#mikke admits defeat

[mikkeneko]

Been putting some serious thought into what I want to do with (say hello to my) thirty million little friends  (aka The Untamed IN SPAAAACE! au.)

It's becoming increasingly apparent to me that I am not ever going to be able to finish the entire arc I had planned -- even if I could finish the current story, which is a big If given the fact that it's now been multiple years since I was able to progress on it -- this is only part two of four that would cover the entire rest of the story. I gotta be real with you, I don't have this in me, and just thinking about climbing that mountain is overwhelming enough that it's discouraging me from touching the project again.

So, I could just get to the end of the current story, right? Except that the end of the current story was intended to be a downer/cliffhanger ending that sets up a Big Problem which would only be resolved (kinda?) in Part 3, which as I said, probably won't ever get written, and even it did, that one also has a downer ending which would only be resolved by Part 4.

This is exhausting to think about, and I also feel like it would be a disservice to my loyal readers to lead them to an unhappy ending and just leave them there.

So my options are:

Stop writing right now, declare the series abandoned, and do nothing more with it.

Stop writing right now, declare the series abandoned, but add a bonus chapter with an outline of how the rest of the series was going to go.

Continue the current story to the next good non-cliffhanger stopping point (the secret to a happy ending is knowing where to stop, right?) and end it there.

Continue the current story to the next good non-cliffhanger stopping point, but including a bonus chapter with an outline of how the rest of the series was going to go.

Do none of these! Finish the damn story and write the next two books or perish!

What do you think, chat? (Don't call your readers "chat.")

[ana-chronista]

I know I keep pestering you about this but if you would talk a little about The Best Laid Plans??

Absolutely I will talk about The Best Laid Plans with anyone who will listen! Thank you so much! Let's get the bad news out of the way: I kept my writing on an external hard drive that crashed. Recovery has been... partial. I've got folders containing no files, which I'm trying to get resolved. Unfortunately this includes the 50-75% completed next chapter for BLP... 😑 If it's a fully lost cause I will admit defeat and start rewriting. BUT let's chat about some of the other bits!

This fic is the first anything I started writing in about seven years. It's very close to my heart and I'm determined to see it through.

It was originally going to be a one shot. LOL. This is because sometimes people lie (to themselves...)

There is a chapter coming up that I keep referring to in my own head as "the backwards chapter" because it keeps jumping between past and present.

I can't believe I've got them so many chapters in without them even kissing. Oblivious!Bojan and FocusedonESC!Jere, my beloveds.

My favourite Bojere moment so far in the fic was the hug in London as I feel it's the first time they connected away from everyone else and on a more personal level. I thought it would be a cute idea and ran with it.

One thing I noticed is how much more comfortable I became with writing the JO guys as time went on, because the band shenanigans started to emerge. The glittery airport sign and the "I'm not dead, you assholes" parts were two of my favourite moments to write.

I can also pinpoint exactly where I started shifting around who hangs out more with who in the band, and I sort of assume that's obvious to everyone.

I have some vaguely drafted parallel scenes from Jere's perspective for reference. For the record, he's getting massive side eye from his delegation, especially Mikke.

I don't think it will surprise anyone to learn that Gregor is my least favourite to write, but I've actually written and rewritten several parts of his dialogue to try to make it seem "reasonable", if that makes sense? He has a job to do and is laser focused on that, but... well. He's Gregor, and he's a dick about it.

I'm well aware of how Voyager keep cropping up in the background and I'm not sorry. (I'm also not done, they're in the next chapter too haha.)

[mariacallous]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been an exercise in thinking the unthinkable—from the shocking barbarity of the invasion itself, to the unexpected course the conflict has taken, to the shattering of long-established national security norms and taboos on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The picture of how the war will end is about as clear as the muddy trenches scored into the black soil of the Donbas. Meanwhile, the contours of Ukraine’s post-war future are already being sketched: the billions of dollars of reconstruction aid required and the country’s prospective membership in NATO and the European Union.

Divining what Russia will look like once the conflict is over is altogether more difficult. Save for a radical change of heart in the Kremlin, perhaps the unlikeliest scenario of all, longtime Russia watchers and former U.S. government officials sketch a bleak picture of a country that will likely emerge from the war poorer, more aggrieved, and more unstable. In all likelihood, Russia will remain the world’s largest country, a major nuclear power whose shared border with NATO will more than double once Finland is admitted into the alliance. The Russia that emerges from the war will have profound ramifications for Europe, the United States, and the wider world. 

