elizabethmccoy | Network

I just reupped my Dreamwidth blog for another year, though I realize I don't post much. I think of blog topics when away from my computer, then realize I'm reluctant to clog the constant stream Out There with my socially awkward and clueless maunderings.

But briefly: writing a lot, reading some. Of late, Katherine Arden's The Unicorn Hunters, which I really enjoyed a lot. Also going, Emily Tesh's The Incandescende, which is dark academia from the faculty POV, and the worldbuilding actually makes sense. Tesh thought about what magic in the world would be like. This is my walking book (audiobook).

Speaking of: it's dog walking time, which means some more Incandescence!

mildred_of_midgard

No running this weekend, I still need to sort out the shoe thing. Furthermore, I slacked off on coddling my knee, thinking it was all better because it had been asymptomatic for so long, and now it's back to occasional symptoms. So now I'm back to trying to coddle it...except...

I am revising my year-long hypothesis that my hamstring is overstretched and replacing it with a hypothesis that it is in fact tight. I thought this wasn't the case because I had tried stretching it and it had gotten much worse, but I'm now thinking that I positioned my leg wrong and was in fact tightening all or part of the hamstring.

It has been mildly responsive to stretching and massage in the last 24 hours. Not of the "I stretched it once and it will never give me problems again," which is my favorite kind of tight muscle, but even partial, temporary pain relief is better than nothing. At least it points in the direction of a treatment.

Though I knew that the bottoms of my feet were tight for 10 years, and it still took me 10 years to (accidentally) figure out how to fix them, since stretching only got me partial relief and massage none. OTOH, I do at least know of the existence of sleep posture as a factor, so hopefully this doesn't take me another 10 years.

However, stretching my hamstring does irritate my knee, so, sigh. As my partner says, why can't the leg parts all be on the same team? Why do they have to fight each other?

In happier news, I also acquired some equipment, such as a running vest, at the local REI store, so hopefully that helps. If not--say it chafes--I have 1 year to return it.

Hopefully I can get new shoes soon and break them in and go running again next weekend!

sovay

I no longer owe my soul to the Malden Public Library, having returned the books that had become dramatically overdue in the midst of the latest nonsense. The loop of errands I was running allowed for the purchase of a Zagnut, which I continue to love in despite of Stan Freberg. It was gorgeous out and almost warm and I took a couple of pictures. I am trying to do more than just exist through my days.

( Happiness is just a street away. )

It would never occur to me to rescue and restore vintage Coach bags and purses, but I like knowing someone else has chosen it as their art. Speaking of art, I just heard about the Peabody Essex Museum's Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone. Speaking of things I like knowing about, Jin Shengtan's "Thirty-Three Nice Things" is in fact pretty nice itself.

Current Music: Brigitte Calls Me Baby, "Slumber Party"

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

(Another quote from Elizabeth McCracken.)

"Any writer’s ideal craft manual must be bespoke, like a suit, made to measure. Write a manifesto aimed only at your own work without worrying whether it applies to or offends anybody else in the world. Address, in your silent heart, punctuation, plot, character, all your picayune concerns and grandiose plans, all the things that made you want to be a writer. Make it living, an armor-clad list that might change. It will be dearer to you than any other guide."

— Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (HarperCollins, 2025).

My Check-In:

Alibi sentence! An angry one! Adulting, gah. It's also why I'm behind on comments. 8-(

Today should be better!

Tally
( Days 1-9 )

Day 10:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

sholio

The other prompt fill I wrote today ended up being full-story-length (~1100 wds) for Babylon 5, posted on AO3 as Exercises in Linguistics.

The prompt was: G'Kar and Londo (slash or gen, up to you!) and Language. Set in early season 5, probably between about 5x02 & 5x06.

( Exercises in Linguistics )

oursin

A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution - including Ronald Hutton (fangirling).

***

And on subversive women: Archiving Bengal’s Revolutionary Women:

[M]any women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.

Surprised? not really.

***

More on grassroots activism: Travelling activists, Radical Hospitality, and the Intimate History of Socialist Organising in Britain, c. 1880-1914.

***

Women in perhaps unexpected occupations (though I knew a little a bit about this since an old mate of mine did some research on the topic back in the 80s): Women in the Private Asylum Business in Nineteenth-Century England.

