Three links to follow

1. Wooo! It is multifandomdrabble time again. Round 1 for 2021 is now open for signups! I love this exchange, because I like writing drabbles, and it's a good excuse to write a lot of them. This is my note to myself to remember to sign up -- I have a busy week and don't want to forget!

2. Every now and then I take a dive into the boards over at alternatehistory.com; I usually only read in the pre-1900 board, and avoid anything involving the American Civil War (I have a blanket "no Confederates and no Nazis in my pleasure reading" rule). But I really enjoy the site, especially the sort of deep dives into the marriages of minor and not-so-minor European nobility; one day I will actually make an account there, or even write something. In the meantime I found something I thought was really interesting, and it's the sort of thing a number of people on my access list here might like:

A Horn of Bronze: The Shaping of Fusania and Beyond: this is an alternate history of the western part of the North American continent based on the idea that caribou were domesticated in the Yukon in the early 1st millennium, and that this leads to plant domestication and the domestication of other animal species. From that point it's a survey of the complex cultures which develop in the arctic, subarctic and Pacific northwest and the effect that they have in the rest of North America and beyond -- the writing is very anthropological in a somewhat old fashioned way but the worldbuilding is extremely impressive. At some point (which I have not reached in my reading) there is contact via the coast with Japan & China, and the ethnographies reflect that, since in-universe some of them are ethnographies by people from Asia, or by people from North America residing in Asia. If what you really want in your worldbuilding is a survey of the most common domesticated plants in this version of the Pacific Northwest, and their spread beyond that region, this might be for you. It is really deep and engaging.

3. I've also recently read a very very long ASOIAF (book, not show) AU, involving Rob marrying a genderbent version of Domeric Bolton at the start of the events of the series. It carried through the whole of the foreshadopwed plot, building in a reasonable way from what we know is likely to happen. The author insists that it isn't a fixit, and enough bad things happen to make that true, but it does come to a satisfying conclusion. It's also a version of the ASOIAF story which is very much focused on the female characters and their view of the world they live in. It's called I lack the patience to haunt / Instead, I hunt by dwellingondreams. Be warned, it's over 700,000 words. But they're 700,000 really good words.