Fond of rumpots, crackpots, and how are you, Mr. Wilson?

Here's something you very much want to get in on: Fae Fatales: A Fantasy Noir Anthology, the first print production from belgatherial's Solarwyrm Press, is within a stone's throw of being funded and coming into glorious being. To quote from the website:

"Though this is the first publication from Solarwyrm Press, we are not publishing inexperienced writers. The anthology itself was put together by Jax Goss, winner of a Highly Commended Prize in the Commonwealth Short Story Writing Competition for her short story "Icarus" in 2011. Several of the other writers placed highly in the online writing competition LJ Idol over the 2010-2011 season, which was made up of over 250 contestants. Sally Bell, Daniel Heichel, J.M. Templet, and Dominica Malcolm placed 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 12th respectively. These 5 writers, along with Jeremiah Murphy, also have stories published in Idol Meanderings, a book that grew out of the competition.

"All of the stories within this anthology are previously unpublished, so you'll be getting completely new stories by each of our writers.

"Okay, but what exactly is fantasy noir? Consider it the gritty side of urban fantasy. If you're a fan of urban fantasy but not really familiar with the original 1940s noir films (where the noir genre began), then you'll enjoy this collection. If you already love noir and fantasy, then you'll LOVE it."

I've seen bits and pieces of the stories submitted, including works from comedychick, i_17bingo, the aforementioned belgatherial, and Many Others Whose LJ Names I Do Not Know (including a guy I coincidentally knew in college!), and they're truly stellar works and very much worth tossing a few coins towards even before you look at the nifty incentives being offered. Read more about the project here, then run, don't walk, to the project's Indiegogo site to get a finger in this pie. Thank you, and you shan't be sorry.

Chatting with belgatherial the other night, in response to a statement from her that I do not recall, I playfully referred to her as a "trollop." She replied that no, she was not so much a trollop as a strumpet, as the latter term seemed to connote more of a playful joie de vivre. Naturally, as all good sex talk should, things devolved into a trip to the thesaurus.

The list we found and considered (not as all-inclusive as it could be) was as follows:

hussy, minx, coquette, tease, seductress, Lolita, Jezebel, slut, harlot, loose woman, floozy, tart, vamp, tramp, trollop, jade, strumpet

We quickly agreed that the various terms for wanton women have pronounced qualitative differences, and devoted the next chunk of our Skype date to trying to delineate them: A tease is someone who says she will but doesn't actually, unless she's French, in which case she's a coquette. A harlot takes her sluthood as a tacit religious calling, while with a Jezebel, the only religious one is the one using the term in the first place. Minx, tart and hussy are merely variations of the same thing, arranged in order of distance from floor to hemline. A tramp is a seductress after four cheap beers, and a floozy is the same with a substantial IQ reduction. belgatherial felt strongly that "loose woman" should be reserved for scullery-maids in nightstand Victorian novels, the sort who keep getting backed into armoires and bent over dressing tables with little protest: "Oh, Lord Cronenweth! How scandalous!" We disagreed on "vamp"—she thinks "Goth club rat," while I go for "noir femme fatale."

But this is all purely subjective, I'm well aware, so I'll open the floor to discussion. Ignoring for the moment whether or not the difference between such terms for men and such terms for women is wrong and unfair (SPOILER: it totally is like whoa), how would you categorize the terms above? Is there anything that the preceding list from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus woefully omitted?

It blows my mind that I have two important birthdays to announce at the same time:

First to my beloved belgatherial, my spice, my Bright Girl. I am so grateful for your presence in my life. I wish you joy and strength and grace in the coming year, and hope you can find your way back into figmentj's and my arms before your next birthday arrives. *love*

And second to my darling Abbey, who has just turned sixteen, ye gods. Happy birthday, dearest daughter. May love and happiness find you and keep you, and may the gods shower you with all that you need, whether you know it or not. I love you, and am more proud of you than you realize. *hugs*

It was a day.
Work was tedious.
The Buffalo wings didn't sit right.
I squandered yesterday's beautiful autumnness and time to myself for How I Met Your Mother reruns.

