Could you describe the ruckus, sir?

healingmirth @ 2015-04-14T16:27:00

2015-04-14T20:27:15Z

For several (? maybe five?) days now, I have been telling myself that I'm going to sit down and start going through every fic bingo card I have (which is many cards) and pick a ship, and just write some words for every square until something sticks. Like, fifteen words even. A handful of phrases. Some jumbled outline notfic.

I made it so far as turning my laptop on, on, like Saturday.

Aaaannnnnyyyy minute now.

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blah, blah sports

2015-04-06T14:48:39Z

As I complained to one of my friends yesterday, all of the wrong people won at sports. I flung myself petulantly onto the couch afterwards, and it didn't help. I don't know how people who are actually from places manage to stick by their teams when they lose year after year.

(I actually just meant that I was disappointed in/for the Penguins and Andy Murray, but it felt more terrible at the time. Also, I was bored and hungry but only had less than an hour before going to have Easter dinner with my mom.)

Luckily, I have accidentally prepared myself for many possible paths through the playoffs. A few weeks ago, I bought some NHL shirts. The reasoning went like this:

- I hate all my long-sleeved t-shirts
- I also hate all the long-sleeved t-shirts that Threadless currently has for sale
- society6?
- wow. what if I just search for cats?
- why is everyone making shirts with giant pictures on them? I look terrible in shirts with designs from hem to hem
- You know what's not productive, self? using google to try to find shirts that only have a banner across the chest, with no restrictions on content
- Ooh, I bet there are sports teams that make stuff like that
- Wow, I hate all the Penguins merch
- Wow, I hate most of everyone else's merch
- Well, the Caps have a banner-ish logo
- And the Habs, I guess
- But if I'm going to be buying things, I really should buy at least one thing for a team where I can match more than one player to his number

Which is why I now have three raglan long-sleeved hockey t-shirts. They're pretty great. And now I am well prepared for jumping on the Canadiens bandwagon through the playoffs.

I haven't written anything in what feels like a year and a half, but what is actually only a little over a month. There was a Perron/Crosby prompt on the meme that has been bouncing around my head, but not any more productively than the multitude of things already bouncing around my writing folders.

I made a pretty great first effort at Spring cleaning last week?

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Really, The Blacklist?

2015-03-16T14:08:15Z

A clip show? Really? Disappointing in concept. Disappointing in execution.

I've spent much of the last week shaking the internet and hoping for the perfect fic to fall out.

(In case you missed it, the ability to "favorite" tags on AO3 is pretty great - and gives me a reason to go to the home page instead of my dash, so that's good for them, too.)

Since said fic hasn't magically appeared, I started clearing out some stuff marked to read later - mostly Teen Wolf, mostly longfic - which just served to remind me that I get frustrated when I'm out of sync with a fandom.

For instance: I got halfway through a story, and then suddenly realized I was only halfway through, "But where else does this story have to go?" I ask the author in my head. Where it has to go, I come to find, is into a totally different story. The two halves are connected in plot but not in tone, but now I really wish they'd published it as two fics in a series. Not least because this browser's memory doesn't handle long pages now. I know that chaptered fic can be such a cliche, but I'd really appreciate some demarcating features right now.

But I digress. My point is, if I wanted to talk about this fic, nuts and bolts, with someone, that ship sailed, like, last year. Womp womp.

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wherein the wednesday reading meme effort accelerates downhill

2015-03-12T02:14:44Z

Unrelated to absolutely anything but my brain, but references to K/T (Kane/Toews) on the hockey rpf meme still cause a moment of confusion as my long-dormant geology thinking goes straight to the K/T (Cretaceous/Tertiary) boundary.

I was going to WIP amnesty some stuff to AO3 for a kudos boost for my birthday a while back, and in the process discovered that almost all of my random Teen Wolf crap in my google drive can be woven into a single storyline. So, instead of letting go of a fandom, I've now got 5000 words waiting for probably another 5-8k. Blurgh. I've been trawling thesinbin for hockey ideas in the hope that the Teen Wolf thoughts will go dormant again and I can jettison it.

What I finished: Jackdaw! I really liked it, and have been periodically thinking about re-reading it, already, over the past couple days.

Think of England was great. Charm of Magpies was great. But Jackdaw absolutely (ahem) nails my desire for characters to make mistakes - big, big, big mistakes - and to repent and recover from it. There were a couple brief stretches where Ben and Jonah Just. Kept. Talking. that I skimmed over, and if I am being super-picky for a published work, I'm not sure how I feel about the placement of the flashbacks. BUT! Those are tiny personal preferences amid a story that I really loved.

