merryghoul | Reading

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

coffeeandink

Welcome to the Very Slow C.J Cherryh Reread! I will be rereading C.J. Cherryh's work in order of publication and posting about it on a weekly or fortnightly basis. Subsequent posts will be all spoilers all the time, but for this overview, I will stick to generalities.

Cherryh is pronounced "Cherry", because that is her name; her first editor thought people would assume Carolyn Janice Cherry was a romance writer. (Her brother, sf artist David A. Cherry, was not subject to similar strictures.) Starting in the mid-70s, she has has written 77 novels and four short story collections (1); self-published three journal collections (blog posts); edited seven anthologies; and translated four novels from the French. Her shared world fiction, not included in the aforementioned collections, must amount to at least another four or five novels' worth of word count.

Notes towards an overview

It is so hard to know how to start talking about Cherryh's work. She is so foundational and yet so idiosyncratic and weird! She has a wide fanbase and has won two Hugos and been recognized with the Damon Knight Grand Master Award by the SFWA, and I, like many of her fans, am still convinced she is underappreciated. I blame a lot of this lack of recognition on sexism, though I think some of it is also due to the nature of her work. Cherryh belongs to what I think of, for lack of a better term, as Deep Genre: she makes almost no sense if you are not familiar with science fiction tropes and reading protocols. She is almost unimaginable as Baby's First Science Fiction, unless Baby has a heavy tolerance for getting thrown in the deep end and having to figure out oceanography and navigation pn the fly while also learning to swim by trial and error while also being shouted at by several different parties, some of whom are trying to rescue Baby and some of whom are trying to drown them, but good luck telling which is which. (This is, of course, my preferred mode of science fiction immersion, but it's impossible to say whether that is the cause of my deep love for Cherryh's writing or the result of my early exposure to it.)

Cherryh is an extremely immersive writer, and famously an expert at extremely tight unremarked third-person focalization; she expects you to pick up hints and asides and put together information by implication, or, if you can't do that, at least to be absorbed enough by what you do understand that you just keep going anyway. To this day, I have almost no comprehension of the plot of a Cherryh novel until my second or third reading.

Cherryh, more than almost any other sf writer, feels like she is writing history: her books don't cohere into a single grand narrative, but are each snapshots of different collisions between nature, nurture, chance individual encounters, and overwhelming social forces. Very frequently, conflicts are upended or balances of power shifted by the sudden intrusion of a player that was never mentioned before, or that got mentioned in a tossed-off subordinate clause in a passage focused on something else entirely, and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina or an overcomplication; it feels like panning out of a zoomed-in map and realizing you should have been thinking about how those close-ups or insets fit into a bigger context all along.

Cherryh writes so many different kinds of books—big anthropological novels told blockbuster-style with multiple POVs, with a Victorian devotion to including people across every sector of society and class; weird slender thought experiments about the nature of reality and the definition of humanity; and alien encounters, so many alien encounters, humans encountering aliens, humans encountering humans who might as well be aliens, humans and aliens encountering other aliens who make the "alienness" possible to other humans seem facile and trite. (I am very much looking forward to getting to the weird body horror of Voyager in the Night and the multi-way alien encounter extravaganza of the Chanur books.)

I have heard Cherryh's prose style called dry; in a recent podcast Arkady Martine called it "transparent"; I remember Jo Walton once in a blog post saying it read like something translated out of an alien language. I personally love its distinctive rhythms and find it extremely chewy and dense, the very opposite of transparent; I think it gets a lot of its peculiar flavor from the deliberate deployment of archaic vocabulary—not words that have fallen out of use, but words where she relies on the older rather than the present connotations. Vocabulary and grammar become tools of estrangement; the style itself tells you that you are not reading something set in the present day and you cannot assume you understand the personal or social logic shaping this narrative by default.

Series and other groupings

I do not have a single good way to divide up Cherryh's oeuvre, so here, have a mishmash of setting, genre, and production history:

The Union-Alliance universe
Most or all of Cherryh's science fiction takes place in a vast future history known as the Union-Alliance universe for two of its major political powers. Union-Alliance is less a series than a setting; most of the books grouped under it stand alone, or belong to short subseries (often later published in combined editions) that are independent of each other. Outside the subseries, the books can be read in any order, and publication order generally does not reflect internal chronology.

In this future history, habitable planets are rare; extrasolar colonies are initially space stations built out of slower-than-light transports sent from star to star. After FTL (dependent on sketchily explained "jump points") is developed and new (though still rare) Earthlike exoplanets are settled, trade is dependent on family-owned and operated Merchanter ships, each one in effect its own independent small nation.

The books themselves vary widely in focus: some depict an enclosed society, a ship or a space station or a single, sparsely populated planet; some encompass vast spreads of space or time and major historical events. Cherryh has a welcome tendency to produce books whose characters all share a common background and then to go on to write others from the perspective of the other three or four sides of any given conflict. (Conflicts in Cherryh seldom boil down to as few as two sides.)

