Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 15

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Harry initially refuses to deal with Maeve, despite a) having just asked what her price is, and b) having
approached her for information. Maeve responds by threatening him, which is a little excessive, but honestly I can understand being annoyed by this kind of performative show of uncooperation. Billy suggests they leave, and Harry says they can't until they get answers, confirming that he was never actually in a position to refuse, They sit down, and Maeve says Harry isn't as untameable as "he" claimed, but won't answer when Harry asks who, although it becomes clear later that it was probably Lloyd Slate.

Harry tells Maeve he doesn't have much to trade. Maeve makes a show of thinking, indulging in a little performative time-wasting herself since she already as good as admitted she had a price in mind, before asking for Harry's firstborn. This feels like it's obviously too high a price, which leads me to suspect it was meant to be a strong opening bid, not what she actually wanted, except that she pushes for it really hard. The other possibility is that she honestly really wants Harry's kid for something, but for the life of me I can't think what. It's a couple of days before the summer solstice, so a child conceived now would be born right around the spring equinox, so maybe that has something to do with it? Maybe Jenny Greenteeth wants a new child to replace Lily, and this is about Maeve clearing a debt with Jen for something unrelated? Maybe a child of Harry's, specifically, would be special or significant for some reason we haven't found out about yet because it's gonna matter for little Maggie's storyline later. Maybe Elaine was pregnant when she fled to Summer, and there's a little Harry + Elaine baby running around there somewhere (or maybe not so little, but time moves weird in faerie) and Maeve wants a Dresden baby too because she doesn't like Aurora having anything she doesn't have. Maeve acts as though she agrees that Harry doesn't have any children, but we don't know if she's already been infected by Nemesis at this point, so it's possible she can lie, and in any case "naturally not" is the kind of meaningless noise of agreement that could probably be twisted as just politely acknowledging what Harry said without actually confirming it, given that the rules preventing the fae from lying here are loose enough to allow Mab to refer to Bonea as a parasite. 

Jenny Greenteeth comes up out of the pool at the low end of the room, entirely naked, and immediately starts trying to glamour Harry. I'm sure she is, as Harry says, pushing it, but given that it hits Billy too, and given what we know about Lily, I suspect she can't ever actually turn this glamour all the way off. Pixies or something of the sort help "dress" her as she comes up the steps. draping her in a length of silk that doesn't really cover anything, doing up her hair and putting on her jewelry. I know this doesn't matter at all, but I do wonder how much practice it took for them to get that right reliably. When she reaches the top of the stairs, she introduces herself, and Harry is beset with some vividly sexual intrusive thoughts. When he maintains his reluctance, Maeve offers that perhaps she could join in as well and make it a threesome. I am... genuinely curious whether that would work. We know now that the Winter Lady can't do anything that would get her pregnant - the mantle won't allow it. But if there's another person involved, can she get busy without triggering those defenses, as long as no one's planning to put their penis inside her? Inner Harry points out that this is not exactly an unpleasant way to get the information, which he does need after all. Maeve offers that if Harry wouldn't be satisfied with her and Jen, they could bring in more women, which honestly like, I know there are people who enjoy group sex, but that just sounds tiring and logistically awkward. 

