Hello there. I am alive. I've been feeling a bit under the weather this past week and I was totalled Friday night and most of Saturday so I slept in and I took it easy, tried to stay away from my PC as much as possible. One of my coworkers has the flu and I'd very much like to make sure my system is in top shape so as to stay healthy myself.

In other news:

1) I'm getting really close to the finishing the final edit of my story so yay progress.

2) It seems that once again I will be (for reasons that I can't realy explain) participating in Nano. Woo-hoo. One month of writing badly. But at least this year I should be able to avoid being bored as I'll be writing about dragons. Dragons are fun, right?

3) An old friend of mine, whom I haven't seen in... say... nine years, is again trying to set me up via facebook. She did this a year ago and I told her not to and it pisses me off. She says we have a lot in common... Yeah because it's not like my interests would have changed in the intervening decade or anything. Clearly the fact that there have been few outer changed in the landscape of my life means that my personality and interests have remained static as well, right? I'm sure the fellow is nice and I'd be fine with speaking with him but a) I don't find him attractive at all and b) her interference makes me want to run in the other direction.

He sent me a friend request and message I didn't respond because I've been feeling tired and no so good and figured I'd deal with it later but now all of a sudden I got a message from her too which leads me to believe he told her I hadn't responded and she decided to stick her nose it. Grrrr. I don't like being toyed with. I don't like interference in my life. And the presumption that I've not changed in all these years offends me greatly. I don't like how manipulative she's being with the whole thing either. She should fix her own life before she tried to fix mine.

4) I saw the Twilight movie. It wasn't as cheesy as I had expected. I don't think I shall ever be a fan of the series but I understand better why it appeals to teenagers so much. I wasn't impressed with the dialogue (and why does he sparkle?), but I can appreciate that the drama and the angst and the love story are probably things I'd have enjoyed when I was fourteen -- my general dislike of vampires notwithstanding. Bella probably wouldn't have done it for me, though, even then. I've always liked heroines who are powerful, who can do amazing things, not ones who have to be rescued by their preternatural beaus. Eowyn was always a favourite of mine. I was sixteen when I read LotR and Eowyn was my hero. I loved her to pieces. I still do.

I have a Master's degree in English literature and this language still confuses me sometimes.

In the course of working on my final draft I have come to realize that I'm inconsistent in my usage of the past tense of the verb "to leap."

I checked, and it turned out I had five instances of "leapt" and fourteen of "leaped." I suspect the latter to be more US than UK.

In any case, I really want to get this done before the end of the month but I still have over a hundred pages left to wrestle with. Ugh.

I also need to decide whether to put myself through the yearly torment that is NaNoWiMo. Do I really want to write 50k of exceedingly bad fiction for 30 days?

Okay so a year after my two readers finished reading the second draft of my original story I've not only finished a third draft but have also had my mom read the thing for errors and I've been reading up on manuscript formatting. I'm going to finish this. This year. Send it out somewhere and go on with my life.

Meanwhile, I've been doing a final once-over and I've started correcting all the typos. I'm so bored I feel like I could pass out.

I wonder if published authors get this bored when they try to polish their manuspcripts.

So I did it. Apparently. I finished all the changes I planned to make to my third draft. I went over all the comments by both my readers and did my best to make the story better. I feel oddly at loose ends, though. Shouldn't I be ecstatic or something? Maybe it's the perfectionist in me. Maybe I'm just twitchy because I'm not in the middle of anything anymore, neither a game nor a story nor a project.

*frets*

I'll need to print out the thing and then have it read for typos and read it myself once more. I need to figure out how to format it and where to send it. And then I need to let it go.

Well... at least I finally finally got this done, though. That's something at least.

I've been working on my edit all day. I mean literally, since this morning. With occasional breaks of course, but basically all day. I'm stopping now.

I'm proud to say, though, that there are only four things left to do. Two are just places where I have to tweak earlier chapters to make everything fit just right. The other two are bigger: I need to see about paring down one chapter and writing a new one. That'll be something to do next weekend.

