Cleolinda everywhere

Today, I am full of French onion soup and accomplishment. Really full. I have a few screencaps to make (I want to link to visual evidence of some of this weirdness), but other than that, I'm putting the Van Helsing footnotes to bed. Exciting. Which means I get to plow on through the list chronologically and keep going until I hit another unfootnoted patch, and hopefully work through the entire set UNTIL THEY ARE DONE, OMG.

A weird little sidenote: I've been trying out different old BPAL favorites as room scents, and even though Fae is a pretty bubbly scent (bergamot, heliotrope and peach, I think?), I haven't been all that productive this week. Then I put out Siren (ginger, jasmine, vanilla and apricot), and suddenly I'm getting a lot more done. Could be a coincidence, I don't know.

OH OH OH I KNEW I WAS FORGETTING SOMETHING: Today's flashback is (the oddly prescient... kind of) MyScene Lindsay Lohan entry. I even went through and freshened up all the picture links (well, except for one, and I have no idea what it originally was).

Linkspam! ( The Hair touches down in Mexico, is assaulted with sombrero )

Generally I put links or ramblings into Semagic as I find/think of them, and when I have enough, I hit post. The problem with this is that the entry you start may not be the entry you feel like posting when you finish. So I've got a blithe musing on Coldplay, of all things, right after this that I wrote last night, but today I found out that my frail, 84-year-old grandmother has fallen down and hurt herself (again), and while she hasn't broken anything, she can't put any weight down at all so my mom and my aunt are having to take her to the hospital, and the spectre of assisted living rears its head once more. And she had just gotten over shingles, y'all.

So... what I wrote last night:

I have a few of the songs off the new Coldplay album--I think it's coming out June 13? Fortunately there seem to be a few songs floating around already, and so far I like what I've heard. I really like "Viva la Vida," possibly because the line "I sweep the streets I used to own" really resonates with me for some reason. I mean, you know: there are times in your life when you felt like you were at the top of your game, and you end up looking back and wondering what the hell happened to you, and how you fell down to where you are now. I don't feel like anything was taken from me; I feel like I let something slip through my fingers, and sometimes I wonder if I can even remember what a good grip on the world feels like. Which is why I like the song, I guess, because the lyrics capture that feeling, but the music is actually really beautiful and almost hopeful-sounding. And the interesting thing is that, as the song goes on, it becomes about how hollow "being king" was in the first place. So it's both about nostalgia for something you had and being disillusioned with it at the same time. Huh.

I also really like "Violet Hill." My thoughts on that are less scintillating.

Linkspam (the more ebullient bits were compiled last night), because linkspam makes me feel better: ( Read more... )

1. I fought off several attacks of The Blahs today, but ended up getting a lot done. I'm trying to sort out the first three chapters at this point--rearranging the old material into logical concert with the new, and so on. Let's put it this way: I wanted to finish this by my birthday, December 14. Today is November 13. I'm not going to do the actual math, but we're talking twenty chapters that have to be filled out and whipped into shape in roughly thirty days. When you consider that I won't be able to write every single day (that's just Murphy's Law talking. Also, you've got Thanksgiving, and I know at least one or two days will be given over entirely to midnight-showing Golden Compass squee), and that I'd probably like to have a little time just to revise things on a word-by-word level... we're talking one chapter per day. Some chapters'll probably take an hour's run-through; the last chapter is going to involve a lot of raw drafting. Really, I just want to have it in a complete, readable format so I can show it to some close friends and, hopefully, my agent, with the understanding that I can still polish it at my leisure and double-check some research details for a little while, while it's shopping around. I've been working on it for four years now--I'd like to give it six months in a drawer, but it had a year or two in a drawer, unfinished, as it was.

But it's an arbitrary deadline. I made it up. Why is it such a big deal?

Because I'm going to be twenty-nine, which is almost thirty, and this is what I've wanted to do my entire life--write novels and, with any luck, publish them--and I haven't done it yet. If I don't draw a line at some point, any point, when is it ever going to get done? This point's as good as any other point.

2. Unfortunately I have a headache now, but it comes with the territory.

3. Questions that are not the most helpful to ask a writer: "So... who's the audience?" "Uh... people who like to read this kind of thing?"

4. I'm saying this here so as not to pick on any one person, but: ARGUING IN CLEO'S JOURNAL BAAAAD.

5. In other housekeeping issues, enough people are emailing me about the Free Rice thing (which I linked!) that it sounds y'all want a little graphic at the bottom of the page. I'm worried about reaching a saturation point with the reminder graphics, though, so I'm thinking of combining all the click-a-day sites into one graphic. Would this work for people? There's tabs at the top of the Hunger page to the others.

( Linkspam )