This year, ganked from angeltaisha.

Take the first line from the first post of each month, and that's your Year in Review.

January: I don't do New Year's resolutions, but every December I tell myself that I will find a way to write more in the coming year.

February: Progress on specific goals: 1. Write every day in January. Done! [Sigh. January. Those were the days. The days before 2009 went entirely to hell.]

March: Some of you may have heard that the Author's Guild sued Amazon over the text-to-speech capability of the new Kindle, claiming that this feature infringes on their right to sell the rights to audio books.

April: Tomorrow morning, we're heading to San Diego.

May: 17 hours of flying + 3 hours of layover + 9 hours of time difference = one seriously tired KJ.

June: Three entries in a row and all I've done is whine about this poison oak thing.

July: Ah, home, with kitties and T and just missing a heatwave, although I hear it was actually rather nice in SF proper.

August: This is just about the awesomething thing ever. ["This" was a video of Bobby McFerrin playing the audience as a musical instrument at the World Science Festival. It remains one of the most awesome things ever. If you didn't watch it before, you should watch it now.]

September: This is how I know it's Labor Day Weekend in San Francisco: I can hear the jackhammers hard at work on the Bay Bridge.

October: So the new quarter has started.

November: It figures that I would get struck by a cold that's making it hard to concentrate on anything just in time for NaBloWriMo.

December: Because I'm the only person who has been uploading FFX-2 fic to AO3 en masse so far, the character with the most stories in the archive is Paine (with 15 out of 25). [Still true as of this writing, although Baralai has taken over second place from Nooj.]

Feh. Is it over yet?

Because I'm the only person who has been uploading FFX-2 fic to AO3 en masse so far, the character with the most stories in the archive is Paine (with 15 out of 25). And Nooj is second (10).

Considering that there are only 102 stories tagged with Nooj's name on FF.net out of over 3000 X-2 stories, and only 38 tags in the ff_press archive, this amuses me. Greatly. (To compare, there are 356 Paine stories on FF.net, and 43 tags in the archive; not huge numbers for her, either.)

Greater visibility for my favorite characters? I am pleased! (Although if other X-2 people want to start uploading fic to AO3 and evening out the numbers a little, I certainly won't complain!)

Dear November,

Good riddance. Don't let the door etc. Also, feel free to take all of 2009 with you.

No love,
Me

Okay, with that out of the way, let's see how we did.

Journaling goals:

1. Write and publish at least one unlocked post every day. - Missed this, but not by much; there was one day when I was sick and hating life and so didn't post publicly. (It was just whining, so you missed nothing.) I guess that's not so bad, but this is the first time that I've failed NaBloWriMo, so I'm kind of bummed.

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. I only resorted to this a couple of times, so I feel okay about that. Downside: I wrote so little that there wasn't much point in making writing progress posts.

3. At least four substantial posts per week. I'd have to go back and count, but I'm pretty sure I managed this one. So for posting goals, I think I can call this two for three.

Writing goals:

1. Write something every day. Hahahahahahaha. Ha. Ha. For the first half of the month, I blame being sick; for the second, I blame futzing with AO3.

2. Make progress on Aftermath. (Poor, poor Aftermath.) Some, almost all at the start of the month. Less than I wanted, though.

3. Finish at least two outstanding request fics, ideally more. This one, I did: I finished up two stories for the Alphabet meme. Both drabbles, true, but I completed them, and I think they both did prety well.

4. Post a completed story at least once per week. Nope. Once again, I blame the Cold of Doom - I missed in the second week of the month and pretty much gave up on this one.

So, overall I'm four for seven in terms of goals, which I suppose isn't too bad given that I basically lost two weeks. Lessons learned: sometimes I can write when I'm sick, but not always, and perhaps more importantly, I shouldn't let myself get discouraged when I set myself a goal and then miss a step almost right away. Maybe it was clear almost right away that I wasn't going to write a lot that first week and a half, but that's no excuse for having slacked off so much the rest of the month. Even with November as a semi-failure, I want to continue setting monthly goals and holding myself to them as best I can. It worked at the start of the year; it can work again.

The Archive Of Our Own beta has been running for just over a week now. (I'm assuming that anyone reading this who cares already knows what AO3 is. But just in case you haven't, here's the official site from OTW. The Fanlore page also has a good collection of links. The short version is that it was created as a response to Fanlib.)

Thanks to my OTW membership, I got in on the first day and have been playing with it since. I've uploaded 21 fics as of this writing, including all my FFEX stories and almost everything from 30_fantasies. Still deciding what all to upload. I don't think it's going to be every last story -- that's what my personal archive is for -- but I'd like it to be a broad cross selection.

