#a story about gremble

[abeautifulblog]

I am interested in hearing about the bad acid trip if you feel like talking about it?

Okay, so the truth is, I have no idea what I was tripping on—I would not have chosen to take acid, that is not a drug I have any desire to fuck with. It was supposed to be just pot, but everyone I've told this story to has gone, “That... doesn't... sound like... pot. o_O” So who knows.

Anyway, here's Gremble's Bad Drug Trip!

I had been on a trip to visit my parents, and while I was in town, I got to reconnect with my friend P, whom I hadn't seen in a while, when he and his housemates were hosting a party. It was chill, low-key, about a dozen people. P and his housemates had good taste in friends, everyone was cool and very queer, and even though the only person I knew there was P, I was having a good time.

(By the way, another character who will become relevant in this story is Shelley—my best friend, my roommate, my lawyer, my queerplatonic life partner—but she hadn't come on this trip so it was just me.)

Then a joint was getting passed around and I was like, Sure why not, I'll give it a spin.

See, I had tried pot twice before, and both experiences had been Bad, but they had been bad in different ways, so I still didn't have a baseline for what pot was 'like.' I was curious, and I do a lot of things out of curiosity.

And the first hit was very nice! Like the tipsy euphoria of being at the perfect stage of drunk, without the inner ear imbalance. And I thought, oh this is actually quite pleasant; this is what people are on about with weed.

And then I took a second hit.

P had offered me the water bong in the kitchen, and I took a deep hit off that and promptly started hacking my goddamn lungs out. Can't-stop, can't-catch-your-breath, tears-streaming-down-your-face coughing, like every stereotype about newbies trying weed. I staggered off to the bathroom so that I could at least hack my lungs up in privacy, until I finally got control of myself again.

I was braced against the sink, and in the moment when I lifted my head and locked eyes with myself in the mirror, I realized that my consciousness was rapidly leaving my body. I could feel it, sliding downward, about to slide right out through the soles of my feet, and the thought came to me, very clearly:

You have fifteen seconds to put yourself somewhere safe, because *you* are about to not be here anymore.

I managed to get myself to P's bedroom—which was sheer dumb luck, since I'd never been in that house before.

And then I fell through the void for ten hours.

For large swathes of it, I was... conscious but not conscious of myself. The word for it is depersonalization, but it is a hell of a thing to try to describe, because human language wasn't built with the words for that experience. Imagine having your senses, observing the things around you, but there is no you that is doing the observing.

Sometimes I was present and conscious, and it felt exactly like a picture I'd once seen in a grade school textbook, a photograph of the sun taken from Pluto:

That dot of light in the infinite distance was my life, the life I'd known before, and as I drifted weightless through the void of space somewhere beyond Pluto, I grieved for everything that I knew I was never going to see again. Everything I'd known and loved was lost to me, unimaginably distant, no returning.

I'm going to miss Shelley, I thought, at the times when I was lucid.

And then, like the Silent Hill sirens starting up their warning, I'd feel it as my consciousness started to slip away again. I kept drifting through space, but gremble wasn't there for it anymore.

Occasionally I would resurface to find myself in P's room—but that wasn't terribly reassuring either. I didn't know where I was, and P is an artist (same photographer-friend who took these pics, actually), so his room had dark walls covered in canvasses of his paintings—large, bold, surreal and abstract, and altogether not the thing to be looking at when you're tripping balls. To be honest, that room felt a hell of a lot more threatening than falling through space did.

P came in at one point to check on me—he got me sitting upright and got my boots off. I don't remember anything he said there, but I remember myself, very slowly, putting the words together to tell him, quote, “Your room is a very uncongenial place to get high in.”

And then he left, and I slipped away into the void again, and the next time I resurfaced I was back in a menacing room I didn't recognize.

And that was it, all night long. Sometimes drifting through a void of unimaginable isolation, with nothing but the knowledge of what I'd lost, sometimes waking up in a strange, dark room with with incomprehensible paintings looming over me on all sides.

(At one point when I was awake, “Take Me to Church” was echoing down the hallway from the living room, but slow and distorted. This song actually conveys the experience very well, of the familiar becoming strange and unsettling.)

After a while I did get used to the room. I still didn't know where this place was, but after returning to it enough times I came to recognize it, like, ah, it's this place again. And since nothing bad had happened to me the previous times I'd been there, eventually I reached a point where I could cautiously venture to relax a little in it.

~~

I woke up the next morning to find myself back in my right mind, with P sacked out on the bed next to me. And while alcohol has a tendency to blur one's memories of being drunk, I could recall everything from the night before with unnerving clarity. The cognitive dissonance of being back in the real world—of never having left it, really—while simultaneously feeling what I had felt the night before, when I had known, with absolute certainty, that this life was lost to me.

I talked to P about it; apparently no one else had a weird night, just me.

But for the next twenty-four hours I was... not quite non-verbal, but close. This is a Known Bug when it comes to me and pot, that it makes talking very difficult, and since talking is pretty much my hobby, this is another reason why Pot Is Not The Drug For Me.

I went back to my parents' house and did my best to pretend like I was normal, but the experience had been extremely unsettling, so I called Shelley on discord and made her talk to me for a few hours. Except I still couldn't talk, so she was on voicechat, while I typed all my responses. She indulged me, because she is the bestest of friends.

Anyway. If another opportunity to try pot presents itself, I'll prolly do it, lol.

(Shelley: “Oh for fucks' sake, even my brother only stuck his finger in an electrical socket twice.”)

But I still don't have a baseline! I have tried pot three times, and each time was worse than the last, but the experience has been wildly different each time. And it's been very educational, and equipped me with the firsthand knowledge of how to write a bad trip, without requiring me to fuck around with drugs that are actually dangerous.

(Just... very unpleasant sometimes.)

So yeah, I'll probably stick my finger in that electrical socket again someday.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[silverbirching]

11. Link your three favorite fics right now. (Ahem.)

Way to go Hilary why don't you just do donuts on my front lawn while you're at it.

Friends, Romans, I don't actually read much fic. Not for any reason, it's just that I'm am ambush predator when it comes to reading. Instead of going out and hunting for it, I'm much happier if juicy, wiggling prey wanders right into my open mouth so I can just snap my jaws shut. This is a baroque and uncomfortably sex-adjacent way of saying I have friends whose opinion on The Written Word I trust, and when they tell me to Read a Thing, I generally Read a Thing. Please feel free to recommend stuff to me!

But the fanfics I have most enjoyed, that mean the most to me personally are as follows, in no particular order:

A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood , by peripatetic super genius and all-around ball of fluffy cuddles Gremble, aka @abeautifulblog, this is a brain-meltingly good Dream Daddy fic that will grind you into powder and snort you off the slightly past-it abs of a very, very sad man. Harrowing, heart-breaking, at times deeply hilarious. Also he's one of my best friends and if you aren't nice to him I will blow this whole fuckin' building up.

