Tales From An Alternate Reality

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Prison Break FanfictionI write primarily non-shipper general fiction, and some Lincoln/Michael slash pieces as well. Yes, I know they’re brothers… and no, I normally wouldn’t be writing brothercest. That said, if it’s not your thing then please stick to the General Fiction section.

                  Prison Break Gen Fiction                      Prison Break Slash Fiction

Supernatural FanfictionSupernatural also deals with two brothers, who in this case are bound together in the pursuit of demons and vengeance. An excellent overview of this show and its characters can be found here.

                  Supernatural Gen Fiction                      Supernatural Slash Fiction

Other Fanfiction: Iron Man, Die Hard 4, Chuck, White Collar, Burn Notice, Reaper, and more

Original Fiction and Non-Fiction Stories: Miscellaneous Original Fiction // Real LJ Idol Season 8 // LJ Idol Exhibit A // LJ Idol Exhibit B // LJ Idol Season 9 // LJ Idol Friends And Rivals // LJ Idol Season 10

We've finally hit a long-delayed cooling period—just in time for us to leave for vacation on Friday. \o? But that means I've been able to bike outside again the last couple of days, and should be able to continue through Thursday. Finally!

With the Zepbound-related wimpiness, I don't entirely look forward to the rides now. I've heeded one_raido's suggestion about getting more protein, so I'm more careful about that. Yesterday's ride was at least no worse than the one the week before, which is something, I guess? Today was a little better— slightly cooler and with the wind going the normal direction so I wasn't riding into a persistent headwind on the way back. I've never been good with heat, hills, or headwinds, but right now they exhaust me. Ugh.

We'll be flying to Hawaii on Friday, to spend ten days on the big island at this corner of paradise. We went there a year ago, at my sister's recommendation, and loved it! HalfshellHusband wishes it were more compact, like the Oahu Hilton, because there's a lot of walking even just getting from the lobby to the building our room is in. (We're hoping walking in general will go better for him after his upcoming foot surgery this Fall) But the swimming pools are gorgeous, the view is incredible, and the seawater lagoon is fabulous. We'll be spending a LOT of time at the lagoon.

I've already started amassing library books on my Kindle, to make sure I can get them. Dungeon Crawler Carl #5, the last of Dennis Lehane's Kenzie and Genarro mysteries, a Lisa Jewell, another Mike Chen, a deeply weird Emily Jane, and an Anthony Horowitz. I'll be looking for another book today, since I finished Cinder House (Cinderella as a ghost! And also a house!) faster than expected. :D

Other recent reads: The Life Impossible, which I liked but didn't love, and We Burned So Bright (same). The first was kind of sci-fi, and others may have felt it was profound? Eh. The second was good but really preachy, though I liked the ending a lot. A similar setup to The Last Policemen series, but with a very different feel to it.

All right, time to give in to the urge to do some early packing! Toodles. :D

The insanity that is The Real LJ Idol starts soon, and I expect most of you on my f-list probably have no idea what that even means!

So, I thought I would post a link to the FAQ here to see if I can get a few more people interested in playing. It's an online writing competition with "weekly" prompts and deadlines, and I've participated in it since season 8. I missed about 2 1/2 years of it, due to the aftermath of our house fire, but apart from that I've been there for every season and mini-season.

The type of entry you write is up to you. People regularly write both fiction and non-fiction, in regular story formats, poems, and more.

I hope some of you will be joining me!

Boy, this is tedious. It seems like almost every photo taken inside our house or my parent's house needs the lighting enhanced. My Dad always wanted the drapes shut, so his houses were always dark. And our house? It has 8-foot ceilings, and there were no overhead lights in the living room before the rebuild. Plus, the dining room had no natural light until we opened the wall to an oddly-placed third-bedroom (some kind of nanny suite?) and converted it to a family room with glass-paned pocket doors. Much of the downstairs was cave-like. :O

I just finished editing 2008, which was the year of lost pictures, thanks to an unrecoverably-crashed hard-drive on an earlier PC. Our daughter had backups, somehow, so I'm mostly missing January and February (slow months), plus there are no Father's Day pictures (boo!). I hope to get through at least 2009 today, maybe even 2010? Eventually, I'll get to when all the photos were taken with my phone, so I'll have to drag them down off of the cloud. That'll be a new kind of hassle!

We saw The Odyssey last weekend, which was much better than I expected. Matt Damon was able to bring gravitas to the role of Odysseus, and Ann Hathaway was excellent (as were the various monsters!). Tom Holland and Charlize Theron both sounded too modern for me, like a "gonna" was about to show up at any moment, and Eliot Page was an odd casting choice. The movie's pace was good, though, and the storm scene was fantastic! Now we're all looking forward to the Acme movie, though HalfshellHusband and I might go see the Minions at some point without The Boy.