On the other hand.
I finally watched Super 8, and loved it.
It's figmentj's and my 6-month wedding anniversary, and we had a lovely in-house date night to celebrate.
We're going to see Glen Hansard tomorrow.
I've had some great interactions with belgatherial over the last several days.
Game night with zeyr and fiddle_dragon was splendid.

So I think I win.

And now, I sleep.

This is a story in three parts.

Jenna
Jax

This post has been nearly impossible to start. I mean, how do you start with something this big? The beginning, yes, but what does that even mean for something like this?

So let me start with my right forearm.

Anyone who knows me knows how skittish I am about permanent physical changes. For ages I avoided the thought of tattoos altogether—"not for me," don'cha know. Then I started to consider the possibilities there, and consider them and consider them and not do much but consider them. Finally, I decided I wanted a rabbit tattoo for my 40th birthday, but dithered on the design and on the location and on the money I waffled about spending, until here it is a year and a half past my 40th birthday with still no ink anywhere on me.

Fast-forward to last week. Jax's visit to New Hampshire is in its waning weeks, and she, Jenna and I are discussing how best to honor this too-big-for-a-name Thing that has been growing between the three of us over the last year or two and gelled into something intense and utterly unignorable during her time here. A ceremony is certainly in order (more on that in a bit), but we want something tangible to keep with us. We start in with the rings discussion, but we run into the problem that each of us has our own separate predilections where jewelry is concerned, and consensus isn't happening.

I speak up. "How about tattoos?" All agree. I don't blink. Not even a little bit.

That's how big this is.

I haven't talked much about Jax here, which I regret. Partly that was to appease her husband, who preferred that we not speak publicly about what was going on. Partly it was because we had made mistakes early in our relationship—secrets kept, emerging truths ignored, things that I felt uncomfortable discussing even after we'd corrected and made amends for as many of those mistakes as we could. But the fact is that two years ago, Jax and I began chatting from opposite sides of the world, and those conversations, almost behind our backs, quickly grew into something more than just affection, until we found ourselves in a relationship, one where the only way we could set eyes on each other was through a pair of webcams between us.

And then Jenna and I fell in with each other, and a whole other set of challenges began: What is the place of each of these two amazing women in my life, both of whom I dearly love? How does it affect things when I can touch and hold one of them, while the other is limited to pixels on a screen? On the heels of these came Jax's husband, who was having a painful time absorbing and accepting all that was going on between her and me, and so Jenna, who had more experience with poly than her and me, stepped in to give advice on how to strengthen their marriage. And somewhere in there, the two women fell in love, too.

it's startling, really, how complicated a network of three can truly be. The three individual connections aren't at all static, as anyone in a relationship can tell you, but it's easy to forget how each side of the triangle affects the other two—shake one leg of the table, and the other two have to move to accommodate the shift. The ebb and flow of Us has taken us down some difficult paths over the past months. My depression has sometimes risen up and taken its toll on my relationships with each of them, leaving them hurt and confused and uncertain of where they stood with me. The nature of where they stood with each other has shifted over and over again, sometimes leaving them insecure and lost. Each of us has had doubts at some point or another, wondering where this all was going, or even if it was going anywhere at all. And yet we always came back to this same place of solidity, because in the middle of that graph of three lines is the spot where the three of us join into some undefinable whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.

We've known from the beginning that we needed to see each other, to be in the same place for just a little bit. It wasn't just longing, but the knowledge that we only had part of the picture. So Jax began saving money for the plane tickets that would take her and her son Christopher to America for a month-long visit. Even as we counted the days (hours, actually), we all kept in the back of our minds the knowledge that there would likely be an adjustment period for us to figure out how to talk with each other again. This wasn't Skype, after all, and being in real-space together was a whole new challenge all over again. So Jenna and I went to pick her up at Logan Airport armed with due caution—and discovered that we didn't need it, not a bit. Even the discussion (one we had a gazillion times) of who'd get to kiss her first was solved when we both embraced her together, and then Jenna's trickster streak got the better of her, leading her to kiss the girl on the moving sidewalk out of the terminal. I shouted, "Hey! I saw that!" but in truth I'd never seen anything so lovely, and it gave me the freedom to wind an arm around her waist and taste her for the first time as well, the corridor drifting slowly by.

