This Is So Painfully Accurate.

If I could still do hours in heels like I could pre-Lockdown, I would absolutely be buying these.

Jude would wear these, she’d run in these, she’d murder in these, and id eat it up

How do we know which part of the love story we're in?

Are we in the really difficult part before we get our shit together and it's about to get really fucking good?

Or is our story the one that kicks off my book of falling in love with myself and finding peace or someone else? Is this the story that leads to my story, alone?

If it's the first...how many more chapters until we get to the part where it all makes sense and neither one of us knows how we ever lived for a second without the other?

If it's the second...God, can you just rip my heart out now so we can get on with it?

In mine and many other east Asian cultures, the dragon traditionally symbolises things like power, wealth and strength (imperial symbol and all)

I think we often forget that in the story of the Great Race, the dragon came in fifth because it'd stopped to give people rain. Then it'd stopped again to push a rabbit adrift on a log across the wide river so it reached the shore safely (that's why the Rabbit year comes before the Dragon).

Dragons aren't meant to just be powerful - they are meant to do good with such power, and to help those in need.

So in this lunar new year, I hope you gain more power, so that you might be able to help others. I pray you have abundant resources so you may give to yourself and those around you. I wish you courage, endurance, kindness and generosity, for yourself and your people.

I hope you, and I, will be rain givers, life preservers, joy bringers.

I hope we will be dragons.

Extremely belated postscript that should have been here far earlier:

Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo 🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩

2005 Pride & Prejudice back on Netflix UK!

This is not a drill! AHHH!

I would be so interested in a prequel that shows Madoc's backstory, what happened with his first wife, and how he and Oriana came to be together. I reckon it would be more political/adventurous, but still. I think it would be so interesting to see how his moral compass actually works and to know more details about what happened to lead to the events of the main series.

Spoilers for The Prisoner’s Throne

Not Madoc giving me the most emotional responses in this book. 🥹

Listen, Madoc is the most complex, the most morally grey, the most treacherous, and yet, I adore him.

"Love everlasting, love wished for desperately, love that walks in through the door, love that is a mistake, love that is yours alone."

— Alice Hoffman, Magic Lessons

All the time. It's a growing problem. It's almost like I think if my eyes skip over quickly, it won't matter, my brain will somehow still absorb it (Plot twist - it doesn't, and I need to start the paragraph, or, indeed, the page, over).

This story did make me cry with laughter. Mostly because I remember going to Little League games and this is scarily accurate.

The Malfoy-Potter quidditch rivalry continues. 

(Thank you emilyprocraftinates for commissioning me. Inspired by ‘The League’ by I’m All Teeth.)

I've ended up falling down a Dramione rabbit hole. I read some really amazing ones (Wait and Hope and Draco Malfoy and The Mortifying Ordeal of Being In Love are probably my favorites, although Measure of a Man was also PHENOMENAL).

However, I've just finished Manacled. It was so well written and absolutely brilliant, but holy shit on a stick if it didn't break my heart.

The alternate ending to the Battle of Hogwarts was worse than even my panicked teenaged brain could have come up with back when Deathly Hallows actually came out. I wept for characters I've always loved in ways I didn't think I could.

I finished the flashback scenes last night and thought about them all morning, until I forced myself to get back into it and read the rest of the story. Which was still devastating. But honestly.

I am currently drowning my sorrows in Meg Cabot's cheerful writing and then I'll have to reread something funny and familiar. All the people telling me they've reread Manacled, like, HOW?! I need a few years away from it before I could think of rereading.