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Argh, so I sat down AGAIN to try and write some notes on the wedding, and this time wrote a story about someone else's wedding instead. Hurray for me.

Fic:: Apple (scenes from the wedding album of Jenny Flint and Madame Vastra)
by Raven
1000w, Doctor Who, Jenny/Vastra. "I understand it is not the custom of your people…"

( pater noster )

Yesterday I transposed two digits in a title number, lost a transfer, and kept almost dozing off on a stack of plans. Around five, when I had irritatedly roused the entire department to search for a deed that was, actually, exactly where I had left it a week earlier, the other trainee said, "Iona, do you think you could be coming down with something?"

Oddly, I actually feel better this morning but suspect the inevitable result of four hours' sleep is coming soon. I am staying home and resting and writing your ficlets. Here are the ones I've done already:

for philomytha, Aral and Simon and telepathy;

for ladymercury_10, Amy/Rory, huddling for warmth

for hedda62, Simon and Alys pretend to be married

for bibliotropic, the crew of Serenity and accidental-baby-acquisition

for littlered2, Doctor/River, huddling for warmth

They vary in length from drabble to 2000 words. More to come!

I smile a winsome smile at y'all and ask if anyone has a Spotify invite going begging.

Otherwise life continues complicated, I am rewatching Doctor Who and after rewatching "The Impossible Astronaut" I really, I could not sleep and by the way I have a giant ridiculous bandage on my left hand excuse typoes. I shall return shortly to 'splain and offer the cautionary tale of one woman, a vacuum cleaner and a hand with less skin on than previously.

OH MY GOD DOCTOR WHO.

( A Good Man Goes To War ) And basically I do not wish to be profound. I wish to SQUEE AT PEOPLE. And poss draw hearts around River Song. Many hearts. Lots of sparkly hearts. Hearts that are fucking awesome and save the universe. River! <3!

As predicted, despite the last-minute dashing about, no polling card came for me. I am still kicking myself hard for having been stupid enough to disenfranchise myself; so, you know, could we hold off a little on if-you-didn't-vote-you-should-be-ashamed and you-lost-every-right-to-complain-for-the-next-ever, because it's not that I don't agree with you, but I'm there in that place already, okay? I tried.

In other news, I have one exam down. As usual, I couldn't sleep till four am the night before and went for it with the barrelling force of will that sleeplessness entails, and you know, it wasn't the worst thing. It was a surprisingly humane exam - in form, rather than substance, with a hour's reading time, no writing permitted, to begin with, which is a genius idea because it forces you to think about what you're doing. Eight questions, most of them okayish, I missed the point of one of them entirely and there was another one I think didn't have a point.

(Seriously. It was the first question on the paper and I was finding it baffling, so I left it till the end and came back to it with about eleven minutes to spare. For the first eight of those I wrote a paragraph about nothing in particular, and with three minutes to spare I had a genius idea and wrote "Overbreadth!" Just like that! With the exclamation mark! And didn't deign to explain how or why or in relation to what the statute was overbroad, but you can't have everything in life. Baby E later confessed to having done almost the exact same thing, which was cheering.

Also, the one where I missed the point ( was interesting to none but other people who care about constitutional law and the Establishment Clause, so I'm cutting it )

I could write here about how everything is making me cranky - I didn't get to vote! iTunes is refusing to let me listen to music I paid for, why didn't I just torrent it! USPS want to charge me $175 to ship my books home! migraine migraine MIGRAINE! - but maybe I just won't. The music I am trying and failing to listen to is "Sigh No More", the Mumford & Sons album, and I really, really like it. It's fabulous, affirming stuff - seriously, you can sing along and feel very definitive about everything - that sounds sort of like a cross between Dar Williams and the Gaslight Anthem. Like the Gaslight Anthem got on stage, anyway, with a trumpet and some string instruments, and tried to pretend they were an English folk band.

To alleviate the cranky, I have been reading aaaaaaall the Vorkosigan fic, as you've all probably guessed, so I will leave you with some recs so this isn't just a post about how I have a headache and my life is so unfair.

