Damn, being sick for all of November so far has really thrown a wrench in a lot of things, of which my writing goals are only one. (Notably, I had to scrap most of my plans for my long weekend, which due to various scheduling things was Sunday through today. Back to the grind tomorrow! At least it'll be a nice short week.) I even missed posting publicly one day, which makes this the first NaBloWriMo that I've failed.

On the other hand, it be worse. I've missed a couple days of fic writing, but only a couple. I posted a drabble on Thursday (it was mostly written already, so all I needed to do was polish), I worked a bit on "Aftermath" and got a good inspiration about where to take it next, and I've gotten over a thousand words on a new WIP in the last two days. I've been terrible about the record-keeping, though, so I have no fancy charts to show you yet. At least I left enough of a trail for myself to reconstruct the data before the end of the month.

So, I guess not too bad, all things considered. I'm really bummed that I'm not going to succeed in daily posting, though. But I suppose all streaks come to an end sometime.

I could only mope around the house watching Gilmore Girls for so long. So I came out to Panera. Good coffee, good bagel, and the drugs are helping too. I also seem to be writing my first ever FFXII fic that isn't based on a prompt; we'll see what comes of it.

As for Gilmore Girls, I just finished the third season and watched the first episode of the fourth. ( A few stray thoughts... )

Okay, back to writing before the drugs and caffeine wear off. Hope you are all having a splendid Monday.

This is making the rounds and suits my current state of mind. So, hit me:

Leave me a pairing [or two] and I'll tell you...

1. Two things that are awesome about it
2. Two things that are not so awesome about it
3. Two ways I'd love to write it

Apologies for the earworm, but how could I resist?

Via Sociological Images, these maps show how much of the Earth has been colonized.

There's a map showing every road in the world, and every railroad, and all the navigable rivers. The road one is particularly cool, because the parts of the world that aren't settled stand out really starkly -- mostly deserts, but you can also see the Amazon.

Then they pull all together:

Considering all of these modes of transportation and the type of terrain, the New Scientist calculated how long it would take, from everywhere on the planet, to get to a city of 50,000 people or more [by land or sea]... They estimate that less than 10% of the world is more than two days from the nearest city. The most remote place, they calculate, is the Tibetan plateau.

The full-size maps are on the New Scientist site and are very worth looking at. You can also see maps of other things, like shipping lanes, and some interesting detail blow-ups.

Title: Nightmares
Fandom: FFX-2
Rating: PG-13 (for mentions of violence)
Wordcount: 100
Pairings: Paine/Nooj
Spoilers: For Nooj's story
Notes: Written for the Alphabet fic meme (which is still almost wide open), to lassarina's prompt, which was "S: Solid, Paine/Nooj". The first true drabble I've written in a long time. I always forget what a satisfying challenge it can be to write to a strict word count. Also the first P/N story I've finished in awhile. It's always nice to get back to them.


( Sometimes Nooj startles himself awake... )

The outcome of the election in Maine is proof positive that we should not be making decisions regarding people's civil rights at the ballot box.

Take it away, Melissa McEwan:

Historically, we have depended on the courts to make decisions about the application of constitutional guarantees in spite of popular opinion, and they have repeatedly secured protections for marginalised groups decades before Congress and state legislatures, which more closely track public opinion, would have done. John Rogers once noted that "when the supreme court struck down the bans against interracial marriage in 1968 through Virginia v Loving, 72% of Americans were against interracial marriage. As a matter of fact, approval of interracial marriage in the US didn't cross the positive threshold until – sweet God – 1991".

That's exactly 30 years after our current president was born to an interracial couple.[1]

Waiting for the whole of society to be on board with granting equal rights to everyone is simply not in our collective best interest.

[1] And now, almost 20 years later, we have a justice of the peace who resigned rather than perform interracial marriages. Which just goes to show that prejudice against interracial couples is hardly dead. It isn't even hiding very well.

Attitudes do change. I have even seen them changing over my adulthood, to the point where a Washington state initiative legalizing strong civil unions is barely a blip on the national news radar. Remember when Vermont created civil unions and threw the entire nation into a tizzy? That was in 2000. Not even 10 years ago. So the tide will turn, eventually. We're seeing them in motion now. But (to switch metaphors) would the door even have started to open if judges -- first in Vermont, then in Massachusetts -- hadn't forced it a few cracks? Would Jim Crow laws ever have been defeated by popular vote? Guaranteeing our rights is what the court system is for. We should let it do its job.

