Seven Seas posted cover reveals for The Beauty's Blade!

The main cover version has art by Velinxi and a there's a Crunchyroll exclusive variant by Gravity Dusty!

vriddy

I am 57% into my beta edit preps – not the edits themselves based on the actual beta feedback yet, but the list of action items I intend to go through. I'm more or less following the plan I had set out, though I ended up using Scrivener comments a lot instead of a separate file as I had expected. So I have 3 files/file types:

Structural comments, which I'll address first. I think this will be the most difficult and most painful part. Will try to do this in a way that has as few consequences as possible to limit the amount of rewriting (I think that's feasible as long as I'm careful, for this particular story).
Overall comments, for stuff that'll need small changes in every chapter. I plan to re-read this before and after every chapter edit, so I keep it in mind as I edit and potentially find new areas to include these elements. It's about things like certain characters feeling too one-dimensional and/or too unsympathetic (so more options for interactions, flashbacks/memories, and other elements to flesh them out more), worldbuilding elements that still weren't highlighted enough and feel like a surprise when they come up later, etc.
One file per chapter for more generic notes, though so far I'm not really using that much. Scrivener comments are doing the job. And it's very satisfying when several people bring up the same thing and I can edit an existing comment, like, wow! This sure was a confusing paragraph for everyone, huh!

Having said that, I still had massive, massive, massive issues with getting started. Like, I had built this all up into such a huge thing in my head, and it's in the first time I handle feedback on an entire manuscript at once, and from several people... Below the cut is a list of things I did to finally make myself Just Do It (tm). Maybe there'll be a piece of inspiration for someone else, though mainly I want my future self to remember to check here next time I'm stuck! In my case, it was definitely a process problem, like, just not knowing where to start or what to do.

( vriddy's weirdo productivity tips on actually getting started )

In general, I am tremendously enjoying working offline. I got the feedback back in 3 formats: GoogleDocs, Ellipsus, and LibreOffice with tracked changes. I am loving the LibreOffice one, so much that I downloaded all the GDocs too (thankfully the comments are included!) and work like this for everything. Ellipsus didn't work for me for reasons I mentioned earlier, and as a note doesn't seem to allow exporting with comments either, as far as I could see.

Making progress feels nice! Once I have a system, it's easier for me to let momentum carry me. We'll see if that continues to work when it's time to do the actual beta changes! I do intend to take a short break before jumping in.

vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Vigilantes chit-chat on

bnha_fans.

Commented on

endings.

mistressofmuses

This week, the Baba Yaga hut sticker from the "folkgore" pin collection, by Kim Kuzuri and Aspenhearted. My teal pen died, but the metallic green almost worked!

This was a fairly good week, but a busy one. Time spent with Taylor at the beginning of the week was good. Though as busy as the week felt, I didn't really get very much done. Maybe it was just that work felt like a lot. The concert later in the week was great, and I was very glad we went. Feeling some pressure over how much I have going on next week and how much I also feel like I need to catch up from this week... Not sure when I'll have a good chance to, but I'll try to do more.

Goals for the week:

I did get together with Taylor from Sunday - Tuesday
We went to our concert on Thursday
I did not finish the third snowflake exercise
I did finish reading Overgrowth
I did not cancel my dentist appointment
I did not go to the bank
I did do the June tracking grids
I did not put my laundry away
I did not finish my May book reviews
I did go get crickets for Berry Mad

Tracked habits:

Work - 5/7
Household Maintenance - 3/7
Physical Activity - 2/7
Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/7
Meta Work - 4/7
Personal Writing - 2/7
Other Creative Things - 0/7
Reading - 6/7 - mostly on Overgrowth, but also a good chunk of Installment Immortality with Taylor, a little bit of Duma Key with Alex, and a little bit of my ebook side read
Attention to Media - 6/7 - Sunday listened to some youtube and music in the background at work, listened to a Re: Dracula episode and then more music; Monday a very short Re: Dracula and more music; Tuesday, listened to music early and later abandoned place videos; Wednesday had storm chasing in the background and another Re: Dracula, plus music; Friday we finished the last two episodes of The Handmaid's Tale; Saturday a Re: Dracula episode and some paranormal videos in the background.
Video Games - 2/7 - Taylor and I played some more Final Fantasy XIV. We played through the second and third parts of the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse raids (the Nier crossover), finished the Dark Knight and Red Mage job quests, then another extra quest for the general class quests, then the Sorrow of Werlyt trials. Finally next time we can do the next part of Shadowbringers!
Social Interaction - 4/7

Total words written: 0

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

soc_puppet posting in

moodthemeinayear

Time to plug in the next batch of moods!

