This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Friday to midnight on Saturday (8pm Eastern Time).
scenes from an italian restaurant (4048 words) by scientistsinistral Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Tennis RPF Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Carlos Alcaraz/Jannik Sinner Characters: Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner Additional Tags: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Alcohol, requester asked for 'intense possibly unrequited feelings of longing' and i hope i have done that, food as a metaphor for relationship and longing, US Open 2025 Summary:
If one had a long enough tape measure, enough guts to bring it out in the middle of a packed, upscale Italian restaurant, and enough fortuitous timing to use it whilst the two best male tennis players in the world were sitting at opposite ends of said restaurant smack bang in the middle of the 2025 US Open, one would find that the distance between the tables they’d each been assigned was around seventy-eight feet.
or, a triptych: Sinner and Alcaraz consider food and each other, during and after the 2025 US Open; from hotel rooms to Italian restaurants to hazy New York nightclubs.
Mods, please could I have a Tennis RPF fandom tag?
The holidays have been calm and quiet for me so far, but I've spent them with my mum, so somehow almost all the time was filled up anyway. *g* Tonight I finally found the time to properly settle down with my Yuletide gifts! I got three of them, two in the main collection and one in Madness. ♥ ♥ ♥
Here they are:
Nicky and Gwarha from Ring of Swords, completely spot on, in an episode mentioned but not described in detail in canon:
Summary: The purple jungle adventure, from Gwarha's point of view.
The Nantucket Trilogy, a few generations later - future history my beloved:
Portraits of the Past (1371 words) Fandom:Nantucket Trilogy - S.M. Stirling Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Kenneth Hollard/Raupasha, Kashtiliash/Kathryn Hollard Characters: Raupasha (Nantucket Series), Kashtiliash (Nantucket Series), Original Characters Content Tags: Post canon, Canon as Seen Through The Lens of History
Summary: A new exhibit opens at the Athenaeum...
More Nantucket Trilogy - a Raupasha drabble about her arrival on Nantucket:
Her New Future (100 words) Fandom:Nantucket Trilogy - S.M. Stirling Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationship: Kenneth Hollard/Raupasha Characters: Raupasha (Nantucket Series), Kenneth Hollard Content Tags: Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational, YUMADRIN 2025, Drabble, Post-Canon
Summary: Raupasha reflects on the future.
I'm so pleased! So far I'm having a fantastic Yuletide. :D
Now I'm looking forward to diving into the rest of the collection! How's everyone else's Yuletide so far?
Another new year of me has come around again, and I keep remembering how my best friend from middle & high school used to call me up on my birthday & refer to me as "O Ancient One" because I was about 8 months older than she was. Probably partly because of the comparisons brought up by having a nearly-teen around living her own chaotic life.
Things I have been considering, & may yet do something with include:
*The Baltimore Gamer Symphony Orchestra meets... just across from where the Key Bridge *was* (but I have driven farther to get to weekly meetings before; I've just gotten lazy) and they require no auditions and even have a choir that theoretically one can manage to be part of *at the same time.* And I do miss having scheduled & group music...
*I need to *actually talk to* people about writing community, which of course I have been saying for years, & I think what I need is a general progress-sharing & brainstorming cheering section space or even just an update window on other people who are writing regularly, because it's the momentum that is hard, but I don't really know how to create that or with whom because none of the standard "writing group" models is going to recreate 2000s NaNo lj or pausing every couple hard-won paragraphs in a college paper to exchange random e-mails with a friend who's working on their own. (and both papers & NaNo ultimately got written because of deadlines, sigh.)
*I keep meaning to say to my family that I'm good for 2-3 nights of dinner plan a week, & if each of them take a day then we can declare one "seagull night" (seagull says "get yer own!") & a take-out day per week and stop having to make last-minute food decisions when we're already hungry and/or done braining until after food.
*Still working on plan: make the basement suitable for habitation &/or sudden arrivals of kids who live within walking distance. (at least the pre-Christmas clean-up has led to a slightly less problematic living room space, temporarily...)