The New York Times posted a list of The 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century yesterday, and between that and the ballots of the authors they consulted, I added about 15 books to my library Wish List. Tana French was incredibly popular, as was S.A. Cosby. For some reason, a LOT of authors mentioned Jo Nesbo's The Snowman, but it's #7 in the Harry Hole series, so it would take a while to get to it. Thinking of Lisa Jewell's And Then She Was Gone (several mentions, but not enough to make the list) inspired me to check out one of her newest books, Don't Let Him In, and put a hold on the most recent one.

Meanwhile, I just finished a highly-recommended short story by Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat. I was... underwhelmed. It was definitely strange and interesting--maybe a little shocking (some might say 'unrealistic'). I didn't like Spark's prose, though. She seems not to have learned that opening phrases akin to "Once upon a time" or "Before the last meeting" need to be followed by a comma, so the reader doesn't have to fight to parse the sentence. And that the flip side, lots of comma-separated sub-clauses in a sentence, MAY be a sign that you've inside-outed your phrasing and might consider wording things more straightforwardly. \o?

In weather news, I might be able to ride out in the world again later this week (Wednesday or Thursday). After a gap of three weeks in the garage. :O

I finished my project to cull extra photos from our albums about a month ago. Now I've turned to Stage 2, which is the process of looking at the photos dating after (**mega-cringe**) 2004 to decide what to print out to put in albums so we have hard-copies. Boy, I didn't realize the gap went that far back. /o\

This mostly has to do with the rise of digital photos. I was great about staying on top of things when I was still working with film and negatives! And I kept up for awhile after going digital, but it's a bigger pain to upload photos to a website one-by-one for printing. And then I got to thinking that maybe I should edit the photos first— crop them and/or clean up the lighting. Before I knew it, I was only reprinting the annual Xmas photo and the year's "highlights", to put in the mini-albums we gave to my parents and my husband's mother. Plus, I lost 2008 altogether when I downloaded the images to my PC and cleared off the memory card, only to have that PC's hard drive die a particularly nasty death. I only have the digital images our daughter had in her saved photos. :( :(

So, I saved all the other backups I had to DVDs, and last weekend I copied all those over to the external hard-drive where my older photos now live. I also went to the Walgreen's website to see what I might have inadvertently saved there. It doesn't look like I can copy them back down, unfortunately, but if any of 2008 is up there I can get prints.

It's still 20+ years of photos! I'm slowly making my way through and improving where needed (which winds up being most of the photos. I have a bit of a perfectionism streak). I've done 2003-2005, then 2020-2026. God knows what's in those in-between years. Let's just say that the additional shift to taking photos on my phone has resulted in a LOT of pictures that need better lighting. *massive sigh*

It feels overwhelming, but all I can do is keep at it and know that I'll eventually be done. \o?

It takes up a lot of my weekends. I'm glad I have the time right now, and that a certain writing-related distraction isn't eating all my time instead. I'm hoping that stays true for a while still...

Today's bike ride was not quite as bad as Monday's. Less hot, though windier. Still exhausted by the end, still had an extra unplanned stop. But at least this time I went the full distance!

I can't tell if the bulk of this tiredness is the weather, the altered biking position, or a side-effect of having started Zepbound. Possibly all three. \o?

On the plus side, I finally saw something going over that second train trestle! The maps say "Western Pacific", but it looks like those tracks are for Union Pacific (the other trestle is Southern Pacific). On the negative side... there's a manure stench at the Business 80 over-crossing. The wind is blowing the wrong way for it to be coming from the State Fair, so IDK why it's happening. When I used to bike near the office in Roseville, construction would sometimes unearth that smell and it would last for months. That all used to be cattle-grazing land, and I use to wonder if backhoes were cracking into a reservoir of buried stench just by breaking the surface. Ugh.

I finished reading On Earth As It Is On Television, which was fun. Then I plowed through A Quantum Love Story, which was wonderfully soulful and bittersweet. It's about two people who are the only ones who realize the Earth is in a 4-day time loop, and they fall in love as they work together to try to fix that. Based on how much I liked it, I've put a bunch of other Mike Chen books in my online library wishlist. Now, I'm reading Three Days In April.

And TV-wise? I finished Hope Street (unresolved ending--boo!) and have started a single-season crime drama on BritBox called The Jetty. After that, I've got a couple of things to try out on Hulu, based on friends-list recommendations. :D

I was able ride my bike outdoors last Sunday and test out the handlebar changes. From what I can tell (only one ride), raising them 2 inches has helped with the numbness in my hands. It'll take some getting used to, but I'm optimistic so far!

