Stuff done so far today:

1. Started a batch of veggie sidedish, which should be done around 10pm. I also hardboiled some eggs.

2. Volunteered for the church recycling sale. I am a little unclear what I will actually be doing, as the response got mangled by the coordinator's iPhone autocorrect -- it says, and I quote, "How about Saturday and housewares 830 to 11 or 11 to 2 or him and Sunday we could use some help monocot cashiering and Monday 10 to 2" -- but I will show up to work housewares tomorrow morning and hopefully get clarifications about the rest in person.

3. Started the application process for Not the IRS 2017 tax season... by which I mean I determined that the application website now supports Chrome (yay!) and put the three relevant positions into my job cart to deal with tomorrow.

4. Attempted a new method to combat depression-induced inertia and executive dysfunction, namely, in the morning I will text Vicky one or two things I want to do that day -- specific tasks, with clear endpoints -- and she will text me once or twice later on to remind me and/or ask if I've finished yet. I think this will be helpful, and may improve my productivity on other tasks as well because it's a lot easier to keep going after I get in a groove of doing stuff than it is to get started on that first task.

5. Cleared out the backlog of old reviews/comments I'd been avoiding because they required actual thoughtful responses.

6. Read and reviewed another Ladystuck Remix fic. This leaves me with three to go in the main collection, plus three in the treats collection (and the originals that inspired them). They're all really good stories, but there's a difference between reading just for the hell of it and reading with the intention of leaving a comment that says more than just, "Hey, I liked this."

Today is Ladystuck Remix reveal day! I wrote two fics: my assignment and a pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.

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Tiny Grass Is Dreaming (Failure To Communicate): Something about talking to Damara makes Aranea feel like all her words twist in her mouth and come out as unintelligible nonsense. She hates it. [1,500 words]

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This is my assignment, written for feralphoenix! It is a remix of Tiny Grass Is Dreaming.

( thoughts! )

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(And hey, if anyone has grammar and/or tone corrections for the German, I am all ears.)

The Ladystuck Remix collection is open! Sixty-two remixed female-centric Homestuck fanworks, plus two more in the Treats collection.

Main collection / Treats collection

And what did I get, you may ask? I got this:

The Time-Traveler's Kismesis: Counterthesis (The Troll Out Of Time Remix): Meetings between the Demoness and her kismesis, the Dolorosa, who refuses to give up hope in a world the Demoness knows is doomed. (1,863 words, by a currently anonymous writer)

This takes my short, fragmentary work The Time-Traveler's Kismesis: Counterthesis and not only flips the POV to show Damara's view of that meeting, it extends both forward and backward in time to encompass the whole story of their relationship and is framed by two excellently deployed quotations from Alternian romantic poetry. ;) It is gorgeous and bleak and hopeful all at once, and I love it to pieces, and you should go read it right now and tell the author they're brilliant! ♥

Ha! I successfully finished and posted my Ladystuck Remix pinch hit.

It is drastically tangential to the original in a lot of ways, though it mirrors one particular aspect with perfect rigidity. I also want to revise it a bunch, though not as much as I want to revise my assigned remix -- in both cases, because I think the stories are thematically sloppy and need a much tighter, cleaner focus.

Still, it's done and that's the main thing. :)

I got my dates mixed up somehow and thought the Ladystuck Remix posting deadline was the 24th instead of the 25th. Oh well, that just means I have an extra day of editing time, and that never hurt anyone.

The posted version is kind of, um. Well, dire is too strong a word. It's serviceable. But it's awfully clunky and I think about half my point gets lost in that clunkiness, besides which I didn't have time to apply the formatting thing I want to do. I suppose that's a project for Tuesday.

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In other news, Susan and I did succeed in seeing Star Trek Beyond, though the only tickets left were for the very front row so all the characters' faces and shoulders looked weird and some of the action scenes became visually unintelligible because of perspective issues. That aside, I liked it! It was a lot more hope-peace-exploration-wonder than the previous reboot films, and there were no women randomly posing in their underwear, both of which I take as victories. :D

Correction: Several hours later I remembered that there is one very brief shot of an underdressed woman, as part of the montage accompanying Kirk's opening Captain's Log. He's talking about morale and relationships among the crew, and after we see a shot of a happy (and fully clothed) couple ducking into a doorway while kissing, we see a shot of a (barely clothed) woman throwing a (fully clothed) man out of her room into the corridor. So it's gratuitous underwear, which is annoying, but it's also over in about two seconds and it's not set up in a way where a male character is watching a female character undress without her knowing he can see. Everybody else remains fully clothed through the entire movie, despite a gag reference to Kirk's shirt getting torn.

Okay. Current writing project summary:

1. WIP Big Bang. My posting date is August 15. I should probably have all my chapters done at least a week before that, for editing purposes. I am currently stuck (yet again) halfway through ch. 11 because I suddenly realized I need to explain a bunch of political process stuff, which should have been introduced a lot sooner for proper flow and foreshadowing purposes. I have the terrible feeling I need to go back and make edits to previously posted chapters so the necessary setup for my ending is in place. (This is doubly annoying since I already did make edits on ch. 1 a couple years back. *sigh*)

2. Ladystuck Remix. Due July 25. I looked through my remixee's archive, picked a few likely stories, and then stalled out. This is my most immediately pressing project and I should try to get an outline and a decent stab at a rough draft done by Sunday night.

