Hi f'list, how are you?

[sholio]

I haven't been around much lately. November has been a busy month. But I'm feeling happily accomplished; I've finished all my holiday gift-exchange fics and a handful of pending original projects (all I have left now is the story I signed up to write at lostcityfound, which isn't due 'till early January) and I did quite a bit of freelance this month as well (because fanfic, fun as it is, doesn't pay the bills). I'll be heading out of town on Friday, and I'm only working two days this week, so my plans for the week basically involve some semi-leisurely Christmas shopping, putting together my holiday boxes and getting them in the mail, baking stuff, and playing with my shiny new MacBook. *pets it*

A handful of recs and links:

Push Until It Holds by zillah975 (SGA, John/Ronon and mostly-onesided John/Rodney, NC-17, contains BDSM)
This is one of this year's sgabigbang stories (thus, it's long, about 50K words) and it's the current featured discussion story at sga_talk. I absolutely loved this story -- even though I don't really go for romance as a genre, I love how sex and attraction can, in a good author's hands, be used as a way of exploring and developing character and culture, and this story is a fantastic example of that. But aside from that, it's just a fantastic Atlantis story; it's as much of a team story as a slash story, and the character dynamics are well developed over two and a half slightly-AU seasons. I particularly loved the story's development of Satedan culture and Satedan/Earth sexuality, including the characters' own confusion about where they, themselves, fall within their own culture's norms.

Five Women Who Hate Fleur Delacour by snegurochka_lee (Harry Potter, gen)
I very rarely read HP stories anymore, but I came across this one somehow, and it's wonderful -- a really fascinating look at jealousy and isolation and how we see our own flaws reflected in other people; it made me view Fleur as a much more likable and complex character than I ever found her in the books, without whitewashing her faults.

Semi-nonfannish stuff: How Not To Write a Sex Scene - the short list for the winners of this year's Literary Review Bad Sex Awards: goddawful sex scenes from actual, published novels. And they are hilariously horrible.

The fiction research community little_details (to which I am addicted) has a recent, interesting (to me) thread on heterosexual male friendships; the OP asked how to depict close male friendship, and respondents chimed in with their own experiences or good examples of realistic male friendships from movies and TV (of which someone mentioned SGA ... of course!). It may be of interest to those who write such relationships to see real-life guys talking about their own close friendships with other guys. I was also intrigued by the link to this article on pre-modern same-sex romantic friendship and the way that the modern world has drawn a somewhat arbitrary box called "platonic" and plunked all non-sexual relationships into it; it ties into a recent conversation I was having with xparrot in interesting ways.

I thought I had more links, but apparently not ... perhaps I'll be back if I find more.

Comments

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of inclined to side with the old-fashioned people who weren't speculating - I think deep, true love is possible in erotic and non-erotic friendships both, and the presence or absence of sex doesn't really matter. I tend to suspect that whether a romantic friendship is also erotic depends mostly on the participants - some people are more inclined toward sexual relationships, others more inclined toward "platonic". (In my experience, fanfic tastes go the same way - people who like smarm or who like slash are both into romantic friendships, but smarmers are people for whom sex is less important or meaningful than slashers...)

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

We-elllll.... the problem with the "it doesn't matter/don't speculate" point of view on historical people is that it does make a difference when it comes to describing and understanding pre-modern behavior accurately. And you end up with idiots like the "Ewww, Lincoln wasn't gay!" crowd; historical evidence does, probably, point to romantic friendship being mistaken through our modern lens for a sexual relationship in that case, but for a lot of people just the idea that Lincoln wasn't OMG STRAIGHT freaks them out.

I mean, to some extent yeah, it really doesn't matter -- but it matters in the same sense as knowing, say, what the Neanderthals were doing with those flowers in that cave in Iraq. In either case, of course, people are going to be applying their own prejudices and preconceived notions to the past in the process of trying to understand it...

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, I put "it doesn't really matter" in a different category from "don't speculate" - I'm not really saying there's anything wrong with speculating, more that I think focusing too much on the nature of the love might be undervaluing the relationship itself. There's nothing wrong with trying to figure out whether or not Lincoln was actually buggering the friend he shared a bed with, but it isn't that important to understanding Lincoln the man. Except insofar as it could be an argument against homophobia, and yes, when it comes to using the past to understand the present, I agree that it could be important to know, in certain situations. But even if Lincoln was "gay" by modern definitions, it wouldn't have had the same impact on his life then; to try to define him as "gay" or "straight" paints a misleading picture of the man and his motivations.

...But then, I personally feel that not only is trying to categorize Lincoln gay or straight a mistake - but I kind of am opposed to categorizing modern people as gay or straight, either, because human psychology and history both indicate that such strict categories are misleading and inaccurate reflections of the human condition. I understand the politically necessities of describing "gay" as a minority, but in a lot of respects it's damaging to all of society ("gay" and "straight" alike) to be locking people in those boxes.