julchen_in_red | Recent Entries

My first attempt at writing up a 2018 recap for Tumblr produced an overwrought wall of text that I posted at 3:00 in the morning, reconsidered, and immediately deleted. In the light of day, I posted only the recap without wall of text, earning the displeasure of a friend who damn well wanted to read it and was grumpy that I was holding out. It's all on Tumblr, and now it's here too. :D

Total word count: On AO3: 694 words of poetry, 181 words of fiction

Poetry forms written: Villanelle, sestina, sonnet, terza rima, limerick

Fests: Birthday Mini-Fest, NextGen, peripheral Erised

Writing posted: Short intro to paper art, four poems on AO3, five limericks on Tumblr

Baked with fannish love:
Tried-and-true recipes: Treacle tart, chocolate-chip cookies
New recipes: Oatmeal raisin cookies, shortbread cookies, blondies

Crafted with fannish love: 2 pairs of earrings, 15 glass ornaments, 20 embroidered cards

Paper artworks: 27 in 26 weeks (!!!)

Other cool things:
Was engaged for two art commissions
Gave and garnered Ko-fi support
Received first invitation to beta
First fest participation
Was told I inspired other traditional artists to participate in fanart (!!!!!)

Goals for 2019
— To make at least two pieces of paper fanart each month
— To keep going down the list of poetry forms. Next up is a Drarry pantoum.
-- To collaborate with other artists
— Going way the hell out on a limb: To finish — FINISH, I say! — the Hermione fic I’ve been working on since 2016. Fiction is not my strength and it’s slow going, but Very Good Fic Writers have told me it’s a story worth writing, so I’ll keep trying.

Overwrought Wall of Text under the cut.

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"She panicked, grasping frantically and thrashing against her captor."

Those are all perfectly fine words individually, but together they sound like an episode of Between the Lions. I'll rewrite it when I stop snickering.

It's my hc that there was a storage closet in the Hogwarts library containing 40 copies of The Monster Book of Monsters because every student in Harry's class refused to take theirs home at the end of Third Year.

During the Battle of Hogwarts, Irma Pince heroically defended the library by opening the closet, unbuckling the restraints on the books, and hurling the books at Death Eaters in the hallway.

It's going into the fic. :)

I'm writing a thing. An honest-to-god fic. Not a Drarry fic, but a Hermione fic, because nobody else has written this story and it needs to be written.

-- Hermione was tortured under the same wand that drove two trained Aurors out of their minds, and then had a chandelier dropped on her. These aren't experiences you just shake off with a dose of Skele-Gro and a good night's sleep.

-- She then spends at least a month and a half sharing a bedroom with Luna, who has been held for three months in a lightless stone cellar with an old man who's just waiting to die. Neither Hermione nor Luna is anything close to okay. There are midnight conversations.

-- Hermione and Ron go down to the Chamber of Secrets to kill the Horcrux. After seeing the fights put up by the diary and the locket, we're supposed to believe the goblet lay there and let itself be stabbed, and Hermione is just giddy with Ron's Parseltongue success when Harry sees them again? Nah. The cup read Hermione as viciously as the locket read Ron, and she's behaving oddly back upstairs.

-- As far as everyone knew, Harry died in the forest. All Hermione's studies and puzzle-solving and endurance had been for nothing because Harry died, and Hermione is going to be tortured and then slaughtered in a big example-making way if the Death Eaters win, so she dives into her last battle and rolls right up on Bellatrix LeStrange WITH BELLATRIX'S OWN WAND.

And after all this what's-past-is-prologue, Harry and Ron go right into the Auror program and she returns to Hogwarts...and then what happens?

Someone needs to write the thing, so I'm trying, but I'm swinging hard between "This isn't awful" and "I need to set this all on fire and do penance for even attempting it."

I'm given to understand this is normal for fiction writers, but damn, y'all have strong constitutions.

Deep, deep respect to all of you. <3

This just surfaced as my mother was straightening her photo albums. Early 1983, aged 10, reading Judy Blume while talking to my grandmother on the phone. This little nerd was already developing a repertoire of "You're not allowed to read that yet"-book-sneaking skills. At the moment this picture was taken, I had either Firestarter, The Valley of Horses, or Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen hidden in my backpack. (I'm not allowed to read a book? Says you.)

A young girl in glasses, reading a book

Because I was asked yesterday about the origin of the name "Julchen In Red":

It was inspired by two of my best friends.

I was nicknamed Juliet by a German-speaking friend in college (after the Dire Straits song, not the play). If I'm ever fortunate enough to meet any of the fandom writers who knew me first as Julchen, I'll happily answer to Jules.

The red comes from a friend who was a staggeringly talented visual artist. One of her many skills was stained-glass design, and she designed major installations for two synagogues. My icon is from the one in New Jersey. She was always telling me I ought to wear red, which was more bold than I could carry off at the time, but I'm getting there now. She died of complications of childbirth in 2009, at the age of 39, but she continues to be both the angel and the devil on my shoulder, in Bettie Page bangs and a leather bustier.

If I ever finish the very first fic I'm trying to write, it'll be because these two are both still kicking my ass. <3

The phrase "lust-blown pupils" is this age's "heaving bosom."

“…Then Pansy threw a snowball at your head,
and Greg ate too much cake, Blaise lost his ring,
your mother caught us jumping on the bed…”

It’s midnight and I’m sleepless, following
the echo of his voice through empty halls.
I find him near the Room of Hidden Things,

red-eyed, disheveled, slurring at the wall,
a firewhiskey bottle in his hand.
He glowers at me from his bleary sprawl.

“Crabbe’s birthday,” he announces, drunk and grand.
“We used to be like brothers. You don’t know.
I don’t expect you’d ever understand.”

