“The Prince’s Consort” – Chapter 17 [A Good Omens AU]

More sweet, sultry, sexy, smutty goodness for our two lovely boys today, because they deserve all of it and more, don’t you think? ❤

If you have a fan, you might want to sit in front of it. XD

Enjoy, my loves!

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 32

Good morning, my lovelies; I hope this Monday morning finds you well!

Before I get into this week’s post, let me first give you a brief explanation of what summer weather is like in Nova Scotia, Canada.

To much of the world, specifically large cities and areas on the equator, our summer weather may not sound particularly hot. Growing up, I can remember that it hardly ever hit a high of 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), and these days it’s generally pushing it to hit 32-34 on the hottest days. That said, what we have in spades here on the Eastern coast of Canada, is humidity.

You’ve likely heard the term “it’s not the heat; it’s the humidity”, and perhaps you’ve even rolled your eyes, because it sounds whiny and pedantic. It sounds like an excuse to complain for people who are especially hateful of hot weather. But let me tell you, if you’ve never truly experienced high humidity temperatures, you have no bloody idea.

Over the course of the past week, our temperatures have been roughly in the range of 28 to 34 degrees Celsius (82.4 to 93.2 Fahrenheit), with maximum humidity levels, which brings the perceived temperature up to roughly 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), which you may recognize as being disgustingly fucking hot. And the thing is, what you get with humid heat is a sense of heft. Whereas a dry heat feels like it’s burning your skin and maybe makes you feel parched and breathless, humid heat feels as though the air is thick, as if it’s filling your lungs and weighing you down. Plus, it’s deceptive in the fact that the air feels moist and sweaty, and makes you sweat, so you feel wet and gross when in reality you’re dehydrating something fierce.

In other words, it sucks. It doesn’t bother everyone, of course, but it can definitely affect the physical and mental health of plenty of people, and can be especially miserable for people with certain conditions. For instance, this past Thursday the air was so hot, humid, and heavy, that I took an asthma attack while sitting still on the couch in my living room. If that’s not all kinds of bullshit, I don’t know what is.

And all of this is more or less to say that not a whole hell of a lot got done last week. We all did our best, truly (hubby and I even sold a few things!), but for the most part it was just too difficult to even move most of the time.

So with that in mind…here we go.

Health

I won’t lie; I’ve been rather disappointed in myself recently. For one thing, I’ve yet to actually move on and start a new Beachbody program, though I’ve had one picked out for a while now. Granted, as I explained above, it’s been rather too fucking hot to be doing anything too exerting, but surely there’s something I could be managing to pull off to keep my body from getting too sluggish again. But no, the overwhelming majority of my time recently has been spent staying as still as humanly possible while parked in front of one fan or another. Without really intending to, I’ve become sedentary again.

That’s not even the bad part though. The bad part is that my eating habits have gone all to shit again. It was rather impossible for them not to, when we went to the cottages with hubby’s family, but I haven’t recovered at all in the time since. I’ve gotten bad for snacking again, suppers have been less than nutritious most of the time, and hubby and I have been eating at night again. It really has to stop, like, yesterday, before all the work I put in during Morning Meltdown 100 completely vanishes.

Creativity

Well, let’s get the easy one out of the way first: I did not do any kind of visual art this past week. Theoretically I should have been able to find the time to do it while I was sprawled on the couch trying not to die of heat stroke, but I spent most of that time trying (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing) to write.

Which brings us to the writing bit. I must say, I really didn’t expect to pull off my Pacemaker.press goal for this week, because the site is starting to be a bit more forceful with me and gave me a rather challenging number to hit. But somehow, miraculously, I actually did manage to hit it, just barely. The site wanted me to write 11,995 words, and I squeaked through by the skin of my teeth with 12,156 words. Booyaka-fucking-sha.

The majority of those words, for the record, went toward The Prince’s Consort, which I put a bit of a push into when I realized that the published chapters were catching up to the available pre-written ones. The good news is that I’m now a few chapters ahead again, and am rapidly sprinting toward the actual completion of the story. It will be bittersweet, let me tell you, because I’m definitely ready to move on to something else, but I’ve also absolutely adored writing the characters in this way.

Down-Time

Reading:
Surprisingly, I didn’t get much reading of any kind done this past week. A bit counter-intuitive, honestly, since being sprawled out, trying to move as little as possible, rather lends itself to the relatively simple process of moving your eyes across a page. I suppose I was mostly distracted by my own writing.

