james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-05-28 04:42 pm
Entry tags:

Bundle of Holding: Sine Nomine Corebooks (from 2023)



The complete Deluxe Editions of Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number, along with Wolves of God, Silent Legions, and more.

Bundle of Holding: Sine Nomine Corebooks (from 2023)
senmut: Snapshot of Eliza's stubborn face, captioned with "Just You Wait" (My Fair Lady: Just You Wait)
Asp ([personal profile] senmut) wrote2025-05-28 03:36 pm
Entry tags:

Podfic!

[Podfic] Dreams and Thoughts (66 words) by pieces0fstars
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Phèdre nó Delaunay/Melisande Shahrizai
Additional Tags: POV First Person, Introspection, Podfic, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Audio Format: Download, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes
Summary:

Podfic reading of Dreams and Thoughts, by merfilly.

Author's summary:
Phedre thinks on her Lady

rachelmanija: (Books: old)
rachelmanija ([personal profile] rachelmanija) wrote2025-05-28 10:28 am

Blood Over Bright Haven, by M. L. Wang



Sciona, the first woman ever admitted to the University of Magic, takes on Thomil, a janitor from a discriminated-against culture, as her lab assistant, and they both learn dark secrets about their world.

Thomil is introduced when his clan makes a desperate run across deadly ground to get to the safety of a city surrounded by a magical shield. The shield protects against bitter cold and the deadly Blight, which randomly zaps and dissolves people, but the area around the city is particularly Blight-infested. Only Thomil and his baby niece survive. When they arrive, they find that the city natives hate their race and has consigned them all as a permanent underclass.

Ten years later, Sciona, a well-to-do young woman in the city, is preparing for her magic exam to try to get into the sexist magic university, which no woman has ever passed. Though she does pass, all the male mages but her mentor hate her and hassle her. The only other person who's even remotely nice to her is Thomil, the janitor, who is assigned as her lab assistant as a cruel joke. But though Sciona is racist and classist, and Thomil is mildly sexist in an oblivious way, they find that they kind of get along...

Wang has an engaging, easy-read style for the most part, the intros to the two main characters are quite compelling, and despite the heavy-handed axes of privilege themes, Thomil and Sciona have a nice dynamic.

I said "for the most part." The exception is the magic system, which I think is basically computer programming via magic typewriters (spellographs). The wizards program a spell to access a specific area of the magical Otherrealm (which they can't see or sense in any way, so they're just plotting points on a grid) to grab magical energy or matter from it. But we get MUCH more detailed and lengthy descriptions of it, from long explanations to actual spells:

CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.

ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.

ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.

If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.


The first half is Sciona and Thomil working on various spells, interspersed with very heavy-handed commentary on colonialism, sexism, and how Sciona totally gets feminism when it applies to her personally but is oblivious to all other isms. Sciona is an awful, self-centered person and Thomil is mostly perfect. Almost exactly halfway through, there is a shocking reveal. At least, it shocked many readers. It did not shock me.

Read more... )

Despite what the plot description sounds like, Sciona and Thomil do not have a romance beyond occasional sexy feelings. It's a magical dystopia/dark academia, I think similar to Babel (which I could not get very far into) but less anvillicious in that it does not have literal footnotes saying stuff like "This is a racist comment and racism is bad." (In the bookshop, I have Blood Over Bright Haven tagged "If you like Babel you will like this.") Sadly for M. L. Wang, this comparative subtlety got them some reviews on Goodreads accusing them of condoning Sciona being a bad person and endorsing her beliefs.