Although author timelines and republished edition front matter puts all the sf Cherryh produced in the twentieth century into this background, when people speak casually of the Union-Alliance books they often mean the subset of books clustered around the time period of the Company Wars, when Earth is attempting to exert control over its extrasolar colonies. (None of the books take place on Earth; only two take place in the solar system. Probably one of the clearest signs that Cherryh is American is that her sympathy defaults to the colonies attempting to break away.)

The atevi series
In the atevi series (also known as the Foreigner sequence, for the first novel in it), a lost human ship settles on a world already inhabited by an intelligent native species called atevi.

The humans and atevi get along great for around twenty years, which is when the humans find themselves in the midst of a catastrophic war they don't understand how they started. The surviving humans are displaced to a single large island, with a peace treaty that declares no humans will set foot on the mainland except the official interpreter.

The series takes place a few hundred years later and focuses on the latest official interpreter, whose job duties are soon to expand drastically and include cross-planetary adventures and fun poisoned teatimes with local grand dames.

This series has been the bulk of Cherryh's work since the mid-nineties. It is twenty-two volumes and still ongoing. Unlike the (other?) (2) Union-Alliance books, these form a single continuous narrative; by the late teens, they are more or less a roman fleuve. Cherryh initially breaks down the longer series into sets of three, possibly with the hope each new trilogy could serve as a new entrypoint, but this pattern is abandoned after the first fifteen books. She does still valiantly attempt to summarize the important points of the previous books within text, but in my opinion this straight-up does not work. You really do need to read these books in chronological order for them to make sense.

The series is popular and well-beloved and has been cited as a major influence by both Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, and I nevertheless blame it in part for Cherryh's failure to receive the attention and respect she deserves. Long ongoing serials do not tend to receive as many award nominations or reviews as work that requires less background reading, not helped in this case by the weakness of the latest books. The atevi books have always been less dense than Cherryh's earlier work, but in the past decade they have sometimes narrowed down to an excruciating microfocus. (I am especially cranky about Book 19, which takes place over a single weekend and is entirely concerned with the logistics of securing a hotel room from infiltration or attack.)

Fantasies
Cherryh's fantasies are all traditional medievalish works, most of them very Tolkien influenced. The majority of them are in ahistorical, vaguely Celtic settings (the Ealdwood books, Faery in Shadow/Faery Moon, the Fortress series, possibly Goblin Mirror); one trilogy is set in land-of-Fable Tsarist Russia; one magicless standalone is set in a kind of China-Japan analogue that feels a lot less Orientalist than that combination should because of the determined lack of ornament and exoticization (YMMV).

Like her science fiction, Cherryh's fantasy tends to feature protagonists who are terrified, desperate, paranoid, and in desperate need of a bath and a good night's sleep. Also like her science fiction, somehow or other her fantasy invariably ends up being about thought control and social conditioning and infinite regresses of self-conscious thought.

Shared-world work
The eighties saw an explosion in shared-world fantasy, something like professional fanfiction and something like the work of television writers' rooms: groups of writers would collaborate on stories set in a background they developed together. One of the earliest and most influential was the Thieves' World series edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey, set in a sword & sorcery venue most notable for its exponential urban deterioration with each volume, grimdark avant la lettre. Cherryh was a frequent contributor, her stories featuring a particular set of down-on-their-luck mercenaries, street kids gone hedge magicians, and the extremely powerful vampirelike sorceress Ischade. This series set the pattern for her most significant later shared world works, both in terms of her frequent collaboration with Abbey and writer Janet Morris and in the tendency to treat each story more as a chapter in an ongoing serial than as a complete episode in itself.

For Janet Morris' Heroes in Hell anthologies, set in a Riverworld-inspired afterworld where everybody in all of recorded history seemed to be in the underworld, Cherryh resurrected her college major and Master's degree in Classics to focus on Julius Caesar and associated historical figures, producing nine or ten short stories, some of them also incorporated into two novel collaborations with Morris and a solo novel. The world-building and general theology are frankly a mess, but I would still 100% go for a historical novel of the Roman Republic or early empire if Cherryh felt like writing one.

Cherryh launched her own shared world series, Merovingen Nights,with the solo novel, Angel with a Sword, and then edited seven subsequent anthologies. She described several of the anthologies as "mosaic novels", and they do indeed show an unusual amount of close coordination and interdependence among the stories penned by different authors. Despite the novel title, the series is science fiction, set on an isolated planet in the Union-Alliance universe. Neither novel nor anthologies were reprinted during DAW's early 2000s phase of repackaging most of the older work Cherryh originally published with them, which is a great shame; they are very solid.

Full disclosure

This isn't 100% a reread project. There are three books in the 2000s I've never read. I'll let you know when we get there.

I also expect Cherryh to have published more books by the time I finish, but let's be real, I'm going to read those as soon as they come out.

Currently I'm not planning to cover Cherryh's translations, her journals, or most of her shared world work. I'm not sure about how I'll handle the Foreigner books, which suffer from diminishing returns; I may cover the first few and stop, I may skip around to only the volumes I find particularly interesting, I may bundle together multiple volumes in a single post.

I am going to cover the Lois and Clark tie-in novel, because I find it hilarious that Cherryh (a) wrote a contemporary novel; (b) wrote a tie-in novel; (c) wrote a Superman novel. (Her first short story ever, the Nebula Award winner "Cassandra", was also set in the then present day, but I think that's it.)

