dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with me elsewhere

There's a blackbird that's taken to standing on the kitchen roof (just below our bedroom window), singing its heart out every morning around 6am to greet the dawn. It's like a natural alarm clock, and it's such a gentle introduction to each new day that I can hardly begrudge it.

I didn't know I needed a four-day weekend so badly until I had one, with four days stretching gloriously ahead of me, every hour my own to do with as I chose. It ended up being the perfect balance and mixture of activities, planned in such a way that everything worked out seamlessly, with even the weather cooperating. I'm good at this — organising holidays at home — but I so rarely have the opportunity.

I've described everything below in words, but have a representative photoset, as well.

This extended weekend's events can be grouped under a series of subheadings, as follows:

Movement
I swam 1km at the pool, three times: on Friday, Sunday, and today, gliding back and forth through the water, which was blissfully empty today and Friday, but too crowded for my liking on Sunday morning. On Saturday, I went to my classes at the gym, and then Matthias and I walked 4km out to Little Downham (about which more below), through fields lined with verdant green trees and flowering fruit orchards, watched by sleepy clusters of cows and horses, and then returned home the same 4km way. I did yoga every day, stretchy and flowing in the sunshine, listening to the birdsong in the garden. Yesterday, Matthias and I walked along the sparkling river, and then back up through the market, which was full of the usual Sunday afternoon of cheerful small children and excitable dogs.

Wanderings
As is the correct way of things on long weekends, we roamed around on the first two days, and stuck closer and closer to home as the days wore on. On Friday night, we travelled out into the nearby village of Whittlesford (via train and rail replacement bus), and on Saturday we did the walk to Little Downham, but beyond that I went no further than the river, the market, and the gym, and I was glad of it.

Food and cooking
The Whittlesford trip was to attend a six-course seafood tasting menu with wine pairings, which was delicate, exquisite, and a lovely way to kick off the weekend. In Little Downham, we ate Thai food for lunch at the pub, cooked fresh, redolent with chili, basil and garlic. I made an amazing

oliahercules fish soup for dinner on Saturday, filled with garlic and lemon juice and briny olives and pickles. Last night I spent close to three hours cooking a feast of Indonesian food: lamb curry, mixed vegetable stir fry, slow-cooked coconut rice, and handmade peanut sauce, and it was well worth the effort. We'll be eating the leftovers for much of the rest of the week. We ate hot cross buns for breakfast and with afternoon cups of tea. We grazed on fresh sourdough bread, and cheese, and sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Growing things
On Sunday, we picked up some seedlings from the market: two types of tomato, cucumber, chives, and thyme, and I weeded the vegetable patches, and planted them. I was delighted to see that the sweetpea plant from last year has self-seeded, with seedlings springing up in four places. The mint and chives have returned, as have the various strawberry plants. Wood pigeons descend to strip the leaves from the upper branches of the cherry trees, and the apple blossom buzzes with bumblebees.

Media
The fact that we picked Conclave as our Saturday film this week, and then the Pope died today seems almost too on the nose (JD Vance seems to have been to the Pope as Liz Truss was to Queen Elizabeth II: moronic culture warring conservatives seem to be lethal to the ageing heads of powerful institutions), but I enjoyed it at the time. It reminded me a lot of Death of Stalin: papal politics written with the cynicism and wit of Armando Ianucci, and at the end everyone got what they deserved, and no one was happy.

In terms of books, it's been a period of contrasts: the horror and brutality of Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, in which aliens descend to extractively rake over the remains of an Earth ruined by Cold War-era nuclear catastrophe, in an unbelievably blunt metaphor for both the colonisation of the continents of America, and the way human beings treat livestock in factory farming, and then my annual Easter weekend reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, about the implacable, inhospitable power of the sea, cut through with selfless human compassion. Both were excellent: the former viscerally horrifying to read, with aliens that feel truly inhuman in terms of biology, social organisation, and the values that stem from these, and unflinching in the sheer extractive exploitation of what we witness unfold. It's very of its time (for something that's so interested in exploring non-cis, non-straight expressions of gender and sexuality, it ends up feeling somewhat normative), and while the ideas are interesting and well expressed, I found the writing itself somewhat pedestrian. It makes me wonder how books like this would be received if they were published for the first time right now. Greenwitch, as always, was a delight. Women/bodies of water is basically my OTP, and women and the ocean having emotions at each other — especially if this has portentous implications for the consequences of an epic, supernatural quest — is my recipe for the perfect story, so to me, this book is pretty close to perfect.

I've slowly been gathering links, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll leave them for another time. I hope the weekend has been treating you well.

This weekend has been absolutely glorious, albeit somewhat tiring. The sky is cloudless and cornflower blue, the breeze is warm and gentle, and Matthias and I have made the first efforts towards getting the garden into shape this year. I planted poppies, marigolds and cornflowers in the raised beds, he mowed the lawn for the first time since late autumn, and we both sealed the deck with two layers of oil — messy, tedious work that made my legs ache, but that I'll appreciate later on. Here's a photoset of various blossoming fruit trees and other flowers in our garden.

Yesterday's two hours of classes in the gym involved dance fitness (instead of the regular zumba), in which we spent the hour-long class learning an entire dance routine from start to finish, which left me feeling jubilantly ecstatic. It reminded me a bit of doing dance classes in high school and after school when I was a teenager, and made me wonder if I'd enjoy doing some kind of actual dance classes now. The main problem with this is that I dance like a gymnast: i.e. I am incapable of dancing in shoes, and (as a consequence of having ten years of gymnastics drilling into me that one's body should be held as straight and unyielding as a board when undertaking any physical activity) I am incapable of moving my hips or chest with any fluidity. A gymnastics background does have some benefits (I pick up routines quickly and have a good memory for movement, I have very good balance, and a good sense of how different parts of the body interact and work together), but is severely limiting when it comes to most styles of dance.

Other movement this weekend included swimming through liquid sunshine for 1km this morning at the pool, and yoga next to a sunlit, open window. It does feel a lot easier to move when the weather is like this, that's for sure!

Matthias and I continued making use of our current MUBI subscription, and watched Crossing, a Georgian- and Turkish-language film in which an ageing Georgian woman, accompanied by an aimless but enterprising young twentysomething guy travel from Batumi to Istanbul to track down the woman's trans niece in order to fulfil a promise she made to her dying sister (the niece's mother). Once in Istanbul, they have no luck finding the niece, but drift into the orbit of a found family of sorts: a trans Turkish woman working as a sort of all-purpose advocate at an LGBT nonprofit organisation, and a pair of impoverished children who eke out a precarious existence scamming and selling tat to tourists. The film's title is very pointed: crossings of various kinds (over borders, back and forth on the ferry between Istanbul's European and Asian sides, and of course from gender assigned at birth to living openly as characters' real gender) feature throughout. It's a beautifully made film about people who've never quite fit in, brushing up against the rough edges of the world, and finding unexpected softness in each other — and a reminder, again, that Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities in the world (which makes me feel even more irritated that it's unlikely I'll be able to see it in person any time soon).

I only managed to finish two books this week: a Thousand and One Nights retelling, and a nonfiction work of political analysis that's already out of date.

