Amy's Free Library of Rock!

What happened is, I got a new computer for Christmas! I set about transferring files and downloading preferred software–Firefox, Scrivener– but I decided to upgrade Scrivener to the newest version, which meant all my files got upgraded, too. And THEN my new computer promptly stopped working two days later.

Well, yay for staying firmly in the warranty period!

So for the whole between-Christmas-and-New-Years (and a week or so beyond) that I USUALLY spend pulling my Annual Roundup together, I had, well, my old painfully slow computer, which also pertinently would now no longer open my Scrivener files (which luckily were all still saved on the cloud. And most of my other files were also still saved on my old computer. So I didn’t LOSE any information luckily).
So now I no longer had ACCESS to my file of Notes on Stuff that I keep throughout the year!

But wait. That’s not all.

I finally got my new, WORKING computer back, so I opened up my Scrivener file– only to discover that I’d never MADE a 2023 Notes on Stuff folder!

So if the only really great detailed stuff in this update is the booklists, you have the BookRiot Reading Log spreadsheet stored on Google Docs to thank! Because I DID take thorough notes when it came to stuff I READ this year!

Anyway, here’s my 2023, don’t forget to comment and converse with me about it!

STUFF THAT HAPPENED
Life Events in no particular order

1. So, if your last contact with me was LAST year’s roundup, you may have noticed how depressed the library-related write-ups sounded. My job was getting pretty miserable, and I wasn’t doing what I loved anymore, and it wasn’t like I was even getting paid well for it (though I couldn’t just quit, because we couldn’t afford that, either). But it was draining on my self-esteem and I didn’t believe I COULD get a new job, either. With a lot of vital encouragement from former coworker Dana, though, I finally got up the courage to at least LOOK what was out there, and wouldn’t you know it? There was a position for an actual Children’s Librarian in Waynesburg, just under a 40-minute-drive-mostly-highway away. So dangit, I applied, and dangit, I got the position.

Here’s the thing. Eva K. Bowlby died back in the 1950s and left her house/estate to the city of Waynesburg with the CLEAR STIPULATION that it would be used as a CHILDREN’S library. Oh sure, there’s a grownup library too, and grownup programming, but the FOCUS is Youth Services, which means our professional goals actually align! And I was going from being constantly belittled, doubted, and having responsibilities taken away from me at the Sarris library, to being IN CHARGE OF THE MOST RESPECTED DEPARTMENT of Bowlby Library– which was a little daunting! But you know? I’m doing all right. I’m not perfect, and the job isn’t perfect either, but I am SO MUCH HAPPIER now and the patrons are apparently happy, too. More in the Library Happenings section.

So like I said, I forgot to note the exciting things happening throughout the year AS they happened, so what sticks out are the BIG things. Like that.

2. Oh, and since I’ve only met her twice, I nearly forgot another big change in the EXTENDED family: in July, Maggie– my 39-year-old apparently-child-free sister–had a baby, Betty. I gave her a stuffed Betty Lou for Christmas. Maddie goes into fits of hysterical shrieking because her baby forehead is so big. Anyway, I’m convinced my Dad had something to do with this development, from beyond, because of the timing (she got pregnant as soon as possible after his death)– if not just to reincarnate himself back into the family, at the very least just as a sign, a reminder, that life goes on.

3. Uh, Sam got his driving permit. Yes, I’m the mother of a driving teenager. This is less scary than you might expect, Sam being Sam and A) obsessed with cars from toddlerhood and therefore learning everything possible about them, so INTELLECTUALLY knowing what he’s doing; and b) from the same age, spacially gifted– innately knowing how to make machines work; and most importantly, c) also from the same age, being a very CAREFUL, RULE-CONSCIOUS kid. I mean he already MIGHT be a better driver than me. He only just qualified to take his test, but he still hasn’t learned how to parallel park. But soon, I’m sure.

Okay. Oh!

4. Jason brought home a semi-wild pig! This is totally one of those weird little things that would have made the list if I was keeping track of everything as we went along– it happened early in the year, before I was even looking for a new job. Not a pet pig, he went on a pig hunt. Yes, these things exist. And it was GENERALLY slaughtered and quartered beforehand, but I had to cut it into serving sizes myself. After almost a year, we are now down to two racks of ribs, which we still haven’t QUITE figured out how to cook properly. I am kind of happy to not feel compelled to have pork three times a week any more.

5. Oh, I’ve got one more thing to round this off, even if it might not FEEL like a real life happening to anyone but me. I participated in Yuletide, the annual massive fanfic exchange dedicated to giving fic in “rare” fandoms a boost– what qualifies as “rare” is a fandom with 1000 or less fics of 1000 words or more on AO3– I clarify this because I was genuinely shocked that the fandom I was assigned still qualifies– but, see more below! The whole experience was super fun for me as a writer (and reader!) on many different levels, so I think it deserves this last bullet point!

Christmas
This is where I normally talk happenings and famous presents, but the happenings feel too far gone now, and you’ve already heard about my biggest present. Oh, we were laughing because Jason’s presents for me almost all had to be sent back! The computer broke, the underwear was too small, my brother got me the clock the night before! The only one I got to keep and love unconditionally was a nice throw blanket he’d gotten as a freebie sample at work! (It could be personalized with the company name, and J was doing the buying of Personalized Company Stuff to give employees, so the personalization company was like “buy this blanket for your employees!” and J was like, “Nah, but I’ll give it to my wife, okay?) It IS a very nice blanket.

Library Happenings
This is of course extra big this year. It seems so long since I even had library programs to talk about, and now all of a sudden I have a whole department in my hands.

Top Regular Programs I am Now In Charge Of
1. Summer Quest: I only ever marginally pitched in with Summer Reading programs at the old library, and I STILL occasionally had Summer Reading-related stress dreams. Now I was in charge of the whole thing! Worse, my only adult helper (I had several teen volunteers as well, some of them more actually helpful than others) got a new job and left two weeks in! And yet, despite the occasional chaos, I think it went very well. Summer Quest was the day-long weekly program for elementary-aged kids– younger ones on Wednesday, older on Thursday. Everyone seemed to be happy with it, and I heard lots of stories about kids talking excitedly about the things we’d done, like:
–Top Activities from summer quest. Apparently a lot of other librarians were complaining that the Collaborative Summer Reading Program theme of “All Together Now” was hard to plan programs and activities around, and honestly I do not get that. This theme cries out for teamwork building and getting along, and there are SO MANY fun activities to do with that!

1. Improv Games: The subject of “kindness” made me think of good listening which lead me to “Yes, and–” which led me to a ridiculous afternoon of improv games. After some large group warmups (Walking in different imaginary settings, coming up with a unique use for an oddly-shaped block), we used a set of customizable dice to roll different improv games for randomly chosen kids to do. At the end I had them act out the Three Little Pigs (plus more) like I used to do at the Children’s Museum, and it was hilarious.
2. Robotics and coding: This I came to on the subject of “Making a Difference” – though admittedly also because my boss had also gotten a grant for BristleBot kits that we were required to use this summer. But when you’re coding, every little step makes a difference, right? We read “How to code a sandcastle,” then used the Primo Cubetto robot we have to practice programming. Then we built the BristleBots, which converted even the most “This is stupid” kids by the end, and they spent recess making their Bristlebots dance together. Or fight. One or the other.
   
3. Multicultural Cooking Activity: The obvious choice for the subject of  “Crossing Borders,” it did get pretty chaotic, but resulted in lots of kids trying– and liking!-- new foods and a few deciding they liked cooking, too. We split everyone up and assigned everyone different tasks. Would definitely have been easier with another adult. My own kids even came along that day to help out.
   
4. Build the tallest tower out of weird supplies: The subject of this week WAS straight up “Teamwork,” so it was filled with team-building challenges like 60-second Lego builds and round singing and, memorably, making a Rube Goldberg Machine. That last may have been a little TOO complicated (and it was very hard to convince them that it wasn’t a marble run and they physically COULDN’T make one marble do everything); but the tower building challenge was just the right amount of challenge, and was very exciting.
   
5. Telephone on paper/Painting relay: Two more activities from “Kindness” week also stemming from the concept of “Yes, and”ing, though not improv. The painting relay required the group to try to paint a scene, one person at a time for one minute each, so you had to play off whatever the people before you had done. The younger group took this more seriously than the older group, who were prone to Pollocking the whole paper on their turns just to be obnoxious; but all groups had a wacky time with Telephone on Paper, where you pass around a strip of paper, folding it over each time, alternating between guessing what the person before you just drew and trying to draw what the person before you wrote that the first person drew.
   

2. Ready for Kindergarten: On Mondays during the summer, for less time than the elementary kids but still three hours, I led preschoolers through school-readiness exercises. I was nervous about this, because I’m not certified in early childhood education or anything, but really it was a storytime taken through the next level, and whatever activities I came up with weren’t hard to tie to school.

3. Storytimes: of course there’s basic storytimes throughout the year. I have a part-time coworker, Haley, who actually IS an early childhood educator (but she has a 1.5 year old so she doesn’t want a full-time job. In fact half the time her toddler comes with her. Which makes me jealous in retrospect at how much my kids were unwelcome at my last job), who mostly covers the baby and toddler storytimes, while I take the preschool and evening ones.
--Top themes from regular storytimes

1. Election Day: this will probably be even more interesting this year. It’s really a delightful way to teach kids about the election process without the baggage of grown-up Politics. We read two books: Clifford for President and Duck for President. Then the kids took turns voting by circling their choice’s picture on the ballot and put the ballot in a toy mailbox inside a Voting Booth (a three-sided poster board), while everyone made “Vote For” posters while they were waiting their turn. Then we counted (counting practice!) the votes together. I caught this conversation on the way out one of the days: 4yo, with mild disgust: “I voted for Clifford, but Duck won.” 4yo’s mom: “I know the feeling.”
2. Sharing: I always like to focus– or broaden– themes during holiday weeks to something related to the holiday, but not necessarily ABOUT the holiday, and “Sharing” is one of my favorite Thanksgiving topics. We read Around the Table that Grandad Built (see below) Feast for Ten (more COUNTING PRACTICE!) Thank you, Omu! (see some previous year’s list, I love that book), did an interactive flannelboard of The Doorbell Rang, and a magnet board activity of working together to put pictures together (each child had, say, a window or door but only together could we all build a house). And then we did snack time by making a fruit salad together. The smallest kids dumped in berries, the slightly bigger kids chopped bananas and strawberries and pre-peeled apple slices with butter knives, and everyone took turns mixing it up. “I didn’t know I could DO that!” one 3yo exclaimed proudly, and isn’t that just what we’re going for?    
   
3. Lights and Candles: Another example of broadening your “holiday” themes– the last storytime in December– this community has like NO religious diversity, it is frighteningly Evangelical Christian, so nobody would have a problem with the library doing anything straight-up Christmasy– but there already WERE like three straight-up Christmasy events going on that month (see below for some of them), so I’m sticking to something more universal for this storytime. We started with The Dark by Lemony Snicket, then read a board book called My First Chanukah and did a lighting-eight-candles fingerplay, then read a Disney Frozen board book that had real twinkling lights in it that end up on a tree, so we really covered all bases. And THEN they covered pieces of contact paper with scraps of colored tissue paper and we wrapped it around electric tea lights, so they had their own little “stained glass” nightlight decorations, which they all thought was the coolest and made an excellent grand finale to storytime season.
   
4. Berries: Honestly I wanted to do Berries just so I could read Berry Song, and We Wait for the Sun and Jamberry and The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear (which was probably the winner)-- we did NOT have time for Blueberries for Sal but I pulled it just in case. And then we painted with berries! And also ate berries!
   
5. A Two-fer: “Superheroes” and “Boo! Monsters”:  I’m just putting these together because the craft was variations on the same, and it never ceases to amaze and delight me how you can give kids all the same art supplies and they’ll all come up with something totally unique if you let them. We have Ellison die cutters with both mix-and-match superhero paper dolls and mix-and-match monster parts, and the results were always just special. LOOK at all these wonderful monsters! 
   

4. Family Place Play: The new library is a Family Place Library, a system of libraries focusing on early childhood development through giving families the resources they need to help their children thrive. All Family Place Libraries have to host relatively regular Parent/Child Workshops, which are developmentally-appropriate free play sessions with special guest community experts in to answer grownups’ parenting questions. We expanded the 5-session minimum Parent/Child Workshop into a ten-week regular playtime for three-an-unders and their families. Now, my biggest role in this was just setting up. Since the playtime was MEANT to be between the child and their caregiver, or sometimes with the other kids, I was kind of the third wheel in the room, just watching. But watching is interesting! People who don’t spend much time with babies tend to forget, or not ever realize, that babies (and toddlers) are not just blank slates before they can talk– they have opinions and great big feelings and they are FIGURING OUT SO MUCH STUFF, and when you watch them in a situation like this, you see all the gears turning and the revelations happening and it’s cool. And I keep wanting to talk about my own kids when they were very small, because it reminds me of the unique things they did that proved they were certainly their own people right away.

Top Special Events
1. Polar Express Night: I’ve never been in charge of such a successful program, at any library. 48 people turned out in their pajamas (well, SOME were in their pajamas) for hot cocoa and cookies and the Polar Express movie and leftover gingerbread house decorating– I had had a specific gingerbread house workshop the week before, but there were a bunch of no-shows, so I just pulled the leftovers out again here and boy were they popular– and there were simple craft paintings and a fake-snow-made-of-baking-soda-and-conditioner sensory box and wooden trains and a very weird set of snowglobe crafts and an engine you could go inside to drive! (Observe photo collection here). Everyone raved about it, even the families who left early because their kids got tired! It's already in the album linked above, but please again admire the Polar Express I built!


2. Fetch’s Sleepover: first time I ever got to do one of those taking-pictures-of-inanimate-objects-goofing-off photo shoots, check it out.

