picked a handful of violets in my name

Made a rather small error in reading comprehension a few weeks ago (thought a primary source was from Corporate Body X, whose records have been digitized, but actually it was Corporate Body Y, whose records don't even have complete online finding aids), procrastinated on an assignment, and only discovered my error at the eleventh hour. I would have been massively sunk were it not for my kind-hearted parents, who went to the repository the very same day I called them in full freakout mode, and took photos of some very old documents for me.

Best parents ever, y/y? I am totally buying them a nice dinner when I go home for the holidays.

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In other news, I wish to remind folks that I like to send holiday cards around this time of year! (Not that I have mailed any just yet, but I have loads of time.) I'm happy to send cards anywhere USPS will let me, and I am also happy to send you a card even if you're not doing your own "mail stuff to people from the internet" thing.

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I have a speaking engagement later this month at my undergraduate institution - in my old dorm, no less. I'm not really nervous about it yet, but I'm sure I will be. I will probably do some practicing in the mirror, since I haven't done the full speech since I was trained over the summer.

I don't write fic, so my personal warnings policy is kind of pointless.

But I do write fiction not immediately traceable to a source canon, and my current publishing plan should I ever actually finish anything is "on my website with a virtual tip jar" - you bet your ass I'm warning for shit, because that's the standard of the community that taught me to write and to love writing.

I don't write rape scenes - I can't bring myself to do it and I don't really want to anyway. But in the story I'm working on right now, two characters discuss and enact a rape fantasy in a minimally skeevy way,* and I have restructured the story such that a reader could skip that entire section and only miss out on a bit of character development.

My purposes in writing that scene are:
1. examine my own issues with rape fantasies, based on my personal history,
2. emotionally affect readers who choose to read that scene without causing them harm,
3. demonstrate the characters' trust and ability to communicate,
4. possibly comment upon noncon/dubcon tropes - depends on how the scene goes and how meta I get.

( * Potentially triggering footnote about my past abusive relationship and rape. )

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• kalpurna: ways to hide your warnings, if you're worried about spoilers
• blackboggart: on artistic integrity and artistic responsibility

tangential to the warnings issue: terminology
• were_lemur: discussing terminology: rape/non-con/dub-con
• solarcat: defining dub-con and non-con, also available on LiveJournal. Comments and good discussion on both entries.

I'm so used to encountering the terms "non-con" and "dub-con" in fandom that I don't have any trouble parsing them in fannish contexts like headers. But I do find them troubling - each term is vague enough to encompass a pretty huge range of situations (see above links), and I don't like the way they tend to sanitize rape-in-fiction. I don't dislike it enough to get very upset about it, though.