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Harry pours a glass of ice water down his pants, which calms everything right down. He tells Maeve he's not giving her a child, his or anyone else's, and that she was stupid for not knowing that. While she's still recovering from being called stupid, he adds that she violated guest right by throwing glamour at him. Maeve actually seems impressed by this far more meaningful display of defiance. Lloyd Slate, who apparently just got here, says that he told her this wouldn't work on Harry, and that she should have been polite. I would love to know how Slate knows this much about Harry - my best guess is that he's getting his information from Mab, who would have gotten in from Lea, either in the usual course of Winter's affairs or as part of the handoff of his debt to Lea. I notice here that while Mab isn't exactly polite, her opening move is to try to make him want to help her by implying that he can't, rather than trying to push him into it. She only resorts to threats when this fails, and never makes any effort to tempt him or affect his mind. We get a description of Slate, of which the only really important parts are that he's got blood on him, his face has been burned recently, and he has a brand on his throat in the shape of a snowflake. Slate kneels in front of Maeve, and offers her a carved box. It says "the box" when he does it, but this box has not been mentioned before he gives it to her. I assume the introduction of the box as an item in Slate's possession was accidentally removed when revising his description. Maeve accepts it somewhat impatiently, and Slate says getting it wasn't as easy as she said it would be. Harry, who's also pretty impatient at this point, asks Slate if he killed Reuel. Slate says that not only did he not do it, he's not sure he could have, since Reuel has been the Summer Knight a lot longer than Slate has been the Winter Knight. This is actually sort of interesting, because a minute ago when Harry asks Slate to confirm that he is Winter's Knight, he says "So far, yeah", which implies he hasn't been doing this very long. See, looking at Slate, and looking at Harry, and in light of a discussion Harry has in Cold Days with... Fix, possibly, in which he says he's not Maeve's toy, and whoever he's talking too agrees that no, he's not, he's Mab's weapon. It seems tolerably obvious that Maeve chose Slate, and I strongly suspect that she got to do so because it was like, her turn to pick. Which since Mab chose Harry would imply that the status quo up until pretty recently included a Winter Knight chosen by Mother Winter, and I just really wish we'd had a chance to meet that guy, or knew like anything about him. Slate having had a relatively short tenure as Winter Knight is also sort of confirmed by, also in Cold Days, Harry telling Lily he's not Lloyd Slate, and Lily saying "neither was he, not at first". Now we don't know exactly how old Reuel's changeling kids are, and we do know that changelings who never Chose can be considerably older than they look, but I don't get the impression that this set are much older than the very young adults they appear to be. So for Lily to have had the opportunity to see Slate changing, I don't think he can have been around for very long. Anyway, Harry points out that Reuel was old, and Slate points out that a lot of wizards are old too. Without being able to listen to Reuel say this aloud, I can't be certain if he's implying that Reuel actually was a wizard. Difference between "So are a lot of wizards" (like a lot of wizards, Reuel was formidable despite his age) or "So are a lot of wizards" (Reuel was a wizard, so it's not surprising that he was formidable despite his age). The emphasis in the audiobook kinda favors the latter, but I don't necessarily set a lot of store by that, and I think there's something somewhere about Harry being the first wizard, or the first wizard in a long time, to be the Winter Knight. Maybe just the first one who was actually a member of the White Council, though, I honestly don't remember. I do also want to draw attention here to the characterization of Slate himself. We learn later that Slate is a rapist, as the Winter Knight he's almost definitionally a murderer, and he someways betrayed Winter although just at present I honestly don't remember how. But he's the most pleasant and reasonable person Harry talks to here. He's likeable. He's willing to admit there are things he can't do. And it's pretty rare for fiction to acknowledge that violent rapists can also be likeable, reasonable, pleasant, etc, without either downplaying the rape or presenting the likeability as a deliberate deception. 

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Maeve opens the box, and promptly kicks Slate down the stairs, although the timing and description are such that it's not immediately clear that this wasn't prompted by his saying he couldn't have killed Reuel. The box contains "what looked like a military issue combat knife" covered in something black and gelatinous, and apparently it's not useful to Maeve for whatever she wanted it for. I don't remember if we ever find out what this was about. For a second there I thought it might be the dagger Bianca gave Lea in Grave Peril, but the description doesn't match. In any case, she throws the knife at Slate, it bounces off his shoulder, and he picks it up and starts back up the stairs, apparently intent on killing her with it, which I would normally consider a pretty reasonable reaction, but she's a faerie queen and he works for her and both of those factors make this attempt both impolite and inadvisable. Maeve calls up her power, making the room considerably colder and lighting up the brand on Slate's throat, paralyzing him. I note with interest that Harry never receives such a brand, and now I'm immensely curious if they just haven't gotten around to it yet, if doing without it was a courtesy on Mab's part (or a response to the threats he made at the end of Ghost Story), or if Slate did something specific to get branded this way. I mean, it's Slate, so I'm leaning towards the lattermost, but I don't discount the possibility that at some point in the next couple books Mab's gonna be like "Yeah we gave you additional freedom while you were adjusting, but it's brand time now". Jenny wraps herself around Slate and starts doing something, presumably another glamour, to "calm" him at Maeve's instruction. She takes off his jacket, revealing track marks, and shoots him up with something from a syringe given to her by one of the pixies. 

