stillshiny | Recent Entries

Recovery, rewatching, and remembering who I am.

Hi, I’m Clara (she/her). I’m 42, based in the UK, and after a long stretch of silence — emotional, creative, fannish — I’m slowly finding my voice again. This space is part of that process.

Once upon a time, fandom was my lifeline. I lived for fic, meta, late-night episode marathons, and that electric feeling of finding your people through shared obsession. Somewhere along the way, I lost hold of that. Life happened. A lot of compromises happened. And I forgot what joy felt like.

But now? I’m rewatching shows that once made me feel alive. I’m letting myself fall back in love with fictional characters, messy redemption arcs, found families, and late-night meta spirals. I’m letting fandom be mine again.

This journal is part recovery blog, part fandom notebook. Expect:

rambling thoughts about old shows (currently rewatching Leverage — again)
musings on mental health, healing, and joy
a deep appreciation for complicated women and good old-fashioned hurt/comfort
reblogged fic, art, and fanish treasures that spark joy
quiet reminders that it’s okay to start over — even at 42

If you’re here, you’re welcome. Whether we share fandoms or not, whether you’re loudly posting or quietly lurking — I see you.

I’m still figuring it all out.
Still here.
Still shiny.

💫
Clara

Current Mood: determined

Some quotes sit quietly in your bones, waiting for the right season to echo. This one found me again recently, and wouldn’t let go.

“The Past Is Never Dead. It Is Not Even Past.”
— William Faulkner

That line has been quietly resonating with me lately. Faulkner wasn’t just being poetic; he was pointing to something profound about how our past lives with us, not behind us. It’s not a dusty relic locked away on a forgotten shelf. It’s more like a shadow, sometimes stretching long and unexpected, sometimes warm in the midday sun.

For years, I tried to tuck my past into a box marked Do Not Open. After a long marriage where I was taught to shrink, that past felt like a weight - something to hide or outrun. But just like some of my favourite redemption arcs in fandom - Leverage, Buffy, even Doctor Who - the past isn’t something you escape by erasing. It’s a part of the story, messy and complicated, but also the soil where growth takes root.

In stories I love, characters don’t just leave their history behind. They carry it like invisible scars or secret powers. Those moments when they confront their past, whether it’s trauma, loss, or regret, make their triumphs feel earned, their healing real. The past is part of them. And often, it’s the very thing that shapes their found family, their hard-won joy, their redemption.

That idea feels deeply true in life, too. My past isn’t a chain but a map - sometimes tangled, sometimes clear, always guiding me toward understanding and reclaiming myself. It’s not about forgetting or pretending it never happened. It’s about learning how to live with it differently, maybe even to find strength and hope in the scars.

For anyone feeling trapped by history, whether personal or collective, Faulkner’s words offer a quiet kind of hope: your past is there, yes, but it’s not the whole story. Like any great narrative, it’s the groundwork for something new, something hopeful.

I’d love to know: how has your past shaped your story? Do you find comfort in those fannish moments when characters wrestle with their histories and find their way forward? Have you ever found a character whose history mirrors your own in unexpected ways? Or a story that helped you see your past with new eyes? I’d love to hear about the fandoms, and the feelings, that have stayed with you. Let's talk in the comments.

Current Mood: peaceful

Sometimes Libby hands you something gentle and devastating, like it knows what you need before you do.

I picked up The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es on a whim — no prior knowledge, just a vague curiosity sparked by the title and the fact that I’d never heard of it. I expected something quiet, maybe a bit historical. I didn’t expect it to sit inside my chest like a weight made of memory.

This is a story about Lien, a Jewish girl hidden in the Netherlands during World War II. But it’s also about Bart — the author — and the act of tracing the life of someone who had once been loved (and later forgotten) by his own family. It’s history, biography, memoir, reckoning. It’s also, in its quiet way, about repair.

There’s a particular ache in reading about a child shuffled from home to home for her own safety, learning again and again that survival means becoming smaller, quieter, less. I felt that with every line. Not because I’ve lived through anything remotely similar, but because the feeling of learning to disappear in order to stay safe… resonates. Loudly.

What moved me most wasn’t just Lien’s courage, or the unbearable facts of war, or even the long tail of trauma (though all of that is here, with clarity and care). It was the complicated tenderness — the author stepping into the history of his own family and refusing to accept the polite silences passed down through generations. The bravery it takes to say, this story matters, even if it’s uncomfortable. Especially then.

