Today I went to the monthly fannish stitch'n'bitch that synecdochic has started giving, where there was much talking about NaNo but very little actual *writing* nano.

I did, however, pass around my planning notebook and have everyone writing something that should go in my novel. So, for the record, what the denizens of the Baltimore fangirl stitch'n'bitch think I should write about:

- ritual dance. Have one of these already! Actually two or possibly three, depending on where the line between "dancing" and "mating" and "murder" is.

- a product all your characters use, complete with a brand name and marketing. Don't have one, but know exactly where it can go in, for at least most of the characters.

- surfing on supernova shockwaves. ... I have surfing on air puddles, and on gravity waves, but I have no supernova. This one will take some shoehorning.

- Library dragons (and yes, I do mean mythical firebreathing dragons!) I will probably cheat and have these be in a VR interface, but I can totally do. (I already have a "scene in a library" dare from LT's nano group.)

- Traditional "bardic" tale with a twist ending (and a female with spine.) ...depends on whether it has to be singable?

-Boys sexxin'. This happens around my characters, but I had not yet decided whether do actually put in a sex scene or two, so that solves my dilemma.

-Advent calendars for all occasions! Heh. I can do at least a couple of these, no problem. Though they may not have chocolate in. And only one of my major characters would get the Advent reference right away.

-Penguins! - I agree, multiple penguins! This had me stumped, but if alien-creatures-that-are-penguins-under-vaguely-phenetic-classification count, then I know exactly where to put multiple penguins. They get to save the day!

-rats, polka dots and musical lessons too, because a reality warper wants people to be happy! I will have to think about this one. There may be knitting involved. --dude, this could totally be an *FTL piloting sim*.

-darjeeling tea. That, I can do.

-snakes (goa'uld or no). Should be doable as at least a passing reference, though my worldbuilding tends to lean more toward tentacles.

-a mythological creature coming to life. I will have to decide how far I can stretch that one.

I just opened a kit-kat bar that had absolutely no Crisp Wafers embedded in its chocolate! Rip off!

...In other news, am I allowed to attribute my complete lack of wordcount since Sunday to solidarity with the WGA writers' strike?

(But I'm almost half-done tagging my mp3 collection on this computer.)

ETA: OMG DENNY AND ALAN, HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.

Got seven-hundred-twenty words today, which puts me just over five thousand and still a whole day ahead, but it was like pulling teeth just to make myself start, and now I have to get up at six. D: It doesn't help that this scene I'm currently at touches on subject matter that I'm really reluctant to do a sub-par job with, and yet: still all crap. BAH! Well, there's no rule that says I have to show it to anyone else. Like, ever.

Everybody's posting their NaNo stuff, and it's all so much better than mine that it's making me all depressed. D:

I have 4,230 words, but that's mostly due to forcing myself to push through even when I knew that I was just spewing crap. Also, I installed wc.exe for word count of .txt files (it's part of the unixutils package that lets you use all the nifty unix command-line utilities on a windows command line.) Unfortunately, I forgot exactly how to set it up to work as a right-click menu option in windows explorer, so I've been forced to actually run it through the command line ... which means I have a record of just how many times a day I check wordcount.

Anyway, did I mention that it's all crap? Well, just to prove I'm actually writing (and, of course, to grovel for ego-boo) here's the first few lines of the first chapter, one of the few bits I'm actually okay with:( Read more... ).

Feel free to critique my first-paragraph-writing skills.

This is me, lindentreeisle, and kyabetsu trick-or-treating! We were spinking.


(I am the baby spink. They are the momma spinks. Until we traded costumes partway through.)

Then we wheeled and dealed over our candy (of which there was lots!) and now we are preparing to start NaNo in an hour! (Yay NaNo!)

ETA: 2,000 words! 2,000 words of utter crap, but it's prologue, and that's always utter crap anyway. But it's done!

So I've been using most of my spare brain cycles reading and thinking about NaNo. This is the level where I'm at: I have just realized that I have exactly *one* honest-to-god male character in this story. "Honest-to-God" being taken literally: I do have a couple gender-variant characters who would probably in modern culture identify as male, but in their milieu, when they get down on their knees in honesty, they identify either as female or thirdsex.

All the other developed male characters are either dead before the story starts or are killed soon after my character meets them. The only cisgender man who gets much of a speaking part spends most of his appearance in the story running errands for his girlfriend. ...That's kind of cool, considering that I didn't do it on purpose at all. And that I'm supposedly writing a patriarchal culture.

