Beyond Selidor

I often talk about needing more hours in the day, and on the one day of the year where that is possible, I certainly made the most of it. I've been able to get a lot done, in addition to the usual bits of grocery shopping, cleaning and so on that I always do on the weekend.

Saturday poured with rain, and it was freezing to the point of almost being sleet, so I stuck close to home, apart from a quick trip into town to the market. Matthias spent most of the day writing an assignment for the cataloguing module of his librarianship degree, so I elected to spend Saturday writing as well. It was lovely and companionable to sit there, typing away at our respective assignments. In my case, this was Yuletide. I always aim to write multiple treats, and this year the sheer volume of fandoms I love in the tagset makes me even more enthusiastic about this. It will be hard to narrow it down!

So far I've written one (completed, but not uploaded) treat, about a third of my main assignment (along with an outline for its remainder), and done a lot of very weird research for another treat. I normally finish assignments before working on any treats, so I will not be touching the second treat beyond this preliminary research until the assignment is finished.

I also did one of my periodic sweeps of Ao3, where I check if any new fic in my main fandoms (all of which are tiny, inactive book fandoms, most of whose fic, if it exists at all, has been written by me). Normally this is an entirely futile exercise, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that someone had written Warden/Paige fic for the Bone Season series. I've been requesting fic for this pairing in exchanges for several years without success, so it was a wonderful treat to find this there unexpectedly. I don't think there are any Bone Season fans here among my Dreamwidth circle (the only people I know who like it are people on Tumblr, and a handful of my real-life friends), but I link to it here in any case.

J'attendrai (2459 words) by LaReinadeEspadas
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Paige Mahoney/Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Characters: Paige Mahoney, Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Summary:

I looked for any other signs that he knew the significance of the day, but unsurprisingly found none in my Rephaite cohabiter. It’s not like immortal beings had any reason to celebrate birthdays.

Reading the fic reminded me how much I love the series, so I've spent most of Sunday morning curled up on the couch in the sunshine, rereading The Song Rising. I'm not sure the story of a brave, doomed revolution brought down by the inability of disparate groups of oppressed, dispossessed people to make common cause was a wise choice, given the state of the world, but it seemed to be what my brain wanted.

Now Matthias and I have just come back from running, and I'm sitting here with a cup of tea, catching up with Dreamwidth and trying to decide between doing a bit of yoga (probably not), or getting started on the chicken and dumplings (this Smitten Kitchen recipe) I'm planning to make for dinner.

*

I can't talk about what's going on in the world. In the country of my birth, the country in which I grew up, the country which is now my home, anywhere, everywhere. I just can't. Words recoil from it. I return, as always, to Calexico, who, as always, have the words to give voice to this horror. Everywhere you look you only see red, indeed.

There was a great surprise waiting for me this morning when I opened my work email: confirmation that my application to become a Chartered member of CILIP (the professional body for library and information professionals in the UK) had been successful. The chartership process involves documenting evidence of professional development (this can be formal training, conference or workshop attendance, or self-directed learning, and it needs to include work that demonstrates your knowledge of your own institution, as well as other libraries in different sectors), and writing a reflective statement evaluating your transformation over the course of the chartership process.

Chartership is not compulsory, and indeed opinion in my field is mixed as to its benefit, but it was something I wanted to do for myself. I don't have a library/information science degree, and have progressed as far as I have through the Cambridge library system through a combination of being known to the powers-that-be (simply because I worked in low-grade jobs in a large number of libraries), and having had teaching and research experience within the university due to having done two postgrad degrees at Cambridge. I've never been keen to get a librarianship MA, but instead have been taking various other steps to gain professional recognition and qualifications, of which CILIP Chartership is one.

In any case, it was nice to have some good news for a change!

[This post gets a very appropriate Noviana Una icon, because she spent part of her time running a resistance movement out of a never-burned-down Library of Alexandria in an alternate version of our own world, and while I'll never be that cool, we do have being library assistants in common!]

Thank you for writing for me!

I'm pretty easygoing about what type of fic you want to write for me. I read fic of any rating, and would be equally happy with plotty genfic or something very shippy. I read gen, femslash, het and slash, although I have a slight preference towards femslash, het, and gen that focuses on female characters. I mainly read fic to find out what happens to characters after the final page has turned or the credits have rolled, so I would particularly love to have futurefic of some kind. Don't feel you have to limit yourself to the characters I specifically mention — I'm happy with others being included if they fit with the story you want to tell.

Feel free to have a look around my Ao3 profile, as it should give you a good idea of the types of things I like to read.