3. Narnia Fic Exchange. I made my requests and offer today, though I may tweak them somewhat before the signup period closes. Assignments go out around July 29 and stories are due August 31. I don't need to worry about this for a month.

4. Remix Redux. There is no schedule yet and signups probably won't open until next week at the earliest. Again, I don't need to worry for a while.

5. Daredevil Bingo. significantowl wants to set one up. I want to participate! No hard details exist yet.

6. I am not allowed to sign up as a Palestuck pinch hitter. I do not have the time. (Other people should, though!)

7. "Guardian" ch. 17. Yeah, I'll... uh... get back to you on that sometime? *headdesk*

Today is Ladypalooza reveal day! I wrote two fics this year: my assignment and a pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.

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Let the Water Take Me: You've known since you were a wiggler that one night Meenah Peixes will set you free. You've known for almost as long that your death will only draw her further into the trap of your Master's schemes. And it only took one sweep in your Master's active service before it occurred to you that she is the only other troll in the universe who will live as long as you, with all the loneliness and loss that implies. It would take a far stronger person than you will ever be to not love and pity her a little, if only in the abstract. (You will destroy her anyway.) Handmaid/Condesce, depression, suicidal ideation, attempted suicide. [2,450 words]

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This is a pinch hit, written for Burgundyrose!

The prompt was for a version of Handmaid/Condesce that leaned toward red- or palerom rather than blackrom, which I leapt at because I'd been wanting to write something along those lines for a while but didn't have any framework for such a story. Burgundyrose's suggestion of a scene where the young Handmaid tries to drown herself, only to be interrupted by the Condesce, immediately gave me ideas. :D

I've always liked this ship, and while my first impulse in 2012 was to categorize it as a kismessisitude gone wrong (one of them kills the other), I later rethought my stance and decided the Handmaid would be much more likely to hate the Dolorosa, the Signless, the Disciple, or the Summoner. See, what would piss her off most is hope, since she knows in her bones how futile it is to expect any change to the system she's helped build at Lord English and Doc Scratch's orders. And by the time the Condesce is an adult, I think she shares that fatalistic, nothing-changes worldview. She comes at it from a different direction -- her core assumption is that she's always going to win and always be in charge -- but that can easily get wearing and pointless in its own way. She and the Handmaid also share an assessment of other trolls as toys/game-pieces.

And when you come down to it, after all, the Handmaid wants to die. She makes a genuine suicide threat to Doc Scratch as a child, and I can't think eternity in Lord English's service was any kind of pleasure. The Condesce, in effect, frees her by killing her.

"Let the Water Take Me" is a small exercise in radically divergent character perspective. For Meenah, it's almost a meet-cute (aside from, you know, the 'I rescued you from attempted suicide' thing), whereas for Damara, it's several small tragedies bound together because she knows exactly how their story is going to end, hates what that's going to do to Meenah, hates herself for looking forward to it, and would probably go through with that final assisted suicide attempt even if she did think she could change the outcome, because she wants her freedom more than she wants to save Meenah from Lord English's service. (And she hates herself for that, too.)

I used the characters' Beforan names for simplicity's sake, because Meenah at this point in her life is too young for an adult title (and might have used a different one at first anyway).

Ladypalooza authors were revealed today, which reminded me that I never posted about the opening of the archive or my gift. *headdesk*

So let me do that now.

Life & Space (1249 words) by GracefulArchitect
Fandom: Homestuck
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jade Harley, Jane Crocker

Summary: Jane visits Jade on her island.

This is a lovely fic about Jane and Jade spending time together post-game, nominally because Jane wants some technical advice on pieces of Crockercorp technology she's trying to safely decommission, but also because she wants to know her ecto-relative a little better. The background details are perfect, and the slight awkwardness of two people who share a bunch of friends (and an interlude of mind control) but haven't interacted much on their own comes across clearly, as well as the first steps toward a more proper friendship.

Go read it!

Note: I am repurposing my stock Yuletide letter here, which is why some of the sections may seem slightly off-topic for a single fandom exchange.

Hi, and thank you in advance for creating a story or artwork for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene, I'll be thrilled just to get something in response to one of my prompts. Optional details are optional, after all! *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

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( General Information )

Okay. On to specific prompts.

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( Jade English's adventures in the Medium )

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( Terezi-Aradia-Vriska ashen porn )

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( Jade and Jane )

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So... yeah. This is what I want and I will love you forever for filling one of these prompts. ♥

Today is Ladystuck reveal day! I wrote four fics this year: my assignment, a pinch hit, and two treats just because. I will talk about each in a separate post.

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The Rule of Threes: The day Aradia Megido arrived in New York, three important things happened, though she only noted two at the time. [1,375 words]

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This is a treat, written for ChameleonSerket. They requested a humanstuck modern magic AU with the following elements:

-Aradia, a hedgewitch in a small town with a talent for fortune telling and prediction, moves to a big seaside city to seek fame and fortune (or something like that anyway).
-Feferi, a very rich noble who is the most powerful seawitch that has been seen for decades.
-Jade, a mysterious witch living in Aradia's apartment block who may or may not have space altering powers.
-Finally, Rose who is a seer plagued by horrible rage filled episodes (possession?) with an affinity for both light and dark magics.

I didn't get Feferi on-page, but I managed the rest. As with "The Moons of Skaia," there's a much larger story I didn't have time to write -- in a very real sense, "The Rule of Threes" acts as the opening chapter for that unwritten fic. And again, maybe someday I will come back and see where the threads I laid will take me. :-)