Why do these stories always go plotty, with elaborate settings and magic systems and historical doodahs and original characters and plot arcs and all that? WHY?

And why can I not write anything at all? I just want to sleep for a million years. Open files list:

"Liegeman", penultimate chapter.
Untitled short Seven/Ace-ish thing on metagames.
Iceland, aka Seven Nights in the Northern Lights.
Giles mpreg (very rough outline).
GBX Big Sky cabin post-Chosen apocalyptics.
Giles/Ethan/Buffy in Hell.
Giles/Xander and a barrow wight.
Helios Hyperion.
A file of abandoned kink meme responses.

Progress: NIL.

Addendum: If you haven't watched James May's Toy Stories at all yet, you should probably check out the most recent one, which is all about slot car racing. (Which the Brits apparently give the name of their most popular brand, Scalextric.) He and an entire neighborhood recreate a classic and long-closed racing circuit... literally. Along the entire course. I've enjoyed the entire series so far, but this one was especially good.

It is like pulling teeth, the writing. But it is happening. Cunning plan still creaking forward. The writing includes a rather surprising Ace+Seven short story. Surprising that it exists, to be clear, since I wasn't expecting it. But this might not be done in time for cunning plan(tm).

Also, James May's Toy Stories is quite charming. And an example of television that the spousal unit enjoys even more than I do.

Today's progress report: 2000 of the right words for "Northern Lights (working title)". A bunch of writing in... something else... as well.

I need an icon of Buffy with a sword. Giles with a sword icons bonus. My little stash of icons saved from various sources didn't have anything. Did she ever hold a sword in canon? Of course she did, right? In S5 at the very least, when those knights of the idiot brigade were in town to provide plot complications.

Have been completely distracted and absent-minded for days and days now. Normally this is okay; I wander into my workplace and become distracted by the things they pay me to do, which is convenient all around. Now I get distracted without external structure and vanish for hours into projects. Is there such a thing as attention surfeit disorder?

Life: Was feeling good about my three-minute 12kg kettlebell snatch test until I watched youtube videos of women doing five-minute tests with 16kg bells. I know that I can snatch a 16kg kettlebell ten times just fine; wonder how dead I'd be after snatching it for five minutes non-stop. Probably "very dead". Well, it's good to have goals.

Birthday! Happy belated birthday to spikendru! I was so happy to meet you at Writercon. I want you to know that the bracelet you gave me is at this moment held by my action figures of Giles and Xander. Xander is attempting to show Giles how to do hula hoop. Giles is doubtful.

Today was boxing day at the gym, which always makes me smile because I have my own personal Giles telling me what to do with my shoulders as I attempt to punch his lights out. Except my own personal Giles is much younger than I am, and American, and not given to cross-referencing for relaxation. This is boxing for fitness not boxing for real, mind you, but I'm still beginning to have some power in my punches. Which is cool. Strength training for women == literal empowerment. Highly recommended for all.

Am attempting to work on plot today. Or sort of the expression through action of internal issues vis a vis new Watcher/Slayer dynamics on an emerging Hellmouth. Except that I also want major major sensawunda reaction to this stuff, so some of the plotty stuff needs to be foregrounded. Good practice, I call it, for the origfic. But it's work. Major sweat goes into these throwaway entertainments for you guys, you know that? I do it 'cuz I love you.

Well, actually, I do it because I want that experience for myself. Sharing it with you is just a bonus.

Huh, that wikipedia article on the sense of wonder is pretty good, if tres Clutian. I note a gap in my SF background, as I have read the mega-famous "The Weapon Shops of Isher", but not the followup novel referenced. Van Vogt is sorta, hmm, pulpy for my tastes. But I bet it's on the shelves in Mr P's office.

I find the poll responses telling. ( Wait, aren't you supposed to show not tell? )

I am behind on Merlin and Dollhouse. I can't say I'm really burning to watch either of them, not the way I was burning to watch new House. You know what I should catch up on, though? Eureka. Or I could just try to put a dent in my stack of unread books.

And in conclusion, a most emphatically happy birthday to kivrin!

The next chapter of Blackmail, Giles and Buffy at dinner and afterwards.
Giles/Buffy in Iceland, with original Watcher character as foil.
Post-Chosen Core Four smut.
Giles/Xander kink.
Giles mpreg, which now has a scenario I can buy. Heh.
Buffy/Giles/Xander in a big sky state, post-Chosen.
Original fiction.

