Title: A Frequent Traveller's Guide to Jovan
Rating: Hard R/NC-17
Warnings: explicit heterosexual and homosexual sex, slavery, violence, torture and drug use.
Summary: Since the death of their brother the Emperor Dolmus brought the royal brothers Valentin and Cassius back to Monsilys, capital of the great Jovani Empire, Valentin has cured the boredom of court life with poppy-sap and women, while for Cassius the remedy has been ale and the result much the same. Then an ill-fated duel causes their niece the Empress to send them to Gallica to deal with a problem there, and they find themselves drawn ever more back into the world of Jovani politics: a world their brother banished them from seventeen years earlier. As Valentin veers from disaster to disaster, always running from his past and a life he would prefer to forget, Cassius is fascinated by a damaged boy he rescues from a slave brothel. Valentin's weapon is sly diplomacy, while Cassius prefers the honesty of the sword, but will either be enough to protect Jovan, and themselves?
Notes: Volumes I and II are already written; you can check them out at my website (along with Vol III as it's written), as free eBooks (Volume I and Volume II) or I will be posting them on livejournal at a rate of one chapter a week.
(Start from the beginning of Volume I)
(Start from the beginning of Volume II)
( Volume II, Part 2 )
“My father thought it was about time I was married,” said Isobel. “He—”
Mila intervened again. “The offer from Veribias was generous and well-timed.”
“Prince Nadzic was very handsome,” said Isobel with a sigh. “Was he not, Mila?”
“Very handsome. And well-spoken. He seemed as if he would make a good husband, aside from being Crown Prince of Veribias.”
- A Frequent Traveller's Guide to Jovan
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wilfulandsneaky wrote in 
fictionwriters- May 26th, 13:57
- (no subject)
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- seachanges
- May 25th, 21:17
Went out to the island with Valerie and John this evening for a little amateur stargazing. First, we watched the sun set. Then we watched Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury rise. It was lovely. ♥
- "Who was that masked man?"
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- redheadedfemme
- May 25th, 17:35
There's been a lot of outrage, and deservedly so, about Representative Louie Gohmert telling a woman who had a medically necessary late-term abortion she should have given birth anyway. But nothing I've read has addressed this little snippet of his comment. (Maybe I look for these things because I read a lot of science fiction dystopias.)
Ms. Zink, having my great sympathy and empathy both. I still come back wondering, shouldn’t we wait… and see if the child can survive before we decide to rip him apart? So, these are ethical issues, they’re moral issues, they’re difficult issues, and the parents should certainly be consulted. But it just seems like, it’s a more educated decision if the child is in front of you to make those decisions.
The parents should certainly be consulted?
This lends a very creepy undertone to the whole thing. If the parents are not making the decision, then who the hell is? Who is this 'we' you speak of, kemosabe?
That's a rhetorical question, of course. Obviously, in Mr. Gohmert's mind, the omniscent, all-knowing State is the only entity capable of making such decisions, and we should bow to its godlike wisdom.
A party of small, limited government, my ass.
This entry was originally posted at http://redheadedfemme.dreamwidth.org/149655.html. Comment either here or there.
- Fanfic of Biblical proportions...
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- ceciliatan
- May 25th, 19:33
So, I'm speaking on panels at Balticon this weekend, and one of the most fun was Literary Never Have I Ever, in which each writer had to name a "literary sin" they've never committed, e.g. "I've never written a story in the second person." If no one else on the panel had either, the person who brought it up was challenged to do it by next year, and if only one person had, they had to describe the circumstances under which it was done. One of the other writers mentioned "ripping off old school Old Testament stories." I raised my hand, having realized I wrote a Harry Potter Sodom and Gomorrah story.
I later went to link people to the story and realized... I had never posted it before! Wow. I think I must have written it for a fest, then set it aside at wrote something else because it didn't have enough sex in it for the prompt? I'm not sure. It would have been back in 2008, most likely, and I can barely remember what happened last week!
So anyway, I figured I had better share the story now. Voila! You asked for it Balticon, Harry Potter and the City of Sodom.
Title: The Lot of Severus
Word Count: 2,015
Pairing: Snape/Draco
Genre: Voldemort-wins!AU, Biblical retelling
Warnings: Hints of non-con offstage, character death
Rating: Hard R
Summary: An old testament story done Harry Potter style
( Read more...Collapse )
- Itching after sex?
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- turnemetoashes wrote in vaginapagina
- May 26th, 9:28
I had sex on Friday night, and the next day I started experiencing itching around the entrance of my vagina, even more so this morning. We did have sex for quite a long time, and being sick with a cold everything has been a bit dry - I was nowhere near as wet as I usually would be. I'm guessing it's just from a bit of chafing from the sex that's probably healing? I've experienced it before, after extended sessions. Has anyone else had this?
