hey guys! I love you all, immensely. You make my days 500% easier to get through, and are incredibly funny and smart and kind and make me think about things I might not have thought about before. I'm incredibly thankful for all of you. Thank you so much! I hope all of you who do Thanksgiving have a fabulous Thanksgiving, and that everyone else has a fabulous day! <3333333333

(on a much less important note, would someone be willing to beta a Doctor Who/Chronicles of Narnia crossover? I'm almost done, it'll be at least 1.5K but I'm not sure what else.)

ETA: things I remember from reading posts that I forgot to comment on.

congrats simpleflower on winning NaNo!

zempasuchil OMG AVATAAAAR. your post flooded me with memories - just watch, in about four days there'll be a ridiculously long comment on it from me. ZUKO, BABY.

hi guys, this is just a short drop-by.

+ I have been reading my friends list, just not commenting on much of anything. time time time! I has none of it. sorry.

+ I kind of sort of really hate my period. cramps, I have plenty of.

+ nanowrimo is actually going pretty well. I'm still a little bit behind, but not by enough to actually be worried about, especially if I can get in 3K today (which, uh, I can, since I can write 1000 words in 15 minutes, consistently).



so yeah. I've been keeping an eye on the progress of those of you who are doing it, but I'm just curious - where is everyone? wordcount, how's the story going?

+ something is totally relevant to interests! I am writing, for my English class, a 1-1.5K paper on social interaction on the internet and how it can totally be good for teenagers and other such things. obviously, I'll be drawing on personal experience - I found a journal called 'Computers in Human Behavior' (!!!) which has several good articles, and I was wondering if any of you knew any good articles I could use. I'd ask for blog posts, but citing them would be... problematic. :P

hello all, this is Betsy! I'm currently away from the LJ doing:

a) writing NaNo. *assorted screams and moans in the background*
b) reading the transcripts of/watching Stargate: Atlantis.
c) procrastinating in other ways.
d) having a nervous breakdown.
e) hiding from people.
f) ALL OF THE ABOVE. *manic eyes*

Be back later!

My sincere congratulations, ladies, and good luck!

 

15325 / 50000 words. 31% done!

Still behind, but catching up! Off to neglect things more, work on school (I signed up for my spring classes today - General Psych, Human Bio, and Lit. and Comp.), and then write a lot hopefully.

+ first, to get out of my system: oh my god I hate homophobes so much sometimes. SO MUCH. agh agh agh. in World View class last Friday, the question was "What happens when an individual's rights trump the community's rights?" and a girl answered that "It's like with homosexuals! Their right to be homosexual shouldn't trump the community's right to not be associated with homosexuals because that's just nasty!" (paraphrased- she was a lot more roundabout about it). I did my best not to punch her in the face, and while I was doing that my teacher (bless her) pointed out that what if the majority of the community was homosexual? does their majority right then trump yours? and then she and her mother (who sits in on the class and helps out) were both like "but it's so wrong! and there are books! in the library! on homosexuals! where anyone could read them!" and once again I tried very hard not to hurt them. I was quite reasonable! I was unaware I could be reasonable in the midst of such rage.

I still wanted to punch them though.

+ had an anti-social weekend, didn't want the week to start, but oh well.

+ ... I suck at staying on track on anything. Including NaNo. I always manage to come back at the end, but I just don't manage to stay on track. have to get a lot of wordcount in today, and stop procrastinating.

+ SCHOOL. ACK.

+ ETA: OH YEAH. As part of my procrastination regime for NaNo, I've been binge-watching The Sarah Jane Adventures, which I've meant to watch for ages and of course neglected to do until I didn't actually have any time for it. But it's loads of fun, and I adore Luke, and I miss Maria and her dad but Rani's pretty nice, and Clyde reminds me of Mickey, who I loved to pieces. And Sarah Jane! How can you not love her?

+ do you remember my neighbor? I talked about her a while back, because she was dying and I loved her. I never did say it, but she did die soon after that, and I just now wanted to say that when she was young, she went up the Rhine River on Hitler's yacht with her husband and his regiment, and it was her birthday, and the war was over.

+ things I am never doing when I am older: taking romantic advice from any of my older siblings.

+ things I did do today: called colleges, asked about gap years and transferring credits from a community college. checked out Oxford and Cambridge's requirements for admission, because it is a possibility, even if a vague one.