Ikon's LiveJournal is now a memorial.

Objectively, a good thing, to be sure. And yet I am a mass of mixed feelings right now. I guess acceptance is a slow process.

Stayed home sick from work today. Perhaps that's why I didn't remember until after noon that today was Election Day. I considered dragging myself off the couch and away from my Gilmore Girls DVDs to go vote on the half-dozen stupid local propositions on the ballot (nothing statewide for us this year, and all the city officials were running unopposed), but ultimately I decided against it, mostly because I hadn't prepared myself on the issues at all. I only knew what one of the propositions was even about, hardly an informed voter making thoughtful decisions about the future of my city. Not that I delude myself that most of my fellow citizens are. But I like to hold myself to a standard, at least.

It looks like they're all passing, and as far as I can tell, there's nothing egregiously stupid, so that's something.

Speaking of egregiously stupid... as of this writing, Question 1, the Maine initiative that would block the legalization of same-sex marriage, is too close to call. On the other hand, things are looking good in Washington, which may be poised to create domestic partnerships at the ballot box for the first time ever. I'm not ready to get excited yet, though; I'm afraid I got too badly burned last year. We'll wait, and we'll see.

(The song that was playing as I was writing the title down was "Hope Fails" from the Return of the King soundtrack; before I finished typing, the next song came on, and it was "Beautiful Day" by U2. Perhaps iTunes is trying to tell me something...)

Back when I first acquired the FFXII soundtrack, I noticed that one of the songs was called "Clash on the Big Bridge". The title was somewhat familiar, the song itself even more so, but it took some cross-checking with my Black Mages albums to discover that it was based on a battle of the same name in FFV. I hadn't remembered hearing it anywhere in the game, so I chalked it up to poor memory and moved along.

Then today, a hunt called "Battle on the Big Bridge" showed up in my queue, so of course I had to check it out.

( Minor spoilers for a hunt in the latter half of FFXII. And also for FFV, perhaps. )

I approve. It's a fun little nod to fans of the series, and I love that it takes one of the less-played games as its jumping off point.

I could be almost done with FFXII, but I'm doing hunts and sidequests instead. I'm pretty sure I've finished at least a few hunts that we didn't manage last time, mostly by good Quickening management. And I'm having enough fun poking around Ivalice that I don't have any desire to rush it, at all.

One question before we get into "spoilers-behind-the-cut" territory: Has anyone ever found the Espers useful, or am I just doing it wrong?

( Okay, here are the spoilers, through the return to Balfonheim. )

It figures that I would get struck by a cold that's making it hard to concentrate on anything just in time for NaBloWriMo. Yeah, I'm going to do it. Or I'm going to try, anyway. Maybe I'll fail on the first day, but at least I will have tried.

Journaling goals:

1. Write and publish at least one unlocked post every day.

2. A check-in post about writing progress counts as a post, but I can only use that as my sole post three days a week.

3. At least four substantial posts per week.

Writing goals:

1. Write something every day.

2. Make progress on Aftermath. (Poor, poor Aftermath.)

3. Finish at least two outstanding request fics, ideally more.

4. Post a completed story at least once per week.

No wordcount goals, either monthly or daily -- those don't work particularly well for me. I do intend to get back into making the charts, though. I do enjoy my charts.

Also, my cheering hat for those of you doing NaNo is firmly on! Let me know if you ever need a boost. :)

Title: Getting Rest
Fandom: FFX
Rating: R
Wordcount: ~2300
Pairings: Lulu/Rikku
Spoilers: Minor, for the first half of the game. Set right after Bikanel.
Notes: Written for first_seventhe, for the Out of the Comfort Zone meme. I think the fact that it took me a year and a half to get around to writing this serves as evidence of just how far femmeslash is outside my comfort zone. ;) But I would like to be at least as comfortable writing this as I am writing other sex scenes (which is still actually not very), so I'm glad I took it as an opportunity to do so. I've written other stories that allude to femmeslash pairings, but this is easily the most explicit. So I hope it works! Sorry it took me so very long to pull it together.

This officially fulfills all the requests on this meme, although there are plenty of other unwritten prompts there that I might get around to, someday.

( 'We ain't gonna find her today. Might as well head for the cabin, get some sleep.' )

Bay Bridge closed "indefinitely" for emergency repair.

