kiya

I wrote the last third or so of a post that will go up under lock tomorrow related to the TDoV (4800 words total, don't know how many I added today) and then wrote, uh, 3629 words of fiction.

Because I hit the point that I was nearly done with this novella and so I just kept going. Especially since I'm pretty sure I've been in a major depressive episode the last two weeks or so and one of the ways of resetting brain is actually accomplish a fucking thing.

And I keep failing to actually do so.

A summary of life:

I finished writing Cracked Pots, which is apparently now the first book in a storyworld I have dubbed The Mother of Invention. The second book, tentatively titled In The Seed, has not yet begun, but I keep accumulating bits for it. (And I may need to read up extensively on Bengali religious stuff, which is well outside the Shaivite stuff that I have mostly dabbled in in my own research.)

I did not place in the Escape Pod flashfic contest, though I made it further than some. I had an agent bite on my PitMad tweet, but she turned me down in part because of book length. (Cracked Pots is not a short book; it is a slow-paced exploration of a world, which includes adaptation to a complex social environment, social scheming, the POV coming to realize things about the effects of bigotry and have her own exposed, and semirealistic amount of time spent on scientific discovery, which would make for a lot of book even if it weren't heavily influenced linguistically by formative experiences with Dickens.) No bites during SFFPit, but jenett pointed out a plausible agent to me who wasn't participating, so I will query her at some point.

Working on short stories. I'm still not sure what made me capable of writing these as more than a fluke. I've been, in addition to the stuff I'm trying to write to sell, doing Chuck Wendig's mostly-weekly fiction challenges and posting the results at my writer website, on the principle that producing regular content is a goodness and I work well with challenges. At some point I will see if I can figure out if I can get the blogs to xpost here again, the upgrade to https all around seems to have busticated the plugin I was using.

KJ and I will be at Readercon on Sunday, knock wood, so anyone who will be at Readercon then, hi.

Constantly feeling that I ought to be doing more politically and being flattened by a combination of global warming, toddlers, and autism spectrum. Did make one protest. It was hot.

Identity issues are complicated and hard to talk about, so I'm not doing so. I would like it if I had a functioning executive function, but I've been useless lately. I wonder if that's something else that just fails when it's bright and hot. Though I don't know if I'd be doing better if the AC were not broken, it may just be the brainweather. But this is always the dry time. Just, hard to deal with the depression loop that kicks in when I'm not being Productive (and I wish I had any clue about what reasonable expectations for myself might look like anyway, because I'm perpetually not Productive according to the standards of capitalist bullshittery and that's just fantastic for my mental health).

Anyway. Been working on and off on building a proper herb spiral in the front. artan brought around another load of rocks so I can work on building up some more, esp. now that I've put in the bindrune on the core stone.

The children are often loud and frequently exhausting. Last week was super-busy (my mother visiting to do art camp with the girls meant a lot of Doing and I do not usually have a lot of Doing going on for spoon budget reasons). Tired.

Intend to try to write more often. We'll see if intentions carry through.

Just hit 'send' on submitting a short story in response to an SFWA-qualifying anthology CFS.

I hope they like it.

For, um. The values of the word "like" that are appropriate for that story, which is... not about things one likes.

I wrote 3399 words today.

I don't know how the next chapter starts though. :} Sleep on it. Do the last 633 I need tomorrow.

I think that fanfic would probably have been better had I finished it closer to July 2009ish, which is when I started writing it.

On the other hand, it's the first bit of writing I've managed to actually do in a dog's age, and it is in first-draft form now. Perhaps I will watch the movie again before we send it back to Netflix, to do tweaking and see if I missed anything that needs in there.

But still. Five pages of new!Trek fanfic, about three and a half of those pages written today, I think. First fanfic I've written in like fifteen years, even.

Perhaps this will prime the pump so I can do other things.

POV character to telepathic dog, who is looking upset about something: "What's the matter?"
Telepathic dog, to POV character: "Is Timmy in the well?"


1252 words is Part 4, Chapter 13.

949 words finishes 4.8, traumatises one character severely and another one moderately, and scatters a few clues around.

Moderately entertained by the usefulness of experience with 24/7 d/s in writing the interactions between a mystical dog and his girl.

Assisted zeborahnz with something, too, so a useful day all around, even if I am up this far past bedtime.

I wrote 153 words. I don't want to think about how long it's been since I last wrote, but hey. Not bad for a day when I wanted nothing more than to give up and just ... softly and silently vanish away.

Which I know is the depression talking. Which doesn't help it any.

At least the end of Daylight Stupidity Time means that my sleep schedule looks a little less fucked up. If I ignore the hypersomnia bits.


... ranting about my childhood and 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' ... my mind is odd.

I have met my 23 April deadline for my webzine article. (lupabitch, it has a tangential reference to something I was going to do because of F&F,B&B; haven't got my ducks in a row yet, but you're footnoted.) It won't be up for a bit, but I think that's the best I'm gonna do. Thanks as always to brooksmoses for first-reading me and telling me when my sentences are pretzeled.

It's oddly comforting to go to a restaurant, place an order, and have the waitress say, "Like you always get, yes?" I am a creature of habits, and I find it comforting when people know how to take care of me.

First ballgame I got to actually watch this year. Not a bad one to do, though I was out stacking buckets for the back-to-back-to-back-to-back homers. arawen appears to think my reactions to him are hysterical. I just ... buckets.

Fair warning to all and sundry: I'm really feeling quite existentialist in not exactly angsty ways, but sort of quietly contemplative and slightly broody ones. If you crack my shell, you will hatch out small sharp birds of the nature of being real. Or possibly small sharp Velveteen Rabbits, but I don't think those live in eggs.

So I noticed that my previous post was utterly incoherent and did not include that the bluegrass cover was of Pink Floyd's "Goodbye Blue Sky" despite my being sure I typed it, but that is probably about par for the course for that evening.

I wrote 268 words the other day, getting back to work and trying to pick up the threads of that and make progress. So I've started part 4 of the thing. Figured out the next bit, too, just need to write it down. Feeling a bit better about things; it's good to actually write. I need to figure out how to rewrite the early bits to get the cultural stuff in that I sorted out ages ago thanks to ritaxis.

I've been doing planning for the garden. Which is amusing, given how much snow/slush/sludge there is out there, but best to know what I'm doing well ahead of time. I'm planning on building two frames to start out with; we'll see if I can manage to maintain that properly and then see where to go in later years. Asked nex0s for some help on figuring out what local pests there are; need to go to UMass and see if they have the pamphlets she thought they ought.

Other miscellaneous stuff has included discussing reconstruction and crazed druids with arawen, miscellaneous states of emotional breakdown (I am tired of this, but seem to be getting better), persistent wrestling with depression, thinking about theology that I'm not actually getting written down, and playing Warcraft (hit 70 on Samh yesterday, along with honored with both Scryers and Lower City). I think I am slightly ill, but not enough that it's anything other than a distraction, another reason to sleep, and intermittent abdominal pain.

Depression may be breaking; I'm having impulses to do things. Though if I'm not careful it'll all fall apart in a morass of 'Augh, too much' and I'll fall down into the goddamn pit again.