dotsandlines

Oh yeah, it's past the end of the month! Forgot about this.

Uh, I changed some things again.

( June stats )

EDIT: Also just finished one of my "anything interesting under $2.99" purchases, Dawn by Octavia E. Butler, a.k.a. Book 1 of Lilith's Brood / Xenogenesis. Deeply, deeply strange book. My brain hurts. That strange. I can finish the whole trilogy for $9.99, and I am tempted just to get some closure on this WTFery. Which is not to say that it's bad, in any sense. Just...deeply strange.

Heyyyyy, I've been talking about writing and depression too much. My life is not all made up of those things, I swear.

I'm excited about a sewing project for our own house, so let me rave about that for a bit.

( spaaaaaa~ you probably know the rest ~aaaaaaace )

Just a fun quote that seems apropos for my journal. I bought this book when it popped up in the daily Kindle sales. It was adorably batty. Scene: A father haphazardly trying to calm his inconsolable (young?) son.

---

But Ranulph’s sobs redoubled. “I want to get away! to get away!” he moaned.

“Away? Away from where?” and there was a touch of impatience in Master Nathaniel’s voice.

“From … from things happening,” sobbed Ranulph.

Master Nathaniel’s heart suddenly contracted; but he tried not to understand. “Things happening?” he said in a voice that he endeavored to make jocular. “I don’t think anything very much happens in Lud, does it?”

“All the things,” moaned Ranulph, “summer and winter, and days and nights. All the things!”

- from Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

---

The book overall is a fantasy story about a town on the edge of Faerie which is Very Unimpressed By Such Outlandish Nonsense, and the interactions between the townspeople and the fantastic world right around the bend. It's quasi-Victorian? It was published in 1926, which I thought was kayfabe* at first because it seems strangely parodic and simultaneously un-stagey, in a weirdly modern way. But no, according to Wikipedia and Amazon, it actually was published in 1926. I still feel wary of being tricked.

Anyway, it's a keeper. Lately I have been checking the daily sales... well, daily, buying dang near anything that is under $2.99 and piques my interest. I have a sizeable backlog for the first time in a while.


Writing is going well. Cut about 10K retconned words, then wrote 6K more. By my estimates, there's about 29K more that needs to be either cut or heavily edited - most of the last quarter of the thing, as it stands now. But I believe in my edits! They are drastic, but the end result will be better. There are two more weeks till stats time, so I won't belabor that point too much.


* something which is fictional, but which you're supposed to pretend is real in real life in order to play along with fandom properly. Like pro wrestling, or those fans who insist(ed) that Sherlock Holmes is factual. To me it seemed like a book which was written more recently but pretended to be vintage.

Apparently my new hobby is overdoing things. Attacking the Aerith and Bob problem with a bazooka today, I renamed three of the five narrators and several of the side characters. I (finally?) made a list of every named character, noted the ones that annoyed me, and then brainstormed and tried things out until I had workable(?) replacements.

I knocked out all of the Bobs, and made an attempt to align characters from each country with reasonably similar-sounding names. It was an alarming hour or two with Search & Replace. Still have to go through to look for unintentional rhyming/awkwardness/alliteration and toss in nicknames when they would flow better.

Also cut off the last ~4,000 [edit] 10,000 words, which had been completely retconned by earlier plot points and would be easier to rewrite from scratch. The next stat check is going to be...interesting.

Gotta admit: it's been a strange, slow reversal. At the start I would pretty much rather die than let anyone read this story, and now I'm having more fun imagining how it would work as a published piece. IMAGINING, mind you. It's just fun to think about. My first loyalty is still to the integrity of the story (loony though it may be) and to having fun.

(As a side note, I make a lot of backups. Still.)

I still exist. So what's going on?

What's going on with me, leaving aside some real-life stuff:

Trying to get through a cute commission project, a pair of bears from Sword Art Online and Fairy Tail. And after that I'm freeeeeeee, and will mess around with whatever I want to sew.

Doing fairly well at keeping my exercise schedule together - four days a week, mostly alternating between Dance Central 3 and Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012. The latter has some really annoying quirks, like an unhelpful and insincere-sounding voiceover "trainer" and a habit of docking points without telling you what you're doing wrong. Apart from that, though, it has some fun minigames and a lot of variety.