*likewise, attempts to join/create/promote local community continue to be an unchecked ticky box.
*[complicated mutterings/rant about having a useful website] [slightly further shadowed by watching a nature writer/artist's website get devoured & replaced by the internet asbestos machine]
*wholesale deleting my phone games in the hopes of redirecting my flow-state downtime towards... something else??
The list will always be longer than I have world & time to devote to it, but we knew that already.
Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #989. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Today on Instagram and Facebook, Julia Quinn announced the launch of JQ Editions, a historical romance special edition subscription service.
Per her announcement, the special editions will include “luxurious soft-touch covers, illustrated endpapers, and fabulous sprayed edges.”
(SPREDGES?! Everybody drink!)
Quinn will be selecting each title, and says in the introduction that some will be “brand new,” while others will be “recent gems, or classics of the modern genre.”
Per the caption, “Each and every title is hand-picked by Julia Quinn, and she works personally with illustrators to make sure that the art reflects the story and honors the author.”
I am fascinated by this announcement on several levels because it’s the full-speed collision of several major trends. There’s the Kickstarter part, the historical romance part, the special edition part – my brain is Jiffy Popping all over the place.
Let’s start with the Kickstarter of it all. Every year for the podcast Patreon, Amanda and I do predictions for the coming year, and another episode where we listen to our older predictions from the previous year to find out how accurate we were.
One of my predictions for 2026 was the continued rise of Kickstarter as as a major option for authors who are frustrated by the diminishing returns when self publishing, particularly as a platform exclusive, and by the diminishing returns of working with a publisher when shelf space continues to shrink and mass market, the format most associated with historical romance, died this year. When a publisher like Harlequin can’t meet the demand for paperbacks of Heated Rivalry, one of the greatest romance television adaptations of all time, and in the same year,“After the End,” an author collective Kickstarter, crossed $1.4 million in sales, it’s not difficult to understand the increasing appeal of Kickstarter.
Oriana Leckert, who is the Head of Publishing at Kickstarter, said during our interview,
…I think two, two really, really key things that make Kickstarter very special for authors is that our cut is five percent.
Sarah: Yep.
Oriana: Five percent. Also we have Stripe, who processes our payments; they take three to four percent. Even so, you’re paying less than ten percent in fees, which is so much less than you’re paying to any other avenue through which you might sell your books
Another benefit to Kickstarter that I still think about: data. As Leckert explained it,
Kickstarter is in the business of giving you your audience…. [A]s we see the continued fracturing and dissolution of social platforms, as we watch these, like, you know, mercurial to malevolent executives with a flick of the wrist change their algorithm in a way that now that, like, you know, a hundred thousand strong audience that you’ve worked so hard for, you can no longer access, or not as effectively.
…If you run a Kickstarter campaign, first of all, during the campaign you get a tremendous amount of data about where your backers are, where they’re coming from, are they using desktop or mobile? What time of day are they backing? Which of your promotional avenues have reached them? And then afterward you get everybody’s email addresses! You get to send them surveys. You get to ask them all sorts of questions….
[H]olding onto those direct avenues to reach your readers is so much more important than ever. This is something that we can do for our authors that Amazon’s not going to give you.
Kickstarter is also an excellent way to test new ideas, as Katee Robert explained: “I’m going to be circling back to Kickstarter a lot in the future, just because it’s a very interesting platform and, and if it doesn’t fund, it doesn’t fund, and then you do something else.”
So that’s the Kickstarter part. But as I said, a subscription box of historical romance special editions is also dead center of an intersection of other major trends: special editions (obvs), Rrrrrrrromantasy market saturation, and the future of historical romance.
I’ve said many, many times, per the Bruce Springsteen Law of Publishing, “everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back.” In other words, no genre ever dies. They come back in a different form. Like Pokémon. Just like how New Adult was Chick Lit re-invented for readers coming of age in a terrible economy instead of a good one, or how romantic suspense with military and law enforcement heroes, which used to be everywhere, seem to have given way to a mafia and unaffiliated special ops heroes. No genre dies, but it will evolve before it comes back.