It reminded me, weirdly, of fandom. Of how we return to old stories looking for the things no one else saw. Of how we build altars from fragments. Of how remembering can be an act of resistance, or healing, or both.

5 stars, no hesitation. This isn’t a flashy book, but it’s one that left me different than it found me.

Have any of you read it? Or anything like it? I’d love more books that navigate memory, recovery, and the ethics of bearing witness. Or just books that linger in your bones long after you’ve put them down. Those quiet ones are often the ones that change me the most.

Current Mood: pensive

Let’s talk genres - the narrative comfort food of the soul.

There’s something deeply soothing about knowing the shape a story will take, even when you don’t know all the ingredients yet. Give me my favourites, remix them, subvert them, go full trope bingo, and I will eat it up like it’s hot buttered toast after a rainy walk home. Here's a ramble through some of the genres and subgenres that built me, and the ones I'm still returning to like a dog-eared paperback.

🧭 Fantasy (Especially the Coming-of-Age Kind)
Give me a girl with a sword and a destiny. Give me magic systems that require study and sacrifice. Give me quests with consequences and young heroes who grow into their power the hard way. I imprinted early on Tamora Pierce and Narnia and Earthsea, and honestly, I never looked back. I still get a little thrill every time someone discovers they’re a chosen one - or chooses not to be and saves the day anyway.

Subgenres I Love:

High fantasy with political intrigue
Low fantasy with found families in cosy inns
Portal fantasy (especially when someone comes back changed)
Magic school stories, but preferably for awkward adults who don’t fit the robes properly

🚓 Heists, Cons & Capers
A ragtag crew with complementary skills and trust issues? Yes please. I want team dynamics, complicated backstories, clever plans that go sideways, and moments where someone who’s never been protected gets protected hard. Leverage is basically my platonic ideal here, but I’ll also devour anything where someone says “I work alone” and then promptly doesn’t.

Subgenres I Love:

Found family crime teams
Heists with moral ambiguity
Redemption-through-caper arcs
The “we’re not friends” team who bleeds for each other anyway

🖤 Redemption Arcs & Morally Messy Characters
I will always root for the character who did something awful and knows it. Give me the people clawing their way toward better, haunted by what they’ve done, scared they’ll never deserve love - and then being loved anyway. Bonus points if they do something terrible to protect someone else and are genuinely sorry about it later.

Subgenres I Love:

Villain-to-antihero journeys
“I don’t deserve forgiveness” with someone softly saying, “Maybe not. But you have it.”
Stories that don’t handwave consequences but honour the choice to change
Grumpy ex-warriors reluctantly helping kids and accidentally healing

☕ Cosy Speculative Fiction
This one’s newer to me, but I’ve been revelling in it lately like a cat in a sunbeam. I love when fantasy or sci-fi gets small and intimate - quiet towns, quirky shops, relationships that take their time, a low-stakes vibe that still makes you feel deeply. Think Legends & Lattes, or The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Basically: tea, feelings, and a touch of magic.

Subgenres I Love:

Slice-of-life in magical settings
Queer found families running bookshops or spaceship kitchens
Immortals who have time to knit
Emotional growth as the main plot

📺 Genre TV That Leans Character-First
Okay, not technically a genre, but it’s a throughline in all my favourite shows. I’m here for the character arcs, the long-game emotional payoffs, the bottle episodes where people yell their secrets and then hug. Whether it’s science fiction, supernatural drama, or plain old mystery-of-the-week, I need people I care about, changing each other slowly over time.

Recurring Themes I Seek Out:

Chosen family over blood
Grief and joy coexisting
Women with messy arcs and sharp edges
Team hugs after explosions

I used to think I needed to be a "serious" reader. These days, I’m much more interested in being a joyful one. So give me tropes, give me catharsis, give me the kinds of stories that say “you’re not too broken, actually” and I’ll keep turning the pages, rewinding the episode, rereading the fic.

What genres or tropes do you always come back to? What’s your narrative comfort food?

There’s something oddly comforting about food memories, isn’t there? They hang around like a favourite song or a scent that suddenly hurls you back through time. Summer foods especially feel steeped in nostalgia - even if the British summer is more mildly soggy picnic with a side of wasps than cinematic sunshine.

When I saw this <user name=sunshine-revival> prompt What are your favourite summer-associated foods? I thought, oh, this one will be easy. But it turns out, like many “simple” questions, it opens a little door in my brain and lets a whole parade of thoughts come spilling out. Which is, let’s be honest, half the point of journaling

So, in no particular order, here are some of mine:

🧃 Ice lollies from the corner shop
The kind that stained your tongue radioactive colours. I had a brief but intense affair with Calippos in the mid-90s, particularly the orange ones. It’s funny how something so simple felt like pure luxury when you were twelve and sticky from playing rounders on a school field.