Anyway, I've been meaning to post more world-buildy stuff in the last month, but, um, not so much, and writing starts tomorrow! One thing I did get written up, rather than just marked in a library book, is my world's cosmology: Anyone writing in a fantasy world is writing in a world where the basic underlying principles are at least a bit different from ours, and I think it's important that the writer know what those principles are. My *characters* won't necessarily know, or they might have a lot of it wrong, and it may never come out in the story that they have it wrong, but I have to know what's possible, what's impossible, and what's absolutely necessary for the world to hang together.

It was especially tricky for this universe because I want it to be a world where the gods are present and magic works - but I also want to be able to use this world for alternate-history fantasy stories set anywhere from earliest prehistory all the way to near-future speculation. So I had to come up with a cosmology where Gods were present and magic works for *every* religion and belief system ever, from animism to m-theory, with minimal fudging necessary.

Um. Tricky. But I had a lot of other people's efforts to draw on, so here's what I've got, and I think it'll work for at least this story's world, with enough options left open to make it work for others, too: ( It starts with a bubble in the deeps. )

Tomorrow: Draw maps, work out language phoneme charts for naming, make last plot outline. Oh, and make a Halloween costume.

Fandoms you should never, ever get confused with each other:
MASH and Supernatural.
('Ah, it's the famous Winchester stamina,' he says, and I blink.)
I bet Sam and Dean totally have a Great-Uncle Charles up in New England somewhere that Dad never talks about except they went there that once when the thunderbird ripped Sam's leg open all the way down and Uncle Charles sighed and moaned and wrinkled his nose a lot, and then fixed it.


Two things I wouldn't care about at all if it weren't for certain people on my flist:
The Red Sox are going to the Series! wOOt!!
(I wonder if I'll have my multifandom Baseball AUs recs set ready to post for the start of Game One tomorrow?)
Ronnie O'Sullivan lost! Waaaah!!
(I wonder if anyone ever has written a snooker AU. --Lust Over Pendle totally doesn't count, no matter how sexy Neville was bent over a table with a cue.)


Gilgamesh the king of Uruk invented a ball game once, according to the Sumerian story "Bilgames and the Underworld". He cut down a possessed tree to make a bed for Inanna, and with the leftover wood made the equipment for the game. Then the game became so popular among the young men that the women they were ignoring got angry and kicked the equipment into the netherworld, so Gilgamesh's manly life partner Enkidu volunteered to go down and get it back, but Enkidu didn't follow instructions and got stuck down there, and Gilgamesh had to make a deal to let him hitchhike along with the sun-chariot the next day to get him back to the light.

To which I have several reactions:
1. Man, the Gilgamesh stories were much cooler before somebody went and turned them into a tragic epic.
2. So very, very manly.
3. What is this game? How was it played? HOW CAN I PUT IT IN MY NANO?
4. When (and where) on Earth did Gilgamesh meet up with Hunahpu? And which of them was more gay?(Has anyone investigated similarities between Old Sumerian and Quiche?)

Everybody has just under an hour left to sign up for Yuletide! You should do it. Even if your squee is feeling really harshed right now. Because it's worth it, and you'll regret it if you don't. And two of my requested fandoms still don't have any offers. :( (I only offered about 1/10 available fandoms this year, which is less than last year ... well, proportionately less.)


In other news, I just got two new friends over on lj. Which puzzles me, because I haven't done anything over there lately except get wanky and get called on it. Although if that earns me new friends, go me! I think I will have to go back and edit my top post there to make it clearer that I've moved, though, just in case. Then I ended up reading a bunch of old entries, and dude, I used to be awesome. What happened?


IN other news, who here is still missing their paid account icons? Do I need to go ask at support, or should I be patient a bit longer? Because I want to put up NaNo ones already, dammit.

(The poll in my last entry came out strongly in favor of NaNo blather, btw, so I'm going with that. Feel free to defriend whenever you get sick of it.)

Poll #292
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

How much do you want to know about my NaNo?

(Quick NaNo summary, if you care: Sword&Sorcery set in vaguely Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Plot is currently nebulous; will be doing a lot of playing with worldbuilding, especially gender, and a lot of wibbling about worldbuilding. What plot there is, is kind of the traditional Chosen-One-Kills-Evil-Wizard storyline, but backwards and upside-down: Evil Wizard already killed, Chosen One has to live down the weird instead of living up to it. ...Will probably give up within about a week, but all bets are off. Also there is an ancient Sumerian glam rocker.)

