janthina

It's been a good weekend after a tiring and emotionally difficult week. Saturday was filled with the kind of icy clear wintry skies that I love, and it was wonderful to wander around the market gathering vegetables, eggs, and other bits and pieces, before retreating to the house. I made a batch of ginger-, lemon- and honey-infused water to use as a sort of tisane on cold nights, and lay around catching up with podcasts and Dreamwidth comments. On my walk out to the pool this morning, almost every second window had a cat slumbering on the windowsill, and the hedgerows were filled with clouds of twittering sparows. I put in even more effort than usual in the pool this morning and at the classes in the gym yesterday, and my body feels pleasantly tired. Now, I'm sitting in the living room with softly foggy skies outside and a whisky-scented candle, while a noorishbynoor Bahraini-style dal simmers on the stove in the kitchen for tomorrow's dinner. Everything feels sleepy and slow.

I'll start things off with some very good news. Some of you may recall my post last week about Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with suggestions of ways to help. This included a fundraiser to buy large, expensive batteries for Kyivan families so that they had reliable sources of power in the wake of constant blackouts, and loss of heating and hot water in their homes. These batteries cost $3400 US apiece, and when I posted about the fundraiser last Saturday, the organisers had bought two so far. As of this week, they now have nine, and you can see some photos of Anastasiia Lapatina, the journalist who organised the fundraiser, with the delivered batteries, in her latest Substack newsletter update. Thank you to everyone who donated or spread the word of this fundraiser: you contributed to this, and you can see concrete proof of your actions. It's a small thing in light of the overwhelming horrors going on all over the world, but it is genuinely, unambiguously helpful. The fundraiser is ongoing, so please feel free to continue to share my original post or donate if you are able. Other concrete ways to help are the Ukrainian government's fundraising initiative for air defence or Come Back Alive's fundraising campaign for drones to use as air defence against other drones — helping civillians cope with the attacks on energy infrastructure is good, but preventing those attacks from happening at all is obviously better.

Reading this week has mostly been rereads, with the only reread of note being Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month poetry and short fiction collection. This was a project she undertook in 2010, when a friend spent the month of February sending her different samples of honey each day, and she wrote a poem or short story in response to the look, smell and taste of each sample. Each creative piece of writing is preceded by a description of the sensory experience of that specific honey, vividly captured so that the reader is brought along for the ride. Although this is an early piece of El-Mohtar's work, it has all the hallmarks that I've come to expect and appreciate in her later writing: lyrical, fairytale storytelling, with each item in the collection an exquisite, self-contained gem. Her writing is always a rich feast for the senses — one does not just read her stories and poetry, but rather tastes, smells, and touches the little worlds she creates within them — and this collection really plays to those strengths.

I'm also about a quarter of the way through Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan's adult fiction debut, in which a young woman with terminal cancer is offered a chance to save her life if she elects to be transported into the fictional world of the wildly successful series of fantasy novels of which she and her younger sister are fans. The only catch — she finds herself in the body of one of the series' villains, who is slated for execution, and must therefore rely on her knowledge of the series' plot, and wider genre knowledge in general, in order to wriggle her way out of things. Rees Brennan herself was diagnosed with cancer in her thirties, and went through a long, painful recovery, and the fear and rage of that experience is conveyed with real vulnerability, deftly sitting next to the book's gleeful, quippy humour. It's written with real affection for both transformative fandom and the way that experience of collectively engaging with fiction transcends the sometimes questionable quality of the source material (if a work of fiction is meaningful, that's all that matters), and I can tell it's going to be a wild ride from start to finish.

I've got laundry to hang out (in the kitchen, as outdoor laundry will not be possible until at least late March), and more reading to do, and then Matthias and I will be heading into one of the villages south of Cambridge for a Burns Night dinner in one of the gastropubs we frequent sporadically. I'm expecting tartan, bagpipes, and whisky, the latter of which will be a bit of a shock to the system as I have been refraining from alcohol for the past month. But it will be good fun!

