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damkiannaWHAT A PERFECT TIME FOR THIS TO BE GOING AROUND.
So what have you been up to?
Simultaneously not that much and SO MUCH, because it felt like a lot and yet can be summarized pretty quickly in the answer to ...
Major life changes? Same old same old?
... this question! Halfway through June,idriya and I discovered that our landlord intended to sell our place, though this wasn't confirmed until the week after, which then gave us five weeks to find a new apartment—which, I'm sure that's not the worst deadline anybody's had when moving in the history of ever, but I wouldn't have objected to having a little more time to deal with it.
Happily, we found a new place with more space and only slightly higher rent, still in the same town. (It is right next to the interstate, but I don't mind the white noise—it's only the louder motorcycles that really bother me so far.) At this point I just need to finish unpacking my books, so everything's pretty much settled again, but boy was that ever not fun. :P
On the upside, just had my annual review at work and the comments were basically all positive, which is a great feeling and has done wonders for my anxiety. (At my last job, I was a weekday person at a place that ran seven days a week, and I struggled a lot with nausea and panic on Monday mornings because I was constantly afraid that something had happened over the weekend that meant I would be fired. Good times.)
What fandom are you in/do you spend most of your time in?
I don't even know how to answer this—I hardly ever really leave fandoms, so honestly I'm in most of them. /o\ Lately there's been a lot of Daredevil, Poldark, Starsky & Hutch, and Robin of Sherwood going in, of all things; and, aside from the bedrock constant of A:tLA/tLoK, some Mad Max, Sinbad, and Battle Creek coming out. *hands* I had a brief due South retrospective while pulling together a recset for a friend new to the fandom, and discovering that Hawaii 5-0 was still airing (who knew?) sent me back to read a couple of my favorite old fics.
Where do you hang out online?
My RSS reader, honestly, which permits me to consume Tumblr without having to actually interact with it, and to read my dwircle without having to face my guilt spiral over not posting for so long. /o\
What are you reading?
A weirdly large amount of historical non-fiction, considering how strongly my tastes have always run toward SF&F.idriya bought me a book about Dowager Empress Cixi that I'm still working my way through—my favorite thing about it is the time it spends on the friendship she had with Dowager Empress Ci'an (they took over the government and raised the late emperor's son together! YES).
What are you watching?
Just finished rewatching the first four episodes of Poldark withidriya, and we're stopping there because we like to end things on high notes; we're also working on Daredevil, including some episodes I skipped the first time around. (I spoil myself for things, and then am content to skip ahead to parts I know I'll like. This doesn't work when I'm watching things with my sister.) As noted above, I'm also working my way through Starsky & Hutch (almost done with S3, skipping some because you couldn't pay me to watch the blackface episode), and Robin of Sherwood (still in S1, though I skipped forward briefly just to watch Lewis Collins's guest spot).
What are you making?
/o\ A GIANT PILE OF HALF-FINISHED THINGS. With the move and all, I've basically just been writing down whatever hits me without any attempt at self-control—which means bits and snippets and not nearly enough Avatar!Katara. In non-writing terms: nothing whatsoever. I haven't been organized enough to crochet in AGES.
What are you squeeing about today?
Not precisely squeeing, but Major Crimes has been a real balm, being something I like and trust to be pretty consistently enjoyable but do not feel any need to generate fannish output for. \o/ I'm also pretty thrilled about![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
femslashex coming around again—I didn't nominate and am not planning to sign up, but I do hope to write some treats if I can.
If you could rope old fandom friends into a new fandom, it would be...
Well, I mean, if there's anyone who somehow hasn't seen Fury Road yet, I join the rest of the internet in heartily recommending it, if the prospect of explosions and violence doesn't put you off. (Gore, not really, but violence, yes.) And if you're into not-especially-good but still heartwarming ♥team♥ adventures, Sinbad and The Librarians are both out there waiting for you.
I should really watch/read/dive into _______ and then come talk to you about it!
Oh, I'm terrible at reccing things, my personal taste is such an awful metric. /o\ DON'T INTERACT WITH THINGS I LIKE UNLESS YOU HAVE OTHER REASONS TO THINK YOU'LL LIKE THEM TOO.
What else is on your mind?