I did not care for this book but I can see how it would work for many readers, especially if they're shocked by the twist at the halfway mark.
badly_knitted: (Rose)
badly_knitted ([personal profile] badly_knitted) wrote2025-05-28 06:15 pm

BtVS Double Drabble: Heart To Heart

 


Title: Heart To Heart
Fandom: BtVS
Author: 
[personal profile] badly_knitted
Characters: Joyce, Buffy.
Rating: PG
Written For: Challenge 451: Up To You at 
[community profile] drabble_zone.
Spoilers/Setting: Early Season 3.
Summary: Joyce is trying hard to understand.
Disclaimer: I don’t own BtVS, or the characters.
A/N: Double drabble.
 


 
badly_knitted: (Dee & Ryo black & white)
badly_knitted ([personal profile] badly_knitted) wrote2025-05-28 06:05 pm

FAKE Triple Drabble: Traffic Jammed

 


Title: Traffic Jammed
Fandom: FAKE
Author: 
[personal profile] badly_knitted
Characters: Ryo, Dee.
Rating: PG
Setting: After the manga.
Summary: It may not technically be their job, but as police officers, Dee and Ryo can’t just ignore the situation.
Written Using: The dw100 prompt ‘Signal’.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
A/N: Triple drabble.
 


 
badly_knitted: (Pout)
badly_knitted ([personal profile] badly_knitted) wrote2025-05-28 05:55 pm

Double Drabble: Injured Again

 


Title: Injured Again
Author: 
[personal profile] badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Owen.
Rating: PG
Written For: Challenge 867: Right at 
[community profile] torchwood100.
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Poor Ianto is in the wars.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
A/N: Double drabble.
 


 
brithistorian: (Default)
brithistorian ([personal profile] brithistorian) wrote2025-05-28 10:08 am
Entry tags:

AKICIDW: What does editing cost?

I got an email yesterday from one of my professors who I've been using as a reference. She said she had a student who was in the process of applying to grad school and was looking to hire an editor to help him improve one of his papers for inclusion with his applications. She remembered that I had experience in editing and wanted to know if I'd be okay with her passing on my contact information to him. I was up front with her about my editing experience (I've done lots of copyediting, style editing, and fact-checking, but no real heavy-duty developmental editing other than on my own writing), and said if she still felt comfortable recommending me to him I was interested. After reading this, she said was comfortable recommending me and would be passing my information on to him.

Now we finally get to the question part of this post: I've never hired an editor. I've never worked as a free-lance editor of this sort. But I know a lot of you have editing experience and/or ties to universities, so I'm hoping you can give me some guidance here: How much do editors usually charge for something like this? Should I be charging by the hour or by word count or what? At this point I have absolutely nothing to go on other than my instinctive valuation of money, which I already know is seriously fucked up from years of being broke.

pauraque: Marina Sirtis in costume as Deanna reads Women Who Love Too Much on the Enterprise bridge (st women who love too much)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-05-28 10:19 am

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin (1972)

In this Hainish novella set sometime before Rocannon's World, the pacifist inhabitants of an idyllic forest planet are enslaved and brutalized by colonizers from the Terran military who are there to ecocidally clear-cut the forest for wood because Earth is nearly out of trees.

I have read this book before, but not in a long time because I'm afraid I don't like it. (cut for negativity) )
analogbasilisk: (Default)
Ash E. Costa ([personal profile] analogbasilisk) wrote in [community profile] 100words2025-05-28 10:41 am

444. Wander - Original Drabble

Title: untitled
Original
Rating: T
Notes: warning for mental health issues

Read more... )
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-05-28 09:30 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-05-28 08:58 am

Kindergarten Wars, volume 1 by You Chiba



Lonely Rita has no end of meet-cutes with hunky men. If only Rita could stop shooting them in the head...

Kindergarten Wars, volume 1 by You Chiba
osprey_archer: (books)
osprey_archer ([personal profile] osprey_archer) wrote2025-05-28 08:49 am

Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.

Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.

I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”

What I’m Reading Now

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.

What I Plan to Read Next

Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?
pilottttt: (Default)
pilottttt ([personal profile] pilottttt) wrote in [community profile] common_nature2025-05-28 02:43 pm
Entry tags:

Turtle from the Kyzylkum desert



For more details about our trip to this desert (in Russian), see here: https://pilottttt.dreamwidth.org/445028.html
Audrelite ([personal profile] pitchblackrenegade) wrote in [community profile] 100words2025-05-28 01:10 am

[Prompt #444 — Wander] Metal Family — Things To Find Cute

Author: Audrelite Fandom: Metal Family Title: Things To Find Cute Prompt: #444 — Wander Rating: T Characters: Dee, Lif Word Count: 100 Summary: Lif is cute.

