AO3 Link | Strange Support (100 words) by Merfilly Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Green Arrow Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Dinah Lance & Shado Characters: Shado, Dinah Lance Additional Tags: Drabble, +Modern Age (1986-Present), Post-Crisis, [Green Arrow Vol. 2 - 1988-1998] Summary:
When the community forgot about her, her ex's other lover didn't.
Strange Support
Dinah knew she wasn't alone as soon as she stepped into her house, but the assassin there was quick to show she was not openly armed. In fact, Shado's eyes were filled with concern, and it was not for the sleeping child on the couch, but for Dinah herself.
"I thought, perhaps, you needed support."
Shado's words broke her reserves, letting Dinah weep. What even was her life that Oliver's one-night fling had come to give more of herself than any hero in the community?
Shado held her, eased her down on the end of the couch, and stayed close.
January was rereading, and not much of that: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold, and Sorcery and Cecilia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer: the latter was a read-aloud, with Cattitude and Adrian switching off depending on which character the letter was from.
I also bounced off a couple of rereads, and read news and other articles online.
Just finished:
Grown Wise, by Celia Lake: another of her Albion historical romances, set in a fantasy Britain with a middle-sized community of people who use or are aware of magic. This one is set a couple of years after World War II, and people are dealing with both individual loss and trauma, and the war's effects on the land. I enjoyed this, but I don't know whether it would be confusing as a starting point. (It's the first in a new series of these books, which might help.)
This morning I got to call one of the candidates we interviewed yesterday and offer her the work placement. That felt nice.
But also weird. I've never done anything like this before! I am in a very technical sense her line manager, in that her actual manager, my manager, is now on leave for the next week and a half and he asked me to take care of this. Which meant not just the fun phone call but doing paperwork, and that meant having to write down my own name and contact details where it said "Manager."
Wild.
The less said about the rest of the work day the better, but the rest of the day was good. I went for a nice long walk in the warm(ish) drizzle with Teddy, who drank from so many muddy puddles that he had a big dirty circle on his snout. Like the dog equivalent of a kid with a milk mustache. The air smelled amazing, the plants and the soil are starting to wake up.
Then angelofthenorth invited us over for cheesy toad in the hole, which is a genius idea and I think I might have to make it in future. It was great to see her, and Mr Smith.
And since we'd all planned to go to the gym, she and I walked there while D drove V home and then came back to join me (Miriam having gone swimming). The gym is so much more fun with him there.
This weekend, February 13-15, we will be tabling at Boskone 63, at the Westin Boston Seaport District, Boston, Massachusetts. Tabling hours will be 4-8 Friday, 10-6 Saturday, and 10-3 Sunday. To make up for the sick day at Arisia, we will be debuting four new titles, creek don't rise! All of them are short stories, and two of them contain all-new material available nowhere else (yet): Sacrificial Stories of the Neverwas, a collection of imaginary folk takes on the nature of sacrifice, and Kayfabe in the Coliseum, a pseudo Greco-Roman tale of prizefighting and metanarrative.
The other two are a zine version of Crazy Boys Get Money (with an illustration I'm proud of!) and Time is a Mobius Strip, which is a compilation of two short stories, "Ana, Chronistic", and "Chrone," originally published in Flights of Reality under the name "Better Luck Next Time."
All of the stories have been edited for print. Hope to see you there!
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 13 secrets from Secret Submission Post #996. 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.
(Which last I took in part because A only discovered last week that many snowdrops have decorative green bits on their frilly inner noses, courtesy of a waist-high planter outside one of our local pubs!)
Since the group finished a week of downtime only to leave port and have their ship half-destroyed by a kraken less than twelve hours later, which means they now have another week of downtime, most of that second batch of downtime happened via chat over the past two weeks.
I'm going to summarize the important events from the downtime channel here, for recording purposes. We'll still be covering some parts of the downtime in the game tonight, as there are some scenes that needed played out for various reasons, but I wanted to make this post to cover the things that happened that won't be in the game itself.
So we’ve been having a bit of a debate in the office because we wanted to do the headline “Local man gives up sugar for 12 minutes” but then overdoing the “local man” trope is a bit male-centric, so we considered “Local woman” but then that sounds like we’re typecasting women so that wasn’t great either, but I think we’ve finally found a worthy compromise:
What the hell sort of question is that? Of course I'd pay up! I have money, pride, and my teeth, and of the three, I can least afford to lose the last. Wouldn't almost anybody submit to the shakedown? That's how protection rackets work, after all - everybody does the same math and comes to the same conclusion as I just did.
(Of course, the context was "I think this company was rude to me over the phone, therefore I decided to live without hot water and heating because I have my principles" so, you know, I guess we have different approaches to life?)
Sweetie, our 14-lb Kliban cat (dark gray and black tabby) hasn't been feeling well. She was upchucking yesterday, not furballs, and I think she may be allergic to the food. But this morning we couldn't find her at all -- looked downstairs and main floor -- until the SU located her in the most inaccessible place in the house: on the old shag rug under the desk in the library/not so spare room. There, she's under a large desk and blocked in by a large chair and neither of us are up to digging her out. She is reasonably alert, so we're waiting for her to emerge at some point. I've put out water for her, and food that I know she can eat (non fish). And now we wait.
Meanwhile, there's a gland at the top of my throat that is trying to decide if it's swollen or not.
