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sidereabrickhousewencharchersangel
wychwoodpegkerrlydamorehouse exclaimed when I showed them off to her). I liked them because of the leaf motif on the sides of the dice.
james_davis_nicoll
althea_valarasabotabbydancefloorlandminefred_mouseGiordano Bruno was also burned at the steak by The Inquisition
.. oh. umm. I have no words for the image this presented.
vriddyThe meant-to-be-just-a-pacing-check-except-not-really cleanup is DONE! VERY anti-climactic because of the unexpected month break right before the end XD The soul thief revision plan is good to go I think, and maybe I knew this time I was happy with it because my mind immediately switched to "finish up the witch remaining work, then we dig into the actual revisions." I even have a tracking spreadsheet ready!! AND I made a chart this time! I learnt about secondary Y axis and how to attach a data series to it so it scales properly! Lol. There may be PICTURES in my next recap XD I'm kind of planning 3-4 months for those revisions, but it's the first time I go so deep during the structural phase so I have no idea how it will go. The witch only took ~14h, but the changes were a lot simpler (to my detriment, since I ended up having to make large structural changes 3 rounds of revisions later based on beta-reader feedback. Ouch!) Very eager to find out how it will go this time!! And feed data to that chart >:D
I was so excited about my little chart that I decided to make one for the remaining scenes of the cursed witch's pacing check, too. 18 scenes left. It took me nearly 1h30 to fix up that first scene because it was a fight scene that dragged a lot. Slow, slow, slooooow. So I figured, 18 scenes, 2-3 weeks to do it! I can copy my scenes-per-week chart, with a dot for each week! Well. The pacing check was intended to be light. Only the big, you know, PACING problems. Of which there were fewer in the following chapters, so I finished it all up in several feverish sessions over a 3-day weekend 🤣 MY CHART IS A SINGLE DOT. This is so funny. If I'd known it'd go so fast, I probably would have tried to squeeze it alongside the workshop, but maybe I just needed a break.
Anyway, it was a happy surprise to return to the witch and enjoy it! I've learnt a fair bit about structure during the last month, and while -- as I feared -- I do see all the places that I would handle differently now... I don't hate it, nor feel anguish at how much better it could be? I dunno. Although, the dark side of taking yet another long break is that I feel so refreshed that I could smash myself against another round of editing... I could. Forever over and over, possibly. But I do need to learn when to move on, too.
buttonsbeadslaceursamajorMe, pulling the leftover matzo ball soup out of the fridge: "Um, hon, what happened to our balls?!" (The matzo balls had expanded overnight, soaking up about 60% of the soup broth in the container.)
Me: "Look at how ... inflated they got!"
H: "Well, they're still better than Tom Brady's balls."
fred_mouseOctober
I've had some of these hanging around for a startlingly long period of time. I'm in a bit of a grump, which makes this the perfect time to look at a book list. I don't have a lot of energy to deal with interfaces, and I'm less likely to be interested in All! The! Books!
75 Notable Translations 2023 from World Literature Today (limited free pages) - the introductory section was interesting reading, but the list was text, with title, author, translator, publisher, and no info, and I didn't care to click through. I scanned through to see if anything caught my attention namewise, but wasn't really expecting much. I spotted Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera and Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami to click through, and both sound sufficiently interesting I've added them to the list.
Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2023 hypothetically this should be a list I'll find a lot on. But! I was at least somewhat on top of my reading last year, so before looking at the list, I'm taking a guess that some of the interesting ones I'll already have read. I do like the format, where each reviewer talks about their picks, and writes some number of paragraphs with the books discussed collectively. I was right that there are some books I very much enjoyed on that list. There were some that I don't remember ever hearing of (although at least one that looked interesting was already on the wishlist; I didn't check them all). And a surprising number that I started and bounced out of to 'finish after Hugo reading season' because I knew they weren't going to be my number one Hugo vote. Most of which I still haven't gone back to.
November
Locus Magazine 2023 Recommended Reading List - this page managed to annoy me before I'd read anything by popping an ad up over the 'reject tracking' button, so that I ended up clicking on the ad instead of the reject. This provides a long list of who provides the recommendations, and many of those I recognised are people whose suggestions I have previously bounced off, so I wasn't actually all that optimistic. And then I started skimming, and realised that I just don't care enough to click through, and title plus author doesn't give me enough to latch on to. I was interested to note that the most recent Greg Egan is self-published, and I'd be interested in knowing what the story is there -- although not interested enough that I allowed myself to be distracted from task Close! All! Tabs! I spotted an Octavia Cade collection that I didn't know about, so that went on the list. I was very bemused to see a collection by Tom Reamy, but again, did not go down the rabbit hole of finding out what was going on there (assumption: reprint?).
I could have gone looking at the short stories, and decided against it. Similarly the next tab I had open was a long list of short story links that I decided to just close. I do like short stories, I just don't need these lists sitting there being Tasks.
