plays the toughest hand, holds the longest stand

chocolateboxcomm creator reveals were more than a week ago, but my pandemic brain fog/disjointed awareness of the passage of time has been a lot, lately. I had a ton of fun drawing for the exchange as usual!


( My contributions! )

My GIFTS, though. likeadeuce wrote me The Only Hell Ma Guthrie Ever Raised, a deeply delightful piece of classic New Mutants comics gen that was exactly the kind of balm I needed. The best kids! Shenanigans! Magneto and Emma Frost being, respectively, stern and snarky! And then there was this intriguingly tropey piece of Locked Tomb smut, Fingerbones, by DachOsmin. D/s-inflected necro/cav ritual sex set at the very start of Gideon the Ninth, my gosh.

Cabin fever shows some signs of breaking, as the weather has been warming up (I got to go back to commuting to work by bike last week, which was such a relief). At least, to a point. Semi-quarantine continues to be painful and lonely, and there was an awful scare in my family (non-COVID-related) last week that has me even more shaken right now, which I didn't even really realize was still possible. So I've buried myself in a reread of the Murderbot Diaries over the last few days. I'm excited to write my first fairy tale retelling in years for once_upon_fic (and my goodness, aren't I grateful for the generous writing period, in this time of deeply unpredictable creative energy/exhaustion). And the BFF has convinced me to try and take up Tumblr again, luring me with talk of upcoming The Expanse fic. I hadn't been back over there in three years, so it's a bit surreal.

Speaking of both Murderbot and tumblr, I'll leave you with this truly stunning Murderbot animatic/fanvid which gave me ALL THE FEELINGS, good lord. Made by a 20-year-old, I have wasted my life.