My bike was in the shop for a WEEK, and I lost some speed. Expected, but boo. :( I got it back just in time for another heat wave, so Sunday was the one manageable outdoor day in the last week. Maybe tomorrow? But mostly, I'll be stuck in the garage some more. I just finished S3 of Arrested Development out there (leading me to believe that I never actually saw the S3 finale when the show originally aired). I'm curious to see how the Netflix seasons 4 and 5 work out. Almost done with S2 of Beef, so I need to consider my next series. Indoors, we finished Glitch (Netflix) and have now introduced The Boy to the awesomeness of Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect (BritBox). Meanwhile, I'm closing out S5 of Hope Street, so I need another nighttime me-only show...

Book-wise, I finished TJ Klune's Somewhere Beyond The Sea. I didn't enjoy it as much as the first book, which was terrific. The second book was less heartfelt and more goopy, and the author's wish-fulfillment was in overdrive. Still, some fun bits. Theodore! Chauncey! Mudmen!

I also read Men Like Ours, which features a neighborhood of Indian men and women in New Jersey who are jolted by the apparent suicide of one of their own. The plot and structure were good, and the dialogue was clever. But the characters were portrayed so negatively that it was rough going. It's deliberate, but why? Self-loathing? An attempt to hold a mirror up to the author's society? No idea. :(

Now I'm in the middle of On Earth As It Is On Television. The title tempted me, for obvious reasons, but also the story: what if aliens came to earth, and then just left? Are they coming back? What does it say about us that they didn't even try to establish contact?

I'm not sure what my next book will be, but I introduced my sister to Dungeon Crawler Carl, and she inhaled it. It's making book 5 look really attractive to me right now!

HalfshellHusband and I watched Voicemails For Isabella on Netflix this weekend, and really enjoyed it. It was funny and sweet, and the leads weren't impossibly young (yes, that's a thing for us).

On Britbox, I've been whipping through Hope Street as fast as possible, since it's leaving soon. Possibly today. :O It's about policing in a small, Irish village. I'm sorry one of the S1 actors didn't return for S2, but I like the cast overall. HSH and I have also been watching Jack Ryan on Amazon. So far, S2 and S3 just haven't been as interesting as S1, and it's hard to stay focused when everything is SO DARK (even with the overhead lights out) that you can't always tell what's going on. Ugh, Amazon. Give it a rest already!

I finished TJ Klune's The House In The Cerulean Sea yesterday. It was magical (literally), and I liked it very much. Theodore! Chauncey! I didn't find the romance aspect as believable as I would have liked, which is a problem I've run into with Klune before. He makes the main character sound so unattractive (here, he's a schlub) that it's hard to imagine anyone falling for him. Everyone else was charming, though, and there's a lot of humor and heartfelt feeling in it.

Now I've moved onto A Sorceress Comes To Call by T. Kingfisher. There is, as usual for most of her adult fantasies, an overweight woman in her 40s/50s as one of the main characters. I wouldn't mind that so much except that it comes off as relentless self-insertion, and I wish she would resist the urge. But storywise? So far, so good! I'm running out of her books, so I hope she's writing some new ones. :D

I saw a couple of baby quail again the last couple of days, and they just seem impossibly small compared to the adults. They could fit inside a chicken egg! And yet, they have feathers.

The "pile-driving" sound was going on again at my first cycling rest stop today. When I go downstream, I pass under the Highway 99/Business 80 overpass and a Southern Pacific railroad trestle, and then I rest under the Highway 160 overpass just before the Western Pacific railroad trestle. In the almost 40 years I've been biking on that path, I think the Western Pacific tracks have been in use maybe a total of 5 times? And that includes after an arsonist burned the Southern Pacific trestle during the Pandemic, and rail traffic had to be re-routed for 6 months during the rebuild (that trestle is concrete now).

Anyway, I actually spotted a piece of construction equipment from the project-o'-mystery yesterday. It was a small backhoe, working near the base of one of the trestle supports. Maybe they're replacing some of those supports? The tracks do angle in a way that puts them in the vicinity of the hidden noise. Because otherwise, the only thing I can think of that would be behind those bushes is... more bushes. And those do not need construction equipment!

We finished watching S2 of The Pitt yesterday. Disappointed that there isn't more! That show is so addictive. Now it's just The Glitch, Ashes To Ashes, and Leverage:Redemption in rotation. Time to add a 4th show!