I can't imagine that it'll be more than a couple of days, realistically. But it sure sounds dramatic, doesn't it? (Of course, no matter how long it is, it's really going to suck for people who use that bridge to commute. And if it's more than a couple of days, my weekend plans could get... interesting.)

I could also go off on my rant about how we'd have a shiny new bridge by now if it weren't for Willie Brown and our need to grandstand against Pete Wilson, but I'll spare you all that one.

November is fast approaching, and I need to decide what to do about it.

For the past three years, I have participated in NaBloWriMo -- one substantial post every day in the month of November. In 2006 and 2007, I found this very satisfying, but last year it felt more like a chore, and this year I am finding myself at something of a loss. I haven't been posting to LJ nearly as much in recent months, and I don't know how well motivated I would be to suddenly put myself back on a daily schedule.

The first question to ask myself, of course, is why I haven't been posting. Part of it, I think, is that I've moved a lot of the random life stuff to Twitter. (Reminder: iamkj. I promise I am low-volume, rarely more than 2-3 tweets per day.) One big factor there is that I've found a Twitter app I like a lot for the iPhone (Twitterrific), whereas LJ.app and the LJ mobile web interface both suck. And I don't use that word lightly. We're talking gigantic vacuum cleaners worth of suck here. About the only thing I like about it is the ease of uploading pictures from the phone. I'm also trying to do less random webstuff on my work computer, which also leads me to spend more time on the iPhone, and therefore less on LJ

The other problem is that I just don't feel like my life is that interesting right now. There are all kinds of various stressful things going on, but I would have to write pages and pages of background to explain them, which would probably bore everyone to death. Mostly it's continual low-grade stress, which is the very worst kind to deal with for me, because it's not so bad that it motivates me to fix the things that are wrong, and in many cases the issues aren't mine to fix anyway. Just the thought of sitting down to write the whole thing up is exhausting. But it also saps my energy to write about other things, too.

Still, I do want to write in November. I am big on traditions, and NaBloWriMo has become a tradition for me. I can't imagine skipping it entirely. NaNoWriMo isn't an option, unfortunately; November is a concert and family holiday month, so I can't make that kind of time commitment, and I don't have any novel-length stories in the works anyway. One option is something like I did last January: writing every day with specific short-term goals in mind and keeping track of my progress, but not necessarily posting something every day. Another possibility is doing a hybrid, where I write every day, make daily posts about my progress (along the lines of the hashtag that some of us use on Twitter, #thewritestuff -- although amusingly, that hashtag has recently been hijacked by a Twilight fic!) and focus on finishing and posting stories as I can. If I did that, though, I would want to make a point of posting non-fic related stuff as well, and then we're back to the daily general posting.

Which brings me full circle, and makes me wonder whether I'm not thinking about this all wrong. Maybe I should be looking at this as an opportunity to get back into regular blogging about the things I care about: politics, media, librarianship, cats, and yes, fic and fandom. Not a chore, but a treat. I will mull on this some more.

Fortunately I still have a few days to decide.

You would think that some things go without saying. For example, that it's a bad idea to try and bring a hand grenade onto an airplane.

You would be wrong.

Was chatting with renay about fandom stuff, and we got to wondering something that really requires the collective consciousness of fandom. So, have a poll.

( How many fandoms? )

Please spread this one far and wide; I want as broad a sampling as possible. Also, my standard disclaimer: I welcome open and honest discussion, but I request that you not flame FFX-2 in comments -- flawed or no, I happen to be quite fond of it, so if anyone comes out with the burning hatred, the conversation isn't going to get very far. Thanks.

After two or so years of meaning to do this and not getting around to it, I finally joined the Organization for Transformative Works. I don't have time to write a super-long post detailing why, but there are many reasons for me to support this group: as a fan, as a librarian, as a defender of free expression, as a citizen concerned about copyright protections run amok. We've needed an organization like OTW for a long time, and I'm thrilled that they finally exist.



They're having their October donation drive right now, so if you've been thinking about joining, this is a great time to do it. Join early, join often.

Okay, back to wresting with more weird crossovers. Games like Trick or Treat always give me the urge to write stuff way outside my usual zone. Probably this is a good thing.

It's October, and you know what that means: it's Final Fantasy Trick or Treat time! Come play.

I have prompted, and now I'm off to deal with this terrifying bit of crack that's brewing in my brain...