nor so wide as a church door

So we got about four inches of snow, which is way less than a lot of people, and yet we still somehow lost power this weekend - off and on, even, which meant I had to drag myself out of bed at like 5:00 AM yesterday to turn off lights and yet when I woke up for real there was no power. :P

But! It came back on with plenty of time for me to post one of my complements and also my fic for thelittlebang, although it looks like the fic post is still trapped somewhere in the moderation queue. I tried really hard to not write the same story again, because, let's face it, there are a lot of ways Avatar-the-movie could be improved; but I probably repeated myself at least a little. /o\

But I still feel very accomplished! Two big bangs within a week of each other! Granted, my genretwisting bingo has fallen by the wayside; one story, I'm trashing and replacing with something else, and the other grew a zombie army and is 16k and climbing, so there's no way I'm going to get that done before the deadline of ... um, today, but. I'm still planning to finish them even if it won't "count" officially because I'm a rebel.

NaNo starts tomorrow! OMG I AM EXCITE. :DDDDDDDDD I'm sure there will be angst and pain later, but right before the first of November I am always filled with joy and sunshine and puppies. I have so many things to finish, I really shouldn't be doing it; but it's a tradition! I've done NaNo every year since high school, I can't just not. I am going to be watching the homepage countdown alllllll day.

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 ...

I've been going to bed early and sleeping like a rock this week, and yet I feel more tired today than I did on Monday. :P

I missed Burn Notice because my mother's Netflix was extremely long, which I am bummed about; I did catch The Closer, about which I only wish to say I love Sanchez, CAPTAIN RAYDOR YES, and ( small spoiler! ) Rizzoli and Isles, well. I wash my hands of their ability to plot out a crime whose portrayal and resolution do not make me cringe for one reason or another; I am watching this show for the ladies, Jett Jackson, and the third-to-half of each episode that isn't about the Crime of the Week, and in those respects I enjoyed it relatively well. ( Another couple spoilers. )

I spent yesterday enforcing consistency - in terms of format and grammar, hence the icon - on our faculty handbook, which included redoing the table of contents with revised page numbers twice. I hate page numbers. D:<

And it looks like I spoke too soon when it comes to thunderstorms dropping trees on my bedroom; I think I may sleep downstairs when Irene hits us, just in case. And I should probably kiss the power and the internet goodbye for the weekend, unless we get reeeeeeally lucky - which means I'd better post my genretwisting bingo fic tonight.

I adore Tiny Dog (yeah, that's still her name) but her habit of barking at 5:30 is THE ANTITHESIS OF CHARMING. >:E I'm sure that it's not the only reason I'm still annoyingly tired, but I bet it isn't helping. Also, ( blah blah work. )

But! It hasn't rained yet today, which is a tiny miracle, and I think I have the general direction of the subplots for Book Three sorted out, which is GREAT. Seriously, I am getting all GRRM up in here; I need to sit my fics down and have a talk. Every minor character does not need their own storyline, okay. (And now I sound like a PSA: "When's the last time you talked to your fics about plot kudzu?")

To conclude: I don't precisely like having the office with the window that faces the fire escape, but there's some kind of large-leafed vine growing up it that makes it almost appealing in summer. Also, I can't believe I have to watch Avatar again, but I can't remember the middle (including who's onscreen when, so no transcripts for me) well enough to finish my fic for thelittlebang without it. Curse you, James Cameron.

OMG ANOTHER ROUND OF ladiesbigbang YAY. :D :D :D :D

I'd volunteer to help out except I am such a n00b - I could never co-mod, and I wouldn't have the least clue about decent graphics or promotions or anything. (If you do, though, you should let them know! Help bring more ladyfic into the world!)

This and thelittlebang and genretwisting - what an embarrassment of riches, augh, I feel so spoiled. Clearly I should be working on LttE, and yet the siren song of new outlines is so hard to resist. /o\

Too many fics on the dance floor!

