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While the church for my choir's New Year's Eve performance was not absolutely jammed, it was pretty full, including the balconies, and judging from comments from friends as I exited through the sanctuary, it was an excellent and meaningful performance. Jean, who used to sing with us, said she had cried through the entire part three. Whoa. It was also special because for one of our regular soprano soloists, Jess, it was her fiftieth performance as a soloist.

Rebecca and Jess are founders of Variant 6, my favorite local small vocal ensemble. Rebecca is on the left, Jess on the right, in gold:

Watch on YouTube

"Laudamus Te" from last year's NYE Bach B Minor Mass.

Watch on YouTube

After the performance, I was too wiped out for dinner; luckily, a bus came pretty quickly. I got home, ate dinner, removed my eye makeup, and crawled into bed. Surprisingly, after my afternoon coffee, I managed to get to sleep fairly soon. I don't recall hearing many fireworks (apparently, someone saved their illegal firecrackers for the night of New Year's Day...a lot of them).

New Year's Day, I had decided our menu was nachos and another small trifle. The nachos had cheese, pre-cooked chicken seasoned with adobo and mild salsa, and spinach. The trifle was in a glass loaf pan: more cinnamon graham crackers for a base, a layer of spiced peaches (from a jar), a thick layer of whipped cream, pumpkin snaps, blueberries, and a drizzle of the sugar syrup from the peaches. It all turned out great!

January 2, I hung out with

drinkingcocoa and family.

Today is laundry and more Flight Rising. I have to go back to the dayjob on Monday, so I might do some cooking today or tomorrow as well.

scrubjayspeaks

She found the stash of silverware in the back of her grandmother’s closet after her death, swaddled in mouse-nibbled dishcloths, crammed in byzantine arrangements into dusty cardboard boxes. All of it was black with tarnish from decades of disuse, save one piece she took at first to be the wedge of a cake slicer. The knife was big and freshly polished to a shine like moonlight by someone who evidently knew her grandmother’s house and belongings better than she did.

---

LL#1351

scrubjayspeaks

As mentioned previously, I don’t use streaming music services. So I do a DIY end-of-year wrap-up for my music listening. Obviously, I listened to music I already owned as well, but this is the highlight reel of the year’s new purchases.

I feel like this summary could just be a copy-paste from last year: more instrumental music, less pulled from the classics I missed in my youth. A lot of musicians I love had new albums this year, so I spent a fair amount of time listening to very current music.

I had a lot of weird one-offs, often found via poking around on Bandcamp. I often found that while I liked them enough to buy and listen to the whole thing, the albums did not tend to stick for me. That's okay--I know I sometimes come back to music years later and rediscover it when I'm ready. I don't mind.

Top album of the year was, without question, Djo's The Crux. If other albums this year lacked in stickiness, it's because this album was goddamn flypaper. The longer I listened, the more I got out of it, circling back around to tracks that didn't immediately grab me and suddenly finding something to love.

New albums* heard: 64--down yet again, I had fewer multi-album weeks, in part because I bought fewer short/light albums that needed to be bundled to make enough for a week's listening
*(discretely purchased music items, includes singles, EPs, and other short forms along with “full” albums)

Contributing artists: 54 (not counting multi-artist compilations)--same as last year

Oldest album: An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, 1972

Newest album: Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan (The Mountain Goats, November 7, 2025)

Top artists by albums: Louie Zong continues to lead in this category with four albums, but this wasn't a big year for me to dive deep into the back catalogs

Most repeated albums: Even In Arcadia (Sleep Token), This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway (Lola Young), The Crux (Djo), Coydog (Carter Vail)

Tracks of note: Stunner (Carter Vail), Nervous Dancer (Louie Zong), Anoana (Heilung), We Will All Go Together When We Go (Tom Lehrer), March of Cambreadth (Alexander James Adams), Charlie's Garden (Djo), Alibi (Hurray For The Riff Raff), Factories In Heaven (The Scoffs), SCRAP HEAP (Louie Zong)

Current Mood: cheerful

jazzy_dave

Having read 72 books last year, you can definitely call me a philobiblist, which is a person who loves or has a deep affection for books and reading. This term is used to describe someone who treasures books not just for their informational value but also for their physical form, historical significance, and literary quality. That does sum me up neatly and succinctly.

