Reading

fests and exchanges

After not writing anything more than alibi sentences for ages - my last fic was in May (The Consultant, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan), and the one before that in March (Beyond the Gates, the Mountain, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan) - I'm signing up for a lot of stuff now! Deadlines are usually very effective at making me write, so now that I'm not so busy any more and it's actually possible, that should get me back to where I want to be, writing-wise. I hope. *g*

In order of reveals:

There's rarepairexchange, which has its deadline a little over two weeks from now, though reveals aren't until October. I've been poking at my assignment, and I have a bunch of things I know I want to be in it, but so far I haven't managed to pull it all together into a coherent narrative. Hopefully once I've conquered this one, things will be flowing again!

Then there's guardian_wishlist, for which I just finished my sign-up last night - and we've only just posted the first batch of wishlists. (Mine is here; I'm requesting Guardian drama and RPF, as well as Guardian/Grimm and Guardian/Stargate crossovers.) And there are so many tempting prompts already! Reveals are on 6 October, and I hope to make a bunch of stuff before then.

Next comes ficinabox, with a deadline in October and reveals in November - assignments aren't out yet, but should come soon. I won't seriously tackle that one until after Rarepair Exchange, though. Plenty of time if I brainstorm and have a plan by then!

There's also the Guardian Bonus Bingo grace period in November, for which I hope to finish at least some of the things I started and didn't finish so far. *g*

Yuletide is of course gearing up again as well, so that's what I'll be working on in December. Can't wait to find out which rare fandom I get to write this time!

Then, hopefully fandomtrees will also run again this year, and I'll get to make a bunch of stuff for that too! Reveals are genearally early to mid-January.

And finally, there's fffx which doesn't have its deadline until the second half of January. I still need to finish my sign-up for that (planning on doing that this weekend), but that deadline is so far away, there'd still be plenty of time even if I didn't start thinking about it until after Yuletide ends. (Though I hope to have a plan before then!) Of course, an idea might grab me right away and I might be working on this in parallel to everything else, you never know! *g*

Yeah, I know that's a lot. *g* I hope to make up a bit for all those months of not writing! But everything's nicely spaced out, except for Rarepair Exchange revealing one day before Guardian Wishlist, and the Bingo grace period overlapping with FIAB reveals. So it should be very doable without being too exhausting. *g*

What fests or exchanges is everyone else doing?

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wed 2025

Write Every Day September 2025 - Day 5

Quote of the Day:

On following a writing schedule and "finishing for the day:"

"Writing is obsessional and in many ways the hardest work is done when it's buzzing around in your head and you suddenly realise how things should be, and so going back to the typewriter and putting that right is actually easier."

— William Trevor, interview with Tom Adair, The Linen Hall Review (1994).

Today's Writing:

Almost 245 words, and some alibi editing. I sprained my ankle (not badly! It's better!) and was cranky.

Tally

( Days 1-3 )

Day 4:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

falkner,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

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wales

made it!

Our flight was delayed by almost an hour and I had serious doubts that we'd make our train out of London, which would have set off a cascade failure of prebooked transit. But by dint of rushing as fast as possible through the infinite hallways from our arrival terminal, through baggage claim and border control (THANK GOD for the e-gates), to the Heathrow Express platform, we actually made out train with time to breathe! That was not how the smart money had been betting, so I'm very relieved.

(Also, as you can tell by the fact that I'm posting this, my UK SIM is working perfectly. £10 for all the service we could possibly need, I'm very pleased.

Now we're relaxing on our first train (of two, followed by a prebooked taxi). Well, I say "relaxing," but we're apparently on the Lad Local; we're sitting directly behind a group of eight young men all talking and laughing uproariously, and consuming vast quantities of sandwiches, crisps, and canned drinks that look like beer but I'm not sure. I can't really follow their conversations but they don't seem unpleasant in any way, just loud. I like hearing people having fun!

ETA: One of the lads just tried a friend's drink and announced that it was some kind of tequila lime grapefruit something something, I didn't catch it all; and he said, "Do you ever feel like they're putting too many flavors into a drink these days? Like, that's a lot of flavors! I like it when I just drink a beer, you know, it's a nice simple refreshing one flavor--"

"In other news," interrupted one of his friends, "old man yells at cloud."

ETA2: Our first train was delayed en route and we had only four minutes to catch our second one, but thankfully it was 1) on the adjacent platform, and 2) also slightly delayed! Everything has fallen into place despite the stresses. On this train, the announcements are made first in Welsh and only afterward in English. I've never actually heard Welsh spoken before; it's so pretty!

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Another farmboys picspam, part 1

( Sorry (not sorry) )
(Part 2 to follow in a day or so.)

Seattle Kraken

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now plied: "leaf" yarn

wheel wheel

Taking a break from MUD coding.

