the deep moans round with many voices

Assorted things:

1. The Best Buy tech said he could only replicate my bluescreen problem once, when he first turned on my computer. After he did some tune-up/clean-out on my system it did not reoccur. This is frustrating because I replicated the problem FIVE TIMES IN A ROW on Wednesday afternoon when I got home from work. I actually left my computer awake all night and then all day today so I don't know if it would have reoccurred again after I finally got enough time to restart it properly instead of just mashing the power button while the blank screen gleamed mockingly at me.

Background: my laptop has a known -- and so far as I know, unfixable -- Windows 10 glitch where if you tell it to sleep, it then refuses to wake up until you turn the power off and back on, at which point it will act like it woke up from ordinary sleep. And the thing is, that screwy version of "waking up" is exactly when the bluescreen glitch occurs. I forgot to mention that to Best Buy when I dropped my laptop off on Saturday because I'm so used to it that I forget it's a glitch, and I suspect that may be why they failed to replicate and thus hunt down the cause of the bluescreen incidents. *sigh*

2. Work has been EXHAUSTING. Cornell surprise!announced their fall 2020 schedule on Tuesday afternoon, and we have been fielding so many phone calls. All the phone calls. ALL OF THEM. And also all the emails. *headdesk*

We are also still working our butts off to create new shiny photos and videos of staged apartments. Miss California is editing and posting the video tours. I have started working through the photos -- first organizing them into folders by apartment, and then tweaking every single one to be brighter, sharper, and more colorful (and also sometimes cropping and straightening wonky angles). I have, to be honest, done very little photo work because I have been running a Red Queen's race trying to keep on top of all the other office stuff.

I have a three-day weekend starting tomorrow because of Independence Day. I am going to sleep SO MUCH.

3. My WIP Big Bang story has been claimed by an artist. \o/ I need to get in touch with them, but I have been so brain-fried these past two weeks, I have been letting a LOT of things temporarily slide.

4. For example, I still need to apply to Not the IRS for the 2020 tax season. I must remember to do that tomorrow. It's not like it takes very long -- they have all my information on file from previous years, so all I really need to do is verify which office I work at and add an extra year of employment to my tax job and my rental company job histories.

5. I got another prompt for my latest mini-ficlet prompt meme. Yesterday I kind of blinked at it and tilted my head because it is... well, it's a request for Yukiko/Kakashi ship!fic in my Apartment Manager AU. This is something various people have expressed interest in over the years, but it's also something I thought I'd been pretty clear was never going to happen, for various and sundry reasons. But! Today I figured out a way to elide the issue: namely, a fake relationship between undercover personas while on a joint mission. It's going to be mostly a mission fic, but it will be very heavy on friendship and trust, so I think that will fulfill the relationship aspect of the prompt.

(Look, you don't actually WANT me to write Yukiko/Kakashi rather than Yukiko & Kakashi. Even if I tried, it would come out very badly, because I straight-up cannot convince myself of that particular relationship in any romantic or sexual form. At best you'd get a crash-and-burn disaster that leaves them both hurt and avoiding each other for years. You are much better off writing your own fic-of-a-fic if that ship is what your heart desires. I will just continue writing them as unexpected good friends who sometimes use each other for safe flirting because they both know it's never going anywhere.)

6. I really enjoy having no idea where the Magnus Archives is going each week!

7. I have also started listening to Rusty Quill Gaming. Today I finished episode 17: Good Cop, Bad Cop, Stabby Cop and Bertie (which, tangentially, I am slightly annoyed does not have an Oxford comma) and will probably skip the two Storyjam! episodes in favor of diving into episode 18 tomorrow, as the first 17 episodes wound up being more or less a prologue and now the REAL quest is about to begin. :)

8. Yesterday while pruning a hedge, I was so focused on reaching down to uproot a pernicious scrub maple that I bashed my forehead directly into the sharp, pointy end of a dead branch and left myself with some bloody scratches and a surprisingly painful bruise.

...

Yeah, this weekend I am going to get ALL THE SLEEP.

Stuff, in no particular order:

1. Things are looking good on the money front. My raise came through as of my most recent paycheck, and while still not very big, is a bit more than I was expecting. So that's nice! I am also continuing to work overtime, probably through mid-July. And I got my semiannual dividend check from Vanguard on Thursday, so there's another smidgen of financial security.

2. I have regretfully dropped out of this year's WIP Big Bang. It turns out that I can write while working a full-time job, and I can write while taking college classes, but the job and the classes together are just too much. This semester is especially bad in that respect because both classes involve more writing and are also compressed (8 or 10 weeks instead of 15 weeks) so each week contains a higher proportion of stuff.

3. I am still trying to write, just... very slowly, in little dribs and drabs. I've managed a few hundred words of my horrifically belated FTH fic, resolved a minor hold-up in the next chapter of "Guardian," and other things of that nature.