So, as we are now in 2026, I have already started my next two books. The challenge is the same, the target of 80.

jazzy_dave

Listening to some goth rock music followed by some opera music is just one of my quirks. I suppose I am a perfervid music lover who can switch genres at a whim. Perhaps not a whim, but juxtaposed to that, a desire to appreciate styles of music, and a journey to learn and gain knowledge.

I first listened to that goth music collection - all five CDs of it - and now listening to Verdi's Nabucco.

Giuseppe Verdi - Piero Cappuccilli, Placido Domingo, Evgeny Nesterenko, Ghena Dimitrova, Lucia Valentini Terrani, Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin & Orchester Der Deutschen Oper Berlin, Giuseppe Sinopoli - Nabucco for sale

Giuseppe Verdi - Piero Cappuccilli, Placido Domingo, Evgeny Nesterenko, Ghena Dimitrova, Lucia Valentini Terrani, Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin & Orchester Der Deutschen Oper Berlin, Giuseppe Sinopoli - Nabucco for sale

Silhouettes & Statues (A Gothic Revolution 1978 - 1986), Primary, 1 of 13

The possible idea of losing LJ makes me shudder. I really do not want to be on just DW - which I have reserved for my book reviews. Only time will tell.

ljgeoff

I'm still learning a lot about the practice of food forests and permiculture.

We're planning on taking down 5-10 trees this year. Big trees. Mike has been thinking about the management of the fresh lumber. I've been thinking about the stumps.

Stumps are rather amazing things. They hold water, and as they decompose, they release nutrients into the surrounding soil. They nurture the soil mycelium:

Plants have something the fungi needs: energy from the sun in the form of sugar. The fungi on the other hand, has something the plant needs: access to the nutrients trapped in complex organic molecules. These nutrients are not available to the plant. So, like a small child who cannot open the cookie jar, the plants must bribe their fungal partners with sugar to open the jar and hand them a cookie (nutrients). This relationship plays an incredibly important role in our forests. Fungi do more than form connections with individual plants. The mycelial network of one individual fungus connects with many individual plants, forming a vast interconnected web of shared information and nutrients throughout the forest. Amazingly, mycorrhizal fungi can do more than just exchange energy and nutrients with the plants they are connected to, they can also act as a mediator between healthy and unhealthy individual plants, passing vital nutrients from the healthy to the weak. Mycorrhizal fungi are the communication and resource transportation infrastructure of the biological world.

Mayne Island Conservancy

What I do with the stumps will depend on where they sit, of course. But mostly I'll be putting in perennials like garlic at one stump and asparagus at another (those two dont play well together). Likely, there'll be a stump or two inside the greenhouse - a strawberry bed would work well there.

soc_puppet posting in

queerly_beloved

First new Thursday Recs of the year; come share some stuff you've found!

Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

scrubjayspeaks

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

I'm Jay (he/him). I'm a fandom old, though my fannish contributions have been thin on the ground for a few years due to life things. I write and post original fiction regularly, though. I also talk about music, which I'm always open to recs for, and gardening.

Snowflake is a nice, low-pressure way to potentially meet new people. I look forward to it as a touchpoint for each new year. There's usually a good mix of prompts for looking forward and looking back. In place of setting resolutions, I think of this event as my yearly taking stock activity.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Louie Zong - Rain In The Valley

ljgeoff

Concept drawing - forgive the roughness

view looking at it on end:

top view

The boys are working on a design for switching out the double walled polycarbonate panels for screens, for summer. That'll be an all-hands-on-deck job!

I want to plant 2 hardy olives inside, cultivars Arbequina and Frantoro.

There will be bees and chickens, greens growing in the shade of the olives, tomatoes ripening in the sun.

The olives will be planted about 5 feet from the cabin, and as they grow, will send branches up and over. I can see grey me sitting up on the roof of the cabin, in the shade an olive, watching the cats chase each other up and across the greenhouse frame.

duskpeterson

FREE ONLINE E-BOOK (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

The Motley Crew (The Thousand Nations). When a young man named Dolan flees from the north, he faces danger on all sides. The Northern Army wants him back. The Empire of Emor wants him dead. His native homeland of Koretia may not want him at all. And his only protection is a man with motives that are mysterious and possibly deadly.

