stuff done: Thursday-Friday (the Happy Birthday edition *wry*)

1. Finished reading Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India by Diana L. Eck (third edition). This is a short book, only about 90 pages and heavy on photographs (for obvious reasons), but very informative! It's the kind of basic 'here is a concept, here are some things it means to the people who hold it/do it, here are some ways it plays out in practice' introduction to a foundational cultural practice/assumption that is really helpful in understanding anything higher level, but which very often seems to get overlooked and thus leaves people from other cultures floundering without a framework and misinterpreting that higher level stuff because they're using a mismatched set of cultural assumptions.

I am definitely keeping this one.

2. Shoveled the sidewalk when I got home from Not the IRS, because apparently NOBODY ELSE bothered to do that during the FOURTEEN HOURS I was commuting or working. *side-eyes neighbors, hard*

( more items under the cut )

...

And now I should be heading to bed, because I have work on Saturday and I would like to finally shake my not-quite-cold rather than let it develop into a full illness. *wry*

wherein Liz makes a writing project to-to list

Okay. In order of priority, my current writing project lineup goes like this:

1. Finish Cotton Candy Bingo prompt for wistfulmemory. I know roughly where it's going (as in, I know why the unexpected ambassadors are in the Mountains of Morning, and I know Kazul's going to generally agree to their request/offer), and I have finally managed to find the right arrangement of story elements to lead up to that conversation, but I still need to fit some other stuff around the edges in a hopefully logical way and come up with a good closing paragraph or two, so... a few more days' work, probably. (It's currently at ~1,850 words, FYI. It needs at least 500 more to wrap up, quite possibly more like 1,000. We'll see how that plays out in practice.)

2. Finish editing "Second Chances." Again, I know roughly what I need to insert, and where; the trick will be making it all read smoothly without disrupting what's already there. Another few days.

3. Quick-sketch outline for Susan's very belated gift story. Just set up the scenario, the main characters, and the problem/resolution so I can run them past her and make sure I'm hitting the requested trope correctly without veering into tropes she doesn't like as well. Actual writing will hopefully happen sometime this summer.

4. Quick-sketch outline for Vicky's very belated gift story, because evidently trying to write without one does not work in this particular case. Whimsy needs a framework, or else 'this could go anywhere!' rapidly turns into 'and therefore I have no reason to care.' Again, actual writing will be put off until summer.

5. Start work on Fandom Trumps Hate fic for mme_hardy. We've already emailed a few times to pin down a general prompt and some ancillary details, but I need to work that into an actual outline that can sustain at least 6,000 words of story. And then of course I have to write the story, since I'm not postponing this one until summer! That won't be a hardship; I like the prompt a lot and it involves a bunch of affectionately teasing conversations, which are always fun to write. :)

6. Anything else if inspiration strikes and refuses to go away, but I'm tired enough (argh, work) that I don't think that's terribly likely. *sigh*