Questionable: Introducing Character: Nate

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026 10:04 am
[syndicated profile] arghink_jennycrusie_feed

Posted by Jenny

As I said, the thing about the first scene a character appears in is that it’s the scene that establishes that character.  You can show a character change in its arc, but the base line at which that character’s arc begins?  That’s the first scene in which that character appears.

What I wanted with Anna (see previous posts) was a calm, intelligent woman who did not make waves.. Somebody who thought a lot more than she talked.  Somebody who tried to go along with everybody.  A woman who loved her dog.

But then there was her opposite number: Nate.  When Bob gave me Nate’s first scene, I loved it. (I still did rewrites, but I loved it.) This was Anna’s perfect opposite.  So laid back he was damn near unconscious.  Willing to shoot people if necessary, but only if he didn’t have to fill out the paperwork.  We’ve both worked on the scene since then, but Nate is all Bob’s creation and I still love this scene that introduces him.  But I have the same problem that I had before: After you read a scene forty times, you really can’t evaluate it anymore.

And that’s when you call in the GBT team.

Questions:

What’s confusing?

Where does it drag?

What should be cut?

What must be kept?

Again, feel no need to be tactful.  Bob never is.

NATE

Chapter Two

Being number one shooter through the door of the penthouse apartment when we blew it open with explosives seemed kind of dumb on the surface. There are usually bad guys inside places we hit, and they tend to shoot at the smoking hole where the door used to be. However, I have a theory, one of many, that by the time the perp(s) react, plus recover from the effect of the flash-bang that follows the explosion and precedes our entry, they’re more likely to shoot the second or third guy through the door. Plus, first shooter goes in low, crouching. Less of a target, although hell on the knees.

Surprise added to smaller equals safer.

Like every theory it has to stand up to practical application, and so far, I had been eight for eight. At not getting shot, that is.

As I sat in the back of the ambulance arguing with the EMT that I was fine, nothing wrong here with this manly man, I tried to do the math. Eight out of nine would get you a passing grade most places.

I really didn’t need to be in the ambulance. Thirty minutes ago my vest had taken the impact of the round. The good news was it had been a .38 caliber and had passed through a sofa before hitting me. Still, it had felt like being hit by a baseball bat swung moderately hard, but that hadn’t stopped me.

I was the only one hurt because a moment after a guy had fired at me, (poorly, first hitting the sofa he’d been lying on after rolling off it and firing blindly toward the door, really dumb, but really lucky that he hit me), a shadowy figure had rushed into the room from a hall screaming “Don’t shoot! We surrender,” and thrown himself on the shooter.

His surrender had been a split second from me double-tapping his friend from the couch; lucky for him I have excellent reflexes and a modicum of fire control. Before I could reflect on things or even get a good look at the perps, I’d been hustled out by my FBI Counter-Terrorism teammates, all full of concern that I’d been shot, until they learned the vest had stopped the round and that the sofa had been hit first. Then the concern turned to jokes.

We were, after all, manly men, doing manly things.

I was of the opinion, little harm, little foul. But I was curious why one guy shot and the other guy stopped it and also why both lived in a swanky penthouse. And why someone was sleeping on the couch. With a gun. And why we had raided them. Something smelled rotten.

But I was just a shooter, so. Above my pay grade.

Nevertheless, I was more than ready to get the hell out of there. It was just a bruise and it would heal. I was informed the team had taken the two men into custody while I was being hustled out to the ambulance.

Which is when I spotted the SAC, Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field office of the FBI, get driven up in her black Rivian electric SUV. Our big boss. The fact she was here just a half hour after the raid meant that not only was something big going on, but that traffic up the west side of Manhattan wasn’t too bad for her to make it uptown so fast.

Maybe we were getting medals?

Or promotions?

Or, the more realistic part of me, fueled by a decade and a half of military and FBI experience, something was seriously wrong.

She got out of the back while her driver also exited. He walked with a slight limp. His name was Butler, an old guy, GS-God-level who was also her administrative assistant. Butler was a former field agent who’d gotten blown up his first week on the job in Oklahoma City many years ago, along with a lot of other people, and been forced to adjust his career trajectory given he’d lost his lower right leg. As prosthetics got better over the years, so did his walking. He’d been working for Madeline for many years and was as loyal as any dangerous guard dog on the verge of going rabid. Who was also starving. And perpetually angry.

