primroseburrows

Very BRIGHT and SNOWY today, lol. Gross!!! I thought we had moved beyond this!

My spanish-doing has taken a major hit lately with my need to write rising....except, I haven't actually written, either. Mostly just staring at the doc while I think "I should be doing spanish," or doing spanish and thinking "what if my story was already written." Not very useful!!

And my attention span is pulled to the NASA livestream every other minute, anyway. Astronaut chatter <3

mortmere posting in

ds_noticeboard

Before I completely forget, here are the new dS artworks from March:

ARTIST: allofthebeanz and dirtyzucchini

I survived the 11the of March (Dief)

https://www.tumblr.com/allofthebeanz/809996200257503234

ARTIST: look_turtles

The Reaching Out One (Manip) (F/K)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/80943721

ARTIST: Middlepeep

Ohhh I donno (F/K)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/80769021

ARTIST: Wandererseas

Ray V and Fraser sketch

https://www.tumblr.com/wandererseas/810805963484430336

jesse_the_k

Short update on our new dog Shadow, who’s getting really really bored. He’s starting to move quickly around corners — there’s an energetic pup in there who has been healing all this time. Hasn’t tried zooming yet, and we’ll be screwed if he takes off inside. I hope that if he has the urge to zoom it’s proof he’s well.

He came with an (ugly) collar, and MyGuy found a very spiffy hot red collar with retroflective threads, a sliding D-ring that can be opposite where the tags depend, and white reflector. But because he’s so wary of things happening on top of him, we’ve needed to making snapping on the leash less traumatic.

Today I’ve gone through this routine four times:

get a handful of treats, shake the container
call his name
treat 1 when I can reach my hand to his mouth
pull back my hand and come! plus kiss-kiss to get him closer, with a treat for each stop along the way.
when I can readily reach the D-ring, I snap on the leash and dispense 2 treats
I rotate the collar around his neck clockwise and counter-clockwise a few times.
another treat
unsnap the lead
2 more treats
speak all done! & ASLsign FINISH

MyGuy’s leash always leads somewhere very high-value: today he's been taken around the block twice and for three backyard excursions.

Eleven days left until FREEDOM where he can run in the back yard.

omens

748 hours! Two hours from the halfway point of the Dreaming Spanish roadmap :D

I don't know what the downswing in the middle of the month was because I didn't take notes, but it was definitely a combination of things: pet errands, dentistry (the blank day is definitely a dentistry recovery day), doing more writing, playing a new Stardew save & Supermarket Simulator, Kelly going on holidays, etc. Also, I took a month off ANKI (& therefore Polish).

Podcasts I listened to: Quiet talks with Mila (patreon), Dreaming Spanish, Español al Vuelo, Español desde el sur, WorldsAcross Advanced, and InterSpanish (this one is so much more enjoyable now than when last I listened to it, months ago. It's just one speaker reading a script but the topics are interesting). And Cráneo, a bit, a science podcast for kids.

TV: I continued on with the odd episode of the cartoons I'm watching but not a lot. I watched a Netflix cartoon about unicorn boarding school without knowing it was a sequel series (it didn't matter, and also, ftr, the unicorns got magical girl transformations; amazing)

YouTube: okay the funny thing is that at the end of every month I look at my stats and the top input sources are always dreaming spanish and spanish boost gaming. This month it was Noni. By a landslide. It's just that my supermarket simulator addiction is getting to dangerous levels, okay. He had twenty episodes and then did a new series (the game had changed a lot since he played it the first time). It's very goofy.

(#2 was Diegodoal (cooking videos/vlogs), #3 was Dreaming Spanish (not including the podcast, which I log separately), #4 was Unicorn Academy, and #5 & #6 are both books!

Also interesting: time spent reading beat out time spent listening - both still trailing far behind watching, of course.)

Some newer to me youtubers I enjoyed lately:

Japatonic (Argentinian who is also Japanese, living in Japan culture vlog stuff),

MrSalas (comprehensible input/language learning, but for spanish speakers),

Jepllavador (Seoul vlog stuff),

animalogices (animal science),

arquitectomarceloseia8716 (house reno stuff),

antoniouton (Mexican living in Sweden vlog stuff),

UnMundoInmenso (geography) and

BBCMundo (culture stuff, mostly)

Books I read:

Historias del Mar (interesting middle grades comic)
La hermanita de las niñeras #5 (lower grades comic)
Hilda y el trol (I don't know if this is middle or lower tbh, but it was very short)
Alérgica (middle grades comic)
¡Sonríe! (middle grades comic)
and a couple NatGeo Kids books (lower grades non-fiction).

