KJ

Things I have done this weekend:

-- Slumber party in the living room.
-- Made memes over coffee.
-- Ate burgers at Five Guys. Then brought home the leftover fries and melted cheese over them, with bacon and sour cream. Oh yum.
-- Went to the library, admired the signage, and forced myself not to line up book spines with the edge of the shelf.
-- Took a walk through a nearby woods. I got to crunch through leaves for the first time in years.
-- Trawled the depths of YouTube for everyone’s greatest hits.
-- Read comics, specifically the first two volumes of "Avatar: The Promise", about which more at another time.
-- Got my ass kicked at Mario Party.
-- Watched RuPaul's Drag Race, Game of Boobs Thrones, Eddie Izzard, and Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire.
-- Got a room to ourselves in a pizza joint to watch the Bills play the Jaguars. Featuring wings, calzones, and a ranch dressing explosion.
-- Went to the bookstore, because how could I spend the weekend with renay and not go to the bookstore? My purchase was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the third volume of "Avatar: The Promise".
-- Drank. A lot. I think I had more Jello shots this weekend than in the entire rest of my life combined. Lime and orange made with raspberry vodka, highly recommended.
-- Pulled every muscle in my body laughing. I think I’ve found myself in tears or doubled over, unable to breathe, approximately every five minutes.

It's official, I love this weekend.

Today, I flew to Memphis, TN, where I ate a BBQ pork sandwich at a restaurant within a mile of Graceland. I had no idea Graceland was just in town like that. It was closed, of course (we drove by at like 9:30pm), but all lit up for the holidays.

Tomorrow, I meet up with seventhe and justira to drive over to renay's place for a weekend of mayhem and shenanigans. At least, I hope there are shenanigans. I have been promised some, after all. And if the world ends from the sheer confluence of awesome that will commence, I guess the Mayans were just a few days off.

Not a lot to say about today, despite it being busy. I met up with a friend from Tumblr for lunch, which was awesome, and then got together with a bunch of folks to help another friend pack for a move. Probably more running around than I should have done on my concert weekend day off, but it was worth it.

Yesterday's concert went pretty well. One more show tomorrow, a week off, and then we pick up right away for a special concert in January. I am excited about the new venue -- the first Monday in December is our first rehearsal in the new space, and I'm so eager to get a look at it.

Sorry I am so boring today. That's what happens in November -- you get to learn how mundane my life really is....

The coffee is fresh, the Panera is warm and smells like cinnamon, I got my favorite table, and I have lots of ideas for the continuation of the crossover fic percolating in my brain. A good start to the last day of a short work-week.

This holiday is going to be really busy, but I also hope really fun. Thursday is Thanksgiving with family in Sacramento. Then a second Thanksgiving on Friday with friends, which has started happening more often over the last couple of years, and I love it. We're making desserts for both -- I plan to pick up ingredients for apple crisp at the Farmer's Market today (assuming I'm not too late...) and then T is going to whip up a Fromage Blanc Bavarian for Friday. (One large cake, not many little cakes like in that picture.) Then Saturday is a small Moose Day (observed) celebration, and on Sunday, I collapse.

Oh November. Usually a busy month, but this time it has just been non-stop, from the opening bell. Let's hope that at least the opening weeks of December are a little quieter...

With too much booze but lots of yummy food, and a backed up kitchen with a kickass waiter who made up for it by bringing us free fries (before he took our orders, even -- I like a server who makes pre-emptive amends) and only charging me for the burger I originally ordered rather than the steak I had to get instead when they were out of burgers. And good company, of course, although that's pretty much a given on Thursday nights. So overall, I count my evening as a rousing success.

And now it's a little late and I'm a lot tired (possibly largely because of those three drinks I had, and also because of work ughness, but I'm really not going to get into that when I'm in this state of mind), so it's time for me to head to bed. Good night, Internets.

I had thoughts on the article about the agent who asked two authors to de-gay their YA novel (a story which has now come under dispute by the agent in question; my thoughts on the resulting pushback are best summed up in this tweet by Scott Westerfeld, but I digress). It turns out that renay also had thoughts, and we bounced those thoughts around and off each other, and we posted the results over on ladybusiness:

http://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/15574.html

Your thoughts on our thoughts welcome!

lassarina asked about my experiences playing Tabletop (or what I think of as "pencil-and-dice") RPGs.