I might have had too much caffeine today, but I can't argue with the results. Well, maybe I can. I really wish I'd settled and made good traction in any one of those. Too many stories in my head, all the time. To think I once was convinced I had no story ideas at all and would never write fiction. HA.

Today's distraction: Google Wave and pondering how LJ might integrate with it. Yesterday's distraction: District 9 with the_emu and gloriana. What an excellent film-- best movie I've seen this year. Highly recommended. If you're squeamish, you can cover your eyes at the gross bits the way I did.

It turned cool practically overnight here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where "cool" is something you midwesterners would cheerfully mock. But I have turned to my clothes closet and begun to contemplate exchanging the shorts for the long-sleeved shirts.

Two weeks of upper-body focus at the gym has had its effect already. I feel like I've leveled up in upper body strength. Hulk smash! Or as Mr Pedia just put it, "I married a linebacker." Yesterday's workout was brutal: 100 reps of everything I did. What feels easy at #20 is agony at #90, let me tell you. Yesterday also included all the leg stuff I can do without using my toes, and oh boy I feel it today when walking.

Writing report: I've been looking at people's Icelandic flickr streams. That'll tell you what I'm working on. I've also picked up the morally reprehensible kinky GX as a fidget story. Why does this stuff always turn into season rewrites? Who wants giant kinky stories with plot? The LJ house style is for the 1000-word-tops one-shot. But I guess my brain needs the 180-degree tonal shift from slow-moving angsty Giles and Buffy healing in Iceland. ETA for both stories several years from now, as my current writing pace is glacial.

Ha, ha, see what I did there? Right. I'll shut up again now.

Random: I'm experiencing font lust.

Well, that's a complete draft, without any notes to self or unwritten bits. It has a title and a thematic whatsit and everything. It also probably doesn't have any un-deliberate ungrammaticalities any more.

I think I'll give it 24 hours of pretending I'm thinking about it, then just post it without looking at it again.

Random: Continuing the week's musical theme, here's a cover of "Taking Tiger Mountain". Available for free download from the musicians.

Writing overly-plotty kink meme responses.
Contemplating story.
Contemplating outline for a different story.
Reading overly-schmoopy classic BG stories (with the grammatical error tolerance dial set high).
Fighting resulting urge to read Willow/Spike, which was in vogue in BG stories set in mid-season 4. Also, ultra-schmoopy Xander/Anya.

In short, I'm incredibly boring right now.

Today I was absolutely useless. Okay, I worked out. That wasn't useless. I did laundry. That also was not useless.

I need to buckle down tonight and finish this story. Failure to do so already is really what has me feeling useless. I need to stop trying to hit home runs every time. Lots of at-bats instead. Lots of balls put in play.

Sorry. I like baseball metaphors.

Deadline: Sunday. You heard it here.

We interrupt your evening programming for this brief update: I am one off-screen frustrated-Buffy vamp-staking sequence away from a first draft. Today was a good writing day.

Er. Lets see. Surely there's something actually interesting I could say here. I could say that "Schoolhouse Rock" was really more "Schoolhouse Jazz", which was sneaky of them. It would have been more interesting to have a generation of schoolkids singing the Declaration of Independence, which is full of fascinating and incendiary sentiments. Was that interesting enough?

iTunes chose next to play LCD Soundsystem, "The Great Release" which is so very very Brian Eno. On purpose. It echos Eno album-closers like "Here Come the Warm Jets" in loving homage. Thus you might call the song a perfect Antenna-trap. I'm mixed about the album as a whole, though I often sing "Daft Punk is playing at my house, my house" at random moments.

Or there's this BG shipper secret from today's fandomsecrets.

No. Wait. As I type I learn something sad: Teddy Kennedy is dead at age 77. This, I will mourn. His legislative legacy is far greater than the flawed human being was, but that's what the tradition of public service used to be about.

From last night: The Dogs of Great Evil are asleep in Mr P's office. Mr P himself is off board gaming. I am hermiting with the cats. The Inky Blot No-Longer-Kitten is floomped out on my chest, purring and kneading me with one paw. I can see the Shaggy Cow Cat over in his usual spot on top of the cat tree. He used to sleep on my chest when he was a kitten, until the day Mr P brought home the cat tree. When he saw it, he climbed on top and hasn't come down since. Inky Blot, however, prefers to use me as a platform, which has the side benefit of entirely preventing me from typing.

And now from this morning: Story's going okay. I think maybe I know what it's about now, and can finish a draft with some sense of direction. One problem with this post-Becoming setting is that there is just so much going on for these characters. Canon blithely ignored it all, but I feel I can't. Not all of it. I am having an interesting problem with designing scene that express character, because in this story I have a sort of rule against direct action sequences. Buffy so often doesn't say what's going on, but instead punches. So if I prevent her from punching...

