The Secretary Will Disavow Any Knowledge

For those of you who write, you know that point in a story where you just want to scream at it: "Why won't you just do what I tell you??"

Yeah.

There were going to be 75 chapters. Yeah, not so much.

Getting rid of Mary-Louise, finding out about Bodhi, Jensen's mom…I was totes going to be able to cover those in a single chapter each. Ha. Yeah, not so much.

I can't even begin to dissect how many scenes there are that I thought were going to go one way and, somewhere in transition, took a left at Albuquerque when they should've taken a right.

Don't get me wrong. To date, La Muse hasn't led me wrong in these unexpected detours. I think the stories that have resulted have always ended up being stronger and better than my original conceptions. As well, it's a pretty common writerly phenomenon.

That just doesn't make it any less annoying when it happens. And it doesn't make me feel any less like a maidservant trying to get her mistress into a dress that's entirely too small for her, fingers wrapped in the laces, foot planted firmly in her back and heaving for all I'm worth.

I know where I want to go. I know that. But the scenarios that have evolved have done so in a way that makes it impossible to resolve them as quickly as I first thought I'd be able to. Which means I then end up adding things, trying to course correct and bring them back around to where I think they should be (which doesn't always work) and that means I generally hit up at a point where the two ends don't meet and I'm at a loss how to bring them back together.

I just wrote myself off a cliff. I'm at a loss how to bring the ends back together.

And I'll figure it out. I always do. The boys at the brain farm are always working. But having built up so much momentum in the last couple scenes, it does feel a bit like slamming face-first into a screen door and falling on my ass (I speak from sad, pathetic experience, here). And there's always that initial panicky reaction of, Oh crap. Where do I go from here?

Me and the boys on the farm have some musing to do.

I was putting together what new material I have for Appetite and I was really pretty shocked at how little it comes out to be, when assembled. Part of the reason for this is that there are two scenes that I've spent a lot of words on, but it was all writing and rewriting them, trying to find the "right" take for them. So there's verbiage, but most of it is garbage. Or…if not garbage, than discards and it's a real struggle for me to be Zen about this and say that it will come when it comes and accept that with equanimity. There are some stories I can bull my way through. I used to be better at bulling my way through a stubborn story. But now it's a talent that seems to have deserted me and, as usual, I'm not sure how to recover it.

On the other hand, I feel like AKB is going like gangbusters. Which is awesome and I am thankful for that, but, at the same time, it's hard not to feel like my success with AKB and that all my excitement and creativity going toward it is detracting from my other goals. And while a part of me doesn't want it to end, the glimmering of the end on the horizon is also a relief. Of course, it also brings up a certain morbid curiosity about what, exactly, will take its place as the object of my obsession. And, of course, the fear that nothing will.

In my current spate of 'trashy' reading, I'm reading LKH's Skin Trade and I realized a big part of the many, many things that bother me about the Anita Blake books (and their [de]evolution over time) is the distinct lack of femaleness.

( A little more about that. Not specifically spoilery. )

Another thing that I really want to write about, but haven't quite figured out how to talk about it without potentially offending people, is mini_nanowrimo. On the one hand, I understand that it, like anything writing related, is a tool and what people get out of it and how they use it and what it means to them is entirely individual. I can't dispute that. I can't argue with that.

But, at the same time, I confess to a certain (un-modly, personal) frustration when people either miss a day of writing or miss a day of posting and decide to pack it up and give up on the challenge entirely. I mean…I get the disappointment of not meeting the goals that you've set for yourself. Boy howdy, do I get that! And I do understand the impulse that, if you cannot be perfect, you'd rather be nothing at all.

But I also feel like it's a childish impulse, in its way. The older I get (and the theoretically wiser) the more I think less and care less about perfection and care and think more about perseverance.

The way we do one thing is the way we do everything. In this life, we make mistakes, we fail. We fail in so many ways. Some failure is inevitable. And, generally speaking, we don't have the option of packing it in, taking our ball and going home. Generally, we have to stick it out, strap it on and clean up our messes. And I find a certain grace in that. Much more grace, in some ways, than the people who do manage some level of perfection, because it takes guts to faceplant and then get up again and move on. I feel like we spend so much time trying to self-talk ourselves and everyone else into not making any mistakes, to being perfect and we spend none of that time teaching ourselves or each other how to recover from those inevitable failures. Or that a failure doesn't need to be the end of everything. And that a failure in one part doesn't equal complete catastrophe.