The retelling is Every Rising Sun (Jamilah Ahmed), which I found worked in some areas and was weaker in others. She chose to set the retelling in medieval Central Asia (although her characters journey east via current day Iraq to join Saladin defending Jerusalem against the Crusaders), and I did enjoy reading a work of fiction whose geographical orientation was so different to how we normally perceive the world. I also appreciated the way Ahmed approached the source material (the frame narrative really does need to be retold as something of a horror story, rather than YA romance, which I've seen done before), and the folk stories told by her Shaherazade are fantastic. I take issue with some of the choices Ahmed made in order to finish the book with a sense of character growth and justice — I would have preferred something messier, I think.

The nonfiction work is Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, a slim essay on the global growth of authoritarianism that suffers by being published in 2021, and therefore outpaced by current events. Her assessment of the far right authoritarian turn in Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the US (and the globally interconnected nature of far right authoritarianism) is sound and persuasive, and the personal anecdotes serve to humanise and contextualise what could otherwise be a fairly dry book. She opens the book with a New Year's Eve party she and her centre right Polish politician husband hosted in 1999, making the point that within the next five years, she was crossing the street to avoid half the guests, and those guests were likely to deny that they had ever been guests of Applebaum and her husband, such was the political rupture and divergence. She closes the book with another party held in 2019, making the point that although many of the guests were her usual crowd (political and intellectual elites of the centre right), her social circles and political allies had now been expanded to include a lot of similar figures from the centre left — her own politics hadn't changed, but 'the Right' had drifted so far to extremes, and embraced authoritarianism so wholeheartedly that she'd been left behind. The weaknesses of the book are the weaknesses of Applebaum's own political ideology: she's a conservative at heart and has been well served by existing social organisation and institutions, and so sees little need for large scale systemic, structural change, and she views the world through a prism of authoritarianism versus democracy, which leads her to equate things like left-wing Twitter mobs 'cancelling' people or protesting the presence of their ideological opponents giving speeches at university campuses, with the governments of Boris Johnson or Victor Orbán. (Although I think the former are often ill-informed, ill-advised, or counterproductive, to equate them with the latter is ridiculous, because it does not take account of important things like their relative power.) All in all, an interesting read, but confirming things I already believed and knew, and very much outpaced by political events of the past four years. It reads almost like an artefact (even though based on what I've seen Applebaum writing and saying these days, I think it still remains broadly her position on both national and global politics).

Today it's so windy that one of the sheets I have hanging out to dry has blown off the line repeatedly. Although this is somewhat frustrating, the combination of the heat and the wind suggests this laundry will be dry in several hours. Everything is sunlit and floral, and accompanied by a chorus of birdsong, which feels audibly more present than at other times of the year. Yesterday I got my first hot cross bun from the bakery down the road: a highlight of the year which (unlike supermarkets, which start selling hot cross buns practically on 26th December) is possible only for about two or three weeks in the lead-up to Easter.

It's been a low-key, low-energy weekend — other than the usual morning trips to the gym and grocery shopping at the market, I've barely left the house, which suits me fine, as work continues to absolutely flatten me, and I need a very undemanding weekend to recover. Matthias and I did watch a film last night (La Chimera, an Italian film which on the surface is about a group of rather hopeless people in a crumbling village eking out a living by stealing Etruscan archaeological relics from underground burial sites, but in reality just hurls every piece of of symbolism about descent to underworlds, otherworlds, labyrinths, death, sacrifice and harvest at the wall to see what sticks), and I did drag him out today for a wander around the market square in the sunshine, looping back home via what we jokingly termed the middle class trifecta of posh cheese shop, posh toiletries/homeware shop ('Don't let me buy any candles,' I said to Matthias before we left the house, and then returned with two new candles), and independent bookshop, but that's it for the weekend. I now plan to immerse myself in a mixture of reading (I bookmarked a bunch of stuff from

peaked's recent fanfic exchange wrap-up post, and still haven't made a start on any of it), yoga, and lots of slow, fragrant, Iranian cooking. It should be good.

( This week's reading )

Yesterday, another annual event took place: a local farmer, and his young son arrived outside our house on a massive tractor, and cut all the grass in the vacant field over the road. That, along with the clocks changing over to daylight saving time last night, is a sure sign that spring is well and truly here.

That may as well be the theme of this weekend, for various reasons. On Saturday, I headed down to London for a demonstration in support of Ukraine. We marched from the Ukrainian embassy to the Russian one, and then had about an hour or so of speeches — the event was organised by Ukraine Solidary Campaign, so the speakers were Labour MPs, representatives of various unions (my union was there, but no one from it spoke), Ukrainian activists representing various civil society organisations, and a heart-wrenching speech from a young man who (aged 16) lived through 75 days of the siege of Mariupol before escaping.

Weirdly, given the dark place we are currently in in terms of European geopolitics, I felt a lot better after being part of this. My own rule of 'the antidote to despair is concrete action (especially involving physical movement, outside, with other people)' held true, and it was particularly helpful to listen to the specific things the MPs were saying in their speeches. I'm not good at estimating crowd sizes, but I'd say the numbers were probably in the thousands, which isn't massive, but isn't terrible. Most drivers (including buses) that passed us beeped in solidarity. It's no hardship to march in support of something that I'm fairly confident is a mainstream position across the whole UK; support for Ukraine is not a partisan issue here, apart from at the absolute extremes of left and right (even if our power — even at a political leadership level — to do anything about it is limited), so this was a protest to keep the fire alive, to lift spirits, and to remind Ukrainians that they are not alone. I saw another Dreamwidth friend mention in one of their posts that political action is like a muscle that you have to keep exercising, and I felt this was very much the case here. And it was cathartic to yell at the Russian embassy. Here's a photoset of placards (no faces, of course), plus vyshyvanka-clad dog.

I've already described the journey home in my previous post, so won't discuss that further here.

Today, I dragged my exhausted body off to the swimming pool, and dragged it through the water for 1km, and felt better for it. After a few hours back at home, our friends collected us for this month's walk with the walking group: 6km or so through the Norfolk fields outside the village of Hilgay. All our walks seem to feature some theme (horses, apples in an orchard, mud), and this walk's theme very much was snowdrops, which absolutely carpetted the landscape, and kept popping up in unexpected places. There was also a lot of interesting fauna, including swans, ducks, a buzzard, and a stoat. We opted to skip the rather creepy pub in Hilgay, and drove instead a few kilometres towards home, and stopped for a post-walk drink in the much nicer pub in Southery, which had a fire going in a little wood-burning stove, and offered a cosy respite from the wind and the cold grey skies.

Now I'm back home, with Matthias fretfully watching the results roll in from the German election, attempting to finish the last fifty pages of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which has been a great distraction this week. For obvious reasons, I've been finding it hard to focus on reading, but weirdly, a discursive, historical doorstopper, filled to bursting with interesting digressions and new-to-me corners of the past was exactly the right thing to pick up. Other than that, I've only finished one other book, a reread of KJ Charles's historical M/M romance novel, Band Sinister, which kept me occupied on the train to and from London.

I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Last night, it was so cold that we elected to put a bottle of wine outside the kitchen door in the garden, instead of in the fridge — and it chilled to a far cooler temperature than would have been achieved in the fridge. Everything is covered with a thick layer of spiky frost that doesn't melt away in the sunlight. I have been outdoors — to the gym and the market yesterday morning, and for a brief walk with Matthias today — but it's a bit too biting even for me. I like to look at the landscape, rather than be within it, if possible.

