you live your life as if it's real

 I submitted my poem, "Paradise is a World of Trees," to newWitch on the 13th. Got a rejection today. (First rejection ever, actually, since I still haven't heard back from my other submission). I'm not too down about it, and actually pretty happy that it was so fast. I like this poem a lot, so I'll send it out again. Haven't figured out where yet, but I'll find somewhere.

My apostrophe/quote key is sticking and it's really frustrating. Apparently my right pinky finger isn't very strong.

Today was the dance recital, and now I'm really tired. Dance recital and then grocery shopping = sore, sore feet. It was fun though... obviously about a thousand things went wrong, but overall I think everything came off pretty well. Our Clocks choreography was hilarious cause none of us knew what we were doing at all, but the one dance mom I talked to said it looked good. Then again, moms (even if it's not my Mom) are pretty much obliged to say that.

Most hilarious thing ever though... our choreography to Mairi's Wedding (except we changed songs a couple weeks ago, but never changed the title of the dance, and my teacher spelt it Marii instead) ended with a ten person reel. Basically we were just doing highland reel movements, weaving in and out to get off the stage. Anyways, for some reason we only had 9 dancers today, and so two of the girls mucked up the reel formation and totally smashed into each other hahahahhah. Seriously like full body collision. I managed to avoid also being hit, but it was almost a four person pile up. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard as soon as I got offstage.

Now no more dancing for me until the Cambridge Highland games. Oh that reminds me, bluebonnets, do you know if anyone from KR's is going to that? It should be a good time. I'm dancing in the ceildh July 18th, and volunteering for the competition on the 19th and 20th.

Oh boy have I ever been scarce. Well, a lot of the reason I've been holding off posting is that I was waiting to hear back on the job I wanted this summer. Also, I've just been hella busy. But I have a lot of really exciting updates that I can finally post here.

First, about the job. I had my interview on Friday morning, and I was pretty confident it went well. Got an email this morning from the prof. in charge, and they're hiring me! So I am officially spending my summer buried neck deep in 800-year old Latin, hurray! I get to proofread the automatic text generated version of scanned images of the text. Mostly I'm sure it will be really tedious, but I get to work with one of my favourite profs (the other prof on the project I have never met before), I get to make some money, and most of all, I get experience that is right in the proper field that I want to go in. I am insanely excited =)

Second, about my teeth. Or lack of them... I had all four wisdom teeth pulled yesterday. It was a whole lot of not-fun, but at least it's done. And I guess I'm pretty lucky too. My dentist, as he was pulling them and telling me what he was doing, at one point goes "okay, so the top two are out. They're usually the easiest, so that's why I started with them, the bottom two are usually harder to get out." Pause while he takes out the two bottom ones, and then: "oh... your bottom two came out even easier than the top." He sounded a little bemused, haha. Anyways, my appointment was scheduled for an entire hour longer than I was sitting in the chair. And I had the nice hygenist. Actually, I think all hygenists are saints, must be a job requirement. But I had the extra nice one. All in all, it was pretty good I guess. It was the nausea and inability to keep anything down -- not even water -- later on in the day that was the worst. Today seems better though. Only a brief bit of nausea, and I've managed to eat soup, and my mouth isn't hurting too too bad.

Third, about my sister. She flipped over the handlebars of her bike last Sunday and the doctors were pretty sure she had a broken elbow. This was awful for her as she was all set to be the star quarterback of her school football team, and something else important (hey, I don't know anything about football) for her touch football team. Plus it would mean that she would have to switch which horse she competes on in the summer, and would probably have missed the first couple shows. BUT! It isn't broken! It was just a ligament injury, so now she just has to do some exercises to regain range of motion and strength. The doctor said max. 2 weeks until she can be doing all her sports again. So today has been just full of good news.

