Setting Sail for Svalbard
Feb. 25th, 2017 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarFirst: You know that weird new(ish) feature LJ has, where you can "like" a post? Just a heads-up, if any of you like a post of mine...I can't actually see it.
I was baffled about this for a while: I would get a notification saying "Someone likes your entry!" (yes, isn't that annoyingly vague, that it doesn't even tell you who, just "someone"?) but then I would go to the post in question, and there was no sign of any liking there. (Whereas if someone likes a post of mine at a comm, rather than my own journal, that does show up.) Weird!
Eventually, I did some poking around and figured out this is because I don't have the latest LJ upgrade or new interface, or whatever it was... And apparently one side of that is that the new "likes" don't show up for me at all.
So y'all are welcome to like posts if you want, but it's just kind of going out into the ether, unfortunately... I get a mysterious "someone likes your entry" message, but I'll never know who!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
This Harry-Potter-verse, even-more-feminist Snow Queen retelling I'm working on is still a total blast! I've now written to just before the big final denouement ...which is set on Svalbard, so I get to look at lots of pictures of far-northern landscapes in the name of research. Ooooh. (Latest new favorite thing: Rossøya, the furthest north little island of the Svalbard archipelago, at 80°N latitude, a thousand kilometers from mainland Norway, where it juts up out of the ocean with stern, quiet dignity. Ohhhh Svalbard. I wonder if I will ever get to Svalbard, someday?)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
My reading is still kind of out of control (there are so many books I want to read...so I keep this long list of them...and I then get compulsive about tackling the list... and now I've somehow landed myself in THREE book clubs??) I keep catching myself thinking it must be almost time to do my quarterly round-up, because I've already read so much, but it's still only February...
I can definitely tell you that the Mirka graphic novels are indeed awesome ("Just another troll-fighting Orthodox Jewish girl!"), and Nimona is indeed awesome (my colleague's been telling me to read that forever!), and I've been catching up on some of the excellent LGBT+ YA books in our library that I've been meaning to read (including Forgive Me If I've Told You This Before, which I read on the recommendation of one of my students, and Skim, which I read on the recommendation of one of my colleagues.)
I'm dying to get my hands on The Last of August (sequel to the modern-day-young-Holmes-and-Watson A Study in Charlotte I loved so much last year), so while I'm waiting, I read yet another modern-day-young-Holmes-and-Watson reboot: The Great Shelby Holmes, which was pretty darn adorable. (They're young kids in this one, so it's Watson's mom who's an army doctor, and 9-year-old Shelby Holmes takes on neighborhood cases like...dognappings.)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Right now I'm wrapping up in a café where I was having a hang-out-and-work afternoon with a friend (working on her writing project), her boyfriend (doing his grad school reading) and me (reading-and-feedbacking a friend's play script). The friend who was here today is also the one who's beta reading my Snow Queen story, so she read a chapter I'd asked for feedback on and discussed it right here with me, in real time. In person. Haven't gotten to do that (writing feedback, in person!) in an age. Also, having local friends who want to sit and write together is the besssst. I missed this.
I was baffled about this for a while: I would get a notification saying "Someone likes your entry!" (yes, isn't that annoyingly vague, that it doesn't even tell you who, just "someone"?) but then I would go to the post in question, and there was no sign of any liking there. (Whereas if someone likes a post of mine at a comm, rather than my own journal, that does show up.) Weird!
Eventually, I did some poking around and figured out this is because I don't have the latest LJ upgrade or new interface, or whatever it was... And apparently one side of that is that the new "likes" don't show up for me at all.
So y'all are welcome to like posts if you want, but it's just kind of going out into the ether, unfortunately... I get a mysterious "someone likes your entry" message, but I'll never know who!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
This Harry-Potter-verse, even-more-feminist Snow Queen retelling I'm working on is still a total blast! I've now written to just before the big final denouement ...which is set on Svalbard, so I get to look at lots of pictures of far-northern landscapes in the name of research. Ooooh. (Latest new favorite thing: Rossøya, the furthest north little island of the Svalbard archipelago, at 80°N latitude, a thousand kilometers from mainland Norway, where it juts up out of the ocean with stern, quiet dignity. Ohhhh Svalbard. I wonder if I will ever get to Svalbard, someday?)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
My reading is still kind of out of control (there are so many books I want to read...so I keep this long list of them...and I then get compulsive about tackling the list... and now I've somehow landed myself in THREE book clubs??) I keep catching myself thinking it must be almost time to do my quarterly round-up, because I've already read so much, but it's still only February...
I can definitely tell you that the Mirka graphic novels are indeed awesome ("Just another troll-fighting Orthodox Jewish girl!"), and Nimona is indeed awesome (my colleague's been telling me to read that forever!), and I've been catching up on some of the excellent LGBT+ YA books in our library that I've been meaning to read (including Forgive Me If I've Told You This Before, which I read on the recommendation of one of my students, and Skim, which I read on the recommendation of one of my colleagues.)
I'm dying to get my hands on The Last of August (sequel to the modern-day-young-Holmes-and-Watson A Study in Charlotte I loved so much last year), so while I'm waiting, I read yet another modern-day-young-Holmes-and-Watson reboot: The Great Shelby Holmes, which was pretty darn adorable. (They're young kids in this one, so it's Watson's mom who's an army doctor, and 9-year-old Shelby Holmes takes on neighborhood cases like...dognappings.)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Right now I'm wrapping up in a café where I was having a hang-out-and-work afternoon with a friend (working on her writing project), her boyfriend (doing his grad school reading) and me (reading-and-feedbacking a friend's play script). The friend who was here today is also the one who's beta reading my Snow Queen story, so she read a chapter I'd asked for feedback on and discussed it right here with me, in real time. In person. Haven't gotten to do that (writing feedback, in person!) in an age. Also, having local friends who want to sit and write together is the besssst. I missed this.
