Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

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. 

Reading: Just finished Connie Willis's two-part Blitz-time-travel saga, _Blackout_ and _All Clear_. Recommended, especially if you're up a lot at night with a teething toddler and want something really long and good to read on your kindle while you're awake.

Watching: WandaVision, which I really loved, although I felt like the last couple of episodes could have stayed in the sitcom setting and done some really interesting things with the same story but, well, nothing can be everything to everyone.

Playing: I like computer games, although I hardly ever get time any more (even without all this). Started playing a bit of Crusader Kings 3 again while off work, on the easiest possible setting, and currently my dynasty is three generations in and I own all of Ireland plus a random bit of Sweden, which is a nice accomplishment for a weekend. I've also played some Ring Fit Adventure which is fun for a fitness game and surprisingly hard despite the cutesy Nintendo-ish setting. Extra difficulty setting: play with a 6-year-old next to you shouting things like "you have to do the kicks BETTER, Mummy, you're going to lose all your hearts!"

Listening: I used to listen to lots of podcasts, it was part of my commute to work. This last year when my commute has been a 15-minute walk back from nursery (on good weeks) or walking from one room of my house to another while shouting "whatever that is please don't rub it into the furniture!" (on bad weeks), less so. So it's taken me quite a while to get through the ten episodes of the BBC/PBS podcast 'I'm Not A Monster', but it's really worth it. This is about an American woman who went to live in Syria under ISIS, and whether she knew what she was getting into or not, and whether she was complicit in what ISIS did or not. Not easy listening (I mean, ISIS...), but fascinating and very well done.