"Laundry Day", the working title of an angsty post-Becoming Giles/Buffy story, wins the poll at 8 votes, just nipping out the next chapter of Blackmail, at 6. I will write this, post it, and then put up a new poll with 7 or so story choices in it. Target posting date for the story is Sunday; that would put the new poll on Monday.

I'm off! I'd also like to write a kink meme response or two while I'm at it: the meme right now has a lot of prompts and 0 responses.

This is how the poll has finally shaken out:
complex, angsty romance
complex, triumphant friendship

"Complex" is such a clear winner that I thought I'd apply it to both stories. I think I know what they both are. "Complex", unfortunately, means "harder to write" because it requires mental bake time. Lots of cycles around in the subconscious. But I'll do it!

You will have observed that this time around I didn't poll about characters. You'd all vote for Buffy/Giles so there's just no point in asking! Instead I'll oppress you by writing something unpredictable. (Right now it's looking like Spike and Xander. Guess which is is the friendship fic.)

In the mean time, I have some drabbles to finish (so much work I might just bail and write longer ficlets, as the less time-consuming task) and a chapter of "Liegeman" to move beyond the skeletal outline phase. Might have to wait until I get home, though. It's been non-stop thrills here at Flood Control Dam #3. There has been high-speed fun on the water. (You may have noticed that I'm an adrenaline junkie. Yes.)

Must see! If you haven't seen katekat1010's latest batch of manips, run over there now and take a look. Entirely worksafe: the men of BtVS in cravats and long-waisted suits. I think the ones of Ethan and Xander should have fic dedicated to them.

Poll results: So far, complex romance is winning, and you guys can't make up your minds if you also want it angsty, triumphant, or transcendent. I'll have a job on my hands if none of those three pulls ahead of the others.

A surprising number of you want friendship, which is actually kinda good. Because a couple of days ago, in one of those thinking while driving moments, I figured out that what had me really stuck on one of my stories was that it is not a relationship story. It is a friendship story. My character motivation problems all solved themselves with that realization.

WriterCon comment 1: After the hurt/comfort panel today, I feel I need to say something in defense of the flufic subgenre. No clue what. Perhaps instead I'll just write Giles with a cold being made tea by somebody unlikely.

WriterCon comment 2: Tonight at the writercon100 Dirty Drabbles session I read my Giles/Ethan drabble "Hustler" aloud. And I also read brutti_ma_buoni's X/A drabble "Evil"! Many other drabbles from the comm were read aloud by other people as well. Big fun.

Fic commentary! Also, hey! dvd_commentary is now open for signups for the 2009 DVD Commentary Challenge. What's that? Authors sign up to make their stories available to be commented upon, and then you write a DVD commentary for a story you love. How's it work? This post has all the details.

I'm signed up as an author. I signed up last year, too, but nobody else in my little corner of the fandom joined me in navel-gazing. Why not give it a shot this year?

( The troubling story... )

( Ideas sleeting through my brain like neutrinos through water tanks... )

( Seventh Doctor watch continues... )

( Writercon Ho! )

Remix: remixredux09 author reveal tomorrow. Any last guesses? nutterbudgie and snickfic have already tossed their hats in the ring.

( Cut to spare you the vague story spoilers, not to mention the sight of extra-waffly wittering... )

We've now watched two more serials with the Seventh Doctor, since Mr P has taken a shine to him. And so have I.

Oh, god, I've got unanswered fic comments from spring of last year. As in, last year's remix. *hangs head* Would it be absurd to answer them now? I think it might be.

However, it's been another good writing day. I've finally reached the stage where I'm grumpy to be interrupted for any reason. For instance, this evening's climbing with one of my classmates. I'm supposed to be overjoyed that I have a belay partner, not stomping around the house getting my gear bag ready and muttering to myself.

In conclusion, I note that my current writing soundtrack is nearing the point of awesomeness for the task of getting me in the mood for the stories I'm working on now. Though it might be a bit overdoing it on the transcendental happiness of the concluding tracks. It's making the stories happier in the early bits than they should be. However, second drafts now exist for two stories. I'm setting them aside and picking up a third story. A sadly overdue one. After climbing, though.

Today was a good writing day.

Chase my own story needs chase my own story needs chase my own story needs. Don't worry about whether you guys will like it, because if I do not satisfy myself, I most assuredly cannot satisfy you.