I don't have words to describe this month. The silence in this journal has been deafening, I know, but life has been anything but silent. It has, however, been quiet, and I don't think I'm making too fine a distinction between the words. She and her son fell gently into our lives as if they'd always been here. Accepting long-term guests into one's home is usually a shock to the system no matter how positive and welcome, but the daily rhythm of sleeping and waking and eating and working and playing and existing coalesced around them like a feathered nest. We've cooked, talked, watched all the movies we've been wanting to show each other, talked some more, visited with friends, chsed and been chased by the boy, traveled some, touched, made love, slept in each other's arms in twos and threes. Forever and no time at all. There have been difficult times, too: Jax decided to end her marriage during the visit, a decision that was a long time coming and not really about jenna and me, but which brought with it conflict, stress and difficult decisions. There have been hard moments between us three as well: miscommunications, volatile emotions that come with living and loving this deeply, my usual f*cking demons that have kept me from investing as emotionally deeply as I would otherwise. And yet none of it, none of it, has stopped us from being an Us. There's something here, and it's too big even for me at my most obliviously emo to miss.

Which brings me back to this weekend. After the long and fruitless jewelry discussion, I might have expected the tattoo subject to drag on indefinitely, but the decision to get ink done was made in all of five minutes, I think. From there, it was only another 15 or 20 to settle on a design: Jenna suggested an ampersand, based on tacit's favored truism, "Embrace the power of and!" It's about numbers greater than two, and infinite possibilities, and not having to settle, and constantly growing: And now what? What's next? What can you add to your world? It's a symbol we three can each take with us and draw meaning from even if by some fate we end up no longer being an Us, and yet it's still absolutely about Us, and about this visit, and our future together. Perfect. (I think the hardest part of the decision-making process was choosing the damn font. We settled on Harrington, for those who feel such things important, and you know who you are.)

We knew we'd be in the Boston area for the Rebecca Loebe concert that i was opening for, so we decided to stay an extra day and head to Davis Square on Saturday morning. We got there just as the Boston Tattoo Company was opening, and I was volunteered to go first since I was the body mod virgin in the group (thanks, guys). Jenna came in to hold my hand as we were starting, while Jax took the stroller for a roll around the block to quell the whinging of the Cranky Young Christopher. As the needle approached, it occurred to me that I would be seeing this symbol on my right forearm until the day I die. Permanent change, my greatest bugaboo, the thing that sends me shrieking into the night.

"Cool," I thought. I didn't blink. Not even a little bit. In 15 minutes, I had my ampersand, and in less than an hour, so did they.

( The tattoos )

On Sunday, we gathered the tools we'd need for that evening. Before Jenna and I were married, we weathered a difficult period together that we felt called for a renewed commitment to each other, so he held a quiet handfasting in a secluded garden next to a pond on the Mount Holyoke campus, just the two of us. For the handfasting itself, we'd made a braid of two leather leather strips, brown for my Earth and blue for her Water; for the third strand, though, we used a silver thread to represent Jax, winding around the two of us and helping keep us whole. That braid has been on the headboard of our bed ever since. Sunday's project was an expansion of that: we rebound the original braid, then made two more, one for me and Jax, and one for the two of them. Mine and hers consisted of flexible metal bands (dark brown for me, copper for her), interwoven with pearl-like beads for my wife, while theirs was made from wide ribbons in fire colors and blues with an earth-tone shoelace-like cord with gold accents for me. Each pair braided our strands as a team of two, and then the three of us came together and somehow did the same with the three braids we'd just formed—a tangle of ribbon, leather, metal, beads, thread, and cord, ungainly, wild, and more beautiful than any of us could have predicted.

( The braid )

And then we celebrated with a true feast: pecorino fonduta by me, based on something we'd tasted at Craftbar on my birthday this year; an amazing New Zealand roast lamb with butternut squash and asparagus by Jax, representing her current residence; and from Jenna, our magical pastry chef psychologists, a trio of desserts, representing each of our favorites, chocolate mousse, tiramisu and creme brûlée, which she gleefully blow-torched herself. And then, bellies stuffed and Christopher finally asleep upstairs, our clothes fell away (as is their wont these days) and we tumbled together on the sofa until we could no longer move, and slept the sleep of the blessed.

