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shadowsong26fic · 9 months

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Coming Attractions!

First Monday of the month, so here goes!

(And, as is often the case with these, I'll be keeping an eye on my askbox for an Open Question Night. Anything I've posted about here or on AO3 is fair game; I do take prompts but am not necessarily very fast at filling them)

Year of the OTP

I'm still behind on all of these, haha...I still have to do the three origfic ones for June (but...honestly, I didn't...really like most of the June prompts, ah well) and all five for July, plus get caught up on August. Goal is to get all of that done by the end of the month, but we'll see how it goes (especially since this month involves the Actual Moving sooooooo yeah)

Other SW Fic

Mostly putting this here to say that Precipice is not dead because I refuse to let it die; granted I haven't been actively working on it as much as I should lately, but I will update Someday, I promise. Unless I end up falling out of the fandom entirely, that fic continue.

BSG Fic

Once again plugging the Big Bang/Mini Bang event! There's still time to sign up! We are particularly low on betas, and could also use a few more artists. So given the numbers I'm not going to participate as an author myself (though I'll beta and probably jump in to podfic). Also the idea I had I'm not sure how to structure it (Zarek character study; the general idea was him looking back on his first arrest as he waits for his execution; drawing some on that great quote of his from Kobol "It's a lot easier to get blood off your hands than on it" or something like that; sort of approaching the questions of how much of his rhetoric does he (still) actually believe; some things about charisma and leading other people to their deaths; I was going to title it 'The Blood of Angry Men'...)

Other projects--aside from the OTP stuff, I am still slowly putting The Other Battlestar together. No real ETA on that, but it is coming. And it is going to be. Extremely Long, lol. Even if I do end it after Pegasus, which is my current plan (because while I have Some thoughts, figuring out how drastically things would shift after that is. A Pain. I can more or less do In Spite Of A Nail between Atia and Kimble to get the fleet in Close Enough to that same position by the time that encounter happens but. After. Man.) But yeah, very long, because...I don't need to cover/rewrite everything, but there's a Good Chunk that does need to be reworked, plus covering those six months from the Pegasus side...It's probably going to be Precipice-length (200-250k) by the time I'm done, lol.

There are always other things noodling around in my head, but that's pretty much all that's sort of Actively In The Works.

(But sign up for the event! Join us!!!!)

Les Mis Fic

Yeah so this is the current primary brainrot, lol. Papa and J... is picking up again; Ari will start learning some things in the next chapter! And will find it way easier to identify J than initially expected, lol.

For the stuff Ari won't be able to learn (due to letters/records being lost, either deliberately or because...just...::gestures at the 19th-century French governments:: ), I'm going to post a companion piece after P&J finishes, working title Provenance.

The other project which I'm hoping to start posting soon is a Groundhog Day AU, working title Acheron. I'm excited for that one but. uh. Definitely heed the warnings when it comes out because. Yeah.

Other Stuff

I'm doing the occasional origfic snippet that's not connected to the OTP fills; plus bouncing back to some of the AtLA projects I started on at the beginning of that fandom renaissance, but nothing super concrete coming up.

But also pod_together! Writing is done, recording is mostly done (I think?), I'm really excited for how this one's turned out. Leverage in the style of Shakespeare, it's a delight. (Three scenes; one with Eliot and Parker set fairly early; one with the whole crew in the Exposition scene; and a soliloquy from Sterling which was actually the first thing I wrote XD)

I also haven't forgotten about Incinctus, especially since Nocturne finally has an actual Trailer. But I think I'm going to need to rewatch the show and get in the right headspace in order to actually update it (which I do want to do! I just. Got stuck on the next chapter that needs to come out, haha...)

fun fact: watching castlevania was actually how i ended up getting actively back into bsg fandom XD

...I think that pretty much covers it! Like I said at the top, Open Question Night, and I'd love to hear about what you guys are working on, too!

also this is a reminder to me to finish putting together the Story Details form/do a reminder post about the first GBB checkin coming soon...

#coming attractions #miscellania #open question night

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deathcomesinallcolors · 7 years

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This will be personal. I'm sorry.

If I weren’t on mobile, I’d make it a read more. As it is, you can scroll on by.

I honestly don’t know how much longer I will last in my mother’s house. I live there now with my parabatai and roommate, and I’ve been stuck here for two years. I graduated college two years ago and, left with nowhere else to go, turned home.

I was going to save up to move to New York City. I was going to be a private eye. I had majored in criminal justice, and all my best professors had been supportive. “E-mail me when you get there!” my favorite professor said, a sociology teacher. “Tell me all about your wild adventures.”

