#and then i decided to ignore that information and include it anyway because jewish tradition trumps british absence of food

[clumsyclifford]

hi my love i’m hope not too late but i would like you to tell me about my loves jewish cake, anything you want to but specifically baker calum 🥰 thank you i love you

of course you aren’t too late!!! ESPECIALLY to talk about jewish cake oh my goodness meg i shall die for you i love you. alright let’s see what i can dig up

ha’ahava hazot shelanu + it’s so simple

a cut, per usual

so let’s start WITH:

ha’ahava hazot shelanu

jewish cake was a labor of love for myself. little known fact about me is that i am in fact jewish! :) and around christmas time i always get a little prickly about the surplus of christmas spirit and in this case the amount of fic for it. and i’d sort of had this hesitant idea to write a jewish fic in the back of my mind for a long time, but it felt like a really big divergence from the Cast of Characters that was for some reason a lot more dramatic than any other circumstances into which i could place them, so i’d basically been hesitating for several months. in november we had a brief conversation about it in the club which looked like this

but the idea still made me a little nervous and so i kind of talked myself out of writing it, as always. and THEN, middle of december, iba sent me this 1d fic out of nowhere with this accompanying message:

and i kinda lowkey almost cried!! it was such a jewish fic. i read the word kvetch and i almost lost it. the fic was just so unabashedly jewish. and i was like...well. that’s what ive been wanting to do. so now i have no reason not to do it.

in the ao3 notes i talked a little bit about my internal debate over How Jewish To Go with the fic because on the one hand i really do understand that it can feel alienating going into a fic with zero understanding of the culture but on the other hand since it was MY fic i wanted to make it jewish the way i’m jewish. which is like...............very. i don’t think i ended up striking a balance so much as just deciding to say fuck it and write it the way i would want to read it, but i definitely think that was the right decision for me.

there was actually one more motivator for writing this fic, especially the WAY i wrote it, in eight chapters, and that motivator was that i wanted to break 400k on ao3 before the year ended. i just wanted to have an even number and 400k was a good goal. which i did achieve thanks to jewish cake fic being the 13.6k beast that she is! so that was also part of it

NOW! as for the PROCESS. i created the doc on december 22 and i originally kind of thought it was a little bitchy to write a hanukkah fic after hanukkah had already ended but was reminded that most christmas fic is neither written nor posted on actual christmas which reassured me well enough. i had already had the idea to divide it into eight chapters for the eight nights of hanukkah and i thought that would be a nice way to showcase different aspects of the holiday (seeing family, playing dreidel, opening presents etc) and also in certain cases (like the third chapter where they do some baking) some days that weren’t necessarily hanukkah-driven but just a nice natural consequence of being on break for hanukkah. i wanted it to feel like hanukkah feels to me!! normally i don’t like people seeing the way my outlines look but this one i don’t mind sharing so here’s what i had at the top of the doc for reference while i was writing. not everything in that first list got included but most of it did !!! 

i’m not really sure how this fic ended up being cake. i never used to default to cake but for some reason as i was diving into this one it just felt right. that’s all i can say about that. meg you have genuinely shifted my approach to fic i DO default to cake sometimes now and that’s on YOU. 

the very first thing i ever wrote down for this fic was this part that ended up going in the summary:

“Happy Hanukkah,” Calum says, smiling at Luke as their fingers intertwine.

Luke murmurs, “Chag sameach, ahovi,” and Calum’s face is aglow in the candlelight.

that was The Moment for me. i didn’t even write the rest of that scene until later but i had those two lines written down straight out the gate and i knew they were gonna close out the first scene because it just Felt Right. and i was right! very cool and fun for me

now the nice convenient thing about having this fic separated into eight discrete scenes/nights/chapters was that i didn’t have to write it in order, and i didn’t. i DID write the first night/chapter first, but then over the course of maybe a week, i wrote (deep breath get ready): the first half of chapter 2 (hemmings family) > the beginning of chapter 5 (the dreidel game) > most of the scene in chapter 7 > the beginning of chapter 3 (where they bake) > finished writing chapters 2 & 3 > started chapter 4 and finished chapter 5 > finished chapter 4 and wrote the rest of chapter 7 > all of chapter 6 > all of chapter 8 aka the proposal. i deliberately saved the proposal for last because i don’t think i could have written it exactly right without knowing the events that came before it but everything else was all over the place as you can see. 