( Some more thoughts on the matter. (The opinions within are those of poisontaster, and do not represent the comm as a whole or in part.) )

Back in Frederick. It's a strange day when that feels like a relief. Things are not good with my mom, but I also don't really want to talk about it, especially on this LJ, which has a different focus than my personal LJ. However: I would like to thank all of you for your support, prayers and kind wishes.

While mooching around the hospital, I managed to finish two books: a re-read of Stephen King's Misery, which is one of my absolute favorite books and Charlaine Harris's new book, Grave Secret. I also managed to hit my mini_nanowrimo word count every day--mostly out of sheer stubbornness, I admit, not to mention the long hours of nothing much to do. Of course, now that I'm trying to think about it, I hardly remember what I was working on.

I know I'm about a thousand words into the next piece of AKB, but I'm unsure about how I feel about it. I was about 5 or 6 hundred words in when I realized/I thought/I decided I was using the wrong POV character. And I'm still a little undecided about whether I can make it work with the POV I started in or whether I'm going to have to scrap it all and start over. It's one of those scenes where I wish I could convincingly have it both ways and cram both POVs into a single, unbroken scene.

I worked some on Appetite, thankfully. If things in the real world go the way they seem like they're going to, I'm going to need to get even MORE serious about putting myself out there. I still feel so ambivalent about it all, though. I feel like I've lost some essential spark of knowing these characters. They feel like caricatures of themselves and I don't know how to get around that to the honest place.

Trine has been turning up in the mental hopper at unexpected moments. I think that realizing what kind of tack I was going to take with this story really broke some things loose, though, to be fair, it's more in the prewriting stages than in the actual writing. But I have what looks like the beginning and that's not nothing.

I really need to get onboard with my Yuletide story. I couldn't manage to read my entire flist from the point I went AWOL to now, but even reading the purgated "do or die" version of it, it seems like the mods did a superlative job of matching this year. ...I wish I felt the same. And now I'm trying to think about how to talk about this without giving too much away, but let's leave it at this: the fandom is great. The mods did (and do) a great job. I just don't do well when people give me a "Oh, write anything!" prompt with no greater direction. In the world of fandom, I'm a niche, midlist writer and I feel like what interests me, in terms of storytelling, is not going to be what interests the average reader. So there's that. I also need to reaquaint myself with the source material quick, fast and in a hurry.

Here's an interesting question: at what point do you give up on a book you're reading? I've had Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in my "currently-reading" queue for months now, but the truth is that, despite my deep love of zombies, I'm not finding it funny or entertaining enough to hold my interest. So should I give up on it entirely and acknowledge that I'm probably never going to care enough to sludge through it, or should I persist, in the idea that I've started it and now I should press on through to the end? What do you do? If you start a book, do you feel obligated to finish it or do you discard it easily the minute it ceases to keep your interest?

Watching my lazy, long-haired cat make one of his lacksidaisical periodic attempts to groom himself is pretty hilarious.

Feeling pretty disgruntled today. No good reasons, but sometimes you don't need one. Maybe it's just because I woke up from nightmares about buying a house full of swarming earthworms. *shudders* Just a couple nights ago, I had a dream about a giant demi-god eel. Oh, yes, it's been a barrel of monkeys in my head as of late.

AKB is slowly rolling its way around to its end and, though it still occasionally gives me a panicky pang in my gut to finish something I've been working on so long (and that still has such potential), I'm feeling pretty good about it. Mostly things are falling the way I wanted them to, the way I envisioned them all this time, and that feels good. Mostly, the reactions are just what I hoped for, and that feels good too. And I've enjoyed the conversations it's inspired, the way it's made me think about what I'm doing inside and outside the story.

Appetite, on the other hand, feels like a source of such huge frustrations. My love for the story is so deep and incredible. It's been just about a year since I started writing it and it's still so incredibly present in my life. The obsession isn't quite as deep as that with AKB, but it's close.

And it's hard to say whether it's hard to find the words because I'm not as invested or whether I'm not as invested because the words are so grudging to come...but either way, the words are not coming and a month that I was theoretically supposed to be devoting to Appetite is...not working out that way.

More than that, I don't have a good feel for what's not working. I mean...a lot of times when I feel like I'm veering off course, I can take a good, hard look at it and at least come up with a hypothesis (generally correct) about what to do. And this time, I have no feel for it. It looks good on paper, it looks good to my advisory committee and the only advice that I--or anyone else--can come up with is to just keep forging forward. But that requires words. And words are what I most emphatically do not have.

But the alternative is to accept (temporary) defeat. To stop trying to squeeze these words out and move on to something else, something not so hard. And...I'm not quite ready to do that, either.

