The Book of Lamps and Banners by Elizabeth Hand. The fourth and most recent Cass Neary book, in which Cass meets up with old flame Quinn again and sets off on a wild goose chase in Sweden to steal a treasure / save a techbro (gender neutral) woman who suffers from similar trauma to Cass / save the world from the worst possible techbro idea of trauma therapy. Which of these is serving as Cass's motivation at any given time is very much up in the air.

This book takes Cass on an actual arc of sorts and leaves her someplace new, while still leaving her open to further adventures. I appreciate that Hand understands one of the essential elements of these books is Cass suffering through miserable, cold, wet weather. I also appreciate that despite a surfeit of Quinn in the middle, the finale of the book is all about Cass and Tindra the techbro. And despite Cass giving away(!!!) her camera in the last book, she does come into a new one here, also very important. There is less photography in this book than previous, and it is less central to the story, but we still get some here and there.

Overall, very much a Cass Neary story, and I like those, so.

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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Journalist joins a guided group climbing Everest, is conveniently on hand to document the worst loss of life on the mountain up to that point.

I've been hearing about this book for years and years and was pretty sure I would love it; I just hadn't gotten around to it. Well, I finally got around to it, and indeed I loved it. I DMed someone within the first twenty pages and said, "I can already tell this is going to be deliciously horrible," and it was! Krakauer is a great writer, immensely readable, great at building tension.

Honestly, the actual deaths in this book are unsurprising. Mostly they're due to exposure, which seems a likely way to die on a mountain higher than the cruising altitude of jet airplanes. What I found really gripping was how miserable everything else was, especially the effects of being at such high altitudes. Not just the addled thinking from getting so little oxygen, although that's a nightmare in itself, but the fact that above a certain altitude, people basically stop eating because they can't get enough oxygen to digest the food, so it just makes them feel sick. And this while they are expending enormous amounts of calories! Climbing Everest just sounds like an absolute slog, which Krakauer hammers home continually. Weirdly enough, the closest reading experience I can think of is The Long Walk by Stephen King, which is also about putting your body through absolute hell and possible (/probable) death for no good reason.

There's an incredible horror-style stinger about 4/5 of the way through the book that I did not see coming at all, and it really brought home the nightmarish feeling of the whole thing. A++.

Combine that with the fact that there's no good way to get a body off Everest, and it's much too cold and low-oxygen for anything to decay, and you end up with situations like a sherpa who goes up the mountain every year and passes by the preserved frozen body of his friend who died on the side of the trail. (Death in the clouds: the problem with Everest's 200+ bodies.) Grim!

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K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs. A world-famous climber and the first American to summit all fourteen mountains taller than 8k meters tells the stories of some of the most memorable expeditions to K2, as well as his own experience climbing it.

Yeah so after Into Thin Air, I've been on a whole mountaineering journey, lol. Generally I enjoyed this a lot. It lacks the propulsive narrative flow of the Krakauer book, not least because there's a half-dozen expeditions here, so less time to really sink into a single experience, but I enjoyed Viesturs's balance of meticulous sourcing of historical documents and his own perspective as an experienced climber. If you want an introduction to the history of climbing K2, you could do much worse. He's done another one on expeditions to Annapurna that I will get to at some point.

Incredible factoid from this book: the first attempted climb of K2 included ALEISTER CROWLEY. What the fuck. I feel like at some point I need to learn more about him, because he's adjacent to a number of my interests. Including this one, somehow!

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Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2 by Jennifer Jordan.

After the two extremely dude-focused books above I thought I would like to read about some women. This seems to be one of the major works on high-altitude women climbers, but unfortunately I didn't get on with it at all. Jordan has an enormous bibliography in the back but doesn't cite sources for literally anything, which makes the whole thing feel untrustworthy (I am not in general a fan of narrative nonfiction) and also means it's mostly summary. Which is boring! Please lady, put in some direct quotes once in a while! Even in translation, since many of your subjects are Polish! The fact that Jordan does not seem to be a climber herself, or at least is unwilling to include that expertise in the narrative, also makes the book less engaging than the previous ones.

I DNFed this one. I'm now into Arlene Blum's book on how she led the first women's expedition to Annapurna. It's slow going because the library only has it on audiobook, but I'm enjoying it so far. Lots of interesting stuff on leadership within the group, group dynamics, lack of institution support for the trip, the logistics of managing the porters to get all their stuff to the mountain.

First: for my belly kink exchange that I ran in August, I ended up writing:
scenes in a stilltent, Dune (movies), Paul/Duncan, 1200 words, mpreg. This did not have nearly as much belly kink as I intended, but Duncan turned out to have so many feelings about the whole thing that it was a struggle to get to the kink. The recip seemed to really like it though. <3

And then, today I finished posting that WIP I've been nattering about for ages! \o/

postcards from, Oasis RPF, Liam/Noel, 15k!!! of vignettes from first contact to the first gig of tour. Title is a riff on the video summaries like this one they've been doing at the end of their run at each venue. (They're less annoying on Instagram. IDK why they feel the need to do that stacked vertical thing everywhere else. ;__;)

I've never written anything quite like this before. There is obviously a general emotional arc from "not spoken in 12 years" to "going on stage together," but most of the scenes are intended to stand alone. There are very few callbacks between scenes. I also specifically set out to write only the vignettes I wanted to write, partly to avoid just getting totally overwhelmed, but for example that means that at no point during this fic do we seem them really hash stuff out or have big conversations. Presumably they had some, but those happen off screen.

I also mostly avoided writing denouments to scenes; they mostly end in the middle, or unresolved. Partly I was trying to write the opposite of one big scene where the characters work all their shit out in one long conversation, which I am sometimes prone to. And I think writers in general or prone to? It's convenient to take care of the whole conflict at once. Whereas here I kind of wanted to give these snapshots along the way, showing that repairing a relationship is a long process over time, often in the small moments. (But also I was lazy/intimidated about writing all the connective tissue, and if I'd tried that I wouldn't have been able to finish a fic, so.)

I also wrote this so fast, at least for me. I wrote the first 10k in three weeks, mostly in August, and then wrote the remaining 5k in the four weeks since.

Also, I decided to post a vignette a day, which was fun. I've never been able to do that with a fic before, but a lot of the vignettes were very short, some in the 200-word range, so one a day felt right. I accidentally timed it so the final chapter went live this morning, a few hours before Oasis performed their first gig in a couple of weeks. A commenter congratulated me on my deliberate timing, but no, that is definitely just how things fell out. (Nerdily, my priority was to get the fic all published within one calendar month for the sake of my stats keeping.) Also, look at me, posting fic outside an exchange!!

I'm still not sure what I actually think about it as a fic, because it's so different from my norm, but I had fun writing and posting it, and that's the whole point, right? There are a lot of lines I'm really happy with. Also it's my second fic this year over 15k, which feels fantastic after last year.