Dragon Subjugation Incantation is a baihe (GL) cnovel by Shi Wei Yue Shang/As The Crescent Moon Rises. It is 200 chapters long including extras, and an ongoing English translation by Hei is up to chapter 49 on WordPress.
It's hard not to read a summary of the premise and not go, "so, baihe Scum Villain with dragons instead of demons?" I wouldn't say the comparison is inaccurate, but perhaps misleading; the stories are interested in different things.
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This review is long overdue; Maggie Siebert's Bonding was not only my favourite book release of 2022, but my favourite read of 2022 period. Its staying power has been proven in the frequency with which I think back to its most nightmarish images.
Good horror fiction tends to produce one of two responses in me: either I want to roll around in everything it does by attempting to emulate it in some way with my own writing, or I go, "Great, that was fun, I am never going to read this again." I spent my time reading Bonding flipping between one and the other.
Debut short story collections are often lacklustre, but the pieces that make up Bonding display a remarkable variety in tone, style, and format while retaining a coherent and distinctive authorial sensibility. Siebert goes for the gross-out with gusto and to great effect. Despite unflinching fascination with bodily abjection and excess, my favourite stories, "Witches" and "Ammon," were creepy as hell courtesy of a strong command of creeping dread.
There's empathy and sensitivity amidst the bleakness--the stories I found the most disturbing were also the saddest, like "Best Friend" and "Every Day For the Rest Of Your Life." The works are also quite funny, with several, such as "The Alumni Association," "The Prime Minister," and "Smells" leaning into surreal humour.
If you like short-form horror, especially of the queer variety, which is unafraid to go to bleak and visceral places, I can't recommend Bonding enough.
Em X. Liu's If Found, Return To Hell is a novella I found perfectly pleasant to read despite feeling frustrated and/or dissatisfied with most of its choices.
Our hero, Journeyman Wen, is a disaffected intern at a wizarding support hotline in a world that, despite having magic, is much like our own in its reliance on the thankless toil of wage labour. Their discontent leads to an off-the-books handling of the strange case of a college kid's possession by none other than a prince of hell on the lam. This is a charming premise!
I suspect I would have enjoyed this book more if it were either a short story or a novel; the former might have been tighter and more potent in its focus and the latter would have the leg room necessary for richer depth of its characters and relationships. Most of the characters felt thin, with the exception of the protagonist's colleague Nathaniel, who is the kind of cool girl coworker milking a crap job for what she can that I've known and admired many a time. Characters who met within the scope of the novella speedran interpersonal intimacy to land in a found family place that felt largely unearned.
The pacing in the back half felt rushed and everything wrapped up too neatly for my taste, despite liking the general idea of the way the climactic confrontation gets resolved. Both the pacing and plot issues speak to insufficient sense of conflict and stakes.
I was also unconvinced by the choice to use second person POV rather than first, which would similarly accomodate the nonbinary protagonist reveal (a choice about which I have mixed feelings to start with /grumpynonbinaryperson.) Despite being a second person POV apologist, the affective alienation of second person didn't land for me here. I would rather have had a stronger and more distinctive voice which could have accomplished some of that estrangement through qualities of its narration rather than the second person POV brand of detachment.
Even so, it's a quick read and memorable entry in the field of urban fantasy/magic bureaucracy fiction, a mode in which it's at its best. The depiction of miserable corporate drudgery was horrid in a good way. Also, the pleasure of encountering an unexpectedly nonbinary protagonist has not lost its lustre, even if I had quibbles with the delivery.
I have no idea if this perception in any way reflects popularity in China or other global fandom spaces, but in today's English-language fandom, the "Big Three" danmei writers are Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, priest, and Meatbun Doesn't Eat Meat. This doesn't mean other authors aren't read or known of, but these are the authors with multiple officially licensed titles out via Seven Seas and, in my experience, most English readers coming to danmei since ~2019 will have had the entry point of one of these works.