3. Turkey Trot: So every year the library has a 5K the weekend before Thanksgiving as a fundraiser, and it’s massive, and all we (Haley and I) were told was that we needed to have activities for kids for when they finished the kids’ race and were waiting for their growups to finish the 5K– not when or for how long. So it turned out about an hour in, we got COMPLETE CHAOS for an hour, and then everyone went home. But at least everyone was occupied (with games, snacks, and crafts) during that hour of chaos.

4. Teddy Bear Picnic: This apparently was also originally a fundraiser, but now it’s just an annual tradition that again Haley and I were thrust into in hopes of living up to everyone’s expectations, which luckily we did. We had stories and a teddy bear parade and a stuff-your-own-plushie activity and bear masks and bear food like berries, (swedish) fish, honey (grahams), ants on a log, and peanut butter and jelly because of course they do, and now the pictures from this event are my work computer screen saver and it’s a good time (sorry, I don't actually have a LINK to those pictures).

5. The Summer Quest Field Trip: Wanted to tie the field trip to something Teamwork related to fit the theme, and finally the improv activity made me think, A SHOW. The nearest community theater doing a children’s matinee was an hour away, but we went anyway, and saw a play called “Cinderella Caterpillar,” which I think my fellow coworker-chaperone laughed way harder at than any of the kids did. The kids got to get all the players to sign their programs as a souvenir, and then we had a picnic, because it was an outdoor theater, and then they spent at least an hour playing on stage themselves. That in itself was cool! But like two days before, my boss said, “There’s some more money in the budget for field trips, you should stop and get ice cream for everyone on the way home.” And I looked at the map and wouldn’t you know it, exactly halfway on our route was a restaurant attached to a dairy farm that makes their own ice cream and has a playground with big slides built into the hill– it’s a great place my own kids have been to on field trips too. So we stopped there and had MORE fun! There was a perfectly timed rain shower for exactly the amount of time it took to ride the bus from the theater and to eat ice cream inside the restaurant, that then immediately cleared up.

Top Other Stuff that Happened at the New Library
1. Sorting the Closet: there was a chaotic supply closet that I used my first break between programming seasons to completely reorganize and inventory and I’m PROUD of that, baby!

2. Sorting the Office: this one’s a bit trickier and I’m still working on it! It involves lots of old files, some of which are useful, and some of which are completely out of date! There are books of literal Clip Art, the kind you had to photocopy, before you did that sort of thing on the computer! There are shelves and shelves of old Mailbox magazines! There’s a lot of stuff I’m not supposed to get rid of because it actually belongs to my boss, who started out as the children’s librarian there, but I don’t always know WHAT! It’s quite the interesting treasure horde!

3. Collection Development: if there’s one thing that frustrates me about my new job compared to the old, it’s that my boss does NOT like to weed anything, and there is NOT a lot of room. And there’s some seriously out of date stuff in that collection. But I am doing my best within my parameters to get the collection a LITTLE less chaotic and easier to use!

4. Christmas party: One very long day I was in town for something like 13-14 hours, starting with a Family Place Play session in the morning, a regular in-library workday in the afternoon, then making Frosty the Snowman buttons at a booth at the town Light-up Night celebration in the evening– I couldn’t just GO HOME in between because it’s a 40 minute commute one-way– and then we had our staff Christmas party at a small local combined pottery-shop/restaurant, which served us THE most comfort-foodish Baked Potato soup as well as a meat and cheese board and wraps; and we had a secret santa exchange and the girl who had me made me a gift basket of all sorts of random treats named after Beatles songs, it was great; and then we played a Murder Mystery Roleplay game (though it wasn’t murder, it was non-lethal poisoning) and I solved it, and we LAUGHED a LOT, and afterward somebody or other asked if I’d had a good time and I was actually a little stunned. “YES,” I realized. “Yes, I really did!”

So now it's time for everyone's favorite section:

MEDIA REVIEWS

Books!

2023 Picture Books
1. Nell Plants a Tree, by Anne Wynter, illus. by Daniel Miyares. Oh this is lovely! Poetic and flowing but simple enough for even a toddler storytime, though older kids will more appreciate how the pictures show time going by and how Nell was a girl when she planted the tree and a grandmother when the tree is full-grown.

2. Mister Kitty is LOST! by Greg Pizzoli. I am looking forward to using this in a story time. There’s counting, guessing, and subversion of expectations– a perfect recipe for child interaction and all-ages entertainment.

3. Stranded! A Mostly True Story from Iceland, by Aevar por Benediktsson, illus. by Anne Wilson (not the rock star). What sold me on thinking libraries need this technically-nonfiction book was that it kept making “great read-aloud” lists. And it does seem to be perfect for next summer’s CSLP theme, “Adventure”-- but I actually bought it as a gift for J’s nephews before I bought it for the library, and got distracted reading while I wrapped it. It is a wonderfully fun book, delightfully told, and with illustrations that add a literally-mythic quality to the author’s grandfather’s unbelievable (but mostly true!) story.  

4. Evergreen, by Matthew Cordell. This book made me wish I had more elementary aged storytimes because it's just a bit too long for preschool. Then I realized this will fit next year's summer theme, too, as it’s about a shy (not quite as much as Scaredy) Squirrel having an Adventure, and I can read it to my elementary group then!

5. How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? by Mac Barnett, illus. by Jon Klassen. Remember there was awhile there I had like three Barnett/Klassen books per year-end list? It seems like a long time since I did. This is an excellent book to share with thoughtful kids who like to examine all options. Klassen's work always makes me smile, and the words are straightforward but fun, and are just slightly rhythmic with some internal rhymes, so, a good read-aloud. The part about dogs got me and was what tipped me over into “okay, I love this.”


2022 Picture Books I Crammed for Mock Caldecott Time, which happened before I even considered I might have a new job in just a few months so feels ages ago:
1. Action! How Movies Began, by Meghan McCarthy. A simple (enough to read aloud) yet thorough (enough for even grownups to feel like they’re learning something) history of movie making. It ties the first times various innovations were used to more recent movies to show the parallels, which is very cool, and the illustrations highlight parallels as well, which is how it got on the mock Caldecott lists! And it got one of my votes, along with Blue and Berry Song (see last year’s list of New Books).

2. Color the Sky, by David Elliot, illus. by Evan Turk. I remember “arguing” with a kid about why this was on the Mock Caldecott table, because they were “just scribbly crayon drawings.” But oh, the ENERGY those crayon drawings capture! There’s a lot of energy in the verse (about birds of many colors) as well. You could take off flying with this book yourself.

3. Nigel and the Moon, by Antwan Eady, illus. by Gracey Zhang. Sweet story about a kid who whispers his dreams to the moon when he's shy to share what he wants to be in the day. The pictures are sweet, too, if not quite what I’d deem Caldecott-worthy– it was the story I liked most!

4. The Three Billy Goats Gruff, by Mac Barnett, illus. by Jon Klassen. Here they are again! This is a worthy addition to the folktale collection, and a lot of fun. Barnett adds some fun food rhymes to the traditional refrains, and Klassen continues to draw the best expressions. There’s an interesting use of space, as well. Great example of why Klassen is one of my absolute favorite illustrators despite (or because of?) his deceptively simple style!

5. How to Eat a Book, by Mrs. and Mr. MacLeod.  It’s a mildly silly story about the joy of getting sucked into a book (literally), but the cut paper illustrations are a little mindblowingly psychedelic. Curious what the authors might do next.

What’s funny is this is being posted so late that I have already done my Mock Caldecott cramming for THIS year, too. So theoretically I could make next year’s list right now. But I won’t, because spoilers.
(PSST: Remember, Simon and the Better Bone, An American Story, Big, and Stars of the Night– descriptions and ranking subject to change depending on the rest of the year, but those are the ones I liked best, if you’re using my opinions to do your own purchasing and really want to know. Edit to add: Simon and the Better Bone just won our Mock Caldecott. Edit again to add: Big just won the real Caldecott. Yay, month-late roundups!) (Incidentally, I can't remember what won last year's Mock Caldecott. I have looked it up on the FSPL Facebook page but apparently that didn't get posted).

Older Picture Books, which may include 2022 (but I don’t actually think do. Oh, there’s one):
I’m having trouble ranking these: they might just be a ten-way tie. Or they might go something like this.

1. A Polar Bear In the Snow, by Mac Barnett, illus. by Shawn Harris, 2020. And Barnett squeezes on a third time, but the pictures are definitely the real star here. Harris could have gone the easy route: I have no doubt Barnett was thinking of the joke when he came up with the title-- but the artist instead has done some really cool things with torn white cardstock and a sparing use of black and blue ink. It immediately gave me Story Time Art Project ideas. Unfortunately I read this at Sarris like a week before leaving, and we haven’t GOT the book at Bowlby. (Gee, who has the power to change that, anyway?)

2. Around the Table that Grandad Built, by Melanie Heuiser Hill, illus. by Jaime Kim, 2019. Nice Thanksgiving book: it manages to be very classic in tone and themes while showing a diverse family with a variety of foods. An excellent addition to a Thanksgiving collection.

3. The Christmas Mitzvah, by Jeff Gottesfeld, illus. by Michelle Laurentia Agatha, 2021. Speaking of good additions to holiday collections, this is a really lovely story! When I first read reviews of it back in 2021, I remember not being sure how a story of a grownup doing grownup things would be accessible for kids (though it didn’t stop me from putting it on the wish list. Can’t remember if I ever got around to buying it for Sarris. It was already at Bowlby though). But this book pulls off just the right tone, and the pictures help, too. It's just a big smile in a book.

4. Bartali's Bicycle: the true story of Gino Bartali, Italy's Secret Hero, by Megan Hoyt, illus. by Iacopo Bruno, 2021. Fascinating story about a champion cyclist who secretly worked for the Italian Resistance in WWII.

5. My Baby Blue Jays, by John Berendt, 2011. This is apparently an adult-focused Pulitzer-winner, but when he decided to chronicle the family of blue jays outside his window with photographs, then describe what he saw, he explained it on a kid level very well! I always like having simple real-life nonfiction sorts of things like this to sprinkle into storytimes, and the preschoolers all diving forward to get a closer look at the pictures is exactly the sort of reaction I’m going for.

6. Ways to Welcome, by Linda Ashman, illus. by Joey Chou, 2020. This is simple and sweet and exactly what it says on the tin–ways to show kindness, as well. Perfect choice for the All Together Now Summer Reading theme, and unlike a lot of these kinds of everyone-getting-along books, the rhymes actually scan really well.

7. Super Sloth, by Robert Starling, 2019. A very cute everyone-is-talented-in-their-own-way story.

8. The Happy Day, by Ruth Krauss, illus. by Marc Simont, 1949. I found this among the Big Books on one of my first days at the new library and felt called to read it immediately. Indeed it fit my upcoming spring theme storytime, and amused me with its unique refrains (who thinks to include SNAILS in a story like this?). I mean, I know Ruth Krauss knew what she was doing (and Simont’s no slouch either), but I’d never heard of this book before, so who knew it stood the test of time?

9. Mushroom Rain, by Laura K. Zimmermann, illus. by Jamie Green, 2022. Fascinating facts about mushrooms presented in poetic prose with very pretty pictures.

10. Time is a Flower, by Julie Morstad, 2021. Wonderous poetic and artistic musings on the nature of time. The pictures themselves are poetic too.


2023 Longer Books
1. Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy. This was hilarious. It's a not-very-wordy graphic novel, so I read it in one sitting (accidentally), when someone accidentally put it on the Children's New Book shelf instead of the YA, and I just flipped it open as I started to carry it away and started laughing out loud immediately. It is cataloged as YA (and I haven’t read the first book in the series to say if this applies there, too), but if this one had stayed in the children’s section, it could have been perfectly appreciated by a middle-grade kid, too, since it's about that universal wonder, sibling relationships (and bc it's a very conservative family– the not-as-universal theme is of being Very Visibly Muslim In Public– it hasn't got the "naughty bits" you might find in a lot of YA, either).  It verges on uncomfortable cringe humor– I kept tensing for disaster!-- but everything works out in the end, so it’s pure delight.

2. The Chalice of the Gods, by Rick Riordan. It’s fun to read Percy and Co. have an adventure that's not world-shattering for once. This is actually taking place in the months between the end of Heroes of Olympus and the beginning of Trials of Apollo, so you canonically know nothing HUGE happened in that time– it’s just a series of fun, funny, often dangerous hijinks– not will he get out of this, but how will he get out of this?

3. The Night Raven, by Johan Rundberg, trans. from the Swedish by A.A. Prime. To be perfectly honest, I’m still not quite sure what to think of this one. I wonder if some subtlety of the plot was lost in translation, because I'm still not entirely sure what happened and why; and the young main character’s relationship with the police detective gives me slight predator vibes even if that's not what’s intended. But Mika is a great protagonist, headstrong and sort of surprisingly snarky (the kind of person who will just say something ridiculous straight-faced and throw you off for a few seconds to a minute), and the kids and I are definitely looking forward to the next English translation (there are already four books in the series out in Sweden). And just as far as well-writtenness goes, it beats out all the other contenders for third place here. It's objectively good! I'm just a little confused by it still!

4. Deephaven, by Ethan M. Aldridge. Pulled this off the New shelf– it was part of the Junior Library Guild shipment, so I hadn’t read much if anything about it beforehand– and went WHOA, if this doesn’t have Maddie-would-like-this written all over it. Mysterious boarding school? Dark occulty secrets lurking? Nonbinary, slightly-autistic-coded protagonist has to solve the mystery before someone else gets hurt? The plot is a little simpler/more middle-grade than some of what we’ve been reading lately, but as we were approaching the last quarter of the book I said, “You know what? I have a feeling this is just the start of a series.” And while the immediate plot was firmly wrapped up, and there's nothing explicitly STATED about a series, there are still plenty of hints that there could be lots more mysteries in the future.    