( General likes )

( General dislikes )

Fandom-specific prompts:

( The Bone Season — Samantha Shannon )

( The Daevabad series - S. A. Chakraborty )

( The Queens of Innis Lear — Tessa Gratton )

( Six of Crows series — Leigh Bardugo )

( Spinning Silver — Naomi Novik )

( Winternight series — Katherine Arden )

Don't feel you have to stick rigidly within the bounds of my prompts. As long as your fic is focused on the characters I requested, I will be thrilled to receive anything you write for me, as these really are some of my most beloved fandoms of the heart, and the existence of any fic for them will make me extremely happy.

By way of a life update, have a few scattered bits and pieces from the past week or so.

It's autumn, at last! Autumn is my favourite season of the year: scarves, gloves, coats and blankets, the cold bite of the air, the smell of the changing, falling leaves, and that indescribable quality of the light. The northern summer just went on and on and on, and I'm so relieved to finally experience some cold weather. It hasn't spread across all of Europe — my mother, sister, and parents-, sister-, brother-in-law and nephew are all in Italy (not together — my sister's at a wedding in Lake Como, my mother is in Verona, after which she and my sister will meet up in Milan, and my in-laws are all on holiday together near Lake Garda), and it's still very summery there, but it is well and truly autumnal in Cambridge, and I am very happy about it.

Apart from a quick foray out to the alumni event for my former academic department (it happens this weekend of September every year, and mainly consists of drinking glasses of wine in the departmental common room, and generally the only people who go are people who still live in Cambridge, such as Matthias and me, ienthuse and her husband, and those who are still affiliated with the department as postdocs), I barely left the house, and have spent most of today curled up in my chair reading Naomi Novik's glorious Spinning Silver, which I think I like even more than Uprooted, although I'm only about a third of the way through. Normally I read a lot faster than this, but I've loved it so much I've been deliberately slow in order to savour the magic. Novik's Temeraire books really don't work for me, but I adore her fairytale-inspired fantasy.

Reading-wise I seem to be all about the Eastern European inspired fairytale retellings at the moment; last weekend I devoured the second of Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy books, which are set in a fantastical version of fourteenth-century Russia and seem written to my exact specifications. I posted a review of the first two books in the series here, and highly recommend them.

Matthias and I binge watched the entire first season of Killing Eve, which I adored. The whole lot is on iPlayer if other UK people want to watch. The plot and premise is frankly ridiculous, but if you accept that it's taking place in a sort of melodramatic, soap operatic reality, it's very enjoyable. The two lead actresses are great, the soundtrack is excellent, and there's a lot of gorgeous scenery porn in various picturesque European cities. After all our travelling this summer, it's been good to be back at home and just spend some time binge watching TV. I'm not sure what we'll move on to next — possibly the second season of Luke Cage, which should give you some idea of how behind we are in terms of TV series!

The weekend is drawing to a close, and the last few hours of it will be spent cooking a cosy and delicious Polish goulash, watching the last episode of Bodyguard (which I've liked, but not loved as much as Line of Duty, partly because the acting and writing in the latter is just a bit sharper), and reading more of Spinning Silver. I feel like I need a third day off to be fully refreshed after the work week (huge amounts of teaching and lots of wrangling of confused new medical students) I've just had, but alas it is not to be.

If I don't post about my trip to Tuscany (made in late August/early September) soon, I'm unlikely to ever do so, so consider this a belated recap of my time there. This was the last of my international trips this northern summer, which ended up being very busy with trips back and forth across the Channel.

Matthias and I were invited to Italy for the wedding of two of our friends, E and A, both of whom we know through our mutual time as students at Cambridge. Unlike Matthias and I, who have left academia behind us, E and A have remained in the field. E is now a lecturer in medieval history at Durham, and A is doing a postdoc at Freie Universität in Berlin, and for various reasons decided they wanted to have their wedding in Italy. I was a little dubious at first, because Albiano, the village in which this was set to take place, appeared super inaccessible without a car, but the whole thing was planned with surgical precision and a great deal of thought as to the wedding guests' enjoyment.

The wedding was set to take place on a Sunday, but events were happening from the Thursday onwards, so Matthias and I elected to stay from Thursday to Tuesday (flights out of Pisa were much cheaper on the Tuesday than the Monday, so we decided to give our excess money to a hotel in Pisa and spend twenty-four hours there, rather than giving it to Ryanair for the dubious privilege of returning home one day earlier). Albiano is a tiny little village, nestled in the mountains, about two hours' drive from Pisa airport. We were fortunate enough to be picked up after our flight by two friends who had hired a car, and they drove us right to our hotel.