🍓 Strawberries and cream
Wimbledon coded. Mum used to make them in tall glass bowls when guests came over, the cream whipped until it was just on the edge of decadence. I still associate them with “trying to look posh” and stealing the last spoonful when no one was looking.

🥪 Cucumber sandwiches
Not an everyday thing, but I aspired to be the kind of person who had cucumber sandwiches in the garden. The reality was usually warm squash and whatever we’d packed in a hurry for a day out to the coast. But the idea of cucumber sandwiches is deeply lodged in my summer aesthetic, along with floppy hats and old BBC adaptations of Emma.

🍦 Vanilla soft serve with a Flake (a.k.a. a ’99)
Ideally from an ice cream van, preferably slightly overpriced, definitely melting down your hand before you can eat it all. That little curl at the top felt magical as a kid. Honestly, it still does.

🍅 Cherry tomatoes warm from the sun
I didn’t even like tomatoes until adulthood (childhood me called them “suspicious squish bombs”), but there’s something about picking them straight off a vine that makes me feel vaguely like I’m starring in a pastoral cottagecore fantasy. Bonus points if I’ve grown them myself.

And of course, there are the people attached to the food: the way my gran would slice fruit into a bowl for us, the picnic with my best friend where everything got sand in it and we didn’t even mind, the first barbecue I went to after leaving my marriage and realising I could pile my plate high with what I actually liked.

That’s the thing about food and memory. It’s rarely just about taste. It’s about moments. Independence. Connection. Feeling like you belong, or realising when you didn’t, or learning how to choose yourself one bite at a time.

💬 What are your favourite summer foods, and what do they bring back for you? If you feel like sharing, I’d love to hear.

The thing about a good bottle episode is that it puts characters in a pressure cooker - and oh boy, do they bubble over in “The Bank Shot Job.” This one’s part hostage crisis, part political farce, part slow-burn found family casserole. Just the way I like it.

Let’s start with the premise: Nate and Sophie walk into a bank. (No, not the start of a joke, although it kind of turns into one.) They’re supposed to be running a straightforward con. Instead, they get caught in the middle of a very messy hostage situation featuring one desperate gunman, one sleazy senator, and more than one person in over their head.

Enter the rest of the team - Eliot, Hardison, Parker - swooping in from the outside to rescue their people, solve the con, and definitely not bond emotionally. (Spoiler: they absolutely do.)

A few things I noticed on this rewatch:

🧨 Sophie being 43 steps ahead even when pretending to be a clueless bank customer. She’s got that warm, artfully scattered charm that disarms everyone... until it doesn’t. Watching her slide between masks is chef’s kiss. And Nate? Still pretending he’s just the brains of the operation when in reality he’s also the emotional disaster centre.

🥊 Eliot throwing himself through a window with zero hesitation to save a civilian? Peak Eliot. He growls, he punches, he insists he’s not part of a team but he’s there, every time. No questions asked. I may have made a small high-pitched noise.

💻 Hardison being an actual genius and also deeply, hilariously annoyed by people who don’t appreciate how genius he is. The moment with the cell tower spoofing? Brilliant. And Parker quietly trusting him to keep her grounded while she climbs? That’s something new growing.

🧡 And honestly… the team chooses each other here. Not just because it’s the job, or the plan, but because they care. Even this early. They’re not calling it family yet, but the roots are there.

It’s also such an early-2000s time capsule in the best way. Slightly clunky camerawork, odd greenish tints, and the sheer amount of men in bad suits trying to get away with worse things. (Timeless content, really.)

There’s something delicious about seeing a new-ish team trying to hold it together while the world around them descends into chaos and managing to pull off not just the job, but a better version of themselves in the process.

Favourite quote this episode:
Hardison, exasperated: “Y’all see me working, right?”
Same, babe. Same.

Rewatch rating: 8/10 improvised hostage negotiations, with bonus points for Parker’s “guy in the suit” moment of emotional growth.

Would love to hear others’ thoughts—especially if this is a favourite episode for you too! Or if you have a fave bottle episode from any show where the team gets thrown into chaos and comes out a little more found-family than before. Let’s talk tropes and trauma bonding 💬

There are books that stay with you because they’re brilliant, and books that stay because they found you at exactly the right moment — or maybe because they helped you survive one.

