End of Year Writing Meme 2025

Jan. 5th, 2026 08:58 pm
thisbluespirit: (writing)
[personal profile] thisbluespirit
I continue recovering very slowly but at least pretty steadily - and my things are gradually getting out of boxes too. In the meantime, I thought I could probably manage to do the end of year meme, so here it is:

The usual writing meme for the year. (Last year's post is here.)

Cut for length )

wait I have more things to say

Jan. 4th, 2026 09:53 pm
usuallyhats: Uhura happily snuggling a tribble (uhura)
[personal profile] usuallyhats
First of all, from the department of corrections and clarifications: I can't believe I forgot MURDERBOT in my last post, absolutely one of the joys of last year. (I didn't realise until it was happening what a delight it would be to have a show with an aroace autistic lead or how much it would mean. People like me don't get to be the main character!)

It has also occurred to me that most of the Pluribus I have watched was technically THIS year, so it doesn't entirely belong in a 2025 round up, but listen, time is weird, whomst amongst us is not fallible etc etc

I did make a bingo card for this year! I haven't decided yet if I want to share it here, but maybe. It's mostly household things, plus a few creative endeavours - I'm wary of putting too many of those on there in case it turns them into chores, but I'm hoping the bingo card format takes some of the pressure off.

Also, turns out I do want to talk about my year in books a bit. I read 149 books last year, the upper end of average for me, but although I read some absolute BANGERS, I feel like overall I read more books I felt three stars and below about than four stars and above - not necessarily a reflection on their quality, but on how much I personally enjoyed them. I don't do reading goals, because I find the freedom to read whatever whenever more motivating, but I think maybe this year I should DNF more.

I'm also pondering whether I want to do more awards-shortlist reading this year. I nominate and vote in the Hugos, but there's usually at least one or two things on the shortlist I don't end up reading (for 2025 it was Someone You Can Build a Nest In, because a romance where people get eaten is basically my banishing circle, and Alien Clay, because from the reviews I read I couldn't tell whether I'd like it enough to make up for the body horror), and I don't plan to force myself to read stuff I don't, at least on some level, want to. Other awards on my radar:

- The Le Guin! I'd read about half the shortlist when it came out last year, so decided to read the rest; I almost managed it and had a great time - I loved a lot of things on it and didn't regret reading any of them. (The only one I didn't read was because the ebook was FIFTEEN POUNDS and I simply could not. All in favour of authors getting paid, but FIFTEEN POUNDS for an EBOOK, come ON.)

- The Clarke! I never quite line up with this shortlist like I want to, but I'm always interested in what's on it.

- The Ignytes! I read one thing off the novel shortlist last year and really loved it, would have read a second if it wasn't for the FIFTEEN POUNDS issue mentioned above. I like that this one also has a novella shortlist (I've read three of last year's). And more categories, but I'm less into short fiction, YA and MG, so I'll keep an eye on them, but I'm not committing to reading them.

I haven't run the numbers, but based on vibes I think I am reading more older stuff than I have been (ie more than two years old). This is a good thing for me personally, I think, because when I was struggling to find things I was excited to read a few years ago, part of the way I got myself enthused was by keeping up more with the buzz around what was New! and Exciting!, and while I'm still enjoying that, it's nice to feel like I need it less.

And finally, my top ten books read last year, five published last year, five from earlier (not on purpose, it just worked out that way):

Metal From Heaven - august clarke
Menewood - Nicola Griffith
The City in Glass- Nghi Vo
The West Passage - Jared Pechaček
Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera
The Breath of the Sun - Isaac Fellman
The River Has Roots - Amal El-Mohtar
City of All Seasons - Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley
Some Body Like Me - Lucy Lapinska
The Everlasting - Alix E Harrow

(Honorable mention to Iona Datt Sharma's Wish You Were Here, which came out in 2025 but which I read in 2024, just.)

i wake up dreaming

Jan. 3rd, 2026 12:27 pm
usuallyhats: close up of Jo Grant from Doctor Who; text reads "I don't know what I've been worrying about." (jo is cheerful (and sarcastic))
[personal profile] usuallyhats
Slightly belated happy new year one and all! I have decided to try and get back into posting and commenting on Dreamwidth this year, let's see if that bears any fruit beyond this post.

I am not making any big new year's resolutions this year, because there's some work stuff going on that is likely to eat a lot of my energy and I don't want to set myself up for failure on top of that, but I am considering a bingo card of things I'd like to do this year. I think I probably need 24 things to make a decent card, and I'm up to seventeen eighteen (thought of another one as I was posting this), so I'm getting there!