Fourth, about my family/family home. Getting the idea why the past week has been complete insanity yet? My parents are selling the house, a prospective buyer wants a closing date of July 1st, another wants to sneak in fast before we list with an agent, all of our stuff has to be cleaned and packed away into a storage unit, my mom has bought a new house, my dad doesn't even know which city he will be looking for a condo in... it just goes on and on. But I'm really, really excited about all the changes. And my mom has agreed to store my piano until I have a place of my own for it, and my sister loves my nice mirror too much to let it be sold/left behind, so my only two larger and more precious objects are going to be taken care of.

This is getting ridiculously long, so I'm going to stop here, and hang out with my ice packs and Lord of the Rings for a while. It's been so long since I read LotR, it's so much fun to re-read it. The Fellowship, minus Gandalf, has just managed to get out of Moria. And re-reading the book, I am annoyed all over again at Liv Tyler's Arwen for stealing Glorfindel's part, but that's a rant for a different day.

 Milestone! I've been revising "A Thing of Many Facets" slowly over the past week. Didn't really make any major changes, mostly just cut a few unnecessary words and added a few for clarity here and there. The only major change I made was adding two sentences to the ending paragraph to give it a bit more weight and hopefully fix the (very valid) concerns that shade53had with it.

"A Thing of Many Facets"
Starting word count: 1,489
Ending word count: 1,530

I submitted it to Fickle Muses tonight. Not a paying market, but it was the one I could find whose guidelines seemed to match my story best. First ever submission! (Unless you count my high school magazine, in which case it's my fourth ever submission.)

So now I wait, almost certainly for a rejection. In the meantime, I'll create a spreadsheet for keeping track of submissions.

... Alright, that's done. Now what? Right. Wait.

Good thing I have Iliad and Aeneid translations to do.

(Oh yeah, and I've been on a big TRAX kick lately. Can you tell?)

Edit: I was tagged by bluebonnets!

After today, I'm caught up!

Yesterday:
Word count: 772
Really, really close to not making quota, but I did it. Was writing the scene that is the real start of chapter four.

Today:
Word count: 2,445
Total word count: 20,259
20.2%

Excuse me now while I go do a victory dance on chapter four's dead body. Except I kind of think that it's more alive now than it was when I was wrestling so unsuccessfully with it. Damn. But anyways, it's DONE. (Until I have to edit it, and I strongly suspect that at least a thousand of its words are complete crap, but lets not think about that now.) It's DONE. Ha! Now I get to write chapter five, and chapter five will be much better to me than chapter four... I think and hope. (Though actually, in all fairness, I'm bound to point out that chapter four wasn't so bad after I went back and wrote that new opening scene. In fact, parts of it, like the rainstorm, were actually pretty fun. But it was mean to me for more days than it was nice to me. Pout pout pout.)

Hanyways, my dear friends and monsters, I take this moment to say: I have written one fifth of a book. Fuck yeah! It's a teen Regency romance, with a predictable plot full of genre conventions, but that doesn't make it any less of a book. It's going to be 100K or a little more when finished, and it's going to be the first thing over 2K words that I've finished. (Hell, most of my short stories are still in the needs-editing-like-whoa stage.)

So three weeks (tomorrow will be the start of week 4) has gotten me 20% of a novel. Why didn't I do this years ago? (Answer: because I gave up multiple times years ago without realizing how steady work could add up, and anyways anything I'd written back then would have sucked even more than what I'm writing now sucks.) Why yes, I do answer my own rhetorical questions.

And now, for some non-writing content (there is some, every once in a while)!

Yesterday was, by any definition of the word, fun. Okay, the play sucked. (As I said to xsilvan earlier, that play was the playwright going "hey, I wonder what happens when I take my pretentious prose poems, set them to sort-of music, and add some interpretive-dance-like movement and body percussion! Oh wait, a play needs a plot, doesn't it... hm... oh well, it's close enough! Anyways, it doesn't need to explain itself, it's ART!" I spent the first few minutes trying really hard not to laugh. There were some redeeming moments, but it could really have used some more coherency.) But! There were things thrown/put in people's cleavage, and there were milkshakes, nachos, fries, music, discussion of the power rangers, hanging out in the park, getting a ride home from an almost-stranger. And possibly my favourite from the night: the crazy man on the bus, who wanted to know if it was one of our dreams to go to Carleton. (Sorry, ahahahahaha.) He also informed us that xsilvan  is the Master of Confusion, which was news to us. (I thought she was the Masked Avenger...)