***

This association is already fairly well-known but a nuanced set of arguments about the complexity of how it plays out: Inequality and health: Lost in the mists of time?:

Rather than behaving like a toxin that produces a sudden spike in mortality after a fixed incubation period, inequality is more like a fog that gradually seeps into bodies, relationships, and institutions over time.

***

What the information in one scroll recording an C18th Chancery suit opened up concerning George Orwell's ancestors (Jamaica connection).

nanila

After breakfast, we got on the bus to the museum at San Sabba, the rice factory that served as a concentration camp in WWII. As expected, it was quite harrowing, especially walking into the middle square where the Nazis had torched the crematorium before fleeing. The hole where the chimney had been ripped out has a small plaque and flower vase in front of it. I am not at all superstitious. However, the feeling you get walking in from the entrance is one of tremendously bad juju. The dank cells with the wooden doors and too-small bunks may be the only physical remains of the instruments of torment, but the walls are permeated with it. We did not take any photos. We read through all the exhibition materials in the museum. Keiki insisted we leave a donation to ensure all is preserved so no one forgets.

Our bus ride back to town was quiet, and at the end of the journey we walked to a gelateria. Everyone practiced ordering in Italian. We must have done reasonably well as the server smiled at us a great deal and our single scoop cones wobbled under the weight of gelato piled in.

Much of the rest of the day was spent walking, punctuated by stops for refreshments and a bit of shopping. We visited the Cattedrale di San Giusto Martire (photos in a separate post), and we watched the sunset from the harbour’s edge.

Random garden with large wisteria vines in full flower.

The drive leading up to the castle.

WWI monument.

Aperol, crisps and beer. Very acceptable.

Triestian sunset.

sovay

The better part of my afternoon was spent sitting on a park bench with

rushthatspeaks in the classically balmy sunshine, watching a classful of kindergarteners shriek and clamber all over the climbing structures, the fountain, and the swings. One edged his way over to us with his school tablet on which he showed us the groups of things he was learning. I saw another with a pinwheel, another with a fanny pack, another with a baseball cap made of duct tape, crouching with a friend to pry open a maintenance hatch in the fountain with a stick. We agreed that we miss tire swings and feel nostalgically toward metal slides which had to be insulated from thigh-scalding summer with pieces of cardboard or brown paper bags. FiDO Pizza turns out to deliver all the way from Allston and while I recognize the garlic honey and chili zing of the richly soppressata-studded Doc, the anchovy-forward collards and kale of the Braised Greens over Parmesan cream tasted like an entire kelp forest and I ate it like one. We had cookies left over from Pesach for dessert. Especially at the end of a scrambled week, it was a low-key, springlike, lovely time. We have made plans in the newly discovered directions of All She Wrote Books and Dani's Queer Bar. In the evening we saw that Artemis II had safely splashed down.

Current Music: Holly Humberstone, "To Love Somebody"

sholio

Catching up on some older prompts now that I'm in between books.

1. EvS on Sakhalin

Prompt: EvS, that last night on Sakhalin between when Biggles first speaks to him and his escape the next day.

Posted on Tumblr here.

( Under the cut )

2. EvS & Algy (Biggles/EvS implied)

Prompt: Set post defection in London. A misunderstanding leads to Biggles being told that Erich is cheating on him. After some angst and h/c, their relationship is even stronger.

This went in a Direction. Also posted on Tumblr.

( Under the cut )

stonepicnicking_okapi

ETA: there's a prompt fest at Spring Renewal if you are into that: https://spring-renewal.dreamwidth.org/

So I went by my public library and they were doing the tiny scrolls of poems for National Poetry Month so I got two (one for me and one for Minisculus who I was taking for his annual check-up) so I had us unroll them at lunch...and they were the same poem! No fair! This one. So I used it in a collage.

Monadnock in Early Spring by Amy Lowell

Cloud-topped and splendid, dominating all
The little lesser hills which compass thee,
Thou standest, bright with April’s buoyancy,
Yet holding Winter in some shaded wall
Of stern, steep rock; and startled by the call
Of Spring, thy trees flush with expectancy
And cast a cloud of crimson, silently,
Above thy snowy crevices where fall
Pale shrivelled oak leaves, while the snow beneath
Melts at their phantom touch. Another year
Is quick with import. Such each year has been.
Unmoved thou watchest all, and all bequeat
Some jewel to thy diadem of power,
Thou pledge of greater majesty unseen.

