galadhir

Well, all my future belly dance plans got tossed into the air and scattered. Mostly in a way that I'm happy with, but still...

So, as I wittered on about endlessly my plan was to do a new sword-dance solo to Ya Baba and also a heavy metal duet with another lady from Elizabeth's class, to Khepri - Fangs of Apep

To which end I had even bought a studded belt and decorated a black bra for a heavy metal outfit. I found a black skirt and a snakeskin patterned skirt in the charity shop and tweaked them to fit me properly. I was going to wear the black skirt for the heavy metal dance, and then use the same bra and belt with a few red items and the snakeskin patterned skirt to make a villainous Wen Yao outfit that would work for Ya Baba too.

Then of course I was like 'I don't actually like Fangs of Apep' And in browsing on YouTube I found Wolf Totem by The Hu which I fell in love with and suggested to the other lady for our dance instead. She said she loved it, so I thought that was settled.

But the best laid plans etc, because it turns out that the particular version of Ya Baba that I liked so much is not available to buy. This is the second time YouTube has done this to me! And I really don't like the other versions as much. I'm not sure I really want to do a sword dance to any of them. (And why do you even need seven different arrangements of the same tune. Argh!)

Also OL, (my partner in the duo) has a number of other suggestions for tunes which she might prefer to The Hu, so we are not decided. Some of them are not even heavy metal, so the whole outfit is called into question now... LOL! This is what I get for jumping the gun.

OTOH, if we go for one of the other tunes, then Wolf Totem by The Hu is available for me to use for my own purposes, and I will use that for a new sword solo. It's certainly thematically appropriate for a sword dance, though sadly much less Meng Yao related.

Meanwhile Elizabeth has asked me to do a sword dance solo when the group is performing at Aquafest in June. I don't know if I have time to develop and memorize a new choreography for June, so I'll have to crack open baby's first choreography and see if I can improve on my old dance.

In other words, it's all up in the air again and I have a new studded belt and decorated bra for nothing ;)

Ely Aquafest will be an interesting place to perform, that's for sure!

So, it was Louise's hafla last night, aka the 'Hob al Raqs' Hafla. I wonder if I can get a copy of the running list up here? Hm... but it's very big, so here is a link to the pdf instead.

After having been sick with nerves and dreading it for two days prior, the nerves cleared up on the day, and I gradually got ready by ironing my veil (for the Nawwarat group dance) and practicing putting on a dramatic blue eye make up look from YouTube.

(Did you know that you can use cellotape on your face to get a sharp wing to your eyeshadow? I didn't. But I do now.)( Read more... )

DH of course, who turned up with two huge cameras, (one for video and one for stills) was very popular and everyone wanted to pose and show off their sparkling outfits. There will be much excitement when he posts the finished photos to a friends-locked group on the web. I'm looking forward to that too. He is a treasure and everyone knows it :)

PS. The other lady from my class who said she might do a solo did not in fact do a solo despite being objectively much better than me. I don't understand - surely the point of practicing a dance is to perform it?

PPS. I wonder when I will feel as though I have the right to use the dance name I picked out? I mean I'm not good and I'm certainly not professional, but I am up there performing. Does that make me a dancer yet or is there another trial you have to pass first?

End of term for Elizabeth's class and she let slip that next term she would be expecting us to write another solo.

One of the other ladies suggested to me that perhaps--as we both grew up being into Heavy Metal Rock--we could do a dance together to Khepri - Fangs of Apep

I could definitely put together an outfit for a heavy metal bellydance, with a black lace skirt and chains and a cropped band t-shirt. It would be nice to revisit my heavy rocker phase, and I do have the hair for it these days. It would also be really nice to dance with someone else. It's great just to be asked :)

But... just in case she is ill or changes her mind, I think I'm also going to work on a solo dance - if I don't use it then, I'll still use it later.

Today I was practicing Louise's veil choreography and my Fos solo for the hafla on the 11th, and you know I've been turning over the thought of using Ya Baba for something for a while now. Then this morning I woke up and looked at my sword and thought, "it would be nice to do another sword dance."

But I had been missing the thing that would bring everything together and give me the inspiration and excitement to actually start anything.

Well, it arrived today while practicing something else.