The set up of the village was rather odd — the hotel, pool (and poolside bar), cafe, and sole restaurant were all owned by one woman, who opened each at strategic times of the day, funnelling customers from breakfast at the cafe to lunch at the poolside bar to dinner in the restaurant according to the hour. Our hotel room had the most incredible view over the mountains and valleys, and was right above the swimming pool, which was free for hotel guests. I went in for a swim on the Thursday, before going down the hill to the wedding venue, which was also where A, E, their families and some other guests were staying, for a barbecue dinner.

On the Friday, we were driven out to a local vineyard for what was described as a wine tasting, but actually ended up being a massive lunch of antipasti, accompanied by jug after jug of absolutely incredible wine — prosecco, minerally white wine, and two excellent red wines. I resisted the urge to buy bottles to take home (we had only paid for hand luggage on our flight), and returned to Albiano for a pizza dinner at the restaurant.

The Saturday was occupied by a day trip to Lucca (a town about forty-five minutes away by car with a pretty historic centre, beautiful cathedral, and old city walls). Unintentionally comical highlights included being trapped in the cathedral by an absolutely torrential downpour which flooded the footpath and square outside the cathedral doors and poured in through the roof and heavy wooden doors, where it was swept out ineffectually by two old men with brooms, and a tour guide, indicating a relic of Thomas Becket, describing the saint as having been 'killed by the Anglicans because he didn't want to convert to Protestantism' (at which point the entire room, which was mainly filled with medievalists, cringed). We then moved on to Barga, the town across the valley from Albiano, for dinner in a restaurant to celebrate A's birthday. Here is my Barga and Lucca photoset.

Finally, on the Sunday, there was the wedding. It was meant to be outdoors in the venue, which was a gorgeous villa, surrounded by grape vines, apple trees and lovely gardens, but the unpredictable weather, which we had watched roll in all morning as we lounged by the pool, brought rain in the afternoon. We picked our way down the muddy path in the vineyard, had a quick drink of Lambrusco with friends staying in the venue, and then went to the (indoor) ceremony. Fortunately, the rain had cleared by the end of the ceremony, so we were able to enjoy drinks, aperitivo, and antipasti in the gardens before heading indoors for dinner (honestly, most of this trip was just people feeding me vast quantities of incredibly good Italian food). There was a jazz band during the outdoor pre-dinner festivities, which was replaced by a cheesy 80s playlist piped into the gardens via speakers after dinner. My ASNC friends and I danced all night, and it was glorious, although the grass in the garden probably won't thank us.

Then it was on to Pisa by train from Barga, where Matthias and I checked in to one of our characteristically bizarre hotels (honestly, this seems to be something of a pattern with us). We spent the evening walking the city walls and hanging around near the cathedral and leaning tower. We left going inside until the next day, and then wandered around the city looking for somewhere to eat, at which point we bumped into E, A, ienthuse and her husband E, who were on their way to a restaurant, so we joined them. It was an excellent final meal to have on the trip — just delicious, simple, good quality (is there anything else?) Italian food and wine — and very serendipitous to bump into them. I would definitely recommend Pisa as a place to visa for a long weekend, especially if you're travelling from the UK, as you can fly there from pretty much every UK airport, the airport is a five-minute train ride from the city itself, and it's very easy to walk pretty much anywhere you'd need to go. Here's my photoset from my twenty-four hours in Pisa.

And then it was back to Cambridge, and reality, and autumn.

The fic_corner collection went live on Sunday.

I received an absolutely gorgeous Galax Arena fic: dark, and quietly devastating, and exactly the way I like the Presh/Allyman relationship to be written. I'm absolutely blown away by it.

Missing the Moon (1275 words) by Morbane
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Galax-Arena Series - Gillian Rubinstein
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Allyman | Allan Manne, Presh
Additional Tags: Missing Scene
Summary:

Allan's view of the last act of Galax-Arena.

I wrote a Six of Crows fic. It's Matthias Helvar/Nina Zenik, post-series and canon-divergent.

A Road Made of Stars (5647 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Matthias Helvar/Nina Zenik
Characters: Nina Zenik, Matthias Helvar
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Canon
Summary:

Having survived Ketterdam, Kaz Brekker's various schemes, and the assassination attempts of powerful people from at least four different nations, Nina Zenik and Matthias Helvar have embarked on their most dangerous mission yet: to bring about peace between Ravka and Fjerda. While they knew this wouldn't be easy, they were at least expecting their journey to be uneventful.

They were wrong.

Post-Crooked Kingdom.

