This was a very stressful couple of weeks at work - not in a bad way, in a 'big important deadlines ahhh' kind of way - but I might be getting my first independent research project if my proposal is selected for funding!

Will be taking a couple of days off this week after all that; Z also has a minor surgery on Friday, so I'd like to be free in case needs anything.

The free time that I haven't been spending on the submission has mostly been spent on writing the latest chapter of my Morrowind WIP. I was nervous about posting it, because it's a very important chapter that the story has been building up to for a while, plus I ended the last chapter on a cliffhanger and took a week off, and then I would have wanted the time to do one more pass over it... but based on the heartbroken comments, it had the impact I was hoping it would, so that was a relief.

Artistic gymnastics Worlds were this past week, and although I really enjoyed rhythmic Worlds (I watched with my parents - my dad enjoyed it a lot more than he expected to), and I made time to watch some of the figure skating GPs so far, between work and my recent meh feelings on artistic, I didn't end up watching more than a couple of videos. After the Paris fuck-up, the fan reactions to the Paris fuck-up (hoo boy did some fans who think of themselves as progressive let their racism fly), the recent Simone transphobia fuckery (glad to know our human rights mean just as much as Covid masking did to her when the sponsors call! really nice that she found the time to apologize someone who used her own sexual assault as a gotcha but not someone she ran off social media for not liking her floor music!), and who got through the "neutral" athlete screening from Russia... I wasn't feeling like trying to fit it in. Can't even be that happy that Leanne first proved wrong everyone proclaiming US gymnastics done, over with, won't win a single medal, because I don't like her, lol. (She's almost certainly an anti-vaxxer despite being pre-med, and I find her constant resume-fluffing endeavors annoying.) Nice results for Josc and Kaylia and Aiko, I guess.

On a happier note, now that I have free time again this weekend, I've been catching up on my reading. I just finished Renault's Fire From Heaven, her first Alexander the Great book. I'm not entirely sure exactly how I feel about it yet or whether I want to try another one of her novels; it was a very up-and-down book for me, with some parts that captured my attention for a long time, and others that felt like a slog.

One thing I did enjoy is that you can tell Renault put a lot of love into the setting, though I did learn quite fast that I shouldn't be looking up every unfamiliar name and place, because there were simply too many, and let them flow over me for the most part. The way she wrote it feels very immersive, with the characters just living their lives in a very different world than the one I live in. And while I'm sure she's over-romanticizing the historical Alexander, he made for an interesting central character, and there were still undertones in things like his relationship with Hephaestion that made him not feel 100% like a hero.

There was also a lot more stated indirectly or by implication than in other books I've read recently, which was a nice change of pace, though it did occasionally get confusing when I was tired or felt like I was missing some historical context. I also had a bit of trouble with the number of characters and how spaced out their appearances sometimes were - for instance, the backstory of Pausanias, who is central to the climax, is told briefly maybe a third of the way through, and then he doesn't appear again for another third of the novel, at which point I had completely forgotten who he was. However, the fact that I read some of the book slowly and had to give it back to the library for a few weeks definitely didn't help there.

I think one of the things that made some parts more difficult for me to get through is that her use of grammar is often pretty loose, more so in some scenes than others. While this can be used for good effect, I'm pretty sure some of her excess commas were mistakes, and there was at least one sentence that looked like it got mangled by OCRing the original into an ebook and didn't get fixed. She uses a lot of comma splices, sometimes chains together multiple phrases with semicolons, and does whatever this thing is with using a semicolon to add a dependent clause, which I associate with older works:
Those in his path would dress ranks anxiously, or fidget with their equipment; then stand easier, aware that he had not looked at them.
Again, sometimes these added nicely to the feel and rhythm of the scenes, but when there's too many comma splices and 'a; b; c; d; e.' sentences together, I found it tiring to read. It did remind me to watch out for overusing those kinds of sentence structures in my own writing where they feel like they fit the tone of the story.