the deep moans round with many voices

Merry Christmas!

The church service last night was lovely, and for once we sang mostly unaltered carols -- they went so far as to print the original words in the order of service in order to avoid the edited versions in the hymnal. Ah, UUs. :-)

Also! The Yuletide stories are up!

I cannot (obviously) point you to the one I wrote, but here is the one written for me: Restante, a Westmark fanfic, in which Mickle writes two letters to Sparrow after the end of The Beggar Queen. It's lovely and faithful to the books, and it broke my heart just a little (in a good way).

The wonderful and talented Ellenlome has drawn two pictures for "Apartment Manager"/"Guardian"

The first is Yukiko and Naruto, probably shortly after the end of "Apartment Manager," or between chapter 17 and the epilogue.

The second is Naga in her chuunin outfit.

I am tickled pink. :-)

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In real life news, I am currently getting over a mild to moderate cold.

That means I was out sick for one day with a runny nose, sore throat, achy joints, mild headache, bone-deep tiredness, and my internal temperature regulation blown all to hell... but I was not absolutely wrung flat like a dishrag, nor did I get so congested I had to blow my nose every three minutes even after medication, nor did I run an actual fever, nor did I get a hacking cough. Those are symptoms of a major cold. :-)

(They're also symptoms of the flu, but then, I've never been able to tell the difference between a bad cold and a mild case of flu, since I have a tendency to get laid out absolutely flat by colds at least once or twice a year. Which is a much better average than when I was a kid -- then I got laid flat about every other month. Yuck.)

If I feel up to it, I may start dress-shopping for Cat's wedding tomorrow. There are a number of small boutiquey-type stores on or near the Commons that I can reach without a car, and I figure those are the best place to start.

The lovely and talented kazeko drew a picture of Naga and Kafunnokaze being cute together!

Go tell her how wonderful she is!

They hit me too hard, you see. It's very hard to keep any sort of emotional or critical distance -- maybe through lack of practice, or maybe because a visual experience is just more intense in some ways.

In any case, my brain and life have been hijacked by Doctor Who.

See, I'd been seeing people talk about it for three years now, and I'd sort of picked up some basic notions of the world and story and characters, and I had some birthday money and two Borders discount coupons, and I was bored... and somehow this resulted, on Saturday evening, in me buying the DVD sets of seasons 1 and 2 of the new series.

I am happily drowning. :-)

I also think I'm going to buy season 3 ASAP, and if anyone can give me pointers for where to start with the old series (all 26 years of it, my god!), I would be eternally grateful.

...

This does mean that I haven't been writing a blessed thing for the last three days, and I probably won't be much use at writing for another week or so -- brain overload -- but I'm having so much fun I can't bring myself to care. :-)

This is part 5 of An Ounce of Prevention, which is a Naruto/Harry Potter crossover that I started as a giftfic for askerian.

Technically, it's an insertion of one element of HP into the Naruto world, but that does count as a crossover of sorts, and the HP element will be playing a larger role as time goes on. This story will not affect canon in either series; that is, it takes place during the Naruto timeskip, and significantly before CoS in HP.

( An Ounce of Prevention, chapter 5 )

Nothing much has happened lately in real life. JH will get back from Rochester this weekend, so my work schedule will get all the way back to normal. It's already cut back from crazy holiday hours, but I'm stil averaging well over 30 hours a week, which is a lot for a part-time employee.

I am still having fun working on "The Transient and the Eternal." I've started chapter 11 of "Lemonade," and this morning I got another 150 words of "Secrets" chapter 11. I really do want to get that chapter done and posted by the end of the month, and hopefully work up some momentum to get through chapter 12. I want that story FINISHED.

And I wrote a sort of epilogue to "Locked Room Problems," my WTF BtVS/Indiana Jones crossover, but it's... strange... and I want to look at it very critically before I post it.

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I finally read David Brin's Startide Rising and The Uplift War, which I'd vaguely meant to read for several years now. They're quite good, and I would recommend them without reservations, except for three things. One is the use of psychic powers without A: an attempt at scientific rationalization (a la Catherine Asaro), B: an explicit consignment of such things to a semi-mystical realm (a la Star Wars), or C: a tacit admission that the whole thing is bunk by keeping the rest of the story light and likewise silly.

The second irritating thing is the way Brin wants to pair up all his characters into romantic/sexual relationships. Honestly, not everyone has to be tied up with a red bow by the end of the story! Especially when a few of the relationships feel a bit like they exist for the sake of existing, rather than because the characters involved would actually work well together and want to start such a relationship. (Athaclena's unnamed male friend at the end of The Uplift War, I am looking Right At You.)

The third problematic factor is the (to me) extraordinarily irritating logical lapse displayed by every single character in Brin's freaking UNIVERSE. Follow me here, please: ( the conceit of Brin's Uplift universe is that... )

Beyond those three points, though, which are admittedly fairly minor, the books are great! They're space opera with a hard sf patina, populated by engaging characters, and while the various Earth species (humans, dolphins, chimpanzees) do get most of the focus, there are constant reminders that this is a very old, very large universe, and Earth is a very small part of it.