Title: Reawakening
Rating: G
Type: Fic
Size/length/word count etc.: 803
Prompt: 041: Dove
Fandom/Ship: The Kingdom; Yang Dongsik | Louis, Jang Yunho | Arthur
Notes/Warnings:
Summary Dreams lead Dongsik to those he’s spent centuries with.

( Read more... )

Find the table with the list of fics here

The Seven Rings by Nora Roberts is the completion of her Lost Brides trilogy, which I've been waiting a year for - and it didn't disappoint! I love the set of characters working together to break the curse in these books - even if they didn't actually properly start working on that until 90% through the third book... I'm sure a lot of readers will have been frustrated throughout this series by the lengthy, drawn-out, mostly mundane nature of the story - but I actually really enjoyed all the stuff with the pets and the characters working on their businesses and the gradual romance and the sailing and the small town community building, etc. The periodic intrusions of the evil ghost were what annoyed me more than anything because it was just so repetitive. A character would be alone in the house, the ghost would frighten or threaten them (often by trapping them in one of the rooms and throwing things at them), they would escape, the other characters would rush round to help and arrive after the fact, and the affected character would explain what happened - over and over and over again, which did get a bit wearing.

And then, when we finally got to the breaking of the curse, it was all over extremely quickly and felt way too easy, with not nearly enough aftermath. Still, those minor annoyances aside, I really enjoyed this whole series overall, and there was a lot to love about how everything got wrapped up in this instalment. I've completed another Nora Roberts trilogy with a very similar format and plot in the interim, so I may not be visiting more of her back catalogue for a while, but I'll definitely give the next trilogy a try when the first one inevitably comes out in November 2026.


The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly has been on my wishlist for a while, since someone at a reading retreat recommended it to me ages ago - and then I spotted it in a local charity shop last week and immediately read it, since I was looking for a book to round out the month.

It tells the story of Frank Churcher, who writes a book of imagined folklore, with a complex puzzle built into it in the 1970s, which captures the imagination of a group of treasure hunters, who get dangerously obsessed with solving the mystery. This puts various of Frank's family in danger over the ensuing decades, until he decides to stage a media event around the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication and things derail even further in unexpected ways.

The book is less thriller-y than I expected - in a good way - and much more layered and involving, with a split timeline gradually building up the history of events, and complex family relationships evolving and devolving over the course of the book.

I really liked the main POV character, Nell, Frank's oldest daughter, and the development of her arc with her foster daughter was my favourite aspect of the book. The main mystery was still compelling, though it got a bit too drawn out towards the end. Things didn't resolve the way I was expecting, though, and there were some complex moral aspects to the conclusion that were really interesting.

This kept me engaged throughout and I read it pretty quickly, though I was never tempted to skim.

I literally feel at least 5x better than usual. I don't know if it's because the weather is good or because my hormones are just right, or because the new med is working. I've been on it for 2 weeks, so it's probably the med. WOW. The difference is so striking.

Another poor month, only 6,700 words, bringing my yearly total to just over 110k, so hopefully I will still reach the 120k.

A lot of what I've written has been drabbles, so time to word ratio is poor.  This includes my allbingo Fairy Tales entry, with The Death of Sir Roderick (Sherlock Holmes), a casefic in 9 drabbles.

Nothing more to share this month - there's a couple of ficlets written but not as yet posted to AO3 - they'll be up next month.

And I've just sent my Yuletide fic off to beta.

So, rather like my word count for the month, this is short and sweet!

✨ holiday love meme 2025 ✨
my thread here

continuing the yearly trend of disappearing for ages only to reappear asking for compliments, as i do

Happy Thanksgiving (a day late) to those of you living in the U.S. Happy Thursday to everyone else.

I slept late this morning (7am again), even though Pip got up early due to coughing. (When it’s not a work day, I don’t have to worry about getting Grant back in the house, which means I can stay in bed.)

I put together a tossed salad for Thanksgiving in the morning. My other contributions to the meal were: a cabbage salad, a loaf of banana bread, and butter cookies. (Since I had to make a GF dessert, I figured it had to be something Pip liked, so we decided on butter cookies, as they’re his favorite.)

ETA: How could I forget to mention this!! There was only one pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving Dinner. *g*

I did a load of laundry, hand-washed dishes, emptied the dishwasher, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, and scooped kitty litter.

I finished the new Inspector Gamache book.

Temps started out at 34(F) (at 7am; it was a couple degrees cooler when Pip got up) and reached 41.2, that I saw. The forecast said it was supposed to hit 50, but I never saw that. It was overcast most of the day again.