The look on Madeline’s face made me lean toward something seriously wrong. She was mad. Even I could pick up on that. For a woman who rarely displayed emotion, this was not good. She and Butler went to my immediate boss, the team leader, and his body language made it look like he was getting hit by a bat. Harder than I’d been hit by the bullet.

Then she went over to the van the perps had been shoved into. The uniformed officer opened the door. Madeline headed inside. As she did, she glanced over her shoulder as a news truck pulled up. You don’t get many SWAT raids on Park Avenue.

For some reason, I wasn’t surprised when one of the perps got out, a coat draped over this head to hide his identity and was hustled into the building, a free man.

This wasn’t good.

Then the second one, the shooter, a skinny guy, head covered, came out. Madeline said some harsh words to him. Butler handed him the evidence bag with the revolver in it, and then he followed the other guy into the building.

What the hell?

She looked around and spotted me. She glanced at Butler and said something. He shook his head, apparently disagreeing. She considered that for a moment, then shrugged it off and headed my way, Butler limping alongside her, looking annoyed.

Why were they coming to me? I was just a shooter.

“Agent Sadler,” she said as she arrived at the ambulance, Butler moving to a flanking position, keeping me in his field of fire.

When Madeline had arrived to take over the New York Office, she’d made a big deal of insisting that she be called by her first name, sacrilege to all the old timers. Everyone, including the old-timers, had quickly learned that a first name could carry as much weight and authority as five stars on a collar, and now the word ‘Madeline’ was only breathed with the utmost respect. She’d been given the mandate to clean up the New York office after a number of scandals had wracked it, and she’d done so with ruthless efficiency, so now there were a lot of older guys in retirement still wondering what had hit them and a bunch of younger former agents now in less demanding Federal jobs such as the TSA checking luggage. Even minor infractions landed someone in a hot spot like Boise. One guy had even been sent as the field agent in Utgiagvik, formerly Barrow, Alaska, where they had sixty-six straight days of night and the coldest temperatures of any place in the United States. The other agents and I hadn’t even known such a position existed and suspected Madeline had invented it as a teaching point. He’d never been heard from again. I’m thinking vampires got him.

I popped up to attention, banging my head on the roof of the ambulance.

She didn’t wait for me to say anything. “You were first in, correct?”

“Yes, Madeline.”

“Did you double-check the address for who lived there?”

Not my job, I thought, but did not say. “It was the address given in the mission brief.”

“Did you read the mission tasking?” she asked.

“No. The team leader briefed us.”

“Someone got your team to SWAT an innocent person,” Madeline said.

Oops. That explained some things that had seemed goofy from the start. That also explained the freeing of the guy who’d shot me. And his buddy. Excellent reflexes on my part not to return fire. Most guys would have double-tapped the shooter. Really. He was lucky to still be breathing. I deserved an atta-boy.

She went on. “You didn’t think to question the address? Or the warrant?” She waved that off. “Did you identify yourself before entering?”

“Right after the door blew. It was a no-knock—” I began but she held up a hand.

“Why didn’t you shoot?”

I blinked at the question. “Instinct.”

“You knew something was off,” Madeline said, and it wasn’t a question, but it got me thinking. She was right. Normally I would have fired.

“I was shot. If the other guy hadn’t—”

She raised a hand, cutting me off. “You are hereby relieved from duty on the CT team. My assistant, Agent Butler, will be texting you your new assignment. You begin immediately.”

It took me longer to process that than the situation in the penthouse we’d busted into. Relieved? What the hell? And text me? He was standing right there glaring at me. As she turned to walk away, he followed her, and my cell phone buzzed with a text message. I had the strange feeling he’d typed the message on the way over and had just hit send as he turned and walked away. Multi-tasking.

I pulled my phone out.

REF: SADLER, NATHAN

REASSIGNMENT

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

ASSIGNED ATF

DATE, LOCATION TO FOLLOW

BUTLER

CONFIRM

I texted to the guy who had his back to me, fifty feet away:

CONFIRM

Why the hell was I becoming the scapegoat for this cluster? And why were they sending me to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms? It wasn’t even part of the FBI.

And I lived for counterterrorism, for the action.

Well, maybe I could blow some things up. ATF did explosives. That was always fun. I definitely knew firearms. I didn’t smoke, but alcohol was okay with me. Maybe—

As if Butler knew where my mind had gone, he clarified with a second text:

ART TASK FORCE

ATLANTIC CITY

1800 EST

XANADU CASINO

REPORT TO AGENT CHRISTINE WELSH

BUTLER

OUT

A cell phone number was at the end with Welsh’s name.

