#letters to the farm

[cloverfarm]

Hi I see you've been doing mood boards and I love them!! Saw them reblogged by my moots. If that's okay could you make farmer Beau's mood board? 🥹 (no pressure)

hi! thank you so much! And thanks for sending this, I’d love to make one for beau! I loved reading about him (and elliott, and their family! 🥺💖 you have so many awesome posts about them) - I added a couple ellibeau hints on this moodboard with the love letter & hands. I hope you like this! 💕

farmer beau

[sdv farmer moodboards 💕]

[a-door-to-somewhere]

Sometimes I wonder how much fanfic of classical/iconic literature exists because of school projects. Just floating out there. In a drive somewhere. Not to mention that nothing is more unhinged than bored middle/highschoolers being forced to liven up books they might not care about. For every deranged ao3 crossover fic there is an infinitely more deranged crackfic written for the great gatsby or antigone or to kill a mockingbird or whatever by a bored highschooler and his friends for 10th grade English. I wanna read it

[redlettermediathings]

[textless]

Scorpion surprise (found in the shower). Cochise County, Arizona, May 2024.

[shyhandart]

Hey there! Do you perhaps have more Tempest and AJ stuff? Maybe some headcannons? You've planted worms into my brain

But wait, theres more!!

[mlpoutofcontext]

[ofliterarynature]

NOVEMBER 2024 WRAP UP

[ loved liked okay nope dnf (reread) ]

Kicking Ice • (The Bride of the Blue Wind) • Animal Farm • The Lost Manuscript • Heart's Blood • Hotel • The Liar's Knot • The Education of Pip • The Glassblower • Terec and the Wall • (The Hands of the Emperor) • The Village Library Demon Hunting Society • One Good Turn • The Silence of Bones • (The Raven Tower) • The Art Thief • Safer Places • Letters to Half-Moon Street

* * * * * *

Letters to Half-Moon Street - an absolutely charming epistolary regency romance told mostly through letters between the main character, his siblings, and his love interest. The mc is gay and demi-sexual (and a younger son) in a queer-norm England where gender norms have been replaced by rules about birth order, and there's magic - it's very Sorcery & Cecelia meets KJ Charles (if not quite as good). As I said, very charming, but when I read the two shorter follow ups, One Good Turn and The Education of Pip, it was pretty clear that the epistolary format (and romance) helped cover a lot of hurts. I applaud the author for including an aromantic character and trying to write stories about finding your place and self-recovery without romance, but in her attempt to create comfort she sacrificed any real development to the characters or the plot. (also, while the rich upper class characters are exceedingly nice to the lower-class characters, we still almost never see any of their servants. hmm.) There's a few more books in the series that are romances (and at least one looks like it might be epistolary), so we'll have to see if she improves. Fantastic covers though!

Safer Places - a comic collection that was supposed to be for my book club but didn't quite work out unfortunately! These comics were very strange and dreamlike, making me not quite sure what happened but very much wanting to think about it. The artist also returned to a story idea several times, sometimes taking on an entirely new shape, and it really lent a sense of connection to the book as a whole. Would recommend!

The Art Thief - I'm not really one for more narrative-type nonfiction or for true crime, but non-violent crime involving fine art? I don't know why I find the fine-art world (and crime) so fascinating, but I do, and I enjoyed this! It was actually a fairly nice, chill read to distract myself with in the middle of the election.

The Raven Tower - revisiting my first Ann Leckie 5 years later - this was incredible! Slow yes, but watching the story build itself out of all the pieces was absolutely fascinating. 100% satisfied with the ending, but it was also a bit of a cliff-hanger? I'll be absolutely fascinated to see what kind of stories Leckie felt compelled to write that take up half of the Lake of Souls collection.

The Silence of Bones - DNF @ 11%. I was very interested in this as a historical mystery with a female protagonist set in Korea, but leery of it being YA. I admit I wasn't a big fan of the audiobook narrator, but an hour and a half into the audiobook I still hadn't hadn't settled into the story, so decided to drop it.

The Village Library Demon Hunting Society - This was very high on my watch-list for 2024 due to my love for CM Waggoner's first book Unnatural Magic, but was somewhat leery of the cozy-fantasy vibes it was giving. My first shock came when it turned out to have a fairly modern and contemporary setting and was not in a fantasy other-world, though as expected it was definitely going for the cozy-fantasy and elderly-person-solves-murder vibes that are popular right now, and with which I've personally had mixed results. Overall though, it was aiming to be a sort of meta-commentary on cozy mystery tropes, which I think it was successful at! I think it definitely did better than its sci-fi cousin, the Midsolar Murders series by Mur Lafferty. I just wish it had a better title, this one is a bit of a mouthful and only semi-relevant.

The Hands of the Emperor - started slowly rereading this a few months ago with the intention of getting around to my first reread of the sequel. Honestly, the perfect book to be reading during an absolutely horrible election, I imagine I'll be burying my head in the Nine Worlds a lot in the upcoming years.

I wasn't quite ready to head directly into AtFotS after finishing Hands, so jumped around to some of Victoria's short stories I hadn't read yet. Terec and the Wall is the second Terec story - I admit I really don't have much interest in this sub-series? This one in particular was at least interesting in the second half because of its crossover with the Greenwing & Dart series, so I recommend you don't read this until you've read that. The Glassblower was...fine. It showed promise, but it was so short! I hope the second part fleshes out more, but idk. It's also related to the Ysthar collection of books, which is the only part of the Nine Worlds that I haven't bothered to revisit yet. To skip ahead a bit, the third of the Sisters Avramapul novellas is finally out! It's been a while so I decided to reread the first two books, starting with The Bride of the Blue Wind. It's a Bluebeard retelling and deals with pregnancy/body horror and is not for the faint-hearted! Sardeet was SO YOUNG in this, I don't think I quite realized before. Good but not my favorite of the series.

