singedsun

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singedsun

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AKA: cherith, thesunsaid
Discord: singedsun#1069

What you can expect
This journal is primarily about my life, music & the occasional fandom diversion (mostly: Critical Role & Dragon Age). I do not have any particular friending policy; I welcome new friends and will usually add back. If you know me from elsewhere, feel free to send me a message. Thanks for stopping by. <3

Secondary Fanworks
You may podfic, MST3K, or create secondary fanwork of any fanwork I have posted. Please include a link to my work and let me know where you've posted yours. Please do not archive elsewhere.

I continue exist quietly, busy and kind of slightly but not completely burnt out. I have a major project at work that launches labor day weekend, and every day between now and then is full of things I likely will not finish in time. *shrugs* I've learned to just put it on a list rank by importance and do my best. When I'm not working, I've been spending a lot of time reading. Matt and I went to CONvergence in Minneapolis last weekend - a little be to at the con, and a little just to be away from home - and I read like three books while we were there between panels and movies and whatnot. I've finished two more in the week since we've been back. My goal on Goodreads was 40 books for this year and the next book I finish will get me there.

Books I've finished recently:
Go Hunt Me by Kelly deVos - A group of high school seniors somehow raise enough movie and the help of a famous actress to travel to Transylvanian to shoot a movie ad Dracula's castle. This is written like a slasher almost, the premise of shooting a movie goes away almost immediately. The main character is weird and I really hated most everything about this book. Do not recommend. 1/5

Alien: Out of Shadow by Tim Lebbon (canonical post Alien book) - I did the audiobook for this one and it was great. Felt like an Alien story and the woman who read for Ripley sounded very much like Sigourney Weaver. Didn't really connect with all the new people we're introduced to (and you know, lose shortly after). 3.5/5

Beneath the Stairs by Jennifer Fawcett - idk what this book was trying to be but it wasn't very scary, and the story felt underbaked. 3/5

The Darkwater Bride by Marty Ross - this was an Audible original, and it was awful but short so I did finish it. It's an extremely misogynistic tale about a Scottish woman who travels to London to investigate her father's death and she finds out he was not a good person... and also there might be a ghost to blame? 2/5

Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo - a kind of haunting modern supernatural & also dark acadamia novel about a college student who inherits everything from his best friend/kind of foster sibling/maybe something more, after this friend dies. He gets embedded with his dead friend's friends, shenanigans and spooky things ensue as the main character tries to unravel what happened to his friend. I really like this one by the end, but the MC is not likeable for a good portion of the beginning. It's GAY. 4/5

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé - a like new adult dark acadamia about two black students a prestigious private school. Someone starts spilling secrets about these two students who don't really know or interact at all until their lives begin to unravel as more secrets are outed. This is Very Gay and has a lot of classism & racism commentary baked in. Also very good, quick read. 4/5

A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy I. Lin - a fantastical story about a woman who travels to the heart of the Empire to compete in a competition to become the tea magician (and advisor of sorts) to the Empress. But our MC wants to win to help save her sister who has been infected by something in a batch of poisoned tea. The magic system in this is very cool, the story obviously has a lot of Chinese & Japanese influences. There's also a bit of a love story and there are queer characters. Also the covers for this book and it's sequel are GORGEOUS. 4/5

All's Well by Mona Awad - I have no idea what to say about this book. It's written like a magical realism horror novel. The MC is the theater director in the college where she teaches, she's in debilitating chronic pain, and also her mind isn't ...all there. There's a Shakespearan backdrop as she prepares the school's production of All's Well, and also plenty of hints at MacBeth as well. It's a very strange story, with a very unreliable and unlikeable main character. I'm going to let this one ruminate a bit longer.

I think I'm going to try and participate in Jordaline's "Spooky Smart Bitch" read-a-thon in September, hopefully find some good horror to read before spook season really starts.

I'm also currently trying to participate in the Story Collective's Fanfiction Challenge for August. It's a free to participate and the discord for all their lessons and events is always a good time. Have I written anything yet? Great question...no I have not. But I'm going to start something at the very least.