(Work stuff: my university merged with another university about eighteen months ago, the library is currently being restructured and is about to lose some helpdesk staff, so my helpdesk duties are increasing, plus we're losing working from home AND we haven't actually done any of the massive amounts of work it'll actually take to merge our systems yet, so in conclusion: bad.)

Other life stuff: I am in the queue for ADHD and autism assessments! ADHD I hadn't really considered as a possibility until fairly recently, but the more I look into it, the more it fits, and my GP suggested it might be at least part of the reason I've spent my adult life just getting more and more exhausted. And I've been pretty sure I'm autistic for a long time without feeling a need to get formally diagnosed, but I'm hoping if I do I can parlay it into getting to keep some working from home as a reasonable adjustment.

Media round up! Here's some non-book media I've been into this year (books I feel like I've covered):

- I'm really out of the habit of watching films, but I loved both Wicked: For Good and Wake Up Dead Man recently. The nuance in Wake Up Dead Man's portrayal of belief and non-belief, and the things it was willing to make space for in service of that, was particularly excellent.

- [personal profile] tellitslant is visiting and has been showing [personal profile] alwaystheocean and me Pluribus, what an excellent show (we're six episodes in). In an age of AI I love that it's so clear that Carol's messy, genuine, individual rage and grief is wildly preferable to the plurbs' anodyne samey niceness, but I'm also appreciating how the show is resisting easy messages? Very good all round, so glad that season two is already being written.

- I have also fallen head first into Shetland, particularly the Ruth and Tosh seasons, but I also really enjoyed the Jimmy seasons too. I love its commitment to every character being a rounded and coherent individual, it's so satisfying.

- After really not loving Campaign Three of Critical Role, I'm very pleased to be incredibly into Campaign Four - it has the feel of a big chunky complicated fantasy novel and I am having an excellent time.

- I've also got into Dimension 20 this year and am having an excellent time meandering through their back catalogue.

- I was sure there was other TV I'd been into this year, but having looked through my TV app, apparently it has all just been the above plus Taskmaster and Game Changer? I'm also still very very slowly rewatching Classic Who in order and having a lovely time. It's in colour now!
usuallyhats: Uhura happily snuggling a tribble (uhura)
[personal profile] usuallyhats
When They Burned the Butterfly - Wen-yi Lee
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles - Malka Ann Older
Cinder House - Freya Marske
The Fortunate Fall - Cameron Reed
Murder by Memory - Olivia Waite
The Isle in the Silver Sea - Tasha Suri
Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox - Victoria Finlay
The Everlasting - Alix E Harrow
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart - Izzy Wasserstein
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep - HG Parry
A Chorus Rises - Bethany C Morrow

Floating Hotel - Grace Curtis
This Brutal Moon - Bethany Jacobs
Audition for the Fox - Martin Cahill
Or What You Will - Jo Walton
Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age - Eleanor Barraclough
The Confession of Brother Haluin - Ellis Peters
All Is Bright - Llinos Cathryn Thomas
Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame - Neon Yang
Sunward - William Alexander
A Case of Life and Limb - Sally Smith

When They Burned the Butterfly (three stars), Cinder House (four stars), The Fortunate Fall (four stars), The Isle in the Silver Sea (three stars), The Everlasting (five stars), Sunward (four stars)When They Burned the Butterfly
This was an incredibly frustrating read, because the first few chapters were stunning, and the last few chapters were also really good, but the middle just wasn't a patch on either. It's like the plot kicked in and suddenly all that rich atmosphere and character work just fell away and instead everything just felt so flat and generic, with an annoying tendency to tell us about an emotional revelation a character had had without showing them having it or the journey that got them there. I do wonder if something went awry in the editing process, because it's also a very messy book - plot threads and characters are dropped, it doesn't always make sense on a sentence level, the main character's significant tattoo moves from her breastbone to her collarbone etc.

It also tries to have its cake and eat it with regards to having a lesbian lead in 1970s Singapore - the main character and her girlfriend at one point are given a magazine with quotes from members of Singapore's burgeoning lesbian community, and we're told it's meaningful at least to the girlfriend, but everyone in the book has been so incredibly neutral about the fact of their relationship (including the main character herself, who has absolutely no feelings negative, positive or mixed about the realisation that she's a lesbian) that it just doesn't land.

I will be keeping an eye out for what this author does next, because this book had so much potential and she's still very early in her career, but this book just wasn't it.

Cinder House
Really great Cinderella-meets-the-Gothic-novel novella. I wish it had been just a hair longer, to flesh out two important secondary characters and their relationship more, and to tie off a dangling plot thread, but otherwise, loved it.