Aral Vorkosigan's Dog by philomytha
I mentioned this the other day, when I was still reading it, so this is the rec. I really, really enjoyed this. It's novel-length, about Illyan and Aral during the Escobaran war, and like I said the other day, it's sort of like a love story, only with a different kind of love at the centre of it: it's about how Illyan the neutral, human-computer observer finally takes a side, and why. It's about loyalty, and fidelity, and a kind of ownership. There's this scene in it, which I completely adore, where Illyan, exhausted, falls asleep on a chair and during the course of the night slips off it - and on waking, berates himself for literally sleeping on the floor by Aral Vorkosigan's feet. It's both hilarious and very poignant.

A Deeper Season / What Passing Bells by lightgetsin and sahiya.
Is there anyone left who hasn't read these by now? Regardless, they're great: both novel length, with many side-pieces and sequels. Miles/Gregor, going AU from Memory, and while they do wipe Laisa from existence they don't, to my delight, wipe out Ekaterin - she's there and her usual amazing self. My favourite of all the bits and bobs is A Place To Stand, a lovely, fascinating short story. (The funny thing is, these are all so good that I love them to pieces despite the fact I don't buy the major premise: Miles and Gregor are adorable, and no they're not that related, but I have trouble getting behind the pairing when the two of them are foster-brothers; effectively, they have the same parents. I mention this only in case someone else has the same hang-up and isn't reading for that reason.)

Warrant For A Day's Leave by jetta_e_rus.
Aral/Simon set shortly after the latter gets out of prison. Ridiculously sweet and heartwarming and in no way ignores Cordelia. I really liked it.

The Earring by philomytha
I read this and immediately recced it to gavagai, because omgyes. The author's summary is "Aral and Cordelia on a state visit to Beta Colony", which is true as far as it goes, but. Yes. Much love.

Oh, and while I'm here, I got three stories from Remix! Home (the don't look back remix), a remix of my story Pomegranate, which is about Uhura, and Amanda, and tells me things I didn't know about them.It's short and lovely.

And from Remix Madness: The Gardener (the Singing TARDIS Overdub), a remix of Sweetpeas, and I love this SO MUCH, it's about Rory and it's about the TARDIS, oh, so much love; and Be My Love (the first and last time remix), a remix of will you stay with me, will you be my love, and it's Doctor/River and again with the LOVE. I suspect these two are written by the same person. Time will tell.

Right. I need to go back to work sometime ever.

Forward momentum, chaps! Do not even ask about the issues I had getting into the city this morning. Do not even ask. Luckily I have a fairy godmother in the shape of Shim. But I am in New York on macadamanaity's couch and I am blissed out on rum and wine and some other things.

Also ( DOCTOR WHO )

Tomorrow! Brunch, and probably another windswept grey New York day, and I'm cheerful. It feels good to be in the city; earlier in the day I got a Lindt bunny for the Siren and a cheap necklace from Forever 21 for myself, and I got a purple nail polish from somewhere on Madison and just felt the small-town itch lift. Feeling much better, and so so glad I didn't cancel this trip down. Back up north in the evening, but let's not talk about that.

Precisely three weeks from now I will be half-asleep above the mid-Atlantic. So close, so far. In the meantime I am subsisting entirely off peanut butter, whisky, gummy vitamins and battered Galaxy bars, and spending my time either working, failing to sleep, reading decade-old SG-1 fic or wailing on Shim down the phone. I have done approximately a quarter of my outlining and a quarter of my paper writing (my professor writes: "Nice start - why don't you write about due process?", to which my response has not so far been "DO I LOOK LIKE SOMEONE WHO KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT CON LAW DO I" only through a magnificent quantity of self-control.

On Thursday morning I got up at twelve, stared at the ceiling, went back to sleep. Then hit said ceiling at a hundred miles per hour half an hour later, hit the shower, found clothes, managed to have earrings in and boots on, even, by the time the South African Siren wandered in, looked around and said, "...you just got up, didn't you."

We ran out to the car, which was stuffed with people. "I drove past them all at the bus stop waiting for buses that wouldn't come," the Siren explained, and the bleakness of the sky seemed particularly telling. "It's a day to be kind, I think."