Latest singles preparing for a 3-ply "leaf" yarn!

This one is also slated for Local Astronomer Knitter Friend. :)

This book has genuinely been my favorite read all YEAR. It's so engagingly written (I love technical/craft instructional books), wry moments of humor, but incredibly clear explanations of the engineering of a spinning wheel along with the MATH.

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historical fiction pet peeves

The more time I spend talking to elderly people and reading history ...

... the more often I notice little details that are wrong in movies and books.

Like, most recently, I watched a few minutes of Saving Private Ryan, which included the delivery of the telegram about most of her sons dying to Mrs. Ryan. She is doing dishes in the kitchen when she looks out the window and sees a car driving up. She is wearing an apron. She goes to the door to greet the Official Men who are coming.

Me: ... why isn't she taking off the apron, or replacing it with a clean one, or flipping it around?

I have heard stories from multiple women about their mothers working really hard to always have a perfectly pristine apron whenever unexpected company showed up, the 1930s version of "we can't let anybody know we live here!" So, for example, women who would wear their aprons inside out, so that they could flip it around whenever the doorbell rang, and know the pretty side would be perfectly clean. Or women who would take their aprons off and stuff them in a drawer when they saw a car drive up, and pretend they hadn't been working in the kitchen or scrubbing the floor or whatever. Or run to the kitchen and swap out their everyday apron for the fancy one with the ruffles and embroidery or whatnot. In every case, the idea was for the apron to look like a fashion statement, and not an actual functional garment.

But the thing is, no piece of fiction is ever going to be 100% perfect in its presentation of the past, no matter how much they try for accuracy; if for no other reason than that lots of the past simply gets forgotten about. Nobody can possibly know every detail about what life was like in an era before they were born, even if they've studied it extensively. (And the further back in time you go, the less stuff it is possible to know.) And even if you could be accurate, the accuracy might not fit with the story you're trying to tell; it might distract from an emotional moment, or it might signal something completely different to modern eyes, or it might just not register to modern people unless you took the time to stop and explain what's going on. All of which interfere with telling the story you're trying to tell.

So for me, it's a lot of "they're not wrong to do it that way, that I find it annoying is totally a ME issue and not an objective problem with the story.

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wed 2025

Write Every Day September 2025 - Day 4

Quote of the Day:

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

--Ernest Hemingway, interview in Writers At Work, Second Series, edited by George Plimpton (1963)

Today's Writing:

Reminded of a tip by

goddess47 (thanks!), I skipped to writing the middle of my essay. This worked! Not enough new words to count, but a goodly amount of rewriting and rearranging and etc. ;-)

Tally

( Days 1-2 )

Day 3:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

chanter1944,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

the_siobhan,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 4:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Current Mood: enthralled

further adventures in bureaucracy

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let them eat fancake

Fancake's Theme for September: Food & Cooking

Photograph of steel spoons and spices in a dramatic setting with added text that gives it the look of a gourmet magazine cover: September 2025. Food & Cooking, at Fancake. Steel teaspoons are arranged in an elogated oval to suggest a fish, with the bowls acting as scales and some of the handles left visible to create the fins and tail, giving the creature a spiky appearance. The concave bowls are dusted with a powdery orange spice for color and one spoon at the front of the fish is filled with a coarse black spice to create an eye. The fish is on a black surface with a rough texture and around it are three skinny green peppers, a mound of salt, a mound of orange spice, and a dipping bowl filled with a clear amber liquid.

It's farm to table—and every stop in between—at

fancake this month! Bring on over your recs for fanworks featuring hunting, farming, ranching, fishing, foraging, grocery shopping, farmer's markets, kitchens, restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, food carts, bars, wineries, breweries, waiters, bartenders, baristas, and, of course, cooking and eating.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

Bohemian Rhapsody (Zulu version)

Via

brithistorian: the South African Ndlovu Youth Choir has translated Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody into Zulu. It's gorgeous - and after I saw the video, I just had to share it. It's completely stunning:

Watch on YouTube

reel WIP

Music reel. :3 Thoughts/feedback welcome (although I'm still learning industry norms for composition/orchestration); I graduate in 2028 but figure I'd hit the learning curve accreting a reel starting now.

Note: it's the norm for people in composition/orchestration to have audio-only reels (unless, I suppose, you have some gigantic AAA-videogame or Star Wars-level movie credit you have permission to show off as a video clip!).

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weekly update

Me-and-media update

Pandemic life
( Nothing to report, really. )

Previous poll review
In the Cluedo poll, by far the most popular weapon was the cassowary (53.3%), followed by extremely elegant clothing (33.3%). In ticky-boxes, musical frogs and the wishing abyss tied for second place with 42.2%, after hugs with 75.6%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
More of Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, read by Candida Gubbins (I'm enjoying it, but it feels like it will never end), more of the latest Rivers of London (also audio), and more of A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall (library book). A browse through Low-FODMAP and Vegan: what to eat when you can't eat anything by Joanne Stepaniak (library book), of which more below.

