quigonejinn

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Are you an angel?

Ten Things I Find Much to My Delight to in a

randomalia Fic of the Biscuit Variety With Which I am Mot Familiar, in No Particular Order

Assonance and consonance. I don't know if those are the right word, but you always have the most wonderful ways of hooking words up so that the phrases that jut glow and exist beautifully by themselves. the old oil used on the surface and whose hands are shoving at his naked hips
Especially in your Hornblower fic: the presence of family bonds. Cotard has his brother; Kennedy, in "Men Who Follow Spring" has the family and the family vacation home; Parker in "Blessings" has his aunts and brothers, and of course, Jack in "Hornblower" has his uncle and mother.
The way you move across time. A lot of writers would, I think, stumble at breaking a narrative up into single, gemlike scenes the way you do, but man. I love how, if we stopped reading at the end of each individual section, we'd still feel like we'd still gained something wonderful and lovely.
Quotations! I'm too stupid to understand them half the time, but I love how they fit around your fic. They're never extraneous or weird. They're there, and they make sense, and they provide this wonder sense of balance. <3
The contrast between what you tell us and what you don't. You have plenty of rich language in your stories. There are lots of described objects, brilliant phrases, similes and metaphors and all that, but at the same time, there's always an undercurrent. There's always something important that you're not putting into words despite the fact that you very obviously could if you wanted to because you're just that good. Goddamn, I love the fact that there are two layers in your fics.
Brilliantly still endings. I have to call out the Marine Reserve Band in order to get a proper ending to a story, but there's always such a sense of possession and control with your writing that you can conclude things beautifully with a fragment, the way you do for "Alchemy" and still leave me all breathless.
Porn that is Super-Hot because it is so underwritten. Jesus, yeah, Alchemy, and that oblique description of Bush on his stomach, flushed, and getting rimmed until he comes in the sheets. It's sixteen times hotter because we have to put the pieces together, pick them up here and there, and then BAM! Suddenly, we have the image in our heads, and we're the ones blushing. The same goes for "Hornblower," which contains probably about six of the hottest ten sentences ever written in this fandom.
Dialogue. OMFG. The way you nail Movie-Bush's speaking cadences in "Hornblower" makes me peagreen, and how I love, love, love the way you've developed Lt. Kennedy's speech patterns for the older, harder Captain Kennedy in "Blessings."
I love the way you talk about weather, damn you. In fact, I love the way you talk about all the vivid, wonderfully evoked things that populate your stories -- the weather in "Blessings," the tub of water in "Alchemy," the table in "Men Who Follow Spring," not to mention that loch. By the end of that paragraph where you describe, I could practically feel it on my skin.
The role that ambition always plays in your stories. It's the Age of Sail, dammit, and these are Navy officers. Kennedy and his thirst for heroism, Hammond and his desire to be a man, and how it's so wonderfully and powerfully brought out in your writing.