Confessions of a Fictional Historian

Usually when I go through these periods of not-posting, I keep notes to myself so that I remember what I want to post about. This time, I didn't. The week before this past week, I was massively stressed out and spent the whole week being in a bad mood. This week, I felt more peaceful but didn't really accomplish much.

I haven't been up to much except rehearsals is what I guess I'm saying. But here are a few things:

It was June of 2001 when I read The Fellowship of the Ring--that was more than ten years ago. That was even before I started working at the library. Once, I thought I'd read all the books before the movies came out, or at least each book before each movie. Obviously not so; I read The Two Towers in July of 2006, I think, and just Tuesday finished The Return of the King. It was lovely, and part of me wishes I could have read it untainted by the movie/s, but the movie really enhanced some things, and in some things the book was far superior. Frodo was my favorite in the movies, with a tentative side of Aragorn and Pippin; in the books, I found much more to like or admire in Sam and Eowyn.

I keep thinking of all the people who came before me who discovered that book when there was nothing else like it in the world and I wish I could have been one of those people and discovered it for the first time in a feverish enamored grip. But getting this far has taken me a long, long time; even before I started reading LOTR, my dad read The Hobbit to my sister and I when we were little. Really, I can't believe it's taken me this long.

Similarly, Elyse and I watched Back to the Future (it's getting to the point where I'm starting to think of it as one six-hour movie, because that is how it is best watched) last weekend. I'm just so in love with that movie. Like, a ridiculous amount of love. I've been listening to the soundtracks (to 1 & 3; hopefully getting 2 soon) constantly at work and I ADORE THEM SO MUCH. That, and everything else about the movies. I keep thinking of that time Elyse and I saw it at the AMC and I wish I had thought to dress up! I would have rocked Lorraine's Enchantment Under the Sea prom dress so hard.

I'm trying a new house-cleaning method. I've heard of it before, but I got the idea from the Pomordoro Technique. That is when you set a timer and do a task for 25 minutes and take periodic breaks and such. My version is this: do the dishes for fifteen minutes, straighten/clean for fifteen minutes. That's only half an hour of housework every day. I've been skipping it on rehearsal days because I'm too tired, but I did it every other day this week and feel pretty good about it. I measure the time with iTunes--I made a playlist with my two favorite songs from the Return of the King soundtrack, equaling a little more than fifteen minutes, and put it on a loop. Yeah. (They are "The End of All Things" and "Return of the King" if you are wondering.) Thinking of it in those terms, that I only have to work for half an hour every day, instead of thinking about trying to get the endless chaos of my life under control, has really helped!

I haven't been writing much, either. In the stress of the week before last, it got really hard to make myself work on it at all, in terms of both time and temperament. It just kept getting away from me. I wrote Varenta a couple of times (because of the stress; as I've said before, I tend to want to write him when I'm unhappy), and I know I worked on AEFB once or twice but...mostly not. This is frustrating to me.

I suppose it's difficult because right when I get home from work I like to rest a little and catch up on e-mail and Google Reader, and my preferred writing time is right before I go to bed, but that can mean staying up too late. And somewhere my priorities shifted to the house-cleaning thing, so writing has been shunted aside. My show goes up in less than a month; I'm hoping after that I can work regularly again. Because I can't function like this.

However, a couple nights ago (Thursday, I think), I made myself write. I did a little (like 200 words) in AIW, and then finished chapter 13 in AEFB. This means I am halfway through the book, and have cut more than 11,000 words from it. I was pretty pleased with myself about that.

I just want to say that OK Go's "Here It Goes Again" is my most favorite song ever. It is possibly tied with OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" (their most epic and amazing song). HIGA wins (for now) because it works on many levels and is possibly my personal theme song, because I do tend to get caught up in cycles about things (especially in my angsty thought processes), and also because it is exactly the kind of music I like.

Somehow I managed to book up my entire weekend. :/ I spent my early afternoon working at the theatre, and my late afternoon wondering where we're going to put our storage stuff from my mom's house. Evening: babysitting. Tomorrow: laundry. And maybe shopping.

So, food. (A post I have been writing for weeks.)

( Read more... )

Yes, food. Food is, as I like to say at work, the universal pleasure, and I do like to ramble on.

Sooooo I don't want to go into huge detail about this on the Internet (such a gossip) but I heard something today about that bank job I applied for ages ago. Basically when I least expected it. If I am good at one thing, it is jumping the gun; I am not really worried, more--bemused? Confused? (Wondering: what if they make an offer and I refuse? Would they make another offer in the future?)