I really enjoyed Alérgica! My favourite of the bunch. My running reading wordcount is 71500! Definitely hitting 100k in April, which will put me into my "level 2" of reading!

「 February 2026 | Index | April 2026 」

china_shop

Article 48 [Restriction on Acceptance of Engagement] (7647 words) by china_shop [Teen and Up]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 당신이 잠든 사이에 | While You Were Sleeping (TV)
Relationships: Han Woo Tak/Jung Jae Chan/Nam Hong Joo
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Threesome - F/M/M, Getting Together, Prophetic Dreams, Found Family
Summary:
“Woo Tak, you haven’t left home yet, right?” Hong Joo’s voice comes down the line with the familiar confidence of long-standing friendship. “Don’t drive. You’ll get stuck in traffic, and you’ll miss your test.”
Woo Tak momentarily forgets his place in her life. His crush is usually manageable, but this morning, taken off-guard, he can’t suppress a kindling warmth, nor the smile that accompanies it. “Nam Hong Joo, have you been dreaming about me from all the way over in Australia?”

This request came up for pinch hit around the time I defaulted on Yuletide, and I thought, well, if I can't manage my assignment, I'll at least do a treat. Especially since I'd nominated While You Were Sleeping (one of my long-standing tiny Kdrama fandoms). But in the end, this foundered too. Turns out partners having operations is not great for my writing productivity.

So since mid-February (I think?!), I've been finishing the draft, re-writing, and re-re-writing. I came up against successive problems, and I want to document them here, because I know these issues are cropping up in my writing generally, of late.

Internal/external consistency: one of the big problems with my first few drafts was: Character A decides to do X and continues to believe they're doing X while actually doing Y. In other words, the external dialogue and actions contradict the internal monologue in a way that is not deliberate and just comes across as confusing and nonsensical. ("I've decided not to tell them how I feel... except that I keep hinting without acknowledging that.") I'm sure there are deliberate ways to do this that can be very effective. This was not that.

Solution: step outside the POV and look at what the character is actually doing. Then signpost reversals and the reasons for them.

Cue words/flow: one of Matt Bell's newsletters a while back quoted Robert McKee talking about cue words:
[E]very reaction[...] needs an action to prompt it.

Therefore, ideally, the last word or phrase of each speech is the core word that seals meaning and cues a reaction from the other side of the scene. [...] A miscue happens when a core word is placed too early in Character A’s line and prompts a reaction from Character B, but because Character A has more words to recite, Actor B must swallow her response and wait while Actor A finishes performing his speech.

In prose, this isn't just about external reaction, but internal reaction too. If the POV character's internal monologue isn't reacting to the last thing that happened/was said, then the reader is left scrambling to make connections with something that might have happened lines or paragraphs back, or which might not be there at all. I find I'm particularly prone to this when I have a lot of meta thoughts I'm trying to include in the POV's internal monologue.

Solution: restructure so that the reactions directly follow on from the thing that caused them, and make sure that meta thoughts flow naturally, each one prompted by the last, in a way that fits the overall arc/direction of the scene (keeping in mind that it's perfectly fine to have reversals).

Location of conversation/theory of mind: I've been finding lately that my POV characters often conduct a huge amount of the story just inside their heads, even when there's someone else there. They have all these thoughts and feelings to process! It's a lot! And then occasionally the other person says something, setting off a new cascade of thoughts and feelings. But most people have theories about what the people they're talking with are thinking, how they're feeling, what they're trying to achieve. Conversations, especially romantic ones, usually work better when the focus is shared between the POV character's internal thoughts, and their assessment of what is happening externally.

Solution: make the other party to the conversation more active. And make the POV character react to them, as well as their own internal stuff.

Direction/progress of scenes: I touched on this above, but it deserves its own point. Because I discovery write, I find it easy to take a very meandery path from the start of the scene to where I want to end up. In fanfic, this isn't fatal because we all enjoy spending time with our characters. But it can undercut tension and test readers' comprehension. It's something I want to work on.

Solution: structure scenes so that there's a sense of progress, with only one or two reversals, not flip-flopping every few paragraphs.