Art crime? What the fuck? No big bangs there.

Atlantic City where the old went to gamble and die?

1800? Shit, that was barely enough time to drive down there. Through New Jersey.

I tried to look on the bright side. At least it wasn’t Utgiagvik.

But it was Jersey and that was a close second.

Questionable: Establishing Character: Anna

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026 09:40 am
[syndicated profile] arghink_jennycrusie_feed

Posted by Jenny

The thing about the first scene a character appears in is that it’s the scene that establishes that character.  You can show a character change in its arc, but the base line at which that character’s arc begins?  That’s the first scene in which that character appears.  So you have to establish a lot, but you have to do it while actually writing a scene, that is, a protagonist, an antagonist, a conflict that rises to a climax.  You can’t just dump information on the reader because they’ll need to know it later.

What I wanted with Anna (see previous post) was a calm, intelligent woman who did not make waves.  A little repressed.  Somebody who thought a lot more than she talked.  Somebody with quiet goals who tried to go along with everybody because that was easiest.  A woman who loved her dog; she might not protect herself, but she’d protect that dog.

But I also wanted this scene to have the “day that is different” feeling.  The day too many things went wrong all at once (ever have one of those?) and she was pushed to the limit.  And I wanted all those things that went wrong to be her fault for settling for less, for not going after what she wanted, for playing it safe.  It couldn’t just be a lot of people being mean to her; she had to have brought this on herself because of her flaw of playing it safe.  Last thing: none of that could be blatantly evident in this scene.  That is, on a reread, it should be plain that these people are reacting to her, but the first time through, I wanted it to be just A Very Bad Day.  (Which is going to get worse.)

So Jason is a putz, but he’s a safe putz because she’s settled, which isn’t fair to him, either; he deserves somebody who’s all in.  He tells her to get rid of the dog because he doesn’t like it, doesn’t want to live with it in the future, and  doesn’t think it belongs in the workplace (all fair things for him to think), and he expects she’ll agree because she always agrees with him (she’s trained him to expect that).  But the dog is too much of an ask for her and she says no, and that sets in motion a chain of events for the rest of the series.

Her mother is truly concerned about her still living in the pool house.  She wants her kid close, but Anna is thirty-three, so it’s time she does something about it, ejects her kid into the world.  Anna has three good reasons for living in the guest house–she lists them–but the real reason is because it’s safe and easy.  She doesn’t have to stretch.  So her mother is going to spend the next three books making her stretch, another complication in Anna’s life.

And then there’s Gracie, who’s watched her playing it safe for twenty-nine years, and she’s worried that Anna is going to settle for things (like Jason) for the rest of her life.  So Gracie digs Anna’s drawing out of the trash and spray paints a mural with Anna’s signature on it, trying to remind her of who she used to be when she invented Joan.

And then, fifty pages in, Anna is so frustrated by the day from hell she’s had that she picks up Nate in a casino and the romance plot begins.  But Anna’s character change begins in the first scene when the results of playing it safe come home to roost and she starts fighting back.

Now all I have to do is write it that way.

And thank you very much to everybody who chimed in.  I learned a lot.

Welp.

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026 12:54 am
kiya: (jade)
[personal profile] kiya
Not my best way to start a year, honestly, this state of mind.



ETA ... okay random shuffle is being perfect in a lolsob way.

Time is like a bullet from behind
I run for cover just like you
Time is like a liquid in my hands
I swim for dry land just like you

Time is like a blanket on my face
I try to be here just like you
Time is just a fiction of our minds
I will survive and so will you

We are the only ones right now that are celebrating
And we are joining hands right now
We are the only ones right now that are suffocating
We are the dying ones right now

As the water grinds the stone
We rise and fall
As our ashes turn to dust
We shine like stars

Here's the whole thing, and welp.

Official video.

Haul In, Little Otter, There's More Fish In There!

Monday, February 2nd, 2026 11:20 am
[syndicated profile] daily_otter_feed

Posted by Daily Otter

Via Alaska SeaLife Center, which writes:

Un’a is proving to be one tough (and smart!) little otter. Despite her rare arm injury that she had when admitted, she shows minimal signs of discomfort and is staying active and curious.

