Beyond Selidor

I've just come back downstairs after finishing today's yoga class — 35 minutes of slow, calming stretches, tucked up in the bedroom, watching the bare branches sway in the breeze and the clouds slowly fill the sky. This morning was much clearer — by the time I returned from swimming at 9am, the streets were full of people out and about and enjoying the bright winter weather.

It's been a weekend of good food. Matthias and I went out for our semi-annual joint birthday/Christmas present to each other: a meal at restaurant22_cambridge. These are tasting menus with wine pairings, and a really nice treat, in a lovely restaurant located in an old terrace house in Cambridge. This particular iteration was delightful, and for once getting in and out of Cambridge by train went as smoothly as it's possible to go, which was very pleasing.

Other than going out for dinner, it's been a typical weekend with the usual array of Saturday morning fitness classes, buying groceries at the open air market, the aforementioned Sunday morning swim, yoga and so on. I suppose this will be the last time for this specific weekend routine for the year — next weekend I'll be in Cambridge all day on Saturday, and then Sunday will be a whirlwind of Christmas meal preparation, cleaning, and so on, and I'm not yet sure what will be going on on the New Year's Eve weekend. In any case, I'm pretty happy with the normal shape of my weekends, the result of various changes and habit-forming behaviour I implemented at the start of the year, all of which I plan to continue.

I'm satisfied, too, with my contribution to this year's Yuletide collection. At the final count, I've written my main assignment, and three treats, the last of which I finished editing earlier today. Hopefully they'll be well received. I have an idea for a fic for Fandom Trees, but it's not yet ready to post, and hopefully I'll be able to make at least one more contribution to that fest on top of that (since the expectation is that each participant should receive two gifts, I try to contribute at least an equal amount back).

It hasn't really been much of a weekend for reading — too much time spent out of the house for that — but I did pick up a copy of Emily Wilson's Iliad translation from the local independent bookshop, and have made a start on that. This is I think my third attempt to actually read the Iliad in translation — on every other occasion I'd get bogged down and bored in the endless lists of names, and give up — but I really loved Wilson's Odyssey translation, so I have high hopes that this third time will be the charm. I've always felt vaguely bad that as someone who spends so much fannish energy devoted to the sort of fanfic Briseis I've created in my head, and who has such strong opinions about various Iliad retellings and reimaginings, I've never managed to read the actual original epic poem that launched these thousands of other things.

As well as this doorstopper of a book, I'll be turning my attention to various seasonal rereads that I always do around this time of year: Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma's novella 'Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night' (which I try to read on the actual day/night of the solstice), and The Bear and the Nightingale, the first, most frozen and wintry book in Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy (which really is suited to a much colder climate than these mild East Anglian winters). And then it will be time for Yuletide to open, and I'll bury myself in the collection, and read all the wealth of small book fandom fanfic that appears at this time of year like my own personal winter harvest.

Can you tell that, although I have a week more work to go, I'm already somewhat in holiday mode?

The current snowflake_challenge is one that I always find incredibly stressful: I don't really collect fannish merch (other than ... physical books? Dreamwidth icons?), and I'm completely incapable of taking decent photos of anything that isn't a) a tree or b) a body of water.



So, with that disclaimer out of the way, here is the prompt:

In your own space, post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt. earch in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture or description of something that is or represents:

1. A favorite character
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A bookshelf
4. A game or hobby you enjoy
5. Something you find comforting
6. A TV show or movie you hope more people will watch
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A thing from an old fandom
9. A thing from a new fandom

My photos can be found on Instagram. Edited to add that the bad-quality photos were stressing me out so much that I deleted the whole photoset from Instagram, so the link here will no longer work. The descriptions of the photos remain below.

I have merged several categories.

1. A favourite character — Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. This is the back of a t shirt which is possibly the only piece of fannish merch I own, a quote from McDougall's book referencing Una. (A picture McDougall drew of her own character, plus this quote, forms my default Dreamwidth icon.)

2. and 3. Something that makes me laugh + a bookshelf — a small portion of the Terry Pratchett section of our bookshelves. This is only a small portion of our collection as a whole — my copies are all still at my mum's place in Australia, and many of Matthias's copies are still in Germany. At some point, we will have all the copies in the one place and may have to discard the duplicates.

4. and 5. A game or hobby I enjoy + something I find comforting — swimming swimming swimming. I am, as I have said many times, half woman half ocean. Swimming is the only thing that stills the sea inside.

6. A TV show or movie I wish more people would watch — Babylon Berlin

7. A thing from an old fandom — the final lines of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. This isn't my oldest fandom, but it was my first experience of fandom as an online community, and the HDM forum I joined still remains my gold standard for online fannish spaces. It was the perfect welcome and introduction to fandom-as-shared activity.

