The eyes, and what the eyes see
Jan. 18th, 2026 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12A busy work week like the one I described previously requires a quiet weekend, so that is exactly what happened. Gym, swimming, market shopping, and a loop around the river, market, and high street today with Matthias (we bought hot drinks from the coffee rig and browsed in the bookshop without buying anything), and otherwise no other excursions out of the house. I tried making these brown butter miso chocolate chip cookies as recommended by rekishi, and they were very delicious indeed! I've just taken more pine and red berry branches from the disassembled Christmas wreath, and they'll go on the fire in the wood-burning stove tonight.
Two nice things happened on Dreamwidth yesterday:![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomtrees reveals went live, and threesentenceficathon is open for prompts and fills for 2026. I wrote one Six of Crows Kaz/Inej ficlet and made a couple of recipe recommendations for the former (and got given so many soup recipes in response to my own request — I can't wait to try them out), and in general had an enjoyable time. I haven't had a chance to plunge into the latter so far, but I always enjoy it when I do. The first post of prompts is here — I think it's a great, low-pressure way to rekindle the creative spark, and the atmosphere is always so friendly.
I've read three books, and one serialised short story this week. All but one of these (the third in a really silly romantasy series that I'm grimly carrying on with for completionist reasons; it involves human women falling in love with the personified gods of the North, South, East and West winds, and is really not good) were excellent.
The other two books were The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix), and The Stolen Heart (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk). Booksellers is Nix's first foray into novel-length fiction for adults, and is set in alternative version of 1980s Britain in which the titular booksellers have a secret life acting as a sort of supernatural security service. Back when I was a book reviewer, I interviewed Nix in his Sydney office, which was packed to the rafters with all the books he used as inspiration — encyclopedias and folklore dictionaries, fiction of all genres, popular history, anthologies of folktales and mythology, etc — and I could see the varied, myriad works of this personal reference library put to good use in this novel, which is heaving with references and allusions from all sources. There's Arthuriana, British children's fantasy (such as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones), Terry Pratchett, Romantic poetry, local folklore, weird bits of London history, Cold War-era spy novels, and so on. It's the sort of book that will appeal to people who enjoy playing spot-the-reference to all the ingredients of this genre salad, and Nix clearly had the time of his life writing it.
The Stolen Heart is the second in Kurkov's series of historical mystery novels in which his hapless protagonist Samson (who fell by accident into a job working for the Soviet police force in 1919 Kyiv) tries to solve another bizarre mystery while struggling to survive the chaos around him. As with the previous book in the series, The Stolen Heart is written with a careful balance of humour and empathy, conveying both the terror and the absurdity of living in a place and time of violent, destabilising transition. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm confident that I'll enjoy its conclusion.
Finally, I read 'The Road Less Taken', a serialised short story by Amal El-Mohtar. The link goes to the final chapter of the story, with links to the previous six chapters gathered at the top of the page, so if you are interested in reading it, ensure you start at the beginning. The story interweaves a relationship breakup with the recent jewellery theft from the Louvre and the folktale of Thomas the Rhymer in a manner so clever that you will feel by the end that these three things are, of course, connected in reality! It's an Amal El-Mohtar story, so all her trademarks — the power of music and of female friendships, and food and cooking as a way to show love and care — are of course front and centre.