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

1. What was the last book you read (or are currently reading)?

2. What was the last movie you watched?

3. What television series are you currently watching?

4. What are some of your favorite blogs or communities online?

5. What social media do you belong to and check often?

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!

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

— E. L. Doctorow

My Check-In:

Neverending Project! It was a soothing break from the adulting, at least. 8-/

Tally
( Days 1-8 )

Day 9:

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

oursin

Because when I read this, I had Further Questions.

London pub thief sold £2.2m Fabergé egg and watch set to buy drugs

I am going, hello?

Enzo Conticello, 29, took the Givenchy bag belonging to Rosie Dawson as she stood in the smoking area of the Dog and Duck pub in Soho, London, on 7 November 2024.
Inside the £1,600 bag was an emerald-encrusted Fabergé egg and watch set belonging to Dawson’s employers, the Craft Irish Whiskey Company.

So, she had these items in her HANDBAG (going full Flora Robson as Lady Bracknell) and

went to the Dog and Duck pub in Soho. She was outside the premises in the designated smoking area, she put her handbag on the ground in between her legs, and a few minutes later she noticed her handbag was no longer there.

We observe that this was a £1,600 Givenchy bag, and while I do not think London is quite the crime-ridden hellhole some social media depicts, I might hang on to this a bit more carefully in Soho even did it not contain my employer's Fabergé.

Dawson had the Fabergé items because she had taken them for display at a work event earlier that evening.

Surely there ought to have been some kind of security procedure involved, like, 'take a taxi and put them back in the safe'?

(Am trying to think of any circumstances in which, in former days, would have been taking precious unique archival and manuscript items out of the building in the first place. When we had them out on display for visiting groups, they got put away pronto.)

I probably read too much crime fiction, but this reads like 'set-up for heist/insurance scam that went pearshaped'.

oursin

Happy birthday,

schemingreader!

sovay

Entirely apart from it now apparently being business as usual for my killing joke of a government to start wars in whatever sovereign nations it feels like and threaten the annihilation of entire civilizations on capricious deadline, I have had a weird and fairly scrambled week in which I was not able to avoid talking to doctors after all. I can feel suitably noir-poisoned for recognizing some location shooting in The Rockford Files (1974–80) from Desert Fury (1947). The sky this afternoon suggested that it was trying to be autumn.

rushthatspeaks sent me an improbable mammal.

Current Music: Lake Street Dive, "Bad Self Portraits"

sholio

1. New Dungeon Crawler Carl book comes out in just a month! I'm wondering if I should reread the previous book before it drops, because these books have about a zillion characters and I'm confident that I have forgotten most of what happened in it.

2. The thing which happened to me on Tumblr today was so weird that I'm going to describe it under the cut even though I already complained privately to friends. (Murderbot fandom is so freakin' weird. Seriously.)

( Awkward! )

3. Speaking of Space Swap, they are still looking for some pinch hitters!

skygiants

Made a extremely silly decision this past weekend, which was to break up our long drive to and from Philly by Exactly long enough to see one (one) show in NYC on the way down, and another on the way back. Literally put the car in a garage by the theater, went into the show, got the car out of the garage, and kept driving. And to make matters even sillier the show that we saw on the way down was Bad -- and we knew it was going to be! Or at least we had a reasonable suspicion! But were we not going to go out of our way to see Norm Lewis play Villefort in a Count of Monte Cristo musical? Of course we were. The path before us had simply been prepared.

Q: When you say it was bad, do you mean it was a bad musical as a musical, or a bad adaptation of Count of Monte Cristo?
A: Oh, both! Absolutely both.

Q: What made it a bad musical?
A: Well, the music. And the lyrics. They hit exactly every beat on the Musical Sheet while constantly feeling like less subtle knockoff versions of other songs you might know slightly better. The song you might know slightly better is not a subtle one, you say? Well, I guarantee you that songs such as "Dangerous Times," in which the full cast explain that they are living in dangerous times, and "How Did I Get So Far Away [From Me]," in which Mercedes sadly wonders how she has gotten so far away from herself, are less so. When the best you can say of a song is that it felt like pallid diet Frank Wildhorn -- as in, lacking the noted power and vibrancy of real Frank Wildhorn, composer of such deathless works as Death Note: The Musical -- then you know we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. And that's not even mentioning the frenetic stream of mediocre jokes.