I had sushi with Emily and her boyfriend tonight, and we watched some old plays (the original Peter Pan rehearsal reel, and chunks of ITW) and then after they left I was thinking about this job situation, so naturally I have done nothing today. (It's okay! I did 850 words yesterday instead of 500, to make up for it.)

I've had a lot of trouble with catching up lately; this week I feel so much mellower about it. I must do what I can, when I can. End of story. If I'm not home, or it's late, or I'm tired, well, that's okay.

So let's distract myself from confusing thoughts with talk of e-readers. I want one and I have been researching them since December. I do not know when/if I will get one, but I love the idea of carrying hundreds of books around with me on a reading device, and also I get jealous when I see people with their cute little e-reader covers reading books. But which one to get? Caroline says the nook is better; my dad uses a Kindle and seems very happy with it. SBTB RAVES about the Kindle. I installed the iPod apps for both readers; this is what I have learned so far:

Kindle

SBTB says that this is good for people who use Amazon for everything; however, you don't really buy your books; they sit in your Amazon Cloud and have been known to disappear. (PS: I HATE Amazon Cloud.) It seems to be the more popular choice, and when I installed it, I was intrigued by the possibility of uploading Word docs. (Edit (?) AEFB on the go! But then would Amazon Cloud eat the docs? Can I e-mail them back to myself?)

I have heard (SBTB) that the Kindle Fire is a nice, cheaper option for people interested in an iPad.

So far I have done most of my book reading on Kindle, mostly due to logistics--I already had an AMZ account, so it was easy for me to download a few free books (I started out with A Christmas Carol, The Scarlet Letter, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, then, as I received various notices, added Remalna's Children and a mythology book I haven't synced yet). B&N--I had to sign up for an account or something and I think I was in a hurry? More below.

I've read A Christmas Carol and Remalna's Childrenboth on the Kindle for iPod and haven't found it to be a huge strain on the eyes. I set the text at its smallest setting and changed the background to sepia and it's not bad. It seems to load fairly fast (though it's also sensitive and is constantly turning pages or bringing up the menu when I don't want it to, but I suppose that's an iPod Touch for you). There were a few really mild formatting issues I noticed that were probably due to reading on an iPod instead of a Kindle/nook/Sony Reader/iPad/whatever.

Nook

I like how it automatically gave me several books to choose from: some free, some not. I started reading Pride & Prejudice just to give it a whirl; the response time seemed a little slow at times and it took ages to flip through the introduction.

Upon downloading the app, what intrigued me most here was the offer of free ebooks.

I do seem to recall my dad saying he had two e-readers installed on the iPod that eventually became mine (Kindle and another) because there were some things he couldn’t read on Kindle. Caroline said that the Kindle is for Amazon ebooks only, whereas the nook allows books from anywhere. Amazon is huge, sure, but I don't want to be limited to only them.

Drawback to both: I can't seem to buy/find new books within either app; I think I even tried in the AMZ app and it was still weird? So I have to take extra steps by getting onto AMZ or B&N on my computer, downloading, then opening the iPod and letting it sync (doesn't seem to take long) before I can read. (I also feel that either/both website/s should have a "free ebooks" link, though I suppose they don't want to advertise the free version of, say, Sense & Sensibility when they could pimp the shiny $10 ebook version.) Anyway, I know this is just an iPod thing because I've seen people buy/download on their reading devices before; it's just a pain.

Project Gutenberg has a CRAPLOAD of free ebooks and directions on how to download.

Thing is, I don't buy a lot of books. I get them from the library. Sometimes I'll buy from Half-Price, or borrow from friends. If I read it and enjoy it, it goes on my AMZ wishlist.

I can't tell you how many times I've wished that we could combine the digital and the real world, that everything worked like the iTunes music arrangement, that I could download movies I already owned into iTunes and then be able to watch them on my iPod anywhere, or that I could enter some magic code for a book I bought years ago and have loved my whole life, and be able to read the ebook version on the Kindle/nook for iPhone.

I am also intrigued by the idea of comics on a reader, but I haven't researched it yet, and I think that is better saved for larger devices like the iPad or Kindle.

Anyway. I questioned my father and brother, both technonerds and Mac users, about their preferred reading devices. My dad received a Kindle as a gift from the Board of Regents several years ago and used it all the time...until he got an iPad. Now he only uses the iPad and seems happy with it. (Rachael's unasked question: "Listen...if you've just got an ereader LYING AROUND that you're not even using, maybe think about lending it to me long-term? Just saying.") (Actually, he is going to let me borrow it because I discovered that a book I really need to read for my transportation fantasy project is on the Kindle's free lending library which you have to have an actual Kindle for.) He was very happy with the Kindle before the iPad, but now the iPad, so useful in so many ways, trumps all.

