attractivegeekery

I realized recently I haven’t worked on the mainline entry in my MCU fanfiction series, Forever Captain, for like a year now, and I feel kind of guilty about that. Of course, I feel guilty when I spend too much time writing fanfiction as well, so I guess I can’t win. But I do want those stories to get finished eventually. Unfortunately, I always find plotting to be the most intensive work in writing, and in a plot-heavy story like that one, it makes it the number one barrier to making progress.

It sometimes helps when I’m stuck on a prose project to try drafting scenes as drama, to lower the barrier to getting them on the page. That’s not super helpful when I’m trying to just figure out what needs to happen structurally, but it occurred to me it might help on a lower-intensity installment in the series that hasn’t seen any updates recently either. So here’s a scene from The Show, the one where Steve’s great-granddaughter takes him to see Rogers! The Musical. The premise of that piece is that while laughing over the musical’s inaccuracies, Steve gets to reflect to his great-granddaughter about the trajectory of his life, so I can weave pathos into the humor, and I’m afraid this scene is a bit thin for that. But as I continually remind myself— draft now, flesh out later. If you can’t do something you want to with a scene, do the next-easiest thing to it, and fix it in the edit.

I shall definitely have to do that here.

( Day #9 – Singing and Dancing )

breakinglight11

A very silly Little Monsters piece. This is inspired by a combination of two things: the meme about the bat and the toothbrush, plus the absolutely bonkers lore snippet that Draculaura is unaware that her pet Count Fabulous is actually an ancient evil vampire who’s trapped in bat form.

( Day #8 - Count Fabulous )

breakinglight11

Wow, this one turned out long. A good bit longer than most of the scenes I post for the 31P31D challenge. But my rule for myself is I need to present a complete unit of dramatic action, even if it’s a small or short one, in every scene I post, and this took a lot of stuff to come to a stopping point.

This is I believe the third scene of my new horror piece Lacuna, after #4 - New Game and #5 - Curious. I feel like this scene needs to lay a lot of groundwork that would be important for building up the suspense, so I was compelled to really flesh it out. I know the details will need a lot of refining, as most of them are made up as I went and might not actually serve to built to what I want. But I’m hoping to make the audience ask a lot of questions and start their minds wondering without giving too much away of what’s to come.

( Day #7 - Streaming )

skygiants

I think I did The Tainted Cup a bit of a disservice in reading it For the Hugo Awards. It's a very competent book that is hitting all its beats at being both Fantasy Novel and Mystery Novel -- the world is detailed and well-realized (if a bit Attack on Titan-ish) and the plot hangs together in a sensible and logical way. In every way it is doing its job. Unfortunately in my heart I never want to give awards to things that are doing their job competently, I want to give awards to things that are trying to do something weird and interesting and ambitious even if they don't entirely succeed at it, so I kept squinting at The Tainted Cup like 'are you going to get weirder?' and the answer was, no! It continued working very reasonably through its fantasy mystery plot in an interesting and well-realized world!

The Tainted Cup follows Din Kol, a young man who has been magically altered to have perfect memory recall in order to act as an assistant to a highly-placed investigator, Eccentric Detective Ana Dolabra.

genarti tells me Ana Dolabra is not a Holmesalike but a Nero Wolfe-alike, which I have to take her word for since I've never experienced any Nero Wolfe; anyway, I admit her Eccentric Behavior did not always really land for me, but I can't deny it's in the Tradition and I do like Din, who's very polite.

This dynamic duo live in an Empire that is constantly under threat from Extremely Large Beasts that live outside the Big Wall and wreak massive destruction whenever they breach it. The existence of and need to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts justifies the rule of the Empire; the center of government exists in the center of the country and then people live in sort of concentric rings of safety around it, with the least safe of course being the area right next to the Big Wall. In order to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts, the Empire is constantly pushing forward experimental magical bioresearch projects that do things like 'alter people to have perfect memories' or 'grow very large and scary vines very very fast.'

When an important nobleman turns up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very very fast through his entire body, this is an interesting little murder problem. When a bunch of other people also turn up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very fast through their entire bodies -- in a way that also causes the vines to damage the structural integrity of the Big Wall -- this immediately becomes a large and scary murder problem which Din and Ana have to truck out to the absolute least safe bit of the country to try and solve.

