personal life administrivia

These past few days I've been attempting to catch up on miscellaneous... can you call it administrivia when it's about your own life instead of your job? Well, anyway, that kind of stuff.

So I have:

1. Applied for/been approved for a new credit card, which has a rewards program and no annual fee. Once I have it in my hands, I'm going to figure out how to close down one of my two current credit cards, which has no rewards and a $30 annual fee. That card was my first credit card, which I got through my bank when no other credit card company would take a risk on me (note to younger readers: GET A CREDIT CARD EARLY SO YOU CAN BUILD A CREDIT RECORD -- it is stupidly difficult to do this in your mid-twenties), so I've hung on to it out of a weird combination of habit and a sense of gratitude. But those are silly reasons to keep paying $30 a year for something another company will give me for free.

2. Renewed my PTIN, or paid tax-preparer ID number, with the IRS, so I am legal to do tax returns in 2020. And I sent the confirmation of that renewal to my local Not the IRS district management so they can get me activated in our company systems for the coming year.

3. Paid my rent.

4. Mailed a birthday card to my cousin on behalf of my parents, who are still in Italy.

5. Signed up to do some volunteer work at my church's annual Service Auction, and purchased two items I'd agreed to contribute to a tea-themed basket in the silent auction.

And a bunch of other stuff like that, you know? Just kind of going through my longer-term to-do lists and my email inboxes and dealing with the things I've let stack up for a couple weeks.

wherein Liz thinks out loud to herself about a writing question

I made some good progress on another old WIP today!

Of course, now I have reached the point where I need to decide whether to go back and add some stuff to make the current endpoint an emotionally satisfying conclusion, or to continue and write a third scene. On the one hand, my current last sentence is a good last line (it has a nice weight to it), and a third scene would require me to have the characters dig out and resolve some tricky emotional baggage which is annoying and fiddly and would probably require an outline. On the other, this is a ship!fic and I feel that at least now and then I ought to practice writing shippy stuff that gets all the way through some action (...by which I mean making out, in this case; this is not going to be actual porn because that is really not the mood of the piece) instead of leaving things at the "and now they are going to get together but I will duck out without describing the details" stage where I have a tendency to end stories.

I end there mostly because writing people making out is logstically complicated and I rarely find it emotionally compelling in and of itself, but challenge is good for the soul, right?

And also backfilling would be annoying and fiddly in its own right, plus three scenes feels more balanced than two and I probably should resolve some of the baggage the characters are lugging around...

...

Ugh. Fine. Three scenes it is.