a problem i ran into a lot, and i talked to my sounding board and fellow jew sam about this among many other things, was that i had a lot of trouble characterizing very obviously Not Jewish people in a way that made them Very Jewish. not even like, Jewish But You Can Ignore It. i wanted them to be front-and-center jewish like i am and that was hard for me to navigate because obviously my speech patterns and vocabulary as an american jew are extremely different from 5sos’s as australian goyim (non-jews) like i do use hebrew words in my day-to-day communication all the time and i somehow had to keep their mannerisms but also insert mine BUT not insert so many of mine that the fic became incomprehensible and it was just. a Challenge. here’s some insight into THAT crisis

and then again writing the other characters in other chapters

i sent sam the doc when i was mostly done writing it, mainly just to be reminded that at least one person was going to appreciate this fic, which worked out nicely because she very very much did. genuinely i cannot stress enough how insecure i was to write and share this fic. like i’m gonna be really straight up with you meg, i think part of the reason i had calum and luke baking sufganiyot was because to me that felt like a sort of bribe? i basically wrote what felt to me like the least appealing fic ever and then my mission from there was to add stuff in that would convince people to give it a shot anyway. i was trying to make it worth everyone’s while. the baking was my trade-off, i was like “well yeah it’s a jewish fic but maybe she’ll be happy enough that it’s cake and they’re baking that she’ll forgive it for being a jewish fic” yes i realize how kind of hilariously tragic this sounds but !!! you never get jewish fics!!! and you especially don’t get them in fanfiction for obviously non-jewish bands!!! anyway. we’re not gonna get into this whole thing but like. even though objectively i knew that i had been told again and again people would appreciate the fic i still had doubts and knowing something and feeling secure in it are very different things.

also, i didn’t remember this, but apparently i had a lot of problems with writing the proposal! here’s a sneak peek into that mental breakdown

don’t actually think the fic specifies (making life easier for myself) but they have already had dinner in that scene. so now you know. 

i could choose to not get this elbows-deep in the details of Crises I Had While Writing This Fic but instead i am choosing to go all out. here’s another thing i had trouble with:

(i did end up using transliteration obviously but i DO think actual hebrew would have been a cool flex)

and as for the title, ha’ahava hazot shelanu is the name of an ivri lider song that i love, and it translates to “this love of ours” and i realize titling the fic in hebrew was a Choice but i did talk to sam about this as well and that went roughly like this

by the way here is the song, i absolutely love it and i cannot recommend it enough. also i’m not sure how glaringly obvious this is but the chapter titles on ao3 are just hebrew numbers. like the first chapter is echad which literally means one. and so on. are they the correct genders? i don’t know ! fuck gendered language.

one more thing and then ill move on but an unfortunate natural consequence of writing a hanukkah fic (at least the way i wrote this one) is that it necessitates presents. so i had to come up with presents for these dumb boys to give each other. and to be completely honest with you i don’t remember how i did!!! the ones calum got for luke were trickier because they were actual things. for some reason this luke was always a version of luke that just kinda like, wore makeup, so that was just a question of figuring out an eyeshadow palette that would be Nice but not obscenely schmancy (i did ask the club for help since i know nothing about makeup but as usual i ignored their replies). but that by itself didn’t feel like enough of a gift, and so i tried to think of something that would be more than just the gift of an object. like, something that would maybe enable luke to spend more time on something he loves. piano music made sense to me because it wasn’t just a thing by itself it was a thing that encouraged luke to play piano and even to improve at it and to learn songs that he could be excited about. so! that was that

the trip to israel gift was a little bit of a retcon situation i really liked the idea that luke had been planning to give that “gift” to calum for a hot sec that he’d have had it ready, but i’d already written the scene where he and mali talk about israel, so i went back to it and edited it a little to hint at the idea (luke plays it off very casually because he is a clever boy) but i thought there was something very romantic in the idea of the israel trip, of luke planning a future with calum and a trip to a place that means so much to him (to me yes maybe luke and i are the same blah blah) and getting to drag calum around to falafel places and teach him words in hebrew and it just seemed like the appropriate trip for these two cute jewish boys to plan so i rolled with it.

okay moving on slightly!! to baker calum <3 baker calum was more of a cameo in the hanukkah fic, in the chapter i wrote with you in mind, but i can talk about it’s so simple here as well because i fucking adore that fic.

it’s so simple

so the inspiration behind the fic came from the “kitchens are for lovers” rhetoric and the realization that that would be the perfect...sort of thesis to build on for a fic for you in specific, because you are, in my mind, a very kitchen-based person, given your baking habit. it actually just worked out pretty nicely for me honestly because i’ve been wanting to write a big Kitchen Romance type fic for a while and you just gave me the perfect opportunity. here’s what i had at the top of the doc for the fic for you

and then once i sort of landed on the idea for the fic, it just made a lot of sense to make it jewish cake because, well, im gonna be real w you, because i identify very strongly with jewish cake and the kitchen-romance aspect felt like a very bella thing in the same way that jewish cake felt like a bella thing. and so i wanted to be able to romanticize these kitchens to share the way that i, bella, feel about them, and that was easy to do when the characters were so similar to me. not to mention this cake already existed in my head as a very settled, domestic duo, and they had their own home and had already had a kitchen-romance scene in the hanukkah fic and the whole thing just fell together perfectly. i had this sentence in my head and it was: “Shabbat in Luke and Calum’s kitchen looks something like this.” the kind of thing you would read in a fic summary right? and especially having it take place on shabbat felt like an extra layer of domestic easy romance to me so that was kind of my guide

here was my "outline” for this:

