the lament of the chronically short on sleep

It's only twelve-thirty, this is way too early for me to go to bed, I should be editing "Secrets," there is stuff I want to read, I should drink some juice because vitamins yay, I need to put away laundry and consolidate my trash before my parents' flying visit tomorrow, I should--

...

Fuck it, I will do it all in the morning.

Yes.

Good night.

quick Latin question! (also editing. SO MUCH editing)

I just realized I forgot to ask for editing advice about this specifically, whoops. Ah well, better late than never?

So okay, there is one point in the remaining unpublished sections of "Secrets" wherein a person is stopping and counteracting a bit of malfunctioning magic. The words I used are "finite, pace, dormare," -- the intention is roughly, "cut it out, calm down, go to sleep," or more formally, "stop, pacify (yourself), sleep."

I don't speak or write Latin, though, so while these may be the right general verbs (I hope, anyway), I am fairly sure I screwed up something about tenses or conjugations or whatever. (Latin, why so complicated???)

If you know Latin, please take pity on me and tell me how to correctly say what I am trying to say.

I fling myself upon the goodwill of the internet!

ETA: Finite is taken straight from HP canon, as in "finite incantatem." lady_songsmith and animus_wyrmis both suggested quiesce for the "calm down" part, which sounds awesome to me. Thank you! I do not know the difference in nuance between dormire (imp. dormi?) and domo (imp. doma?), so any further advice would be greatly appreciated.

(Note: these commands are addressed to a single inanimate enchanted object that was activated by accident.)

ETA2: Thank you, via_ostiense! My three words are now officially finite, quiesce, dormi.

You are all wonderful and I am very, very grateful. :-D

---------------

I have both beta responses back and am busily adjusting stuff in response to corrections and suggestions, btw. This means that, following my pattern of posting one chapter per day to AO3 -- today is ch. 12 ("Into the Dark," aka hello there, Chamber of Secrets that we won't actually see until ch. 13 because, you know, possession) -- chapter 15 and the epilogue will go up on both AO3 and ff.net on Saturday. So exciting!

I am posting ch. 15 ("Open Doors") and the epilogue ("Isis Alone") together because the last paragraphs of ch. 15 feel so conclusively like an ending that if I don't have the epilogue right there for readers to segue into, I think the idea of the story continuing may wrong-foot readers. Which is why I waited to get ch. 15 edited until I'd finished writing the epilogue as well. They are really kind of part A and part B of a single final chapter, but the setting changes so drastically -- from Great Britain to Egypt -- and the characters involved are so different -- yes, this does mean Bill and Charlie! -- that I wanted the separation to acknowledge that shift.

...

Saturday is July 27th. I posted the first chapter of "Secrets" on FictionAlley back on May 22nd, 2002. So it will have taken me eleven years, two months, and not quite one week to finish this story. Also about 157,000 words, holy shit. That is more than twice as long as "The Way of the Apartment Manager," which up 'til now has been my only finished novel.

I mean, I knew from the word go that "Secrets" would be a novel, and probably a long one at that. I think I was figuring about twelve chapters and 100,000 words, but I had to chop both ch. 6 and ch. 14 in half (thus creating ch. 7 and ch. 15) and I tacked on an epilogue... which, come to think of it, would only make fifteen chapters. I am not sure where the sixteenth came from. *hands* It is a mystery! But still. A lot of words, a lot of work, a lot of world-building, and way more discussion of ethics and prejudice and the differences between guilt and responsibility than I'd expected. Plus an excess of italics and a lot of commas and ellipses that were, in retrospect, very weirdly placed. (I have been attempting to weed the worst of those out as I cross-post.)

I lost the thread of this post at some point. That keeps happening to me when I try to put my feelings about finishing "Secrets" into coherent words. It's been too big an albatross for too much of my life to really see it clear and whole just yet. Maybe by Christmas I'll have some perspective.

But right now, I have things to edit. So I will go do that. Because editing is good for the soul. :-)