( Three books and a movie )

Beyond films and books, I've been keeping an eye on the prompts at

threesentenceficathon, and have been sporadically adding my fills to this series on AO3; I'll try to add some prompts of my own once a new post opens up.

fandomtrees is close to opening — there are a handful of requests which need at least one more gift before the collection is ready to go. If you're able to fill any of the prompts here, I'm sure this would be very welcome by the remaining participants. You can see a list of all requests on this Google spreadsheet.

I hope everyone's been having cosy and nourishing weekends.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had a particularly successful Yuletide this year, in terms of both the gifts written for me, and how the fic I wrote was received. (I was completely overwhelmed by travel and visiting my in-laws, however, and didn't have a chance to read anything else in the collection besides my own gifts, so for the first time since I participated in Yuletide, I unfortunately won't be able to include recs from the collection here.)

This year, I received not one, but two gifts, which I can now see were written by the same author.

The main gift was Paige/Arcturus fic for The Bone Season — a pairing and fandom which I have been requesting for ten years in almost every single exchange in which I participated. I'm so delighted that someone chose to write it for me at last, and to have dug into so many things that I love about these characters and this pairing.

Adamant (1024 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Paige Mahoney/Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Characters: Paige Mahoney, Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Additional Tags: POV First Person, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma Recovery
Summary:

Paige vs PTSD, with her usual feelings about battles.

Every year, I've hoped (while knowing that no one is entitled to such things) that someone might choose to write an additional treat for me, and for the first time in ten years of Yuletide participation, someone did! I feel very grateful and privileged, especially since the fic is for a tiny (even by Yuletide standards) fandom of which I thought I was the only person who felt fannish: Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy. Again, the fic really got to the heart of what I love about this canon, characters, and pairing — right down to the nostalgic 1990s tech and internet!

futurism (1259 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Space Demons Series - Gillian Rubinstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: pre Mario Ferrone/Elaine Taylor
Characters: Mario Ferrone, Elaine Taylor, Ben Challis
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Mario in the aftermath, reaching for a future.

( My three fics — The Dark Is Rising, and the Winternight series )

So that was my Yuletide. I have today and tomorrow remaining as holidays, before returning to work (from home) on Friday. I'm going to ease my way gently into 2025 with a long yoga class, doing the final bits of set up of my bullet journal, and starting a new book. I hope the first hours of the new year have been kind to you.

I returned home yesterday via four trains (and a rail replacement bus, ugh) through four countries and two sets of border control, over seven hours. Absurdly, there were fewer transport connections getting from Amsterdam to London than there were getting from London to Ely (and the latter leg of the trip took longer in hours than the trip from Brussels to London).

Christmas with Matthias's family was busy and tiring — the usual chaotic whirlwind — but it was nice to see everyone and I think our presence there was appreciated. We managed to spend one evening at the really good Christmas market one town over, which is my favourite part about being in that part of the world at this time of year, so I'm glad.

The two of us broke our return journey with 36 hours or so in Amsterdam, which provided a good kind of mental divide between the frantic busyness of family Christmas and our return to the familiar stillness of home. I'd been to Amsterdam once, nearly twenty years ago, but Matthias had never been (apart from transiting through the train station), and we packed a lot into the two days we were there: visits to the Rijksmuseum and a fantastic modern/contemporary art gallery, a canal boat tour, and two really great restaurants (one was quite possibly the best Indonesian food I've eaten in my life, the other was an exquisite tasting menu with wine flight on the final evening). What I remembered most about Amsterdam, however, was how much it rewarded walking around. Every canal is beautiful, and every little lane is like a jewellery box of surprises — a quirky shop here, a great Scandinavian bakery there. I'm glad my memory proved correct (and current, twenty years later) — we had a marvellous (if cold) time, wandering, and discovering, letting our feet and whims lead us on.

And then it was back on the trains, to collapse with relief into our own bed.

I've now got four days of blissful, blissful rest and stillness. We've picked up supplies for our customary New Year's Eve activities of grazing and watching films, and other than going for a couple of swims and walks (and out for drinks with walking group friends tonight) I don't plan to leave the house until I have to go in to Cambridge to work next Monday. I'll be cleaning, reading (undemanding rereads like the last Benjamin January mystery, which I'd forgotten was set during the time between Christmas Eve and the first days of the new year, and The Dark Is Rising, which I'd been unable to start on the solstice due to travelling), doing long, stretchy yoga classes, setting up my 2025 bullet journal, and above all resting my mind and my body, which are both absolutely exhausted.

I'll talk more about it in my reveals post on 1st January, but I couldn't close this post without at least mentioning what an absolutely perfect Yuletide it's been this year. As a writer, my three fics (the main gift and two treats) have been very well received — all three received absolutely rapturous, detailed comments by the recipients, and one of them seems (by my standards at least) to have become something of a hit. When I was signing up, I was aiming to get assigned to any of these three specific recipients (and then write treats for the other two), so I'm really pleased that my intentions proved well founded.

In terms of my own gifts, I feel particularly grateful this year. My main gift was for a fandom (and pairing) that I've been requesting fruitlessly for ten years in ever exchange in which it's been eligible, since the first time I signed up for Yuletide. I'd almost given up hope of anyone ever wanting to write it, so the notification in my inbox on 25th December was extremely welcome — and the actual fic itself is fantastic. And if that wasn't enough, for the first time ever, someone chose to write an extra treat fic for me, about characters from one of my first, dearest, and oldest fandoms of the heart — something about which I have been fannish for close to thirty years. It was absolutely wonderful to receive this lovely piece of writing whose author clearly shared a lot of my own feelings about these characters, and this canon. I'll post them all properly with more comments in the reveals post on Wednesday, so that the authors can receive proper credit.

The one drawback about all the travel (and my general mental state) is that I have had literally no time to read beyond my own two gifts in the collection, and am unlikely to have the chance before reveals. I may come back and dip in, since normally I read and comment widely, and put together a recs post, but I don't want to promise anything given how utterly, utterly exhausted I am.

I will leave you with a couple of photosets from my travels: wanderings in Amsterdam, and the fog in the hills above my father-in-law's place in Germany, plus some Amsterdam spillover photos. I cannot emphasise how utterly fog-blanketed everything was for the entire time we were in western Europe (including the train journeys through Belgium and France). I love that kind of weather: it's as if winter is draping the world in a soft blanket, telling us to slow down and rest.

This weekend has been absolutely glorious: beautiful light, beautiful autumn leaves, and lots of time spent out and about.

I spared myself the prospect of two hours of Halloween-themed Zumba yesterday, and just went to the first hour of my regular fitness classes, which meant I was out of the gym by midmorning, rather than lunchtime, then met Matthias at the market, where we bought a bunch of vegetables, fruit, and cheese. It started to rain just as we were queueing at the coffee stall, but it was so mild that I didn't really mind, as we dashed home between the raindrops, clutching our hot drinks.

After lunch, I made a good start on my Yuletide assignment, which is coming together well. I have plans for at least four treats this year, so I'm going to need to be fairly disciplined in order to get it all done — it's my tenth year doing Yuletide, so I want to make an effort.