Other Cherryh reading projects

The single tag for Jo Walton's Cherryh rereads has been lost to the Reactor Magazine reorganization, but you can find them pretty easily by going to the oldest Cherryh reviews on the site and reading forward

Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project has multiple Cherryh reviews by multiple reviewers

The Three Hoarsemen podcast, The Works of C.J. Cherryh

sholio's Read All the Cherryh tag

james_davis_nicoll is reading a Cherryh a month for 2025; to find his earlier Cherryh reviews, use a keyword search

Endnotes

1 This count includes the collaborations with Janet Morris and Jane Fancher, but excludes The Sword of Knowledge series, which was written entirely by her collaborators (Leslie Fish, Nancy Asire, and Mercedes Lackey) from Cherryh's outline. [back]

2 It's not clear from the text itself whether or not these books also fall under the Union-Alliance umbrella. Cherryh has sometimes said they do, but the humans in the Foreigner series are so isolated that the events of the Union-Alliance books have effectively no bearing on them. [back]

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Companions poll, the emotionally unavailable alley cat and the trivia-obsessed fennec fox came first equal with 42.1% each, followed by the stoic capybara with 35.1%. Hugs won the ticky-boxes with 66.7%, followed by frittered-away time with 38.6%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Audio: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, read by Arian Moayed. Full of cultural specificity and lots of wonderful observations about humanity in general, and art, and death. More emotion-driven and theme-driven than plotty. Beautifully written. So good!

Audio: Swordcrossed by Freya Marske, read by Omari Douglas. I just finished this, and oh my goodness, it mashed all my buttons! It's a light, secondary world, urban-historical m/m romance with guild politics and secrets, swordplay and skulduggery, and people being messed up by their rich guild-house families. I hereby declare (for myself, at least) a sub-category of enemies-to-lovers that is "playful-enemies to lovers". You know, when there are compelling reasons not to trust each other, but they like each other enough that they can't help teasing, admiring, and developing inconvenient loyalties, despite the suspicion. (There are tons of other examples, and I would like to read some more of them. In fact, the Guardian drama falls squarely in this category, as does White Collar a lot of the time.) The two leads of Swordcrossed clicked so well -- I laughed out loud at the banter, and again, often, in sheer delight.

Thoughts about depictions of falling in love in fiction.

There was one thing it did particularly well, for the main pairing, that I'm still emotionally and analytically rolling around in. I think it's quite hard to show people falling in love: I've seen it done via one character obsessing about the other's secondary sex characteristics, which I don't find convincing or interesting. Or sometimes an author has a character notice how good-looking the other is, and from that, the reader is supposed to intuit attraction and emotional curiosity/investment -- but it's never quite clear to me if the "good-lookingness" is subjective or objective, and there are plenty of objectively good-looking people that I don't want to even be in the same room as. Other times, what we're shown is physical attraction as a stand-in for emotional connection, followed by kisses and/or sex as a stand-in for a lot of things. (I've done all of these, of course; fandom is particularly rife with all of this because most of the time a fic author and their readers go into the story pre-invested in the ship.) Anyway, in Swordcrossed, Marske teased all these layers out by having the couple acknowledge their attraction and start an intense "casual" thing with an expiry date, semi-independently of catching feelings. The development of loyalties and being on the same side (in cahoots!), and the delicately depicted tenderness, understanding and mutual care were wonderful precisely because they weren't implied just by sexual attraction, and because it was the feelings, not the sex, that disrupted the characters' plans. It was delicious. (Perhaps I just need to read more fuckbuddies-to-lovers, with a side-order of people-in-denial-in-love, lol.)

tl;dr I found the "falling in love" part very satisfying, and it's making me think about how I might be able to do that better in my own writing.

In terms of the audiobook, Douglas's narration was fantastic and very hot for the sex scenes. A++++ (And for people who've already read Swordcrossed, there's an excellent 18k fanfic for a background pairing by

marquis, which works as a supplement to fill in some gaps.) (How is there not more than one other fic for this book, though? I went to AO3 expecting a "Red White & Royal Blue"-sized fandom.)

Audio: I'm two chapters into Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, and approaching it, as recommended, one chapter per day for now (though I'm not sure my limitations need enhancement).

Ebook: I'm sort of dithering between The Black Cauldron and getting back to Werecockroach, and consequently not reading anything... and now I've opened The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing for a re-read, but not actually started that either. Also, Guardian -- we're in the home stretch.

Paper: Having reached the end of my third and last library loan renewal period, I finally sat down and read No Rules Tonight by Hyun Sook Kim and Ryan Estrada in about two and a half hours. It's a graphic novel about a university traditional-dance club going on an overnight hiking trip in 1980s Korea. The military regime is a constant looming presence, but it's gently funny and sweet as well as eye-opening. I really appreciate how this and Banned Book Club, by the same authors, depict life, friendship, and resistance under authoritarianism. Also, it made me want to try Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, one of the banned books mentioned.

Btw, does anyone else remember

obsessive24 and her amazing fanvids? Looks like she has a queer fantasy trilogy coming out soon.