Mom Update:

Mom ended up agreeing to go to my sister’s for Thanksgiving. ( more back here )

Quote:

"You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you."

"If my life is fruitless, it doesn't matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it doesn't matter who criticizes me."

~ John Bunyan



Cooking Video:

Cooking with Dave – Keto Cheeseburger Mozzarella Sticks:

https://youtu.be/72WSPJqsAfE?si=rztimsZdYR79AGyK

I was up early yesterday and it was lovely, so I decided to take some pics. It's all very lush as we've had a fair bit of rain, mixed with sunny days as hot as midsummer. I think it's going to be a hot one, this year. I tried to include slightly more panoramic shots this time to give you some idea of my small garden which is almost all in pots and wheelibeds, as my rented unit has largely concrete and asphalt around it. Click on each pic for full size.

( pics under here )

For those celebrating, I hope you had a good holiday. Me, I went to this...I don't want to call it a soup kitchen per se, free community meal? Mostly it's there and free for the students who can't go home and for townspeople who can't afford it etc. Helped out. Had lunch of well stuffing and cake and a bit of turkey. the rest is...not to my taste but that's okay. Can't complain about free.

Came home, didn't clean. Wrote some. Did book reviews I forgot to do. Made pumpkin soup, stuffin muffins and threw the rotisserie turkey breast in the oven. Not a bad meal at all.

I have Free HBO, Starz etc this weekend. Have recorded the new Superman movie and 5 episodes of It Welcome to Derry so there's that.

Hope you all had a nice day. I'm thankful for my friends in RL and online.

I ploughed onward through FFVII Remake and ultimately platinumed it, woo hoo, although it’s definitely thanks to Optinoob’s combat guides. His strategy for the final Sephiroth boss fight (which comes after a series of other fights, so you have to manage your characters very carefully to have enough MP etc left) boiled to down to block, counter stance, block, with Cloud, switch briefly to another character once they show up for heals and barrier etc, then back to Cloud (as Sephiroth will instantly target the character you’re playing) and keep blocking/countering until you can get him with a limit break before he unkindly drops Meteor on you - Optinoob when describing this started imitating Sephiroth going “Cloud, why won’t you attack me?” :D

After that I played chunks of FFVII Intergrade (the Yuffie DLC) on hard mode and I haven’t finished it but I jumped back into FFVII Rebirth. I’m still on chapter 12 of this in hard mode, which is exactly where I was storywise in March, but I have now gone back and done all the side quests I’d missed earlier that you have to repeat on hard mode to unlock more character progression, as well as some of the mini games (aargh the mini games. There are too many and I don’t know if I’m ever going to get through some of them, like the pirate’s gallery shooting one and the gambit & gears hard mode games and, omg, the PIANO). Where I am now, though, I really need to unlock Götterdammerung to be able to make it through the next fights, and it’s locked behind a series of excessively tricky boss fights - the six Brutal Challenges. I have done four, again heavily relying on Optinooob, and they were painful slogs.

As a change of pace from repeated party wipes, I picked up Blue Prince, which is a puzzle-solving rogue-like centred around a mysterious mansion, and not only is it great but I have not yet died even once. You are the presumptive heir to the mansion, but to prove you deserve it, you have to find room 46 - the house is a 9 by 5 grid, every day you start in the entrance hall on the middle of the bottom row, and when you open a door you get a choice of possible floor plans to fill the next space - some of the rooms are dead ends, some have items or hints you need, some require specific resources to select them, some interact with other rooms, and some actively punish you by removing resources or limiting your subsequent choices. When I first got a PC, the game I totally fell for was Myst, a puzzle-solving world-building lore-heavy game with (for the time) amazing graphics, and I spent hours on it, not least because this was largely before the WWW and I had no easy way of finding out puzzle solutions. The creators of Blue Prince credit Cyan (who made Myst), and it brings back that same feeling - there’s a massive amount going on here, with intriguing hints of story as well as fantastic puzzles, and it’s very satisfying when something finally works. Last night I entered room 46 (on day 28 of game time) but there’s a surprising amount left to do! It is a terrible game for the “just one more day” because a day can be over in 20 minutes if you have bad luck drafting rooms or can take nearly two hours if you find a lot of stuff, and I also now have all these notes about hints and clues and possible solutions to pore over. Recommended.

Another 7 books read this month, bringing my yearly total to 74 - up on last year, but it all depends on length of book etc.

