Beyond Selidor

I'm really tired, and don't feel in any way prepared for the upcoming working week, but I've been trying to mitigate that with a very lazy Sunday. I had grand plans to plant the first of the spring seeds and start germinating seedlings in the growhouse, I had plans to go out for a walk with Matthias (the weather today is gorgeous), but instead I've spent the whole day vegetating in my wing chair in the living room, watching the tail-end of the Winter Olympics from the corner of my eye, watching Olia Hercules cook borshch on a BBC cooking show, scrolling around on Dreamwidth, and so on.

Matthias and I saw Marty Supreme at the community cinema earlier this week, and we'll be heading out to see Hamnet tonight, so it's definitely been a film-heavy time by our standards. I'm anticipating a lot of cathartic crying tonight.

I've continued to make my way through mythology/fairytale/folktale retellings recommended by you on a previous post. This week it was Girl Meets Boy (Ali Smith), a slim little novella in conversation with Ovid's Metamorphoses, concerned with fluidity in gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and so on. It felt very, very, very of its time and place (the UK in the 2000s), but that's not to say that its specificity was a bad thing.

I also read The Swan's Daughter (Roshani Chokshi), a lush, surreal fairytale of a book in which the titular daughter (one of seven sisters born to a power-hungry wizard and his swanmaiden wife) finds herself caught up in a competition to win the hand of the kingdom's prince in marriage. Chokshi's previous books have been very melodramatic and earnest, and she's relished the opportunity here to shift the tone to something much more humorous and knowing, while still digging into her favourite big themes: the tension between love and vulnerability, genuine love requiring an embrace of uncertainty, and the interplay of love and monstrosity made literal.

It reminded me so much of one of my very favourite books — The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (Patricia McKillip) — although the latter is portentous and serious where Chokshi is whimsical and humorous that I picked up the McKillip for yet another reread. I've written about it here before, so suffice it to say now that it remains an incredible book — sharp and perceptive, devastating and beautiful.

I'll leave you with this fantastic link to a Shrove Tuesday tradition in which contestants dressed in costumes race through central London while flipping pancakes in pans. It's as delightful as you might imagine.

It's been a good weekend after a tiring and emotionally difficult week. Saturday was filled with the kind of icy clear wintry skies that I love, and it was wonderful to wander around the market gathering vegetables, eggs, and other bits and pieces, before retreating to the house. I made a batch of ginger-, lemon- and honey-infused water to use as a sort of tisane on cold nights, and lay around catching up with podcasts and Dreamwidth comments. On my walk out to the pool this morning, almost every second window had a cat slumbering on the windowsill, and the hedgerows were filled with clouds of twittering sparows. I put in even more effort than usual in the pool this morning and at the classes in the gym yesterday, and my body feels pleasantly tired. Now, I'm sitting in the living room with softly foggy skies outside and a whisky-scented candle, while a noorishbynoor Bahraini-style dal simmers on the stove in the kitchen for tomorrow's dinner. Everything feels sleepy and slow.

I'll start things off with some very good news. Some of you may recall my post last week about Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with suggestions of ways to help. This included a fundraiser to buy large, expensive batteries for Kyivan families so that they had reliable sources of power in the wake of constant blackouts, and loss of heating and hot water in their homes. These batteries cost $3400 US apiece, and when I posted about the fundraiser last Saturday, the organisers had bought two so far. As of this week, they now have nine, and you can see some photos of Anastasiia Lapatina, the journalist who organised the fundraiser, with the delivered batteries, in her latest Substack newsletter update. Thank you to everyone who donated or spread the word of this fundraiser: you contributed to this, and you can see concrete proof of your actions. It's a small thing in light of the overwhelming horrors going on all over the world, but it is genuinely, unambiguously helpful. The fundraiser is ongoing, so please feel free to continue to share my original post or donate if you are able. Other concrete ways to help are the Ukrainian government's fundraising initiative for air defence or Come Back Alive's fundraising campaign for drones to use as air defence against other drones — helping civillians cope with the attacks on energy infrastructure is good, but preventing those attacks from happening at all is obviously better.

Reading this week has mostly been rereads, with the only reread of note being Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month poetry and short fiction collection. This was a project she undertook in 2010, when a friend spent the month of February sending her different samples of honey each day, and she wrote a poem or short story in response to the look, smell and taste of each sample. Each creative piece of writing is preceded by a description of the sensory experience of that specific honey, vividly captured so that the reader is brought along for the ride. Although this is an early piece of El-Mohtar's work, it has all the hallmarks that I've come to expect and appreciate in her later writing: lyrical, fairytale storytelling, with each item in the collection an exquisite, self-contained gem. Her writing is always a rich feast for the senses — one does not just read her stories and poetry, but rather tastes, smells, and touches the little worlds she creates within them — and this collection really plays to those strengths.