Maybe I'm just spinning wheels waiting for my yuletide assignment to magically appear in my inbox.

AKB 73: 300 words

Appetite: 259 words

Sometimes my youngest cat likes to plant herself right in front of the door of our apartment. My guess on the matter is that she thinks by doing so, she can prevent us from leaving. Which is both cute and sad.

The last few days have been bad writing days; I'm hoping this is a trend that does NOT continue. You know, I look forward so much to November--NaNo and Thanksgiving--and, at the same time, I always forget how incredibly STRESSFUL November is, invariably. Not even just with those two polestars; it's like November is some kind of freaky magnet for misfortune and frustration, the full moon month of the year.

Anyway. I don't know whether it's because I'm deliberately and consciously trying to work on more than one project at a time or a fundamental fault elsewhere, but I feel like I'm struggling with everything I write so much. The analogy I gave merepersiflage yesterday was trying to follow a bad radio signal, one that keeps fading in and out between curtains of static. There was a brief period of a few paragraphs where I had the voice for Gabe (Appetite) and it felt good and right and then it was gone again and now I can't quite get it back. I know what's supposed to be happening now, but when it comes to actually writing it out, it's an epic battle.

And I'm not really competitive in most arenas, but it's sometimes doubly hard when I'm entering word counts for mini_nanowrimo and I see that people have written 2 or 4 (or more) thousand words that day, while I was grudging out my 500. And some of it is jealousy and some of it is regret because there was a time when *I* could do that and some of it is a nagging sense of failure.

Which I AM trying not to dwell on, believe it or not.

I am starting to wonder if I'm ever going to have the time and ability to do a regular NaNo again, though, as long as I'm tied to mini_nanowrimo. It's a great idea and I very much don't want to see it fail, but it is also INCREDIBLY time-consuming (even with my co-mods taking up an incredible amount of work, omg, thank you, y'all!) and I do sometimes feel resentful that it's taking up so much of my very slender, very precious free time, when I could be using it to write myself. While my writing 'ambitions' (and I use that word laughingly) are erratic and ever-changing and don't necessarily involve publication, I am very jealous and protective of that time. Whether for fun or money, writing is such an important avocation to me. I can't and won't give it up.

All my mini_nanowrimo peeps; please note that there's an important announcement on the comm. Anyone who has forgotten to post on a given day so far has a ONE TIME chance to recoup. If you would, spread the word.

Yesterday was a bad day and a bad day for writing. I made my word count, but I've been trying to do double or triple that every day and yesterday I wasn't even close.

On the other hand, the words I wrote were on Appetite, which pleases me. I don't want to let AKB stagnate all month (and there's no worry about that) but Appetite is really my focus. Or I would prefer it was my focus. I've been flitting between three different projects, really.

Started AKB 73 today. Writing for four year olds is HARD, yo.

I'm struggling with Appetite. I'm making new words, I don't hate the words I'm making (for the most part) but at the same time, I feel like I've lost some essential grasp of their characters that I had before and I feel like I lost the window into their world and I'm pressed against the wrong side of the glass, trying to peek through.

I'm doing this thing with my body right now where I feel like I don't know how to fit in it any more. I feel uncomfortable in whatever position I sit in and it's like I don't have any muscle memory for what my body "normally" likes to do, so I'm trying to fake it, but it's not working. It's really messing up my back and my neck and shoulders. And writing Appetite right now is a little like that. I'm HERE and I'm in the body, but I don't remember how it's supposed to move or sit or anything. There's no muscle memory.

...I suspect that made no sense to anyone but me. What can I say? I've had a rough week.

I made pot roast last night. I'm picking at the carcass today. You know you have made some damn fine beef if it tastes just as good COLD the next day. NOM NOM NOM.

Well, I did it. I signed up for yuletide. And though I was tempted to sign up for more fandoms and more characters (and there was some last minute switching around), I stuck to my plan. So that happened.

I had another woeful moment today when I saw an advert for a holiday exchange ficathon for a fandom that I'm tangentially interested in and realized that my pairing of choice is so wacky that it seems unfair to ask anyone to write it and, simultaenously, I have nearly zero interest in writing the preferred pairing(s) in the fandom. This pairing rare-pairs crap is hard, yo! Most of the time I don't care so much because I'm writing whatever makes me happy and so it doesn't matter what anyone else ships, but when I want to be all join-y and stuff, it's vexing. My heyoka nature in a nutshell. But, one less ficathon to tear my hair out about, right?

Tangential to THAT, I feel like there's enough interest that I'm going to go ahead with the JDM ficathon. I don't have any more details than "Yeah, let's do that!" but I figure I have all of December, at least, to figure that out. So...more news when I have it!