My brother switched to ebooks ages ago. I spoke with him about ebooks and ereaders when I was out there and he said that he almost never just sits down and reads. (He is a single parent. Single parent of a preteen. He doesn't have a lot of time.) He reads on his iPhone when he is out and about--at stoplights, in lines, when waiting for things.

I didn't ask which app he uses (I assume that they both switch back and forth as needed--actually at Christmas I was looking at/judging my dad's iPod and he has a LOT of e-reader/ebook apps that he rarely uses, like Bookshelf and iBook), but it was his talk, as usual, that made me a little more okay with reading on the iPod. Because I am jealous of beautiful Jonathan Adler nook covers (I am sure I could find a Jonathan Adler iPod Touch cover if I looked), and I like the idea of the instant book gratification, but maybe I'm not ready for one yet. I like being able to carry a book around on my iPod; it's small and fits into whatever purse I'm using.

(Of course, when I decide I want to bring The Return of the King to work and cram it into my purse, that kind of defeats the purpose...)

I WAS intrigued by Stanza--I read somewhere that it kind of centered around free books. However, reading the link I just made, that is not the implication I'm getting here. (Looks like just another reader app.)

I'm still very interested. I'm kind of working on The Scarlet Letter right now (looooong introduction); next I'm going to set up an account with B&N and download some books from them, and then try that out and see how it works. After that...maybe checking out Project Gutenberg?

I was crabby in my last entry. I haven't had the best week; I'm concerned about money and trying to catch up on sleep and life etc. after the holidays. I hate feeling like I can't catch up on life.

This is my first completely obligation-free weekend in I don't even know how long, and I spent today being bored and lazy and also spending too much money. (The oxford heels I've been lusting after at Target were on sale. So were some other things.) I finished my book and started two more, and tonight, frustrated by my overall writing progress, I worked on AEFB and did double my quota (to make up for yesterday), and finished two chapters. And I wrote a little in something else too. So I feel pretty satisfied about that, despite the uselessness of the rest of the day.

Writing some book reviews:

(this first one is from more than a month ago but I forgot to post it)

Yesterday I finished listening to Bartimaeus: Ring of Solomon and it's got me in a crazy kind of mood. Crazy like at 11:00 PM when I should have already been asleep, I instead drew some Bartimaeus "storyboards" for half an hour and then said to myself, "What about all those old Bartimaeus drawings I did?" so then got out my old sketchbooks and flipped through them until I found all the old Bartimaeus drawings.

Not so much that Ring of Solomon was spectacular--it was pretty good; I love Bartimaeus the character and that shadow-marid was kind of cool, but I didn't feel any great connection with Asmira, the shared protagonist--but rather that it reminds me of one of my favorites, Ptolemy's Gate, which was spectacular. I keep drawing it. I keep pulling it off the shelf, reading the last two pages, flipping through the rest of the book wondering where all the good parts are, then putting it back on the shelf and wandering away.

Bartimaeus and Nathaniel make for good shared protagonists because Bartimaeus is supposed to be the "evil" of the two (in Solomon he kills and devours people and other spirits without pause) and he's completely and unhappily enslaved to Nathaniel, who is (from our point of view) supposed to be the "good" of the two, yet he's doing the enslaving. And just that all Nathaniel wants is power, his whole life, and when he finally gets it, he just falls apart and misses who he used to be, and he goes back, he tries to fix things, and then there's completely badass teamwork like unto no other badass teamwork. It was SO, SO GOOD. When I first read it, I just kept weeping uncontrollably and clutching it to my chest, wondering why Deathly Hallows hadn't been this wonderful.

Slightly more current ones:

Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels: I like to fold over pages in books when I read something good. For the first fifty pages or so, I was folding over nearly every page. It was really interesting, and actually made me think a lot about my own writing.

The Demon's Surrender: Excellent! Surprising and gripping, not as great as the first book (Lexicon) but better than the second (Covenant). From all the hype, I was afraid a character I rather liked would die and they did not, so that was good.