Telling y'all that this fic is good feels a bit like busting down the door of the Great British Bake-Off and telling them about this fantastic new thing called Chocolate that all the kids are going crazy for, but the inestimable @qqueenofhades wrote the magnificent Deo Volente (Lux Aeterna), which is one of my favorite books, full stop, no asterisks or qualifiers required. It's also a handy crash-course in her many, many, many, MANY strengths as a writer (seriously, if her writing was a person it would be a horrifying sea-urchin monster made of big beefy arms). It's a millenium-spanning Old Guard story, it's a masterpiece, and you should read it right now.

(she's also one of my besties but I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up drinking her brain with a crazy straw to gain her word powers so)

[qqueenofhades]

so is the sandman series just a bunch of little short stories? i know it’s a comic book, i didn’t read it lol, but it’s just supposed to be like “hey here are the characters here’s a general premise let’s have fun with it” ???

Aha, I am a bad person to ask, because I have never read the comics either, was wheedled into watching it by my friend who IS a long-time fan of the comics, saw gifsets of Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer and promptly simped for her like the useless lesbian I am, saw a lot of reviews of straight people whining about all the Gay, and went "hmm guess I have to watch this then." I am obviously a fan of the Neil Gaiman Cinematic Universe and have enjoyed many shows based on his works before (Good Omens, Lucifer, etc), and at various times found myself going, "so is The Sandman just a mashup of all of Neil Gaiman's favorite tropes/literary devices/character archetypes? Because I think it is."

Anyway, I also found myself confused by the not-totally-linear nature of the plot, the way various characters/plots seemingly appeared and disappeared, and the fact that they were evidently quite faithful in adapting the episodic, self-contained nature of the graphic novel (at least according to my friend, said Sandman expert). So that means that there are several stories-within-a-story that overlap and generally reference each other, but don't necessarily proceed in strictly logical or chronological order; for example the Rose Walker plot, which you would think would get started earlier, doesn't appear until episode 7 of a 10-episode series, and episode 11 is also largely standalone.

So yes, it is kind of mini-stories taken from the various events in the first volume of comics, and people more familiar with the source material than me have said it is pretty faithful in doing so. I am just here for beautiful Black women, cool magic, and of course the good ship Hob and Dream, because to literally nobody's surprise, ever, I love me some pining disaster idiot queer immortals who don't know they are in love even as everyone else they know ships them. Oops.

Likewise to the surprise of none and the regret of all, I held out for all of 12 whole hours before starting a new fic, and @bonfireofthesamities (silverbirch on AO3), @abeautifulblog (gremble on AO3), and I are now going whole hog on creating the Dreamhob Cinematic Universe, where we are all writing different fics that complement each other and use the same backstory and so forth. This is indeed the fic that I previously dubbed DVLA But Dumber, as it likewise features idiot queer immortals pining after each other through a variety of premodern historical events while attempting vainly to figure out their feelings. I will probably finish the first chapter tomorrow, and it will be a test to see if I can wait long enough to write a second chapter, or if I just go GIVE ME THAT VALIDATION!! and slap it up there. So yes. Stay tuned.

[darkisrising]

AO3 wrapped!

Respond to this with what you would call the top 5 fanfics you’ve read in 2022. Any genre! Any ship! (Bonus points: if you’re a creator, make this a 5+1 and include your favorite fic you wrote in 2022!)

Then leave this in your friends’ asks too. Let’s give creators one more spotlight before the year ends, and share some of what we’ve enjoyed along the way!

Sure thing anon! Okay, so, with the caveat that these are fic I read and bookmarked this year, they haven't actually been written this year... also, I have a ton of fic I've read and loved--way more than 5--so you can always go into my bookmarks on ao3 and read what I've got in there, it would thrill me to know other people are reading the same fic I adored, lol... here are 5 fics I read: 1. Getting There by @mswhich (teen wolf, chris/derek)-Oh boy, this fic made my chest hurt in the best possible way. A meditation on grief after Allison dies where Chris is on a steep downward spiral and Derek takes care of him. It's so much more than that, but I don't want to ruin it. There's something so easy about the two of them in this fic, and it's a ship I'd never really considered before but this fic makes it work so beautifully that I'm sold. 2. The Standing Dead by standinginanicedress (teen wolf, sterek famous au)- techinically a duology, I know I'm late to the party on this writer, but I read all 244k of this series in one huge gulp. I couldn't put it down. I love angst and I love it unrelenting for 3/4th of the fic and that's what this is. The second one especially has some beautiful passages about the addiction recovery process that still haunt me to this day. I appreciate especially it wasn't afraid to show that recovery isn't a straight line, and in telling the story, showing their flaws and all, the writer made these characters *so* vivid and real. 3. a traditional courtship by helenish (x-man, charles/eric) Okay, so I REALLY don't go here. X-men isn't one of my fandoms but I was recced this fic because while abo isn't always my jam, I love it when writers play with societal elements in an abo universe and man oh man does THIS one do that. Eric is an alpha "passing" as omega, and it's just a really beautiful, 12k metaphor on identity and how people want to be perceieved by strangers and the ones they love. 4. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood by gremble aka @abeautifulblog (Dream Daddy, dadsona/Robert Small) Okay so I really really REALLY don't go here. I don't play video games of any kind at all, I never have, but I fell into this beheamoth 112k fic and it absolutely lit my brain on fire. The writer offers a primer if you, like me, don't know a thing about this game that is super helpful. This fic has a fully fleshed out, realized world full of interesting, perfectly imperfect characters that were so much fun to follow. 5.the guard place by thirtysixhudson (gen, Good Place/ Old Guard crossover) It's the 528 words you never knew you needed until it's right in front of you. I fucking LOVE The Good Place and this mini fic made me laugh so hard. Jason Mendoza at his finest. +1 should i stay or should i go? by darkisrising (me!) (Stranger Things au, gen) This might be the first story I've ever written that made me laugh while I was writing it. These characters are all such clowns and such a joy to play with. Even though the fic didn't get a lot of traction I stand by it, dammit, lol. The premise: instead of chasing the otherworldly, the Stranger Things kids start a garage band. Steve is roped into being their ride to gigs.

[samstree]

🌿Geraskier spring fic recs🌿

(Stories that made me cry or laugh, or both. An imcomplete list.)

Lost in flirtation by Beginte

[Teen, 10k]

Ten thousands words of Geralt trying to flirt - and failing. Everything by this author is sweet and witty and funny, I cannot recommand enough.

