Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 32

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Thomas interposes himself between Harry and the fireplace, getting himself a couple of broken ribs and very likely saving Harry's life. Obviously everyone's a bit distracted by the active fight going on, but it's nonetheless interesting that this goes essentially unremarked, given how thoroughly at odds this is with Thomas's characterization up to this point. Something like two chapters ago, he said "I like you, Dresden, but I like myself a whole lot more", and suited action to word by betraying them at a critical moment. This, more than anything Thomas has said since arriving at Harry's apartment, not only establishes his sincerity about helping them now, but lends credence to the idea that his apparent betrayal at the party really was a ruse, that he might really have intended to help them as soon as he got the chance.

Michael gets between Lydia and both of them, sword drawn, but the Nightmare points out, and Harry corroborates, that it's wearing Lydia's real body. She's an innocent in this, and hurting her with the sword risks unmaking it, and would, you know, be wrong. So Michael drops the sword and throws her into the couch, trying to keep her occupied while Harry gets set up to perform an exorcism. He puts down a salt circle and uses those trick birthday candles that can't be blown out to anchor the directions, which is honestly kind of brilliant. I don't know why those aren't more readily available in non-birthday shapes and sizes - fire risk, I guess. When he gets the spell going, the energy forms a small vortex, swirling down into the earth, where the dark spirits energy will be absorbed and grounded once it's removed from Lydia. So that's actually fascinating. I think this is the only time we actually see Harry perform an exorcism on the page, so this vortex doesn't come up again, but what we're seeing here, on a reread, is the basic structure of the Darkhallow. "Not a new spell, just a really, really skewed application of an old one." The Darkhallow is an exorcism, scaled up and turned inside out, so that instead of drawing one possessing spirit out of a person and into the ground, it draws many spirits out of the surrounding environment and into a person. That's very cool, both as an element of worldbuilding and as a reflection of the amount of thought Jim Butcher started putting in after the first few books. Once the circle is empowered, Harry just needs to put the Nightmare off balance so it can take effect. He uses what he thinks is its name, Azorthragal, but of course it doesn't work, because the Nightmare is not, in fact, the ghost of Azorthragal. Nightmare Lydia breaks Michael's hand, and in his efforts to fight her off, he inadvertently breaks the circle. 

Harry tries to hit her, which isn't a very good plan, but good plans are in pretty short supply here. She slams his head into the floor (he sees stars, so that's concussion number four), and...look, I need you to remember that I didn't write this, okay? I'm not responsible for what goes on here. She starts humping him. Looked at objectively, I suppose this is foreshadowing for the sexual trauma yet to come, but subjectively it's weird, uncomfortable, and more than a little jarring. Except also, as Harry's going to realize in a minute, we've been referring to Nightmare Lydia as "she" or "it", but that's the ghost of Leonid Kravos in there. I... don't know where Butcher was going with this. It feels transphobic, certainly. (Broadly transphobic, to be clear - while this can certainly be taken in a transmisogynistic "man disguised as a woman" way, we are nonetheless looking at a man in a phenotypically female body, and the stereotype of trans men as small, violent, hypersexual, criminal women has a persistent, if somewhat obscure, history in the genres that form this one's parentage. Butcher may have had either, both, or neither of these ideas consciously in mind, and I don't think it matters which). Sexual violence is, as they say, an extension of violence, not of sex, but I have no idea whether we're meant to take it that way here, or whether this is meant to queer code Kravos, to suggest that he's into Harry? Of course, a minute ago Nightmare Lydia was like, seductively running her hands over her breasts, so it's possible this is more about doing weird things to Lydia's body and Harry's just, y'know, there. It may be that the point of Kravos Nightmare Lydia grinding on Harry is to make things uncomfortable enough that the reader notices how inherently violatory this possession is. That's important, because there hasn't been time anywhere in here for Lydia to become someone we actually know. She was sketchy, at the beginning, an unknown quantity whose motives were suspect, and she's spent most of the book off-screen, unconscious, or both. This version of her is as real to us as whoever she actually is, if not more so, because we're given to suspect the non-possessed Lydia we've seen is at least partly a performance, so we may need a little extra help to catch that Kravos is using a whole other living person's body for his own twisted ends, and that's incredibly fucked up. That was pointed out explicitly, too, earlier in this chapter, but sometimes you have to both say something out loud and make it weird to make sure everyone's on the same page. 

