Laughter Through Tears

April is gone, and if I'm truly honest with myself, I'm surprised I managed to do as much as I did with it. I wrote a total of about 21K words this month, including about 7K of Blue Rose. Given I only started the actual first draft in March, and that the total for the first act is around 9K and change, that's not half bad. I had set myself a goal of 15K words for the month of April but that proved unrealistic.

It was a busy month. Holidays ate up time with family things, there was the yearly Pesach convention, things like that always throw off my routine and make it hard to keep a schedule. Then there were family issues and I needed to be very available for that, which also didn't do wonders for my personal morale. Things are calming down a little but that mainly means I have to kick myself into higher gear in terms of fixing my own life up.

May is the month when I start to get my shit together. My shit's been untogether since about December, for reference.

Started Pilates again this month too, and I've been therapizing aggressively. Objectively I'm in a miles better place than I was even a month or two ago, let alone last winter. It's hard to see because work means clarity and clarity means seeing everything that still needs to be done. Laundry, reviews for my blog, money matters, work. Everything. I try not to get overwhelmed.

I am doing well. Just not so well that I don't need to keep reminding myself of it. Not so well that I can feel how well I'm doing without deep qualitative analysis. Just feel an uncomplicated emotion and sit with it for a while. That turns out to be the hardest thing.

Remind me to never again do a game jam during the holidays.

An annotated guide to my Purimgifts 2017 request:

Part 1 - Fandoms

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Part 2 - Additional Tags

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Part 3 - Rating

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Part 4 - Archive Warnings

( Read more... )

Part 5 - Additional Details

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I'm always happy with what I get, but sometimes I respond to the fics late because of anxiety issues. If it's been a day or two and I haven't commented yet, that definitely doesn't mean I didn't read and love the story, just that I'm anxious that day.

This entire month is messing with my head. Individually, I'm looking forward to all sorts of things (and glad for all sorts of things I've already done). Collectively, October needs to die.

Passover was approaching with giant, menacing steps and I didn't even have time to make a post about it before it got here and now it's basically here OMG.

Holidays are stress, everyone knows that. I basically have two modes, 'I have to worry about that' and 'I don't have to worry about that yet'. The problem is, once something gets slotted into the second category, it tends to get stuck and stay there too long, until it bubbles up to 'I have to worry about that RIGHT NOW' or 'it's too late to worry about that'. Which sucks.

My medical chores went poorly so that's another things I have to worry about again. And it's the holidays, which means I have to carry all of my mother's stress in addition to my own. And my apartment is so dirty because I am always too tired to clean.

Now I have to choose to forget everything so that I can spend the rest of the morning writing.

Hi!

First, you are awesome for doing this and I'm guaranteed to love anything you make for me. Because I love presents and this is my favorite holiday.

Some general notes: ( General notes on gifts. )

These fandoms are tiny and I would adore literally anything you make for them: ( Read more... )

( The Traitor/Baru Cormorant )

( Game fandoms )

( Killjoys/The 100 )

( Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens )

Year, we got off to a rough start. I acknowledge this. I'm not sure how I feel about you just yet, but I am willing to give you a chance.

Tomorrow, my 2015 writing retrospective will go up on the WordPress blog. I will probably crosspost it here. It has charts! And numbers! And colors!

I also have some Yuletide recs that I've been gradually accumulating. I will post them once I've grown a spine and read the reviews on my own story.

Meanwhile I'm drafting a review for Solstice.

The dust storm broke over the night. Particle count is back to normal (< 100 mcg/m^3) as opposed to the ranges between 300 and as high as 600 of last week. I opened the windows. All of them. The house is going to need a thorough cleaning -- much more thorough than I have the energy for.

And tonight is the new year. Happy new year?

So this pretty much wraps up Purim. I nominally dressed up as Red Riding Hood but it's not terribly convincing because it's the sort of outfit I'd wear on an average summer day to work. I had some 70% fig liquor and should probably have had about half as much as I did. I did get plenty of snacks (pretzels, potato chips and popcorn) so I'm not really worried about headaches and the like. I am taking a water bottle and a granola bar to bed with me, though.

purimgifts was awesome as ever and, par for the course, gifted me with a deluge of positive feedback far above what I can usually expect. Which is delightful.

I received three Root/Shaw fics for Person of Interest and they were charming and perfectly in-character, not to mention just the thing for a week with no episode: Chai and conversation (featuring Shaw and Persian cuisine), Polish (featuring Root and Halloween), and Day in the Life (which is kind of a meta summation of the Root/Shaw ship, in my eyes).

I wrote four fics. My gifts were a series of Agent Carter/Miss Fisher crossover bits, filed under How We Won the War. Then I wrote a rapid, last-minute treat: The Katabasis of Queen Esther, in which Esther and Vashti reenact Inanna's descent into the underworld. Also Tarot. I piled on some extra crack on top of that, too, because apparently that's how my brain plots on Saturday mornings.

Now i am strongly tempted to utilize my intoxication to write fic, but instead I will be an adult and go to bed early(ish). Because work tomorrow.

Seal barking at my purimgifts assignment.