Six months passed by without a job. Finally, I started work at a DIY hardware store. I was paid pretty well. I hated it there, but I was meeting important people. Federal agents and cops told me I should apply here and there. The manager at an Enterprise gave me his card, said he loved my lively personality and that I should join their manager’s program. My manager loved me and pushed me to apply for better, permanent jobs within the store. She begged me to stay past my seasonal term.

Yes, I was a seasonal cashier. My term lasted 6 months, unless they decided to keep me. In truth, I worked dozens of jobs around the store that wasn’t actually part of my job. Running deliveries of paper towels and cleaning supplies and leaving my post to check if there was a refrigerator hiding in receiving, because the guys back there were always too busy to help customer service.

Despite the horrid work environment, it was a stable job. Everything was going well. I felt my life hit the rails and click as it slowly progressed forward. I and my best friend decided to get out of our parents’ houses and move in together. We signed for an apartment. I applied to Enterprise, where I mentioned the manager BY NAME and waited for a phone interview. Our lives were looking great.

Then the apartment place never let us move in. Enterprise turned me down. My job let me go without even mentioning my last day. When pressed, HR shrugged a wishy washy “Oh, we’re considering you.” They never called.

I found myself fighting the apartment manager’s secretary (as their manager was invisible and avoided everyone, even tenants), then the landlord company itself. They owed me $600 of security deposits and application fees, not even including $200 for the uhaul expenses made the day our contract said we could move in. They voided our contract, and this criminal justice student was going to take them to court.

They paid up, but we still found ourselves jobless and homeless. My roommate’s family was six states away. Mine didn’t want me. But I was stuck with them anyway, along with my roommate.

For half a year, they pretended to care. I got a job at Target. But no matter how hard I worked, my parents always said, “You should be working harder. We won’t let you stay here forever.”

It’s been eight months that I’ve lived in my parents’ house with my best friend. In that time, I’ve lost $2000. My mother promised to give me a food budget, but refuses to give me money for food, because she “doesn’t trust” me. She thinks I’ll use food money on games or pizza.

They no longer trust me. That has partly to do with my friend (they always blame a queer friend of mine to blame for my changes in belief–he is just the most recent), my sexuality, gender expression, and also…the fact I saved a mouse.

After a long day at my hardware store job, I walked out into the parking lot, only to find a gray speck scurrying around the lot. I approached cautiously. It was a baby mouse, only a few days old. Its eyes were barely open. It must have wandered away from the hay bales we sold not twenty feet away, along with its little hay mouse family.

I rushed to my car–my mom’s car–retrieved an old pair of garage gloves, and chased it around the lot. Finally, I scooped it up, placed it in an upended plastic bin from the car, and drove to a pet store. I got it a turtle cage and all its little baby mousie necessities. I then snuck it upstairs.

A few days later, my mother stepped foot into my room and found the mouse cage sitting there, on the floor. She dropped a book on top of the cage to “keep it closed”, covering the breathing holes and nearly suffocating the poor dear. I came home to a very quiet, terrified mouse.

They tried to toss it out. They tried to toss ME out. I called their bluff. I refused to kill this helpless creature, this small, baby animal that would die without my care.

So I nursed it. I bathed it with Dawn. And after much pictures to my parabatai and his vet mother, I named her Eleven. Named for the days she survived before I found her.

My mother screamed it would give us all diseases and died. From its urine, from its fur, from its very air. I showed her links to medical websites, disproving all of this. I showed her texts from my friend’s vet mom. I debunked every single argument, but still she shrieked and cried and screamed. The moment I raised my voice in defense, she stomped to her feet and thrust her face in mine. Threatened to hit me. To throw me on the streets. My fists shook at my sides with anger and fear. But still I held my ground. I would not kill this small animal.

And that was before I brought home a trans gay boy to live with me. And the two stray secret kittens we saved from our local rescue. And his bunny and bird we brought from his family’s home.

Maybe I don’t deserve their trust. But I do deserve to eat. I deserve to live.

Today, I approached my mother about our food budget. Way back with our failed apartment expedition, The Deer Run, she had promised to give us a $200 monthly food budget. To help out. Instead, while we’ve been living here, she saves all our receipts and, 3 months later, pays us back for certain food items. Anything she pays us for, before she even pays us, is free game. It’s food for the house, not for us. Because if she pays for it, and it’s her house, she and the family gets to use it. That’s fair. IF SHE WOULD PAY US BEFORE WE RUN OUT OF MONEY.

