Check-In #1
Jul. 6th, 2025 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Pod_Together participants,
Today is our first check-in! You can check in over email (pod.together@gmail.com), dreamwidth comment, or via discord message to klb, shmaylor, minnabird, or rockinhamburger --whichever feels most comfortable to you. A single person can check in for your entire group, although if each person wants to check in individually, that’s fine too. (If you signed up as a group and did not opt-in to check-ins, you obviously aren't required to check-in, but are certainly welcome to if you would like!)
Completed writing is due in 3 weeks, on Sunday July 27th. When you check in, let us know if you feel on track for that deadline so far. We'd also love to know what's going well in your group and any worries you may have about your group or your project.
In addition to checking in with us, make sure you check in with your partner(s). Sharing your work-in-progress with your partner(s) is mandatory, and the minimum requirement is once per check-in. That means that, if you haven't already shared what you have so far, now is the time to do so. Partners, don’t forget to give feedback/encouragement on the work-in-progress when you see it!
It's very early in the game, so if you are anticipating difficulty, this would be a great time to start discussing problem-solving options. We're happy to help in any way we can to ensure you and your partner(s) have as positive an experience as possible! And if everything’s going awesome, YAY, we can’t wait to hear all about it!
Best,
Mods
Today is our first check-in! You can check in over email (pod.together@gmail.com), dreamwidth comment, or via discord message to klb, shmaylor, minnabird, or rockinhamburger --whichever feels most comfortable to you. A single person can check in for your entire group, although if each person wants to check in individually, that’s fine too. (If you signed up as a group and did not opt-in to check-ins, you obviously aren't required to check-in, but are certainly welcome to if you would like!)
Completed writing is due in 3 weeks, on Sunday July 27th. When you check in, let us know if you feel on track for that deadline so far. We'd also love to know what's going well in your group and any worries you may have about your group or your project.
In addition to checking in with us, make sure you check in with your partner(s). Sharing your work-in-progress with your partner(s) is mandatory, and the minimum requirement is once per check-in. That means that, if you haven't already shared what you have so far, now is the time to do so. Partners, don’t forget to give feedback/encouragement on the work-in-progress when you see it!
It's very early in the game, so if you are anticipating difficulty, this would be a great time to start discussing problem-solving options. We're happy to help in any way we can to ensure you and your partner(s) have as positive an experience as possible! And if everything’s going awesome, YAY, we can’t wait to hear all about it!
Best,
Mods
UC_XMEN FIC MEME > PROMPTS NEEDED
Jul. 4th, 2025 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Event Info: Help is needed for
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Important Dates: Collecting Prompts until July 6, 2025, which is when a new post with all the prompts will be organized and viewable for anyone to grab and start writing! No time limit after that!
Notes/Other Key Info: PROMPT AS MUCH OR AS LITTLE AS YOU WISH! THE MORE THE MERRIER! You want a full sentence or song title or whatever go ahead, or you can just do simple one or two worded prompts. If you have more than one prompt for a pairing, please separate by a comma (such as Cyclops/Rogue - bed, kiss, butterfly kisses) Comment as many times as you want, or just edit your comments before July 6th. I'll make a Masterpost for all the prompts that day and start the challenge then. If it happens where no one comments, I'll try to make up my own list up with various pairings, not just everything I ship.
"The Witness for the Dead" by Katherine Addison
Jul. 2nd, 2025 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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You know that feeling where you're enjoying inhabiting a book so much you don't want to reach the end? This week I finished The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison, and that's how I felt.
Witness is a companion novel to Addison's breakout novel, The Goblin Emperor (TGE), which I read for the first time last year and never got around to reviewing. You don't need to have read TGE to enjoy this one at all; Witness focuses on a minor character from TGE and his adventures after the events of that novel. Thara Celehar is a prelate of the god Ulis, and his role in elven society is something like a cross between a priest and a private detective. He has the ability to commune, in a limited fashion, with the dead, and he is employed by the city to provide this service to the people. This may involve reporting a deceased's last thoughts to a mourner, asking a deceased to clarify a point on their will, or seeking answers from a murder victim to bring their killer to justice.
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( Read more... )
Kink Hub Theme of the Month: "Sex on the Beach"
Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Links:
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Description: Kink Hub is an 18+ comm for anything kink fic, where you can self-promote, share and rec fanfics of all fandoms and original works. RPF is welcome.