I'm also about a quarter of the way through Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan's adult fiction debut, in which a young woman with terminal cancer is offered a chance to save her life if she elects to be transported into the fictional world of the wildly successful series of fantasy novels of which she and her younger sister are fans. The only catch — she finds herself in the body of one of the series' villains, who is slated for execution, and must therefore rely on her knowledge of the series' plot, and wider genre knowledge in general, in order to wriggle her way out of things. Rees Brennan herself was diagnosed with cancer in her thirties, and went through a long, painful recovery, and the fear and rage of that experience is conveyed with real vulnerability, deftly sitting next to the book's gleeful, quippy humour. It's written with real affection for both transformative fandom and the way that experience of collectively engaging with fiction transcends the sometimes questionable quality of the source material (if a work of fiction is meaningful, that's all that matters), and I can tell it's going to be a wild ride from start to finish.

I've got laundry to hang out (in the kitchen, as outdoor laundry will not be possible until at least late March), and more reading to do, and then Matthias and I will be heading into one of the villages south of Cambridge for a Burns Night dinner in one of the gastropubs we frequent sporadically. I'm expecting tartan, bagpipes, and whisky, the latter of which will be a bit of a shock to the system as I have been refraining from alcohol for the past month. But it will be good fun!

A 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: 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.)



( Fictional cities, and more )

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.

I've had this post written and locked for over 2.5 hours, hoping that the next snowflake_challenge prompt would be posted so that I could add it here and then unlock things, but it's getting to the point in the day when I close all screens and step away from the internet, the next prompt is still not posted, so I'm going to unlock things now and update ... who knows when?

We were promised apocalyptic storms and snow all weekend, but apart from a bit of sleet on the ground yesterday, and now some wind that keeps blowing our green bin out of the front garden and onto the footpath, the dire warnings were not necessary in this part of the world. Nevertheless, it was a weekend for hunkering down at home, although I was out at the sports centre for my classes yesterday and my swim this morning (nearly slipping over on the ice as I walked there both days), and Matthias and I did a quick run into town to return a bunch of library books this morning. The heating has been on almost constantly all week, and I supplemented it last night with a fire in the wood-burning stove. I added branches from the Christmas wreath, and the whole living room smelt of pine sap.

The combination of global politics and some difficult stuff with my family back in Australia have rendered me incapable of getting to sleep without watching dialogue-free cottagecore videos of Youtubers gardening, cooking and cleaning their cosy houses, but between that, and deliberately selecting yoga classes which feature kittens (my yoga teacher fosters cats, and tends to foster mother cats with new kittens when she does so), and ruthless avoidance of social media and news websites, I'm doing about as well as I can to manage the situation.

Last night Matthias and I picked the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein adaptation for our Saturday movie night. It's been over twenty years since I read Shelley's novel, but as far as I could remember, this was a pretty straight adaptation — some characters fleshed out and some details added, but in essence faithful to the ideas of the source material, unsubtle biblical and birth and death metaphors and Victoriana included. This was a real labour of love for del Toro, and he and the cast clearly had a fantastic time bringing the story to life.

This week's reading was two novels, and a couple of SFF short stories, one of which I found bafflingly unsatisfying (the characters' choices and motivations seemed to boil down to 'I love you so I'm going to order my underlings to stop torturing you' and 'I love you so I'm going to forgive the fact that your underlings tortured me and we are on opposites sides in a cosmic battle, and clearly your side is in the right'), the other of which I found hauntingly folkloric and charming.

The first of the novels was The Lantern Bearers, as I continue to make my way through Rosemary Sutcliff's works for the first time. This one is set at the moment in which the last Roman legions are withdrawn from Britain; our point-of-view character is a legionary who opts to desert rather than forsake his family and their farm in Britain, and then barely survives defending said family and farm against Saxon raiders, in an attack in which his father and most of their employees (their farm does not use slave labour) are killed, the farm is destroyed, and his sister is carried off by the raiders and later goes on to marry one of them and bear his child (with, it is assumed, not much choice in the matter). Aquila — the protagonist — is left embittered and broken, unmoored in the aftermath, drifting into the orbit of the remnants of the Romano-British order, pushed out into what is now Wales, struggling to hold back the tide. Here we are treated both to a retelling of some Welsh Arthuriana, and also a very painful personal story of the limits of revenge as a motivating factor, and how to survive and carve out a life when you are hollowed out by grief and loss. I liked it a lot, but found in this book that Sutcliff's appparent absolute lack of interest in the interior lives of women almost tipped over at times into actual misogyny, which I had to essentially push aside and ignore in order to enjoy and appreciate the story she was interested in telling.

