nor so wide as a church door

So! I utterly failed at More Joy Day, but the weather didn't - even if it's raining today, it SNOWED yesterday, all is forgiven - and idriya didn't, either! I am in awe of her persistence; it has been over a year since I accidentally wrote almost 20k about the vanished mothers of A:tLA, and she steadily produced portraits for every single woman!

( The final four: Kang Mashei, An Li, Lady Ilah, and Yue. )

:D :D :D :D :D Flying Blossoms was actually kind of difficult for me to write, because what it basically amounts to is TINY TINY pieces of a couple dozen AUs and backstory fics, and so if I had not had idriya to talk me down, they would each have been 200k and none of them would be finished. /o\ But she rewarded me, as always, with some really gorgeous artwork. ♥♥♥♥♥

Through a combination of growing disdain for my own fail and the need to track words obsessively for inkingitout, I sat down on Monday and wrote several thousand words. \o/ Apparently word tracking makes me competitive against ... my own laziness? IDEK. But progress occurred, is the point!

The other significant event of 2012 for me is that I hurt myself. It is extremely cold here, and earlier this week the road was covered in ice, so of course I fell down, though thankfully the car that precipitated my loss of balance did not hit me. My knee is turning gorgeous colors, and you never realize how much you use the muscles in your armpit until you strain them and suddenly a million actions hurt. AWESOME START.

But! There have been Netflixen, and also a trip to the movies.

( On the Other Hand, Death. Spoilers! )

I added another to my queue, though I forget which, and hope to work my way through them all.

( Inkheart, because my queue is all 2008 all the time. Also spoilery. )

Not bad, precisely, but it didn't quite seem finished. Maybe the script needed to go through a couple more drafts or something.

And then also idriya and I went to see Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. Which had ( some things in it that I quite enjoyed ... )

( ... and some things that I did not. )

Quite a text wall there, but: ALL THE FEELINGS. Honestly, it's a good thing I had the chance to get my thoughts in order the other day, or everything behind that cut would probably just have said AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

So, ha, I fail. /o\ I hope everyone, with or without a holiday to celebrate during this part of the year, has an excellent time - and enjoys the VAST BOUNTY OF YULETIDE. :D

The bad: I did not in fact finish that next chapter of LttE by Christmas. The auxiliary good: I do have nearly 7k words of it! I am still working on it! /o\

The bad: I only finished one of the stories I planned for Yuletide. :( The auxiliary good: my recipient seems wonderfully pleased with the one I managed to get finished! (The slight wrinkle in the AO3 makes it BLATANTLY OBVIOUS which story I wrote, if you make even a little effort to figure it out, so if you want to preserve the spirit of author reveals, don't make any effort!) So I have once again failed to ruin Yuletide forever. \o/ I posted the story at like two in the morning on Christmas, and then spent the next three hours staring at the ceiling in my bedroom and accidentally thinking of things I really ought to edit before story reveals. The resultant lack of sleep was actually a really good thing, because at one of the places my father and I went caroling in the morning, I was the only soprano, and I could never in a million years have sung aloud alone if I had been firing on all cylinders. \o?

But enough nattering, there are Yuletide stories to read!

Posting fail, ugh, but I hope everybody to whom it is relevant had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that everybody more generally had a wonderful Thursday. I am thankful for so many things I could never list them all, so probably it's a good thing that I sort of missed the boat for attempting a long eloquent Thanksgiving post.

Having vacation was AWESOME, and yet, as vacations so often are, it was not long enough. But! I got a bunch of stuff done, if not everything I'd hoped to get done.

First:

50,217 / 50,000 words. 100.0% done!

\o/! I have no idea what I'm going to do with this thing, but there are WAY better odds than usual that I'm going to finish it, simply because I (still) somehow don't hate it. I mean, it's clunky and kind of awkward and there's probably continuity errors eeeeeeverywhere, but that's okay! I wrote a thing! \o/!

Second: I finished ( Infidel (Kameron Hurley). Spoilery! )

I should stop pretending I can analyze these books at all, because I really can't. I am way too invested. ♥ The third one is probably going to wreck me.

And, speaking of me crying emotional overinvestment, I also watched ( Sucker Punch. Spoilers, of course. )

Broke my heart and only stitched it about halfway back together again.

And also I should not forget: I stayed up late one night and blew through ( Changes (Dresden Files). Spoilery! )

I still want to find out what happens, so I'm hoping this was just - a blip. A, like, four-hundred-page-long blip. D:

And now I am going to prep to watch as much of The Closer as possible before going to bed early, because the last thing I need right now is to get sick.

( The OTW, the elections, and me. )

( Aaaaand the new AO3 site skin. )

Okay, now to slightly less fraught things. I am caught up on Burn Notice but have nothing to say, except TEAM, TEAM ON MY SCREEN, and also MADELINE YAY. And I watched Once Upon a Time in real time for once. ( Spoilery, of course. )

And! I finished Blackdog, but should probably hold off on the actual review until I have the book in front of me again. (Short version: I definitely enjoyed it! :D)

4,894 / 50,000 words. 9.8% done!