As you can see, I finished the AKB chapter. Wrote 1400+ words on that, once I hit my groove, which was kind of awesome. The problem with writing in existing files is that I never have any good grasp of how much I've written until I finish and do the math.

Didn't work on anything else, for obvious reasons. And I have yet to do any writing today, which is making me feel like the biggest slacker in the world. I'll have to rectify that posthaste.

I have a very specific way that I lose track of time. I obsessively count down minutes until about five minutes until my deadline. Then I blank out and don't regain any consciousness of "Hey, weren't you waiting for something?" until about 6-10 minutes after my deadline. It's kind of amazing. *sighs*

It's not everything, but it's a lot: How Defying Gravity Would Have Progressed, Straight From the Creator. It's not quite a Firefly hurt, that DG didn't make it, but it's pretty close. It's rare that I take such deep pleasure in a show, so quickly...but it's usually a pretty good sign that the show is DOOMED. I'm like TVphoid Mary.

I'm too tired to do either of these stories justice, but.

I had the great privilege of beta-reading darkrosetiger & telesilla's More Than One Answer; an AU of their Keptverse AU. As much as I love Question of Compromise (and it's attendant stories), I have to confess I've been wanting them to write this AU since nearly the start, give Dylan and Joe their chance to get it right, just once. Misc. Actor RPF: Dylan Neal/Joe Flanigan, Dylan Neal/Chris Pine, Dylan Neal/Joe Flanigan/Chris Pine. Slight familiarity is recommended, but it stands pretty well alone. (Link leads to Dreamwidth) ♥

I have yet to even comment on this story, but reading it was a great pleasure and I feel like I'd be terribly remiss if I didn't recommend Shameless by helen78. It's 98K+, and I read it over the weekend. If that's not a sterling recommendation, I don't know what is. Also Misc. Actor RPF with many pairings, so I'm just going to name off the main players and you can go see all the permutations: Christian Bale, Sean Bean, William Fichtner; minor roles by Viggo Mortensen (who kind of became my favorite, omg), David Wenham, Karl Urban and Wentworth Miller. Slave fic, BDSM fic, with an interesting take on the slave angle and some truly awesome kink. I really want everyone to read this just so I have people to talk about it with; it hits some really great narrative kinks right along with the kink kink. (Link goes to Dreamwidth)

Only a few hours left to sign up for mini_nanowrimo, if you're going to do it.

I've got 1400+ new words on Appetite in the last couple days. Nothing new on AKB yet, but it's in there, percolating. Definitely leaning toward yuletide (down to 11 fandoms; one was disqualified!) and considering prettylights, though I don't know if they'll be able to find me someone willing to write JDM. We are a mighty minority. *muses*

Okay. Losing functionality. Off to bed!

Flipping through the Yuletide fandom nominations and I came across RPF-Curb Your Enthusiasm. Um. Isn't Curb pretty much RPF already??

Also, The Sims? Really? I mean...okay, I LOVE my Sims. I really do. But I'm a little puzzled how that would work as SOMEONE ELSE writing a Sims story for me or what shape that would take. I suppose it's limited to the prefab characters, like the Brokes or the Goths, etc. I don't expect much of anyone would be interested in my story about how Jimmy Phoenix stalked and won the adopted son of Jensen and Jared, though. At least before I change all the names. :)

I'm still on the fence about whether I want to do Yuletide or not, though I think I pinpointed my problem from last year. I think that last year, I volunteered for a lot of fandoms because I'm familiar enough with them that I think I COULD write fic and I don't think I spent nearly enough time considering whether I want to write or receive fic from that fandom. Which is one of those things that seems so simple and obvious in retrospect, but I have a bad habit of wanting to be able to write all things for all people, whether it's something I'll actually enjoy or even want to do, or not.

IF I sign up for Yuletide this year, I'm definitely going to be really, incredibly restrictive about what fandoms I sign up for.

Another thing that I don't think enough about, imo, is what fandoms I really WANT/NEED stories from. There are a lot of media that I'm fannish about in the sense that it excites me and I love it...but that I don't feel any particular need to find or write fanfic about it. The media itself is enough. So I also need to think about that, rather than just, "Ooh! That movie/show/book is SHINY!"

Which is much more difficult than it sounds.

Anyway, I've got it down to a maximum of 12 fandoms and I'll probably cut it even more from there. If I decide to sign up. *headdesks*

AKB 71: 1083 words. So I wrapped up what I wanted to do with the chapter less than a thousand words in. I wanted to stretch it, but they were not cooperative. Quelle surprise Which left me at a bit of an impasse, but I think I can see my way through it. It's actually an opportunity to write something that I've been wanting to include for a while now. So there's that.