This isn’t a list of literary masterpieces (though a few might qualify). It’s a map. A little breadcrumb trail back to myself — the girl who dog-eared pages and stayed up too late, the woman who stopped reading for a while, and the version of me now who is quietly, stubbornly rediscovering joy.

In no particular order, here are ten books that helped build me:

1. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
Not an uncomplicated love anymore, but this book cracked my heart. Angry, grieving, isolated Harry was the most real he ever felt. I lived in those pages. I think I still do, in some ways. (Note: loving something critically is still love.)

2. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
For the misfit girls who loved too much and spoke too fast. I wanted to be Anne. Maybe I still do. Or maybe I just finally understand Marilla more than I ever expected.

3. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
This book felt like a hug and a lifeboat. Space as found family. Queerness, care, consent, softness. It reminded me that kindness is a form of rebellion — and that I still love sci-fi when it loves people back.

4. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Reread it in the first days after I left my marriage. The humour, the love between the lines, the ridiculous grace of it — it carried me. Aziraphale and Crowley are absolutely a redemption arc and no one can convince me otherwise.

5. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
I cried when I first read this. Not because it was sad, but because someone saw us. The fannish girls. The anxious ones. The ones who feel safer in stories. I still want to write like Cath did — badly, bravely, obsessively.

6. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Read it young, understood it better later. It sat on my shelf like a quiet dare: You’re allowed to take up space. I'm finally listening.

7. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
Soft boys with trauma and integrity are my catnip, apparently. Maia made me believe that gentleness could survive power, that kindness wasn’t weakness. A balm of a book.

8. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
I knew how it would end. I loved it anyway. It hurt in the best way — beautiful, aching prose and a love story that felt like myth and memory and everything in between.

9. The Collected Poems of Mary Oliver
When I couldn't read anything else, I could read this. Her words are oxygen. I keep them near me — on my desk, in my phone, tucked into old notebooks like pressed leaves.

10. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
For the cranky wizards and the stubborn girls. For magic that grows sideways and stories that don’t quite behave. This book reminds me that transformation is never just physical — and that loving someone can be the bravest magic of all.

These aren’t my “top 10” or even my “desert island picks.” Just ten that shaped me — who I was, who I’m becoming, who I’m still learning how to be.

✨ If you’ve got a list like this, I’d love to see it. What stories built you?

What do I love?

Oh, everything I wasn’t supposed to.

I love the way fandom lives in the margins—scrappy, inventive, full of longing and weird jokes and storylines that ache where the canon was careless. I love the sound a kettle makes just before it boils, and the way Yorkshire fog drapes itself over the hills like a cardigan someone’s shrugged off. I love the softness of found family tropes and the sharp defiance of choosing softness at all, in a world that told me to harden up or disappear.

I love early morning light on a good book. I love remembering I have friends in every time zone and there’s always someone, somewhere, posting a gifset of a character I’d walk into battle for.

I love when a song from 1994 comes on the radio and I still know every lyric. (Relight my fire, indeed.)

I love that I didn’t forget how to love things. That I’m still here, glittery bits and trauma-soaked bits and all, rewatching Leverage and reading fic on a Monday night and feeling alive about it. I love that joy can be stitched together from scraps: a text from a friend, a candle that smells like vanilla and memory, a character whispering their arc into your ear at 3am.

I love words. I love the ones I write and the ones I don’t. I love the way we keep telling stories, even when everything’s broken, especially when everything’s broken. I love that, against the odds, I’ve built something tender and real out of all the times I was silenced. And I love that I get to say so, out loud, now.

This post is, frankly, just me scrawling I love you to the universe in the margins of my notebook and hoping someone recognises the handwriting.

If that’s you—hello. I’m so glad you’re here too.

Current Mood: softly defiant
Current Music: Andreas Johnson - Glorious

So. I read Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis and I’ve been turning it over in my head ever since — like a relic, like a prayer bead, like a worry stone that still smells faintly of someone else’s perfume. It’s the kind of book that feels like it was written in a quiet back room of the archive of your heart.

The premise sounds absurd at first blush: Ellis retrieves a piece of Nina Simone’s chewed gum after her performance at the 1999 Meltdown Festival (which he helped curate), wraps it in a towel, and keeps it. For decades. The book is the story of that gum — what it became, how it travelled, what people projected onto it. But what it’s really about is the emotional weight we place on objects, the stories we embed in things, and the way performance leaves a trace.