Fever Song by crushcandles

[Explicit, 54k]

Fuck or die, but make it slow-burn. Painful, delicious, and full of mystery and yearning.

A Song of Selfish Hearts by gremble

[Explicit, 71k]

Geralt loses a chunk of his memories and is convinced that Jaskier is his lover.

Value by didoandis

[Explicit, 43k]

A story where Jaskier goes through hell but remains kind and gentle and slightly bastardy as he is. I hold it very close to heart.

place your hand in mine (how long can this last) by Curlscat

[Mature, 15k]

Fifteen thousand words of clingy!Geralt and his emotions (which he insists are not there).

La belle au bois dormant by Deputychairman

[Explicit, 13k]

Sleeping beauty reimagined, with many surprises.

kiss me thru the phone by provocation

[Explicit, 1.9k]

A hilarious misunderstanding at 2 am.

You, Forever by inanoldhouseinparis

[General, 16k]

Geralt and Jaskier play doting fiances. Certain feelings ensue.

Press Until It Hurts (But Not Until It Bleeds) by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels

[Mature, 5k]

Jaskier thinks they are just having casual sex. Geralt thinks they are in a relationship.

Bearing the will of the flower by Solshine

[Not Rated, 11k]

A classic Hanahaki. Geralt is very slow to understand his emotions, Jaskier suffers along the way.

Dandelion Lies by Hum My Name

[General, 14k]

Jaskier tries to warn Geralt about Rience, dresses in disguise and introduces himself as Dandelion. Gut-wrenching and beautiful.

The Reluctant Hero by Proctor

[Explicit, 13k]

Part of a series of hilarious encouters, while Geralt and Jaskier navigatte a budding relationship.

Witcher of Surprise by ghostinthelibrary

[Explicit, 82k]

Jaskier claims Geralt with the Law of Surprise. They become (rather reluctant) husbands.

navigation (and lack thereof) by PenAndInkPrincess

[Teen, 7.7k]

Jaskier keeps getting lost in Kaer Morhen and finding himself in other witchers’ beds. Everything by this author is hilariously soft, so check out her other stuff please.

Yet Broken Still You Breathe by whisperedstory

[Explicit, 20k]

A series where Jaskier finds his family in Kaer Morhen, and Geralt is utterly bestowed.

Make me Happy by multiplelizards

[Teen, 9k]

A Frankenstein AU. Painfully soft and full of love.

A Portrait of the Witcher as a Man in Love by Elizabeth

[Mature, 14k]

A Pygmalion and Galatea AU. There’s so much yearning I could barely breathe while reading.

[inexplicifics]

so 'with a conquering air' and 'i shall not live in vain' both made me realize how much i'm Into the whole "vulnerable person is mind-numbingly terrified but it turns out the people they're with are actually good people" thing. i was reading gremble's latest awau remix the other day i think i've figured out the itches these stories scratch so well. we get:

- delicious whump with the early stage, lovingly described terror, while *also* knowing that they are, in fact, safe and just don't know it yet (like, i cannot stress enough how good this particular dynamic is for the whump center of my brain)

- the very compelling fantasy of someone with total power over said person having absolutely no interest in abusing that power, ever.

- mutual. pining.

- the romance and hotness of a well-negotiated power imbalance

like any one of these on their own is excellent, but altogether it's unstoppable. obviously these aren't the only things i love about your writing, especially the awau with so much worldbuilding and developed characters, but you definitely unlocked something here and i love it so much. and i would happily read a million remixes lol

anyway thanks!

I am delighted that my common tropes give you so much joy!

[coffee-mage-sans-caffeine]

TW: Paedophilia This is the song Jaskier writes about the Asshole Baron in chapter 18/19 of In The Company of a Glacier as part of a propaganda campaign to depose a corrupt asshole.  I haven’t finished all the verses, but the conceit is that he started with normal age brides and gets younger with each consecutive one (since the story has the baron married to a woman who seems very young to both Jaskier and Geralt, too young to be married to this man).  This verse is bride number five.  While cheerful and catchy the song is meant to condemn an asshole who’s taking brides too young and turn the peasants against him for stealing their daughters and letting them die, not to glorify paedophilia. Jaskier is using earworm powers to remind the peasantry that this man is a monster.  Full cowriting credits go to my amazing beta reader, Gremble!

[roughentumble]

What are your favorite geraskier fics? I got into a Ferris bueller fan fic rabbithole but it's unfortunately short, and need something else to read

oooo, ok. to be totally honest, i don't bookmark good fics as often as i should, so there are probably people with longer rec lists out there (i believe valdomarx here on tumblr posts some semi-frequently), but i'll give it my best shot.

you can also check my ao3 bookmarks(same username as here), i think most of them are public except the rly Spicy ones? so you'll be able to see everything witcher i've put a pin in.

(also these'll all be on ao3, as that's the site i use)

Dear by Potrix - im like, irrevocably head over heels for this one. i adore outsider POV, and it's so sweet, it just kills me. it's basically a bunch of different strangers bumping into geralt and jaskier, and their different take-aways of the relationship.

Make me Happy by multiplelizards - a frankenstein AU, really good and sweet, i periodically reread it just to cheer myself up

For The Asking by gremble - if you like the Accidental Warlord fic series, you're basically guaranteed to like this fic, which was inspired by awahp, but from geralt's perspective instead of jaskier's.

the aftermath will ring with songs you've sung by emamel - another fic you'll like if you like awahp. fun little fic, and i rather like the ending

Ivy on the Hill by chaya - first fic for the witcher i ever bookmarked. it's been long enough i don't recall the details(sorry, bad memory), but it's multi-chapter and sweet and deals with Interpersonal Drama, if that's your bag

so we can pretend, sweetly by theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes - inhuman!jaskier discovering his less than human ancestry

If I Must Starve(Let it be in Your Arms) by igneum807 - jaskier platonically cuddling with touch-starved wolf school witchers

Roach by octinary - very sweet little fic about geralt's horse and the wild hunt(and now i'm thinking about it, the only rec here that isnt geraskier. sorry about me haha)

the fire & powder series by violaceum_vitellina_viridis - jaskier/witchers. idk how to summarize it. it leans into the "feral bard" trope, which im usually not SUPER into, but i recall this one being rather sweet(though fair warning, im not up to date on the recent stuff)

you're only brave in the moonlight (stay til sunrise) by summerfrost - modern AU, roommates to lovers. genuinely fantastic modern AU. i cant describe why i love it, beyond just-- i love it so much, very sweet, genuinely funny dialogue in places.