Also, sentiments like:

'I sometimes think we stand at sunset. It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.'

are almost painfully relevant but also excruciatingly optimistic, given the state of the world. Ooof.

Finally, I picked up The Silver Bone (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk), the first in a series of historical mystery novels set in post-First World War Kyiv. This one takes place in 1919, at a point when the city kept changing hands between White Russian, Red Army, and Ukrainian nationalist control, and Kyiv residents are just trying to keep their heads down and survive. Kurkov strikes a great balance between conveying both the terror (the novel begins with the protagonist's father's death before his eyes at the hands of a bayonet-wielding Cossack, an attack which he survives but costs him his ear), and the absurdity (all these different armies keep issuing different documentation and currency and the population struggles to know what to use, in the end settling on bartering things like fuel, salt and sugar, which at least remain useful no matter who is in charge). Via a convoluted series of almost comedic events, Samson (the protagonist) falls into a job working with the police while Kyiv is under shaky Soviet control, and, after overhearing (via an almost magical realist mechanism) the nefarious plans of a pair of Red Army soldiers who have commandeered most of his flat, he has his first case to crack. There's also a charming subplot about Samson's halting courtship of Nadezhda, an earnest, idealistic young woman who works in the Soviet bureau of statistics. In terms of historical mysteries, I would say this is heavier on the history and lighter on the mystery — a great evocation of a city and its people experiencing (as they are also, tragically, now) turbulent change. I'm very much looking forward to the following books in the series.

I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the rain on the windows and the wood pigeons frolicking in the hedgerows over the road, as the weekend draws to its grey, windy close.

2026 is off to a good start. Matthias and I spent the morning on a long, looping walk along the river, across the railway track, and back into town for coffee at the rig in the market square. I've done yoga, I'm about halfway through my first book of the year, and I also read this dystopian Kate Elliott short story, which imagines a world in which absolutely everything is pay-as-you-go, which is exactly as horrifying in almost every facet of society and social organisation as you'd imagine.

1st January means two things in my fannish calendar: Yuletide author reveals go live, and the first day of snowflake_challenge is upon us. I always wait to share my recs from the Yuletide collection until after reveals, because I want authors to get credit for their creations.

( My reveals and recs behind the cut )

How were your Yuletides? What did you enjoy from the collection.



Challenge #1 is: The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

( Response here )

I'll close this out with a final link relating to changes at Livejournal. You may have seen denise's recent post at dw_maintenance regarding a new influx of Russian (and/or Russian-speaking) LJ users due to changes in the terms of service. vriddy made the point that it's likely LJ's days as a viable site are numbered, and if you have anything there that you want saved, backing it up now is imperative. I imagine most of you are like me, and have abandoned, backed up, and deleted things on LJ many years ago (if nothing else, it's a massive security risk), but it's probably worth spreading the word.

Today's prompt from chestnut_pod brings this year's December talking meme to a close, and it's been a great run of questions. Many thanks to all of you who left a prompt! This final prompt is to talk about how I learnt to garden, plus any longstanding plant friends in my garden.

( Response here )

fandomtrees is due to open for reveals on 10 January, but it will only do so when every participant has a minimum of two gifts each. This post on the comm links to a spreadsheet of needy trees — there are still a substantial number of participants with only one gift, or with no gift at all. My own tree is here.

And the new year means that snowflake_challenge will be rolling around again. I'm always so happy to see the consequent burst of enthusiastic activity on Dreamwidth!

Tomorrow is my birthday, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to use this week's open thread as a chance for all of us to do some good. Behind the cut, I'm going to recommend some concrete political actions for causes that matter to me — charities, campaigns, resources — and if you feel so moved, please do take the suggested actions.

Alternatively, use this prompt as a way to highlight in the comments causes and actions that matter to you. Two requests if you do take this latter option:

Be specific when describing your causes. If they are focused on a particular country or region within that country, name it, rather than expecting people to intuit that your cause is US-specific, limited to rural Australia, or whatever.

If you are asking people to part with their money, only recommend initiatives to which you have personally donated or would be comfortable donating. Organisations rather than individual fundraisers are generally safer in this regard.

( Charities, campaigns, resources )

Please do recommend your own actions in the comments.

I've spent this morning at the pool, then fixing hooks to the living room wall from which to hang more string lights (the latest batch were made by hand in Shetland and each light is contained in a little glass, cork-stoppered bottle filled with tiny pieces of sea-glass), and now finally have a bit of spare time in which to write and catch up on Dreamwidth. It's a beautiful, crisp, clear wintry day, and I think Matthias and I will go out for a walk to take in the silvery-blue sky — and I might light the wood-burning stove for the first time this season.