Kdramas
I finished My Dearest Nemesis and loved it; an adorable depiction of whole-hearted fannishness and the search for love and acceptance. Am now an episode into First Night with the Duke and still in that "not yet hooked, but willing to be" state of quantum uncertainty. I've also randomly picked up my abandoned rewatch of the Cdrama noona romance, Nothing But Love. (This is a rewatch I started with my late friend J, way back when; he bounced off it because he hated all the male characters.)

Other TV
Finished Murderbot, Poker Face and Étoile, which I enjoyed in that (descending) order.

Just me grumbling about Étoile; please skip if you love it!

My deep loathing of Crispin overshadowed a lot of my enjoyment; they kept making him quirky, and I was worried they might try to redeem him. And lo, by the end, Jack was turning to him for advice, wtf??? I don't super enjoy incompetent management (Jack seemed to have no idea what he was doing most of the time; who hired him?) or artistic people being assholes (Tobias, sit down and let the dancers do their jobs!). Mostly, though, my problem was Amy Sherman-Palladino's tendency to let her characters chat endlessly with no story or drive; the party episode was very rambly. I thought she'd got better with Mrs. Maisel, but this was (fittingly, I guess) more like Bunheads, just on a grander scale.

That said, I loved Mishi and Cheyenne's mother, and I liked Geneviève. Cheyenne was funny some of the time, and I enjoyed her sojourn in the cemetery with her mother (despite it literally not going anywhere), and Geneviève's advice to her about The Slip. And I liked Tobias' breakup.

tl;dr: I should have stuck with the gifset.

More Fringe with my sister. The cases of the week are more interesting than the season arc to the point that we both forgot, in a ten-minute break between episodes, that Olivia was kidnapped.

The Secret Genius of Modern Life with Hannah Fry s02e01, which was fun like always, but with disturbing "look how effective surveillance is" undertones.

And a whole bunch of Bluey, the kids' cartoon, which is omg so adorable and funny. I'm not even into kidfic, and I love it!

Guardian/Fandom
Guardian!!! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Also,

mific and I are working on an intentionally Dreamwidth-specific comm for people to post or link to meta discussions about writing. Watch this space.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, random episodes of Letters from an American, Midnight Burger, possibly some other things but I'm having technical problems with Pocket Casts atm. (The app controls are obscured by the phone controls, as if the app thinks my screen is bigger than it is; anyone else having this problem?)

Films
Jurassic World: Rebirth -- this was such silly fun. I'm pretty sure the bad guy was built from a template, but the dinosaurs were wonderful. Favourite part:

spoiler

the dozing T-rex -- so tense, yet so funny.

Writing/making things
The glittering ice sculpture of my oomph has become a puddle. Anyway, this was my entry for the Science round of

fan_flashworks:

Title: Winging It (600 words) [General Audiences]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Characters: Ya Qing, Lin Jing, Zhao Yunlan, Zhu Hong, Original Yashou character, Da Qing
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Yashou Renewal, Education, A New Era for the SID, Kidfic, Drabble Sequence
Summary: The Crows need a science tutor.

Life/health/mental state things
The weeks are flicking past at a frightening rate. I'm constantly in a state of "is this just my baseline sore throat, or am I coming down with something?" Note to self: that online Harvard course you signed up for? Do it.

Cats
Cure for ongoing minor cat health niggles: book a vet appointment for later in the week. Within two days she was fine, and I cancelled the appointment.

Korean
I randomly listened to a TTMIK episode (the texting vs phonecalls one) and understood maybe 10% of it? That's not nothing. (Aside: Hyunwoo's theory of why young people take phonecalls on speaker is that the young people were all on FaceTime as babies, so they didn't acquire the "hold phone to ear" habit. I was pleased with myself for catching that, then realised he'd reiterated it in English. ;-p)

Food
My sister brought me a packet of Selena Gomez Oreos, for the laughs; I'm pretty sure those were my first oreos ever. (Selena is mildly cinnamon-flavoured, if you were wondering.) | I made lemon honey last week (10/7/25); I always go through a few rounds of buying lemons and not getting started before they go a bit squishy, but in the end, it never takes as long to make as I think it will. | Also made enchiladas, including the sauce, and a no-recipe beef casserole. Yesterday I made pumpkin and kumara soup. I have plans to try lemon chicken (via

autodach) and to make no-recipe risotto this week. It's hard to fathom that a few years ago I rarely cooked.

Good things
Sunshine! Audiobooks with great narrators. Kids' cartoons. Ginger in everything. Fandom and Guardian. Writing (*presses face against the shop window*). Washing on the line. Dreamwidth.

Poll #33363 Retribution

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

View Respondents

The best revenge

View Answers

is living well
26 (74.3%)

is sweet
7 (20.0%)

is served cold
5 (14.3%)

requires two graves
4 (11.4%)

leaves everybody blind
1 (2.9%)

other
0 (0.0%)

ticky-box full of writing theory
12 (34.3%)

ticky-box full of brain being empty, but not in a meditation way
16 (45.7%)

ticky-box full of dabbling your toes in a tray of soft, cool, shimmery sand
15 (42.9%)

ticky-box full of the ancient language of shadows and flight
18 (51.4%)

ticky-box full of hugs
28 (80.0%)

hannah

I went across town to gather the last of my pay this morning; I'd gotten a text a couple hours earlier telling me that the main receptionist was doing fine and didn't need additional support, so all I had left to do was get paid. I ended up deciding to take that vacation opportunity, with plans to come back fairly early Friday to make the evening showtime.