Remnants of Filth is a novel by the venerable Meatbun. Until last week, she was the only one of the "Big Three" I'd yet to spend any time with. Meatbun's Erha is highly popular but I've held off on actually reading it because there's a lot of noncon and it will either work for me or really, really not. However, I've been in the mood to read pulpy trash, and when I read that Remnants of Filth is a lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers military story, I figured I might as well start there. (Anyone who knew me in my Golden Kamuy days knows what's up.)
Going in, I knew nothing about RoF that wasn't in the one-paragraph book blurb. Let me attempt to summarize volume 1.
Also, huge CW for discussions of slavery, rape, torture, et cetera.
I didn't read Enough To Make You Blush: Exploring Erotic Humiliation for work, but it was brought to my awareness during a work meeting, because my life is like that.
This past fall, I decided to get more structured and disciplined with my tarot practice, which has been haphazard and vibes-based for about a decade now. I read (or at least skimmed) a ton of tarot books, many of which are bad, and some of which are good. I'd like to practice writing reviews, so here are writeups for the four I’ve spent the most time with.
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Do you have similar struggles while trying to read within an areas of interest that is suffused with unbearable levels of woo-woo/casual gender essentialism/etc? If so: my sympathies!
DISCLAIMER THAT YMMV AND MY EXPERIENCES ARE NOT UNIVERSAL
I don’t claim particular expertise or authority on writing longform fiction, but it is factually true I have spent a lot of my one wild and precious life on it. I like to talk about it because I find it fun and exciting, and I know it’s something a lot of people express intimidation about, which is something I also used to feel (and sometimes still do, sometimes starting a new longfic project feels like a criminal sentence.) I felt like yakking about it, so I asked if any folks I know on Mastodon had AMA-style questions for me on the subject. A couple people did, and I… wrote like 4k about it. The curse. Of being longwinded.
There will be a lot of generalizing, personal opinion, etc below, and no writing advice works for everyone. If you read something and you’re like “wtf I totally disagree” that’s cool! I’m talking about me~
one of last year's beefleaf fics has been podficced! this has only happened to me once before so it still feels kind of wild. go listen to soph's wonderful reading if that's your thing!
i have a piece in yuri zine, forthcoming very soon. you have a week and a bit left to preorder a physical copy if you want one! free pdfs will be going up shortly after the paper copies ship.
i also appeared in the t4t: trans fic by and for trans friends zine compiling and expanding on the speaking notes from the fanworks 2023 panel of the same name.
my zine of my very own (the gothic beefleaf analysis tome) will be coming to the internet near you quite soon, whenever i get my act together to revise the conclusion and fix a couple indesign errors. someday..........
a long-overdue post coming to you as per request of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophia_sol. look, i might as well use my powers for... good ?
this only lists on-screen appearances or exposition passages that i thought were particularly noteworthy or characterful; characters being mentioned in the third person or delivering minor plot-related speaking lines were skipped unless they involved important lore drops.
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This is barely a DVD commentary, and mostly discussion of background noise concepts that influenced the fic in an indirect way. It's still nominally revolving around the thing I wrote, though, so, you know.
in your little grey heart: 5,311 words, beefleaf. on ao3 | on dw.
Content warnings
discussions of abuse + brief suicide, incest, and rape mentions. woof. THIS POST IS HONESTLY DARKER THAN THE FIC. SORRY
it's roland. if we've interacted before, you'd like to exchange access, and you're not sure I'll recognize you, please comment here and give me a heads up as to who you are. I'm not accepting access requests from total unknowns at this time but feel free to subscribe. happy to exchange access with mutuals from elsewhere.
In light of... many things, and also because yay redundancy, I'm backing up my recent-ish fic, and plan to crosspost going forward. The comm where you can find that is here; feel free to subscribe if my Fan Content interests you: ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
appendix
I still have plans to spruce up my Neocities for similar yet distinct purposes but don't have the bandwidth atm. (I do plan on dumping older stuff on there, for example.) I like getting comments and that's easier to manage on here, so DW takes priority!