KATARA. *shakes fist at uncaring universe* I have almost 14k of the first chapter of Book Three and I swear I know what I'm doing, I just have to sit down and write it. The move just threw everything off! But I'm going to finish these next two books if it's the LAST THING I DO.
So what have you been up to?
Simultaneously not that much and SO MUCH, because it felt like a lot and yet can be summarized pretty quickly in the answer to ...
Major life changes? Same old same old?
... this question! Halfway through June,
idriya and I discovered that our landlord intended to sell our place, though this wasn't confirmed until the week after, which then gave us five weeks to find a new apartment—which, I'm sure that's not the worst deadline anybody's had when moving in the history of ever, but I wouldn't have objected to having a little more time to deal with it.Happily, we found a new place with more space and only slightly higher rent, still in the same town. (It is right next to the interstate, but I don't mind the white noise—it's only the louder motorcycles that really bother me so far.) At this point I just need to finish unpacking my books, so everything's pretty much settled again, but boy was that ever not fun. :P
On the upside, just had my annual review at work and the comments were basically all positive, which is a great feeling and has done wonders for my anxiety. (At my last job, I was a weekday person at a place that ran seven days a week, and I struggled a lot with nausea and panic on Monday mornings because I was constantly afraid that something had happened over the weekend that meant I would be fired. Good times.)
What fandom are you in/do you spend most of your time in?
I don't even know how to answer this—I hardly ever really leave fandoms, so honestly I'm in most of them. /o\ Lately there's been a lot of Daredevil, Poldark, Starsky & Hutch, and Robin of Sherwood going in, of all things; and, aside from the bedrock constant of A:tLA/tLoK, some Mad Max, Sinbad, and Battle Creek coming out. *hands* I had a brief due South retrospective while pulling together a recset for a friend new to the fandom, and discovering that Hawaii 5-0 was still airing (who knew?) sent me back to read a couple of my favorite old fics.
Where do you hang out online?
My RSS reader, honestly, which permits me to consume Tumblr without having to actually interact with it, and to read my dwircle without having to face my guilt spiral over not posting for so long. /o\
What are you reading?
A weirdly large amount of historical non-fiction, considering how strongly my tastes have always run toward SF&F.
idriya bought me a book about Dowager Empress Cixi that I'm still working my way through—my favorite thing about it is the time it spends on the friendship she had with Dowager Empress Ci'an (they took over the government and raised the late emperor's son together! YES).What are you watching?
Just finished rewatching the first four episodes of Poldark with
idriya, and we're stopping there because we like to end things on high notes; we're also working on Daredevil, including some episodes I skipped the first time around. (I spoil myself for things, and then am content to skip ahead to parts I know I'll like. This doesn't work when I'm watching things with my sister.) As noted above, I'm also working my way through Starsky & Hutch (almost done with S3, skipping some because you couldn't pay me to watch the blackface episode), and Robin of Sherwood (still in S1, though I skipped forward briefly just to watch Lewis Collins's guest spot).What are you making?
/o\ A GIANT PILE OF HALF-FINISHED THINGS. With the move and all, I've basically just been writing down whatever hits me without any attempt at self-control—which means bits and snippets and not nearly enough Avatar!Katara. In non-writing terms: nothing whatsoever. I haven't been organized enough to crochet in AGES.
What are you squeeing about today?
Not precisely squeeing, but Major Crimes has been a real balm, being something I like and trust to be pretty consistently enjoyable but do not feel any need to generate fannish output for. \o/ I'm also pretty thrilled about
femslashex coming around again—I didn't nominate and am not planning to sign up, but I do hope to write some treats if I can.If you could rope old fandom friends into a new fandom, it would be...
Well, I mean, if there's anyone who somehow hasn't seen Fury Road yet, I join the rest of the internet in heartily recommending it, if the prospect of explosions and violence doesn't put you off. (Gore, not really, but violence, yes.) And if you're into not-especially-good but still heartwarming ♥team♥ adventures, Sinbad and The Librarians are both out there waiting for you.
I should really watch/read/dive into _______ and then come talk to you about it!
Oh, I'm terrible at reccing things, my personal taste is such an awful metric. /o\ DON'T INTERACT WITH THINGS I LIKE UNLESS YOU HAVE OTHER REASONS TO THINK YOU'LL LIKE THEM TOO.