The historical romance genre is not in terrific shape in terms of market strength, to put it mildly. But it’s not dead — the mass market paperback is dead, but not historical romance, even though it was most published in that trim size and at that price.
So how might the JQ Editions affect the state of historical romance? Could historical special editions reinvigorate the historical romance audience? Or will the audience for historical special editions be found with established historical romance readers who have deep ties to the genre, and to specific books?
Both, possibly?
First, special editions are, as the memes say, so hot right now, and have been for a few years. Moreover, readers on social media who are likely to be part of the special edition audience have been ‘rediscovering’ historical romances because the internal conflicts coupled with the external class structure produce a lot of yearning and pining. The new trend of “Who put all this pining in historical romance?” reader engagement only helps a project like JQ Editions. The same readers who adore special editions of much loved Rrrrrrrromantasy titles may also seek out special editions of historical romances that are still popular.
The thing about special editions, though: they’re more aesthetic than practical. No one is going to sit down with a special edition book with end papers, art, and spredges (drink!), and start reading while eating cheeze puffs. Cheeto dust + special edition = rage bait.
A special edition isn’t necessarily a reliable discovery mechanism, either: the goal of a special edition is to reach fans of the book with a unique artifact of that book’s popularity and virality. Which leads me back to audience.
The audience for a historical romance special edition would have to include historical romance readers, obviously. Many historical romance fans are collectors of romance as well – specific cover artists, models, or entire backlists for beloved authors. Historical romance is a older genre with books that have been favorites for literal decades. Some readers may be very excited to have unique art editions of their fave, simply because the special edition trend finally includes them.
Attaching the artistic enhancements of a special edition to a book that has been a reader favorite for most of their adult lives? I hope Quinn picks some old favorites because if she’s picking books that have Big Reader History attached, the subscription Kickstarter could do very, very well. I’ll bet folding money, as my sister says, that there will be loud and ample calls for Kleypas editions, particularly Devil in Winter.
This may be a fusspot feature of my age and perspective, but personally, I want less stuff in my house, not more. So I haven’t been in the audience for special editions, and everything I say must be taken with a Volkswagen-sized grain of salt here. But even though I am pretty selective about stuff resides in my home, I am so, so curious to see which books are selected, and what they’ll look like, and how they’ll be decorated and styled. (Lol – that’s like a whole new job category, right: “book stylist.”)
Special editions are fandom artifacts, gorgeous representations of a specific book’s popularity at a moment in time. They also assign more visual cues to a three-dimensional book than mere cover and copy: the art and motifs on the cover or the spredges (drink!) visually communicates so much more about the story. And they’re usually gorgeous! Luscious paper, textured cover treatments, art and designs in lavish colors you can see from across the room – they’re meant to appeal to our senses and our experience with that particular story. Special edition treatment for historical romance could potentially aid in the evolution of the historical romance genre, especially if the titles included mix enduring favorites with titles that are part of historical romance’s evolution in progress.
A special edition has more opportunity to signal to a reader what’s inside, and it’s usually aimed at a reader who already knows that what’s inside is special to them. I am extremely curious to see what titles are included, and what they’ll look like.
What about you? Would you be interested in special editions of historical romances? Which one?! Are you interested in JQ Editions?
Bookish Notes shared a cover image and a screenshot of some marketing copy from the publisher about Eloisa James’ next book,The Last Lady B.
The marketing copy includes:
POTENTIAL SUBSCRIPTION BOX PLACEMENT: THE LAST LADY B is being heavily considered to launch Bridgerton author Julia Quinn’s (IG: 520K, FB: 407K) new subscription box. This would include a beautiful, deluxe hardcover edition that would publish simultaneously with our edition! Since this would be the first book ever chosen for this new box, we would benefit from any publicity surrounding the launch in addition to our own publicity.