“What might happen to Russia afterwards is, of course, something we need to think carefully about,” said British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly on a visit to Washington last month. “I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest to see a failed state or a collapsed state in Russia.” 

Save an improbable unconditional surrender by either Russia or Ukraine, the most likely way the war will end is with some kind of peace agreement. The nature of that deal could play a significant role in shaping the Russia that is to come and the longevity of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As recently noted by Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Putin’s regime is both the strongest and most vulnerable it has ever been.

In invading Ukraine, the Russian president tore up the social contract that had underpinned his popularity during his 24 years in power—delivering relative prosperity to the Russian people. Hundreds of beloved Western brands pulled out of the country while sanctions sent shockwaves through the economy. 

“In some sense, the risks of Putin losing office are arguably higher now than they’ve been,” said Timothy Frye, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “The main achievement of his 20-plus years in power was delivering stability to Russia.” 

The war has made Putin’s position more precarious, and the Russian leader clearly views his conquest in Ukraine as an existential matter. A spectacular defeat, experts say, could pose a serious challenge to his rule, but Putin’s departure from office once the war is over is by no means a foregone conclusion. “I think we have to find a way forward based on the premise that Putin may still be president of Russia for some time to come,” said Fiona Hill, who served as Trump’s top Russia advisor on the U.S. National Security Council. 

Even if Putin were to leave office, there’s a strong chance that whoever follows will be cast in his image. “I would stress that so-called Putinism is widespread in Russia across many circles,” said Mikk Marran, who served as the head of Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service until October of last year.

Opinion polls by the independent Levada Center and the Kremlin’s own internal surveys, obtained by Meduza, indicate growing support for peace talks, which could provide an avenue for Putin to bring the war to a negotiated end without risking public outrage. (This could be a fine needle to thread, however: Levada Center polling shows Russians are staunchly opposed to returning any Russian-occupied territories to Ukraine.)

“There is a chance, especially in the scenario of a negotiated outcome, that this does not become existential for Putin’s regime—but only if he is willing to move towards that aim,” said Liana Fix, a Europe fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Another potential scenario is that the war instead ossifies into an intractable stalemate. Military analysts see no signs that Putin is backing down on his ultimate goal of seizing Ukraine in its entirety, even as Russian forces have sustained an eye-watering rate of casualties—most recently estimated by U.S. officials to be close to 200,000 deaths in a year of war. Such astonishing losses would quickly come to weigh on many leaders, but from Putin’s point of view, the price of not continuing with the war would be to lose Russia itself. “In Putin’s eyes, the alternative would be to lose 145 million Russians. It’s a question of Russia’s existence,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wars, won or lost, rarely unseat strongmen like Putin. A 2016 study by scholars Sarah Croco and Jessica Weeks found that since 1919, authoritarian leaders atop highly personalized regimes largely weathered the wars they fought—no matter how badly. Wars can even offer protection against elite coups, reinforcing a “hang together or hang separately” mentality, said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who studied the political dynamics of authoritarian regimes as a senior analyst at the CIA. 

Russian elites still see Putin as the best chance of preventing the system as they know it from collapsing entirely, Stanovaya said. In the eyes of Russia’s top officials, the two most immediate threats to the status quo come from upstart outsiders—such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, sponsor of the mercenary Wagner Group—or a popular uprising by Russian society, Stanovaya added. “There is such a prominent fear among the elites that everything can collapse that they prefer to have Putin than to face any changes,” she said. 

With space for dissent in Russia winnowed by a brutal crackdown and opinion polls showing buoyant public support for the war, elite fears of a grassroots uprising appear misplaced. But sparks can be hard to spot; few people would have expected the suicide of a Tunisian fruit vendor in 2011 to spark uprisings and civil wars across the Middle East. “I always try to remind myself of the fallacy of linear thinking that we usually have. Who would have foreseen [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev coming?” Fix said. “We should always prepare for surprises that can happen.” 

The faint glimmers of hope that do exist for Russia’s future lie in its population rather than among the elite. Russians, Frye noted in his book, are wealthier and better educated than your average citizen of an autocracy. Russia’s younger generations have, in opinion polls, shown themselves to be far more open to the West, and recent surveys indicate that the country’s youth are more skeptical about the war than their elders. On paper at least, Russia is not bound to remain an authoritarian regime. 