Romance :)))

obviously calum was going to be the one doing most of the cooking/baking because he had been established as the Kitchen Boy between the two of them and maybe i realized in the course of writing it that while i was luke, you were very much calum. so the goal was then basically to romanticize (1) the kitchen and (2) luke as much as humanly possible for you (see: message sent to helen and ainslee)

unfortunately i was unable to do baker calum justice as much as i would have liked because i could not have him baking anything complex because i can’t bake anything complex and if i had tried to describe him baking something complex and then described it wrong i would have died of shame so that is why he is only baking brownies BUT they have chocolate chips which hopefully makes up for it. also i just stumbled across this which i think pretty well represents the crisis i had regarding baker calum

:)))

re: the soundtrack (so to speak), i wanted to include some songs that i associate with you meg but you see the situation is that some of those songs are 5sos/mali/atl songs and so i couldn’t include those, for obvious reasons, which did narrow down my choices somewhat. fortunately i think the mcfly worked pretty nicely i mean yeah it’s a little obvious that i was forcing mcfly into the story but they deserved to be there. i think i’ve mentioned this but i genuinely have a memory of listening to star girl on a loop in my kitchen at home and in my head the hood-hemmings kitchen looks like my kitchen because i have zero imagination so it felt to me like these songs just belonged in kitchens. and that they’d be inherently romantic. woah i think my brain is short-circuiting i’m not sure i’m making sense anymore. point being i hoped that you would appreciate it nonetheless.

a note about the short introduction, because it’s very unlike anything i’ve put in any other fic to my knowledge. i kind of wanted it to feel like the prologue to a fairytale, almost. i wanted it to feel like the beginning of a movie, when the camera is slowly, slowly zooming in from a Big Picture down to one house on one street and then through the window into the kitchen while the voiceover is very serenely describing the scene. i wanted it to feel like we were in the kitchen before even calum was and that we were standing against the fourth wall watching the fic unfold. and also, i wanted to make the fic romantic as fuck, from the get-go. there was to be no confusion: this fic was going to romanticize the living daylights out of the hood-hemmings kitchen.

(also you may have noticed that despite having “london” in the list of Meg Things at the top of the doc, the fic never actually specifies that they’re in london. that’s because this fic was really an exercise in “how much can i hint that they’re in london without outright saying it so i don’t establish a canon that i may later regret” which went as far as me asking helen what her kitchen floors and counters are made of. like. if you want it to be in london then hell yeah it’s in london but i didn’t wanna lock myself into that decision just in case so i never actually said it but i hope it kinda felt london-y anyway lmao)

so...............i THINK that’s all i have to say. “all” as if i havent just written an entire dissertation but at least it’s done now. i sure did say a lot! that was a lot!!! but also a very very fun and interesting dive into the ~process~ of writing these jewish cake fics. also, for what it’s worth, the way hanukkah fic was received basically calmed all my fears about writing jewish fic, which was a relief for me. so thank you for loving it, i don’t think you know how much that means to me!!!! i love YOU so very much

[itsclydebitches]

The RWBY/It Crossover That Absolutely No One Asked For But You’re Getting Anyway

Ozpin - The “gifted child” who is already sick of that shit, both because of the bullying he’s gotten for it at school (what middle schooler uses his vocabulary and dresses in a suit?) and because it has given his parents another reason to ignore him. You’re basically a functioning adult! The Losers are Ozpin’s first group of friends outside of his little sister Salem, gone missing one day and now re-appearing in his basement, pale like she drowned, with strange black veins threading over her skin... Though they all silently think of him as the leader once the horror begins, he discourages that whenever possible. He’s done with being the odd one out. 

Qrow - Qrow “Trashmouth” Branwen. Twin brother of Raven who also disappeared around the same time as Salem, though only Qrow knows that’s because she finally hitch-hiked out of their fucked up town. He hasn’t heard from her since. Unfailingly annoying and loyal in turns, Qrow’s nickname is only partly because of his foul-mouthed tendencies. The group decided he needed another, proper nickname after he quietly told them that he and Raven would like to be known by those names indefinitely now, regardless of what’s on any birth certificates. The Losers respect that. Devoted to Ozpin in particular, Qrow often uses his status as the (presumed) local bad boy to keep others off his friends’ backs. 

James - Coming from the only Jewish family for miles around, James has his own share of problems, thanks. Lately, with his bar mitzvah approaching, he’s found his adoration of science is somewhat at odds with his faith, especially when so much is riding on him continuing tradition. Quieter and more reserved than the others, James was inwardly pleased to make a friend in Ozpin, the only one around capable of keeping up with his theories---even if they disagree 99% of the time. When all the horror starts, it’s James who is the most resistant to it, first through sheer disbelief, then later through confidence in his own sense of what is and is not reality. It’s often his mental fortitude that gets them out of tight spots. 

