wherein Liz defeats Ladystuck! (and then pleads for a beta)

So I got my Ladystuck fic finished and posted. This took a bit of doing, as my internet connection has been intermittently failing all night -- and this is on Verizon's end, not mine or my upstairs neighbors' -- but I was able to get it up before the deadline, albeit in a weirdly truncated and broken-code fashion. I have since restored the missing sections and fixed the coding errors. :-)

I would like to have somebody look it over for general narrative flow and character voice issues. Is anybody willing to beta-read a story about female Homestuck characters that is between 3,000 and 8,000 words long?

Ithaca is cold

This is what Cascadilla Creek looked like at 11am this morning, January 7 2014.

When I leaned on the railing of the Tioga St. bridge to take the photo, I heard a loud QUACK! from almost directly underneath me… and sure enough, there was a trio of possibly suicidal ducks swimming in ice-filled water. (You can’t see the third; it swam out of view under the bridge before I could snap the photo.)



Ducks are supposed to be migratory, dammit. Migrate! Fly south! Ithaca is not a good place for you right now.

(The creek had completely iced over by the time I walked home from work around 7:30pm, incidentally. These frigid temperatures following heavy snow and a warm spell have produced some really nasty ice jams downstream where the local creeks flow into Cayuga Lake. A bunch of storm sewers in Northside have backed up, flooding several streets and swamping a lot of people’s basements -- and thus killing their furnaces, yikes!)

3 things: smoke shop hours, Ladystuck, and family visits

1. The Commons reconstruction project, which was hoped for lo these many years and finally manifested in 2013, is apparently on track. Which means that phase 1 -- rip up the central "street" part of the pedestrian zone and do lots of cool-but-invisible utility work -- is more or less done, and phase 2 -- resurface the whole shebang, put in new lampposts, plant new trees and hedges, and build pavilions, benches, and other features -- will commence in the spring once the weather isn't vicious evil cold. But for the moment, the whole area is a giant unfinished construction site, and that has discouraged a lot of casual foot traffic to the smoke shop.

In response, we are now closing at 7pm until spring -- which means sometime in March or April, exact dates yet to be determined. Boss Lady and I are doing some sales analysis to hopefully convince Mr. Speakerphone that this should only be a temporary measure and not a permanent shift, but for the moment all my sense of time has been thrown off. Also, all my shifts now start at 11am instead of noon. It's weird.

On the bright side, it does mean that if things go wrong, I have oodles of spare time after I lock the doors and cash out my register. So if, say, a couple comes in and wants to buy a pack of cigarettes with eight dollars in loose pennies -- which happened tonight, and I gritted my teeth and said, "You really have to stop doing this, but I will let you slide this one last time" -- I can do half my closing checklist after 7pm instead of before it, without making my work day feel like it's eleven hours long.

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2. Last night I picked up a Ladystuck pinch hit, mostly because one highly specific prompt from the recipient's list pinged me exactly where I live. I'm not sure the resulting story will be obvious, because the element I leapt upon is something from an original fiction world that I've never managed to write an actual story in, nor have I posted any world-building files online. But oh man, talk about your childhood dreams! (Literally, come to think of it. *wry*)

I made some basic edits to my assigned Ladystuck fic tonight, and have begun a preliminary outline for the pinch hit. I have Wednesday off work, so I should be able to get a bunch of solid writing time, even though I will be in and out of the apartment doing laundry during the afternoon.

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3. My mom will probably be coming up for a brief visit this weekend, ostensibly to attend a Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble concert for which I have two tickets. The exact scheduling will depend on weather, but conceivably she could arrive Saturday evening and stay until Monday morning. (The concert is Sunday afternoon.) I have removed myself from the RE teaching roster on the 12th in preparation, and already arranged to have Saturday evening and all day Sunday off from work. I'm not sure what we will do between church Sunday morning and the concert at 4pm, but I'm sure we'll think of something.

Oh, hey, I should check the Johnson Museum and see if they have any exhibitions that sound interesting. :-)