#onionjuggler

[swaps55]

Not to be weird, but this tag genuinely made me tear up. I also hope that for you!

It's not weird in the slightest, friend.

Sonata just had its 5th birthday and Sam shows no signs of giving me any peace. I'm very grateful.

[caphairdadbeard]

your trademark ™️is homemade holiday cards! I still have mine in a box somewhere

aww, those were so fun! maybe i should resurrect that practice now that i'm not so burned out that the mere thought of it makes me want to cry.

(i still do holiday cards, they've just morphed into the very classic happy family shutterstock ones instead of "photos of chris evans semi-nude that the person working the wal-mart photo counter told me they weren't allowed to give me because of nudity)

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

Oh man, I hope I'm not too late for this. 💌 ⇢ how many unread emails do you have right now? and especially for you, a bug 🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

from these tumblr asks thank you :D

💌 ⇢ how many unread emails do you have right now? 

for my personal emails: I live at inbox 0. as soon as i go to the tab and see there is a new email i either open it or mark it as read. i mean i guess i only bulk-clear out spam/promotions every couple months but otherwise! nothing for me.

except: got depressed over the summer (and it did not lift) and my grad school email was Overwhelming. bc i get like 20-30 per day because there's So Many Fucking Lists and like 99% of them are Useless, and its a waste of time to even look at them. so now there's 1741 emails in there and they Haunt me. i should just mass mark-as-read them but every time i hear the outlook "new email" ding it activates my flight-or-fight response so rip

🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

oh goddammit you are CRUEL 😭 but i cannot deny i love a good bug. i'm picking the doc that's fastest though which is the post-trespasser one where i give Lavellan a borzoi puppy (curtesy of the Knight-Enchanter trainer) bc i think its funny

            Lavellan’s eyes burn, and her head throbs in time with each step she takes up the stairs. She can hear the hound’s nails scrabbling against the cold stone behind her, and when she opens the door to her chambers and walks inside, it slips past her legs and begins to make a circuit of the room, sniffing curiously at the edges of the furniture. She ignores it as she drops to sit on the edge of the bed, breath rushing out in a huff as she flops backwards onto the covers. She can’t avoid sleeping anymore, after two days it’s pointless to keep putting off. But sleeping means taking off her uniform, and that means putting it back on in the morning, with all those damn laces and buttons she has to fumble with only one hand and her teeth now. That, or bear the indignity of asking a servant to dress her, just like the cold and glittering nobles in Orlais—with their masks staring down at her as voices ring out all the ways the Inquisition cannot be allowed to last. The memory swims behind her eyelids, until she digs her fingers into the corner of her eye to erase them with a swirling mess of color and light.             There is a light thump on the bed next to her, and she jerks her head sideways to see that the spindly animal has leapt up onto the quilt beside her. Its dark eyes stare intently at her face, far too close, and after a moment she can smell the carion-tang of it’s breath against her cheek.             “Absolutely not,” she says as she sits back up, awkwardly half-lifting the beast with her one arm until it relents and bounds back down to the floor. “You can stay down there.”

[little-piece-of-tamlin]

🛏 Is there a new trope you'd like to write this year?

🪩 Do you have any "good" writing habits you want to cultivate?

🐌 What is one of your smallest writing goals?

aa ty for the ask!

🛏 Is there a new trope you'd like to write this year?

i don't have anything particular in mind, no. but i do want to stretch my horizonts a bit so i probably will end up dabbling with something (maybe even use that handy wheel of yours lol)

🪩 Do you have any "good" writing habits you want to cultivate?

probably getting better at editing. i often rush into it bc im excited to share my work, but it probably would benefit me to let my fics rest longer and read through them with a more ciritcal eye. but also i write fic for fun so i also don't care too much

🐌 What is one of your smallest writing goals?

the smallest one is to keep writing lol, since im officially graduating from uni in january i will become a Working Adult, and im a bit worried that a 9-5 will make me too exhausted to pursue my creative hobbies

[luzial]

Jealous!

Sales beat you to that one, so I'm gonna treat this as dealer's choice but, in keeping with the spirit of the request, choose a WIP that does have some jealousy in it.

"a night at the opera"

This is Teia/Viago smut with the tiniest bit of plot that's been sitting in my drafts since 2021. The title is because the Crows like to name their kills, and that will be the name of the assassination Teia has been contracted to carry out. It's a murder in an opera house and she talks Viago into going along with her. The jealousy comes in because Teia does a little light seduction on her target before murdering him and of course she makes sure Viago sees it.

Predictably, I wrote a solid intro and then just a ton of unconnected dialogue (my preferred drafting strategy these days) so it has a lot of work still to be done. Here's a little snippet of some of that dialogue, though:

“Are you enjoying the show?” “As much as I appreciate your work, I am not well-equipped to witness it firsthand.” “Oh Vi, of the few faults anyone could attribute to you, none could complain that you are not well-equipped.”

Now that I really look at it, it's just a whole bunch of Teia roasting Viago and like, I do love that for me. I should do something with this.

Hope you don't mind me totally derailing your actual ask! 😂

More WIP titles for the game here!

[findusinaweek]

1, 3 and 4 for the book asks!

1 How many books did you read this year? I did a lot less reading this year (now I feel a little silly doing this ask) so...less the 30? 25? A good deal of them were nice for passing time but little else.