Bart - Manic almost to the point of being obnoxious (some Losers would lovingly argue that there’s no ‘almost’), Bart has ADHD according to a couple online quizzes he took with Glynda. That’s the best they can do with no money, no resources, and no one else who cares. It’s fine though. They make do. With an intense passion for all things history, Bart is more than happy to start researching the town once Ozpin brings it up. A good thing too, considering that he’s probably the only one capable of working through that many massive, dry tomes. Find him in the library and you’ll be startled by the contrast: a vibrant look that includes dyed green hair and a bright yellow shirt paired with the most studious of attitudes. Researching something he loves is the only time when Bart keeps still. 

Peter - A stocky, boisterous boy, Peter longs for nothing more than to be the hero of his own story. Even if he really doesn’t look the part. Or seemingly have any heroic skills. And sometimes freezes when things get messy. None of that matters because he’s going to succeed one day, dammit. Fake it till you make it! Practically attached at the hip to Bart, the two make an unlikely---but as others quickly learn---unstoppable pair. Contrasting James’ skepticism, when Ozpin first told them about seeing an evil looking Salem in his house, Peter immediately pulled an ax out from under his bed and demanded to know where he was needed. Oh, the ax? He just had it for... reasons. 

Tai - Kind-hearted almost to a fault, Tai took Raven’s bedroom when she left in order to escape his own parents. He’ll take indifference over his previous living arrangement any day. Though more than once Qrow has tried to talk to him about the broken school supplies and badly hidden bruises, Tai never offers anything except a smile. It’s the same for all of them, all the time, and whenever his back is turned the Losers share glances among each other, wondering when he’ll finally break. Not if, but when. Not that it matters because they all intend to be there when it happens, determined to show Tai that he’s allowed to be something other than that constantly cheerful, helpful version of himself. 

Glynda - The one girl of the group and no, she’s never going to let you forget it. Also the real leader if we’re getting right down to it. Glynda had no intention of making friends with six other boys, especially when she already has an entirely undeserved reputation as the town slut. Why not embrace it then? The Losers lose their collective shit the day she walks up in a new purple skirt, black boots, and white top, all of them stolen from the store where the manager dared touch her. The persona isn’t at all what she’d intended---like Ozpin and James, Glynda is somewhat introverted---but then she had no intention of fighting whatever was hiding in those sewers either. Something dark and otherworldly, capable of transforming into a massive bird, a boar, sometimes a vaguely human-like shape...  Glynda hates that version most of all. 

Fun plot points after the time jump include: 

Qrow losing his goddamn mind as he remembers that he’s been in love with Ozpin for over thirty fucking years and what pRECISELY is he supposed to do with that information NOW? 

Ozpin is also panicking, he’s just quiet about it 

The awful realization that this Grimm thing beneath the town feeds on/grows stronger through negative emotions so lol that’s a bit not good when the seven of us are all such a mess 

Oh hi Tai great to see you again quick question WHY DID YOU BRING YOUR TWO YOUNG DAUGHTERS TO THE MURDER TOWN? 

Hey Tai second question what do you mean you went and had a kid with my long-lost sister 

Whole side plot involving Ruby and Yang meeting Weiss and Blake who grew up here. Cue culture clash and the kids helping the adults out on their messed up adventure 

Blake: “You won’t believe me if I tell you... no one does... it’s just too horrible...” Yang: “Oh you mean the supernatural entity that wants to devour you and frequently finds its way across the town via the sewers? Yeah. Dad filled us in on the drive up.” 

James takes all of .5 seconds to start bickering with Oz again, mostly on how to handle the situation. The Losers know they’re really back together once the shouting starts

Bart greets Glynda with an enthusiastic “I finally got diagnosed and you would not believe---I need you to sit, honey, this is gonna take a while” speech and she’s so happy to do it

Peter still has his ax. It comes in handy 

[trainthief]

Hey I was wondering if you'd ever consider doing like a top 20 fav classical music albums or composers list or something. Obviously if that just sounds stressful disregard this but I know you are like, into classical music & I grew up with my parents playing it & recently got, like, into the classical station but aside from like 3 artists I like I don't know where to start & I like your blog and would be interested in hearing about like, your taste

Sorry for responding to this so late, I’ve had a real week and I wanted to make sure I had time to put some thought into answering this ask. I’d definitely love to help, I always like recc’ing classical stuff to people! The idea of 20 absolute all time favorites is a difficult one for me because I love so much stuff and it’s really difficult to compare like… Caroline Shaw’s modern experimental chorale stuff to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Anyway, instead I will give you some full length pieces in different styles that I think are great for new listeners, and explain a little about what each one is doing and what I love about it, and some more pieces I recommend if you enjoy what you’re hearing. Hopefully that will help! 

