elrhiarhodan

I'm rambling all over the place in this one, it's been a long while since I've had the headspace to just ramble.



1 - Feeling Better! I don't really know if I was sick or just sick and tired, but I left work early on Friday (as noted in this post). Got home around 4 and pretty much planned on sleeping through the night. But the damn house phone rang (and no one of importance has that number), and shattered my REM sleep. I forced myself to stay in bed, but I didn't fall back to sleep. Around 11, I got the bright idea to change my bed linens. Not because I couldn't wait until tomorrow (it's generally a Saturday chore), but I thought that maybe a little physical exertion might wear me out. Now, how much physical exertion does one get from changing the sheets? Plenty, if you've got as many pillows as I do.

It worked, and despite the change of color (shifted from the crisp white linens I've been using to the old, soft, pumpkin-colored ones), I managed to drop off into dreamland a little easier. Had some odd dreams and the body made its needs known at the usual times, but I managed to sleep until 10 am, about 5 hours longer than I normally do. Woke up refreshed and if not ready to take on the world, at least ready to get my hair cut.

That and a trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond for a refill cartridge for my Soda Stream afterwards was the sum total of my out-of-House Wonderful experience for the entire weekend. I guess, I should add, for completeness' sake, that on Sunday, I did walk down to the bottom of Driveway Wonderful to visit Mailbox Wonderful and to pick up the newspaper.

My thanks to everyone who left me good wishes on Friday, they certainly helped. And extra-special thanks to joy2190 for the v-gift. It made me smile and did spark the muse!

2 - My Flist (and White Collar Fandom) Is Awesome. I keep meaning to do some sort of write up about the incredible White Collar Fandom Meetup in D.C., but I couldn't seem to find the time (more about that below). I was, before the event, a little stunned and a little nervous about how many people decided to attend. There were, at one point, sixteen of us. In addition to my longtime buds, rabidchild, doctor_fangeek, ivorysilk, ladyrose42 and winterstar95, I got to meet so many awesome ladies: pooh_collector, ruahnna, leonie_alastair (who was an awesome driving companion and navigator), qwertyfaced, embroiderama, angelita26, anodyneer, lionessvalenti, daria234, algeiban, and bluegreen_17 (oh, crap - did I forget anyone???).

Contrary to plans, but in complete accordance with past experience and expectations, we did not get into DC and case any museums. We were simply having way too much fun being fangirls and friends. The Brackets Challenge was a lot of fun, and many, many thanks to embroiderama, who sat out of the writing but acted as the on-site Admin, and the off-site judges who got to read the fanfic and had that difficult task of picking the winners for each round. Our judges were sahiya, sinfulslasher, theatregirl7299, fatale, and anodyneer.

The totally awesome and extremely talented qwertyfaced ran a drabble challenge later on Saturday (many thanks to leonie_alastair for admin'ing), and the queen of all HC, rabidchild, took top honors. ivorysilk and embroiderama were runners up.

More drabble writing happened on Sunday, and throughout the weekend, many episodes of White Collar were watched and squee'd over. We also managed to watch all of Magic Mike in about seven minutes (Matt's dance scenes, including the Pony Fight about 6 times). Extra-special thanks to embroiderama for bringing her DVD player, and to algeiban for her Mac-to-HDMI converter and to angelita26 for having Magic Mike on her laptop.

There are a lot more wonderful memories running through my head about the Meet-Up, and maybe someday I'll commit them to the journal, but I just have to say that if you ever have the chance to get together with fandom friends, grab it with both hands and don't let go. I don't know if it's the fandom (one of the things that was constantly commented on was the almost total lack of wank in White Collar), or that the best parts of any type of "official" fandom convention are the hours spent off the floor, in the rooms, socializing - and the Meet-Up was simply just those best parts.

It also helped that the hotel (the Fairfax, VA Residence Inn) was awesome about getting everyone in the same building and as much as possible, on the same floor, and letting us take over the lobby for a pizza dinner on Saturday night. And the restaurant in walking distance had no issues about separate checks for a party of sixteen on both Friday AND Sunday nights.

