Weeks 9-11 - this year is zooming by!
Mar. 16th, 2026 12:34 amSo quick summary:
HOME: deep cleaned kitchen and sorted out a bunch for a recycling and tip run today. Next week it's deep cleaning the bathroom, and chipping away at the chaos and decluttering/#orjenising in the bedroom and living room. I have detailed bullet point lists and daily/weekly targets!
HEALTH still a bit FUBAR'd but improving. Finally took myself off to Toni and Guy's on Friday where a very firm hairdresser chopped off a significant amount of my hair. It had almost reached my waist and had way too many split ends. I got a free treatment (whatever product they used smelled awesome and made my hair super silky) and I now have a really simple cut - still long enough that I can put it up when gardening /at the gym, but short enough to wash and go and no danger of overnight knots. Today I got my piercings back - found a great piercer locally and I was just going to get single studs in each ear but happily we discovered 5 of my old piercings were still open! She popped new studs in those - because I have no idea where my old studs are - only the tons of dangley earrings on the boardd in my bedroom. She redid the middle piercing on my left ear and now I have all the shiny jewellery back. Once the current ones have settled down I'm going back to get my helix piercing redone - might get one each side.
LIFE ADMIN: still planning to move from Gmail once I've decluttered it. Applied for a postal vote as I'll be working local election day (7 May) as a poll clerk in Richmond so won't be around to vote locally. Have to make time to complete training for that and it will be a long day (5am to midnight inckuding travel to/from )polling station.
DIGITAL DECLUTTER: have kept email at mail at 11,000 but not managed to reduce it; staying on top of transferring To Keep items from tablet to dropbox, my phone images storage is a mess.
GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: nope - too cold and/or wet and lacked motivation.
COOKING/EATING: reboarded the takeaway train over the last week - there just seemed to be no time at all, long work days!
READING/LISTENING: LOL. Thank you Rachel Reid - read Game Changers, Heated Rivalry, Tough Guy, Common Goal, Role Model and The Long Game and now re-reading Heated Rivalry matching book chapters to rewatch episodes. What do you mean obsessed?
WATCHING: Heated Rivalry - 4th rewatch. Everything else is having to fit around that!
CREATING/LEARNING: several, projects on the go/nearing completion - spring wreath, Halloween blanket, granny square blanket, hexicardi, granny square bags x 2. Might get one or two done by the end of the month.
CATS: all good.
VOLUNTEERING: one new task to complete as of meeting last week.
SOCIALISING: a 3 hour call with
WORK: much improvement - BRAG quarterly meeting went well, the Seed Swap was a success, the three consecutive Saturday's of work are over until 28 March which is my next weekend day of work. I've started the current round of inspections which is generating a ton of admin (which is this coming week's issue), I need to carve out some time to dealing with financial year end (how is it almost the end of March?!!!) and reprofile the capital budget.
It's going to be a long work week - think I'm going to work from home tomorrow as I should be able to plough through a chunk of admin uninterrupted. Tuesday through Friday lunchtime will be office days and site visits. Then I've got 30 bags of compost to shift from a site wide delivery down to my plot on Friday afternoon - say a prayer for my knees and back! Keeping my fingers crossed for sunshine and blue skies next week.
Pinch hits #32, 62, 70
Mar. 16th, 2026 02:01 pmIf you have a current pinch hit, I'm happy to discuss extensions. However, your deadline is not automatically extended. Please contact me if you'd like more time.
Minimum requirements: An art gift must be a completed comic at least 10 pages or 40 panels long; a fic gift must be a story at least 10,000 words long. You can also fulfil a pinch hit by giving two complete half-length works, if your recipient has opted into that for the fandom(s) you are creating in. Any work must be for a fandom your recipient has requested and one character/relationship/worldbuilding tag requested in that fandom, and must avoid their DNWs.
Pinch hits can be claimed in 5k or 20-panel increments if the recipient has opted into receiving half-length works. Please say in your claim if you're claiming a pinch hit for 5k (fic) or 20 panels (comic), and for what fandom.
( Pinch hit #32 - fic - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (TV), Murder She Wrote, Jem and the Holograms (Cartoon), G.I. Joe (Cartoon), Voltron: Lion Force (1984) )
This pinch hit can be part-claimed as one story of 5,000+ words
( Pinch hit #70 - art, fic - 9-1-1 (TV), 名探偵コナン | Detective Conan | Case Closed, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga), Ouran High School Host Club - All Media Types )
This pinch hit can be part-claimed as one story of 5,000+ words or one comic of 20+ panels.
See below cut for CLAIMED pinch hits!
Pinch hit #62 - art, fic - 少年歌行 | The Blood of Youth (Live Action TV), 莲花楼 | Mysterious Lotus Casebook (TV), 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV), 伪装者 | The Disguiser (TV), 少年白马醉春风 | Dashing Youth (Live Action TV), 杀破狼 | Sha Po Lang - priest, 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV) x2
Title: The Life You Build
Mar. 15th, 2026 07:42 pmChapters: 1/1
Fandom: Top Gun (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Characters: Ron "Slider" Kerner, Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Ron "Slider" Kerner is a Good Friend, Jewish Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Catholic Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Don't Ask Don't Tell, dishonorable discharge, Los Angeles, Gay Pride, Gay Wrath
Summary:
§ 925. Art. 125. Sodomy
(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.