I sit and coax him upright, sighing. “So.
Let’s hear about that birthday in the snow.”

lqtraintracks: “Drarry haiku or sonnet for the prompt ‘shower’.”

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They sent us to the greenhouses today,
the Hogwarts restoration near complete.
Without a single civil word to say,
we sweltered in the brutal August heat
repairing tables, pots, and shattered glass.
We worked apart until he caught my eye
to note approaching clouds and flattened grass.
We fixed the last together, then the sky
broke, thunderous, and drenched us instantly.
He stripped his clothes off, spinning in the rain
then sank, arms wide, euphoric, to his knees
and let the torrent make him new again.
He reached for me and beckoned, bold and warm.
I stripped and ran to join him in the storm.

Ever find yourself wondering what mnemonics Hogwarts students would memorize to help them learn, say, Astronomy? And then you picked a random list of Astronomy facts and created a wizarding mnemonic for it yourself?

Because who's never done that?

*cough*

Um. So.

Saturn has many moons, 35 of which are named, but these are the main ones:

Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe

The mnemonic:

"Measure Everything Twice; Don't Ruin This Hundred-Ingredient Potion."

If there are any actual Astronomy students out there -- Muggle or magic -- who find this useful, I'm happy to help! :)

On September 1, 1998, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was released in the US. I was 25 years old, with a toddler and a three-month-old. Their bookshelves were full of Dr Seuss and Sandra Boynton board books, and I wasn't yet paying attention to current chapter books for grade-school kids.

A year later, Chamber of Secrets was published, and Prisoner of Azkaban soon after, and everyone was talking about Harry Potter. I asked a friend of mine, a children's librarian, if I should pick up the books, and she said, "Enh...they're pretty standard examples of the British-children's-boarding-school-adventures genre. Not a must-read." So I didn't.

Goblet of Fire came out in 2000 and I started to wonder if maybe I was missing something truly important. I happened to be in a Barnes & Noble that had the first three paperbacks on discount to celebrate the new hardcover. The store staff had made elaborate castle turrets of the paperbacks and the display was irresistible. I picked up the first book, took it home, and didn't put it down for two days. Every minute that my kids didn't require two eyes and both hands was spent reading. I inhaled it, and when I finished, I turned right back to the first page and started again. Better late than never, I was hooked.

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With line-ending words “push, scars, darkness, body, home, fly” chosen by lqtraintracks. This is my first ever sestina – thank you for inspiring it! <3

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Sometimes I dream I’m bleeding from my scars.
My shame soaks through my robes. I cannot push
my hands beneath the fabric to my body.
My blood tells all I’m only made of darkness.
Discarded by the earth, I have no home.
Rejected by the clouds, I cannot fly.

It wasn’t always so. I used to fly.
I must once have been faultless, without scars.
I knew the warmth of custom, clan, and home,
a child who only sinned with pout and push.
Then I was taught to snarl. They fed me darkness
and pledged me to a fiend in soul and body.

You learn the limitations of the body
without a wand. You’re cold, you cannot fly,
you cannot quench your thirst or light the darkness.
My master tore my clothes and mocked my scars
and I was powerless to fight the push
that flung me down the cellar stairs at home.

I trundle between Diagon and home
so numb and disconnected from my body
I’m yanking on a shop door labeled PUSH.
I don’t remember how it feels to fly,
to be more than my crimes, more than my scars,
to feel at peace and unafraid of darkness.

A hand upon my shoulder in the darkness…
Why is he on this ledge? He’s got a home,
a life that’s not in ruins for his scars.
He sits and puts his arm around my body.
I cannot bring myself to fall nor fly.
I don’t deserve his comfort, but a push.

He takes me home, half gentle tug, half push,
and one of us is crying in the darkness
or maybe both. I ask him how to fly.
I ask him where one finds another home
and how one puts a new soul in the body
and how to keep my dreams behind my scars.

One push into his bedroom and we’re home.
The darkness soothes me, safe against his body.
I dream I fly with him. I have no scars.

The map says Malfoy’s sneaking out at night.
I watch his name and wonder where he’ll go.
Someone should follow, make sure he’s all right.

He wanders through the corridors, despite
the hexes others plant to lay him low.
A person could get injured here at night.

It isn’t me who’ll wait and start a fight
but many students call themselves his foe.
The castle’s unpredictable, all right?

He passed Sir Nicholas. Was he polite?
Did he make conversation? Does he know
that he could talk to me alone at night?

A moonlit alcove. Mm, imagine light
and shadow on his hair, his face, and – oh,
I just…I’ll quickly check that he’s all right.

Don’t know that I’ll be welcome, but I might,
if I approach him gently, soft and slow.
He really shouldn’t be alone at night.
I have to go and see that he’s all right.

In 2015, I took my MS diagnosis and made poetry out of it, as you do. When I use this six-line form I usually make it A-B-C-C-A-B, but the fury didn't want to rhyme so I just let it ride. With medication, I'm doing better now. At least I can climb the stairs and hold a pen. Still no goddamn sense of direction, though. :)

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Inanna went to Hell, dressed for the trip,
expecting to be treated with respect.
She was accosted on the journey down
by smirking gatekeepers who took her clothes
and articles of power, one by one,
until they’d stripped her of her finery.

Of all the goddesses to emulate,
I didn’t mean to choose Inanna’s path.
They made me take my earrings out, and leave
my glasses with my clothes across the room.
Entombed within an MRI machine,
I felt my mask and costume shred away.

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I haven't had a proper blog in ages. I've got two Drarry poems and piles of non-Drarry poetry, and, like, photography that's pretty good? Nobody's connected to me here anyway so I'm basically singing in the shower right now. If you're reading this, throw a pebble at my window and ask me things. Or challenge me to write Drarry poetry; apparently I respond really well to that. :)