Vanessa Ricci-Thode's Blog, page 2

Meds O’clock

It’s been a really shitty year weather-wise and I can’t believe summer’s already over. I hate it so much! Spring never really happened, and summer took a while to show up too. And then when it was good hot weather, it was often to smoky to go out and enjoy it. Everything has been really exhausting. I hate my moods being controlled by the weather. But I started my anti-depressants again today, because even if the weather improves again (it probably will) that doesn’t do anything about the days being noticeably shorter now.

I really wasted the summer this year. And I feel it in my soul. I was so exhausted all the time when the weather was good. I’m a little worried it’s going to make the winter even harder to deal with. I’m hoping I can start HRT to deal with the perimenopause and get out from under this brain fog and exhaustion. But it’s unlikely I’ll even get in to see a specialist before the weather turns to shit for good.

It's hard to be optimistic these days. Hopefully the meds will help a bit with that.

Butterfly Time!

It’s butterfly time! It’s been another slow year for butterflies, and a lot of the caterpillars in the bug tent have died for no reason (possibly it got too hot?) but it looks like there will still be a good number of them. I’ve released over a dozen now and there are still at least a couple dozen left in the tent (they’re getting hard to count, ha!).

Anyway, here are some recent releases, and one chrysalis just before the butterfly emerged.

The Enchanted Greenhouse

This is the perfect follow-up to The Spellshop, which I also really loved! The book works as a standalone as well as a sequel. It’s not directly related, featuring the librarian who created Caz from Spellshop. Much like The Spellshop, this one is about starting over and a lot of the usual romance tropes.

After being turned into a living statue because she broke a fairly ridiculous law, Terlu wakes up suddenly, cold and alone in the middle of a forest that surrounds magical greenhouses. But the magic on the greenhouses is failing, and they’re dying one by one, despite the island’s residents (human and plant alike) working hard to save them.

It’s a gentle book full of food. This book made me so hungry, which love interest Yarrow who is basically a trad wife hahaha. He also reminds me of my spouse with all his grunting and shrugging and general quietness. It’s at turns frustrating and endearing.

It’s about new beginnings, rebuilding after devastation, healing from traumas, and the importance of community. It’s a sweet/low-spice romance too, and that’s probably one of my favourite things about it. It’s got some good humour to it, and a cast of characters you want to see succeed (even the ghost of the sorcerer responsible for the whole mess).

It’s a slow, meandering, gentle read, though I stayed up way too late far too many nights waiting for the characters to get their shit together. And while the main pairing is cishet, there are queer side characters, including some of the plants.

If you’re into cozy romantasy, or enjoyed The Spellshop, I highly recommend this one.

Summer Garden

It’s not that there isn’t a ton of stuff blooming in my garden, it’s that I keep forgetting to take pictures. The globe thistle has bloomed and gone to seed and I completely forgot to take pictures of those spiky little weirdoes. And when I do take pictures, I forget to upload them.

So anyway, here’s one corner of the front garden and everything it’s got going on. Sea holly, phlox, butterfly bush, daylily, last of the veronica, tons of milkweed, and that random orange thing whose name I have forgotten. There’s liatris in there too, though it’s blocked by the sea holly.

And also, just for fun, my sequoia. It used to be a little taller than that, and then I didn’t do a good enough job protecting it from the cold a couple of winters ago and it died back to only about 6 inches high (the parts that were under the snow/straw). I’m pleased to see it rebounding!

The Chonks Return!

Butterfly season got off to a really late start here this year. I didn’t end up seeing any of the first generation of monarchs. We get two generations in this area in the summer and usually I start seeing the first generation in late May/early June. I didn’t see my first monarch until July this year, which was unusual. Thankfully, the actual numbers for generation two are pretty good!

I’ve got dozens of eggs, caterpillars and chrysalises. So far I’ve released six butterflies. The one in the final image was the first one. There’s also a fifth instar caterpillar, a fairly new chrysalis, a chrysalis a few hours before butterfly time, and a wild butterfly who was hanging out in my Japanese maple.

Hugo Reading Round-up

I’m having some health issues (perimenopause, 0/10 do not recommend) that leave me pretty exhausted and scatterbrained so I’ve been meaning to do this post forever and just… keep forgetting.