Obviously what I wanted was to do a sword dance inspired by the scene in the Fire Palace when Meng Yao is torturing Nie Mingjue for Wen Ruohan's entertainment.

• Nie Mingjue is a clan leader who rescued Meng Yao from bullying soldiers and made him his favourite, but Meng Yao killed one of his men. Almost immediately afterward MY saved NMJ's life by taking a sword thrust that was meant for him.
• So with streaming tears on both sides NMJ exiled Meng Yao, who went off to serve NMJ's enemy (and actually to spy for the good guys.) NMJ then got captured and MY had to torture him enough to make Wen Ruohan distracted, so that WRH would let his guard down and MY could stab him and win the war.
• This succeeded in winning the war, but meant that MY and NMJ's relationship never recovered and they became bitter enemies, eventually killing each other and being buried in the same coffin.

I have a lot of problems with doing the whole sexy & playful part of belly dancing, but Meng Yao is going full ham in that scene, being the most homme fatale a spurned favourite could possibly be while dressed in immaculate robes and eyeliner, and fondling another man's sword.

This is absolutely ideal for a belly dance! I'm sure I can do scheming villainous homoeroticism with a sword!

I was like 'I bet that would work with Ya Baba.' But now I have come home and looked up the lyrics, and it turns out they could have been written for that scene:

The wound My beloved (Oh Father) is on two sides
And I swear by God (Oh Father)
I have never loved anyone but him
We are not being lifted up (We are not being lifted up)
And the fire is in my heart (And the fire is in my heart)
It burns my veins, it burns my veins

So yes. I'm going to do that one regardless, even if I do a fun heavy metal one first :)

Found at least a couple of tracks that I absolutely love, so I thought I might post them here. It turns out the genre I was looking for is Arabic Afro House.

Note, all the links here go to YouTube.

• My current top favourite Arash Mohseni - (Ya Baba) I followed the algorithm from:

• Bladi, which is one of many I like from Maro Hereira Bladi - (Original Remix) by Maro Hereira

• I don't know where I found this next one, or what it would be classed as, but I like it. Faylasuf - Alchemy

• This one, I think is unbelievably beautiful and ties with Ya Baba for 'tune I would most like to dance to next.'Taoufik - Our Memories

• I love this cover, which sadly doesn't appear to be available to buy anywhere. Ya Rayah - cover by Ahmed Alshaiba feat, Farah Fersi & Mohamed Aly

• This one's less in your face but it kind of sneaks past your defenses and suddenly you're bopping along. Sey0six - Ya Hobi

• And this one is perhaps too short for a dance, but great for just listening to.Habibi (Albanian Remix)

It's a start :)

90 discussion questions. 1. If you could travel anywhere, where would you go and why?

There are so many places! If I'm imagining myself being as physically limited as I am now - whereby I find walking difficult for more than about half an hour at best - then a cruise might be best.

I would like to cruise up the Danube and see the painted churches of Romania. But then again I would also like to cruise down the Nile and see Luxor. I could take a few lessons with Egyptian Raqs Sharqi teachers and get a new outfit while I was there.

If, on this imaginary trip, I'm also imagining myself as physically fit again, I'd like to go to Mexico and see what remains of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. Or perhaps to Peru to visit Machu Picchu

Alternatively, my son would like to go to Japan, so perhaps I would use my imaginary trip to take him there.

It's approximately two weeks since we had the heat pump put in, and I know I promised an update on how it is going :)

I thought it would be a bit colder, but it's not. We have been so toasty that we had to set the thermostat down a degree.

I was also worried that there might not be enough hot water in the tank that DH could have a shower in the morning and I could have a bath in the evening. Probably - I thought - we'd have to boost the hot water with the supplementary immersion heater if we wanted a bath full of hot water in the evening.

But no, the hot water is actually hotter with the heat pump than it was with the boiler, and the tank is hot enough throughout the day that there is enough left in the evening to run a pre-bedtime bath and more.

The cost of running it seems to be about equal to the cost of both electricity and gas that we used for heating the house, which DH seemed to think was good, although not as spectacular a saving as I expected. Still, it means that we are no longer dependent on oil as a household, and that is a step toward a less fossil-fuel based world, while not being worse for us in any way.