I think I've probably only written another sentence on Appetite, which is discouraging but not unexpected. Is it stage fright? They're more than willing to talk to me when I'm nowhere near the computer, but as soon as I open the file, they clam up. So typical. As of November 1, however, I have no more excuses. 500 words a day, hell or high water.

I wrote a few hundred words of incredibly indulgent AKB road trip fic. Friday was aggravating in a number of ways and I needed something that decadently indulgent. Didn't get very far, though, but I'm sure I'll go back to it. It amuses me too much not to and I'm sure nilchance & beanside will enable, as they always do.

So, that happened.

Posit 1: We go through repeating cycles of behavior.

Posit 2: Behavior is fractal: how we do one thing is how we do everything.

When I first make up my mind--and that's a very specific state of mind, making up my mind--then I'm completely on pointe; I'm determined, I'm focused, I'm unstoppable. And I can keep that state of mind almost indefinitely...as long as nothing interrupts me.

And then, when something does, it's nigh unto impossible for me to get that momentum back again. Or so my history would tell me.

With Weight Watchers, I lost 100+ lbs. Then the pilings dissolved out from under my life (lost a 15 year friendship, lost boyfriend, hated job, mom's appendix exploded, she almost died from sepsis and we discovered her first cancer) and... There just wasn't time for any more than there was. Worrying about what I ate just wasn't a possible part of the equation. And that wasn't the end of everything, but it was the start, where I fell off a path that I was on.

With exercise, it was the fatigue. At that point, we still didn't know about the cancer, but I was just SO TIRED. I was barely making it through my work day (and I mean that--barely; there were times I didn't think I'd make it the block and a half from the jobsite to our parking garage without collapsing). I didn't have anything spare to be able to get to the gym and do my usual 4mi on the elliptical. I didn't have the focus or energy to do my yoga. And I've never recovered from that stumble.

With my writing, it was my own cancer. And I've gone on about this ad nauseum and I don't feel like I need to rehash my emotional brow clutching about the difference in my creativity between then and now, but even working within the confines of what I have and am now, I struggle to recover the simple mechanical habits that have little to nothing to do with creativity. Simple things like sitting myself down to write every day.

I do pretty well with it during pressured situations like NaNo (or mini_nanowrimo, as the case may be) but left on my own, without specific deadlines, I'm not nearly as scrupulous. I still write more days than I don't, to be sure, but I miss the steadiness of that daily practice. And all my attempts to recover that consistency have been short-lived and inattentive. And though I feel (intellectually) like it IS and SHOULD BE in my power, the actuality is that I feel helpless to alter my situation. And I don't know how to get past that mental stumbling block. No amount of positive self-talk has made a difference. I feel at such an incredible loss to affect my own circumstances. And I'm not sure what the solution to that is, other than what I'm already doing, which is simple persistence.

It's just that simple persistence can be extremely frustrating, quite often.

Wrote a couple hundred words on AKB today. Poked at Appetite, but I don't think I wrote more than a sentence worth of words on it. I feel like I have so much inside me about this story; so many things I want to do and say, so many ways I could spiral off the central story, if so inclined. Frustrating isn't even the WORD for how I feel about my inability to call all this creativeness out of me in any meaningful way.

The Winter Holiday exchanges are coming up and I'm torn whether I want to do Yuletide or 3 Ships or (ha ha ha) both or ANY, given my track record with ficathons lately. La Muse has always been fickle and capricious, but I find that to be especially true when it comes to my desire to sign up for and my ability to carry out ficathons.

My primary motivation for doing Yuletide would be to (hopefully) force someone to write the Glee story I DESPERATELY want, where Rachel is sekritly a transwoman, which...I don't know if that's an honestly good enough reason. Especially since I don't know if I could honestly write a Glee story in return. Which is not a prerequisite, but still.

And as for 3 ships, short of my various permutations of RPF fangirlery, I'm drawing a blank on any other threesome I'm particularly into or interested in right now. Which, given that my usual stance is "Poly makes everything better!" is a little distressing.

I dunno. Lately, I've been feeling a twin pull, one stream going back to SPN (which...yay! Except for the fact that I don't really have the TIME to write SPN right now) and the other going to Appetite, which is nice because that's where my focus is actually supposed to BE for the next little while. Yay post-apocalyptic werewolves! And the glee I get from writing 'post-apocalyptic werewolves'!