Feel free to disregard and only refer to my signup if you don't find this helpful. This is just to offer a wider grab-bag of potential prompts if you're stuck for ideas.
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Trying to push past the embarrassment I feel any time I try and actually verbalize anything about music. Some good stuff came out this year. Everything is in alphabetical order. I hate rankings.
There are lots of ways in which beginning to focus more on my original work over the past year or two has, in turn, made my fic better, but I'm running up against some areas now where it's not exactly that it's making my fic worse, but introducing some minor complications. At the moment, this is largely around OCs--obviously, if you're writing original work and you think, "it would be great for [protagonist] to have an opportunity to interact with a person of [x] background/social standing/etc in order to illuminate things about their character (or whatever)," and don't already have any characters fitting that description, you'll just invent one. It gets more complex with fic, as there are a lot of preconceptions about Including OCs In Fanfiction. I keep finding myself in this position lately, and expending way too much effort avoiding including an OC in a story because it's cringe and blah blah, but then undercutting my own ability to tell the story well because I'm not letting my choices be guided by my (fairly reliable) instincts about what needs to happen, but by these semi-arbitrary rules about How Not To Write Fanfiction that I internalized reading anon meme threads as an impressionable teen.
There can be a tendency to course-correct too hard in this area, where people will avoid including OCs in fic at all costs because they've internalized that it's inherently cringe to do this and any OC they come up with will be a Mary Sue and readers will bail en masse etc--this definitely isn't the only reason people do this, there's also just simple laziness, as well as the desire to give other canon characters an opportunity to show up in the fic because the author/readers already have attachments to those characters, but I don't think it's not a thing, either. But I really hate when canon characters get shoved into a contrived background role in a fic that doesn't make sense and ends up distracting me/disrupting my suspension of disbelief way more heavily than just coming up with a utilitarian OC to help move the plot ahead.
And then there's the plain and simple truth that a lot of fic OCs just aren't very well-written, or they're well-written but in a way that distracts from the story the reader came here for, which is usually about the canon characters. This isn't to say I've never encountered OCs in fic that I thought were compelling on their own merit--I'm thinking of this one Fallout 4 longfic where the author's Sole Survivor was way more interesting than anything coming out of the actual game, for example--but I think there's a bit of a delicate tightrope to walk between underwriting an OC out of fear of making them seem Super Cool and Special in a cringe way (and I think this is the side I've erred on out of caution in the past), vs. having them take up up too much narrative breathing room.
I'm trying not to hem myself in unduly by what I think Fandom At Large's tastes are, because to be blunt Fandom At Large has bad taste and isn't a reliable metric of what is or isn't a good storytelling choice for any given fic. But it still makes me way more anxious than I can actually justify, lol.
This has been a bit of a stumbling block with Beefleaf 2, as it's become increasingly clear that writing this as actual factual casefic is probably the best route to make it a serviceable narrative, but casefic requires so many OCs! And also so much planning and outlining and work--you have to write a mystery!--but oh god the OCs!
I'm trying to push through my internal resistance... I think this would be good writing practice, since it's a type of story I've never written before and I think it could be helpful to get myself to do the exercise of coming up with and writing a mystery story instead of having my plot just be Vibes and Feelings like they generally are, and it's nice to have some scaffolding in place re: canon characters and details so I'm not overwhelmed with all of the stuff I need to come up with at once. Even so, this is an example of a time where a story being fanfic poses some challenges compared to original work... Beefleaf are lucky that I'm so obsessed with them or else I'd be sparing myself this misery and enjoying playing around in my mind palace of 70000 OCs that no one else knows or cares about.
Also, remember what I said about wanting DW to adopt markdown? The New Create Entries page available for beta testing can do this! And also is way more mobile-friendly than the standard one! Please go forth and enjoy!
