hack and track
[If you don't want to know anything about K.J. Charles's England World/Will Darling Adventures before reading them yourself, come back to this entry later. Since they're romance novels, I don't consider the mention of pairings = spoilers, especially given my lurid history of non-canonical shipping, but mileages do vary.]
Many things are going well -- sometimes astonishingly so -- but I have nonetheless been moody and apprehensive AF for more than a month, because, oh, I'm me (hello past sins and persistent demons) and the world abounds with supremacists and traitors and airheads. Good God almighty on a rusty skewer.
(The astonishing includes finally winning You Can't Win Jack, a tennis contest I'd been close-but-no-cigar in a number of times for more than a decade -- and you can tell I was moody off the charts because I didn't find out or see the congratulations for half a week, having silently taken a break from following either the second half of the USO or the forum.)
What I am congratulating myself on this morning is knowing my wiring well enough to know that if I could simply get an England World drabble posted, that would appease the bunny-chasing part of my brain that was opening my fic-scribbling folder every hour and let me get on with the other things that have to be thinged before I dive into full-barreled canon review and research. It ended up being 400 words . . .
Matter of Fact
G, Archie/Daniel, post-canon, doting, no plot
Until yesterday, the line I quote in the fic summary was arguably my favorite in Subtle Blood (hello, competence kink), but the one that has been ringing through my head the past two days is "You stupid bastard, you're true as steel." In Think of England, this speech may have been the first passage I bookmarked:
“Thirdly, and this is the important one: dead men. Dead men under the sun of Jacobsdal or floating down the Thames at night. Dead and smashed in the seas off Beachy Head, or in lonely rooms with a gun falling from their hands, or in the next war because of the secrets that have been sold. The Armstrongs have left a trail of blood for their own enrichment, and I intend to bring them to justice. And I am quite sure that you will stand with me to do it, whatever else happens, because if you are a man to put personal concerns before duty, then I have lost my judgement.”
"I intend to bring them to justice" is sharing the room in my brain that also has "Everyone who fought or resisted in World War I or II or the others had other things they could have done with their lives had it not been for supremacists, traitors, et al. Everyone who had the misfortune to be born in outright serfdom or slavery is a testament to the world being profoundly unfair" and "Your parents survived martial law and poverty. Get over yourself and get on with things."
But since I am also an unconquerably frivolous and hedonistic soul, there is also the Yuletide Fandom Promo post to be vastly amused by (I started laughing at the very first one and didn't stop, and I had been warned in advance that someone had nominated Sotheran's Twitter, but still... *wipes tears from eyes*). It occurred to me this morning that Yuletide is much like RPGs for me -- I'm too much of a control freak and hot mess to participate as a regular, but I love the lead-up (building characters, aye; actually playing them, nay) and once in a blue beaverish moon popping in to serve a morsel of mayhem.
Anyway, I've got to dedicate 14 hours to professional melodrama today (melodrama being the topic rather than the situation, fortunately), so off I go. I have a glass of water at hand and I slapped sunscreen on my face before sitting down, so that's at least two teensy steps toward getting back into a good groove.
I'm also wearing my phone as a pedometer, because my employer is dangling gift card raffle entries as an incentive to get in 7,000 per day. Which has not been happening with me yet, but it is helpfully informative to see just how sedentary I currently am, and to plot how I'm going to fix that once the melodrama has been curtained off. This entry was originally posted at https://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/423308.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.
Many things are going well -- sometimes astonishingly so -- but I have nonetheless been moody and apprehensive AF for more than a month, because, oh, I'm me (hello past sins and persistent demons) and the world abounds with supremacists and traitors and airheads. Good God almighty on a rusty skewer.
(The astonishing includes finally winning You Can't Win Jack, a tennis contest I'd been close-but-no-cigar in a number of times for more than a decade -- and you can tell I was moody off the charts because I didn't find out or see the congratulations for half a week, having silently taken a break from following either the second half of the USO or the forum.)
What I am congratulating myself on this morning is knowing my wiring well enough to know that if I could simply get an England World drabble posted, that would appease the bunny-chasing part of my brain that was opening my fic-scribbling folder every hour and let me get on with the other things that have to be thinged before I dive into full-barreled canon review and research. It ended up being 400 words . . .
Matter of Fact
G, Archie/Daniel, post-canon, doting, no plot
Until yesterday, the line I quote in the fic summary was arguably my favorite in Subtle Blood (hello, competence kink), but the one that has been ringing through my head the past two days is "You stupid bastard, you're true as steel." In Think of England, this speech may have been the first passage I bookmarked:
“Thirdly, and this is the important one: dead men. Dead men under the sun of Jacobsdal or floating down the Thames at night. Dead and smashed in the seas off Beachy Head, or in lonely rooms with a gun falling from their hands, or in the next war because of the secrets that have been sold. The Armstrongs have left a trail of blood for their own enrichment, and I intend to bring them to justice. And I am quite sure that you will stand with me to do it, whatever else happens, because if you are a man to put personal concerns before duty, then I have lost my judgement.”
"I intend to bring them to justice" is sharing the room in my brain that also has "Everyone who fought or resisted in World War I or II or the others had other things they could have done with their lives had it not been for supremacists, traitors, et al. Everyone who had the misfortune to be born in outright serfdom or slavery is a testament to the world being profoundly unfair" and "Your parents survived martial law and poverty. Get over yourself and get on with things."
But since I am also an unconquerably frivolous and hedonistic soul, there is also the Yuletide Fandom Promo post to be vastly amused by (I started laughing at the very first one and didn't stop, and I had been warned in advance that someone had nominated Sotheran's Twitter, but still... *wipes tears from eyes*). It occurred to me this morning that Yuletide is much like RPGs for me -- I'm too much of a control freak and hot mess to participate as a regular, but I love the lead-up (building characters, aye; actually playing them, nay) and once in a blue beaverish moon popping in to serve a morsel of mayhem.
Anyway, I've got to dedicate 14 hours to professional melodrama today (melodrama being the topic rather than the situation, fortunately), so off I go. I have a glass of water at hand and I slapped sunscreen on my face before sitting down, so that's at least two teensy steps toward getting back into a good groove.
I'm also wearing my phone as a pedometer, because my employer is dangling gift card raffle entries as an incentive to get in 7,000 per day. Which has not been happening with me yet, but it is helpfully informative to see just how sedentary I currently am, and to plot how I'm going to fix that once the melodrama has been curtained off. This entry was originally posted at https://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/423308.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.