Generic Life Update 2/24/23

Hello, blog! I hope this post finds you somewhere comfortable, possibly in bed under many layers of blankets. (There's a cold snap in Seattle right now, so that's where I want to spend most of my time.) 

Since the last time I posted one of these, I:

✨ Finished the Little Red Riding Hood retelling that turned into a 22k horny novella, and now I'm letting it cook for a couple weeks before I revise it.

✨ Got a new tattoo!

This is a piece of flash by Caitlin Stairs tattoo, and I love how we managed to tuck it into the negative space from the previous tattoo!

✨ I planted my Arctic Baby dwarf nectarine tree in the ground, where I hope it will give me many, many nectarines in the coming years.

✨ Planted my new White Gold dwarf cherry in the 50 gallon drum that previously held the nectarine, where hopefully it will give me many cherries in the coming years.

✨ Finished a 60k fanfiction.

✨ Was accepted into a short story anthology that I can't talk about yet, but will refuse to shut up about when I can officially yell about it.

✨Wrote 11k on the Knife's book.

✨ Took some pictures of Matcha being a perfect tiny lap baby.

It's been a pretty okay February, even considering it's objectively the most terrible month. I hope you all had a pretty okay February, too!

Scarlett Reads: Half a Soul, Ten Thousand Stitches, and Longshadow

Hello, blog! Today I come with a review and recommendation of not one book, but three!

Half a Soul was recommended to me by an online friend literally years ago (either pre-pandemic or very early in the pandemic), and I checked the ebook out of the library and then returned it to the library unread probably five times over the course of two years, forgot about it, and then finally actually read it this year. This probably doesn't seem like an auspicious beginning, but listen, once I started reading it I was hooked. Regency manners? Balls? The Ton? The Fae? Social activism? Half a Soul was absolute catnip to me, and I immediately followed it up with Ten Thousand Stitches and Longshadow.

The three books are a trilogy in the romance novel way, rather than the fantasy way, by which I mean the second and third book focus on side characters from the first book going on their own adventures and getting their happy endings, as opposed to all three books being about building up to one single, over-arching story or one big fight against a villain. Each book is about a small fight against a small villain, and the triumphs of making the changes you can without losing hope because you alone can't change the entire structure of society.

Also there's fancy dresses, fairy smoochin', and queers. A+ work all around.

https://oliviaatwater.com/series/regency-faerie-tales

The carrot and the stick

Okay, so.

I've written previously about my goal this year of "doing good exercise for my body," because unfortunately it turns out that exercising actually makes me feel good (rude). I've been using an actual paper planner so I can cross off the things I achieved, which is satisfying--I'm using it to make sure I make these Patreon posts, too--and then I also felt that if I managed to meet 90% of my fitness goals in a month, I should get a reward! Yeah! Who doesn't love rewards?

The issue is that being the person who earns the reward while also being the person who provides the reward... sucks. And is bad. Also I couldn't come up with a good reward that I wouldn't just allow myself to buy anyway, so I was stuck for a while...

Until last Friday.

Behold! The carrot!

"But Scarlett," you say, "that's not a carrot, that's a glass cabinet from IKEA that you bought off OfferUp for $75!"

"You are correct," I respond, "and it's weird that you know those details."

Anyway, I've been wanting to create what is functionally an indoor greenhouse for a while now, so I can have a space for houseplants that want a more humid environment and keep them safe from the cats. This cabinet was my first reward for the year, and for the rest of the year if I meet my fitness goals, I get to buy one houseplant a month and stick it in here!

Currently it contains a somewhat crispy maidenhair fern I haven't quite managed to kill and a nerve plant grimly hanging on to life. The black cups are Japanese tea cups filled with water to try and make it more humid.

The silver brake fern is new because my wife convinced me to treat myself, which is why it looks good compared to the other two.

I need to get grow lights set up through the whole thing at some point, but one step (and one plant) at a time!

As long as we're here, please enjoy these pictures of Gyoza. I attempted to take some moody pictures of him because the lighting was good in the bedroom, and... well...

Generic Life Update 2/3/23

Saying this is generic actually sort of downplays the cool stuff I did in the last month, but titles are the bane of my existence, so:

I wrote 64,388 words in January!

I made my first Eshakti order, got some custom-sized outfits (that fit like a dream!!!) and wore one of them to a queer burlesque karaoke show where a man sang Tennessee Whiskey and then PROPOSED DURING THE INSTRUMENTAL BREAK!!! Love is real! I looked great!