“The picture about Russia’s future is more mixed than the simple view that if we get rid of Putin everything will be fine or that Russia is condemned by the weight of history to being an autocratic regime,” Frye said.

Peering over the walls of the Kremlin, economic clouds look dark—regardless of how the war goes. The United States and its allies imposed waves of unprecedented financial penalties on Russia, which surpassed Iran to become the most sanctioned country in the world. But the effect so far has been far from the scorched-earth scenarios predicted ahead of the invasion. The International Monetary Fund predicted that the Russian economy will eke out a tiny 0.3 percent growth this year, whereas economists surveyed by the Russian Central Bank predict a less rosy—but far from catastrophic—contraction of 1.5 percent. “As long as Russia continues to sell oil and gas and commodities somewhere, the state will continue to generate revenues,” Hill said.

Sanctions experts note penalties were never intended to collapse the Russian economy but rather were intended to poleax Moscow’s war machine—something U.S. officials do believe is happening. Russia’s ability to access advanced semiconductors has been curtailed by 70 percent, the U.S. Treasury estimated last year, bringing the production of sophisticated hypersonic ballistic missiles to a near standstill. (However, Moscow has proved able to wreak havoc in Ukraine using unsophisticated Iranian-made drones.)

At the same time, Russia has spent years trying to sanction-proof its economy, and authoritarian regimes can prove surprisingly resilient: Iran is still a menace to the Middle East despite years of international efforts to isolate the regime and cut off its funding. 

“There are countries around the world that somehow manage to keep it together and continue to have a lot of coercive capacity, such as Iran, but are not net contributors to the greater prosperity of mankind,” Hill said. 

Another scenario batted about in the West is that Putin may have unleashed the dissolution of the Russian Federation, as its constituent republics—many of which were seized during centuries of imperial expansion—could seek to break away from Moscow. Reports that Russian ethnic minorities have been disproportionately used as cannon fodder in the war has further fueled speculation. Most experts see an entire collapse of Russia as unlikely, as Moscow has worked steadily to strip its 21 constituent republics of political power.

“I don’t see too much power in those regions to break away. I think the probability of that is quite low,” said Marran, Estonia’s former spy chief. It’s also hard to envisage Russia fragmenting without descending into bloody chaos—as happened in the former Yugoslavia, albeit on a much larger scale. Moscow fought two spectacularly violent wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, seeking to quash separatist movements in the tiny mountainous republic of Chechnya. 

“If you think about a country breaking up like that with 6,000 nuclear warheads, that’s a pretty terrifying prospect,” said Angela Stent, an expert on Russian foreign policy. 

Less than two years ago, in June 2021, Putin and new U.S. President Joe Biden met in an 18th-century villa on the banks of Lake Geneva as Washington sought to forge a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia. The outreach did little to curb Moscow’s revisionist ambitions. Just a few months later, U.S. intelligence officials began to pick up the first signs that Russia was headed for war, and the U.S.-Russia relationship has pitched steeply downward ever since.

With Putin, or at least Putinism, set to stick around for the foreseeable future, Russia’s relationship with the West is unlikely to improve after the war and Ukraine will remain under threat. Necessary efforts to hold Moscow to account for atrocities committed in Ukraine will complicate matters further. 

“Despite all the positive effects that a Russian defeat might have … this will not be a golden age of stability. We should prepare ourselves for Russia’s defeat as much as we should prepare ourselves for Russia’s return,” Fix said. Any hopes that Russia might reconstitute itself as Germany did in the wake of World War II ignores how that happened. “It was not that it was suddenly coming out of the souls of Germans that they need democracy and [to reconsider] their own history. It was the occupying powers which forced Germany towards de-Nazification and towards building up democratic structures,” Fix added. 

While intelligence officials and policy planners across the West will keep closely analyzing Russia for clues as to where the country is heading, the range of realistic options to effect change within Russia remains highly limited. 

“One thing we’ve learned in the 30 years since the Soviet collapse is that the West, the U.S., we have very little influence on what happens domestically in Russia,” Stent said.

[tykimikknuggets]

Brother Mine

#dgraymanweek » day 02 || Lonely Boy

                        ↳ option a: favorite character (Tyki Mikk) (word count: 967)

Tyki sighed and shoved the book off of the table, letting his forehead replace it with a loud thunk.  That was the third tutor to resign this month - Father would be furious.  Reading was just so hard, with the way the letters seemed to never stay in the right places, and how every time he looked back at the words they would be spelled differently.  How did Sheril do it so easily?  

