brightly_lit

The other day, I found an anime I'd never heard of, started it, and loved it. (Journal with Witch.) "They ARE still making decent anime!!" I cried with relief. And then I saw it: a calendar in one shot, that read "2018.” Sure enough, it came out years ago, because of course. Since no, they're not still making good anime.

Anime has been a huge part of my life for over two decades. (Or, if you count all the Voltron I watched in my youth, far longer than that.)

I went to anime for deeply emotional stories. I went to it for tremendous creativity in animation styles, which exploded in quality over those two decades. And I went to it for stories that weren't being told in Western media, both because it originated from a unique culture with its own unique perspective on life, social mores, the spiritual, etc., and also because -- at least until the isekai plague hit -- original ideas were greenlit for anime that would never be greenlit in the West.

Anime was fun and an inspiration and a comfort. It injected a tremendous amount of welcome originality into my viewing, as the output of TV in the West had become cliched, predictable, and safe. A thousand reboots later, American TV almost never surprised or thrilled me or made me feel much anymore.

I turned to anime because I knew all the Western tropes by heart already, not because I wanted to see Japan's take on Western tropes that were played out decades ago. I saw Tron when it came out (and it wasn't that great then); I didn't need another sucked-into-a-video-game story (none of which have been that great as anime, either, from what I've seen). If I wanted to experience yet another long journey with humans and elves and dwarves, I'd go play D&D. And aren't we on our 8th incarnation of "I was reincarnated as a 💩 but turns out I was a 💩 in my last life, too!"?

When I fruitlessly skim Reddit threads for anime recommendations, praying I've somehow overlooked something good, I get this "I can't believe the TV they make me watch" vibe, like just like me, they know they like anime, so they keep watching, but they haven't found themselves actually enjoying much of anything in a long time.

In just the last year or two, half-baked romance has been added to the previously all -isekai-all-the-time diet, which romance usually has a decent premise that grows stale within a few episodes. Aside from Wind Breaker and Apothecary Diaries, what truly excellent anime have even come out since 2023 that are not isekai (and now, the half-baked romance) or that didn't begin production before that year like My Hero Academia and Mob Psycho 100? There's a small percentage of shows that doesn't fully fall into either the isekai or romance categories (though usually close enough), but nothing stellar. Every time I see a list of anime people think is truly great, the animes always came out before that fateful year (except people really seem to like Frieren).

Am I the only one out here who doesn't even bother to look at the list of upcoming anime anymore because I already know exactly the genre and quality of just about everything that's going to be on it? My little otaku heart cries for the good old days when multiple truly excellent, creative, original animes came out every year.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

NaNoWriMo completely revolutionized the process of writing for me. I attempted to complete 50,000 words in November two years in succession, with much preparation the second time. Both times I wore out about five days in and couldn't complete it. But it taught me it's possible to write 2,000 words a day, and that even if I wasn't yet able to do it, lots of people were!

I loved both projects I started for NaNo (one became a full-length novel called X, which is probably my favorite thing I've ever written), and though I couldn't complete NaNo, I realized I could just apply that approach to writing the rest of the year (and finish that book!). That's what I've done ever since.

I usually write for about two hours a day, which generally results in around 2,000 words. Doing the writing makes way for more ideas, and I spend a lot more time the rest of the day planning more parts of the book or story, then rinse and repeat.

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge.

Top Tens! I think I mentioned this before, but a dear friend in my dorm used to make a daily top five, and then we would all do our top five. No theme, just whatever your top five was at that moment. So in honor of that, I will made a top ten of today. And to my friend, wherever you are, I miss you, dude.

1) Though it does make me nervous because it might be due to climate change, the relatively warm, sunny weather is beautiful.
2) Having enough wood to keep warm with the wood stove! (And soon to have more, yee!)
3) I woke up this morning hating everything, then I rolled over and saw that the sun was beginning to shine through the mist, and I thought, "Well, I don't hate THAT." Mist is ALWAYS a favorite for me, but seeing the sun shine through it is rarer and also pretty.
4) Three kinds of delicious leftovers in the fridge.
5) I've been super enjoying Snowflake Challenge.
6) I got some writing done today.
7) I'm so grateful for the long list of recs I got from comments on my Day 1 Snowflake Challenge post.
8) We recently started Kamisama Kiss, and I had no idea it was so good!
9) This song. Would that the anime were as killer as the song:

10) I harvested the biggest carrots I've ever grown yesterday!

