:: Sunday, December 29, 2002
I'd forgotten how desperately slow I am when it comes to editing "Sakura." Four days of work and I'm still in the same two paragraphs. (Nipple? No nipple? Argh.) This bodes poorly for the hoped-for New Year's release. As in, it's not going to happen. Sorry, everyone. (That'll teach me to promise. Again.) Nevertheless, gradual progress *is* being made. Thanks to everyone for their support, and particularly to MD, who seems to have appointed herself my personal cheerleading section. (Hey, doesn't everybody want one of those?) And Skuld-chan, are you the Skuld-chan from Shoujocon? If so, nice to see you again. ^_^
Since the process of editing goes something like this--read paragraph, tweak, look at something else to clear the brain, reread paragraph, tweak, etc.--I thought I'd use some of those in-between moments to ramble about stuff. It beats playing Addictive until my eyesight blurs. (This ended up being so damn long I stuck it on the entry page. Blargh.)
- 11:35 PM EST
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:: Friday, December 20, 2002
So I finished writing the first half of the Drift, the part that's for release on the next update. (Yay!) Unfortunately, that update may have to be pushed back to New Year's, instead of being for Christmas. The reason is that I still have to do at least one editing pass over both S&S16 and the Drift, which will probably take a day if I'm very lucky, more likely two or more, and there's no way I can reasonably expect my prereaders to turn around 20-odd pages of text in two or three days, especially right up against the holidays. It's just not going to happen--and if it *does* happen, it's a miracle that I can't demand. So, stuff is coming as soon as possible, which means as soon as it's decent for public consumption. Your patience is appreciated. ^_^
Also appreciated are the various comments people have been leaving. I'm sorry I haven't been as interactive with this as I'd like. Maybe after the holidays are over and I don't have to worry about unfinished Christmas shopping and the fics have been released and the issue has gone to press and I've finally recovered from the sleep-deprivation of going to a late showing of The Two Towers on a work night. Whew....
You know, I'm always saying to myself, "As soon as I finish this project, I'll be able to relax," and it never happens, because there's always something else to consume all my available time and energy. Maybe some day I'll finally clear enough space that I can actually have a bit of rest. Of course, then I probably wouldn't know what to do with myself.
Anyway, there's more stuff I've been wanting to post about, but it's going to have to wait a while longer, because I'm at work, on deadline, and have probably taken about as much time with this as I can. ^_^ See you all in a bit.
- 09:31 AM EST
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:: Sunday, December 15, 2002
Eee! Haku art! Very cool, very cool indeed. I definitely approve. (Kristin, go and take a look.) Oh, and I completely understand your guestbook woes. I just did a sweep through to clear out my own lot of spammers, and there's already a new post that I'm almost sure is another one. I'm nearly to the point of making my guestbook closed by default, and only turning on entries that look like real visitors. As for the shower--I think there's some inspirational quality about bathrooms in general. If I'm stuck writing, I usually just have to go into the bathroom and stand around for a while, and the solution usually comes to me.
Speaking of writing, I found another draft of the Weiss chapter that lost the big chunk of text hiding out on the computer at work, and it has one more paragraph than my previous best version, so I'm very happy. Okay, so I lost the beautiful Omi angst with the night and the wind and the sea and the crazed Farfarello mutterings, but at least I don't have to write Schuldig posing again.
Also speaking of writing, after a bit of stop-and-start I think I'm finally in the groove with the Drift. I'm starting to run out of time, but hopefully I will get the first half done, as planned. I was going to post some ramblings about today's fic progress, but upon reflection I'll give them a miss in favor of getting off the 'net and doing some more actual writing, since this is a section better *not* worked on while riding the commuter train. (I'm not even sure that it's possible to get into the position that Subaru's attempting, unless you're a Tantric adept. Good god, none of my other characters can manage that. O.O;;; Except maybe Kamui...something about those long CLAMP-style legs....)
Okay, yes--writing now. *cough*
- 09:16 PM EST
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:: Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Two minutes! I let the WK boys back into my brain for two minutes (well, okay, maybe more like fifteen or twenty minutes, the amount of time it takes to read a fanfic), and suddenly we're back with the brain-cell-stealing catboy story and the aching and the panting and the writhing and the reading WK smut fics all day at work.* Argh. (At least it was good smut--Koumori's Pat Benatar series at Boys Next Door, in case you're wondering. Mmm.) (And yes, this *was* all your fault. Evil.) Fortunately the daydream story went decadent very quickly, right about the time of the brainwashing of Schuldig and Weiss going up against Kritiker, so I think I've more or less escaped it. K-chan, I get what you mean now about the catboy story really making Omi become not-Omi; that was where the storyline started to die for me, when Omi changed far enough to be nearly unrecognizable and frankly a little bit scary. Luckily I've never meant to write the catboy story up until that point anyway. I plan to stop with the happy, cuddly, genki Ken/Omikitten scene and leave it at that. Assuming that I ever do write the rest of it, of course.
So with luck the deck is now clear to get back to the person who's *supposed* to be scary: darling Sei-chan. I've been wearing my sparkly Sakurazukamori Christmas bracelet for inspiration. Speaking of which: my cat has an amusing if somewhat disturbing fondness for putting my Subaru and Seishirou UFO catcher dolls into compromising positions. Here's the latest one, along with the culprit. (Of course, I'm assuming that she's the one doing it, and that they aren't getting into these positions by themselves. After all, since I moved the remote control from the couch to the table, they don't really have any other form of entertainment.) I appreciate Maiko's efforts, but if she thinks Subaru and Seishirou look that hot together she should stop sitting on me every night and let me write! The laptop and the cat both fit in my lap--just barely--but it makes it very hard to type.