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
The runner up for the Shedunnit book club read of historical novel by modern author.  It looked interesting, and the time period of just after WWI should have been of interest, but the book spent a lot of time showing Maisie Dobbs' background in great detail, which, together with some very clunky explanations, put me off.  The actual mystery was interesting and well solved, but not worth all the pages that needed reading.

The Retired Assassin's Guide to Country Gardening by Naomi Kuttner
I forget who recommended this, but it was excellent.  Great fun, with a well plotted mystery.  There's a retired assassin, ghosts, and a cat, together with several other plot twists.  And it's set in Aotearoa New Zealand.  Not serious but definitely fun!

Brueghel - the Complete Paintings by Jurgen Muller
My review is here

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
The wizards need to create a football team, with the usual confusion and creativity.  The Librarian plays in goal.  I've enjoyed reading several Discworld novels this year, and this one was a good way to finish.

N or M? by Agatha Christie
More of a spy thriller than a straight murder mystery.  Tommy and Tuppence are deemed too old to make a useful contribution to the war (the book was written in 1941), but then Tommy is asked to help seek out a spy, and Tuppence gets herself involved.  Christie's prejudices, which are greater than I think the war justified, are very apparent.  And I guessed one of the plot points.

Crime in the City: The 2002 Crime Writers' Association Anthology edited by Martin Edwards
This year I bought a number of anthologies cheap, which I shall be reading over the coming year.  This was the first.  It does make me wonder how many of these writers will still be read in another 20 years.

Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE by Sarah Helm
The role of the SOE agents in France and the discovery of their fates was interesting, although the unnecessary loss of life was appalling.  Vera Atkins turned out to be an unappealing character and I really wasn't interested in her background, especially given her share in the responsibility for the deaths, which she doesn't appeared to have accepted.

In addition, but not counted in the total, I read (twice):
Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm by Charlie Mackesy
I remain the Mole!

Quote:

"I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes."

"Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other."

~ Ferdinand de Saussure


Cooking Video:

Gentle Tummy - Easy Ginger Orange Cranberry Sauce with Honey:

https://youtu.be/LwjxRMHZ0Qg?si=wKrR7iioNy2BM3vq

Here on the eve of the national holiday celebrating thankfulness, I shall grumble, possibly a repeat, but one that always comes to mind when I cook a turkey.

There's an episode of Hawaii 5-0 where Mary, Steve's irresponsible sister, is trying to thaw a turkey with a blow dryer. Steve catches her and chides her for not being better organized and she apologizes/whines it's not her fault, whatever. (I should rewatch this episode, I don't recall how all the dialogue goes.)

But I'm just watching and thinking... that's not how you thaw a turkey. It's frozen from the inside. Blowing heat on the outside is pointless. You read the instructions that come with every turkey and follow the direction to run water into the middle. (Possibly it's a drip and I believe the water should be room temperature but don't quote me. I rarely need to do this.)

Totally, I could see as a reflection of Mary's character, that she doesn't move the turkey from the freezer to the refrigerator on the correct day for it to thaw naturally. I could even see that she doesn't read the flipping instructions and so tries the forced thawing wrong.

Though I had to wonder if the writer actually knows anything about thawing turkeys? Because *Steve* is the one who bothers me. A turkey that size should have been in Steve's refrigerator at least three days before the holiday. *Steve* is always presented as a good host and decent cook. Sure, he's more often seen at the barbecue, but he's also regularly carrying various bowls of side dishes, he knows his way around a kitchen. *Steve* should have noticed that the turkey wasn't thawing and asked. *Steve* should have told his sister to put down the hair dryer and get that bird under the tap. And Steve doesn't. I'd say maybe Steve is always supposed to have done fresh turkeys, except I've never even seen a fresh turkey in our grocery stores, they're always frozen. This scene is several seasons into the show and Steve is totally the guy who has been hosting holiday meals for his ohana.

STEVE IS A BETTER COOK THAN THIS SCENE SHOWS. And I assume that the writer isn't trying to imply that at all, because the writer either doesn't know how turkeys should be thawed or assumes that the audience won't think about it. Ha ha ha, look, Mary is screwing up again and Steve is being the annoyed big brother again, that's their sibling dynamic. Except I cook one turkey a year, every year for the last 20 or so years, and wow, it weirdly grated on me that *Steve* didn't know how to thaw a turkey.

I don't know how people who work in law enforcement watch cop shows, health people watch medical shows, etc. Those things must be full of procedures, etc., not being done correctly.