+ I've been thinking about potential careers, because hi! graduating from high school in a year and a half, need to start figuring out a major. and you know, I really want a job that I can help people in. like, really help people. and I mean, I could be a social worker/counselor and still be in a field that's totally relevant to my interests. it's a definite possibility, and one I'm interested in. I want to help people.

+ Poetry, you guys. I've got 97 poetry bookmarks right now and the number is only growing, because I'm hunting poetry down tonight. Yay! it's being inspiration for my NaNo. Speaking of which.

+ NaNoWriMo is being... interesting. I got about six thousand words down and then today I started writing and *bam* suddenly I'm writing in second person about Jared, who's hardly supposed to be the MC, and it's all this weird, prose-poetry like stuff, but it's a load of fun to write and I'm really enjoying cathartically throwing my own issues into the mix. So, two tiny sections of it that sort of go together. (omg why am I writing in second this is not supposed to happen! maybe it is bleedover from my crossover exchange? uh.)

( somewhere in Virginia )

you guys I'm pretty sure I'm certifiably insane.

Just dropping a note - there's a campaign going on to raise money to donate classical books to schools in the Philippines who have lost many/all of their books due to the four typhoons that have hit them. The government is replacing schoolbooks but does not have the money to replace any other books. Just wanted to spread the word.

the icon, by the way, is completely appropriate to the research I'm doing for school right now. and I'm off to class! hopefully getting a few thousand words in tonight.

I hope everyone's November is going fabulously so far!

oh hai guiz.

so, yeah, this is the obligatory 'IT'S NOVEMBER' post in which I tell you things you already know. like the fact that I'm crazy and am doing NaNoWriMo again this year and so will be extremely busy and will probably miss half your posts and/or forget to comment on them. sorry! I'll probably emerge from my cave in December, at which point I'm really hoping I'll not only have finished NaNo but three of my classes and the crossover exchange. so yeah.

in World View class on Friday, depression came up. I wanted so badly to be able to talk coherently about it and explain some things, because one of the girls was being an idiot about it, but my brain was too busy completely freaking to handle talking about it beyond telling her quietly "You are not qualified to deal with someone who is suicidally depressive. Make sure they get help." I want so much to be able to talk about these things in RL as well as online, but I just fall to pieces whenever I have to talk about it. I think mostly I was worried if I talked too much about it I would let personal details slip?

Things wot I am reading:

Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore. What I find really fascinating is that this really brilliant woman, Germaine de Stael, clever, witty, talented, was also against women's rights. And she wasn't the only one of these women to be against women's rights! it's a really odd dichotomy. apparently it's partly because of Rousseau, who was popular? and part of the argument against the old Regime was that it had let women gain positions of power (even though this wasn't really true - women gained an illusion of power, but they had almost no real control, and to gain it they had to sacrifice their reputations). so yeah, I find that strange.

THINGS THAT ARE NECESSARY TO KNOW.

movementmvt is zempasuchil 's brainchild, and is awesome, though I'm pretty sure those two things are mutually inclusive. ANYWAYS. the idea is that fandom/academia is totally OTP, and that revolutions/movements are awesome. always. the lady herself says: "so I haven't done anything to it yet but KNOW THIS: It is a comm for your squee and content of the academia/fiction kind, of stories based on Movements (social, historical, literary, ideological, meaningful!) and Movements that stories should be based on. post/link to relevant fics, ask questions, share interesting information, generally have fun!" fandom/academiaaaaaa!11!!!one! in short, it is AWESOME and there will be fabulous discussion of fandom and academia and fantastic recs, so you should join in. because of awesomeness! inherent in the system!

In other much-less-exciting news, I got 108 on my latest math test. also, on my English midterm (which was an in-class essay) a 100/A+. With the comments "brilliant" and then at the end "I continue to be impressed with your high quality of writing and with the maturity of your ideas and expression. You are a true intellectual." The thing that makes this totally relevant? The essay was written in response to the prompt "What technology has changed your life, and how?" and I wrote about the internet and fandom. crossing the fandom/RL divide in academia! wheee! interestingly enough, tonight and last Monday we are working on writing in class an analysis/rebuttal of someone's essay that online communication is empty and meaningless and ruining our teenagers. yeah, I'm doing a rebuttal. whee!

