Something shocking happened today. I actually had the nerve to work on my rewrite. No one could be more shocked than I. I finished the scene I'd left hanging in chapter one. I'm now clear to move on to the bit in chapter five that needs to be cleaned up.

I have no idea how this happened. As recently as last Saturday I was still feeling overwhelmed at the thought of working on it. I'm not sure what tipped the scales. Last weekend I finished my second Artemis Fowl fic. I was tired much of this week as I went back to work. I had a couple of really interesting dreams. I listened to a random book that mentioned laziness, which may have spurred me to action somehow. I also told the folks on the site that I couldn't do news anymore. My chest clenches at the very site of a press release. Newswise I'm toast for a good long while.

Anyone interested in doing news for an RPG site? All you need is knowledge of and interest in RPGs. ;)

I'm still going to do stuff on the site, but after a steady year of news I need a break from it, even if the timing is awful. But it's truly a load off.

Anyway, I'm going to post edit updates like I did for the second draft since that seems to be encouraging and I need all the motivation I can get to finish this thing once and for all.

So: Chapter one done!
(Chapters 2-4 previously finished)

I think I'm due for a vacation. I haven't had one since September. I need to hold out until the end of May.

I should have posted during the week when I was all excited. Has anyone on my flist read the the Artemis Fowl books? I've been reading them and... I love them! They're great! I can't believe I didn't know this. On the up side it means there are six of them for me to read-- I'm currently in the middle of book five, though heaven knows I've got spoilers up the wazoo thanks to Wikipedia. There's even a ship I like, though it may be the wrong one, which is depressing, but you'd think I'd get over my need for canonicity...

Things have been otherwise uneventful. I been having troubling writing, which makes me feel... awful. So instead I've been writing reviews for RandomNPC. I posted on for Persona 4; a feature review for Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, and I've got a draft of one for PuzzleQuest Galactrix, which I do not recommend as it was a very sloppy piece of work: bad controls, some poor gameplay decisions, obnoxious loading times-- the works.

Oh and I found a rather cute piece of Seth/Eirika fanart that I feel must be shared with the universe:

( explodes from cuteness )

I actually got a bunch of Seth/Eirika doujinshi in the mail on Monday but was too tired to post about it. How sad is that. I was wiped out a lot this week. A couple of them were sort of disappointing, but the other four are just gorgeous. Don't have time to scans stuff, but I got some pics of the covers and a couple of pages if anyone's curious.

( Yes, more Seth Eirika: I remain obsessed )

I am determined to be able to read this language one day, though it will be years still at this rate. But the good news is I rock at kanji. That test the other week? Yeah... as it turns out I was fretting for nothing and there was no grammar at all and it was only a kanji test. But even though I hadn't studied my kanji I still did better than most of my classmates, who, for reasons I don't understand, don't practice writing kanji. They all say they can recognise them without drawing them but I think that's horse hooey. Some of the kanji are so very similar that it's tricky to just remember them (and the readings!) if you haven't practiced drawing them. Drawing them actually helps me to remember, but I'm also much more interested in reading than speaking, which is the opposite of most everyone in my class.

In other news, I attended the Marathon write in of DOOM yesterday after Japanese class. I stayed for some six hours and manged to come up with 8000 words to catch up. Which is good. Man, after slogging through this Nano, that third draft of my real story will be welcome. Did I mention that the main character of my Nano is named "Iam Generic"?

26,203 / 50,000 (52.4%)

I also somehow got roped into a podcast for RNPC this past week. I'm a little nervous about how that will have turned out. I'll have to make someone listen to it and tell me how it came out. ;P

We have no water.

A water main burst on the street circa two p.m., I'm told, and now, at six p.m. there's still no water. There is, however, a vary large hole in the street. A several workmen staring into it.

In other news, I've been on the fence about Nano this year but I decided today to go ahead an do it. I can't seem to nerve myself up to do my third draft. I've been balking at the idea of doing it and it's somehow making me drag my feet on everything internetwise-- emails, LJ, the Nano forums-- except for my work on RandomNPC since that's basically a commitment and I don't slack off on stuff like that. Maybe Nano will give me jolt I need to get going on that third draft.

In other news, I almost bought a new computer a couple weeks back. I went to the store, picked out a model and then... it turned out they had none left in stock so I left empty handed. *sigh* And it was shiny... 4GB of Ram...

EDIT: Yay! We have water again!