If you are a person who reads M/M and buys books, or who occasionally spends $5 on things that you enjoy - fancy coffee, a smallish cake, some fraction of a movie ticket - then I thoroughly recommend tossing that money in KJ Charles's direction.

What I'm reading now: IDK. I think I lost my copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude under my flurry of tax paperwork. Le sigh.

What I'm reading next: Next. Ha. Yeah, right.

I found a copy of Hyperbole and a Half in a bag underneath some terrible presents from two Christmases ago. Apparently I bought myself some books along with what I bought my mom, and then promptly forgot about them. Maybe that.

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a commentary track of sorts

2015-02-22T01:39:56Z

I just opened up a browser session that I created while working on my Yuletide 2013 Lewis fic.

Using Your University Card
Oxford University student safety information, since removed from the web or (hopefully!) moved somewhere else
Francis of Assisi quotes, for title reference
Oxford Student Union News Archive for I have no idea what, but the page before it in history is a search for freshers, so perhaps info on Freshers Fair?
Lady Margaret Hall Undergraduate Accommodation
Several efforts to get the internet to cough up information about porters in Oxford colleges
Oxford Food Shopping although I'm pretty sure I ended up searching on Google maps.
List of fictional Oxford colleges

and a search to see if Love, Actually was streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Well, this is certainly an entry.

2015-01-01T20:01:18Z

Yuletide fic! I wrote three things!

I'd written three stories once before, when I wrote two stories for my recipient and then a treat for Elyn in one of those fandoms, but that was waaaaay back in 2009.

( Breakfast Club, Breakfast Club, Vikings )

I threw a lot of words at a lot of things that I didn't post this year - a story or two for SS*BB; the aforementioned abandoned Yuletide fic attempts; an American Idiot fork-in-the-road AU that I don't think there's anyone left in the fandom to read; a few Arthur/Eames story ideas. I'm not sure that it was more unpublished words than any other year, but it was spread across fewer files. I didn't have a fandom that lead to thirty different plot bunnies.

AO3 word count for the year: 10244

Two (of three) ficlets for AELDWS, an attempt at stop-drop-howl that stopped and dropped before the porn, and three yuletide fics. Not my lowest count year - that was 2011, which was a giant pile of work-related stress.

I now have 74 works on AO3, and I think #75 is going to be the scenes from the proto-Smokin' Aces fic that I am still so excited that someone else wrote. *\o/* ponderosa *\o/*

snowflake_challenge Day 1:

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

( Justified, Teen Wolf, American Idiot )

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Sloth is a theme here

2014-12-30T21:59:24Z

My favorite thing in the world is when my older cat stands up from where he's napping on top of a pile of mail or whatever and shifts over a foot to fall back asleep next to me. This happens nearly once a day, and only in that order. It's like the feline equivalent of pulling on an extra quilt.

New cat just jumps directly to my lap and passes the fuck out, which is also nice, but leads to much more time trapped under cat than I had originally planned.

I'll do some sort of AO3 meme/writing roundup with yuletide reveals, but I was sitting here thinking about it, and it occurred to me that the only things I've finished and posted this year have been for challenges. I don't think that the answer is "more challenges" because I regularly fail out of bingos, etc., but I fear it may be too late to train myself to do anything without a deadline. I mean, I do things, but so very much on my own timeline. Last week I finally hung a picture that I bought a year and a half ago, and I might have hung two more today if the frames for sale at Michaels hadn't all been horrible. Baskets 50% off though!

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healingmirth @ 2014-11-29T01:10:00

2014-11-29T06:10:56Z

I was doing so well with writing, word-count wise, at the beginning of the month, and then I'm not sure where it went, but wow did I crash out hard. So tonight, in lieu of trying to produce words for a bit, I went back and reread the last four things I posted to AO3. Found typos in the concluding paragraph of three of them. /o\

I've still got, y'know, like 27 December posting meme slots over yonder - http://healingmirth.dreamwidth.org/253402.html And in opening up this browser session, found a bunch of people's meme posts that I'd misplaced, so if yours might be among them, feel free to gently remind me, but I'm also going to do a scroll back through tomorrow.

I've had several conversations with my mother about Ferguson over the past two days. (Sounds like a fun Thanksgiving dinner topic, right?!) The most recent of these followed some news she had just heard about the protests in New York, and they had interviewed someone who, my mother said, was clearly hoping that they would antagonize the police enough to provoke a violent reaction.

So she called me, my mother the social worker, to ask me to explain why someone would want that to happen.

To which my response was basically "... Do you want me to make something up? Explaining why someone might do this thing that this guy may or may not have actually said?"