Not much going on with me, but it's been a while since I've posted and I know that if I don't make an effort I'll go silent again, maybe for another year :) So:

• As promised, an announcement that The Boat of Small Mysteries is out in paperback. Though I only pressed the button yesterday so it may take some time to work it's way through to the shops.

• Louise's belly dance class are now in full preparatory panic mode for the Cambridge hafla on the 11th of April. Next week we do the dress rehearsal for the group veil choreography which we are putting on there. I'm not getting on well with the veil - I get it stuck on my hair, or step on it. Even when I don't do that, I can't make the turns fast enough to keep up with the rest of the class, though it's quite a slow and elegant dance. Eh, this is what I get for trying to dance when I am naturally unathletic. Nevertheless we persist.

• Louise's veil dance is set to Rumeli Hisarı nın Yapılışı Which bears out my point about her always finding the best music.

• I am also doing my Fos solo at the Cambridge hafla, so I have started practicing that again, and have completely revamped the outfit that goes with it. I must practice putting the outfit on also, because it involves body glitter and fake nails, neither of which I have experience with.

• I'm at the end of week 10 of the 12 week low calorie diet I am on, and although I will have lost 3 stone (42lb) by the end of it, I still have a good 3 stone left to go, and I am afraid that if I loosen my grip even slightly it will all come back on and more. Still, this diet has been true to its word so far, so I'll trust it as I move to the next stage (intermittent fasting instead of permanent fasting.)

• My fear that I would lose so much weight before April that I wouldn't be able to wear the dress I bought at Christmas for the hafla in April has not been borne out. The dress is stretchy, and I had a lot to lose!

• Health-wise, I have been feeling less sluggish. The permanent pain in my hands and feet has eased - thank God! I find it easier to stand up and sit down, and much easier to get in and out of the car. I can also fasten my seatbelt without taking off my coat, which is just a factor of cars being too small, rather than my health, but is still an improvement in my day to day life in the winter.

5. How many local birds can you name?

• Robin
• Blue tit
• Great tit
• Crows
• Rooks
• Jackdaws
• Magpies
• Pigeon
• Wood dove
• Collared dove
• Blackbird
• Starling
• Wren
• Red kite (a kind of hawk)
• Buzzard

A tiny little wren lives in our garden and scurries around our fences. He is my favourite. But the family of blackbirds, and the robin who comes down to greet me when I go out are also my favourites. The rest of them are passing through, but the wren, robin and blackbirds live here with me.

On very bad news: my belly dance teacher, Elizabeth, popped over to the Middle East to get some dancing in during the half term holiday, and she is now trapped there thanks to the war. We suggested she find the embassy and let them know she's there but that's all we've heard, so none of us know what's happening beyond that. Some prayers for her safety would not come amiss if anyone reading this has a prayer list :(

On slightly better news, DH and I are having a heat pump put in, to run our central heating, instead of the gas boiler we previously had. And when I say 'we're having a heat pump put in' I mean right now. One engineer is outside drilling something. One is putting sticky back plastic over our carpets to protect them, prior to checking which radiators need to be replaced.

(Apparently we need larger radiators because the water coming from the heat pump will be at a lower temperature than that coming from a boiler, so we'll need a larger surface area of radiator to provide equivalent heating.)

We were keen to get a heat pump because we are with an electricity provider who get all their electricity from renewables (mostly wind farms around here.) That way, once we swap our gas hob for an electric one, we will be freed from fossil fuel use except for the cars. (They're on the plan too, but second hand electric cars are not yet as available as we need, and who can afford a new car?)

I'm very impressed with our electricity people so far (Octopus Electric.) They said they'd be here by 8am and they were here at 8.10am. (In contrast to the scaffolding people who said they'd be here yesterday and never turned up at all.)

They're putting protectors on our carpeting where they intend to walk. They say it will take them three days to install the heat pump system, but we'll only have one day without heating. And they have given us three fan heaters to keep us warm on that one day, and told us we can keep them afterward.

It'll be hard to go back to a system where you have to heat up the hot water tank in order to have hot water, (rather than the current system where the boiler heats the water on demand.) But we're doing our bit for the planet, so that will have to be the consolation :)

When you leave your home, what essentials do you have with you?

