Heart Attack Exchange

Heart Attack Exchange opened this weekend! This is an exchange for 10K or longer fics with a 2-week writing period. Does what it says on the tin. XD

Main Heart Attack collection | Sub-collection for treats under 10K

I wrote two things. Finding them is left as an exercise for the reader.

And I loved my gift!

Double Blind by Anonymous (Torchwood, team, 12K words)
Really fun, well-plotted, in-character casefic with the mid-season-two team. It feels just like an episode, with great character voices, creepiness, banter, and some good character insights too! (I am also wildly curious who wrote it, as I'm pretty sure it's not any of the Usual Suspects.)

Other stuff:

• My fandom tree is up!
• Master list of fandom trees

A few perennial things going on in DW fandom:

recthething - for reccing things!
fanart_recs - still going strong after a decade!
fan_flashworks - twice-monthly prompts for creating any kind of fanworks.
fandomcalendar - for keeping up with exchanges and fests.

Wild Life by Molly Gloss

Getting back into talking about books with the one I just read! It was really delightful.

Wild Life is an epistolary novel, told mostly in the form of a diary from the early 1900s. The frame story is an exchange of letters between the diary author's grandchildren, who found it after their father's death and speculate over whether it's an actual journal describing real events, or one of their grandmother's unfinished works of fantasy fiction.

That's just the frame, though. The main content of the book is the journal of Charlotte Drummond, a single mother of five children supporting herself as a pulp fiction writer in 1905 in a Pacific Northwest logging town, through the events of a spring in which something weird and fantastic happens ... or does it?

( More about Charlotte and her world )

( This book requires some content warnings )

Wild Life on Amazon



(I like how rachelmanija does this with the covers so I think I'm going to start trying to do it too.)

Books I hated: Heartwood Box by Ann Aguirre

Read earlier this summer. Complained to various people. Never actually wrote it up for DW.

This was doubly annoying because I enjoyed the first half so much! It reads like a modern-day version of Stranger Thing with a more diverse cast and more of a focus on social issues.

And then it goes off the rails in the most stupid and trainwrecky way imaginable.

Araceli is the protagonist, born to a Mexican/(white) American couple who are globetrotting journalists. To keep her safe while covering violence in Venezuela, they send her to stay with her grandmother and go to school in a mostly-white upstate New York town. The town is your basic Affably Evil Suburb where everyone insists everything is fine and things are clearly not. It's almost 100% white, for one thing, and the kids at school -- where she makes friend with the handful of other kids of color -- tell her about the town's racist past; it's a former sundown town where the streets literally used to be named after Nazis. There are missing-persons posters everywhere, and inexplicable sounds in her grandmother's house at night. Her new friends tell her that people are going missing in worrying numbers and the authorities appear to be covering it up. There are strange lights in the woods at night, and her grandmother still puts out a dinner plate for her grandfather that she asks Areceli not to ask questions about.

Areceli also finds a mysterious keepsake box in her grandmother's attic, and discovers that it's full of letters written by a WWI soldier to his relatives back home. On a whim, she writes a letter to him and puts it in the box. It vanishes, and soon a new letter reappears, and she finds that she's in an impossible correspondence with a young man who died before she was born, who she finds herself falling in love with.

Oh yeah, and there's a mysterious lab near the town that possibly might be run by Nazis? No one is sure.

I realize there is A LOT going on here (this is all before the 20% mark of the book, too). I expect you might think all these things are going to tie together and be resolved in some kind of satisfying and not mindblowingly stupid way by the end? Yeah, so did I.

I am going to spoil literally everything underneath the cut. This book was fascinating and twisty and fun until about 3/4 of the way through, and then it careened off a mile-high cliff into one of the most infuriating, throw-the-book-at-the-wall endings I've ever read.

( Spoilers )