Worth noting is packing's not nearly the stressor it used to be. Especially not for just a couple of days. Not even music for the trip or what to bring in my backpack. There's no getting around the nervousness that comes from waiting for a train - especially with the downpour earlier this week, which tends to mess with schedules - or trying to fall asleep the night before. But there's a predictability to that, which makes accepting it easier.

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: Slow Show - The National

tjs_whatnot

The only (slight) downside of reading primarily queer books all year long is that June hits differently for me. I want to go big, but how? How can I differentiate it from any other month? Ho hum. * ponders * But anyway… on to this month's mixed bag of delights.

( June 2025 ) Oh, but speaking of Pride. I should probably make another post for this-- but I know myself enough to know I won't-- so here, have some pictures I took in my medium-ish city's Pride Parade:

So, this is the first Pride since moving back to my hometown last summer (did I ever tell you guys I moved across the country? No? Ooops, sorry).

Anyway, I did not know what to expect, but I was excited because they didn't do any pride related things when last I lived here (but that was like 30 years ago, so that wasn't too rare) and it's a middle-ish sized big town, but it's in a red side of a very blue state, so who knows that that means.

But it was lovely! They had a parade, then a festival and at the end, since it was on June 14th, a No Kings rally. I went to the parade and then volunteered at the booth my employer had there and that was great fun. Then I hung out at the protest before taking the bus home. It was a great time!

merryghoul

Title: Claudia de lioncourt
Creator:

haflacky
Prompt: colored art
Fanwork Type: fanart
Fandom: Interview with the Vampire (TV)
Character: Claudia de Lioncourt
Rating: G
Warnings: none

( Read more... )

merryghoul

1) write for

iddyiddybangbang before the fest started
2) post my

tardis_bingo comment bingo chart 😑

merryghoul

Locked in/trapped	Huddling for warmth	Tea	Accessory	Master
Sound/Vision	Injury/illness	Reunion	Bodyswap/Genderswap	Aliens made us do it
Spies/secret agents	Angels	WILD CARD	Sonic	Companion
Wings	Multi-era	Age difference	Mystery	Date
Daleks	Fashion	Science	Soul mates/soul bonding	Monsters

kaffy_r

Hey,

masakochan !

I hope you've had a Happy Birthday, and may the coming year be good for you. I'm glad I know you!

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: Ateez "Hala Hala"

kaffy_r

Just When You Think It Couldn't be More Stupid

Now come six proofs that you can have the IQ of a broken toaster and still make it to Washington D.C.

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; four U.S. House Representatives from Minnesota, and two from Wisconsin, sent a letter to the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S.

Their subject? The smoke from Canadian wildfires that were coming south and preventing people in their states from enjoying outdoor summer activities.

Seriously.

Since I would not be surprised in the least if you've already started snickering, sure that I'm having you on, here's the story. It's not behind a paywall, I swear. And it notes with a perfectly straight face, the smoke from U.S. wildfires heading northward. The "Are you actually humans, or malfunctioning Chat GPT programs?" is unspoken.

These six examples of Darwin's Law are either fully aware of the fatuous asininity exhibited in this letter and are doing it to ingratiate themselves with Dear Leader or to their own MAGA constituents ...

... or they're really that stupid.

JFC. Once I would have laughed merrily at this. Today I'm perilously close to weeping.

Current Mood: cynical
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: Ateez "Answer"

hannah

I made a mistake regarding patient charts at work - nothing life-threatening or genuinely harmful, simply highly improper procedure that created twice the work for myself and the practice instead of half the work that would've come from doing it right the first time. When asked about it, I said I could provide reasons and excuses and it didn't matter, I'd done the thing and would fix it.

Besides the lessons of "write everything down at least twice" and "most mistakes can be fixed", the main takeaway is the person who spoke to me about it assumed I was Gen Z and was a little surprised when I said I was a Millennial. Partly that's the nature of the mistake, and I think another part's simply how I look. Granted, he's nearly twice my age so anyone more than 20 years his junior is "young" by that standard. Even so, I'm going to take the skin care compliment.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Fake Empire - The National

hannah

On account of half the members of my dad's book group not being able to make it in person tonight, the other half decided they might as well all meet remotely. No cake this month. Thankfully, I got the call about it before warming the butter. Now I've got some under-ripe tomatoes that were going to go into a streusel cake and some red and black raspberries that I was planning on using as a backup in case the tomatoes were too ripe for the cake. I'll probably cook with the tomatoes and either eat or freeze the berries.

The usual receptionist is recovered enough she might be in next week, though it's still too soon to say for sure, and even if she's in, whether she'll be up to her full or operating at a reduced capacity. It's certainly pointing to an end stage of the gig, which somehow has me enjoying it more. The inability or the difficulty to savor the indefinite, I suppose. Something along those lines.

