paranoidangel | Recent Entries

What I Just Finished Reading
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman. I can't decide if I liked this or not. I couldn't get through the Thursday Murder Club because I didn't like the characters and wasn't interested in the murder. In this one I like the characters and would absolute be up for reading more with them in, but wasn't that interested in the murder. And found the short chapters cutting between characters made it hard to get into.

Clean Point by Meg Jones. This was awful. I thought it was a tennis romance, but then read the preview and thought it was an interesting tennis story about drugs and parents and coaches. That part of the story was interesting and would have been better if it had been the main part of the story. Sadly most of it was about the two main characters spending all their time thinking about each other's legs, which was dull and predictable. I kept reading for the tennis aspect and whether it was all going to end up happy or more realistic. I could have not bothered.

What I'm Currently Reading
Triangle: Imzadi II by Peter David. My Unconventional Courtship fic is set during this book. I skim-read bits when I started, but then my writing stalled. I finally have an idea for the next bit (if not the ending) and I thought reading this book would help me actually write it.

What I'm Reading Next
Is This Working? by Charlie Colenutt. A library hold that's just come in.

Mirrored from my blog.

What I Just Finished Reading
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady. This is kind of an autobiography, but through the lens of her getting diagnosed as autistic and then looking back at things she did and how they related to that. It was so interesting I read it in a day and had such a book hangover that I didn't read another book for a day.

The Twins at St Claire's by Enid Blyton, The O'Sullivan Twins by Enid Blyton, Summer Term at St Clare's by Enid Blyton, Second Form at St Clare's by Enid Blyton. After re-reading the Mallory Towers books I wanted to read St Clare's. I don't know if it was the books or my mood, but I struggled with these until partway through the second one. Mallory Towers is better, I think, but they are pretty similar.

What I'm Currently Reading
The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey. I looked through my physical books to read thinking I ought to get through some of those. This one is hard going, partly because Mercedes Lackey books are slow and therefore hard going, but also because it has tiny writing.

Jackpot Summer by Elyssa Friedland. The other book turned out to be so hard to get it to stay open while I ate that I started this one to read during meals. And then I remembered I'd read another book by the same author that I hadn't thought much of. So far I haven't thought much of this one either.

Claudine at St Clare's by Enid Blyton. The fifth book in the series.

What I'm Reading Next
Fifth Formers of St Clare's by Enid Blyton. The last book in the series.

Primula of the Chalet School by Helen Barber. This turned up just before Easter, but I really can't start it until I've finished some others.

And I'm getting to the top of the list on my ebook library holds so I'm expecting those to come in soon. If you say you don't want it and let the next person have it you don't get to be in the queue after them, you go to the back of the queue. One of the books I have on hold has over 100 people in the queue, so I have to get it when it comes to me!

Mirrored from my blog.

A year ago I started Couch to 5K for the second time (last time I did one run and that was enough). My plan was to finish it and then do a Park Run. I didn't intend to keep going. But I have and I've now been running for a year.

Although at the moment all my achievements were last year. A combination of weather and illness means I haven't done a lot of running in the last six months. In comparison it feels like I can't do much. But if I compare it to a year ago I could just about run for 90 seconds. Now I can definitely do at least 10 minutes without stopping.

And I've learnt that it's ok to stop and walk if you need to. Or stop and take photos of something interesting you're passing.

Mirrored from my blog.

What I Just Finished Reading
The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman. I felt like this book meandered about a bit and I struggle to say what it's about. I finished it but there were points when I wondered why I was bothering.

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan. This I really enjoyed. The author is a shy introvert and decides to spend the year acting like a extrovert, mostly because all her local friends had moved away and/or had babies. It was really interesting to see what she learned.

What I'm Currently Reading
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. I started this and it was all about a meteoroid hitting America and how awful everything was and how many people had died and I was not in the mood for something that depressing. I haven't totally given up on it because I checked reviews and found that it's just the first part of the book and later it moves on a few years to a mission to Mars, which is what I thought the book was about.