Where There's a Witcher by ghostinthelibrary - another modern au, but in this one geralt is still a witcher. jaskier is an unemployed journalist and musician, who accidentally stumbles into danger in the form of a wyvern that geralt is actively hunting through city streets. i really loved this one, and it's also a series(tho heads up that im also not up to date on the recent entries to this series either)

most anything by kathkin, but im especially fond of New Monster Stories - another modern AU where geralt is still a witcher. you know that trope where People Dont See The Unusual, Because They Don't Want To See It? so like, a monster can walk right past them and it doesnt register in their brain? that's the rules this fic operates under, and it's glorious and funny and sweet and i adore it.

there's also, like, the fics ive written on ao3(again, same username as here). not to, you know, toot my own horn or anything, but! they exist, if you'd like to give em a look.

if you'd like smut fics i can also provide, just hmu. hope some of these r to yr taste 💕

[armory-rasa]

Leatherworking with gremble: the Anders brigandine

Alright, Anders fans -- let's talk brigandine.

PART I: SEWING

So most of the other Anders cosplays I've seen have done a quilted effect for his coat, which can also come out looking quite nice, but when I look at his outfit, I see brigandine. Brigandine is an armoring technique in the subset called "coat of plates" because it consists of small plates -- metal or heavy leather -- riveted to a garment of leather or heavy fabric. Since that's more in line with my skillset anyway, and considering that I've been hoarding scrap leather like some scrap-leather-hoarding dragon for just such an occasion, brigandine it was.

If Anders' coat is indeed meant to be brigandine, then it wasn't rendered right because it doesn't have enough rivets -- each rectangular plate needs 4 rivets (one in each corner) to attach it to the coat. 

It distresses me when I can't be screen-accurate, and distresses me even more when I can't be accurate because their costume doesn't actually make sense, but such is life.

**

So the first step is to make the coat that will form the backing onto which you rivet your plates. It's pretty basic; I took the pattern from a coat I'd done for an unfinished Thrall cosplay, which I believe had itself been adapted from an inquisitor coat. Original:

Pattern laid out:

Sorry I can't give you something printable, but it's just too big for that. =/ (Not to mention that you'll be adjusting it to fit you anyway.) You shouldn't have too much trouble drafting your own though, and it is a very forgiving pattern.

The piece in the foreground is the front, and the further-away piece is the back. The front looks considerably bigger, but only because I fold the center edges over like three times. Remember that the edges are not actually supposed to meet in the front -- he's got that line of O-rings over his chest, so you're going to be leaving like 3"~4" of space down the center. I think I might also have wound up dropping the neckline a bit, I'm not sure.

It's also worth noting that the hem on this pattern makes a pretty dramatic dip in the front -- rather than being the same length all around, it's shorter in the back and comes to a point in the front. This is not accurate to what Anders wears in-game, his coat is indeed all squared off, but guess what looks better? And guess what gremble cares about more?

Anyway, cut out your fabric:

I used a black microsuede, because I bought a metric fuckton of microsuede when Hancock was going out of business and it was cheaper than dirt, and now I have microsuede for days (weeks. years) and I use it for anything I can. However, you can use any material that is (A) sturdy and (B) fray-resistant. You're going to be putting rivets through it later, so tight, sturdy weaves are your friend.

And even if you can put the back pieces on a fold, cut 'em apart anyway, because we want to put a vent in the back:

Sew the seam down the center back, stopping about 12~14" from the bottom, and crossing over that point a couple times with like your buttonhole function to make the endpoint strong. Seriously, that point is going to have a lot of stress put on it later, you want it to hold.

Fold your seams over:

Stitch your seams down:

And yeah, there's where you can tell that I'm not actually all that good at sewing. Parallel, what is parallel?

Anyway, keep going and attach the front pieces to the back pieces along the sides. I can't remember if I did the same seam as above, or if I did flat felled seams for these. It doesn't really matter, either way:

But considering that I then felt the need to document how to make flat felled seams on the shoulders:

So now you get to try on the coat and make sure that it's not completely off base:

Is good to me.

Next I edged the neckline and the armholes with bias tape. Goddamn do I hate bias tape.

But it makes it pretty tidy:

Alright, now it's time to do the center-front edges. We are making them VERY THICK AND VERY STIFF. I have seen too many Anders costumes where the weight of the O-rings drags down the edges of the coat, it is not a good look, but it's pretty easy to avoid if you plan ahead. So when I was making my coat I (1) folded the edge over twice (2) ironed some interfacing into it and (3) sandwiched a strip of felt into it. And I'm still not sure it was enough -- if I had it to do over again, I'd probably work a strip of 5-6 oz veg-tan in there instead. Truly, I don't think it's possible to make this part TOO stiff, while on the flip side, it's not going to look sexy if your coat is sagging under the weight of the O-rings.

So here is my felt and interfacing, both of which were 1" wide:

Iron on the interfacing:

Fold the felt into the edge:

Pin it, check how much of a gap it leaves down your front:

(This coat, for the record, is not the slightest bit adjustable. You make it, and then you don't gain or lose weight, ever.)

If the sizing is all good, then sew it down.

Time for your O-rings -- three of them are attached to the coat, the fourth one is on the belt, but needs to be spaced proportionally to the other three. Here is the spacing that worked for me (a 5'10" dude):

Test, 1, 2, 3...

You can see how the O-rings are too heavy for the straps holding them up, with more of their weight on the bottom instead of being distributed evenly -- that is okay. For this test I just snipped off some lengths of the bias tape I'd used on the neck & arms, so it's very thin fabric, but for the final version I use Legit Actualfax Leather (tm) and it is sturdy enough to hold the rings correctly.

Okay, time to put the gold edging down the center.

Full disclosure: I HATE bias tape. Like, everyone who knows me has at some point accidentally let themselves get cornered into having to listen to me rant about bias tape, how I hate it, let me count the ways. I get why it's used in cosplay so much -- so many costumes for the small-screen, be it anime or panels in a comic book, where you don't have much space for detail, add visual interest to a costume by putting contrast edging on it -- which, irl, is achieved with bias tape. But look the fuck around you, how many people have bias tape on their clothes?? Fuckin none, is the answer. So when I see bias tape, it feels strikingly cartoonish. It looks like cosplay; it doesn't look like something that anyone would ever actually wear out and about.

...and then there's Anders with his fucking gold bias tape down the center of his fucking coat, and all over the edges of his cute lil bolero jacket.

Sir, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Anyway, I wound up doing gold piping on the jacket--

--because it looks so much less shit than bias tape, but there really was no choice but to do a very wide band of gold fabric for the edging of the coat. This is, strictly speaking, not bias tape since I didn't do it on the bias -- it was wide enough that I thought bias tape might pull weird, and straight enough that I could get away with doing it on the grain, so I did. Oh yeah, and I put interfacing on it to keep it smooth, so I guess the center edges actually have THREE layers of interfacing to keep them sturdy:

Ignore the plates -- I will explain how to do the plates later, but I am encouraging you to do as I say not as I do and put the gold edging on it now, not after you've already riveted the plates, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT PUT THIS STEP OFF UNTIL YOU'VE ALREADY PUT THE PLATES ON IT.