Planted a TON of things in the front yard. We are out of space. It doesn't look like it now, with the big spaces between the plants, but they will grow and I'll replace the ones that don't and in three or four years, it will be freaking fantastic. I was able to do that only after accepting that we can't handle the back yard yet. That this will be a multi-year project, year as in YEAR. That I don't have to do everything now.

Haven't been working on AMVs much lately. I will eventually. Just not right now. Actually, I just realized that I haven't seen this year's VCAs yet. I always try to at least catch those so that I'm not entirely out of touch. Eh, eventually.

As noted in many previous posts, I am still plinking away at the original story. ( I'd like to ramble a bit about writing itself, and why I (have to) keep doing it. )

Every time I roam through the cheap-and/or-free ebook selection on my Kindle, I become more convinced that I should finish writing something. ANYTHING. Ever.

I should download and read some of this stuff, so as to have more things to read AND get a better idea of where the bar is set. However, I am a little paranoid about Amazon's recommendation stats. The next time a relative tries to buy me a birthday gift, I don't need them to be chirpily informed that I would "probably" enjoy schmoopy sword & sorcery or romance novels about goat herders or something.

In particular, romance novels are potentially entertaining (I love characterization and character dynamics, and even bad writing is fun), but the genre is so subdivided that I wouldn't even know where to start. I might now know what non-anime fans feel like upon being exposed to a corner of our fandom. Why is everyone 14 years old? Do the robots go with the girls in miniskirts? Sometimes.* What's with all the cat ears? I don't knooooooooow!

So for now, I am just reading Midnight Blue-Light Special and writing a lot of plot outlines - but I've never written plot outlines before, so that in itself is something. I still feel like this project is unreadable by humans. But if it is, maybe it will be epically, transcendently unreadable by humans. I suspect not, given my personality, but who knows.


* Speaking of which, I binge-watched Escaflowne last weekend for no particular reason. I'd borrowed it from a friend, and it was high time I gave it back. I watched the subtitled version while doing a jigsaw puzzle that I'd gotten as a Christmas gift, so I apparently missed some things. I didn't realize that Millerna and Dryden were married, for one thing. Uh, I did notice some giant robots.

This will probably not be too peppy, because I have some sort of con plague. My eyeballs are on fire and I'm too tired for 9 p.m. Anyhow:

( Good things )

Haaaa, got a positive YouTube comment from the band that I used in my Spice & Wolf AMV. So happy to not be sued.

I had sent it to our friendly neighborhood con, but they haven't announced the finalists yet. I would love to pay back the not-suedness by having the song earwormed into the brains of several hundred nerds at once.


...so where was I. Con preparation is going all right. Trying to make things for the Alley. Generally doing OK.

Personal life is pretty meh; I got the distinct feeling that the gaming group we'd been sporadically attending was a bad match for me. (When an entire roomful of people drops a lively conversation to stare at their shoes the second you arrive... it's a bad match.) It's a bummer, because I did enjoy the games, but life is too short to be around people that make you censor yourself. I never asked anyone to censor themselves, but they seem to think that my presence demands it. And so that's the end of that.

Uh anyway, making things, reading a really melodramatic book that is taking forever (curse you, Kindle $2.99 sales), catching up on Archer on Netflix, and writing a very little bit. That's March so far.

Unstuck in the story. Kind of. Sometimes I convince myself to just TRY a new scene, even if it starts out sucking - and it does start out sucking, but it improves later. And then I get to edit. I do love editing. Passed the 140,000 word mark, which means I get another bit of money in the "totally gratuitous entertainment" fund.

Mostly unstuck with crafting. I squandered most of the week, and seem to have mislaid the reference photos I've already printed. But I'm mostly unstuck.

Skipped two workouts in a row, however - not good. I will, WILL!! do one tomorrow morning.

Still reading and reading and reading the Vorkosigan books. I will be sad when I run out of them. But there are still several to go.

Real life/family drama happening tomorrow, most likely. Come at me, life.

OK, the Gathering of Many People went well. I think one key is picking a seat toward the end of a group rather than in the middle. I always assume that being in the middle = being included, but what it generally means to me is that I will be surrounded by 2-3 conversations that I can't follow. So.

Off to work on a LOT of Hellsing bears. We got a request for two sets of Alucard & Seras, to be picked up at the convention (as well as a Kyoya from OHSHC). This is the first time we've done more than one pre-con order, so I am curious to see how this will pan out. If it works out, we'll have to start canvassing for pre-orders a few months before the next con.