For the month of July, the theme for all shared fics is "Sex on the Beach", which means any kinks related to outdoor fun (no actual beach required) and/or alcoholic beverages (no cocktail required). If you've written or read fics featuring any related kink, you're very welcome to share the links to them in this comm.
Rebuilding journal search again
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.
Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Babylon White
Jun. 29th, 2025 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Babylon White by Kit Sun Cheah
The grand conclusion! Spoilers for earlier books ahead.
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The grand conclusion! Spoilers for earlier books ahead.
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Allbingo and Crowdfunding
Jun. 29th, 2025 04:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Further details below ...
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celebrity20in20 Round 15
Jun. 27th, 2025 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Link: Round 15 Sign Ups | Round 15 Themes
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Schedule: Round 15 sign ups are open NOW. Icons are due July 17, 2025.
"The Monster Baru Cormorant" by Seth Dickinson
Jun. 26th, 2025 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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The day after finishing The Traitor Baru Cormorant I had to rush over to the library to pick up book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I finished earlier today.
Spoilers for The Traitor Baru Cormorant below!
Spoilers for The Traitor Baru Cormorant below!
The second book of a fantasy series of any kind often bears a very difficult burden. It is most often the place where the scope of the story grows significantly. A conflict which before was local to the protagonist's home and surrounding area may expand, often to the extent of the known world. New players are often added to the cast, bigger and scarier problems and challenges arise. The protagonist may have gone up in the world, wielding new power and influence, with new responsibilities. As a result, this is where many series lose their footing; a tightly-woven book or season 1 may give way to a muddled, watered down part 2 as the writers struggle to juggle this expanded focus.
The Monster suffers from none of those things. It is the place where Baru's story expands—in The Traitor, her focus was almost entirely on Aurdwynn; it was the full field of play and outside players mattered only as they influenced events on Aurdwynn. In The Monster, Baru has become a true agent of the Imperial Throne of Falcrest, and with these new powers, the entire field of the empire is opened up for her play, and it is fascinating to watch.
In The Traitor, Baru was narrowly focused on managing the situation in Aurdwynn; everything she did was to that end. In The Monster, Baru can do whatever she wants, and we get to see her finally on the open field. Even where she flounders and flails, it's delightful to watch the machinations of her mind constantly at work. Her cleverness rows against her bursts of sentimentality to produce some impressively chaotic effects, but she is as slippery as an eel to pin down, even when her rivals think they've gotten the best of her.
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( Read more... )
"Sundial" by Catriona Ward
Jun. 25th, 2025 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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I don't actually remember where I saw Catriona Ward's Sundial recommended, but it was somewhere and convincing enough to get it on my TBR. I finished the audiobook this week so it's time to reflect.
Sundial is a domestic psychological thriller which focuses on the relationship between the protagonist Rob and her eldest daughter Callie. Or at least, that's what the novel summary posits. A good 50% or more of the book is actually about Rob's youth and her relationship with her childhood family, primarily her twin sister, Jack. I didn't get that at first, which led to me being slightly frustrated by the length of the "flashback" sections until I realized that they were at least half the true focus of the story.
Ward excels in capturing the petty toxicity of a domestic environment gone sour. Especially deftly handled are the ways in which a partner can wound in such seemingly mundane ways. Many of the exchanges between Rob and her husband, Irving, come off as completely innocuous to an outsider, but to the two people in the relationship, who have the context for these seemingly nothing interactions, the full cruelty of them is on display. This adds completely believably to the tension between Rob and Callie, who has long favored her father, and who sees her mother's responses as hysterical overreactions, because she doesn't have the context that Rob does. Ward also very neatly portrays a truly vicious marriage, where both parties have given up pretending they want to be together, at least to each other, and where the entire relationship has become an unending game of oneupsmanship, trying to get one over on your spouse.
Adding to this suffocating atmosphere is Callie, a very strange 12-year-old who is starting to exhibit some very troubling behavior, particularly in her interactions with her 9-year-old sister, Annie. Rob has always struggled to connect with Callie—in contrast with Irving, who happily spoils her to force Rob to be the bad guy enforcing boundaries—but when Callie is thought to have attempted to poison Annie with Irving's diabetes medication, Rob decides it's time she and Callie have a real heart-to-heart.
So she takes Callie on a mother/daughter trip to Rob's childhood home, Sundial, an isolated family property out in the Mojave desert.
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