All is Translation, and All of Us Lost in it

My writing output has been horrendously low lately. Thankfully I am working on Hungry Ground again, along with the imaginarybeasts story! I will get back into shape, so to speak.

In the meantime, here are a couple pieces from the Drabble-thon! I will catch up on comments and links later tonight, hopefully.

( Possession is Nine-Tenths of the Law: Felix and Alex get introduced )

( The Imperial Guard: Celeste, 'The world should have ended this morning' )

( Catalyst: Tuyen, on pain )

And hopefully more to come later!

So you know how I came home all gung-ho and all ready to write and mess around and have fun and all those other things you do on vacation?

I got sick immediately and have spent most of the week too braindead to do much of anything. H-Hahaha orz. Thankfully I got antibiotics somehow, despite the doctor once again making a huge effing deal out of the fact that I get nervous in medical settings. IT IS NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN TALK ME OUT OF, GUYS. I CANNOT TALK MYSELF OUT OF IT. Just let me lie down for two seconds and it will be all good.

I am finally starting to feel a bit better, though, so tomorrow I plan on catching up on comments/links for the Original Fiction Drabble-thon, and I want to throw in a couple more fics myself. We've got tons of awesome prompts over there, so if you want to play, come on over. ♥

I haven't had the energy to do much else except watch a lot of things. I watched the first season of LOST again, which: DANGEROUS. I stopped watching in season three, and I have been spoiled to hell and back and know that the way to the finale is paved with heartbreak and tears and frustration. But. Sayid! Sun-Hwa motherfucking Kwon (and Jin as well, naturally)! Rousseau! And I haven't even gotten to Ben Linus. Gahhh must stop before it's too late.

I have also started watching Justified, the new modern Western on FX. Westerns are so not my thing, but I really enjoy it! Possibly because I find the protagonist really very hot. Seriously. UNF.

Which got me thinking about the meme that was going around a long time ago where people talked about the fictional characters they found most attractive. Out of curiosity, who are yours? I'll give you my Top Ten once I have the brainpower to do picspam.

Hope your summer is off to a good start. ♥

THINGS THAT MUST BE WRITTEN:

- Hungry Ground ch 2
- IMPERIAL GUARD (anything! even if it's not the chapter, random drabbles will do!)
- Projectfic for Elle
- Prince/Elika for Chira
- Lightning and Hope for Endy
- Shounen Onmyouji fic for glass_icarus and inarticulate
- Continuation of LJ log with ivory_and_horn

Busybusybusy getting ready for the end of the semester, and then GRADUATION. Eeek.

Also, Glee tonight: not PERFECT, but it was very right in quite a few places. Great character development for Kurt, Mercedes and Quinn, loved Tina and Artie's cute nosy couple-y moment, and the music was gorgeous - Chris Colfer's version of "A House is Not a Home" especially. ♥

Give me a character or pairing, as well as a prompt (a word, a phrase, a cliche, an AU, whatever) and I will write something of indeterminate length!

♥

This thing is so freaking long, but it looks like tons of fun. OC meme! ♥

( Mememememe )

*PHEW*

Been feeling so burned out lately. I need to get writing-things going so that I can start plotting things again! Going to revisit this meme again - maybe I'll think up some new characters, too.

Rather than a prompt, give me a type of relationship (i.e "best friend," "rival," etc) and I'll write an interaction between characters who embody that relationship. Let me know if you want to play along - I'll give you one, too!

I finished one round of editing on Grandmaster Draw, and I currently have two rounds of editing going on simultaneously. The second is based on my mom's edits, and is almost finished except for the epilogue. I started the third back at the beginning to keep myself occupied in-between. Those edits cover chapters 1-13 so far.

It's kind of amusing, because the first one was mostly to add things that weren't clear before and clarify plot points and such... and the second and third have mostly been devoted to taking lots and lots of words out. Sometimes changing phrases to clarify them/make them less awkward, but mostly just slashing down adverbs without prejudice. The blood of many an adverb stains my keyboard. ;;

As it stands, I'll be getting the last batch of edits from Mom tomorrow, and I'll finish up my own reread not long after. I'll be at my friend Miranda's house for the weekend, which will help me take a bit of a break, and next week I'll do one more reread... and then probably start the querying process on Tuesday or Wednesday.

G-Gulp.

I'm not in a huge hurry to take everything down just yet because it's under lock and filter here, but I don't want to keep it up too long after I start querying, either. So as it is now, I'll probably take down all but the first few chapters in two weeks or so.

A-And then perhaps I can relax and do fun things, like write that Imperial Guard chapter and finish up the first book! And I want to think about my next YA project, too. It's definitely going to be horror in some regard, but I'm torn. I could either go the horror-comedy route start on the Possession is Nine-Tenths of the Law short story collection, or I could think more seriously about this horror/fairy tale/urban fantasy story that has been kicking around. I KNOW NOT. I need brain cells that are not tied up in Grandmaster Draw to think about that sort of thing.

Aaaanyway! Off to a JSA meeting, and then I must do some actual schoolwork...

My mom is a technical writer and editor at a small company, and therefore spends five days a week reading other people's lazy writing. Which means she is not about to put up with mine.

I sent her the current draft of Grandmaster Draw, because she's the best editor I know. She hasn't sent me her notes yet, but we talked on the phone, and in our brief writing-related discussion, she pointed out that according to my first draft, the following are now true:

- A deadbolt actually = one of those slide-y chain lock things. I did not actually know that they were something different. Now I need to find out what the chains are called. Maybe just "chains."

- Steel = aluminum. YES BECKY, BASEBALL BATS ARE TTLY MADE OF STEEL. And Thom has super-strength. Where was my brain that day, I wonder.

- 14 - 6 = 6. Or Liam is secretly 12. ONE OF THE TWO.

All goes to show that no matter how much editing you do, you can still miss the most ridiculous mistakes.

Mom also suggested that I change my first line a bit, and told me that tomorrow she'd send the first of many e-mails full of notes about sentences where I decided that verbs/articles were apparently optional, and places where I "connected too many dots."

This just in: my mother is amazing and I am way spoiled.

So, uh. Watch me epically drop the ball on this reposting business, haha. To start off, here's the first chapter of Catalyst.

This story is a bit different from most of my other projects. For one, it's straight-up fantasy: most of my stuff is either YA "urban" fantasy type things, or fantasy just by the virtue of taking place in a made-up world. This also began from a cowriting project with hijiri on LJ, though with every new draft, it gets further away from what it was then.

The story is also one of my only stories with a female POV character. I have a lot of female main characters, but for some reason, male POV characters are a lot easier for me to write. That said, Tuyen is one of the easiest characters I've ever written, of any gender. I've been writing with her since I was seventeen, and while she's gone through a few different drafts since then, she's still a lot of fun.

Catalyst was on its fourteenth chapter when I scrapped everything and decided to start over. Here's the new version of chapter one.

( Oh. Wait. ‘Once upon a time’ is how these things tend to begin, right? )

I'll probably just backdate the In Descending Order chapters, so next is either The Imperial Guard or some fanfics...

In which I attempt intrigue, rising action, and dramatic reveals.

( Chapter Five )

( Chapter Six )

( Chapter Seven )

( Chapter Eight )

( Chapter Nine )

( Chapter Ten )