5. The Sun and the Star, by Mark Oshiro and Rick Riordan. Sorry, Oshiro is no Riordan– it just didn’t have the same gripping narrative style as the rest of the Riordanverse. And I kind of take offense of their portrayal of Hypnos because I’ve already started writing a fic in which Hypnos is way more interesting (but still true to the original myth!). But there’s still lots of fun mythological details, and a particularly lovely scene between Will and Persephone that I really enjoyed.

Honorable Mention: Simon (sort of) Says, by Erin Bow. I started reading this on my own because I knew my kids wouldn’t be interested (they weren’t), and while I really enjoyed what I read, it’s a lot harder to make time to read just for me (hence, the one book on this particular list I DID read just for me was read in one sitting at work), and I never FINISHED it before I realized I needed to stop hogging it and just return it to the library already. I have a feeling it would be higher on this list if I had finished it, but since I didn’t, I’ll settle for the honorable mention. (Edit: it just won a Newbery Honor so I was glad I'd taken it back so I could put it on my winners' display!)


Older Longer Books
1. The Astonishing Chronicles of Oscar from Elsewhere, by Jaclyn Moriarty, 2022, whom I adore so very very much for her kindred ADHD brain. Oddly there is outright acknowledgement of ADHD in this one, even though every one of her characters seems to have some neurodivergent aspect or another. It’s just there’s one character from our world (the eponymous Oscar), instead of from The Kingdoms and Empires, so he gets a proper diagnosis.

2. Hello, Universe, by Erin Entrada Kelly, 2017. I was looking for long reads to "introduce" to the older Summer Reading Quest class by reading first chapters–I mean, I read the first chapters TO them to introduce them, AND I was reading first chapters myself beforehand just to find the books in the first place. This was the first one that jumped out and made me want to keep reading! It was a sweet story and an easy read with memorable characters. Not quite sure about the bully character's development, but otherwise.
    
3. The Lockwood & Co. series, by Jonathan Stroud, 2013-2017. My kids were really into horror in at least the first half of the year (carrying over from last year), and there was a show of this coming out– what’s funny is we completely forgot to watch the show after we finished. Took awhile to read, but we thoroughly enjoyed it. I had started to read it myself years ago but didn’t get past the first chapter– the voice just wasn’t holding my interest. This time I was hearing Lucy with entirely new ears or something– I got her this time around.

4. Ophie's Ghosts, by Justina Ireland, 2021. Pittsburgh history, Black history, ghosts and lore and mystery: a little something for everything we were in the mood for, and educational, too. This book managed to be both sad and fun.    

5. The Truly Devious series, by Maureen Johnson, 2018-2020. Speaking of Pittsburgh not-history, the main character of this series is from Pittsburgh and we totally didn’t know until we read it. But most of the story takes place at a remote mountain boarding school in Vermont, and there’s a modern-day mystery and a past mystery being told in alternate chapters. Maddie said the historical parts were the more interesting ones, but I think that’s because those stuck closer to the mystery itself, while the modern parts also dealt a lot of regular realistic (relatively) teenage social interaction– I found those bits fun, but then, I don’t have to BE a teenager any more, so I dig that my kids are more into escapism– so was I at their age!

Notable Rereads:
Yeah, somewhere along the way we crossed over from horror to mystery, and I decided it was time to introduce my kids to Agatha Christie. We read two:
1. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie– my personal favorite, and I thought it would be a good start since it’s got a major horror trope (everyone dying one by one!) at its center. And wow, it really hit me just how many common tropes come from this book right here. I ended up getting sucked into its many many citations on TV Tropes (one trope of which– Ten Little Murder Victims– even gets its name from this book. Technically). The kids' reactions were fun– I enjoyed Maddie’s early, “They’re ALL terrible people! They ALL DESERVE to die!” And they kept making predictions and I was bursting with knowing exactly how close and/or not they were.

2. Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie–on the other hand, I actually forgot how this one ended (I remembered in PART, but ONLY in part, so it was a fun reread for me just for that). This was the first straightforward detective-interviews-suspects-and-thinks-a-lot type mystery my kids ever read, very different from their usual thriller-type reads, and I was pleased how interested they stayed regardless. Maddie was extremely satisfied with the ending. Also, when we read Truly Devious, which were the two Christie novels directly referenced in the story? These two! I kept being all, “Ah-hah, you SEE? Aren’t you glad I read those books to you?!”

Onto something completely different, 3. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman. From back in the horror era– in fact this was the very first book on my reading log spreadsheet for the year.  This is a good read-aloud: I appreciated the classic feel of the book better than I ever had, reading it in this capacity.

Moving Pictures!
I watched VERY LITTLE this year. Of course I could be missing some on account of having not kept track, but I don’t think I watched a single movie (for the first time at least), and I started several shows that I forgot to finish (granted, two of them WEREN’T finished by the end of the year). But here are the few notable exceptions:

Two I watched in full!
Muppets Mayhem, Disney+: I think I’ve said before that the Electric Mayhem is genuinely one of my favorite bands– certainly my favorite FICTIONAL band at least. So much that a friend called me out on Facebook: “You ARE watching this, aren’t you?” It managed to be the one thing I binged when I was down with COVID in July (OH! That was another happening. Apparently COVID went around Maggie’s baby shower. Sam got it there and maybe Maddie– or Maddie got it from Sam at home– then Jason got it from those two, and I think I held out because I was the only one to have gotten a booster in the past year, but finally after a week of everyone else being sick they wore me down, too). Anyway, so, the Muppets Mayhem was, like most Muppet shows, kind of a mixed bag, but it quickly became so loveable you don’t care about the weaker parts anymore. The music of course rocked, and the jokes were on the whole funny, and the Get Back episode– because of course I’m going to mention the Get Back episode– was absolutely perfect.

Only Murders in the Building, Hulu: Maybe thanks to reading so many mysteries with the kids this year, I kept having the urge to watch this again. I hadn't gotten around to watching season two, and then when I heard season three was out, I said, well that SETTLES it! And I finally binged both those seasons while making Halloween costumes. The humorous murder mystery is one of my favorite genres, but I always forget until I’m in the middle of one again!

Three I watched in part!
Loki, Disney+: It’s funny, I saw season one before I saw the Umbrella Academy, and now I was kind of curious how the TVA would hold up against the Commission in my perceptions– but Loki definitely holds its own as far as pure time hijinks go. I love time hijinks! (See #1 on the Fanfics I Wrote list for MORE fun with time hijinks!) And I love the Legionesque aesthetic of the show! It’s so many of my favorite bits of television all at once! But I started my binge of Only Murders in the middle of the season, and that put my viewing routine off-schedule, and I never caught back up…

Fargo, Hulu: another one lost to a put-off viewing routine! I saw the first episode– and it turned out two episodes dropped on the first night! But I only noticed the first one! Before I could even catch up with the second, the third dropped during Thanksgiving Vacation when everyone was home and cutting into my viewing time! So… I still have to catch up. So far from one episode, Season 5 seems more promising than Season 3 was at least, but since every season is completely different, I won’t really know until I WATCH THE REST, now, will I.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Disney+: Now, I HAVE watched every episode of this so far, primarily because Maddie won’t LET us miss a single episode, but considering it only started at the end of December, most of it has been watched THIS year. Absolutely confusing the statistics, getting this out so late! But it’s very enjoyable. Maybe I’ll say more about it in the 2024 roundup.

Top Fanfics I read!
I’m still– but more sporadically– reading Umbrella Academy fic in alphabetical order by author, so again that’s where most of what I read and bookmarked this year comes from. I thought I’d read a lot more fandoms after Christmas (when the Yuletide gifts all went online), but it turned out a) I’m still confused from writing this in mid-January, and I read a lot of the Yuletide fics in 2024; and b) I went through and marked a whole lot of Yuletide fics “For Later,” but haven’t actually gotten around to reading them yet. So those will show up next/this year, I guess. Meanwhile, here’s five non-TUA fics I did read, and loved enough to bookmark to perhaps tell you about:

Top 5 Non-Umbrella Academy fics I actually read IN 2023:
1. “No Reservations: Narnia” by Edonohana (Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations RPF, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, T, 6,228 words) – This is one of those “famous” fanfics that people-who-don’t-make-a-habit-of-fanfic-reading have read– Anthony Bourdain himself apparently read it even, and enjoyed it a lot. Someone linked to it on Tumblr and I finally joined the crowd as well– it’s great fun, imagining Bourdain and his crew exploring the cuisine and cultures of Narnia! The sensory details are exquisite. Pretty sure I smiled the whole way through.

2. “Five Subfolders of Existence” by storiesfortravellers (The Good Place (TV), T, 1,536 words) –  storiesfortravellers was my Yuletide recipient, so in deciding what to write for her I clicked to see the sort of stuff she’d written. The answer was “a lot,” so I narrowed that down to just Good Place fics, because that was, spoiler alert for the “Stuff I Wrote” section below, what she’d requested (that I could write. It was the only thing on her request list that I’d seen!). This is told in lists, a look inside Janet’s…brain seems too small of a word, but it’s a human’s feeble attempt (or not so– seems a pretty good attempt to ME) to express all that goes through Janet’s figurative head during a simple fleeting moment with Jason. It’s a fun format that manages to express a lot of emotion in a very not-a-robot way! I left a note in my bookmark to come back to kudo and comment on it later so I wouldn’t give away that someone was snooping around her old Good Place fics before the Yuletide reveals, and luckily saw that note while putting this list together so I could actually do that!
    
3. “You Can't Find the Woods (When You're Hiding in the Trees)” by panAcademic (Legion (TV), X-Men - All Media Types, M, 14,448 words so far) –New Legion fic? Is it possible? Yes! panAcademic was on a roll earlier in the year (and also incidentally inspired my own Greatest Fic of the Year see below), including this wildly layered trip through David’s system’s inner world– which, it turns out, takes place during the middle of season 2. The season that makes the least amount of sense anyway! But seriously, you’d be hard pressed to figure that out in the first few chapters, which all take place internally and are appropriately surreal. David’s got some interesting new alters with some unique roles. And I hope they keep going because supposedly when we get out in the real world we’re going to see the other characters we know and love too (ie Loudermilks). So far there’s just Lenny, but Lenny is written so very Lennyishly.

4. “1/3 Of What You're Saying” by pale_and_tragic (Only Murders in the Building (TV), T, 4,810 words) –I’d only just started my Only Murders binge when Yuletide requests went out, and I noticed a few Mabel/Theo shipping requests, and I said, “Oh, that’s an interesting ship, I can see that I guess,” but by the time I was halfway through the binge I’d decided “Oh I totally get what they’re saying now, I am fully on-board Team Theo,” and I was almost tempted to comment on all those requests congratulating them on their good taste. Anyway, this Yuletide fic is not only a lovely slow-burn Mabel/Theo friends-to-lovers, it’s also got an actual murder mystery to solve, and dream imagery, so an excellent time and my favorite of the Yuletide fics I actually READ in 2023!
    
5. “miscommunications” by carterhaugh (All the Wrong Questions - Lemony Snicket, G, 1,314 words) –  This was the Yuletide fic written specifically for ME! It’s an utterly Snickety conversation between young Lemony and Moxie from within the course of the story, all about the nature of Truth. Which is itself an extremely Snickety topic.

Top Five Returning Favorites from ANY Fandom (the ones I’ve got on Subscribe so I catch each new chapter as it comes out) that I Feel Like I Must Also Mention:

1. “When My Fist Clenches, Crack It Open” by versaphile (Legion (TV), Mature, 876,030 freakin’ words) – And that’s 229 chapters…out of 229! YES! They did it! The most epic Legion fic has come to an end at last, and if I MAY have cried a little just knowing I wouldn’t have a new chapter (particularly a new chapter involving Loudermilks that I don’t have to write myself) possibly waiting on the horizon to surprise me? Yeah, so?

2. “Through Every Open Door” by Gin_Juice (The Umbrella Academy (TV), Not Rated, 165,004 words so far) – I am reasonably certain Gin_Juice is my favorite fic writer. Every update is just pure awesome from start to finish. I haven’t even read all of her really old stuff yet! This ongoing fic is an alternate season three where, instead of eating itself up, the multiverse has started throwing up anachronisms all over reality, and there’s only one screwed up family– or two– who can fix it.

3. “Joining Together” by sharkneto (The Umbrella Academy (TV) , T, 185,149 words so far) – a physics professor takes a didn’t-get-lost-in-time Five under her wing and it’s absolutely the best thing that could happen to him. It’s a prequel to “Holding It Together” which I think made my list last year? Yes it did. Sarah and her husband Rob are seriously the most loveable OCs and deserve recognition for that.

4. “Apollo and the Aftermath” by ceruleancats (The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, T, 35,249 words so far) – Did this one make the list before? Well anyway it’s got an excellent Apollo voice narrating, and its latest developments involve Dionysis, being the god of madness, taking on the role of therapist for Apollo, which is something you didn’t know you needed to see until now, didn’t you.

5. “Little Soldiers In A Row” by damagedpickle (The Umbrella Academy (TV), M, 65,141 words so far)  –the Subscription feature is the handiest part of reading on AO3. You must subscribe to anything unfinished, no matter how long it’s been, because you never know when suddenly something will update out of nowhere (yes, everyone who’s been waiting on “Tesseract” since December of ‘21, I’m talking to you). This one pulled that on me this year, and I hadn’t linked to it in the past, so have some now, if you’d like something really depressing and angsty but in a good way! This is an AU where there are no superpowers, but Reggie adopted everyone and treated them pretty much the same way he did in the universe where they DID have superpowers, as a psychological experiment, and it’s remarkable how removing the supernatural element just makes the whole thing seem that much worse. But, you know, in a well-written way.

Top Five Umbrella Academy Fics from the TUA Masked Author event, because I reread them more times than the rest in an attempt to guess the authors (which I didn’t. Well, none of THESE five, I don’t think: I actually was like the third-best guesser overall), which gives them an unfair advantage:
1. “To Resurface an Acorn” by glimmerglue, (The Umbrella Academy (TV), G, 2,923 Words) -- So imagine that when Five takes everyone back to the ‘60s, they arrive as only voices in his head? On the plus side, they’re all together! On the downside, they’re all stuck together in one already-maddened guy’s head! There’s so much interesting potential posed in this fic! I respect the author's decision to leave it at this, but that doesn’t stop me passionately wishing for more.