So I got sick! Which actually was good timing, in a certain sense, because in between naps that added up to like eighteen hours of yesterday, I actually got pretty far on my NaNo. Sometimes being sick is weirdly facilitating to my writing - somehow it can temporarily lower the barrier between the not-words floating around in my head and the actual words I need to be putting down on the page. \o? Obviously I'm not quite done for today, but I think I can manage another paragraph or two this evening, if I don't just conk out on the couch the second I get home. (It's original fiction; I promised daemonelix a looooong time ago that I would reserve NaNo for origfic, because I write fanfic the whole rest of the year. :D)

But! There have been TV shows since last I posted. ( Once Upon a Time. Spoilers, of course. )

I am also watching Prime Suspect, but I have less to say about that except that I like Maria Bello, and also it makes me want to check out the original. I like watching cranky people be cranky and then also do their jobs, and since I am hitting my oversaturation point on most other police shows, it's nice to have one where I haven't had this ep on in the background while reading/eating dinner/writing fic twenty times already.

And Burn Notice is back tonight yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. ♥♥♥♥♥ Once I hit a certain level of affection for something, I am incapable of ever being objective about it again. Ever.

YAY ART YAY! I cannot even tell you how hard idriya worked on these - I may have mentioned somewhere in my notes that she actually wrapped herself in a sheet to get the cloth in some of these right. That is dedication. I am so, so, so unbelievably lucky to practically have a pet illustrator of my very own, and I owe her big time for all her help and encouragement, whether it comes in the form of gorgeous digital paintings or incredibly irritating nagging about when I'm going to send her more fic. ♥♥♥♥♥ Best sister ever.

But, onwards: art! She did six pictures, each of one character as one of the cards in Gaius Helen's tarot deck. HOW COOL IS THAT.



( Bigger versions of all six below the cut! )

If I did not have to work I would spend all day staring at them with cartoon hearts in my eyes! How so awesome?

Title: The Blow of a Knife
Fandom: Children of Dune (2003 miniseries)
Rating: PGish? Some attempted violence, some achieved violence, but all of it is either brief or inexplicit. Or both.
Characters/Pairing: Ensemble: Chani, Irulan, Alia, Jessica, Duncan 2.0, plus assorted minor canon characters and an OC or two. Canonical past relationships, hints of Alia/Duncan 2.0, and in my head the whole thing has come to serve as pre-Chani/Irulan but that could just be me.
Wordcount: 21,000.
Summary: Chani feels it, when Muad'dib dies. Midseries AU: the attempt to assassinate Paul with the stoneburner is successful. Written for Round 2 of ladiesbigbang. (Also @ AO3.)
Disclaimer: Places and people you recognize from canon are not mine. Some scenes diverge only a little, so some dialogue (particularly when Jessica first meets Duncan 2.0) is essentially from the miniseries. Title from the first quote below, which appears in Dune, I believe.
Acknowledgements: Thanks immensely to idriya, who tells me things I don't want to hear even though I'm whiny and horrible to her after, and whom I hear spent a lot of time wrapped in a sheet to complete my beautiful complement art - which is unfortunately delayed due to RL issues, but I will embed/link when it's finished! And, of course, the impetus to write and complete this story came from the ladiesbigbang challenge, which is great and awesome and great and everyone should sign up for it. :D

( Other notes! )

( Fic! )

How is it Tuesday already WHAT. D: The end of last week was, like, the least relaxing Friday I have EVER had - Thursday night involved traversing a road that hates me, on foot, to find a place that would copy a document which I discovered on Friday had been missing a page, and needed to be picked up Saturday morning, only for the person who wanted them to find that, erroneously, the cover was in black-and-white instead of color. :P (Not a fatal problem, but he was not happy.)

And then I had a daemonelix for the weekend! Which was AWESOME, obvs., but not conducive to my usual relaxing sit-around-doing-nothing routine - we made brownies and took a good long walk and went kayaking. So yesterday was actually the do-nothing-iest day for me. Our school does not have "Columbus Day" off, precisely; but there was a local fair, and all the kids were there for the day, which meant I could sit in my office with the lights off and spend eight hours double-checking the parent-student directory and getting it ready for the printer. Good times.

BUT. There are still a whole bunch of things I need ( to do. )

I am buying myself so much candy for Halloween.

Ugh, long week was incredibly long, which would be why I sat around and did nothing but war on the UK this weekend. Victoria is such a beautiful, beautiful time-waster; I am the furthest I have ever gotten now that I have reached the 1870s and begun producing telephones, and I won a chunk of Canada and part of Ulster and I feel SO ACCOMPLISHED. ( Probably this is not interesting to anyone but me! )

Plus I think it's making me better at geography.

But! More importantly, my ladiesbigbang is just about ready to go, and I turned in my first draft for thelittlebang, even if it still needs editing. Both of them are at least twice as long as they were supposed to be, and I'm probably going to need at least a couple more weeks for the next chapter of LttE; but overall I feel pretty okay. Which is great, because when I signed up I was kind of figuring two big bangs at once would make my head explode. :D

Which, by the by: thelittlebang complement signups are open, and aside from my ridiculous porn-free epic, there are ten fics in ten fandoms (CW RPF! Hanna! My Little Pony! Glee! Power Rangers! ST:TNG/DS9/VOY!) that are eligible and indubitably deserving of art - if anyone happens to have time to put together a wallpaper, short vid, collage, what have you, signups are @ LJ | @ DW. I'll have to take a look around my caps folder and see whether I could pull together cover art, or maybe a wallpaper ...