hey pals!

If you follow me on twitter you will of course know this, but I have a new life calling, and it is tweeting about Midsomer Murders. My obsession continues unabated, and I’m enjoying it too much to call a stop to it. It’s half the reliable comfort of the show itself, and half the fictional county of Midsomer. I’d like to live there, I think. Lots of country walks, every village has a bookshop on the high street. Yes, it’s full of murder, but no place is perfect.

Dog Thing

Mixed Media

When I was in 7th grade, I started sitting with a group of girls at lunch. It was an odd group, and I don’t remember how it formed. None of them were people I knew from elementary school, and we didn’t all have classes together. Regardless of how it began, what bound us together was one simple thing: books. We were all voracious readers, and at 12 the world of books was wide open to us. At that point, I’d read almost exclusively mystery novels and historic fiction. One of the girls, Gracie, lent me Daughters of Darkness by L.J. Smith, a book about vampires, and reader, I must confess to you: I stole it from her.

Just like that, I was hooked. It was my first genre romance, but it was far from the last. Daughters of Darkness is the 2nd book in the Night World series, which revolves around vampires, witches, and shapeshifters. Each volume is about a different couple, a different facet of the Night World. They were all building to volume 10, the last in the series. Strange Fate. Before it was published, Smith took a break from writing to care for her son. By the time she came back, the teen horror heyday was over. There will never be a volume 10.

But what a heyday it was! If Smith’s name sounds familiar, you likely know her as the author of the Vampire Diaries books, which became a tv show some years back. For my money, the Night World has the Vampire Diaries well beat. I loved the variety of storylines and characters, and good lord would you LOOK at those covers, each one painted by Spanish artist ​Sanjulián.

I found myself down the Night World path this week when a friend asked to borrow the first book because a podcast he listens to was covering it. That podcast is Teen Creeps, which is entirely devoted to teen pulp fiction, and I was so delighted with their episode about Secret Vampire that it’s made me want to reread the entire series.

The romance novel kick continues! I read queer paranormal romance Cutie and the Beast and you know, it wasn’t bad! I also read The Covert Captain: Or, A Marriage of Equals, a regency romance about a woman who goes to war using her brother’s name, continues to live as him in peacetime, and then falls in love with her former commander’s sister. The style of writing was unlike any I’ve encountered before, and I was charmed by it. Finally, I read My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, a memoir about how it feels to be outside what everyone else expects of your life. I saw myself reflected in it more than once, which wasn’t always easy, but it’s a wonderful book.

I saw A Wrinkle in TIme, and liked it a great deal! A lot of the visual sequences in it felt a bit like they were stalling for time–Wrinkle isn’t a terribly complicated story, plot-wise–but they were beautiful nevertheless, and the film nailed all of the family stuff, which is what I really cared about. Storm Reid, who played Meg, was fantastic. I also saw Tomb Raider, and I loved it! I did. I love dumb action movies, and played the game this was based on, so I was primed to love this movie. Alicia Vikander killed it. It needed more women, but everything always does. It also needed more Daniel Wu, and I’m hoping for a sequel for just that reason.

Fics I Shouted About

Everything Except by Pouler // My Hero Academia, Midoriya/Todoroki, future fic. Midoriya and Todoroki have a good friendship and a solid partnership, when they encounter a villain with a quirk that changes everything. Mutual pining! Misundertandings! I love it.

Also: I wrote a thing! I quite like it.

Anxiety Pyjamas

Lastly

C’est ça!