2. “Grace Through the Doorway in Time, and what she found there” by Undercamel_of_Pluto, (The Umbrella Academy (TV), Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, T, 9,398 words) -- First let’s enjoy that for the second year in a row someone has chosen one of my favorite books as the framework for their TUA Masked Author piece. Then, after the author reveals, let’s appreciate that Pluto is a well-known fan ART maker, and had actually never WRITTEN (or at least posted) a fic before. But mostly, let’s appreciate this fic itself, which has ‘60s human Grace fall into a metaphorical rabbit hole that turns out to be just a totally realistic (for them) day at the Umbrella Academy, but certainly SEEMS all topsy turvy through the looking glass from her point of view! It's such a fun twist!
 
3. “Deep Down” by KawaiiCommunism, (The Umbrella Academy (TV), G, 1,035 words) – Poor Allison often gets turned into either “the mom” or “the villain” depending when a fic was written, so I found this a refreshingly balanced and believeable look inside her psyche a couple of years before the show takes place.

4. “Of Monsters and Men” by MyDarlingClementine, (The Umbrella Academy (TV), G, 1,516 words) -- An excellent exploration of character development– I know a lot of people want Five to be the uncontrollable killer he is in the comics, but I think the guy who will listen to his (still messed-up) scruples is a lot more interesting.

5. “Scales and Scars” by rebel_by_default, (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 5,708 words) – Look, this fun-yet-deep “conversation between two emotionally stunted former assassins” was on my shortlist of POSSIBLY being rebel, whose work I’ve read a great deal of, (shout out to “Life is Just This (It's Living),” which ALMOST made the below list on account of being perfect platonic 5+7 content),  I just didn't make that my final guess. I had a lot of little triangles of possible authors for possible fics and I just picked the wrong ones, you know?  

Top 10 OTHER Umbrella Academy Fics, I think, not counting ones that have continued from last year, and not counting fics with over 1,000 kudos because in effort to narrow down my options I figured they didn’t need my advertising:

1. “Certain Ends” by frimfram (The Umbrella Academy (TV), M, 20,144 words) --full disclosure, I beta’d this one, which is why I’m ranking it first: I’m not going to bother trying to be objective about it. This is a delightfully evocative Christmas Carol-full ghost story, and it didn’t get enough hits, being that it’s a Christmas story that finished updating in February. If I had gotten this roundup written AT Christmastime…! But seriously, read this one whatever time of year. The sensory details are scrumptious and spooky. And there are Muppet references.

2. “The Art of Memory” by redaurorarora (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 22,210 words) --I looked back at my bookmarks and said, “I REALLY should have sorted these better,” because I couldn’t tell which ones were REALLY GOOD vs. ones I just enjoyed a lot, to pick out which would make the list, but this bookmark was just straight up gushing so here it is. It’s a post-Season 3 reboot where Five is now apparently Reggie’s only son, and how much does he remember? The characterization is spot on, the word choices elevate everything even more. There were so many really good lines. Top of the pops.

3. “The Time Traveller's Life” by LittleRit (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 169,165 words so far. It totally just updated while I was writing this) --first longfic I tackled this year—last year—was LittleRit’s still-in-progress epic supposing what would happen if Five kept randomly and uncontrollably popping back and forth through time—how would that affect canon? How would that affect his apocalypse experience and relationship with the Commission? There are a LOT of timeline shenanigans to keep track of in this, and Rit keeps dropping in all sorts of details that suddenly mean something many chapters down the road, so, hooray for keeping that all straight!

4. “Where You Gonna Run To?” by ToriAnne (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 52,264 words so far) --It’s a what-if-they-hadn’t-been-adopted fic, but events are transpiring to bring them together anyway; and their stories for what happened with them instead all just make so much sense. I had not bookmarked this one, but as I was attempting to make this list I kept thinking “But what about that one where…?” and the clearer it was that none of the bookmarked fics fit the bill, the more I had to just dig back in my history until I found this. It sticks out that way.  
 
5. “why'd you look so tough?” by myeyesarenotblue (The Umbrella Academy (TV), G, 2,286 words) --now, I can’t speak for the writer, whom I don’t know at all, but this fic was written in between when pictures from Season 3 were being released/Viktor’s transition was announced, and when Season 3 actually came out, so I imagine they just saw those pics of freshly-transitioned Viktor and said, “Hey, it looks like he’s raided Ben’s wardrobe”—and from that tiny observation they wove this beautiful little scene of grief and self-discovery twisting together, wrapping up so many layers and tiny canon threads together in Ben’s old leather jacket I mean a story.

6. “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back” by RaspberrySwish (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 11,297 words) – Is it kind of obvious yet that I’m a big fan of absurd humor? I had forgotten this one, and ignored my bookmark, confusing it with an earlier fic I’d read, so I’m glad I clicked through to read it again just to be sure. This one supposes a hypothetical point when the Hargreeves are facing something like their seventh apocalypse and, after a stupidly entertaining scene of them making bets on what’s going to cause the next one, they decide to go back in time to when they were teenagers, murder their dad, and kidnap I mean adopt themselves. It’s ridiculous. I love it.

7. “My Brother's Brother” by spyspyspyder (The Umbrella Academy (TV), G, 1,765 words) -- yes, to my own bewilderment I’m still obsessed with the relationship between Five and Viktor—no that’s wrong. I’m bewildered by my brain’s need for them to be kissing. Their relationship IS fascinating enough platonically, and I wish I could gush about it more objectively because for some reason a lot of people just stop listening to you the moment you start shipping adoptive brothers. So I appreciate this fic so much for doing what I cannot: showing bits of that fascinating relationship through glimpses caught by other people over time, keeping it strong and inevitable and ironic but also still platonic.  I brought this up in the comments, and the author replied, “I definitely see them as two planets set to orbit each other in any universe, in whatever relationship context,” and that is so perfect and correct.

8. “(Feels Like) Heaven” by Melivian (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 34,795 words so far) --More The Good Place sneaking in to these lists, as this is a Good Place AU, and nicely done, too. The humor is spot on and appropriately quirky, and the casting fits in ways I never would have thought of. I don’t care about Klaus and Dave as a ship really—I feel like Dave was mostly in the show just to inspire Klaus to sober up—but it works perfectly and rather beautifully here as they become the Eleanor and Chidi of this neighborhood.

9. “He Sleeps with the Fishes: The Hoffa Job” by Stephsageek (The Umbrella Academy (TV), M, 29,048 words so far) –I almost forgot this one actually started this year, not last, as it’s a continuation of the series Steph started last year about Five and Lila being Commission partners pre-show era. There are so many moving pieces in this absurd encounter (multi-chapter, but it’s all happening in one scene, basically!), including a cameo by Carrie Fisher; and she keeps hinting there’s a sea monster, too, but the sea monster hasn’t shown up yet.

10. “Learning Fear” by Repeatinglitanies (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 30,638 words) --now this is unabashedly a Fiktor fik (or Fiveya, it’s from 2019), but almost—almost!—incidentally: there are cults and vigilantes and completely chaotic convergences of secret organizations! I did not expect a “Five-and-Vanya-raised-separately-meet-as-teenagers-and-bond-while-trick-or-treating” to develop into the wild ride this one turned into. It makes the list on uniqueness alone. Again with the absurdity. I have a (story) type.

Stuff I wrote!  

Stuff I Wrote, Here on Dreamwidth Edition: Only my “Dear Yuletide Writer” Letter, designed to give whoever was assigned to me for Yuletide an idea of what I’d like. The way Yuletide works is, starting in September or October, they collect nominations of “Rare” fandoms, then put out the list, and you have to choose between 3 to 5 fandoms that you’d like someone to write for YOU, and then you ALSO choose between 5-10 that you would be willing to write for OTHER people. But you only write a letter about your requests, since what you WRITE will be a surprise. Anyway, I nominated, requested AND offered Legion, just because the idea of someone ELSE writing Loudermilk fic for me to read was so lovely; but then I saw someone had nominated Sal and Gabi??!?!?!?!?! I wish I knew who, because in the end nobody else requested or even offered that one, and there ISN’T any fic already written, and I CAN’T write it myself because I am not fluent enough (at all) in Cuban-American Spanglish to do Sal’s voice justice! SIGH, I want more Sal and Gabi in my life. I did finally match on my THIRD choice, though, as you saw above, and incidentally was assigned something I only offered, not requested, because I figured enough other people would request it because it apparently only still qualified because half its fics on AO3 were less than 1000 words, but SEE BELOW…

Stuff I Wrote, GeekMom Edition: Um, I occasionally participated in the threads in the GeekMom Talk Facebook Group. Do you think if I ever get the motivation to write something GeekMommish again, they’ll take me back?

Stuff I Wrote, Fanfic Edition:

1. “The Magic Man of Oz” (Legion (TV), T, 15,004 words, but only 9,000 of those words are story, the rest are bonus features, so you can skip those if you want) – This is my masterpiece of the year, and it breaks my heart there aren’t more people who can appreciate it! Someone on the Legion fan Discord server posed the idea of a Wizard of Oz AU, and we all started casting the characters, and as soon as someone suggested that Oliver should be the narrator I HAD TO WRITE IT. I worked really hard! Legion meshed beautifully into the Wizard of Oz! Oliver as narrator made it cracky and 4th-wall-breaking! The union of Flying Monkeys and Time Eaters made for the most tripped-out wild fight scene I have ever attempted to write! Please, please, send this to everyone you know who has watched all three seasons of Legion for best effect but you know what my beta reader hasn’t watched ANY Legion and still enjoyed it so MAYBE YOU WILL TOO! (I even wrote an Answer Key to explain all the references, if it helps!)

2. “In Which Jason and Chidi Rob a Bank” (The Good Place (TV), G, 2,785 words) – Now, if you want something a little more mainstream... I say jokingly, as yes THIS was my Yuletide assignment. YEAH I KNOW, rare? But I’m not going to argue, as I’ve always wanted to write the novelization of this show, and when I got into the writing I was honestly surprised I HADN’T ACTUALLY written any of these characters (except Vicky oddly enough) before, because it felt so natural! The recipient wanted something about Jason and Chidi, so I asked the kids what Jason and Chidi should DO together, and Maddie said “They rob a bank” and that WORKS. I LOVE this absurd show! Anyway, to my absolute delight, not only the recipient but also LOADS OF OTHER PEOPLE loved it, leaving comments to the effect of “This is like watching an episode of the show!” which has to be one of the highest compliments a fanfic writer can receive. And in just the short time since Christmas, it has already become my second-highest kudoed fic ever! But don’t let that keep you from reading it, too! It is, if I do say so myself (because lots of other people said so!) quite funny.

3. “A Captain With Seven Children...What's So Fearsome About That?” (The Sound of Music - Rodgers/Hammerstein/Lindsay & Crouse, The Umbrella Academy (TV), G, 14,754 total so far but that’s 3,354 words posted this year)   – Before “The Magic Man of Oz,” this was my I-worked-really-hard-please-appreciate-this Masterpiece of the year– not the first three chapters, which you might have read last year (and WERE pretty good, dangit, so if you haven’t read them you can do that now, this is one you actually DON’T need prior canon knowledge to appreciate), but the FOURTH chapter, finished and posted THIS year: “High on a Roof Stood a Lonely Seven,” which is the Big Turning Point in the Story, in which Maria’s meddling pays off and the Big Secret about Viktor-then-Vanya blasts its way out into the open! I mentioned the unusual fight scene in “Magic Man,” but THIS was the work for which I first had to teach myself how to write fight scenes in the first place! Still a highly unusual fight scene (if not as unusual as the one in “Magic Man”)-- I don’t think I COULD write a NOT-unusual fight scene. Why bother if you’re not going to go all out?

4. “How to Catch Up with your Therapist after a Couple of...Busy Months” (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 9,322 words) And before I participated in Yuletide, I joined a totally different fanfic event, The Umbrella Academy Masked Author event (where people had to guess the originally anonymous authors)! And because I didn’t have time to get to a completely NEW fic to submit, I ended up submitting something I had already vaguely alluded to writing on the TUA fan Discord server, convinced my General Invisibility would keep anyone else from remembering (though one person, who wasn’t actually participating, DID therefore guess by title alone!). There’s a line in the next fic on this list implying that Viktor convinced Five to start seeing his old therapist, and when I wrote it I went “Wait, that implies VIKTOR is HIMSELF seeing his old therapist again. Bet THAT was an interesting catch-up session.” So I wrote it out, a basic dialogue between the two, Viktor describing the whole first three seasons of the show from his own viewpoint, and the therapist getting more and more shell-shocked. By the end I figure it may be just as difficult to convince the therapist to take Five on as a patient as it would be to convince Five to see her, and that’s saying something.

5. “Morning-After Meltdowns” (The Umbrella Academy (TV), M, 3,930 words) – So right, I’ve grown no less obsessed with this non-canonical pairing between adoptive siblings, and the joy of working with two highly-emotionally-repressed characters is figuring out how to get them to actually admit anything to each other. Last year I wrote a flashback-induced mind-meld; this year I took the more realistic path of drunk sex (which also theoretically takes place the night of the flashback-induced mind-meld). As usual, I do not write onscreen smut, so sorry– it’s basically trying to piece together in the morning what happened to get them into this place the night before. It’s much better than the title. And I hated the title I first posted it with even more.

6. “Anonymous: Renegade Teenage Hormones” (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T though the second chapter should probably be M, 5,688 words) – Okay, this one is STILL on AO3 anonymously because I don’t necessarily want someone seeing it on my dashboard without warning. This is me giving you warning!* It’s still not smut, but when you obsessively ship messed-up-adoptive-siblings sometimes you do have to read smut in order to get your fill, and this story was inspired by– in fact is a direct sequel to– someone else’s story that was apparently written to fill a Kink Meme. But that story was (I know this may be shocking to some people) technically a scene from a theoretical YA novel! It was the sort of awkward thing that would HAPPEN to a couple of horny teenagers (when the story took place) in a YA story, and I couldn’t help pondering the awkward teenaged angst that would surely transpire the next day. And so I wrote it! I just didn’t want a link to a Kink Meme right on my AO3 front page so you'll have to get it this way!  
 
