basaltgrrl

They arrived for a Thanksgiving visit. On previous visits they have stayed at our house but my mom said they were renting a car and staying at a hotel, and that I should not be hurt. I'm not hurt, but I am rather concerned after they got lost trying to find their hotel, and then got lost again trying to find my house. Ugh, they're struggling so much with new stuff! The car has a navigation system, of course, but they don't know how to use it and my mom can't do the first thing with her new iPhone 6. I'm not judging, mind, I'm just concerned. I would be happy to walk her through phone stuff--and I will do that tomorrow, but for now I'm just so aware of how old they are, and how much age has affected their functioning.

I see that in myself, too, although I can still figure out an unfamiliar car or a subway system in a new place. Age, man. It's a bummer.

Here it is, in all it's green-skinned red-armored glory!

Title: Size differential
Author: basaltgrrl
Pairing: Tony Stark/The Hulk

Apologies for the quality at the moment: this is a camera photo of a pencil sketch. I'll get a better version up soon!

So, this is a fic set in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar fantasy world, which I wrote... oh, at least ten years ago. The funny thing about it is--well, on the one hand it was one of the more ambitious plot lines I came up with at the time, and it involved non-canonical characters. And it's very unfinished. The weird thing is I think I could switch it to an original setting (thus getting away from ol' Mercedes Lackey), and I think it could work in a space-ship or space station setting. Bizarre.


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I went to the climbing co-op last night, for the first time ever. See, I live in a city that's large and enthusiastic enough to have THREE climbing gyms; the two big, commercial ones and this small co-operative one that's just for bouldering, build by passion. And they're hosting the yearly bouldering competition this coming Saturday, which I was mad enough to sign up for, and I wanted to experience the place before showing up to compete.

I convinced this other woman, Emily, to sign up with me. Last year the comp was held at the gym in Rochester, and I went there with my darling D and two other women and we had so much fun that I wanted to do it again, but this year I feel achy and sore and not at the top of my bouldering game and D isn't doing it because she's just back from her back surgery recovery.

And then last night Emily didn't even show up! So I ended up bouldering with this woman J who I had met once or twice before, and it was quite nice actually and I enjoyed it more than I expected to. There's so much trust involved in climbing; it's so weird to climb with strangers, unless you really hit it off right away. But I'm not the strongest boulderer. So much of bouldering is about brute force climbing up overhanging things, and I'm much more of a finnesser.

I'm not looking forward to Saturday.

The last week or two has just been... nothing horrible or anything, but I'm having a resurgence of hormonal emotionalness, and then I climbed really hard Friday evening and woke up on Saturday with this almost crippling hip pain. I'm nervous about suddenly discovering terrible arthritis, so the weekend-long hip pain made me unhappy although it didn't stop me from going climbing outdoors on Sunday - mostly because I had already arranged to go with four of my favorite climbing peeps.

Two Aleve helped me through the day, and I ended up climbing pretty hard - I got up four 5.11s, and I was particularly pleased to climb Roofburner clean, as well as leading Suicide Squeeze.

OK, so a big deal is that I'm doing this nine day elimination diet, to be really nice to my digestive system and get off of wheat for a little while. But I've had huge emotional barriers to doing an elimination diet, and now that I've actually started it I feel like I'm on the verge of throwing a tantrum, constantly.

What do you mean I can't have a beer??? What do you mean I can't have a piece of toast???

I'm taking tomorrow as a vacation day so I can go shopping with my friend, which we've talked about for ages but haven't managed to fit in to our crazy modern lives.

And I feel guilty about it. I feel guilty about everything, which may be a sign of my hormonal stress. I feel guilty about not being at work, I feel frustrated about work, I feel guilty every time I go climbing and am away from my man and my dog, and I feel frustrated if I don't go climbing.

I'm not good at taking care of MY needs.

And I haven't been finding time to do fannish things, and that makes me melancholy.

Day 10 is "recommend a creator day", and I have to rec petra. I had been reading a lot of Whofic, and then a lot of Life on Mars fic, and in both realms a lot of slash... and there was a lot of great stuff. I can't complain about the quality. And then I read--it was probably nothing left to lose, the first petrafic I had ever seen. And it did things with the whole slash/kinky/dirtytalk/men having sex but being men setup that felt entirely new to me. There was something almost--well, I didn't have the words for it, then. And I wanted to illustrate, to say "Hey, this moved me" in a way that would get the attention of this person who had just blown me away. But I wasn't quite there yet.

Fortunately for me I warmed up to the subject, and I had the supreme pleasure of communicating with this person and getting more comfortable and being moved to do many more illustrations, and also the supreme pleasure of reading the reams and reams of fic petra has written in this fandom. I'm afraid I'm not going to say it in a very articulate manner, but her understanding of the characters--or her understanding of her own version of the characters--is so thorough and so deep that I feel like I'm watching some sort of psychological profile...

Well.

Day 11 is "ask for recs" day. I'm honestly not sure what to ask for, because great LoM fics have come to me from so many directions, and to the extent that I've sampled other fandoms I've found wonderful stuff. I did find reapersun by myself, who does amazing Sherlock art, and then found that other people already knew about this artist. So my request is for amazing fan recs that everyone already knows about but me.

Day 6

In your own space, rec at least 3 fanworks you thought you wouldn't like (because they weren't your fandom or they pushed against your boundaries or you thought you just wouldn't be interested) and that you ended up loving.



My introduction to slash began so many years ago, with a casual aquaintance who said she wrote Star Trek:TOS slash. That was in the days of photocopiers and typewriters, and I didn't come near the genre for quite some time until I fell in love with Farscape and googled on a whim and read a few fics. But still my interest was vague and disjointed. I got a little more intrigued when I encountered some lovely Firefly slash, most particularly Mal/Jayne, and then New Who entered my life and transformed me, and I readreadread. But it wasn't until Life on Mars that I was sufficiently moved to write.

So my recs, on this topic, are going to tend to be of the LoM persuasion.

1. Ease my worried mind by petra. When I first read this it wasn't that I expected not to like it, but that I had a kneejerk reaction to the concept that all people are divided into either doms or subs. That reaction stems, no doubt, from my tendency to reject preconceived notions of what a person should or shouldn't do, but part of it was just that I had not been exposed to much of that kind of thinking. While I understood "kinky", I didn't understand "kink". But now, oh now how I appreciate petra's fic and the things she's done and her subtle understanding of who these characters are (or the ways in which she's warped my understanding thereof...).

2. I never thought about furry kink or had a particular need to read it. But Life on Mars fandom has taught me that either I'm pretty open-minded about kinks, or I'm happy to read anything as long as it's in my fandom, or...? So here's Toys, in which Sam Tyler has a serious issue with his stuffed animals. And I think it's scorchingly hot.

3. I really should rec something that's not in my fandom. My first impulse is to rec another freakish and weird LoM kinkfest, because honestly, I can think of multiple options. But for the sake of diversity I will rec... Even dirty has layers, a piece of Top Gear slash that's quite monstrously hot. When I realized there was such a thing as Top Gear slash I was absolutely charmed.