What else is on your mind?
KATARA. *shakes fist at uncaring universe* I have almost 14k of the first chapter of Book Three and I swear I know what I'm doing, I just have to sit down and write it. The move just threw everything off! But I'm going to finish these next two books if it's the LAST THING I DO.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-24 04:19 pm (UTC)I recommended them to her some time ago as some of the best fanfic I've ever read - fic is not usually her thing but I point her toward some of the really good novel-length gen stuff sometimes - and she just did a reread. She liked them the first time and thought they were even better the second time through. We spent a while talking about how you repopulated the Avatar universe with women, especially adult women, and how awesome that was, and how Yin is THE BEST OMG, and the climactic battle of LttE and how amazing the fallout was going to be.
(Yin is a bulletproof character type for me - the ethical, thoughtful person with very strong loyalties who finds their principles and loyalties in terrible conflict, and has to figure out who they are and what they stand for in the wreckage of the person they thought they were. Moral dilemmas! Identity crises! Being a moral person is incredibly hard sometimes, but [character] can't stop trying! Story-catnip.)
Anyway, someday I may send you epic feedback with all my feels and some of my notes while reading, if I can wrangle it into coherence. Over 100 notes on each book on my kindle - I got really into tracking how many women were just THERE, in the story, being people, and overwhelmed by how different that is from most fiction I've read. It was like a gift from an alternate universe where people write sf/f that doesn't have the default-male assumption embedded in the worldbuilding. (Can we import more books from that universe?)
Anyway, I hope you find more time/energy/motivation to write, and whenever Book Three shows up I will be delighted to see it. :)
no subject
Date: 2015-08-24 05:26 pm (UTC)And your mom! :D Glad she enjoyed it, too (especially on a re-read, which I expect is a bit of a time-sink!). I'm extra glad both books hold up when reread together, because they took so long to write and the outline got revamped several times—that the result doesn't feel too disjointed is really good to hear. And the adult women! A:tLA does fairly well with girls, but there really are way too few living adult women; I'm delighted to think the difference in ItO/LttE is both noticeable and meaningful. :)
(:D Honestly this whole parenthetical is EXACTLY what my id-feelings are about Yin—and that's probably why she's become so important when she wasn't originally in the outline at all, because my subconscious was just SO ON BOARD with her. I'm just crossing my fingers that you enjoy where she ends up!)
So, absolutely no pressure here, because by the sound of it trying to pass all that along would be quite a task to tackle—but if you ever do find yourself pulling your notes together, I would LOVE to see that, whether it's in six months or like five years, because that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard. /o\ Sometimes I feel like I've gotten a bit ridiculous, just ADDING WOMEN EVERYWHERE, but I'm not planning to stop, and this is exactly why. (If only! Back in the day, I used to feel a little sheepish about loving Xena: Warrior Princess so much, because it was just so shameless about altering history to fill it with women—not anymore.)
Seriously, thank you so much for this! On the plus side, after stumbling my way through the first two books, I'm so much better at outlining now that I'm hoping to be able to update relatively consistently once I actually start posting. /o\ Thank you so, so much for your patience—and for this comment, which has seriously made my day. ♥
no subject
Date: 2018-09-13 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-14 11:11 pm (UTC)Too true! It's never the wrong day for some Irulan. :D As for the book about Cixi, I believe it was Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China; if I remember right there's some wonderful material about what was essentially a coup undertaken by Cixi and Ci'an/Empress Zhen, based on technicalities of court procedure, which I found really interesting! I'm sure I can find it pretty quickly, if there's anything you want to know about the contents that you can't find out from Amazon. ;D
no subject
Date: 2018-09-14 11:39 pm (UTC)Oh man, I think I should straight up buy it for... potential fic research purposes, but also because it sounds like a great story in exactly the genre I've fallen into. Thank you so much for the rec (and also the offer!)!
no subject
Date: 2018-09-14 11:48 pm (UTC)And in that case, I just hope you like it, and that it turns out to be useful for your fic - I found it really engaging, but of course I'm easy for empresses, oops. Glad I could help (maybe)!
no subject
Date: 2018-09-21 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-21 01:49 am (UTC)