Candyheartsex Reveal!

I wrote five stories for candyheartsexchange.

Annihilation - Movie

Embrace. 477 words. Lena/Dr. Ventress. Rated T.

The final encounter of Lena and Dr. Ventress goes a little differently.

I love writing for Annihilation - so much beauty and terror and wonder and strangeness in that movie. It gets excellent fic, too.

Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander

With Flowers in her Mane. 679 words. Gwydion/Melyngar. Rated G.

Gwydion gets Melyngar ready for a festival.

The very charming prompt: "I read these books for the first time a couple of years ago and absolutely adored Gwydion but also made an offhand comment to a friend that he was clearly married to Melyngar and shoot, headcanon permanent. Anyway, I am all for sweet moments, fluff, and/or the magical horse-bathing/grooming fic you've always wanted to write.

Fandom-Specific DNW: anything over a G rating"

I could not resist writing G-rated "His wife? A horse."

Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey

Another Round. 1491 words. Jaxom/Original Green Rider. Rated E.

AU of the green dragon's mating flight in The White Dragon. This time, Ruth participates. Which means Jaxom participates.

In The White Dragon, Jaxom has the chance to have gay sex, absolutely freaks out, and has het sex instead. So I was very pleased to see the prompt "but what if he didn't?"

Worrals - W. E. Johns

Special Friends. 1695 words. Rated M. Frecks/Worrals.

A get-together set during Worrals Flies Again, the night Worrals returns after being presumed dead.

That book has a fantastic presumed dead, one of Johns' best which is saying a lot as it's his number one with a bullet favorite trope. But the books stints on the aftermath, so I wanted to remedy that.

A Wolf for Worrals. 4151 words. Frecks/Worrals. Rated T.

“Girls can bond with wolves too,” said Worrals. “There’s no reason they should be kept for the boys.”

“If they let us bond with wolves, they’d have to let us do more than that,” Frecks pointed out. “They’d never waste us transporting Tiger Moths.”

“Exactly,” Worrals said triumphantly.

Worrals and Frecks in an AU where people bonding with psychic wolves is a known, rare, and valuable phenomena. I wrote this for cyphomandra, who wrote me Malory Towers with psychic wolves a while back. All fandoms should have psychic wolf AUs.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & other lessons from the crematory, by Caitlin Doughty

A memoir by the goth mortician Caitlin Doughty. I've enjoyed her surprisingly chipper YouTube series her YouTube videos, so I thought I would like this. Especially after I'd just read S. A. Cosby's noir My Darkest Prayer, whose hero works in a mortuary.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is part memoir of how Doughty got obsessed with death (as a child, her goldfish died and she witnessed a serious accident that may have killed someone) and got a job operating the crematory of a San Francisco funeral home, and part facts about death, corpses, and funeral customs.

The memoir part is fairly interesting but a bit marred by Doughty making the same points and jokes over and over with minor variations. It turned out that I already knew about 80% of the factual material, so that part was pretty dull for me. There's definitely some gross parts, but it's not that gross. Ultimately I was most interested in the stories of the dead people and their loved ones (or hated ones), a la the opening scenes of Six Feet Under, and the book is spread about in focus enough that there's not that much of that.

I will share my very favorite part though. The machine that grinds up bone bits is called a cremulator, which as Doughty points out sounds like a cartoon villain. "Beware the Cremulator!"

I've had more-than-average contact with death and dead people for someone who doesn't deal with it professionally, due to spending my childhood where people often just seemed to be dead where I could see them, and then, as an adult, volunteering for a number of years with the Crisis Response Team, which did crisis counseling on-scene when people died suddenly. So I not only attended some funerals where the body was burned on a pyre while we all watched, but with Crisis Response mostly no one had done anything at all to the body other than check to make sure it was dead.

I think Doughty was around corpses that had been sitting around for longer than the ones I encountered, and of course she encountered way way more than I ever did. Also, the deaths I'd get summoned to were exclusively ones that the police got summoned to, as we got called by the police. If someone has been declared by a doctor to be dying, the police don't get called. So the scenes I went to were exclusively unexpected deaths, which both means that they were more likely to be violent but less likely to be of someone who was in absolutely horrendous condition before they died. I think that explains our different experiences with them.

Cut for comparison of my and Doughty's experiences with corpses, but nothing really graphic. ( Read more... )

This all sounds like Doughty was making a pitch for morticians, but in fact she ended up very against automatically embalming corpses and uncomfortable with efforts to hide the reality of death from loved ones, like shifting the washing of a body from the family to professionals. She talks a bit about death doulas, whose ideals she liked but whom she found to be too New Agey for her. The most interesting thing I personally got out of the book was the idea that being a death doula might be something I'd like doing if I could avoid the New Agier aspects of the community.

I've always found corpses and what we do with the corpse itself to be the least interesting part of death, and this book didn't change my mind about that. If you're curious about American mortuary practices plus a sprinkling of comparative anthropology, this book is okay. But honestly, her YouTube videos are better - and I say that as someone who would almost always rather read a book than watch a video.