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?

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.

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.

Yeah, so you know how some days Alfred Borden loves his wife best and some days he loves magic best? Well, I am not actually [spoiler] but it feels like it sometimes; some days I'm a useless waste of self-pitying carbon and some days I'm a superhero. (There are very few days in between.)

I spent the weekend being a sobbing waste of carbon over having to drop out of polybigbang, but then I watched a Phineas and Ferb marathon and felt a little better. And as of yesterday, thanks to blue_monarch and deconcentrate and my boss, I am a superhero again! I am a superhero who can sew a seam, and shoop things so well the photographer I work for is going to recommend me to more photographers, and write awesome fic even if I can't meet a deadline with it! And I am also a superhero who is going to be assistant costume designer on Batboy: The Musical. I'm not entirely sure what an assistant costume designer does, but I intend to be awesome at it.

> First day of school! More importantly: first coffee of the school year. Mmmmmm.
> Two days till I have a functioning computer again thank you God.
> Still the only prospective Illustration major in the world who can't draw. Cannot wait to see the advisor's face when I tell him that.
> New roommate coming tomorrow aaaaaaaaahh
> The Red Eye, a virtual paragon of hardassed investigative journalism, tells me that public support for having the Olympics here is falling off. THANK YOU, CHICAGO. KEEP THAT UP.
> polybigbang is five thousand words in. If I can hit 20K by the 20th, I'm sending a draft in; otherwise I'm dropping out. I think that's fair.
> The links at the top of my LJ layout have suddenly vanished, though I haven't changed anything in the CSS or display settings. Anyone know anything about this?

Hello, Internet! I am still wigging out, because my computer is still being crappy, but I am sort of settling into a constant lowlevel wigout until Tuesday when I can get into the school library and start using reliable computers. This still really sucks.

Tomorrow I think I will clean my room, do laundry, and have a nice Labor Day party at home by myself; I bought hot dogs and buns and relish and everything. And attempt to work on fic longhand. I really don't hold out much hope for polybigbang at this point, but I might as well try.

I have seen Taking Woodstock, Gamer, and Julie and Julia in the last week or two, and have thoughts on them! Those will appear Tuesday, if I remember to post them.

In the meantime, a movie-related poll: folks, who are some actors (male) from the 60s or earlier who were actual good guys? Like not sexist, not racist, etc. So far my mom and I have come up with Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Yul Brynner, and DeForrest Kelley.

Yeah, so this really really sucks. My computer is barely useable and getting gradually worse; basically I can only do one thing at a time, and right now that thing is almost always backing up my files to box.net. I can't find my Vista install CD, so I can't send the computer to a professional place to get fixed, because if they wipe my hard drive I've paid at least a hundred dollars to make my computer completely unusable. There are things I need to be doing-- signing up for Internet service, finding a job, signing my lease, not to mention writing fic-- that I simply can't do right now, and while I'm shockingly functional 80% of the time it is amazing how hard it is to make myself eat when I haven't got anything else productive to do while doing it. And I have to get this all sorted out before the 16th, when my free box.net trial will run out.

newredshoes, berserkide, do either of you know anyone with a computer running Vista? I could really, really use an install CD to borrow.

I don't know what to say, but I feel like I should be posting. Nothing terribly exciting is going on in my life right now.

Crossover fic is chugging along. polybigbang is chugging along. I'm not sure why, because I still have no idea what the fuck I'm doing and am thinking up things to happen as I go along, but once I know what scene I'm writing it's surprisingly easy and fun to write.

After a lot of calling around, my CTA pass finally showed up; my drafting table hasn't, though, and I've been calling the company so often that I'm on friendly first-name terms with the shipping manager but he can't get hold of the warehouse for tracking information. So in the meantime my CTA pass is no good, because I can't leave the apartment for fear that Fed-Ex will show up with my table.

School starts in a few weeks; I'm taking Drawing I and Costume Construction I, which are both useful life skills in any case.

I seem to have fallen off the baseball-following wagon, as I do every year. I have the vague impression that the Mets are being complete crap and the entire Cubs roster is injured, so I suppose my attempt at support wasn't much help to them in any case. I have been watching Ken Burns' Baseball for the first time since I was tiny, so I'm still loving the whole baseball history thing.

I still don't have a job! Surprise surprise.

Like I said: not very exciting. Being stuck at home does that.

HERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE AWESOME.

1. You know that ridiculous crossover fic I've been nattering about since January 16? It just went off to beta, all nearly-29000-words-and-gonna-get-longer of it, so HA. FIC WILL APPEAR RELATIVELY SOONISH.