If you can incorporate the gold-edging step into the hemming-the-edges step you can probably make something tidier than what I came up with. I did a zigzag stitch along the edge to keep it from fraying and then tucked it under and stitched it down by hand, but it was not fast, and the underside is not pretty, so I am not exactly holding this up as the definitive way to do it.

And when it was done, I hated it. It looked like cheap shit, just like all things made of bias tape. So gross, why oh why did I try to make it look like the screencaps instead of doing something more realistic, o god I hate bias tape so much.

Luckily, it turns out that when you pile on the rest of the costume, the bias tape on the coat looks less awful. ‘ “It looks less awful now,” I said grudgingly’ is pretty much the story of this cosplay.

PART II: LEATHER

So now that you've got the garment that's going to be your backing, you need to figure out how the leather plates are supposed to fit. I sized mine based on the screencaps, assuming Anders was my height (5'10"), so the top 7 rows came out to 3.75" L x ~2.5" W and the bottom two rows are 4.5" L x ~2.5" W. (I can't tell what width they were supposed to be, but they come out to about two and five-eighths inches.) Since some of the pieces have to get trimmed to fit around curves, I started by making a bunch rectangles out of graph paper and pinning them where the plates are going to end up:

TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS STEP. You will need it later when you've got your plates all done and you're trying to remember how to arrange them.

I did the front half from beginning to end, and then went back and did the back half later, but it would probably be easier to do it all in one go. I just didn't have proof that it would work as intended, so I was holding off on doing the whole thing.

This is my box of scrap leather that I'd been saving for a rainy day, and since it was literally flooding in Sacramento during this project, I decided to take that for a sign. The coat uses 90 plates of leather, all told, and I managed to get 79 of them out of this box, yay.

This is veg-tan leather in the 8~10 oz range, and you can't really tell once it's all put together, but I was using the werrrrst shit for this project, we're talking the dregs and weird ends that got rejected for everything else. Lumpy leather will mess up your tooling and won't shape well, but guess what, we're not tooling or shaping here! :D

(I think it turned into a false economy, because it was pretty time-consuming to find & fit the scrap leather to the pattern pieces, whereas it's insanely quick to cut strips of rectangles out of a full hide, but hey.)

Tracing the pattern onto the plates. Don't do this, make your pattern out of cardstock, graph paper is too bendy. If you're using a pen/sharpie, trace it onto the BACK of the leather, because we're not beveling the edges down and you don't want pen lines along the edges of your plates.

Edge rounding tool, you can get 'em at Tandy and they will save you so much time and heartbreak:

Time to DYE. I like Angelus alcohol-based dyes, they are versatile and inexpensive and waterproof. Water based dyes will run if they get wet; oil based dyes will bleed and ooze oil onto everything they touch, forever. Alcohol based dyes are great, but Fiebings (the Tandy alcohol-based brand) is prohibited under California's chemical laws so I buy Angelus instead. (And they send me weird swag, it's great.) Dilute it like 1:3 or 1:5 with acetone for dip dyeing:

(Okay so the color I used for this project can't really be replicated, because I went nuts one day and bought a 3 oz bottle of every shade of brown Angelus had, like 15 different colors, made a bunch of test swatches, and went, "Huh, the only one I really like is the dark brown." So I dumped the rest of them all together in a tub and added about three quarts of acetone. Pro-tip: your tubs for dip dyeing HAVE TO be hermetically sealed, because alcohol really really likes to evaporate, it will escape through the crevices and leave you with sludge. Granted, I think I can reconstitute this sludge with more acetone.)

Also note how all my pieces are different colors -- that's the range that natural, undyed veg-tan leather can come in. And they WILL take the dye differently, so if you have a project (not necessarily this one) where the pieces need to match in color, you HAVE TO cut them from the same hide, and ideally dye them at the same time.

So here's them all freshly dyed:

Apparently I didn't take a picture after they'd dried, but they looked awwwwfulllll. Sure enough, the different leathers had wound up different colors, weird and blotchy. Some of them I gave another dunk in the dye bath to make them darker, but mostly I just crossed my fingers and forged ahead.

Good news, they will look much better after you put a clear topcoat on them:

50/50 mix of resolene (which you can buy at Tandy) and water. I've messed with other topcoats before, but this is your best bet. It dries quite water-resistant; one coat will leave you with a matte finish and if you want it shinier you can add more coats.

They will also look better after you add lines along the edges. I forget what this tool is called, but you want one, it is invaluable, lets you put lines parallel to the edges of your leather very quickly and very neatly. The lines I did were 3/8" from the edge:

And now you have also conveniently marked where to punch your rivet holes:

Lay 'em out (I was eyeballing this, not measuring it):

With a gel pen or something, mark where the holes are:

I debated whether I wanted to use small or medium rivet caps, went with medium. These are what's called double-cap rivets, because there is a cap on both ends so it looks clean and finished on both sides of the project, but rapid rivets (the ones where the post end does not have a cap) would work fine here. Tandy sells rivets in lengths XS, S, M, and L -- the post length you need for this is S, but you can mix and match the posts and the caps, so I paired small posts with medium caps, which I felt were better proportioned for this project.

Use a burnishing awl to poke holes in your fabric, wide enough that you can push a rivet through. You will break some threads doing this, which is why you want your base fabric to be fray-resistant:

Add plate:

Add rivet cap:

Grab your rivet setter, apply hammer:

Yessssssss:

That was the point when I said, awww yeah, son, this might actually work. I'd been kinda iffy about it til then.

Alright, doing the rest of it. Here's where the patterning for the plates gets weird, because the coat is not a tube, it's narrower at the chest than at the hem, so some of them are going get cut at angles along the side seam. You can see that I labeled the plates this time because the assembly was getting kind of crazy, but it wound up not mattering because the acetone in the dye bath stripped off my labels. ;_;

So I labeled them again when they came out of the dye:

And repeated the same process as above. Aww yeah:

By the way, I did not make boots for this costume; I bought those boots in Harajuku like ten years ago and they turned out to be one of the best investments I ever made, because I wear them all the time and they blend seamlessly into so many costumes -- including Anders.

Anyway, you're not done yet, time to put the O-rings on it. I cut some tabs out of 5 oz leather and cut stitching grooves about 1/8" from the edge. That is the same tool I used above for creasing the lines along the edges of the plates, you just swap out the head to carve a groove instead of leaving a crease. Also I should have cut the grooves before I dip-dyed them, because I wound up having to go back and put dye in the grooves:

Mark your stitching holes (rolling wheel is great) and punch your stitching holes:

Punch your rivet holes:

I clipped the corners on the underside of the tabs so they wouldn't be poking my chest.