Entwined: It's a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and I found the audiobook! Also, it ended up being tentative high fantasy (takes place in some other kingdom but could basically be England), which to me is a plus. The story was okay, fairly well told but a little too silly in some places. It also fell into the Twelve Dancing Princesses trap--there are twelve girls who, as an entity, are considered a main character in this story. They are represented by twelve girls but they are really one character. In retelling the story, you either get to lose their personalities because you show them as a single entity, or do a half-assed job of characterizing them because you can't have twelve main characters. Entwined was the latter. There was also a kind of Footloose theme going (and I really hoped that the dead queen/mother would end up being the witch/vampire/something). (Also, why do TDP stories always have vampire types?) Overall, the book was interesting but not great.

Chime: I was really looking forward to this book! I read so many great things about it! So many things that when I actually read it, I was moderately disappointed. Not as great as I'd hoped. (I was also led to believe that it was high fantasy. It's not.)

Remalna's Children: I read this collection of two short stories on my iPod earlier this week. (More about reading on the iPod later.) The first, "Beauty," is the sequel-story to one of my favorite books ever, Crown Duel, and I love it. A long time ago, it inspired me for the title An Eye for Beauty, which is the book I'm writing now. I found the second story difficult to follow and disappointing.

Across the Great Barrier: Patricia C. Wrede is so wonderful. Everything she writes is different from everything else. She wrote some good high fantasy and some great alternate-history fantasy, and some of those alternate histories were EXCELLENT epistolary novels. It's been several years since I read the first book in this particular alternate-history series (trilogy?), but I liked this book. Interesting, not too complicated. My favorite alternate-histories are the ones with America; people do London a lot but not America, and it's so huge and wild that you would think people would write alternate Americas more often.

Then this morning after I finished Barrier I started The Return of the King (more than ten years since I started LOTR, and I never got around to finishing...I remember once upon a time I said I'd read LOTR before the movies came out...oh, how I laugh at that memory!) and also The Annotated Peter Pan, which is a beautiful book that must be savored. And also A Christmas Carol on the iPod, which I am really enjoying.

I'm attempting to read three audiobooks right now, all of them high fantasy, and almost all of them irritating or disappointing by various levels.

The first is Eon. The premise sounded good, but it didn't grab me. Also, the discs were sticky, and I have to clean them--always a pain. I haven't decided yet if the story is important enough to me to go ahead and clean the discs.

The second is Kristin Cashore's Fire. I read Graceling and found it irritating for several reasons. The biggest reason I remember is that she basically just rolled into bed with this guy she liked without considering repercussions or whether he might not be worthy of having sex with her. (I don’t care so much if characters--even teenagers--have sex in books. I just want them to think about it.) I think I felt she was Mary Sueish? I don't know. It felt contrived or something to me. And everyone LOVES this book, so I was like, "...well, what's wrong with me?" But I'm listening to Fire, and aside from the beginning (which was fairly engaging, and which I believe was about the king in Graceling as a little boy), I have literally not been following this book AT ALL. I can't even remember the main character's name. (Lol OH WAIT IT'S THE TITLE OF THE BOOK.) There's a lot of mystery but I don't know why. I don't like this book, basically, but I keep wondering if I'm missing something here. My desk at work is in a really central location and near the vice president's office; the noise often distracts me from my audio books.

The third is Tamora Pierce's Mastiff, which irritated me for most of it and as I have three discs to go, it's now completely grabbed me. Planning a long and bitchy post, but after I finish it.

Tomorrow: Findley (I have become a grocery store snob and store-bought turkey tastes like sadness now), hooking up my new DVD player, attempting to hook up the new-old flatbed scanner my brother let me have, putting up my new-old blackout curtains, dishes, cleaning, writing, library, research, and probably some baking.

Posts to come (reminders to myself; if I write them in Word-doc-posts, I will almost definitely forget): food, e-readers (eReaders? ereaders?). Possibly something else that I already have forgotten.

I had such a lovely time in Baltimore, and I don't wish they lived closer, because my brother has his dream job in Baltimore, and I don't wish I lived closer, because I love Cincinnati and I'm just really starting to get my hands dirty here, but I wish it was easier or feasible for us to visit more often.

Now I am home, and I am tired and grumpy and faced with the challenges of my everyday life. I've started using Weave, a kind of project-oriented to-do app for the iPod. As you can see from the screencaps at the link, they kind of expect legit business owners to be using it. My projects are mostly writing things, with sides of general housework. Somehow I seem to add more things to it than take things away.

Really, I wanted to write about writing yet again because it is (as always) on my mind. Tonight I skipped actual writing in favor of doing a little research (library books due back soon, you see), and I keep getting caught up in the brain-trap: How can I make this book shorter/better/sweeter/smarter? I can't let go of it, but progress is slooooow. Progress was slow BEFORE I started stage-managing a show with rehearsals three nights a week. It is much slower now.

