this is the light of autumn, it has turned on us

i lied before, we're doing 2025 retrospectives after all. tagged by commanderspock and fake-monalisa on tumblr <3

🎧 music

albums

(2025 releases only)

• SPELLLING - Portrait of My Heart
• Sophia Kennedy - Squeeze Me
• Anna von Hausswolff - Iconoclasts
• Sorry - COSPLAY
• Leon Vynehall - In Daytona Yellow
• Haru Nemuri - ekkolaptómenos
• Bria Salmena - Big Dog
• Jane Inc. - A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH
• ganavya - Nilam
• Deradoorian - Ready for Heaven

... and some runners-up to the top 10 list:

• Wet Leg - Moisturizer
• Lucrecia Dalt - A Danger to Ourselves
• Circuit des Yeux - Halo on the Inside
• Cate Le Bon - Michelangelo Dying
• Debby Friday - The Starr of the Queen of Life
• Automatic - Is It Now?
• Faetooth - Labyrinthine
• Lady Gaga - MAYHEM

singles & standalone tracks

• "Toxicity" - Fionn
• "Mine or Yours" - Hikaru Utada (& its various remixes)
• "SLIME is BESTIE [Sega Bodega + JT]" - Shygirl
• "Foundry" - Yu Su
• "Koko (Sun's Signature Remix)" - Goldfrapp

📚 books

(fiction only & as usual, some of these were started in 2024 because I'm an insane person who reads 20 books at the same time and takes forever to finish any of them)

• Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
• Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
• A Wizard of Earthsea & The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Beowulf: A New Translation - Maria Dahvana Headley (translator)
• Perfumes: The Guide (2018 edition) - Tania Sanchez & Luca Torin
• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept - Elizabeth Smart
• Margery Kempe - Robert Gluck
• Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
• Ballad of Sword and Wine (vols. 1-3) - Tang Jiu Qing
• Marilou Is Everywhere - Sarah Elaine Smith

🎥 movies

• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (1988)
• Sinners (2025)
• Carnival of Souls (1962)
• Basic Instinct (1992)
• Night Tide (1961)
• Strange Days (1995)
• John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
• Conclave (2024)
• Vampire Hunter D (1985)

I'm currently engaged in the effort to unfuck one of my problem child WIPs, and at risk of jinxing myself, I've turned a corner. While the efforts of my unfucking centre around plot--making the sequence of events make sense and feel satisfying, because currently they do not--I started making actual progress when I set down my follicle-damage-inducing attempts to rearrange, cut, or add scenes.

Plot and pacing (which is closely linked to plot) were the things I found most daunting when I started writing long stories. This is a common experience! Particularly in fandom, many writers are happy to say they write plotless things; there are whole subgenres of fic ostensibly founded on the lack of a plot. But is there even such a thing as a PWP? What is plot, anyway???

A lot of what's contained below will likely read as incredibly basic and obvious to people who already write fiction, especially longer fiction, but there was a time at which these things were neither basic nor obvious to me, and sometimes I need to be reminded of how engine go brr. I have to pretend I was a baby longfic writer again, and revisit what it took to "get" plot, which was not Freytag's Pyramid or three- or five-act structures or the Hero's Journey or anything else you can visualize via diagram, but themes.

( Read more... )

For some time now, I've been like, "I'm going to get back to working on my novel." Well, I am now down to 4 days a week at work, so the time is now. I've been pretty secretive about this project because I find it deeply embarrassing to talk about, but I've had this project on the backburner (and occasionally on the front) for several years now and it's time for me to get serious... but I figure it'd be worth my while to have something to link to instead of having to explain it all from scratch every time.

( Read more... )

In case you haven't seen my posts elsewhere, I opened preorders yesterday for the print copy of my years-in-the-making zine about Beefleaf as trans gothic! You have a little more than a week to make an order. I'm ordering one big batch and don't plan on doing a reprint, so this is probably your only chance if you want a physical copy. The free PDF will go up circa March 1.

I will certainly boost this in other places between now and the end of sales, but I can't shut up about it because this has been a project in the making for a long time and is an attempt to express my love for something that, despite its flaws, is very important to me...

I return to work in an hour and a half (I'm not running late... yet), which is the real cutoff for New Year's navel-gazing, an activity I look forward to with relish. I've spent time with Year Compass, done my tarot spreads, etc and now I look back on the year in books, as well as the year ahead.

(I also made a playlist collecting some of my favourite music releases of 2024, which you may stream here.)

( nattering about books )

Didn’t get scared enough this October?? Need some horrors (positive) to console you over the horrors (negative)??? Me too. I bring you…… a chance to get spooked in the comfort of a friendly Discord call. Or, at the very least, watch me try and fail to solve puzzles. Coming to Wednesdays near you, this Nov/Dec only.

( WE CREEP WHILE YOU SLEEP SO DON'T MAKE A PEEP )

This wip. It’s evolved a lot! I’m really enjoying where it’s going now! It's proving really difficult to write, but so is everything else right now, so I think it's just a me problem.

I've never been Like This about a ship before... but y'all knew that. They just mean a lot to me and these are fictional worlds I love to play in time and time again. But I'm in the dumps with my writing at the moment so this is just one of those posts I write to convince myself it's worth sticking out creative projects even when I feel about as capable of writing interesting things as a slug.

( say my name in the morning, so that i know when the wave breaks )

Part deux of my pantingbed DVD commentary is still in progress, but in the mean time, tshirt wrote an insanely cool and smart post in response to it as part of a little informal friends-giving-commentary-on-each-other's-work exchange. If you are at all interested in related topics, please read it, I kind of can't believe it's real?

Dragon Subjugation Incantation is a baihe (GL) cnovel by Shi Wei Yue Shang/As The Crescent Moon Rises. It is 200 chapters long including extras, and an ongoing English translation by Hei is up to chapter 49 on WordPress.

It's hard not to read a summary of the premise and not go, "so, baihe Scum Villain with dragons instead of demons?" I wouldn't say the comparison is inaccurate, but perhaps misleading; the stories are interested in different things.

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