3 What were your top five books of the year? I don't really know what to rank them as but: Cod - Mark Kurlansky (This guy can tell me about anything, but "Salt" is my favorite nonfiction book.) Memento Mori - Eunice Hong (My friend aeide and also a very deeply emotional book that I really enjoyed.) Prayer for the Crown Shy - Becky Chambers (I love the Monk&Robot series so far. It helped me come out to myself as nonbinary, it helps me understand how to use they/them within writing, and it gives me hope for a future.) Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng (Despite her first novel being my favorite novel of all time and this one being even more acclaimed, I struggled to read it for years. I finally read it and once I got into it I couldn't stop. I am struggling to decide what to consider my fifth favorite book is, because I read a lot of books I didn't care about or learn anything from, but I did get this book about embroidery out of the library 3 times this year so I guess "How to embroider texture and pattern : 20 designs that celebrate pattern, color, and pop-up stitching" by Melissa Gailbraith should be the fifth, even if I mostly looked at the pictures and then did not start a new embroidery project. 4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year? I've mostly just been re-excited by authors I already liked, but I've made an effort to read through books I already own. I did read through some old lesbian poetry books I got years ago at a library sale, so I guess I could mention Lesléa Newman's "Love Me Like You Mean It", which is this thin little poetry book from 1987 that kept catching my attention. I am not really very into poetry, but I spent an afternoon really just reading through it and that day it was what I needed. I like how reading these poems feels like watching someone else's memories or thoughts on an old, grainy tv.

[merrinish]

Having never read the Bridgerton series, I didn't know about issues in Pen's characterization. What did they change about her?

Gonna go ahead and put this behind a spoiler tag just in case

The biggest change, I think, is that in the books, Lady Whistledown only ever punched up, not down. She never ruined anyone's life, never repeated gossip that someone couldn't recover from.

Marina was an offscreen character in the books, married to Phillip Crane (who you see her with in season 2), but she lives and dies off page and only really comes into play after her death. The fact that she's added to the show in season 1 and then Penelope has Lady Whistledown reveal her pregnancy so Colin doesn't marry her? All because Pen's in love with him? Gives a massive ick.

She also never had to out an inappropriate friendship/budding romance between Eloise and a shopkeeper on Rotten Row because it never happened in the books. This whole massive fight between Eloise and Pen in the show never happened in the books and in fact, they were an example for Lady Danbury of how nice female friendships can be, because there was no jealousy between them.

Also also, the carriage scene in the book happens after Colin follows Pen to the church where she drops her articles, because he sees her walking in a bad part of town. He kisses her in the carriage after he's found out she's Lady Whistledown, so he proposes knowing full well who her secret identity is. Which isn't character assassination so much as something I'm kinda nervous about in the second half of the season.

I understand why they felt the need to add some faults and make the characters more modern and interesting, this just felt way too over the top for me. They made her a vindictive bitch when she never was.

[songofsaraneth]

@onionjuggler submitted:

3 and 14!

From this books ask game!

3: What were your top five books of the year?

I'll be honest most of what i read this year was either rereads of treasured books (finishing up my RotE reread I did mostly in 2023), and then a lot of books i thought were just Fine. They were good enough to keep me entertained and then pretty instantly forget what happened in them specifically. So the ones that stand out from those that weren't just rereads are:

Exordia by Seth Dickinson: This book is a bit frustrating actually because it's SO CLOSE to being exactly what I want, and it drives me mad that it's not quite there. It also is a better read if you go in with the understanding that it's actually 5 novellas in a trenchcoat (publisher changed the plan, from what I understand). But it's the kind of frustrating that wouldn't leave my head for weeks after because what was there was so compelling. I will be reading book 2 the instant it drops.

Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui: It was so cute and fun. I couldn't watch the anime when it started out so found the manga instead, which isn't a format i read much of otherwise. Great balance of silly, heartfelt, and using speculative bio to introduce a usually untouched element of realism to fantasy aka cooking/food.

The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories by Ken Liu: I mean I knew I was gonna like this anthology and just never got around to it to now for some reason. I like reading translated sci fi in anthlogies becuase you also get a window into what tropes are being used in other cultures/languages which is half the fun of it to me.

Monstress vol. 7 by Marjori Liu & Sana Takeda: honestly I love all of the Monstress graphic novels but this one had some fun stuff I apprreciated in particular. I also read 8 and it was good but not as suited to my tastes, and have 9 (this year's release) but left it in New Mexico so will read it once I'm back.

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries: this book was just a fun fantasy romp but what I really appreciated about it was that the protagonist was ACTIVE rather than passive despite being a more stuffy/bookish sort of personality. She just went outside and dealt with things anyway. I'm pretty tired of stories where the protagonist is just being unwillingly dragged along by the narrative rather than directing their own fate so I always notice & appreciate when books break that particular mold.

14: What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

I started rereading the How To Train Your Dragon books because they're very short and I am so close to my book goal for the year (95/100...). I won't finish all of them but I will get through a couple more probably. And I've also gone through some of the Hugo nominated novellas as well since I do usually read those most years.

Actually you know what. Gonna go back and plug HTTYD books more emphatically, because if anyone reading this comment imprinted on Animorphs you should give these a try next. They're not the same level of trauma, and the first couple books are WAY sillier, then the greater story arc comes into play and I am so invested by book 5, and books 8-12 just get me so good emotionally. Never thought I'd be heartbroken over a character named Snotlout but here we are! Also, if you're an audiobook person, David Tennant does the narration and you get to hear him sing a bunch of funny little songs. Though the print versions have the authors cute scribbly drawings that go along with the story so can't go wrong really.