Words of Wood

Hi, new friends! (Also hi old friends, ilu too!) I feel I should start this post by saying I still have slots in my December meme which I would love to fill :)

I have been ridiculously busy lately. Small children in the daytime, different small children in the evenings. I'm still at the Autism school and still absolutely loving it. And I'm there until at least the middle of January! One of the fun things about agency TA work is getting to go into loads of schools and get a really broad range of experiences, but it's also really nice to have the next few months locked down in one place.

(I was sorely tempted to fill this post entirely with little anecdotes of adorable things my class said/did, but they are probably vastly less interesting to people who aren't me and are less fascinated by small children than I am, so I will spare you.)

I have also been reading lots of new-to-me books lately. The Mirror Empire, the four current Steerswoman novels, Twilight Robbery, the Graceling series... I highly recommend all of these. (Steerswoman subjectively slightly less than the others because of worldbuilding quirks that have been frustrating me.) Then after those, a few days ago I started reading Guy Gavriel Kay's latest, River of Stars... and put it down after less than a chapter. The lack of women kept jarring me out of the story. THIS IS A FANTASY AUTHOR I REALLY LIKE. READING WOMEN-WRITTEN FANTASY HAS RUINED ME FOR DUDE-FANTASY. Even dude fantasy authors I usually really like, apparently :P So I re-read Ancillary Sword instead and will go back to GGK sometime later. I got used to the casual inclusion of women in key roles all over the place!

Writing: I am finally approaching the end of the first draft of the story I started writing for nanowrimo last year! :P This is even less impressive once I tell you that it's in the 8-12/YA SFF age category, which has recommended word counts of 40-60k. But it's now the longest story I've ever written, having beaten out both the White Collar apocafic and a long-ago CSI:NY one.

On a related note, I accidentally started writing a multichapter White Collar bookshop AU. I know. I JUST MISSED WRITING THEM TOO MUCH.

fandom_stocking reveals are UP and I am AT WORK and I am literally going to explode with impatience before the end of the day when I can read them all, AHHHHH!

(Basically this is a placeholder to say THANK YOU SO MUCH I LOVE YOU ALL and me not commenting for a few hours is most definitely NOT something I am doing by choice!!)

(I'm totally going to be taking a desk lunch today.)

I may have gone and bought an Eee netbook purely so I can take it to cafes and steal their wifi, since we're not being connected up until the start of October. It's very shiny. I'm currently trying to decide on what to name it. (All of my tech shinies get names, except my phone for some reason. So far I have/had Lucy, Athena, Rodney, Zelenka, Osiris and Matilda.) This one may end up being Miles, because it's little and clever.

Also, it has spellcheck! I apologise to everyone who's had messages typed from my phone. I am a terrible speller.

In my internet-less state I've been doing quite a lot of writing. I've also finally got around to typing up a lot of stuff from my notebook that had been languishing for a while. And I'm still aiming for a blackout on my hc_bingo card. So, things I am currently working on that I'm hoping will eventually see the light of LJ (as opposed to things I have which I'm more meh about):

~ I am resurrecting my Diana (and Neal)-centric casefic, which is a crossover with Criminal Minds and has Diana/Garcia as a ship. I came up with this ship in January, and I will go down with it :P It also has dead bodies and explosions. I really like writing explosions. Going to be a while before it's finished, though.

~ A wingfic I started ages ago for a prompt from elrhirhoden. This is pretty much ready to post, actually, although I think it should really have a sequel because it doesn't really go anywhere much.

~ One where Neal wakes up in a prison cell and can't remember the last few months.

~ An apocafic. Of which I have written very little, but I have plans for more. Whee, doomsday viruses. It has Peter and Neal and Diana trekking to try and find El and Mozzie, who managed to escape the city before it was quarantined.

~ Some Diana h/c I promised to surreal_14 in April *headdesks*

~ A fic I promised to sholio at around the same time *headdesks some more* Neal goes off the radar to find Peter, who's gone missing, and (naturally) gets into trouble himself. Then Diana and Mozzie have to team up to try and solve the whole thing. This is going really slowly because I keep making a mess of it, argh.

