Cleolinda everywhere

From Saturday: New Secret Life of Dolls, in which a sparklepire finds out exactly for whom the bell tolls. Looking at my calendar, I'm thinking we'll have the next installment on Saturday (as usual), and then we'll skip the next week, because that's Harry Potter and I have a podcast to do on Saturday and I don't think anyone will be paying attention to anything else anyway. Unless there are unexpectedly high number of Potter non-fans here who want counter-programming?

Meanwhile, I fell into a gigantic plot hole over the weekend and realized that the central premise of the first half of the novel (the first Black Ribbon novel) doesn't make any sense. I won't get into specifics, but it came down to an anguished writer-wail of "Wait--but--why wouldn't he tell her? OH, FFFFFFFFF--"

The thing is, I'd been sitting there trying to jam together puzzle pieces that didn't fit for--I don't know, months, probably. I just kept telling myself that I had all these nice, shiny scenes I had created--some of them independent of the others--and that if I just thought about it hard enough, my Powers of Logic would force them into place. And then I finally ran into the one failure of logic that made the whole thing collapse. So I'm opening a fresh Word document (I save every variation of everything, so it's not like I lose anything by experimenting) and just talking it out. So far, it's... actually going really well. I got something like 4000 words done today, and about 2000 on Saturday. It's kind of liberating, in fact, to just be like, "Fuck it, I'll just start over." I mean, there are older bits that will get absorbed into the new as I go. But at least I'm not trying to pound the same square pegs into round plot holes anymore. So... I've got that going for me, I guess.

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New Secret Life of Dolls thataway. We've had three new entries so far and the read-through is updated, if you need to catch up on those (Christmas II is the first of the new ones). I'm trying to decide which day is best to update on--I'm trying to space them out with some kind of regularity. I was doing them on Saturdays, but I'm not sure if people actually see them on the weekends. Monday seems like a terrible day because, as someone suggested, people are busy catching up. Tuesdays, maybe? Although... if people learn to expect them on Saturdays, maybe it's not a problem. I don't know.

In case you're wondering, it's not that I got tired of the series or forgot about it for nine months. It's that I had a massive block as to how to make those last three entries work. I would sit and pick at the drafts every other week or so, and just... nothing. That last one, I pretty much ended up rewriting the entire thing from scratch the other week. It happens. And if I have to wait nine months for something not-crap to occur to me, well... there it is.

The good news is, I have the next seven entries either written or mostly written, and shit, as Mark would say, is about to get real.


Meanwhile, it's an "I see this working out well for you" kind of day on the movie news front: ( Linkspam! )

Early linkspam so I can go take some pictures for something I'm a bit behind on posting. Cough.

Re: the previous post: Okay, you know me. I love me some Tonners. That is not a factory fresh "original" Tonner Jacob. Now that I've gotten a good look at it, you can't convince me that it is. I know for a fact that the other two are repaints, because I know what the originals look like. That is just not a Tonner paint job, and you cannot tell me otherwise. ETA: Aha! Solved.

The new Made of Fail podcast is up, for real this time.

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This head cold is driving me crazy--of course, I have the luxury of saying that because it's not very bad. It's the kind of light cold where you sit around moaning all day that man, there is just nothing worse than a stubbed toe, you know? Because you've forgotten what a real knock-you-down bug feels like, you've forgotten anything but the thickish head and the slight sinus pressure and the developing cough and the constant frog in your throat right now. I have had chills pretty bad (no fever, though) and a good bit of fatigue, to the point where I spent half the day in a couch coma and the other half cheerfully on Twitter. Which I'm sure impresses no one.

From wolfsilveroak: "Hey, check out this Etsy shop. It was set up expressly for the Aussie Bushfires. So far, they've raised $12,000 in Australian funds. 100% of the proceeds goes to fire relief and they have free international shipping." Also, from sailorcoruscant: "One of my favourite yarn stores in Victoria is asking for people to knit squares that she will make into blankets for the victims." And from alexthedevil: "A reporter's tale of surviving the fire - 'How we cheated the flames of death.' "

I... have no good segue from that! Snack Deathmatch! Peanut butter cups vs. red licorice.

(Note: Much of the news, even the movie news, is toy-oriented because it's being reported from Toy Fair. So... that's what's up with that.)

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Apparently another pancake storm is coming in, and it's going to be bad. I hear they're actually letting schools out, in fact. I just have to get to my medicine check and get back before the wind cranks up.

Re: The Tudors pics yesterday:

If you watched the behind-the-scenes/interviewy thing I posted last week, you might have noticed that the premise of the show seems to be that Henry VIII was "the original rock star." So accuracy may not be the top priority here. I almost hope they go full-out with modern music and be done with it--go hard or go home, that kind of thing.

Ask and ye shall receive: "New preview of The Tudors set to Evanescence's 'Lacrymosa.' " (Oh, King Henry, you so emo. Hee.) There's also another new preview, "All The King's Women", aka A Little Something for the Laydeez. You'll understand what I mean when you get there.

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