I would like to tell you A Story about my family, or rather my family's pets. It begins Once Upon A Time, because it was a few years ago and that is a long time ago now, when we had chickens, and then all of the chickens were killed by something except for one. One chicken, who was white.

Also crazy.

You think I'm exaggerating? I am totally not. That chicken was almost as crazy as as our duck Katrinka* had been. For one, it fought our cat and dog over a lizard. For two, it thought it was a dog and tried to come into the house and sleep on the dog's blankets and hang around on the front porch. It did not cluck. It made extremely strange noises that sounded like what a chicken might sound like if it was trying to bark. I cannot emphasize enough the part where it tried to come into our house. I mean, some of our other chickens had done this, yes, but only a few feet in, and they fled as soon as you looked at them. This chicken would come ten or twenty feet in and stand there staring at you until you noticed, and it wouldn't leave unless you chased it out.

We named it C.D.C. - Carnivorous Dog Chicken - and buried it when it died, a little worried that it might come back as a zombie. It hasn't.

Yet.

*Katrinka made herself a giant nest out of leaves. After she had laid all of her eggs, every day she would roll all of the eggs out the nest, move the nest a few inches, and then roll the eggs back in. She ended up moving it about ten feet total during the incubation. Only three ducklings hatched, and because she was crazy she didn't give them the oil they needed to float and two of them drowned in a one-foot deep pool. The last one got eaten by a snake. Her mother was Katrina, and they looked almost identical, except for the part where her mother wasn't insane.

(so, telling weird stories about my family/pets is apparently my way of coping with a mix of boredom (I can't go anywhere yet), pain (killlll the flu!), and extreme frustration (hi, procrastination/anti-feminism creeps/no SPN episode/being way behind on school!). sorry?)

WHAT WHAT guysssss! is it true that there is no SPN episode tonight? none at ALL?

goddamnit whyyyyyyyy. the week I need it most!

*sulks*

my sister, being awesome, left her laptop behind for me yesterday and today, and now I'm doing school and/or writing. a lot of writing! so at least this is good for something, yes?

sick. possibly flu? not really sure. head hurts, bones hurt, throat hurts, you get the gist. not going to class tonight or tomorrow - hopefully I'm in shape for Friday.

garh.

I'm listening to Glee music  (the mash-ups from 1.06! both the boys and girls did such a fantastic job, and there's a boy's version of the Halo/Walking On Sunshine too! this is fantastic) and watching SPN. wow, you guys, how did one show get three of the most talented, handsomest actors on it? one show. it's ridiculous!

You guys you guys. I'm hosting comment_fic this week, and my theme today was 'on the road.' And as a sample prompt, I gave "Merlin, author's choice, road trip AU." And mariana_oconnor (on her writing journal definewisdom ) wrote a long, beautiful one called "Until We Run Out of Road." It's a modern AU, Merlin driving across England in the days after Will dies with a figment-of-his-imagination-Will in the passenger seat, and Arthur comes into it, and it's really lovely. From the back seat, Will laughs. He sounds a little hysterical. Merlin thinks that being dead will probably do that to you.

+ Lass wrote more Narnia Durkheim fic, which is naturally awesome. Forms & Foundations. Susan & Edmund. This world tells her, You are Susan Pevensie, a whole equal to the sum of her parts, and she wonders what that entails.

+ Florida got a cold snap in the past few days and my hands are freezing. off. I'm not even really kidding about this - I have poor circulation in my hands and feet, and I pretty much always have cold hands, but in the cold weather they just don't warm up. at all. it makes typing a little annoying.

+ my little procrastination habit? really bad this past week. feels like I'm physically incapable of doing school unless there is a tangible deadline, and even then it's close. I finished my 1.5K essay due tonight about half an hour before it was due. makes me feel stupid. I've got to stop that.

+ things are like... shifting? I dunno. I mean, I took the PSAT, which is suddenly feeling like a tangible piece of my possible history and every time I think about it I start worrying about the questions and if I did well enough, because my mom wants me to get the Merit Scholarship. and I mean, fuck, you have to be really really smart to do that and I just don't know if I'm that good. I could be, I think. I should be. but I've been distracted and unable to concentrate and just, fuck, you guys. if I want to go to a good college without pulling a couple hundred scholarship strings, I need that Merit Scholarship. I need the prestige that comes with it so that the colleges want me. agh. I don't want to be stressed by this but inexplicably, I am. I have a year and a half before I graduate highschool! I'm planning on taking a gap year, maybe two! I should not be worrying about this shit yet. *deep breaths*

