There is an upside to not actually going to any Halloween parties, and that is that I can dress up as however many people I like! In this case, three.

The theme for the evening is "clothing I own and love but rarely have any use for."

( Photos under the cut )

I should probably stop procrastinating and start writing things now.

IMPORTANT ETA: when Geocities went down it took my Peter/Harriet mood theme with it, so they have now been replaced with the Farnon brothers. Best mood theme ever, y/y/mfy?

Have I mentioned lately how happy Sarah Jane Adventures makes me? Hint: really really really really happy.

But I want Eve/Sam fic and there is never going to be any :( Everything I could ever want out of a canon pairing and naturally it all happens offscreen.

You know what's great about lunchtime on Monday? Nobody wants to use the practice rooms at the library. Should you be so inclined, you can go and sit and play "Scarborough Fair" over and over again for two hours, until you almost don't suck at it and your wrists and the small of your back are miserable knots of pain, and it is awesome.

I'm just saying, my kindergarten piano teacher-- who used to tie himself into knots trying to get me to sit still for five minutes at a time-- would be pretty pleased right now. I know I am.

In less impressive news, I have been listening to the same three musicals over and over again so much that I wasted like five minutes this morning trying to find the song "Confrontation" in the Funny Girl soundtrack. While there is probably an awesome crossover idea in there somewhere, I think I may be suffering from too much of a good thing.

I have no particular opinion one way or another on the existence of Disney's A Christmas Carol, but I wish it wasn't coming out now. I was very carefully brought up to believe that the Christmas season doesn't come until after Thanksgiving, and I firmly believe it should stay there. Christmas movies have no business coming out at the beginning of November.

Also, the commercials are making me homesick, which is equally premature and Generally Not On.

As a general rule, though, I am quite fond of November and December, despite encroaching schoolwork and costuming work and miserable weather. December means a train trip and Bethlehem and the Moravian Bookshop and Hannukah and Christmas; and November means just enough snow to be pretty, and buying a hot drink and curling up in an armchair somewhere and writing a lot. Because, yup, November is Get Your Shit Written Month.

I hesitate to call it National Novel Writing Month, because I'm not writing a novel this year; I was going to, and then I was going to finish last year's (which could take up another 40K easily). And then it got to be mid-October and I have three fics in progress that could easily be 30K+ each, and . . . yeah, I'd like to get these done someday. So my actual goal for November is a thousand words of either Zac/Vanessa/Ashley or Hilary/St. George a day, plus a second draft of the Link/Violet by the end of the month. I think this is doable; a mess, and probably not ~in the spirit of NaNo~, but hopefully productive.

And newredshoes, or any other Chicago folks, if you would like to have writing parties again this year I am all for it. :D?

Ahaha so this thing where you write fic with three- or four-digit word counts? Completely awesome. Why did no one tell me?

Of course, now I've gotten started on this pairing I will never ever finish and it will probably end up being a longfic anyway, but, uh, here, have a bit more St. George/Hilary. It is the_antichris's fault, which is excellent; I rather missed having things be her fault. They always turn out so nicely.

( just a tiny thing, 305 words )

So it turns out that drafting body blocks is the most relaxing thing ever. It involves exactly enough math not to be boring, but not enough to require actual effort, and I want to do it all the time.

In not-precisely-related news: I'm fond of Newsies and Hairspray and all, and Singin' in the Rain and Jekyll and Hyde are pretty great, but Funny Girl is the best of all possible musicals, and if you disagree something is clearly fundamentally wrong inside you and I should probably come find you and put you out of your misery.

How are all your days going! :D

Today I discovered that my NYR recipient loved my fic! And then I went to "class," which was actually sitting by myself drawing a hallway in a Victorian office building for three hours while I listened to musicals and strangers sometimes wandered by and told me I was doing a good job. (And when my professor came to check on me, I mentioned this and he said "I can see why! :D") And when I got home I discovered that someone had recced The Fraser Record (Excerpts) and there is HSM superhero fic.