After dinner on Saturday, we watched the Wynonna Earp film, which I can't really recommend. It had some good quippy lines, it was nice to see the old gang back together, but the whole thing felt a bit hollow: underdeveloped character motivations, and relationships that didn't quite ring true to where the characters had been when the TV series ended. I had felt that the TV show's final season was incoherent fanservice, and this felt like more of the same. Like Veronica Mars, another beloved TV show with sharp writing, great chemistry between actors, and a cult following, it's been allowed to go on too long — rewarding fans' passion and loyalty, but not necessarily with a good result.

Today started will all the Sunday staples: swimming, yoga, stewing fruit, and cooking crepes for breakfast. Then Matthias and I lay around reading for a few hours, before our friends from our hiking group came to pick us up and take us to the starting point of this month's outing: a village called Brinkley, 25km or so away, where we met up with our other walking companions, and set out. It was a gorgeous day: the sky was clear and blue, the air was still, and the autumn leaves were vivid and crisp. We walked over gently undulating hills, through fields and little tracks between picturesque villages, and over a narrow and rather stagnant river. The theme of the day was fruit trees (we ate windfall apples from the ground under a line of trees by the side of the road, and they were delicious), horses, and dogs. The latter featured heavily at our final destination: the cute little village pub in Brinkley, which had two massive fireplaces, and a rotating cluster of locals gathered near the bar, with their various friendly dogs. It was a cosy and welcome end to the walk before the drive home (just to be clear, the drivers among us drank orange juice and non-alcoholic beer, respectively).

Now I'm back in my living room armchair, catching up on Dreamwidth while Matthias and I wait for our Indian takeaway to be delivered for dinner. I could do with one more day of weekend, but at least the two days I've had have been great.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I picked the remainder of the apples from our tree, which necessitated climbing the tree itself and handing them down to him. Our fridge is now filled with close to 80 Bramley apples. Autumn is well and truly here!

We've just returned from our monthly walk with our walking group, a meandering loop through the fields (and sometimes some very overgrown, blackberry- and nettle-filled pathways, including one point where an elderly woman emerged from the undergrowth with her dog, informing us that she'd gone through the whole area with a pair of secateurs), on a walk that took us past a massive — and unexpected — three-day eventing equestrian competition, which at least explained where all the horse floats we'd seen driving past were going. The walk finished in an orchard, where we spent some time scrounging around for windfall apples under the trees, just to add to our fridge apple collection! The photoset from the walk is pretty much peak fenland autumn!

Matthias and I added an extra 6km or so onto the walk by walking out in advance to the village where it began, where we had Thai food for lunch in the pub (which is run by a Thai family) before meeting the others. We got home before 5pm (which is early for these things), and now I'm just lounging around, catching up with Dreamwidth for a bit before sorting out dinner.

The only books I've finished this week are a reread — Jo Walton's Arthurian Tir Tanagiri Saga duology, which I deliberately left until this point in the year, because Arthuriana, with its sense of fleeting beauty and irreparable loss, always feels autumnal to me. These books were among my very favourite when I was younger, and I was curious as to how well they would hold up. The answer is very well, and I seriously feel that they are probably the best Arthurian retelling published in this century that I've read, and I could make a case for them being the best Arthurian retelling of the current and previous centuries, depending on how I feel about T.H. White and Susan Cooper's books.

They're set in an alternative version of our own universe, told from the point of view of a female war leader serving under the Arthur figure (this is a world which has gender equality — to a point), and most characters, countries, and plot points are easy to map onto familiar characters from the legends and places and peoples from our own world. (The one exception is the narrator, who has no analogue, and indeed about whom Walton goes out of her way to emphasise has no analogue in a very clever moment that passed me by until this reread.) This retelling draws heavily from the Welsh Arthurian tradition, but later medieval versions are there as well, plus the medieval Irish Táin, and loads of other western European medieval poetry and stories.

Different Arthurian retellings choose to emphasise different things, and Walton's focus is on people's experience of social, political, and cultural rupture brought about by the departure of the equivalent of the Romans from Britain 40 years before the start of the first book, and the arrival of the equivalent of Christianity and the spread of this proselytising religion. Characters who are young adults at the start of the first book have experienced nothing but chaos and civil war, and are in essence fighting to restore a well-functioning political structure in which safety and justice are not dependent on enforcement at the hands of a single powerful ruler, and in which written law will live on and persist after the death of the king whose regime created such law. In other words, they are fighting to build something which they themselves have never experienced, but which their ageing parents describe as some kind of half-forgotten, nostalgic dream.

Walton writes the sheer logistical effort of this — in a way that emphasises the monumental task — in brilliant way, in which polite diplomacy and political marriages, the work of keeping supplies well stocked, the need to have reliable communication through trusted messengers across the length of the country, and the work of setting up communities with marketplaces and prosperous craftspeople is of equal importance to valiant military deeds on the battlefield, and in which all of these things need to work together, with all the personalities involved working harmoniously. She's also one of the few writers writing fantasy (or indeed historical fiction) in a pre-industrial setting in which I really feel that her characters actually believe in their various religions in a tangible way. (It helps that in this world, the divine is palpable; people converse with their gods, the elemental powers of the land can be called on to provide fresh water or safe passage in moments of crisis, characters use charms in their everyday lives to heal wounds, and curses made in earnest are felt in such a way that they become part of the fabric of the universe, and inescapable in their doom.) It makes her depiction of the disruptive, disorienting arrival of a proselytising, monotheistic religion in a world that has until that point been pluralistic and pagan feel real and believable, with characters' individual choices in the face of such change seeming understandably human. The books do a fabulous job of depicting people whose values are very different to our own in a way that doesn't whitewash these differences, but still makes you empathise with their dilemmas and choices.

For me, Arthuriana should have an elegiac tone, a sense that it's written in mourning for something aspirationally beautiful, with built-in flaws that, from the very beginning, inevitably lead to its destruction. There should be a sense of ideals never quite lived up to, whose loss is mourned nevertheless. Walton's books do this, and they do it in a way that is lovely, and that is full of heart. I'm glad I returned to them, and found them to be as I remembered, while discovering new little things that served to increase my admiration of the writing even more.

This week's open thread prompt is sparked by the sad news that, when I was walking to the pool, I realised that the council had cut down my favourite tree in Ely! I love trees: they're one of my favourite things to look at and photograph, and I get very attached to them. They're like familiar old friends, and they're one of the first things I notice when I'm in a new place.

So: talk to me about the trees that have meant the most to you.

( Arboreal talk behind the cut )

There was no customary Sunday Dreamwidth post from me this week, but thankfully that was for a very fun and delightful reason: I spent a good chunk of the weekend away in rural Suffolk, celebrating a wedding. The occasion was the marriage of

lowercasename, one of my oldest and dearest friends, to his (now) wife

hazlett92. I've known him for nearly 20 years, since he was a gangly teenager and I was a miserable twentysomething, and we both formed part of the weird, wonderful and precious community of a Philip Pullman fan forum message board. I've talked in the past about how (due to the utter indiscretion with which everyone on that forum treated their personally identifying information) we realised that not only were we the only two Australians there, but that we also lived around the corner from each other, had attended/were attending all the same schools, and were friends with various overlapping sets of siblings of different ages. I migrated to the UK for my studies, he did the same several years later, and both of us ended up finding love and choosing to build our lives here.