Like as far as making a scene and/or actually protesting in public, or any interaction with police, I am at least as conformist as my mother is. But we had a lovely conversation where I spun out hypothetical plans of action with respect to creating narratives and holding attention in mainstream and social media.

And then she called back to ask how to do something on youtube.

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three things make a monday

2014-07-14T19:34:17Z

I complain fairly often that I can't write short things, but I signed up for the Arthur/Eames Last Drabble Writer Standing over at inceptiversary and there's been something really satisfying about writing below a word count on this first prompt. It's like a puzzle! This is particularly true since I am generally so, so lazy with my prose. Like, there's an excellent chance that I'm not improving the sentences by continuing to fiddle with them, but it's been a nice and relatively finite distraction from, y'know, everything that's wrong with everything lately.

Speaking of losing faith in humanity: in conversation with my mother recently, it came out that her conversations with my dad now completely avoid politics and the economy because he thinks Obama is the worst thing to ever happen to the country. And also that he doesn't understand why we didn't just build a giant wall on the border. Giant. Wall. Ugh.

The Obama thing wasn't a huge surprise, but, yeah. For anyone who wonders why I never have anything to say to my father on the phone, there's a start that I can point to.

Back in shallower news, I guess the new(ish) "feed" version of the LJ friends page doesn't display the text of cut tags, just an arrow you can click on to expand the body of the entry. So, I'm never going to that page again. It's nice when decisions are simple.

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December 12-ish for poisontaster: all that drawerfic I wrote in November

2013-12-13T06:45:37Z

It's rolled over to the 13th (Friday the 13th, mwa-ha-ha-whatever) here, but I'm still awake, so there! And it's appropriate, I guess, that I'm blogging, post-midnight, about writing, most of which I did post-midnight last month.

(also: this is the last of the questions I've got, and I am nowhere near motivated enough to do that other meme, so if you've thought of something you'd like to ask, the big empty list of dates is thataway)

This entry has way too many parentheses in it. I'm sorry.

As previously mentioned, a lot of what I wrote in November was drawerfic. I've got a fairly low shame threshold for the pure ridiculousness that I'm willing to attach my pseud to, so for me, drawerfic is something that I'm generally conflicted about putting out to the world. In this case, it was RPF.

(also, part 2: appropriate that this was poisontaster's question, because A Kept Boy was among the first bits of RPF that I remember reading. *waves*)

So, I think, with absolutely no data to back this up, that I have a pretty middle-of-the-road interaction with RPF for fandom?

( Read more... )

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for kate, my WIP culling process. Culling. Right.

2013-12-05T04:00:37Z

Found...somewhere? IDK, it was open in a tab just now processfest is a thing that's happening, and maybe will be happening on a recurring basis? Today's prompt was "multiple projects."

So, hi! It's December 4th, which means a request for something about my WIP culling/condensing process. Again, feel free to pitch in a question, although if I'm being honest, today's effort is not a great selling point for my further attempts at meme-ing.

( this is actually more like 'the woeful state of my WIP folder and what I hope to accomplish next month' )

I moved to the couch because I was cold, and now I have a cat asleep on my left arm. So I think that's it for now.

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Writing. Also, Stolen from everywhere, a meme:

2013-12-02T03:14:44Z

I did really well at writing things in November, in terms of quantity, at least. I signed up for mini_wrimo at 300 words, when I think my previous commitment was 100 or 150 words the last time. And I did it. I wrote at least 300 words every day, even if they were shit and I was tired or lazy and didn't get to it until after 1am, which was often.

According to the spreadsheet, I wrote over 20,000 words last month, and I absolutely typed more than that, because there were days when I kept going and didn't bother changing my total.

I really liked some of them! I also deleted a fair number of words, and wrote a lot of drawerfic.

I have 65 subscribers at the moment (hi /network, /latest, anons!) so this is clearly not in danger of filling up, and you're welcome to pick multiple days, questions, whatevers. Any day that doesn't get a question (which may very well be all of them!) I think I'm going to try to write something from 31_days prompts, because that's what I was going to try this month before the meme appeared.

Dec. 1: You're reading it.
Dec. 2:
Dec. 3:
Dec. 4: My WIP culling/condensing process (kate)
Dec. 5:
( I bet you can guess how the rest of the list goes )

Total question-asking amnesty. Fannish, not fannish, something that you think someone on your flist talked about once, but on second thought it was probably someone else whose username started with an H.

Please feel no shame about relevance to my actual journal contents, because I couldn't even tell you what I've already posted about without referring to tags and possibly journal search.

Also, I have at least 80 files in my "inactive WIP" folder in google docs. Yikes. I think I'm going to go do some condensing of those.

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