Our veterinary and animal care teams continue to monitor her closely and support her healing with gentle physical therapy (more on this soon!). Luckily for Un’a, floating is a natural part of her day, which helps keep weight off her arm.

An injury like this would have been a serious challenge in the wild, but with a little extra care, she is not letting anything slow her down.

Questionable: First Scenes

Monday, February 2nd, 2026 09:45 am
[syndicated profile] arghink_jennycrusie_feed

Posted by Jenny

First scenes have to do a lot of things: Introduce the protagonist, the mood, the setting, and the most important characters as community; set them in motion, in action; introduce conflict . . . it’s a lot.

I’ve also come to believe that scenes should be shorter than 2000 words.  That’s not a writing rule, that’s more to keep me from babbling.  Early scenes might hit 2500 words, but that’s a lot.  You don’t want people yawning.

But after you’ve rewritten a scene twenty or forty times, it becomes impossible to tell if it’s good or if it’s garbage.  Then you want feedback from the kind of people who post in This is a Good Book Thursday weekly.  That would be you.

So here’s the first scene of Arresting Anna.  What I need to know is:

What’s confusing?

Where does it drag?

What should be cut?

What must be kept?

Feel no need to be tactful.  I need all the truth I can get these days.

ANNA

Chapter One

I woke up on Saturday morning because my rescue dog, Johnny, a dachshund-chihuahua mix, was making a commotion because my mother, Lucianna, an Italian-American mix, was standing at the foot of my bed in her pool house where I lived, making kissy noises and saying, “There’s my beautiful baby!”

She was talking to the dog, of course.

I grabbed my catseye glasses—catseyes are my faves, especially if there are rhinestones in the frames—from the counter behind my bed to see Johnny making a happy fuss because, even though my mother had been adamant six months ago about me not getting a rescue dog—“awful, yappy, dirty sonsabitches”—the first time she saw Johnny’s long, pale, tan little body with its random puffs of white fur and his bat-like ears and curly tail, she fell hard, and now she and Johnny were devoted to each other, in no small part because she carried treats for him at all times and told him that he was the best boy who ever lived.

Johnny was easy.

I let my head fall back on my pillow and once again contemplated moving somewhere else, only not really. My mother’s pool house is close to my work, I can live here for free, and there’s a pool outside my front door.

“Get up, Annie,” my mother said as she scratched Johnny behind the ears and made him close his eyes in ecstasy.

“Go away and let me sleep.” I took off my glasses and rolled over onto my side. “I had a bad night last night. I’ll work late tonight to make up for going in late.”

(Yes, I work weekends because that’s when we get most of our foot traffic, scant as it is at the Keppler Museum.)

My mother huffed. “You can’t stay late at work tonight. You have a date.”

“I do not have a date.” I did not tell her that Jason, my significant other, was the reason for my bad evening. He and I had had an argument because I’d been bringing Johnny to work with me for the past six months where he was now practically the museum mascot. People who came to the museum knew him by name. They couldn’t remember my name, but Johnny they knew. And Jason actually wanted me to get rid of this dog permanently. It finally culminated in him saying, “You have to choose, Anna. It’s me or the dog,” and me saying, “It’s the dog.”

“Oliver Olivero,” my mother said. “I talked to your Aunt Paulina, and he’s picking you up at eight.”

“No, he is not,” I said.

“Annie,” my mother began.

“One,” I said, staring at the ceiling, “he’s my cousin and a man who has shown no interest in me.”

“Second cousin,” my mother said.

“Two,” I said, “I’m not sure what the state of my relationship is with Jason.”

“Jason is a putz who will never marry you,” my mother said.

“Three, Oliver tells everyone he meets that he’s so good in bed that every woman he sleeps with shouts out his initials.”

“That’s possible,” my mother said, looking unsure for the first time. “You like him. You should at least give him a chance.”

“Why are you doing this?” I said, since my mother had never favored Oliver above any of my other cousins of various distances.

“You should be married,” my mother said. “You’re thirty-three, it’s time you got serious about life. Have somebody to take care of you. Give me grandkids. I won’t be here forever, you know.”

That made me sit up and Johnny stop yapping. “You’re fifty-two. You’re not going to die any time soon unless there’s something you’re not telling me. Are you sick?”

My mother pulled back. “No. Why? Do I look bad?” She picked up Johnny and went to check out her perfect black updo in the mirror I had on the back wall. “What? What do you see?”