The wedding itself was lovely: tucked away in a former priory at the heart of a forest; other than the sound of conversation and music, the place was full of silent stillness, peaceful and serene. Both bride and groom have loads of creative and talented friends, which resulted in excellent speeches (both as part of the ceremony, and over the reception dinner), and poetry, music and singing as part of the evening's entertainment (including a hilarious dual recital by

lowercasename and his best person about their experiences attempting to cook in their share house kitchen when they were undergrads in Canberra), and the whole day just felt filled with love and sunshine (both literal and metaphorical).

Sadly, due to the timing of the event (a Sunday after school holidays had ended),

bethanwy_ and I were the only representatives of our group of Pullman forum friends, but we made up for it in sheer enthusiastic celebration: she, Matthias and I were the only people who danced without pause for the entire duration of the band's performance (over three hours), a feat which was praised by the bride, the groom, the groom's mother, and the band itself. (My attitude towards dancing at weddings: where else will you find such a perfect compilation of cheesy and danceable music, and, most importantly, spending the night dancing means you do not have to spend the night making awkward small talk with strangers, which is a win-win situation all around.)

The whole thing was simply wonderful, and I feel saturated in love, light, and the calm, green, stillness of trees.

After a sleepy taxi ride to the airport through the slumbering streets of Vilnius, an early-morning Ryanair flight that left miraculously on time, and an (even more miraculous) sail through Stansted, we arrived home before midday, to a hot, stuffy house, and a dry and feral garden that had somehow managed to not just survive two weeks without us, but also to grow fruit and vegetables in astonishing abundance. (Benign neglect is clearly the way to go with this garden!) Matthias and I have spent the past two weeks on holiday in the Baltic countries — a whirlwind tour that took us through eight cities (or rather six cities and two small towns) in four countries (moving at such a pace at the beginning that we spent the first seven nights of the trip in seven different hotels). This is the longest we've ever been away apart from trips back to visit my family in Australia, where we essentially stay put, so it was very exhausting — but well worth it!

The reason for the whole trip was the wedding of one of Matthias's school friends, who lives in Finland and was getting married to his Finnish fiancée; we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to add a visit to Tallinn, and then decided that when would we next have the chance to be in that part of the world, and added on some time in Latvia and Lithuania as well! We did the whole thing (other than the flights at either end) via public transport: ferry, trains (and an unintended rail replacement bus), which was logistically complicated (especially the trains between Estonia and Latvia, and Latvia and Lithuania, of which there are only one per day on each respective route), but a great experience.

Since I always regret not doing so when travelling, I put pen to paper every day with a few sentences in my paper journal, so I'd remember all the various things we did. I'm very happy to expand on anything noted here, especially if you are considering visiting the same places and want advice or recommendations.

( On the worldroad )

And that about sums it up. That was a lot of transcribing, so I'm going to ignore any typos that I discover later! I feel really fortunate to have had such experiences, and particularly appreciate that Matthias and I are such keen walkers, since it allows for a kind of sponteneity and serendipitous discovery that balances well with my own impulses to plan and schedule everything to a rigid degree. Walking means you can revel in the unexpected, encountered en route to the planned activities!

I have a few final impressions of the trip and region as a whole, but I will leave that to another post — but as I say, I'm happy to expand on anything mentioned here in the comments! I also have extensive photographic documentation of everything documented in writing above, over at Instagram (

ronnidolorosa, where I'm always happy to be added by people from Dreamwidth, although give me a heads up if your username there is different to your Dreamwidth one, otherwise I won't add you back).

There's been a lot going on — lots of travelling, lots of fun things, lots of tiring hot summer sun. This time of year, which is normally a lull at work, has stayed as busy as ever, which has been draining in its own way, and next week the stampede of new NHS staff will begin, so there's no chance of a quieter period this year, it seems.

Two weeks ago, Matthias and I met Mum in London for a long weekend. Matthias's job is actually in London, and normally he commutes three days a week, but for two days he was able to walk to work from our rental place in Waterloo — a lovely journey over the river. Mum and I did two legs of the Thames Path: Staines to Hampton Court, and Teddington to Putney (which involved a lovely stop over in Kew Gardens). These were long walks in quite hot weather, but we took it slowly and appreciated the varied scenery. Here is the photoset from those walks.

As well as the two day hikes, we managed to see three exhibitions: 'In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s', 'Tropical Modernism: Architexture and Independence', and 'Yinka Shonibare CBE: Suspended States' (the annual exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery; plus the Serpentine pavillion and Yayoi Kusama sculpture in Kensington Gardens).

As always in London, we ate incredibly well — Polish food, southeast Asian food, a couple of nice pub meals, and a new-to-me bakery just downstairs from our apartment.

Then it was back to Ely for the next working week.

This most recent weekend, there was a bit more walking, but closer to home and on a much smaller scale. On Saturday, Matthias and I took Mum out for lunch at one of our favourite village pub/restaurants, in Hemingford Grey. This involves a train to Cambridge, a bus along the guided busway to St Ives (where the statue of Cromwell was sporting a traffic cone hat — which sparked an unintentionally hilarious BBC news article), and then a walk across the fields, and through suburban woodlands to Hemingford Grey. We ate a relaxed meal out in the courtyard garden, and then headed home. I have a photoset here — you can see that it was a beautiful day.

On Sunday, we joined our hiking group for their monthly hike, although due to the weather and the fact that we'd all eaten a largeish lunch at the farm shop at the start of the walk, this ended up being more like an amble — strolling through the grounds of Wandlebury Country Park, where we saw highland cows, belted cattle, wildflower meadows, a magnificent orchard, and Ely like a little speck in the distance, the cathedral looking like tiny pieces of Lego.

And that's what I've been up to for the past two weeks. I'm granting myself comment amnesty, since I've been both busy and tired, but I have been keeping up to date with my reading page, and look forward to having a bit more time for Dreamwidth soon.

Now I'm going to collapse in front of the TV and watch the gymnastics, and try not to get too irritated with the BBC's somewhat annoying coverage and extremely annoying commentary. All discussion has been about Simone Biles's comeback (and the significant challenges that she's had to overcome), but Suni Lee's comeback has been equally difficult, and also deserves admiration.

I returned a couple of days ago from a week's holiday in Portugal with my mum. It was glorious, restorative, and coming back to home and work was exhausting. We managed to escape what sounded like a miserable week of weather in the UK for sunshine, swimming, and plenty of time spent outdoors.

The first three days were spent in Lisbon, where we stayed in the old Alfama district in a hotel where we ended up being given an entire apartment (with living room, kitchenette and garden) as a free upgrade. We wandered around the narrow streets, dodging the tiny yellow trams that whizzed past every few minutes, visited an old castle filled with peacocks, and then visited an absolutely wild art collection left as a museum by an eccentric wealthy Armenian in the 1950s (this is very worth seeing, and is free if you visit after 2pm on a Sunday). We caught a ferry across the river and walked along the waterfront under decaying industrial warehouses covered with graffiti, and ate delicious meals in restaurants perched on hills overlooking the whole city.