Today was an exercise in frustrations, from bullshit at work (OMG, I hate HVAC with a fiery and burning passion and I don't have much better feelings for the guys working on it) to losing my way in the current scene of AKB (I later found it), to the flailing despair of realizing that my everyday email cabal is a little cocky-screw ATM, and isn't really THERE to get me through my long, frustrating days at work the way it has been to finding out my mom's sicker than she's been telling anyone (it's not life or death...or, at least no more so than usual). *sighs* Such a Monday, yo. Such a very, very Monday Monday.

But! On the bright side, I have tomorrow off to do whatever I like. Except sleep in, because the cleaning people are coming at Obscene O'Clock. But I will perservere! And probably play The Sims! And maybe do some writing.

A random spate of thoughts before I dive back into editing:

Does anyone know of any alternate history books (novels) where the South didn't lose the Civil War and, instead, the CSA and USA exist side by side? I don't really want something where the CSA took over the entire US; just something where America was split internally into two separate countries. I'm rewatching the old North and South miniseries (not the BBC one, the Patrick Swayze one) and (my issues with it aside) I'm really intrigued by that notion and what stories would come out of it. But I have no idea if any stories like that exist or where to find them, if they do.

There's posts in meta_lj and announcements about a security breach on LJ from embedded media. Some/Most embedded media has been disabled. Other LJ clones and/or forks like DW have not been affected.

Writerly Neuroses: So, the way I have AKB plotted out, there should be about 75 chapters total. I haven't announced that anywhere or posted that on the story because I wanted to give myself the leeway to fudge, if it became obvious that another chapter was needed (which has happened often in this particular story). At the same time, I find myself really LOATHE to add more chapters, because 75 is such a nice round number and I'm OCD enough to not want to end on "an ODD number" (horrors!) like 76 or 78. *facepalms* This is not productive.

Okay, back to the grindstone.

When verb_noire was announced, I was really excited. Not for myself in particular, so much, as I think it's an idea whose time really has come. As someone who grew up reading SFF, a habit inherited from two parents who read SFF, I'm aware of how few of those beloved epics contained characters that looked anything like me, let alone protagonists and, simultaneously, I'm aware of how—as a result—I absorbed some fucked up messages and internalized racism.

As a fan of the genre, as someone who loves it, and as someone who is still unpacking the damage the genre they left with the good, I feel like there is absolutely a greater need for diversity and representation in the genre.

( Which, indirectly, brings me around to my own writing.  )

Today on my flist, someone was talking about the number of unfinished WIPs they have on their computer and, as it's been a long time since I've dared take too close a look at my many WIPs, I got curious to see how many I have.

This list, of course, excludes any stories that were merely planned in my head, with nothing written. I also cheated in a couple places by calling out the whole 'verse (Lightverse, Sex Pollen, Transmutation) rather than specific stories in those 'verses, so…yeah. This is a bit of a cheat count, but close enough for government work. There's both fewer and more fics than I thought there'd be. I have a really difficult time of letting go of stories, both because I'm stubborn and like to believe I'll finish everything (some day) and because La Muse is mercurial enough that he has previously become re-enamored of some old chestnut I thought had long gone to compost.

OTOH, trying to take an honest look at the probability that some of these will get written, I'm thinking I may throw up some 'Discardia' posts over on thecatevari and just…clear the air on some of these. Admit… Well, not defeat, but that I won't be visiting some of these strange countries again.

A lot of the ones rated as "Unknown" are ones that I'd very much LIKE to write, but depend on La Muse's interest, fickle as anything. There's depressingly few of these rated as "likely", which really says all you need to know. And we won't even START on all the original things I have as WIPs.

( Go, then. There are other worlds than these. )

And…that just ate up an hour of my life. Sadly enjoyably.

This: video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Zooey Deschanel dancing. It really takes SO LITTLE to make me happy. *hums*

AKB 62: 1,561 words. Done and posted.

Outtake: Wendy: A whopping 35 words.

The Colony & Security Mentality: 868 words.

Other things that I have thought about, but not written a word: Many.

I got way behind with birthdays through the middle of the year and I'd like to get back to it, but then I feel guilty about all the people I overlooked and I drown in my own inertia.

I'd similarly like to get back to writing up short reviews for the movies I'm watching as part of the 100 movies thing, but I'm so far behind...blah blah blah.

So. Happy birthday rivers_bend! Happy birthday likeadeuce! Happy birthday snowphilosophy!

For those of you whose birthday I missed, I'm sorry and all my best wishes to you, not just for your birthday, but EVERY DAY.