(b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
-I officially have a new record for walking in late to a fandom with Starbucks. It's how I've come to describe joining an established fandom, looking around at what's been written, trying to find a story that seems like it ought to have arrived by now, struggling to believe I have to do it myself, and having to do it myself. The last times I've done this for specific fandoms, it was about 21 years since their debuts, both for Deep Space Nine - Julian Bashir never getting the genetic modifications, with DS9 coming out in 1993 and the fic getting published in 2014 - and for Buffy - an all-human AU where it's still Sunnydale, Buffy living on into retirement and enjoying her life, achieving status as public figure, her and Spike simply making a wish to have a baby, with Buffy coming out in 1997 and the first of several fics getting published in 2018.
There's been a handful of times it's been for tropes and general ideas that could go to just about any fandom, like that one I wrote for mpreg where the technology to get men pregnant was developed to achieve maternity leave reform in the United States and the character exploration simply happened to be for the show Scrubs when it could just as easily have been for any number of reasonably grounded fandoms that take place in what's more or less the real world. In fact, I'm certain there's a few fandoms where having that level of medical technology in the background would have the canon make somewhat more sense given what we see them do. And it wasn't a take on mpreg I'd ever seen before. I just happened to wander in after several decades of fandom and do it myself.
I've made a habit of doing this, and like I said, I have a new record for it.
Because in the forty years this fandom's been around, nobody's written anything where Iceman and Maverick are dishonorably discharged from the Navy. Nothing. There's been fics that tackle the culture of secrecy, or Don't Ask Don't Tell, or the legalization of gay marriage in the US. There's been fics that take place in a much kinder world where it's not an issue. There's been fics that skip past it because it doesn't work with the kind of story the author's trying to write. But there hasn't been anything about receiving a dishonorable discharge and living with what comes after.
Lawrence versus Texas happened when I was in high school. I saw Don't Ask Don't Tell come and go. I remember the pictures from the San Francisco courthouse and the wave of joy from Obergefell. I like to say that fandoms like Top Gun deliver a particular type of yearning you can't get anywhere else, especially not contemporary ones, and a lot of that's from the world those fandoms take place in. It's not a world most people want to visit, and it's the world I grew up in. I didn't mind going back there for a while.
Sometimes I feel like people forget how recent all of this is. Forty years is a long time for a movie to be around, and for people to be writing fic about that movie. For the idea to have taken this long to arrive speaks to what the fandom wants to write about. I can understand that people would rather avoid this kind of thing. Just as much, I can't grasp why nobody else thought to give it a try. I'll admit to being a little proud for being the first one to do it, and a little grateful that this is a reflection of the world that was, not the world that is.
Forty years is a good long time.
Heated Rivalry update
Mar. 16th, 2026 12:33 amSo the last time I posted I was 5 days in, had watched it once, bought the books and was just about to start a second rewatch - that was last Saturday.
I read all 6 books in 2.5 days, completed a second rewatch, randomly watched eps 3-6 across 4 nights (because why not?) and then decided it would be fun to match reading the relevant chapters of HR and then watch the relevant episodes. I got as far as ep 3 and then got distracted by more cast interviews and HR insta and threads.
Yeserday I disappeared down the YouTube rabbit hole of fan vids - so now I have 193 open tabs across 2 browser windows, there's music playing, I have no idea where it's coming from and I'm in the middle of curating playlists on my YouTube. I need to remember how to DL from YouTube because I want a good chunk of those vids accessible to me at all times and never worry about them being pulled.
I may be curating playlists on Spotify for my gym workouts because HR bvidders use great music for their vids. And...um...I have a bunch of meta posts bookmarked to go back and read properly after the current rewatch.
Still noticing new things - all the subtle little whispered remarks that weren't obvious on first or second viewing. I need to see the whole series on a screen bigger than my tablet.
I'm catching up on the cast interviews which I'm finding delightful and astonishing. I mean the 3 minute social media sound bites, wild humour and meeting fans where they live was an absolute gift - but the long form interviews with their openness, vulnerability and in depth discussions are just blowing my mind.
Still steering clear of fanfic - because there are only 24 hours in a day - and I'm not sure I have time for an "Inception" level fandom event in my life - though I suspect I'm fighting a failed rearguard action there. Inception inhabited my brain for 2.5 years and with S2 of Heated Rivalry not airing until '27 and (please god) a potential further season - it's quite possible I'll be fully consumed by this until 2028.
Around all of that it's been super busy at work and I've been making a bunch of appointments/ running errands which come under the heading of "Get Your Shit Together" but for the first time in months I feel like I'm fully firing on all cylinders.
Not sure how much of that is down to the Little Canadian Hockey Romance That Could or whether it's due to the fact that we've had more than a few days of sunshine, warmth and blue skies (and not the dreary grey, wet and miserable days we've had since before Christmas) - whatever! I'm running with it.