It's like yesterday got two days' worth of suck and today got two days' worth of awesome. I am confused.

Hey! Hey, Internet. Guess what I did for the first time in more than two and a half years. That's right, guess.

---------

Title: The Social Climb
Fandom: The Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy Sayers
Pairing: The Viscount St. George/Hilary Thorpe
Length: 1435 words
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Note: written for mayhap in New Year Resolutions 2009; betaed by the_antichris and chocolatepot.

Uncle Peter would most likely have found some sort of entertaining symbolism in the phenomenon, but even Uncle Peter wasn't likely to be much help right now.

My Yuletide nominations are:

17 Again (2009)
Jackie Chan Adventures (tv)
John Bellairs - Johnny Dixon series
Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events
Michael Buckley- The Sisters Grimm series
Push

It's almost like I've completely failed to grow up! OH WAIT

I am going to go write my NYR fic now. Um. Yes.

In which I make a pimp post about my terrible taste in kiddie television! Because I feel like posting videos, and none of you can stop me.


1. Zeke and Luther

Yeah, yeah, a kids' show about two white guys and the one guy's sociopathic sister having ~*hijinks*~. Revolutionary. I know. And I thought Zeke and Luther was kind of bland at first, but it grew on me-- it's not nearly as good as Even Stevens, which was created by the same guy, but it's still a lot of fun!

Also, it is really, really gay. I've been trying really really hard lately not to ship white guys together just because they happen to be on the same show, but . . . no seriously, Luther spends most of his time latched bodily onto Zeke, and they're absurdly codependent and say they love each other like once an episode, and at the very least it's intolerably cute bordering on gay.



Also, Brian Stepanek is on it sometimes! He owns a donut shop.


2. Jackie Chan Adventures

See, this show is actually good. Ostensibly it's about a college student named Jackie Chan who works at his cranky old uncle's antique shop in San Francisco, and his little cousin Jade lives with them, and they run around battling an organization called the Evil Hand for a bunch of powerful demonic talismans-- different ones each season. It is a ridiculous amount of fun. Uncle complains at everyone constantly, Jackie kicks ass but inevitably ends up getting captured, and then Jade shows up and saves everyone's asses even though she promised she was going to stay home and safe this time no really. There are a bunch of great recurring characters, too, mostly Latino-- there are not many white characters at all-- and also a small plush superhero called Supermoose. I can't understand how anyone could ever hate this show.

Jade is one of my favorite characters in anything ever, seriously. I love seeing a mouthy nine-year-old girl get to outsmart and beat up thirty-foot bad guys every single episode. Plus she was a ninja queen once, and her BFF is an enormous ex-sumo-wrestler named Tohru who was a bad guy at first but then became Uncle's apprentice.

There are time travel episodes, and parallel-universe episodes, and kung fu battles in space! And on top of all that, Jackie Chan shows up at the end of each episode to answer a fan's question! I have learned from watching this show that he is scared of swimming, that as a kid he wanted to be a cartoon character when he grew up, and that if he weren't an actor he would want to be a jet pilot.

I can't find many short clips from it-- YouTube mostly has entire episodes-- but here, have the credits :D?



Also, Adam Baldwin is in it sometimes! He plays one of the bad guys' henchmen.

So we seem to have skipped autumn entirely this year-- we've gone from 80-degree weather to 40-degree weather in about two weeks. Half the population of Chicago, including me, was in H&M today frantically buying up gloves and scarves and hats. In other news: I broke out my long wool coat today, I've switched from iced coffee to hot, and I'm on the Amtrak website checking the train schedule so I can go back to Bethlehem for Christmas. Next up: emailing the Moravian Bookshop, the only pleasant retail workplace in the world, to see if they can give me hours for a couple of weeks. Winter is coming whether I like it or not :/ I could swear I saw a snowflake today, but I choose to believe I imagined that.

