Janet Miles

This is your weekly read-in-progress post!

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That's what we're being driven to. Nursing is probably pissed at me because I refuse to do one of my classes online. It's for the freshman. No, we're not. So far these online classes are a nightmare of failing software.

We had a pointless all-school meeting (we do every month) and I'm like why are we voting on this? It's mandated by the state. We have to do it.

Sigh. And again no one but me cares.

Maybe others might have thoughts/suggestions. I'm thinking I'm revealing one character's backstory too much too soon. I think I would like it to remain hidden a little longer but the problem is Asha (a detective) knows his secrets. Lilian (her new partner) would ask about this guy. His employee is the sex worker/dancer who is killed in chapter 1. She would ask. So I'm like great now everyone knows his secret and we're only in chapter 4.

I'm not sure I see a good way around it other than maybe his history isn't as well known as I thought but really that makes no sense either. He was taken by a m ajor sex trafficker as a child. Asha knows what Goren did to children. He was one of those they couldn't make things stick to (rich buddies buying him out of trouble) so not sure how to write my way out of this hole. Maybe it's not as disappointing as I think it is.

Yoga went really well tonight. She modified it so I could do 90% of it but one thing I did (and easily) was one that it was easy to move past my natural joint movement into bad zones (which I often can't tell because of my condition) and I think that elevated butterfly move pulled my groin. Rolls eyes.

What I Just Finished Reading:

With Friends Like These by Alissa Lee


What I am Currently Reading:


Violet Thistlewaite is not a villain any more so far, I really like this one

Back to Zombie Day Care just to get it over with and tick off a few challenge boxes


What I Plan to Read Next: The Death Card (an arc I just got in the mail) and The Book woman of troublesome creek for the book club

The doctor's office called me this morning. They STILL wouldn't tell me a damn thing. I had to make an appointment to go over to their office day after tomorrow and they say they're going to tell me then. oh, and did I mention I have to walk up a big ass hill to get to their office? With arthritis? because there's no bus?
At least I had a nice time yesterday. I went over to a local theater to try to get a price on a show I wanted to see (I found out later it's too expensive) but that theater happens to be near L's house so we wound up hanging out and having a nice time and going to dinner. I had a really good pizza.

Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Nie Mingjue & Nie Huaisang
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 100
Content Notes: No Archive Warnings Apply, stern martial culture, the implicit angst of their situation.
Creator Tags: Drabble, Fluff

Creator Links: (AO3) Zdenka; (Dreamwidth) zdenka

Theme: Siblings, Comfortfic, Cuddling Snuggling & Bed-Sharing, Drabbles, Family, Fluff, Kidfic (as kids)

Summary: Nie Mingjue tries to be stern with his younger brother and fails. (The Nie brothers as children.)

Author’s Notes: Translation into Русский available: (AO3-locked): Здесь безопасно by TiokDragon.

Written for 100words amnesty week for the prompt "indulgent".

Reccer's Notes: The Nie life expectancy means that poor Mingjue is already having to contemplate succeeding his father as Clan Leader. And grooming his little brother as his own successor in turn; it’s like those aphids so short-lived and desperate to survive that they’re born already pregnant.

Which makes this moment when a child allows himself to treat a child like a child all the more poignant.

Fanwork Links: Here is Safe, by Zdenka:
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59174212
Dreamwidth: https://100words.dreamwidth.org/690464.html
Collections: 100 Words.

Tsukiko entertains her former high school teacher with an extraordinary tale.

Parade by Hiromi Kawakami

It's the season for spring sales and for less than 2 USD, you can get Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders on Steam or the Switch store.

PLOT: You play Di Renjie a.k.a. Judge Dee in the early days of his career. After gaining recognition in Penglai, you are called upon by Empress Wu to solve a string of murder cases in Chang'an.

Recommended if you like:
- Short games (a little more than 5 hours of play)
- Point-and-click mysteries (pixel art style)
- Puzzles
- Serial killer storylines
- Historical Chinese settings + figures

The music is nice too, very atmospheric!

(Also wrote a longer write-up about it here.)

In glad-i'm-not-a-farmer news, we hit freezing around 4 am this morning. While we aren't going low enough to harm the blueberries (no fruit set yet) the king blossoms on the apple tree will be harmed. Fortunately apples have a small defense in that they don't open all the blossoms at once.

This year i do have multiple pawpaw blooms on multiple trees so i could go do some hand pollination. Apparently, very few blossoms get pollinated and with the asymmetric flower count on trees and the need for cross pollination, i think a little help would be wise.

--== Rest ==--

Yesterday i think a few things triggered me at work: i'm using a new to me database tool and i was getting odd SQL failures. I suspect that's just the sort of thing on a project i have procrastinated on to trigger more procrastination. I don't think i had quite gotten to self blame, but i definitely hit the "this is what happens when work goes stale" thought - one step from self blame. I don't know why the error indicating i don't have permission occurs but using a different pane in the app works. I don't know that i need to sort out the difference.

The other was a discussion with legal, where i apparently surprised them with the existence of an application and -- while this may make my design work trivial --  who wants to surprise lawyers (except, of course, opposing counsel).

Then the dermatologist appointment needed me to reveal my skin again in places i wasn't excited to disrobe, and the trainee doctor kept repeating my "twice a week" dosing schedule as "twice a day on weekends" which, wtf. I haven't checked what was recorded. Also, freaking impossible to pronounce meds.

Yay me, i got to the end of the workday without too much avoidance, but i had no energy for anything else. So after work i didn't feel like setting an intention and i acknowledged i needed rest.

I finished reading a fantasy novella which, yes

This month is almost over, so, let's hear it. *g* How did it go with your fannish creativity?

Did you manage to make a thing?