Anyway, things to think about. Things to work on. I'm super grateful to

teaotter for multiple beta rounds, helping me figure some of this stuff out. And I'm looking forward to applying these lessons to my current WIP, which oh dear, really needs it. ;-)

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Favourites poll, 63% of respondents have a favourite colour, 23.9% said sort of, and 8.7% said no. In ticky-boxes, rainbows came second to hugs, 68.8% to 87.5%. Raccoon chefs came third with 43.8%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Still listening to The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley, read by Sid Sagar. At this stage, I'm enjoying the worldbuilding most of all. (Why is ancient xenophobia, eg, Thebians hating on Athenians, amusing, when its modern counterpart is the worst?)

Still dipping into Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell. I'm still in the drafting part, which has lots of strategies and good things to think about, but doesn't seem like it will get you a clean first draft. Like, that is not at all his goal.

Kdramas
I've nearly finished my immediate rewatch of One Spring Night. Will I manage not to go straight back to the beginning, or will it be like that time I had Maroon Five's Songs About Jane in my car tape deck for maybe three years straight? (Note to self: potential Yuletide fandom; I would love future fic about teenage Eun-u and his relationship with his new mother (and cousin(s) and possible younger siblings), and also his sort-of-outsider POV on his parents' relationship.)

Finished Undercover Miss Hong, which was sweet and fun. Not a favourite for me, but enjoyable, and I'm glad I watched.

I'm in the market for something new. I started Phantom Lawyer (about a fledging lawyer who sees ghosts and takes them on as clients; yes, it's a shaky business model), but Andrew's watching it with me, so that's an evening thing. I need something else to lure me onto my exercise machine.

I tried episode 1 of The Practical Guide to Love, for Han Ji-Min, but am not convinced. (Is anyone else watching it? Does it pick up?) Also, a little more of While You Were Sleeping, but either VIKI or I have forgotten where I'm up to. No Love Scout this week or last, due to illness.

Other TV
The Pitt. Ahhhh, my favourite weekly stressbomb.

A few more episodes of The Madison, which continues to be pretty; continues to push the message that cities are trash, versus country living, which is wholesome and full of community, and inspires personal growth. Somehow, the appearance of a love interest has turned me off the whole thing, and I don't even know why. Genre shift? Also, (can I be spoilery? does anyone care?)

not even really spoilers

there are all these flashbacks to Conversations from a Marriage between Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, and every single one of these takes place in New York while Michelle Pfeiffer is in the bath. After a while, I concluded that actually these conversations had happened all over the place (at brunch, in the street, in Central Park, in bed), but Michelle Pfeiffer's character's bereavement/grief means she can only conceptualise them as bath conversations. And then Andrew said that soon there'd be flashbacks of her friends in the bath with her, too, and now I can't take them seriously at all. (Also, she must have been so pruney after shooting all those bath scenes!)

Rooster, Cheers, and Scrubs season 1. A little bit of SurrealEstate. Paper Girls with Ed. Fringe and Bluey with my sister.

Online life
520 Day Guardian Reverse Exchange modding behind the scenes, yay! Part 2 of sign-ups closes tomorrow, then it's matching, and then things will quieten down for a bit. | A lot of beta. :-) | My computer went into a crashing spiral a couple of days ago, and I started worrying (DNW to upgrade from Windows 11 to a subscription model!), but the culprit appears to have been a faulty flashdrive. Now I've removed that, things have calmed down. *knocks on wood, makes a backup*

Writing/making things
I finished a fic in March (by the skin of my teeth)! Hooray! So happy about that. I'll post about it separately.

I'm still having thoughts about my other started-for-Yuletide WIP, but I've fallen into the "I'll just ~quickly~ get this done before switching to my exchange assignment" trap before, and that way lies desperate last-minute scrambles up against the deadline, especially when I'm going so slowly. So I'm putting WIP #2 on hold until I at least have a 520 Day draft... which is why I'm writing this update, rather than racing to finish a fic that simply cannot be completed in two busy days.

Life/health/mental state things
Things are good. A bit hamster-wheel-esque, but at least my arms are hanging in there. | I'm looking forward to next week when Writers' Hour goes to 8am NZ time, and I can find a new rhythm for my day that somehow includes exercise. (Summers are great because I exercise first thing and then it's done.) | It's a long weekend, with a bunch of family stuff going on. My other-city-based brother (not to be confused with my US-based brother) is coming to dinner tonight for the first time in roughly a decade.

Cat
Halle really likes burrowing; I think she may be part mole. Sometimes I go into the bedroom, and a lump in the bedclothes starts letting out little warning "don't sit on me" meeps.

Car
I stopped driving on about 6 March because, you know, petrol prices. Which meant of course that when I tried to drive to lunch on Wednesday, my battery was completely flat, and I had to call NZAA and go for a long drive to recharge my battery. This seems like a terrible, inefficient system. Why can't my car just sit there, primed, until I (rarely) want it? Bah! I've considered getting rid of it entirely, but we're heading into winter, so idk.