Damn it, the two posts that I saw on m_f, jumped over here, and breathed a sigh of relief that nobody'd posted them JUST SHOWED UP. Dear flist: just because it's on metafandom and it's full of fail doesn't mean you should wank it.

In fact, if it's on metafandom it's probably full of Serious Business and you probably *shouldn't* wank it. Go look for something wacky and irrelevant, please.

(How quickly one gets jaded!)

Anyway, I went to do food prep for this fundraiser the local homeless shelter is doing, and as I was prepping about two hundred hard boiled eggs, I started thinking (as you do) about what the characters in my head would be doing in that situation.

Thing is, while the characters currently living in my head would totally have let themselves get roped into a church fundraiser, they live in early-copper-age Greece. Did they even *have* hen's eggs? I don't think they did. Did they have other kinds of eggs? (Were there quail eggs in Greece? Would there be quails in my alternate-fantasy-Greece with the Mediterranean landlocked?) Would they have fried things? What would they have fried them in (olive oil, I suppose? Or would there be animal grease to use for that? Is early Greek olive oil as messy as cheap American frying oils?) Was everyday cookware in the Mediterranean glazed, or sealed, or what? How would you have gotten grease out of it - did they have soap? Did they have hard soap? Would the rare copper have been used for cookware? (How would you cook in pots of unalloyed copper?) I know there would have been octopus and eel, but would there have been crab? How about other shellfish? Did they have mayonnaise? Would they have used cream sauces at all?

...sad thing is, last time I was working in this universe (NaNo four years ago) I actually read a book of Bronze Age recipes. Do I remember the relevant bits? NOOO. I have never missed being in walking distance of a University library more than now.

This is why I never get anywhere in actually writing my original fic. This is also why I was originally so attracted to fanfic - at least there, the canon is FINITE. 'Course, I still never get around to watching the canon when there's wikipedia articles I could be reading. It's also part of the reason I write in fantasy and SF universes instead of the real world; you can pick a point at which you've done enough research and it's time to just make shit up. (Not that I've ever gotten to that point. At least with the Copper Age mediterranean (and even more so when they eventually go to the Sahel) there will be a point at which I've exhausted what is currently known. I'm just not there yet. (I wonder if it would be a good use of my time to re-read Homer?)

Spent most of the afternoon and morning working in the yard. I can't decide if it's awful or awesome that the black walnut tree is fruiting this year. We'll see what my opinion is after I've picked up another four or five bushels of mostly-rotten nuts. (Feel the burn in those thighs!) Haven't decided yet if I'm going to try to shell any this year or not - I did a bunch two years ago, the last time it fruited, and my fingers were this absolutely lovely mahogany color until mid-October. Then Mom, who has a vicious PUT IT IN TUPPERWARE instinct, sealed them up before they'd had a chance to cure and they all mildewed. Bah.

The squirrels get nearly all the good ones anyway. Anybody know how to tell a good nut from a bad before you shell it? Because that's a *lot* of effort for a very few good nuts.

Then I spent the evening shelving books on my LibraryThing.com account. It's not solved yet, but the remaining books are a lot more manageable now. (For those who haven't encountered me in hoard-brooding mode before - I live, with all my worldly possessions, in a 15x20 foot bedroom. Among those possessions: well over a thousand books. And I acquire new ones at a rate of about five a week, although in a good month I can easily do four times that. So it's a never-ending puzzle to get them shelved = good thing I love messing about with books! ATM I have eight separate bookshelves of varying sizes in the room, not counting the line of books across the top of my dresser, and I sleep on the top bunk of a bunk bed with a reading nook on the bottom. For all that, the room's surprisingly open and airy when everything's stowed away where it belongs.)

So now instead of four tall piles of random recent books under my bed, I have a pile of classic literature and a pile of books on the writing life and a pile of books that might be relevant to my NaNo. And *everything else* is shelved, which I honestly didn't think I'd manage until about five minutes before I finished. Yay!

(Yeah - I know what I'm doing for NaNo already, mostly thanks to limyaael's fantasy rants. I'm starting a good month sooner than the last five years though, so hooray! No worries, though - I'm fairly well certain I'll just do all the worldbuilding and then give up on the actual writing a week in, like always.)