+ on a much more cheerful note, MUSIC. "The Captain and the Hourglass" by Laura Marling. It's kind of melancholy, kind of hopeful, and I love it a lot because of these two lines - "He’s done with all this bullshit, he’s going back to war, / If Heaven is as Heaven does then this is Hell for sure." Also, because Kathy recommended it to me and now I can't stop listening, "Citadel" by Anna Nalick. And naturally, my very own theme song for cloudy days, "Defying Gravity" from Wicked. Complete with kickass Firefly vid, of course. Also a lot of Vienna Teng, because she has a gorgeous voice.

+ now I need to go to bed. so I can wake up and take a math test. oh shit. one that I haven't really studied for aghkshgdlg. I shall have to wake up early.

so I had a FABULOUS birthday and I am spending most of today lounging around, doing some housework and schoolwork and trying not to fall asleep. heh.

yesterday! my dad's birthday present for me was subs for lunch and pizza for dinner, and I'd cajoled mom into letting me make coconut cake on Thursday, so there was lots of good food! also running around and stuff!

and, to top it all of, when I got home Lass had written me fic. Revolutionsverse fic. RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME FIC ahgksldghldskjfs. YOU SHOULD ALL GO READ IT. wheeee!

SO! zempasuchil posted a link to you are here: the journal of creative geography (!!!!!!) which made me whimper with glee because CREATIVE GEOGRAPHY oh academia you can be so RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME SOMETIMES. ahkhdlgkhsdlkfjsdlg

but I am busy I CANNOT TRY TO WRITE FOR THIS JOURNAL NOOOO I have xover_exchange due in two months, and one of said months is NOVEMBER during which I am doing NANO (I got my prompt for the crossover exchange, btw, AND OMG YAAAAAAY I cannot give things away but I shall have LOADS AND LOADS of fun!) and then there's the SPN fic I've been writing off-and-on for a little bit with marycontraire 's birthday in mind (it's going to be late, but most everything from me is late these days D:) and well at least I finally finished that Susan fic and posted it! because the next three months there is going to be one hell of a lot of writing! NaNo = 50K, xover_exchange = at least 1.5K but considering what I want to write will be probably at least double that, the SPN fic is threatening to be long if I can't curtail it (but I don't really WANT to), and the imaginative geography thing if I do manage to get around to it (which I had better!) promises to be full of ridiculousness and squeeing and stuff. *headdesk* 

Happy two-days-after-your-birthday, marycontraire ! I'm sorry this is late, for some weird reason I thought your birthday was today (my brain is scattered). eventually there will be SPN girls-being-awesome fic for you! <333333333333 you're awesome!

Title: lovely in my sight
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia
Characters/Pairings: Susan.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Death, as this goes through LB.
Summary: Susan, from LWW through to LB. Things she refuses to remember.
Disclaimer: Not mine, they're Lewis'.
Author's Note: The title is from Mnemosyne by Trumbull Stickney, specifically the lines "I had a sister lovely in my sight: / Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre; / We sang together in the woods at night." Part of me now wants to write more Narnia, just so I can title it from the first line of the poem, "It's autumn in the country I remember." I've been working on this off and on for a lonnng while.

+

so, yesterday I went to the beach, with Sam and Kat and Esther and Matt-Esther's-boyfriend and his friend Adel. mostly it was lots of fun, and I really enjoyed myself. except for The Incident.

we'd been having what more or less passed as a mud-slinging war over the sand castle Kat, Esther, Sam and I were building and the two older guys kept trying to knock down, particularly Adel. one of those kid's surf boards got involved and somehow I ended up on my back under it with all of Adel's weight pressing me down. I hadn't been aware I could panic that badly. if he hadn't been being chased off by Kat by the time I got out from under it, I might have gone into instinctive defense mode and actually hurt him, particularly as I was also in pain (the center of my back was on a mound of sand and something popped). the mix of a larger man and a trapped space freaked the hell out of me, and I know that Adel would never voluntarily hurt me - he's a really sweet kid, honestly. it was just... scary.

heck, I can't even think of it now without feeling cold and my heartrate going up.

in much more wonderfulness, someone did a picspam solely about how completely ridiculously BLUE Misha Collins' eyes are as Castiel. and yes, it is as awesome as it sounds.