The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths. Back to the Elly Griffiths. I have three at home from the charity shop and this is the first of the three. Eventually I'll make it back to the library for the last two in the series. But I am enjoying this more for having had a break from them.

What I'm Reading Next
Whatever is on my to read list that I feel like reading next. Probably not another Elly Griffiths as I think I'll space them out a bit.

Mirrored from my blog.

I've spent the past month either busy or ill and therefore haven't posted.

1. I decided to start using my Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/paranoidangel42) for fandom-related things. So I found some tags to follow that were all about people posting photos of their rabbits and then got ill and took a social media break. I've come back to it and are yet to work out how I want to read it or who I might want to follow.

2. I signed up for unconventionalcourtship again and this year I was organised. I looked at what I wrote in past years, discovered I hadn't written any Star Trek pairings at all, then found a summary. It still needs some thought as to the plot, but it's a start at least. And I didn't go completely round the bend reading Mills & Boon summaries.

3. While I was ill I watched the second series of Star Trek: Prodigy. I had been keeping a mental note of all the things I wanted to watch on Netflix to get them all watched in a month, but since it was a mental note I forgot what all of them were about from this. And then I discovered it was also on Amazon and for less money than a month of Netflix. So I watched the whole thing in about a week. It took me a little while to get into it and then once I got near the end I didn't want to finish it because there is no more of it. I did really enjoy it, although it made me weirdly nostalgic for Voyager. Weirdly because I lost the will to live with it during the 7th series, not helped by the BBC taking a whole year to show it because they kept stopping for darks and snooker etc.

4. And now I'm rewatching Farscape, which I'd been meaning to do for a while. It was both weirder than I remembered and also less weird. I'm now into the second series and I remember a lot more of that than the first. I remember spending a lot of time on a website that had white text on a black background. Which is a colour combination I can no longer read. I also remember watching a lot of music videos at the time. I looked up the one I remember and it's on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=148g-mhkCGs. So it's all been very nostalgic.

Mirrored from my blog.

In 2023 I got into doing some ficathons and thought I hadn't done Chocolate Box for a while, so it would be good to do candyheartsex. And then everything went to shit and I spent January looking for jobs and doing tests that were the same as my job at the time, only made harder by incompetence and inability to understand that there are other operating systems beside Mac and Windows.

But this year was fine, so I did it.

I wrote
Bored Games (838 words) by paranoidangel
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963)
Characters: Barbara Wright, Ian Chesterton, Vicki Pallister, First Doctor (Doctor Who)
Additional Tags: Fluff, Board Games
Summary: Barbara, Ian, Vicki and the Doctor play a game of Monopoly.

And I got
Meddling in the Affairs of Humans (3986 words) by AstroGirl
Fandom: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Ian Chesterton/Barbara Wright
Characters: Susan Foreman, Barbara Wright, Ian Chesterton
Additional Tags: Matchmaking, Susan POV, Also includes the Doctor
Summary: Barbara and Ian would be perfect for each other, Susan is certain of it. If only she could get them to realize it...

Which considering that I when I did my sign up I was missing the first two TARDIS teams worked out quite well.

I thought about doing unsent-letters-exchange, but then couldn't think of enough things that I wanted and wasn't inspired by the tagset. But that doesn't stop me from writing treats/picking up a pinch hit should the opportunity arise.

And after thinking about it for a while, I set up tardis_remix. Since it's not a gift exchange, most of the work is in setting it up and the rest is in box ticking. And most of the set up work was about LibreOffice and AO3 fighting over formatting.

(~~I know none of my DW links are actually linking - the plugin that creates the links suddenly stopped working and I need to look into why~~ - now fixed!)

Mirrored from my blog.

My Reading Wednesday posts would be pretty much entirely Elly Griffiths at the moment, so have this meme instead, that I got from thisbluespirit.

Rules: give us the links to your fics with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the fewest words.