This week's Minimum moods are: Determined, Devious, Energetic

This week's Medium moods are: Stressed, Excited, Optimistic

This week's Maximum moods are: Horny, Good, Grateful

As a quick discussion reminder, I do want to keep this comm friendly for all ages, so if there's something 18+ -ish that you want to do with Horny, please either hide it under Details/Summary tags, or post it in your own journal and link it back in the comments.

Other than that, have at it as usual! What are your thoughts on this week's moods? How do you think you'll portray them? "Good" in particular seems tricky to me; what are your thoughts? Let's talk about it!

silversea posting in

booknook

Happy June!

What are you reading?

beatrice_otter

justmarried exchange is currently in the nomination phase, and I have been having trouble because they allow you to sign up with ten fandoms but you only can nominate seven. And my favorite marriage trope is the sedoretu, which is a specific type of poly marriage invented by Ursula K. LeGuin, and requires four people. Which means that I need to have foursomes nominated! (Although I can just go with a pairing and say "I love sedoretus, if you want to write this pairing as a sedoretu you can choose who to have be the other pair in the sedoretu.")

Anyway, the reason I have not nominated is that I am waiting to see what else got nominated to help me whittle down what I want to nominate, and I just checked the nominations and I think that

tielan has nominated! (Thank you!) Because the BSG foursome I was going to nominate (Lee/Kara/Sam/Dee) has been nominated, and so has the Steve/Maria/Bucky/Natasha foursome in MCU fandom, and both are foursomes I have written as sedoretus for

tielan before. Which means that not only is there someone interested in the same characters, there's someone who's probably going to sign up who is interested in sedoretus, specifically. That is really exciting to me! And it does free up some nomination slots.

Here are some nominations I am planning:

TGE: Maia/Csethiro/Csevet/Vedero (there are a bunch of TGE ships already nominated but they are all suuuuuuuper rare)

DS9: Sisko ships, Worf/Jadzia, Miles/Keiko/Kira/Bashir

TOS: Spock/Uhura and some foursomes (although someone on the Yuletide discord may be nominating sedoretus in this fandom, which would mean I don't have to nominate them and could free up a slot)

B5: John/Delenn, John/Delenn/Lennier, Delenn/Neroon, John/Delenn/Lennier/? (I don't know who I'd put with those three to complete the sedoretu--Anna, maybe? a Minbari OC?)

Peter Wimsey, sedoretu with Parker and Mary? Or Bunter? (Although I can't think of who would be the fourth in a sedoretu with Bunter, so I may just leave that as a poly threesome.

Rivers of London--I think just Peter/Beverly here, because I can't think of any sedoretus and ever since we learned that Nightingale was ace (in the novella Masquerades of Spring) that has completely killed any desire to ship him, for me. RoL is the only one on the list that's iffy, because much as I love it I'm not sure how much I'm into RoL + marriage tropes.

That's six, and with BSG taken care of I can look at some of my other fandoms for the seventh slot. Here are some options:

SW Legends, Han/Leia/Luke/Mara, Han/Leia/Lando, Lando/Luke/Mara. Han/Leia/Lando most properly belongs in SW OT, but that would mean using a second Star Wars nomination slot.

TNG: nobody's nominated this yet, and I can't think of any sedoretus, but I would probably do something like Picard/Guinan (my TNG rare pair OTP), Picard/Ro, Riker/Ro, Troi/Worf, and Data/Geordi

Random Harvest. Look, this movie is just so tropey and melodramatic it would be amazing to pile even more tropes into it.

polyamships_mod posting in

fandomcalendar

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lanternglass posting in

fandomcalendar

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geraineon posting in

cnovels

This is your weekly read-in-progress post for you to talk about what you're currently reading and reactions and feelings (if any)!

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>Highlight for spoilers!*</b><span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

mistressofmuses

On Monday, we took Bella to a FastCAT competition. It's rare for them to be on anything other than a weekend, so it was nice to get to go for a change! This is only the second time I've been able to go with her.

Alex let her go at the start of the run, and I caught her at the end. The first run felt really slow, but was actually a better time than I'd expected. The second one was a fairly decent time, though she'd started to slow down a little bit by the end.