Lastly - I know I've not been keeping up with New Music posts. But, listen... I just want to listen to "Engravings" by Ethan Bortnick on repeat right now. It's SO VERY GOOD. (OH OH! Did you know that Rhett from Good Mythical Morning's (Rhett & Link)? Rhett has put out a country EP under the name James and the Shame. If you like country, and religious deconstruction, the songs are a great listen. Like "Believe Me" is greal and he did "Where We're Going" with his wife and it's lovely. Consider those your unofficial belated music items (for now).

I hope you're all doing well, I'll be in the comments and trying to catch up on things here this week. If I've missed something exciting, please let me know!

Been fighting a massive headache and the precipice of migraine all day. I just wanted to get done early tonight with work and watch Loki and maybe take a nap... but then I spent three and a half hours on an emergency bridge call dealing with something the contractors messed up again... It is so tiring to have to keep pointing out that not only has this been the way things had been done all the times before this new contract team came on board, but the reason it was never a problem to this extent is because we touch the systems manually to get our jobs done and there are literally three times as many of them (all of whom are woe-fully under-skilled to do the jobs of two people). I am just not physically capable of following all those people all day long. I'm exhausted.

At yet something I felt the need to do (because it's something in my control) is redo my media tracker I built myself in Notion. Now instead of having separate trackers for movies versus television, I've been able to combine them and build different views to show them instead. BUT ALSO I managed to create a specific page for my friends and I to keep track of all our bad movie night watches. So I have a collection of all 42 movies we've watched for bad movie nights in the last year. We've been talking about do some monthly themes moving forward - like for shark month, or the fall holidays... recently we watched a rash of small movies with 90s pop-stars. If you're interested at all in either our bad movie night fare, or just how I have it set up in Notion, I've got images behind the cut.
( images )

I'd written a while ago about feeling kind of down about writing, or more about being like 'a writer' with my name out there where people could associate me with the things I write. But I'm a little more over that now. I did leave my name on my flashbang story and I'm happy about that. It's not huge, but the collection has been in the best top ten sellers on DriveThru Fiction for the last week+ which is pretty neat. And it's something I can point to when submitting to bigger things later. The collection is here should anyone be interested in checking it out.

Some of my calmness came with this post from Nebula winner John Wiswell last weekend, who is a super cool guy I've met at 4th Street Fantasy a few times. In his acceptance speech, which is linked here on his brand new Patreon and free to read, he talks about the stories he's excited to read. And it's just really an amazing speech. I'm proud and happy to have someone like John win, especially for a story like “Open House on Haunted Hill", which was clever and wonderful and a unique twist on the haunted house genre in a short story.

Towards the end of his speech, he says this:

in my career my various stories were rejected over 800 times before I won this award tonight. And that’s why I hope this author is listening.

You, who think you’re not a good enough writer because you don’t write like someone else.

You, who haven’t finished a draft because your project seems too quirky or too daunting.

You, who are dispirited after eating so many rejection emails.

You, who are going to write the things that will make me glad I’m alive to read them.

What the field needs is for you to be different, and to be true to your imagination.

Please, in the next couple weeks, go back to that document. Finish that story, and then go write the next one, and the next one. You don’t know when you’re going to come into your own.

And... yeah. I have these stories and I want to finish them. And I want them to be known as mine in some way when they're finished. I want to be able to claim them, and I'll have to navigate the rest as the time comes. I mean also, just don't fucking perceive me as a person still, but I'd like it if people read my things and knew they were mine.

It's convinced me to try for Camp in July in the hopes of at least finishing the rough draft of what I started in November. I've got a lot of bits of it, good stuff I can keep. And I've got my notes from Futurescapes earlier this year. I think as long as work doesn't wear me completely down, I want to give it a try.

Oh, and good news on the ants front. I think I've convinced the rest of them to get the fuck out. Even after my deep clean last week we were still seeing several every day. Sunday I thought they were gone, but nope, they've been hiding in and around our kitchen sink. But last night I found the new trail they were using under my kitchen table. So I broke out a pretty tried and true method of mixing apple cider vinegar and water, with a little dishsoap for extra stick and sprayed that everywhere. Sure the kitchen smelled for a bit, but I happen to like the smell of apple cider vinegar, so it didn't bother me. And the scent only lingered for a few hours. This morning? Haven't seen anymore. So hopefully they've learned their lesson.