Of course, this now means that I no longer have an excuse not to actually reread the Series of Unfortunate Events books, or watch Star Trek, or-- most importantly-- stop looking at pictures of motorcycles and buckle down to write my polybigbang. Oops.

2. So naturally I spent the rest of my evening torrenting Ken Burns' Baseball and watching the first inning. I haven't watched it since I was little and renting the videos with my dad! And I've failed at my New Years' resolution of keeping track of how the Cubs and the Mets are doing, same as I do every year, but oh my god baseball history is still so cool and I love it.

3. The Sisters Grimm series, by Michael Buckley. ( Block quotes under the cut. )

So yeah, these . . . may or may not have beat out Snow White: A Tale of Terror for my favorite fractured fairy tale, because I love that movie an awful lot, but they're coming awfully close. :DDDDDDDDDDDD

4. In celebration of the possibility of me finally actually posting fic: a WIP excerpt meme. This thing is always going around somewhere.

( Three Link/Violet, one Doctor Who/Hot Fuzz, and the beginning of my polybigbang under the cut. )



5. I cleaned my laptop screen! The world looks so much brighter now :O

I could swear writing fanfic used to be easier than this. This doesn't feel like dashing off a bunch of words, like it did in high school; it feels like making a movie, and needing all kinds of research consultants and production designers and God knows who else. Except I have no budget but a ton of time, so I get to be all my own research consultants and production designers and, oh right, screenwriters.

This might have to do with my recent inability to come up with simple fic ideas; it might be some kind of attitude problem brought about by two years of writing history papers. Either way, I seem to need to flip some switch in my brain back from research research research to write write write.

Semester is over! I survived and everything, and I'm free until the first or second week of September now \o/

And now, have a ton of photos. I don't know if anyone wants to see them, but I want to post them, so there.

First of all, ( that set design project I spent a million hours on. )

In the interim here I also did a costume design assignment and a sound design assignment. Sound design I can't show pictures of, obviously, but it was a passage from World War Z read to Nine Inch Nails' "A Warm Place"; the costume design assignment was done on a second consecutive all-nighter while watching cartoons, so the idea is sound but the quality of the work was awful. You guys don't get to see that either.

Instead, have ( the costume designs I did for the group final. )

Apparently I not only survived the semester but got an A, but it's four years since I got through an academic semester without severe embarrassment and more than that since I got an A in a class I wasn't repeating, so chances are high that I will wake up soon into the real world where I flunked. In the meantime I'm relatively free for the next six weeks, so brb buying a tank of coffee and writing all the fanfiction in the world.

Ahoy there, Internets! Check me out, taking a break from my tightly-packed schedule of work, school, cartoons, panic, and way too much sleep to actually come say hi to you. Did you miss me :D?

:(

Currently I'm trying to decide whether to write for polybigbang; luckily I found out about it reasonably soon and have till next weekend to sort this out. I had an OT3 fic I was thinking of writing anyway; the problem is that it would be set in a historical era that wasn't exactly known for coping well with diversity of any sort. Doing the fic right would involve an insane amount of difficulty-- in terms both of having to do a ton of research (I have eleven library books out just to help me decide whether to write it) and of having to write at least ten thousand words about how incredibly shitty people can be to other people. The fic would probably get written sooner or later, and I think I could pull it off; the question is whether I'm able and willing to get a draft of it finished in the next two and a half months.

So yeah! That's fun. Kind of. In a really depressing but oddly exciting way.

In the meantime, I'm still creaking away at a fic split between the 1970s and the 19mumbles, researching this potential polybigbang set in the 1950s, working on classical Greek costuming for a final for school, probably apping to butwhatwemake which is set in 2018, pondering returning to a couple of original things which are set in (entirely separate) far futures, and rereading Cryptonomicon, which is split between the 1940s and 1990s and has a trilogy of prequels set around the turn of the 18th century. I don't actually know how many separate time periods I can deal with intelligently at one time, but I guess I'm going to find out. Halp.

In conclusion: DO WANT.

Today I returned a pair of shoes I'd bought and then decided were hideously ugly, bought two more pairs (for the same price) that are not hideously ugly, picked up Lemony Snicket's Unauthorized Autobiography and some actual useful domestic items, and came home. Successful shopping trips! They're a wonderful thing.

And then I actually opened the book I'd bought. DDDDDDD:

( cut for a couple of scans and some flail )

Even the book I'm actually reading right now is talking about metamathematics and how some mathematical propositions have been proven unproveable, so we can't ever know whether they're true or not. So between that and all the fourth-wall warping going around, I'm not feeling too well right now. I think I might go lie down and quietly read something nice and soothing, like say a Stephen King novel.

! Three-day weekend, hooray! And then a really hectic four-day week. This thing where I'm actually operating on the same day-to-day schedule as the rest of the universe is weeeeeird.

