I wanted to run.

It wasn't as if Celebrían burned The Fields down, leaving me there to watch flames eating its flat, starless sky. But what she did was this: carefully take off my rose-tinted glasses, and say run —- this earth has swallowed you whole. 

I had assumed it was my fault, my attachment to The Fields, that I was looking at things wrong, that I was maintaining unhealthy attachments to sites of trauma, prioritising the wrong perspectives, the body keeps an atlas and all that. But Celebrían did not call me crazy. Celebrían was not the kind of person who would ever call you crazy. She was the kind of person who would lay in a wide-open field beside you and ask you what you were looking at. 

And when you say "oh, just up at the big sky", she wouldn't probe. She would know exactly what you mean when you didn't say "-- because there is nothing ahead of me", and she wouldn't say a word about how the ground around you was soft with decay, reeking like a corpse, that you were caught in the straggling grass of its hair. 

She would instead shrug, wink, and point you towards Gollum, because of course she would. She would tell you that Tolkien, ever the Catholic, had drawn out a perfect depiction of what might have happened if Lazarus was left in that cave. And then she would say, run, for god's sake, girl, run, and you would. I did!

How stubbornly we all cling to the idea of staying fixed until being fixed, to the idea of a ready-made Valinor to sail to if we do well enough at life, stay still enough in the margins! How faithfully we believe that if you spend enough time being a very, very good cracked vessel, maybe one day you might feel the quiet triumph of bearing water again. Celebrían, not the Celebrían of The Footnote but my Cel, the manic pixie freakshow of Imladris, said shut the fuck up and run. That it was no use hungering for the impossible and thumbing listlessly though footnotes, and to instead run, and run, and start digging a garden at the ground you come to a stop at because it is only in new soil that something gentle could unfold unbidden. That as time passes, you will belong less and less to the ground you left behind and more and more to the ground you walk upon, to the new trees and new hills around you, to those who love you still.

Run! she said. How alive you looked, hunting for me. How badly you craved my story. See? There are still stories you crave. You are still human enough to crave. Run! 

I think many of us who love this brief, inexorable footnote of a Celebrían, whether we read her or write her, are bound by a similar truth: that in her we caught sight of something within ourselves. All around the world, these tiny, unflinching mirrors in Appendix A and the rest, tie together and create a hundred different Celebríans, all part of the same thread, each version carrying its own burden, though rarely do we ever acknowledge it in each other. It's a quiet nod, an unspoken connection, a reminder that we are all more alike and less alone than a cursory footnote might imply.

To find Celebrían, I had to write her. And in turn, she wrote me in her image. I look at her now, as she is in my head, and there Celebrían is neither alive nor dead. No, what is most clear in my mind is a girl in a dusty wing mirror, a life packed into boxes, sunglasses sliding down her nose. One hand sandwiched in an ordnance map, prying the pages open, hurtling at a perfectly legal speed down an M-road, The Fields growing smaller, and smaller, and smaller in the rearview mirror. Not gone, not truly, but invisible to the naked eye, unless you know exactly where to look. A grain of sand in a bucket of water, a single, sad-looking fish half-buried on a tropical beach. A finger to the past, a wave from a window, a footnote in an appendix. 

[maggiehoneybite]

There's just so much I don't know about Tolkien's work

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So excited to announce my Christmas Podfic Playlist Project! I felt like we could all use a little cheer this year, so I will be releasing a short, Christmas-themed podfic each week starting on December 1 and then a bonus present on Christmas Day! So grateful to @snae-b @tawnyontumblr @feraltuxedo @ajconstantine and @naromoreau who have agreed to let me record their fics. To receive updates when I release them, please follow me on A03: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Outrageous_Ring

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I was rambling on the issue of museums and human remains and how certain populations are more likely to have their bodies put on display to be gawked at and then went "well I guess the Pompeii casts were of Europeans. there are bones in there right?" and Googled it to make sure, at which point I confirmed that yes there are bones in there, but more interestingly DNA testing revealed that a cast of an adult holding a child everyone assumed was a mother and child were, in fact, a man and a kid entirely unrelated to him. Honestly that's more moving to me. Maybe they were connected in a way other than blood, but maybe a stranger saw a child when the world was ending and thought the one thing he could do was hold them.

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Curation, or, Joy Is Resistance

A while back I made this post, in which I urged lovers of fanfiction and fan art to curate the work they have created and/or loved, and currently trust to online platforms, in case of a Republican election victory in the US. That has now come to pass, opening the door to Project 2025's threats of repressing not just "pornography" as usually defined, but any celebration of things queer or explicit, or indeed any expression that breaks the bounds of 1950s Hays code twin-bed movies.

We're all going to have to brace ourselves without knowing exactly what's coming, or how fast. It may seem a minor thing when you hear language about essentially outlawing trans identity, rolling back marriage rights, or defining any representation of LGBTQ people as "pornographic," including vital sex-education materials and everyday references to queer people's mere existence; about upending the healthcare and education systems and orchestrating mass deportations.

But if you find joy in fanworks, queer or otherwise, explicit or otherwise, I recommend you take some time to preserve your access to the works you have made or love best. AO3 - whose servers are in the US - has already posted on the subject, and we know that they and other groups committed to freedom of expression have been planning for this. But as I write, the House has passed a measure that would allow the administration to unilaterally label a nonprofit group "terrorist supporting" and cancel its tax-exempt status without due process. That could easily expand to any shock label used as an excuse for suppression and censorship. And resistance begins at home.

Get thee, I urge you, a good capacity flash drive or three, with "dual connectors" that will allow you to access the contents on a PC as well as phone or tablet. Download the fic you've loved, the fic you've been meaning to read, the fic you've posted yourself; then copy the files to those flash drives. I've made, and continue to update and back up, a folder:

For my own completed fic as it appears online

For each of my favorite authors

For a general miscellany of fic I've read and loved and bookmarked

For the 1000 (it sometimes seems) fics I'm going to read some day.

Art freely circulated on social media? Make a folder. You can convert a .webp file (which often won't open to full size onscreen) to .jpg with this free online utility. (Just be a good scout; don't repost art you've saved, and respect the rights of artists with a Patreon or similar to control exclusive content.)

One response to my original post said "They will come for everything you love." If, by some happy miracle, "they" don't, you will still have a personal archive of self-selected fanwork for times when the Net is down, or the power is out, and judging by some of the economic lunacy I see coming down the pike, that alone is worth some trouble. Even in the best times, authors take down fic you've enjoyed and want to revisit: I reblogged a post searching for a fic thus lost only this week. It costs only time spent at a keyboard, repeatedly clicking "download" and "save as" when it feels like there's nothing else you can do to make things better. Honestly? When the nerves are rattling, it's a form of meditation.

Right now, preserving fanwork may not be the first thing on your mind. But we will need all the joy we can get; when things get bad, comfort is not just a luxury, it's a lifesaver. Joy is resistance, joy is survival. Bread and roses; the work, but also dancing. Let's not forget there was a time when fanworks existed only in physical form and were shared in secret with trusted friends -- a history of which I myself have only the smallest inkling, and one which we should honor now. If a time comes when we have to dance in secret, let us still dance.

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