Same MO as attaching rivets to the coat, use your burnishing awl to poke a hole through the front edge and attach your tabs. (Hearkening back to the picture waaaay above, where I measured where you want to attach your O-rings.) While I'm stitching, I hold it in place with a brad, not the actual rivet. Stitching:

This is waxed nylon cord, by the way -- you can buy it at Tandy, or you could probably substitute dental floss, it’s about the same weight.

So one side of tabs is stitched & riveted shut and holds the O-rings, the other side consists of snaps so that they can come on and off the O-rings easily.

I hate snaps almost as much as I hate bias tape, but sometimes they're unavoidable. At Tandy, you have the option of glove snaps, segma snaps, or line 20/line 24 snaps -- they are all terrible, but glove snaps are your best bet for this operation. Segma snaps and the line 20/24 snaps are too heavy-duty for putting in fabric, they will slide sideways when you try to set them and you will have to pull REALLY HARD on them to make them release, and you'll end up stretching your fabric out of shape. Glove snaps will also slide when you try to set them, because all snaps are assholes, but once you get them installed they will work well.

(Except for when it popped off the morning of PAX, and I was out of town so I didn't have access to my workshop, and we had to swing by Tandy with me in my Anders costume to buy a new bag of snaps and beg use of their tools to set it. It took like fifteen minutes of swearing, because snaps are assholes, but I did make some kid's morning ("IT'S A WIZARD!!!") so there's that.)

Snaps:

Bias tape, looking less awful once the O-rings are added:

Here is a picture that better demonstrates how the rings are attached:

You’ll need medium-length posts for the rivets holding the O-rings on.

There are also a couple tabs lower down that are purely decorative. Initially I was going to skip those, but the other story of this costume is me going, "Eh, good enough. .........NO, NOT GOOD ENOUGH, MUST BE PERFECT" so I added them later. I'm glad I did, because anything to break up that line of stupid bias tape is a plus:

And more random rings on the sides:

Technically those should be O-rings, not D-rings, but I have a gratuitous number of brass D-rings just kicking around, so I used them instead of buying more O-rings.

The rings you can buy from Tandy -- solid brass, they look and feel great. The top three are 1.5" interior diameter, the rings on the belt are 2".

**

And I think that's it. Happy Anders'ing!

(And the glamour shot)

[abeautifulblog]

hi gremble! i think that a while ago you linked to a blog that taught how to write better sex scenes. do you still have the link? i looked, but can't find it

LOL so initially I thought you were talking about the LJ post I wrote about sex scenes, lo these million years ago, and I was going to say, Well, it's not exactly about how to write them, per se~~ it's about the choice of where in the story to have the blorbos jump into bed together -- at the end or in the beginning/middle -- and how that affects where the narrative tension is invested.

And then I realized you probably meant this monstrosity. 😂😂

Despite appearances, it is very useful! The formula she lays out helped me hobble along for years when I could not write a sex scene to save my life, but would occasionally write myself into a corner where plot/character development was happening while sex was happening, so I couldn't just fade to black.

And even once you're more comfortable with writing sex, the formula is good for checking your work against, because it helps you maintain the mind-body balance needed for a compelling sex scene -- reminding you to ground your scene in the physicality, if it was getting too rarefied, or reminding you to bring in the character's emotional presence, if it was starting to veer into just a mechanical list of actions.

Though really, what helped me the most was to (finally) learn to stop thinking of sex scenes as a completely separate species from.... writing any other kind of scene. Because they're not, and when you treat them as something unrelated, that's how you wind up with sex scenes that are poorly integrated into the story, bringing all the plot momentum to a screeching halt for some paint-by-numbers smut where the blorbos could be swapped out for any number of unrelated blorbos without changing a thing. Not great. >_<

But yeah -- if you're struggling with the mechanics of writing sex scenes, that blog post will definitely give you training wheels. :)

[abeautifulblog]

Story time with Sam!

(transcript below the cut)

A discord conversation between gremble and gemlord:

gremble: tell me again the story of the time you didn’t get laid because the guy noticed you had a tupperware full of human remains on your kitchen counter

gemlord: alright so

I was working for a cultural resource management firm in [redacted]

me and my buddy colleague were excavating a native american grave that someone had found on their property.

to be excavated and repatriated to the tribe in the area for reburial, right

so [redacted] and I get back to the lab and find it completely shuttered

nobody there, lights off

so we both kind of shrug and just take a skeleton apiece

which I bring into my house and leave on the counter in a big plastic bin

and then, you know, forget about

gremble: as you do

gemlord: Later, I have a gentleman over for netflix and chill and the Chill part is like, in progress, when he suddenly goes "... sam, what the FUCK is on your kitchen counter?!"

and like, the skull was front and center.

there was no way I could pass it off as anything other than human remains

and because I am a goblin, the FIRST THING OUT OF MY MOUTH is "the last man who did me wrong. 🤨"

i tried to explain but the magic was uh

gone

[abeautifulblog]

o gremble, i beseech thee, reveal to us your ac: valhalla ships

HAH, I could write a fucking thesis about the relationships in that game (and about Eivor's relationship with gender), it is all fascinating.

But if I were to write fic, it would start out with Eivor in a (stable, though slightly strained) poly triad with Sigurd and Randvi, and have Eivor/Leofrith as the endgame.

(Yes, we stan Leofrith and his ten minutes of screen time. Eivor the Tiniest Viking wants to climb that giant Saxon man like a tree. 😻😻😻 He is just so GOOD, and LOYAL, and THEY DON'T APPRECIATE YOU LIKE I WOULD APPRECIATE YOU. 😭😭 I KNOW WE'RE THE PAGAN INVADERS RANSACKING YOUR COUNTRY AND DEPOSING YOUR KING, BUT BABY PLEEEEASE I WANT YOU TO BE MY FRIEND SO BAD. I WANT TO TAKE YOU HOME WITH ME, I WOULD APPRECIATE YOU SO HARD ALL NIGHT LONG. 😭😭😭)

(Seriously. Like, I get that he would never become one of your viking raiders, but you should have been able to talk him into staying as a mentor/advisor to Ceolbert, they were already friends, ffs. There was so much fascinating potential for Leofrith's character, if he'd stayed in the story.)

(And also if Leofrith had been there, you know that That One Plot Development 🤬🤬 would have 1000% been averted.)