Happy Ides
Mar. 15th, 2026 07:59 pmRaffles and Bunny celebrate their anniversary at the opera.
References to 'Va tacito e nascosto' - 'Go silently and stealthily' from Guilio Cesare by Handel. Shifting POV.
( Read more... )
and now for something completely different
Mar. 15th, 2026 05:01 pmSo I've been watching bits and pieces of that, as well as all of The Royal Ballet's Cinderella. I therefore offer you some fully random observations, from someone who never got into any kind of dance as a kid, and therefore knows baaaaaasically nothing about the topic. (I have been to several ballets in person, The Nutcracker of course, and the Winnipeg Ballet's Svengali..)
- I like classical ballet (I'm not really watching modern) because it's quite ridiculous, and unconnected to anything that has ever happened on the face of the Earth.
- I have learned that there's dialogue! Classical ballet has a kind of sign language, done through gestures, so that the dancers can explain plot points such as "We make evil men dance until they die!" and "This lake is made of my mother's tears!"
- There does not seem to be much point to the male principal dancers. They have thighs like birch trees, which allows them to leap impressively high in the air, but they don't spin around on nothing but their big toe, which makes them less interesting to watch. Their main purposes seems to be to move the plot along, and act as a "Ballerina holder upper."
- Maybe it's just because I'm not good enough at reading the mime, but the romantic dances are... not very romantic. They mostly seem to be the ballerina holder upper holding up the ballerina while she spins around on her big toe.
- I don't know if there's non-transphobic/misogynistic way to do the comedy roles where male dancers play female characters, but Cinderella sure didn't manage it.
- The plot of Giselle is really interesting (boy meets girl, girl dies when she finds out that boy has a fiancée, girl joins chorus of vengeful ghosts, vengeful ghosts attempt to kill boy, girl saves boy), and I wonder if there have been modern retellings like there have of other old fairytales.
- I'm pretty sure the human body is not designed to do any of that.
Which is all I have for now.
Write every day! - March 2026 - Day 15
Mar. 16th, 2026 12:46 amWelcome post
( Days 1-10 )
Day 13:
Day 14:
Day 15:
Let us know if we missed you or if you didn't check in for a while, so we can add you. Of course joining the fun is possible at any point.
~ ~ ~
There's no combination of words I could put on the back of a postcard
Mar. 15th, 2026 04:27 pmFinish Line March 15!
Mar. 15th, 2026 11:18 amFINISH LINE
YOU MADE IT!
I hope your weekend treated you well, but even if it didn’t, we’re here to celebrate your marathon achievements!
Please reply with your numbers for the weekend–word count, number of pages edited, outlining work–whatever you accomplished. Include what you feel should be included, but please remember that we love numbers almost as much as words.
Thank you for writing with us this weekend!
FIC: Regency Rivalry (2/?)
Mar. 16th, 2026 02:45 amby Luthien
Chapters: 2/?
Fandom: Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
Characters: Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Svetlana Vetrova, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Hayden Pike, Scott Hunter (Game Changers)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Regency, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Military, The Season, men in tight breeches, elaborate descriptions of clothing, Rivalry, obviously, conflicting duties, Lust at First Sight, inconvenient boners
Summary:
Former Russian cavalry captain Ilya Rozanov meets former British cavalry captain Shane Hollander during the Tsar's state visit to London for the peace celebrations in June 1814. Things progress in various unexpected directions.
Writing Sprints March 16-20
Mar. 15th, 2026 09:41 amwhat’s a 1k1h?|| time zone converter || 1k1h Calendar
All sprints are run on Discord only. You can find our Discord server here.
Monday ( time zone converter)
6am PT/ 9am ET/ 1pm UTC Mrsimoshen
8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Max
11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC LittleMissTPK
1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC LittleMissTPK
5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am Tues UTC Treefrogie84
7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Tues UTC Joe
Tuesday ( time zone converter)
8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Alec
12pm PT/ 3pm ET/ 7pm UTC PreciousAnon
7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Wed UTC Alec
Wednesday ( time zone converter)
6am PT/ 9am ET/ 1pm UTC Mrsimoshen
8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Max
12pm PT/ 3pm ET/ 7pm UTC PreciousAnon
2pm PT/ 5pm ET/ 9pm UTC Treefrogie84
5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am Thurs UTC LittleMissTPK
7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Thurs UTC Alec
Thursday ( time zone converter)
6am PT/ 9am ET/ 1pm UTC Mrsimoshen
8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Alec
12pm PT/ 3pm ET/ 7pm UTC PreciousAnon
5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am Fri UTC Treefrogie84
7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Fri UTC Alec
Friday ( time zone converter)
6am PT/ 9am ET/ 1pm UTC Mrsimoshen
8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UTC Max
11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 6pm UTC LittleMissTPK
1pm PT/ 4pm ET/ 8pm UTC LittleMissTPK
5pm PT/ 8pm ET/ 12am Sat UTC Treefrogie84
7pm PT/ 10pm ET/ 2am Sat UTC Alec