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

I spend a fair bit of time on Reddit. When I first found Reddit, as I think many of us do at first, I thought, Wow, look at all these well-informed people with interesting opinions who are so nice and funny! Then one day you get downvoted for the stupidest imaginable thing, or regarding a question you happen to be knowledgable about you see some actually well-informed person being downvoted to oblivion while some inaccurate but popular comment is at the top, or you realize you've seen the same exact post phrased the same exact way every other day for a month, and suddenly you see through the facade.

Reddit's whole upvote/downvote system was based on the charmingly idealistic notion that it would cause the cream to rise to the top. What it actually does, of course, is cause not the most accurate, informative, or helpful posts and comments, but the most popular posts and comments, to rise to the top--i.e. something that reflects the most popular notions of the time, something that reinforces what readers already believe or want to believe, something that makes them feel good, etc. It causes a certain type of user--that is, some idiot who talks out their ass entertainingly with great authority--to be hailed as brilliant, while people who may lack pizazz but otherwise have much to offer tend to get ignored.

Also, Reddit has a big bot problem. It's easy for more paranoid users to become convinced that most of the commenters with whom they're interacting are not actually people. (I personally think the number of comments not made by a human is less than 15%, but it is hard to tell.) However many of the comments are not composed by a human, undoubtedly lots of the most popular posts are composed by AI, but even before AI, a great many of the front-page posts that purport to be the truth were always fabrications, which does suck, but at least the fake stuff can be entertaining. And even if the original post is fake, many of the comments on it are sincere and informative/touching/hilarious.

However many bots and trolls may plague the place, there are lots of real people there, too. One really cool thing about Reddit is that there's a subreddit for EVERYTHING. Smaller subreddits, especially where there is advice being sought and dispensed, can be invaluable. Much--maybe even most--of the best gardening/homesteading/food-preservation/plant-identification information I've gotten has come from Reddit--real people with real experience who actually know what they're talking about. (For some reason this kind of information is very hard to come by in articles; so many gardening articles seem to have been written by someone who has never grown a plant--and from what I know about how magazines hire writers, that's very likely to be the case.)

When it comes to fandom, Reddit is pretty good. It lacks the friend-group aspect of lj or dw. You probably won't make any friends there, and general-interest posts tend to repeat questions like "What's your favorite x" or "What's the worst episode of y you've ever seen"; the conversation never progresses and gets deeper. One of the best and worst aspects of Reddit is how anonymous it is. Most of the time, a question asked of one user is answered by another, and most people probably never notice. But so far in my experience, in fandom spaces there, people have been pretty nice.

As long as I take it with a massive grain of salt, never assuming anything I see there is true, Reddit can be a lot of fun, and an interesting window into humanity and its evolving opinions.

I've gotten so many kind responses to my first Snowflake Challenge post. Thank you all! It's so nice to meet/reconnect with you!!

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

Though I had pets as a child, and allll I wanted for my whole youth was a horse, after my much-loved but extremely annoying Krazy Kat went to the great tuna buffet in the sky, I haven't had any more pets as an adult. We've discussed getting various farm animals, but it just doesn't sound appealing -- a lot of responsibility, poop, and fence repair. Plus I'm at least a little allergic to probably every animal with hair.

However, we do live in a pretty remote forested area, so we have a ball with sightings of the many kinds of animals we see on our property who consider it home, at least for a while: a lonely lady turkey, dozens of kinds of birds, a beautiful grey fox, many deer, a skunk who thinks it owns the place, plus a couple of stray cats whose eyes we saw glowing when we went out at night, and have only glimpsed in daylight when they thought no one was watching.

And of course, the giant slug who lives on one wall of our house! We call him Frisky.

Supernatural Summergen is a gen fanworks exchange I've taken part in every summer since 2013. Spring comes and I start looking forward to it, every year. But, well, the show's been off the air for a long time now, and the fandom's been in decline ever since, especially the lj fandom that spawned this exchange. (Although about 70 fics for this fandom have been posted TODAY, and it's just after ten in the morning as I write this. !) For all that, there was still a lot of participation last year! But this year, the time when they usually announce it came and went. We were sure there wasn't going to be a summergen this year, because weeks passed beyond the time they usually announce it. My friend even asked the mods if it was happening this year and got no response ... but about a month after the usual time, they announced it's happening again this year!! I don't write for Supernatural anymore except for this exchange. It's not where my fannish heart lies anymore. But I'm not over this exchange! I would write fics for this forever. There's a core group of fans who've been there, participating in this thing together, for all this time. It's become a part of the fabric of my life. I'm so glad I don't have to give it up yet.