As you can hopefully tell from this summary, the logic of the mystery and the logic of the world are very well-integrated with each other. The beats make sense as they land, and at every point you're given enough information to go 'ah, this clicks perfectly with what I already know about this world, and now I've learned a little more.' It's a good fantasy-mystery novel! I would like to see more fantasy-mystery that does this sort of thing well! The murder by exploding vines is very creepy!

I don't think it's a particularly spectacular novel for character -- there are Din and Ana, and there are a bunch of people who are required to make the mystery go, and there's a sort of flash-in-the-pan love-interest-shaped fellow for Din -- and I don't think it's much of a novel of ideas. Which absolutely not all books need to be, and which would not have been looking for it to be, had it not been multiply award-nominated. But that brings us right back around to the beginning of this post again.

breakinglight11

Another possible bit for Hawking part 9, though overall a fairly inconsequential one. I know I want to make the workings of the new, expanded team not a smooth transition, and show our heroes having to work pretty hard to figure out how things will function from here on out. I think this bit shows some of the new status quo for Mrs. Hawking, where she’s got many more personalities around her and she’s going to have to find some way to get along with them.

The capper is a quote from a silly song Bernie grew up with that I always wanted to incorporate into a Hawking play.

Photo by Kathy Bedard

( Day #6 - Sugar )

skygiants

You know how sometimes a show is more or less made for you in a lab, but also you watch the actual plot and you have some notes, and you're not actually sure it's good, per se, but also it was made for you in a lab?

Anyway, we just finished watching Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, the Kim Tae Ri vehicle about 1950s Korean all-female theater troupes in which the entire plot revolves around aspiring young lesbians competing to see who's going to be the Prince of the Theater.

Please admire these official portraits of the main cast:

Jeongnyeon! Our Heroine. Baby butch. Massive protagonist energy. FORBIDDEN to sing by her mother, who has some kind of tragic lesbian performance backstory, despite that she has the BEST VOICE in a GENERATION. In episode four someone tries to make her sing full femme with no genderplay and she revolts on live television.

Moon Okyeong, the established theater prince!! beloved of every baby lesbian in 1950s Korea!! fishes Jeongnyeon out of the sticks and inspires her to join the troupe in the hopes of molding her into a COMPETITOR who can CURE Moon Okyeong's TRAGIC ENNUI and SCHRODINGER'S MORPHINE ADDICTION with the power of HOMOEROTIC RIVALRY.

Seo Hyerang, the theater's most important femme. Moon Okyeong's toxic partner who does not approve of Okyeong experiencing homoerotic protege/rival emotions.

Heo Yeongsoo! My favorite. Jeongnyeon's OWN baby butch rival that she made HERSELF in the classic rival mode, a stiff and reserved rich girl with Family Issues whose Haughty Pride covers a Profound Passion for Theater, who only really comes alive when she gets to go onstage in full drag and play a prince or a villain. A real Mr. Darcy of a lesbian.

Jeongnyeon and Yeongsoo also have their own same-age femme whom they're constantly competing to perform with who for some reason does not get lead actress billing or one of these cool character portraits even though she is to all intents and purposes the female lead ... anyway here she is, she's extremely cute but needs to pick up some skills in communication

The experience of actually watching the show is a a bit of a roller coaster ... like one episode you're watching Jeongnyeon make the worst decisions that a human has ever made in their life, and the next episode you're just sitting back enjoying the experience of Theater Lesbians Practice The Big Villain Seduction Scene In Every Possible Casting Variation, and the next episode everyone is getting together to do the big performance when apparently nobody has ever practiced their actual blocking together before and you're like "why are you like this. surely a theater troupe cannot run this way" and then the next episode Moon Okyeong is looking simply unbelievably good in a suit.

Honestly most of the time even when something annoying was happening there was some lesbian looking good in an Outfit, so even at the times I was suffering I did not suffer! And most of the time I was not suffering, because a truth about me is I love absurd Method Theater Drama where people are constantly going out to Find their Characters and saying to each other 'show me ... your interpretation of the Foolish General! The one only you could bring!' My many years of reading Skip Beat! have prepared me perfectly for this experience.

[nb: when I say lesbians, nobody is doing anything more than tender embraces or fraught handholding on screen, and nobody is saying 'I am a lesbian', but like they are very unambiguously lesbians. The entire plot is powered by lesbian drama. Every two episodes or so a man shows up to do something like 'embezzle money' or 'vaguely menace' and then exits again.]