( Us )

This post is nearly impossible to end. I mean, how do you end with something this big? The ending, yes, but what does that even mean for something like this?

So let me end with right now: I'm sprawled on the couch, full of pasta and vegetables and bacon tossed together by Jax, who's on the floor nearby with Christopher, reading him one of his favorite books. Jenna has returned upstairs post-lunch to finish her post and possibly play some Sims. It's an amazing summer day, and we have nothing much planned aside from maybe buying some tonic water for G&Ts, or possibly finishing the screening of Vicky Christina Barcelona that we never finished yesterday. The visit will end soon, and that's weighing on all of us in the spaces between moments, but none of that matters right now. There's Us. And there's now. And there's tomorrow. And. And.

And.

Originally posted by belgatherial at Submissions are open.

It's nice to know that even when separated by a hundred miles, figmentj and I can still be joined at the lungs by our his'n'hers respiratory ailments. *cough* *wheeze* As belgatherial put it, "I know you guys share stuff but you don't have to share germs." (She's in New Zealand, so she's safe. Perhaps the one and only benefit of long distance relationships.) Still, even with the wheezing I managed to get some vocal tracks down that weren't too shabby, which means that "Untitled" is now more or less done, fiddly-tweaking aside. Five down, five to go! Woohoo! Dance the dance of danciness!

Also done: the instrumental tracks for "Step It Out, Mary," which, if you'll pardon me whilst I bend my arms behind me yoga-like to firmly pat my own back, is kicking ass like an ergonomic ass-kicking device. If I can get the vocals to work (*wheeze* *cough* *hack*), I am going to be a camper of the happy variety.

It's now that I reluctantly face the Green Death debate: do I knock back some NyQuil, knowing full well that I'll be a foggy slug about town when I wake up, or do I forego such crutches and risk getting no sleep at all? Heads, tails, lady, tiger, po-tay-to, po-tah-to.....

I mentioned the costume. The perfect storm. Three elements.

The first came in the hours just before my 40th birthday. figmentj had managed to keep mum about just what my gift was, and I didn't even have a guess to hazard. It was this:

( The watch, outside and in )

I couldn't get a non-blurry photo of the watch cover no matter how hard I tried, which is a tragedy. The images gracing the cover were lovingly drawn almost entirely by her, and all deeply personal to me: guitar, pentacle, strip of celluloid, crossword (a detail of my Sunday Times grid, in fact), 9/8 time signature, rain to represent figmentj herself, and, of course, a rabbit. All wrapped up in a Tiffany's box, with a gorgeous letter that echoed the one I received as an infant from my mother's employer. And incidentally, the photo of the interior has not been reversed—the watch runs counterclockwise. (The part you can't read: "White Rabbit Watch Company / Wonderland 1865.") It couldn't be more perfect. Yes, I melted into sea foam, right then and there.

The second element arrived a few days after, although it had been a long time coming. Before I had even left New York, I'd spotted a white leather rabbit mask being offered online for some extortionate fee, and linked to it in this journal. belgatherial commented that she could do something like it for much cheaper, and promised to do so. It had been in the works ever since, but my coming birthday and Arisia led her to put a rush order on it, and the box from New Zealand arrived on my doorstep with days to spare:

( The mask )

It's kind of miraculous how well it fits, as she had to guess at the construction based on shaky measurements I sent over e-mail. It's a simple construction, which is exactly what it needs—it's the platonic ideal of Rabbit reduced to its most basic form. Like the watch, a labor of love, and like the watch, perfect. And yes, I melted again.

So there was no doubt in my mind that I'd be dressing as Rabbit at Arisia—not a particular existing character (although there would obviously be borrowing from Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit), but ideally something, well, me. The official plan at packing time was to wear the mask, the watch, my black vest (I even made a point of ripping out the stitching on the pseudo-pockets to make room for the watch, with the chain prominently displayed), black trousers, striped socks and black dress shoes. And that plan held until about three hours before I was planning on putting it on, when I suddenly decided that it needed something. It needed a waistcoat.

