August Recap & FIC

[brumeier]

Big news of the month: I got a car upgrade! Kudos to the salesman who texted and emailed with frequency until I finally caved in and went to see what he had to offer. He put me in a 2023 Rogue (from a 2019), which has a lot more safety features, but also some weird new things, like having to shift forward for reverse, and the lights working in reverse of the previous car.

This is the first car I’ve had that doesn’t come with a CD player, and even if my MP3 player still worked there’s nowhere to plug it in. What’s a girl to do? Luckily, I have a free three-month trial of Sirius, which I might keep up after the trial is over.





I took a week off to use up some vacation days and, while it wasn’t the writing-palooza I’d hoped for, I sure did enjoy getting to linger in bed every morning and sit around like a lump all day. This is the first summer in a while that my boy and I haven’t gone anywhere, not even a fair. I feel bad about that, even though my boy wasn’t keen on doing anything. His ladyfriend might have liked to go to the fair, but I think for him it’s still a thing he did with his ex, you know?

My boy and I had a day out together, which included sniffing all the new scents at Bath & Body Works and having dinner at Five Guys. Normally when we go out, we just grab drive-through food and eat in the car on the way home, so it was nice to do something different this time.





In book news…I actually finished a book! LOL! World Travel: An Irreverent Guide. It was written by Laurie Woolever, who worked with Anthony Bourdain on gathering material for this shortly before he died. Now, I love me some Bourdain and I love a good travel book, but it was lacking in both.

It’s setup like a travel guide, alphabetical by country. How to get there, where Tony liked to stay, a little excerpt in Tony’s words. I guess I didn’t really read the book info before I bought and downloaded it? It wasn’t bad, just way too bite sized in every possible way.





Scrapbooking petered off a bit last month. I focused on books and music, with some heritage pages thrown in. Exploring my favorite reads and songs has been fun, and there’ll be a lot more of that because I have so many lists.

Here's one of the 10 layouts I created last month:





Writing was good! I finished the next installment of my steampunk ‘verse and started on a new installment for another crossover ‘verse that might possibly only interest me. LOL! I also signed up for xoverbingo, which is for crossover and fusion fics, and I’m pretty excited about starting in on that.

Is it weird that my writing focus is so much better lately even though the rest of my brain feels like it’s deteriorating thanks to peri-menopause? LOL!

Here are the 2 new fics I posted in August:


Title: Duplicity of the Dead
Fandom(s): Stargate Atlantis/The Sentinel
Series: Madison Miller Talks With the Dead
Pairing(s): Madison Miller/OMC, Jim Ellison/Blair Sandburg
Challenge(s): sga_saturday premier; ficlet_zone k.d. lang – I Confess
Wordcount: 7,879
Warning(s): murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, stolen identity, corpses

Summary: Madison receives an unexpected letter from her missing Uncle Meredith.

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Title: Cowgirls Don’t Cry
Fandom(s): Stargate Atlantis
Series: Dress Cute
Pairing(s): John Sheppard/Rodney McKay
Challenge(s): whatif_au Cowboy Prompt #2
Wordcount: 1,488
Warning(s): fluffy family times

Summary: Cara has big plans for the first day of Kindergarten, but a new policy at Witte Academy might ruin everything. Luckily she has Rodney and John on her side.

Comments

[nagi_schwarz]

Your mixtape scrapbook layout is so cute! I love it! (Do you print them out and keep them in an actual book?)

Also does your car have Bluetooth? Could bluetooth your phone in and play music that way. Another option is a radio adapter. That's how we play music on Cody's truck's sound system - it plugs into the player and you tune to a dead radio station and it becomes your radio station with the MP3 player as the DJ.

[brumeier]

Thank you! Ideally, I'd turn all my pages into printed books. But I have a gazillion of them. I do have some books, though. I have them printed up when I can afford to, through Mixbook.

Yeah, my boy uses the Bluetooth to access his Spotify playlists. I think I'm going to stick with Sirius after my free trial, though. I don't use Spotify.