Harry tells Billy to get up because they're leaving. Maeve insists that their bargain isn't complete, but Harry says he doesn't need her answer anymore. It took a considerable portion strength for her to deal with her own Knight, and she's sloppy and reckless besides, making it unlikely that she did this. She tells Harry she didn't give him permission to leave, but he doesn't really need permission. The second they're out of the room, the doors slam shut and disappear. Harry figures they were never really there to begin with, just a temporary, if very stable, portal to somewhere in the Nevernever, or somewhere else on earth. Billy is impressed by Maeve's display, but Harry says again that she was sloppy, leaking enough power to change the temperature, and he pretty quickly moves on to being impressed that Harry is so critical of her, and that he could have done the same thing. Harry reiterates his reasoning for Maeve's not being the killer, but says he can't rule out Slate, since Slate is human and can therefore lie outright. He's also increasingly troubled by how pressed for time everyone seems to be. It's unusual for the fae to care much at all about time on the scale humans are usually interested in, so this suggests something big and serious is coming very fast. 

Elidee leads them back to the surface, where they pretty much immediately trip over Reuel's changeling kids. Billy gets in one good his against... I think Fix, given that he was small enough to hide in a trashcan, before Meryl picks Harry up by the back of his neck. 

This one took a few days, largely because in some ways there isn't much to say about it. A lot of the page space is dedicated to Harry thinking about how much he wants to have sex with Jenny, which is interesting enough I suppose but doesn't really provide a lot of material for analysis. I'll try to be a little faster on the next post, but I'm still kind of settling into the new routine, especially with the more complex breakdown of administrative tasks. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

 

2025-2026 Eeveeyear Goals

So this year went pretty well, actually, especially compared to last year and the year before. It helps that, once again, I haven't had to move, and that some of my most intense freelance work has wound down. I hit at least 45% on every goal, which doesn't compare well to the first few years since I started tracking my work this way, but I have a lot more goals now than I did then.  It will come up several times throughout this post, but I really cannot emphasize enough what a difference it made not to have this huge, unending freelance project sucking up all my time. I think the format from last year worked pretty well, so we're gonna cover this in four sections: Core Goals, First Year Goals, Non-Core Goals, and New Goals. We've got a couple more things this year that have been around long enough that I could do graphs, but I'm not entirely sure whether they actually 

Core Goals

These are the goals that pertain directly to books, reading, and writing, since that's what this blog, and my career, are primarily about. The things in this section mostly either consist of or support those activities necessary for me to maintain this blog and make progress towards that whole "published novelist" thing I've been aiming for since adolescence. Fiction writing is still trending up, and seems likely to continue to to do. Books read is still trending down, but there is cause to hope that this will be corrected. 

So as not to bury the lede, this is the best year on record for fiction writing. Which is kind of the most important goal, so we're gonna call that an unqualified success, even though I still have yet to even really get close to where I'd like to be. Aligning the number of pages I try to read and the number of words I try to write really seems to be working here, and so does using a randomization tool to determine which writing projects to work on at any given time, rather than using a bunch of mental energy like, deciding. If I wanted to make decisions more than once a year, I wouldn't be doing all this with the spreadsheet. But actually having time to sit down and do it does make a difference - please assume that's a factor in basically everything this year. 

After two years of only 50 books read, I managed 83 this year, which is also what the target would be for the coming year according to the standard formula, but I'm still not comfortable allowing it below 100, so the actual target will be 119. I've gotten a bit more willing to just drop books if I'm not having a good time with them, even if I can't point to anything in particular they're doing wrong. I've never precisely been one of those "Oh, I always finish books once I start them, I have to" types, but I like to have a reason if I'm not going to finish something, and I've started to occasionally consider "I'm bored and annoyed" a reason. Honestly the high page count target has helped here as well, because like, I trust myself more not to capriciously abandon books when I know it will mean they don't count towards a pretty challenging target. Like I said, I don't like making decisions. 

This somehow isn't actually the worst year on record for rereads, but that says more about how awful I've been about rereading the past few years than it does about any particular triumphs for this year. I suspect this is why, despite keeping mynewreading up appropriately by entwining the target for pages read with the one for fiction word count, I've continued to feel somewhat under-resourced when drafting. I considered tethering rereads similarly, but I think for the time being we're going to take the much simpler route of just doubling what the standard formula says the target ought to be, putting it at 96 rather than either letting it be 48 or just pinning it at 75+1d10 like we did last year. I must note again that we could probably have avoided this entire mess had I just let it be 89 the second year rather than getting cute.

Honestly I think nonfiction writing is still kind of finding its level after the tumultuous circumstances of its introduction, but we did hit one exciting mile marker with it this year - my original nonfiction word count document is so long that Google docs will no longer allow me to add to it, so I was forced to start a second document.