Q: And what made it a bad adaptation?
A: I mean I know there are probably people in the past who have said that Edmond Dantès literally did nothing wrong but I want you to understand: in this show, Edmond Dantès literally does nothing wrong. His backstory takes up the entire first act, and by the time we hit intermission I was already like "huh, there's not going to be a lot of time in here for revenge schemes," but I didn't actually understand how dire the situation was going to be until ( this part of the Q&A gets into quite detailed plot spoilers )

Q: So do you regret your objectively silly decision to go out of your way to see this musical?
A: No I do not, not in the least, and I would have regretted missing it. There is something very nutritious in bad theater, I think. It forces you to consider what good theater might look like. Also, the surprise appearance of Lucrezia Borgia was one of the funniest things I experienced all weekend.

stonepicnicking_okapi

The Blackened Alphabet by Nikky Finney

While others sleep
My black skillet sizzles
Alphabets dance and I hit the return key
On my tired But ever jumping eyes
I want more I hold out for some more
While others just now turn over
shut down alarms
I am on I am on
I am pencilfrying
sweet Black alphabets
in an allnight oil

carenejeans

Quote of the Day:

"No process is wrong that leads to a first draft of a book."

— Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. HarperCollins, 2025.

My Check-In:

Neverending Project is neverending. ;-)

Tally
( Days 1-7 )

Day 8:

annavere,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

oursin

So dr rdrz will be aware of my recent problems with printer, so I finally bit the bullet and after consulting Which Best Buys and so forth, went for an Epson Eco-Tank from John Lewis.

Which arrived at lunchtime today.

And I had anticipated spending hours if not days whining and stressing and beating my head on the ground and wrestling like until Jacob with the Angel to get the thing talking to my system and actually printing/scanning/copying.

Behold me sat sitting here having achieved getting it connected to the Wifi (the Wizard, though, is crap because it assumes that your password is a word rather than numeric, fortunately there was an alternative route), appearing under printers/scanners in my desktop computer settings, and copying, scanning, and printing.

There was a little hassle with printing which turned out to be due to Advanced Printer Settings turning out to have weird Paper Size as default rather than A4, which given that A4 is supposed to be their standard size, was bizarre.

This is positively uncanny, do admit.

Profile (About Me)

elizabethmccoy

July 2019

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Page Summary

sartorias - Here
mildred_of_midgard - Update
sovay - I bought Blue Velvet on a DVD
carenejeans - Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 11
sholio - Promptfic from Tumblr 2: Babylon 5 edition
oursin - Rounding up various things
nanila - Day 2: Risiera di San Sabba and walking through Trieste
sovay - And this blue and green ball keeps spinning to the beat
sholio - Biggles promptfic from Tumblr
stonepicnicking_okapi - Collage Journalling: Monadnock in Early Spring by Amy Lowell
anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 10 April 2026
carenejeans - Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 10
oursin - Possibly I read too much crime fiction....
oursin - (no subject)
sovay - A lonesome highway is a pretty good subject
sholio - A few fandom things
skygiants - (no subject)
stonepicnicking_okapi - Poet's Corner: The Blackened Alphabet by Nikky Finney
carenejeans - Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 9
oursin - Hedjog versus THE MACHINE

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Page generated Apr. 12th, 2026 06:38 am

Elizabeth McCoy

Network

Here

Update

I bought Blue Velvet on a DVD

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 11

Promptfic from Tumblr 2: Babylon 5 edition

Rounding up various things

Day 2: Risiera di San Sabba and walking through Trieste

And this blue and green ball keeps spinning to the beat

Biggles promptfic from Tumblr

Collage Journalling: Monadnock in Early Spring by Amy Lowell

The Friday Five for 10 April 2026

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 10

Possibly I read too much crime fiction....

(no subject)

A lonesome highway is a pretty good subject

A few fandom things

(no subject)

Poet's Corner: The Blackened Alphabet by Nikky Finney

Write Every Day April 2026 - Day 9

Hedjog versus THE MACHINE

Profile (About Me)

July 2019

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