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Nightmare Lydia then starts strangling Harry, which is honestly much less uncomfortable. I do want to
note here that given the strength she displayed earlier, Harry should not have functioning trachea after this. Your breathe-y bits aren't really...supposed to be compressed to a sufficient extent that you can't inhale, and it only takes about two additional pounds of pressure to go from completely occluding the trachea to doing them a potentially serious injury. She makes a remark about him dying without figuring it out, so of course it is at this point, while being strangled to death, that Harry starts to figure it out. He remembers how agitated everyone at SI was, including about Kravos's journal, and how Susan was excited about something but said she couldn't tell him what yet, and asked him to confirm Kravos's name. He works out, at long fucking last, that Kravos deliberately killed himself in the midst of all the turbulence in the border between worlds, creating an extraordinarily powerful ghost. The reader doesn't get this information quite yet, we're just told that he knows it, and that it's going to avail in precisely fuck all since he's about to die. 

Thomas, for the second time in about five minutes, saves Harry's life, although this time at less risk and detriment to himself. He begins to feed on...I'm not actually sure - Lydia, probably, since I don't think a ghost has whatever exactly it is the White Court eat, but Kravos is definitely along for the ride, trapped in Lydia's body as it succumbs to Thomas's inhuman powers of seduction. This is definitely foreshadowing for what happens to Dresden later - in the interests of not having to put content warnings on more than one post, I will discuss the specific quote that makes the parallel obvious when we get there, rather than doing it here. While Thomas keeps Nightmare Lydia busy, Harry gets the exorcism going again, and this time, with the right Name, he's able to banish Kravos's spirit. This doesn't necessarily mean he won't cause any more problems for anyone, but it gets him out of their faces for the moment, and Harry seems reasonably confident that it will keep him from possessing Lydia, specifically, ever again. Harry checks in with Michael, who's pretty sure he's got broken ribs, but then has to tell Thomas to stop making out with Lydia, who isn't fully conscious but is still responding to his feeding on her. Thomas does not make a great argument here - he could point out that he's got broken ribs too and given another few minutes to feed he could be fully back in fighting shape, but instead says something about how she's probably just grateful. Harry carries the point, and Thomas, looking less dented than he did after smashing into the fireplace, goes to find some clothes. 

Harry and Michael discuss the nature of the White Court, how they can feed on different emotions but always induce lust to get close to them. Harry notes that their powers appear to affect the body directly, given that it worked on Lydia's body even when she wasn't the one controlling it, which suggests either ambient magic or something chemical, like pheromones. I believe over time the weight of evidence favors the ambient magic theory, but I don't think anyone ever quite comes out and says. 

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Thomas comes back, wearing some of Harry's jogging clothes. On the scale of inconsistencies that matter, this one isn't, but I was fairly certain Harry didn't actually take up running as a hobby until either between this book and Summer Knight or Summer Knight and Death Masks, so I'm not really sure why he has jogging clothes at this point. Maybe one of the times he resolved to get in shape over the past couple of books, he got as far as getting appropriate clothes for it but then never actually got underway with doing it. That can happen. Harry fills Thomas and Michael in on what he's figured out about Kravos and his plan. He doesn't articulate a specific idea of how Bianca and Mavra fit in, but since Bianca has it out for Harry and Mavra has it out for Michael, and both of those things have already been established, that could account for it and doesn't really need to be said again. He's reasonably confident that he can take the Nightmare, now that he actually knows what he's dealing with. Thomas asks if Harry got hit in the head while he wasn't looking (he uh, he did, yeah) and reminds him that there are guards with machine guns. Michael makes the kind of unwarranted, but in this case accurate, assumption that Harry has a plan, and asks him to elaborate on it, largely disregarding Thomas's suggestion that they disguise themselves as caterers and sneak in. 