New installment:

Side story | Twisted. No matter how you twist away, you cannot escape fate. But you can determine how you meet it.

BLOG FICTION

Anahita Most Strong (holiday gift story). "Anahita leapt from a hundred times the height of a man and ran powerfully. Strong and bright, tall and beautiful of form, she sent down by day and by night a flow of motherly waters." An ancient Persian tale retold by me from a translation of the Avesta by James Darmesteter.

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket.

New installments:

From Daxis to Emor.

Emorian borderland.

Southern Emor's countryside.

( Round-up of fiction released in 2025 )

NEWS & UPCOMING FICTION

In reference to my concussion in early November: My head is close to normal again, so I'm able to do late-stage editing once more.

As I already explained to my subscribers, I've decided to drop early access fiction in favor of releasing my stories to all my readers at the same time. Next up on my release schedule is Suspicion of the Guards (The Thousand Nations: The Motley Crew #3).

I've put together my release schedule for 2026, though these days I often have to be nimble on my feet and juggle my schedule to fit what's happening in my life. I can summarize my 2026 schedule by saying that this year I plan to release fiction from Chronicles of the Great Peninsula and Turn-of-the-Century Toughs. Those of you who are readers of the Toughs cycle have been extremely patient with my delay in posting more fic; I appreciate it. I hope to reward your patience.

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

These questions were written by

tabular_rasa.

1. Do you mostly drink tap, filtered, or bottled water?

2. Is it safe/recommended to drink tap water where you live? If not, why?

3. What does the tap water taste/smell like where you live?

4. Do you collect rainwater? If so, what do you use it for?

5. Do you/have you ever had restrictions on water use where you live? What did you have to change about your lifestyle?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

**Remember that we rely on you, our members, to help keep the community going. Also, please remember to play nice. We are all here to answer the questions and have fun each week. We repost the questions exactly as the original posters submitted them and request that all questions be checked for spelling and grammatical errors before they're submitted. Comments re: the spelling and grammatical nature of the questions are not necessary. Honestly, any hostile, rude, petty, or unnecessary comments need not be posted, either.**

grail76

( Less work safe below the cut )

goatgodschild

I was about 16 when I wrote this, in 2014. I don't remember the context of writing it, which is probably for the best.

( Read more... )

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

luninosity

Lots of writing this year, though mostly shorter, versus full novels – a trade-off, I suppose! Let’s see…

Scholarship / Non-fiction (doing this first, since it’s a shorter list!)

–wrote a chapter on The Traitors and medievalism for Paul Booth’s book on reality television (published now!)

–wrote a chapter on Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner and the romance genre for Nikolai Endres’ book on Warren and her legacy (book submitted to publisher; currently awaiting peer review)

–contributed (one among the et al!) to Heather Schell et al, “Defining the Trope in Romance Fiction” (article submitted to the Journal of Popular Romance Studies; publication forthcoming)

I semi-accidentally dropped out of a project I really wanted to do – just totally flaked and forgot the deadline even existed, in the midst of so many other things going on —and I am sad about that, but it was a good impetus to try to be a little more strict about writing down deadlines and reminders. (To be fair, that was also right when I was in the middle of a) somehow viciously injuring a hamstring, still not sure how, just existing while being over the age of 40 I guess; b) being given really good drugs by Kaiser; c) attempting to then convince Kaiser that I needed more than three days’ worth at a time, because, you know, teaching requires being able to stand up, and, not exaggerating, that was not possible without assistance…)

A couple other things forthcoming—abstracts accepted—but still very in-progress, so I’m not counting those yet, just the projects essentially done on my end.

Romance Fiction!

Seventeen publications this year, which sounds like a lot, though a couple of them are collections and box sets! I think this is numerically more than last year but fewer words written – shorter stories + some republished and collected stories. I didn’t manage to finish The Warlock Affair (Kitten & Witch #3), which has become The Story That Won’t Behave, so I’m a bit grumpy about that. But I did finish off the Regency MMM trilogy (yay for finishing something!), and at least a couple of these stories are ones in which I really love my own writing, so I’m proud of them.

Italics for novellas, quotes for short stories and flash fic! Stand-alone stories unless otherwise noted.

January – “Hexes of Bronze,” the fourth Aric/Em story! This one will reappear later… There will be two more stories in this series, ideally this upcoming year.

