Drink that up, it's good for you

I'm slowly recovering from my cold, helped by all my usual tricks: Burmese noodle soup with tamarind and lime, hot lemon, honey and ginger drink, sipped in front of the wood-burning stove, rest with books under the weighted blanket. I felt horrendous when I woke up this morning, but that seems to have gone away and my head feels clear.

I even managed to write nearly 1000 words of a Yuletide treat this morning! At the moment I have ideas for another two treats, one of which is almost certainly unlikely to hit the lower word count threshold for the main collection (and so will go in Madness), the other of which I will write only if I have time. So it's certainly an improvement on last year, where I managed only my assignment, but I'm doubtful I'll hit the heights of inspiration I reached for several years running where I wrote four or five fics per exchange. In any case, I'm pleased with this treat, and the words flowed faster than I expected.

I've finished two books this weekend, both of which were, in their way, about family, and its complicated, thorny web of expectation and obligation.

The first was The Red Scholar's Wake (Aliette de Bodard), which I've mentioned several times already. It's the latest in her Vietnamese-inspired spacefaring Xuya universe, and this novel involves a marriage of convenience between a sentient spaceship pirate leader, and a captive engineer who has certain technical skills of great use to the pirates. Various political tensions among the pirates, and across the galaxy more generally, must be navigated, and as with most of Aliette's fiction, there's a strong emphasis on the restoration of justice, motherhood, trauma recovery, and finding love and connection in the ruins of past relationships. There's also a lot of tea-making nerdery, and loving descriptions of Vietnamese food!

The second book was Not Good For Maidens (Tori Bovalino), a YA retelling of Christina Rosetti's 'Goblin Market' that ended up being perfect for the gloomy, stormy weather. It reminded me a bit of Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy — books set in a slantwise version of England where magic presses up against the everyday world, in which certain families fight an endless supernatural battle, and in which a tangled web of lies and family secrets finally become revealed, causing hurt and chaos. Unlike Rees Brennan's trilogy, however, there's no humour and wisecracking — Bovalino's characters don't wield words as a shield and a weapon. It was an interesting choice to make one of the two point-of-view characters asexual, given the book's inspiration, although I wish Bovalino had made more of that — I feel that this should either have meant that the goblin market held no allure for this character, or that it tempted her more explicitly with desires that weren't sexual.

I'll close things off with a few links that have crossed my path on Dreamwidth over the past few days.

vriddy has gathered together a great batch of links relating to social media platforms and our relationships with them.

Via firecat, a New Yorker interview with Rian Johnson. (The New Yorker sets limits on how many articles you can read per month without a subscription, so it may ask for a login or payment if you have read multiple New Yorker articles already this month.) Johnson has long been one of my favourite Hollywood writer-directors — The Last Jedi was by far and away my favourite of the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy films (and it's probably my second-favourite contemporary Star Wars media after Andor), his pastiche films (high school film noir Brick, and cosy mystery Knives Out) are great fun, I'm looking forward to Glass Onion, and even his films that don't really work for me are interesting failures (Looper).

I don't know how many people for whom this is of interest, but if you sign up for Holly Black's newsletter, you get bonus Folk of the Air material — a PDF of letters from Cardan to Jude during the time she was exiled from Faerie.

I decided at last to sign up for fandomtrees, and I'll be sure to share my sign-up once the mod has approved it. I'm now going to spend the next couple of hours poking around other people's sign-ups and seeing if there is anything I can fill. All in all, I've had a surprisingly productive weekend!