My little computer seems to have recovered slightly. Yesterday I couldn't get it to start at all, eventually, after having it start and then crash more than once. This morning Violet was filling in time (because we had an ice storm last night and there was a two-hour delay for school) and wanted to use that computer. (She has been using it to write various things in Google Drive.) I told her she could use it, if it would start, so she turned it on and it seemed fine at first. After maybe five minutes it crashed again, and we saw not just the blue screen of death but also a red screen of death and a green screen of death, all flashing on repeat. She said she'd never seen a computer crash so hard. So we shut it down and she did something else for a while, but then she wanted to try it again and this time it not only started up just fine, it didn't crash while she was using it. I absolutely don't trust it not to keep randomly crashing though.
Yesterday evening we went out for dinner, to Chilli's, which doesn't serve chile as far as I can tell. My son in law had intended for us to go to a ramen place a couple of minutes away, but when we got there we found it's closed on Tuesday's, so when Aria suggested Chili's we decided that would be a good alternative. I had a Cajun pasta dish with grilled chicken which was very tasty, but later in the evening I was incredibly thirsty so I guess it had a lot more salt in it than I realised.
I suddenly seem to be needing less sleep than I used to. I've had a few extra short nights over the last couple of weeks but I'm not feeling particularly tired even though on the nights when I slept better I still didn't sleep more than about 7 hours. Last night I fell asleep not long after 9 but I was awake at 3:30 am and didn't feel the need to go back to sleep again (after lying awake for about half an hour trying to sleep).
This afternoon the temperature is actually a few degrees above freezing. I think this is the first time it's been this warm for at least two weeks. I've just been outside to start my car and let it run for a while, just to keep the battery on its toes. I also moved it forward a few inches; I would have moved in a bit further but my son in law has parked one of their cars very close to mine.
This morning Violet and I were looking at the plastic keyboard covers I keep on any computer I own and noticing which keys were more worn than the rest. Unsurprisingly, the e looks like it gets a lot of use, as does the n and the i. However, I was puzzled that the c also looks to get a lot of use - until I went to copy something and realised how much I use ctrl + c.
Finished Cakes and Ale, which is partly that early C20th litfic convention of a first-person narrator who just happens be around to hear a lot about the actual protags and the plot or at critical moments of same, but actually complicates it with Ashenden knowing that Rosie is not actually dead as everyone else supposes. Not sure the ending really worked.
I then, having got into an Edwardian/Georgian novelist rhythm, went 'ah! time for some Arnold Bennett! the one about the hotel', except I picked up The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), which is 1900s thriller hijinx mode with European royalty shenanigans, false identities, etc etc (though I was wondering whether it might adapt into a screwball comedy movie?), and wasn't actually the one I'd read many years ago that I was thinking of.
Which was Imperial Palace (1930), which struck me as, although lacking the highspeed thriller plot element, remarkably like D Francis in its fascination for infrastructure (in this case, running a luxury hotel in London) and competence porn. The running-the-hotel bits and the trials posed for the new supervising housekeeper are, perhaps, at least these days, more interesting than the bits involving Hotel Manager and Rich Man's Daughter Gracie. To give her (and actually, Bennett as author) her due, she is not, whereas she would be in a lot of novels by his contemporaries, an unmitigated bitch (Aldous Huxley's Lucy Tantamount) or a tragic bitch (Michael Arlen's Iris Storm), she has some good points and was a competent racing driver, but she is still annoyingly entitled and egocentric.
I took a break from this because I suddenly had a whim to re-read Mary Renault, The King Must Die (1958) for the first time in absolute yonks. You know, Mary, the sexism and misogyny is not entirely just being Accurate for Period, is it, hmmmm? There is some great stuff in there, but.
On the go
Imperial Palace is very long, and still on the go.
Up next
I think I am up for some Agatha Christie, seriously.
Picking up a book called Part Time Girl about a high school kid who switches (physically, magically, inconveniently) back and forth between Being A Boy and Being A Girl, I was like, okay, I know pretty much what the vibes of this are going to be. And the first couple chapters in which protagonist Michael/Kayla worries about a Sort Of Girlfriend and a Hot Boy and I Have Taken This Part Time Job As A Girl But Now I Need Girl Clothes, Bra Shopping! So Stressful!! did not really lead me to think anything different!
Then about 40% of the way through the book our protagonist was suddenly running through the woods from evil wizards, and I'm like, okay, this I did not expect.
It turns out the plot of this book is NOT high school drama and figuring out your complicated gender feelings! The plot of this book is that evil racist homophobic wealthy wizards called the Clan (yes) run the world and you have to team up with your traumatized neighbor to fight them, while also figuring out your complicated gender feelings along the way.
Also, the protagonist and the traumatized neighbor bond by hanging out and watching the 2014 kdrama Healer, the plot and cast of which is lovingly described in text. This is in fact plot relevant because they later use their arguments over which cast member is hotter to prove their identities to each other when it's in question. Now I do love Healer but given that it came out, again, in 2014 and I haven't heard anyone talk about it pop culturally in more than a decade, this possibly surprised me even more than the evil wizards.
I can confidently say that at no point did I predict some of the major turns this book took, and I will put them under a spoiler in case you, too, would like to experience this Experience as I confidently believe it was meant to be Experienced: ( here we go! for the ride! )
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
unshelved_feed Feb. 12th, 2026 12:00 am)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cosmolinguist Feb. 11th, 2026 11:06 pm)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