Yesterday I had my final two classes for the year at the gym, which went well, as I was full of energy and determination. I've now been doing them both — power pump (basically lifting weights to music) followed by zumba (the cheesiest dances you can imagine, to the cheesiest music you can imagine; now that it's the lead-up to Christmas the trainer has added her warm-up routine set to a medley of Christmas songs that includes — I kid you not — an EDM-rap remix of 'The Little Drummer Boy') — for three years. The result of this is that I'm very strong, and my endurance and ability to dance in time with music without making mistakes (which have always been reasonably good) are satisfactory, but I still dance like a gymnast. I think I'm stuck with this for life. The hips don't lie, and in spite of it being twenty-plus years since I was a gymnast, some things never leave you, and therefore my hips don't move.

I also finally accepted reality and decided that (in spite of my usual track record) I will leave my contributions to Yuletide this year to my main assignment, plus the one treat I've already written. Usually I aim for at least four fics in the main collection, but I can't say that many of this year's prompts are really calling to me, and I don't think forcing things for the sake of arbitrary personal goals is going to result in decent writing.

That has left more time for reading, although the fact that I got so obsessed with one book this week that I reread it five times in succession (and then I reread it a sixth time yesterday) meant that I've only finished one other book this week: Night Train to Odesa (Jen Stout), a British freelance journalist's memoir of her time in Ukraine during the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion, and the various ordinary people forced to do extraordinary things (in the military, as civilian volunteers, in culture and the arts, over the border in Romania helping the first wave of bewildered and traumatised refugees) that she met. It's a well-told account covering ground with which I'm already familiar from other similar memoirs — raw emotions, injustice and atrocities, people rising with ingenuity, stamina and resilience to meet the moment because the only other option would have been to lie down, surrender, and cease to exist as free people of an independent nation — but I appreciated the features that made it unique. These included Stout's background (a journalist from Shetland who spoke fluent Russian and actually spent the first month of the war on a journalism fellowship in Russia — a surreal experience), and her familiarity with Ukraine (she had spent a lot of time there before, and has a particular love for Kharkiv city, and the frontline Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and writes about their landscapes, urban architecture and people with deep affection).

I'm also making my way — for the first time — through The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff). Sutcliff is a glaring gap in my reading, and I'm on such a Roman Britain kick that I felt now was a good time to remedy it. Her books seemed like an appropriate winter reading project (the elegiac tone, the stark, austere landscapes), and I'm enjoying this first foray immensely, and wondering why I never tried them before now! (I have a vague memory of being given one book or the other in childhood and finding the dearth of female characters offputting, and that initial impression is probably the culprit for it taking me this long to pick them up.)

( Another December talking meme response )

I hope you've all been having relaxing weekends.

This was my first full weekend back home after returning from Australia, and it was very much a return to normality in the best possible way. Yesterday rained on and off (the BBC weather website, which always errs on the side of apocalyptic, had been making dire warnings, but in the end there were just a few short bursts of heavy rain), unfortunately coinciding with the times I was walking to the gym, to the library, and home. Today was clear, still, and bitterly cold.

While I was struggling through my first fitness classes in the three weeks (today, my arms and legs ache), Matthias was struggling through the rain to pick up this year's Christmas wreathe, which is now hanging on the front door, bright with happy bursts of red berries. Other than those morning excursions, we spent the remainder of Saturday indoors, with the biathlon on in the background, grazing, and drinking Australian coffee (me) and Australia tea (Matthias).

Saturday night films are back on the agenda with a bang: The Menu, a blackly comedic horror film about a small group of people transported to an isolated island for an exclusive degustation menu with a celebrated chef, who end up getting a lot more than they bargained for. Horror is not my first-choice genre, but this was excellent and very, very clever (if not at all subtle). As well as the constant threat of violence, the true horror of the story is the characters unmoored and bewildered by the excruciating situation of social conventions overturned. ( Possibly spoilerish? )

This morning I walked through the chilly stillness of the morning to the pool, which was uncharacteristically empty for a Sunday morning: I had the fast lane to myself for the entire 1km swim, which has never, ever happened to me. That good start seemed to set me up for the day, which mostly involved working on the first of my planned Yuletide treats, interspersed with yoga, and a walk along the river with Matthias.

The evening promises cosy cooking, and cosy TV: the perfect close to a great couple of days.

I'll finish this post with a couple of fannish events whose sign-up periods are closing soon.

The first is the reccing event that goodbyebird is running:

Welcome to Rec-Cember, the month long multi-fandom reccing event. Let's recommend some fanworks! Let's appreciate and comment on those fanworks!

rec_cember . intro . sign ups

Sign-ups close today.

Second is fandomtrees, the multifandom gift fest that runs over the end of this year and the start of the next. The sign-up post is here, and you have until 5 December to sign up.