I have long enjoyed playing RPGs. My introduction to the genre came from oswulf, who was a big fan and had all kinds of systems; D&D, Gurps, and Star Frontiers are the ones I remember offhand. Starting from our pre-teen years, we would play whenever we could, which was unfortunately not on a regular enough basis to get a long campaign going. But it was still always fun, and led to, among other things, a life-long running gag regarding the dangers of chairs.

The first time I ever got involved in a regular campaign was during my college years -- not while I was away at school, but when I came home for breaks. D and S, the guys I was sort-of dating during much of that time (yes, at the same time; yes, they both knew about it; yes, it's a long story that's only tangentially related, and maybe I will tell it sometime, but not today) were both big gamers, and D invited me to join a long-running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign that he'd been running since high school, and I gladly accepted, taking on an Elf ranger-type fighter who hated humans and didn't much care for other races, either. That campaign led to many others; some of the more memorable were a couple of Star Wars games (one in which I played a hotshot Imperial pilot who defected after Yavin, and another in which I was the daughter of a spaceship manufacturer who went into business for herself shipping X-Wings to the Rebellion -- she is officially my favorite player character ever), a few rounds of Call of Cthulu (to the GM's consternation, I decided to play a woman famous for writing books about organic gardening, which is not your usual Cthulu mythos character), a Teenagers from Outer Space campaign that sadly ran for only a few sessions but featured some of the most fun I've ever had gaming (I played a goth girl who drove a black VW Thing with the best stereo system in the known universe), and a one-night D&D one shot where I ended up getting myself and most of the rest of my party killed in the gladiator ring. I've also dabbled in Mage (the character I created for that game is one I've thought about resurrecting for a story some day), Champions, and Shadowrun.

After graduation, I moved away from that group of friends, and I've never been in a position to game regularly since. A couple of years ago, I was invited to play in a short campaign run by Jed, in a system he created himself, and that was one of my best gaming experiences ever; it was more like participating in an interactive story, which when well-done is something I love. I like a GM who can think on their feet and allow the players some freedom while still guiding them down the intended path.

I've done a couple of one-shot live-action RPGs also, run by my friend E, and they were a blast. I would definitely be up for doing something like that again. One thing I've never done is acted as GM myself, and I'm perfectly fine with that -- I think I'm much happier as a player, along for the ride.

Would I play regularly again if the opportunity presented itself? Probably, although making time for regular gaming sessions is tough, as we discovered during Jed's short-term game. That's the main reason I haven't sought out a gaming group -- time. That said, if another short-term gaming opportunity comes up, you can be sure that I'll jump on it.

Finally, no discussion of RPGs would be complete for me without a mention of dice. I love dice. I love how they look, I love the feel of them in my hand, I love the sound they make when they're rolled. There's something so tactile about them, unlike any other fidget toy. I have many more sets than I reasonably could need, just because I think they're awesome.

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.

In other news, I didn't quite finish the story. Almost; I could probably post it as is, but really it needs at least one more editing run to be presentable. Fortunately (?), Yuletide signups have AO3 running so slowly that we decided to extend the deadline by a week to save everyone the frustration of trying to upload, so I have a bit of a reprieve (and so do the rest of you!). Fingers crossed, it will be ready in the next couple of days.

I've done this one before, but not for a very long time. Ganked from oswulf. (Carrying the meme forward is, as always, entirely optional.)

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

FFEX signups are open! I have signed up. Everyone else should go do that right now.

Also, I had a birthday brunch on Sunday, and it was excellent. I have awesome friends.

Also also, on Saturday I took a chocolate tour with T and amybang. This is highly recommended. Three hours, walking around downtown San Francisco, tasting different kinds of chocolate and truffles, and discovering a couple of excellent shops I didn't even know existed. Yum. And fun.

Also also also, I'm making excellent progress on Chapter 4 of Aftermath. It's only been what, a year and a half? Geez. But anyway, I am on track to post the chapter before getting my FFEX assignment! This is very exciting.