I would probably do that AO3 meme that's going around, except ... I haven't even posted ten full fics yet. :P

I blew pretty much the entire weekend making maps for ItO, because, god help me, I just cannot shut off the part of my brain that needs to know everything - even shit that will NEVER EVER make it into the story. D: On the upside, I figured out how to import base files into the mapmaking program so that I can trace the giant continent the Earth Kingdoms are on instead of eyeballing it. (My eyeballing skills are okay, but things still weren't ending up in the right places, which, important for a map, y/y?) Overall, an excellent use of my time.

Also, Sunday night was the Burn Notice movie. ( I concede that 'Fall of Sam Axe' is a bad title. ) It was not some kind of groundbreakingly amazing movie experience, it was not a two-hour revelation; but it was charming and sweet and a little heartbreaking. FIONA'S MOVIE NEXT PLS. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

And another genretwisting challenge has begun! I think we have a little more time this round, which is great, because it's looking like I have an epic A Little Princess adaptation, a fantasy version of Burn Notice, and maybe an Eagle/Dresden Files fusion on my hands. Plus, of course, the next chapter of LttE, which hopefully will get done on time. **crosses fingers**

Not my best morning ever, so far - one of the cats had another seizure, which was quite possibly my fault, as she seems to be triggered by certain kinds of noise; there was some sort of accident on my way in, which meant a brief moment of terror as I was redirected onto a road I have never driven before and needed to navigate back off of; when I made it back onto the right road, there was a giant truck trailer with a house on it maneuvering around, which meant a wait; and then there was a surprise meeting with a technology consultant, which I almost had to do alone because my supervisor was late coming back from a totally different meeting. :P The rest of today had better be boring.

On the upside, idriya and I managed to successfully jumpstart her car all by ourselves yesterday (using my car, which is now officially mine, new license plates and insurance and all); the neighbors' cats that I'm taking care of for ten days really like me; my first genretwisting fic is finished and just about ready to post; and I'm well into the next chapter of ItO, thanks to lingering momentum from finishing the last chapter up. So it's not all ruin and despair.

Still, I'm going to be super glad when this week is over. Yeesh.

Early update was early! \o/

That's about the only good thing I can say about anything since yesterday evening, unfortunately; today sucked. :P At least this stupid auction thingy is only going to come around once a year. I swear, if somebody sends me one more goddamn updated item list or tells me one more time that I need to add more pictures, I AM GOING TO KILL THEM WITH MY FACE.

... anyway.

The first genretwisting fic is a bit of trickery, a climactic fight scene, and a dramatic escape away from being pretty much done. Clearly, time to start outlining the next one! Also, I've already started writing Chapter 12. I think part of the reason these last few chapters seem to be coming so easily is that they haven't changed much since I first started ItO - the middle part needed a lot of reorganizing and reoutlining, but the majority of these last three chapters has been pretty solid since the very beginning. Here's hoping enough outlining of Book Two right now will help that go more quickly, too. :D

Ugh, I am so boring right now, I have no deep thoughts except DIE, AUCTION CATALOG. DIE. :P Partly because I keep missing TV to sleep and stuff. But once the auction's over, I will totally catch up. I have it all planned out: I'm going to wait until it's almost time for a new billing period for the wireless, and then almost max it out the last day, so I don't have to worry about accidentally going over it. There is NO WAY this will fail. >:D

So, I may have signed myself up for the Genretwisting Deadline Challenge - A:TLA, of course, plus a side of Burn Notice (after all, I do need to expand my fandoms into the Bs). The odds that I'll finish eighteen fics by mid-March are vanishingly low, especially since there are a couple prompts that I'm just not the right person to pull off. But it was blissful just going through the prompt list and imagining. I've got some decent ideas, and 500 words of one fic already down. Good thing Chapter 11 of ItO is going so swimmingly, or I might feel guilty. :D

I went skating with idriya today - only for about half an hour, but it was already rather cold, though it had not yet plunged to the depths that are predicted for tomorrow. And then I finished watching How To Train Your Dragon with M/daemonelix. ( It was interesting. ) Anyway, thumbs pretty up. I'm glad I got the chance to see it.

Now, back to the first of my six assigned A:TLA sci-fi AUs. :D I will keep the fics short, I will keep the fics short ...