But yeah, in the early scene when you're first introduced to Randvi and Sigurd as adults, I took one look at the dynamic between the three of them and went, "Ah, so we're both married to Sigurd, got it," and rp'd the game accordingly -- which makes it absolutely fucking heartbreaking when he starts going off the deep end. Jesus, it's like you're losing a loved one to QAnon, just helplessly watching them turn into a stranger by degrees. 😐

(Seriously, that barely scratches the surface; the storyline with Sigurd is harrowing. Poor Eivor gets put through an emotional meat-grinder.)

So it would be interesting to see that story from Leofrith's POV, and see how it would change things if he were there and in love with Eivor. I've never written a story in which the love interest is straight up not single at the outset -- that they are already in a committed relationship, wholly devoted to someone else, and the complex, contradictory feelings as that relationship falls apart.

(Not that I expect to write such a fic; I don't have a clear enough idea of how I'd actually structure it, and I write slowly enough that any fic is a Commitment, but I am enjoying rotating these blorbos in the microwave of my mind.)

(There is just SO MUCH EXCELLENT MEATY CONFLICT to work with here. The cross-cutting feelings in the poly triad. How queer-coded/genderfucky Eivor is, canonically, completely independently of whether he ever fucks men. Leofrith's conflicting loyalties, and the fact that his very presence on their side would help legitimize the viking conquest, which he'd have mixed feelings about. The interplay between Eivor's faith and Leofrith's. Eivor being dtf and Leofrith not wanting to be just a casual friendly hookup. Sigurd's not-entirely-baseless jealous paranoia of Eivor and Randvi, and how that would land on Leofrith too if he were there and in love with Eivor.

Nnnnnngh, I am feral, I am gnawing on the furniture.)

[abeautifulblog]

If you're still taking these, I'd be interested in your thoughts on a/b/o! (personally, i always thought it was a reflection of most fanfic being written by women who date men at least some of the time, ie writers whose own intimate relationships involve gender-based hierarchies, and who found a way to reintroduce that element into same-gender relationships in order to explore it in slash fiction. But I'd be curious to know what you think about it!)

At first I found it off-putting and uncomfortable—and sometimes still do, depending on how the author chooses to play it—but after enough years of exposure therapy, I've become inured to it, and it's basically value-neutral to me these days. When I'm cruising for fic and something looks interesting, seeing that it's tagged A/B/O isn't going to affect whether I click on it or not.

I enjoy it as a vehicle for porn, because heat/rut/hormones/etc lets authors ramp up the intensity of how scorchingly horny the blorbos are for each other, with a truly gratuitous number of orgasms involved. (As an aside, I prefer it when omegas are intersex, so that writers can hand-wave the trickier/less hygienic aspects of butt-sex. And so I'm not forced to imagine butt-birth. 😖)

But I've read very few fics that actually put interesting ideas into the worldbuilding, and thinking about the broader effects that omegaverse dynamics would have on society, because seriously, that would change everything. Instead, it frequently just gets overlaid atop stories that... have no reason to be omegaverse stories? Again, not like fanfic needs to justify itself beyond “I wanted to,” but I'll admit, I don't really understand why this concept has such lasting and widespread appeal.

As you say, I've read meta theorizing that it allows (predominantly female) fanfic writers to explore gender dynamics and gendered expectations in a way that doesn't hit quite so close to home—that it's easier and more enjoyable to explore those themes at a remove, in a fictional scenario that can be informed by their own experiences, but doesn't have to be constrained by reality.

Maybe that's true, or true for some people—I am not qualified to say. Or maybe it's as fruitless as trying to theorize why some people are into kink, when the answer is just “some people are,” and there's not much rhyme or reason to it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Personally, what turns me off about A/B/O fic is extreme feminization of the omega character. That is 1) decidedly not my kink (I'm getting flashbacks to the heteronormativity of early-aughts yaoi; google 'yaoi hands' if you want to traumatize yourself), and 2) on a narrative level it makes me go, Why didn't you just write genderswap fic? o_O When the anatomy, the clothes, the demeanor, the social expectations are not genderqueer, but all unambiguously female, and the only nod to it being omegaverse is male pronouns... why? In those cases, the A/B/O elements are doing nothing but making me viscerally uncomfortable.

(And mpreg is soooo beyond not-my-kink. 😬)

That said, there is no moral component to my discomfort—a philosophy that modern fandom could stand to reacquaint itself with, along with the term “squick.”

I, personally, find male characters being feminized* off-putting and uncomfortable—I am squicked out by it, if you will—but that isn't any sort of objective judgment on the trope itself, that's a me-thing. You don't have to come up with excuses for why Trope X is immoral and gross and problematic in order to justify not enjoying it. People just like different things.

Anyway, fic recs!

OMEGAVERSE FICS WOT GREMBLE ENJOYED, and don't @ me if they include things I just said I'm not into.

The Ties that Bind, by Odsbodkins – Captain America: Winter Soldier, Steve/Bucky. The fact that I still remember this fic, even though I'm well out of this fandom, should tell you something. The author does possibly the best job I've read of exploring the wider context of A/B/O dynamics, and how that plays out in social norms and pop culture.

Intent, by tnico – The Witcher, Lambert/Aiden. Have you ever heard of an omegaverse fic in which one of the leads was a beta? Now you have, and you're welcome, because tnico writes the best Lambert in the whole damn fandom.

(Now back to your regularly scheduled Geralt/Jaskier recs -- and there are plenty more that I enjoyed, I just have a memory like a sieve. Feel free to rec more in the comments!)

A New Drink, Honey-Sweet, by GreenBird

basically all of suzukiblu's fics in that trope

Ballad of the Bride Surprise, by greyduckgreygoose

Rare Bird, by spqr

Fingers Crossed, by grassylampshade

And an actual books rec: the Wraeththu series, by Storm Constantine. It's not exactly omegaverse, but it hits the same genderbending buttons—humanity is being supplanted by a race of hermaphroditic humans who are all gorgeously androgynous and very queer with each other. Dark fantasy, similar vibes to Anne Rice and Tanith Lee, with moody gothic opulence and rarefied homoeroticism. The first in the series is Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, and I despise the protagonist in that book, I want to slam his head in a car door, but fortunately all the subsequent books are centered on other people.

* This is completely unrelated to trans AUs or trans headcanons for a character, those don't bother me. Trans women are women, and so it is just and proper for them to wear women's clothing, but putting male characters in corsets or lingerie or whatnot is going to have me pretty much instantly back-buttoning out of a fic. Which, it occurs to me, makes me kind of a raging hypocrite, because I'm fine with cross-dressing when I do it.

idk, man. brains are weird and contradictory sometimes.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[abeautifulblog]

Ask inspired by your “scene the author envisions” post - do you have any tips for building a particular atmosphere in a scene?