A busy work week like the one I described previously requires a quiet weekend, so that is exactly what happened. Gym, swimming, market shopping, and a loop around the river, market, and high street today with Matthias (we bought hot drinks from the coffee rig and browsed in the bookshop without buying anything), and otherwise no other excursions out of the house. I tried making these brown butter miso chocolate chip cookies as recommended by rekishi, and they were very delicious indeed! I've just taken more pine and red berry branches from the disassembled Christmas wreath, and they'll go on the fire in the wood-burning stove tonight.

Two nice things happened on Dreamwidth yesterday: fandomtrees reveals went live, and threesentenceficathon is open for prompts and fills for 2026. I wrote one Six of Crows Kaz/Inej ficlet and made a couple of recipe recommendations for the former (and got given so many soup recipes in response to my own request — I can't wait to try them out), and in general had an enjoyable time. I haven't had a chance to plunge into the latter so far, but I always enjoy it when I do. The first post of prompts is here — I think it's a great, low-pressure way to rekindle the creative spark, and the atmosphere is always so friendly.

I've read three books, and one serialised short story this week. All but one of these (the third in a really silly romantasy series that I'm grimly carrying on with for completionist reasons; it involves human women falling in love with the personified gods of the North, South, East and West winds, and is really not good) were excellent.

The other two books were The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Garth Nix), and The Stolen Heart (Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk). Booksellers is Nix's first foray into novel-length fiction for adults, and is set in alternative version of 1980s Britain in which the titular booksellers have a secret life acting as a sort of supernatural security service. Back when I was a book reviewer, I interviewed Nix in his Sydney office, which was packed to the rafters with all the books he used as inspiration — encyclopedias and folklore dictionaries, fiction of all genres, popular history, anthologies of folktales and mythology, etc — and I could see the varied, myriad works of this personal reference library put to good use in this novel, which is heaving with references and allusions from all sources. There's Arthuriana, British children's fantasy (such as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones), Terry Pratchett, Romantic poetry, local folklore, weird bits of London history, Cold War-era spy novels, and so on. It's the sort of book that will appeal to people who enjoy playing spot-the-reference to all the ingredients of this genre salad, and Nix clearly had the time of his life writing it.

The Stolen Heart is the second in Kurkov's series of historical mystery novels in which his hapless protagonist Samson (who fell by accident into a job working for the Soviet police force in 1919 Kyiv) tries to solve another bizarre mystery while struggling to survive the chaos around him. As with the previous book in the series, The Stolen Heart is written with a careful balance of humour and empathy, conveying both the terror and the absurdity of living in a place and time of violent, destabilising transition. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm confident that I'll enjoy its conclusion.

Finally, I read 'The Road Less Taken', a serialised short story by Amal El-Mohtar. The link goes to the final chapter of the story, with links to the previous six chapters gathered at the top of the page, so if you are interested in reading it, ensure you start at the beginning. The story interweaves a relationship breakup with the recent jewellery theft from the Louvre and the folktale of Thomas the Rhymer in a manner so clever that you will feel by the end that these three things are, of course, connected in reality! It's an Amal El-Mohtar story, so all her trademarks — the power of music and of female friendships, and food and cooking as a way to show love and care — are of course front and centre.

The most recent snowflake_challenge prompt is all about tropes: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)



( Fictional cities, and more )

In the time it's taken for me to write this post, the light has left the sky, although it's still silvery blue at 4.30pm, as opposed to total darkness. The Earth moves on its slow tilt back towards the Sun.

I am absolutely flattened by work this week, and next week promises to be more of the same. It's the point in the academic year when all the Master's and PhD students have to hand in literature reviews and project proposals, and all of them suddenly panic and realise that the classes I taught them (carefully timetabled to coincide with the point at which they were meant to start work on their literature reviews and project proposals) actually contained crucial, useful information and they probably should have been paying more attention and doing the suggested follow-up activities while what I taught them was fresh in their minds. Because they haven't done this, they all, of course, contact me at once, now. It's good to be needed — I wouldn't have a job, otherwise — but I wish they didn't all need me so much and all at the same time.

Anyway, let's use another snowflake_challenge prompt for the Friday open thread: Talk about your creative process.

I know a lot of you have already answered this in your own journals, so feel free to link to your posts in the comments rather than writing things out again. Or, answer in the comments if this is a brand new topic for you!

( My answer )




What about you?