I agreed, squished myself in, and was a model of togetherness and poise, until we got to where we going, and I jumped up and down and shouted, "Shit, I forgot my TICKET!" just in time to be introduced to the Siren's mother, who is looking more regretful by the moment at leaving a southern hemisphere summer. ("I'm so glad she's making friends," she told me gently, a little later, while I was desperately trying to give off the impression of being put-together young professional rather than half-asleep work-crazed caffiene-deprived woman.) The Siren, who is all kindness, really, clapped me on the back, refused to be intimidated by my sheer grey-weather incompetence, ran me home to get my ticket and brought me back again.

Explaining Thanksgiving to foreigners is difficult, as my adviser swiftly seems to have discovered ("We thought the Native Americans suffered," said YJ, an earnest chap of Chinese descent over dinner, and he gave up) but nevertheless, the law school took pity on us all and said they would pay for us to have lunch with the graduate-and-international-students' association. Lunch was, actually, surprisingly nice. Tobermory and Baby E had kept some room for us, and we went to get the food. It was informal - you had to serve yourself and eat off melamime tables - but the food was extortionate in quantity, and the sweet potato was sweet and the turkey wasn't dry and there was good coffee. The desserts were lacklustre, but you can't have everything in life.

Halfway through lunch Tobermory stood up and said, "I'd like to say, I'm thankful for all my friends. Except Iona" - to laughter and applause and people making affectionate faces at me.

I waved a regal hand and ate more pie. A lot has changed in the last fifteen weeks of my life, but it certainly hasn't all been bad.

Afterwards the Siren dropped me off home, and I should add my apartment is a biohazard right now - it's full of discarded articles, sweet wrappers, unwashed dishes and laundry, and to add final insult I had a wee incident with a hole-punch and everything's covered in chads, so help me God - but it was looking suprisingly cosy against the backdrop of the bleakest day I've lived through recently. One oddity of the last week or so has been strange, sporadic power cuts: five- or ten-minute intervals heralded by nothing but a sub-audible whine. Because I spent a good deal of my formative years in Delhi, I have an instinct for a loss of power, even in daylight; it's like the world around you has taken a breath and not let it out, an unspoken question hanging on the suddenly charged air - and then you look up and there are no figures displaying on the microwave or whatever, but just for that second, you know, without being told. That's what Thanksgiving daytime was like, on a bigger scale - bleakly grey and freezing cold of course, a cold I associate with bad things coming, and that loss-of-power desertion; no one on the streets, something missing at the heart of things. It's a lonely place, sometimes, this.

So I got home to my tip of an apartment, and turned on all the lights, and all at once it was warm, and welcoming, and nice, despite the bleak feeling outside. I curled up on the couch and got an hour or two of work done, drinking tea sent in the post, feeling rather okay about things. And once I'd done that, I called a cab and went out again.

See, I had kind of had my doubts whether this was a good idea - whether having more than one Thanksgiving meal in a day was going to get a bit Vicar of Dibley - but then I thought, you know, what the hell, I will love seeing thingwithwings and eruthros and livrelibre, and they will totally not mind if I don't do their delicious spread the justice it deserves.

That.... was not an issue. Oh, food. More turkey, sweet potato, squash, delicious salad with walnuts in it, a kind of bombastic pinot noir and my subsequent re-realisation that I can eat more than anyone else I know, especially when I am living off a diet of peanut butter and whisky. We got tipsy, talked politics - somewhat depressingly; though we rounded it off with a solid conclusion that clearly the world would be better if we became pirates and went around dispensing loot and social justice - and watched "Dalek", the first new Who episode which features Daleks. (obv.) livrelibre is in the enviable position of just starting to watch Doctor Who and is being shown it in increments. (I cannot wait to show her "Blink".)

"Dalek", actually, holds up to the rewatch. I hadn't seen it since hathy_col and I were at a con in Milton Keynes back on the weekend it first aired (I remember now, we'd been wandering around all day with little badges marked "Dalek Virgin", and the second word handily came off for the second day of the con.) I was watching it, and there's a marvellous woman in it who is Van Staten's assistant, and gets him dumped by the roadside in the end, and I was watching it thinking "...is that? Yes, it is Osiris from SG-1!"