It's one big thing - my bag. My bag contains:

1. Car keys
2. House keys
3. Mobility scooter keys
4. Phone
5. Hand gel
6. CBD oil
7. Pack of paper handkerchiefs
8. Noise dampening loops
9. Wallet
10. Pen
11. Notebook
12. Hair-tie
13. Chapstick
14. Three of those silky reusable carrier bags that fold down small
15. Pill box with painkillers that need to be taken three times a day
16. Bottle of Lactase tablets - in case I'm going to be eating anything containing lactose
17. Sheet of Mebeverine tablets - in case the lactase doesn't work or I eat something else that doesn't agree with me. (I have IBS, this happens a lot.)

This is after I reduced the size of my bag and deliberately pared down the contents to essentials because my previous bag was hurting my shoulders.

I don't want to have to think about what I might need every time I go out, so I try to have everything I might need all the time.

I have just joined Bluesky, but it does seem to be very worthy and very focused on the big issues of real life, so I don't know how long I'll last over there.

I'm doing it again already, spreading myself too thin. That's it now. No other sites of social media allowed. I already know I can't keep up with one, let alone two. (Or three, in fact, since my non-writing real life friends and activities are all on Facebook.)

Ooh, ooh! There are leaf buds beginning to uncurl on the medlar tree. I barely got my apricot tree replanted in time because there are buds there too. They're still tightly clenched but they're visible in a sort of lovely plum bronze colour.

Snowdrops and crocuses are carpeting the graveyard of the church in our village. We've nearly made it, folks. These last couple of weeks are the worst, but the end is in sight.

Well, this is getting real now! The boat of Small Mysteries has both a cover and a blurb:

When a new disability ruins Emily’s life and family turn her out, she finds herself forced into a nomadic life on a narrowboat. With very little money and even less physical stamina, she doesn’t know if she has it in her to forge a whole new future on her own.

In the idyllic surroundings of the British waterways, as she moves from place to place she encounters a series of small mysteries. Can she solve them and find a new purpose for herself in the process? Or must a missing person remain lost and the case of the body in the lock remain unsolved?

Half cozy mystery and half fond ode to the narrowboat life, ‘The Boat of Small Mysteries,’ is a charming tale of resilience and intuition, sure to appeal to anyone who enjoys BBC Four’s Canal Boat Diaries, or the gentle adventures of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books.

~

It's just going through a final editing pass and then it will be ready to be released. Possibly even as soon as next week.

I genuinely can't remember how I used to do this. But I am very excited and a little nervous at the same time.

It's been so long!

Thank you to dreamersdare for creating and hosting this challenge :)

Series I love, from one to ten in no particular order:

1. Stargate Universe. The first episode I saw of this was episode #4 when they're desperately trying to find lime for the air scrubbers, and I loved that as a premise for an episode. It felt like much 'harder' (more realistic) sci-fi than any Stargate before it. The beating heart of the show, for me, was the Rush/Young relationship. OMG they had tension - what kind of tension is debatable, but they were locked in, wanting to murder each other and yet unable to run the ship without each other. I understood Rush very easily, but I didn't understand Young at all, and so--very like Rush--I soon became obsessed with trying to work him out. Hey presto, now he's one of my favourite characters ever. I actually liked the ending of this, with everyone in their stasis pods continuing to further possible adventures without us. If they were going to end it, I'm glad it got such a good and worthy final episode.

2. Star Wars. Three movies out of the original six movies obsessed me. Star Wars: A New Hope - I saw it when I was a teenager and it was newly out. I immediately went out and got my hair cut like Han Solo. This was before I discovered fandom, so my fic writing for this was limited to daydreams. Didn't like the next two as much. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, I became obsessed with Qui-Gon Jinn and wrote fanfic in which he was something of a Living Force saint - to the point that everyone else found him inexplicable and annoying. Didn't like the next two at all (no Qui-Gon.) Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I became obsessed with General Hux. He was a second generation villain, the child of a man who's speciality was brainwashing children, and he had essentially grown up in a cult. I found that interesting, back in the days when I still believed that Nazis were not a real world problem. Nowadays I would react differently. Didn't like the next two at all. (Make a freaking plan and tell a coherent story, guys! Sheesh.)