That said, I have been slowly reading through a truly lovely fic called Solve et Coagula, by AppleSeeds on AO3. It is a GO fic (surprise surprise), but it’s an AU that takes place in a more medieval kind of time, with Aziraphale as a philosopher and Crowley as an alchemist. There’s a plot afoot to be ‘rid’ of both of them, so they must work together to uncover the details and the perpetrators, while exploring their growing feelings for one another. It is quite good, and while I’m only about halfway through at the moment, I can definitely tell you that it makes my list for fics that could easily be adapted into a publishable book.

Playing:
If I’m going to talk about playing games, I do have to mention that we spent a rather large portion of the weekend playing Pokemon GO. There was a two-day Community Day event going on during which there were Eevees absolutely everywhere, so we all went a bit nuts catching as many of them as possible in hopes of finding shiny ones, and trading for the chance of lucky ones.

Aside from that, I have been playing a bit of Pokemon Snap recently, since they added the free update. It continues to be a ridiculously amusing and soothing experience. There’s not even that much more to say. I adore it.

Hubby, on the other hand, hadn’t really been playing anything for quite a while, but this weekend he bought the Batman: Arkham remastered two-pack that had been on sale on the Playstation store, and he started playing through those. I mention it because it’s one of those games (two of those games?) that I will happily sit and watch him play, because it’s incredibly entertaining. The games are so old now, but they still hold up, especially with the remastered graphics.

Watching:
Well, firstly, we finished the Godzilla: Singular Point anime series. My assessment? Uh…I’m not even entirely sure. lol It was entertaining, for sure, but a bit hard on the head. There was so much made up math and pseudo-science to ‘explain’ what was happening with the kaiju that it was genuinely difficult to follow. In fact, all that math and science could be genuine quantum physics for all I know…it was that complicated and painful to think about. Still entertaining though.

We also watched the new/redone/reboot/kinda sequel/wtf Suicide Squad, and I must say that I thought it was miles better than the first one. There were things I didn’t like, but as a whole it was a fun, violent, anti-hero blast, and Margot Robie continues to be the absolute perfect Harley Quinn, in my honest opinion. Plus King Shark was just…*chef’s kiss*. Fantastic. XD

Aside from that, we’ve been rewatching The IT Crowd for the hundredth time because the kid wanted to see it, and she’s been enjoying it thoroughly. I grin like an idiot every time I see her laugh at something. It’s such a good show. Period.

So, yeah, not the most productive week, but at least I managed to get all that writing in, right? That’s worth celebrating! I think I deserve a treat for that, so I’m going to go have a Tim’s coffee with hubby and our friends now. 🙂 Cheers!

Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 31

Happy Monday, my darlings! At least, I hope it’s a happy one for you!

Let me preface this post by first explaining just what was happening with the family and I over the past few days… See, it’s become a bit of a tradition with hubby’s family to rent a cabin somewhere for a few days at some point in the summer, just to hang out and relax, go to the beach, eat tons of junky food, play games together, and so on. This past weekend was the event for this summer. SO. Friday around roughly noon, my parents-in-law, sister-and-niece-in-law, and cousin-in-law showed up at our place, and we all headed off in the direction of this block of cabins in the middle of nowhere. Once there we met up with several more family members (aunts and uncles, cousins, and the cousins’ kids). We had three cabins between the pile of us, with the cabin I was in being the largest, and thus being designated as the ‘party cabin’.

(And just to reiterate, when I say ‘middle of nowhere’, I really do mean middle of nowhere. There wasn’t even a cell signal, and we had to drive a half hour to get to a store that carried eggs.)

While at this block of cabins in the middle of Everyone-Gets-Murdered Forrest (just kidding…it really was rather lovely), we drank a great deal of alcohol, ate a great deal of bad-for-you food, took two trips to the beach, played multiple washer-toss tournaments, played multiple games of ‘pass the ace’ (of which I won a few), drank a great deal more alcohol, ate a great deal more bad-for-you food, sang loudly (and badly) to great music, stayed up late, stayed in late, barbecued, went for walks, ate and drank even more, and just generally overindulged in absolutely everything possible. And all that overindulging went on until approximately 9 am Monday morning, at which point we all finally returned home.

It was a great time, overall, and I had lots of fun. That’s also to say, however, that it was three straight days of excess and not really getting anything at all productive done. Soooooo, just keep that in mind. 😛

I’m also rather dehydrated after three days of drinking mostly alcohol, so forgive me if I seem a bit loopy in this particular post. :3

On another positive note, the cast cover we’d ordered for the kid actually came in the day before we went off to the cabins, so she was able to enjoy going swimming with her cousin despite her broken hand. We also got notification of her appointment to get the splint off, in just a week from now. So hurrah for that!

So now that you know what our weekend was all about, let’s see if I can come up with something to talk about for today’s post.

Health

Now you know why I mentioned all the eating and drinking before getting here.

