dotsandlines

At Half Price Books, I bought a book about 1603 and one about the history of military medicine. In other words, I'm spending money on research for a book I don't intend to publish. Useless hobbies are fun. Woo. (My story isn't set in 1603, but that's about the latest era it could be analogous to right now.)

Also joined Goodreads, because I like rambling about books, and I like recommendations.

Edit: Oh, and I also bought another used copy of Erasure's best-of, since I loaned out my previous copy and never got it back (and pretty much all of my older Erasure CDs have worn out). So now I once again own a copy of "A Little Respect". Awesome. It's one of my favorite songs to sing, but I suck at it. I just can't handle the notes on "soul" and "calling" in the chorus. Oh, I can reach them, but by the time we've slid to the end of the word, I'm in some entirely incorrect key.

I might be the only dork who was squeeful over the copy of "A Little Respect" at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

This has been today's 1 a.m. geek-out. Tomorrow a new episode of Welcome to Night Vale comes out, so that'll be tomorrow's 1 a.m. geekout.

Juuuust realized that if I write one or two more (longish) scenes, Sequel 2 will have about eighty contiguous, theoretically readable pages without any "and stuff goes here" gaps, AND include the beginning of a couple of key conflicts. You know, like the beginning of a story. I've been passing through it to tweak a few things and make it more readable as a stand-alone. I think it can.

Hmmmm. Uggghhh. Hmmm. Thoughts. Decisions. Dangit.

I am not thinking about publishing; I am thinking about begging for feedback from anyone who would agree to read it. Why? I don't even know. Curiosity, mostly.

I'll see how that thought looks in the cold light of day. And then write those two more longish scenes.

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I've already rambled/ranted on FB, so I'll just mention it once here: new fandom woo! I've been listening to this all week, and caught up with the first 28 episodes. It's so charmingly cracked.

Turns out that putting my notes on my Kindle and using it while I work on the computer doesn't work that well, because the note-taking app that I have on the Kindle is really awkward. I can peck in words with the touch keyboard, barely, but you can't copy/paste/move blocks of text around, nor can you erase blocks of text. You just have to sit there leaning on the "delete" button.

Soooo it was a good idea in theory, and if I had a flashier gadget, it would probably work a treat. (I don't want one at the moment - mine is fine - but that's the circumstance under which this idea would have worked.)

So I'm transferring my notes back to the computer. Next experiment: note cards! - Sometime. Not right now.

Stats next week. I realized this past month that over time, I've deep-sixed the entire first year of writing that I did on this project. It's for the best, but that's still an alarming thing to realize.

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. )

- Intend to spend the evening crafting
- Realize that the bit I wrote on Saturday kind of sucked, return to give it a look
- Start to fix it
[3 or 4 hours and 2,400 words later...]
- Wind up somewhere else entirely, with two characters that didn't even trade two words in the first draft having an adorable Moment on the way to the Scene-That-Sucks, which hasn't even come up yet
- Regret nothing

I will get on track tomorrow. And Scene-That-Sucks isn't nagging the back of my mind anymore. I've got a looong digression of a lead-in, at least.

I do not write like a well-oiled machine. Tangents are fun, and editing is fun, and both of those are why I've only gotten to 2.8 NaNoWriMos worth of material in 2+ years. Regret nothing.

Please excuse any crankiness today. I've spent all week worrying about getting stomach flu, which... makes my stomach hurt. Fitting, I suppose. Still, it's astronomically better than actually having the stuff. My last bout with that (circa age 9) was the worst one-time experience of my life, to the point where it represents, to me, a particular feeling of being entirely alone and unloved in the universe.

I'm a little neurotic. Next!

( Writing stats, i.e. better news )

I was in a mood to buy music at Half Price Books today, during their sale:
Goldfrapp - Black Cherry (fault: DDR; "Strict Machine" is on a later mix) Not done listening to this yet. About what I expected; groovy and kind of dark.

The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing (fault: Pandora; "Shut Up and Let Me Go" has turned up on a couple of my regular stations) Catchier than I expected. Favorite there: "That's Not My Name". Aaaaugh that cheerleading beat thing. It's in my head. Ohhh Mickey you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, Hey Mickey!

The White Stripes - White Blood Cells (in that "What, I don't already own this?!" category. Also fault: Pandora; "We're Going to Be Friends" is so cute) Favorite: Still WGTBF.

Bowling for Soup - Sorry for Partyin' (have a couple of their other albums, all of which sound the same. This one is pretty meh, but the first track is funny)

Since I've been indulging a whim to buy Really Bad Music on iTunes lately, I feel that my music karma has balanced a bit. I've been treating iTunes in that "whee, I don't have to face a real live clerk" fashion that drives people to buy Fifty Shades of Grey on their Kindles. which I have not done. Not my bag. And most of that is fault: AMVs.

Speaking of which: work continues on the Probably Last Utena AMV, not at full tilt, but slowly and steadily. I don't feel like it's one of my personal best, not yet, but it's solid. Who knows; it could become more than the sum of its parts along the way. I'm planning to send the Princess Jellyfish video to Tekkoshocon anyway, so I'll still have that.

Also writing a lot lately. I'm happy with that. Wrote a pair of scenes involving a minor character (previously only mentioned in passing) who turned out to have a lot of personality, and in the meandering that resulted from that, I may have solved a long-standing plot problem elsewhere in the story. Maybe it's too pat, but right now I don't care. I'd rather see how this works first. Also, it's always fun to uncover entertaining side characters.

I felt as though video editing wouldn't work for me at the moment, and that was true. Sewing has been easier; I'm just waiting for a delivery of plush for the next project. I hope the color is OK. Gray can be difficult.

( Stats, and it's fun to take evil overlord quizzes )

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I came across the term "feral fan" a little while ago, while reading about live-action video editing. On one hand, it kind of feels nice to have a name for what you are. On the other hand, I feel very conflicted about the idea of fandom's apprenticeship/guild system. I understand that that's how it is; I just don't know how I feel about it. (And yes, I understand that it exists no matter how I feel about it.)

Hm. It's interesting to see how it's viewed from the outside (errrr, the inside).