I grabbed figmentj and hauled her through the Dealer's Room and up and down Dealer's Row, to absolutely no avail. No one was selling anything even close to what I wanted, except for a leather shop that had gorgeous things that I'd need to hock internal organs to buy. Disappointed, I abandoned the quest without fully surrendering the thought that something was missing. As something between a lark and an afterthought, I decided to go for plan B, which was to upgrade the plain black vest to something snazzier. And it was during this second trip to Dealer's Row on the 16th floor that I spotted a room I hadn't noticed before: part of a clothing shop that had bought adjoining rooms but only opened one to the corridor, leaving only the door between open to get in. And there they had coats that were just about perfect—and one that was so far beyond perfect that I nearly needed to sit down:

( The coat )

It was more than I wanted to spend, but gods, it was precisely what I had been looking for, in ways that I didn't know about until I saw it. I fought buying it. I fought hard. But I tried it on, and discovered how solidly the thing was built. I found out how much it would normally have cost, and how much they had marked it down. My resolve was crumbling. Then the owner told me that Shrine, the manufacturers of the coat, had custom-made that design excessively for her—the pattern existed, but not in brocade, until she basically bullied him into it. And this was indeed the last one in stock, ever. I handed her my debit card.

So.

I had bought the coat literally moments before shadesong's reading, and it was immediately after that figmentj and I ran off to get dressed up for the Saturday night festivities. For me, this meant not only putting on the various components but pasting the mask's ears in place against my forehead, a feat accomplished with liquid latex generously donated by primal_pastry and a good deal of patience. I got a look in the mirror as best I could without my glasses (I would be going mostly blind for the evening), and I looked good, better even than I'd expected. (I posted the full photo in my earlier post on the matter.)

But there was something more to it than that. And this is where it gets difficult to explain.

See, I'm not much used to costuming. I'm certainly not used to outfits as elaborate or as personal as this one was. I didn't know how transformative masks can be, not really. I didn't realize what I was getting into. And I feel like nothing I say here is either not going to make much sense or be met with a resounding "well, DUH," but…all of a sudden I was Not Me. Just that, pure and simple. It wasn't a furry thing or a cosplay thing; it wasn't anything that simple, or that complex, if that makes sense. Confidence was there behind the cloth and metal and leather, and presence, and I daresay some semblance of nobility—all concepts that I normally need to struggle and fight for. And all of a sudden, here they were, and the costume wasn't instilling them in me, but drawing them out. No one could see who I was, I couldn't really see anyone else, but I was dressed in a coat that was grand, a watch that was dazzling, and a mask that was noble (it didn't hurt that I was forced into good posture by the need to keep the latex from dislodging). I'll say it: it was downright empowering.

And irony of ironies, I found it as the Rabbit, a creature that the rest of the world sees as timid and retiring and unthreatening. That's how I've seen myself, so it's been a good analogy for the parts of my life when I've identified with Rabbit, or so I thought. It wasn't until much later in the night that I remembered that Rabbit is also the Trickster, good at cutting off expectations at the knee. And I know almost no one else saw it in me as I walked the corridors that night, and it frustrated me. They saw Rabbit as they knew him: the fluffy little hiding thing, or at the very scariest as a Donnie Darko or Bioshock reference. One stranger ran into me several times, and every time shouted, "You're a bunny!" At any other time I'd have joked with him; that night, I was seriously pondering throwing him against the wall by the collar. Those who truly knew who I was in that outfit, on the other hand, knew it very well—felisdemens called me "El-ahrairah," which, if you know the reference, comes damned close. (She wasn't the only one to see it in full; there are stories I'm emphatically not sharing in a public post.)

As I type this, the mask is safely tucked in the top drawer of my dresser. The watch is resting on top of the same dresser, just above it. The coat is hanging in my bedroom closet just to my right. They'll be worn again, together. I don't know when. Part of me wants to wear them at every opportunity. Part of me, though, wants to save it for those moments when I can wear them with all my heart and soul, and not a penny less.

Either way, Rabbit isn't done with me. Not by a long shot.