I put my head in my hands. “Let’s take this from the top. I’m thirty-three, I’m healthy, and I’m employed, so I’m not exactly a child who’s dependent on other people. What is this sudden need to marry me off?”

“It’s time,” she said, peering in the mirror to make sure every hair was in place and her make-up was flawless, which of course, it was. Johnny peered with her, probably wondering who that handsome dog looking back at him was. “Oliver is a good boy, steady, good income, nice-looking—”

“I don’t want to get married.” I got out of bed, too awake now to fall back asleep. “Also, Oliver runs a chop shop.”

“He runs a car repair business,” my mother said. “Very profitable.”

I gave up. “I am going to get ready for work now. You could walk Johnny for me while I dress.”

“Of course, anything for my little angel,” my mother said, making more kissy noises at my dog, which was all a sham because the most Johnny was going to get was a swift stroll to the gate and back. My mother does not embrace exercise. She says it makes her sweat. I told her that real women don’t sweat, they glow. She told me to stop reading those commie feminist magazines.

When she had once more listed Oliver’s assets, pointed out again that Jason would never marry me, and waxed rhapsodic about how great grandkids would be (which was a crock, she was not a kid person), she and Johnny left. I brushed my teeth and dealt with the frizz in my hair and ignored make-up because it wasn’t like I was going to be seeing people.

Of course, I was going to be seeing some people, but they were my museum people. I saw them five days a week. They were used to the real me. Also, I was going to be lying low because I definitely did not want to waste time arguing with anybody or make waves of any kind. I had bigger fish to fry.

I needed to save my museum.

Look, it was a nice little museum, it just wasn’t . . . great. It needed work. Vera Keppler, the Keppler Foundation chair, was always on the verge of closing it because Thomas Keppler, her little brother and the Keppler Museum president known to all as TK, had a long history of getting swindled by buying fakes. I’d talked her out of it before when I was an intern there by saying that the museum needed to offer classes to make its focus education, always popular, and that had actually worked and had gotten me a job, but since then TK had gotten so bad with the fakes that Vera refused to let him buy art and threatened to shut us down again (the last time it had been a dozen life size ceramic Chinese soldiers with spears that turned out to be made of very heavy papier mache and not part of the famous Terracotta Army as TK had been told), so I had promised her that I had an idea that would turn everything around again if she just gave me time.

No, I didn’t have an idea, I just needed time to think of one.

Look, the museum was a great job for me. They didn’t care what I taught in my art classes there as long as nobody complained, so I had a lot of freedom. In fact, as long as I stayed away from politics and stopped twelve-year-olds from painting nudes (Barry Sanderson had a thing for boobs), nobody cared. And I loved teaching art. Plus, I got to work with my best friend, Gracie Kwan, our tech queen, and I was going out with Jason Lassiter, the museum manager, so it was pretty much the center of my existence.

But I was running out of time to come up with that brilliant idea.

I finished dressing in what I considered my work clothes: a sweater set that had seen some action—children are notorious for being sloppy with art—and a pencil skirt that gave the illusion of business wear. Today’s armor was a green merino cardigan and shell with plain red edging and a tasteful blotch of India ink on the hem where Barry Sanderson had turned around just as I looked over his shoulder to see what he was doing and hit me with his brush.

You teach art, these things happen.

I corralled my hair into my favorite, white-flowered clip and picked up my grandma’s purse, another point of contention between Mama and me. “Why are you still carrying that old thing,” she’d say almost daily. “I’ll buy you a new one.” And I’d tell her it was vintage leather and a very good bag—it was Prada—and did not tell her that I loved it, in part because it still had many of the things my grandmother had kept in it, like the bag of M&Ms from 2005 (candy that she’d kept for me) and her small hairbrush and her beaded coin purse with quarters and her hammerless snub-nose .38 caliber revolver with the specially made blue contoured grip Grandpa had given her . . . I still missed my grandma a lot. My grandpa had given me her handbag at her funeral, telling me she wanted me to have it, and I’d cried all over him because she’d remembered how much I’d loved it. And how much I loved her. I was keeping it.

I met my mother and Johnny outside by my sixteen-year-old Prius, another vintage possession of mine that made my mother nuts. “Tell Oliver not to be here or you’ll be dating him,” I told her, put Johnny in his car seat and my bag on the floor, shut the door on my mother’s protests, pulled around to the front of the house, hit the button on my phone to open the gates, and escaped into the outside world, in this case the lovely little river town of Keppler, New Jersey.