Fannishly speaking? This is a masterclass in objectfication (in the best way): how artefacts become vessels of meaning through the act of attention. It reminded me how we build shrines out of con badges and autographed photo ops and worn-in T-shirts — not because the objects are valuable, but because they were there. Because we were there.

From a media studies lens, it’s also an exploration of cultural hauntology — the persistence of memory through artefact, the residue of performance. Simone, in Ellis’s telling, becomes less a person than a force of nature. The gum becomes a focal point for myth-making, much like how fans carry a fragment of their favourite show or ship into everything they do. (I may or may not have thought about the Leverage season five finale while reading this. Ahem.)

There’s also something incredibly touching about Ellis himself — vulnerable, reverent, a bit overwhelmed by the emotional charge he’s carrying. It’s a rare kind of masculine tenderness. He’s not trying to explain why it mattered. He’s just showing that it did.

It’s non-linear, sometimes chaotic, and often more vibe than narrative. But that’s what memory is. Honestly, if you’ve ever whispered “this mattered” while holding something that shouldn’t — this book is your cathedral.

Have any of you read it? Or read anything like it? I’d love recs. Or tell me your own “gum” — the object you’ve kept far too long for reasons that are absolutely emotional and not remotely rational. I’ll go first: I still have the receipt from a motorway service station stop during my first-ever con weekend. Why? I do not know. But every time I find it tucked in my bag of lanyards, I smile and remember how alive I felt.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No, I Got Life

There was a moment—a quiet, private, but powerful moment—when I clicked “play” on the pilot of Leverage for my rewatch project, and something inside me lit up like fairy lights strung across a long-forgotten corner of myself.

Nate Ford didn’t need to get any further than “I’m thinking Nigerians,” and it felt like a homecoming.

It wasn’t just the familiarity of the dialogue or the heist-of-the-week structure—it was something more rooted. Something about the energy of it. Clever people using their skills to help others. Found family forged through fire and sarcasm. The moral greyness of it all, but underpinned with heart. The sense that, broken though they might be, these characters chose each other.

And I chose them again. On purpose.

That mattered more than I expected.

I wasn’t watching because someone else was in control of the remote. I wasn’t watching to escape—I was watching to reconnect. To remember. To claim something that once brought me joy and say, “Yes. This still matters to me.”

It was a small thing. Just me, the show, a slightly over-sweet cup of tea, and a soft blanket. But it felt like staking a flag on some emotional hilltop and declaring: I’m still here. I still get to like things. I still get to feel like myself.

And when Hardison started talking tech at a thousand miles an hour and Parker casually dropped off a rooftop like it was nothing, I laughed out loud. A real laugh. The kind that bubbles up without permission.

It wasn’t dramatic or performative. No glitter cannon, no grand moment. Just a quiet flicker of joy that said: hey, I’m still shiny.

I’m calling it: that was a win.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Take That - Shine

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the shape of my reading life — what it used to be, what it is now, and how it’s carried me through everything from GCSE angst to fandom awakenings to quiet evenings alone in this little upstairs flat that finally feels like mine.

Books were my first fandom, really. Long before I had a LiveJournal account or learned how to code an icon border, I had Anne Shirley, Matilda, and the Women of Green Gables and Tortall and Narnia (sort of). I underlined things in library books even when I wasn’t supposed to, scribbled fanfiction in the margins of school notebooks, and stayed up way too late rereading scenes that hurt just right.

Then came fandom proper. Harry Potter, of course — I was just the right age to grow up with it, and I did, in all the messy, magical ways. The books meant everything. The fic meant even more. (If you know, you know.)
But somewhere along the way, things got quieter. Life got smaller. And books — the kind that lived in my hands, under my pillow, in stacks on the floor — started collecting dust.

It’s only recently, really, that I’ve come back to reading with both hands. At first, it was through fanfic again — soft, healing stories that found me when I was too fragile for anything else. Then the occasional Kindle download. A walk to the library. A secondhand paperback, bought on impulse and read in the bath with too-hot tea. One book led to another, and here I am. Still shiny. Still reading.

📖 My reading style, now:

Mostly physical books, because I like to underline things and stick post-its on pages and let the spine tell on me.
Kindle for comfort reads — soft fantasy, queer romance, fanfic energy. Also great for hiding from the world when I need to.
Library borrower + charity shop browser, but I buy books I fall in love with — especially the ones that feel like friends.