Then we got on a train, and travelled south to Lagos, a seaside town focused on outdoor tourism. We stayed in a serviced apartment a little out of the town — but ideally located for accessing the nicest beaches and (the reason why we'd chosen this town to visit) excellent day hiking trails. We spent a couple of days there, interspersing our walks with lots of swims in various beaches. The water was clear, sparkling, and incredibly cold — every ocean has its own character, and my experience of the Atlantic was definitely bracing, but highly recommended! Again we ate incredibly well — I'd researched extensively beforehand, meaning we found the one decent cafe-with-good-coffee-and-breakfast-foods in town, the fun rooftop-bar-with-tapas (plus shop selling tinned sardines, ceramics, and expensive homewares downstairs), the nice winebar, and the 'expensive' fish restaurant on the cliff above our favourite beach ('expensive' being a relative term, since a meal for two including bottled water, two glasses of champagne, two glasses of wine, two oysters, two main courses and a shared dessert cost about €60).

Then it was time for our return train, and another 36 hours in Lisbon, where we stayed in a different district, took a daytrip out to Belém for pastéis de nata and a museum which presented Portugal's history of seafaring, navigation and colonisation in the most unbelievably uncritical light, and on to Cascais for more communing with the ocean.

I had to get up early and leave for my flight back to the UK, and Mum went on for three days staying with an Australian friend who owns a house in another part of Portugal. I returned to thunderstorms and torrential rain (and the second worst turbulence I have ever experienced on a flight in my life), and a visit from Matthias's and my friends L and V, who needed a place to stay en route back to Vienna after being in the UK for a relative's 90th birthday party. It was great to see them, especially since the weather had cleared up by then, and we were able to eat our meal of cheese, charcuterie and sparkling wine out on the deck under the fruit trees.

Mum will be back tomorrow, passing through, before we're visited by E, another friend of ours who'll be in this part of the world to campaign for the Labour Party for the upcoming election — as you can see, there's a lot of coming and going, which definitely explains my exhaustion!

I would highly recommend Portugal as a place to visit — there are so many different things to do, depending on your tastes, the people are incredibly friendly, and the food is excellent (and very, very cheap by western European standards). You can see my photos on Instagram (

ronnidolorosa), which give an idea of how beautiful everything is, as well. There is one big caveat here, though: I only recommend Portugal if you are able-bodied with no mobility issues (and I'd go as far to say that you need to be comfortable travelling on foot and reasonably physically fit). It is incredibly hilly, with Lisbon in particular made up of lots of steep hills with narrow streets, narrow footpaths, all paved with irregular cobblestones. This is parodic to the point of being a widespread meme: 'Google Maps said it's a ten-minute walk — but it's in Lisbon *insert video of people pushing suitcases up endless sets of near-vertical steps*' Accessible it is not. I even had to carry my mum's suitcase in my arms for fifteen minutes up such a set of hills when we arrived, because she had a four-wheeled suitcase that couldn't be dragged behind her, and it was literally impossible to push the suitcase along on its four wheels as intended because the hills were so steep — be like me and insist on two-wheeler suitcases!

Today's post is a bit of a blissed-out sunny mish-mash. It's been a lazy weekend, almost like taking a deep breath before the frantic business I'm anticipating (for various reasons) for the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday I met Matthias at the market after my two hours of classes at the gym, picked up the final things we needed, then headed home, gulped down lunch, and headed out immediately again for the little outdoor fair outside the cathedral (which was raising money for the boys' choir). It was the usual mix of food trucks and craft stalls — although the draw for us (and the thing which brought us out of the house again, despite the grey skies and gusty winds) was the chance to buy champagne and little bowls of strawberries and cream, which we consumed on a park bench and tried not to be blown away. We might have lingered longer (or walked to the other side of town where two friends of ours were holding their annual plant sale in their garden), but the weather drove us home. I slowly cooked Burmese food for dinner, and then we tucked ourselves into the armchairs in the living room, where I read Leigh Bardugo's latest book (The Familiar, of which more later) in a single sitting.

Today, we woke naturally at about 5.30am due to the sunshine, and dozed on and off until it was time for me to walk to the gym for my 8am swim, which genuinely felt like swimming through liquid sunlight. I spent the morning after my return from the pool picking away at my

rarepairexchange assignment, which finally unlocked for me after many weeks of difficulty.

But the weather was too nice for us to remain sequestered indoors, so out we went again for food truck food from the market (Tibetan for me, Greek for Matthias), sitting under the trees in the courtyard garden of our beloved favourite bar/cafe. When we arrived, the place was empty, and after about ten minutes, every table was taken — such is the characteristic behaviour of British people when the sun finally deigns to shine.

Now I'm trawling through Dreamwidth, and trying to decide whether I should go out again for gelato or stay in the house — I suspect the gelato will win! I've been gathering Dreamwidth links like a magpie, and will share them with you:

Via

vriddy: the Japanese Film Festival Online in which 'a variety of 23 films will be delivered during the first two weeks, followed by two TV drama series for the subsequent two weeks. These will be streamed for free with subtitles in up to 16 languages, available in up to 27 countries/regions.' I imagine this may be of interest to some in my circle.

Some steps to take to ensure any eligible British voters in your life have the requisite ID and voter registration required by the deadlines to vote in the upcoming 4th July general elction, via

thissterlingcrew. There are particular concerns about younger voters, so do pass these details on to any 18-24-year-olds you know.

Staying with politics (in this case US), this Timothy Snyder essay really resonated with me, as his commentary and analysis generally does. Voting, for me (and treating elections seriously), is like the bare minimum tax we pay for the enormous unearned good fortune of being citizens of (albeit flawed) democracies.

On a lighter note, I just went on a downloading spree from these gorgeous batches of icons from

insomniatic (here) and

svgurl (here); perhaps you'll see something you like too.

And then I took a bunch of photos of all the fruit trees in our garden.

And finally, on to reading, and Bardugo's wonderful The Familiar. This is a standalone adult fantasy novel set in Spain during the early years of the Inquisition, and its focus is on the paranoid, terrifying antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-any-non-normative-Catholic-Christianity atmosphere of the era. Its protagonist, Luzia, is a young Jewish conversa, born into a family which for several generations has maintained its Jewish identity in secret, following religious and cultural practices as best as they can while removed from the Jewish community so necessary for those practices to find full expression. In addition to this dangerous heritage, Luzia is able to perform magic (in a stroke of genius, the mechanism for doing so is Ladino refranes or proverbs, and the act of speaking, and language as a kind of cultural and personal magic, are at the centre of the novel), which brings her to the attention of Madrid's aristocratic elite. This fame brings Luzia (and those around her) nothing but grief, and the novel as a portrait of the constant anxiety sparked by attracting the notice of the powerful is a brilliant, stressful piece of writing.

The Familiar really does feel at last like Bardugo's novel of the heart: my reactions to her previous fiction range from adoration to being left cold, but all have felt to me to have been written to the market, hitting on a winning trend at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way. She has, of course, been incredibly successful while doing so, and I would assume wrote with some degree of affection for this previous output — but The Familiar definitely feels like the first of her books that was written not to satisfy a specific trend in genre fiction, but solely for Bardugo's own need. The soul sings stories to us, and some of us are lucky enough to be able to give those stories voice, and sing back.

It's another long weekend here in the UK, although this time around I have to work on the Monday, so it's just a regular old weekend for me. We've managed to pack quite a bit into the two days nonetheless.