Instantly, it was more peaceful. Yes, there was construction noise and horns honking, but none of it was about me.

Well, it wasn’t about me until I stopped my car in the middle of the street to look at the graffiti on the side of the Keppler Town Hall, which was your basic one-story brick abomination from the seventies. It had one blank wall that had been painted white but was now covered with a spray painted, stenciled mural of a rabbit, a parrot, and a cat, all standing around a pile of burning books, toasting marshmallows over the flaming literature and laughing evilly. In the bottom right corner was a signature: Joan of Art.

Johnny put his feet on the edge of the window and looked out and then back at me and whined.

“I know,” I told him. “What the hell was Gracie thinking?”

Actually, I knew what Gracie had been thinking. The mural was because three members of our town council had been trying to ban LGBTQ books to “protect the children,” and they’d organized some irate homophobic mothers to go in, check out those books, and not return them. Those members were Harold O’Hare, Ursula McGraw, and Kitty Prescott. Yeah, the hare, the macaw, and the cat.

I’d thought that sketch was pretty funny when I’d drawn it. Then I’d thrown it out, and Gracie had evidently pulled it out, cut the stencil, and spray-painted the damn mural from it.

As I was watching, a guy in coveralls arrived with a roller and a bucket of white paint and began to lazily obliterate the mural, which was a shame because Gracie had done a good job. Johnny barked at him, and we’d already caused enough notice by parking in the middle of the street, so I put the car in gear and drove to the museum to confront my best friend who was using my secret identity without permission.

So first Jason Lassiter being anti-dog, then Oliver Olivero and my mother fixating on marriage (for me, not her), and now Gracie drawing attention to Joan of Art. And people wonder why I play it safe.

Because everybody around me is nuts, that’s why.

 

[ gaming ] Monty Python's Flying Royalty

Sunday, February 1st, 2026 08:32 pm
kiya: (gaming)
[personal profile] kiya
Dramatis Personae, from the POV of the major NPCs:

Sir Robin, Lord of Asineau Village, with Greymalkin the wingless gryphon
Celyn Bettws, Lord's Consort in Asineau
Viepuck, squire and herald to Sir Robin, with Es*tiaslos the purple eldritch flying octopus
and
Izgil, the dwarf scholar who hangs out in Asineau

When we left off we had just killed a dragon.

So we packed up our nonsense and returned to Asineau. )
duskpeterson: The lowercased letters D and P, joined together (Default)
[personal profile] duskpeterson

Suspicion of the Guards


ONLINE E-BOOK (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

Free at my website.


The Motley Crew (The Thousand Nations). When a young man named Dolan flees from the north, he faces danger on all sides. The Northern Army wants him back. The Empire of Emor wants him dead. His native homeland of Koretia may not want him at all. And his only protection is a man with motives that are mysterious and possibly deadly.

New installment:

3 | Suspicion of the Guards. Why bother to guard a man who has the ability to torment you?


REISSUES

Already available free at my website, these two omnibuses are now also available at AO3, SqWA, and Ream.

Law Links: Novel and Side Stories (The Three Lands). Few events are more thrilling in a young man's life than a blood feud between two villages. Or so Adrian thought.

Death Mask: Novel and Side Stories (Death Mask). For eighteen years, he has survived in an army unit where few soldiers live more than two or three years. Now he finds himself in circumstances where his life is a living hell. Will the soldier who defied death find that life is too great a challenge?


BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket.

New installments:


NEWS & UPCOMING FICTION

As of January 20, Amazon Kindle began allowing customers to download some of its DRM-free ebooks in epub and pdf. I've opted in my e-books to this program.

My apologies to Ream readers for the formatting quirks in the Ream editions of Law Links and Death Mask. I worked with Ream's forever-patient customer service for eight months to try to work out the conversion problems I encountered, before I had to give up. The text isn't affected by the formatting issues, you'll be happy to know.

"Heir" (The Three Lands: Blood Vow side story) – delayed because of my concussion last year – will be my next release.