A photo of the author in a long-sleeved black jumpsuit.

I got a new tattoo! It's rad as hell! I'll be getting the rest of the color added later this month!

A tattoo of a T-Rex skull shaded in brown with linework chrysanthemums around it.

I figured out how to do several things in my German Wheel class, including this!

We got a new rug pad (which my knees are going to thank me for the next time I work out), and I got an ergonomic pillow to help me not fuck up my neck when I sleep! Yes, I have reached the stage in life where I am excited about rug pads and ergonomic pillows! If you're not already at that stage, you will be someday and then you'll understand!

I just picked up a glass cabinet from OfferUp that I'll be turning into an indoor greenhouse for my humidity-loving plants, so hopefully by next week I'll be able to share photos of that project.

It's been a pretty good January! I hope yours was, too!

Scarlett Reads: A Garter as a Lesser Gift

Hello, blog! I bought this lovely little snack a few months ago but only read it recently, which I feel foolish about, because it's a delight.

I was already a fan of the author's work from Briarly, a WWII m/m retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and I am happy to report that this book lived up to my expectations! A Garter as a Lesser Gift is a WWII m/m/f retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, renowned for probably being the most bisexual poem in Arthurian legend. (While I loved the film version with Dev Patel, honestly? It was less bisexual than the original, and I think that was a shame.) This retelling by Aster Glenn Gray is a wonderful little snack of a story that alternates between surreal fairy-tale prose and a tight peek into Gawain's inner turmoil as he finds himself being drawn to his hosts Lord and Lady Bertilak, and also closer to the date where he must meet the Green Knight to face his future...

Also, in case you were wondering, this story is extremely horny for something that doesn't even have a fade-to-black sex scene. Do you want to imagine Gawain as the wee filling in a big burly Bertilak sandwich? This story has you covered!

(Lady Bertilak is described as a tall stately redhead with crows feet around her eyes and a great rack, so you know I was sold. I am but a simple gay woman.)

Check out Aster Glenn Gray's website here for this and other books! Enjoy!

Writing Update 1/20/23

Good morning, blog! Here's what's happened with me since last we connected!

Total words written since 1/13: 19,384

Breaking them down by project, we get the following:

The new fanfic: 12,234

Oh No, Too Buff 2 (aka the Knife's book): 2,772

Red Riding Hood retelling: 1,899

This is, uh... Very normal for me when I get going on a fic. 😂 It's also the reason for my new rule: I get to write a new fic ONLY AFTER I finish an ongoing publishable project. I finished the first draft of a shapeshifter romance novella in December, so I get to write and share this fic, bask in the comments and kudos, and then return to the delayed gratification mines to write another novella. Rinse and repeat.

Okay, numbers are great but they're not words. Just for fun, here's the last line written from each WIP:

The new fanfic: “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Oh No, Too Buff 2 (aka the Knife's book): “And I’m happy to be the help, so long as I’m not stuck with it.”

Red Riding Hood retelling: Red didn’t know if she specifically had a type, really, but the Wolf wasn’t not it.

Generic Life Update 1/13/23

Honestly the worst part of writing for me is coming up with the title after I've finished the project--it's not enough that I wrote the story??? I need to name it?!--and it turns out that's true for blog posts, too, so here you go: A Generic Life Update.

Writing was hard for me in 2022 from about August on (by which I mean I was "only" managing 17-21k a month, instead of 50-70k a month, because I am an absurd human) and I just felt... blah a lot of the time. Low energy, not very creative, busy busy busy. Now, objectively I know that a good chunk of that is due to producing the audiobook of His Secret Illuminations, which required me to listen to 15+ hours of audio repeatedly and thus destroyed my writing time, but there were other contributing factors. I was spending too much time on the internet, not taking great care of my meat sack, etc.

I decided to make some changes, and I decided to make them at the new year, not because I care about resolutions but because I had a cute planner I bought at Daiso back in 2021 and never used and my brother bought me a cat-themed stationary set for Christmas. Aesthetic, y'all. I had ten whole days off from work in December, which was great, and that gave me time to just chill and play video games and write and figure some stuff out.