AO3 Link

but_can_i_be_trusted: (Nerd Princess)
cyberiad_queen ([personal profile] but_can_i_be_trusted) wrote in [community profile] 100words2025-05-27 10:39 pm

[Challenge #444: Wander] Friends: 'Reality'

Title: 'Reality'
Fandom: Friends
Rating: G
Notes: Crossposted to [profile] anythindrabble and [community profile] vocab_drabbles

Reality )
senmut: Autobot symbol (Transformers: Autobots)
Asp ([personal profile] senmut) wrote2025-05-27 08:58 pm
Entry tags:

Daily Check In

*\o/* Word Count Step Count Headache?
Daily 629 9,104 no
Monthly 18,284 261,199 9 days
luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
luzula ([personal profile] luzula) wrote2025-05-27 10:29 pm

Unsent Letters Exchange

I didn't really bother trying not to be obvious when I wrote this for [personal profile] sanguinity:

Excerpt from the Journal of Captain Keith Windham for August 14-16, 1745 (1011 words) by Luzula
Fandom: The Jacobite Trilogy | The Flight of the Heron Series - D. K. Broster
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ewen Cameron/Keith Windham
Characters: Keith Windham, Ewen Cameron
Additional Tags: Diary/Journal, Missing Scene

It was fun to write a bit of Keith's journal from when he first met Ewen! It was equally obvious that [personal profile] sanguinity was the one who wrote me this lovely "Mr Rowl" fic:

Nary a Cause for Tears (9400 words) by sanguinity
Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: "Mr Rowl" - D. K. Broster
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Raoul des Sablières/Hervey Barrington, Raoul des Sablières/Juliana Forrest
Characters: Hervey Barrington, Raoul des Sablières, Lavinia Barrington, Hannah Jeremy, Juliana Forrest, John Jeremy (Mr Rowl)
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Enemies to Lovers, Bittersweet, Missing Scenes, Canon Compliant, Pining, (but not only pining!)
Summary: If he dies here, that will be his final judgement of me: that I take joy in his suffering.

Were it true, I would be a happier man this night.

It is a fic with many layers: an academic framing, a journal intended for public consumption, and the same character's secret journal. I really enjoyed how these layers interplayed with each other, and of course it's great to get Barrington's POV on the canon events (and more than the canon events, too!). There are some lovely missing scenes here.
smallhobbit: (Holmes Watson grass)
smallhobbit ([personal profile] smallhobbit) wrote in [community profile] 100words2025-05-27 08:03 pm

Sherlock Holmes (ACD) - Pleasant Afternoons

Title: Pleasant Afternoons
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD) - retirement era
Rating: G

One of the great pleasures of being retired and living in our village is that if the weather is fine we can simply leave the cottage and have a wander. In London we always walked with a purpose, and often in a hurry. Now we can go where our fancy takes us and we are governed only by the weather and our stamina. Moreover, when, having spent the afternoon wandering, we sink into our armchairs in the evening, we can be confident that no-one will call to drag us away from the comfort of our home. We are fortunate indeed.
brithistorian: (Default)
brithistorian ([personal profile] brithistorian) wrote2025-05-27 01:02 pm
Entry tags:

SOTD: ifeye (이프아이), "Nerdy"

I had a few minutes to spare today, so I was trying to get caught up on recent K-pop releases. One that I found was "Nerdy," by ifeye, which came out on 8 April. I know nothing about this band, but I liked this song and I loved the video. The video is like a cross between i-dle's "I Do" and Weeekly's "Tag Me", "Zig Zag", and "After School" (which I think of as a trilogy), so it hit in a really enjoyable place for me. I hope you like it!