The original post also notes that this is a historical romance in first person:
This is the cover, if you’re curious:
Launching with a new historical romance (in first person – that’s kind of a big deal) from a very popular author in a special edition would be an interesting strategy for the first box, and aims to capture some of the groups I mentioned above: fans of an author, fans of historical in general, and possibly potential new historical readers. I know many folks who make buying decisions based on hating first person pov, so I can only assume there are an equal or greater number of people who make buying decisions based on adoring first person pov.
Seriously, this remains so fascinating for me. It’s like a bunch of things I think about all the time colliding in front of me. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Updated 29 December: Three of the launch titles have been announced! Per Instagram, they are:
I’m pretty sure the boxes will each be one book, similar to other book boxes, so I’m not certain what months these would be – but oooh, boy, I am curious to see the art.
Title: Earthquake Fandom: The Fantastic Journey Author: badly_knitted Characters: Fred, Scott, Travellers, Varian. Rating: PG Setting: An Act of Love. Summary: The travellers are trapped in a cave beneath a mountain, and Varian is missing. Word Count: 300 Content Notes: Nada. Written For: Challenge 501: Amnesty 83, using Challenge 62: Trapped. Disclaimer: I don’t own The Fantastic Journey, or the characters. They belong to their creators. A/N: Triple drabble.
It's gift card season and there are a couple sorts of books I would like to get with mine, but I don't even know what sorts of terms to start searching on.
1) Something about different legal systems and the philosophies that go with them. How they shape how people think about what the law is even for, and so forth. Would prefer to focus on modern systems, but historical examples are fine if they help illuminate the present. (E.g. I have come across mentions a few times that things work in such and such a way in France or its former colonies because they were shaped by the Napoleonic code.)
2) How the governments of really huge cities/metropoles work.
Blogs or newsletters are okay too. But no podcasts or YouTube series unless they're scripted, please.
I've made this post a number of times without any luck, but I wanted to try again just in case I have better luck this time. Would anyone be interested in any of the following Nintendo Switch games?
1. You have the summer and plenty of money to travel abroad. Where all would you go?
2. What foods would you be sure you got to eat?
3. What landmarks would you be sure you got to see?
4. What airline would you use?
5. Would your knowledge of other languages influence where you went? (i.e., would you be more likely to go to France if you spoke French?)
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
In 2020, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) made a commitment to our users, members, and volunteers that we would work towards making our organization and our projects more welcoming and inclusive to fans of color, and preventing and combating racist harassment on our platforms.
We provided an update on this work in 2023, acknowledging that progress had not been as fast as we had hoped, sharing details of the changes that had been made by that point, and laying out the road ahead.
Today we are delighted to share that we have fulfilled the last of the promises we made to you back in 2020. While we celebrate the hard work and dedication to improvement that has taken us to this point, we also regret that it has taken us five years to get here. We are sincerely grateful for all the support we've received from our users, members, and volunteers to complete this work, and we apologize that it has taken this long to do so.
This post lays out both the progress we've made and the specific ways our 2020 promises have been fulfilled, as well as what is coming next and how we will ensure that our work doesn't stop here.
What We've Done
Since our update in 2023, we have completed the following goals to help protect our users and volunteers against harassment:
Simplified the language and removed redundancies throughout the TOS in order to improve readability for all users, including those who may have English as an Additional Language (EAL);
Generalized the Abuse Policy to provide the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) with greater flexibility to determine how to address harassment and other TOS violations; and
Restarted the creation of "No Fandom" canonical additional tags to allow users to more easily filter in and filter out for concepts as they want. Read more about new canonicals in the Tag Wrangling news posts.
The Diversity Consultant Research Officer completed their internal review, engaged with contractors, and made a culture audit firm recommendation to the OTW Board in 2023.
Following that recommendation, the OTW contracted with an audit firm and underwent a months-long organizational culture audit that included interviews with volunteers at every level of the organization and in every committee.
The Board, working with the firm and OTW volunteers from several committees, created an Organizational Culture Roadmap of items that need to be addressed and changed to promote a healthier and safer OTW for all our volunteers.