7. “Not Just Stupid Kids” (The Umbrella Academy (TV), T, 5,388 words total but just 1,025 posted this year) -- And last year’s FIRST venture into Fiktor-writing bumped back up my recently-posted list this year, again because I was reading someone else’s fic and got, not what happened next, but what happened before in my head, so right in the comments I started writing this little scene of Klaus taking advantage of that nice long Pennsylvania Roadtrip to needle Five over/fish for clues about his feelings toward Viktor’s announcement, but then I decided it fit nicely into THIS fic, too, as a BONUS SCENE taking place soon after the first chapter! I was surprised that this was the most of adult Klaus I’d ever written, too. Some characters just have voices that flow.

8. “The Pipeweed Mafia Epic” (The Lord of the Rings RPF, The Hobbit RPF, Inklings RPF, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, T, 8,986 words) – YES, THIS IS IT, the Infamous Pipeweed Mafia Epic! I got bored, and since I figured out how Real Person Fic worked on AO3 (and considered there were FAR worse things done with the real people in AO3’s RPF collection than just drug dealing and putting Andy Serkis in a coma), I figured I would finally put it up for the world. With a few additional lines added, too! Not remotely COMPLETE or anything. It probably never will be. But this was the silliness I started writing to prompts on the day Diana Wynne Jones died, convincing me that I COULD write again, if I just allowed myself to stop taking everything so seriously! It’s incomplete nonsense, but it’s MY incomplete nonsense! And there’s an Aslan in a Bucket!

*By the way, you do realize this post is full of a WIDE VARIETY of appropriate-for-audience ratings, right? Please mind the ratings! Just because I reviewed Mr. Kitty is LOST! does not mean EVERYTHING on these lists is appropriate for fans of Mr. Kitty is LOST!

Works in Progress
As I did last year, I filled out an “AO3 Writer Wrapped” on Tumblr that went into statistics and favorites and things about the years’ works in a little more detail. I answered a question about Works in Progress there that was pretty much the SAME works in progress I had LAST year, but I’d like to add at least one more here:

I spotted a Yuletide request that made all the neurons in my brain light up at the same time, and said, “Oh I HAVE to write that one: if I don’t get assigned to, I’m writing it up as a Bonus Treat!” I didn’t finish it in time to post with the rest of the Yuletide gifts (I barely finished my ASSIGNED fic in time), and then I had those Computer Issues, but this is really cool and I’m pretty much called to write it– it’s based on a picture book, relatively well-known in kidlit circles but not so much in the Outside World, and is exactly the sort of twisted brain challenge I am so excited by after writing “The Magic Man of Oz.” I will say no more than that since it’s still technically a gift, but I am really excited about it, and I’m sure you’ll see it soon! Well, relatively soon. For me.


So, as usual, that’s the round up! I know it’s long, but please comment and chat with me about anything here that caught your attention!

Real Life Stuff

 Life Events In Mostly Chronological Order

 1. In March, while the library was in another period of Curbside Only Services, I was weeding the juvenile nonfiction section with the aid of a rolling stool— for sitting, not standing— but nonetheless I SAT on it wrong, it shot out from under me, throwing me backward into the bookshelves where I conked my head and got a concussion. So whoo, me.

 2. So, like, I’m enough of an out of shape klutz that I don’t need to take any MORE avoidable risks with my health, so as soon as we each were able to— the youngest turned 12 just days before vaccines opened for 12yos!— we all got vaccinated against Covid-19, and just in time, because I surely would not have felt comfortable with the next item on this list if we hadn’t been:

 3. In June we drove down to Jacksonville, FL, home of the immortal Jason Mendoza, to visit with my sister-in-law and her family. The little cousins loved the big cousins something fierce. We took some hikes, went to the beach and got really really sunburnt, and took a day trip a little further south to see the Daytona Speedway— which turned out to be interesting even for the non-car-people among us, but was heaven for Sam— and St. Augustine, which I enjoyed more than the rest of my family, although we all enjoyed Cousteau’s, a waffles-and-ice-cream place.

 4. Then in August we FINALLY went camping again after two years missing it, to Gettysburg. We took lots of tours, which reminded me of my dad, who used to be able to GIVE most of those tours by heart— except for the Ghost Tour, which I’d never done before, and proved to be really interesting!

 5. But generally, health around here kind of sucks, mental health particularly. Maddie’s anxiety is at crisis levels but it’s hard to get help when EVERYONE is stressed and all the potential resources have enough else to be dealing with, anyway. Which includes me. Honestly, I could use some help. But so could EVERYONE, so how can I even ask? But maybe being stressed is why Maddie and I have both been the ones in this household to get Breakthrough Covid… TWICE. At least, assumed twice. The first time, in October, I tested positive and Maddie tested negative, although we had the exact same symptoms. The second time, this past WEEK, MADDIE tested positive and I tested negative, although Maddie is much sicker than I am. But NEITHER of us got as sick as we COULD have gotten, because VACCINES DO WORK, DANGIT— maybe they didn’t stop us getting sick, but they DID stop us getting BADLY sick. In fact if this WASN’T a pandemic, none of my symptoms either time might have even convinced me to call off work, that’s how mild they were. Maddie’s current bout is definitely miserable sounding, at least, but no worse than a bad cold. GET VACCINATED.

Christmas

 This is usually the portion of the roundup where I go into everyone’s Christmas Loot for the year, but nothing’s jumping out as particularly exciting. I’ve gotten lots of nice sweaters. I made clothes for people, as usual, too, including a wolf hoodie for Maddie, and then I had a lot of faux-wolf-fur left over so I made another for little cousin Max, so that Max can wear his wolf suit and make mischief of one kind and another (Max really is a wild thing, it’s very appropriate). He looks pretty cute in it, according to the picture I was sent, because while we were supposed to have Christmas with J’s side of the family on Monday, by then Maddie had already tested positive, and although Max is a wild thing, he is too little to be vaccinated and he has asthma, too, so we couldn’t risk it. My family, on the other hand, was supposed to get together on Christmas Eve, but even before Maddie got sick, my sister postponed that one because, although SHE felt fine, there had just been a massive Covid outbreak at her workplace. She never did test positive, herself, but it turned out to be for the best since Maddie ended up getting sick the day before Christmas Eve! So as of this writing, we have not yet had Christmas with the Matviyas. But we WILL! It’s only been postponed! We’re getting the full twelve days and more out of this Christmas, I tell you!

  Library Happenings

Stuff that Happened With the Library, Besides Me Bumping My Head, In Not Exactly Chronological Order:

 1. At the beginning of the year we were in Curbside mode, which meant no in-person programs, which meant still lots of video programs! I don’t know if I mentioned last year that the children’s department was switching off Saturday video storytimes, too? Anyway, that was how I squeezed in my annual Mock Caldecott, through my January “Saturday Family Storytime” slot. I only got three responses, including my own, but that was enough to name a clear winner (The Oldest Student, see below for more reviewiness) AND a clear Honor book (We Are Water Protectors, which of course went on to win the REAL Caldecott and which I reviewed in LAST year’s roundup. Oh yeah, and I did use it for Mundo later, but in March, not April, for "World Water Day").

List within a list: My Top Only 5 Saturday Family story time videos!

1. Mock Caldecott 
2. Happy Birthday Fred Rogers! 
3. World Whale Day  These last three are kind of tied for third place, but the Whale one got two Likes on YouTube…
4. Earth Haiku  …The Haiku one Like…
5. Pets  …and this one no Likes EVEN THOUGH IT’S QUITE NICE ENOUGH THANKS, so I’ll just let the discerning public put them in this order, here.

 2. I also took the Bedtime Stories video for the Spring season, then Anne took it over in June, but she left in October so now I’m doing Bedtime Stories again. Here’s a link to the entire Bedtime Stories playlist, because none of them are sticking out enough for me to pick my top five.

3. But in June, the library opened up to limited in-person services again, and most earth-shakingly, the whole Childrens/YA Department moved downstairs to the main floor. YA got tagged onto the end of the Adult books, and Children’s moved into the downstairs meeting room. The idea is of course to save money by only having the upstairs open for special occasions— now EVERYTHING is a meeting room— and because we’ve been short-staffed, we don’t have to worry about staffing upstairs, or just one person being upstairs alone which is a safety concern (and I’m worried my concussion might have had something to do with pounding that line of thinking in, because I HAD been up there alone and it WAS just luck that someone else happened to come up within minutes for me to say “help” to). Our director did her best to spin this as a positive move, but after half a year I’m still convinced it sucks. Teens no longer have their safe hangout space (not that indoor hangout spaces are currently safe at all, but POST-pandemic!), and small children don’t have the same freedom to be kids (ie, loud), butted right up next to the quiet grownup library like this. And there’s no more play area, which has disappointed many a group of young visitors and their harried grownups— which, again, is understandable in a pandemic, but AFTER??? And most selfishly, I used to RULE the upstairs. I knew where everything was and what to do in every situation and ALL THE BOOKS— but now I’m in the Grownup section, because there’s no reference desk in the new children’s room, and yes I get to help people with children’s stuff occasionally but I mostly have to do grownup stuff which is NOT my area of expertise, and I STILL don’t know where everything is (not book-wise, I know where the books are; but like, where-is-the-masking-tape-stored-wise) or all the grownup desk policies after half a year and I JUST MISS having a whole children’s library, OKAY?

 4. In person programs also returned, though during the summer we had the benefit of doing them all outside. “Outside,” though, was a park ten minutes away. This wasn’t a problem for the Summer Quest camp so much, because it’s a big enough deal that people sought it out, but I supposedly had an evening storytime at the park this summer, too. No one EVER came. I couldn’t even get rare passers-by to come. But come fall, we’re back indoors, in the now wide-open upstairs “meeting rooms,” in which I took up Yoga Storytime on Monday mornings again, and started a Thursday morning storytime that our director really wanted to be INTERACTIVE!!! and Ms Barb and I were like Isn’t that what we already DO? but anyhoo so I put together a booklist that really leaned INTO interactiveness and for about a month I did that and it was great fun, but then we had like a mass exodus of staff and no longer had enough staff to HAVE Thursday story times, so that was that.

 5. I also staffed two EVENT programs this fall for which I got to dress in costume. Wait, THREE event programs, but I reused the first costume for the second. Fan Fest, our library Not-ComiCon, came back, and I made an awesome Squirrel Girl costume, and manned a Shrinky-Dink making room. Then I wore Squirrel Girl again for our Halloween walk-through trick-or-treat. Then we had storytime with Mrs. Claus, and guess who was Mrs. Claus! (sorry, no pic). Fun stuff. But is it a coincidence that BOTH my bouts of breakthrough Covid set in within a week of both Fan Fest and Mrs. Claus’s storytime? HMMMMM.

And most importantly, library-relatedly:

 Top 5 Mundo Monday Episodes!

I thought maybe I’d do a top 10 for Mundo since I love them all so much, but it turned out there were exactly five in the Must Include category before I got into a much murkier which-ones-are-REALLY-the-best next five, so top 5 is what you get. I mean, watch all of them, I worked really hard, but here’s the cream of the crop:

 1. "Everybody Counts"  As soon as I started flipping through this wild Norwegian “counting book” I knew I needed to use it on Mundo, but how? It’s a complicated seek-and-find you can study for hours? That didn’t stop me giving at least an OVERVIEW (for half an hour) of how it works! It’s super fun, and now you need to find the book yourself so you can find all the secrets and hidden storylines and so forth!

2. "Dayenu!"  This was pure joy to make. I THINK I’d heard this traditional Passover song before, but I had to look it up first— whew, good thing I didn’t have to do it ALL in Hebrew!— but then I got the hang of it and learned to harmonize with myself (and WHY the heck did I give Mundo such a high-pitched voice!) and it’s just a very joyful video, you should watch it just to smile.

3. "Black History Month"  The endpapers of today’s book, Carter Reads the Newspaper, are stuffed full with Black historical icons, and librarian that I am, I felt compelled to identify every one and tie them— when possible— to at least one other book we have in the library. SO many great stories! You will learn (just hints of) so much!

4. "Celebrate Your Name"  When you grow up in the 1980s with a name like “Amy Matviya”— a first name second only to “Jennifer” in commonness, a last name unpronounceable by pretty much everyone you meet— you have a lot of feelings about names. When I found out “Celebrate Your Name Week” exists, I KNEW it had to be a Mundo episode, with Alma and Your Name Is a Song being such perfect stories for it. AND THEN, someone took out Your Name is a Song and KEPT IT OVERDUE! “Celebrate Your Name Week” was technically long gone by the time I got my hands on it, but I made this video anyway, because NAMES!

5. "Going to School"  Mundo went to once a month in the fall, and the videos were allowed to be longer, too (”Everybody Counts” and “Black History Month” were outliers in the earlier part of the year because I JUST COULDN’T HELP IT), so I got to use more books. My First Day had JUST arrived and I stole it before it even finished going through processing, because it was such a perfect opener. Then I found This Is the Way We Go To School which was PERFECT, thematically, but it was also thirty years old, and I could already see at first glance-through that some of it was out of date (THERE WAS STILL A USSR!), so I ended up doing a lot of research so I could annotate with updated information and that was very interesting!