In no particular order: 

Appalachian Spring by Copland: Let’s just get this one out of the way up front. If you’ve been following me for any amount of time at all, you know I’m deeply in love with Copland. He essentially invented the American compositional style by adding jazz elements to the established practices, which caused an absolute uproar at the beginning of his career as people then considered it an unholy mix of high and low culture. He doubled down on this concept when he wrote “Fanfare For The Common Man” which essentially stands as a celebration of the working class and those who couldn’t afford to see the symphony anyway. He was, I should also note, both gay and Jewish. A real icon. Anyhow, although I love so much of his work and could go on forever, I consider listening to Appalachian Spring in its entirety a spiritual experience, no exaggeration. Take it on a hike, listen to it while you look at the trees and think about whatever crosses your mind, and by the time the Coda hits you… well I personally can’t tell you what experience to have, but I feel for a second like I can see and be seen. Anyway, aside from that, just good music, very pretty. If you’d like similar music that incorporated jazz effectively into classical work, I’d of course recommend another favorite of mine: Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. 

Russian Easter Festival by Rimsky-Korsakov: As a general rule of thumb, Russian composers are ALWAYS good for some drama. This piece in particular is great because it’s not only fanfare and excitement, there’s a touch of pastoral calmness that I really love (more on that as a concept later) at the beginning, but we still get plenty of wildness. There’s a frantic octave part the violins play around minute 5 that always makes me want to scream. If you like this, I’d also recommend checking out Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. The man knows how to write sexy. 

Romance in D by Berkey: I recommend this partially because it’s a lesser known and very beautiful piece, and also because it’s a good lead-in to a whole subset of classical called Furniture Music. Essentially called that - originally by the composer Satie - because it’s nice to put on in the background. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still fun to listen to, and from a compositional and performance standpoint it can still be very impressive. But it’s just good and calming and you could certainly sip tea to it in the restaurant area of a ritzy 1920’s hotel while you read a novel and ignore your rich husband asking if you’d like any marmalade. A good example of the same effect is the soundtrack to Phantom Thread. It’s also good for studying. If you like that conceptually, I’ve got a whole playlist here. 

Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky: A really excellent intro to classical and one of my favorite works, AND like the last one, also a lead-in to an informal format. Pictures was written with the idea that each song was a separate painting that the listener could imagine they were looking at in a museum. For that reason, each one has a different style and personality, and feels very descriptive and exciting. A collection of small related pieces is called a suite, but I haven’t yet been able to find a technical name for that specific kind of storytelling structure within a suite. It’s not uncommon though, and in that same vein I’d also recommend The Planets by Holst (about the planets, as you might assume), and Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens (about… yeah you get it). 

Spem in Alium by Tallis: We’re taking a wild left turn now and veering into the Christian choral tradition dating back to the 1500s. Like anyone else who isn’t even a Christian, there’s a few things about Catholicism that I’m obsessed with. Namely the hymns and the stained glass. Focusing only on the hymns, Tallis is one of the best examples of polyphonic hymnal work. Polyphonic, essentially, means that the different voices in the piece are moving around each other and will frequently change their notes in a way that will compliment - but is not necessarily in line with - the direction of the piece as a whole. It makes more sense if you just listen. The style, however, was developed in an attempt to capture the idea of the stars and planets circling each other in their own independent orbits, because at the time people had just started to turn their gaze to the sky for answers about their own lives. Aside from that very cool background, I just find the really human side of the choir format in particular paired with the elevation of music being this untouchable but powerful thing paired with the holiness of the concept paired with how awesome the acoustics of a chapel can be…. It’s just a lot. If you like this I’d also recommend Miserere Mei by Allegri, Ave Maris Stella by Dufay, and O Magnum Mysterium by Lauridsen 

Peter Grimes by Britten: Classical music is so rooted in every musical tradition, and visa versa, that it’s almost impossible to separate it conceptually from a lot of genres. Technically, “classical” refers to a period of time more than it does a genre anyway, but let’s not get pretentious about it. While we’re pushing the boundaries of what can and can’t be included in this list, let’s talk Opera, and specifically Peter Grimes. When asked to describe it, Britten said it was “a subject very close to my heart—the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.” More specifically the struggle was an allegory for gay oppression, and ironically Britten wrote the lead role with his lifelong partner Peter Pears - an opera singer - in mind. To give a taste without giving too much away, the Prologue establishes that Grimes, a fisherman, is being questioned over the death of his apprentice. The townspeople are all convinced before the questioning even begins that he must have done it, but the coroner decides the death was accidental. Grimes is let free and advised not to get another apprentice, but he of course ignores this…. If the vocal side of opera doesn’t do it for you, there are 4 Sea Interludes from this work that are really great independently. If you want even more opera with even more drama, I’d recommend looking at Tosca or Turandot both by Pucccini. If you think classic opera is too high brow and you want something a little sillier, try Mozart’s Magic Flute. If you want something more new age and weird, try listening to Two Boys by Muhly or selections from Einstein on the Beach by Glass (but probably not all 5 hours, Knee Play 5 and Spaceship would be my top 2). 

Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral” by Beethoven: I mentioned earlier when describing the Russian Easter Festival that I love a piece with pastoral calmness. Getting back to that point, I haven’t ever seen one word that’s commonly used to describe this particular sense in a piece, but I personally call it a Pastoral after Beethoven’s 6th. In general, the symphony is one of my favorites as a composer and listener, especially given that it’s really just about taking a walk in nature which is one of only 3 themes music should have anyway in my opinion. A good amount of my music is written with this feeling in mind. Aside from all that context, the first movement in particular is very nice, passionate but not sensational, and is just about being excited to be outside. Nothing wrong with that. This subset of music is probably the most informal of all the ones I’ve listed so far, but if you’d like more “Pastorals,” or pieces that have a nice calm passion to them, I’d also highly recommend Enigma Variations: Nimrod by Elgar, Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis by Vaughan Williams, Once Upon A Time In America by Morricone, Musica Celestis by Kernis, and of course again Appalachian Spring by Copland. (I would also be legally sent to jail if I didn’t mention that while we’re on the subject of Beethoven, his 9th Symphony is generally considered one of the greatest achievements in classical music). 

Rite of Spring by Stravinsky: A lot of these pieces have been good jumping off points into different musical concepts, but with this one I’m sticking my description to the initial piece itself. I got the chance to email with a composer I admire and he at one point described composition not in the sense of writing something “smart”, but in writing something “detailed”. The Rite of Spring is a really great example of detailed composition. It’s extremely experimental with its time changes - essentially the way that you should be counting your notes as a musician constantly changes and always into a pattern that’s difficult to keep track of - and also with its chord structure. The music itself can be jarring and odd to listen to but the composition wasn’t random and when studied shows an obsessive elbows-deep involvement in the work that I really admire. It might not surprise you to hear, however, that at the initial performance the audience was so furious that the lighting technician had to continually flash the lights to confuse them, out of fear of a riot. If you’d like something a bit more fun to listen to by the same composer, however, Firebird is a good one. And if you’d like another great piece that was completely booed off the stage at its premier, I’d recommend Grand Pianola by Adams. 

Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev: While we’re in the general vicinity of ballet, I should get into that deeper. Ballets can have some of the most fun music to listen to because the timing is required to be so much more specific. Romeo and Juliet is a lot of fun, particularly the “Montagues and Capulets” and “Masks” sections. Another great ballet is, of course, The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky. I’d also recommend Don Quixote by Minkus, and Rodeo by Copland…. I know I know 

Violin Concerto in D by Tchaikovsky: I said Russians bring the drama, and it’s doubly so when it’s a gay Russian. This piece is a classic example of the solo concerto format, which is a staple of classical as a whole. The setup is a single player on whatever instrument the piece is written for accompanied by an orchestra, and is usually a showcase of technical skill by the soloist. This one in particular is basically THE turning point in a violinist’s studies and just about every violinist learns it as soon as they’re capable of taking it on. Personally I still vividly remember when my teacher finally gave it to me, it’s a very specific sense of accomplishment. Similar examples of the solo concerto format on different instruments would be Piano Concerto in F by Rachmaninoff, and Oboe Concerto in C by Mozart, both of which I absolutely love. 

The Revd Mustard His Installation Prelude by Muhly: I’ve gone on forever so I’m trying to be quick. Nico Muhly is one of my favorite modern composers and Revd Mustard combines his classic ecstatic and constantly moving style with an organ, which I’m a sucker for. Contemporary classical in his style can be difficult to listen to because it’s gotten very experimental and as a result, very complicated. But if you don’t go into it with the expectation that you’re going to hear a structured and logical Mozart-like piece and you instead surrender your opinion until the whole thing has come together for you, it can be really interesting at the very least. As a side note, Nico has collaborated with Sufjan, Bjork, Jonsi, Teitur…. lots of people. You’ve certainly heard him before even if you didn’t know it. For more classical from the last few decades I’d recommend Partita for 8 Singers by Shaw, Tissue No. 7 by Glass, Different Trains by Reich, the Red Violin Concerto by Corigliano (especially because I just saw it live a few days ago and am still reeling), Perpetuum Mobile by Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by Part. Each of which is vastly different, stylistically speaking, but all of which I really love. And for more organ listen to one of my favorite pieces of all time, Symphony 3 by Saint Saens. 

Ok, you know what? I’m cutting myself off because I’ve gone on forever. If you haven’t been put off of asking me questions entirely by now, please feel free if you want even more recommendations in a specific style, or want to know more about something you enjoy. Clearly I love talking about this. Hope that helped!

[haberdashing]

Since some of you expressed interest in hearing about my OCs, here is the promised rambling about them!

Note: I’m leaving out ones that I’ve already published fic for, and there are probably (definitely) more that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Putting this under a readmore since it's rather long.

First, the fandom OCs that I haven’t written fic for yet:

I’ve made a few posts referencing Ophelia Jane Smith, but I haven’t given any general description of her, so here goes.

She’s my character in a Pokemon RPG campaign, with @lordlyhour as a fellow player and @verldra as the DM. (If you’re intrigued by the idea of a Pokemon RPG, I can throw a copy of the rulebook and associated info your way, just say the word!)

