The Folly

I just posted a piece of meta about Seawoll and Nightingale, and Peter's changing perceptions thereof, at my journal.

There will be no spoilers in this post, it's more about general vibes than anything.

I liked Amongst Our Weapons a lot better than False Value, and it also felt more like a Rivers of London book than False Value did. Partly, that "feeling like Rivers of London" is a product of Peter being undercover in FV and on his regular police duties on AOW. But on the other hand, Peter was undercover for much of Broken Homes, and that one still feels like a Rivers of London book to me. (Peter was undercover for all of FV instead of only part of it, but he was ALSO doing magic police work on the side, so I'm not sure that the ratio of "undercover work" to "ordinary magic policing" was actually that different.)

In a conversation in sixthlight's journal, I realized why FV doesn't feel much like a Rivers of London novel. It's because the theme of the book is, in many ways, about isolation and tearing down the relationships Peter spends the book building. And most RoL books are about the opposite. There is a constant stream of new people getting introduced and brought back as recurring characters. There is a constant sense that the Folly's understanding of the demimonde and the magical world is being expanded through Peter's community building and his compulsive networking. But while Peter does learn more about magic and the demimonde throughout the world in FV, there is no networking. There is no community being built. Peter goes in alone, and he comes back out alone, and everything he built and every relationship he made is temporary and ends as the book does. And regardless of the quality of writing and storytelling, that is always going to be less interesting to me than a typical RoL book.

I cannot believe that nobody has posted here about Amongst Our Weapons. The new book has been out for two weeks in the US! It's very good. Here's my reaction post.

yuletide is open for nominations!

Yuletide is a long-running fanfic exchange focused on small fandoms (i.e. fandoms with fewer than 1,000 completed stories (in English, of more than 1,000 words each) combined on AO3 and ff.net). Rivers of London qualifies!

The core of Yuletide is a fiction exchange. You sign up with at least three fandoms you would be interested in receiving a story in, and at least four fandoms you would be willing to write in (along with characters from each). Everyone who signs up is assigned to someone to write a story for; everyone who signs up receives a story. Stories are revealed on December 25th, and their authors are revealed on January 1. It's a lot of fun.

However, the first step is nominations. In order to be in the tagset for people to request and offer, a fandom (and characters in that fandom) have to be nominated. Each person can nominate up to three fandoms with up to four characters each, so the more people who nominate, the larger the pool of characters we can request and offer. So, if you are planning to sign up for Yuletide, and you are planning to request a story (or offer to write one) in the RoL fandom, you might want to nominate to make sure the characters you are interested in are part of the tag set.

The same goes for any other small fandom you might be interested in writing or offering. Someone else might nominate that book or movie or obscure TV show or commercial or work of art or whatever ... but then again, they might not. Some things get nominated regularly every year, others don't, there's no guarantee, if you're thinking about participating it's best to nominate things you are interested in.

In order for a nomination to be official, it has to be made at the AO3 tagset. However, there's no way of knowing what's been nominated and what hasn't until after nominations are over and the mods go through and approve things. (They don't approve as nominations come in so that people have the opportunity to change their minds if they want to.) So there is a DW page and a spreadsheet where people say what they've nominated so that people can coordinate. (For example, Ted Lasso has been nominated twice. Two of those nominations duplicate Roy, Keely, and Rebecca, differing only in their fourth character. If one of them sees that before the nominations are done, they could change it so that they're asking for other characters instead and then there will be more characters in the tagset.) Not everyone who nominates puts it on the spreadsheet, so the spreadsheet is not a full list of everything that will be in the tagset, but it is better than nothing.