( 72 movies that I have watched in 2009 )

Untitled 3some fic: 1,076 words

Everything else: 0 words

*sighs* Well. The threesome thing is done. That's an accomplishment, right? Alas, don't expect to see it here any time soon. It's either AU or an out of sequence outtake for AKB, and...yeah.

Sign ups for kamikazeremix are still ongoing! *nudge, nudge*

I spent way too much time today talking with The Gals about the relationship between AKB Jensen and AKB Misha. Of course, I don't think I could've gotten through work otherwise and I'm thinking I might incorporate those thoughts into an outtake. La Muse willing, of course.

As the above word count shows, I haven't made any significant progress on anything else. I've been thinking a lot about Appetite, but there's nothing so far that's pushed concretely past the giant roadblock in my mind and though I've thought (and tried) to go non-linear and write around it, so far it's just a lot of thoughts and no actual wordage.

I've also been thinking a lot about my genderswap SPN story Girl in the World. I was thinking about it last night as I was trying sleep (as you do) and it occurred to me that it might actually be a really awesome original idea. Which excites me...while at the same time making me strangely sad. It feels both funny and weird that I should feel sad about not writing an SPN story to an original piece, but there it is.

I also figured out a key point of Blade or Handle, if I can just wake up my dormant Sam and Dean mojo. I think it's definitely going to have to be three points of view, though. I thought I could get away with just Connor and Sam, but if I am going to go with that idea, then certain events can only happen/be seen if Dean is the POV character. Though...hmm. That would be an interesting challenge; to see if I could carry it off WITHOUT actually showing Dean's POV, come at those events obliquely or after the fact...or with Connor as a voyeur. Hmmm.

I've been sick for the last few days (remember the days when I had an immune system? Yeah, me either.) and yesterday The Husband was out of town, so I made a movie binge. I'm up to 68 movies for the year and can say that Thr3e was utter crap, Teeth may need a longer post, Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity was utterly awesome and adorable (OMG, I want that little girl SO MUCH) and Bottle Shock was...uneven, but entertaining.

So yes. If you carry anything away from all that rambling: kamikazeremix! *beams*

AKB 62: 579 words.

Of course, that was on Tuesday, at my 'working' lunch with gblvr. Yesterday, I didn't get much of anything done, other than scraping myself out of the house for a really lovely dinner with inlovewithnight and romanticalgirl, who is just as awesome in person as she is on the 'net I have previously testified to the wonderfulness that is inlovewithnight often and at length, so all in all, it was a pretty spectacular time. The only detractors were the rain and the oppressive Maryland humidity. (It's like being back in Chicago all over again!)

I went to get my ends trimmed on Tuesday and the stylist straightened my hair for me. It looked STUNNING for all of fifteen or twenty minutes and then I got outside and, between the humidity and my sweating in reaction to the humidity, it puffed up to twice its size in no time at all (as it does). Still looked great, though, and I felt super pretty all day long. *twirls*

Many thanks to those of you who have pimped kamikazeremix! Just a quick reminder that sign-ups will be starting on August 1 (that's Saturday, here in the US) and running through August 7. It's a real fun challenge and me and girlguidejones are super thrilled that so many people from last year are looking forward to signing up again. Thinking about this has been the highlight of my week. Anyway, again, please feel free to pimp the challenge far and wide; it's only a couple more days before sign-ups start!

On writing: ( This gets longer and, undoubtedly, more boring. )

I think I vary between talking about my friends too much and too little, but I have to say that, after years of not having any friends who shared my creative leanings, I am especially blessed now to have such a huge circle of truly AMAZINGLY creative people around me who let me contribute in small ways to their stories and contribute so incredibly to mine. There's a number of people I could talk about, but the ones I talk to every day: beanside, mona1347 and nilchance...almost nothing I've done in the past couple years would be what it is without them. At a period of time when I am struggling a lot with recognizing the good things in my life (and there are many, when I let myself see them), I'd be incredibly remiss if I didn't put those ladies right up at the top.

The Speed of Gravity (SPN): 664 words

Flesh Becomes Water (SPN): 500 words

The Feeling We Once Had (SPN): 676 words

Leave An Entire World Behind (SPN): 620 words

AKB 50: 1,085 words

I'm pleased to be writing every day again. I'm super pleased at having been able to write Sam and Dean again, because I've missed them a lot and it's been like a long-distance relationship with us lately. Though I don't think that I've written anything particularly incendiary, I'm fairly well pleased with what I have written: pleased that I expressed the idea, that I found the words, that the words mostly say what I want them to. And I'm trying very hard to focus on that.