To ensure the completion of these goals, we established the OTW Culture Roadmap Workgroup. This is an independent body from the Board so that this work is unaffected by Board turnover. This work remains ongoing and will continue long beyond this update.
Made multiple changes to the procedures of public Board meetings and Board communications generally, to improve transparency regarding Board work and OTW progress. This includes:
Implemented a new moderation system for public Board meetings, as of the November 2023 public meeting, allowing the Board to address questions raised during public meetings; since the July 2024 public meeting, started addressing questions submitted asynchronously from people who can’t attend the meeting live.
Implemented professional customer relationship management tools for Board work and Board email/communication.
Released bi-weekly internal updates regarding Board and BAT work to OTW volunteers.
Created two new committees and two new subcommittees to better support the completion of these goals and our long-term sustainability as an organization:
Completed and published a Whistleblower Protection Policy to outline and enshrine the protections for people who make reports about misconduct in the OTW.
What We're Doing
We know that creating a safer environment for our users and volunteers is an ongoing responsibility, and we remain deeply committed to addressing harassment with both urgency and care. While the steps outlined in our 2020 statement marked an important beginning, we recognise that true progress requires continuous effort beyond fulfilling those initial commitments. We are dedicated to building on that foundation with transparency, accountability, and compassion.
We are committed to and already continuing to work beyond our 2020 promises to ensure that this work does not end here. Some examples of our ongoing commitment include:
Completing the ongoing project to review the OTW Code of Conduct in full, bringing it into line with industry standards and updating it in collaboration with volunteer feedback;
Supporting the ongoing development and growth of the Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution subcommittee;
Making AO3 more accessible for EAL users through our ongoing internationalization efforts. We've recently finished preparing all emails for translation and are continuing to work on other parts of the site.
Moving Forward
Looking forward to the future, we want to maintain our progress in this area and continue to improve transparency about changes within the OTW. We will make efforts to share information about updates like these in the monthly newsletter and our quarterly public Board meetings on Discord (you can also find updates from our quarterly meetings in our meeting minutes).
We appreciate your ongoing support and patience throughout these efforts, and we offer our sincerest apologies for the extended time required to fulfill our promises. Although progress has been slower than anticipated, we are very excited to share that our major goals are now complete and we are committed to continuing improvement into the future.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
And very heavy on the dudes. I'm not sure if women don't go into this sort of thing, or if they're just too classy when they do it, and thus don't get onto the playlist. Though I guess it would be strange for lesbians to sing an ode to Jingle Bell COCK. (Emphasis all theirs, and totally unnecessary. We know where the song was going.)
Anyway, in honor of this, I'm posting three belated Christmas videos. The last is Boynton and totally SFW.
And an event: Fediverse Punk Month (January 2026) -- a call for punks (and other subcultures) to leave Meta platforms and build communities in the Fediverse instead
RSS Feeds
mixed color (RSS) a great blog about embroidery, sewing, dying, etc!
Winnie Lim (RSS) writes very enjoyable blog posts about life and the things that happen therein
sortition social is a community RSS feed reader! It selects a random feed from their (user-submitted?) database and added to the timeline for 7 days
Query, did readers (as opposed to various gate-keepers in publishing houses, Mudie's and other circulating libraries. etc) want meek women?
(Do I need to cite Victorian novelists who did quite well out of women who were not meek.)
I would also contend that any input from women in Mr D's life was going to filtered through a lot of his Own Stuff, and the article actually points out some of the things like His Mummy Issues.
There is no-one in the novels at all like Angela Burdett-Coutts, whom one suspects very unlike saintly Agnes Wickfield (and married a much younger man at an advanced age), in fact as I think I have complained heretofore, he was happy to work with this renowned philanthropist while the women philanthropists in his novels are mean and merciless caricatures.
One can make a case that he did worse than 'dilute' the women he knew when portraying them on his pages.
Also I am not sure what the 'debate' is over his relationship with Ellen Ternan!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adafrog posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fandom_checkin
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