The seed company was upstanding and sent me replacement seeds for free. We concluded something must have happened to the seeds in transit. She encouraged me to still try planting the first set of seeds, noting that some seeds are more durable than others, so I did. To my delight, the sorghum seeds are coming up! I tried sorghum syrup for the first time recently, and it is indeed delicious. The other thing I considered growing in that bed was corn (which looks almost identical to sorghum, oddly, but apparently they don't cross-breed), but it was such a pain to get the kernels off the cobs to can them last summer, and grocery-story corn is so cheap and delicious, that I decided instead to plant the thing I've never grown before that's rare and expensive to purchase. So, until one of the apocalypses that seems to be headed our way necessitates my growing my own corn, I'll have a little fun with sorghum.

In the meantime, if you have any tips on how to more easily remove kernels from corn cobs, I'm all ears. Some people use a method of pushing them through the center of a bundt cake pan, which seemed like a brilliant miracle solution when I first heard it, but since then I've tried it myself, and watched videos of other people doing it, and ... I dunno, I guess the first person I heard about it from must have gotten lucky, because it turns out it's not generally an easy solution after all. I even bought an electric knife to try to help with it, which didn't work at all, so I just laboriously hacked the kernels off with a knife last year, which is both dangerous and hard on the hands and wrists. So I'm really hoping for a hack that makes it at least a little less dangerous and arduous.

I finally realized the next step in my journey as an author of original work is to make physical copies of all my books available. I've been working on that lately, and tearing my hair out at every stage. What should be minor technological issues easily overcome invariably end up being hours of maddening frustration. For example, I've always saved all my images as I worked on the covers at various stages of completion, and was extremely careful to save a copy before the layers were merged so I could go back and make changes later, only when I went to work on it this time, surprise! No files with layers. I looked up the problem and discovered my image editing software automatically overwrites the existing file with the new file of a different type! (!!!) (!!!! :-#) So all the unmerged files I saved as the filetype specific to the editing program right before trying to ALSO save a .png or what-have-you were erased. I've never before used a program that didn't keep files of every type you saved it as! Well, extremely frustrating lesson learned, I guess. I'll be saving them under different names, on different drives -- everything I can think of to make it so they can't overwrite them! But in the meantime, I'll have to start from scratch with all too many of these covers.

When I was a kid dreaming of being an author, I thought making the covers would be the funnest part! Instead, once I've finished a book, I've just been so excited to publish it, bogged down by all these difficulties that I seem to encounter every time I try to make a cover. It's like trudging through sand, every step of the way -- not least because every time I release a book and make a cover, I always have to learn a bunch of stuff about the image-editing program I use, which is powerful but not intuitive, which I then forget by the next time I release a book, lol. Also because for some reason I always end up deciding I need to use some complex effect that requires hours of research, watching YouTube videos, and then accounting for more recent changes in the software that make the videos out of date, etc. etc. Maybe it can be fun, if I just stop being impatient to get the words out there and put the effort into delivering it in as appealing a cover as possible, because what's the point in publishing the book if you don't end up with a product that looks appealing enough to attract readers?

I remember in high school, I and everyone I knew who submitted stuff to the school literary magazine were always writing untitled poems and stories. Coming up with a title seemed kind of pretentious and like a lot of effort -- sometimes more effort than writing the poem! We felt like, the poem's good! Just read it. But the literary magazine required every submission to have a title, so we'd labor over what to call it, and usually just end up throwing some half-assed title on there. Now, though, I get it. Yes, the poem is good. The book is good. Good enough to deserve whatever must go into its presentation. It still seems kind of pretentious, or slick, to put so much effort into sales when you just want to think about art. A cover that's both commercially appealing and art is even more challenging. But it's worth it.

I'm about to post the final chapter of my novel-length fic -- my very first multi-chapter fic! My best friend had such fun writing a multi-chapter fic that I wanted to get in on that action, too: people reading along, getting invested in it, saying what they thought would happen and hoped would happen. Crossing Stars is an extremely complex fic, interweaving large numbers of characters, timelines, and fandoms (a big part of why I'm so proud of it!), so I rather hoped to have readers along the way to help me keep track of everything, say whether they'd like more follow-up on one part or another ... but no. :-( One person apparently read about a half of it and then never commented again, and another person recently commented on the third-to-last chapter, but otherwise, the few comments I got were spam. (The spam comments on AO3 are a new thing! And ugh.) So I ended up being basically on my own all the way through. JUST LIKE MY CHARACTERS! Well, so it goes. I was bummed about that ... but I am incredibly proud of the fic.

The irony in how unpopular it is is that as I was writing it, I thought it's one of my more crowd-pleasing fics?? At least, according to the usual standards: lots of action, high body count. I guess there's no real romance, and it gets a little technical at times, but people like time-travel stories too, right?? But alas, this did not translate into readers.

I have a few theories about why people weren't reading it. The main character (an OC -- another thing people usually avoid) is fifteen or under for the entire fic and is infatuated with a grown man member of her team. She's in the body of a grown woman and can thus (try to) trick him into believing she's also an adult and into having a relationship with her, an effort which persists throughout the fic -- is indeed a focal point of the fic -- and has repercussions for the plot and for all the characters unto the end, but he always senses something is off and nothing ever happens (except she steals a couple of kisses). I certainly understand people avoiding an unfinished fic where they think something underage might happen, because it would not be at all surprising on AO3 if someone posting a WIP suddenly sprang underage content on the audience, not having tagged for it before the chapter in which it happens, and readers don't want to get invested in a fic they might suddenly find themselves turned off by and unable to finish. So maybe once the fic is complete and they see there's no tag for underage, they'll give it a chance where they were afraid to before. I hope so.

There are also the people who just don't read WIPs until they're complete, which I also get, since the number of abandoned WIPs must be legion. My fic in particular is one where everything leads up to the end, where all the plot points and themes aren't fully realized until then, so getting invested in such a fic would be especially bad while there remains fear it will never be finished.

Also, I didn't realize until I'd already written most of it that all three of the main fandoms (Travelers, 86, and Classroom of the Elite) are essentially dead fandoms, sigh. Just my luck. They are not dead to me; they live on very brightly inside me, but I guess most people lose interest shortly after a show is no longer releasing new episodes.

It's also occurred to me that maybe people think it's gonna be one of those fics that throws a million shows in the tags that are barely actually touched on in the fic? I've never really gotten what's going on with those fics. I've tried to read them before to see what they did with a tagged character I like, and in the couple I did try to read, they like ... passed by in a hallway or had a single line, lol. I don't get it! Unless it's like I felt in my teens about the real people my friend and I had an 'oral tradition' of ficcing about, where I was thrilled by the idea of them simply being present and making a little fun cameo. Is that it? Or is it maybe that they're throwing in a hint of every show they can think of so they can include it in the tags in hopes of getting more readers? Seeing the tossed-off cracky quality to those fics I did try to read, I don't think that much thought went into it, lol.

In any case, Crossing Stars is not one of those kinds of fics; the three main fandoms and the three main characters are all a very fundamental part of the fic. Natasha, Bucky and Steve from MCU also have a pretty important part, although much smaller, as the main characters' senpais. Finally, the My Hero kids have a small but important role as their kohais, as I needed literally a hundred kids fighting against impossible odds, a fandom where putting the kids in such a situation wouldn't be off brand lest I traumatize the fans of some lighthearted fandom with my very dark fic lol, and My Hero fit the bill perfectly. I don't want to trick anyone into reading the fic thinking it's a My Hero fic, because it isn't, but those characters are also present so I've got to tag for them. But I did include the show listing in order of importance to the fic in the tags.

I've never been so proud of a fic I've written. It's incredibly complex, interweaving multiple fandoms and timelines imo quite skillfully. It's got action and heart. It does justice to the amazing shows that inspired it. It covers 15 years of the main characters' lives, so you get to see long growth arcs for all of them. It was fun but challenging to write their characters at all those ages when people grow and change so much, taking into account that these are also highly trained genetically designed geniuses. It was so hard!! But so fun to write, and so personal to me. I went through probably the biggest transition of my entire life over the course of writing it. I started the fic during a trip that represented a big part of that transition, even though I hadn't been able to write in a long time (now that I can write again, I think all my creative energy was going toward manifesting my new life, but at the time, I believed I would probably never be able to write again, and this fic was the singular exception), and finished it only recently. The fic kept me company through what was ultimately a wonderful transition, but which was at times extremely grim and scary. At the end of the transition, I had to leave behind so much about the life I'd lived up to that point. That old life is the life I honored with this fic so that I could give it a good burial and leave it in my past. So I can't fully put into words just how much this fic means to me. Maybe in the end the fic will only have been for me. But it really is a killer fic that has in it so much I think would move a reader and that they would enjoy, so I really hope more people give it a try.

One not-fun thing that's happened with my original work is that though at first I received only four- and five-star ratings, lately three of my books have fallen below four stars overall, two on Goodreads and one on Amazon, and I'm afraid people who might actually like those books will no longer give them a chance -- or give any of my books a chance.

The first of my books to fall below four stars was Restraint. It had five stars -- people really liked it -- then out of nowhere, someone gave it a one-star rating (just a rating without a review). This was when antis were at their height. The book is about a teen male prostitute. He's eighteen when the book begins, but the book does reference that he's been at it since he was fourteen. On Kindle, you can tell when someone's read your book. They might just buy it, or if you've made it part of Kindle Unlimited (which I always do), you get paid according to how many pages they read, and you can see how many have been read recently of any given book. There had been no action on that book in years, neither purchases nor page reads (yes, I'm very popular lol), and then out of nowhere comes this one-star rating, so I don't know what else to assume except that they read the description (and maybe one of the two reviews on Goodreads, which inaccurately says he's seventeen at the start of the book), decided any book on such a topic is Pure Evil, and gave it the one-star rating.

But the thing is, my book doesn't treat it as a cool, sexy thing that he's a prostitute; he has a troubled past and suffers from addiction. It's angst and pathos; he's meant to be a tragic character (though I can never resist writing as happy an ending as may be). The book is the story of his journey through it. There are inevitably a lot of sex scenes, but it's about as inexplicit as a book that goes along with a prostitute on dozens of his appointments can be, because I'm just not comfortable writing explicit stuff (thus, writing a book about a prostitute that's fifty percent sex scenes was a challenge, I can tell you, lol). ( spoiler ) So even Mr. or Ms. One Star, had they bothered to read the book, probably would have been satisfied with where things ended up.

The next to go below four stars was The Book of Jonah, and ... yeah, I knew that one was going to be controversial, to say the least. A teen throuple, one of whom proves to be a prophet, with a story that delves deeply into mental illness, religion, bullying, suicide ... okay. I get it. I expected that with that one, and even Restraint, since it's also about a very controversial topic.

But then there's X, which, goddamnit, is the one book I had that I believed was above reproach, if only because it's so beautifully written. I think people have decided it's supposed to be an M/M novel, because it involves a gay romance, but I didn't write it with that in mind; to me it was just romantic literary fiction that happened to revolve around a gay couple. I know M/M is a huge genre on Kindle right now, and the fact that it's a romantic story about a gay couple plus the (awesome, wonderful!!) first review someone did leave also gave that impression, but it doesn't contain what people are looking for in M/M; there's all but no sex, and what little is there is very inexplicit. It just wouldn't have been relevant to the story I was trying to tell to put more sex in there.

I can't help but think there's a little bit of "This book ain't that great" in response to the glowing review that one reviewer left (the only reviewer who ever really "got" one of my books, except for my friend who kindly wrote a review for most of my books on Goodreads), a backlash. Also, on Goodreads people do challenges to do things like "read a book that starts with every letter of the alphabet." Books that start with the letter X are hard to find, so I think that's how most people are finding it (that's how that one reviewer says she found it), and if you're just reading a book to check a box, yeah, there's no reason to think you'll like it, so that could be why so many of them are rating it three stars. But I guess I'll never really know, since they don't bother to leave a review! Maybe you don't like the story, but come on, it's a good book! Also though, again, I know some of the people leaving those ratings aren't actually reading it, and people who haven't actually read a book, I've found, do tend to give it three stars. (Whyyyy rate a book you haven't read???)

I feel a bit better just for having gotten all this off my chest, but it is still very very frustrating. I know sometimes I do write about controversial or challenging topics. For some reason, those are the books that more people seem interested in?? I really don't care if someone hates one of my books. Go ahead, leave a review, and say WHY you hated it. Because when I want to buy something, I always read the lowest reviews, because they give as much insight into whether you actually want to buy this thing as the five-star ones. One person's poison is another person's pleasure. But just rating it down, especially for an author who has so few ratings or reviews to begin with, does no one any good (except maybe the person who gave me the one-star review; I'm guessing that gave them a lot of satisfaction >:-#).

Like, how do you get original fiction to the people who want to see it?? I know how to do it with fanfic: put it on AO3! They search for what they want to see and they'll find your work. Even if you're writing genre fiction, there are groups where you can advertise, although people seem distrustful of anyone who's selling something, afraid their intentions are impure. But it's just really hard to make that connection for literary fiction. I would be most grateful for any ideas anyone has.

