Mahou Shoujo Emma-chan

I will try and use dreamwidth more. I will.

I'm busy gearing up for christmas now. I'd wanted everything done by christmas and worked my ass off to make that happen only to have a big piece of work land on me when I thought was in the clear which just goes to show you can't plan life and also put me into a grump for a few days. But the big job is edits on my novel so, woohoo! Novel!

I'm also working on Elite, I swear. By which I mean I'm not but I will be soon. When I was doing me 'actual work' bit I dropped it for a while but I'm in a position to do it again now (I've theroughly proven to myself that there are only so many edits you can deal with in a day without crying in the library) so I'll be trying to catch back up. I've got plot events coming up and I want to be able to post them around christmas because I know a lot of people struggle and I think it helps to know there's a fic chapter waiting there for you if you need to get away from racist grandma for a few minutes.

My racist grandma won't be coming to christmas as she's a crazy manipulative bitch who's harassed us for years and we don't speak to her any more but we will be having my nephew, who will be three weeks old so perhaps not old enough to appreciate the full spirit of christmas but very cute.

Now I'm going to stop procrastinating on here and go buy new earbuds since mine dropped to pieces when I took them out of my bag after work. I'm cursed for earbuds so I never know if I should buy decent ones and take the risk or just accept my fate and buy the cheapest in the shop.

I had a pretty nice day today.

It was sunny, which always helps. Fridays are nice at work.

In a lot of ways, I wish I could go back and do my career in the other order. For the uninitiated, I trained in science, failed at a PhD (mental health *shakes fist*), re-trained as a teacher, didn't like it, work as a TA. I think if I'd done my years as a TA before I'd trained as a teacher, I'd have stuck with the profession more. There are a lot of things I do and do well now that I couldn't do when I finished my PGCE. Maybe I just take longer to aquire skills. That's okay. We grow at our own paces.

Anyway, I now actually do more teaching work than TA work which, well, it is what it is. Technically I'm a higher level teaching assistant (most of the time) so I don't get a teacher salary but my pay is higher than a TA pay. And on Friday I get year 5 to myself all day.

So we do some RE, some PSHE, some ICT, and chill. It's pretty cool. My classroom control is so much better than it was when I graduated. I enjoy it.

So, it was a chill day. We've been doing this happiness challenge and this week it involved singing Yellow Submarine. So I learnt it last night on the Ukulele and took it in. I played it on my Uke and they sang and played some other instriuments. It was really nice. Then when they had golden time and I'd marked their books, I chilled out with my ukulele and practiced. The only thing is I need a really cheap low quality ukulele they can pass around now because they all want a go but I don't want them to trash mine.

Also, at dinner we had a discussion about diversity. It was a bit of a minefield because middle aged middle class while ladies. Who aren't all bad and sometimes surprise me but are generally pretty conservative as a bunch. I didn't managed to talk them around to 'we should adress homosexuality BEFORE they start calling each other gayboy and not after' but I did at least manage 'we should have some lgbt books in the school library'. So, yay! And I managed to sucessfully make the point that because we don't (that we know of) have any queer parents actually means we have more of an onus to provide queer role models through fiction because otherwise the only talk these kids might get about the queer community is negative.

So, if anyone has any books they can think of suitable for kids of 11 or lower dealing with LGBT issues, hit me up. I'm gonna see if I can get a cheap copy of 'and tango makes three' at least for them before I leave.

In less good news, my Grandma continues to be crazy. Long story short, she's controlling and emotionally manipulative. As long as I can remember she's faked emergencies to stop us having family holidays and make up visit her at times when we're busy with other things. Her relationship with my mum (this is my maternal grandma) is very disfunctional and after my Grandad died last year, my mum was literally on the edge of a nervous breakdown. My Grandma continues to be selfish and manipulative. She sends letters because we won't answer the phone because she's just abusive. My mum actually had a go at engaging with her through the letters and it took three of them to turn into 'you have to come down here two hours a night every night or I'll know you never even loved me' levels of emotional abuse so we stopped that.

Anyway, this week she'd taken up writing to work instead, which is new levels of not good. And has apparently involved social services as we got a letter asking if we'd like to entre recolciliation. Which, if she was a reasonable person, we might. But she's literally driven my Great Aunt to the point where she's had a stroke and had to cut off contact too and everyone we can think of has talked to her about her behaviour and she just carries on so I don't think there's anything to gain. If she hasn't changed already she won't now.

