1/5/25

poppyseedheart: Light installation art piece. A lightbulb on a string, pink against a dark purple background. (Default)
Happy May! Quick April wrap-up below:

In April I wrote a little over 16k words :') and I'm so pleased that I did! And that I've continued to dutifully track my writing output in a spreadsheet. Notably, I updated trust/fall and got most of the way through the next chapter, and my Olymfics fic was revealed. I also drafted and lightly edited a very wacky original short story that I'm looking to eventually submit to some journals.

On the taking media into my heart and body front, I read a few books that I really enjoyed. Aside from what I read for work, I picked up Alexis Hall's (author of A Lady for a Duke) contemporary boss/employee fake amnesia (yes, fake amnesia) romance novel Ten Things That Never Happened, and I had an absolute blast. Hall has been cemented as a go-to for me when I'm in a romance mood. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, and the audiobook was particularly fun.

I also, for a local book club I run, read Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuang-zi, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. It's an interesting book first because of how many layers it has between its various framing devices and footnotes and prefaces and afterwords. It's also a fairly quiet historical novel that focuses on relationships on both micro (Aoyama Chizuko and her translator O Chizuru) and macro (Taiwan and colonial Japan) levels. Many food descriptions! Many tight turns of dialogue and head in hands moments due to the close POV and the ever-present specter of colonial violence. I found it to be beautiful and moving and loved our discussion about it, which we all agreed made us like the book even more.

No one ever expects me to have updates on the television front but I did finish The Pitt as it came out! Even watched the finale the night it dropped. I had a great time with it and immediately had to write like 400 words of goofy gen fic as a little coda. I want to poke around in the tag more (I started a pretty good fic but lost all my tabs and haven't dug it up again). It's weird to have seen a show that is trendy... I'm like a TV fan or something.

And finally, I've been really tearing through a lot of fic! I'm having sort of a minsung renaissance. I'd distanced myself from SKZ fandom in general for a while, though I never stopped keeping up with the group itself, and I'm only recently dipping my toes back into the kind of fannish feelings I'd had before that distance. Following some new folks on tumblr and bluesky has helped. My relatively peaceful and vaguely anonymous bubble on bluesky has also been a nice place to engage with fandom from. And the minsung ficathon also helped, lol. There were SO many fics that were dropped and I was deeply impressed by the length and scope of so many of them.

Some recent fave reads, since I haven't recced fic here in forever. Mostly but not only minho/jisung:
  • bury me at makeout creek by mhrek - 40k, minsung, fake dating a cabin in the summer, incredibly convincing love story
  • wick to wax by unconscious - 4k, minsung, future fic, coming out, so tender ;__;
  • Case 54 by the problematique - 35k, minsung, jisung is straight (or is he) and kind of ruining minho's life about it, big messy queer friend group vibes
  • Who Comes At Night by nuttinonice - 20k, minsung, minho talks in his sleep and unintentionally says something that sends both he and jisung into a tailspin
  • Made To Be Broken by nuttinonice - 14k, minsung, established relationship canonverse where they have their first fight
  • would you still date me if i went to prison for dropkicking a child? by sunshinedozing - 10k, 2minsung, v funny au where jisung is 2min's couples counselor and all is not as it seems
  • duty of love by hanville - 42k, minsung, modern royalty au where minho is jisung's bodyguard, thank god people are writing this trope
  • Bonsai by disturbeddreams - 9k, seungin, severance au, i'm literally obsessed with this one, so good and interesting
Wow I had more to rec than I thought! Anyway this has been April on this corner of this internet :) what have y'all been into lately!
poppyseedheart: Light installation art piece. A lightbulb on a string, pink against a dark purple background. (Default)
Hello everyone I have dabbled in learning things about astrology before but haven't gotten much beyond the basics (major vibes of each sign and placement, notable things about a few of the houses, etc) and am very curious if any of you who are more knowledgeable than I am have suggestions for resources to dive deeper! Books, podcasts, videos, blogs, etc all welcome. Thank you. <3