In my post about video essayist on YouTube last week, one of my recommendations was for Jacob Gellar. His videos are usually about video games, but also... they're not. They're about people -- how we deal with specific fears, like heights or the dark or the unknown, what makes things ugly or important. And he uses video games as the framework for his ideas, because well honestly that's how we use video games too. It's why designers make the games they do: to explore the human condition.

A few days ago he put out a video called "Cities Without People". In it he uses the video game Microsoft Flight Simulator to talk generally about how great the game is at letting you explore. How he loves the ability to move through the clouds and that even if the game didn't provide the intricacies of the earth below, it would still be interesting to him. Of course, the video is about more than that though. I'm going to put it here and I highly recommend it.

Watch on YouTube

However, the video itself isn't what I wanted to post about. What I want to talk about is an article/story he references often in this video: 17776. I'd never heard of this story before, likely because it's on SB Nation and I'm not a sports person really, so why would I be reading the site. But also it's several years old and my interactions with the internet were different in 2017 than they are now. But also, because this story is weird.

17776 is about the world in about 15,000 years. In it, everyone who is alive now, is still alive. We stopped aging, we stopped dying and we solved most of our problems. So the world still carries on. And in that world, 15,000 years from now... what would the game of football look like? And if that sounds boring... well, it's not. This is a multimedia story told through text and video and images of three satellites watching the earth (the United States specifically) and talking to each other about how the people down here are dealing with their immortality.

It might take you an hour or more to get through this, it's a long story, but wow -- I'm in awe of how good this story is, how... interesting it is. I went into it knowing some of the details from Jacob's video, but even that could not prepare me for how much I really loved this story that's hidden away on a sport website?

If you've got the time, PLEASE go through this story about football in 17776. I promise it's witty and insightful and definitely worth your time.

Over the weekend, I picked up and finished the first book I've finished since before we were sent home to work in mid-March. I got the recommendation from Smart Bitches Trashy Books, it was cheap to pick up the ebook from B&N at the time, so it was easy choice to try and pick up something that was something of an easy, low engaging read. Romance isn't really my genre of choice, but I often find them easy and quick and requiring very little effort from me.

Let's Talk About Love by Clair Kann

Let's Talk About Love is about a college woman named Alice who is biromantic asexual. It begins with her breakup with her girlfriend and centers on her struggles with her own asexuality, especially after this breakup.

There's a lot of positive in this book. The author does not shy away at all from the themes in the book. The struggle with her asexuality is at the forefront of his novel, despite the romance that comes into play. Alice is strong in who she is in many ways: a black woman, a huge nerd, desperately loyal to her good friends. She also has a lot of growing up to do, and even though I'm many years older than her, I found her struggles pretty relatable, even if they didn't match my own exactly.

This was a short read and I think I would've enjoyed more of it. The beginning really tosses you headfirst into everything messy in Alice's life. I would've loved to see more build up to her as a character, more backstory maybe, and more detailed moments in her life with her roommates/friends after her breakup. There's a portion about midway through where she's not talking to her best friend for a period of time and it's a strange dynamic that I felt could've been explored a lot more, given how we're introduced to their relationship early on.

I rated it a solid 3 on GoodReads because while I enjoyed it, it was both too short and a little to twee for my liking. But I think the exploration and explanations of asexuality and biromantic were really good. The support for mental health was well done overall just a solid, but solid read if you're a fan of romance.

I do appreciate the length for one thing, it made me sit and read and finish a book for the first time in along time. It made me want to go back to the books hanging in limbo that I haven't finished yet, because the pandemic interrupted my regular reading time. Short, engaging novels have that effect sometime. I plan to pick back up Polaris Rising from Jessie Mihalick again (other romance, but a sci-fi one). I was about a quarter of the way through it before when I stopped reading, so it's high time I went back.

i am rusty when i talk, it is the storm in me

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singedsun

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Despite all best efforts

My Story Is in a Thing

17776

Let's Talk About Love