Still, despite the best efforts of the cat--I've finished S&S 16! Yay!--Wait, get back here, it hasn't been posted yet. ^_^;;;; It needs to sit for a bit, then have at least one other editing pass before it goes out to prereading. I'm still relatively on-track for a Christmas-ish release, though.
Now, on to work on the Drift.
Oh, and here--while I was posting, I actually did a quiz thing. ('Cuz it was short. ^_^) This is from Talya's livejournal.
(more)
*Um, just in case it wasn't clear, it's the WK boys who are doing the aching, panting, and writhing. Okay? Okay. (I mean, really--if I were going to do something like that, I certainly wouldn't do it in my weblog. ^_^)
- 10:01 PM EST
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:: Saturday, December 7, 2002
So here I am with a snazzy new weblog...which looks exactly like the old weblog, except that now it has comments and an updated links list. One of these days I'll actually get around to redesigning this thing. Probably not this weekend, though, unless I actually manage to catch up on all the email I need to do tomorrow.
Anyway, I'm now one short scene from the end of S&S 16. I might have been farther along, but Seishirou has been resistant. Can't blame him, really, considering that he's currently experiencing something unfamiliar and rather unpleasant. Wow, am I glad that I left off writing S&S for a year with chapter 15, which is only mildly ambivalent and has a good full stop to it.
It's funny, in the odd and inexplicable but rather freakily cool sense--I did take almost a year's vacation from S&S, and the bits I'd written most recently were Subaru PoV (from the next Drift, which I'm probably going to try to go back to after the first draft of 16 is done), but this chapter is all Seishirou PoV, and when I went to work on it, *bam,* the voice was just there, exactly as it's always been, that same absolutely smug and self-absorbed at-length pondering with some Subaru-molestation on the side. *laughs* I don't know, maybe it's just that I've been semi-blocked for so long, but I was kind of expecting to have to find or reclaim that voice. I didn't think that I would just slip back into it, or that it would slip back into me. Whichever. In any case, I'm highly grateful.
Kris, do you remember our conversation after the Writer's Con? The one taking off from the question that was asked about things that are particularly featured in different authors' works (the way certain authors linger over descriptions of food, for instance, or swordplay, or, in Shanti's case, costumes and dancing)? I think I finally figured out what my "Thing" might be--it's mental-spiritual states. Telepathy. Dream sequences. Mystical psychic bonding. Shamanic union. Magical workings. Occasionally insanity. Expand it to include moments of profound realization and that's, um, pretty much everything I've written. (I don't really seem to do "slice of life" stories, or stories that turn primarily around events. "Return," maybe. Oh, and of course "X Rocky.") In retrospect, duh--I mean, the reason I put my three long WK fics on hold (aside from the fact that they were interfering with "Sakura") was that they were all more or less the same thing: Omi undergoes some transformation, acquires extraordinary mental powers and/or charisma, and forms a mystical, soul-sharing bond with the other three. And then the sex.
My secondary "Thing" is probably shape-shifting--a character is either tranformed into another type of creature or acquires the ability to change his form. This one doesn't turn up so much in the things I've written, but it's everywhere in my daydream storylines. (Some day, when I have nothing better to do, I'll post a list of all the things I've turned the WK guys into.) I don't think that the music thing we were talking about is actually a "Thing"--for those who weren't part of this conversation, it's that a large number of my stories have their genesis in a specific song. That's a part of the process of writing for me, but it isn't something that's intrinsic to the fic itself; nor is is something that the readers are necessarily aware of as they read.
(These might actually be more general kinds of "Thing"s than we were discussing at the Con, but I still can't think of anything more specific that I dwell upon. Certainly not clothes. ^^ Nature imagery? Qualities of light? *shrugs*)
While I'm engaged in my limited social blogging--look, I finally linked to you! Will wonders never cease. ^_^ And I *want* to see that picture of Haku one of these days.
So I spent most of today catching up on the almost two years' worth of Animerica Extras that I'd accumulated. Eep. I hadn't realized I'd fallen that far behind. I have to say that I really like Chicago. I might actually pick up the graphic novels of that one. (I like basically everything in AExtra, really, though I have trouble following Marionette Generation, so it often doesn't hold my interest.) Tomorrow's mission is to do email, as mentioned--and maybe write, if I have time and brain cell left. *crosses fingers*
Oh, and the Writer's Con *was* very cool, even if it was mildly traumatic to be sitting on the panel with Jane Yolen (aka "America's Storyteller") and Hal Clement, Grand Master of Science Fiction. *ack!* "Me? Uh...I write fanfiction." *hides* No, actually, I was mainly there in my capacity as an editor, not as a fangirl, although I did end up kind of taking over the Fandom panel on Sunday. It was fun, though. (Except for the freezing rain. Why must there *always* be freezing rain when I drive up to Massachusetts for Writer's Cons?) And I'd forgotten just how much we see of Tom Cruise's silky bishounen thighs in "Legend"! And the pounds and pounds of glitter! And the cherry tree! Okay, I'll stop now. Anyway, thanks again to all at Bellatrix for inviting me. *waves*
And now I must perform the dance of going to bed.
- 11:26 PM EST
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