Selenay's Ramblings

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2023!

I have a bit of a tradition of trying to start out the new year well by doing a bit of all the good things that I want to do through the year. Make 1 January a representation of what I'm bringing to the year.

(I'm not superstitious, but last year I spent 1 January being very ill with flu, so make of that what you will.)

Therefore today I have:

- Had a bit of a lie in
- Eaten a good, yummy breakfast
- Gone for a nice walk
- Made the good coffee and taken the time to enjoy it
- Read a couple of chapters of a good book while listening to music
- Read a chapter of a good fic
- Written words
- Played board games
- Posted fic

I'm currently cooking some tasty food for supper. I plan to get a bit of stitching in and watch some good telly this evening. I think that covers everything!

I don't do new year resolutions, because I don't like setting myself up for self-loathing when I inevitably fail to keep them up. However, celli has been doing a daily writing challenge through 2022 and it's inspired me. The biggest frustration I had last year was not having the spoons to write. I always feel like I should write at least X amount when I sit down to write, when really the important part is the habit and the way that writing regularly--even if it's just a very few words--has always been the best way to keep my creative process flowing.

So this year, I intend to attempt to write something every day. Minimum is 5 words. I thought about 50 words, but realised that if I set the bar really incredibly very low then even if all I did was open a WIP and add a a tiny number of words, it would count and I'd feel good about adding a line to my spreadsheet.

(Yes, there's a spreadsheet. I'm a data nerd. You think there wouldn't be a spreadsheet?)

I'm going to try to keep myself accountable on twitter/fediverse. If I forget to post the daily then I'll try to remember to post the monthly tally of days/words.

Any new words count. If I deleted 500 words and wrote 20 new words? That's 20 words in the spreadsheet, not -480. The important part is getting some words out and keeping my brain nibbling at the ideas and producing new ones. Regular writing leads to creative thoughts.

In the spirit of that, today's tally was 304 words. Woo hoo!

Wow, where did the last month go?

How is it September? How is it nearly 30C AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER? The weather here is so messed up.

Mostly I've been catching up on stuff, working a ton, and being generally terrible at actually updating this or going out to do anything with local friends. Yay me?

But! I finished the first draft of my femslashex fic and I'm pretty happy with it. Must be a personal record for early finishing, I think. I credit pacemaker.press, because it made planning how to handle the work way easier than my usual procrastination. I like seeing little green boxes that mean I did what I was supposed to do :-)

And with that out of the way, yesterday I started writing a new book. Hooray!

I do love the early days of new bookness. This is something I've been planning and researching for months. It's probably got the most detailed outline I've ever done--not a single "and then cool shit happens" in sight--and I worked out characters, locations, backstory, world building, all that stuff.

Obviously I added a new minor character as soon as I started writing but OH WELL. I like her. Niamh is lovely and drives my spellchecker nuts.

It's an urban fantasy set in Devon (so not *very* urban, heh) and I am excite. The main character is already starting to have a voice, I'm excited about getting the other characters on the page, the setting is going to be fun, and I'm looking forward to discovering who else shows up that I wasn't expecting.

I'm planning to take a leaf out of Charlie Stross's book and try a new beta reader/early reader thing for it. More on that in a separate post :-)

I'm also writing in first person for the first time in...probably ten years or more. So that'll be an interesting experiment. The first day of writing went way better than expected yesterday (including the unanticipated new character) and I'm hoping that's a good sign.

I haven't forgotten about the Snow White book I wrote earlier in the year. I'm rewriting the ending for the billionth time. I plan to go over it with a fine tooth comb again after that and then I *will* send it around on query for a while. I promise. It was one of my goals when I started writing it.

And I'll be sending it out with the knowledge that if it doesn't get any bites (and it may not, because niche), I've got a new book in progress already. That feels like an important thing to have.

Agents of SHIELD and Holby review posts are incoming, but first! STUFF.

I think that I have expressed my flail and frustration and every other emotion about the snap election on Twitter, so I won't bring it over here (today). Instead, today I has a sad because the woman who hired me over eight (nearly nine?) years ago is retiring today. She sponsored and championed me through my first couple of years at the company, she supported me through tough some tough stuff, and she's been a terrific teacher throughout my career here. Every time someone gives me kudos for my systems knowledge or planning skills, I just want to point to her and declare she did it. I just learned from her.

In a profession dominated by men, often hostile to women, I've been really grateful to have a woman like her around to be a role model. So I'm sad, but I'm also happy for her, because she's been looking forward to retiring and all the travelling she'll do, so how can I be sad for that?

In other news...

I took a couple of days off and let me tell you, I can rock a vacation like nobody!

On Tuesday, I spent the whole day filing taxes and sitting in passport offices and generally resenting all government bureaucracy. Woo hoo!

Monday was equally relaxing, in a different way. I finished writing the novel. That's right, The Hunter and the Monochrome Princess has got an ending (an epilogue, oh noes!) and I can now bask in the joy of having a complete manuscript for a few days. Or at least, let it stew in its finishedness for a week or two before I dive in and try to wrestle it into being a manuscript that doesn't look like I vomited words everywhere. Then I can let a couple of people read it (the first few chapters have been through crit group, but I need some people to look at it as a whole, rather than in little chunks) and do more edits. SO MUCH EDITS.