January – “Portraits” (short version) in the JMS Books Love Is Free charity anthology benefiting the ACLU! This is a Lorre/Gareth bonus story I’d been wanting to write, set after Magician.

February – A Valentine for Violet (this is one of my own favorite stories this year, if I have to pick!)

March – “Sunlight and Skystone” (little short fic, sequel to “Starlight and Stone” – this one was fun; it just turned up and wanted to be written!)

April – “Tulips for Two” (flash fic length)

April – the Midwinter box set (Midwinter Firelight, Midwinter Music, Midwinter Marriage)

May – “In Perfect Time” (this one makes me happy because it was a story I’d had bits and pieces of, for years, and finally finished!)

May – June (only available one weekend!) – Small Adventures, my collection of short / new / old / preview pieces offered as part of R. Cooper’s ACLU fundraiser! This has some stories you’ll never find anywhere else…like that very early Humorous Fantasy, Pratchett-inspired, story…

June – “Portraits” (expanded version, individually released)

July – “Gifts,” for the JMS Books anniversary releases! One more Gareth/Lorre bonus story; this one was a delight, thinking about how they’d try to make each other happy.

August – Storm Point (individually and as part of the collected National Lighthouse Day box set); this is, oddly, one of my other favorites! It has a slightly different feel from what I usually write, but it was surprisingly easy to write; it flowed well.

September – the Character Study box set (In Frame / In Focus: the two Leo/Sam novels that are the Character Bleed spin-off story!)

October – The Prestley Ghost, which is also one of my favorites; I just like a lot of my writing in it!

November – A Thousand Kisses, the third and final Regency MMM story! This is the other one I’ll pick as a favorite, maybe the most so: because I’m glad to’ve finished the trilogy, because I got to revel in classical quotations, and because in some ways the POV in this one’s very personal.

December – “Illuminations,” free for a day as part of the JMS Books Advent Calendar, on sale after that! Set in the Magician world but with new apprentice magician characters, and winter festivals, and a missing magical lantern.

December – the JMS Books 2025 Top Ten Gay Romance anthology, including my “Hexes of Bronze”, to finish out the year!

I have stories submitted for January and February 2026 as well – one’s an update and republishing of a very, very old story (got the rights back!), and one’s something new, in the Kitten & Witch world, while I keep poking at The Warlock Affair! Also got a couple things submitted for the JMS Books flash fiction anthology (deadline tonight! still time for you!).

Decently productive, I think, though next year I want to get back to at least one full-length novel, and also finish off the Aric/Emrys stories, and Warlock! Those are the big goals, I think – or that’s the plan! There are a couple WIPs…the direct Jer/Talis sequel to Apprentice’s Luck, for one, and also the last Spells novel, co-authored with K.S. Murphy…that I’d really like to finish up as well.

Thanks for reading and sharing all the love of characters and stories!

Current Mood: creative

scrubjayspeaks

Time looked up from its work, delicately lifting hands away from the dominoes it had just added to the elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that was its creation, and it smiled to hear the sound of fireworks and cheering and champagne corks. Accustomed to being blamed for age and loss, it was nice for so many of them to suddenly remember who also brought the coming spring and the maturing wines and the growing children. For one who gnawed iron and had stones for meal, it was a welcome relief instead to drink down one night’s worth of their frenzied gratitude for the chance to see another year.

---

LL#1350

redbird

Steven Spotswood, _Dead in the Frame_ -- the latest Parker and Pentecost mystery, in which the narrator and her boss solve the mystery her boss was being framed for, and another murder that the cops had been ignoring, which turns out to be related. The solution is not at all what I was expecting, on a couple of levels. The book is also about the narrator's friendship with her boss, and the romantic relationship with another woman, which has her navigating various levels of homophobia. (Late 1940s, New York City.)

Malka Older, _The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses_ -- the third of the investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, this one set largely at a university, with academic rivalries and an invention that could threaten various profitable businesses. Still on the implausible, hopefully temporary colony in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

These fit together, which I didn't realize until I sat down to post this.

That makes 39 books for the year, plus short fiction, blog posts, and a few things abandoned partway through.

luninosity

Today's daily deal at my publisher JMS Books is the 2018 Top Ten Gay Romance short story anthology - only 99 cents today, December 31! It's got my story "Leather and Tea" included, along with 9 other fabulous stories, so it's a great deal!