No sooner than I had returned from Spain than I was leaving Cambridge again, this time for a long weekend in Belgium with Matthias. This was one of those things we'd been talking about doing for a very long time -- jumping on the Eurostar and jumping off two hours later in Brussels. International train travel has a lot to recommend it: even with passport control and security, you only have to be at the train station 45 minutes in advance (as opposed to the two hours required for international flights), you have all your belongings with you so don't have to wait at the other end for checked bags to be unloaded, and, best of all, train stations tend to be in the centre of cities, rather than on the outskirts as airports are, so once you've arrived, you're likely to be within walking distance of your accommodation. I hate flying -- and I hate flying Ryanair most of all -- and I'm now completely convinced that, with careful planning, train travel is the way to go whenever we're travelling within Europe.

Choice of transport aside, it was a really fun trip. Belgium was sort of an odd choice for the two of us, given that Matthias isn't keen on Belgian beer, and I don't drink beer at all, and a lot of the touristy things to do in Belgium involve beer. Even without that, though, we found plenty to do in the three-and-a-half days we were there: wandering around the old city centre in Brussels, visiting the comic book museum (which is housed in this incredible old restored Art Nouveau building) and the Atomium building (originally built for the 1958 World's Fair, which was held in Brussels), and walking out to a fabulous food market that I had read about and wanted to see.

We also made a day trip to Ghent, which was cheap (about 10 euro per person for a return ticket on the weekend), and easy to do (trains left every half-hour or so), where we strolled along the beautiful canals, visited the cathedral (which has an absolutely exquisite and famous altarpiece), and wound up in a quirky little jenever bar filled with old bottles, dried flowers, and eccentric old men.

We had been planning to do a similar day trip to Bruges (equally easy and cheap to do by train from Brussels), but decided that we would leave it for another visit, as we enjoyed our brief holiday so much that we're very likely to return again. It was nice to get out of Cambridge for a few days, and have a holiday that was so relaxing and stress free. And while we were away, the long, long weeks of dry, hot summer broke, with spectacular storms, and Cambridge has been restored to its more normal, mild temperatures, which was a great relief to come home to.

Britain — or at least my corner of it — continues to bake. It's been at least a month since it last rained, and for the past three weeks the temperatures have been in the high twenties or low thirties every day. Given that I'm Australian, I can cope with far hotter weather than this, except for the fact that I left Australia when I was twenty-three, and therefore only spent one summer there when I was working full-time. Every other summer I had been either a child, or a university student, and school and university shut down for good during the hottest weeks of the summer. Even when I was working at my part-time jobs (I had weekend jobs from the age of fifteen), these were in patisseries/bakeries run by European chefs, so we worked intensively in the two weeks leading up to Christmas, and then closed for about a month from Christmas Eve while the chefs went to Europe to visit their families. In other words, although I lived in a much hotter country, I spent the hottest weeks every year doing little more than sitting around reading, or swimming in our backyard pool or the ocean. My poor body and brain can't take doing proper work in these temperatures!

*

So far I've coped by spending as much time outside as possible, and subsisting on a mixture of ice cream, iced tap water, iced coffee, and gin. The photos on my Instagram feed should give you some idea...

Today I joined my work colleagues for a meal out at a nice restaurant near my house. We're not the most sociable bunch outside of work, but we do do things occasionally when the mood takes us, and today's meal was really nice. It's likely to be my sole social engagement for the weekend, which suits me just fine as I'm about to head off to Cardiff for a professional conference, which I'm likely to find incredibly draining (so many people! so many awkward 'networking while drinking coffee during the breaks' sessions), so I need to store up my socialising energy!

*

I've also managed to complete my Goodreads reading challenge for the year. While I do tend to set myself pretty low aims, given that it generally takes me about two hours to finish most books, I am pretty happy to have reached the target at just over the halfway point of the year. While I used to be a voracious reader before I moved to the UK, my reading tailed off for a while and I was concerned at one point that I'd never really get back to my old reading habits. Last year was probably the first time that I enjoyed reading the majority of the books I read in a given year, and this year was, if anything, even better. Two factors probably contributed to this.

Firstly, I made a decision about a year ago that I would stop stressing about what I was reading (the demographics of the authors, whether it was recommended highly or nominated for awards, and, above all, whether it was the shiny new thing that everyone was talking about), and focus solely on reading things I was likely to enjoy: subgenres or tropes I liked, certain types of character dynamics that appealed to me, authors whose previous work I'd enjoyed, or books people whose tastes alligned with my own were praising. Once I stopped stressing and agonising about, in a sense, performative reading, everything felt a lot more freeing and natural. Getting over the feeling that I needed to read every single hyped up new book was particularly helpful, because I often feel that in the pro-SFF circles in which I dip my toe, there's an emphasis on newness, on chasing after the next big thing, which, while understandable, is unsustainable for someone like me who can't afford to buy hundreds of new books a year.