Happiness Sunday: Anti-Gravity Raccoons

Sunday, February 1st, 2026 09:23 am
[syndicated profile] arghink_jennycrusie_feed

Posted by Jenny

So I’ve been mostly absent in here for about five months.  That made sense while I was recovering from my butt crack, but I’ve been fully over that for over four months.  I just couldn’t think.  The mind would not work, which resulted in me taking four naps a day, losing my balance and having hallucinations when I woke up.  The last time I woke up like that, I saw footprints across the ceiling and thought, “Oh, my god, the raccoons are back!”  Then I woke up more and realized that unless these were anti-gravity raccoons, this was an hallucination.  (A hallucination?  That one always gets away from me.)  So I saw my GP and my cardiac doc and said, “LOOK, this is BAD.”  And my cardiac doc said, “You may be dehydrated, several of your meds are diuretics.”  So I went home and looked up dehydration and yep, fatigue, dizziness, and hallucinations.  So I stopped all my meds (except for the asthma inhaler because I’m not suicidal).  Three days later, I had a brain again, I could write again (I’d been beating my head against that book for months and not getting anywhere), I stopped taking naps, it was wonderful.  Which is when I e-mailed my GP and said, “So I stopped taking my meds,” and conversations ensued, and I will be seeing her on Wednesday, but I am pleased to say that now, almost two weeks later, I feel like me again.

What does that have to do with happiness?  I’m getting things DONE.  I’m writing good stuff (you want modesty, go somewhere else), my kitchen is spotless (kinda), my website is getting new content (eventually). I have plans, BIG PLANS.  I’m WORKING.  She said, not manic with relief at all.

So what made you happy this week?

(Also drink plenty of water, folks.  If you’re thirsty is means you’re dehydrated.)

Breast update

Sunday, February 1st, 2026 10:01 am
fred_mouse: bright red 'love' heart with stethoscope (health)
[personal profile] fred_mouse

not much in the way of medical TMI this time, but still, content note for cancer treatment details.

  • Healing (external) looking good. The scar is as long as my little finger, and quite dark (almost like a lightly faded black permanent marker). It is no longer raised or itchy. Little bit red either side, possibly because it is difficult to get the breast in a position to see the scar, and it means I was pulling on the skin. I continue treating with the scar therapy gel, in hopes that that decreases my chance of it going stiff (I have a history of cheloid scarring on my knee, which the doctor that did the surgical tidy up of the scar attributed to issues with the original stitching / treatment)
  • Internally I'm assuming there is still a bit of healing to go because there is infrequent discomfort, mostly if I end up in an odd position and the breast is not supported. Also noticeable last night while chopping veggies, so I may need to look at what is wrong with my posture there.
  • I'm still wearing the surgical recovery bras; I've now moved to not using them at night because my skin was getting quite irritated under the band. Of the four I started with, I have misplaced the good one, and one is a size too large. Fortunately, I have found an old sports bra which is appropriately soft and has no underwire to wear while the two are in the wash. A couple of times I have tried wearing one of my usual, which I think of as soft, but have underwire; in each case the surgical area has become noticeably sore. I'll keep doing that every few weeks until it isn't an issue, then transition back to my usual bras. I have decided against going to the specialist bra shop to get more, mostly because I don't have the necessary time + energy.
  • radiation: appointment one with the radiologist, who was all 'this is your choice, ...' and then gave info that summed up approximately to 'given your age/situation, I'd do it anyway'. Also implied, I think, was the fact that there were cancerous cells further from the cancer site ('the margins'), necessitating the second surgery; my take from that is that it was moving quickly. Thus I am skipping over the expensive test and going straight to radiation. I think if the cancer site had been elsewhere in the body, it might be different, although I did not get a feel for which way the likelihood went. But being in the breast duct, there is a lot of potential for cancer cells to have moved a long way and be starting up again. Thus, radiation of the whole breast.
  • Appointment two with the radiologist is Monday. They can treat me at the local public hospital (literally next door to the private one I had the first surgery at). It will be three weeks, multiple sessions. Likely noticeable side-effects are sun-burn like sensation and some other minor discomfort. Slight change in the breast tissue (ongoing) may occur, so it might feel different to the other, but as it already does, eh. And there is a slight chance that a small bit of the lungs behind will be damaged, but in a way that I am not likely to perceive.

Crack, Thwack, Smack, Sea Otters've Got the Knack!

Friday, January 30th, 2026 11:00 am
[syndicated profile] daily_otter_feed

Posted by Daily Otter

Via Oregon Zoo, which writes:

It's a clam clamboree!

Sea otters like Juno and Sushi use rocks as tools to crack open shellfish and eat the meat inside. Otterly clever!

[syndicated profile] pcwrede_comments_feed

Posted by Rick Ellrod

In reply to Mary Kuhner.