FYI, the FFX-2 section is kind of sad right now (17 stories, of which almost half are by me!), so I really encourage all you X-2 people out there to request an invite and get posting!

( Here's my quick first take. )

So, safe to say that the good definitely outweighs the bad so far. It will definitely be replacing FF.net for me, although that's an easy choice since I'm not uploading anything there these days, except for "Aftermath". I think it's unlikely to replace LJ, at least for shortfic, and I will almost certainly keep up my personal archive. Which means that I'm still decided exactly how AO3 will fit into my fannish life. But I think there's an excellent chance that I will find a place for it. So far, so good.

This has been the hot topic of the friends-list today: how to describe the relationships between the different Final Fantasy fandoms, and whether Final Fantasy as an entity can be considered a "fandom". I've been thinking about this stuff for awhile, ever since I started playing around with the Final Fantasy categories in Fanlore, but it's getting wider play now because the new fanfic archive, AO3, is trying to figure out how our categories will work, and the situation is complex, without a good parallel in Western media fandoms as far as I can tell. justira came up with some fabulous charts showing the divisions and connections between the different Final Fantasy fandoms (and so did first_seventhe, in the funny because it's true department), and I'll be interested to see how people who aren't in the fandom react to them.

One of the notable results of the poll I did a few weeks ago was that fewer than 75% of the people who voted selected "Final Fantasy" as one of their fandoms. Since I think it's a fairly safe assumption that everyone who participated in the poll considers themselves to be connected with at least one Final Fantasy fandom, I thought that was interesting. What this suggests to me is that some people consider Final Fantasy to be a fandom, but by no means all. But if you asked people on the "outside" whether they thought Final Fantasy was a single fandom, I'd bet they would say yes. I've been trying for ages to think of a good way to explain to people why it doesn't really work that way, and I think I finally came up with a good analogy today.

People on the "outside", who've never played the games or been part of the fandom, tend to think of Final Fantasy as a metafandom like Star Wars or Star Trek: multiple media properties, created by the same company, in different styles or featuring different characters perhaps, but ultimately all set in the same universe. But it would be more accurate to say that, in this sense, the Final Fantasy VII Compilation is like Star Trek. Which might make the Ivalice Alliance Star Wars, and Final Fantasy IV Babylon 5, and so forth. All similar genres, covering similar themes, often liked by the same people, and you can draw interesting comparisons between them, but distinctly different fandoms. The only thing that makes Final Fantasy different is that the games are created by the same company and share a name.

But of course, that's also where the confusion comes in. So we get things like FF.net lumping together all the Final Fantasies before VII into one section, and breaking X and X-2 into separate sections (and no, I'm never letting that one go; I can maybe see the argument for two fandoms, but you are never convincing me that they don't form a single canon). I am hoping that we can nip all this in the bud with AO3. How great would it be for an archive to meet our fandom's categorization needs from almost Day One?

(By the way, in case you were wondering, one of the reasons I did that poll was to help renay figure out the canon tag structure for A03, and it was definitely helpful, so thanks to everyone who participated!)

I know that justira is looking for more feedback on her charts, so the more that can come by and take a look, the merrier! My poll is always open, too.

I still intend to do a big geeky post on AO3 and how cool it is, but I need to play more with it first. Still deciding how much of my fic to bring over, too. I have a complete archive now, so I'm not certain that I need to have every last story in there. I will continue to contemplate.

We tried a new tea shop today! Always a sign of a banner weekend. Ku Day Ta Tea Lounge (great name). The tea itself was of high quality and well-prepared, and the food was all tasty and in reasonable quantities. On the downside, the service was indifferent, which is a serious strike against any establishment that calls itself a "tea lounge" -- that designation suggests a particular level of comfort and service, and both of these qualities were seriously lacking. Also, if I'm paying afternoon tea prices, I expect refills of hot water for my tea, which were not provided.

It was more than worth an outing, and I would go back (with expectations adjusted accordingly. And a sweater -- it was really cold there for some reason). Still, the quest to find a tea shop that I enjoy as much as Lovejoy's continues...

Also accomplished this weekend: shoe shopping, a trip to the used bookstore, laundry, grocery shopping, playing with AO3 (on which more later), quality time with friends and with T, and some much-needed lazing around the house by choice rather than by force. Not accomplished this weekend: much in the way of writing. My plan to finish at least one story per week in November has now officially bitten the dust, along with both daily writing and daily LJ posting. This cold (which I think at this point has morphed into allergies) has a lot to answer for.

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.

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. :)

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.

I've done this before, and now I'm doing it again. This iteration is from auronlu.

Comment with the word "ICONS" and I'll select six of yours for you to talk about in your journal.