Rather than devoting page space to explaining something we're about to see anyway, the scene breaks, picking back up as Our Heroes step into the Nevernever. From the upper floor, the reflection of Harry's apartment looks nearly the same as it does in real life, albeit cleaner and brighter. Obviously, if they'd started from the basement, they would have had a very different experience. It's got a small infestation of little spirit beings that apparently hang out and feed on the energy that spills over from the mortal side. They've got Bob with them, to find them the shortest route to Bianca's place. As Bob explains, it's not exactly the "shortest" in the conventional sense since places in the Nevernever are linked by ideas rather than geography, but the principle stands, although there's some concern that they may not be able to open a gate back out until the sun goes down. Notably, I don't think that issue ever comes up again, but in fairness I don't think Harry makes any other plans that involving making transit through the Nevernever while severely magically drained. They go out onto a street that looks like a stage set of the real Chicago, down into a tunnel that I assume is a reflection of the undercity, and then back out onto a hill with a ring of dolmens, tombs made of two or more big rocks supporting a slab of flat stone. Harry immediately recognizes this as part of Faerie, which is a very bad problem, since both Lea and Mab are gonna be somewhere in there, putting Harry and Bob both in danger. Bob says there was no way to get anywhere through the Nevernever without passing through part of Faerie. The concepts of the Summer and Winter courts are very briefly and vaguely introduced here, with Bob describing them as the Disney version and the wicked witch version, and Harry identifying the former as Summer. Bob has just pointed them in the direction of a covered bridge that should take them out of Faerie when Thomas points out that this place is obviously maintained, or the grass would be over their knees, and everyone gets a bad feeling. They haven't even had a chance to start moving yet when they hear a hunting horn. Thomas and Michael both make it to the bridge before Harry does, and Harry notes that Michael beat him there with 20 years on him and a broken rib, and that he has to work out more, putting Michael's age at around 47, and establishing that Harry has not, in fact, starting regularly exercising yet. 

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Inches from the bridge, Lea gets a lariat around Harry's neck. Lariat, for those interested, is a strict synonym for the less fantasy-sounding "lasso", from the Spanish la reata. She pulls him off his feet, leaving him lying on the ground and being strangled (again), although he manages to get the rope off. Give the amount of damage he took from Nightmare Lydia, that had to have hurt like hell, and it's too his credit that he keeps it together as much as he does. Lea herself comes into view a moment later, on night-black steed (that's a direct quote - someone bother me if I don't follow up on it when we talk about the next chapter). She's surrounded by her hellhounds, and says that now they can finally conclude their bargain. 

I feel like every chapter in this book has contrived to end with some new, cliff-hanger-y peril. Hopefully, it won't take me quite so long to write about this next one. Remember that if you want more regular updates, the best thing you can do to make that happen is use the button at the top of the page to become a Patron. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

2024-2025 Eeveeyear Goals

It wasn't until I directly compared the two spreadsheets that I realized I didn't, at least in relative terms, actually do worse this year than last. It hasn't felt like it was going well, and my wrap-up post from a year ago talked about being under 50%, without, apparently, mentioning that one goal actually came in under 25%. That goals was New Cards, which was set absurdly high, but still. The goal I did worst on this year still came in at 29.22%, so I suppose that's something. I'm also not sure I have a lot of useful insights this year, but we'll see what we can come up with. 

Core Goals

This is a blog about books and writing. I am, in some ways, a person about books and writing. I'm still hoping to eventually make, if not a living, at least, y'know, money as a novelist. So the goals that directly support that do feel more important than the ones that don't, that are here to give more strictly recreational activities a place in my life, or to shore up areas where I struggle with being a corporeal being. This also includes the goals that have been with us the longest, and that means we get to do graphs. 

I wrote fewer words of fiction this year than last year. I don't like that. I really wanted there to be continuous improvement on that one.  Apparently, I also wrote fewer words, by a substantially wider margin, last year than the year before that. Regression line indicates the trend is still basically upwards, which is something, I suppose. I wish I felt like I understood what happened here, why I haven't been able to keep up the 2021-2022 numbers. I thought last year was just the move, which took a lot out of me mentally, emotionally, and chronologically, but I didn't move this year. I don't know, maybe I'm still recovering, but I'm hoping to fiddle with the knobs some this year and see if we can't get back to a more respectable output level. I know part of the thing is some of my freelance work straight up getting harder, but I can't really do anything about that, so we'll have to see what else we can adjust. 