Piano-relearning is going smoothly, so far! The library conveniently had a lesson book called I Used to Play Piano, which claims I probably remember more than I thought and is turning out to be right. I had a few scary minutes when I discovered that, despite playing one instrument or another for sixteen years, I couldn't quite remember which rest was which; but I got over that okay and am having lots of fun.

Now if only I could learn to dance >:(

I went to the Coming Out Ball last night! It was fun-- not a life-changing experience or anything, which I was vaguely afraid it would be, but there was music and I danced to it and it was fun.

Also, and most importantly, ( I got dressed up, and took photos of myself. )

So I was going to stay home on the computer all day today, like a good little shut-in, and then for some reason I have forgotten manasseh started telling me all about what a moron her elementary school (or middle school, or something) music teacher was. And I found myself getting really really butthurt about this, because if there's any topic that sets me off for no good reason it's talking about how shitty art and music education often is.

The solution to this, obviously, was to go to the public library, borrow a book called I Used To Play Piano, and go poke at a piano in one of the practice rooms for an hour and a half. I thought it went well, considering I haven't touched a piano in twelve years-- well being an extremely relative term in this case, but still. When my life went completely to shit at the beginning of 2008, one of the things that went with it was music; I hadn't touched an instrument in like a year and a half until today. I hadn't noticed either, so it's not really a huge deal, but it was nice and maybe I should get into the habit of it.

I've never rly thought of myself primarily as a ~creative~ person, for whatever reason. Except that I have spent this week sewing things, writing things, drawing things, playing piano, reading things, and watching movies. So possibly I should rethink that point of view.

Man, you know, sometimes you have a hugely long week-- awesome, but long-- full of awesome but long days. And you wake up Wednesday morning, and on the one hand you get to sew things in school today! But on the other hand, it's six-thirty AM and you feel gross and it looks like the week is never ever going to end.

And then you go online and discover that someone has written AU fic where Zac Efron is a superhero and things just look a whole lot better.

My life: still boring, sorry folks.

I spent all day reading Barney/Robin fic, because I am somehow invested in Barney/Robin now even though I don't watch HIMYM and don't ever want to. I took a brief break to check the Yuletide section for A Series of Unfortunate Events, and was pleasantly surprised at first to find a couple of Kit/Olaf and Lemony/Beatrice fics; and then I got surprise Klaus/Violet porn and hightailed it right out of there. I am annoyed at what there is of Snicket fandom for having crap taste in pairings, and I am annoyed at Yuletide for having a format that doesn't allow for warnings or even pairings.

Anyway, this reminded me that I still owe a NYR fic if I don't want to get banned from Yuletide permanently, and this year's exchange is creeping up awfully fast. And, y'know, I was going to do Research and Work and write a nice long plotty shippy fic about Hilary Thorpe and the Viscount St. George fighting crime together . . . but I'm writing two tricky longfics already, and one of them is close enough in dynamic that I honestly don't know if it'd be worth it. So I'm going to see if I can BS a couple thousand words about them in the next couple of weeks, and if something more comes of it later on then something more comes of it.

Preemptively, anyone want to beta a short Lord Peter fic, if I can hammer something out? :D? Is anyone still here, or have you all gotten sick of me talking about fic that never appears? I know I am. I wish I could finish something.

Establishing a LGBTQ+ lit award specifically for LGBTQ+ writers: not actually the same as racism!

Since this seems to be a difficult concept for some people.

Internet. Internet, I am too tired to deal with things like this.

I mean, I am 95% sure that's trolling, and addled trolling at that. But 5% of me is going OH GOD WHAT IF IT'S TRUE. Because really, I can deal with getting jossed by BSG (even though my version was better) and I can deal with getting jossed by Lemony Snicket, because that's really my own fault for writing forty thousand words of fanfic before rereading the enormous complicated canon. But getting jossed by Hairspray would really just be embarrassing.

(I bet my version would still be better, though.)

Ahahaha so, my day. Incoherence forthcoming.

( Breaking news: Cyndi is neurotic! Who knew! )