Long story short, I feel a bit like I got beaten up, and I’m genuinely concerned that I may have undone all the work I did with ‘Morning Meltdown 100’. You guys, I ate so much fattening food this weekend (chips, cookies, candies, shortcake, hamburgers and hot-dogs, steak, potato salad, pasta salad, popcicles, pizza rolls, donair subs…) and drank so much alcohol (coolers, schnapps, vodka, tequila, cream liqueur…) that it’s genuinely a bit amazing that I didn’t just drop dead at some point.

On the plus side, I did manage to go the entire weekend without having any massive hangovers, and I actually kept my daily step count decently high, all things considered.

But that’s not to say that I don’t feel a bit like crap. It was a weekend of massive excesses, and I’m definitely paying for it now. Now that it’s all over, my plan is to try out the ’80 Day Obsession’ Beachbody program, though I doubt I’ll start it for a few more days. I’m going to need to detox myself a bit before I can jump into something like that, which is going to be difficult considering the sheer quantity of leftovers that we were sent home with.

To summarize: I fatted out massively and will now require some extreme maintenance in order to recover.

Creativity

Now, obviously I didn’t spend all my time away with family cooped up in a corner somewhere, writing and drawing. That would have been ridiculous. I did, however, manage to sneak a bit of me-time in here and there, so my report isn’t completely devoid of success.

On the drawing side there actually is nothing, because I never managed to snag a portion of time with which to really sit down and get into something. I thought that I might get a chance while we were away for the weekend, but we had a lot going on and a lot fun to be had, and so I never actually got to the point of sitting down with the tablet. Before the weekend I didn’t get any time because I was busy with things like tidying up the house in case people showed up there at some point before or after the cabins (which they did, so I was glad I did it).

Writing, on the other hand, was still accomplished…just not to the level that Pacemaker.press wanted it to be. After a couple of easier weeks, the website set me a more daring goal of 14,668 words, which just wasn’t going to happen unless I actually did lock myself in a room in the cabin and refuse to associate with anyone. I did, however, still manage to pull off 9796 words, which I think is pretty damn decent considering how much I had going on. A bit of a caveat though: all of those words were toward ‘The Prince’s Consort’…none at all went toward ‘The Other World: Book Three’.

Yes, yes, I am definitely an awful person. But on the plus side, I should only have a few more chapters of ‘Consort’ to go now!

Down-Time

I mean, honestly, you could just look at the entire three-day weekend as being down-time and call it a day.

But if you want a few more details:

Reading was not really a thing over the past week, unless you count picking at a few random fic updates whenever I had a free moment (while cooking or cleaning or what-have-you). I considered bringing an actual book to the cabins with me, but I figured sitting there reading would seem a bit anti-social and rude.

Watching mostly revolved around more of the Olympics, but also a few crappy b-movies on Tubi, and another of Bo Burnham’s specials, which are really something you should watch if you want to laugh but also feel a deep emotional sadness for someone. Which, yeah, okay, is a weird kind of thing to want to do, but there you have it.

We also finally finished ‘Jo-Jo’s Bizarre Adventure’, and I was mostly pleased with the whole thing. I liked a lot of the characters in this most recent season, although I do have to say that the ‘Stardust Crusaders’ season is by far the superior one of the lot. ❤

Playing is where all the action was this past week, although not with video games! I did download the free update for ‘New Pokemon Snap’, but didn’t actually get a chance to try it before we went on our little trip. What I did play was a bunch of group games best shared among a load of alcohol. As mentioned above, the fam and I played several ‘washer-toss’ tournaments, which is always a ton of fun even when you’re playing like absolute crap. We also played ‘pass the ace’ for a few hours, two nights in a row, and a long round of ‘Bang’ after that. There was also a bit of badminton (that I, personally, didn’t partake in), a few rounds of the ‘Blockbuster’ movie-based team game, and a rather amusing round of ‘adult’ ‘Trivial Pursuit’. All in all, it’s safe to say that there was quite a bit of ‘playing’ going on, especially in the past few days.

It’s also safe to say that I now really just want to sit down with several hours of something brain-dead, like ‘New Pokemon Snap’. XD

So that covers that, and to be honest I really don’t have anything more to say. It’s been a long few days, my head is pretty achy from the alcohol-induced dehydration, and the whole family is exhausted from multiple long, late nights in a row. So I’m going to bed, suckers! *drops mic and walks off-stage*

Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤

“The Prince’s Consort” – Chapter 16 [A Good Omens AU]

Oh, my darling readers…it took far more chapters than I was expecting, but things have been ramping up slowly, and we’ve finally reached the bits you’ve likely been waiting for.

Break out your fans and a nice, cool drink, lovies! You’re going to need it. ^_~

Enjoy!