I read exactly as many books this year as I did the one before, 50, which is, y'know, that's almost a book a week, it's respectable, but it's not what I hoped for, nor is it really enough to sustain the level of creative output for which I'm aiming. I think part of the problem, for this and the writing, might just be that living with so many other people makes it harder to really put in the time on these essentially solitary activities. I don't like being unsociable when there's social to be had (I am perhaps the only extroverted writer in existence, and this has its downsides), and there is a lot more social to be had now than there was where I lived previously. I do think I've figured out how to stop game manuals from slowing me down, but I only figured it out part way through this year. Tracking pages of game reading, directly, rather than only counting them when I finish, means I can make some progress without bringing everything else to a halt, and that I'm not forced to choose between slogging through a game I'm no longer interested in and sacrificing the progress I've made so far.

We're dropping handwritten pages, as I said we might. One of my two most active fiction projects, I write exclusively on my phone, and the other primarily on the computer, so it's not doing much to facilitate progress in that area anymore, and needing to work on paper has at this point unambiguously become a deterrent to actually working on blog posts. On the subject of which, I wrote one (1) more blog post this year than last, 17 instead of 16. We're gonna get back to regular output, okay? We are. 

Most of these goals, and the ones that attend upon them, have at this point, of necessity, been pinned. That is to say, rather than setting them via the usual formula, which would result in unacceptably low targets from which it would likely take years to recover, I set them directly, based on what I hope to accomplish or, where fiction writing is concerned, what I think will set an appropriate scale for what I hope to accomplish. I put blog posts at 50+1d10 and got 57 again. This naturally puts the blog reading goal at 570+1d10, in this case, 576. Similarly, the goal for fiction writing remains 60,000 words, so the target for reading must be 60,000+1d100 pages, in this case 60033. Book reading goal is 111 this year - I did it as 100+2d6, so we'll see how that goes. I'm honestly sort of expecting the book target to naturally land where it needs to be now that I've got the goal for pages read set in a reasonable way that supports my goals. This was the worst year on record for rereading, which again I think might be related to spending more time actually talking to other people, an activity notoriously difficult to reconcile with listening to audiobooks. This, too, has been set manually, at 81 (75+1d10). I'll see where I can get with remembering to put on an audiobook any time I'm doing something compatible with it and not currently caught up on rereads (if I am, I should put on a podcast). The reading and writing time goals are not pinned, but they are intertwined. Rather than letting each one develop separately, and then aiming for 125% of prior year average, I calculate as though I were doing that and then average those, so the goals are the same every year even if I didn't accomplish the same amount. This year, it's 1007 hours each, which is a hair over 3 hours a day.

Fanfiction, nonfiction, and short fiction aren't really core, but they're the other reading and writing things, so here we are. I'm continuing to let nonfiction writing do what it's gonna do, for the most part - I do have a couple longer-form nonfiction projects where the additional pressure to get things done might be helpful, but it's as much to check whether, when I'm not writing a lot of fiction, it's because I'm writing a lot of nonfiction. And it supports good length on blog posts, especially in the absence of tracking handwritten pages. We've also added a nonfiction reading goal, currently set at an almost totally arbitrary 928 pages, which is in the same kind of "see how it goes" space from which the originally nonfiction target of 15,000 words arose. I'm hoping to discover if there's a relationship between how much nonfiction I read and how much nonfiction I can write, as there seems to be for fiction and blog posts. Of course, blog posts are part of nonfiction, so one of the things we'll learn this year is my level of patience for using the print function to check the page count on the blog posts I read. Separating fanfiction and short fiction reading largely accomplished what I wanted it to, even if I didn't do as much of either as I'd have liked. I have discovered something of an issue with longform fics-in-progress, because I don't like to count them until they're actually done and I've read the whole thing, but that means quite a lot of reading might not get counted in the year in which it occurs, and also what if they never get finished. Depending upon how this year goes, I may end up counting them as fic read when I get caught up, and potentially subsequently counting each chapter as an additional fic read (since a complete 100 word drabble also counts as a fic, this isn't unreasonable), and only counting it as a book read once either the whole thing is done or I have reason to believe it never will be, but we're gonna give it another year first. Fanfiction writing, measured by chapters posted, went pretty well, I think, and while I didn't hit the goal, the one of the coming year will be higher, which is...not the case for quite a few of my goals. I've gotten kind of into translating pop music from the aughties into the Old Tongue from Wheel of Time - if that becomes enough of a Thing, I may have to make it a separate goal, as the translations take less time, and use a different skill set, from most prose fiction writing.