Most hits: Love Me, Love Me Not (Carry On (Simon Snow), 3377 hits)
I think this is probably because I wrote it for Yuletide 2017 when the fandom was big. Or at least I imagine it might have been. My top five in hits are all big pairings in big fandoms where I didn't kill anyone off, which probably explains why they have a lot of hits.

Second most kudos: Coming Out (The Non-Binary Remix) (Harry Potter, 154 kudos).
This has about half the kudos of the top one, but it's another big pairing (Remus/Sirius) in a big fandom, back when it was big. I'm not particularly fond of my remix subtitle because it makes me think it's about something else. I came up with it because the title of the fic it remixes is Binary Doesn't Really Cut It.

Third most comment threads: A Matter of Faith (Quantum Leap, 10 comments)
This category is all much closer. This one surprised me, but then it's from Yuletide 2007, so the comments all come from there. It's back in a time when the only option was to comment, so that's probably got a lot to do with it.

Fourth most bookmarks: Double Desolation (Doctor Who, 17 bookmarks)
Oh look, another big (ish) pairing (Missy/Clara) in a big fandom. None of the 8 people who bookmarked it publicly said anything about it, but then they could be bookmarking it to read later.

Fifth most words: is a 17,086 word fic not on AO3 because my vague memories of it tell me I don't want to re-read it. So I'm not going to link to it. On AO3 it's Home, Again (Doctor Who, 10,597 words) and is actually my ninth most words out of all fics, whether on AO3 or not. All but two of those fics were Doctor Who. I was very prolific at one point.

Fewest words: According to AO3 it's Two Weeks which has words (sic). I don't know why it has decided it can't count the words in it.

In reality it's a half drabble I wrote back in the days when I wrote a ton of drabbles: Leaving (Tolkien, 50 words). Given that the address for this ends in "leaving-2" I must have written another fic with the same title. I checked. It's another Elrond drabble. I'm almost amazed I didn't write more Elrond drabbles with that title.

Mirrored from my blog.

What I Just Finished Reading
A load of Elly Griffiths' Dr Ruth Galloway series. I've been putting holds on the early ones, one at a time, and then when I go to the library to pick them up, getting another one. I finally read one where they made Norfolk sound really pretty. It was the first one that wasn't set in the middle of winter or a summer heatwave, so that probably helped.

Upper Fourth at Malory Towers, Into the Fifth at Malory Towers and Last Term at Malory Towers by Enid Blyton. I struggled a bit with the fourth series because a lot of it about the First Formers and there was a lot less of the original characters. Turns out the book is all about the original characters and I enjoyed it more. I am saving series 5 until there's less on TV because it has 20 episodes(!), but I've seen the preview. There was one bit that sounded partially like the fifth book and one bit that sounded partially like the sixth book. It feels like they're gradually getting further and further away from the books, but we'll see.

A Good Enough Mother by Sheila Norton
The Lost Letters of Evelyn Wright by Clare Swatman
Her Guilty Secret by Emily Cavanagh
The World Outside My Window by Clare Swatman
Not Your Child by Sheila Horton
I was ill and wanted some easy reading and these were. But they were all about women whose exes were terrible, but it's ok because they found romance (except one). I just felt like I was reading the same books all the time. I thought I liked contemporary fiction, but it turns out I like some contemporary fiction. That doesn't involve divorce or romance or small children.

What I'm Currently Reading
To The Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei. I needed something different and I really wanted to read something written by a man. This is not fiction, so it's different in that respect. It's also really interesting because there's stuff about the anti-Japanese American prejudice during WWII and the sort of roles that were available to him as an actor.

What I'm Reading Next
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. For the 'Banned Book' square on my bingo card. And also because something from the book came up ages ago and I realised that I read it so long ago that I remembered absolutely nothing about it.

And then books 4 and 15 from Elly Griffiths' Dr Ruth Galloway series, once the library has got both of them in. Then I'll have read the first four and last four in the series and will just have the middle seven to go.

Mirrored from my blog.

I came to the conclusion the other day that I feel the same about running as I do about cleaning: I like having done it and that I can listen to a podcast while doing it.