( Auronlu's choices and my explanations behind the cut. )

In other news, I have an amybang all week, so if I'm a little scarce the next few days, that would be why.

A certain site that I will not name or link to (for clearly this is a cheap publicity stunt that I prefer not to reward in such a fashion) has declared tomorrow, 9/09/2009, to be a "Day Without Cats" on the Internet.

This is so appalling that I have no words for how appalling it is.

So I say we fight back! Tomorrow, post a picture of a cat in your journal. Or reply to someone else's picture of a cat with a picture of a cat. Or both! The more, the better. We will not be defeated.

So, what have I been up to?

• I finished my assignment for ff_exchange! It's a Penelo/Vaan story entitled "Lines of Communication" and it can be found here. I'd never written Vaan before, and Penelo only once in a drabble, so it was my first time with this pairing, but I was pretty happy with how it came out. I'm getting more comfortable with FFXII every time I write it, and of course starting the replay was immensely helpful. I was glad that there was so much interaction between Vaan and Penelo at the beginning; it helped me settle their voices in my head, and reminded me just how much chemistry they have together.


• I got a handle on my out-of-control jewelry situation. For the last several years, I've kept all my jewelry in a nice box that I got for my BMC Alum work, and it just hasn't been working very well -- stuff gets lost, necklaces get hopelessly tangled, etc. So I went to The Container Store today and bought some clear plastic jewelry boxes -- a necklace stand, an earring hanger, and a small box with a lid, all enclosed to protect against cat incursions. Then I sorted everything out, including putting some of the stuff I never wear into storage. It's become clear, though, that I'm going to need at least one more earring stand for the first tier, especially as I am unlikely to stop buying jewelry! Probably a second necklace stand as well. Also, I'm rather dismayed by how many of my favorite earrings seem to have lost a mate. Such is life, but it's still sad. The box will find another life as a place to store hair stuff.


• I watched the first episode of Gilmore Girls, thanks to steluch, who lent me the first two seasons last night. This is a series I've been meaning to check out for years, so it's nice to have the chance finally. The first episode was certainly promising...


• I had a lovely dinner with friends on Saturday -- homemade fajitas, grilled corn, and miscellaneous coladas. Lime colada was probably my favorite, although I'm a little sad that we never got around to mixed berry. But others thought that berry and coconut would be an odd combo, and it could be that they're right. Fortunately, the blueberries made an excellent topping for S's tres leches cake.


• So when I started this entry, I had an idea that the list was going to be much longer, but everything else is way too dull (grocery shopping! laundry! Bubble Spinner!), so I'll just leave it here. ;) Have a great week, all.

I have an account on Dreamwidth: owlmoose

At this point it's mostly a placeholder -- I don't plan to import my LJ content, and I'm still deciding whether to cross-post, but I wanted to let you all know that it's there.

I have a couple of invite codes if anyone needs them. Just drop me an email.

If your reaction to this post is "What the heck is Dreamwidth?", the short answer is that it's a new LJ clone, but it's a fork of the code rather than just a straight copy, so they've cleaned up some things and added some features -- a few now, more promised in the future. The long answer is here.

I've done this one before, but, well, I'm doing it again. Ganked from lassarina.

The Rules:
1. Reply to this post with 'Icons!', and I will pick five of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will - allegedly - create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

( Rina's choices and my comments behind the cut )

17 hours of flying + 3 hours of layover + 9 hours of time difference = one seriously tired KJ.

Rome was excellent. It would have been even more excellent if a pickpocket hadn't gotten my wallet on our second day there, but you can't have everything. More on that, plus zillions of pictures, later. For now, I'll attempt to catch up on as much email and LJ as I can before I faceplant into my keyboard from sleepiness -- we got up at 6am Rome time, which is 9pm Pacific, and I wasn't able to catch a nap on the plane, so I've been awake for over 24 hours. As always, I'll try to read all the way back, but if there's anything you especially want me to see, leave a comment here!

So, as you have probably guessed from my lack of online presence, I have been unable to get wireless at the place where I'm staying. I dropped in at the conference's Internet Cafe yesterday to check mail and stuff, but it's just not the same. So today I dragged my laptop down to the convention center, and I'm skipping out on this particular round of presentations to get my fix.

Good trip so far -- presentations are a mixed bag, but some of them have been really good. Sherman Alexie spoke last night; he was amazing. A. Maz. Ing. If you ever have the opportunity to see him speak, do not pass it up. Tomorrow is Ira Glass. I have high hopes for him as a speaker, but he has a hard act to follow. Yesterday I had dinner with anonamys, whom I haven't seen in years, and then we hung out with another college friend, EW, whom I hadn't seen in even longer. Then today I ran into a colleague from an old job and had lunch with her. As a trip for revisiting old connections, it's been excellent.