4. On my way home from Minnesota, I bought a tube of L'Occitane en Provence rose-scented 20% shea butter hand cream at the Detroit airport, because I was having serious problems with dry skin on my right hand, and goodness, it's wonderful! (I had already been using their little tubs of pure shea butter as lip balm, but I hadn't really tried any of their other products.) It's definitely more expensive than I'd usually go for, but then again, quality and fair trade do cost. *wry* Anyway, I just ordered another two tubes of hand cream in various scents from their online shop, because this stuff is just lovely and my poor hand is so dry it's literally cracking open.

5. Prof C. finally graded some of my English assignments, so I finally have a better idea of what she's looking for. Which of course came too late for me to adjust last week's assignments, but so it goes. This week's essay will now be much more to her taste. :)

6. I think I am going to take my lunch break now...

It looks like I will be tackling "Lemonade" this year. This is simultaneously exciting (I love that story and really want to finish it) and daunting (it's long, and it's been five years since I posted ch. 19), but hey, what is life without challenges?

Thank you to everyone who voted!

I didn't have as much free time at work as I'd hoped (and then I had to drive down to NJ, so there went my evening), but "Intervention" is now at 22,100 words total, with 525 words left to bash into shape.

I will finish the damn edits tomorrow, OR ELSE. *resolve face*

...But for right now, I'm going to take the first load of laundry out of my parents' dryer and then crash into bed, because it's been a long day and I am exhausted.

Okay, clearly self-motivation is not working fast enough, so.

I am trying to get my WIP Big Bang draft into shape to send to my betas. Saturday evening is my absolute down-to-the-wire final deadline, but I would strongly prefer to get this done sooner -- tonight or sometime on Friday.

So I'm going to post every hour(ish) with a current word count and general progress report, in the hope that this will be enough external motivation to kick me into flow state instead of what I've been doing, which is progress by about three paragraphs per day. *headdesk*

As of ~5pm EDT, the story is at ~18,600 words and I am still bashing the space battle into functional prose instead of its current 'and then and then and then' state.

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~6pm, EDT: 19,050 words, still fighting the stupid space battle.

The problem with translating 'and then and then and then' into actual narrative is A) I elided a LOT of details in the rough version (intentionally; that is what it is FOR) which means now I have to actually come up with them (although not while ALSO coming up with the general shape/movement of the story, since those bones are what the 'and then and then' consists of), and B) I always wind up 'and then and then'ing in vaguely omniscient third person present tense, but the story is in tight-POV third person past tense. This requires some tweaking. *wry*

Anyway, back to the salt mines!

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~7pm, ~19,400 words.

It would have been more, but I ran into a section where my rough draft had something completely factually inaccurate and I had to figure out a replacement that would serve a similar narrative function. *sigh*

And I think I'm going to have similar trouble in the next hour, because I've hit a place where my draft reads, more or less, 'quick summary of events in [place], this is where Character Y's Big Damn Heroes moment should kick off,' without any details about what that Big Damn Heroes moment should be, nor how to logistically pull it off. *headdesk*

Why do I do this to myself???

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~8pm, no change.

I took an hour off for dinner... and also got interrupted by Mormon missionaries, which was MUCH less intentional, but whatever. *wry*

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~9pm, 19,800 words.

I got past one part that I thought would be ridiculously melodramatic and impossible to pull off, and it was... surprisingly not? I mean, I DID lay setup for it several sections earlier, though I think I should probably make that even more pointed on my next revision pass-through.

I also cheated and completely elided the Big Damn Heroes thing because hello, SPACE BATTLE STILL GOING ON HERE. It turns out 'spaceships attack!' is a pretty good functional equivalent of 'ninjas break down the door!' when it comes to abruptly getting out of narrative corners. :p

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~10pm, 20,250 words.

It would have been more, but I got ambitious and spent about twenty minutes looking up some basic stuff about orbital mechanics because occasionally I have delusions that scientific verisimilitude is relevant to space operas. *wry*

Anyway, I think I am nearly done with phase one of the space battle (aka, ships and more ships) and will knock off for the night once I finish that. Tomorrow we move on to phase two (aka, boarding and negotiations), and then the aftermath (during which I will have to finally detail the logistics of the Big Damn Heroes thing I keep cheating my way around *sigh*).

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Okay, done for the night at 20,400 words and ~10:45pm.

Tomorrow, the rest of the space battle PLUS an exciting and dramatic cameo from the crew of the one and only (haha) Enterprise!

...

These space battle scenes are ridiculously long and are going to completely unbalance the story unless I go back and edit in a bunch more stuff in the medical plot. Which I should do. I also need to edit in more character stuff and foreshadowing for the eventual space battle plot so the story doesn't feel so much like it completely jumps genres halfway through, whoops.

(The space battle is necessary because of the original prompt that is the reason I am writing the story at all. I just kind of... got really carried away with the medical plot, so now the fic has two plots that I can hopefully get to work together instead of just kind of lying there giving each other weird looks. *headdesk*)