@ So is the thing where I went out yesterday and spent a decent chunk of money on things to draw with. I am an actual paying committed art student aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

# ganymi is working on an RP comm that would be perfect for a character I thought up two years ago and never found a home for. I am actually tempted, despite not having RPed anything or wanted to in nearly a year, which means she is a terrible human being and I am never ever speaking to her again >:(

$ Three weeks until my roommate moves out and I can have her room! Which is bigger and has a closet what is this madness D: Though the moving-down-the-hall process should be interesting.

% Yes, I have seen Terminator, and a review will result eventually. I'm lazy, and also still sorting through what I want to say about it. I can assure you that my favorite pasttime of striding heroically around downtown Chicago with the TDK soundtrack on my headphones has suddenly gotten a lot weirder, thank you Mr. Bale.

^ So yeah, I was looking for a PB (not for actual RP purposes) for an older Link Larkin, right? and I ended up with Ian Somerhalder but I was :/-ing over his hair color. And then, and then, he turned out to be on a forthcoming TV show where he has black hair. Because I am just so awesome I can choose PBs based on what they will look like in the future.

( I could not resist adding pictures here )

Oh, and there's something in there somewhere about vampires, but I AM A GODDESS OF PB-HUNTING. I DEMAND WORSHIP. OR COFFEE.

I went to see Star Trek last night! Again. I intend to keep doing this until it leaves theaters or I get sick of it, which I expect to be never.

I was kind of disappointed, though, that the audience was so much less involved than when I went at midnight on the 8th; I mean, I expected that, but there was such a feeling of community at the midnight show. People laughed and cheered and applauded for things. Hardly anyone even laughed at things when I went last night; certainly no one cheered or applauded, not even for ( casting spoiler ) And I really missed that.

So I thought about actually going and looking into organized Star Trek fandom for the first time, the kind of fandom with fic and shipping and so on. Because I haven't really gotten into a fandom in ages and I don't really remember what being properly in a fandom feels like, and everyone else is getting into it these days and so on. And then I remembered that Trek fandom involves the kind of person who was all over the message boards a year ago when photos of filming at Starfleet Academy leaked, going "The girl cadets' skirts are all two inches too long! This movie will be an abomination! I'm not going!" (This isn't a generalization; I remember a specific person saying that he would not be seeing the movie because the uniform skirts appeared the wrong length in a couple of photos taken from a significant distance away.) Trek fandom, including the kind with fic and shipping and so on, includes the kind of people who go "Yeah, sure, the decision to cast a Korean as Sulu needs examining, but I think it's even worse that Kirk's eyes were the wrong color and Spock's earlobes aren't attached." (This, too, was a specific LJ comment I've seen, and incidentally I don't find John Cho's casting problematic but I think it's a substantially more worthy topic of discussion than Zach Quinto's earlobes.) That's what Trek fandom has the reputation for being like, and if it's going to continue being like that-- well, I've been a fan for eighteen years without involving myself much in the community and I can happily go right on doing it.

On the other hand, last night I really just had the sudden urge to be insanely geeky about everything. It was probably because I was at a geek movie prefaced by the trailers for half a dozen more geek movies, but I had this sudden rush of wanting to check out all the canons for everything ever, and just sit around the rest of my life watching things and reading things. Unfortunately this isn't really possible, so I decided to do the next best thing while I'm deciding what to do about Star Trek fandom, and the next best thing is that once I finish a draft of this fic I'm sick of kicking myself over I'm going to go straight through and watch all the TV shows. And all the movies, except that supposed tenth one that doesn't really exist because I won't let it.

You see what I did there? I came up with an astonishingly epic procrastination method five days before I start school. And then found a way to put that off. Self-sabotage harder, self, honestly.

So, yeah, going to watch a horrifying quantity of Star Trek over the next few months and possibly post about it, until I get sick of it (hopefully not) or until I run out, at which point I will then go running to the library for piles of tie-in novels. And when I run out of those it will be 2011 and the next movie will be coming out. I AM A GENIUS.

I also expect to be spending a ton of time on buses and trains, because I live right between school and work but have a decently sized commute to each, so I've got me a ton of Deadpool PDFs and I'm hunting down used copies of all the Series of Unfortunate Events books. I plan to be very, very geeky this summer. >:D

* I'm writing a fic-- you guys all knew that. And I'm determined to get it done and at least to beta, if not posted, by the time I start classes the 26th. Which I thought was doable! Until I decided I just had to be organized and make a checklist.
As it turns out, out of 24 scenes that ought to be in this fic, I've finished seven and written part of eight more. That's less than half the fic-- which I've already written 16K words of over three and a half months. So maybe I should stop shopping around for 70s fashion magazines and actually write the damn thing.