3. The Master and Commander books by Patrick O'Brian. This is what I went on to after Pirates of the Caribbean. OMG! Such ships! Such an amazing grasp on the history of the Age of Sail. And the social mores. The social observation of Jane Austen with a more accessible humour. Watching Patrick O'Brian play with language is just joyous! "Jack, you have debauched my sloth!" I chuckle through the whole thing, totally immersed and loving every person in it, because PoB has such compassion for all his characters and it's a wonderful thing.

4. The Discworld - need I say more? Everyone loves the Discworld books which have a similar combination of humour with sharply observed world building and deeper themes. I have a soft spot for The Light Fantastic, if only because everyone recommends to everyone else that new readers should skip it. I think that if you miss out on Rincewind, Twoflower and the Luggage, your life will be a little bit darker.

5. The Cadfael books by Ellis Peters. I like a good murder mystery and these are good murder mysteries set in the 12th Century, where the detective is a monk whose main job is to be the herbalist in the Abbey of Shrewsbury. Cadfael soon acquires a foil in the shape of the Sherrif, Hugh Berengar, a sly and cunning young man, and the two investigate all sorts of suspicious happenings with great compassion and humanity. The TV series is nowhere near as good, although okay to watch. Somehow they managed to strip all the charm out of it.

6. The Marcus Didius Falco books by Lindsey Davis. Another great series of murder mystery novels, this time set in 70ad, with a sleuth who starts as a bit of a hard boiled noir detective in Rome, but who meets the love of his life and softens out to become much more of a real person. Another series with fascinating history, good mysteries and surprisingly likeable people.

7. The Untamed. This is the rare TV series that I liked more than the book. My first (and still one of the only) Chinese fantasy series. I was blown away by the fact that the storytelling conventions we're used to in Western media are not the same for this, so it was deeply refreshing not to know how it was going to go. There was something I couldn't look away from about all these beautiful, beautifully dressed people yelling at each other in pavilions. Although it took me three watches to figure out who was who, I was entertained the whole time. By then I was hooked enough to become a Jin GuangYao apologist, and that spun me out into writing fanfic. I did try reading the book, but I didn't like the official translation, and my blorbo was barely in it for the first 3 volumes and I was not engaged enough with everything else to carry on reading.

8. Ted Lasso. OMG, I did not expect to get hooked on a series about football. I hate football, and sports in general. But the comedy and the great big heart of this one sucked me in instantly. I seem to have no defense against the combination of humour and compassion, and I honestly don't want to develop any.

9. The Expanse. Another rarity - the book series and the TV series are both excellent. Or rather, the TV series is excellent throughout - hard sci-fi, very believable world building, exciting things happening, imperfect characters you learn to love. The book series however becomes excellent starting at book two. Book One reads like the first book, where the author is still working things out, and Horden is a bit of a mary sue in it. He becomes a much more likable character later, when the author isn't trying so desperately to make you love him. It's well worth suffering (a little bit) through the first book to get to the later ones though.

10. Do I put Murderbot again (because the whole series is great?) Or do I put Babylon 5. Babylon 5, I think, because we cannot one of the best sci-fi series ever. I think I've put my finger on my own taste now, because it was also funny and loving, while still being exciting and full of drama. And Susan Ivanova remains one of the few female characters who hit the same exalted level for me as my male blorbos. She was allowed to be badass, and that meant a lot to me.

So, every time I sign up to do a solo, there's a place on the form for my dancer's pseudonym, and every time it makes me think 'should I have a dance name?' and 'if I should, what should it be?

I don't feel happy about just awarding myself an Arabic name, so these are the three choices I've managed to come up with:

• Ursula Ogg - after Ursula the octopus villain, and Nanny Ogg the witch. I'll be honest, the main driver for choosing either of these names is that I'm fat. Nanny Ogg is my favorite Discworld witch, but I feel no connection to the idea of witchery in general, and if I was to choose a favorite villain, Ursula wouldn't be on that list at all. So basically I just chose this because they were two cool people who were also fat.

• AElfgifu - means 'Elf-gift' and is my favourite Anglo-Saxon name. I am Anglo-Saxon myself so this would be a safe cultural bet.

• Athalia - means 'God is exalted' and is a Biblical name. I would like for my name to exalt God, and there's a long tradition among Christians to grab names out of the Bible, so if it's cultural appropriation, it's a long standing one.