26 blog posts written is a substantial improvement over 17 last year or 16 the year before, so I feel I've kept my word on that even if there's still substantial room for improvement. It's not yet enough that I can return to using the standard formula without letting the target fall below acceptable levels, but maybe I'll be able to in a few years if we keep heading in this direction. 263 and 45.66% is the most blog posts I've read in a year in absolute terms, although as a percentage of the target, it isn't as good as the year the goal was introduced. Honestly I'm starting to wonder why I even bother with the standard formula, since I end up having to drop it for everything important - assuming that there's a relationship between how many blog posts I read and how many I can write seems to have held up (more on this later) so the goal will once again be "pinned" at 593. The Light send there are enough blogs left in this world that are still blogs rather than podcasts. Also, I'm giving real consideration to having a subgoal for non-Series Reread posts, but I've got a whole year to think about that. 

I only finished one song translation this year, and that pretty early on, and I still managed to straight up exceed my fanfiction writing goal by 3, so I don't think we need a new category for those after all. The goal's only going up by 1, from 8 to 9, but I think this might be the first time since I started doing all this record keeping that my target for something has organically gone up just because I did such a good job. Most of the time even when I exceed the numbers from the previous year, the goal is still dragged down by some abysmal failure or other. I did start counting each subsequent chapter of fics I caught up on before they were finished as an additional fic, partway through the year, which somewhat accounts for my having exceeded this goal, but I should emphasize that some of this is the result of deliberately reading more fanfiction, because I'm writing and releasing more fanfiction, so reading and commenting is part of being a good community member. This target has also gone up modestly as a result of my just doing it a lot. 

I did not do well on reading short fiction, and the target slipped by another 5 short stories. I'm hoping this one can be fixed by trying harder, but if trying harder doesn't work it'll be getting doubled next year.

It looks like I spent more time reading this year, but it honestly may well be that I just did a better job of accurately counting reading time. I continue to be really bad about this. Writing time came in pretty high again, which I think is probably accurate to the amount of writing I did, what with a three year high on blog posts and a record high on fiction word count.  

First Year Goals

My patience for using the print button turns out to be pretty damn high. I could do math and make some kind of claim about the relationship between reading nonfiction and writing nonfiction, but so far no tidy, obvious ratio has presented itself, so for the time being we're going to let this goal do as it will according to the standard formula. Also, I read a lot more nonfiction in the course of a year than I thought. A little bit of this was books, but honestly most of those nearly 5000 pages was, so far as I can recall, just reading blog posts. The target for this year is probably too high, but since this is almost exclusively a derived stat, I'm not too worried about weirdness while it finds its level. 

The cleaning goal was not actually set high enough for what I need from it, as I was able to keep cleaning on track with everything else without actually getting any better about the laundry or at all on top of the things I need to organize. Since failures in this area have consequences in real life, I'm gonna just manually set it higher this year, rather than see what trying harder can accomplish. Cleaning time actually looks okay. It's also likely that both these goals were undercounted a little.  

Non-Core Goals 

I was worried that TTRPG Words had gone down every year since I added it, but for the first time since it's introduction, it actually went up this year, although not enough to stop the average, and consequently the target, from falling a little. The difference isn't huge, so we're just going to go with it for the time being, and reevaluate if it goes down again next year. Elements is in a similar spot - the goal is gonna go down a little, but not very much. It's mostly just how bad last year was, and I don't mind letting that take another year to get back on track, as long as back on track is the direction it's headed. Something went wrong with that metaphor. 

For the programming stuff, I did pivot, heavily, into romhacking. This has the dual advantages of occasionally being fun, producing tangible results that look cool within a timeframe I can tolerate, and being supported by a small and responsive community of other people who are, by definition, hobbyists, so there's less of this weird tech bro, startup kind of culture, even if programmers, as a group, continue to be kind of mean. To that end, I'm adding a target for programming tasks, because after a while, adding new guys to the Pokedex or whatever doesn't build any new skills, but you still have to do it for the game to get done. I strongly suspect programming time got at least a little undercounted this year, so since it's a time goal and the drop wasn't dramatic, I'm not gonna interfere with it, especially when I'm adding another thing that will work off of the same timer.  

Orbs and Video Game Time both got a substantial late boost from the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, while basically every other goal likely took a commensurate hit. Silksong is great, by the way, you should play it. You should also play Hollow Knight but you're not gonna be much more confused if you play Silksong first. These games are Soulslikes, as well as Metroidvanias, so they're confusing by nature and also hard on purpose. At some point I should write a blog post about Soulslikes, games that are hard on purpose, and Bloodborne in particular. 