Boy am I ready to be home and sleeping in my own bed, though. And with regular access to the Internet. I knew I was going to miss it, but I didn't realize it would be this much. If this trip has taught me anything, it's that I can travel without T, or I can travel without the Internet, but not both.

There's really no good reason that I haven't been around much lately, and I don't have anything particularly scintillating to say today. either. But I wanted to check in, because I'm off to a conference in Seattle tomorrow. I'll have the laptop with me, but I don't know how much I'll be online -- I'm staying with a colleague, and she's warned me that her wireless is pretty weak. So if you see me around even less the next few days, you'll know why.

Okay, off to finish packing. Four days of academic librarians. Should be good, especially since it's in Seattle, a city I really enjoy visiting. Hopefully I'll be a more exciting conversationalist when I return.

Days written: 31/31 (!)
Words written: 10,606
Stories worked on: 7, plus the character sketch project
Stories posted: 5 (includes the two character sketches)

( Final progress graph behind the cut! (Edit: now with *actual* final graph behind the cut.) )

Progress on specific goals:

1. Write every day in January. Done!

1.5 Post at least once a week. Yes and no. If you count each of the character sketches as an individual story, I did post one story per week on average, but my intention was to actually post once during each week, and I missed two weeks.

2. Finish prompts for "Out of the Comfort Zone" meme and my "fic exchange" with muggy_mountain. I did finish one story from the Comfort Zone meme, but there's still one prompt unfilled, and I never did make any more progress on the story for Mugs. I need to take a step back and rethink my idea.

3. Draft Chapter 4 of Aftermath. I worked on it for two days in the middle of the month and then not again, but it remains on the mental back burner.

4. Wrap up at least one outstanding WIP. As I mentioned in my mid-month progress post, I completed and posted the Paine/sword story, which was a very long-standing WIP. After I finished the Lucil/Elma, I turned my attention to Crimson Squad in Space and made very good progress. If I keep going at this rate, I think I'll be done by the end of next month (February).

5. Work on 30_fantasies claim. Nothing after Paine/sword, not even an idea yet. I have at least one WIP that I may resurrect soon. After that, I'm not sure what happens with this claim.

Overall thoughts:

Even though I only hit about half of my goals (and two of them were fulfilled by the same story!), I'm still pretty pleased with what I did this month. The most important of the goals -- writing every day -- I succeeded in, even if some of those days I felt like I really had to shoehorn a few minutes in right before bedtime. But I've reminded myself that I can make writing a priority, if I want to. And also that I do want to. So I will continue making the attempt to find time to write or edit every day, and we'll see how long I stick with it. Another thing that I learned is that it's helpful for me to have specific and realistic short-term goals. So sometime tommorrow, I will sit down with myself and sketch out a new set of goals for February, and then post them here. Telling the world that I will do something is an excellent way to make sure I do it. (And having a spreadsheet that I'm required to update with my progress doesn't hurt, either.)

A little over halfway through January, so it's time to take a step back and see how I've done so far.

Days written: 17/17 (woo hoo!)
Words written: 5350
Average words per day: 315
Biggest day: 1705 words
Smallest day: 40 words (was mostly editing that day)
Stories worked on: 5
Stories posted: 2

Check out my progress graph! (Idea blatantly stolen from first_seventhe)

( Graphic behind cut to preserve friends lists. )

Progress on specific goals:

1. Write every day in January. So far, so good!

1.5 Post at least once a week. I've posted two stories in three weeks, so it looks like I will miss here.

2. Finish prompts for "Out of the Comfort Zone" meme and my "fic exchange" with muggy_mountain. I've worked a little on Mugs's story, but I'm not terribly happy with what I have so far. And I haven't even touched the prompts. I'll have to step it up a little on this one.

3. Draft Chapter 4 of Aftermath. Started. I have about 800 words so far, at varying levels of usability.

4. Wrap up at least one outstanding WIP. Success! I completed and posted the Paine/sword story earlier this week. I've also made decent progress on Crimson Squad in Space, and I think I have a better idea of where I want it to go.

5. Work on 30_fantasies claim. Progress made; Paine/sword was for this community. That was my last WIP for the claim, though, so I'm not sure what happens next.

Overall thoughts:

I am really liking this challenge so far. There have been a few days where I haven't felt like I've gotten very much accomplished, but even a little is better than nothing, and I feel like I'm training myself to believe that. I also think that forcing myself to put writing on the front burner for at least a short time every day helped shake loose the block I had on the Paine/sword story. So I'm really glad I decided to do it, and I may even keep it up into February. We'll see.