Now I've put them all down I think Ursula is off the table and I just need some help choosing between AElfgifu and Athalia.

I feel more of a personal connection to AElfgifu through my years of Anglo-Saxon re-enactment, but I might need to give pronunciation tips with it, which would be a faff. (It's pronounced 'Alfg-aye-vuh')

On the other hand Athalia would be a new start, it doesn't require an Old English primer to pronounce, and of all the names it's the only one that made my heart leap a little.

What do you think? Athalia? Something else entirely?

(There's a lady I follow on Tumblr who is of a similar build to me and her dance name is Ursa Major, which I think is fantastic.)

A slight disadvantage to this belly dance thing is that I don't seem to enjoy much Egyptian music. I wish I knew where my Monday teacher gets her music from because I generally love her selection but I can't seem to find stuff I like by looking for it on my own. And I'm sure she has spent years building up her catalogue.

Perhaps that's the answer - spend years combing through music I don't really like much and by the time I've built up a library of my own I'll probably have learned to appreciate it better anyway.

Tonight I committed myself to dancing my solo to Fos by Amanati at Shimmyfest in June. I performed it just before Christmas to an audience of women from my belly dance class and it had a remarkable reaction:

For everyone else the audience made encouraging noises and clapped along at the fast bits. For me it was absolute silence. They did clap afterward, but I really wasn't sure if it was a success or an abject failure.

Today, however, the instructor mentioned that Shimmyfest was looking for soloists, so I asked her if Fos would be appropriate and she said Yes in tones that actually suggested enthusiasm, so I told her I would do it.

She also asked me if I had thought about costuming, which suggested to me that she did not think what I had been wearing at Christmas was adequate, even though I made the skirt myself out of translucent, watery-like material. I guess the t-shirt over the top was not very professional.

Fortunately at that same hafla there had been a lady selling her old dresses just to get them out of her house, and I picked up something more professional looking from her for £25. Unfortunately, I have been dieting since then and have lost a stone and a half (21lb), so the dress may need some taking in. I won't know what shape I'll be until much closer to the date.

Still, time to drag the choreography back out and start practicing again before I forget it all :)

I didn't realize I'd been writing it on and off for a year, but I hope to finish my cozy narrowboat mystery either this week or the next. All that remains is the wrap up.

I've been kind of writing it around MDZS, which is why it's taken so long. I didn't mean to write anything for MDZS and the next thing I knew I had 80k words or whatnot, but it's meant that the cozy had to take the back foot.

Now, however, I'm closing in on the end of the first draft, and I see that I have in fact got a finished book on my hands.

Only the first draft, of course. It needs a little while to rest before I can begin a first major edit - fitting the journey to the waterways, remembering everyone's names and the names of their boats, and settling on the final form of the quarrel between Susan and Emily.

In that resting time, I'm going to continue the world-building and plotting on the cozy Fantasy I will be writing next, with the plan to start a first draft of that before I go back to editing The Boat of Small Mysteries.

Thanks to my 7+ years of writer's block, I've realized that I stall out, badly, when I come to the end of a writing project and have nothing else to move on to. So this time I'm attempting to close the gap between one book and the next until there is a seamless transition between them.

I would like to touch wood and say that my long period of being unable to write is over. I need to mind the gap rather than falling into it. Wish me luck!

Maybe I should make a note of what I read, so they don't all blur into one.

Recently (in the last two weeks):

1. The Masquerades of Spring, by Ben Aaronovitch
2. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, by T.Kingfisher
3. Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher
4. Rose/House by Arkady Martine

5. Grandmother's Secrets by Rosina-Fawzia al Rawi

   (1) is a novella in the Rivers of London series about Isaac Newton's line of British official government wizards. Starring Thomas Nightingale in a rare trip abroad to visit 1920s New York and hunt down the maker of an enchanted saxophone.

Very Bertie Wooster dancing the Charleston in a gay club, and it's the novella that reveals Nightingale to be asexual. A rare win for the aces :)

(2) is a children's book in which a young wizard whose only gift is for working with dough is forced to find out exactly what she can do with it when her kingdom is in peril.

It's very well written - the plot escalates smoothly and it keeps you reading without being too busy or hectic. The prose is powerful but doesn't intrude. I enjoyed it but didn't really connect emotionally.

