katallison

Things that are good:

a) a_mews sent me a cool new photo of Patti Smith, from the Meltdown 2005, and I'm rotating it in in place of my old default icon.

b) The suffocating humidity has finally cleared out, and today is warm and sunny and dry, very lovely, so all those people who like to go outside and do stuff on beautiful June Sundays are at last getting their chance, after a monsoon-like few weeks.

c) Long-term stressor at work has finally been resolved, not in a good way, but to be honest any resolution feels like something of a relief after months of fraught suspense.

d) And possibly related to (c) above, I'm writing again, after months of drought. I've been doing some serious revisions on, and cautious additions to, something that's been stalled on my hard drive for quite a while. Had an unpleasant shock, when I first opened and read through it, of Oh my god, could I GET any more blatant with the overwritten emotional exposition?? until I remembered that I'd been trying out the technique of deliberately overwriting the emotional exposition in first draft, so that when I came back later I could remember what was supposed to be going on emotionally, and could then hack out all the signposting. (This has actually proven helpful so far; there are places where I wouldn't have otherwise been able to recall just why these characters were doing/saying this stuff. Now I just have to figure out some way to make it all clear and coherent *without* the signposts. Ahem.)

Anyway, it feels good to be writing again, and will feel even better when I'm warmed up and nice clear fresh stuff starts coming out of the taps, instead of brown rusty gunk.

It's started snowing out. They're now forecasting that we won't get the 1-2 feet after all, that it'll concentrate south of the cities, but we should still get several inches, which is fine. I never much mind March blizzards; they're like LJ kerfuffles, dramatic and overblown and flouncy but you know they'll melt away in short order. (November-December blizzards, on the other hand, are like blood feuds, heavy, inexorable, and in for the long haul.)

Project of the Week has been keeping the house clean, after last weekend's big clean-up, and my main discovery (apart from hmmm, this is a lot less work than I thought it would be) is that I have WAY too many coffee mugs. Because if one only does dishes once a week or so, one *needs* a lot of mugs, so that one's pre-dawn lunge for caffeine is not delayed by the need to dig a dirty mug out of the sink and wash it. But now that I'm washing up daily, and even putting the clean dishes away instead of living out of the dish drainer, I may need to move some of these to storage.

Today is a day of huzzah! because the university is closed (spring break holiday) and I have a whole, entire day with nothing to do except watch the snow fall and start inching my way back into writing. Well, that latter is not so much of the huzzah!, maybe, and more perhaps of the eeeek!, because I have been very very stalled out lately with the putting of words on the hard drive. I say "stalled" rather than "blocked" since there's nothing really impeding me, just that I've lost momentum. The daily habit of getting sentences cranked out is one of those Newton's-First-Law things like the daily habit of exercising, or washing the dishes, a whole lot easier to keep going with once started than to start up from a dead stop. But what I'm telling myself is, self, if you can actually keep your house cleaned up for a whole week, getting some progress on that fucking story ought to be *cake.*

Story done!!!
Sent to _aerye_!!
Eight hours ahead of deadline!!
It sucketh like a Hoover and bloweth like unto an F5 tornado, but -- DONE!!!

::doing the Very Tired Dance of Subdued Celebration::

Gnarrr. Have hit an inconvenient plot-snarl in my dS Sekrit Santa story; I'm either going to have to think my way through it, or else do a little distracting sleight-of-hand around it and hope nobody notices.

I tell you what, realism-whore though I am, I feel very lucky at times to be writing in dS, where there's no canonic precedent for, say, slavish adherence to actual police procedure, or pettifogging nitpickery about the laws of space, time, and physics, or whatever. One can simply give the "magical realism!" wand an airy wave. And it's nice to remember that the show itself often tended to use its A-plots with a certain negligence, treating them as a pretext for the *important* stuff--character interaction, relationship development, dialogue, etc.

As a viewer, I've never minded this at all--it takes grand-mal plotline incoherence along the lines of later-season XF to really put me off. And as a writer whose default story line is So, these two guys sit around and talk about stuff, and who is deeply impaired in the development of plottiness, I cherish it.

At the risk of jinxing myself, I plan to get prodigious amounts of writing done this long weekend. There are only two Thanksgivingy social events on the calendar--first, dinner tonight with Mr. P, featuring:
--a pork loin which will have many incisions made all over its surface, into which will be inserted much slivered garlic and rosemary, the whole thing then roasted to a fine crackling turn;
--a gratin of creamed leeks and fingerling potatoes, with gruyere;
--brussels sprouts, halved, steamed briefly, and then sauteed with finely chopped toasted walnuts and a dash of sesame oil;
--a compote of dried cranberries and chopped dried apricots, simmered with brandy and some orange zest;
--a bottle of excellent red wine.

Note the complete absence of turkey! Because that's just the kind of wild and crazy rebel I am! Hah!

And also because I shall get turkey on Saturday, when debchan, lapillus, jackiekjono, and I will gather for consumption of Deb's leftovers and viewage of various things, which should be great fun.

Other than those, and the obligatory visit to aged parental units, my agenda for the weekend is simple: Write. Lots.

My best wishes to all of you celebrating Thanksgiving for a peaceful and relaxing holiday, devoid of familial strife, travel mishaps, or subsequent digestive upset.

ETA: And if you haven't already, go read Laura's, Lum's, and Cereta's entries, because they express much more eloquently than I could the gratitude I feel toward fandom and toward all of you.

Holy crap. I'm 1,918 words into my dS Sekrit Santa story, and -- um -- there's a fair bit more to come (though what *is* there will likely be edited down, so who knows how long it'll end up). Golly. It's coming pretty easily, though, despite the fact that I discovered yesterday that the *one* episode I need to rewatch to verify certain points is on the *one* tape I can't find in this disaster area I laughingly call my house. Unfortunately, putting out the call for a copy might tip the identity of the story, once posted. Hmmm--Kalena, are you joining in our reindeer games? If not, can I hit you up for a tape?

In other news, I have successfully gotten the Firefox and Thunderbird updates installed and configured on all computers, and even (ta daaa!) finally managed to sort out the account info for my e-mail, so I am slowly switching everything over to my new address, kat at katallison.com. (I am nothing if not egomaniacal.) If you're someone who keeps an address book, you might want to make the change, but I'm certainly keeping the mrks.org addy alive as well, and will check it regularly.

I spare you all a grab-bag of other assorted blather, including the story of my incredibly depressing visit to my dad in the nursing home, the tale of last week's workplace warfare with the infuriating idiots in the athletics dept., and the completely pointless newsflash about falling down in the bathtub, with side notes on the decrepitude of the body and how very much I don't want to turn into the old lady who's Fallen and Can't Get Up. It is Sunday evening, the saddest evening of the week, the shades of dusk are already falling at 4:30 p.m., and I still have a ton of laundry to do and another thousand words to crank out. And dinner. There should be dinner in there somewhere, I suppose.

Because I am still much with the unproductivity and the general snarliness, two more poems.

One of which I've always wanted to work into a story somehow:

( Over and Over Stitch, Jorie Graham )

And the other of which I actually did work into a story, some time ago:

( Coming to This, Mark Strand )

Both of which, in their respective ways, speak to my mood today.