To Hell & Back (Couple of Mirrors, Xu Youyi/Yan Wei)
Jun. 29th, 2025 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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I’ve blogged for basically my entire adult life.
LiveJournal, Tumblr, WordPress, here. There’s something about having a corner of the internet that’s mine - a space that isn’t a feed, isn’t an algorithm, isn’t speeding past at a thousand miles an hour. I miss that.
Lately, I’ve mostly been posting on Tumblr about tennis. And I love talking about tennis, but it’s started to feel like that’s all I do.
I go to work, I watch matches, I read. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I stare at the same three WIPs and hope they move. I’ve been telling myself that doesn’t leave me with much to say. But maybe that’s not true. Or maybe it doesn’t matter.
So: I’m coming back to Dreamwidth. I want this to be a quieter space. A bit rambly. A bit nostalgic. More fandom and life and writing and less “keeping up.”
I’m really hoping the new sunshine_revival community will help with that too - it feels exciting, like something gentle and welcoming is starting to grow again. I’m looking forward to seeing what the prompts will be.
I also need to figure out commenting again. I overthink it. I draft something and delete it and worry it sounds weird or too much or not enough. But I want to try. I miss the part where we actually talked to each other.
What you’ll probably find here:
Here’s to slow internet, quiet posting, and the kind of connection that doesn’t need to be loud to be real.
This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”
(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)
Bands – especially ones with a pretty boy singer or a female singer – can get really nervous that the singer gets all the attention. Noel was never like that. He said: “You’ve got to use the assets you’ve got.” -- Kevin Cummings
We were booked on the same flight, but the band were in club class and me and the hack were in goats-and-chickens. Liam came back to say hello. He was a garrulous guy, even pre-fame. He was standing at the back of the plane having a beer and this woman came by huffing and puffing with some kids and Liam offered to look after one of them. He pulled down one of those seats the flight attendants sit on and had the girl on his lap and chatted to her. After the tales I’d heard, I’d thought I was about to spend a few days with a nutcase. But he was sweet as a nut. -- Tom Sheehan
Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.
And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.