(3) follows a slow and unworldly (third, spare, novice nun) princess as she makes/finds allies in a quest to rescue her sister from the sister's husband. He is the prince of a neighbouring, much more powerful kingdom, and having murdered their elder sister is now abusing the middle sister.

I enjoyed this one much more for its blend of realistic dynastic politics and weird wizardly powers. I liked the characters more too, and they combined with the excellent workmanship of the author in a way I almost had feels about. (Not quite - my feels don't get engaged much any more, sadly.)

(4) A dead man turns up inside a hermetically sealed house run by a powerful AI, and a detective goes inside the house to try to solve the murder. This turns out to be a mistake. I enjoyed Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series (A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace) so I thought I might enjoy this too.

I am finding it haunting, and I appreciate her attempts to construct intelligences that are not human, but this one feels a bit like there is no plot, just an experience. And it's not a particularly pleasant experience. Rose House is not a particularly likeable character, even if its murder was in self defense. (Or was it?)

(5) A non-fiction book, partially a treatise on the origin of belly dancing and partially an autobiography.

I appreciated this as coming from within the culture where raqs sharqi originated, and it is a beautiful memoir of the author growing up with the dance. It was interesting to think of it as a private, indoors thing done by the women of the household chiefly for each other

I've found a lady who has the same sort of shape as me, who dances the same kind of dance that I would love to dance. She has such precision and confidence-verging-on-arrogance and strength and lyricism and sweetness. I don't know that I can get my creaky old, arthritic person to do some of the things she does (that back bend!) but I love her sense of theatre. I love how she has combined bellydance with inspiration from sci-fi and theatre to make something that is very unique.

Much though I like dancing, I haven't been able to find any genuine love in my heart for the whole 'scantily clad get in touch with your inner goddess who is also a sexy flirt' malarky, chiefly because I don't think I have an inner goddess of any kind, let alone a sexy one. But as a writer I 100% have an inner Evil Galactic Emperor, or an inner hero or villain character of a sort that I can lean into.

So I the new dance I am now wrestling with is inspired by the plot in Stargate Universe in which Chloe - experimented on by aquatic aliens - fears she is losing her humanity, even while she grows stronger and more intelligent.

My question was, why the heck wouldn't you embrace that? Super strength? The ability to do maths? Sign me up.

I've just got to find a way of expressing this in dance.

When I said 'lesson learned - pick a more varied tune next time', I was lying.

This time I picked a less varied tune that doesn't even have a chorus.

OK, for a person who thought they had not done anything creative in 2024, I actually wrote 77,175 words of MDZS fic, produced 8 hours of podfics, and choreographed/performed my first solo dance in an art-form I'd barely been studying for a year.

That might be less than some years, but it's not nothing. I have been (as usual) down on myself for no reason.

Here's hoping (being determined that) 2025 will be better.

A lifelong ambition achieved! One of my Christmas presents was dinosaur dungarees for adults:

Finally danced my dance, and indeed I danced it three times - first in front of my other belly dance class, as a 'lets watch M do her dance while we take a water break,' thing. In which Louise gave me the idea to turn to the side so the mermaid arms on the camels could be seen better, and the whole class went 'oooh' when I did the deep dip with the sword on my head.

That was done in exercise gear. It felt okay despite the fact that I did lose my place at one point and find myself coming back to myself, thinking 'where am I? What am I supposed to be doing here?' Nobody seemed to notice, so it was fine.

Then I did it in full memento mori skirt get up in front of Elizabeth's beginners class. I don't think I forgot anything there, but I don't think there was a lot of enjoyment or engaging with the audience. I was too busy trying to remember how it went.

Then I did it again in front of a paying audience at the Buckleton Christmas hafla. This had a Christmas theme, so I wore a red 24 yard skirt, a green top, green and gold coin belt and a tinsel crown (was told I looked like the Ghost of Christmas Present, which I think is a complement.) This time it felt really good, and I was able to remember to make eye contact with members of the audience and smile.

Later my teacher who was also there emailed me to say it was a good performance, so I think that one went well.

I came away feeling buoyed up, and am still feeling oddly more solid for it, even a week later. I definitely enjoy going to a hafla and performing for one. Time to start on a new, better choreography for Shimmyfest next year.