Writing is hard. Writing is always hard. I mean, most of the time. My general average seems to be around 1200 words/day, but there are days when I sit there and make 1000 awful words just to make my daily quota, and some days when I can't stop writing and then I look back and I'm like, "Hey! 5000 words!" And that is nothing compared to revising!

Actually, I am afraid to work on anything but AEFB. I have a lot of projects queued up but you know me, I am very fickle, and I can't focus on more than one project at once. Also, I want to finish this. I don’t want to take the lazy way out and work on something random just so I can say I wrote that day; AEFB NEEDS EDITS, DAMNIT.

This is how this part of the process (draft five, round two) is going:

-I read through a chapter, cutting spare words and sometimes rewriting as I go.
-Same for next chapter.
-And the next.
-And the next.
-Repeat the next day.
-Repeat on every chapter until I’ve cut a thousand words from it. Then that chapter gets taken out of the queue.

Ideally, I'd have three chapters going at once: one that I'd finish, one I'd still be working, and one that I'd just have started, but I don't think it's going to work that way. I find I have trouble managing more than three chapters at a time (three chapters seems to be enough to make my daily quota, but I can throw more in there as needed).

Most of the time, I cut between one and two hundred words per round for the first few rounds, and as I read the chapter more and get more impatient with it, I get more ruthless and cut more. So far I have only finished five chapters (3 – 7); the average amount of passes it takes to complete a chapter seems to be around seven.

However, this is moderately preemptive, as if things continue at this pace, then the total wordcount when I'm done with draft 5.2 will be somewhere around 118,000, which is at least 18,000 words still too long. D:

(Again, I say: I am never writing a long book again.)

I am trying to think my way through those last 18,000 words, and I think of all those authors I love that managed to write so much in so little space, and I think that maybe I should just rewrite the whole damn book.

It is disheartening. And difficult. And on days like today, when I stayed late at work to help make up time for tomorrow's doctor appointment, and then I had to go take care of my dad's cats, and it was late when I got home and I had to make dinner and I'm so tired and I had to work on my library books so I can return them this week--well, writing becomes low-priority. And it will be low-priority again tomorrow, when I have rehearsal.

I am irritated and frustrated by this. My priorities get a little skewed sometimes, but admittedly my favorite time to write is just before I go to bed, which can lead to staying up too late, unfortunately.

(My brother has long lectured me on the very bad habit of procrastination, but I think it's not even that anymore--not entirely--it's just being tired and massively busy.)

This has been a longish and nonsensical ramble to reflect the tired and confused and frustrated depths of my mind. Enjoy!

I don't actually have much to say right now, but I wanted to get in another post before the end of the year.

I had a pretty mild Christmas. I got a handful of books, a couple of wardrobey things, and some big-ticket electronics I desperately needed.

I'm in Baltimore just now, and we watch Firefly and eat lots of bad food (mmm...Cheesecake Factory...) and play Catan and watch the Neil Gaiman episode of The Simpsons and attempt to order vegan cupcakes and yell and laugh and quote The Simpsons constantly and stay up too late.

Rowan summed it up best when we went out to the Cheesecake Factory yesterday:

"When we're at home, we play video games. When we go out to dinner, we talk about video games."

Love.

Today Rob took us to a beautiful, geeky little toy store; they had a massive collection of Back to the Future toys and a magnificent Marauders' Map. And we went to a lovely eclectic little restaurant that offered some vegan food, and we visited Rob's office, which is just so cool.

I'm being massively lazy; I met my word quota yesterday but I'm not sure if it’s going to happen today. Thursday I finished rereading The Goose Girl; today I finished Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels (a Christmas present, and so good).

We also saw The Nutcracker last weekend--it was my idea and I was super excited because I'd never seen it before. I suggested it to my family and everyone was on board with it, and then I was sitting in the store thinking about it and my thought process was pretty much like this:

"This is going to be so cool. I have never seen The Nutcracker. I wonder why people don't write more adaptations of it? It's strange, it's so old and kind of part of the American Christmas tradition, but no one really explores the myth and history of it. It's kind of a modern fairy tale, like Alice or Oz or--OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. IT'S TRANSPORTATION FANTASY. AND IT FITS THE PATTERN OF OTHER STORIES IN THAT ERA. OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG."

Then I was in the store for several more hours, so I had to hopelessly scribble out vague notes on a random piece of paper and couldn't work more on it until later.

