Laughter Through Tears

I am trying to both write and feel good about things.

Things I am doing: morning words on 750words have treated me pretty well. stack Exchange has also been pretty good to me, especially writes.SE. Actual words on paper have not gone well, but I've been trying to put together plots and thinking about meta and characterization. I want to know how far I can stretch a character like Aya, who has no canonical backstory. I might have to cave and make a canon for her, IDK.

Staying with my sister went surprisingly okay. I have also succeeded in meeting a friend after work, so that's three evenings this week that I spent with company, rather than sitting in my living room. Paging through Tumblr and playing Sunless Sea. And not writing. Yesterday I worked the morning, which was a bit annoying. Next Friday is family birthday, and the one after that is friend birthday.

And the Friday following is Dragon*Con OMG.

During free hours at work, I've been studying up on HTML 5 canvas element, trying to make a dynamically generated family tree. Between JavaScript and DOM, I've succeeded in creating an interface that allows adding named nodes and creating edges between them. If I backed it with Rails and MySQL I bet I could produce a half-decent shipping chart generator.

Games I need to review on Dreamwidth, because I have too much to say for Tumblr to be sufficient: Sunless Sea, Unrest, Broken Age. Meta essays I need to write: magic, power and nobility in secondary world fantasy.

Now that my fic-related deadlines aren't weighing on my mind, and since no call was forthcoming from either of my interviewers, and since I visiting my old employers and my old boss wasn't around... I am back in the Rails game.

Now, I figure I know just enough Rails to create something small and semi-functional. No, not a micro-blogging clone, something that will actually hold my interest. At this point the trick is to create in increments and not immediately drown myself in an overly elaborate plan. My main experience is with demo apps and so I can't expect to start with anything more complicated than a series of interconnected tables.

Once the basics are covered I can think about getting creative.

I would have joined the Dreamwidth devteam if I didn't have a pathological fear of Perl.

Never let me forget how incredibly boring reading programming books is. Last time I did so successfully I was on a plane.

This process is also complicated by the exciting fact that my left hand is fucked up again. Two thumbs up for arthritis.

I have not yet figured out how to execute a complicated breakup.

In better news, I may get an interview for a job in TA. It would seemingly involve more client-side than I might have hoped, but that may ultimately be better.

This open source thing, IDK.