Non-core goals

The overhead projector that I used for most of my video gaming and some of my tv watching broke this spring, which kinda put a cramp in my style in those areas. We're mostly up and running with using the living room tv instead, but we can't use that for the more difficult stuff in Hollow Knight because the switch controllers lag a little, and so does the connection between the switch and the tv. Nature of the physical space, and not a lot to be done about it except hope that increased efforts to make money will make it possible for us to repair the projector sometime this year. Time spent playing tabletop games (and, to a lesser extent sewing) was lower than it might have been because my GM's summer hiatus was both delayed and extended due to circumstances beyond either of our control. And that's as much as I think we need to say about how none of this is my fault, yeah?

I don't think we need to get into every single goal here. You can see the numbers for yourselves. Webcomics was one of only two goals I actually hit this year, and to be honest I have no real idea how that happened. Learning python is going very slowly, although I'm working on a dice calculator for my partner's ttrpg system, which at least gives me a project to learn on. I was also able to get in a lot of extra Skills at the last minute because one of my freelance projects required me to learn R. I was told that R is "statistics software" like SPSS (which I also don't know how to use, to be clear). It is not. It's an entire damn programming language, in which I am now marginally competent. There's even a chance this will help me with the statistical operations I need to learn to perform in Python. This year I will probably also install RPGmaker and start playing around with that, and maybe with some tools for Pokemon romhacks. I wish I'd managed to listen to more podcasts, but we're just gonna see if Trying Harder works for that. 

I think I've got the TCGOs targets about right now. They're gonna move some every year, of course, but what happened this year feels reasonable, manageable, and like it's keeping the place this thoroughly unproductive activity holds in my life both open and contained, which is what it was supposed to do. Music, on the other hand... Part of the issue with this one was the social thing, that it's hard to do something that benefits from headphones while interacting with other people, but also, listening to new music is harder when there's a bookkeeping element involved. I'm gonna keep it as a goal for this year, but after that we're going to evaluate whether it's doing more good than harm. Walking was straight up undercounted because I'm still using Pokemon Go to track distance, and it had an update that disconnected the function to count walking when the app wasn't open and it took me a while to notice, but I have also been walking less. Duolingo is the only non-core goal that got pinned - I made very little progress this year, and I don't want to risk letting the situation get worse. I am also looking for a different language learning app with a similar structure, as I'd really prefer not to support their AI nonsense, but most of the ones I tried are expensive, are bad, or don't have Russian as a language option. 

I got fewer little administrative tasks accomplished this year than I would have liked, but as a goal it is basically working how it's supposed to. The only difficulty is that it interacts a little oddly with Dracula Daily, and even in that area it's more of a blessing than a hindrance, if only because it prompts me to check my email more often than I otherwise might. 

New Goals

We already talked, back up in the discussion of core goals, about the addition of nonfiction reading. The only other thing I'm really adding this year is goals for cleaning and organizing my living space. Progress units for cleaning include: putting away a load of something (laundry, dishes), returning five objects that are not part of a load to their permanent homes, putting an object in its permanent home for the first time, retiring a temporary container (e.g. a cardboard box), and setting up a new permanent container. There's also a time goal to go with them. I have no idea whether either number was set in a good place, but there's no real way to find out except to give it a try and hope for the best. 

Potential goals that were considered and discarded for this year are TCGO wins, about which I didn't feel confident in setting even a tentative target, and which in any case are not really sufficiently under my control, and working with the dog, which I do want to do more but is a little fiddly and contingent, and about which again I had no real idea where to set such a goal, or even what a reasonable non-time unit might look like. Either of these might be considered for future years if I can get my head around them a little better. 

I don't feel like I really have any useful insights about my progress this year, anything you might be able to apply to your own work or even your understanding of mine, for whatever that may be worth to you. It didn't go well, but it did go. And I finished Ghani and started on its sequal, Kozatin, so there's that. Next post will be more Dresden Files, and it's gonna have to be soon if I want to stay on track. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The things!