We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Lord Peter's large income ... I deliberately gave him ... After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.

-- Dorothy L. Sayers, How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey

So yesterday morning I woke up at 5 with a vague headache, lay in bed a bit until it was clear it was getting worse, took two ibuprofen and sat up for a while with a wet cloth on my forehead feeling vaguely miserable and nauseous, and then went back to sleep and when I woke up again it was gone. This is about how I expect my migraines to work, although I haven't had many recently. (Yes, I'm very lucky.)

Then last night I couldn't sleep, so I went and sat up reading fic, and then developed a terrible migraine and spent the next three hours crying in pain and occasionally puking. Possibly if I'd taken meds sooner it wouldn't have been as bad, but man. And then consultingpiskies (very reasonably) insisted I sleep in so it is now 4:30 and I haven't done anything useful except feed the cat.

We are back from the Giant Family Christmas Week of Doom (it wasn't bad, there was just ... a lot of it) and I have slept for nine hours and started the laundry and paid bills and done various other back-home things (and, halfway through this post, eaten lunch) and am therefore free to spam your reading page.

Not sure how much I wrote in 2018 in terms of numbers, but I wrote more than 300 words on 1/3 of the days. And probably over 60 000 words total.

Hit 150 000 hits and 1000 comment threads on AO3, and posted my longest single work to date.

Read 120 books (including novel- and novella-length fanfics, which this year made up about 2/3 of the total. Which I am okay with - this is because I have been reading on my laptop while knitting, which is great). And more than doubled the percentage of works by authors of colour from last year, mostly because of Silk, though the hard numbers are still kind of embarrassing.

Speaking of which:
I would like to read more works by authors of colour. I have been reading a lot of fanfic. Putting these together, I am soliciting recs for fanfic authors of colour (who, obviously, are comfortable with the internet knowing that), preferably but not necessarily Marvel.

To start, gsparkle writes great detective AUs and Natasha!fic.

In other news, the Three Sentence Ficathon is still going on, and I have written some things and may write more; I'm not quite sure what to do with them after, though. I'm fine with posting drabbles on AO3 but some of these are shorter than drabbles and also very casually tossed off. So your thoughts appreciated.

Dear Brain:

Just because it is raining does not mean I have not accomplished anything today.

Did laundry
Said "mm-hm" on the phone with my mother for 20 minutes
Updated wall calendar

Back to work tomorrow, which I suspect may not go well. No sleep last night.

Finished and backed needlepoint from November. Let's see if I can get that here from Tumblr.

( Crappy webcam image )

Cleaned bathroom.
Filled in literal accounting for the last two weeks.
Wrote more than 300 words.
Went out with knumpify and talked about stuff and bought books and felt better about self and work prospects, and may have helped with his stuff a little too.

I feel like I did more than that. Well, woke up at seven, for a start.

Did laundry
Typed up 700 words from dictation night before last
Edited and posted

Title: Chaeronea
Author: Violsva
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes
Rating: E
Warnings/Enticements: Slash, Colonialism, War, Internalized Homophobia, Swearing, Fighting, Depression and the side effects thereof, Casual Sex, Period-Typical Homophobia, Victorian Attitudes
Word Count: 1719
Summary: What Watson got up to in the army.

At AO3.

Things done today:

Did some research on early 20thC Toronto
Told relatives (the important ones)
Talked to knumpify
Went grocery shopping
Read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Wrote over 600 words

One of the problems with moving out is that I have lost easy access to Mom's recipe for apple crisp, which can be used to make one of the best comfort foods around. So I had to guess at this one, and it worked, so I'm writing it down for times when I don't even have the spoons for experimentation (and I had pretty few spoons this evening as it was).

Take 3 tbsp butter, because that's what was left of the stick. Soften in microwave. Add 4 tbsp flour, 3 tbsp brown sugar, and some cinnamon. Cream together. Maybe a drop of vanilla, too.

Add 1/3 cup rolled oats. Mix.

Slice an apple into really thin, small slices. You could do this into a separate bowl, but I just shove the crisp to one side and then mix it all again afterwards. If it's in a separate bowl, pour on the topping, preferably in layers.

Eat.

Or, you know, you could put it in the oven or something, I guess. Theoretically.

I am having an anxiety upswing because of a lot of things but mostly work, and I spent today happy but with way too much nervous energy. But I have an apartment and my Yuletide assignment as it turns out is an awesome excuse to write the fic I've wanted to write about these characters for more than a year now, and tomorrow there will be steampunk. And tonight there is shortbread, by the following process:


Realize you are hungry. Look in fridge and cupboards. Realize that possibly it's time to go grocery shopping for real, rather than at the Shoppers on the corner.

Poke around on food blogs.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remember that oven cooks hot and lower that a little.

Get out flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and a clementine (because why not, and even though you don't have a reamer it should be manageable).

Measure out half a cup of butter. Drop rest of butter on floor. Blaspheme.

Leave butter alone for a bit to get to room temp.

Add a cup of flour and a quarter cup of sugar and some cinnamon. Break up butter and make piecrust (that is, mash everything with the fork until it's a bunch of little crumbs, with the butter mostly evenly distributed. Or until your arm hurts enough that you say 'screw it' and stop anyway).*

Using another fork and your fingers, inexpertly juice clementine into a saucer until you have about 2 tablespoons or 1/8 cup. Swear never to tell knumpify about this.**

Mush everything together with your fingers. Fingers are necessary here, because the heat helps melt and distribute the rest of the butter. Press into a ball.

Flour the counter. Place dough on the flour. Flatten.

Cut into weird triangular shapes because you don't have any cookie cutters. Arrange on greased baking sheet. Place in oven. Set timer for ten minutes.

Place dishes in sink. Consider dishes. Consider timer. Clean up remaining ingredients and the flour.

Consider dishes. Wash dishes. Rejoice in virtue and the smell of baking cookies.

Take cookies out of oven. Poke. Consider golden brownness (should be very little, just around the edges). Maybe put them back in for two minutes. Leave tray on top of stove for a couple minutes.

Remove cookies to plate. Remove tray and spatula to sink, because the first rule of the kitchen is that there are always more dishes.

Eat.

Having tried them: the orange and cinnamon are more of a suggestion, but they're very good. Hard to go wrong with shortbread.



*This is more formally called 'cutting cold butter into flour' and it is one of the more irritating tasks in baking. People who do it regularly have pastry cutters, but they're hard to clean.
**knumpify reads this blog.