wherein Liz gets to work on "Guardian" ch. 15... tomorrow

Thank you to everyone who voted in the poll! It looks like I will be writing "The Guardian in Spite of Herself" ch. 15 this week. Hopefully I will be able to finish it by Sunday night, but since all I have right now is a rough-sketch outline (one paragraph per scene), I make no guarantees. I will do my damndest to finish it by next Sunday, though.

Assuming the characters are willing to stick to my outline, I have one Yukiko-POV scene, two Naga-POV scenes, and one Eiji-POV scene. Yukiko and Eiji are stuck in "people talking about stuff" sections, but Naga's plot thread is starting to pick up speed and, if I have managed my timing right, will even end on a cliffhanger. *evil grin*

And now to bed. With luck the ambient temperature has cooled enough for me to achieve sleep free of unpleasant dreams, but I am not especially hopeful. (I get nightmares and/or frustration dreams when the air temperature is too high, which I suspect is related to the way people get nightmares while feverish. Yet another reason I hate summer!)

frustration dreams (and a mermaid story I refuse to write)

The ambient temperature had not, in fact, cooled enough to forestall frustration dreams.

I dreamed that I was walking home from work, heading north on Tioga St. Every single block, I was interrupted by some person or incident that held me up for anywhere from twenty minutes to a couple hours. Probably this means I kept having random unrelated dreams and then slipping back in a recurring dream of walking home, but the practical effect is that I woke up every twenty minutes to an hour itching with annoyance.

A couple of the interruptions were fairly interesting in their own right, I suppose. Halfway down one block, a random guy in an SUV enlisted me to keep watch over his young children while he ran off to do something vitally important but also (so he assured me) very quick and simple. He lied. I ended up watching a 90-minute animated movie that was clearly a knock-off of Disney's The Little Mermaid, though it took enough weird turns that it was also clearly its own story.

(Roughly speaking, replace Ursula with a talking giant octopus who kept all other octopuses in his thrall somehow or other; replace Ariel with a more practical and less flighty mermaid who had a habit of rescuing lost sea creatures and playing veterinarian; replace Prince Eric with a marine biologist; and have the dramatic climax come when the mermaid's father uses magic to turn the marine biologist into a merman and the baby octopuses the mermaid rescued turn against their overlord. The mermaid does turn human for a while, though, courtesy of a bargain with the evil octopus... and don't ask me why an octopus knows magic. *hands* And I refuse to write that story, no matter how interesting it might be.)

Another block or two further toward home, I was walking past a construction site when I noticed a bunch of boxes and boards blocking off the sidewalk. The gate to the construction site was open, so I started to pick up the obstruction and move it just inside the fence where it wouldn't inconvenience people. I was just finishing when a county sherriff's car pulled up, headlights blazing and siren wailing, and the sherriff jumped out and asked me what I thought I was doing, was I associated with such-and-such criminal group, did I know anything about thus-and-so drug smuggling ring, and put your hands up real fast, missy!

I woke up before I learned how that was going to end.

The other interruptions were mostly stuff like highway-speed traffic on a cross street, giant puddles I had to walk far, far around, and once, I think, a parade. Nothing very exciting or story-oriented.

"Guardian" progress report

I've only written one sentence so far, but in the process of checking a couple of things against my master timeline, I realized I was planning to drag the caravan journey out too long. I have now tightened the trip up by two days. This is useful both because it gets me to more interesting stuff faster, and because it saves me from having to invent two days worth of filler. There is only so much "Let's watch Sasuke angst; angst, Sasuke, angst!" I can stand to write, and I'm sure you don't want to read pages and pages of that either. *grin*

Now back to actual writing