eye_of_a_cat: (Default)
Work: Is great, in most ways. New job is rewarding and doing something important and actually out of the house 75% of the time. It is a bit more of a Kobayashi Maru situation than I was ideally hoping for - "we need a solution to this problem which is both good and cheap and fast!", hmmm - and the subject matter can get a bit upsetting sometimes, so I'm even more glad of being able to take it out of the house and come away from it when I'm off work. 

Writing: It is all Tolkien, all the time. I am lost. Rings of Power has reawoken the Balrog of my latent Tolkien fannishness and I can remember all of it now and ohhhhhh I've missed this. I am also really, really pleased to have rediscovered writing fanfic as stress relief and am amazed by how much I can get written on my phone on the train. I am carving out a really nice happy-place writing niche for myself writing Galadriel and/or Sauron Rings of Power woven into wider Tolkien canon and I am having so much fun with it. Latest:

So Wide a Sea: 5500 words, explicit/mature (kind of borderline), Galadriel in s1 Rings of Power era then after LOTR, Galadriel/Sauron and Galadriel/Celeborn but mostly Galadriel, really.

Shadow-Bride: ongoing WIP, currently 50k words and 8/15 chapters. Galadriel/Sauron which lol I never thought I would be writing and is now this huge pairing, all hail the ff.net girlies who saw the light in 2003. 

Also I have a fandom Twitter account now! all welcome come say hi. It is a wild and crazy world out there and the other week I got accused by some 'Tolkien purists' (pffft you kids know NOTHING) of being a paid-for Amazon promoter. lollllllll. Amazon if you're out there: I will come work for you if you give me a job that is as interesting as mine, less stressful than mine, and comes with an extra few seasons of The Expanse please please please. 

Reading: more Tolkien. Currently on umpteenth Lord of the Rings reread, after... about fifteen years I think. But so SLOWLY, I have so little free uninterrupted time and much of it is spent manically writing fanfic. I am also reading Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, a memoir of addiction and life on Orkney. 

Watching: not so much because ditto. I saw the first episode of s3 Picard and I quite liked it (but then I've always liked how previous Picard seasons started, just went off them as they went on); I saw the first episode of Wednesday which was fun but hasn't made me desperate to watch more; and I've started watching Lockwood & Co which is very young-adult-y but in the best way. Oh! And I finally saw Wakanda Forever when it came out on streaming, and LOVED it. 
eye_of_a_cat: (frog)
Peter Jackson's LOTR films were great and all, but my first ever Tolkien adaptation was the BBC radio drama from the early 1980s. My local library had it on cassette and I used to borrow it over and over and over again. One thing that did really really well, and that I missed from the film versions, was the use of Tolkien's songs - done not as background music but sung by the characters as part of the narrative. Here's Sam singing 'Gil-Galad Was An Elven King':



So one of my absolute favourite moments in Rings of Power was Poppy (one of Sam's distant ancestors?) (I will CRY FOREVER if Smeagol/Gollum ends up being one of the harfoots we've met) sings this:



It's not one of Tolkien's songs (although it lifts some words from his) but there's something wonderfully Tolkien-ish about the spirit of it, and it captures the feeling of those radio drama songs in a way I did not realise I had been missing.

Also also I am really loving some of the shippy fanmade music vids (I believe the youth of fandom call them 'edits' these days) that Rings of Power is producing. Putting these behind a spoiler cut because even the static image is spoilery )
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