A good point. This ties in with the Holmes-Watson setup, which we also see, for instance, with Nero Wolfe. But it also applies, I think, in any fantasy tale where we want to keep the magic mysterious and arcane. We never see Gandalf as a viewpoint character: he knows too much, and he’s too familiar with what seems exotic and numinous to the hobbits. It gives rise to a very different tone than a story where the wizard(s) are the viewpoint characters; magic there ends up seeming more like science. (Which is a perfectly fine and delightful scenario too; it’s just a different effect.)

The Friday Five for 30 January 2026

Thursday, January 29th, 2026 06:18 pm
anais_pf: (Default)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
These questions were suggested by [livejournal.com profile] twirlandswirl.

How many times a day do you . . .

1. Brush your teeth?

2. Shower?

3. Check your E-mail?

4. Check LJ? (or DW?)

5. Eat?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Comment on Basics–Who’s the Viewpoint? by Auri

Thursday, January 29th, 2026 12:00 pm
[syndicated profile] pcwrede_comments_feed

Posted by Auri

But the story becomes differentiaali, when theres the viewpoint of the villain: BothShrek Who is troll and Maleficent make parodia about fairy tales, but when Shrek is funny, Maleficent is touching. ( For especially for Wolf Lahti)

[syndicated profile] arghink_jennycrusie_feed

Posted by Jenny

I adore this book.  Well, I like most of everything Jodi Taylor writes, but Amelia Smallhope is a heroine in a million.

Which is a damn good thing because Amelia is a picaro hero, and if you’re going to follow one of those through a story, they better be fascinating.  Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, Moll Flanders, Huckleberry Finn, the list is long, and the genre is tough because of that reliance on the hero.  And Taylor nails it with the ballad of Amelia Smallhope, best heroine ever.

Here’s your educational moment for today:

“A picaresque novel is a genre of prose fiction featuring a roguish, low-born hero (the picaro) navigating a corrupt society using their wits to survive. These stories are characterized by episodic adventures, first-person narration, satire, and a realistic, often humorous tone that critiques societal hierarchies.”
Lady Amelia Smallhope is not a lowborn hero (she’s got the roguish part down, though), she’s the younger sister of a lord who marries a horrible woman who sets out to diminish and destroy her (jealous), sends her to finishing school, and kills her dog.  Amelia is not complacent through any of this, but since she’s young, still a teenager, she copes, learning everything she can until, fifty pages into the book, she’s seventeen, at a family party where she meets, drum roll, Pennyroyal, whose background is much too complicated to summarize here.  After an evening full of twists and turns which does not end well for the sister-in-law, Pennyroyal–the rough lowborn picaro who came to the party to steal diamonds–says “Come away with me,” not in a romantic sense, more of in a sense of “you can help me deliver a lot of grief to people who deserve it and we can make a lot money, too,” and they embark on an amazing journey spanning years and many different antagonists, ending finally in their thirties with bringing down the horrible sister-in-law completely.  (She should never have killed that dog.)
The novel is an episodic recounting of Amelia and Pennyroyal’s rise to power and fortune, tales of how they get smarter and tougher as they bring down more and more powerful assholes, illegally, of course.  Some bad stuff happens along the way, but they navigate it, sometimes knocked apart and defeated, but always coming back together.  And best of all, it’s told in first person Amelia, and Amelia’s voice is wonderful.
This is the opening paragraph:
“I was with Papa when the news came.  He was hanging out of his study window at the time, shooting at the bloody peacock, and I was loading for him when our butler, Cleverly, came in. He stood in silence for awhile and then coughed politely.”
That’s Amelia at what must have been fifteen or so.  I’m pretty sure I fell in love with her there.  Or possibly when Amelia made important friends at her boarding school for wayward teens, like the fence she uses later.  Definitely after her sister-in-law hit her, and when people asked what happened, she said, “My sister-in-law hit me” to appalled silence and accusing glances at said in law.  It just gets better and better.
What I learned from this: I want to write a picaro hero.  I don’t think I have the chops for it, you have to have a really strong grip on plot, but this book is inspiring, as is Amelia as a character.  Oh, it’s also a time travel, I should mention that.  And also there’s a sequel coming out in August, A Family Affair.  Yes, I have already pre-ordered it.
So what did you read this week?

Profile

lizvogel

Tags

January 2026

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
1112 1314 151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags