Get to know your mutuals

Thanks for tagging me @arsenic-lobster - I always love reading these and find thinking about the answers really fun!

What is the origin of your blog name? Ember is a word I’ve always loved. The remains of a fire that stubbornly stick around, still warm, still alive. The “-line” was mostly practical, because pretty much every other possible Ember variation was already taken.

What’s your “I will always order this” food? Anything with artichokes. I am obsessed to a degree that comes off weird. Also if it contains cheese and or truffle, count me the hell in immediately.

What’s your overused emoji? I am very dramatic, so probably the crying emoji or the heart eyes emoji, often deployed together and repeatedly to indicate that something has emotionally destroyed me via cuteness.

What’s your current comfort show, movie, book? Shows: Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, True Blood, Downton Abbey, 1995 Pride and Prejudice, Romola Garai’s Emma, BBC North and South, BBC War and Peace. Movies: Lord of the Rings, selective Star Wars (A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Rogue One), plus several films that feel like being home sick from school with a blanket and Lucozade. Books: Regency romances are my forever comfort read. If I am stressed, tired, or spiritually unwell, simply hand me K J Charles or Mary Balogh and I will be fine. Ish.

Song you’ve had on repeat this week? My nephew’s band just released an album, so I have been listening to that on loop like a proud aunt with absolutely no chill.

What’s the last thing you hyperfixated on? I read a book about shipwrecks that changed the world and immediately decided I needed to know everything about each one. What happened, why, and how it accidentally rewired history. Normal behaviour? :/

What’s an oddly specific thing that brings you joy? A violently hot bath with Weleda pine bath milk, followed by fresh sheets and fresh pyjamas.

What smell instantly makes you happy? Beach air and Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen.

What’s something you loved as a kid that you secretly love now? Not really a secret, but books about horses. I was a full horse girl as a child and remain one in spirit, tragically without the budget to support the lifestyle.

What’s your phone wallpaper right now? Me with two of my nephews on holiday last year. Hoping to update it in a few weeks when we are on holiday together in February.

Are you a morning person, night owl, or something else entirely? None of the above. I simply love sleep. I go to bed early and lie in. Dream big.

Lastly, if you work, what is your work profession? And do you like it? I have recently changed roles but still work mainly with ideas and words. And yes, I am really enjoying it so far, which feels like tempting fate but here we are.

Tagging @cerebronn @rogue4ever @bobakowalski @isoleeshouldbewriting @shezzasstuff Zero pressure, only if you want to!

I keep wondering where my next fic obsession will take me

I am increasingly convinced that my writing process is not “having ideas” so much as “developing an intense and highly specific research fixation and then refusing to rest until Charles and Erik are inside it”.

First it was Himalayan mountaineering, especially the Mallory Everest expeditions. I read Into the Silence by Wade Davis, which is incredible and immediately filled my head with ice, altitude sickness, doomed idealism, and men making catastrophically bad decisions in wool. Naturally I thought, yes, this is perfect, and that is how The Killer Mountain happened.

Then last year I read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and that was it for me. I could not stop reading about the Spanish Civil War. Politics, propaganda, international brigades, betrayal, idealism versus survival. Somewhere along the way my brain decided this absolutely needed to be a big, emotionally ruinous wartime romance, and Red Sky at Dawn was born.

Now I am back in the familiar position of wondering what obsession is going to get me next.

I have been deep in a Wars of the Roses spiral for a while, but I am weirdly stuck on how to cherik-ify it. Partly because Kaydeefalls did such an incredible job with the Anarchy in The Conspirator's Gift that I am mildly terrified I would accidentally reproduce it out of sheer love and admiration (yes I know the time periods are centuries apart, but it's still my fear).

I also keep flirting with the idea of horror, but I want the setting itself to be a big part of the horror. I keep circling submarines, the existence of which I find genuinely terrifying. I do not know if that means it is a brilliant idea or a sign I should stop reading about pressure hulls at night. Or mermaids, but feral - like in Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant. Maybe something about researching the Marianas Trench (shudder)

At the same time, part of me really wants to write a medical drama, very ER or Grey’s Anatomy coded. I have backstories, dynamics, emotional damage, all the essentials, but it is still mostly vibes and notes at this point.

And then there is the persistent urge to do a Sharpe-style Napoleonic Wars epic. I made Charles a Napoleonic war veteran in my Regency romance and now I cannot stop thinking about actually exploring that. Campaigns, mud, command, trauma, long memories, and the particular flavour of emotional repression that only the early nineteenth century can provide.

At the moment I'm kind of working on a one shot to tide me over. Hopefully I can make it work. It's v different to my Mind The Gap one shots - a bit more assholey, maybe, haha.

Anyway, based on past experience, whatever I read next will probably derail my life and turn into a fic. I never know what it will be, only that it will arrive suddenly, take over my brain, and demand I read everything I can find about it!

What is everyone else working on? Anyone else get inspired this way, or do they work more ... consistently?

Red Sky at Dawn chapters 13 and 14 are up!

Despite setting my own schedule, I have failed yet again to meet it - sorry! But chapters 13 and 14 of 18 are now up! and if you want it, here's a little exceprt of what's happening with Charles and Erik: "Erik kissed him like a man who had survived something and was busy proving it. Charles kissed him back with the same motive. The rope line at Charles’s shoulder hummed faintly in the breeze, a taut string plucked by the river’s long fingers. He found himself counting the beats between the wind’s small touches and his own.

“Does anything hurt?” Erik asked against his cheek. Even desire came second to the checklist in his head.

“Only the good bits,” Charles said, and felt Erik smile into him. “Don’t fuss.”

“I’m not fussing,” Erik said. “I’m inventorying.”

They had the space of perhaps ten minutes before the world remembered them. Charles didn’t want to spend any of them speaking the kind of sentence that might break the fragile logic of the night.

Feeling had never been his first language; he trusted words because they obeyed him, because they built neat rooms where chaos could be labelled and contained. Whatever this was – it refused containment. He could already feel his mind searching for definitions, diagrams, arguments that would make it safe. He wanted to stop himself before he ruined it with understanding."

Five things I’m proud of in 2025

Thanks for the tag, @arsenic-lobster - this was actually really lovely to think about!

1. Posting my writing

I finally got the nerve to share work I’d been sitting on for a long time. When you read so much incredible writing, both published and fanfic, it is very easy to convince yourself your own work does not belong alongside it. But I did it anyway, and the kindness of people in this fandom has genuinely helped me grow in confidence.

2. Changing my career direction

After thinking about it for ages, doing training, applying for internal roles, and having a lot of conversations with senior people, I am starting a new role in two days. I have been in my current role for around six years and I am objectively terrible with change, so this felt huge. I am proud that I leaned into it instead of staying put out of fear.

3. Learning to crochet and sticking with it

I learnt to crochet this year despite being very bad at it at first. I have made teddy bears for nieces, nephews and friends’ kids, a cardigan, many hats, and my proudest achievement, a tiny jumper for my doggy niece. I do not have a great track record of sticking with things I am not immediately good at, so this feels like a proper win.

4. Being kinder and more practical about my anxiety

I have a brutal inner critic and for a long time I tried to manage anxiety by shaming myself into coping, which does not work. This year I have started understanding how my ADHD feeds into it and responding with more curiosity and compassion. I am not fixed, but I am better than I was.

5. Doing boring, grown up admin instead of avoiding it forever

Money stuff. Planning. Sorting things out before they became emergencies. I do not enjoy it, but I did more of it anyway, and it turns out that actually helps.

I’ll tag @eriknocherikyes @brawlingdiscontent @bobakowalski @cerebronn but only if you want to - absolutely no pressure!