So that was less good.

But Ukulele and some good stuff on diversity. I'm going to feel more confident talking about diversity now anyway knowing the rest of the staff are behind me, at least on paper.

So, I have evacuated all my stuff from lj. This now contains everything from the lj of my university years through the present. Not my college lj, weirdly. It won't transfer. It's like it's trying to save me from myself...

So, an update on me. I'm still Emma. I still like in England with my parents. I still work in a school.

My current fandoms are Check Please and Hockey RPF. Fictional hockey players have taken over my life to the extent that I now pretend to understand the Stanley Cup and went to watch lots of IRL English ice hockey. The wrong team put the puck in the net and I was disapoint. Fuck the Steelers, basically. And not in the nice way. I also seem to have taken up skating. I am...okay. Like, I thought I was doing pretty well then I took my sister out ice skating and she's a natural and I'm there in a corner like "stupid sister, didn't even want to skate well anyway" but also proud because look how awesome my sister is XD But, anyway, the thing about hobbies is you're allowed to suck as them as long as you still enjoy them so there's that.

The other big news is that next year, things will actually change. Next accademic year, that is, becasue I'm going back to uni! Again! Since teaching fell through, I'm going to study for an MA in creative writing. At least 25% of the motivation of this is getting out of my parent's house permenantly. The other 75% is I want to write better. Even if all write better eventually translates to for me is writing better fanfiction and I never managed to make my living through writing, I'm at peace with that. Though, of course, if someone did want to pay me to sit around and write about the things I make up all day that would be beyond awesome. But the idea is to move out and stay moved out. Translate the MA into, at least, hopefully a better job than my current one. Like, a job where I support myself and don't live with my parents, not too much to ask.

Though, to bring it right up to date, I'm glad I was here this week. My mum, the patron saint of 'I'll be fine', I'll-be-fined herself into hospital. She decided her infection would wait until the doctors opened instead of going to A+E with it and she was wrong. Very wrong. Trip to the urgent care centre and hospital for 6 days wrong. Where she also got a good talking to about actually taking care of her diabetes (which she I'll-be-fine's). So she's home now but I spent the week rushing around keeping my dad running so he could be normal for her. And now it looks like I'll spend this week rushing around stopping my mum overdoing it since I came down this morning and ended up having to call in late to work and run around doing a lot of errands for her to stop her doing them herself. Calm yourself mother, you've just been in hospital!

That's me, anyway. I will now try and use this thing more often. Because a place to brain dump is a good thing.

If you would like to read something I'm writing - I just posted a chapter of this -

I'm on my way (21839 words) by Signe_chan
Chapters: 4/6
Fandom: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Eric Bittle/Jack Zimmermann
Characters: Eric Bittle, Jack Zimmermann, Shitty Knight, Original Male Character(s), Justin "Ransom" Oluransi, Adam "Holster" Birkholtz, John Johnson, William "Dex" Poindexter, Derek "Nursey" Nurse, Chris "Chowder" Chow, Caitlin Farmer
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, Road Trip, life doesn't end at graduation, reconnecting, mentions of divorce, other minor pairings - Freeform
Summary:

In the ten years since graduation, things have changed for Eric. After Jack was traded away Eric married, adopted a son, divorced. Now he's barely scraping by and the last thing he expects is his ex, Jack, and his ex's best friend Shitty, showing up on his doorstep to sweep him away on a road trip.

After all, it's too late for second chances, isn't it?

So, back from London. I had a really good time there but immediately followed it up with a few bad brain days, which I think is as much to do with expecting the bad brain days and working myself up about it as anything else. Still don't regret going.

Brain news first, I've started keeping a journal at the end of the day, writing down the bad brain things but then making myself reflect on the things that made me happy and writing them down to. I got a few CBT books on London specifically for dealing with medical anxiety but it's weird becasue it's like my brain think they'll make me worse instead of better and I don't even. Don't worry, I'll bully myself into reading them.

And now, happy things! London!

I met up with a lot of awesome people. Monday night I met up with the 9worlds fanfiction people and we had a nice meal and talked some and it was great. I love spending time with fangirls. And then Tuesday night I went to visit a friend who's just bought a house (which is an awesome house) and I looked at her house in awe. It was good fun and great to just casually see friends. I also went to Expo on Sunday and it's always nice to be surrounded by geeks. I walked around London on Monday and went to Regents Park. Tuesday I did the tower of London. Saturday I went to Tatty Devine and bought this and this.