Current Mood: indifferent
Current Music: Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Crowd-sourcing randomness poll, heads got 19.4%, tails got 22.2%, edge got 25%, and zero-g (the coin never falls) got 38.9%. Either a) the laws of probability have ceased to function in a localised manner, b) Dreamwidth is surprisingly popular in space, c) we've stepped into an alternate dimension, or d) these results are not statistically robust.

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 75%, followed by surviving AO3 outages (69.4%), and grumbly cats in search of treats (66.7%). Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Two chapters to go in The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander. It hasn't hugely grabbed me, maybe because of my stop-start reading habits, but I am very much enjoying mentally casting Grover from Sesame Street as Gurgi. I have an omnibus of the Chronicles, so I may continue on to The Black Cauldron.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, read by Arian Moayed -- ahh, this is so good! It's about a young death-obsessed recovering-alcoholic gay Iranian American who's writing a book about martyrs. It reminds me a bit of Love in the Big City, but it's more experimental and lyrical. I'm ~~halfway through~~ nearly done. Surprising, funny, sad, beautifully written. Warnings for drug use, alcohol addiction, suicidal ideation, and politics.

Also Guardian by priest, and I currently have on loan from the library: No Rules Tonight by Hyun Sook Kim and Freya Marske's Swordcrossed in audio.

Kdramas
My Dearest Nemesis -- I am enjoying this so much. The leading man, as well as being a closet fanboy, is adorably ridiculous and so love-starved. I want to give him a puppy. (In fact, I think he should just have a dog for a couple of years, and one or two more friends, and then he can get a girlfriend.)

Other TV
Ghosted on Apple TV+, a spy/romcom with Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. The reviews are terrible, and it was indeed very very silly, but we watched it on its own terms and enjoyed it tremendously. Some laugh-out-loud moments. A+ popcorn movie! (The trailer is VERY spoilery, ftr.)

Murderbot, Poker Face, Fringe, Étoile (omg, someone please give these people media training!! Also, I'm sad I looked at that one gifset, because I'm very spoiled for the plot thread I'm most invested in, which is undercutting the tension), and Turning Point: The Vietnam War (so disturbing and thoughtful and informative).

Guardian/Fandom
Partying on. <3 <3 <3

Audio entertainment
Not much; my listening time is being eaten by Martyr!

Writing/making things
I'm currently working on a handful of different shortish things in a desultory "what shall I pick up today?" fashion. This is not how I finish things or even get a satisfying sense of progress! (Yesterday's was another CSZ/SW/ZYL fic -- many deliciously difficult feelings; today's was a gen drabble sequence for FFW.) Just pick a WIP and finish it, china!

I now have 238 Guardian fanworks on AO3. Ten more will make it my most-created-for fandom. # writing goals

Online life
I keep getting as far as checkout on shop websites and then drifting off. The fear of buyer's remorse is very real. Yet another reason I have so many tabs open.

Link dump
Screenwriter's Secret to Mindblowing Plot Twists by

heyjameshurst |

mergatrude's e/R playlist (Youtube) | Music: Mon Rovîa - Rust. (Live) (Youtube, via

teaotter) | US politics: 5 calls | Newsblur RSS reader | ‘I wanted to be a teacher not a cop’: the reality of teaching in the world of AI (The Spinoff, local indie newsite) | Hieronymus Bosch butt music (tumblr link, via

mific) | Underrated Apple TV+ show recs? (

tv_talk post) | Thai Coconut Chicken Soup recipe (via

autodach) | Poetic fic meme (via

extrapenguin). There, I've closed a dozen or so tabs. # progress

Good things
New shampoo making my hair soft. Guardian. Warm buttery toast. My sister coming over this evening. Kdramas and books. Yesterday's sunshine, and walking through the trees along a shared mountain-bike trail. Sushi on the waterfront. Writing. Clean sheets.

Poll #33341 Companions

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 57

View Respondents

What talking animal would you take on an adventure?

View Answers

emotionally unavailable alley cat
24 (42.1%)

naive gecko
9 (15.8%)

sad wolf
12 (21.1%)

stoic capybara
20 (35.1%)

trivia-obsessed fennec fox
24 (42.1%)

upbeat skunk
10 (17.5%)

coffee-addicted giant panda
12 (21.1%)

other
7 (12.3%)

ticky-box of frittered-away time
22 (38.6%)

ticky-box full of infinite monkeys and... wait, who's providing all the typewriters?
21 (36.8%)

ticky-box full of liquid birdsong that tastes like vengeance
20 (35.1%)

ticky-box full of dancing, light as thistledown, to an orchestra of metronomes
21 (36.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
38 (66.7%)

hannah

I'll be working this week, and possibly in the foreseeable future as well. It's hard to say - the woman I'm sitting in for needed emergency surgery to have her gallbladder removed, and organ removal always constitutes a careful recovery period.

I don't know how long I want to do this. Full-time, at least. It's the gnawing nighttime feeling and the looming mornings that are getting to me more than lost afternoons at the gym and visits to farmers' markets. Having less time to get my daily living activities finished so I can get writing done in the evening. I'm sure there's a knack to it I can pick up with practice. Breaking the weights out for some evening workouts is something I'm out of practice doing, but I'm getting back into easily enough. I can't drop and do twenty pushups straight, and I'm still capable of a few with good form, so I'll hitch myself back to that goal, among others. Something achievable.