The Fortunate Fall
Absolutely fantastic. This is a mid-nineties cyberpunk novel, recently reissued, and while it has unavoidably dated in parts, it still feels so fresh and alive. Its two main strengths for me were its sense of humour (I feel like a lot of its contemporaries were a bit po-faced, this isn't) and the ending: it eschews a more superficial happy ending in order to stick to and fully crystallise its central theme, that people matter more than ideas, in a way that ultimately felt more true and more hopeful than the alternative.

The author has a second novel coming out next year, I'm very excited for it.

The Isle in the Silver Sea
Sadly this was a bit of a mess. It was very readable, and it has some great ideas, but overall I was left with the sense that it hadn't quite figured out what it wanted to be, or how to get there - there's a moment towards the end where it makes an explicit thesis statement, and I could see a lot of things in the rest of the book that could back that statement up, but there was also a lot in there that wasn't doing anything at all: it wasn't so much a crystalisation of what had gone before, but more a sort of "yeah, ok, I suppose so" moment.

I originally wrote here that I thought the romance hurt it, but actually I think the romance suffered from the same problem as the rest of the book: lots of potential, but the narrative continually seemed to be pulled away from the interesting and the specific towards something more generic. With the romance, it felt like it took a situation with a lot of potential for conflict and interest (they've known they were fated to fall in love since before they met, how do they feel about the fact that they seem to be falling in love for real? What does "for real" even mean in this context?) and then just... didn't really dig into that at all. The whole book just felt like it kept gesturing at some really interesting stuff, but then it would swerve away to some easily overcome plot obstacle instead of getting into anything that could be in any way meaty or difficult.

It also had a bit of a case of not caring about anyone who wasn't a named character - part of the tale that Simran and Vina are fated to play out involves Vina laying waste to the countryside, burning villages and presumably killing a lot of people, but neither she nor the book seem to have any feelings about that at all. And when we're told that destroying a tale destroys part of the Isle, no one seems to be in any way concerned about the people who were living there, and none of this factors into how Simran and Vina feel about either giving into or resisting their story.

The setting was potentially really interesting - a sort of perpetual Elizabethan present under the Queen Undying, but with deliberate anachronisms - but again, the lack of development meant it was just "vaguely Tudor but showers and same-sex marriage exist" (the book wasn't clear on whether it was a queernorm world or whether being queer meant you were marginalised). It also had a lot of different magical elements thrown in, between the tales themselves, witches, cunning people, fae, misc other powers etc, but without any sense of whether and how it all interacted.

It was just all so frustrating. There was a really good book under there, but it needed a lot more tightening up, pruning and refocusing.

(Some time after writing this it occurred to me that the Arthuriana aspects might have made me more judgy than I would otherwise have been? Like, I am judgy and mean about books sometimes, this is a known fact and because of the love I bear them, but I have particularly high standards for Arthuriana.)

The Everlasting
Time loops! Lady knights! The danger and power of a simplified version of history being told as truth! What does freedom really mean! This was an absolute banger and I loved every minute of it.

Sunward
I've bounced off a lot of the cosy books I've tried (eg Murder by Memory in November), but this one really worked for me and I can't quite work out what's different. I think it managed a good balance of the stakes being personal (and comparatively small scale compared to what else was going on in the world) whilst also really mattering, both to the main character and in terms of the possible implications of the world at large. The book's about a space courier who also fosters baby artificial intelligences who haven't quite settled yet, and it does a great job of making the baby bots idiosyncratic without being self consciously cutesy, which really worked for me. (Her current foster named herself Agatha Panza von Sparkles, so I did have concerns going in.) Anyway, I liked this a lot, would be interested in more in this universe or from this author.

Yuletide Reveals 2025

Jan. 2nd, 2026 03:03 pm
thisbluespirit: (winslow boy)
[personal profile] thisbluespirit
[community profile] yuletide is now over for another year! I did, in fact, have the misfortune to turn up at the exact wrong moment to catch the reveals bug on the 24th, so I saw the identity of my gift-writer, although as they were someone that I only had the vaguest idea of having seen the name around AO3 somewhere before, it didn't really spoil anything, thankfully.

I had hoped to do some little treats, as I got on and got my fic done as soon as I could, but I moved instead. However, as I cut out one section from my assignment and posted it separately in Madness, I did technically still post a treat as well!

I wrote The Winslow Boy for [personal profile] edwardianspinsteraunt, so I was not super anonymous really, for anyone who actually looked that far, but I had a lovely time spending a month or so rewatching the film and coming up with different scenarios from their prompts and my head for a 5 + 1 Times fic. By the end, I decided, though, that the "+1" just increasingly didn't sit right with the rest, so I split it off, hence the Madness treat.