Nebula reading list - I'm assuming that this is a generic link, and what is on the page changes each year. Which means I was probably meant to be looking at 2024's list, but I'm looking at works published in 2025. After a bit of a look at the novels (which was a much shorter list than I was expecting) I decided to skip. At this point in time my focus is kids books, and there aren't any.
Esquire: The 30 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 - this one gives lovely potted summaries of why they are recommended, and it was so nice to engage with. I did end up adding books to the wishlist that i would otherwise have missed. Long, but interesting.
From the New York Public Library Best Books for Teens 2024 - this has an itty bitty drop down that would allow for selection of other years. As I'm in 'close all the tabs' mode I have chosen to not go down the rabbit hole. This shows me covers, with title and author as text; there are an assortment of filters available. Oh! and a potted summary for each. I didn't find anything very inspiring, but I did realise that I can use this as a list for my uni book search, because there is a kids books section.
December
Unusually, a video: The Top 10 Science Fiction Books Published in 2023 - I hadn't heard of most of these; there were two that I have on the wishlist, but I didn't have the motivation to add any of the rest to said wishlist, not least because several were subsequent books in a series. I skipped through much of this because I wasn't that interested in the commentary, at least on the series ones.
Reactor: Readers Pick Their Favorite SFF of 2025 - this is the first one of these I'm reading today, but I'm tired and grumpy, so I suspect I won't be putting things on the wishlist. ... and this is image plus link; I don't have the oomph to go clicking through, so looking at the pretty and then closing the tab.
fred_mousetagged by mabiana on tumblr to do a set of questions that overlap with the ones they answered here, so I'm combining them. I do not have the oomph to work out how to tag, please consider yourself tagged if you have the time, energy, and motivation to complete.
Almost certainly. I can't think of any examples, but I'm now very sceptical of anything I see on the relevant date and for the next couple of days. To the point that it took me a couple of days to start to believe the Kit-Kat heist might be true.
I kind of like things that are in the overlap of sweet or salty. Some of the local east asian grocers sell various kueh lapis (translation: layer cake) and the one I love the most has a salted layer and a sweet layer. I also like very lightly sweetened breads, like brioche and hot cross buns. Other than that sweet/savoury is a very random kind of thing with me.
Only if they mishear it. It is not a name that really shortens sensibly. At various times over the years people have used extended versions, of which there are many, because it is the first part of a lot of compound names.
I'm not sure what 'opportunities to go walking are' - this is a good suburb for walking, with most roads having footpaths, shortcuts through sections of the suburb, and a few tiny bits of remnant bush. There are also lots of places I can go to walk, with a variety of parks, remnant bush, state and national parks in easy (car) reach. I don't walk as often as I ought, for energy and pain reasons.
eh. I did not learn to love it but I will eat it. This is because pizza pineapple comes from cans, and there is something in the older can lining materials that my body reacts very badly to, so for a long time cooked pineapple was something I couldn't eat without nausea even if it wasn't out of a can, because of the learned response.
Reading: planning to do a post on that later today
Last Series Watched: Nearly had to go ask Youngest what we watched, but realised it was the one about training working dogs--Muster Dogs.
Last film: It's so long since I watched a film, I don't know. I tried Everything Everywhere All At Once, and had to stop because of the flashing lights. Might have been one of the Benoit Blanc ones?
Last Song: Whatever the ipod was playing while I was working in the study. I think I've got it on shuffle on a playlist; I have a dock for it that means I just press a button and music happens.
coffee or tea: both. Used to be at work that I would buy a coffee on the way in, drink that slowly, and then for the 10am morning tea catch up make a cup of whatever black tea I currently had in the drawer. These days the coffee is still regular (artisanat makes a pot each morning), but the tea is less predictable. In the office at uni I do have black tea, but I also have tisane options--currently blueberry, some kind of red berry (might be currant?), rooibos, and peppermint, so the later drinks might not be tea.
working on: so many projects. actively trying to make progress on '21st' quilts for the offspring, none of whom are that young any more. three knitting projects active plus one that is waiting to be started. 'some' crochet projects. many books (reading). PhD. garden. a pile of half done craft and repairs in the sewing space.
grayestofghosts
siderea - The other, OTHER mental health problem with generative AI [ai, tech]brickhousewench - Three Random Quoteskuwdora - heated rilvary fic rec- NEW FIC BY TAFKAR!!archersangel - well, now that i've said thatwychwood - take my rights but you can't destroy all my love and my punk rock joypegkerr - 2026 52 Card Project: Week 14: Miniconlassarina - Reading log, or something of the sortjames_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Runecairnalthea_valara - JOYsabotabby - Melania, Part 2dancefloorlandmine - (no subject)rekishi - meditation on fanfic preferencesfred_mouse - Tyop du jourvriddy - Witch so-called pacing check: complete!buttonsbeadslace - I just finished reading The Shabti by Magaera Lorenzursamajor - i rolled, i boiled, for hours i toiledfred_mouse - [lost drafts] reading lists (2025-10...)fred_mouse - Get to know you questionslassarina - Goals post of a sortgrayestofghosts - XTEInk x4 Initial Thoughtsbranchandroot![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
