conjureupasmile

What I Just Finished Reading

Naomi Novik, The Summer War: Fantasy novella about a girl who ends up unwillingly married to a fairy prince as part of a treaty and/or revenge. Is it petty of me to be annoyed that an author who got here by writing queer fanfic and then did not write anything queer professionally (as far as I know; I haven't read the Scholomance books yet) has decided that now there can be queer characters in the background but mostly in unflattering ways? And also that the main character still needs to basically be rescued by her brothers even though the story wants me to believe she is Smart and Independent? Yeah, probably.

Cat Sebastian, We Could Be So Good: lysimache keeps telling me I should read the second book of this historical m/m romance series but unfortunately I am the type of person who has to Read The Whole Thing From The Beginning so I said, no, I was reading the first one first. So this is the first one. It was kind of meh. It had a great 1950s NYC setting but nothing really happened and then it just kind of ended. Also we all know exactly what books the author read about being gay in NYC because there are only two and everyone's historical gay romance regurgitates the same facts from them (seriously, you can go to places other than the Navy Yards, I'm pretty sure) so I was really confused that the author seems to have missed the part where "fairy" actually has a really specific meaning. I guess now I read the second one? The second one is baseball.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Captain America #9 )

What I'm Reading Next

I guess the second Cat Sebastian book in that series? Probably?

So Marvel Trumps Hate, a fannish charity auction that I have occasionally participated in, has people offering fic and art and various other fannish crafts and services for charity. There are usually a few people offering fanbinds of Marvel fanfiction, and in 2024, a bunch of people got together and organized a group bid for zerosconsort to bind two of my stories. I had no idea this was happening! It was awesome!

So I talked with Zero about it -- mostly in the spring and summer of 2025 -- and we settled on doing two anthologies of my shorter Steve/Tony fic, split by POV. So there would be one Steve book and one Tony book. I know we talked about what stories should go in there and how to balance the word count, but this was also the period of time where I was getting 20-25 migraines a month for about five months straight, so I don't actually... remember... a lot of last year especially well, my capacity for coherent reasoning was at about 0%, and I figured whatever Zero wanted to do was probably going to be good and I would just be pleasantly surprised when Books Got Here.

(I am really sorry. It was a lot of migraines.)

Zero did also mention that she was additionally working on a fanbind of my Trek AU and would send me that too, and I thought that was really sweet of her. She commissioned additional art, also, which is definitely above and beyond. It's really nice art.

So I was expecting three books in the mail yesterday and opened the box and got FIVE BOOKS and my first thought, honestly, was, "Oh, my God, I have had so many migraines, and I don't remember talking about five books. Is this something we actually talked about that I was supposed to know about or is this supposed to be a surprise that I don't know about?" But it was in fact not a thing I was already supposed to know! It was a surprise! So that's good! I didn't entirely break my brain! Whew.

Yeah. It has been A Time.

(The two additional books, that I did not know about, are Thrust Issues and my Ults soulmate AU. The Ults soulmate AU has every occurrence of the word "soulmate" in red. Hooray for rubrication.)

Anyway, if you want to see them, I personally am terrible at taking pictures so nobody wants me to take any, I promise you, but Zero made a very nice masterpost on Tumblr with more detail about all of the books.

The Star Trek AU is black with SILVER SPARKLES. Like spaaaaace. Eeee.