Rosemary for Remembrance

To begin with, I love things that are big and gaudy and outrageous. This year I've requested three poems that are wildly overblown. What depths do you see in them? Would they make more sense if all the characters were amoebas? Would they make much less sense if all the characters were platypuses, but in a good way?

Please write the story you've always wanted to read. Write the story you've never dared to post. Write a sonnet sequence, or a detective story, or an acrostic. Experiment. Have an adventure. I will delight in your daring. I have absolute faith in you, because you love these poems, too. Do with them what you will.

The Eve of St. Agnes. The story in this poem is complete, as far as it goes. Something mysterious and bad is happening in Madeline's family (implications of forced marriage, maybe). Madeline performs a ritual to see the future and lies down to sleep. Porphyro finagles his way into the castle and awakens Madeline, and they escape together. In the original draft, which is not binding on you, they have The Sex; Keats's editors made him take that part out. Courtesy of lnhammer, the original manuscript, if you're curious.

Anyway! What's going on in the rest of the castle, at the implied wild party? Who is dwarfish Hildebrand? What evils was Lord Maurice up to? Expand the backstory, or tell us of the wild chase after Madeline and Porphyro, or something even better that just occurred to you.

Kubla Khan, Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

What a fragment it is! Glorious words spangled as far as the eye can see. Hints at interesting places, at things that were about to happen, at things that had happened.

But they didn't. Whether or not you believe in the Person from Porlock (I don't), what we have is part of a magnificent introduction. I'd like you to do some worldbuilding. In the fragment we have, build your own castle or hovel or underwater cavern; people it with your own characters, or tell a legend, or tell us what the damsel with the dulcimer was saying about Mount Abora, or, again, write something I haven't conceived of but you have.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
Browning sure did personify emotion. There's an evil river that is petty and spiteful! There's evil farm equipment! There's an evil horse! (Poor horse.)

In short, Childe Roland is in a Mood. He is probably dressed in black and wearing heavy eyeliner.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to add to the story. Fill out some of those references to Cuthbert, or The Band. What exactly was the hoary cripple up to?
There are so many possibilities. Somebody Roland doesn't even notice is sitting down with a picnic and planning how to clean up the landscape and put in a nice tea-shop. The Band are bitching about Roland and planning to ride off after him.

And, of course, what happened after Roland blew that horn?

Do not wants: urine, feces, vomit, omorashi, forced feeding, prolonged embarrassment, emotional abuse, sex with kids under 15, violent rape*, vore, explicitly described torture.

* The usual "sex pollen", "I know I shouldn't but I must", and other flavors of dubcon/noncon are fine. Just nobody being threatened with death or violence.

Thank you. I wish you a joyful and surprising Yuletide.

e: It turns out that this year you have to opt-in to treats; by default you don't want them. If you feel like writing me one this year, please do! Also, hi, mods!

When I was thirteen, in 1972, my family moved into my parents' penultimate house, and my first. I remember fragments of our first two houses, plus the houses we lived in for sabbaticals and summer classes, but when I dream, it's of the house we moved into when I was thirteen.

Our house had belonged to a biology professor (my dad was a mathematics professor); before that, it had been the farmhouse for a set of fields that became the surrounding suburb. The house came with grapes, strawberries, plums, apples, raspberries, asparagus, and plants I don't remember. I spent many springtimes sitting in a branch of an apple tree in bloom, reading and being happy. I will never forget the way that apple bark looks after rain. That tree is long dead, but it lives in my memory.

At 906 Abington Pike, I learned to prune, to weed (God, I hated weeding), to can, and to deadhead. I learned to can in the era when making jelly required three different boiling pots. One of paraffin (UK wax), one of boiling jelly, one of jelly glasses. I wasn't allowed to help with the paraffin; too dangerous. My roots are sunk deep in that soil. My father made the family bread; I got teased, in middle school and high school, because my sandwiches were the wrong shape, round instead of square.

I left, because I loathed Indiana and wanted to see the wider world. When I graduated from college, and my husband lived in staff housing, I began my own garden; I have been gardening myself since 1982. There are three gardens I count as my own: one in Massachusetts; one, a failure, in North Carolina; and one in California, which I dearly loved, and left only when my knees could no longer manage the terraces.

We are in our last house now, beside the sea. When we leave this one, we will either be dead or no longer able to care for ourselves. I am paying large amounts of money to have the land carved into my last garden. Right now I have European elders, a self-fertile Cox's Orange Pippin, and French strawberries, waiting in pots for their final home. In the kitchen, there is a sourdough; I've been making bread every two days, and need to stretch that to three. Every day I go out into the garden (currently pots on the deck) and water it and look out at the sea.

When I was a girl, I resented being an Earth sign; I wanted to be fire or air. As an old woman, I am comforted by bread, and earth, and growing things. Sourdough and strawberry starts and old roses make me feel safe in a very unsafe world.

Here I am, and here I stay, until I can no longer.

That's all I know; I heard it from friends of hers who would absolutely know.

I will always remember her bright, fierce mind, the depth of her expertise, and her coruscating wit.

Dear Author,

When your viewpoint character, kidnapped by foreign forces when he was expecting to be killed by them, has to live in their military camp for some months, he is going to have culture shock. More than once. He's eating weird food, speaking his second language constantly, traveling (because army), exposed to wildly different assumptions about (for instance) the proper treatment of women. He's going to worry about what his family is doing.

To say nothing of being kidnapped when he expected to be murdered instead.

Just going with the flow and learning interesting new things is the act of a robot.

Yours,
Tonstant Weader.