 So we’re not doing Mundo anymore in the coming year, because it takes up too much time now that we’re back to in-person services AND short-staffed, but honestly, I wonder if this might not be my calling? Sharing stories through education and puppetry? I mean my whole working for Sesame Street obsession paired with my story obsession? I was listening to Matt Vogel’s Below the Frame podcast (which I mentioned last year) a few weeks back and, you know, a lot of his guests do several different things for Sesame Street and/or whatever, most commonly puppeteers AND writers, and one of them a few weeks ago said something like, “Well, I had experience writing for puppets,” and I was like THAT’S A THING!?! I now have experience writing for puppets! And truly I’m only middling at puppeteering and video editing and acting on camera, but if I could get a real job WRITING something like Mundo Monday, I mean, that’s what I’m aiming for, isn’t it? 

 But in the meantime, speaking of sharing stories:

  Media Reviews

BOOKS:

Top 5 2021 Picture Books

1. My First Day, by Phung Nguyen Quang and Huynh Kim Lien. I bought this Vietnamese book with the thought of possibly using it for Mundo, and it really did come right on time and was PERFECT for opening the “Going to School” episode. I love how the whole journey is told through school metaphors, even though it doesn’t explicitly SAY that’s where he’s going until he gets there. I love the pictures so animated and flowing!

2. The Rock from the Sky, written and illustrated by Jon Klassen. Have I mentioned lately that I love Jon Klassen? I love Jon Klassen. I love the way his seemingly simple illustrations have such hilarious expression. I love the dry, absurdist humor. I love that his vision exists in the world.    

3. Milo Imagines the World, written by Matt de la Pena, illustrated by Christian Robinson. Have you seen that Christian Robinson has designed a whole line of kids decor and junk for Target this year?  That’s awesome. Christian Robinson needs to be all mainstream like that. I meant to use this for Mundo sometime, but never got the chance.

4. Wonder Walkers, written and illustrated by Micha Archer. This would have been a perfect book to use at my outdoor summer storytime, if anyone had shown up. I probably like this best of all Archer’s books I’ve seen. A lot of them seem too sentimental to me, but the level of, well, wonder in this one is just right.

5. The Octopus Escapes, written by Maile Meloy, illustrated by Felicita Sala. I brought this to Florida to read to J's nephews. They ARE like escaping octopuses.     

Top 5 2020 Picture Books I Crammed in January In Prep For the Mock Caldecott even though it was just a video this year                              

1. In a Jar, written and illustrated by Deborah Marcero. I love this delightful friendship fantasy so much— I mean described like that you already know it’s my sort of book: Delightful. Friendship. Fantasy! I stubbornly dragged a box of jars (and this book) to the park story time every week hoping someone would show and we could make Memory Jars together.

2. If You Come to Earth, written and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. She may already be a multiple Caldecott-er, but I’m not really a huge Blackall fan generally. THIS book, though, is epic! It’s basically a letter to potential alien visitors about what to expect from our weird human society, and it’s ironic that THIS one isn’t one of her winners, because the pictures do a LOT.    

3. The Old Truck, by Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey. I mistakenly judged this by its cover until multiple mock Caldecott lists made me open it! The artwork is actually made with handmade stamps, which is kind of mindblowing when you see it. And the story itself is beautifully circular between a girl and the truck.

4. The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read, written by Rita Lorraine Hubbard, illustrated by Oge Mora. I love Oge Mora so much, the marvelous things she does with collage! This as I said WON our Mock Caldecott, and I don’t know how much that has to do with my glowing description in the video. I mean I tried to be balanced about every book and what was Caldecott-worthy about it, but it’s possible I wasn’t ENTIRELY objective in my enthusiasm!   

5. Honeybee: the busy life of Apis Mellifera, written by Candace Fleming, illustrated by Eric Rohmann. No shade to him but I actually liked the words better than the pictures in this Mock Caldecott hopeful— they caught the FEEL of bee life! It’s the sort of nonfiction that reminds you that just because something is factual doesn’t mean it can’t be art.                                   

Top 5 Older than 2021 (and some might be 2020 but I didn’t read them for the Mock Caldecott) Picture Books I First Read This Year

1. Everybody Counts: A Counting Story from 0 to 7.5 Billion, written and illustrated by Kristin Roskifte. This book is just mindboggling. And hilarious. It starts out looking so simple and then you start to see how it all intersects, and HOW many stories are playing out in the background, and even when you turn to the so-called “Answers” page it gives you even MORE to discover. I have scanned and studied each page for that Mundo episode and I’m still certain I’ve missed a lot.

2. Tiny Feet Between the Mountains, written and illustrated by Hanna Cha. Actually, I’m almost certain I read this last year but forgot to put it on the spreadsheet, so it didn’t make last year’s roundup. Which is WRONG because it's delightful and definitely one of my recent favorites! I read it in my “Not So Scary Scary Beasts” Mundo episode, which was definitely a contender in the possible top ten Mundo episodes, along with The Girl and the Wolf which just missed making THIS list, but hah I just snuck it in now, look at that.    

3. The Boring Book, by Shinsuke Yoshitake. This isn’t actually a boring book, although it might be mistaken for such at first glance since it’s a little wordier than most modern American picture books (this is from Japan. I’ve got a lot of imports in these lists today! So far we’ve had Vietnam, Norway, and Japan. We’ve got Canada, Australia, and the UK coming up, too, but I guess those don’t count so much since they didn’t have to be translated!). It’s subversive. I cackled aloud sometimes. I read it in a Bedtime Stories video to allegedly put my audience to sleep.     

4. My bed: enchanting ways to fall asleep around the world, by Rebecca Bond, illustrated by Salley Mavor. Speaking of which, this was actually the FIRST book I read for Bedtime Stories. I was kind of channelling Mundo into it since it’s a Mundo-like subject in a bedtime book. I am most taken not with the words, though, as much as the very pretty handsewn models that make up the illustrations.

5. What's My Superpower? By Aviaq Johnston, illustrated by Tim Mack. Here’s the Canadian one— Inuk, specifically. I have used so many books from this publisher, Inhabit Media, which specializes in Inuit authors and storytellers, in my Mundo vids. This one isn’t, like, an Inuit folktale or anything though, it’s a modern story that just happens to take place in an Inuit community— but I still finally found a place for it in my “You Matter” Mundo episode! I love me a super-positive character that’s written in a fun way— Janet from The Good Place? SQUIRREL GIRL? Which, speaking of which, positivity IS really Squirrel Girl's true superpower, what she actually uses to defeat bad guys, so maybe this story’s heroine isn’t so far from being a superhero after all.

Top 5 Longer than Picture Books of 2021

 1. The Stolen Prince of Cloudburst, by Jaclyn Moriarty (and this is the Australian one). I am convinced more all the time that Jaclyn Moriarty is a kindred spirit and also totally has ADHD. That’s part of where that comes from, of course. I feel like she really ought to be my best friend. The latest Kingdoms and Empires book to hit American shores (there’s apparently a newer one out in Australia ALREADY though!), and it’s as unexpected as all the rest, making me laugh and cry in equal measure.

2. Amari and the Night Brothers, by B.B Alston. This was sold to me as “A Wrinkle In Time meets Men in Black,” and I can see both influences. It also feels a lot like those certain boy wizard books in tone, and will most definitely appeal to fans of the same. Honestly, it just feels like a Classic, and I feel like I’ve been TRYING to get everybody at the library to try it without success, which is wrong, because it NEEDS to be a story every fantasy-loving kid reads!          

3. Broken (in the best possible way), by Jenny Lawson. Somebody snuck a grownup book in here! But who isn’t a fan of Jenny and her equally-ADHD twistedness, though ADHD is the least of her issues…which of course is the point of the book, finding humor in even the darkest places. I laughed out loud more at this one than I had at Furiously Happy, but not quite as much as Let’s Pretend This Never Happened— but that’s still an awful lot!

4. City of the Plague God, by Sarwat Chadda. There’s a last-minute author’s note at the beginning saying we totally didn’t mean to release this book about a supernatural pandemic during an actual pandemic, but, um, here it is? And okay, the real-life parallels occasionally inspired shrieking in my audience! And the magical plague-ending was far too good to be true! But this was a fun read regardless, full of cool Mesopotamian myth and creative twists-- you just have to imagine it happening in a parallel universe that hasn’t gone through the past two years. Note: his sequel, which is something about a Chaos God, is still set for upcoming release and I’m like, Can you just, maybe, NOT? Just in case??

5. Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom, by Sangu Mandanna. The last import on the list, the UK one. It involves Indian mythology, but being that we’ve been reading all the Aru Shah books (the latest of which JUST missed this list), that feels more familiar than the Britishness does! Unfortunately the MOST familiar thing about this book is that it’s about a young artist with severe anxiety, like someone else I know. But it’s delightful fun nonetheless, except for ONE particular loss that made Maddie up and say, “Okay, I don’t like this book anymore!” No really, it’s good.        

Top 10 Longer than Picture Books Older Than 2021 I First Read In 2021, because the last six are pretty much tied for fifth place.

1. Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History, written and illustrated by Vashti Harrison. It’s a collection of one-page biographies, written on a simple reading level and each illustrated with rather chibi-esque portraits, which is why it’s mindblowing how much genuinely fascinating information she managed to cram into each one. I was just looking up a few of the people for my Black History Month video (see above) and got sucked in. I kept saying WHOA! and REALLY? I need to get the rest of the series now.

2. Tristan Strong Destroys the World, by Kwame Mbalia. Loved it maybe more than the first one. Also cried again. The power of STORIES!!! And there’s still Gum Baby!

3. The Witch's Boy, by Kelly Barnhill. For some reason we had two copies of this at the library— I think I bought it twice by accident— and in the process of moving everything downstairs I had to weed one copy out, and since it seemed like something my kids might like I kept it for myself. Then promptly forgot I’d done so until we needed a new book days before my next library shift, and then it was like, Oh, hey, look at this! A unique sort of fantasy, and some of the imagery still pops into my head without prompting months later.     

4. Ghosts of Greenglass House, by Kate Milford. Maddie brought the first book up in conversation right at the beginning of Advent, and I went, hey, there’s other books in that series, and the sequel takes place at Christmas, too, want me to pick it up for us? That was a yes. So we read it this past month by our tree, and I kept seeing stuff about the Waits everywhere, and it was great fun, possibly even more than the first one?

5. When You Trap a Tiger, by Tae Keller. I was all Hey kids, let’s read the Newbery winner, it’s a fantasy for once! It’s actually more magic realism than fantasy, but I for one really appreciated that the tiger WAS real (though a ghost), not just a dream or hallucination, at least.  

6. The Ambrose Deception, by Emily Ecton. One of Maddie’s online friends recommended this, so Maddie was like, Hey, can we read this book? And I was like, I’m pretty sure we have that at the library, I’ll bring it home. And it’s a lot of fun, a quirky, Westing Game-like puzzle mystery. It really should get more attention!

7-9. The Kane Chronicles, by Rick Riordan. What? A Riordan series we hadn’t yet read? We quickly fixed that once Maddie got the whole series as a birthday gift. Or Christmas gift. Some kind of gift? Must have been birthday, because we were reading one of them on the Jacksonville trip in June. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I went in afraid these would feel formulaic— Percy Jackson but with EGYPTIAN gods!— but he really did shake things up enough that it felt exciting and new and just as much fun as his other books.

10. Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh. Another grownup book! Which is also another humorous memoir from an ADHD woman with mental health issues! This one was somehow both simultaneously funnier and sadder than Hyperbole and a Half was— she was clearly writing out of a very dark time, but found the humor in it nonetheless. And the funny bits were REALLY wheeze-inducing funny.     

Top 3 Rereading Experiences, because although I’ve reread many books for storytime, none of them are sticking out, so I’ll just go with what I reread with MY kids:

The Dark is Rising series, starting with The Dark Is Rising, because we actually started it at the end of last year and it’s another Christmas-set book. I forgot how trippy some of these books get! Love it. And I don’t get why The Grey King won the Newbery because it’s actually the most boring book in the series. Silver on the Tree is wild, though. That one should have won instead. Yes I know it doesn’t work that way.

Nation by Terry Pratchett. Okay, I remembered objectively that this was a great book, but when I read it again to the kids? OH, this IS a GREAT book. Intense and devastating yet humorous and hopeful. This was the only book on this year’s BookRiot spreadsheet that I gave a full five-star rating to. I’m stingy that way. But books don’t get much better than this!

 The Graveyard Book, which I think we started during our first covid isolation when I couldn’t go out and GET a book so I checked what was available on Libby that they might like? And it was Halloweeny, too!

 MOVING VISUAL MEDIA

 I had to make a spreadsheet to figure out how to sort these! There was overlap between movies and series, not enough “returning favorites” to make that a separate category; I thought of splitting them by streaming service but Disney+ dominated and we got ONE count em ONE DVD out of the library… anyway I’m going to go with “Movie,” “Limited Series”— for multipart movies and series that aren’t coming in multiple seasons; and “Series,” because that seemed to work out most evenly, giving lists of five that weren’t unfairly excluding anything super important.

Movies

1. Tick Tick Boom (Netflix)—  Confession: I never got into Rent. It hit just as I was getting OUT of my Broadway Musicals Phase. So I didn’t go into this with any preconceived feelings toward Jonathan Larson, it just seemed interesting. And I unabashedly loved it. I loved the storytelling of it— the narration stringing together the scenes acting it out; I loved the music— better than anything from Rent, I thought actually (*gasp*); I laughed and cried! I’m kind of freaked out that he wrote about feeling like a time bomb was ticking down in his brain and that actually turned out to be basically true! It was wonderful, I definitely recommend checking this one out.

2. Muppets Most Wanted (Disney+)— I never got around to actually seeing this when it was new, which I feel mildly guilty about because apparently that was a common thing and the movie bombed at the box office even though it is both objectively and subjectively better than The Muppets 2011 was. It was delightful, hilarious, and actually focused more on the Muppets than on the humans, yay.

