Arctic Light

I've seen a few really gorgeous pictures from our general area of the red moon in last night's sky with the aurora borealis. Not right here, alas. The lunar eclipse maximum happened at about 11pm in our time zone, but there were too many clouds in that part of the sky to see it.

But I did go outside a few times, and it was such an interesting quality of light - dark, but not really normal dark, I'd actually describe it as "murky." Especially in the cloudy south, the moon's general area, where there was a dim, blotted-out quality to the sky.

When the moon came back, you could see the glow emerge through the clouds. We did get to see it pretty clearly towards the end of the eclipse, with a bite taken out of the side.

It's tire changeover season (summer -> winter tires), and I was going to take the Subaru to my preferred tire place on Wednesday, but my body decided that getting up at 5:30 this morning after going to sleep around 1 was a GREAT idea (tonight is shaping up along similar lines, I would like to question autumn and all it stands for) so I went in at opening time because they do first come, first served, and usually it's not too long of a wait if you get there early. (The tire place is located in the middle of absolute nowhere in the industrial part of town, so there's really nowhere to walk to, unless window shopping for caterpillar tractors is your sort of thing.)

( Tire stuff )

You know, I think tomorrow I'll be ready to start working again, but the extent of my brain just Going Down this week has been really something. In retrospect it's kind of amazing how blitzed I was mentally by the end of last week; I remember one day where it took me something like half the day to write a mailing list email. Note to my future self: take breaks before it gets that bad! Your brain is not a machine, and even machines need to cool down sometimes! Anyway, I am very fortunate to have a job where I can take a week off when I really need it, and I really needed it.

By way of muccamukk, a post at selenak's on why MCU's Secret Invasion miniseries was so bad: Secret Invasion, or: How Not To Do a Spy Or Any Other Miniseries. I watched the first couple episodes of this back in June, because I love spy stuff and I love Nick Fury, but it was just awful - draggy, slow-paced, and egregiously stupid on nearly every level. The MCU doesn't do politics very well most of the time anyway, and espionage really needs to lean into politics, so that was probably never going to work out well, but even apart from that it was terrible! Nothing made sense, they squandered every opportunity for cool spy stuff and for shapeshifter identity porn, it was just bad. (Also, every spoiler I have picked up since I stopped watching makes it sound like things did not improve even slightly.)

And I found this link at Tor.com really interesting: What Do We Want From the Bookish Internet?, talking about the demise of Twitter and where to go from here. It was an interesting read in part because it doesn't jibe with my experience of being an author at all (but clearly everyone has a different experience). In particular, the article bemoans the loss of blogs, as I sit here typing about it on a blog, and talks about how authors need to find something new to market their books without Twitter, when I have never marketed my books on Twitter and I'm doing just fine; the phenomenon of authors-on-Twitter as this big thing pretty much passed me by entirely, as Booktok is continuing to do now. Maybe I'll jump on whatever the next big thing is, maybe I won't, but I'm entirely confident there'll be a next big thing. I think it always feels terrible to lose whatever your Big Thing was, though, as a lot of authors are losing Twitter now.

I had an eye exam today, and assumed beforehand that I needed new glasses due to eyestrain while reading. It turns out that my prescription hasn't changed. What's changed is that my focal depth has gotten more restrictive. In spring 2021, when I got my last reading glasses update, I could use the same prescription to read at a computer screen distance (arm's length) and a comfortable book-holding distance (which is closer); now this no longer works.

For now I'm going to keep the same pair - I mean, the computer is the more vital of the two, and I can compensate by holding the book farther away. My optometrist thinks I really should start thinking about progressives, but I don't wanna. ;__; I'm only 46!!

I'm curious, though - for those of you who are glasses wearers and are hitting an age when you're starting to have divergent prescriptions for reading and distance, how do you handle it?



(One handy trick I've been using when drawing is that you can slide the frames down your nose and change the prescription to a more up-close focus that way. This doesn't work for reading because it messes with my astigmatism, though.)

Hi, new people following me from the DW friending meme! And people who have followed/friended me in the last couple of years in general. For one reason and another, it's taken me this long to write an intro post, and I don't think I ever did one the last time I did a friending meme at all.