This is what's left, listed by chapter so I can strike it out when it's done:

Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three


The other twenty-one chapters are revised and done with.

Chapters five and ten are done! I'm clear up to chapter twelve now. And suddenly I feel like I need a nap.

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)

Well apparently Nano did the trick because here I am on a Saturday night looking over the notes jenniferlupin and Kitsilver sent me about my original story (Nano and listening to Viva la Vida over and over as it makes me think of my story). It's not quite as overwhelming as it was in August. It's manageable. Almost. ;P


The worst part is, many of the "complaints" were the result of material I chopped out during the rewrite. I cut out a ton of stuff to speed up the early chapters and for clarity's sake some of it needs to go back in in some form (not sure what and how yet...). The original version was painfully slow, but now I need to go back and explain some things and maybe put a couple scenes back in. Hmm... *ponders*

Plus I need to somehow work on the world-building in early chapters add clarify the politics. Ack! I think that's my brain breaking. It's so tricky with fantasy: how do you avoid info-dumps? In real world stories all you have to worry about is character and setting; you don't have to introduce a whole new world with its own set of rules. The trick is not overwhelming your reader at the start and yet giving them enough to make it interesting.


Still getting used to the new PC.

I'm working on the final little tweaks I need to make to my second draft before I send it to the couple of kindly folk who've agreed to read it.

Meanwhile I am pleased to announce that I rarely use over-the-top dialogue attributions (e.g. he grated, she jerked out, etc.) and adverbs after "said" ("slowly" and "quietly" come up here and there and I'm inclined to leave those). I decided to check because I wrote the first draft several years ago and I wasn't sure whether I still had a lot of bad writing habits back then. It's nice to know that's not a vice I need to worry about much. I don't think I use the passive voice much either, though it's not something I ever thought to check for... Those are the two big ones Stephen King complains about in On Writing, which I've finally gotten back to (I'd set it down partway through the hundred pages of autobiography at the beginning).

I have a bunch of partially-read writing manuals and while my readers work through draft #2 I'm going to finish those books and see if there's anything I should check for when I draft #3. My biggest concerns, though, are things I'll need my readers to look at, though, things I no longer have any perspective on-- pacing and how well the plot holds together.

Well I should get back to the edit. I need to deal with:

-- The King's Road
-- north/south
-- King's castle
-- Timeline
-- the card scene (9/7 cards)
-- misc ??

EDIT: All done. :)

I did it! I did it! I'm done!

Well there's still some tweaking to do, a few question marks I left hanging in early chapters, and a couple of things that need to be cleaned up, but for all intents and purposes, I'm DONE! I have a second draft. I can hardly believe it.

--83,730 words (down from the original 99,700 words-- mostly due to heavy editing of the first few chapters).

I have a couple of people who may have time to read it-- fingers crossed-- and give me some feedback so I can then go on and do a third draft. In the meantime I need to do nitty-gritty research about manuscript formatting and submission guidelines (does that sound painful enough for you?). I hope to have a third draft and a completed manuscript by the end of the year. *hopes*

Clearly, I don't.

Life:

It was E3 week in the gaming world so there were some busy days the past couple weeks on the site. Meanwhile, the only exciting thing I have to relate is that I moved to a new workstation a week and a half ago and I'm thrilled to announce that I no longer have horrible glaring lights in my eyes all day long. Coincidentally, I seem to be feeling noticeably less fatigued when I get home in the evening. Seems those infernal lights were the main reason I've been more tired than normal for the past eleven months.

Writing:

My rewrite is progressing. I finished chapter twenty last week and chapter twenty-one today. Those two chapters required major changes (I had to add new material and switch the scene order completely) but I think I'm done with the major changes now. I really really home to be done by the end of the month. Which is like 10 days from now but... it's only four chapters and the epilogue so I think I can do it.

Edit: Chapter twenty-two is done as well. I like that chapter. The action-y scenes I wrote all those ages ago are still pretty good, I find.