Do I think the ending is fully satisfying? No. Will I be requesting it for Yuletide? DESPERATELY. I hope they keep letting Kim Tae Ri play intense lesbians forever.

(Also, if anyone knows where to find scanlations of the webtoon it's based on, I am Extremely Interested in reading them ...)

breakinglight11

This is another scene from Lacuna, an idea for a horror story about a video game, directly following yesterday’s scene #4 - “New Game”.

As I mentioned, I have not planned out this piece with the kind of structuring process I usually make use of. I am considering just writing it in sequence, with whatever comes to mind, even if I don’t really know where I’m heading. So I guess that makes this scene two, with no idea how many scenes in total. I can always edit it later, if I find there’s something worth it in the drafting.

As a side note, I am inordinately pleased with the online handles of “Chemical Gothic” and “PascalesBust.” I feel like both of them tell you a lot about who the characters are.

( Day #5 - Curious )

breakinglight11

This is the opening scene of an idea for a new piece, that came out of a conversation about doing something that could be shot fairly easily, rather than our typical elaborate period piece works. It’s a horror piece called Lacuna, about two friends who get into a strange new video game that brings out parts of them they’re not ready to confront. I’m interested in horror but haven’t written much of it, so that would be an interesting direction to attempt. And I’ve never written anything about technology particularly, which makes for a real stretch for me.

I haven’t thought this story out very deeply— right now I’m just kind of making up shit as I go along —but it’s the perfect sort of project for 31P31D, since I just need to draft and am specifically choosing not to figure it out in a structured outline beforehand. We’ll see where it goes.

( Day #4 - New Game )

breakinglight11

I haven’t shot a Little Monsters video in a while now. I was so busy this summer planning for the Hawking filming at the end of June and the beginning of July, then I was cleaning up and recovering after it. But I really do enjoy making the silly little stop-motion films, giving myself a cool little creative project that I can do on my own time, without having to wrangle a hundred people’s schedules, and justify my owning all my dumb little dolls. I should do one more before school starts again at the end of the month.

I admit, I love those ASMR videos where a nice lady pretends to give you a facial. They are ridiculous but I find them very soothing.

( Day #3 - A S Scream R )

skygiants

god have I really not posted about Voyager in a year and a half?? we are still very slowly watching Voyager! we are almost at the end of season six! but I am NOT posting about thirty episodes in a single post so, let's see, I left off with Latent Image, let's see what I remember about the rest of Season 5.

( Voyager Season 5, Episodes 12-26 )

WHEW. OKAY. Now let's see if I manage to write up the first half of S6 before we're actually done with the second half of S6. I still wish these writers knew what a B-plot was.

breakinglight11

Okay, while yesterday I said I really don’t know much about the upcoming Mrs. Hawking part 9, actually there is one thing I really know I want to do. I had this idea that Mrs. Hawking needs to be approached by people who engage with social issues as systemic issues and encourage her to do the same.

I think this would be interesting for several reasons. One, we’re working in the superhero genre, and an unfortunate limitation of that genre that it is not well-equipped to discuss the effects of systems. Superhero stories come from a fantasy of individual agency— what, if you had the power, WOULD YOU DO? I really hate when writers try to make superheroes symbols or stand ins for systems— like fascism or libertarianism or communism or whatever —since a genre all about individuals doing stuff really can’t effectively represent something so complex. But because of that, superhero stories tend to hand-wave overarching issues baked into the fabric of society and the need for collective, ongoing action to solve them, instead treating problems as matters of individual choices and individual actions, of single heroes standing up to make a difference.

I would like do a little bit of a better job addressing that complexity in our story. So I thought it would be interesting to have someone, basically, challenge Mrs. Hawking to engage more with the truths of systemic problems and collective solutions. All her life, she’s been such a lone wolf— partially because of her nature and her own arrogance in her judgment and abilities, but also from cynicism about the willingness of the rest of the world to change. Characters need to be continually challenged, and a big one for our hero is to learn to work with others to achieve bigger things. So I think it would make a great challenge for her to have to expand her thinking in this way.

Photo by Kathy Lucie Bedard

( Day #2 - Speak )

breakinglight11

Here we go again! 31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, the fourteenth year of my taking on the challenge of writing a page of drama every day for the month of August.

