Halrloprillalar

Thursday already and I'm not sure how the week has gone by so fast. I meant to post on Monday, and then again yesterday and well, I didn't. Work has been busy, the cat is trying to kick me off of my computer by sitting on my arm, and I made a kinda sad swiss roll tonight for dessert that's still tasty even though I probably should have put the mouse on the inside instead of the outside. But these are the choices we make.
 

On the reading front, I'm still enjoying Avatar fic, and the two series (unfinished, sadly) I read this week were when the world stops spinning by Nautica_Dawn, which is a lowkey Zuko/Katara plus Toph and Ty Lee survive Aang failing to defeat Ozai. It's rough on Aang's characterization but he's not a major part of most of the story til the end, and I really liked the rest of it, plus the sequel that deals with the fallout from when they actually win the war... more with a whimper than a bang.

The other one is The Worst Prisoner series by emletish which took a little to get into, but once I got used to the style of storytelling (the events of episodes are described but still there) it was a lot of fun. It's basically AU from the middle of season 1 where Zuko accidentally takes Sokka prisoner after the storm when he's fishing, and after that, Sokka and Aang accidentally kidnap Zuko in the Blue Spirit ep. In short, Zuko joins the Gaang much earlier and they have lots of bonding and shennanigans and everyone is wonderfully in character and wonderfully teenagers. I really liked it and thought book 2 is not done I'm eagerly awaiting updates.

Now that I'm two weeks out from reading Embers and the flush of being immersed in the story, the more I think about it, the less I like the second half of it. Especially having read these and the ones from last week for contrast in style and characterization, thought I still love what the author did with the bones of the plot, if that makes sense. Anyway.

Lastly, I read an actual book too! Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C Wrede. I think I last read it over ten years ago, but my niece recently finished them so I borrowed it from her, and it is still completely delightful and charming. Now I need to return it and borrow the next three. Though maybe not till the weekend.
 

I'm trying to take a little break from reading for a few days so I can get some writing done. For the couple days after my plot breakthrough on my original story last week I flailed around trying to figure out what to do next, and then yesterday settled down and started doing some of the snowflake method exercises to start fleshing out the plot. I've still got plenty of details to work out there, but I'm also at the point I think where I need to do detailed character creation so I know the people I'm going to have at the center of it! I've discovered as I do that just how much more worldbuilding falls out of filling out some random character sheets. Way more than I thought would, so I'm going to continue that for the moment for my four mains. I want to have solid characters at least when I start writing, which I hope to do in March.

I've also got a couple of Voltron fics I need to finish up, and maybe a Dragon Age one, as well as Star Wars edits. I plugged away at that last week. I'm not committing myself to a timeframe, since that doesn't seem to work for me for editing. Unlike the first draft I can't just say, "write now, fix later." I'm at the fix later part.
 

In other stuff, still watching Schitt's Creek and liking it. Still playing DAII again, though slowly. I picked up the Witcher 3 again also, though I'm not as sucked into that game at the moment. I think I've got too much other stuff going on to really immerse, and I handicapped myself by starting out on normal when I should have been playing story-mode from the beginning. Ah well. These are also the choices we make.