john_amend_all

#4: A book published at least five years before the previous book

Attempt 1: Twenty-Two Goblins by Arthur W. Ryder, a translation/retelling of "Vetala Panchavimshati", a Sanskrit cycle of folk tales.

In the frame story, a king encounters a goblin (properly a vetāla) who tells him a series of stories involving magic and supernatural creatures. ( Read more... )

Attempt 2: Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster.

I decided that what I needed was a book in which nobody was getting horribly murdered. ( Read more... )


#5: A book with the same spine colour as the previous book

Here's a conundrum: What colour is the spine of an ebook?

Well, in this case there's an answer: PG's edition-with-images of Daddy-Long-Legs includes not only the internal illustrations and a picture of the front cover but also a picture of the spine, which has a nice floral decorative element on it. The spine is green.

The Project Gutenberg edition-with-images of the sequel only has the front cover and not the spine (insufficiently decorative, one presumes), but if the spine is the same colour as the front cover then it is also green. Therefore:

Dear Enemy by Jean Webster.

A young woman is charged with running an orphanage in need of reform, with the assistance of, among others, a taciturn doctor with whom she immediately fails to get on (and we all know what that means). ( Read more... )

. There was a heatwave lasting several days, during which the temperature got as high as 45 degrees Celcius and never got below 20 degrees. During the hottest few days, it was too hot to be sitting at the computer and I didn't have much oomph for reading, so I listened to a lot of podcasts and finished my current jigsaw puzzle (and, when it got really hot, took a long nap).


. The board game club meetups have started up again for the year. This week, the main game I played was Leviathan Wilds, in which the board represents an enormous creature that you're climbing over, trying to achieve goals while avoiding hazards and trying not to slip and fall. Beforehand, we played Let's Dig For Treasure, and afterward we played Ingenious.


. I'm keeping up the regular walking, weather permitting, and I remembered that I have a bicycle and went for a bike ride. I've also resumed the set of muscle exercises that I stopped doing a couple of years ago during a health scare and hadn't got around to starting up again.


. The current season of Jet Lag involves playing hide and seek across England (theoretically the entire UK, but the travel time limits mean they're unlikely to hit the outlying regions, in the same way that the Australian season barely went further west than Adelaide). There have been some fun interactions with the locals, and this week Ben and Adam got sent to Coventry and Sam went to hide in Milton Keynes, on the grounds that it would never occur to the seekers that anybody would voluntarily go to Milton Keynes.


. A couple of list videos showed up in my Youtube recommendations about video games that were set in the year 2026. One such game was Observation, a game which I was initially very enthusiastic about but haven't opened in about five years after I got stuck in one of rather too many frustrating pixel-hunty puzzle sections. Seeing it on the list prompted me to wonder if I should give it another shot, but on reflection I'm happy to let it be.


. I was at a loose end and decided to give XCOM 2 another go, but I'm not in the right frame of mind to enjoy it and avoid getting into another grim spiral, so I've stopped again.


. Our state started a container deposit scheme a few years ago, in which used drink cans and bottles can be dropped off at collection points in return for a small amount of money per can or bottle, thus hopefully reducing the amount of cans and bottles that become litter. I've been accumulating cans and bottles due to uncertainty on my part about where the local collection points are and what the appropriate method is to bag them up before dropping them off, but I managed to get that sorted out and yesterday I dropped off two full bags, with a good start made on filling the next bag.


. Rehearsals have begun for the first Rep Club production of the year. The first read-through was fun.


. I see the End of Year Writing Meme is going around again. My complete output for 2025 was two pieces of flash fic ("Being" and "Flesh and Blood") amounting to a total of seven sentences, so I don't think there's enough material to answer all the questions about "What was your best opening sentence" and so on -- but it's a quantum leap above the last few years when I finished nothing at all.

(I started writing a few other longer pieces, but I think most of them were more about working out how I felt about the plot point in question than about producing a finished story. The exception is the one I started a couple of weeks ago, which might yet amount to something.)