Current Mood: working
Current Music: nothing now

coffeeandink

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Greenwood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.

kaffy_r

I use semi-colons; you?

Anyone who reads anything I write, whether fictional or non-fictional, knows of my love for semi-colons. When I think about why that's so, the one thing that leaps to what I laughingly call my mind is that I use them to reflect the same patterns I use when speaking. I find them extremely useful to demarcate thoughts, observations, realizations that could reasonably be considered "in process," rather completed. (Protip; don't use quotation marks quite as liberally as I undoubtedly have. That leads to bad grocery window displays; almost as much as apostrophe misuse.)

WRT that last sentence; see wut I did thar? But I digress.

I read this WaPo article* this morning and have grumbled about it all day. In part that's because it's not that well-written a story - it's apparently predicated on the assumption that cleverness is preferable to writing a story with a point, or at least preferable to having to prove you can write such a story.

In larger part it's because I'm part of an apparently shrinking number of English speakers and writers who have sworn off this kind of proscriptive grammar pedantry, in favor of punctuation that has a perfectly understandable and effective use, if used properly.

So I must ask my friends, for whom the acronym AKICOTI (all knowledge is contained on the internet, for those who don't trust the internet) was undoubtedly coined:

Poll #33330 Semi -colons: Threat or Menact

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

View Respondents

I use semi-colons

View Answers

All the time; if it's good enough for Jane Austen and Lincoln, it's fine by me.
10 (50.0%)

When I deem the time is right. Which isn't all the time, damnit!
9 (45.0%)

Occasionally; that's because it's only occasionally useful.
0 (0.0%)

Rarely; I mean, I think that's what the WaPo writer meant ....
0 (0.0%)

Never! *makes warding anti-semi-colon sign*
0 (0.0%)

Other, which I'll explain in comments
1 (5.0%)

* I cancelled my subscription months ago, but was told I was still a member until sometime in November. Most likely they hope I'll resubscribe.

Edit as of 7th July: With many thanks to

conuly , here is a link to what I think can get you to see the WaPo article without running into paywalls. Let me know if it works.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: None

china_shop

I wrote a self-indulgent Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan treat for

idproquo and a post-canon Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan domestic-fluff flashfic for the

fan_flashworks Amnesty round. Thanks to

trobadora for beta on both of them! <3

Title: Sunshine and Honey (4126 words) [Mature]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Ye Olde Haixing Era, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Outdoor Sex, Feeding, Finger Sucking, Oral Fixation, First Kiss (for one of them), First time (for one of them), Treat
Summary:

They were halfway to the Allied Forces’ southern boundary when the sun came out. Shen Wei pulled back his hood and looked around, conscious of the breeze on his bare face. The heavy clouds were finally breaking up.

Meanwhile, Kunlun had dropped his bag and flopped onto his back on the grassy slope. “Let’s rest here a while.”

Title: Pages for You (1762 words) [Teen and Up]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Established Relationship, Domestic Fluff, Fade to Black, Community: fan_flashworks
Summary:

Over the course of the evening, an impulse had taken root, and now Shen Wei submitted to it. He switched on his desk lamp, laid out several large sheets of paper and quietly ground some ink. If Zhao Yunlan wanted to read of their time together through the eyes of a Dixingren soldier, who better than Shen Wei to write an account—to show Zhao Yunlan exactly how much his arrival had meant to the war effort and to Shen Wei himself.

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Routine poll, 84.2% of respondents voted for tooth-brushing, 50.9% for locking up and switching things off around the house, and 33.3% for tending to pets. Night-time routines taking more than half an hour got 24.6%, and "sometimes it takes me an hour or more" got 7%. *high fives*

In ticky-boxes, hugs won with 75.4%, followed by "how stressful it is to ask tradespeople to change things they've done" with 57.9% and "sitting on a mountain ledge in the moonlight, listening to owls" with 56.1%. Thank you for your votes! <3

Reading
Incandescent by Emily Tesh, read by Zara Ramm, who sounds exactly like Emma Thompson. I spent the middle third of this being unsure what the plot was (or if there even was a plot; "is this a cosy magic-school story?" I asked nobody in particular). Things stirred ominously under the surface, but the tension relied on the reader being more worried about them than the mostly oblivious POV character -- which was interesting. Overall, I enjoyed it very much.

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander (Chronicles of Prydain). A few more chapters. I'm past halfway and it still feels like setup, which I guess is a function of it being the first book of five.

A tiny bit more of Neurotribes. I'm bored with the case studies/anecdotes and ready for some theory.

Two more chapters of Guardian by priest.

My Whimsy binge stalled after bouncing off three different narrators for The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. None of them hit the humour right. I suppose I'm going to have to read in text, but Prydain first (and I still haven't finished my reread of Werecockroach, note to self).