This year crept up on me a little bit less than it often does, so I took some time to think about what I was going to write over the course of the last few weeks. I usually do best when I have a specific project to draft, which for me often works best if I have a plan, an outline, that I’ve already thought over. I’ve been more focused on production than writing new stuff lately, so I unfortunately don’t have much worked out yet, but I definitely do have projects that I’d like to use this time for. So, perhaps if I can be very diligent, I can do both some planning and some drafting over the course of the month, and make some real progress.

One thing that will need a lot of doing is Mrs. Hawking part 9. I really know very little about it at this point, except that it is to be the grand finale of the mainline Mrs. Hawking series, so it has to be BIG. Big in scope, big in cast, big in emotions, big in action, big in everything. So I’ve really got to make it count.

So, to kick things off, here’s a bit of tiny noodling of something small about it, as I work on figuring out all that stuff that’s big.

Photo by Kathy Bedard

( Day #1 - The Suit )

skygiants

I really enjoyed Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale a few years back and also I really enjoy espionage, so when

osprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is

osprey_archer's post.

I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.

I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!

The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.

To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.

Now both

osprey_archer and

genarti, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But,"

osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.)

However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.

Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'

With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.

genarti

I’ve been meaning to read more Adrian Tchaikovsky for a while now, first because a number of my friends really like his stuff, and then also because I read his book The Doors of Eden and really enjoyed it. (The character work in that one was hit or miss, but the speculative biology was enormous fun in directions you rarely see done well that also aimed directly at my interests, so I had a great time with it.)

The joy of finding a very prolific author is that there’s a ton of stuff to read, but the difficulty of finding a very prolific author is figuring out where to start. Handily for me, this one was on the short list for the Hugos this year! And it was my top pick – I really loved it.

( More details -- no spoilers beyond the first few chapters )

skygiants

I was sitting outside at work two weeks ago reading Zen Cho's Behind Frenemy Lines when our regular volunteer suddenly popped up next to me. "What are you reading?!" she demanded, and I blinked at her, and she said "I can't remember the last time I smiled as much reading a book as you were right now! Please tell me the title, I have to read it!"

So now you all know two things, which is that I have no poker face when reading in public and also that Behind Frenemy Lines is a delight. It's a particular delight to me because this book is a really fantastic, affectionately grounded example of bring-your-work-to-the-rom-com; my brother works in the same kind of big law firm as the protagonists and every word of it rang true. As soon as I was done I texted my long-suffering sister-in-law to tell her that she should read it immediately. (My brother should read it even more, but he will never have the time to do so, because, again, he works in big law.)

So, the plot: our heroine Kriya Rajasekar has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and followed her boss to a new firm, which has unfortunately resulted in her sharing an office with the competent but deeply awkward lawyer whose presence throughout her career has coincidentally but unfortunately coincided with all the most screwball catastrophes in Kriya's career.

Charles Goh does not know that he is Kriya's bad-luck charm. Charles actually has kind of a crush. This is regrettable for Charles given that life has provided them with a couple of perfect reasons to fake date (Charles needs a date to his cousin's wedding and Kriya needs to fend off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss) and also a good reason they should not real date (Kriya is busy fending off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss and does not need romantic complications from her office-mate/fake boyfriend.)

As a sidenote, the cousin's wedding is a Fandom Wedding, the details of which I will not spoil but which are the other half of why I was laughing visibly out front of my office building (and which I did not explain to the volunteer.) I would not trust a lot of authors to write a Fandom Wedding, but this book carries it off with charm and ease. It really helps that the leads do not understand what is happening and do not really care except inasmuch as it's nice to see a person you like get married.

Of course everybody catches feelings, but also everybody also catches more serious ethical dilemmas, as the corruption case from The Friend Zone Experiment rebounds back into the plot and forces both Charles and Kriya to figure out where their professional lines actually are. I love where the characters make their respective stands, and where they end up; the stakes feel exactly right for the book, deeply grounded and deeply personal to the characters. It's so nice to pick up a Zen book, and know I can trust her to always be very funny but also to always make her books about something real.

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attractivegeekery

Reading

31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #9 – “Singing and Dancing”

31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #8 - “Count Fabulous”

31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #7 - "Streaming"

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31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #6 - “Sugar”

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31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #5 - “Curious”

31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #4 - “New Game”

31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #3 - “A S Scream R”

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31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #2 - “Speak”

31 Plays in 31 Days 2025, #1 - “The Suit”

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Booklog: Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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November 2022

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