At the same time, it's hard not to compare now to then. And it's hard not to look at these few words and remember when I could write two thousand or more in a day. I'm not focusing on it, but the comparision is there, lurking. Another problem I'm finding is that La Muse seems to be thinking/concluding that his work is done once the writing exercise is done, so, although I've been poking at the stubborn knot of AKB 50, I haven't done much beyond the writing exercise each day.

So starting Monday, I think I'm going to try and do at least two timed sessions a day, see if I can gradually up my ante the way I did before; ease myself into producing more words a day. Basically just see how it all goes.

Another thing I'm trying to work on is giving myself more time to read. I used to be a rather insanely voracious reader, but in recent years, I've been reading less and less. There are lots of reasons for this: fewer books that actually interest and engage me, less time, the gnawing worry that I should be spending this time on my own writing instead... While I was sick, the act of reading was actually painful, making my eyes and head ache, which was a big further deterrent and I got into a habit of just not reading. But I miss it. Being a reader is so much a part of my self-identity, even when I'm not ACTUALLY or actively reading. I don't want to give that up. So I got myself a library card for the first time in more than fifteen years and borrowed some books and I'm allowing myself to sit and read and in blocks of time longer than that of a commercial break or while standing in line at the grocery store.

There's a lot that I'm angry about, because of the cancer. I resent how completely my life is broken into a before and after; the things I used to do and the things I can never do again. So many small, stupid things to relearn. At the same time, there's an opportunity in there; the ability to choose how to rebuild myself, perhaps, in a more conscious way than the first time around. The ability to decide whether I still want to be self-defined in these same ways or whether I want to seek out new ones.

And now I have the intro to the Six Million Dollar Man playing in my head.

Flesh & Blood snippet: 537 words

Outtake #6: Hutton (AKB): 1,641 words

Meta: On Hutton (AKB): 1,383 words

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I am most humbly grateful that there are words; more of them in the last day than in a while. So that's the blessing. And while I don't want to take it for granted, if some of those words could trickle down into any of my original projects...that would just be peachy.

*sighs*

On the plus side, the Hutton outtake is one that I've been wanting to write for a long time--pretty much since I first conceived of writing the outtakes--and had never quite been able to. It's so funny; sometimes it takes one extremely simple change to clear the path. Other times, you try and you strain and you change things...and you just can't untangle it, no matter what. I just had to change my thinking about one small part of the Hutton outtake for it to become clear. I've changed the leave-off point for Appetite a couple times now and haven't been able to make it gel.

I'm thinking about starting a critique group. There's theoretically a group that already meets in Frederick, but:

a) The critique group only meets once a month.
b) From everything I've seen, they're more into poetry than prose.
c) I feel extraordinarily apprehensive about how well the writer-residents of Frederick would feel about critiquing m/m erotic romance.
d) (and most hubristically) I think I'm a better writer than the few people I've met here so far and I question how constructive the criticism would be from people who aren't at my level or better than me.

So all these things are problematic. I've already talked to beanside & nilchance about starting up our own group; I know of a few other fans in the area...maybe some of them might be interested as well. Of course, I've never run my own group, and the prospect makes me very nervous, especially since I don't really know how to do it. I also feel uncertain about whether I'd want to restrict it to original fiction only or open the door to that and fanfic. Basically, I just don't know. So...I'm kind of throwing the idea out into the air to see if it flies from here.

Just did some housekeeping over at DW. I still haven't worked out a policy about subscribing/granting access, etc. and knowing me and my laziness...I may not. I pretty much grant access to just about everyone since I don't put anything here that I'm particularly worried about one way or another. I suspect that I'm going to need to work out a reading filter for those who have or are moving to DW for good but that's work for another day.

I need to do a movie catch up post, if I'm going to keep track of how long it takes me to get to 100 new movies. I'm somewhere around 32 movies for the year. I feel like I'm missing some, but that may be my raging ego talking. I haven't been in a movie mood of late; one hour is about my attention span for television lately.

I have three Dreamwidth invites available, if anyone is still looking.


So I wrote this for an exercise today. [Bad username: romanticalgirl's] prompt was: Something original or non-canon based for any pairing. Prompt: another side. I really don't like what came out, but (as I remind myself often) that's not supposed to be the point. So I'm just going to post it and then talk a bit more about what I don't like about it afterward.

Fandom: Original (Flesh & Blood)
Pairing: None
Rating: All ages.
Warnings: None.
Word Count: 537
AN: This is backstory on two characters I've been writing about in another (unfinished) story.

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( It had been a week with no word. )