And also on Saturday night I went to see Les Mis.

Which might seem like an odd choice for someone with depression but I'd been wanting to see it. I saw the movie when it came out and it's kind of a staple of theater so I paid my money and went to see it and...

...and did I miss in the film that Grataire is really gay for Enjolras? I mean, so gay? I think they toned down his drunkeness in the movie, but that seems to cheapen him somehow. I mean, I haven't read the books but how I read the musical, Enjolras is the ideal. He is the dream of a better society but he doesn't understand the individual. The rises and falls of a small, ordinary life. Grantaire is the people. He knows from the first that they're doomed to fail but he stands with them becasue he wants them to win, he wants to believe. Graintaire is the one who encourages Marius to sing about his love. He's the one who goes to Marius after Eponine dies. He's the human heart of it and that's why he's constantly drunk, becasue he's the one who understands they're going to a tragedy, not a rebellion. That's why he doesn't work as well if he isn't drink, he isn't as tragic.

And the song Drink with Me, that was different in the movie, right? Because on the stage, Grantaire sang his verse to Enjolras and then broke down and Enjolras came to comfort him and it's the only time he comforts anyone and...

So gay. Such love. Wow.

And now it's Nano so I should be making words. I'm not sure how winning nano's going to go this time becasue...yeah...but we'll have a crack at it. I remember doing it lsat year and being so excited and now I'm really not but I'm going to try anyway because if I don't try then what's the point?

Ok, first, I'm going to try to sell you Carry On.

Carry On is the latest book my Rainbow Rowell. Who is a beautiful individual. She wrote Fangirl which you might have come across about a year ago which was a great portrayal of fandom and how fandom isn't a force for bad in the world. Carry On is the most meta of all meta, it's basically the fic the fictional character in the book wrote, which was based on Harry/Draco fic. So in a lot of ways Carry On is a love song to Harry/Draco but if you don't ship that, it's still good. It's a love song to Harry Potter in general and it's a love song to all of Fandom.

I don't want to spoil it too much but Rowell writes romance so I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you there's a romance element. And it's executed beautifully. You won't know if you're reading original work or the best kind of fanfiction and you won't care. The romance is adorable, the characters are great. The sidekick character is a south-Asian girl who's a bit pudgy but kicks all of the ass in the world. This book basically addresses more or less every criticism that fandom has collectively leveled at Harry Potter over the years.

And the writing is Rowell so it's beautiful. She has real emotional punch and lush descriptions that somehow feel true and sometimes it's more like poetry than prose and basically I want to marry her. Her writing is so good.

So, go read it. Then come fangirl with me becasue I have a need.

Now meme.

5 –If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?

I'm half-assing this one as the short answer is no.

6 – When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?

...In my original writing I tend to write female, in my fanfiction I tend to write male. Though it's debatable how true to the way masculinity is performed in society my men come. It's my personal belief that when a lot of us write men in slash pairings what we're really doing is exploring what it's like to live in an equal world as it's almost impossible to write male/female romance without politics coming into it somewhere. And we know that because we live it. But when we write slash, we don't have to worry about that. We can conveniently forget that bit for a while and forget that sometimes being a woman in society sucks and, yeah, this is hugely problematic because among other things it accepts (normally) white man as some kind of default the rest of us can explore humanity through but it's also freeing in that we can tell the kind of romance and erotic stories we want and also in that we can redefine masculinity in our own way.

( Rest of the questions under the cut )

3 – For each of the fandoms from day two, what were your favorite characters to write?

I'm not doing ALL those fandoms. I'll pick a few I want to witter about.

Avengers

The obvious answer is Clint Barton since I have written a million fic from his POV. I actually prefer Phil to Clint in my pairing but since I prefer Phil, I like to write from Clint's POV and be in love with Phil. Also, Clint is a complete human disaster which I can relate to. Love me some Clint.

Supernatural

Cas was always my favourite character but he was never my favourite to write. I loved writing Kevin which is why that show lost me the minute it killed him. I noped right the fuck out of there.