I'm now two full weeks into the year, and doing things like "making sure I move my body in a healthy way every day," and "taking the time to play video games instead of doomscrolling twitter," and "reading actual books and not just fanfic," and "sewing actual garments for myself with the many materials I bought for that purpose," and I regret to inform you that I feel fucking great and I've already met my wordcount goal for the month. Taking care of myself makes me feel better? How insulting.

Here's Gyoza helping me stretch, which was definitely very cool of him and didn't get in my way or make the process harder at all.

And here's Matcha warming all of her feets above the baseboard heater. This has nothing to do with the content of this post, but it's very cute.

Here's to a 2023 full of self-care, cats getting in the way, high wordcounts, and many runs of Hades! Happy Friday!

Scarlett Reads: Ocean’s Echo

One of my vague goals for 2023 is to read more actual books (instead of just fanfiction about my faves, which is excellent reading and also important but sort of a different vibe) and to that end I plan to review at least one actual book a month so: Here we go!

The cover of Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell

I loved Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell. I mean... arranged marriage? the excruciating ordeal of falling in love with your new husband? cool gender stuff? a space conspiracy? HUDDLING FOR WARMTH? THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED????!!! If she'd managed to mess up a book with those tropes it would have been honestly impressive, but she didn't! It was an excellent read, and as soon as I heard about Ocean's Echo I was so ready to read her work again. I never for a second worried I wouldn't like it as much as the first one.

Excellent news: I liked it as much as the first one.

Listen, you all probably know at this point how much I love the cdrama The Untamed and the Chinese webnovel The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation upon which it was based. If you've seen a single gifset from the show, you may have gathered that it's a romance between a feral chaos goblin and an uptight, emotionally repressed order warrior. If you've done any further investigation into the characters, you may have learned that the chaos goblin is actually incredibly insightful and the order warrior, instead of being unfeeling, is actually so full of feelings that he has to keep them under careful control at all times.

Friends: Enter Tennal and Surit. They are a chaos goblin/order warrior ship like none other. They hate each other! They admire each other! They have a terrible time trying to communicate with each other! They have mind powers! They end up telepathically bonded! Wait, that wasn't hate, that was love!! THIS IS MY FUCKING CATNIP!!!

Throw in complicated family dynamics, a military conspiracy, space as an ocean, wild alien shit, and compelling prose? You have a compelling, fun, seat-of-your-pants sci-fi romance that had me guessing at the twists and turns and only getting some of them right. I highly recommend reading this if you haven't already, and pick up Winter's Orbit while you're at it.

Info about both books can be found at https://everinamaxwell.com/

Happy New Year!

I felt like I struggled with wordcount and finding the energy to write for the entire second half of 2022, but my spreadsheet tells me that I actually managed to pump out 375,618 words for the year. (Most of those were fanfiction, before you get too excited about what this means for my published books.)

I’d like to propose a toast to me! Here’s to a surprising wordcount for 2022, and a hopefully even more surprising one for 2023! Let’s work together to build a kinder, hornier world!

A Candlenights Sermon

So five years ago a friend of mine said, "I grew up religious and I don't want anything to do with that anymore, but damn do I miss the good parts of a Christmas Eve service, like singing together and lighting candles!" and I said, "Well, what if we invent our own holiday? With singing? And candles?" and she said, "That sounds awesome!" and then we stole the name Candlenights from the McElroy brothers and I wrote a non-religious sermon and we rewrote our favorite carols to be secular and now, five years later, we have a new holiday tradition.

