Coming up for air...

Lo and behold, a post that is not a signal boost or fanfic, though there will be discussions thereof.

Have been busy with errands or RP tagging or reading. I've ordered a number of books (used) from Amazon, including several of Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's modern faery tale anthologies, Sarah Monette's "Doctrine of Labyrinth" novels (aka Felix and Mildmay's canon, to the carpe_ho_ras folk), and two very different biographies of Mervyn Peake (that's him in the icon, if you wondered who the gent up a tree was) and an anthology of several bits and bobs of poetry and short stories by him, entitled "Peake's Progress". This year being the centennial of his birth, I felt it was in good form to bone up on this fellow whose writings and art I admire.

I'm finding that Peake was every bit as eccentric and gleefully odd as some of the characters he created and it's been a delight discovering the man behind the Bricks, as tomboy_typist and I affectionately call his magnum opus (which is getting a canon update in June, since the long-lost "Titus Awake" is going to be released then: I have that on order as an early birthday present for meself). He's also someone I'm coming to admire with little disappointment. A lot is made of his tragic illness, but that mostly seems to be played up since he seems to have had very few of the unpleasant skeletons in the closet which some writers seem to have had. This can get irritating, since it seems a lot of critics let that overshadow the rest of his life, but I'm refreshed to find that his death was balanced by a life full of wonder and eccentric happenings (including nearly getting bitten by a camel when he was eleven, which incited him ever afterward, to make jokes about camels to lighten a mood) and an incredible level of productivity. This guy, it seemed, lived with pencil and paper in hand, sketching and doodling and drawing as much as he could. In many ways, he reminds me of myself...

Work today: I was anticipating having jury duty, as I'd gotten my summons back in January, but after calling in to find out if I was needed, I found that I wasn't. They were looking for Badge Numbers 1 through 91, and since I was Number 153 or 159, I didn't have to go in.

I've been poking at the Hurt/Comfort fics that I owe people, but I have to admit that while the fount hasn't dried up, I just haven't had the energy to post them. Add to this, I've got the deadline for love_bingo and I took up the help_japan auction as well. The fics will be written, it's just taking some time for it to happen. That and I got stuck coming up with ideas for my last two squares for love_bingo: for the life of me, I'm staring at two prompts, trying to match them to fandoms and characters, and those prompts would be:

"When I fall in love" and

"heavenly love".


Any thoughts? I'm open to any ideas now.

To say nothing of being worried for a penfriend of my mother's, in Japan, who lives in the Sendai region. We've been trying to locate her via the people finder that Google has set up, but she's come up as "unspecified", which could mean anything. This wouldn't be the first time that she's lost a penfriend in a natural disaster. She lost contact with a penfriend whose husband was a medical missionary working in Sri Lanka, during the tsunami there a few years back.