Love In The Asylum

I was supposed to work today, but I had to email my boss and ask if I could take a shift later or something, because, as hanjuuluver put it when I was talking to her earlier "when we started talking you sounded a little funny, but now you sound like an old lady strangling a cat". Not being able to talk for five minutes without my voice giving out completely is not really conducive to spending four hours on the phone convincing people they should give me money. Luckily, boss was very nice and understanding about the whole thing. I'll have to work an extra shift next week to make up for it, but no big deal. And now I have four hours of downtime I didn't expect, so yay!

Japanese midterm went okay-ish, especially considering the amount of time I spent studying, which was just about none. (re: that, I really would like to know why my brain is so wired to Fucking Idiot right now. Geez.) I don't think I did astonishingly, phenomenally well, but I'm reasonably sure I passed, and maybe even with a not embarrassingly low grade. So yay?

Has anyone here read Watchmen? Anyone at all? Cause I think scans_daily  just converted me to Nite Owl/Rorschach, and I am scared and confused. *theirloveissonostalgicallyfuckedup*

I am definitely making progress on my NaNo storyline. One of the big things I'm very excited about is that I think I worked out a believable characterization for Ifan (the smith who is 'kidnapped' by faeries), something that had been driving me up the wall for /months/. Even when I originally came up with this story I didn't know why Ifan did any of the things he did - most of which are /stupid/ things to do. But now I've finally got it nailed down, and even managed to tie it back into the key plot.

The thing about Ifan is, smiths in fiction are usually calm, centered, real life oriented, non-drama people. But Ifan is...not. And this ties into my magic system. Within this world, this particular country's stock in trade is craft-magic - men and women who can tap into a piece of wood, or metal, or wool, and draw out its virtue, see what it wants to become and make it so. It gives them brilliant talented woodsmiths, and silversmiths, and weavers, and all that. But because Ifan is that sort, who can work with iron on a magical level rather than just on a crafting level, he loses a lot of that smith-steadiness. Instead, he's a romantic - he falls in love with Damien at first sight, and then becomes so invested in his idea of this wonderfully tragic, doomed, very litererary affair that when Llyr (the bard boy) comes along and they develop this friendly, we have fun together and get along well and maybe even are attracted to each other relationship, it doesn't even occur to him that it might be love. He's a bit dense, I'm afraid. 

Does that make sense to anyone else?

This week in NaNo, we worked on creating characters, which was pretty neat. The main exercise we did was a group character sketch thing - we started with one random piece of characterization, and then people shouted out details until we had a full character drawn out. Our first character was a 22-year-old redheaded volleyball player named Alex who grew up on the run from the Russian mob with his vacuum salesperson/Vegas showgirl mom. The second character was a girl named Audean who ended up sounding more or less like what would happen if I reproduced. I got bored after and ended up writing a little bit of her.



( If I ask myself when it started, I have to say it's when my mother named me Audean. )

DDDDDDDDX THE STANFORD BOOKSTORE FAILS I HAVE HOMEWORK I CAN'T DO BECAUSE I HAVE NO TEXTBOOK
ALSO I HAVE A SONG ABOUT THE BLACK DEATH STUCK IN MY HEAD WTF?

Four Stories I May Or May Not Write For NaNo This Year:

1. the story will the magic eye and the smith getting kidnapped by fairies and the cute bardic angst that everyone's already heard me go on about
2. the story about the clown who falls in love with the acrobat and gets the rest of the circus folk to help him woo him. While they solve a mystery at the circus. Pure, unadulterated YA fluff.
3. the story about the girl who is stuck in the intensive care lounge with her mother's boyfriend after her mother is in a car accident and they have to make a tough medical decision that is made more difficult because they don't like each other.
4. the story about the girl who is living simultaneously as her past, present, and future incarnations: a young nun in 11th century Europe somewhere, a modern teenage girl, and an aging politician representing one of earth's major colonies in space. As you can imagine, this is a bit confusing to her.