I asked her if she could give is that stipend instead of…this. I channeled Gansey, reasoned with her. Offered multiple solutions so we can better budget our food spending, because…if we don’t know when and how much we’ll be paid, we don’t know what we can afford. And if she keeps the receipts, we don’t know what we’ve spent.

Instead, she talks over me. Accuses us of “living in the lap of luxury.” She outright refuses to give us grocery money for when they’ll be in Honolulu for two weeks, because we might “spend it all on video games and pizza.” Pizza. Really? Even foregoing the obvious fact that if we run out of money, that’s OUR PROBLEM, pizza is definitely food the last time I checked.

She said she wants to know what we’re buying, always, because she doesn’t trust us. Me. “I don’t care,” I told her, “ You can have all the receipts. I just want to eat.”

“You can eat anything in this house,” she laughs hysterically. “Everything here is open to you.”

Condiments. Chips. Clam soup that would make me vomit. And…pounds and pounds of frozen chicken far past due. Yeah. Thanks.

“We don’t really like anything you stock. You don’t even get spaghettios and ravioli, except when we ask you to. But if you’re going to pay for it either way, it’s much easier to get it ourselves than wait for you to go to the grocery store.”

Back up. Background. She once told me she’d go to the grocery store on Wednesday. Two days. Okay. I could handle that. We’d eat canned soup until then, and then I’d cook something decent.

Wednesday passed. Then Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. We then decided to go out food shopping ourselves or else we would have starved. Actually starved. We hadn’t eaten in two days.

Never does she go to the grocery store on time. It takes her two weeks from when she said she would to get food, which she then buys in bulk. Which then spoils before she can use it. Bags of blueberries, bundles of asparagus, it doesn’t matter. All trash. And her cooking? I can’t eat that much grease and oil anymore without vomiting. Her meat is frozen for five months (the safe length is three) at 20 degrees. The highest safe temperature you can possible keep food is 0 degrees F. HIGHEST. It’s best when it’s -10 or -20. The 3 month length for keeping frozen food safely is at 0 degrees at the highest. She is 20 degrees above that.

It’s no wonder her gruel makes me sick.

“Once you’re out of here,” she said, heated, “you’re not coming back.”

“That’s just fine,” I stated. “That was the plan.”

I thought parents were supposed to look out for their kids. I never considered my parents abusive. But my mother is manipulative, controlling to 1984 degrees, and passive aggressive. Every time I step foot downstairs, she beats me down emotionally. My dad just sits there, beaten too, and lets her. When he’s even here.

This is the way it’s always been. But it wasn’t always this bad. I was a kid once. Once, she was loving. But now that I believe in a pantheon rather than her Christian god, now that I’ve come out as bisexual and trans, my mother doesn’t love me. And, behind closed doors, my dad agrees with her.

Once I move out–once WE move out–I’ll probably never see them again. I’ll still look after my younger siblings, though. But that doesn’t change the fact that my youngest sibling, Dalton, is home for spring break. That boy eats four helpings in a five person family. He’s the type of giant to make four sandwiches at once and finish off the loaf while he’s at it. He’s inconsiderate and unaffected. He laughs everything off, especially actual problems, just lets them run down his back because it’s not HIS problem. First come, first serve. Thin as a rail and tall as a basketball pole, all Dalton cares about is himself.

And he’s been drinking our coke. The only drink my parabatai drinks, and the only thing my mom doesn’t “reimburse” us for. When I bring it up subtly…

“Hey, Mom. Did Dalton drink our coke?” I ask conversationally.

I’m staring at the two coke bottles in the recycling. I know he has.

“Oh, yeah… I saw him make a rum and coke, so maybe.” She laughs. “We have coke, too. It’s all the same.”

No, I think to myself, fists shaking. No, it’s not. It is our money spent. Our money wasted. And he always eats our food. Without asking. While I’m cooking. Right from under my nose.

I haven’t cooked for a week.

My mother throws around the word “job” like it’s a magic word, but that doesn’t make a college degree any more valuable in this job market. All that matters is experience, and jobs won’t give me experience unless I already have it; this student with a job and essays to write didn’t have time or money for an internship.

Oh, did I mention Target let me go just after Christmas? While every store is firing people rather than hiring? I haven't had a paycheck in three months.

So here I sit. Alone with my family of parabatai, two cats, a rabbit, a field mouse, and sort-of-a-bird. I’m lucky to have them. Because I’d be dead and on the streets without them. I would have killed myself by now.

#personal

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