Thanks :)
- How to help when partner having erection problems
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- hide_away_away wrote in vaginapagina
- May 25th, 22:02
This feels like I need to ask this question in a male community but I don't know of any where I will get serious answers. I have checked the tags here (not sure where it should be tagged!) can't seem to find anything about this but I could be wrong and please direct me to the right place if not! So I just got together with a new guy, we get on amazing and are getting close and all that good stuff.
Anyway so things have naturally progressed and the other day I stayed over his. The problem came in that he couldn't get an erection, we'd been fooling around a while and he said he'd had one then but then once we moved to his bedroom and then his erection went. It's not a problem, he just got frustrated and stressed out and maybe very tired and I don't know, I feel it was mostly just the pressure, I hope anyway, we still really close and we found other things to do and I tried to reassure him and chill him out as best I could. I know these things can happen for whatever reason.
It's happened again last night though so this is twice now and he just gets stressed but I don't want to ask him why because I know he can't like control it.
My question is kinda more how I should react, obviously I reassure him it's fine and all that, and we find other things to do, but I am quite unexperienced in bed (one other partner, only had sex a handful of times) and never been in a situation where the guy hasn't had at least part of an erection before we started that always quickly became a full erection. I did try and give him a hand job basically, stroke him and stuff, but I didn't know what the best to do was, he still wasn't getting an erection (but then I am unexpereinced so I don't know if I am even doing the right thing) and I didn't know whether it was best to just leave him, because I didn't want him to feel more pressure if I was trying to make him get hard y'know? So I ended up just kinda ignoring him down there and touching him everywhere else but I'm not sure if that's good either cause then he's got nothing to make him get hard? What's normal, do you like touch a guy til he gets an erection? And then what if he doesnt? Same with a blow job, I've only done that when the guy is already hard but is it ok to try while he is still soft? If it wasn't that he seemed frustrated to start with because he was clearly turned on but it just wasn't happening I probably would've assumed I should touch/suck him to get him to get an erection, but because it seemed like he already felt he should have one (there was a lot of other foreplay and stuff) I felt maybe I shouldn't because I didn't want to stress him more.
I know I should probably ask him what he would prefer and I likely will if it happpens again but right now he seems so stressed out about it and frustrated with himself that I don't want to make it worse by asking him what he wants me to do.
So I just wondered if others have been in this situations and how you usually deal with it, and I guess just simply wondered if it's a rare thing for a guy to not get an erection straight away, I feel so naive asking this but I honestly don't really know even though I'm like 25 and should know this stuff!
- “Digital Death”
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kmankiller- May 25th, 17:17
http://www.katherinemankiller.com/2013/0
5/25/digital-death/ http://www.katherinemankiller.com/?p=544
The WisCON panel description:
Who gets your ebooks when you die? Your Twitter feed? The baby book that mostly exists on LJ? Do you have an estate plan for all these intangible but valuable assets? When you go, do you want your pages taken down or kept up for all time? Who do you trust to preserve or annihilate your online presence? The legal status of digital media is still a little fuzzy. With more of us and our parents moving that direction, we should think about this not just for ourselves, but our elders. What is the digital equivalent of inheriting grandad’s books, or is it even possible now? Join the discussion on legacies, files, and virtual tombstones.
Yeah, I was on that 8am panel.
With another sysadmin, mind you! The two sysadmins had two basic approaches to the topic:- Love your data. Cuddle your data. Back up your data.
- Embrace bit rot. All things die, including your data. Don’t get attached to data, because Buddha says attachment leads to suffering.
I’ll open with my final comment, which is that this is not for you. It’s a form of consideration for your survivors, and they’ll decide what’s valuable or not in the end.
What if your family is hostile, and doesn’t see the value in what you consider valuable? Well, if you disagree strenuously, make your works public domain and put them online. I put a lot of family photos on Flickr, Creative Commons Attributions No Derivatives so my family could download any of them without contortions. I also had a friend at one point who died, and her mother found out she wrote fan fiction with same-sex romances in it, and her mother embraced that as part of who her daughter was. (The moderator suggested that “I love my dead slash-writing daughter!” was a whole other possible panel topic.) That could have gone in a completely different direction, though.