On Saturday morning, Matthias and I headed off fairly early into Cambridge in order to see Furiosa in the IMAX cinema. I'm glad we did so from an audiovisual perspective, since it was a great spectacle, and was served well by the format, but my feelings about the film as a whole are quite mixed. When I first heard George Miller was making a prequel about Furiosa, my immediate reaction was one of Do Not Want — and all those misgivings were confirmed. Fury Road was pretty much close to flawless (it's my favourite film), precisely because it left so much about its world and its characters unexplained, operating in an almost mythic space in which viewers fill in the blanks according to their own experiences. I didn't need Furiosa's backstory, I didn't need to know every little detail about the social structure of the lives of the inhabitants of the wasteland — and in general I'm kind of fed up with this perception that fannishness of a particular fictional universe equates to a desire to see every blank spot fleshed out and every plot hole filled in. The chase scenes, as always, were incredible, visually it was beautiful, the world felt vivid, three-dimensional and lived-in, and Chris Hemsworth was clearly having the time of his life playing a character who was essentially Thor, but evil — but overall, this was not a film that I needed to exist.

We were out of the cinema in time for a late-ish lunch at a Korean restaurant, then sat for a while under the trees in a pub beer garden before heading back to Ely. It was warm and clear enough for us to eat dinner outside on the deck, which was wonderful.

I'm writing this post a bit earlier than I would usually do on a Sunday because we will be heading out after lunch for the monthly walk with our walking group. Unfortunately the lovely clear weather of Saturday has blown away, and it's been raining on and off all morning, with thunderstorms promised. We'll see how that goes. The walk itself will be flat and easy (there's no other kind of walk in this area, given the landscape), along the river and through fields in a loop of about 5-7km. An easy Sunday stroll, and hopefully without rain!

The other thing that happened this weekend was author reveals for

once_upon_fic, so I'll stick my recs for the collection in this post, now that I'm able to give credit to the authors.

I must start, of course, with my lovely gift, which gave me exactly what I wanted in terms of character dynamics from Tochmarc Étaíne fanfic:

Carried by the Wind (1468 words) by Nelja-in-English
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Irish Mythology
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Étaíne/Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Characters: Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaíne (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Love Potion/Spell, Metamorphosis, Dreams, Magic, Temporary Character Death, Mentions of Midir and Aengus
Summary:

Fúamnach tells the story, this time. And when it gets away from her, she gets help.

I also enjoyed these other fics in the collection:

Gold Tree by

water_bby (I assume the user has archive-locked it so I can't embed it)

Blush-Rose (2893 words) by RussetFiredrake
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid | Gold Tree and Silver Tree (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Craobh-Òir | Gold Tree & An Darna Bean | The Second Wife (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid), An Darna Bean | The Second Wife/Am Prionnsa | The Prince (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid)
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Fairy Tale Retellings, First Kiss, Curiosity, Bisexual Female Character, implied threesome
Summary:

A prince's new bride fears she is in a story where her curiosity will be her downfall. She finds herself in a different tale altogether.

A Rose of a Different Form (1438 words) by BardicRaven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Belle | Beauty & La Bête | Beast (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Le Marchand | Merchant (La Belle et la Bête)
Characters: Belle | Beauty (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | The Beast (La Belle et la Bête), Le Marchand | The Merchant (La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête)
Additional Tags: Redemption
Summary:

As soon as sundown came on the day that the merchant was to have brought his daughter and no-one had darkened his doors, the Beast knew that the merchant had lied

Grant Me Clemency (4039 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Bertilak de Hautdesert & Gawain
Characters: Bertilak de Hautdesert, Gawain (Arthurian), King Arthur - Character
Additional Tags: time loops, A Game of Questions, Rash Actions Lead to Rash Consequences, Ruminations
Summary:

Sir Gawain is trapped in an endless cycle of repetition, from Arthur's hall to the green chapel, attempting to find a way out of his predicament, but he has no earthly idea what he is supposed to change, or who is responsible for this cycle. So he plays the game again, hoping this time might be the one that finally breaks it.

when you return, go to the sea (14840 words) by celaenos
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride), Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Human Husband (The Selkie Bride), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2024, Sister-Sister Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Family Feels - Struggling To Be A Good Guardian, Family Feels - Fraught Sibling Relationship, Fairytales & Folklore, One Shot, Original Character(s), Fic Exchange, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Summary:

She learns about her ma three days after her seventh birthday—but she doesn’t learn the whole of it until many years after that.

My own assignment was another fic for 'The Selkie Bride' folk tale. Women/the sea: my ultimate OTP.

Ripples (2035 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Selkies
Summary:

The sea takes, and the sea gives back its own unexpected gifts.

Two of the selkie's daughters try to find their way through uncharted waters in the wake of their mother's departure.

And now the sun has come out! Let's hope the weather holds during our walk.

It rained all week, and then on Saturday, the clouds rolled back, unfolding across the clearest, brightest winter skies. This was opportune and perfect, since Matthias and were joining friends (or, I guess at this stage, friends of friends would be a more accurate description) for their monthly walk. (In line with my aspirations to lead a slightly less restricted, hermit-like existence, this walking group seemed like the perfect, low key way to open up my world somewhat.) On the last Saturday of every month, they pick a local-ish hike, and whoever wants to come joins in.

Yesterday's walk was circular: 8km or so across the fields and woods near Stetchworth. Like everywhere in this area, it was a pretty flat landscape, and because it had been raining all week, it was muddy, soggy going — which made what would otherwise have been quite an easy amble somewhat tough going. My boots ended up caked in mud, and although it didn't feel physically challenging at the time, once I'd stopped moving, I realised my legs hurt a lot — in a good way. I imagine in summer it would be a very different experience, but mud is an occupational hazard in this part of the world at this time of year.

I could not get over the sun-drenched expanses of sky, sweeping above, clear blue interspersed with cottonwool dots of low-hanging clouds. After what feels like weeks of grey, the contrast was remarkable, and really did a lot to lift my mood (which has been very low for what feels like a very long time) — I imagine being out in the open air, with other people played its part as well. This photoset gives you a good idea of the whole vibe.

We had time for a quick drink in the garden of a seventeenth-century pub in Woodditton, trudged back across more fields and forests beneath the setting sun, and made it back to the carpark where we'd started in the last moments of daylight. As we were driven back to Ely, the moon rose, and hung, huge, yellow, and low to the horizon, looming above us as we made our way through the darkening fens, adding to the magical air of the whole journey.

Today was a more typical weekend day: swimming through sunshine first thing in the morning, river loop walk with Matthias ending up in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar eating food truck food for lunch, a challenging yoga class this afternoon just prior to opening up Dreamwidth and composing this post.

It's been another slow week, reading wise (my reading has not been helped in general by my low mood), but I did finish a single book: Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees), an early 20th-century fantasy classic that I'd always meant to pick up, and had the serendipity to find left out on the front step in a box of books being given away for free by a neighbour down the road. (This is a good street for such things — now that I've read the book, I'll give it away myself once I've gathered together a few more books I no longer want to keep.)

Lud-in-the-Mist is a strange, meandering, fable of a book — it's always interesting to read early fiction with fantasy elements published before the conventions of the genre were established (and indeed before fantasy was perceived as being a firmly distinct genre). It's set in an indeterminate fairytale world whose inhabitants have anxiously banished any thought of the magical and fantastic — to the point that it's a social taboo to even mention them — but, as in many similar stories, the fantastic continues to encroach on the human world, with potentially dangerous consequences. I always love reading stories in which the the otherworld and the human world bleed into one another, their boundaries porous and interwoven, their inhabitants interdependent in spite of their best endeavours. The fairies of Lud-in-the-Mist are uncanny and inhuman in the best folkloric tradition, and the story is told with a resonant, lyrical beauty.