She’s a twin- or was, anyway, the tense changes depending on who you ask. (Her name wasn’t actually chosen for the Shakespeare reference, but because I was poking around on baby name sites looking for twin names, and found the suggestion of Ophelia and Ezra, which both mean “help” but from different languages of origin.) See, when she was... seven or eight or so (haven’t quite pinned down the timing), she went for a walk in the woods and lost track of her brother. And nobody ever saw him again... at least, not in human form. But while searching, Ophelia did find a Phantump that felt strangely familiar, and- knowing, perhaps, about the lore that Phantumps are the ghosts of children lost in the woods- she decided that the Phantump was her brother transformed, and brought him home and treated him as such from then on.

(...this backstory was approved specifically with the caveat that the Phantump in question is NOT actually her brother. Sorry, Ophelia, everything you think you know is a lie. Whoops.)

Also, like most Pokemon protagonists, by the time she heads off on her journey she has a mother but no father in the picture. In Ophelia’s case, a few months after... whatever happened to Ezra, her father left for what she had assumed was a business trip (her father is/was a freelance occult specialist, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to leave abruptly to go on a trip to where his expertise was needed), but he never came back. Ophelia’s mother knows more about what happened to him than Ophelia does, but she gets upset whenever the topic is broached, so Ophelia still doesn’t know what exactly became of him.

On the topic of her parents: Ophelia’s mom is the town medic for the little town in Orre where she resides, and as mentioned above, her father was an occult specialist; Ophelia’s inherited some of the personality of them both. Like her father, she loves to learn new things, even if the knowledge isn’t something terribly practical, and is fascinated with the occult (much to her mother’s chagrin); like her mother, she cares deeply about helping people and Pokemon and wants to make the world a better place, at least in some small way.

The campaign’s still in its early days, but right now her team consists of “Ezra” the Phantump and a Houndour from the woods near her hometown that willingly joined her team and was given the nickname Queen.

(I’d promise that these aren’t all going to be this long, but... well...)

The other fandom OC I haven’t touched via fic yet is Franklin Clark, who’s from the world of the Avarice AU. He’s Ford’s first reincarnation, and is as much of a nerd as you would imagine based on that information. He’s also black, has a very noticeable case of vitiligo (mostly on his face and neck, with some spots on his chest and upper arm as well), has a single mother (his dad died shortly after he was born) who struggles to keep their family in the lower-middle-class range rather than plunging into poverty... And he lives in the small town of Mud Bluffs, Arkansas.

...yeah, his school years would be tough enough even without getting into the whole “friends with a demon” thing. As it is, well... at least he gets good grades?

He’s an only child, but is somewhat close with his relative Ellie, who is technically his niece even though she was born a couple months before him. (Weird family trees are weird.) As time goes by, he eventually gets to know the Pines family as well, and learns more about who exactly this “Ford” person was and why it’s such a big deal to Stan/Mercuriat that they have the same soul.

As an aside, his name is Franklin. If you call him Frank, he’ll ignore you, or at least try to do so. And the only two people who get to call him Frankie are his mom and Stan, and even then he rolls his eyes and plays annoyed half the time.

On to the original OCs! Otherwise known as characters in search of a story... or, really, characters for whom I have a small snippet of story in mind but have no idea how to turn that into a whole Thing.

I’ll start this section with Scott Carlin, who I came up with way back in high school and hadn’t touched for some time before I started thinking about him again for some reason a couple weeks ago.

I can’t decide whether I’m going to use real place names and such in the story I have in mind or fictionalize them all, but for the sake of comprehension I’ll use the real names in this description.

Scott Carlin’s a teenage genius with particular aptitude for math and science who skipped a grade or two to get into college. He really wanted to get into a top-tier school- Caltech, MIT, Harvard- but all of those schools didn’t accept him, so he ends up going to NYU, or a school like it- not a BAD school per se, but not what he was really hoping for. It doesn’t help that it’s annoyingly close to his home in NYC when all he wants to do is revel in being away from his less-than-supportive father and their small, cramped apartment.

Another thing that annoys Scott is that of all the roommates he could’ve been placed with, he got stuck with Ryan (last name tbd because the one my high school self picked is super unsubtle). Ryan seems in many ways to be the opposite of Scott- he’s super-wealthy, takes luxuries for granted, and spends more time partying than studying. What Scott doesn’t quite realize until some ways into the story is that there’s more to Ryan than meets the eye- yes, he’s a rich kid, but he’s also something of a genius himself. (I imagine Ryan as being a bit like a young Tony Stark- yes, he’s brilliant, but he hides that part of himself often, being content to be seen as a rich playboy alone.)

If I stick with the story idea I came up with in high school, the plot starts with Scott, who’s bored with his classes and needs to occupy himself with some project or another, cobbles together a machine that theoretically could act as a time machine. He turns it on, not really expecting it to work... but it does.

...It also explodes in the process, stranding him several decades into the future.

Scott struggles to find a way to get back to his own time while learning what he can from the future, including the surprising (or at least, surprising to Scott) news that his old roommate Ryan turned out to be quite the successful entrepreneur.

All I’ve decided thus far while thinking about this story lately is that Scott’s trans and mixed-race, and that the love interest I had initially thrown into the narrative is entirely unnecessary.