Kdramas
I finished Our Unwritten Seoul and enjoyed it very much. It's about 30yo identical twins, one who works in a corporate office in Seoul, and one who lives in their hometown and does a series of temporary and part-time jobs. The office worker is miserable from being bullied at work, so they decide to swap lives. Contains some pretty good (in my inexpert opinion) disability rep, and

I approved of both the morals (spoilers)

1) if you bottle things up and don't let people see your vulnerability, you can't feel their love; and 2) love isn't about winning or losing, or whether you're a burden; it's about being on the same team, staying together, and supporting each other as you win or lose. <3 <3 <3 (I was so happy when Ho-su stopped pushing Mi-ji away, and with the ending when they used sign language sometimes. <3 <3 <3)

I cancelled my VIKI subscription earlier this week because I wasn't using it, so of course I immediately started watching My Dearest Nemesis, as recced by

adore. It has a bit of a "based on a webtoon" feel, but I'm fine with that, and it's a neat twist on the Obnoxious Repressed Chaebol Exec trope. (The leading man is leading a double life: he's a closet fanboy, but his family and position require him to present as a 100% bland, respectable businessman.) I'm obsessed!

Note to self: check out First Night with the Duke next. And maybe renew your VIKI subscription.

Other TV
Poker Face and Murderbot continue to be enjoyable (we're an episode behind on each of them). I found the second half of Andor season 2 a lot more engaging than the first half (and might like the first half more on the rewatch; yet to be determined). Another episode each of Étoile and Krapopolis. The Old Guard 2 on Netflix.

Tiny spoiler for the very end.

Andrew was disgusted that, at the end, as [redacted] leave the secret archive full of ancient texts, they turn out the light but leave candles burning. "What about the ancient books?!" LOL!

A rewatch of French film Rosalie Blum, which I love.

Guardian/Fandom
The continuing delights of read-alongs and polls.

Audio entertainment
A little bit of Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American (US constitutional-law context for current developments), a little bit of Midnight Burger (audiodrama), most of the first season of Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones (which I'm enjoying despite not being familiar with DWJ's earlier books).

Writing/making things
I wrote a flashfic for the

fan_flashworks amnesty round and am poking at a couple of WIPs. My brain seems to be in recovery mode. My only current deadline is the

fan_flashworks Science round.

Life/health/mental state things
My thumbs/hands/wrists are not in great shape. My body is working hard to metabolise ambient stress. (*hugs to everyone*) I'm feeling a little under siege by winter and ~the state of things~, but I saw my sister for the first time in weeks (she's had a cold), a friend came over for lunch on Thursday, and last night our tv-watching friend joined us for Rosalie Blum.

Good things
Chocolate. Andrew and Halle. Fandom and all of you. Polls. Kdramas. Books. Podcasts. Eminem. Writing when it happens. AO3 (*clutches*). Love, kindness, and diversity.

Poll #33324 Crowd-sourcing randomness

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 37

View Respondents

Crowd-sourcing randomness

View Answers

heads
7 (18.9%)

tails
8 (21.6%)

edge
9 (24.3%)

zero-g (the coin never falls)
15 (40.5%)

ticky-box full of grumbly cats in search of treats
25 (67.6%)

ticky-box full of being protective of your blorbos
18 (48.6%)

ticky-box full of surviving AO3 outages
26 (70.3%)

ticky-box full of soft, bright-green moss nestled at the base of a tree, glittering with beads of dew
23 (62.2%)

ticky-box full of hugs
28 (75.7%)

hannah

Things which I don't get to say nearly enough: "Can you break a hundred?"

To make things as simple as possible, I got paid in cash earlier today, and to make things really simple, it was a mix of twenties and hundreds to use as few bills as possible. I'll freely and happily admit it cut down on the volume of currency being exchanged. It also struck me that while $100 is a standard unit of currency, it's an atypical one, which isn't a combination of traits I see much.

My plan was to break them into twenties if the bank was open for customers, or deposit them intact in an ATM kiosk if it wasn't. On the walk to the bank, I decided to buy a luxury imported British film magazine at Barnes & Noble, and in thinking about how to pay for it, I asked the clerk my question.

Then I said it was fine, and handed over $21 to more easily make change for the $15.50 price tag. A much more ordinary type of payment. I took the hundreds to the bank and deposited them at the ATM, as I'd planned.

And for a moment there, just a brief moment, I had a glorious glimpse into another life where I always asked that question.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Betting On Trains - Hem

Profile

a merry ghoul

LiveJournal

July 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Velvet Steel for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jul. 17th, 2025 08:23 pm

you should've seen the other guy

"For God's sake, Eddy, listen to her! She's crazy--"

Reading

C.J. Cherryh bibliography

The Very Slow C.J. Cherryh Reread

Me-and-media update

Hurry home to you.

June Reads and Pride Shenanigans

some recent recs I’d like to share 1

two things I meant to do last week

tardis_bingo comment bingo

Dept. of Birthdays

Dept. of Stupid

Falling through the sky.

Swap our places.

Me-and-media update

Seventh of the Seventh.

Ghost Quartet (Green-Wood Cemetery, 7/28/25)

Dept. of Grammar Strangeness

Two Guardian fics: Sunshine and Honey (M-rated) and Pages for You (T-rated)

Me-and-media update

Take my business.

Profile

July 2025

Links

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags