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lucymonsterOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie: On a routine trip to the dentist, legendary private detective Monsieur Poirot becomes embroiled in a case of apparent suicide that looks increasingly suspicious as the bodies of other patients from that day's appointments start to pile up. This is a clever, twisty, wryly funny mystery on par with everything you'd expect from Christie; my Poirot reading has been sporadic and out of order, but he's such a vivid character that it only took a few pages before he felt like the very best of fictional acquaintances. I find it impressive in general how much Christie manages to do with so few words. Her prose is very neat and precise, with minimal but to-the-point descriptions and long passages of untagged dialogue that are nonetheless easy as anything to track. She lures you through the story at a brisk walking place - pleasant, exhilarating, but not exhausting - and then ends it all with a solution to the puzzle that you could never have guessed (well, I couldn't, anyway) but feel like you should have guessed for how well it brings together all the clues.
Carefully avoiding any spoilers, I will just say that I really liked the pairing of crime-thriller-worthy events with the utterly prosaic setting of a dentist's office, and then also, paired with that, Poirot's nobly naive insistence on the value of ordinary human life in the face of grand ideologies. IDK, it was all just so nice, for a story with so many corpses in it. Our girl Agatha was perfecting the cosy mystery long before the genre was a twinkle in the zeitgeist's eye.
H. P. Lovecraft: I have never attempted Lovecraft before, but I came in abundantly forewarned of his 1) breathtaking racism and 2) rather unlovely prose. The latter I mitigated somewhat by listening to this first handful of stories in audio format, with a good narrator to make up for the lifelessness; the latter can't be helped. I enjoyed myself, anyway!
( Three novellas/short stories )
Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin: And now for something completely different! I've been plugging away at this all month, and it has been an experience. Augustine (St. Augustine in the saint-having traditions) is a 4th century church father, theologian, philosopher and priest from Roman Africa. He was from a mixed-faith family and his mother attempted to raise him Christian, but in his twenties he fell in with the Manichaeans (a dualist religion incorporating elements of Christianity as well as other faiths). Augustine was fiercely intelligent, passionately interested in philosophy and rhetoric, and never fully satisfied by the Manichaean doctrines; it took him a decade of uncertainty and questioning, but eventually, at age 32, he embraced Christianity wholeheartedly after being taught an allegorical approach to reading scripture that resolved all his objections to the faith.
( Cut for length )
Carefully avoiding any spoilers, I will just say that I really liked the pairing of crime-thriller-worthy events with the utterly prosaic setting of a dentist's office, and then also, paired with that, Poirot's nobly naive insistence on the value of ordinary human life in the face of grand ideologies. IDK, it was all just so nice, for a story with so many corpses in it. Our girl Agatha was perfecting the cosy mystery long before the genre was a twinkle in the zeitgeist's eye.
H. P. Lovecraft: I have never attempted Lovecraft before, but I came in abundantly forewarned of his 1) breathtaking racism and 2) rather unlovely prose. The latter I mitigated somewhat by listening to this first handful of stories in audio format, with a good narrator to make up for the lifelessness; the latter can't be helped. I enjoyed myself, anyway!
( Three novellas/short stories )
Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin: And now for something completely different! I've been plugging away at this all month, and it has been an experience. Augustine (St. Augustine in the saint-having traditions) is a 4th century church father, theologian, philosopher and priest from Roman Africa. He was from a mixed-faith family and his mother attempted to raise him Christian, but in his twenties he fell in with the Manichaeans (a dualist religion incorporating elements of Christianity as well as other faiths). Augustine was fiercely intelligent, passionately interested in philosophy and rhetoric, and never fully satisfied by the Manichaean doctrines; it took him a decade of uncertainty and questioning, but eventually, at age 32, he embraced Christianity wholeheartedly after being taught an allegorical approach to reading scripture that resolved all his objections to the faith.
( Cut for length )
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Thursday Pinch Hit ✎ Not Quite Right [DW]
Today's theme is "not quite right." Something is off. The math isn't mathing. A character knows something is wrong but can't put it into words. Something's on the tip of their tongue, something important that they should know, but... Or perhaps someone has returned from the dead and isn't how they once were in some respect. Maybe someone walks into a room and immediately feels the tension or awkwardness in the air. Or the gang meets someone who is very off-putting, like an especially weird Scooby-Doo suspect they want to run away from really really fast. Y'know. That sort of thing.
Feel free to add specifics to your prompts, like whether you'd prefer a gen fill over something shippy, or if you have a squick or trigger you hope to avoid. Original fiction, fanfiction, and fanfic crossovers are always welcome. ~_^
Just a few rules:
No more than five prompts in a row.
No more than three prompts in the same fandom.
Use the character's full names and the fandom's full name
No spoilers in prompts for a month after airing, or use the spoiler cut option found here. Unfortunately, DW doesn’t have a cut tag, so use your best judgment when it comes to spoilers.
If your fill contains spoilers, warn and leave plenty of space, or use the above-mentioned spoiler cut.
Prompts should be formatted as follows: [Use the character's full names and fandom's full name]
Fandom, Character +/ Character, Prompt
Some examples to get things started...
+ Resident Evil (game/CGI 'verse), Sherry Birkin + Leon S. Kennedy (+ any), (RE9) "Shouldn't much more of the city be crumbling, if not already be completely leveled to dust?" and/or Leon's RCS + PTSD cause him to hallucinate while exploring familiar places
+ any fandom that specifies its timeline(s), any (+/ any), make a time/date/year inconsistency make sense
+ author's choice, any (+/ any), the memories of an unreliable narrator
We are on AO3! If you fill a prompt and post it to AO3, please add it to the Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2026 collection. See further notes on this option here.
Not feeling any of today’s prompts? You can use LJ’s advanced search options to limit keyword results to only comments in this community. Fret not, DW members; we are working on a way to search through old entries for prompts for you! As of right now, the best way to search for a lonely prompt on DW is to search the community’s archive, which can be found [[HERE]].
While the use of LJ's advanced search and DW’s archive are options, bookmarking the links of prompts you like might work better for searching in the future.
As a friendly reminder about our schedule, Lonely Prompts and sharing completed fills are encouraged on Sundays, while new themes and prompts are posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Saturdays are a Free for All day. We'll share our posts on DW and LJ for everyone's convenience. Keep an eye out for notifications!
If you have a Dreamwidth account and would feel more comfortable participating there, please feel free to do so… and spread the word!
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