So, yeah. DC was awesome. Can't wait to do it again.

3 - Writing. What would a Ramble be without talking about the writing. It's going well. I got back from D.C. and took a deep breath, aligned my chakrahs (or whatever), and finished the Polyamory Big Bang. It's a sequel to the story I wrote for last year's polybigbang, A Life Less Ordinary, also known as "Vet!Neal". I am very pleased with this entry (and also pleased that I finished it with more than ten days to spare - first time that's happened with a Big Bang, ever). The posting goes up tomorrow. And there will be awesome art by kanarek13!!!!!

Working on the Fic-Can-Ukah stories, and happy with those, too. Although the one I'm working on now can go epic if I let it. But I'm not! My goal is to spend no more than one day per fic, and I'd like to have the first eight done before Thanksgiving.

I've got a few other commitments, but right now, I'm on a break from the Big Bangs. kidficstory is due at the end of February, and that's only 7500. Of course, there's the wc_reverse_bb that's due in March, the history_bigbang due in April, but I'm not the least bit worried about those.

I need to give some serious thought to what I'm going to write for the whitecollarhc Advent. My brain is going all sad for this one. I may give into it.

I finally finished my White Collar/West Wing crossover story - Full Disclosure. I love how it came out (blushes), and I find myself bitten by the Timestamp bug - Moz has to teach Jed how to pick locks. Jed needs to give Moz a little inside information about the death of the electric car.

Something completely weird happened to one of my DW journal entries. I have an eyes-only, date-out-of-order post that I use to keep track of all of my bingo cards. I was able to get a blackout on my Love Bingo card in August, and spent hours filling in all the HTML coding, plus a complete list of the fics that went with the bingo. But when I went to update the post with some entries for my H/C Bingo card, the entry somehow reverted to one that was over a year old. It either didn't have any of the current bingo cards (Love, H/C, Kink, Trope), or the information was all messed up. It was a good thing that I had done most of the coding work in various word documents, but it still took over an hour to get everything back in line.

And it looks like, if I can manage five hard prompts, I may be able to do a blackout for H/C Bingo this year, too. Cages, Arena, Hunger/Starvation, Combat and Apocalypse are needed. I can podfic Apocalypse, and maybe do something Satchmo-centric for cages... But Arena and Combat are defeating me. How can I write a 1000 word Roman A/U?

Is anyone else as obsessed about their wordcount as I am? It's not like I set any goals, but I find myself agitated by the thought that I won't beat last year's total (approx. 363k). I'm around 340k now, and I have no doubts that I can get out enough words beat that number. I don't know what that's so important to me. I accomplished the equivalent of two NaNos this year, writing my 56k Pairings fic, start to finish, in 29 days and the last 53k of my WC Big Bang in 30 days, so it's not like I'm not writing...it's just the thought of a diminishing word count disturbs me.

Foolish, I know. But I'm entitled to my mishegas, right?

4 - The Awesomeness That Is Season 5. OMG - it's like the WC writers have discovered the LJ and AO3 archives and are writing just to please the fangirls. They've indulged in fan service before, but not like this! There are things that trouble me, but they trouble me in the context of the story, not in a "jump-the-shark" way. Eastin had said that they would be cutting away a lot of the broad humor that characterized a lot of Season 4, and he's accomplished that. He didn't say how dark the storyline was going, and for an angst queen like me, each episode has been delicious, delicious cake. It's funny, I didn't feel like this through the just-as-angsty first half of S3. Maybe because the danger here feels more organic, more authentic (and no stupid plotcakes about Nazi treasure)?

Hmmm, much to ponder.

And speaking of Season 3...has anyone else noticed the dichotomy between the odd and even numbered seasons? 1, 3, 5 has Neal pursing his own agenda. 2 and 4 are more about Neal working hand in glove with Peter.

AND WHEN - OH WHEN - WILL WE HEAR ABOUT SEASON SIX?!?!?!?!?!?

This ramble has been sort of epic, and I did promise that it would be worth the journey. But I have to ask, is this pose a deliberate attempt to draw our attention to the perfection of that ass?