*eyes calendar*
Mar. 27th, 2013 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nenya_kanadkaOkay, so, two months is certainly not the longest I've gone without updating LJ, but for someone with over a hundred icons, it's rather ridiculous.
Between having post-holiday-fest writer's block and getting an ereader for my birthday, I've been reading a lot more than I've been writing lately. It's been Actual Books more than fanfic, for the most part, although GrabMyBooks and the AO3 download function mean I can read just about anything on the Kobo. Which means I can read longfic on work breaks or on the bus, instead of just at my computer. Hurray for portability!
Back in February I decided to watch all the Lost episodes with Danielle Rousseau in them, because I like Mira Furlan but didn't think the show itself was all that interesting. So over the course of a couple of weeks,muccamukk saw me go through the Lost fan's emotional arc, highly condensed. ("Oh, interesting!" "Neat characters!" "...WTF are they doing to Sayid?" "Who with the smoke monster what now?" "The hell, Ben?" "WTF Jack's emo beard of manpain?" "I hate this island so much but I can't stop watching!" Mercifully, the finale intervened at that point. I still don't get the finale. But I like Claire and Charlie and Sayid and Danielle and Kate.)
I then inhaled all of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bachlava's post-canon AU fixit fic for Danielle and Alex, because seriously, show? That was Tasha-Yar-and-the-giant-oil-slick levels of pointless character death, there. (No, I don't care about Ben's drama over getting Alex killed. Cult leader = dnw.) Lovely, lovely fic, hit a whole bunch of my narrative kinks for characters surviving certain kinds of trauma and taking care of each other afterward.
I also finally got around to reading both Redshirts by John Scalzi and Ana Mardoll's Pulchritude, which I'd been meaning to for a while. I'd probably rate both of them a B+.
Redshirts is of course a parody novel of sorts, dedicated to the junior crewmen who get offed to show that the situation is serious. The writing moved along very quickly, and was kind of light in tone with a lot of short declarative sentences. And then it took a left turn at Albuquerque and I found it a lot more interesting. But it was the last two of the three codas that really grabbed me. (I'm a sucker for secondary characters getting to tell their side of the story, so I suppose it's fitting that third-string characters from a novel about redshirts should be the ones that made me tear up a little.)
Pulchritude (Goodreads reviews) is a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast". I somehow missed that it had an unhappy ending, so when the story suddenly ended tragically, I was surprised. (Though I think some of that surprise came from looking at the page count and thinking that at 160 pages out of 250, I had a lot more story to go--but the last 100 pages are all meta: character biographies and deconstructions of other versions of the folktale.) I really loved the stepsister characters; they were fleshed out and made interesting and given their own personalities. And the stepmother was actually heroic and on the heroine's side! I guessed the twist ending a little before the characters did, though, and thought they would realize what was going on and avert the disaster about to unfold. But no: rocks fall, everyone dies. :(
Other things I've used the ereader for:
--the PsyCop novels by Jordan Castillo Price (featuring a gay medium (as in psychic) cop, and a LOT of fanfic-level NC-17 slash sex)
--Dark Mirror by Diane Duane, in which Picard, Troi, and Geordi La Forge (with the help of an OC who is totally a wizard from the Young Wizards universe) run into their evil counterparts in the Mirror Universe. Evil!Troi realllllly likes putting people in Agony Booths. :/ But our!Troi and Geordi save the day and it is lovely.
--The Practice of Barrayaran Sex by Philomytha (Aral and Cordelia's wedding/wedding night)
--221B Barrayar by Wandering (Lord Auditor Sherlock Holmes and Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan take a case together, whilst Watson and Ivan share identical looks of admiring horror)
Writing-wise, I'm ignoring all my WIPs in favour of something with OCs that exactly one other person on the planet cares about. It's, er, better than nothing? But then, Mucca's in town; when Mucca's in town I tend to watch more canons (see above: we're also following Elementary and doing a TNG rewatch) and write less. Maybe when she buckles down to her latest fest-fic, I'll Kitten War my way to victory.