The actual show was okay. Tchaikovsky is my favorite classical composer (with the possible exception of Beethoven); Elyse and I are totally obsessed with Swan Lake and will see it ASAP. The Nutcracker is no Swan Lake, but it is still excellent and beautiful. This particular production was being billed as the new Nutcracker. It was definitely beautiful. The sets and costumes were gorgeous and extravagant. The choreography was, of course, lovely. However, Caroline has ruined my brain for all theatre forever--it was beautiful but it made me think of today's stage musicals like Wicked--it becomes more about the trappings than the actual show. That, and at one point a dude flew, and the magic of stage flight has been completely ruined for me forever. D:

Still: I am EXTREMELY intrigued by the story of The Nutcracker and I'm really glad I got to see it. And I bought a nutcracker there; it was $15 and he's beautiful and not sparkly like some of the other ones, and it supports the Cincinnati Ballet.

2011! Let's talk about that. I read 66 books in 2011, the best ones probably being the Hunger Games trilogy. (The Wilder Life was also good. And The Creative Habit and War for the Oaks.)

Can I just say something? 2010 sucked. It sucked a lot. Nothing in particular happened to make it suck, except that I was depressed and I had a hard time with life. 2010 was one long unhappy train of "I'm so miserable/how can I break out of this awful place I'm in/I need a new job/why did I make all these bad choices?" (Okay. There were some good things in there too. Like doing Into the Woods and also going on the Newport Gangster Tour all those times.)

It was at the end of 2010 that I realized I had no choice but to get help or just keep getting worse, and in 2011 I saw a therapist several times, until I lost my job and felt it better to focus on paying rent.

2010 was about being unhappy. 2011 was about getting happy again.

I lost my job in 2011 but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt so humiliated but also very valued among my friends. I was given opportunities I'd never had before. I was given new responsibilities I'd never had before. I experienced joblessness (very humbling and boring). I made new friends. I went to roller derby. I skated. I tried whiskey. I read more books than in any other year since 2008. I started a DeviantArt account (yeah, that needs to be updated). I took on new responsibilities. I wrote a story about a boy. I wrote a short story. I went into a secret beer tunnel and two haunted buildings. I took on a lot of bills all on my own for the first time ever, like phone bill and Internet and car insurance and renter's insurance. I signed up for online dating (yeah, I forgot about that too). I crashed my car (that was not so good, but a valuable lesson). I got a haircut. I did new things and interesting things and (most importantly) I got happy again.

In short, 2011 was a good year. A crazy, crazy year, but excellent as well.

More later, perhaps Monday. I'm just drowning in laziness here, and it's really nice not to have obligations like house-cleaning or work. I love my family and I love my life and I think 2012 is going to be equally awesome.

I've been pretty busy lately, very stressed out. I've been working really hard at work in preparation for someone who's going on vacation starting tomorrow (I'll be doing his job and I had to train someone else to do my job, and she had to train two others to do her job). I've been going out a lot. I've been working at the store every weekend. Then I started rehearsals for a show on Friday.

It was a rough weekend. I was so exhausted and lazy that I pretty much spent all Saturday morning chatting with Caroline on Facebook.

This is what happened:

Friday: Rachael goes to rehearsal:

RACHAEL'S DIRECTOR: So. I will teach you how to stage-manage for real.
RACHAEL: I AM SO TERRIFIED. ALSO EXCITED.

Saturday: Rachael goes to work:

RACHAEL'S MANAGER: What does your January and February schedule look like?
RACHAEL: I have rehearsals every other evening at seven, though February. I am so glad to be working for you, but thinking of this makes me tired.

Sunday: Rachael goes to church to see her father sing in Christmas choir:

RANDOM CHURCH LADY: So, would you be interested in serving on our board of education?
RACHAEL'S BRAIN: COLLAPSE

That last one more or less sent me into hysterics. (Not real hysterics. Hysterics like going up to my dad and demanding, "DID YOU TELL SOMEONE I COULD SERVE ON THEIR BOARD????") Someone thinks I would be a valuable addition to their board! Someone thinks I have time, talent or treasure! I find all of this very amusing and terrifying! It would look great on a resume, but I literally have no time.

So I wasn't in a great mood on Monday. I was tired and grumpy and worried about rehearsal. Then I had errands to run between work and rehearsal, and somehow, by the end of the night, all my worries had just fallen away.

It was stage-managing, I think. We are doing a show called Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (which I shall abbreviate as Jimmy Dean). It's very interesting and last night we blocked what I think is my favorite scene, a very intense one. And I like to watch the director at work, as I have never been in any kind of production with anyone but Caroline directing.