Glee

Kurt Hummel. I would NEVER have watched this show for so long if it wasn't for Kurt. I mean, there were some secondary characters I loved but it was Kurt's voyage from that one queer kid in the back of the room struggling to mean someone to someone to this wonderful, confident, mature young man that I really loved. I wrote several Kurt pairings becasue I'd ship him with just about anyone who'd be good to him because I loved him. That's, again, why I bailed from the fandom when I did (when he left for college) becasue the writers only knew three types of story - will they/won't they, she's having a baby, they're breaking up (again) and since Kurt and Blaine were together and neither of them could get pregnant it was clear where that was going and it wasn't Kurt/Happiness and though the show had hurt him before, it felt like an earned hurt, like growing pains, not something there for the dramaz!

Harry Potter

Neville Longbottom. God I love Neville. Neville/Draco. He's a down-to-Earth boy from my neck of the woods, what's not to like. One of my secret desires is to record a podfic of Lust over Pendle.

Enterprise

Getting into old fandoms now but I thought I'd leave this one in as it was a formative one for me. I shipped Reed/Mayweather, so stuffy British guy with hot young man XD Loved it. I liked writing them becasue they were such a contrast but they had this odd affection in the show and this history in the extra-canon material and I enjoyed playing with that.

Bleach

Another of what I'd define as one of my big fandoms. I wrote reams of Ichigo/Renji/Rukia. It's notable as one of the first time that I shipped a multiple pairing seriously. I just didn't enjoy any of the various pairings alone as much as I enjoyed them together. And the text set it up greatly, though probably unintentionally. I just wanted them running around together kicking ass and Ichigo being like, how the fuck did I end up with these two idiots?

Hellsing

The only fandom I've written a lot of femslash in. Also one of my early long-fic. I used to ship Seras Victoria with Integra Hellsing. Because Integra was awesome. Who doesn't like ladies kicking ass and making powerful vampires do their bidding and I kind of wanted Seras to lick her shoes.

Pacific Rim

NEWTON! Seriously, Newt is my baby. I love him. He's such a little shit and he's so inappropriate and I love him for all that. I love writing his voice and how everything can be that big quicker like things are going through his mind so fast there's no time to filter them before they get out and...yeah, just love him.

Soul Eater

Chrona! Canon person of indeterminate gender who's gender was (at my time in the fandom) never CLEARLY revealed. There were strong hints but nothing 100% conclusive and I loved that. Most of the fandom fixed their gender but I wrote them as genderqueer and shipped with Maka who had 0 fucks to give about Chrona's gender.

( All the questions under the cut )

Okay, so I've avoided talking about this because I got so upset by the fan reaction to Age of Ultron - how fandom went in to destroy it and did so. How they tore Whedon and Natasha appart for having a woman raised to be a killer by the extreme equivalent of Soviet Russia express the belief that infertility made her monstrous when the text then followed through by proving she was NOT monstrous. So I know what it is to see something you enjoyed torn apart. And I try not to but frankly I've been surprised that all those voices who were so quick to hang up Whedon were silent on this.

So I'm going to talk and it's not going to be complementary. Feel free not to read if that's what you need to do. I make no judgement of you. Also, should be obvious but this does not constitutes value judgement on people who enjoyed Ant Man. Our preconceptions and politics affect our reading of the text. There is no right or wrong way etc.

So, I guess I'll do my preconceptions first. I was watching with a feminist lense as a result of the above criticism and also the grudging of Janet Van Dyne, who is awesome. I also had a pre-concieved and largely irrational hatred of Hank Pym. I was openly sceptical but had heard good things and was ready to be convinced.

I wasn't convinced.

My non-feminist observation was that it felt like a film outside its cultural moment. It felt like a less charming Iron Man and I feel like if I'd seen it before Pacific Rim and Jupiter Ascending and Mad Max were things I wouldn't have reacted so negatively to it. It felt like a call-back to the times when a female as an action hero would have just been a thing that didn't happen and Hope being vaguely useful would have been a victory. But I feel like I expect more now. I want my men and women up there kicking ass together. I wanted Ant Man and the Wasp.

I could talk a lot about the idea of the daughter who must be protected (the main motivation for both male characters) or about female agency and the fact they used fridging one woman to justify side-lining a different character. But as much as those are problems, the film could have come back from them. I watched this film with hope in my heart because I wanted the fucking thing to get better.