The most recentsnowflake_challenge prompt is all about tropes: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)
I'm not sure I'd call this a 'trope,' a 'theme,' or just a 'feature,' but — since it's so strong in Kurkov's evocation of post-World War I Kyiv — I thought I'd talk about something I particularly enjoy in fiction, which is a strong sense of place. This can sometimes be in the sense of 'setting as character,' but it doesn't need to go that far. I want to feel transported and get a three-dimensional sense of the spaces the characters and stories inhabit — a proper feast for the senses — in my fiction, whether this is our own world, but in the past (historical mysteries are great for this — 1840s New Orleans in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series, Singapore during British colonial rule and Japanese occupation in Ovidia Yu's Crown Colony series, Rome and the region during its transition from republic to imperial rule in Steven Saylor's Roma sub Rosa series, Victorian London in Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart mysteries), our own world in which the supernatural sits above and beside and sometimes bleeds through (Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, Monica Furlong's Juniper and Wise Child, or the science fiction version of this in Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy, which is a pitch perfect evocation both of 1990s Adelaide, and then Tokyo as seen through Australian tourist eyes, and of what it might feel like to be physically within a 1990s computer game or the 1990s Internet), alternative versions of our own world (Pullman again, in His Dark Materials), a sort of heightened, comic book version of our own world (the impoverished parts of 1920s Birmingham in Peaky Blinders, the dark, interstitial, in-between places of contemporary London in Luther, the dying days of the Weimar Republic in Babylon Berlin), or a wholly secondary world (Tolkien, of course, and the world of Le Guin's Earthsea are the exemplars for me, because they feel so real and lived-in, and the characters think about their worlds and histories in a way that does not seem artificial). I love it when works of fiction do this with visual language (one of my favourite examples is Deutschland 83, in which the main character — a citizen of the DDR — finds himself transported to West Germany, stumbles into a supermarket, and is immediately rendered immobile and speechless when faced with the colourful, riotous cacophony of capitalist abundance; it tells viewers everything they need to know about his world without a single word being spoken), but I find it even more impressive in written fiction, when skilled authors are able to make readers experience their settings with all senses solely with the written word.
This kind of deep grounding in place makes for such a rich, fictional experience because — if done well — it gives the sense not only that it shaped the characters, but that their story could not exist in any other place, and if they were transported to another setting, their story would not be the same. I think this is also why I'm so thoroughly uninterested in setting change AUs — people have explained the appeal to me, and I understand it on an intellectual level — unless the setting is somewhat fluid and flimsy to begin with. So, like, change the setting for your fairytale retelling or your reimagining of a Shakespeare play — go wild! — but for anything with a stronger sense of place than that, I'm likely to take a lot of convincing.
In the time it's taken for me to write this post, the light has left the sky, although it's still silvery blue at 4.30pm, as opposed to total darkness. The Earth moves on its slow tilt back towards the Sun.
rekishi, and they were very delicious indeed! I've just taken more pine and red berry branches from the disassembled Christmas wreath, and they'll go on the fire in the wood-burning stove tonight. Two nice things happened on Dreamwidth yesterday:
fandomtrees reveals went live, and threesentenceficathon is open for prompts and fills for 2026. I wrote one Six of Crows Kaz/Inej ficlet and made a couple of recipe recommendations for the former (and got given so many soup recipes in response to my own request — I can't wait to try them out), and in general had an enjoyable time. I haven't had a chance to plunge into the latter so far, but I always enjoy it when I do. The first post of prompts is here — I think it's a great, low-pressure way to rekindle the creative spark, and the atmosphere is always so friendly. I've read three books, and one serialised short story this week. All but one of these (the third in a really silly romantasy series that I'm grimly carrying on with for completionist reasons; it involves human women falling in love with the personified gods of the North, South, East and West winds, and is really not good) were excellent.
The other two books were The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix), and The Stolen Heart (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk). Booksellers is Nix's first foray into novel-length fiction for adults, and is set in alternative version of 1980s Britain in which the titular booksellers have a secret life acting as a sort of supernatural security service. Back when I was a book reviewer, I interviewed Nix in his Sydney office, which was packed to the rafters with all the books he used as inspiration — encyclopedias and folklore dictionaries, fiction of all genres, popular history, anthologies of folktales and mythology, etc — and I could see the varied, myriad works of this personal reference library put to good use in this novel, which is heaving with references and allusions from all sources. There's Arthuriana, British children's fantasy (such as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones), Terry Pratchett, Romantic poetry, local folklore, weird bits of London history, Cold War-era spy novels, and so on. It's the sort of book that will appeal to people who enjoy playing spot-the-reference to all the ingredients of this genre salad, and Nix clearly had the time of his life writing it.
