luthien

I'm currently in the Deep North, staying with my mother. My mother's cat is a sweet little weirdo:

( pics )

And yes, if you're wondering how my mother wound up adopting what appears to be a Turkish Angora from her local rescue: I have zero clue. There was a whole litter of them that were all put up for adoption about a year ago at the age of eight months. There's some sort of story there, especially since as far as I can tell there are no registered Turkish Angora breeders operating in Australia atm. But however it happened, my mum ended up with a sweet, funny, playful, affectionate ball of white fluff with a tail like a plume.

There was the story I was planning to write, and then there was the much more out there (and potentially much longer) story idea that came up in conversation with a friend last night - when I foolishly said: "I could write that."

Guess which one I've now got 1500 words of?

*sigh*

The word "fuck" has been coming up in my online conversations quite a bit today, mostly coupled with "you". She's an utter menace.

1. The heatwave - or heat dome as the meteorologists have been calling it - is over. There's eight days I never want to live through again. The max got to almost 42C/107F here again on Saturday, but was down to about 30/86 yesterday and we're on track for only 24/75 today. I'm actually sitting here with a light wrap around my shoulders. When I went out at 8.00 this morning it was, like, 9/48 degrees. Talk about temperature whiplash. It's going to heat up again later in the week, but only to about the mid-30s, which is much easier to live with than 40+.

2. I had dental surgery for an implant this morning. It went well, and very glad they could do it under local anaesthetic, but also very glad it's over. Currently sipping tepid coffee on the non-numb side of my mouth and icing the other side of my face. I think I might curl up in bed with some fic in a while.

3. Festivids is live. I haven't had a chance to watch as many as I'd like yet, but just off the top of my head there are several Babylon 5 vids (yay!), a great character study of Gromit from Wallace and Gromit,  and some really inventive Dykes to Watch Out For vids that manage to turn a static source (a comic strip) into something really effective and dynamic.

Challenge #15

How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

Not as well as previous years. lol. I was going well up to challenge 9, and then life happened and I got behind and it all got too much and I crashed and burned. I did enjoy taking part, though, and it was good to interact with some new people as well as people I already knew. Really, the interaction is what I want out of snowflake more than anything, so in that sense it was a success even though I didn't get to all the challenges.

We survived the high of 42C/107F yesterday - thank you, ducted air con - but I wound up with a particularly bad headache that snuck up on me over the course of the day. It was one of those days when I kept wondering why everything was so hard and I couldn't get anything done. Eventually, when the penny finally dropped and I took some painkillers, my first thought was: I can't think straight. I can't write! This is it. I'll never be able to write again.

I will just point out here that I have lived with chronic daily headache and migraine for literally decades - and yet logic still goes out the window every time I get hit with a bad one when it's been a week or two since the last one. The human mind - what can you do? I think I'll try to write something tonight, just to prove to myself that my mind while in the grip of a headache doesn't know what it's talking about.

Today has been much better. The headache has departed and the max temperature today was 'only' 35/95. You can really feel the difference in how less suffocating the air outside feels, even though the poor garden is still baking. It's going to get back up to 40/104 again tomorrow and the day after, though, so we'll see how I go. I'm having my weekly massage tomorrow, which should help stop my upper back from clenching up too much.

One other side effect of the hot weather is that we're only sleeping under a sheet atm, so no real surprise that I was awakened fairly early this morning by my feet being pounced on, not long after D had left for work. When I opened my eyes I was surprised to find that it was Abby, who is seven now, and not Olly, who is not quite ten months old. Then she growled, and I realised she thought my feet moving under the sheet were a moving kitten. Even after six months, she is still DEEPLY offended that Olly exists, and, worse, that he exists in her house.

So I rolled over and went back to sleep, and a while later I got woken up by another pounce. This time it was Olly. He didn't let up, so I had to fold the doona back over to protect my feet. Then, when I'd spoilt his fun, he jumped up to play with the blind cord. At that point I incarcerated him in his bedroom. (Yes, he has his own bedroom with his own special fluffy bed, blanket, litter tray, scratching station, water bowl and overnight snacks, partly because he's spoilt to death, and partly because every time we leave him free overnight, he wreaks havoc on the other pets and the house in general. I guess we're getting off reasonably lightly, though. As a friend pointed out to me, think how much worse he would be if he hadn't been desexed.)

Have some pics:
( Cat pics )

I wrote a couple of fills for threesentenceficathon. There could be more, but for now there's these two:

She Knows
Fandom: The Scarlet Pimpernel
Pairing: Percy/Marguerite
Rating: M
Prompt: she knows

( Read more... )


Rumours
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters: Hayden & Shane (Shane/Ilya implied)
Rating: G
Prompt: Have you heard the rumors about us? 