“Stupid Sheril,” he muttered, swinging his legs as they dangled off the edge of the chair.  “Stupid Sheril with his stupid advanced lessons and his stupid books…”

“What ever did I do to warrant such cruel words, brother?”

Tyki jerked upright and swiveled in his seat.  Sheril was smirking from the doorway, but as Tyki watched, he dramatically collapsed against a bookshelf, eyes fluttering closed as if he were suffering greatly.

“…You’re weird,” Tyki decided, swinging one leg up as he twisted around all the way to straddle the chair.  “What are you doing here, anyway?  Don’t you have lessons?”

“I finished my work early, so Ms. Matos permitted me to take a short break from my studies.”  Sheril straightened at that, frowning at him.  “Don’t you have work to do, brother?  Where in the world is your tutor?”

Tyki looked away with a grimace, and he heard a sigh before his brother sat down in an empty chair, somehow managing to look elegant even as he slumped into the cushions.  “Father will not be pleased, Tyki.  Can’t you at least try not to embarrass the family?”

“I do try!”  Tyki paused.  “And I’m not an embarrassment!”  

He knew that wasn’t really true, though.  He’d always been an embarrassment, ever since he was born, a living sign of their mother’s infidelity, forbidden to even take the Kamelot name.  That was probably better, though - at least this way, nobody expected anything from him.

Except for Father - Sheril’s father, really - who seemed determined that he make up for the shame of his birth somehow.  It was really too bad that Tyki always seemed to disappoint him.

Sheril leaned over and lightly rapped him on the head with a slim book.  “You know perfectly well that’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah, yeah…”

As he watched, Sheril leaned down to pick up the book Tyki had dropped.  “Oh, this one - I read this when I was five, Tyki, really?”  He didn’t wait for Tyki’s indignant reply before flipping it open and beginning to read aloud, his smooth voice filling the room.

Tyki decided he liked that much better than reading.

Sheril was sick.

He was sick, and no one but the healers were allowed in his chambers, and there were rumors that he was dying.  

Tyki was sure he was going to go mad.

If it weren’t enough that he had his brother to worry about, the servants were suddenly watching him at all times.  Even Father had stopped turning a blind eye to him sneaking out to the town to gamble with the miners on the poorer side of town.  He hadn’t even been able to go fishing in weeks!  

And on top of all that, Father had hired a tutor for him again, even after he’d admitted defeat so many years ago and declared Tyki simply unteachable.  

It was as if everyone was preparing for Sheril to die, and Tyki hated it.  Sure, his brother was a pompous ass at times, and they certainly irritated each other - but he was Tyki’s pampered, stuffy big brother, and him dying was absolutely out of the question.  

Sheril wasn’t going to die.

That might have been why Tyki felt absolutely no remorse about ignoring everything the tutor tried to teach him.  As he wrote down random answers to the problems that he had been set for the day, Tyki stared outside, to where he could see his brother’s window with the white lace curtains pulled tightly shut.

He got a sharp rap to the knuckles for not paying attention, and he scowled, glaring down at the paper as though it had personally offended him.  Honestly, he was rather offended at the idea of having to learn things - never mind the implication that he, rather than Sheril, would be responsible for following Father into politics and a “respectable” life - so that wasn’t too inaccurate.  

When his gaze drifted outside again, something seemed different, though.  It took him a few moments to figure it out, but when he did, the blood drained from his face and he bolted from the library, ignoring the shouts of the tutor behind him as he raced down the halls to his brother’s rooms.

Because there was no good reason for the curtains to have suddenly changed from white into such an ominous, bloody red.

He smelled the blood before he saw it - but when he did see it, he collapsed, his knees suddenly too weak to hold his weight.  The walls, the floor, Sheril - everything was dyed red.  The only consolation was that his brother was standing upright, no longer bedridden and apparently as healthy as could be.

The mangled corpse on the floor was the obvious source of the sickening red, but… could one body really hold that much blood?  And how had it gotten splattered so high up on the walls - even the ceiling, he realized, as some dripped down onto his nose.

“Sheril…?”  His voice sounded strange, as if it were echoing into his ears from a distance.

His brother turned to face him, and Tyki bit back a whimper at the twisted smile on the familiar face. 

Why were his brother’s eyes golden?

And why, why did his head hurt so badly?

He lifted one hand to press against his forehead, and when he felt the slowly forming incisions there, he screamed.