Good things
So many hot cross buns, srsly! I finished a fic, after many many rewrites, yay!!!!! Family stuff will probably be good and will definitely come with delicious food!

Poll #34439 The whooshing sound as they go past

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

View Respondents

Deadlines, generally speaking

View Answers

yay! motivating!
10 (25.6%)

meep! *hides*
11 (28.2%)

manageable in moderation / under specific circumstances
25 (64.1%)

depends on the time of year
9 (23.1%)

other
3 (7.7%)

ticky-box full of pirate treasure, and the pirates are labradors and border collies
19 (48.7%)

ticky-box of finding a rhythm
15 (38.5%)

ticky-box of sunbeams dancing brightly on leaves in the breeze
26 (66.7%)

ticky-box of lemur vs sloth poetry slam
14 (35.9%)

ticky-box full of hugs
34 (87.2%)

omens

Witch Hat Atelier 2 Coco is such a weenie :D I know I'm supposed to find her endearing but I'm mostly like "ooof poor roomie Agott," most of the time. And I need more Qifrey backstory or like, more worldbuilding, so I can stop thinking his small girl collection is pretty sus actually. Maybe I just don't know what kind of story this is (I actually really do not, but I'm enjoying it)

Witch Hat Atelier 3 and now the story wants me to find Qifrey sus so I am immediately "oh okay, he's probably legit and fine actually." We'll see, lol. I like whatshiscrap (silverwash boy) A LOT.

Allergic - what big feelings 12 year olds have!! This made me tearful twice, lol. It's about a girl who feels left out in her family (parents expecting a baby any minute, younger brothers are twins) who goes to adopt a puppy and finds out she's VERY allergic to all animals with fur or feathers. I really liked it.

Smile - I didn't know beforehand that this was autobiographical! Or that Raina Telgemeier is pretty much my age (I'm probably the age of her younger sister, I think), it was pretty fun to look back at that time period in comics form. (Dentistry/adolescence combo punch)

Mob Psycho 100 vol 5 - I never really know what's going on in these books but I'm always enjoying it. I didn't like that Mob was basically a side character in this one. I do not care about the other teens. I don't even care about his brother, tbqh. (Though I love how much Mob does.)

Found out Hoopla has "Bonus Borrows," a collection of titles you can borrow when you run out of borrows (my library only gives me 4 a month) - none are in Spanish, but I got a handful of things that seemed fun:

octopus pie vol 1 by Meredith Gran
Deadpool Classic vol 1 (a reread for me)
The Unbelievable Gwenpool vol 1 (issues 0-4)
Nancy Drew: the Palace of Wisdom (issues 1-5)

I went to look at the bonus borrows for April and couldn't find them, so maybe it was a one time thing. If so, that's disappointing, but I'll still enjoy my freebies.

jesse_the_k

The musician explains:

In 2018, I recorded and filmed a cover of "Yellow" by Coldplay under my former name, Lots Holloway. In 2026, I returned to the exact same place to film it again, this time as Dylan Holloway (Dylan And The Moon). What you're watching is both versions, woven together.

Lyrics at the band’s page: https://www.coldplay.com/song/yellow/

Watch on YouTube or ( stream it here )

isis

What I've recently finished reading:

Cinder House by Freya Marske, which is a gothicy Cinderella retelling except that Cinderella is a ghost. For some reason I had osmosed it was f/f, which it is not, though it's not strictly het. The various analogs to the fairy tale were mostly quite charming, and the various rules of ghostness and magic as well - I enjoyed it a great deal. More of a novella than a novel.

What I've recently finished watching:

It looks like I didn't say anything after I finished Pluribus; it was...okay, interesting, some weird plot-gaps (not exactly holes, but) that had me thinking, "yes, but..." a lot.

We watched A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms which was enjoyable enough, though I could have done without certain graphic disgustingness.

Bridgerton S4 was fun as usual. Sophie was delightful (another Cinderella story, hee, complete with evil stepmama!) and the resolution there surprised me a little but I liked it. I was expecting a different outcome of Francesca's story due to osmosis about the books, but I guess that will happen next season. I was completely gobsmacked to see Cressida again but as usual her terrible sartorial choices made for excellent comic relief.

Okay, this was definitely a shorter media review than usual, but I need to finish packing - we're heading out on a camper van roadtrip vacation tomorrow morning. See you all sometime in April!