Of course, reading back my own review of the episode from 2005, I apparently had this exact same revelation in almost the same words when watching it with Colleen. I am so smart. So I wandered home, fell asleep on my couch - and managed to move myself to my bed during the night, which is, sincerely, an achievement - and have made it through the next couple of days without what one might call major crazy. Three weeks, three weeks.

Oh, hey, scrubbing the bathroom for three hours is not guaranteed to leave you in a sunny mood, who knew. At least I have done it, and may get maybe a teeny weeny bit of my deposit back. Tomorrow, my bedroom, and the day after, the kitchen. Hello, domesticity. But my exams are over! Thank you, kind people who commented, it was good of you. I am feeling... well, not good, exactly, but a lot less stressed. When Cornell and my letting agent(s) and tutors send me emails about Things That Need Done, I do them rather than sitting in the corner to cry. It's refreshing.

(It scares me a little, though, that I will be in the US by the time my results come out. C'est la vie.)

One of the things Cornell want me to do is to write a 250-word biographical description of myself for a little booklet they're going to distribute to the faculty, containing inter alia, "my educational background, work experience, academic areas of interest, family, hobbies, career goals, etc." The memo promises that "sample biographies are enclosed", but they're... not. Anyone ever done one of these? How do you begin? Do you just put, "My name is Iona [last name], and I read PPE at Oxford, and I like science fiction and travel"? (Gosh, how tedious.) Do you even do it in the first person? I'm not even sure.

Also, I know I have academic areas of interest, but am I the only person who feels oddly illegitimate about this sort of thing? I mean, who am I to have academic areas of interest? I have one joint-honours degree and two very-rapid diplomas, it's only five years since I left school. I feel like I'm going to be in a cohort with Real People, whereas I am... not. I'm just me, for heaven's sake. I just write stories. Don't take me too seriously, I want to put, because I certainly don't.

Anyway! Speaking of stories, I am still writing ficlets - I believe we're on four down, eight to go, because two of you helpfully requested the same story - but I'm taking a break this weekend, if no one minds, for a story of my own. tau_sigma was visiting today and yesterday, and we had a lovely time. We went wandering around the Botanical Garden - which I have somehow failed to visit in five years of living in Oxford - and spent the evening drinking pink wine and watching Doctor Who, and making happy noises.

( about Doctor Who, series 5 [spoilers] )

Have two fic recs:

Vita Longa, by sam_storyteller.
Rufus Atius Ferox remembers two childhoods. This is great: long, sensitive and fabulous, and rich in the way it fills in Rory's life alongside the life of the Roman legatus.

Wondrous Strange by lixia84
Eleven/Rory, NC-17. I very rarely just delve for fic these days; I tend to stick to authors I know and reclists. But for some reason I clicked, and this was just a gem. The Doctor and Rory are out getting into trouble, and somehow they're being chased by aliens at the premiere of Puccini's Tosca, and then for some other reason there's a bathhouse, and then. Well, and then. I was impressed with the dialogue - the Doctor in particular really sounds like the Doctor - and the way the author has these two together but doesn't erase Amy at all.

What else, what else? For my leaving Oxford/the UK party, jacinthsong and I are dressing up as Kira and Dax. I have at least spent an entertaining half-hour looking at purple dresses on eBay, which has improved my mood greatly.

(Although, I've been writing this wondering why my hands feel strange - and then remembering why I remember the weird feeling. I have clear memories of Chemistry A-level and spilling NaOH on my hands, trying womanfully not to swear, while my marvellous chemistry teachers explained, meticulously, the lipid reaction going on under my skin and how it was turning my hands into soap.

Guess I know what the active ingredient in the bathroom cleaner was. Ewww.)

Back to writing, I think.

Okay, you guys, SPOILERS. This whole story is one enormous spoiler for what happens at the end of "The Big Bang". Even the title is spoilerific. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I do love Doctor Who.

Fic:: Scenes From ( ... )

by Raven
G, Doctor Who, Amy/Rory and the Doctor. Just what it says.

( Read more... )