And last but not least, watch this space for an update on the Final Fantasy Big Bang project. Because a few people have asked: no, it's absolutely not too late to drop in on the initial entry and express interest! Take the poll, leave your thoughts. I hope to have a new post with a tentative schedule ready this weekend.

This was a particularly sweet long weekend because, up until Wednesday, I wasn't sure whether I was going to get it -- there was an event on Monday that I originally thought I would have to be present for, but my boss got me off the hook. Fabulous. It was too short, as such weekends always are, but it was still the break I needed to recover from the rush to get ready for the new quarter. I'll have to hit the ground running today, of course, but I might actually have the energy to do that now.

It was pretty low key -- Friday night was the school staff holiday party (yes, in January; that's the tradition at my school. In December there would be too many conflicts with finals), which was fun, if too loud. Saturday was be-lazy-around-the-house day. On Sunday, SE and SF came up for an excellent crab dinner. Monday I had made tentative plans for lunch and a movie with SE, but the long-promised winter storm blew in that morning and we decided it was too icky to go out, so I spent most of the day writing instead.

Writing Aftermath.

Anyone who has talked writing with me lately knows that Aftermath has been much on my mind in recent weeks, largely as a source of frustration. There is no question that this has been the hardest story for me to write ever: I started setting it down in October 2006, the first chapter was posted in February 2007, and it has continued to be a slow and painful process. Every year since 2007, "finish Aftermath" has been my primary fic-writing goal for the year to come, and every year I have failed to do so. Sometime, I pull it out, look at it, and put it away again; sometimes I pull it out, make edits, and put it away again; every so often, I pull it out and add a few words, get an inspiration for one scene and set it down, then get stopped dead by the next and put it away again.

Until yesterday, when I started writing, futzing around with ideas, took a couple of false starts, then suddenly hit on the right direction. And the next thing I knew, the chapter was nearly finished, and I knew not only how it was going to end but where the next chapter was going, which has been a problem throughout with Aftermath: I finish one chapter, segment, or scene with no idea what's going to happen after that. Aftermath is the first long story I ever started without a clear vision of where it was going to end. I have complained about writing endings in this space before, but that's in the context of shorts. Normally, when I start a long story, I have the image of the last paragraph in my head. It might change in the meantime, and I may have no idea how it's going to get there, but I have a destination. Aftermath began life as a short -- the first scene of the first chapter, Beclem at Operation Mi'ihen, was going to be the entire story -- but as I was writing it, the vision of the second scene (Beclem finding Nooj, who is on the run from the Travel Agency) appeared whole in my brain, and suddenly I was writing a novel. I knew from that point that Aftermath was going to be the story of the Youth League, but that was all I knew. Inspiration has come slowly, it has come in fits and starts, and it has come from talking ideas through with people, but the true leaps forward have only ever come from actually sitting down and writing.

This is a truism of writing, at least for me: inspiration may or may not come from writing, but it will never come from not-writing. I don't know why I have to keep re-learning this fact, but I do. And yet I continue to find ways to distract myself from stories that aren't coming easily -- catching up on Google Reader, chatting with people, getting sucked into the latest metafandom conversation, betaing and working on fandom projects. I don't want to give any of those things up, and I don't plan to (betaing, particularly, I think helps me to become a better writer, and so I think it should at least partly count as writing time), but I need to better learn when I am genuinely taking a break and when I am avoiding working on a story. Maybe if I hadn't avoided Aftermath for so long, it would be done by now and I could move onto the next major work with a clear conscience.

So I ask you, dear writers on the friends list: how do you tell the difference? How do you get started when the blank screen is staring you in the face and the weight of your own expectations for the story seem too much to bear? And how, short of tearing the Internet connection from the wall, do you shift your focus when the time comes? (I have thought of going offline, but I actually find the lack of a distraction to be more distracting than the distraction itself, if that makes any sense. I keep wondering if I'm missing anything. It's similar to my inability to concentrate in total silence.)

By the way, I finished the rough draft of Chapter Four this morning, and, in a first for this story, set down the first few words of Chapter Five, which ought to be the last. So the end is, possibly, in sight. Wow.