Come grab your copy here!

Current Mood: bouncy

jazzy_dave

James Kaplan "3 Shades of Blue:Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool" (Canongate)

I was expecting this to be more about the making of Kind of Blue, which should be a desert island disk for pretty much everyone, but those two recording sessions get only a few pages here.

It's actually a triple biography of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans, although Miles (who, after all, lived a lot longer and was responsible for bringing the other two together) gets most of the space. The author combines lots of sources to try to tell the story coherently, but especially in the case of Davis, it is hard to sort fact from fiction. Just as he took credit for others' compositions, Davis also had a truth optional approach to remembering his own life. Mostly he comes across as a very unlikable character--yet--during the author's own interview with Davis many years before he had any idea about writing this book, Davis charmed him. And there are anecdote after anecdote in the book about good things Davis did for people, such as his mentorship of Wallace Roney. Of course, all this is interspersed with Davis's addiction to heroin, cocaine, Heinekin bee, you name it. Likewise, Coltrane and Evans were serious drug users, a habit Coltrane managed to finally kick, only to die at age 40 of hepatitis and cancer. Evans was an even worse addict, who only managed to kick drugs for a few years before returning to them for the last few years of his short--but not so short as Coltrane--life.

Miles struggled on, constantly trying to keep up with the times, leading to the creation of jazz fusion and the incorporation of electric instruments into his music, exemplified by the best-selling Bitches Brew album. Despite the book's length, however, much of it seems sketchy and there's a lot left out. Miles great In A Silent Way album gets hardly a mention, and it would have been nice to see the author's reportage on Miles final recordings, including his version of Cyndi Lauper's Time after Time!

Still, this is recommended, and it will point you to some great recordings that you can easily stream, or better still, purcahse as a CD or vinyl. At times this seems more like a well-done compilation (sort of like the tape-splicing to create Bitches Brew) that it does an original biography, but it reads well, informs quite a bit, and tries to stick to the facts or when that can't be done, at least provide perspectives on all sides of a story.

A good read overall.

jazzy_dave

Gabriel García Márquez "Until August" (Penguin)

10 years after García Marquez’s death, this novel is believed to be his last and according to the preface by his sons, a heroic battle against memory loss which he felt was the ultimate threat to his creativity. “Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there is nothing.” The book contains a sample at the end of his self-edited pages. The premise is Ana Magdalena Bach makes an annual overnight trip to place flowers on her mother’s grave on the anniversary of her death. One year she has a one-night stand fling with a man she meets in the hotel bar, and she makes this part of the yearly tradition too. She becomes almost predatory as she selects her man for the night, but it often is a matter of happenstance. She is able to resume her’ normal’ life with her husband Domenico when she returns, but ironically begins to suspect him of infidelity.

Because it is such a short novel and Ana is the focus, this relationship isn’t fully explored, but operates as a foil to her flings. We get 4 years of her ‘tradition’ and on the 5th year, when she has turned 50, something is revealed to her about her beloved mother and the ending has a dramatic turn that makes the story worthwhile.

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ahunter3

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January 2026

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Page Summary

oracne - Happy New Year!
scrubjayspeaks - Lake Lewisia #1351
scrubjayspeaks - 2025 Music Wrap-Up
jazzy_dave - Philobiblist
jazzy_dave - Musical Hopping
ljgeoff - permaculture guilds
soc_puppet in queerly_beloved - Thursday Recs
scrubjayspeaks - Snowflake Challenge #1
ljgeoff - naturhus
duskpeterson - UPDATE: Twisted + Anahita Most Strong + 2025 round-up + 2026 plans
anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 2 January 2026
grail76 - Photo post (first for 2026)
goatgodschild - Ose Poem I Wrote in 2014
denise in dw_maintenance - Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow
luninosity - 2025 writing round-up!
scrubjayspeaks - Lake Lewisia #1350
redbird - Wednesday reading: two mystery novels to round out the year
luninosity - quick post: a daily deal!
jazzy_dave - Book 72 - James Kaplan "3 Shades of Blue"
jazzy_dave - (no subject)

Style Credit

Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Mitsuba Aoi

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