The difference with running is that I realised late last year that you can get medals for doing what is just a hobby to me. Which I am unreasonably excited about. And you don't have to run a long way either.

After googling races I found the best way to find a race is to remember which ones I've seen mentioned locally. So my plan for this year is to do a 5k in the next town. I know the distance is do-able, but you can't wear headphones. Which means nothing to take my mind off it and no feedback about how fast I'm going or how far I've run. (I know you can get watches that tell you this information, but I can't read a watch while running, so it seems like a waste of £100+)

And then there's a 8k (5 mile) race that is so nearby the route goes past my house. Which is a bit more of a stretch because the furthest I ran last year is 7k. I did have plans to gradually work my way up to 8k, but then I got ill and couldn't run for weeks, then it got cold. My asthma limits how fast I can run when it's cold and quite a bit of winter means that limit is walking. Hopefully when the weather improves I can start getting the distances up again.

The difference between Park Run (which I've done three times) and a race is that a Park Run you can just rock up to if you feel like it that morning/depending on what the weather's like. With a race you register and pay in advance, so you're running whatever (to a point, obviously, if you're ill or injured you can't run and if it's way too hot the race is likely to be cancelled anyway).

Both the races I plan to do this year have a similar number of runners as at my local Park Run, so it'll feel pretty familiar. Next year though I'm thinking of doing a much bigger, slightly less local 10km. And by bigger I mean about 40 times more people. So this year my goal is to run 10km.

But I don't have plans to run further than that. I saw something that said that running boosts your immune system, but only up to 1 hour 30 minutes. If you run for longer than that it has the opposite effect. I already get everything going, so that's the last thing I want. I ought to be able to run 10km in less than 1 hour 30 minutes, so 10km will be my limit of the distance I run.

I saw something somewhere where someone was talking about PBs just for the year. Which makes sense because as you get older you just can't run as fast. I can't run that fast at the moment, but I'd like to get my 5km lifetime PB down by 30 seconds to 34 minutes.

Mirrored from my blog.

I've been meaning to write (most of) this post since November.

After not having written for ages I signed up for both TARDIS Festivities and Star Trek Holidays wondering if that was a good idea. At least the former has a short wordcount and the latter has a long time to write.

And then someone defaulted on TARDIS Festivities and the prompts were ones that I really hoped someone would write. And I quite fancied that someone to be me. Except that I wasn't sure if I could write and wanted to get at least the first draft done for my assignment before picking up a pinch hit. Or in other words, I made my life stressful unnecessarily. I did end up doing both and it was fine.

And then someone defaulted close to the deadline and it turned out that two people wanted to write something before they picked it up. In the meantime I thought I couldn't write it. But then watched some clips, followed by some episodes and realised I could.

That's the thing I like about the ficathon. Because I'm running it and can see everything I'll just happily fill in a hole, which means sometimes writing things I don't normally (or haven't ever). And I end up enjoying it. And then continue to play things safe in other ficathons.

After the stress I wasn't at all sure I wanted to run it again this year. But then someone thanked me for running it and suddenly it all felt worth it. Unless something changes, I shouldn't be looking for a new job or doing any morris admin this autumn, so I ought to have time to run it again.

I also quite fancy the idea of reviving DW Remix. I miss the Remix ficathon and I want to read and write some remixes. If I did it it would be relatively soon so it's done before I get busy in May/June and before it gets hot (if it's too hot to do anything I don't want to have to do anything). But it wouldn't be a gift exchange. That way people who are happy to be remixed, but don't have time/inclination/whatever to write one can take part. As can people who don't want to/haven't written enough can just write a remix. And there's far less organisation required, which is a win all round.

I did end up writing my Star Trek Holidays fic after TARDIS Festivities was over. By then things had quietened down and I'd got my post-Covid jab/cold/Norovirus being ill out of the way. And managed to write a Yuletide treat too. I'm just not interested in enough small fandoms to sign up for Yuletide - as evidenced by me reading everything I was interested in in the collection in an evening.

Mirrored from my blog.

May 2025

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