I loved season one of Clarkson's Farm. I knew nothing about Jeremy Clarkson at the time (we looked him up and discovered he was famous for hosting Top Gear and being a driver--not things I had any particular knowledge of--and also for hosting Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the British version--also not something I would know anything about), and I greatly enjoyed the show. I've mentioned before that I'm obsessed with all things farming, from rooftop gardens to homesteads to largescale monoculture commercial agriculture, so this show was right up my alley, especially as it's beautifully filmed and produced and aimed at the layperson, with Clarkson learning about farming from scratch right along with the viewer.

I had thus naturally been extremely excited for season two, which just came out, and which I just finished watching last night. After I read some of his comments about Meghan Markle, I wondered if I'd still be able to enjoy the show. I mean, he doesn't exactly present himself as Mr. Likable anyway. He thinks on his feet and is naturally funny. He can also be charming with effort. But he's often rude, demanding, and difficult. He relishes giving people a hard time while trying to weasel out of any kind of responsibility himself.

He's not the easiest guy to watch or root for even if you don't know about his rabid nationalism, but there are many other characters on the show and a lot more going on than just him, including his young (23 as season 2 was being filmed, 21 during the filming of the first season--!!) but mind-bogglingly experienced farmer Kaleb, his sexy farm-business manager (... I guess would be his title) Charlie Ireland, his stone-wall-builder (which I guess is a thing in rural Britain?) Gerald who is hilariously incomprehensible in nearly everything he utters--basically he's the British Boomhauer--and Clarkson's girlfriend Lisa, who came across as a doormat devoid of personality in season one but this time around was lots of fun--wry and funny.

I was glad to discover I still found it quite enjoyable to watch. Trying to understand the person behind the nasty words about Markle actually added another layer of interest to the show. Clarkson also got himself booted off Top Gear for punching a producer, calling him 'lazy' and 'Irish' as he did ... although Clarkson's girlfriend is also Irish. I read an entire article about how it's "impossible to imagine" this guy who dodders about his farm and frets deeply over slaughtering his animals punching someone. ... I didn't find it impossible.
( Spoilers behind the cut. )
All in all, even if your only feeling about Clarkson is an eagerness to see him suffer, you might enjoy the show just for that, because he does a lot of it. In season one, wonderful, competent Kaleb seemed to feel helpless to Clarkson's whims and cruelties; this season, he doesn't take a thing Clarkson says seriously, and frequently yells at him for his various fuckups (Clarkson dreads seeing him coming when he's done something stupid, knowing he's about to get another dressing down). Charlie Ireland also seems happier and more comfortable this season ... and even braver, more noble, and if possible, more decent and dutiful than in season one. I LOVE that guy! Gerald is as much a delight as ever. Clarkson isn't always a jerk; he gamely tries hard to understand Gerald, and politely responds in noncommittal way when Gerald is done talking so as not to let on that he didn't understand a word. (It's also quite cute that Kaleb seems to have no trouble understanding Gerald at all ... although they have the same last name and come from the same small town, so they might be related.)

If you were a fan of James Herriott's books (as I very much was, from childhood), there are similar feels to be found here, particularly when Clarkson's cows are giving birth, which brings a tear to everyone's eye, even the vet's. Since Herriott worked in England, and some aspects of raising farm animals haven't changed since he was a vet there, in some ways it's like seeing Herriott's books playing out on the screen. The politics of farming in England are frequently addressed, and are fascinating (and horrifying--all of his farmer neighbors are struggling to stay afloat after Brexit was set to soon greatly reduce farming subsidies there--which subsidies were the only reason Clarkson was able to make any money at all from his farm in season one, despite having a thousand acres and producing a variety of things there).

The ending is a little rushed and forced and awkward, some plotlines are brushed off or abandoned, but damn if I don't wish this show had a hundred seasons, so I could binge them all. I've seen some great shows and YouTube channels about farming, but Clarkson's Farm is the best one I've found, so if farming, rural life in England, or anything I mentioned in my review are of interest to you, too, I highly recommend it.

I had a dream last night that I joined One Direction. Not only can I not be called a fan; I've never heard a One Direction song. I do have tremendous respect for Harry Styles as a human being, though. We were all sitting there waiting to be interviewed by the press and I was relieved when no one asked me anything, lol. I love dreams.