We're doing the "double the standard formula" thing for the goal formerly known as Duolingo too, and changing the name to Language Learning since I'm using Mango now but like, who the hell knows what will happen with that anymore. Podcasts too, because I know I'm godawful at actually listening to them but that doesn't mean I don't want to. 

I honestly expected the amount of TV I watched to be higher this year, relative to prior years, given that I did a fair amount of TV watching while I had Covid back in January. It's possible this got undercounted a little, but I'm not too fussed about it. The actual goal here isn't shifting much from last year, and the goal for Movies is shifting at all, so I guess they're finding their balance, the way things are supposed to. The YoutTube target is going down, substantially if not dramatically - this is partly due to changes in the way I've handled reading blog posts over the past couple of years, but if it continues slipping I may have to pin it for a while, as part of the idea here is to get through the backlog of channels not yet on my RSS feed, and I can't do that if the goal is low enough to be met with only the RSS feed itself. Television rewatch also went up organically, which is probably also Covid related. I feel like I need to get more structured about when I rewatch what, but that's still in the planning stages, so watch this space. 

I thought that how badly I did on walking this year was mostly attributable to, y'know, the Covid again, both in the extended confinement and taking it easy after so I didn't do myself further harm, but apparently the goal was straight up set incorrectly. It was set at 761km, when it ought to ave been 1132km, and I honestly don't know what went wrong there. 

I appear to have no record, anywhere, of how many SCP articles I actually read in 2023-2024, although based on my 2024-2025 target it must have been in the neighborhood of 40. That's what we're going with for the purposes of setting this year's target, anyway, although this is another one that I'm vaguely considering pinning, even though it's non-core, if it slips much further than it already has. I appear not to have a tracker set up for it anymore. On the other hand, I do still have a tracker set up for handwritten pages, even though we got rid of that, so the former can pretty smoothly replace the latter this coming year. I am making an explicit note here that I did 40 this past year, since in the absence of a tracker I don't have any visual record of that either. 

Music ran into a new problem this year when Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist started throwing AI slop at me, so now I'm mostly working through the catalog's of artists I already like but haven't listened to like, comprehensively. That and the steep drop that so many goals experience upon hitting their third year are the bases on which I'm keeping this goal around for now, but honestly it's still on thin ice. 

Sewing time went down because I didn't spent as much time playing tabletop games, basically, and while there was originally some notion of doing it while I listened to audiobooks etc, in practice that hasn't mostly been what happened. Repairs is holding steady for the time being, because I started darning a lot of little holes in my socks, which just doesn't take that long. Both goals are in line for either pinning or doubling if this coming year isn't as productive as I want it to be, but I'm gonna give it another year to see how Trying Harder goes. 

The TCGO stuff has also really started to find its level, with this coming year's time goal being virtually identical to the past year's, despite some pretty broad fluctuation in the records. This is probably somewhat undercounted, and I do want to get better about that, but not so much that I'm gonna try and correct the targeting right now. New Cards is going up a fair bit, but that's largely due to changes in how I play, not how much I play. 

New Goals

So the big new thing here is that Admin is getting dropped, which is why we didn't talk about it earlier. And by "dropped", I mean split into 7 separate categories, several of which are getting the same initial target that Admin would have had this year if we weren't breaking it up. The new goals are:

• Sorting: Putting stuff were it goes. This includes organizing files on my computer and making some kind of sense of the things I tagged for later on Tumblr. Sometimes includes just going "y'know what, no, I don't need to keep this". 
• Sifting: Sorting through big piles of things I mostly don't need to keep, determining any that I do need, doing something with those. Includes dealing with emails. 
• Listing: Making and adding to lists, whether they're static lists for randomizers and the like or dynamic lists like my TBR. 
• Updating: maintaining the trackers and read list here, a couple other projects that we'll talk about if they go anywhere. 
• Data entry: Copying information from one place to another, without doing a lot more to it than maybe applying an Excel formula. If I do have to do more that's probably listing. 
• Transcription: This is technically a new word count goal, and covers trying to make searchable transcripts for things that don't have them, write down all the quotes and lore in Eternal pursuant to making a lore wiki, etc. 
• Correspondence: Getting back to people, reaching out to people, filling out forms and applications, mail. 

The other two new goals are both reading articles, one for like, magazine articles the other for journal articles. The latter goal is called "Science" but does of course also encompass the humanities. 

We'll have the new trackers up in a little bit, probably not all at once. Next Dresden Files post should be in the soonish.  Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!