The Liar's Knot - loved loved loved. These books are so good even if (or because?) all of the plot twists are somewhat soap-operatic. I think this is my favorite in the series because the characters are a bit more settled but also having to learn to trust each other. And all of the secret identity reveals!!! I had a wonderful time.

Hotel -DNF @ 8%. picked this up at a recent library sale because a mystery at a hotel sounds cool! Then I started it on audiobook and realized it was a thriller (not my thing) written by a guy in the 60's (ditto). What I read was certainly passable and maybe I could have gotten through it, but I lost interest.

Heart's Blood - I've seen Marillier's work around somewhere, and picked this one up at a library book sale at some point. I got so close to DNF'ing this early on and almost wish I had. It wasn't bad I think, it has some beauty-and-the-beast vibes, but it felt excruciatingly slow, and something that I couldn't quite put my finger on was annoying the heck out of me. It made me wish more times than I should admit that I was reading Chalice by Robin McKinley instead. I'm not entirely scared off of trying Marillier's other work, but I'd proceed with extreme caution.

The Lost Manuscript - DNF @ 19%. A surprisingly lighthearted novel told in letters about a woman who finds a manuscript in a hotel bedside table and proceeds to track down the original author, only to discover someone else had added to the manuscript at some point after he lost it. She and her contacts try and trace its history back to find the mystery author. Seemed very nice, if you're looking for something calm and lighthearted? Just not what I was looking for at the time.

Animal Farm - somehow managed to escape reading this for school, and a podcast I listen to loves recommending this, so I picked up a copy at the same sale as Heart's Blood. I feel like I spent most of the book sagely nodding my head, like yup, that's how it can be! Very smart book, not a favorite but I'm glad I read it.

Kicking Ice - backed this on Kickstarter ages ago when I was still deep in my Check, Please! fervor. Finally picked it up because it was short and I needed to finish another book for my owned-tbr challenge. It was ok. Maybe a better choice if you're a young girl interested in hockey or sports in general? I also didn't like the art style used for most of the book, so a pass from me. I'm sure a lot of the info about the NWHL is also outdated by this point.

[lexa-griffins]

Lexa: What's mommy's name?

Madi: Mommy

Lexa: What's Mama's name?

Madi: Claaaaaaaarke!!!!

Clarke, rushing in like the dutiful wife she is: you called?

In Lexa's defense..... the farm is still bigger than most houses and sometimes she's gotta get Clarke's attention via yelling 🤣

Madi now likes to yell "maaaaamaaaaaaaa" to get Clarke's attention. Although Clarke keeps telling her she is right there, in front of her, the yelling is really not necessary.

When Clarke becomes older, her hearing goes first. It goes full circle to a 50 year old Madi yelling MAMA and Lexa yelling CLARKE to get her attention 😅

[swamp-chicken]

bdubs the secret scientist

[cloverfarm]

hi j, my cutie pie sweetie muffin lil guy, i saw you're doing cute mood boards and I was wondering if you'd maybe want to do one for noraxmrqi 🥺🩷 I love your mood boards so much, it would be so lovely to have one if you aren't too too busy! 🩷 ily!!

hi hi kat ily and I would be so honored to do a moodboard for nora x mr qi!! they are so lovely, i was excited to work on this 🩵 and you are sweet - i am so happy you like them (and super crossing my fingers that you’ll like this one I made for you!)

nora x mr qi

[sdv farmer moodboards 💕]

[lettersfromavalon]

Again, mod creators so bloody talented. Look at these obelisks? I’m so amazed by the talent on nexus. I endorse everyone of these and I’ve more I still need to endorse. Yes I am working on a list!

[fullscoreshenanigans]

In the novel where Norman is very very sick when he was little, Ray is afraid that Isabella may be forced to send Norman to the QG, right? But Norman wouldn't be killed and eaten then: he's too smart, they would want to keep him alive as long than possible so his brain would be at his best. He would probably be kept asleep until he was healed, and would be send back to the orphenage after that, right? It's just Ray who thinks it means obligatory death? or it 100% means death?

Krone's story in the second light novel touches upon the protocol for when a child is seriously ill:

So it's difficult but not impossible to send them back to the plants. And with Norman being the first child in Grace Field's recorded history to excel by the metrics they measure from his very first test at age four, it seems highly unlikely they would kill him prematurely even if Peter hadn't taken a special interest in him. They might have sedated him enough so his time at headquarters was like a fever haze where he wouldn't be sure what was real and what was fake, or they might have kept him there until he turned twelve, but killing him early seems foolish with the sunk cost put into him and his potential.

(TPN Light Novel 1: A Letter from Norman - “The Day Emma Cried”)

Ray's working with limited information, though, and the fear of losing Norman is very real to him, even if it isn't necessarily to imminent death.

[finnisnotdrowning]

throwback to the time a literal week ago i got extra english help because i kept accidentally spelling things with ph when they were meant to be f...

[therentyoupay]

will i???? be able to open??? the google doc?????? i think???? i THINK I SHALL????

[yoru-exe]

ehehe got em!

[loversmore]

❤️‍🩹🖇️ <3

❤️‍🩹🖇🧩🧶