Between having post-holiday-fest writer's block and getting an ereader for my birthday, I've been reading a lot more than I've been writing lately. It's been Actual Books more than fanfic, for the most part, although GrabMyBooks and the AO3 download function mean I can read just about anything on the Kobo. Which means I can read longfic on work breaks or on the bus, instead of just at my computer. Hurray for portability!
Back in February I decided to watch all the Lost episodes with Danielle Rousseau in them, because I like Mira Furlan but didn't think the show itself was all that interesting. So over the course of a couple of weeks,
muccamukk saw me go through the Lost fan's emotional arc, highly condensed. ("Oh, interesting!" "Neat characters!" "...WTF are they doing to Sayid?" "Who with the smoke monster what now?" "The hell, Ben?" "WTF Jack's emo beard of manpain?" "I hate this island so much but I can't stop watching!" Mercifully, the finale intervened at that point. I still don't get the finale. But I like Claire and Charlie and Sayid and Danielle and Kate.) I then inhaled all of
bachlava's post-canon AU fixit fic for Danielle and Alex, because seriously, show? That was Tasha-Yar-and-the-giant-oil-slick levels of pointless character death, there. (No, I don't care about Ben's drama over getting Alex killed. Cult leader = dnw.) Lovely, lovely fic, hit a whole bunch of my narrative kinks for characters surviving certain kinds of trauma and taking care of each other afterward. I also finally got around to reading both Redshirts by John Scalzi and Ana Mardoll's Pulchritude, which I'd been meaning to for a while. I'd probably rate both of them a B+.
Redshirts is of course a parody novel of sorts, dedicated to the junior crewmen who get offed to show that the situation is serious. The writing moved along very quickly, and was kind of light in tone with a lot of short declarative sentences. And then it took a left turn at Albuquerque and I found it a lot more interesting. But it was the last two of the three codas that really grabbed me. (I'm a sucker for secondary characters getting to tell their side of the story, so I suppose it's fitting that third-string characters from a novel about redshirts should be the ones that made me tear up a little.)
Pulchritude (Goodreads reviews) is a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast". I somehow missed that it had an unhappy ending, so when the story suddenly ended tragically, I was surprised. (Though I think some of that surprise came from looking at the page count and thinking that at 160 pages out of 250, I had a lot more story to go--but the last 100 pages are all meta: character biographies and deconstructions of other versions of the folktale.) I really loved the stepsister characters; they were fleshed out and made interesting and given their own personalities. And the stepmother was actually heroic and on the heroine's side! I guessed the twist ending a little before the characters did, though, and thought they would realize what was going on and avert the disaster about to unfold. But no: rocks fall, everyone dies. :(
Other things I've used the ereader for:
--the PsyCop novels by Jordan Castillo Price (featuring a gay medium (as in psychic) cop, and a LOT of fanfic-level NC-17 slash sex)
--Dark Mirror by Diane Duane, in which Picard, Troi, and Geordi La Forge (with the help of an OC who is totally a wizard from the Young Wizards universe) run into their evil counterparts in the Mirror Universe. Evil!Troi realllllly likes putting people in Agony Booths. :/ But our!Troi and Geordi save the day and it is lovely.
--The Practice of Barrayaran Sex by Philomytha (Aral and Cordelia's wedding/wedding night)
--221B Barrayar by Wandering (Lord Auditor Sherlock Holmes and Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan take a case together, whilst Watson and Ivan share identical looks of admiring horror)
Writing-wise, I'm ignoring all my WIPs in favour of something with OCs that exactly one other person on the planet cares about. It's, er, better than nothing? But then, Mucca's in town; when Mucca's in town I tend to watch more canons (see above: we're also following Elementary and doing a TNG rewatch) and write less. Maybe when she buckles down to her latest fest-fic, I'll Kitten War my way to victory.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 09:19 pm (UTC)I got spoiled on Tumblr and CBS' commercials on tv. Moriarty, for all that he appears in...two stories of the books (I think), is so intricately interconnected with Sherlock and Watson - to an extent - that people already have preconceived notions of what Moriarty should be and Elementary, IMNSHO, managed to turn those notions on the head. Basically what you said.
(Natalie Dormer makes me want to start watching Game of Thrones.)