~ Various random bits of h/c. Mostly for Neal (shockingly), and being written to various prompts around the place.

I wonder how long I can stay in Burger King on their wifi before they kick me out...

Meme-time, apparently.

Give me a character and I'll tell you a piece of my personal headcanon.

From anything. (If you give me a character I don't know, I guess I'll make something up? :P)

Also, I have successfully moved out of a house. The guy who was doing the inventory report was very impressed with how clean we made it :D (Everyone will be glad when I've finally finished with all the moving and stop talking about it.)

It is so warm. Amusingly, all the WIPs I'm invested in involve being cold, so I haven't been able to write them at the moment XD I'm not complaining about the heat, though -- I vastly prefer it to being cold, which I've spent most of this year being. So I've been spending a load of time sitting in the field down the road with my notebook and writing stuff.

(Except for the past couple of days when I've been on my computer stabbing my wcpairings fic with a stick. FEELINGS ARE COMPLICATED AND MESSY CAN I JUST MAKE NEAL FALL OFF A BUILDING NOW.)

Other stuff: I watched White Collar with theoret. I like watching stuff I'm fannish about with other people who are fannish, it makes it so much fun. Also her mum gave me a German Friendship Cake. It is a self-replicating cake, guys. There will be endless cake! (helle, you will love it!)

I also have somewhere to put my stuff now that doesn't involve me paying extortionate self-storage prices! :D But I need to start looking for jobs. I'm rather terrified of the prospect. Interviews. Interviews are absolutely terrifying. Bleh.

Oh, I keep forgetting to ask if anyone else is on Twitter. I had a spare account (for one of my Echo Bazaar characters) so I'm now using that for friends and stuff. Not that I don't love my other one, but it's so full of politics and activism that, although it's great as a literal news feed, updates from people I know get buried! So, I'm @frithinthorns, add me :) (Warning: I'm not particularly interesting :P)

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I shall finish this rather disjointed post by pasting in an extract from an email my mother sent me earlier:

"We went to Charmouth, but all the beaches were closed because of the rock fall where that poor woman died last week. Anyway I am afraid we were naughty and went on the beach anyway, so we had the beach to ourselves most of the day until some other disobedient people came along in the late afternoon. The coast guard came along to inspect the cliffs and they said 'Do you know this beach is closed?' and we said 'Yes' but they didn't tell us to move. Then the harbour master came along in a boat and said the same thing. Then later they came back and took our names and phone number, I suppose so they would know if there was a rockfall and we were dead, who we were."

THIS IS WHERE I GET IT FROM, GUYS.

I do not like job interviews. This is my thing I have learnt today. Although, it was nicer than every other interview I've ever had (I'm not counting TeachFirst under 'job' because it bore way more similarities to my school scholarship interview than it did to this one.)

Anyway, I am waiting for the Odeon to ring me back, which they said they'd do this evening, but it's now gone half eight, so I probably didn't get it. JOYS. Not sure where to try next - Waterstones, maybe. Bleh, it was much easier not being an adult.

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My "supposed to be working on" fics are being so uncooperative at the moment. (Also, I cannot write sex scenes. This appears to be a fact.) Well, my wcpairings fic is mostly done, but I'm kind of really annoyed at my BB fic. I'm still writing it, but I'm really doubting it's going to hit 10,000 words. ARGH. I used to be able to write long-fic (I think my longest hit 35k, and not that much even happened in it! It was just some characters being slowly crushed in a collapsed building!).

Although, all my long ones were chaptered, which I guess might have had something to do with it -- I did have most of it written before I posted, though, so it's not like I kept on making up new stuff. What I did enjoy doing was writing up to cliffhangers. Because I'm kind of a terrible person in many ways.

Also, I kind of feel my BB fic isn't really interesting enough for a BB. It's just one of my general stories, but it goes on for longer. (And has actual plot.) So maybe I'll just finish it and post it normally.

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I have not much else to say? Oh, except that I've watched a season and a bit of Hawaii Five-0 and I really, really like it. It's extremely fun and happy, and I love the characters. So that's nice, especially as I ended up massively disappointed with Grimm.

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