wherein Liz is technically at work, but really writing fic

I arrived at Not the IRS shortly before 9am, and I'm stuck here until 9pm. With no scheduled appointments. *sigh* I made a few appointment-scheduling calls, and have answered the phone a few times, but beyond that I have nothing to do.

So I've been doing some reading, and also some writing.

I am working on an action scene in ch. 17 of "Guardian," which is going... well, it's going. It's going to need a lot of editing to properly fill in the background chaos, but so far I think the bones of the thing are all right. (And kind of gruesome, but that was intentional. This is meant to be traumatizing to several people for several reasons. *evil smile*)

I'm up to ~2,750 words for the chapter, and I think another 500 words or so should finish this scene off.

And then it's back to Eiji & Co, where I get to figure out if I want to do a certain meeting in real time or whether I want to do it as an after-action report. The first option is probably best from a narrative tension standpoint, even if it's pretty stupid from an operational security standpoint. I can even argue that that's in character, since if operational security were Eiji's main concern, he wouldn't be in his current pickle in the first place. *wry*

Also, I would like to report that I spent about half an hour researching mules and wagons and stuff like that, and will have to go back and do some more research to get some additional terminology straightened out. Is this remotely relevant to the overall plot? No. But I needed to know how many panicky animals I'm dealing with, and also exactly how I have them hitched up to the trade wagons. This is relevant for fight choreography!

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ETA 3:45pm

~3,000 words and now I got Yukiko stuck into a single combat I'm not sure how she's supposed to win, given that her skillset lends itself much more to sneaking than open battle.

Well, I mean, there's no reason NOT to make characters be awesome, right? And her taijutsu ought to have improved since "The Way of the Apartment Manager." So I just need to make it cool without being effortless. :)

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ETA 4:00pm

Okay, fight scene is DONE in (very) rough draft.

Now I'm going to take a reading break before I rough out the Eiji & Co scene in a little more detail than its current one-sentence summary. *wry*

February shitposting, day 5

Today's randomly chosen theme is: inside a whale

This brings to mind three things: the story of Jonah (which I very vaguely remember from when I was a small child), Monstruo from Disney's Pinocchio (which utterly terrified me when I saw it in theaters as a small child), and Rudyard Kipling's "How the Whale Got His Throat" from Just So Stories (which I first read as a small child -- are you seeing a theme here? -- and is now one of my go-to stories to read aloud to kids).

The thing about Kipling is that he's a British imperialist with all the attendant failings, but damn the man could write. The Just So Stories are also specifically designed to be read aloud, with hand gestures -- they're implicitly written in, though not in an annoying way -- and they are a joy to work with. They're also really easy to adapt into being less sexist by just swapping some of the animals over to female, which I tend to do. So when I read the whale story, the 'Stute Fish is always female, I make the Bi-Colored Python Rock Snake female when I do "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," and so on.

(This is, of course, why when I wrote a Kipling pastiche of my own, the main character is an adult woman taking the role of the more usual semi-magical wise non-European man.)

On another tangent, have you ever seen an underside view of a sperm whale's mouth? Their lower jaws are like toothpicks. Very spiky toothpicks, to be sure, but still. There is no width to them at all; their only purpose is to pin prey in place. Of course that doesn't make for nearly as viscerally terrifying/useful a visual image as a whale with a properly wide maw, so nobody ever draws them that way in whale-swallows-stuff stories. *wry*