A quiet radiance

[dolorosa_12]

Christmas leftovers have been consumed, two yoga sessions have been completed, and half a book has been read, curled up in my wing chair with a cup of tea. In other words, I spent Boxing Day exactly as I wanted to spend it (barring, given I am not back in Sydney with my family, the customary swim at either North Bondi or my favourite outdoor harbour swimming pool).

I've also spent a good deal of time making a start on the Yuletide collection. After so many years, I have this down to a methodical, fine art: I open the list of fandoms, narrow by medium (I normally start with books/literature and branch out into the other media at a later point), and work my way through the alphabet in reverse order. I don't open anything unless I feel confident from the summary that I'd be happy to comment and leave kudos. I comment on everything I read, bookmark the things I'm going to rec after reveals, and carry on until I want to do something different. (The reason why I work in reverse alphabetical order is that I assume most people work their way down the alphabet, and I want to make sure people who wrote in fandoms at the lower end of the alphabet don't feel despondent at a relative lack of comments.) In general, I try to treat every work that I read in the collection the way I'd like my own fic to be treated. This year — given I'm neither with family nor in-laws, nor trying to pack up and move house — I have fewer demands on my time, and so I'm working through the collection at a more leisurely pace.

There have been some real gems so far, and I find myself, as always, wishing that this focus on smaller fandoms was maintained all year round!

As well as reading Yuletide fic and my book (on which more in a later post), I devoured three new-to-me short stories: Rebecca Fraimow's Yudah Cohen series, which I discovered via a Yuletide recs post by rmc28. The series is delightful (and the fic is great too), and I'm so happy to have been introduced to it — it was exactly the sort of thing I felt like reading on a rainy, grey day.

I hope you've all been having a relaxing Sunday.

Comments

[lirazel]

It sounds like a nice relaxing day! I love hearing about your Yuletide ~approach~!

And I'm super pleased you enjoyed Becca's stories. I'm so fond of them, and I'm always hoping she'll write more. We'll see!

[corvidology]

Lovely to hear you're having exactly the holi-day you wanted. :D

[luzula]

I always start in the middle of the alphabet and work down, then loop around to the beginning. : )

[skygiants]

Oh, I'm so glad to hear you liked the stories!

[scintilla10]

This sounds like a lovely holiday. <3 Looking forward to diving into the Yuletide collection myself!

[merit]

I'm a little behind on going through the collection but it is open all year, I tell myself ^^

[trepkos]

I'm very impressed by your reading methods!

[thawrecka]

That is a very sensible Yuletide approach.

I like short fiction, so my approach is to sort the entire collection by word count and start with the last page, that has the shortest fic. I usually lose speed and give up before the end, but I at least get to the 10k words fic before that happens.

[chestnut_pod]

So methodical! It sounds like you've had a lovely Boxing Day.