So - hi! I'm sholio/sholio, or Layla. I live in Alaska, and I'm a graphic designer, artist, and writer. I used to mainly do freelance graphic design, but over the last couple of years I've transitioned to writing for a living, and I do that full-time now. I write het paranormal romance as Lauren Esker (also on Facebook and on Amazon). I've written a few M/M books in the past as Layla M. Wier (that pen name is basically retired at this point, though), and I'm planning on launching a new pen name this summer for fantasy and sci-fi that's not really romance as such, but tends to feature LGBTQ+ characters and pairings. I haven't settled on that name yet. I also write ultra-commercial erotica-laced het romance as part of a group pen name, which I'm not naming because we're trying to preserve the polite fiction that we are a single person (a la the way kids' series like Nancy Drew or Trixie Belden are written by a number of writers working under the same name) but I'm happy to tell people what it is if you ask in a PM or on a non-public post. I just don't want to give it out in public.

Feel free to PM me or email me at laureneskerwriter at gmail if you would like to try any of my books. I'm happy to hand them out to flist people for free. :D Lauren's website also has a couple of free stories, with more to come.

I used to be active in the small press comics scene, and I've been doing a weekly sci-fi webcomic called Kismet since 2002 (give or take a few years' hiatus in the middle there). It's all online for free. The first book, Hunter's Moon, is archived at my website and the current book, Sun-Cutter, updates every Monday and is about 160 pages so far. (It's on Tumblr, so you can follow it there, but the nav buttons don't work on mobile. There is a partial archive at my website, along with some short side comics. These are only partly archived because my other archive site went down and I haven't gotten around to finishing getting them up at my site yet. I really should do that ....) Anyway, the Kismet comic also has a Patreon where I post sketchbook pages, development art, glimpses of upcoming stuff and so forth, and a Tumblr sideblog for similar content and page announcements, kismetcity, which I really need to do more with.

(Kismet is what the icon on this post is from.)

So that's the pro stuff! But you're probably here for the fan stuff! My fanfic is all on AO3, except for most of the Stargate stuff from 2006-2008, which can be found on my old website and will be on AO3 ... uh ... eventually? On Tumblr, I'm laylainalaska/sholiofic - the first is for reblogs and gifs and general chatting with people; the second is for fic and fic announcements, where I also periodically solicit prompts for whatever fandoms I'm in at the moment. I tend to be a fannish serial monogamist - although right now, unusually for me, I seem to have two main ones, Agent Carter and The Flash (and the DC universe shows in general), and I'm still kinda dipping in and out of White Collar and a few other side fandoms. I mod collarcorner (White Collar gen prompt community) and also run SSR Confidential, an Agent Carter fanworks exchange that will have its signups in March.

So basically what you're going to get around here is a lot of fan squee about whatever I'm into at the moment (Flash and Legends of Tomorrow come back on Tuesday, eeeeee!!), fic, and intermittent chatter about writing/comics/my life/etc. Due to current events, there may also be more politics around here than there used to be, but I'll put it behind a cut.

And that's me! It's really great seeing so much renewed activity around here, and I'm going to try to be more active on DW/LJ in 2017. (HOW IS IT 2017 ALREADY, WHAT.) I'm looking forward to chatting with you all, whether you're just stopping in or have been here for years. :D

I am temporarily sneaking onto my grandma's internet (hiding out in the bedroom XD). I drove down this weekend to have a table at Senshi-Con, Anchorage's anime con (more on that in a minute). I am staying for the next few days to help Grandma move into her new senior-facility apartment and to provide various forms of assistance for my mom in facilitating the process.

Last night I couldn't sleep for awhile and I ended up writing a long report on Senshi-Con, which I did not have Internet to post, so that follows under the cut, and then some late-fall pictures from the Fairbanks-to-Anchorage drive last Thursday.

( Senshi-Con )

( Denali pictures )

I really should not be this glad that my Saturday evening plans fell through, but this has been an exhausting week -- what with emotionally draining houseguests (my in-laws), frantically cleaning the house top-to-bottom in advance of said houseguests, trying to get the garden in, realizing last-minute that I haven't done any of this year's promotional materials for my comics class and scrambling to get all of that done before running a comics workshop on Wednesday night. And I have something scheduled tomorrow night (selling my stuff at an intermission show for a geek-themed play on campus), plus wanting to buy my bedding plants and finish getting the garden in tomorrow, so they can benefit from all this lovely, unseasonably warm sunshine we've been having ... let's just say I was NOT ready for a fun night out on Saturday. My feelings right now are considerably more oriented towards collapsing at home for a couple of days that I don't have to go anywhere.