Oh wait, I lied. I think the whole boar conversation was funnier. How many things with tusks are there? And I don't care what Badgie said, boars do not eat intestines.

And I was named Cupcake. And made everyone cross the street for no reason. Whups! Gooood times.

Damn, now I really want a cupcake. Maybe I'll make some tomorrow.

Et c'est tout pour maintenant, mes amies. (Did I get the right sort of tout/tous/etc? I never know which to use... does anyone have a concise rule to help me out here?)

Man alive watching a huge storm roll in is fun. So this is how it went:

I'm sitting on the bleachers in back of the brother's high school, watching the sister's touch football game with the parents. (Missed a lot of the game due to running back home to fetch ice packs for a girl who had broken her finger -- even though I heard the coach's son say he was going for ice and he had a car so he'd clearly be faster but anyways I was mostly going to reassure my mom -- but that's just an aside, not the real story. I did miss the only touchdown of the whole game though, which was kind of sad/annoying. We won, which makes us undefeated, hurrah hurrah!) Anyways, so there I am, with all the family minus the brother. Someone makes a comment to the effect of "ooh it's gotten a lot darker all of a sudden" and this is true. Thunder boomies are heard in the distance, and the ref is trying to hurry up the start of the next game. In the space of about, oh, thirty seconds the sky in front has gone from cloudy and threatening to dark and looming, and the bank is coming closer all the time. You can tell that it's raining farther away, by the way that bits of the clouds are being stretched down, like someone pulling strings of cotton candy off the bunch.
We start to walk home, the mother making noises about how she hopes we get inside before it starts raining, and me (walking backwards to better watch the clouds, since we had to go the other way from them) telling her fat chance of that, just look at those clouds! They were huge. And rolling in really fast. We hadn't even fully crossed the parking lot before the wind started up, strong. The sister on her rollerblades was pushed on ahead of us fast enough that I ran up and grabbed her hand to slow her down enough that she didn't break herself in one of the many potholes that parking lot is full of.
The clouds were awesome, the leading edge sort of outlined and defined, the storm itself a bit further back and unforgivingly grey. The wind blowing bits of dust and pebbles and the first few drops of rain was exhilarating, but not quite as awesome. The rain started slowly, and we got about half way home before getting too wet. Then the skies opened up with a vengeance, and we all got thoroughly soaked. I haven't been out in a downpour like that since... since the day I biked to say goodbye to Michelle, what, two summers ago now?
It was a lot of fun. The rain was cool, but not cold, and home was only three blocks away by this point, so it was a wonderful adventure. And after a day that was supposed to hit 40 degrees with humidex (don't know for sure what the actual high of the day was), it felt damn good.
It was lovely.

Anyways, after that came drying off, tea, ice cream, and watching a movie (why, yes, another Fred and Ginger, how did you guess?) with the sister and the father. Then, inevitably, writing. Which brings me to...

Word count: 1,397
Total word count: 10,025
10% done! Finished chapter two!

Not quite as exuberant about finishing chapter two as I was about chapter one, but I am still very pleased with myself, never you fear. The novel's gone and sprouted another POV, go figure. I like him though, I approve his choice to take control of the story for a while. It does mean re-jigging some of the following chapters, though. Oh hey, it also means I can actually describe that other scene as it happens instead of just by word of mouth later. Now that is intriguing.

... is still enough to get a lot done in! I am one very happy bunny at the moment.

Word count: 1,826
Total word count: 5,015
5% done first draft. Chapter One done!!!

-does a little dance-

However, missed supper somewhere in all of that. (Hm, missed meals seems to be becoming a trend). Well, not strictly true. I had a pudding cup and a glass of water. I think I'm going to go find some more food now though. Hopefully I will be well fed tomorrow evening with yummy breakfast!