straightforwardly

Reading: The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite—about 83% through, according to my ereader. I’m not fully sold on the romance, but it has enough other things going for it that I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
Listening: Just caught up on Fic Clique; now I’m vaguely bouncing around from podcast to podcast, trying to figure out which to catch up on/start next.
Playing: The Amber Throne! An indie(?) rpg with a really lovely art direction—I’ve owned it on Steam via HumbleBundle since 2016, I think.
Watching: Nothing, unless historical sewing videos on youtube count. (They probably should, come to think of it.)
Writing: Currently focusing on an OW piece inspired by one of my own Relationshipping requests from this past year.

► On the last day of the year, while at work, I was thinking about Zbigniew Herbert’s “The Elegy of Fortinbras”—which some of you might remember is a poem that I have a lot of feelings about. I did a reread of Hamlet sometime in mid-December, which made this poem stick in the forefront of my mind even more than usual.

Anyways, as I was thinking about it, I was suddenly struck by the line, I could never think of your hands without smiling. For the first time, it occurred to me: that’s kind of an intimate thing to be thinking about?

( beneath the cut )

► On the first day of this year, I read a short story by T. Kingfisher that I hadn’t been aware of before — “Metal Like Blood in the Dark”. Unsurprisingly, I loved it!

I wanted to copy down some of my favorite lines beneath the cut, but… spoilers, so I do recommend reading the short story first before clicking on it, assuming that you click on it at all—you really don’t need to, as this is very much something I’m copying down just for my own sake, not for anyone else’s enjoyment, and I don’t know if anyone else would get anything out of it.

( beneath the cut )

I might be posting this too early, as Day 2 of the Snowflake Challenge should be coming up and it could be a prompt that I’d want to fill—but oh well. If that ends up being the case, making a second entry in the same day won’t hurt anyone.