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Current favorite things: Alfred's tie pin on Gotham and Justin Williams's everything. If I lived in a market where there was always narratively-edited hockey on my TV, I would never watch anything else.

Current least favorite things: paying my gas and electricity bills today. I was really annoyed when January was nearly over and it had barely snowed, but I'm good now, thanks!

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It turns out that I might have been wrong, that stretch of years where I blamed my February debilitating head cold on job-related stress and the collective germs of 100+ teenagers. Like clockwork, again this year, spent the day after Presidents Day exhausted, sniffly, and slightly feverish, despite the fact that I am neither stressed nor living with teenagers. Oh well.

That Wednesday reading thinger

Check me out, posting a thing on a schedule, sort of!

(I would definitely do more things if I enforced fewer stupid boundaries on myself. Like saying "I'll make an appointment to take my car in for service when it looks like we've got a few days between bad weather.")

What I've been reading (hint: all the romance novels)

( Three weeks ago: )

( Two weeks ago: )

( This week: )

What I'm reading now:

Enlightened (Book 3) - Joanna Chambers. I'm hopeful that I'll enjoy this one as well? I'm only three scenes in, though.

What I'm reading next:

Jackdaw (KJ Charles's latest), probably. I've also already bought The Suffragette Scandal, but I got distracted between purchasing it and opening the file. I didn't fall in love with Free when she showed up as an adolescent in The Heiress Effect, but I trust I'll enjoy her story now that she's grown up.

I've also been staring at my copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude for a while now. I remembered that I owned it back whenever it was that I got all het up about magical realism tags in fandom, pulled it out of its box and moved it into a frequent line of sight, but I haven't gotten any further than that.

Based on Kindle store recommendations (which seem to be entirely Samhain books) I've also got a bunch of samples that didn't hook me but that I may revisit.
- The Reluctant Berserker - Alex Beecroft (I think no. I had about as much patience for the prose as I do for Ragnar's voice in Vikings.)
- A Minor Inconvenience - Sarah Granger (the sample does a great job of introducing one character, but doesn't get to a point where he interacts with whoever the other dude is.)

Also, I was going to rec Chiaroscuro (Jenna Jones, Torquere Press) to someone, but it's been a few years now since I read it, and I'd like to check back first.

I also opened up about twenty Harlequin blurbs in tabs while poking around for unconventionalcourtship, and I may take a chance on some of them rather than actually writing anything.

kids these days

Okay, over on the tumblr - I don't know if you are aware of this! - there are QUITE A FEW people who enjoy One Direction. Shocking, I know. A couple times now, I've seen conversations around fic exchange blogs that seem, like, super protective of prompts in a way that's the literal opposite of my fannish experience.

The basic idea I'm seeing is that if one is participating in a fic exchange, in the one signs up and has several requests/prompts/pairings for the assigned author to chose from sense, that the remaining prompts should, basically, be returned to the recipient? I've seen a few mods and other people refer to asking for permission to write other prompts later.

Whereas my whole fannish experience has been, like, Yuletide, and kink memes, where individuals may or may not have concerns about gift culture or whatever, but as far as the requests go, it's the most free-for-all environment ever.

Has anyone seen this in other fandoms? Tumblr- (or, idk, wattpad-) heavy fandoms? or fandoms with a lot of younger people? Fandoms with a lot of plagiarism problems maybe?