* Speaking of 70s magazines, I did go looking for some in O'Gara and Wilson today; I learned about the construction of the World Trade Center, and whether some guy named Jack Nicholson might turn out to be famous or not, and some shiny new thing banks were making called "credit cards." I was especially entertained by an article in a 1970 issue of Look that was written by a Soviet scientist about what the world would be like in 1991. He actually had some really perceptive, interesting things to say about the Information Age and the possibility of artificial intelligence; he also predicted the usual kinds of overly optimistic things, 3-D televisions and elevated sidewalks and entire suburbs of gardens outside cities.
And he thought poverty and class warfare would be extinct, which was hilariously naive of him and also kind of sad. Dear Soviets of forty years ago: I have some very bad news about what's going to happen to your country in 1991 :(

* I appear to be on a giant binge of Christian Bale movies lately. Yesterday was Newsies (again) and The Prestige and 3:10 to Yuma; I just started Equilibrium, and ganymi recommends American Psycho. I plan to keep this up until I run out of movies that aren't about Batman or until Public Enemies comes out, whichever happens first.

ETA: I have a Dreamwidth! I have no idea what I intend to do with it, if anything, but my username there is spintheiryarns if anyone's curious. I haven't been paying as much attention as I maybe should to the whole Dreamwidth fuss, or to who's who over there, but I guess I'll see what comes of it.

First of all: a belated HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the_antichris, whom I don't see around nearly as much as I used to when we were on opposite sides of the world but nonetheless adore.

Secondly: I have the awesomest mom there is. I called her up this weekend and told her I was writing Hairspray fic, because I needed to ask her some stuff for research questions, and she went "grmph humbug fanfic ew, write your own stuff" as usual. And then I came home from work this afternoon to find an envelope from her with a page from the New Yorker-- over a year old, too-- with a column about musicals set in Baltimore. Oh mom, I love you but you really aren't fooling anyone any more.

Another conclusion I could draw from this is that leaving my mom home alone, sick and bored, is a Very Bad Plan. I should probably have gone over to show her movies or something, twelve-hour drive and lack of driver's license notwithstanding. Oh well.

Thirdly: I just finished watching the original British State of Play and it is so incredibly good, Internet. SO GOOD. I'm going to need to watch it again, because I was too busy falling in love with all the characters to follow half the plot, but even so the end was heartbreaking and amazing. I am immensely pleased and request fanfic.

. . . there isn't any, is there :(

I'm still trying to catch up on various procedurals and British TV, and after all that and rewatching State of Play I think will come rewatching of Leverage, and then the American Life on Mars and season one of Life and taking a shot at Lost. Basically I want to watch all the TV ever that starts with L! Hooray.

A quick State of the Pringle!

-> My 86-year-old great-uncle, to whom I've never spoken before, has obtained himself a Facebook account and is spamming the hell out of me. It's mildly confusing, because he has the same name as my dad (who also has a Facebook), but mostly adorable and hilarious, and I'm very excited to get to talk to him.
-> I think I might have given myself food poisoning, which is I guess what I get for making a ham sandwich after the date on the ham had rubbed off. I'm going to lie vewwy vewwy qwietly here with a bottle of ginger ale and hope nothing comes of it.
-> Most importantly, on top of the fic I love but talk about far more than I actually work on it, I am attempting two Script Frenzies this month-- one screenplay in collaboration with blue_monarch, running on Australian time, and one comic book script all by myself, running on Chicago time. If I vanish off the Internet, feel free to assume I've died of wrist strain or sleep deprivation.

In the meantime: I've been messing around with a Firefox extension called CoolIris, which is really just a way to make image-searching (which is how I spend about half my life) more efficient and spiffy-looking. And I had to search something to test it out, so . . . instead of having actual fic, have some old pictures of Broadway instead. And I mean old, hot damn. I love using the Internet like a time machine.

10 pictures under the cut, none over 640px on a side.

( No skies are grey on that great white way )

So . . . yes, have that. Next up, this weekend: The Chris Nolan Was Right, or, No Really You Guys I Live In A Goddamn Comic Book It's No Wonder I Have Nightmares Picspam.

Thank you for submitting your online application to Columbia College Chicago. You will be receiving information from us regarding your application status and your admissions decision over the coming weeks.

It's only a student-at-large application. There is no need to panic, self.

No really, there is no reason to panic at all.

DDDDDD:

-------

In happier yet more apocalyptic news, blue_monarch and I have decided to collaborate on Script Frenzy, God help you all. Bwahahaha. Ha. Ha.

Oh god it's March 17 already TIME TO PANIC AGAIN BYE