3. Captain Marvel (Disney+)— I forget what I was doing when I went through catching up a bunch of Marvel movies on Disney+ that I’d missed. It turned out I enjoyed this one the most— I honestly thought I’d be into the Ant Man movies but they ended up getting kicked off this list by Encanto this week because the only really memorable part of them was Luis— yeah, he really is the best and should narrate everything— but when I went from them to Captain Marvel something switched in my head and went, “Yeah, this is more like it.” And I don’t know why! It just gelled more for me! Also, Coulson was in it. I miss him. Is this the first year in a long while I haven’t had a season of Agents of SHIELD in this roundup? But oddly, both this and the Ant Man movies both filled in backstory I was missing when I watched WandaVision (see below), AND ended up adding detail to a fanfic I would start writing even later in the year (see belower). Turns out the Marvel parts of that story would be influenced most by Agent Carter, Ant Man, and Captain Marvel. Who knew.

4. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (the library)— it’s weird how long it takes to get around to something when it isn’t on your streaming services. Sam has been saying, “Why haven’t we watched the 2nd Lego Movie yet?” for YEARS. Or, since whenever this came out. I FINALLY brought it home from the library one day and we FINALLY sat and watched it and it’s ALMOST as good as the first one. Also the mom is played by the Judge from The Good Place, which totally went right over the kids’ heads.

5. Encanto (Disney+)— Maddie had seen bits and pieces of things online, so when we found ourselves stuck at home on Christmas Eve and decided to watch a movie, Maddie demanded this one! It was fun and visually stunning, though maybe not the most memorable of recent Disney movies on the whole. But we enjoyed it a lot, and Maddie is obsessed. 

Limited Series

1. Get Back (Disney+)—You’d think Beatles things wouldn’t excite me any more. I’ve seen it all, I know it all? But there was stuff in this that felt new anyway! And it was great just to sit there being there with them! And funny to watch them just working out songs that I have so memorized, like, how do they not know the words to this one? Oh because they HAVEN’T WRITTEN THEM YET. And I kind of dug having so many other non-Beatlemaniacs getting into this at the same time. This guy came into the library, rough-looking older man who doesn’t know how to wear a mask correctly, but he checked out the companion book to this special and I said, “Oh, I was just watching that before I came here today!” and we got into an enthusiastic discussion about it— who would have thought we’d have anything to talk about? 

2. WandaVision (Disney+)— Oh yeah, my kind of TV show. If anything I wanted it to be WEIRDER (I am a Legion fan, after all). But the way they played with genre and format for the sake of telling a particular story was totally awesome. And I loved the eerie theme music at the end so much I’d sit and watch the whole credits every time even though they were really long— besides, I was never ready for the episode to be over!

3. McCartney 321 (Hulu)— Speaking of which, when this ended I also went “that’s all? No, I want more! So what if it’s just my favorite composer talking about his songs, he has A LOT MORE SONGS STILL!” I read a review that said, “This is for the real music/Beatle/McCartney nerds out there,” and I was like, “Whelp, that’s ME!”

4. Over the Garden Wall (Hulu)— No wait, this we definitely watched in place of our evening read-aloud during the covid quarantine in October, the nights my voice was too scratchy to read. I was like, “I’ve always heard this was good and perfect for Halloween-time,” but I must say I didn’t know what we were getting into. It was very funny and very weird, and Sam’s review sums it up best: “I have no idea what the freak I just watched, but I loved it!”

5. Marvel’s 616 (Disney+)— I was just looking for something short to fill a bit of time and found this series of documentaries. I was thoroughly sucked in in just the first minute about Japanese Spider-Man (and laughed a lot). Each “episode” is totally different in style and some are more compelling than others, but on the whole they were fascinating and fun.

Series

1. Only Murders In the Building (Hulu)—I binged this on the October covid sit-in, too, just for me. My mom is always asking what I’ve watched good recently and I’m always like, I don’t know, but I saw this and was like MOM! You would totally love this one! It is a humorous mystery starring some of your favorite actors! It’s on Hulu though! And I’m not entirely sure my mom totally understands what Hulu IS? Anyway, side note: the actress who plays Jan looks EXACTLY LIKE JASON’S AUNT BUT BLONDE. I was going nuts trying to figure out why she looked so familiar, and felt even more nuts when I looked at IMDB and there was NOTHING there that I would have seen enough to inspire THIS level of familiarity, and then it hit me! And we’ve now got their Christmas picture hanging up and every time I see it I’m like “OMG it’s Jan from Only Murders oh wait that’s still just Aunt Lynnie.”

2. Loki (Disney+)— This is the first and so far only MCU show I’ve watched with my kids! Maddie pointed out how awesome the title fonts were every time! They’re familiar with Loki mainly from the Magnus Chase books, and that was apparently enough to appreciate the MCU version. It really was a delightfully fun show. And we are all team Alligator Loki. And Mobius better get his jet ski next season.

3. The Mysterious Benedict Society (Disney+)— Speaking of books and my kids, I asked them some months back what their favorite thing we read together was that was NOT Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket or Rick Riordan, and I was surprised and delighted that this was the immediate answer. Such that when they saw ads for this D+ series they were messaging them back and forth to each other and not even remembering to include ME in the excitement until later! I am surprised that this series got almost NO buzz— I heard about it when my kids told me, which was the day before the first episode aired— but it was really good! And almost surprisingly true to the book! The casting of the kids was EXCELLENT (though I never quite adjusted to Constance’s accent— and I understand WHY they couldn’t actually cast her to age but still that would have been fun) and everyone else was pretty good too. I wanted more to a certain reunion at the end, but that part makes me inordinately sappy anyway. I assume next season will be the next book!

4. The Babysitters Club (Netflix)— Whereas each season of this is several books and seems all too short! I’m still impressed with how they managed to update storylines while keeping it feeling absolutely true to the originals, to the point where you forget what did and did not actually happen in the books! But I can’t believe they killed off [redacted] BETWEEN SEASONS! I was like WAIT, he’s just GONE??? He was barely THERE!

5. Breeders (Hulu)—Probably because they jumped ahead a few years and the kids are closer in age to my own, a lot in this season hit a little too painfully close to home, so the drama outweighed the comedy for me! I mean I cried more than I laughed and this is supposed to be a(n admittedly dark) comedy, but it was in a good way? But speaking of great casting of kids, I could have sworn the kids from last season just supernaturally matured extra fast instead of that they just cast older kids, because MAN. Those ARE the same kids, just with different names. And they aged really fast.

 Honorable Mention: I put a lot of CrashCourse (YouTube) on while I was sewing this year. Psychology, Philosophy, all the Literatures, History, Film, Geography, Intellectual Property… uh, yeah. A LOT of CrashCourse. Because it’s halfway between a podcast and a thing you have to WATCH, so it’s good for sewing.

The Podcasts, by the way

My favorite podcasts are still Fuse 8 and Kate, Movin’ Right Along, and Below the Frame, but the podcasts I added to my rotation this year are:

Muppeturgy, an analysis of each episode of The Muppet Show by Real Theater People. I tend to glom onto Muppet podcasts, don’t I. The Movin’ Right Along folks do other podcasts in shorter seasons, too, that I like— I particularly enjoyed To Introduce Our Guest Star earlier this year.

The Secrets of Story Podcast, run by Fuse 8’s husband Matt and author James Kennedy, who mostly argue with each other, which can sometimes get annoying, but other times they do make funny or rather brilliant observations about story structure. The episode that likened sucking an audience into a story to recruiting them into a cult was particularly wild.

 
Other Stuff I Wrote

My Single Solitary 2021 GeekMom Article

"Speak Up for the Freedom to Read!" Nothing like the combination of being angry AND knowledgeable to break ones article-writing block. I am still so bothered by how much power totalitarians are gaining simply because the rest of us are just too dang tired to fight back. Book banning is at least something I feel competent enough to keep speaking up against.

The Grand Total of my 2021 DreamWidth Posts

Both of them (not counting last year’s Annual Roundup, which was actually posted January 1st) are actually about the same subject as this portion of the roundup:

"I Wish I Had a Critique Group. Too Bad I Have Nothing to Critique,"  was actually more about feeling lonely for creative companionship than particular writing, but

"Unfinished Stories and Other Notes of Scatterbrained Life" goes into quite a lot of what I’m going to write updated notes about from here on in in this section:

The Top (all) 10 Fanfics and Related Stuff Published in 2021

On the other hand, I DID write a lot of fic this year. These are in order of how badly I want you to read them. Read them, please do, and leave me comments! I’m needy like that!

 1. “Two (or Three) Mutant Freaks Against the Fourth Grade” (Legion (TV)) --  I will keep harping on this one because it is objectively one of my MOST FAVORITES and yet SOMEHOW has gotten the least number of hits of any of my fics except my latest (see below). And you don’t even need to know anything about the show to appreciate it! It’s just a sweet middle grade story about a new kid with ADHD trying to make friends with the class weirdo with ASD and they end up bonding over the HUGE SECRETS they both are harboring! How can you not love it? Please shower love over my favorite story, please?

 2. “Tesseract” (Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle, Marvel Cinematic Universe) -- Now, this may soon become my favorite of my own fanfics, and it is the newest so that could account for it having currently the least number of hits, but on the other hand it is NOT a cult fandom but two rather big ones so why HASN’T it gotten many hits, but on the other other hand, I admit this is only the first of several chapters and perhaps people don’t want to be left hanging, although of course it is backstory and everyone who knows the original story (one half at least) knows where it’s going. ANYWAY, so when two of your favorite stories both incorporate the same not-exactly-common concept into their story lines, you end up making up headcanons like “It was totally SHIELD that hired Mr-Dr. Murry to study the Tesseract,” and maybe you don’t automatically start writing a story for the headcanon, but a couple months ago I said, “Hey, why DON’T I write a story for that headcanon?” and it’s really fun and I can’t wait to post ie finish the rest of it because Chapter 3 has already made me cry several times, it’s great! So check out Chapter One and tell me how excited YOU are for me to finish the rest, too, because that will give me more incentive to overcome my executive function disorder!

 3. “A Strictly Scholarly Collaboration: the Original Romance of the Mind” (Legion (TV)) --  Another one that MAY be fanfic for a cult TV show but it can totally stand alone for people who don't know the show, as a bantery college romance with psychic shenanigans! In which the hero is the ADHD kid from story #1, all grown up and rakish! But you don’t even need to read that one first! Although you should have since I told you to read it! And then you can read:

 4. Or 3.5 “Two (or Three) Mutant Freaks and the Strictly Scholarly Collaboration” (Legion (TV)) --  …because it’s basically bonus scenes for #3, that place it into the universe of #1, ie, the universe where Cary and Oliver became friends in elementary school and so would already be besties when Melanie eventually came into their lives! It doesn’t QUITE stand alone, as it basically dovetails into #3, and assumes SOME basic understanding of Cary and Kerry’s relationship, but you’ll have that since you’ve already read #1!

 5. “Two (or Three) Mutant Freaks and the Adolescent Melodrama” (Legion (TV))--  Or maybe you’ve even read this one, which takes place BEFORE that in the Childhood Friends AU, Cary and Oliver’s high school years! It’s also kind of my treatise on asexuality through fiction! This also has the highest ratio of kudos to hits of all my fics so you know at least other people think it’s a good one!

 6. “Exploration of the Astral Plane: An Immersive, Multidimensional Study, by Cary Loudermilk, PhD, and Oliver Anthony Bird.” (Legion (TV)) --  Okay, this one DOES assume previous knowledge of the characters, but only what you would have already gleaned from reading #1, 3, 4, and 5. It directly leads INTO show canon events, but still 20 years before the show actually takes place, so all the prerequisite you need is in what I already told you to read, and it’s worth it because this is delightful and stuffed FULL of psychic shenanigans! On the negative side, things ARE about to go bad from a fictional standpoint, and from a real life standpoint I’ve been kind of STUCK on the next chapter for… many months now. Which is surely frustrating if you really want to get INTO the story!

 7. “The Invitation: an epilogue” (Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types) --  This is lower in the list because it’s quietly becoming my most popular fic, kudos-wise (just one short of my Endgame fic already!) (WAIT, last minute update! Another kudos just came in today! It’s now TIED with Endgame!), so it doesn't really need extra advertising, but still pretty high because anything Diana Wynne Jones is wonderful and, dare I say, there’s a REASON for all the kudos? This takes place mere minutes after the end of the book— so you do need to have read the book— and yes, I honestly believe Howl and Sophie decided to get married immediately, for all the reasons Howl ends up listing in this story but ALSO because he knows in his heart this is the best way to keep him from slithering out of it at the last minute!

8. “The Puppy-Fly Effect” (Back to the Future (Movies)) --  Yes, and this is only lower in the list because it’s the first fic I’ve posted this year, which increases the likelihood that you’ve already read it! It’s another headcanon backstory! I suppose it’s mostly still understandable if you haven’t seen Back to the Future, but who hasn’t seen Back to the Future?! If you haven’t, go fix that first, THEN read my stories!

 9. “The Fall of [Spoilers Redacted]: a Freestyle Ballad by Lester “Apollo” Papadopoulos” (The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan) --  This is my attempt at writing a proper funeral ballad! I don’t know why I thought I could, but it was sure fun trying! And it’s not ACTUALLY that bad— some of it is even pretty good! As for whether you need to have previous knowledge of the books, hmm, well it definitely has SPOILERS for the first three books of The Trials of Apollo because it’s basically a RECAP of the first three books of The Trials of Apollo, so basically it’ll TELL you the story you’re not reading? Although there are also more than a few vague lines that are basically inside JOKES if you’ve read the books. So, I guess that’s why I haven’t listed this one higher. I don't know whether or not you had to have read the books before. And I'm also self-conscious of my poetic abilities. Although proud of them at the same time.

 10. “Rewind” (Original Work) --  Now technically I should have listed this one at the top, because it requires no previous fandom knowledge AT ALL since it’s an entirely original story! But I’m also less attached to it that way, since the characters— well, the main character doesn’t even have a name! It’s more of a plot-based writing exercise than a character-based one. I signed up for a fic writing challenge— such a challenge was how I got into fanfic in the first place— though this one is only tangentially related to fandoms— it hearkened back to a challenge the Inklings had once given each other. The challenge was that you have to explore a theme from a Christian worldview— mine is mostly about Humility (”Let go and let God” was my basis) with a touch of Stewardship and Grace— through a particular genre category— as Team Tolkien I had to do either High Fantasy or Time Travel, and I went with Time Travel, because it’s curiously a theme that shows up a lot in my fic! It’s much more PLOTTED OUT than I usually write stories, because it had to be, so, it’s pretty cool, you should check it out, even if I did list it last! This is still the list of TOP ten stories, even if there WERE only ten!