Next up is Niklass (last name tbd, though it’s possible that he doesn’t go by a traditional last name, or any at all), who I first came up with in high school as well.

Niklass can’t lie. Or, more specifically, he cannot say something that he knows or believes to be untrue.

If you were to ask Niklass about this, he’d tell you that he was something of a spoiled brat as a kid, causing all sorts of problems at school and then lying when asked by his father what he had done, leaving his father more disenchanted with the school than with his son. Eventually, one of his teachers- the one who specialized in the study of magic- got sick of having to put up with Niklass’ chronic lying and cast a spell on him; Niklass woke up one day and found that when he tried to tell a lie, the words just wouldn’t come out. His father was (understandably) not happy about this, and tried to get the teacher to reverse the spell, but to no avail.

All of this is, of course, true.

But what he leaves out is that his father wasn’t just some random guy who spoiled his kid- he was an evil dictator that controlled the region. And the teacher who put the spell on Niklass didn’t just get a stern talking-to, but was tortured for days, maybe weeks, in the hopes of getting him to reverse the spell and finally was killed once it became clear that the teacher wasn’t going to give in.

Niklass got into the study of magic himself, initially with the hopes of reversing the spell himself, but later on he learned to admire magic on its own merits. He never did find a way of reversing the spell, but he’s made his peace with it. What he hasn’t made peace with is his father; Niklass has spent years running as far as he can from his father, even possibly into other dimensions (that was the original story line I had in mind for him, but now I’m not so sure).

Also, if you’ve noticed some loopholes in the “cannot say what he knows/believes to be untrue” phrasing of the spell... well... let’s just say Niklass has noticed them, too. Just because he’s stopped trying to get out of the spell entirely doesn’t mean he isn’t willing to test the boundaries and use what loopholes he can find to his advantage.

Last but not least, a relatively new one among the original OCs (from college or shortly afterwards, I forget exactly), Isaac Kaufman.

Isaac was raised in a Conservative Jewish family. He’s trans, and when he came out to his family in his teenage years, they continued to misgender/deadname him repeatedly and also made it crystal-clear that once he turned 18, he was on his own, and they weren’t going to give him a cent for college.

Between student loans, scholarships, and work, Isaac was able to scrounge together enough money to go to college on his own. While there, he got involved in the party scene, using his newfound freedom to indulge in some things that his parents definitely wouldn’t have approved on.

While walking to a nearby bar to join some friends in festivities there, a mugger pulled Isaac into an alley, got out a gun, and said to give him everything he had or else he’d shoot.

Isaac had gone through some rough times before, but this was the first time that he’d really feared for his life in an immediate sense. His brain went into fight-or-flight mode, and he chose flight.

Adrenaline rushing, Isaac sprinted away from the alley, not really concerned with where he was going so long as it was away from the mugger...

...and got run over by a car.

...several blocks away from the scene of the mugging.

While in the hospital, Isaac noticed that it felt like the rest of the world was slowed down, like people were drawing out every syllable they spoke. At first he wasn’t sure what to make of it- was it a side effect of some medication they’d put him on, or his brain not quite working right because of the accident? But after a while, Isaac figured out what was really going on.

It wasn’t that the rest of the world had gotten slow; instead, he was the one who had gotten fast. Super-speed fast.

For a bit, after getting out of the hospital and struggling to coordinate his return to school, Isaac didn’t really do much with his powers, save for things like snatching an expensive bottle of wine from a store too fast for anyone to spot him. But that all changed when he happened upon an old lady who was getting held up at gunpoint by a mugger; Isaac remembered when he had been in the same situation and decided to intervene.

The old lady’s improbable escape from the mugging made local news, and one clip in particular went viral- the old lady’s statement that she couldn’t see her savior’s face or make out anything about them save for “a black blur” (he happened to be wearing black clothes that day). Isaac weighs his options and decides to embrace the name Black Blur and become the superhero that some of the media had already proclaimed him to be, fighting crime in the city whenever he can.

He also ends up becoming a philosophy professor, one who deals specifically with the subject of superheroes and others who act to carry out vigilante justice- and his view of the subject as published in papers isn’t all positive. (It’s not that he’s faking the perspective, either- Isaac does grapple with the morality of his own actions on a regular basis.) He also has a loving wife and, eventually, a daughter, and he cares for them both very, very deeply.

Balancing work, family, and superheroics might be hard for some people... but hey, Isaac’s got the time for it.

Also, word to the wise: don’t mess with his family. Just don’t. He’s got literally hundreds of plans drawn up for various things that could go wrong re: his superhero identity interfering with his personal life, and none of them end well for the one who forces his hand.

(I do actually have a few half-formed ideas for other superheroes in Isaac’s world- a college student who doesn’t realize for a while that he’s turned invisible to others’ eyes, a mother-and-daughter pair who both don’t realize that the other is also a superhero- and I’ve considered combining them all into some sort of superhero autobiography anthology, but if that ever happens, it won’t be any time soon.)