Passing Acquaintances (8985 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Winslow Boy (1999)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Morton/Catherine Winslow
Characters: Robert Morton (Winslow Boy), Catherine Winslow, Arthur Winslow, Grace Winslow, Desmond Curry
Additional Tags: 5 Times, Post-Canon, 1910s, World War I, Trains, London, Smoking, Politics, Cars, Suffragettes, Yuletide, Edwardian Period
Summary: Five ways Catherine and Sir Robert might have met again, after the trial.

Some writerly blathering )

I wanted to include the Winslows lose the case AU if I could, as I knew [personal profile] edwardianspinsteraunt was keen on that idea - and as I thought would it might rather put paid to any Catherine/Robert, at least for quite some time, it fitted well into the format as the "one time they didn't" (meet again) (although never at any point was that categorical). It did work out well and was maybe the most Rattigan section in the end, I thought, so I had to post it even after I cut it. (Although had I realised sooner I was going to set it loose alone, I'd have found a way to make the start a little less in media res, although tbf, it's an unlikely one to appeal to anyone who doesn't know canon).

Anyway, here it is:

and watch the things you gave your life to broken (2799 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Winslow Boy (1999)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Morton/Catherine Winslow
Characters: Catherine Winslow, Desmond Curry, Arthur Winslow, Violet (Winslow Boy), Dickie Winslow, Robert Morton (Winslow Boy)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, 1910s, Edwardian Period, The Winslows lose the case, Yuletide Treat
Summary: The Winslows lose the case.

With the usual thanks to [personal profile] persiflage for the beta!! <3<3<3
calliopes_pen: (editfandom Thomas swings pickaxe)
[personal profile] calliopes_pen
The fic commentary post will be up shortly, but for now, here's the reveal!

From Graves Forgotten Stretch Their Dusty Hands (42124 words) by calliopes_pen
Chapters: 9/9
Fandom: Nosferatu (2024)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Thomas Hutter/Orlok, Friedrich Harding/Thomas Hutter, Ellen Hutter/Thomas Hutter
Characters: Thomas Hutter, Friedrich Harding, Albin Eberhart von Franz, Wilhelm Sievers, Orlok (Nosferatu), Greta the Cat (Nosferatu)
Additional Tags: Crueltide, Nightmares, Mind Control, Brainwashing, Demonic Possession, Post-Possession, Vague mention of canon necrophilia, Offscreen Cannibalism, Necromancy, Comes Back Wrong, Evil Detecting Animals, Found Family, No Animals Are Harmed, Fog, Tons of research, Fainting, Unholy mental connection, Bittersweet Ending, Decapitation, Thomas has been used horribly by the great beyond, Von Franz is in research mode, Von Franz adores his cats, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon

Summary: Three months after his presumed final destruction, Orlok’s essence comes forth to seize control of Thomas, and bid him to perform an act of necromancy as revenge. What comes back is Friedrich Harding...and yet not. It is a man transformed into a Nachzehrer, a being hungry for the life and soul and flesh of the only one left of those it once loved: Thomas.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther posting in [community profile] mystery_mansion
In his 1941 book Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, Howard Haycraft included a list offering "a suggestive selection of the 'high spots'" of the first century of modern detective fiction, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to The Patience of Maigret, by way of Holmes, Wimsey, and many others.

For the most part, he limited himself to one book per author, except in a few cases where he felt that the author's range or impact justified the making of an exception. Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr, among others, were awarded a second spot on the list. Arthur Conan Doyle is the sole author to be awarded a third (in fact he gets nine, because Haycraft refused to play favourites and included the entire Canon).

I couldn't find a convenient online iteration of the List, so I made my own: The Haycraft List of Detective Story Cornerstones is now available as a reading list on The StoryGraph.

Yuletide

Dec. 28th, 2025 02:33 pm
thisbluespirit: (joy)
[personal profile] thisbluespirit
I've been having a lovely [community profile] yuletide, in the right sort of place to do reading through it, if not much else! So much so, there should be a recs post to follow soon. But first of all, of course, my lovely gift!

It was for Enigma, which I was excited enough about just for that, but it is also excellent - a really well-done layered look at Tom & Hester running into Wigram a few years post-canon. Plus, my recip turned up to leave a comment on my assignment, so Yuletide 2025 is a win! \o/ (Even more so, as that other Enigma ficlet I mentioned? The author replied to my comment to say that they'd watched the film because of my promo post, so double yay and bonus outside-of-Yule ficlets!)

After the End (1472 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Enigma (2001)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Tom Jericho, Hester Wallace, Wigram (Enigma 2001)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary: Summer 1949. An encounter in a Parisian park.