Created fanart or made vids? Wrote fic or meta? How about picspams, link collections, character mood boards, themed playlists, promo posts, or whatever else you create for fannish enjoyment?

Here's the place to share it with us! Leave a link in the comments, or elaborate on it as much as you want.

Just finished: To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. I absolutely loved this—it was a worthy sequel to the first one, and I ended up kind of binge-reading it because it's so compelling even though for the first three quarters, nothing much of anything happens. It's just a slow burn of political tensions so by the time things explode, you should have seen it coming but maybe don't, because as wise and savvy as our heroine is, she's still a 16-year-old girl navigating school, relationships, and family.

I immediately went to one of my Discord servers to squeal about it and was rewarded with some uncomfortable speculation about the author's heritage so I am hoping those rumours aren't true because I need her to be as cool as she seems.

Grendel by John Gardner. I have been meaning to read this for ages as it's one of those books where when people get to know me, they'll say "oh have you read this" and I'll say "no but it's on my list." Anyway it lives up to the hype. I don't know that the idea of telling a well-known story from the monster's perspective was all that new in the 70s, but it's far more than that. It's a literary masterpiece in terms of the prose, which is squelching and visceral, and it takes some unexpected philosophical turns, especially the bits with the dragon and the mad peasant, that feel fresh and relevant even today.

Currently reading: Always On by Helena Trooperman. And now we're back to the world of indie SF. This one is about an inventor, single mom to five children after her husband's death, struggling to get her career back on track. She discovers a way to power cellphones through human static electricity, which brings her in direct conflict with Big Oil. It's pretty interesting, brought down a little by some strange dialogue choices, but overall compelling character and a cool type of plot that the genre doesn't usually do anymore.

Because not a lot of interesting things happened today.

Let's talk fannish 50 and this time it's all about the last episode of The Amazing Digital Circus.

( hjsakldfhl, and yes there will be spoilers )

And a few more queries.

Freeforms Tagset:
Nominator of Woldbuilding - Hinge is in an arranged marriage with A and but is actually in love with B. A & B catch feelings for hinge:
I approved this as is, but in hindsight I'm not so sure this is Worldbuilding so much as Scenario. Would you be terribly offended if I deleted this tag and re-upped it with the Scenario prefix? Or is there something about the Worldbuilding prefix that is particularly crunchy for your id?


Relationship Tagset:
SVSSS nominator(s) - please double check your noms. If they haven't been approved, it's because they are lacking both the designated Hinge and the disambiguation.

For everyone else who relationship tags haven't been approved - please ensure they are disambiguated, thank you! I'd prefer it if the disambiguation came after the Hinge to make it easier for me with keeping tags where they belong, but I have been approving things where that isn't the case.

Thank you!

I always make my own cards for valentine's day, because commercial cards just do not hit that sweet spot. This year - nice picture of a prehistoric armoured lump of a crab with "Our Love is like a Horseshoe Crab" (Totally not original - plagiarised from Valentine's Day for Naturalists by Bird & Moon comics)

The card is still on the mantelpiece because Himself really likes it. Last week I had the chimney swept. The sweep was too polite to comment directly, but he was giving it some serious side-eye inbetween chatting about chimney copings.

Had some English Afternoon tea. It's been two weeks since I had the X rays and almost two weeks since I had the ultrasound and the blood tests and I still haven't heard anything about any results so I tried calling the doctor's office and the woman who answered the phone wouldn't tell me anything. They were supposed to call me!

Telling the truth can make you unpopular... or put you into real peril.

Five Stories About the Dangerous Business of Truth-Telling

A brief guide to creating plausible planets.

How to Build a Planet by Poul Anderson & Stephen L. Gillett

As the temperatures swing here, from uncomfortably warm (i had to stop the HVAC from cooling last night, despite it being welcome) to chill (no frost warning yet), i wonder if our average is... average? Probably not. The warm is far too warm.

The "king bloom" of the apple blossoms opened yesterday. The other apples seem quite behind: the shade of the pines makes a difference. Somehow the tree has pollinated in previous years: i hope the bees can make it work this year. Blue berry blossoms are opening and inviting bees as well. I should probably give hand pollination of the paw paw a try.

Yesterday's executive functioning went well, remarkable after a month of flailing a bit. I might be on the edge of figuring out something. I did realize my image of what rest looks like is remarkably dim and fuzzy. For Other People it is the lounge chair by the pool or the ocean. There wasn't much rest in my growing up: the morning coffee my parents shared with each other on the weekend inevitably exploded into an argument as they tried to plan what they were going to do that day, a weird lesson in intimacy, communication and, i realize, rest and doing. For me, i think of when i was really sick as a child and spent the time in bed with scissors and construction paper.

I'm suspicious i rested on Sunday, and it didn't look like rest at some angles. There were lists and check boxes and time boxes. On the other hand, there weren't any intentions that lasted longer than ten minutes or maybe twenty. There was laundry. (The air while filled with pollen is dry. The Bruno bed pads and rags dried so quickly!) There was acceptance i was tired from the physical labor on Saturday.

This time the blood sugar stayed over 400 most of the day and crashed out just before water aerobics. That went much the same except I think I hurt my shoulder this time (she has two exercises I've never done in any water aerobics and it's easy to do them wrong)

Today was my writing zoom meet up. went well. I've pretty much pushed the new novel almost to the 10K mark (I'm like 230 words short). So I'm 1/8 of the way there in just a couple weeks. Yay.

I also owe seta_suzume an apology. There was a name change in Easy's sister's name but when I ran the find a word thing it didn't pick up on it. Side eyes word.

It's music monday 30 weeks of music. This week's prompt is 18 a song that makes you smile Share your faves too.

( I put in a few. I'm sure there are 100 more )





here's the whole prompt list

( It's under here )