(Not naming the book because I don't have time to do a proper review. It's got some ill-thought-out tribal-vs-'civilized' cultures stuff going on, too.)

Power can be chancy up here, what with high winds and wildfires. We'd like to install a generator. The local electrical contractors sent a request for a permit to the planning department. They got back:

Your building permit application was referred to the Planning Division of Mendocino County Planning and Building Services for approval. Please be advised that the Planning Division is not able to approve your building permit at this time. The proposed Propane/Generator installation does not meet the criteria for an exemption. The project site is designated as Highly Scenic and Coastal Development Permit is required.

Not gonna lie, it is Highly Scenic. It'll be interesting to see if there's a way to hide the generator that complies with the planning board's esthetics, or whether it's simply a no-go.

I just found out that the first-ever alphabetical-order English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words (1604), is online and searchable. If you click back to the beginning (I'm linking to "A", for happier browsing) you'll find it's

plaine English words, gathered for the benefit &helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons.

Secondly, I have discovered that you can set your Kindle to the Oxford English Dictionary (not the unabridged) instead of the Oxford American Dictionary, which is handy for me, who am likelier to unknow British words than American.

I wrote Eureka (I Remember My Greek), for Jean Webster's Daddy Long-Legs.

I felt like gardening today, so I did. I took previously-ordered seeds from Renee's Gardens and took them out into a pleasantly chill day.

Chervil, in the front of a bed that's the back of the deck. California poppies, scattered up and down the sides of the drive and the sides of the lot. Ideally they'd have gone in last fall, but give them a year or so and they'll be fine. Tough little plants. "Mermaid's Dream" sweet peas, a collection of blues, lavenders, mauves, and creams, promised to be heavily scented. "Sabre" shelling peas, and how funny the back-formation "shelling peas" is. Used to be just peas and sweet peas, now there are sugar snaps and snow peas, so we need a disambiguation for the original.

I still haven't found my tools, so it was me, a chopstick, and a table spoon. I did some hand-weeding including of a nasty invasive raspberry, which of course I didn't go to the house for gloves to pull. Now one finger is prickly.

The only source of heat in our house, aside from electric space heaters, is a propane gas fireplace (not stove) in the living room. This has been failing mysteriously all fall. We had the fireplace guy out twice; the second time, my husband had noticed that the fireplace seemed to fail more often in windy, wet weather. No, this was not a plus.

The fireplace guy, who is awesome, spent about a half an hour poking, and refused to charge us for the second visit because he determined that the problem was with the chimney, not with the fireplace itself. Scheduled a visit in early January for the chimney people to come out.

The chimney people did not come out; they called after 5 to explain they'd run behind on their previous job, so I'd have to schedule, and their office lady would be reaching out. She didn't, so I called to reschedule. She gave me a date another two weeks out. I pointed out that the original date was rescheduled through no fault of our own, and that we'd been without heat since late December. She snarled that she had had people waiting without heat for months. I grimly accepted the new date.

Reader, that date was today. An hour after the people were supposed to show up, I called the office. The office lady (their term, not mine) answered the phone with "Hello?", not giving the business name. I explained that nobody had been there for the appointment. She said she'd call the roofers and call me back.

Half an hour after that call, the roofers called me.

"Well, the problem was that our office lady forgot to give me the paperwork. It's just as well, though, because I just talked to [Fireplace Guy] and it turns out we need two people anyway, and I've only got one. So it all worked out for the best. Anyway, she'll reach out to you to reschedule."

Me, remembering the last time she'd "reached out", said, "Will she reach out, or do I need to call her?" Him: "She'll call you tomorrow morning. She's out for the day." That was at 3:45 local; the original appointment had been for two.

Rural living, ladies and gentlebeings. No matter how disorganized and incompetent the chimney people are, they're the only ones in the area.

Dear Chocolatier,

First of all, thanks for dragging yourself out of the sump that has been this decade into the sunlight of creation. I hope you have fun. Write or draw the things that delight you, and I'll be delighted, too. Feel free to go wild: wingfic, sentient goldfish, everybody lives in a stained glass window, something even more unlikely. Feel free to go naturalistic, too.

DNW: Body fluids (urine, feces, blood, spit), omorashi, degradation, A/B/O. Please keep characters their canon gender, if they have one. No rape, but dubcon is fine.

Homestuck
Dave Strider/Jade Harley

Once upon a time, Dave and Jade were friends. Tell me or show me something showcasing that friendship, please! People can be friends and lovers, and that's how I see them. Making nerdy jokes, teasing each other, enjoying each other's company, smooching. If you want Karkat, feel free to make it poly, but without the jealousy and anger seen in the Epilogues.

No Epilogues or HS^2 content. Pesterquest, Hiveswap, and Friendsim are peachy.

The Addams Family (Movies - Sonnenfeld)
Gomez Addams/Morticia Addams (The Addams Family movies)

The hottest pairing ever seen in the movies, because they *pay attention to each other*. It's not just the way the actors look at one another, it's how much they are in synch, and how careful they are of each other's needs. And how funny! Show me them hanging out together and being (in their own peculiar way) happy. Swordfights, tangoes, or masked balls a bonus.

Zenda Novels - Anthony Hope
Rudolf Rassendyll/Rupert of Hentzau (Zenda Novels - Anthony Hope)

I swoon for love/hate relationships. Rupert is a nasty piece of work, but he's Rudolf's equal in skill, and a great deal better at skulduggery. It's a disadvantage being high-minded when your rival fights below the belt... in more ways than one. If you can find a way to work in a swordfight, so much the better.