It would have been difficult to gracefully get out of the Saturday thing if my only excuse is "I've hit my introvert social maximum for the week" -- it's a going-away party for a friend. However, she changed it last-minute from something I actually wanted to do (dinner at a nice Greek restaurant in town, followed by a bar crawl, which I was already planning to quietly beg off from), to something I really don't want to do AND have a decent excuse for not doing (a concert with a band I don't care about, that has $40 tickets). She doesn't mind me not coming and we made plans to have lunch next week instead.

Collapsing at home it is, then!

Also, once I get the garden in, my (once) frightfully intimidating May to-do list will be nearly 100% done. For the rest of the month, the only thing I really HAVE to do is to get my Kismet page buffer finished through early August (since I will be either traveling or too busy to work on it for most of June and July). And yeah, that's gonna be quite a bit of work, but it's fun work, and otherwise I can play a bit, and do art, and maybe write some fic. And figure out what my next big fiction project is going to be.

I've been traveling - visiting family - but now I am back, curled up in my favorite chair with my computer and a glass of wine. And I have a story to tell you, the latest installment in the ongoing saga of one woman's failure to understand how doorknobs work.

I have this habit, apparently, of locking myself out of places. Cars. Hotel rooms. Houses. I did it so many times in our current house that we ended up changing the locks, because we used to have the kind where the doorknob can still turn on the inside if it's locked on the outside, and that was ... bad. My most spectacular door failure so far was probably locking myself out of my sister's house wearing nothing but my nightgown when it was 30F and she was working an overnight shift. (After numerous attempts to break into her house using improvised tools, I ended up getting into her unheated basement -- which has an outside entrance, one of those old cellar-type trapdoors like in The Wizard of Oz, but no way into the house -- and huddling under a pile of craft supplies until morning, while trying not to think about black widow spiders.)

( At least this time I was indoors. )

The last few days I've been hip-deep in novel revisions and it's completely exhausting the verbal part of my brain, to the point where I can't even scrape together enough brain cells to answer comments, let alone to post anything. I decided to take today (mostly) off and work on a few smaller things that have been getting shoved to the back burner. The fact that this frees up brain processing cycles for dinking around on social media is a nice bonus. :D

... also, tonight is the series finale of White Collar. Being the enormous dork that I am, I've obtained a bottle of pretty decent wine so that I can have either an Irish wake or a pity/rage party, depending on how the finale goes. (I am not at all spoiled for it and haven't watched any trailers/clips; DO NOT SPOIL ME PLEASE.)

Books - I meant to do a reading post yesterday for the reading-on-Wednesday meme, but, uh, see above re: lack of functional brain cells. I've actually been reading quite a bit because the only way to make my brain kick out of editing mode in the evening so that I can fall asleep is to get away from the computer and lose myself in a book. Most recently I've read:

Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood - the first of the Phryne Fisher historical mystery novels, which I've heard people on my flist talk about! This one's been sitting on my Kindle for awhile because I downloaded it during a time when it was being offered as a freebie, and I finally got around to reading it. It was a lot of fun, with engaging characters and a witty, playful narrative voice; I can see why people like them! Sadly it looks like the entire rest of the series is checked out of the library right now, so I'll simply have to pounce on them when they come back in.

The Martian by Andy Weir - This book was SO GOOD, you guys! I absolutely adore "problem-solving" SF -- it's one of the things I love most in the genre, really. A lot of sci-fi (and other kinds of fiction too - wilderness-survival fiction, especially, which this also is) follows the general formula: "You have a problem. You have some random items. Now come up with a clever way of solving your problem." I EAT THIS STUFF UP WITH A SPOON. And this book is 300 pages of it. It's also solidly researched hard SF, which I also adore as long as the technical side doesn't overwhelm the human side, and I never felt like this did.

Boston was really fabulous, and sorely needed. It was so wonderful to get to hang out with friends I haven't seen in years -- and some I saw just last month! -- and meet new people like _leareth. naye and doctorskuld had a gorgeous, low-key wedding, with the two most beautiful brides ever.

I'll continue to be somewhat scarce online 'til the end of the month, but I'm still having a lot of fun with the DVD commentary meme, so feel free to ask me about any scene from one of my fics -- even if you've already asked! Go to the meme post to ask (or I'm also open for questions on Tumblr). I'll post another masterlist of the answers in a few days, since I did get another couple of questions recently.