8. A thing from a new fandom — the extant books from Pat Barker's Briseis-centric Iliad retelling trilogy.

I read three more short stories yesterday. All are free and online at the Tor.com website.

( Short fiction )

I'm happiest when my days are filled with a good mixture of stuff, and that's certainly been true this weekend. In list format, in no particular order, I've done the following:

Read so many books, in a variety of genres (about which more in a review post later in the week)

Done a variety of yoga sessions ranging from the intense to the stretchy to the restorative

Roamed the outdoor market in the rain, picking up vegetables, fruit, bread and cheese

Swum a kilometre

Pottered around on Dreamwidth, overwhelmed by, and grateful for, the response to both my snowflake_challenge posts and the return of my Friday open threads

Walked out through the muddy fens with Matthias, under clear skies

Now I've got curry simmering, fragrant on the stove, and I'm winding down, and resting.



Today's snowflake_challenge prompt is: In your own space, talk about an idea you wish you had the time / talent / energy to do.

( Unfinished visioncloths behind the cut )

I'm always astonished at how much more I can get done if I have a slightly longer weekend. It's not so much the extra hours, but more the fact that I don't feel utterly drained by 2pm, the way I do on a work day. (I suppose most of my work days begin with me leaving the house before 7, walking for 45 minutes and then swimming a kilometre, before I even start my actual paid work...)

But today I have:

Chatted via FaceTime with my peripatetic mother, who has been moving from airbnb to serviced apartment to my sister's flat in Melbourne to the house of one of her sisters on the other side of Sydney Harbour, living out of suitcases while her flat is being renovated;

Gone into town to run various errands;

Done some rough editing of my Yuletide assignment, and completed the first draft of one of the treats I'd been planning (I just sat down at the keyboard, and 2000 words tumbled out);

Done a rather intense yoga sequence, curling and stretching in the afternoon sun as it poured through the bedroom window;

Read about 2/3 of The Silence of the Girls, being struck again at how perfectly Pat Barker writes Briseis's story (and the story of all the captured Trojan women), and how much she is able to say with so few words. I wish every Iliad retelling were like this.

Now I'm just waiting for Matthias to come home after work, and then I will slow cook pork shoulder with chorizo, white beans, tomatoes and potatoes, and rest. And there'll still be one more day of my 'weekend' left.

The colder weather seems to have done wonders for my writing productivity: I've finished my Yuletide assignment, and made a good start on a second treat. That wasn't all the writing I got done over the weekend — I also found the time to write a longish review on two Iliad retellings and Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation. You can find the review here on Wordpress, but here's a brief excerpt:

I never had much interest in the long recitations of characters’ ancestry, names of warriors killed on the battlefield, wooden horses or lucky arrows shot through vulnerable heels. Instead, I focused on the story that whispered in the margins: the calamity of war to the women and children it made most vulnerable, the ways such women coped with the ever-present threat of male violence, and the simmering presence of this violence even in ostensible peacetime, in spaces where women were surrounded by their own families. I sought out retellings of the Iliad that brought this story to the fore.

I should note that because the two retellings focus on the character of Briseis, the review involves discussion of rape and slavery, so consider this a content warning. I also get pretty ranty about The Song of Achilles, so if anyone feels like venting with me about that book, feel free to join in in the comments (and if you like it ... I'm sorry).

Also over on Wordpress, I reviewed Aliette de Bodard's In the Vanishers' Palace, a Beauty and the Beast story where both characters are female and the Beast is a dragon. You can read that review here.

This being an Aliette de Bodard story, there are all the familiar and fabulous features that I’ve come to expect in her work: loving and mouth-watering descriptions of food and cooking, a refusal to flinch away from the devastating effects of empire and colonialism, and an intricate exploration of the different ways survival can look. This last is crucial, and resonates deeply with me. De Bodard rejects an individualistic interpretation of heroism, where a lone, special individual bravely solves the world’s problems alone. Instead, courage in her writing is all about (inter)dependence and community building — the little acts that forge and strengthen networks, reinforce familial and non-familial bonds, and the way that sometimes merely surviving and helping others survive is its own victory.

I'm now taking a break from all that writing with a bit of reading. I've just finished Leah Cypress's 'Timshala', the last in the Book Smugglers' 2018 series of short stories on the theme of 'awakenings', and I definitely think it was the best of the bunch. Their short story series tend to be pretty hit and miss with me, but this one — part Ancient Egypt-inspired death cult with religious controversies and political intrigue, part exploration of determinism and free will — was excellent. It's available to read for free online here.

Having finished 'Timshala', I've now moved on to Girls of Paper and Fire, a novel by Natasha Ngan which I've wanted to read since I first saw Samantha Shannon posting on Instagram about reading an ARC of the book. This was months and months ago, and I'm glad to finally have a copy in my hands. I think I'll curl up in my wing chair and read it, watching the sun go down and the darkness fall through the garden window.