Secondly, I had developed a really bad habit of eating breakfast while browsing through my various social media feeds. This had an appalling effect on my mental health, to the point that I was starting every day either burning with fury, or having a panic attack (usually about Brexit). It was unsustainable, and affecting other areas of my life. I made a decision (something of a new year's resolution, really) at the start of 2018 that I would ban myself from the internet during those early hours of the morning, and would instead start the day reading a book. The effect has been extraordinary. I still go through periods of intense despair about the state of the world, but at least I'm not starting every day on a really negative note — instead I'm immersing myself in fiction. I think the next step will probably be to ban myself from social media in the evenings as well, and read during those hours too.

In any case, my Goodreads 2018 reading challenge is completed, and I'm very pleased with how it went! Is anyone else doing the challenge, or has anyone else set other kinds of reading goals for 2018? How are you all going with your respective challenges/goals?

Thank you for writing for me!

I'm pretty easygoing about what type of fic you want to write for me. I read fic of any rating, and would be equally happy with plotty genfic or something very shippy. I read gen, femslash, het and slash, although I have a slight preference towards femslash, het, and gen that focuses on female characters. I mainly read fic to find out what happens to characters after the final page has turned, so I would particularly love to have futurefic of some kind. Don't feel you have to limit yourself to the characters I specifically mention — I'm happy with others being included if they fit with the story you want to tell.

Feel free to have a look around my Ao3 profile, as it should give you a good idea of the types of things I like to read.

( General likes )

( General dislikes )

Fandom-specific prompts:

( An Ember in the Ashes - Sabaa Tahir )

( Galax Arena series )

( The Pagan Chronicles - Catherine Jinks )

( Six of Crows series — Leigh Bardugo )

Don't feel you have to stick rigidly within the bounds of my prompts. As long as your fic is focused on the characters and/or relationships I requested, I will be thrilled to receive anything you write for me, as these really are some of my most beloved fandoms of the heart, and the existence of any fic for them will make me extremely happy.

The Irish referendum caught me by surprise. I mean, I was aware of it — the British media can be rubbish in covering Irish politics (or anything about Ireland in general), but it did cover the referendum, and I have enough friends living in Ireland who were posting about it almost daily for the past couple of months — and I knew how much the result was going to mean both to my friends, and to Irish women in general, but I was surprised, in the end, by how emotional it made me.

It was the #hometovote hashtag that did it. Ireland allows citizens who have been outside the country for less than eighteen months, and who intend to return, to vote, but it has no postal or other form of absentee voting, so eligible Irish migrants have to return to Ireland if they want to vote. And they did so enthusiastically, and in great numbers, for the referendum. People passionately caring about things, and being earnest about democracy and their right to vote always make me super emotional, but the Irish people travelling home to vote in the referendum did more than that: they lifted my spirits and made me feel hopeful. To see so many people travelling home by plane, train, ferry, bus and car — sometime from very great distances — to cast their vote is incredible, but it's more than that. People crowdfunded people's travel costs, organised carpools to and from airports, and connected with other people on their flights, sitting in packs with Repeal jumper-clad, Yes/Tá badge-wearing strangers at airports and train stations and ferry terminals, or shared taxis. People with banners welcomed their fellow voters at Irish airports.

Many people in the hashtag noted that their journeys were in stark contrast to those made by so many Irish women — alone, fearful, in shame and despair — in the other direction, and hoped that their own journeys would render such other travel a thing of the past. And, with their votes, they did so.

That was the other thing that was so powerful and moving. Things all around the world have been so awful for so long, and the virulence of misogynistic attacks on women seem to have increased exponentially, so it was just so vindicating and healing to see a campaign that put women — listening to women, trusting women, giving women the space to tell stories that had for so long been buried in silence and hypocrisy and shame — front and centre. And then, as the results rolled in, it was clear that almost everyone — rural and urban, in almost every county, in almost every age demographic, male and female — were acknowledging, with their votes, the great historic wrong that had been done to so many Irish women, the damage it had done, and were determined to consign such things to the dustbin of history.

I generally have a policy of not commenting on the politics of countries in which I'm neither a citizen nor a resident, but I was so overwhelmed with emotion at the referendum result in Ireland that I had to break my own rule. I'm so happy for all my friends, for those strangers helping other strangers get to the polls, and for all those women who will no longer have to get on a plane or a ferry to get the health care they were so long denied at home.