alltoseek

Our flock of twelve ducks now number thirteen and occasionally fourteen. Duck #13 is the neighbours' sole surviving duck after the others were taken by a fox (probably). He was keeping them outside. Ours are in a polytunnel inside an enclosure, but I think a determined fox could still get inside. Augh, I hope they survive the winter. Duck #13 is white and looks a lot like our Elsa, but smaller and with a more orange beak; we call her Lill-Elsa (Little Elsa). She has seamlessly merged with the flock.

The occasional #14 is a female wild mallard who seems to be considering the advantages of domestication: free food, water, and shelter! But she comes and goes. One might think our ducks would correspondingly be hearing the call of the wild from her, but no. They like their comforts now. The snow is thawing and I thought I'd make them happy by breaking up the ice in the small pond for them, but when I herded them outside to see it, they just stood there and looked at me like I was committing animal abuse, and hurried back to the polytunnel as soon as I got out of the way. Sigh.

As for me, I am too busy and am looking forward to things calming down a little soon. At least I hope they will.

Candy Hearts Exchange has been revealed, and I now know (well, I was already pretty sure) that sanguinity wrote my lovely gift fic There My Heart Forever Lies! It is a 16K (for a 300 word minimum exchange!) Flight of the Heron story that riffs off the musical Brigadoon, which I had never heard of before, where Ardroy is saved by being taken out of time. I especially appreciate that the story took time to develop Keith's relationship with Francis as a counterweight for his eventual choice.

As for me, I wrote the following for sanguinity (which of course she guessed)! We do keep getting paired up in exchanges, which is no wonder considering the rareness of the fandoms. I had fun writing Laurent being his usual earnest, passionate self, while also, well, rising to the occasion. Thanks as always to garonne for beta reading. <3

In Which Laurent Rises to the Occasion (4150 words) by Luzula
Fandom: The Wounded Name - D. K. Broster
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Laurent de Courtomer/Aymar de la Rocheterie, Aymar de la Rocheterie/Avoye de Villecresne
Characters: Laurent de Courtomer, Aymar de la Rocheterie, Avoye de Villecresne
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Pre-Poly
Summary: Aymar despairs of clearing his name and leaves France, leaving only a letter behind.

Still not reading much, but I did read some books during the past two months!

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (2025)
Listened to the audiobook for my book club. This is the first book in a while that grabbed me in a page-turney way, and I enjoyed it a lot! I'm sure it can be picked at, and we did so during book club, but for me it was mostly notable in being a book I was immersed in while reading, which for me these days is rare.

The Sleeping Soldier by Aster Glenn Gray (2023)
When I first started reading this, my feeling was that "yeah, I read a lot of posts on the author's DW about this book, and I guess the book is exactly what I was expecting it to be". Like, in a way I felt as though I didn't even have to read the book. But this feeling passed when I got into the particulars of the characters and their relationships so that they felt real to me, so that it wasn't just about the Idea of the book any longer, and then I thoroughly enjoyed it. (The Idea of the book being, if you haven't heard of the book before, the contrast between what was allowable in male friendships in 1860 and 1960.)

I also listened to about half of The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (2024), also for book club. I feel like the book had a lot of Gormenghast DNA, and I enjoyed the weird worldbuiling, but I didn't end up finishing it.