It was wonderfully quiet. It was the beautiful reassurance of having a task to do, something I knew I could do and just had to keep doing, without having to think much about it or ask anyone for help or have to spend half an hour in research. (Notice: work has been irritating lately.) It was the lovely joy of watching a play come to life in pieces, in laughing when actors say silly things.

I am still pretty shy, especially around the director, but despite being irritated with myself over it, I know I'll grow out of it.

I got some things done between work and rehearsal and then went home and wrote (I almost made my daily quota!) before going to bed. I felt wonderfully accomplished and peaceful. And I have been rethinking my schedule at the store (first want: a full weekend off; second want: adjusted Sunday hours so I don't have to run out of church anymore).

Also, there was chocolate at work today.

I've more or less given up on reading new books (I might get some more before the end of the year but probably not), and in my brain's state of collapse, I just moved back to old favorites. I started with Diana Wynne Jones' Castle in the Air (it is confusing at first, but the more I read it, the more I find it enjoyable, especially the ending), and read it in one day. (That was Saturday.) Then I moved on to The Goose Girl, only to find yesterday that it had mysteriously vanished. I am hoping I left it at the store on Sunday. Now I am on Tanith Lee's Wolf Tower, which I have always loved, but as I've been rereading it, I realized I barely remember anything. I didn't even remember that there was a Nemian.

I came home from work today and thought about getting on Google Reader, but found that all I wanted to do was lie in bed and read Wolf Tower, on this, my wonderful and beautiful last free evening for the rest of the week.

(Wolf Tower. It is so lovely. It is just weird enough and there are some wonderfully real phrases. I've tried some of Lee's other work--most notably Piratica and sequel--and didn't enjoy them half as much. I intend to reread the whole quartet--remember when quartets were still cool?--as I don't think I ever reread the final book, Wolf Wing.)

Today I made my writing quota for the first time in days (writing, but not enough, for several days in a row); I try to draw at work while waiting for files to load, but that doesn't always happen. Dishes: didn't happen today. Tomorrow, I guess. :p

I keep writing entries and then forgetting to post them. I never reviewed Entwined or wrote about The Nutcracker. It will happen! Perhaps over my glorious holiday weekend!

Words I have cut from AEFB so far: 4728
Words I still need to cut from AEFB: somewhere between 36,000 and 17,000

Hours I worked this week: 52

Number of times I did the dishes this week: 1

Chores I did this weekend: 2 that I can remember, plus a little bit of general straightening

People I'm done Christmas shopping for: 3/7

Books I want to read: you know. 50,000

Books I'm actually reading: 2

Writing projects I want to work on: 5

Things on my to-do list: Oh my. So many.

Number of days since last car wreck: 7

Number of times co-workers have told me I should pressure management for a job I am afraid will be stressful and difficult but fear I should take anyway for reliability: 12,000

Other creative things I feel like I should work on but don't: 5

Number of days until rehearsals (!) start: 5

Number of days until I can truly relax: 13

We're almost there.

My car is driveable (it will never be the same again, but it functions). My head is uninjured. Night after night I stay up way too late and spend all my days hoping a new audiobook will come in at the library and thinking about how I will never drive to Turfway again.

Somehow there's been a lot of hotness going around lately. Let's review:

-MAGNETO/ROGUE. IT IS LIKE MY BRAIN COMING TO LIFE. <3<3<3

-I was listening (finished today) to Tamora Pierce's Wild Magic at work while waiting for other audio books to come in at the library. I own the audio book and have listened to it before and have read the paperback book roughly five thousand times. It is one of my favorite books and it sets me on crazy fire for Tamora Pierce, her Immortals quartet (which Wild Magic is the first book of and features interesting anthropological things like other countries and clothes and gods and family trees) and, most importantly, book-boy-crush, Numair, Nerd of Sorcerers. When I was younger, it was a toss-up between George and Numair; now that I'm an adult, I've come to appreciate the nerd in Numair and now I love him whole-heartedly. (Now I have finished the book and have nothing else to listen to, D:)

-GLEE. WHOA. Usually Will is the source of all hotness because even though the "teenage" actors are my age, I'm still kind of like, "Yeah...they're teenagers." But Chord Overstreet was really hot. Really. Also, he was in a strip club that was obviously in Newport! Hooray for Newport!