The Stolen Heart is the second in Kurkov's series of historical mystery novels in which his hapless protagonist Samson (who fell by accident into a job working for the Soviet police force in 1919 Kyiv) tries to solve another bizarre mystery while struggling to survive the chaos around him. As with the previous book in the series, The Stolen Heart is written with a careful balance of humour and empathy, conveying both the terror and the absurdity of living in a place and time of violent, destabilising transition. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm confident that I'll enjoy its conclusion.
Finally, I read 'The Road Less Taken', a serialised short story by Amal El-Mohtar. The link goes to the final chapter of the story, with links to the previous six chapters gathered at the top of the page, so if you are interested in reading it, ensure you start at the beginning. The story interweaves a relationship breakup with the recent jewellery theft from the Louvre and the folktale of Thomas the Rhymer in a manner so clever that you will feel by the end that these three things are, of course, connected in reality! It's an Amal El-Mohtar story, so all her trademarks — the power of music and of female friendships, and food and cooking as a way to show love and care — are of course front and centre.
The most recent
snowflake_challenge prompt is all about tropes: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)I'm not sure I'd call this a 'trope,' a 'theme,' or just a 'feature,' but — since it's so strong in Kurkov's evocation of post-World War I Kyiv — I thought I'd talk about something I particularly enjoy in fiction, which is a strong sense of place. This can sometimes be in the sense of 'setting as character,' but it doesn't need to go that far. I want to feel transported and get a three-dimensional sense of the spaces the characters and stories inhabit — a proper feast for the senses — in my fiction, whether this is our own world, but in the past (historical mysteries are great for this — 1840s New Orleans in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series, Singapore during British colonial rule and Japanese occupation in Ovidia Yu's Crown Colony series, Rome and the region during its transition from republic to imperial rule in Steven Saylor's Roma sub Rosa series, Victorian London in Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart mysteries), our own world in which the supernatural sits above and beside and sometimes bleeds through (Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, Monica Furlong's Juniper and Wise Child, or the science fiction version of this in Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy, which is a pitch perfect evocation both of 1990s Adelaide, and then Tokyo as seen through Australian tourist eyes, and of what it might feel like to be physically within a 1990s computer game or the 1990s Internet), alternative versions of our own world (Pullman again, in His Dark Materials), a sort of heightened, comic book version of our own world (the impoverished parts of 1920s Birmingham in Peaky Blinders, the dark, interstitial, in-between places of contemporary London in Luther, the dying days of the Weimar Republic in Babylon Berlin), or a wholly secondary world (Tolkien, of course, and the world of Le Guin's Earthsea are the exemplars for me, because they feel so real and lived-in, and the characters think about their worlds and histories in a way that does not seem artificial). I love it when works of fiction do this with visual language (one of my favourite examples is Deutschland 83, in which the main character — a citizen of the DDR — finds himself transported to West Germany, stumbles into a supermarket, and is immediately rendered immobile and speechless when faced with the colourful, riotous cacophony of capitalist abundance; it tells viewers everything they need to know about his world without a single word being spoken), but I find it even more impressive in written fiction, when skilled authors are able to make readers experience their settings with all senses solely with the written word.
This kind of deep grounding in place makes for such a rich, fictional experience because — if done well — it gives the sense not only that it shaped the characters, but that their story could not exist in any other place, and if they were transported to another setting, their story would not be the same. I think this is also why I'm so thoroughly uninterested in setting change AUs — people have explained the appeal to me, and I understand it on an intellectual level — unless the setting is somewhat fluid and flimsy to begin with. So, like, change the setting for your fairytale retelling or your reimagining of a Shakespeare play — go wild! — but for anything with a stronger sense of place than that, I'm likely to take a lot of convincing.
In the time it's taken for me to write this post, the light has left the sky, although it's still silvery blue at 4.30pm, as opposed to total darkness. The Earth moves on its slow tilt back towards the Sun.
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Date: 2026-01-18 08:30 pm (UTC)The Nix book does sound fun - I have faith the references aren't just peppered in without having any deeper meaning and connection to the story, and I love to find references that deepen the audience's understanding of the story beyond what's on the page.
A strong sense of place is a really beautiful thing to get across in writing.
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Date: 2026-01-18 10:04 pm (UTC)