Frankly, I’m not really that concerned about my ebooks, movies, music, etc. I’m more concerned about my facebook/twitter/personal websites, particularly the obituary sites I put up for my parents. So my greatest concern with that is the technical know-how associated with maintaining them. I’d rather they be left up, though, because I had another friend who was sick but didn’t intend to die, and she pre-scheduled a lot of WordPress posts that were tied to her Twitter and Facebook, and those started rolling in after she died. “New music!” and a link to her playing. Our first reaction was, “Wahhhhh,” but after a couple of months it was kind of nice.
On the opposite end, I have another friend who has an arrangement with a buddy that if he dies, the buddy will come in and wipe his hard drive so his Mom won’t find his porn or nekkid pictures.
Don’t count on encryption. Even the best encryption standards get broken over time, so it’ll just make your hard drive a puzzle. Then it turns out to be a case of whether or not someone thinks the drive is worth the effort. (“Oh, it’s porn. 2D, how quaint!”) Do think about the portability of your data (plain text, or HTML, which is plain text with a little markup that can be easily stripped out).
Obituary sites: I wrote my Mom’s site because someone quoted my sister some exorbitant sum for an obituary online for some limited amount of time, and I said, “Bah, I’ll put it up on my own site.” So I did, and it remains, and at least one friend of hers found out she was dead by googling her. My father’s site… well. My stepmother is not a native English speaker and was really upset, so the funeral home wrote the obituary and it didn’t mention that he had children. My site for him outranks that other obituary in google–SEO REPRESENT. However, antispam and upgrading the software is a thing, and does require technical know-how. You might want a digital executor to be in charge of things like that. In particular, the spambots will find the site and post 5000 links to “Buy Viagra!” if you let them, and that’ll feel like someone spraypainting on their headstones. So be prepared.
Last but not least, I’ll reiterate that it’s not really about you. If you believe in an afterlife, you’ll be in heaven and won’t be too concerned about your Facebook. If you don’t, you won’t exist and won’t care about your Facebook. It’s about being considerate to your survivors.
- Hmm.
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- malkingrey
- May 25th, 16:07
There's a special kind of irritation I feel whenever somebody starts trying -- earnestly and urgently -- to tell me about some New! Amazing! and Probably Subversive! thing that I already know. It's a combination of "I will not be manipulated by emotional argument, dammit!" and "You mean you only just now heard about that?" and "Stop being on my side, you're annoying me!", with the exact proportions varying by subject matter.
Scientific theories mostly just get the middle, or "I thought everybody knew that" reaction. I remember being mildly surprised, for example, the first time -- back in the eighties, I think it would have been -- that I saw plate tectonics described in the popular press as a new and until-recently controversial geologic theory, because everybody I knew had known about plate tectonics for ages. Granted, I spent my high school years back in Texas attending meetings and field trips of the local rockhound club with the rest of my family, and the local rockhound club had more than one professional oil-field geologist in its ranks . . . but when you're that age, what your parents and your parents' friends know is pretty much your personal definition of "common knowledge."
I had the same reaction, with a bit more annoyance and grouchy resentment, after first encountering the East Coast wiccan/new age/alternative spirituality community. It's hard, for example, to take Robert Grave's The White Goddess seriously as any kind of revelation when you read it for the first time back in high school because your father recommended it to you. (And when your opinion back then was the same as it is now -- that the book is an interesting account of how Robert Graves wrote poetry, but as far as sober or even drunken historical or anthropological fact goes, it's rubbish.)
And politics . . . I realize, for example, that for some people, the massacre at Wounded Knee is one of those shocking things that their schoolteachers never taught them about. But I was able to put together a class report on the incident in junior high from books in my family's library, a couple of years before Dee Brown and later Russell Means put a national spotlight on it (for a little while, at least.)
None of this stuff was secret. My parents weren't political activists or students of esoterica -- they were a civil engineer and a school librarian, and the closest either of them got to alternative religions was Episcopalianism† and (in my father's case) Freemasonry. They just happened to have inquiring minds and a lot of books and a willingness to let me could read anything on the bookshelves that I was able to reach.
So it tends to annoy me when people carry on as though any of this was new.
†As my mother's aunt said to her on that subject, "Mildred, I never did understand why you had to go and join that foreign church."
- My tweets
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- redheadedfemme
- May 25th, 12:00
- Fri, 17:37: About bloody time Sheriff Joe gets slapped down. http://t.co/uDs8iyWqH5 #fb
- "There's naught wrong with gala luncheons!"
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- p_m_cryan
- May 25th, 14:22
I'm currently on a bus on my way to a restaurant where a gathering of The New England Horror Writers is being held.
On the menu: Greek meatballs in a red sauce, chocolate-covered bacon, and red wine.
Restaurant visits do not come my way often.