How this leads inevitably to [mutter mutter anime trope] is something I categorically refuse to explain.

I have no Gene Wilder Young Frankenstein icon to go with this post.

"[Mumble mutter] (The Run That Title Into The Ground Remix)" is now nearly at 2000 words and I think I finally found a heart for it. Not in the first place I looked, or the second, but the third. I wrote a joking remix title for it and realized that whoops, I'd just figured it out. It's sort of a pity that I am having to absent myself from the con at the moment to make this happen, but this is the price I pay now for procrastination earlier.

Fidget story has been the Montana one, specifically the Giles/Xander bits thereof. Which are interesting to write when one is firmly in Buffy's point of view. I am pondering a shift for the two sections that are mostly notes to self, fragments of outline, and scattered bits of prose. Because it would fit for other reason. Hmm. Okay. Going to have to do it.

Not very random: I have just learned that there are some people in this world who haven't seen the Buffy vs Edward vid, so I share a link that has the vid and some context for it.

Fic archive updated and fiddled with some more. I decided finally to include all header info except author's notes in a block at the top. I think this satisfies the need to let readers know what they're into. This one is an example of the most information anything ever has: entry in a series, banner, pairing, tags, warning. What do you think, oh readers?

I really wish the backstory for "Liberation" were already written, but I suspect I will enjoy the adventure of writing it anyway. Though it will take me a while.

Changed LJ layout to something useless as incentive to fix it. Note to self: need to make banner image 940 by 260 pixels.

Read some surprising things today while researching something mumble mumble. Was also surprised to learn that microbes are a problem in diesel fuel, and that the first fuel used by Diesel in his new engine was coal dust.

( Remix whinging... )

Fandom is giving me Teh Rage(tm) today, so I've decided to go to my happy place. That is, the writing place. Which from the outside looks like me glaring at my Macbook with breaks to gnaw on the side of my finger and wail. Really, trust me, that's happiness.

Time to write fic commentary. And a novel outline. Oh, lord, why is it so hard to transition from the dreaming-it-through mode to the solidifying-it-in-words mode?

As of Saturday, I've been doing giles_watchers for three years. That's how long I've been active in fandom. All of you who've been in it for a decade or more may now shake your umbrellas at me.

I spent the weekend mostly on non-writing projects, of the sort that need to get done. Like laundry. And leveling my druid to 80, which happened on Sunday. Yay me. I signed up for a rock climbing class at a local climbing gym, which is something I've always wanted to do. Starts next week. The climbing gym also does Crossfit, so I might join it and start working out there to supplement the personal training. I <3 Crossfit. As I'm sure I've let you all know most tediously. Working out has been so important to my life recently, though. It's amazing stuff: fun, transformative, empowering in all kinds of ways. And I feel so good that I just want to evangelize it to everybody.

And now the optional fic wittering section of today's post. ( Cut to spare those who are uninterested... )

I dunno. What do you guys hanker most to read?

Random: Cataloging system wank. My hometown library uses the Library of Congress system, and I'm afraid I always thought of the Dewey Decimal system as being a bit down-market. Bracing for impact...

How long can it take to edit 3000 words until they're the right ones? Apparently, all day long. I hope I'll be done soon. Sometimes I wonder why I spend so much time and agony on self-indulgent kinky fanfiction that has an audience of about 20 people tops. On a good day. Oh well. I'm pretty sure all 20 of those people will enjoy it as much as I do. Once I've managed to forget the process of writing it, that is. I can't enjoy it right now. I rather loathe it.

I think this is why fan writers get all needy about comments. We all want to know our suffering has a point, some kind of reward at the end.

To procrastinate, have been writing disquisition on how there is no difference between "emotional arc" and "plot" in stories, in that emotions and character movement and everything else must be expressed through action and choice. In my reference-addled head, I refer to this as the "faith without works is dead" theory of story writing. Who the heck knows who that character is until she does something?

In other news: mmmm, strawberries and cream.

Weekend: Work, Warcraft, watching TV with sahiya and Mr P. Top Gear! We showed S the Vietnam special, which is one of the very best Top Gears ever. Jeremy wailing that he is the most miserable person alive is a wonderful thing. Then more work, more WOW, and a little gardening, which I couldn't find a W word for.

Best of all, though, last night I was visited by a burst of writing in Blackmail. I think I might post the next three sections soon. They'll reach completion together with another evening or two like last night. Um, that was not a euphemism. Not intentionally anyway.

Send writing-inspiring virtual tea and cookies. Well, since I am declining cookies at the moment, send virtual soy lattes with extra shots of espresso.