That is an EXCELLENT question—I'm just not sure I have a good answer for you. 😅

When it comes to getting the scene on the page to match the scene in your head, my general advice is slow revisions. Write your first draft, put it aside for a week, give your brain time to reset, and then when you come back and reread it, it'll be hitting you like it's new. Clunky and/or cringey turns of phrase will jump out at you, and you can discreetly cut them before anyone else has to see your shame. You'll also be able to tell whether the atmosphere is coming across the way you envisioned it, or whether the prose is very facts-&-action oriented.

Do your revisions, put it down for another week, rinse and repeat, until you can reread it without feeling the need to change anything. That is gremble's method for self-editing. 👍

As for how to build atmosphere... hm. I'm not sure I have a conscious approach to it.

I don't think of myself as a particularly atmospheric writer, though that might just be a matter of comparison—because my formative literary influence was Anne Rice and she is ALL ABOUT atmosphere, atmosphere and vibes are what carry her books.

And there are definitely echoes of her influence in my writing, but as I developed my own style, I wound up being more about story and emotional development, and less about atmosphere than Anne Rice. (She does high-key emotion too, but her characters tend to be very static.) When I write, the setting of a scene is usually value-neutral—it's not contributing to the emotional tone one way or the other.

...But sometimes it is. The three most intensely atmospheric examples from my own work that are coming to mind are:

The battlements scene in chapter six of For the Asking (soft and dreamy and intimate)

The catacombs sequence in Song of Selfish Hearts (horror, sterile and creepy)

“This House Just Sings (This House Just Screams)” in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (psychological horror, oppressive menace)

All three were meant to be high-atmosphere; I knew when I was writing them that they wouldn't land unless the vibes came across, and so I was ramping that up deliberately. And I'm satisfied with the results, though I would have to pick them apart individually to figure out how exactly I achieved that. o_O Maybe I will someday.

idk man, just find authors you admire and reread them a lot, and try to figure out what it is about their writing that makes it hit so hard. Early Anne Rice (Interview with a Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned) is a masterclass in atmosphere; Sarah Monette's short story collections Somewhere Beneath These Waves and The Bone Key are excellently atmospheric; Karin Lowachee's space operas (Warchild, Burndive, Cagebird) aren't so much about the physical locales, but she builds psychological oppression like a champ. Ditto to the slow, claustrophobic build in Jacqueline Carey's Santa Olivia.

All of those are books I admired immensely, and have reread with an eye toward figuring out how they did it. (lol fuckin' Lowachee though, she is too good, I can't read more than a page before I'm sucked back in emotionally, and rendered incapable of analysis. She is also one of the writers who taught me that less is so, so much more when it comes to writing abuse and its aftermath.)

(Those books are also all really queer, if that sweetens the pot. ;D)

[abeautifulblog]

I read that Les Miz fic you recommended and oh my god it was good. So I’ve returned to ask if you have any other LM recs? Or Witcher recs or really anything you think is good lol

Right????

Like, "here's a high school AU in a fandom you've probably never heard of before, but no really, give it a spin, I swear it's good" -- and then IT IS???

And to be sure, it helps that the author was clearly well out of high school when they wrote it. They remember what high school was like, they can write that experience with honesty, but they also have the enlightened understanding that comes with time and distance from it.

(I'd recced that fic before, back when this was just a ddads blog, and someone who was already familiar with it remarked that in retrospect, it wasn't a surprise that that fic had been influential to me too -- they observed that Robert might well have been what Grantaire had grown up to be, if he hadn't gotten help, and I can't disagree.)

As for fic recs.............

I'm weird about recs, because there is vanishingly little -- fanfic or published -- that I read and can't see the flaws in, and then I'm hesitant to rec them, because I feel like I can't endorse them without some sort of acknowledgment of those problems.......?

Like -- I long ago came to terms with the fact that the venn diagram of "what gremble likes" and "what is objectively good" is not a circle -- they overlap maybe 30% of the time? 25%? Hard to say.

What I like about a story usually boils down to "emotional intensity" --and I'm willing to forgive a lot if they can deliver that. But when I'm suddenly asked to list my favs, with no other parameters given, then I'm all at once acutely aware of their objective shortcomings -- shortcomings that someone who doesn't prioritize emotional intensity would be less willing to overlook.

Anyway, I find it a lot easier to curate recs by trope/topic/theme/etc, possibly because I'm not promising anything more than "an example of X that I enjoyed." And someday I probably will curate a list of intensely emotional witcher fics, that makes no promises beyond this will make you FEEL THINGS.

But if you just say "rec me something that's amazing," I'm going to freeze up. There's almost nothing that I'm willing to put my absolute, unqualified stamp of endorsement on.

(except for, idk. that high school fic, Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey, and Warchild by Karin Lowachee.)

[abeautifulblog]

Is Gremble for gremlin?

It is not; it is from the following story:

So one time I was at a gay bar in Japan, making out with a hot Chinese dude who went by Ki. (Who turned out to be, like, 45 years old? And I was 21? But he didn't look it, so whatever.) And we were having a grand old time, until his boyfriend called and he had to go home.

(Ironically, he later broke up with that boyfriend for "talking to other guys on the internet." To which I was like -- lol, you goddamn hypocrite, you were making out with gaijin half your age in ni-choume.)

Anyway, so he calls me, months later, out of the blue, sounding -- no joke -- like the automated text reader from one of those old-school Macintoshes. After greetings are dispensed with (try to do his lines in the mechanical-text-reader voice):

Him: "So. Are still alone?"

Me: "Uhm. By 'alone,' do you mean 'single'?"

Him: "Yes."

Me: "Yes..."

Him: "Oh. Good."

Me: "That's not the word I would use for it."

After a few minutes of this, the awkwardness is reaching critical mass and I just want to get him the hell off the phone. So I say:

Me: "Well, it was great talking to you, but I gotta go now! I'll see you later, Ki."

Him: "I'll see you later--. .............."

And there's this catch, this hitch, this hella-awkward silence that he had so obviously meant to fill with my name.

Me: "...Did you forget my name?"

Him: "Nuh-uh."

Me: "..."

Him: "...........Gremble."

I think you'll find it's 'Gabriel.'

More to the point, How did you even call me? What am I in your phone as??

--

Years later I was back in the states and I related that story to my coworkers at Half-Price Books, and overnight that became my name at work. At one point the manager was like, "Why does everyone call you Gremble?" Me: "Uh." [glances at nearby customers] "I'll tell you later." And I never did get around to telling him, but my Halloween stocking at work still wound up reading "Gremble."

And that is the story of how I got my nickname.

--

"...wait a minute," my friend said. "I think the salient point of this story is: Halloween stocking??"

--

THE END.