It's Bella!

I was using the selfie camera to try and get a better pic of Bella in the car, but then we took an actual selfie. Sort of, haha. Me, Bella, and Alex. I am not actually choking her.

Five more pictures:

This event was at the Adams County fairgrounds, which had a nice little pond to look out on.

Pelican attaaaaack! (Half-flying across the pond to check out whether some people might feed it.)

Bella's times weren't amazing, but were respectable! Not her best times, but it wasn't *that* long ago that I didn't expect she'd ever get times like these, ha. (They accidentally wrote "2" on her first run tag, but the top one was run #1.)

Little Bella no-ears.

Too Many Pelicans.

After the FastCAT, we were reluctant to head straight back home. We ended up heading out east toward the plains a bit, just to kind of take a drive and see if there was anything interesting. We were hopeful maybe some dramatic thunderstorms might come up, but those didn't happen until later in the evening.

We did stop at a rest stop for a while, and I got to see a bunch of great-tailed grackles, which are quite different than the usual common grackles we get. They're much bigger!

Looking up through the branches of a tree, lots of grackle nests!

We also saw turkeys! And a hawk swoop down and come up carrying a snake, which was pretty impressive. (Sadly, no pictures.)

It was a nice drive, even though we didn't actually get any exciting weather.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

grayestofghosts

Butter by Asako Yuzuki was a book that I had requested from a long libby queue a long time ago, forgot about, and then suddenly I had to read it right away before it disappeared, so it became my book for May. Anyway, I'm going to be square about it -- I was disappointed.

And I think what disappointed me so much is that about the first two thirds of the book were so, so promising, with a slow build about danger and desire for it to just... poof into smoke. I really feel like to get into my problems with this book will require spoiler tags, so here we go.

For a book with so many meditations on desire, particularly female desire, and clear themes of intimacy between two female characters who are very dissatisfied with their male lovers, the gender non-conformity of the main character, and the taboo of it all, it never... went there. And it's not even that it never went there, it read like there was some kind of invisible barrier preventing it from going there, like some kind of Hayes-like code that prevented it from happening. Once it got too close to happening the novel retracted itself into a nice, neat little story with a neat little lesson about wants without transgressing that awful line of... gasp, lesbian desire!

I admittedly didn't read too much about this book before I started and as a digital copy I did not have the blurb easily accessible so I couldn't immediately tell if it was being billed as a 'queer' or 'lesbian' book. I know that after a certain point in the US, books portraying major characters as gay and normal rather than something inherently... transgressive, I guess? became mainstreamed and I was not sure if this shift over ever happened in Japan so I was wondering if maybe I was seeing something like a book that was pre-this-shift. However, that was not what happened. The story saw what could have been and then went, absolutely not, nothing to see here.

It felt like a perfect distillation of what I was talking about to

yvannairie a while ago, how straight, canonical couples have no chemistry at all, while implied gay couples have so much because they're not built completely on societal expectations of what a couple should be. Hell, there was even more chemistry between the main character and her older male tip source than her boyfriend, who thank God she at least broke up with, but that none of the chemistry that the main character actually had was ever explored is so bonkers considering the themes in the book. And it's so weird because it's not like there's no sex happening. It's like sex is allowed, as long as it's not actually sexy at all. Ugh.

Anyway. I don't know how much of this was stuff lost in translation, considering the book was originally published in Japanese. But I don't think I could recommend this book, especially to the type of people I know.

Current Music: "I Believe," Ghost

dani_meows

Made an appointment to discuss Jasper's future with our vet. So tomorrow I'll know if he gets treatment or if the cancer is such that it'll be time to give my old man cat hospice cat.

Ob July 7th it'll be a year since my five year old cat passed away too.

I'm hoping that it's treatable but the fact that the eye removal didn't contain all of the mass that did turn out cancerous.

I'm not expecting good news.

