Bones of Faerie.

Happy Birthday, lnhammer!

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Simner, Janni Lee. Bones of Faerie. New York: Random House, 2009.

I met Janni Lee Simner (janni) at Sirens 2010, and decided to read this book because of that.

Did I mention that I would have said that I basically had no interest in faerie fiction before I started reading for Sirens? I still don't have an intrinsic interest in the subgenre, but I have read some very good books as a consequence, and this is one of them.

So. The book follows fifteen-year-old Liza, who runs away from her town of Franklin Falls, outside of what used to be St. Louis, when she begins to suspect that she is developing magic, which since the War with Faerie has been strictly forbidden in her town by her father as a survival measure. Liza's mother, in fact, has just disappeared after her father exposed her baby sister on a hill outside the town; unlike Oedipus, Rebecca didn't survive. Liza winds up making her journey in the company of her fellow townie Matthew, who has also lost family to magic, and has secrets of his own; their journey takes them to other towns and eventually to the Arch, teaching them new and sometimes horrible facts about their world and themselves along the way.

I really liked this book; I liked the fact that it mixed technology, the post-apocalyptic genre, and faeries. I liked the characters, particularly Liza and Allie (I think Allie and Karin are my favorites, actually); I liked that the narrative makes clear how easy it is to perpetuate cycles of abuse, even unwittingly, unwillingly, unintentionally, and how overcoming them is a matter of conscious work and effort. I liked how the book is an unabashed love letter to a specific place, St. Louis, which I think we can all agree does not get a lot of love from the fantasy genre. If anything, my major complaint is that it was too short; in some ways too I think readers may be forgiven for being reminded ever-so-slightly of The Hunger Games, though Liza and Katniss are, aside from their hunting skills, very different. Bones of Faerie stands on its own (though I'm looking forward to the sequel).

Happy Birthday, AO3!

One year ago the Archive of Our Own entered open beta, where it remains, in revision 3304. When we entered open beta, we were on--iirc--revision 1300 something (1398?). It was pretty exhilarating watching the number of users rise by the minute that day; I'm still exhilarated by the AO3, honestly.

The AO3 is still in open beta; it still has a lot of performance issues--we are two years ahead of our initial usage estimates, which means we will be buying new servers next year, hooray! which would not be possible without the support of our donors, i.e. our fellow fans. The AO3 is for fans, and by fans, and we want it to reflect what fans around the world want to see in their omnifandom archive. So if you have thoughts about the looks, features, styles, performance or whatever about the AO3, tell us! All feedback is read by real live human beings, and hearing from users what users want makes a huge difference for coders writing features and people conceptualizing features. There's a lot more to come in the next year! 

Dear Yulegoat

Dear Yuletide writer,

First, thank you so much for participating in Yuletide this year! Second, thank you for agreeing to write a story in a fandom we both love, or at least remember fondly. I'm genuinely interested to see what caught other fans' interests about all of these sources, so please don't feel that my prompts are too binding. I'd rather have an inspired story than slavish devotion to my requests. If you're looking for more of a sense of me and my tastes, skimming through the last twenty entries on my DW will probably give you a good idea; most of the entries in general are unlocked.

I hesitate to say what I do or don't like in fic--I don't have any major squicks, and no firm principles as to what I will or won't read. That said, it's my general sentiment that Yuletide is not the place to go looking for PWP, at least for me; which isn't to say that I wouldn't want sexytimes, as it were, in any story you write, but which is to say that I generally like my sexytimes to go along with plot and characterization. And as you may have guessed from these requests, I do really like women being awesome. In some ways, really, my own fics demonstrate both these preferences very well.


( Requests )

Taken all together, these seem sort of random, and I guess they are; for me the fun of Yuletide is just as much in the giving as in the receiving. I hope the same goes for you, and that you can find something in here to tickle your fancy.

♥,
Me