While sitting at the kitchen table, fighting the words, I also had food preparing. There was a loaf of bread. A pot of soup. A pot of lentil bolognese. My freezer has been partially restocked. And after I wrote the last words (and changed the last paragraph three times), I went for a loooooong walk.

See? Totally relaxing!

I need to get better at taking vacations.

My joy over Doctor Who was such that I wrote a short fic. It's back from beta so hopefully tonight or tomorrow I'll post it. I can't promise there will be a fic-per-episode, but it did feel good to write some fic after being in novel mode for so long. YAY FANFIC.

Tonight I have to pick up groceries and go to the library. It's a good thing I'm done novelling for a while, because holy holds, Batman! SO MANY HOLDS. And one of them is a seven day loan, but it's The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi and I don't think it'll be a hardship to dive into that one and consume it in a glorious burst of reading heaven.

My annual eye exam happened yesterday and the upshot is that I need new glasses. I mean, I'd sort of decided that I might *look* at some, but there was always the option to nope out of the whole thing and run away.

Except my prescription has changed, and it's definitely enough to make new glasses a necessity. I'd been trying to convince myself the blurring in my right eye was just my imagination and all the headaches I'd been having was just stress. Argh. Why is it only ever one eye that manages to have almost an entire diopter of change happen?

So, the possible glasses became definite glasses, and then we entered the hell of Choosing Frames (TM). Due to my prescription, I have to have fairly small lenses (or they become so thick the weight is unwearable) and all rimless/half rims are out. My head is very narrow, so I have to stick to the petite ranges. And my nose is incredibly narrow, so I have to have nose-pieces that can be adjusted to get the glasses to sit properly.

Which meant the chunky funky plastic frames everyone is wearing that look really cool...are impossible for me to have. DAMN IT. What's the use in having glasses if you can't wear fun cool glasses?

At least the petite range exists. I've regularly ended up wearing children's glasses in the past. My current glasses date from before my optician started getting petite frames. The were literally the only pair in the whole shop that fitted me (and didn't look like they belonged to a six year-old) and the arms have always been too long, because we reached the limit of how much the arms could be adjusted. So they constantly slip down my nose, which isn't exactly comfortable. And even if they're in the right position, the top is approximately level with my pupil, so I have a massive amount no-glasses space where I need to see. As they slip down all the time, I'm basically looking over them most of the time, so I end up holding my head uncomfortably and constantly pushing them up just to see through them.

I guess new glasses were inevitable, actually.

It's why I thought I was imagining the vision change, though. I've been readjusting and pushing these things up ever since I got them (6.5 years ago) so I assumed the blurring in one eye was just because I could never get my glasses to sit right.

Thank goodness for petite ranges, because this time, I got to pick from four frames after all the ones I really liked were eliminated due to lens side, lack of bridge pieces, and still being too damn big for my head. The pair I've gone for have a lot more pink than I'm happy with, but they fit me and the arms aren't worryingly fragile. I'll live with them.

It'll take two weeks for to make them. Thank you, awful eyes that require lenses made in Japan.

Now that I know I need them, I'm impatient. And noticing my daily headache more than normal!

This weekend will hopefully be the quiet kind where I get lots done. I have a fic to beta. I need to do a final polish on my femslashex fic. And I need to get my Marvel Bang fic done.

It might also be nice to sleep and read and relax a bit, too :-) I got sucked into playing Forge of Empires on my iPad, which ate way too much reading time this week. Must stop playing games. They're not going to get anything useful done!

...I possibly lied. Or overestimated my ability to resist when my local writers got talking about it :-)

I just signed up again. But I'm doing the rebel thing this time. I've got a novelette to finish and then I'll be starting a new novel about gay magical spies defeating evil and falling in love. The novel will be tropetastic and m/m and I'm just letting my id go wild on it.

Looks like I'll be aiming to get 50k written across two projects in November. Wheee!

As a retreat from the overwhelming winterness of the last couple of weeks (and because it's now on US Netflix), I've been working my way through S2 of Hawaii Five-0. I know that it's got problems, it's maybe not the highest quality telly ever...but it's got sunshine and sand and people who aren't wearing snow boots.

The ridiculous slashiness doesn't hurt, either.

And that has led to me digging into the H50 fic that I'd downloaded and hadn't read, and discovering the most delightful high school AU/canon divergence fic that made me happy in ways I'd forgotten about.

But most of my bookmarking and rec sources are, like, three years out of date for this show. So, if anyone has recs for H50 fic (yeah, yeah, Steve/Danny all the way) they want to throw my way, new or old, you should do that. Particularly if it's over 10k, because this is a fandom where my preference is for long fics I can sink my teeth into.

The Writing Bit

For the first time in ten days, I dug into my writing files this week. I picked up the Papercuts reading and revision note making process, which is almost done. The last chapters are so much easier than the early ones.