I haven’t actually finished anything since I finished reading for the Hugos. I didn’t read everything on the ballot because I’m not torturing myself with works I know I’m not going to like just for the sake of completion. I DNF stuff all the time or read the description and opt out entirely.

Novellas, novelettes and short stories were all really strong categories this year, and I used some totally arbitrary metric to decide between the two novelettes I really liked. So, of the new things I read for the awards, here’s what I thought:

Navigational Entanglements
This has some fantastic worldbuilding and fascinating characters and it was wonderful to watch all these enemies become friends (and in some cases lovers) over the course of the book. The ending was just about perfect. I haven’t read any of de Bodard’s work in a while, mostly due to overwhelm, and I’m really glad the awards put this one in my path.

“The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea”
This is just a really excellent, cathartic read, especially if you’ve been in a shitty relationship where your partner ground you down so slowly you barely noticed it until you’d made yourself so small you nearly disappeared. Another one that just really sticks the landing.

“Lake of Souls”
This wasn’t my top pick for the awards, but I still really liked how this story came together. It was weird, and went places I wasn’t expected, but it was really lovely as well. Well, lovely for one of the characters.

“Loneliness Universe”
I really really love this metaphor for the specific loneliness and disconnect of the lockdown pandemic years. Especially as someone still partially living that. It really captures the essence of “together but apart” and I really loved this story!

Nebula Award!

My award arrived a while ago and I’ve been busy and distracted and completely forgot to take pictures of it with the book or get actual good ones of me holding the award. So I did that a few days ago and here they are with bonus dog. Also, they chose stones for the award to match the cover art! How cool is that??

Billionaire’s Tears

OMG my first short story pro sale is now live! Go find “Billionaire’s Tears” on Escape Pod! (It’s a podcast so you can read it or listen.) I’m super excited to share this extremely angry story with you. It’s a story where a plague is killing off the world’s billionaires (fuck yes, sign me up), but it’s less about how and more about what that looks like and what it means.

So this story started in the shower when I was getting ready to leave for the annual pilgrimage to Tobermory with the fam. I happened to glance at the clock in the shower at 11:11am. So I made a wish. (IYKYK)

For the last several years, my wish is always the same. Get rid of the fuckin billionaires and let the world heal. But this day, in the shower, a bit rushed because we needed to hit the road soon to get to our rental on the lake, I started thinking about how that might happen. What would get rid of the fuckin billionaires without hurting the rest of us? That’s a tricky part. I won’t want to have to sacrifice anyone else to get rid of those fuckers.

And you know those fuckers won’t go without a fight. So I started thinking about what that would all look like and what they’d do to try to hold on to whatever power they could and who and what they’d sacrifice to keep as much of their hoard for as long as possible.

So I washed my hair while pondering all these things and I had basically the outline for the entire thing by the time I was done in the shower. I wrote it in early September. It was the first thing I wrote as I emerged from burnout and I’m really happy with it.

This story is 100% wish fulfillment for me. It was cathartic to write. I hope you’ll check it out and enjoy it!

Flower Photodump

I have forgotten about uploading a flower report on here, and also there was a good stretch where there wasn’t much new happening because the weather was absolute shit. Anyway, here’s several weeks’ worth of flowers, including things in my planters (including the Halloween-themed ones) and stuff that’s been blooming in the garden.

Magica Riot

This book is super adorable and a lot of fun and I was absolutely not the target audience for it. Still liked it! But I’m really not into magical girls, like at all. So there was a lot of stuff that just didn’t really work for me for that reason.

But it was still a fun read about a girl rock band that are actually a bunch of magical girls, including the trans MC, who fight evil with music magic. It was fantastic to have a trans MC who wasn’t misgendered or deadnamed or had transphobic slurs hurled at her. Just nice and affirming and fun.

It’s very over the top, which I assume is part of the magical girl genre. It’s a solid book, but a lot of it started to feel very samey. I also found it was lacking in emotional depth.

But it’s a quick, fun read with a sweet, endearing MC, and some cool fight sequences. If you’re into trans rights and magical girls, this book is definitely for you!