This Year’s Works In Progress:

 Obviously, the end of “Exploration of the Astral Plane” and most of “Tesseract.” I’ve got a few more Legion one-shots, too, with a small one that takes place in between seasons 2 and 3 that is almost complete.

 All the DWJ fanfic reading—see below-- inspired me to write my own headcanon crossover between HMC and Chrestomanci, in which Chrestomanci strongly suggests that Cat take on Morgan Jenkins-Pendragon as an apprentice. I don’t have much, but what I have is kind of perfect. I want to reread some more Chrestomanci to get me back in the voices, though!

 I’ve also made an attempt to wrangle my long and complex Ghosts I Have Been headcanons into a simple fic. Written in first person voices of hundred-year-past young adults in Missouri. Really have to do some rereading to make sure THOSE voices are right, too, before I share!

The Top 10 FanFics I READ

I guess this actually belongs up in the Media Review section, except it’s so closely tied to my writing fanfic. Usually, to find fics, I’d just click on the fandom name on one of my own fics and see what showed up that was interesting, which is why most of these are from fandoms I have fics in. But reading fanfic in general is something I’ve definitely done more of this year than I ever have before. Here’s the ten that, when I looked back through my AO3 history, stuck out as most memorable (in a good way). 

 I am not sure what order to put these in so let me split it up by fandom?

 I probably read the most in the various Diana Wynne Jones fandoms, which often cross over:

 “Little Saucepan,” by Batastrophe, a work both funny and touching in which Howl takes Sophie and Morgan to a real Welsh rugby match.

 “In Which Sophie Questions Howl's Hobbies,” by HannaM-- This has no right to work so well. It’s a meta crack fic in which Howl writes fanfic and somehow it’s both ridiculous and PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE.

 “a map of those who used to live here,” by Pieandsouffle-- Lovely HMC backstory of how Michael came to be Howl’s apprentice. It may never be finished, but what is there is wonderful, so I hope it will be someday!

 “A Tale of Too Many Worlds,” by Rhymer23 --a Howl’s Moving Castle/Chrestomanci crossover that manages to be epic, in character, funny, and moving all at once.

 “Letters between the Related Worlds,” by Maman --  Another, much simpler HMC/Chrestomanci crossover told as a series of notes between the characters. I commented that I just wanted the letters to keep going!

There’s not enough Legion TV fic, especially fic that actually deals with MY favorite characters (Summerland Generation One! The Birds and Loudermilks! The ones that were created especially for the show and so don’t appear in the comics and that’s sad!), and when you take out sex-heavy fic there’s even less, but here are three I really loved this year:

 “Phenomena,” by Thornvale -- The most surreal and confusing yet gripping and in-character Legion fic I’ve read. And actually starring Summerland Generation One, for once! I LIKE when people put this much effort into Legion backstory!

 “Enter the Maze,” by Hexiva  -- Lovely surreal and twisty little brainwarp that also contains a bit of Oliver being delightful! YAY! Sometimes fics based at the time of the show DO feature delightful Oliverness!

 “When My Fist Clenches, Crack It Open,” (specifically chapter 187) by Versaphile -- Okay, while Versaphile is my #1 fic-writing cheerleader and I like to support what they do, I will admit this is an insanely long fic and I don’t expect you to read it unless you’re a Legion fanatic or someone who really wished Season Three could have just been David getting the therapy he really needed; BUT I have to shout out to this chapter, chapter 187, which is not only intense and surreal and amazing, it also uses one of my favorite picture books as a really appropriate basis, and it is absolutely the best thing I read in fanfic this year!

 It occurs to me that MOST Legion fic writers actually write fics that are surreal and trippy like the show, while here I am writing middle grade about people making friends. OH WELL, such am I.

 I have read bunches of Trials of Apollo fic, including some ongoing ones that are STILL ongoing, but only one made this top ten when I set out to pull the BEST ones out:

 “see you yesterday,” by JustMcShane -- Lovely post-series adventure for Apollo and Meg, that manages to bring in more and different mythology!

 And occasionally, through clicking on other users and such, I do end up reading fics in fandoms I HAVEN’T written for. I have no idea how I stumbled on this one now, but it IS probably my favorite of those I found:

 “Happily Ever After,” by PenguinsOnJumpers  --They haven’t finished with part “After” yet, but the first two parts are a rather brilliant mashup in which the Marauders of Harry Potter backstory find themselves in The Good Place as run by Michael and Janet. It really works and will satisfy fans of both properties!

IMPORTANT PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Maddie and I are now officially mild but Presumed Positive cases of COVID-19. Before you freak out, I said MILD. We’re going to be fine. This isn’t about us. I make this announcement so you have a better understanding of what this social distancing stuff is all about. To protect OTHER people, and to share points I wish I had known that were getting lost in the general panic.

The TL;DR of it is: most people who get this are not going to die, true. In fact, they MAY NOT EVEN REALIZE THEY HAVE IT. Which is WHY EVERYONE, regardless of relative healthiness, needs to practice social distancing/self-quarantine, because you could think you just have a little cold and then you go out and KILL PEOPLE FOR WHOM IT IS NOT JUST A LITTLE COLD. It’s not about you getting sick, unless you ARE in an at-risk population of course—it’s about you not getting OTHER people sick. Also, you can’t come visit me and/or take me out for my birthday. Unless you want to like, bring me a couple bags of potting and/or garden soil, leave them on the patio, and yell “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” in the window, and I’ll yell, “THANKS YOU’RE AWESOME!” from inside, and that’ll work. Not sure any garden stores are open right now, anyway.

Here’s the full story/details, so you can see how this is happening:

We got sick at the beginning of the month. Maddie had a fever for a couple of days—I did not, in fact I only took the opportunity to stay home from work because the kids were sick (Sam was also sick at that time, but his symptoms are all gone now), because I felt like I was just coming down with a cold. I had a sore throat and a little fatigue, a lot of coughing but sneezing, too, and everything that was coming out on the news said COVID-19 didn’t involve sneezing. Besides, there wasn’t a single known case in the entire state of Pennsylvania at that time. When Maddie’s fever had been gone for the required at-least-24-hours, she went back to school, because she’d already missed a huge chunk this year from her recurring migraines, and it was JUST a little cough, right? Being that I never developed a fever, I went back to work as soon as I could, too. I wrote this article about this, about how our society trains us to JUST KEEP ON PLUGGING if you can get out of bed: https://geekmom.com/2020/03/family-sick-days-can-be-good/ I still figured WE didn’t have the Big Scary Disease, though, and it wouldn’t hurt to go out in public. Long as we’re practicing good hygiene and whatnot.

After a week or so I developed the Red Flag symptom, the one thing on the “COVID vs Flu vs Cold” charts that only showed up in the COVID column—shortness of breath. Here’s the thing. I’m out of shape. I’ve let my exercise routine slide for the past half a year or so. I figured it was just because I WAS out of shape, and felt ashamed. Too ashamed to admit to anyone I was even HAVING this problem. It wasn’t BAD, it wasn’t like a full-on asthma attack or anything. Just a constant tightness in my chest. Earlier this week I carried a bunch of laundry baskets upstairs, and that did me in. I laid on the bed with my heart pounding, trying to catch my breath, feeling AWFUL, and that knocked some sense into me—maybe it was MORE than being out of shape.

By that time the school and library had closed. They were still working at the library, behind-the-scenes stuff, and I tried to go in, but when everyone realized I wasn’t feeling that well they were like “NO, GO HOME,” and I didn’t argue. I wrote THIS article about the relief I felt when everything closed, then how that relief started to fade as I realized people expected us to still DO stuff: https://geekmom.com/2020/03/theres-too-much-to-do-during-a-quarantine/ In retrospect, of COURSE the thought of Doing Stuff exhausted me. I AM supposed to be resting, not keeping busy!

Maddie, for the record, wakes up every morning and just says “I hurt.” I try to get more specifics than that, but that seems to be what it comes down to. Her throat hurts most, and occasionally her head, and often just everything. I keep asking about her chest/lungs, but that doesn’t seem to be bothering her. She often has no appetite, which is not something I’ve noticed in myself. And we both have wildly fluctuating energy levels—one moment we’ll feel almost-fine and be hopping around as usual, the next moment we’ll be falling asleep in our chairs (or in her case, often, on the floor).

On Tuesday Jason came home from work early because a guy he’d worked closely with was now being Presumed Positive, too (I’ll get to the “Presumed” stuff in a minute), and now everyone who’d had contact with him was on self-quarantine/work from home. That guy had also gone to work for nearly a week before he felt the need to stay home. This was the same day I did myself in by carrying laundry baskets, so I started to get suspicious.

There was already a little bit of news out there that people could be asymptomatic carriers. Couldn’t we therefore assume that many people might be PARTIALLY-symptomatic? Not following the exact description, but partially? Having every dang symptom but the fever?

On Thursday I read a Twitter thread from a young, generally-healthy person who had tested positive, but with a mild, non-life-threatening case. So much of it—all of it except the fever, which I STILL haven’t noticed in myself—was EXACTLY what I was going through, what Maddie was going through. UH-OH. First thing Friday morning I called the doctor. She agreed—a mild case of COVID-19 sounded exactly like what it was. She said that Washington County had set up a drive-through testing site, but that tests were limited, and so doctors were being really picky about who they gave them to. Jason’s coworker wasn’t given one—he was told to just ASSUME he was positive. My doctor decided, based primarily on how much social contact I get up to working in a public library, that I, on the other hand, SHOULD be tested and confirmed—and she still wasn’t even sure the testing clinic would agree when she sent them the scrip. But they did, and I drove through, and they stuck squabs up my nose that SERIOUSLY made me want to sneeze, and I will get the results, uh…sometime in the next week. So there are people running around out there who may have been exposed to me but I still can’t give them a definite—BUT THAT’S MY POINT!

THINK how many people out there have symptoms and are not getting tested at all! THINK how many people have been exposed but don’t have ANY symptoms, like Jason, whom I started calling Typhoid Mary until he corrected me that his name is actually “Corona J.” Don’t pay attention to the numbers on the news, because too many people may have the virus who are not getting counted! The doctor told me that they weren’t wasting tests on people who were already deathly ill, and if they died, their cause of death would be chalked up as “pneumonia.” Numbers mean nothing.

Ideally, it should be the people who AREN’T sick getting tested. The people who think they’re just fine, but will end up spreading their germs. But there aren’t enough tests for that.

So that’s what’s up. That’s why everything is closing. It’s not that we’re all gonna die, it’s that it’s too hard not to spread it to the people who WILL die. And I go back to that first article I posted: how HARD it is for us as a society to just stay home when we’re sick. This is what we need to be mad about—how we’re conditioned to work work work. We need to fight for paid sick leave, and ENCOURAGED TO USE IT instead of to save it. We need to fight for medical care that people aren’t afraid to use because of dang deductibles, and that makes a real effort to be preventative instead of just reactive—because in this case reactive is too late. I spent a week at the public library—luckily not on circulation duty—but still potentially spreading this to a wide variety of people, because I thought it was just a cold and I’d already taken three days off. I feel bad about that. The doctor read my mind and reassured me thus: “It’s not worth looking back and trying to figure out who you might have contacted and what you might have done differently at this point. There’s just too much going around to track. We can just do the best we can from this point forward.”

So from now on, let’s as a society allow ourselves and each other to TAKE A FRIGGIN’ BREAK.

And you’re allowed to laugh. Here’s a really amazing thematic Twitter thread you should check out: https://twitter.com/daniAWESOME/status/1240713705517539332

And again, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I don’t need sympathy. But I WOULD like some fun birthday greetings in about ten days, so you can keep that in mind.

there's no reason we can't pop back into the history of proto-SHIELD several years later. Don't be all "CANCELLED" about it! Be "on indefinite hiatus!" COME ON, KEEP YOUR OPTIONS OPEN!

3. Speaking of Marvel TV, Jason has decided he doesn't care about Agents of SHIELD anymore. Part of me's like, okay, I'm fine with that, I don't need to worry about making it to the TV every Tuesday at 9, I can watch on my own time the next afternoon or whatnot (I work Wednesday mornings), but another part of me is like YOU DON'T REALIZE WHAT A HUGE BLOW THIS IS TO OUR MARRIAGE. It was our DATE NIGHT. That's one of the few things we really enjoy doing together, watching superhero shows! And I have a feeling I want to see Civil War more than he does. Which if we could only get babysitting he'd be okay with, but his parents are in the middle of moving and my parents live farther away. Part of me's like, gee, I could totally go by myself some weekday afternoon, but then I'm like, "NO, AMY, THAT'S THE EQUIVALENT OF ADULTERY. Not just because your Imaginary Husband has a small part in it. IT WOULD BE SUCH AN UNCARING MOVE TO GO SEE A SUPERHERO MOVIE WITHOUT JASON." Seriously. There's more at stake here than watching a movie.

4. I'm kind of mentally cluttered at the moment. I've got gardening to catch up on, on account of being down with the flu all last week. I have a lot of GeekMom articles I want to work on, but I feel guilty sitting down to write long enough to do so. The house is, of course, a wreck. And I still have to feed three picky eaters and myself, which is still the bane of my existence. Sometimes I just want to shout "ENOUGH! FROM NOW ON I AM ONLY MAKING SALADS AND YOU WILL EAT IT OR YOU WILL MAKE YOUR OWN FOOD WITHOUT WHINING!" But I have a hard time cooking for myself.

5. Now I am running late for work, so bye. Excuse the lack of editing and links that I would have done had I had more time.