This is all backstory to explain what I'm about to share, which is my 2022 Candlenights sermon. Please join me if you would like to cry about space.

~~~

Hello, dear friends and dear family. We gather in the winter darkness once again, as we have for the last five years; as we have for our whole lives; as those who came before us have, on and on, back to the beginnings of people. Back to when the first monkey raised its head to look at the sky, and instead of only seeing the darkness, saw the stars.

Saw the light.

I think humanity fell in love right then, fell in love with the wide sprawl of the universe and all its secrets. Why else would we dedicate ourselves to it, as we have throughout time? Why else would we look at those sparkling lights in the velvet darkness and give them names and stories? Why would we do that, if it wasn’t to bring them closer to ourselves?

The first recorded evidence of constellations comes from 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, as our ancient ancestors sought to draw the stars out of the sky and know them better. We saw ourselves in them, and named them accordingly. "The Loyal Shepherd of Heaven," “The Seed-Furrow,” “The Farmworker.” Do you still know them? Do you recognize Orion, Virgo, and Aries? Did you know how far back our stories go?

The first telescope came in 1608, allowing us closer to the stars and the universe; allowing us to see the light we loved in greater detail, almost close enough to touch. We saw the craters on the moon; we saw Saturn’s rings for the first time; we looked at the cloudy arc of the Milky Way and learned that it wasn’t a cloud. It was more stars, each of them a tiny point of light.

America launched the first Orbiting Solar Observatory in 1962, and we could look at the stars from out there with them, as though we were one of them. We learned about gamma rays in our solar system and distant galaxies; observed solar flares from the Sun, our closest star; saw parts of stars that were previously unseeable, that we’d only dreamed were there.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, the culmination of twenty years of work by humans who loved the stars so much they fought through earthly concerns like budget issues and engineering mistakes; humans who were so devoted that three years later they made repairs to the Hubble in space to bring the stars closer. We saw things we could never have imagined, great beauty and great destruction, birth and death and so, so much light.

Last December the James Webb Space Telescope was launched after over twenty-five years of development, because we love the stars so much we can never be satisfied. Earlier this year we saw the culmination of that work, and oh, what a culmination. Hundreds of thousands of galaxies previously invisible to us. Nebulae we thought we knew from the Hubble shown to us in awesome detail. Stars being born among the corpses of supernovae. Stars. So many stars.

Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine the line of discovery that traces from our earliest ancestors all the way to us now. Imagine taking your ancient relative by the hand and sharing this knowledge. Imagine looking at the wide, unmapped sky together and telling them our stories, about their future descendants who loved the stars so much we found a way to go out among them.

Don’t you think that they would be proud? That no matter how far we’ve come, we still stand in the darkness and look for the light?

There’s a poem by Mary Oliver called The Summer Day. You may have heard the final lines before, as they’ve been co-opted to support hustle culture or grinding or working out or whatever else capitalism thinks it needs to sell us. I think that’s a shame, as the full poem is much kinder, and gentler, and wondrous than that. Let me read it for you now:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

My dears, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? 

I plan to live the way I want to live, and love who I want to love, and always look for the light wherever I can. I hope that you will join me.

Happy Candlenights.

On the power of asking…

Last Friday the director of the org where I work my day job sent out an email that was like “December is coming up! We should have a holiday party!” and today I rolled into the leads meeting with an unhinged powerpoint presentation about how he should let me book an arcade and and taco bar that ended with this slide:

And you know what?

WE’RE BOOKING THE FUCKING ARCADE AND TACO BAR!!! FINALLY A MAN WHO WILL JUST GIVE ME THE CREDIT CARD AND GET OUT OF MY WAY!

I think the lesson here is, “Don’t be afraid to ask for exactly what you want,” followed by, “If your unhinged powerpoint presentation has several example itemized budgets, you are more likely to get exactly what you want.”

So… about that social media…

I cannot even begin to describe what it’s been like watching the main way I communicate book information being driven into the ground by the richest, least competent man in the entire world, but it’s sure been something! Wow! Not even two weeks yet and I legitimately don’t know if Twitter will still exist when I wake up tomorrow morning! What a world!

I am still kicking it on some other places, if you’d like to follow me, because I know better than to put all my eggs in one basket and then give it to a billionaire, so:

Instagram! This will be pictures of my cats and pictures of books, not so much text because it’s a bad medium for that. (I will probably not use this as much because it’s such a pain to use on web, but it’s there.)

Tumblr! I was born a shitposter and I will die a shitposter. Come see if I ever give in to my baser urges and Blaze a post about my horny books!

Patreon! This is the only place on the internet where I’ll be posting WIP snippets of my writing, and all big news and announcements will go there first before going out to my mailing list and the wider internet.

Here! I started this blog and by god I’m gonna run it. Will it be consistent? Will it have a theme? Will I update regularly? ALL GOOD QUESTIONS.

Let’s find out together.

Greetings and cats

You know what’s great?

Blogs that you own and won’t disappear when a social media website goes off the deep end.

You know what I didn’t have previously?

A blog I owned that wouldn’t disappear when a social media site went off the deep end.

Here I am. Here’s the start of something. Here are some cats.

That is the ottoman that contains my current knitting project, and Gyoza knows it.

When the heat comes back on, Matcha lays on the back of the couch like this so she can warm all her feets at once above the baseboard.