Current Mood: melancholy
Crossposts: https://dani-meows.insanejournal.com/382686.html

thevagabondexpress

spent yesterday evening doing "pleather care" on my new (to me) corset (aka it's secondhand and old so the black vinyl or whatever started flaking and peeling so i covered it up with black duct tape so it doesn't get pleather scraps everywhere).

this morning was spent then finally doing boot care on the knee-highs i bought last weekend, before heading off to my introductory private investigator training. first i glued the screws for the buttons so they don't pop off at random (there's one that wants to keep doing it even with the glue on and i'm currently clamping it with my fingers) and then i switched out the laces the boots came with for ones that aren't as obnoxiously long. i taped some orthotics into them, and quickly discovered i had put them in the wrong shoes so i had to take them back out and put them in the right way 😂 they seem to be good now though. on to the second stage of breaking in: doing it with the insoles in them. once that one stubborn button is properly attached, it's off to the bank, come home to eat something real quick, and then on to my appointment! needless to say i am very glad to have spent yesterday sleeping.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: the living room floor
Current Music: "seven devils" (florence)

runpunkrun posting in

fandomcalendar

Photograph with added text: Female Relationships, at Fancake. Four old Nepalese women sit together on a low brick wall, their feet dangling, most of them barefoot, their shoes kicked off below them. They're dressed in loose patterned fabrics in various shades of red and the mood is relaxed.

fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.

This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!

thevagabondexpress

i didn't realize how bad the crash from the last week+weekends was gonna be 😭 i really need to be recalibrated

klb posting in

pod_together

Before signing up, please take a moment to review the Rules, FAQ, and Content Moderation Policy

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If you have questions for the mods that you prefer to ask privately, you can always message us directly in the Discord server, or email us at pod.together@gmail.com

All sign-ups close Saturday, June 14th.

hrj

I was out deadheading the roses today when I noticed a few late-emerging artichoke heads--I thought the season was well over! That's something to note in my garden calendar. The garden calendar is a long-term project to track when various things typically come ripe and how long their season is. One reason is for the "blink and you'll miss it" crops. The other reason is so I can be mentally prepared when it comes time to do serious harvest processing. I mean, not that it's helped to know that the Seville oranges come ripe around the New Year, since I often haven't had time in January to do things with them. (This year I finally harvested the last bushel in May, which wasn't optimal in terms of quality.)

The other crop that's currently delighting me is the blueberries. Combining the fact that blueberries ripen individually rather than all at once, plus the fact that I deliberately planted varieties with a range of harvest seasons, I could well have a steady supply of about a cup every week for the entire summer. Last year they weren't entirely happy for unclear reasons, but this year they're going great guns.

The tomatoes are setting but none are coming ripe quite yet, which the calendar says is typical. It should be a good season, though. I'm trying a different irrigation method this year--soaker hose that loops around the bed, rather than the oscillating sprinkler. I've spinkled radish and onion seeds along the line of the soaker and I'm getting a steady supply of the former for my salads.

I've spotted two apricots. Not ripe yet, but they should be in a couple of weeks, if some critter doesn't get them first. They're on a very low branch. Maybe I should do something to try to protect them. The cherries will ripen sometime this month, based on past results. The calendar says that the plums will come in July.

klb posting in

pod_together

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klb posting in

pod_together

Welcome to

pod_together, a challenge where writers and podficcers create together—the writer creating text specifically intended for audio, and the podficcer creating the audio.

While we encourage participants to read the FAQ, here are the basic rules you need to know going in:

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Monday June 2nd Sign-ups open.
Saturday June 14th Sign-ups close.
Sunday June 15th Assignments go out to everybody from Match Maker Sign-ups.
Monday June 16th through Friday June 20th Icebreaker week.
Sunday July 6th Check-in #1.
Sunday July 20th Check-in #2.
Wednesday July 23rd Early writing submission date.
Sunday July 27th All writing due.
Sunday August 10th Check-in #3; text must be posted to AO3 collection.
Wednesday August 20th Early podfic submission date.
Sunday August 24th All podfic due.
Thursday August 28th Reveals start.
Saturday September 6th Reveals end, Party Favors due.
Sunday September 7th Party Favors revealed.
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( Notable changes from previous years of this challenge )

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Pronoun Trouble

Reading

Cover reveals for The Beauty's Blade!

Getting started on beta edits/beta preps

Community Thursday

Habit Tracking: Week 21 (May 25 - May 31)

Part 4, Week 2

RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

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[MULTIFANDOM] PolyamShippingDay - June 2025

Link Click: Link Click Exchange Sign-ups OPENED

Read-in-Progress Wednesday

Monday: FastCAT

12 Novels #5: Butter by Asako Yuzuki

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ren faire work = clothes i have to care for

Fancake Theme for June: Female Relationships

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2025 Sign-Ups

The Garden Delights Endlessly

Pod-Together 2025 FAQ

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June 2025

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