I also picked up the file for the Zombie Circus rewrite and started making more notes, because a group of us are doing Camp Nano next month, and I'm more than ready to get my teeth into writing another novel. It's evolved a lot from my original "this would work so much better with Eve as the MC" notes, and I think that I like what I'm doing. It's a little darker, a little more steampunky, and I'm getting excited to see what else develops when I start writing it.

And also, it's going to be interesting to write an MC with the moral ambiguities that Eve has. She's such a departure from Polly (MC of Papercuts) and I think it'll be a lot of fun digging into that.

Ganked from sineala last year, and repeated due to cool questions :-).

( Writing meme below the cut )

Tomorrow I have a date with a dental surgeon, to remove a wisdom tooth that I've been told has to come out before it will causes an abscess. They're frankly amazed I don't have one yet :-(

The threat of abscess is, I suspect, the only reason my surgeon is willing to touch it. He went paler and paler as we discussed my medical history and looked at x-rays during the consult in July. Poor guy.

The other ones should probably come out some day, but given my history and the x-rays, he really only wants to touch the one that's a timebomb waiting to happen. I suspect that one is getting treated now because he's terrified about trying to treat it with an infection in place.

So, that's going to be a thing. Tomorrow. Mum is my designated responsible adult, entrusted with driving me there and back and ensuring that I don't do anything ridiculous while the sedative is still in my bloodstream. I think she plans to tie me to a chair and leave me there, because my history of doing ridiculous stuff while heavily medicated is...well, only funny in hindsight.

Wish me luck?

I shall leave you with this WIP meme, found on settiai's journal. Post a sentence from some of your WIPs, with no context:

( Excerpts under the cut )

Wow, I have a lot of WIPs. Of those, seven are in various stages of being edited. I really need to get some editing finished.

*blows dust off the furniture*

Hello! Yes, I aten't dead. Again.

But I have been finding it increasingly difficult to put together anything approaching an actual blog post. One with words and thoughts and so on. It's much easier to chatter on Twitter and reblog stuff on Tumblr and my brain has been on a "do the easier things" setting for most of the winter. There's a lot of reasons for my absence and lack of braining, including (but not limited to):

WINTER - This has been the worst winter since my first one in Canada. So, so cold. So much snow. Constant, unrelenting snow and ice and shovelling and falling over. I've been feeling quite low a lot of the time, with occasional forays into irrational dread when another snow storm is forecast. If we can please not have another winter like this for a few years, that would be great.

If spring could start to show up, that would also be great. It was -15C this morning, before windchill was added. There's another big snow storm predicted for later this week. IT'S FRICKING MARCH.

So yes, winter. My brain got eaten by winter. And also...

Writing - ( Cut for lengthy stuff about writing )

My current plan is to mostly take April off from fanfic and concentrate on an original story. It's something that's been rattling around my brain for a while and I'm reaching the "must write this" stage now. This week I've been writing a short story connected to it, just to get it out of my head, and I'm itching to get to the main piece. I don't know whether it will go anywhere beyond the hard drive of my computer, but I want to try and I'm planning to use Camp NaNoWriMo as the motivation for it. AFter all, the regular NaNo got me mostly through writing a fanfic novel. Hopefully it's baby cousin can keep me on track for something original. At least for the first month, anyway.

(I'm not calling it a novel, in case it gets intimidated and runs away from me before I finish it. Set the bar low and all that.)

If people see me chattering about Zombie Circus, that's what I'm doing. There are no actual zombies in the circus. My working titles only make sense to me :-D

I'm starting to count the days until my Christmas break. Due to my compressed work schedule and the plethora of federal and company holidays, I've managed to get a Christmas break that runs from 20th December to January 5th while only using five vacation days. In other words, I'm off work for nearly two and a half weeks over Christmas.

*flail arms*

So, I'm now counting the days until December 19th when I skip out of the office singing silly carols and relishing the idea of not returning for a very long time.

Not that I don't enjoy my job, I do, but it's been a long time since I had a break that didn't involve travelling or dealing with parents and parental expectations of what a 'vacation' is. Often both. My mother's idea of a good vacation usually involves getting lots of DIY jobs done around the house and travelling places to get administrative stuff done or shop for curtains. If I take a staycation when she's here, there's usually no chance that I'll get time to sit around reading books and fic or writing for hours on end or marathoning entire TV series.

Take a wild guess at what I've got planned for Christmas :-D

So, yes, countdown to vacation is started. Nine days to go!

I'm feeling ambivalent about my preparedness for Christmas. On the one hand, I've got the turkey (stuffed turkey breast, actually) ordered at the butcher's and the Christmas pud is in the freezer. On the other hand, I got as far as mixing up pastry and mincemeat but haven't actually made and frozen the mince pies yet. Nor have I ordered the Christmas presents.

I got three quarters of my Christmas shopping done tonight. Tomorrow I make mince pies and finish the shopping. When those things are done, I'll feel much happier about the entire thing.

Shockingly, my Yuletide fic may be the only thing I feel relatively calm about. I finished it last night leaving me with well over a week for editing, beta-ing, and re-editing. I'm even feeling fairly happy with it. Huh.

And I still have two weeks to get the big crackfic C/C fic edited for Christmas Eve posting :-D