📚 My favourite genres:

✨ Fantasy (cosy, queer, character-driven)
🚀 Sci-fi (hopeful, emotional, soft)
💞 Romance (slow burn, found family, usually fanfic adjacent)
🧶 Contemporary (especially healing stories
📝 Memoir / creative nonfiction (give me women writing their way back to themselves)

Books I come back to:

Howl’s Moving Castle — because Sophie’s quiet power still feels like a revelation
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet — because kindness in space is radical
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — because I will always love the Room of Requirement, even with complicated feelings now
Good Omens — for the humour, the heart, and the ineffable husbands
Fangirl — because it saw something in me I was trying to find again

I read for a lot of reasons — to learn, to escape, to remember I still feel things — but mostly, I read to find myself. To see something familiar or something brave or something true, reflected back at me through the fog. And I think I’m finally learning that I’m allowed to read just for joy. For comfort. For the love of it.

So here’s to stories, and softness, and all the half-finished books on my bedside table. I’m not trying to read better anymore. I’m just trying to read honestly. And that feels like a beginning worth marking.

Current Mood: nerdy
Current Music: The Fugees - Killing me Softly

The first journaling prompt over at sunshine_revival caught my eye: “Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.”

And I thought: yes. Let’s light things up. Let’s reignite.

Because the truth is, this year has been strange and stop-start and quietly exhausting. Some months I’ve felt like I was coming back to myself in bursts, like flare-ups of light behind cloud cover. Other times, I’ve gone dim again—old patterns creeping in, old silences pulling me under. But I keep reminding myself that progress doesn’t have to be linear, or dramatic, or even visible to anyone else.

So: here’s what I want the rest of 2025 to hold. Some goals. Some intentions. Some small acts of defiance against the quiet that tried to take me.

🌿 Write more, even if it's messy. I miss writing—not just structured blog posts, but the rambly, emotional kind of writing that this journal was meant for. The "thinking aloud" posts. The fan meta at midnight. I want to let myself show up as I am, not as I think I should be.

🌀 Reconnect with joy, not just survival. I've spent the last few years untangling myself from a marriage that taught me to shrink. July marks one year since I moved into this little house on the hill, and I want to honour that by choosing joy—actively. That means dance breaks in the kitchen. That means rewatching Leverage with a hot drink and a blanket, even if there are dishes in the sink. That means saying yes to pleasure without apology.

📚 Build rhythms that support me. Not routines that feel like cages, but gentle structures. Weekly check-ins. Digital decluttering. Intentional time for rest and for creativity. I want to make space for the things that make me feel grounded.

💬 Engage more with fandom community. Leave more comments. Post the recs instead of hoarding them. Finish a drabble or two from the prompt list. Even just letting people know their work made me feel something. We’re all carrying so much—we shouldn’t have to carry it alone.

And maybe most of all: I want to remember that I am still shiny. Not perfect. Not polished. But alive and in motion. And that counts for something.

If you’re also setting mid-year intentions, I’d love to hear them. Or if you’re just treading water right now—that counts too. We don’t have to blaze like fireworks every day. Sometimes it’s enough just to keep the pilot light going.

💗
Clara
“We are all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?”
— The Eleventh Doctor

Current Music: The Cranberries - Dreams

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Clara

July 2025

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Page Summary

🖤 Intro Post: Scenes from a Fannish Heart
What We Carry: Fandom, Recovery, and the Ghosts of Our Pasts
Reading in the Silences: On The Cut Out Girl
Genre Love: A Tour Through My Storytelling Obsessions
Favourite Summer Foods
Rewatch: Leverage 1x05 “The Bank Shot Job”
📖 10 Books That Built Me
What I Love (a non-exhaustive, gloriously sentimental list)
Sticky Objects and Sacred Reverence: On Nina Simone’s Gum
A Moment I Shone
📚 My Reading Life: A Love Letter to Stories
still shiny, still here

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Scenes from a Fannish Heart

Recovery, rewatching, and remembering who I am

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Sticky: 🖤 Intro Post: Scenes from a Fannish Heart

What We Carry: Fandom, Recovery, and the Ghosts of Our Pasts

Reading in the Silences: On The Cut Out Girl

Genre Love: A Tour Through My Storytelling Obsessions

Favourite Summer Foods

Rewatch: Leverage 1x05 “The Bank Shot Job”

📖 10 Books That Built Me

What I Love (a non-exhaustive, gloriously sentimental list)

Sticky Objects and Sacred Reverence: On Nina Simone’s Gum

A Moment I Shone

📚 My Reading Life: A Love Letter to Stories

📖 My reading style, now:

📚 My favourite genres:

Books I come back to:

still shiny, still here

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July 2025

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