Beyond that, I've been finalising my Once Upon a Fic signup (in the end, I went with the same fandoms as last year, since I still feel there are good stories to be told in those for which I've already received gifts, and some are fandoms which I've requested before without luck), and gearing up for the upcoming work week. I'm hoping the joy and light and hope of this weekend will be enough of a drastic reset to carry me through — the start of a springtime of the mind, as it were. For now, I'll build up some kindling in our wood-burning stove, turn on the string lights, and light some candles: warmth and cosiness, shining through from the end of one season and the tentative start of the next.

This weekend feels more efficient than others so far this year — I've done almost everything I wanted to do, and it's only 1.30pm on Sunday!

Every year, I know this specific

snowflake_challenge prompt is coming: In your own space, create a fanwork. And every year, I swear I'll start working on something so that it will be ready to post by the time the prompt comes around, and every year I end up being completely unprepared.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of metallic snowflake and ornaments. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

However, this year I'm lucky, in that

threesentenceficathon is also happening, with some great prompts, and so I have fanworks ready to post! I've grouped all my fills together in an AO3 series, so if I fill more prompts, they can just get added on, but at the moment there are three ficlets posted. The fandoms covered so far are Greek mythology (Hades/Persephone), Peaky Blinders (Ada Shelby), and the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale (Rumpelstiltskin/Miller's Daughter). There are a couple of other prompts that caught my eye, so I'll see how many more I can add.

halfamoon will be running again this February. This is a fourteen-day fest focusing on female characters. Every two days, there's a new prompt, for which you can create fanworks, or share recs for other people's work that fits the prompt. The prompts list for this year is out in advance.

The detailed nomination statistics for last year's Hugo Awards have
finally been made public, and there seem to be a lot of problems (most notably, a number of works or individuals that were eligible for shortlisting and achieved the requisite number of votes to be shortlisted appear to have been arbitrarily ruled ineligible for reasons that are as yet unclear). Cora Buhlert's blog post is probably the best starting point, as it's a good summary in its own right, and links to pretty much every other piece of discussion of the matter.

Reading-wise it's been a slow week. I've only finished one book, The Last Sun (K.D. Edwards), the first in a series of urban fantasy books in which characters with supernatural abilities have washed up on the shores of Earth after their home in Atlantis was destroyed, and in which powerful, aristocratic Houses (based on tarot — the Tower, the Lovers, the Hermit and so on) vie for control of their new, closed community. Our point-of-view character is the last remaining survivor of the destroyed Sun House, and he works as a sort of supernatural private detective for hire.

It's incredibly tropey, everyone has incredibly angsty backstories and unresolved trauma, and in general I found it fun in an escapist sort of way. I wish more of the secondary characters were women, and that we got to know more of the interior lives of the female characters we do meet, but hopefully there's more of that as the series progresses — it's not going to stop me reading future books, nor indeed the free short stories that the author has posted online. In fact, once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth, I'm going to read any of those that fit chronologically with what I've read so far.

The current

snowflake_challenge prompt is short and to the point: Rec Us Your Newest Thing.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of snow-covered trees and an old barn in the background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

My newest thing is not new so much as an old thing to which I've recently returned: Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa mystery series.

( Cut because this got really long; warning for mentions of slavery )

fandomtrees has just gone live, and I've received some delightful gifts, representing the full spread of fandoms that I requested, which is particularly pleasing.

sunshine304 made me some absolutely stunning Babylon Berlin icons,

ninthfeather made a great batch of Six of Crows icons, and

hekateras wrote me a very creepy and atmospheric folklore-inspired fanfic:

Harvest (823 words) by Hekachoc
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slavic Mythology & Folklore, Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Polednice | Lady Midday (Slavic Mythology & Folklore), Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Animal Death, Near Death Experiences, Death, Folklore, Deities
Summary:

Some minutes pass, but it is always midday.

I made two contributions to the fest: some vegetarian recipe recs for

doomedblade, and some Six of Crows fic for

isilloth:

Caught inside every open eye (1791 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Characters: Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary:

'My days of clambering up buildings and sneaking around rooftops as part of some dangerous and complicated heist sparked by your secretive and cryptic whims are long over!'

Inej and Kaz work together on one last job.

I love Fandom Trees, and think it's a really fun event, so I'm glad it went fairly smoothly this year. I hope everyone else who participated had a good time, and received some nice gifts!

Happy New Year to everyone! Matthias and I saw out 2023 in our usual way — with canapes, champagne, and films at home, and it was cheerful and relaxing and cosy. I wasn't quite intending to wake up at 7am, but in the end it was nice to be up and about in the very first sliver of the morning, drinking tea, eating a cooked breakfast, and chatting about which books with which we planned to start our 2024 reading. We then went out for a looping, 5km walk along the river and through the sleepy suburban streets, and back — via the coffee rig in the market square — past the cathedral, drenched in silvery sunlight, watching the canal boats and swans drift by. Here's a little photoset of the transition from one year to the next.

It being 1st January means two things: Yuletide reveals, and the start of

snowflake_challenge. I'm planning to participate in a low key way in the challenge this year: I'll do all the prompts, but I'm not going to link them in the comm. I know this goes somewhat against the spirit of the thing, but I found dealing with the increased replies overwhelming at times last year, and this feels like a compromise that will keep things manageable. But more on Snowflake later: let's get to the Yuletide recs!

I only make rec posts for the exchange once authors have been revealed, because it feels unfair to share all these things I've enjoyed without the authors getting credit, hence why I always wait until 1st January. I'm pleased to see that several of my favourite fics that I'm reccing from this year's collection are written by friends!

( Nine recs behind the cut — mainly book fandoms )

I wrote four fics this year — my main assignment, two treats in the main collection, and one treat in the Madness collection, which seem to have been well received, so from my perspective, this has been a good Yuletide all around: a great gift, a good reception for my own writing, and a collection with some fantastic pieces of work.

( My four fics behind the cut )

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of horse drawn red coach in snowfall. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Today's prompt is:

In your own space, update your fandom information.

My intro post remains up to date, which is pleasing. Something which I had been intending to do for last year's challenge, but which never happened, was writing a template post for fanwork exchange letters, with prompts for all the fandoms I'm likely to request. The idea was that this would save me time and avoid the need to go trawling back through multiple previous letters. I can obviously update it with new fandoms if I decide to request them. I'm really happy that the template letter post is all set up — it should save me a huge amount of time in the future.

And that's

snowflake_challenge Day 1 completed!

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Beyond Selidor

A song with a mission

Entries tagged with me elsewhere

'And everywhere a great smell of the sea'

As we face the sun

Do you know the language of flowers?

One foot in front of the other

Dance for life

Yuletide reveals

Every note lingering, lifting the night up

An apple and a berry plant comes with a house

What a way to arrive — I'm the sun in your eyes

Friday open thread: meaningful trees

Dancing in the forest's heart

New shorelines, new seas, new rivers running through me

The past two weeks

The sea, the tiles, the hills

Nothing is ever just one thing

Drowned in a sea of sound

From off to on

Towards the within

Old loves through new eyes; Fandom Trees reveals

Yuletide reveals and recs; Snowflake Challenge begins