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Smoke alarms poll, 80% of respondent have smoke alarms on ceilings/walls, and 16% have some in piles around the place. Ten percent have inadequate coverage. Forty percent of respondents assume it's a battery issue when they go off.

In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 80%, followed by iridescent bubbles with 62%, and pizza with 48%. Thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
I've put The Pursuit of... by Courtney Milan aside for now, in favour of Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell. I'm hoping it will help me finish my Yuletide stories, but I'm still in the drafting section, and that's not so much my problem. Still, it has some useful thoughts. Written with pantsers/discovery writers in mind.

In audio, I started The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley, read by Sid Sagar. It's set in ancient Thebes, and Pulley's tendency to exoticise/other her non-white characters is transposed onto othering a god, which, okay, fair enough. I'm enjoying the voice.

Kdramas
Same as last week: Undercover Miss Hong, One Spring Night, and Love Scout (ahhhh!). A delicious three-course meal. (I may have oversold One Spring Night last week when I compared it to Austen. What I meant was it's observational. It doesn't have the kinds of flashbacks you usually get in a Kdrama, showing the POV characters' thought processes and emotional reactions. Instead, it seems equally interested in everyone, in a way. The editing is so slow that it feels like a play: the actors' reactions linger on the screen, rather than the camera flicking away.)

Other TV
Finished Ponies, the spy story set in 1980s Moscow, which was great, sometimes brutal, sometimes funny. Ended on a cliffhanger. Emilia Clarke is awesome!

1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed -- a documentary made up of interviews with mixed-race kids in the Bay Area. Lovely, thought-provoking, reminded me of the movie Uproar in which Minnie Driver plays the solo mum of Māori kids.

More of The Pitt. (The latest episode was super upsetting, and it really stuck with me. It's so good.)

Rooster, a new comedy set on an Ivy League campus, starring Steve Carell and feat. unexpected Jamie Tartt. Quirky and charming (and that's despite my side-eyeing Carell because of his role in The Morning Show and my difficulty with compartmentalising). We've watched the three available episodes.

Started a rewatch of Paper Girls, which contains one of my all-time favourite narrative devices (people meeting their child selves; see also Disney's The Kid and one of Richard Bach's books). It's such a great show. I'm still so sad it was cancelled on a cliffhanger.

The first episode of the Scrubs reboot. (I never watched the original, but this is fun enough.) And some more Cheers.

Regularly scheduled Fringe and Bluey with my sister.

Audio entertainment
The usual suspects, but not much. I'm having a rest week.

Onling life
520 Day sign-ups (part 1) are open for two more days. \o/

Offline life
I stood on a wasp, and wow, that hurt. | We went up the coast to see my parents (lovely sunny day, nice drive, good to get out of town). | Been biking a lot. | Indulging in too many hot cross buns. | My day's to-do list is super daunting; I may have to give myself a 24-hour extension.

Writing/making things
My first rewrite of WIP #1 didn't work out, so I've spent a lot of this week revising again, and I think I've finally cracked it. It's back at beta. Cross your fingers for me!

I have about 9 days to finish WIP #2, but they're busy days (by my standards). Ahhh!

Link dump
America built the greatest cultural machine in history. Then quit. Here's what filled the vacuum. (Rodrigo Brancatelli substack chronicling the rise and fall of US soft power, and what South Korea learned from the US's example).

Good things
Nada Bakery hot cross buns. To-do lists. Awesome betas and co-mods. Figuring out writing stuff. Guardian! Dreamwidth! You all!

Poll #34413 Favourites

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48

View Respondents

Do you have a favourite colour?

View Answers

yes
29 (63.0%)

sort of
11 (23.9%)

no
4 (8.7%)

other
2 (4.3%)

Ticky-boxes

View Answers

Ticky-box full of rainbows
33 (68.8%)

Ticky-box full of strong opinions about your blorbos' underwear
8 (16.7%)

Ticky-box full of raccoon chefs folding trays of dumplings
21 (43.8%)

Ticky-box full of being signed up for at least one exchange/fandom event
12 (25.0%)

Ticky-box full of huge hugs
42 (87.5%)

rants and ramblings of utter randomness

Ughhh

Monthly dS Art Digest (March 2026)

Shadow: Collar & Leash Meet Dog

march 2026 language update

While You Were Sleeping fic, and writing meta

Me-and-media update

Comics I read

Trans Duet: “Yellow” — Soprano and Tenor Eight Years Apart

wednesday reads and things

Me-and-media update

Profile

June 2018

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