( Read more... )

I've fallen behind with fandom snowflake this week. I'll have to see if I can catch up tonight. Oh well, it's meant to be a relaxed challenge, so it won't really matter to anyone except me if I finish it or not.

While I've been not doing snowflake, I HAVE been reading quite a bit of Heated Rivalry fic lately. It's been quite a while since I last just sat down and read a bunch of fic for a single fandom. It's been nice to just immerse myself like that. Not sure if I'll write anything. Even apart from all the hockey stuff, it's a very (North) American canon, and I haven't written for a fandom like that in a really long time. But maybe. We'll see. I do have the kernel of an idea. Maybe. Perhaps. If I have the strength, I'll do a recs post, at least.

(I did manage to write a three sentence fic for threesentenceficathon today. I might write a few more if the mood strikes.)

One funny thing. I just left kudos on a HR fic, and noticed that half a dozen names along from mine was an old friend who hasn't had time for fandom for the last few years until very recently. Looks like we have a fandom in common again, for the first time in... fifteen years? More? I'm laughing at the way I found out, though, particularly given the sheer quantity of kudos a lot of the fics in this fandom get. What are the odds that we should leave kudos on the same fic at almost the same time? I guess we must have both followed the same rec, but STILL.

Meanwhile, the weather is being pretty brutal here. The other week, we had the most intense heatwave since the Black Summer six years ago, but this week's heatwave is going to be worse. It got to about 37 (98F) today, which felt like walking into an oven whenever I opened the front door, and it's going to be similarly hot for the next few days, but they're forecasting 43 (109F) for Wednesday. I'm super glad I don't have any appointments that day. I'm just going to batten down the hatches and stay in my nice, cool air-conditioned house until the temperature finally drops. It will be one of those days when it might still be around 30 at midnight, though, so I think the dog's chances of getting a walk that day are basically nil.

I still haven't made it to the beach this summer, mostly because of the weather. Every weekend it seems to be either a heatwave or else a post-heatwave storm, neither of which makes for fun travelling to the beach or being at the beach conditions. There were also four shark attacks in 48 hours along the coast last weekend, including one in Sydney Harbour. That NEVER happens, so everyone is a bit freaked out. The attacks occurred in the aftermath of a big storm, when a lot of storm water was washed into the sea and stirred it all up, though. That attracts bait fish, and the bait fish attract sharks - plus climate change has made the water temperature warmer, which means that the sharks hang around in the area for longer. I grew up a five minute walk from the beach, and my dad taught us from an early age that murky water is sharky water, so there's no way I would have gone swimming in those conditions. But it's clear that not everyone knows that rule. It might be time for the authorities to add a "don't go swimming in murky water" warning to the usual summer slip, slop slap (slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat) campaign.

I'm flying up to the Deep North in a few weeks to visit my mother, so maybe I'll get a chance for a swim while I'm there. She lives right on the coast, which makes it a lot easier than trying to have a day at the beach from here.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

In which I ramble on about how I write...

( My creative process )

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge.

The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

Here's my Top 10 Shows of 2025, in no particular order:

( Top 10 under here )

Catching up, before I fall too far behind...

3. Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

I've posted about this before, but it's worth saying again: not to put too fine a point on it, but fandom saved me. 

I found fandom in the late '90s, about a year before I hit a wall with the chronic illnesses I'd been grappling with for several years, and had to give up work. Going from being in an office every day to being at home by myself was a big shock, even though I wasn't well enough even to interact with other people much at the time. I'd also recently moved out of the city to the Mountains, and left all of my friends behind. I felt very isolated.

I had my cats to keep me company in body, but fandom was what kept me company in spirit. Fandom saved me. As I said, I wasn't up to interacting in person much, but I could interact a little bit at a time online. I remember spending days writing a single email - about a shared fannish love to someone who I'd only just met, but who is still one of my dearest friends 27 years later. I remember painstakingly writing fic, because it was the one thing I could do that showed me that my brain still worked now that I couldn't do my job any more. I remember getting into discussions about canons and characters and meta. I remember engaging - and suddenly I wasn't alone any more.

My health issues have gone up and down over the years, and so has the degree of my involvement in fandom, but neither has ever gone away completely. I still take part in yuletide and I still take part in snowflake, and I still talk to friends old and quite new who I never would have known existed if not for fandom.

Thank you, fandom. Just... thank you.

4. Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page
Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

My choice is Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811 (download from Project Gutenberg here - so it qualifies as a page ;)

Recently I've been writing a fic set during the English Regency (1811-20), and this updated edition of the original dictionary from 1785 is a go to for getting the flavour on the time, particularly when writing young male characters and their very specific slang. It includes many fascinating terms, including tiffing, meaning snacking between meals (and yeah, almost certainly a verb taken from tiffin, meaning the snack in question). And let's not forget the many and varied terms for penis, including: arbor vitae, plug tail, tickle tail, whore pipe, and, my personal favourite, gaying instrument.