Kdramas/Cdramas
I'm still going with Nothing But Love, eking it out. Pru and I watched two episodes of Mystic Pop-up Bar, and it's pretty great. I don't know why I bounced off last time. It does help that Choi Won-young, one of the dads from Family by Choice, is main cast and I love him.

Other TV/movies
Wow, almost no TV. Some Vir Das standup (very good), finished The Sympathizer with our tv-watching friend (fascinating, dark, very black comedy), two episodes of Fringe season 2 with my sister. One episode of new Magnum PI (very woohoo the military!). A ton more Bluey.

Bluey observation; ignore if you prefer to watch unquestioningly.

Andrew: Why is the mum always hanging out laundry, when none of them wear clothes?
me: .........

Jaws at the cinema for its 50th anniversary rerelease, so fun!

Guardian/Fandom
Everything is happening everywhere all at once. We're wrapping up the readalong, and the Slo-mo Rewatch starts this weekend on

sid_guardian!

guardian_wishlist is in sign-ups!

fan_flashworks stuff is happening behind the scenes! And I have a ton of

fan_writers comments to reply to! \o/

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses are doing a deep dive on Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky. I haven't read it, but I still enjoy their analysis. The last episode gave me ~writing thoughts~, and I scrawled a bunch of extra stuff for my WIP, which I then immediately took out again because it didn't fit, but I'll use it somewhere else. Letters from an American is really good, and 12ish minutes of US politics a day is about all I can take. I started Alba Salix, Royal Physician but am still not sure.

Online life
After I posted my last

fan_writers post, I got a ton of great comments, and... hit a wall with things to reply to. I'm kind of paralysed by my inbox, now, overwhelmed, and not keeping up with my reading page either. Tabs continue to propagate. Also, my arms are such a mess, argh. I'm going to need them for Wishlist, so I'm trying to slow down, but <speech tone="wail">I don't waaaaant toooooo.</speech> :-( tl;dr Sorry if I haven't replied to you! I still plan to! <333

Writing/making things
After a week and a half of brain static, I tried to write a last-minute drabble for the FFW amnesty round and ended up with 1300 words of "srsly, nobody asked for this." Still working on my DNW-kink fic and having a ball.

Life/health/mental state things
Overwhelm plus sore arms, dohhhhhh. But my mood and energy levels are pretty good, despite that.

Korean
I have a theoretical plan to read the Guardian subs in Korean (진혼 자막 한국어으로) as we go through the rewatch. I'm completely 100% expecting to fall behind, but still, any reading is better than none, right?

Food
New things I've made in the last week:

a carrot, walnut and sultana cake, recipe from the back of the sultana packet; as I added a cup of this and a cup of that, I started going, "I'm going to need a bigger cake tin." Then I got to 1 cup of oil and three eggs, and looked at my mixing bowl. "I'm going to need a bigger bowl!!" Ended up cooking it in two unevenly distributed cake tins and taking one out early, lol.
vegan nutty gravy from the vegan low-FODMAP book; I used so many substitutions (regular miso for light miso, soy sauce for low sodium tamari, etc) that I'm not sure what it was supposed to taste like. It was good but a bit strong.
baked lemon tofu (ibid); Very Tangy. I tried this twice, and the first time I didn't have enough lemon juice, used some lime instead, and thought that was why it was So Tangy. The second time I followed the recipe more closely (just switched out thyme for oregano and added some maple syrup because yum), and it was still a bit overwhelming. Overall, not unsuccessful, but I don't know how to turn this into a meal.

Conclusion: I'm enjoying my experiments. It's fun flailing around, all "Stand Back, I'm Going To Try ~~Science~~ Cooking!" :-) Also, I feel like recipe books are like fan reccers: for best results, you have to find the ones you click with.

Good things
Bluetooth earpieces. Sisters. Reading glasses (but not the needing of them). Libraries. Unexpected story developments. Recipe books. Bluey! Biking.

Poll #33572 Spice tolerance

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 49

View Respondents

I can handle

View Answers

mild
22 (44.9%)

a vague tingle
20 (40.8%)

a distinct tingle
24 (49.0%)

hot
17 (34.7%)

searing
6 (12.2%)

call the fire department
2 (4.1%)

depends on the cuisine
13 (26.5%)

other
4 (8.2%)

ticky-box full of Michaelangelo's many naked dudes
24 (49.0%)

ticky-box full of someone else is cooking dinner
27 (55.1%)

ticky-box of ducklings debating the merits of existentialism
23 (46.9%)

ticky-box full of chocolate (hot or solid)
32 (65.3%)

ticky-box full of hugs
39 (79.6%)

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What I'm Doing Wednesday

( books (Dunnett, Dunnett, Herron, Tierney) )

media
I finally finished watching Murderbot S1! (It only took forever bc I suck at visual media.) I loved it and want more! I'm hesitant to dive into fic, though, due to the "murderbot has a penis" and "Gurathin/Murderbot" tags. I want canon-compliant Murderbot adventures, not forcing it to behave in any manner like a sexbot. So, those are 2 things for me to filter out of search... But re the ending, wow, evidently they spent their whole series budget on ep 10 & it became a whole different show. Really satisfying.

( dirt )

yarning
no yarn group this week, as too many people were sick or busy. I haven't crocheted on my own in well over a month, as I'm not at all motivated. It's SO frustrating. I'm hoping I can get off one of my meds that affects creativity & regain inspiration. I did at least get 3 kickbunnies listed on etsy...though I haven't promoted them on social media yet due to lack of motivation. OTOH, I have a potential customer waiting on an address to send a bunny to? That's something.

healthcrap
Still having frequent headaches and rationing triptans (I'm not low on them (yet), just being frugal with the stash). The vertigo/feeling faint is bad. Generally, I'm getting 2-16 minutes of Deep sleep per night and not feeling rested at all. ( cut for discussion of weight loss )

yuletide!
noms open in less than 2 weeks, on the 15th, yay! Get your fandoms ready! \o/ And they've upped the number of fandoms you can nom and request! I need to have a look back at the books I've read this year and see what I can manage to offer. Hrm.

#resist
10/18/25: No Kings Day #2

And then there's this

I sent copies of my exchanges with my former aunt to my cousin Susan, the only one on that side of the family whom I'm in contact with. She told me in response that she nearly snorted her coffee when reading them. She hasn't gotten along with that aunt for decades, and manages to avoid dealing with her by being the youngest of her sibs (the aunt likes the two older ones.)

She and I are now the Two Black Sheep of the family, which makes me happy.

YULETIDE!!!!

It's that time of year again!

Yuletide is still my favourite multifannish exchange, and this year's schedule is out - nominations start on the 15th. And they're running an experiment with giving us more nominations and requests this year! Very cool, and I hope it works out well!

What's new this year:

The deadline is 12 hours earlier than it was the last few years. (First time in a while that the deadline will be when I'm actually awake, but I'll try not to cut it too close. *g*)

Reveals are also 12 hours earlier than they've been the last few years. (First time in a while that I'll be awake when the collection opens!)

We get 5 fandom nominations instead of 4. (Woohoo!)

We get 8 requests instead of 6! (And again, woohoo! It's so hard to choose between rare fandoms.)

Who else is doing Yuletide? Have you thought about what you're going to nominate/request/offer this year?

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Life is being only moderately odd today

I seem to live between odd dichotomies these days.

It's hard to go to sleep, in part because of lack of noise. I have just enough tinitis that when I can't hear the traffic it's hard to sleep; think of permanent mosquito in your ear. I found a technique in FB reels for tapping hard on the bone behind the ear that gets rid of the worst of it, but it doesn't always work. So I use an app called Calm, which has 'soundscapes' including things like six different kinds of rainfall, waterfalls, forests of various kinds and white, pink and brown noises, find whatever works for me that night and leave it on all night. That helps. Or I could stay awake till nearly 4, when the noise from the Capital Beltway a quarter mile south of me cranks up to its general daily roar.

A friend suggested that I get a night light for the bathroom in the shape of a capybara, or in her words, 'an imperturbable capybara'. So I did get it, and have it set to the lowest level of light, but I am not yet used to any light there. Normally I have my Kindle nearby, and when I need to get to the bathroom I flip the cover open and use it as a night light. Last night, the capybara was sitting imperturbably on my toothbrush holder, but its light shone out on a wall that I'm not used to having lit, so I had to remind myself that I had a friendly and non-aggressive critter there shining the light (I need reminders when I'm almost asleep but my body discerns something different.)

That meant that I slept on my left side last night, with my face away from the lit wall. Which, for most other people, would not be a problem, but I have all my life had a slightly curved spine, leaning to the left. (During the 2000s, I was doing deepwater running twice a week and the supported floating combined with gravity straightened my spine out, but I have not done it in several years now bcC (because Covid) and it is leaning a little. When I sleep on that side it leans more. As a remedy my husband put up a bar in one of the doorways that I can reach up and grab and dangle myself from, and my own weight straightens my back out painlessly. A side effect of the bar is that my grip strength has increased a bit, so I could do better at pulling out vines yesterday.

Much more of this balancing and I may start thinking of Philippe Petit balancing on the rope between the Two Towers, long ago.