The point I lost hope was the scene where Pym reveals why he's been trying to protect Hope. She thinks on it. In this moment, all I wanted was for Hope to say 'no, that's bullshit'. For her to be angry. For Pym to pull out the Wasp suit. For hope to go in with him. If they'd gone that route I'd have been 100% there.

Instead they went another rout. Instead she kind of accepted his reasoning and he kind of apologised and accepted that she's a grown-ass woman but this had 0 imp!ication for the plot going forward other than her accepting that Scott was the right guy to do it because reasons. Instead of, you know, them letting the man they were blackmailing into helping them go and letting Hope do it as she's not only the most competent but genuinely believes in their mission.

So Hope remains where she is, consigned to hang out in the background and make out with the male lead at the end. A wasted opportunity.

And yes, I saw the post-credit scene. Too little too late. Had that happened half way through I could have forgiven the rest of the movie its faults. But it didn't. Instead we have a story about protecting women and a competent woman consigned to training a less competent man to do what she could because reasons.

Hi, new friending meme people. Sorry it's taken me a while to reply XD

Last weekend I was in Liverpool for my "I'm nearly 30" party. I actually don't turn 30 until October but this was conveniently between me and another friend who just turned 30 so we partied. And by partied I mean ate an excessive amount of junk food, hung out in a rented house and played various card and board games. I cant remember when gaming became the default activity for a group of friends but I like it!

By the time I've recovered from that I'd rather stupidly manufactured for myself the rather gargantuan task of sorting out out the lego robot kits for the school and assembling the robots. This took up literally all of Wednesday and Thursday night and it's not looking good for tonight either. Sigh.

So this is actually the first time I've been at a desktop PC this week and able to add people/reply XD

I've also been reading a lot of Hannibal fic in stolen moment. It's so deliciously dark. I want to write some but I'd need a lot more writing time to find time to so that. I've barely been scraping by on my writing every day push. Sigh.

So, let me fangirl you a thing.

Discord comics by Tab

So, you go on there and there's a range of stories. The stuff at the bottom, Khaos Komics, is the older stuff. It's 8 intersecting stories about a group of people who are all...I'll use queer as a catch-all term for the duration of this blog post, for lack of a better catch-all term. Now, I used to read Khaos when I was a tiny little queer myself.

Growing up where I live, everything is boringly heteronormative and conformist. The fact that I undercut part of my hair over the summer is considered controversial. I self-identified as a lesbian at 16 because your options were being gay, straight or bisexual. (For the record, I currently identify as pan-romantic gray-asexual, though my levels of sexuality have been known to fluctuate. I'm not constitutional incapable like the protagonist of Tab's asexual story but I don't get a lot out of it so most of the time I'd rather just not. Ideally, I'd like maybe a nice poly relationship with a couple who want to cuddle me and have emotional support and exchange silly texts with me but aren't offended that some days I'm always just going to want to stay home and read fanfiction and not see anyone).

So, yeah, personal aside dealt with, I didn't know many queer people growing up. This was about ten years ago and queer representation in the media was this on the ground. We had Willow and Tara and I used to rent "But I'm a cheerleader" from my local video shop (I'm not sure that realise what it was) then smuggle it into the house and watch it again and again until I had to return it.) but my main exposure to other queer people was through fanwork and web comics.

I read Khaos during those awkward teenage years and it's always going to be precious to me becasue of that. I'm a pretty liberal person anyway but it helped shape how I think about the world. It was great, too, becasue it's not just gay and lesbian characters. There are bisexual characters. There are trans characters. And these characters, well, it is a love comic so the main narrative is always going to be the relationships but they often avoid making their entire identity just that they're gay or trans or whatever.

I still adore these comics. I have a full set of the printed Khaos run signed by Tab that I collected over years of going to the conventions. They are lovely. I love Charlie and Jamie's stories the most. I love how they deal with all the issues that come up and how they grow and change as characters and how it's not a fairytale ending but it's great.

When I re-read my trades a few weeks ago I ended up coming to Tab's site and seeing the Shades of A comics, which I wish I'd known about before. Because exploration of gender (including a character who uses they at their pronoun), asexual character who finds love, kinky fuckery (to quote the comic, said in the most loving way by a character referring to their own sexual needs). I just love it! The entire thing just made me warm and fuzzy and it's lovely.

So, you should go and read it. Then support the kickstarter. Because it's good. And becasue it's good. And becasue I find it impossible to talk about these books without writing a mini-autobiography.