Ah, now I want to rewatch some Hawaii 5-0. McDanno rocks. And in summation, if you're ever going to cook a turkey, read the instructions! /weird grumble

Just everywhere but the laundromat. Did I mention the assholes broke both washing machines here and I had to go to my old one in Jackson. Well...I won't bitch about the time i had to go to the one in Gallipolis last month. Holy shit, 10$ to do two loads of wash and one full dryer (I hang a lot of my good clothes).

This put me in mind of something evil_little_dog posted the other day about how expensive it is to be poor. Which is 100% accurate. Like now that I'm not sure I can buy a new car (or newer I should say) but mine has 111K on it. If I don't, something is going to blow and it'll be expensive to fix. I CAN afford a laundry suit for home (but the hook up is fucked up) but imagine doing a WHOLE family's laundry at those prices because you can't afford a washer/dryer. Jesus. (it's much cheaper here at the apt)


The coffee shop was packed. I did get a spot, talked to former students, thought about exploding the heads of the adult son/mom combo who was letting their 3 year old daughter/granddaughter run everywhere for the full hour I was there (and they were there before me) She was nearly hit by the door multiple times and nearly took out the waitresses more than that. eye rolls.

Kroger was predictably packed. I have to make cookies for a giveaway but found out my baking powder smelled like ass so I had to go get more. Like the Hunger Games in there. How many people wait to the last second to buy things (asks the idiot who also forget eggs and milk for her baked goods. I had...the lemon. Whee)



They were also beginning to pull down one of the historic buildings today. I got pictures (It was beyond saving which is sad)

I managed to finish a second fandomtrees don't get too excited. This was a rec one. Easy peasy.

I'm not looking forward to tomorrow. The temperature fell like a rock today but could be worse. I see what's coming to places I used to live (Lake Erie beach side, Wisconsin). But my issue is a tickle in my chest that says let's get sick. Shut up lungs. Go be weak on your own time, not mine. And my lower left wisdom must be lonely missing its upper wisdom buddy because the entire gum is swollen and painful. Exactly what you want the day before a big meal.


What I Just Finished Reading:


The Tea Dragon Society - very sweet


Revenge Serve Royal - historical mystery, it was pretty good. Found out I read book one and this is book three. Guess who didn't read book 2


What I am Currently Reading:


A Twist of Murder - Charles Dickens is the detective, yes another real person fanfic mystery. So far I am unimpressed.

Death at the Door

Wyches - a graphic novel horror I got from the library today


What I Plan to Read Next: Haunted Cemeteries of Ohio

Running late this week. Mostly because I have children home for the holidays.

Weekly Score: 89.1% (115/129)

Goal 1: Do Physical Therapy Exercises. 100% (96/96)

Review: I'm still doing pretty well on this. I'm really happy about it.

Goal 2: Take Care of Myself. 63% (15/24)

Review: I am still not getting to bed on time. I did get a couple of walks in, however, and I have been eating regularly. It's helpful. I can tell, now, when I'm not eating. I did some work on some things I wanted to get done, too, and that's been really good.

Goal 3: Finish GYWO Build-a-Bingo and 100Ships. 44% (4/9)

Review: I'm not sure if I got another bingo board, but I'll keep working on the fics. It's still not working, this writing thing. I'm having a hard time with it. This week might be harder, because my children are home, but I'm going to keep trying.

Intentions for the future: G1: I'm going to keep doing physical therapy. Not much else for this. G2: I have to keep working on making things better, taking care of myself. It's hard. It's hard to make myself a priority. G3: I will be getting a new board soon, and then I'll work on filling that up as well.

Akshually, the real reason the TV show Xena: Warrior Princess ends in S6 with 'A Friend in Need' is because that aired just after reincarnated Xena and Gabrielle were both back in their preferred gender bodies/faces and could sue the network on copyright grounds and invasion of privacy, partly because they were mad that the network kept trying to rewrite their story and partly because Gabrielle is working on new scrolls (aka the comics), and Joxer's many-thousand descendant Ted Kleinman who signed the deal with the TV studio back in 'The Xena Scrolls' decides he's on the side of these super cool women and doesn't sell any more of the scrolls to the network, so really, the network had no choice but not to continue the show in-world after S6.

Also, unrelatedly, clone!Xena may have gone into the network offices and broken a whole lot of equipment with her chakram.

See, I fixed it.



original tags: #easy as #I actually do love the idea that the tv show exists because ted sold the scrolls to the network back in 'the xena scrolls' #so everything is filtered through this lens of translation and rewriting from new narrators