frog princess

Prologue and
Chapter one of the Good Omens all singing, all dancing angels-in-space story.

I saw Finding Nemo and thought the animation was stunning but the script was hopelessly sugary. Humbug! But I really enjoyed the gulls, and the peevish crabs, and Dory. And Alison Janney as the starfish!

And I now have season 5 of Buffy. So this weeks it's digging, writing, Buffy.

Last night I dreamt of getting into a long, very low, shiny train. It was all bit too disturbingly knob-shaped. Maybe I've been taking too many of daegaer's Penis Pills TM.

Pop! The sound of my head exploding from sheer busyness. Still, to make up for it I carried on the theme of senseless luxuries and bought a new skirt and some hair clips that I didn't strictly need. Easy there, Lou.

Wanton thoughts continue unabated on the train. It's all very well me thinking these things, but when I get to writing them down it's another matter entirely, as usual, as with anything, even a boring scene involving tea-drinking. In fact, tea-drinking scenes are hard too. It's all difficult. I can get my imagination fired up, characters behaving themselves, or not, as the case may be, even sometimes, a plot. It's all there in my head, and sometimes (rarely) on paper in diagram form. I'll be practically quivering with the right mood to be writing. But even with the right mood, characters bouncing off the walls, a diagram (!), even then, shifting from that state to one of actually picking up a pen and facing a blank piece of paper, all that stuff doesn't help. Well, it helps a small amount, because at least I know who and vaguely what I want to write about. But it's still me, sitting there, writing crap, rewriting crap and then crossing things out and adding things until it all seems generally okay. It's still 'shit, bugger, that's rubbish, scrub that', seemingly for infinity. Or at least until about version 5, by which time I'll be fairly happy with it. But, despite having to face the pain that is version 1, I still think it's the best fun you can have alone.

And the thing that we all want: I got some nice feedback today, by email. You can't beat the good old-fashioned ways. Fresh crusty emails, just like Ma used to make.

Hey look, lj is working. I am not, however. It's very slow here today, and I've got nothing more to do than answer the odd phone call.

My Week
I've had rather a pleasant week. On Monday I bought two new garden benches and built them, and on Tuesday I filched a large piece of fake black marble from a skip and made a garden table. Last night friends came round and we drank the obligatory amount of wine (ie too much), and they really liked my photos of their wedding! Relief. I've made headway with this damned paper at last, and now it's just a struggle to the death between me, some bar charts and some graphics. God I hate Word. Lastly, I've been rereading OotP, slowly this time and am noticing so much more than I did the first time.

Tomorrow, friends are coming to visit and I'm having a little garden party to celebrate my 33 and a third birthday. It's a bit late, it should really have been last week, but hey. This month is a celebratory month anyway. Everything's good. And G has got some serious gossip about her life. I can't wait to hear it.

Kissing
I was beginning to think that I didn't have any story kinks that weren't annoying abstract concepts, but I was wrong. So wrong. When I look at my own stories, I can suddenly see it as plain as day. I don't know how I overlooked kissing.

I had this little epiphany when I discovered that the contrelamontre challenge this week is about kissing. Of course, sod's law that I've been to busy this week to do anything for it.

I like being tantalised with hints and subtle insinuations. Kissing is a bit like that, or rather, it can be. It's a beginning, or a promise of something more, or a declaration of love, or lust, even. I could waffle on at length about why kissing is a story kink for me, but now is not the time. I think I'll just get it out my system by writing a story about kissing instead.

Bloody hell. I've only gone and lost a story. It's somewhere on a disk, a disk that I can't find anywhere. That is, it should be on the missing disk, unless I've deleted the story or, as I'm strongly suspecting, saved something over it without realising, in which case, bugger!

It's been a trying weekend, and I don't feel very refreshed after 5 days off. But the good news is my brother has bought a holiday house in Staithes, which is near Whitby. I can't wait to see it.

I had some feedback, which did that good thing and made me think about how I write. I think my writing has a certain stillness and emotional distance to it, which I suppose would reflect what I'm like as a person. I don't mean that I'm calm, but rather I don't really like to rock the boat, challenge the status quo, get too involved and so on. This is not necessarily a good thing, or something I particularly admire about myself, and so it's frustrating to think that it comes out in whatever I write. I don't know if things do work like that, if a person's writing wholly reflects what they're like, but I think that it's inevitable that something of the writer comes through. Exactly what is harder to say. Maybe something in the general tone of their writing, and the sorts of things they write about. Are these things you can pick and choose? I think that the better a writer gets, the more skillfully they can create a world or character that is not tied to their world view or experiences; they can control to some extent the reader's experience.

A busy and productive day today. Lux Fanfiction is completely overhauled and looking rather nice and modern. That took most of the day.

Also I've uploaded 'Time Under Glass' to Snapeslash, which I'd been meaning to do for weeks. Vague worries about how it will be recieved. Of all the things I've written, this was the writing experience that I enjoyed the most. It was wonderful, absorbing and exciting. But it's the story for which I've recieved least feedback. Don't know what that means, if anything. Okay, apart from the obvious. *g*

"No," he hissed. (somebody wrote this, don't know who).

How do you hiss the word 'no'? Try it, you can't. The best I can do is to wheeze it.

"No," he wheezed. Not quite the same effect. I always thought the safest way was to just have people say things. Otherwise you are in danger of ending up with a veritable farmyard of growling, barking, yipping, hooting, snarling, purring, and not forgetting hissing, characters. I know, I've been on that farm. It's noisy.