[Fic] "The Way of the Apartment Manager" index page -- Naruto

It's internet housekeeping time again. Sorry for cluttering your reading page! (You may see a few more posts of this nature pop up over the next week or two. I'm trying to rationalize my fic directory posts -- specifically, I'd like them to point to Dreamwidth table-of-contents posts rather than to LJ memory subcategories. For one thing, I can put more information in an actual post! For another... well, LJ. *sigh*)

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The Way of the Apartment Manager: 72,000 words, Dec. 2004 - Oct. 2005. Ayakawa Yukiko retired from being a ninja, and she's come to terms with that. Then the Third Hokage summons her for an assignment that will change her life. AU story, set six years pre-manga. Social ostracism and discussion thereof.

"Apartment Manager" is the first story in an AU continuity. It is followed by a WIP novel -- "The Guardian in Spite of Herself" -- and several sidestories. The basic idea is that when Naruto moves into his own apartment, the Third Hokage asks Ayakawa Yukiko, the building's owner and manager, to look after him rather than leaving him completely on his own. Yukiko is a mostly retired ninja, but Naruto catalyzes her to change her life. Then those changes begin to snowball out to the rest of the village.

The other AU shift is Kakashi's age. When I started writing these stories, I'd never seen Kishimoto's official timelines, so I guessed people's ages based on their appearance and characterization in the manga. I was pretty close with Iruka... but four or five years off with Kakashi. Unfortunately, by the time anyone pointed that out to me, his age had become integral to several character interactions -- for example, Yukiko treats him as a contemporary rather than an annoying teenager -- so I decided not to go back and make wholesale changes.

For a pre-canon story starring an original female character with another original female character in one of the prime supporting roles, "Apartment Manager" wound up ridiculously popular. I think it was one of those 'right story, right time' things that I could never duplicate if I tried. Also, it is absurdly fluffy for a Naruto story, violence and occasional angst notwithstanding.

I advise reading this story on AO3 or ff.net rather than on my journal, since the journal posts were essentially public beta drafts and were noticeably revised before being posted elsewhere. (The comments might be of some historical interest, I suppose.)

( The Way of the Apartment Manager - Table of Contents )

*dusts hands* There, all tidy!

Hmm. I think I should do "Tides" next... which is also a good reason to format that fic and crosspost it to AO3, now that I think of it. Yes. I will work on that tomorrow.

wherein Liz recovers from a headache and rambles about painkillers

I'm not sure if it was the inadequate sleep last night or the way I didn't drink any caffeine until after 3pm, but by the time I left work and headed home I had a vicious, awful headache -- the kind where your head feels like it's in a vise under constant pressure. And then I shoveled my sidewalk. (We got about 3 inches of snow in Ithaca, as of 8pm. It's nice being far enough from the coast that we only get the fringes of nor'easters.)

The shoveling was not a huge amount of work, but there was one particular combination of motion-and-sound -- when I was scraping stuck snow from the pavement, rather than just lifting the easy surface bits -- that made everything a thousand times worse until I had to stop every few feet because my head hurt so badly I thought I might vomit.

Ugh.

So I took two extra-strength Tylenol and slept for an hour and a half, after which I carefully drank a caffeinated beverage with dinner instead of, say, milk or water or wine. It mostly worked. There's still a little lingering tension around my temples and forehead, but the actual pain is gone, to say nothing of the nausea.

I hate headaches. Fortunately, I find they respond well to Tylenol (aka acetaminophen -- paracetamol for Brits, I think?). For me, Tylenol is excellent for headaches and fever but has no effect on cramps or joint aches, just as ibuprofen does nothing for headaches or fever but is my lifesaver when I have bad cramps, a complaining knee, or the full-body aches associated with flu and bad colds. And aspirin reduces fevers, but I have never found it useful for any kind of pain.

Bodies are so idiosyncratic in their reactions to medicine.