Fandomness:

I finished Suikoden V last weekend and totally geeked out over the ending. I got the good ending and it was surprisingly shippy and I spent the week obsessing over the Prince and Lyon (they pronounce her name Lee-on, interestingly). They're a bit like Seth/Eirika but with the genders reversed, so it's cool. I also bought some related doujinshi/manga (which is much easier to find than TSS material) and one of them arrived this week. It's very pretty and I'm thrilled to be able to actually read some smalls bits of it. Another ten years and I'll have the fluency of a Japanese pre-schooler! ;P

Oh and I am still working on that Seth/Eirika AU fic of mine, but I've set it aside for the past couple weeks just until I the second draft of my original fic done. I really really want to be done with this draft.

Things are slowly getting back to normal. I'd been feeling so oddly that I'd made a doctor's appointment. They took blood and did a cardiogram, just to be safe. Everything looks fine, though.

Meanwhile, since I have the day off I just spent the part hour and a half reworking a chapter for my rewrite. So yes, chapters seventeen and eighteen are now done. Total so far:

-131 pages (except a few things I need to go back and tweak) i.e. 60,319 words

I've got eight chapters left and some 25,000 words left to go over. So I'm about 75% of the way through. Fingers crossed I can give a push and be done by the end of the month. I would so love that.

Happy Canada Day! And an early happy Independence Day for my US flistees!

Edit: Finished ch 19 too. Ch 20 needs a lot more work than the last few, though...

Chapter 16 done. Yay for short chapters. Maybe I can get an early start on chapter 17.

Meanwhile, I have an extra scene I need to fit in somehow... Hmm... Man first drafts are so much easier. :/ I wish I weren't so far behind schedule. I had wanted to be done by the end of June so I could find someone to look over during the summer, but I've still got 70 pages left to work on...

Chapter fifteen done.

Meanwhile... my cat woke me at 3 a.m. and I had trouble getting back to sleep. I find kind of lightheaded now. Urgh.

Chapter fourteen done. Less than 90 pages to go.

Seems I forgot to post these little announcements the last two times. Oh well. So yes, ch 13 is done, except for one short passage that I need to think about a bit more. I have to decide whether to somehow use it as foreshadowing or just cut it.

I'm trying to not fret about the fact that I still have 41,657 more words to rework. *headdesk* Eleven more chapters. So much for my would-be June deadline.

Chapter ten done! Oh thank goodness! I'm around the midway mark now.

Chapter nine is done-- unless of course I decide to combine it with material from thenext chapter but... whatever.

For those who are interested, I continue to not be online much as I nurse my neck, which is apparently mightily displeased with me.

I now have fifty pages of rewritten text. It's not exactly polished since so many chunks of to had to redone from scratch, but there it is with a plot and pacing that I hope hold up much better than in the original.

I really hope upcoming chapters can get done more quickly as I'm way off schedule.

Meanwhile, I ran errands this morning and then played Sims this afternoon. I should post some of the ridiculous screencaps I have for the 1 or 2 people who might be amused by them.

I've being going to bed early all week in an attempt to make the adjustment to the time change earlier this year-- I was a zombie for three weeks last year. :/

I decided to take Monday off though and I skipped JP class today (we weer supposed to have a huge snowstorm but now it's supposed to start tonight instead of last night. Okay whatever). I'm using the time off to a) relax and b) work on my rewrite.

Chapter six: So far I've successfully changed a fight scene with a gryphon to a fight scene with a chimaera. Two cups of tea were required, but it's done. As to the following two chapters wherein not a lot happens, I've decided to use one of the scenes to finish off this chapter and merge the remainder into a single chapter. I should be able to cut out all the excess stuff that way and still get in some of the info I needed to.

Progress. But I have more I want to do. But... *ignores beckoning call of Mario Galaxies*

Okay, just a bit more and then a gaming break.

EDIT: Chapter six complete-- finally! *sigh of relief*