hmpf

There's no time, though.
Arrgh.

The Sandman/LoM crossover thing has just grown to around 2,500 words - nearly four pages - and it feels barely started.

I've written another half of a scene, so the scene I talked about earlier this week is practically done now. And I'm just freaking out because a fic with *so many words* (and that's before anything even really started happening!) just feels like it must have far too much *padding*, to me. But that may very well be because I'm just not used to writing longer fic.

But I constantly think, "no, no, this can't be right; this thing *can't* just grow like this; this can't be good enough. This is probably all just weak, unnecessary filler, and I'll have to cut all this stuff in the next round of editing. Or at the very least replace large parts of it with something stronger.

(Which is probably true, really, as this current scene is largely dialogue and my dialogue always sucks on the first round, and needs a lot of refining before it feels natural and in character.)

Also, I really don't even have a clear idea where this story is going (other than that it's obviously all about Sam Being Dead, which is what most of my LoM fic tends to be about). So it feels weird to write any dialogue right now, because... how can I tell if it's even "on topic", if I don't know where I'm going?

Arrrgh.

Short update on the stink: it has lessened - maybe it had something to do with the heat. It seems somewhat correlated with days when the temperature in my flat reaches or exceeds 30 degrees Celsius.

But, because things just *can't* be easy even for five minutes here, it's now raining through the roof in my bathroom.

And my internet connection died two days ago and hasn't come back yet (I'm writing this from my computer at work). I'm still waiting for my internet provider's tech support department to call me back.

(Oh, also? My stereo's tape deck, my laptop's mouse, my desktop's power supply unit, and my headphones died - all within the last few weeks. I must be cursed.)

editing the beginning of The Man Who Fell to Earth, aka "the 2.08 survival fic", down to four pages. I think what I have left now is fairly solid, aside from the obvious problems I have with keeping dialogue in character, especially for the 1970s crowd. The main problem, though, the problem that has kept me from continuing this project since 2008, is that this *needs* some 1970s plot (as well as convincing character interaction in those parts of the story) to really work, and I can't for the life of me come up with one.

I need help. I think I need someone to read what I have - someone with a solid handle on the 1970s characters and the police setting and so on - and then I need that person to have a chat with me. At the very least. Possibly more than a chat. (Sometimes I think I need a co-author.)

Has LJ been assimilated?

Okay... I guess that means I have to migrate my journal to Dreamwidth now. *sigh* One more task I don't really have the time for.

Arrrgh.

- Washed four big loads of dishes (I swear, if I had a dishwasher I'd save enough time, per week, to take up an entire new hobby. Or, maybe, actually devote some time to one of my current ones. Or actually reply to some e-mail...)
- Cooked lunch three times (pancakes; spaghetti with tomato sauce - the latter I made twice, because it's cheap and easy)
- Washed three loads of laundry
- Summed up a couple of chapters of a book about zines for my internship
- Spent some four hours at the workbench, working on an earring and some rings while listening to the last volume of the Thrawn Trilogy
- Knitted about ten centimeters of scarf
- Spent about three hours working on fic
- Started making sketches for a painting that I want to give to my cousin & his wife/my cousin's little son for his birthday
- Perused job offers
- Wrote and posted a fs_10percent rec
- Made a new To Do List, as the old one was becoming a bit confusing, what with all the crossed-out and scribbled-in stuff
- Did a complete antivirus scan of my computer
- ETA: Forgot to mention the Massive Monstrous Grocery Shopping Trip From Hell, which took me through six (in numbers: 6) different supermarkets and the local Asian shop. Why does keeping yourself fed well take so much time? *sigh*

Things I also would have liked to fit in there somehow:

- Reply to mails
- Read some LJs (am I *ever* going to manage to get back into the groove???)
- Work more on fic
- Research green/ethical investment
- Continue reading SelfHTML
- Continue rebuilding my website
- Continue uploading stuff to AO3
- Do... *something*... for The Collators' Den
- Buy glasses

The list goes on...

had about 90 items on it.

About 50 of these are done now. A few more will get done tomorrow.

That's actually... both pretty frelling good, and still kind of depressing, because it's only slightly more than half of the list.

*sigh*

The good news, though, is that not a *great* many new things have been added to the list this week, so next week's is actually shorter than last week's. (60 items - yes, twenty new things to do is *not* a lot. There are weeks when the list grows far more than that.)

***

I wanna write fic, dammit.

So, after making great progress in a variety of areas recently, I was... afflicted with a creativity storm in the last few days. I can't really put it any other way; it's like the weather: it comes and goes as it pleases. And, like any proper storm, it causes a fair bit of chaos.

I fought it. To no avail, really - the only result was that I effectively managed to prevent myself from achieving anything on the creative front, either, while still not managing to get anything 'more important' done. Wrestling the muses down can be exhausting.

It also screwed up my sleeping again, because the nights were spent fighting with bunnies.

Lesson of the day: next time, just give in, and at least get something creative done - instead of trying to *not* give in to the urges but expending so much energy on that fight as to render myself incapable of doing anything real-lifey either.

(Well, there were *some* positive results: I have started a new, small Knytt Stories level, and I think I have solved the central plot conundrum of my LoM crossover - the one that had me stalled these past two and a half years.)

oh, everything. Damn.

I just spent two full days working on jewellery, actually finishing or near-finishing four pieces, which reduces my To Do list in that area quite a bit. It feels good, but there's still so much old stuff I never finished... most frustratingly, a pair of earrings I promised my mother for Christmas... years ago. I gave her the design and promised I'd make two pairs of earrings from it, one pair from silver and one from gold. (I really liked that design, and she's always having trouble deciding what to wear with what, so I figured making two pairs, in different materials so she could wear them with everything, would be nifty.) Well, and I started on the silver pair, and they turned into a nightmare. And now, years later, they're still a nightmare, still far from finished - in fact, they're so ruined by now, from my repeated attempts to fix some problem or another, that I will have to start over from scratch. Only, the problem that caused them to turn into such a nightmare persists, and so the next attempt will probably end up a nightmare, too. Maybe I should start on the gold pair instead - gold is said to be easier to work with, especially in cases like this (pieces that require lots of very precise soldering), and I actually bought the gold back when I gave my mother the design for Christmas. Maybe I should give up on the silver pair altogether, and make something different from silver for her instead.

But I really *love* that design. Especially in silver!

I'm just not sure I have the patience and persistence to embark on that trip through hell once more. I just spent some twenty minutes just *looking* at the ruined pair, and arrrgh, so much frustration!

**

Here's one thing I need to push to the top of my To Do list for 2010:

*Really* get back in touch with people.

Four hours, nearly no progress. Arrgh.

(In the last fifteen minutes of my shift today I figured out the history of the world I'm building for my Knytt Stories level, so the day wasn't all bad on the creativity front, after all. Now I just need to find a way to convey that history using nothing but talking cats.)