-Also X-Men: First Class. When I first heard about it, I was like, "Ehhhhhhh." Then I was like, "James MacAvoy, you say?" Then I was like, "KEVIN BACON AS SEBASTIAN SHAW. YOU ARE NOT EVEN TRYING TO BE SERIOUS." And I gave up. Then, many months later when the general public no longer cared, I decided I had to see it and got it from the library. FYI: Magneto is hot no matter the medium. HOLY CRAP my ovaries basically burst into flames when I saw this movie. Fassbender and MacAvoy were so, so hot. Mystique was kind of interesting but basically Fassbender and MacAvoy made the movie good. SO GOOD. (And so, so stupid. Just to be clear.) Emma Frost made me vaguely irritated, Shaw was stupid (as usual), and the special effects for Emma and Beast sucked. I already loved MacAvoy but I've never seen Fassbender in anything. He has a magnificent, truly epic smile that really takes over his whole face. I like smiles. Seriously, the movie barely made sense, but the Erik & Charles Show made it so worth it.

Comic books: they make me crazy. Because when I like things (pretty much anything) I try to draw it, and when I can't draw it I keep trying and when I still can't draw it I get frustrated and say to myself, "WHY, WHY HAVE YOU NOT IMPROVED MORE? WHY DID YOU ONLY LEARN TO DRAW IN ONE AND A HALF STYLES?" I can't draw Rogue and I can't draw Magneto and this makes me very sad.

And then my ovaries spontaneously combusted. The end.

(I had one of those evenings where I wasted all my time and literally accomplished nothing. Also work went by too fast. Go Thursday!)

I've been writing little notes periodically that I will post soon; my life was kind of derailed Sunday afternoon when I wrecked my car for the first time ever. I keep trying to decide whether/how much I want to write about it. It was easily the most terrifying thing that's happened to me. I don't want to make a big deal about it, but I want to write about it, because I can’t ever ever ever stop writing. But also, I keep thinking of it and it was so, like, fast and scary and awful and I can't think of any words I can use to describe it.

My car started to slide on a wet, curvy ramp where I had bad tires. For one second I tried to regain control of the car and then realized I couldn't. I didn't fight the car. I saw the street lamp, I knew I was going to hit the street lamp. I felt the car spinning. I felt the car hit the street lamp. I screamed a lot. I swore when I first started going off the road, but I think once I realized I had lost control of the car, I was only screaming. Then the car stopped and I was facing the road, perpendicular to it, and there was a huge kind of oval thing in the road that I could only think was part of my car. I was shaking uncontrollably. I was crying. I started swearing again. I think somewhere in the back of my head I was thinking, "Fuck, I can't afford this." I don't remember turning off my iPod or whether it turned itself off. I got my cell and called my dad, crying and panicking. He said to call the police and that he would come and get me. As I hung up, I saw that a couple in a red truck had pulled over to help me. I tried to get out of the car and couldn't. (The panel next to the door was bashed in, making it impossible to open the door.) I had to put the passenger window down (because the inside passenger handle is broken, still) and climb over the seat and open the door from the outside to get out of the car.

I hit my head on the window as the car was spinning, but it didn't bruise or bleed or bump. The man of the couple was a mechanic and he said my tires were awful. (I knew they were.) The first thing I did after the initial "are you okay/yes I think so" chat was to get what I thought was a piece of my car out of the road. As I was dragging it back to the grass, I realized it was the light off the street lamp I'd hit. The glass was smashed in the road. The woman of the couple asked if I wanted her to call the cops and I think I tried to politely and passive-aggressively decline (yes, I wanted her to call the cops, but I didn't want her to think I NEEDED her to, I guess; I wanted to act like I could do it myself), and she did it for me. The damage didn't seem that bad to me, but the woman thought it might be totaled.

I was so scared. I was a little weepy, standing there with them, but I really lost it when (much later) my dad came. Basically, my whole face crumpled and I ran to him and started sobbing. The cop was super nice, he asked if I was okay and I was like, "Yeah, I hit my head, but I'm fine, just really shaken," and then I added, "This was my first car wreck," and he said, "Yeah, that's normal!" The couple waited with me until the cop arrived, and later I wished I had at least asked for their names; I just thanked them about a thousand times. It was raining and I was freezing and we all stood around on a cold, wet highway ramp waiting for the cop.

They fixed my car, and after a Facebook friend freaked out and my coworkers told me some scary concussion stories, I went to the hospital (24 hours later) to have my head checked. Just to be sure. My head was also fine.

I am so sad that I did that to my poor Sheila. She has been so good to me, and I am sorry that I am too poor and lazy to take better care of her.

Somehow (I suspect Divine Providence), I did not hit any other people or cars, the damage to my car was minimal, and I didn’t even get a bruise.

I thought I would be afraid to drive again, especially in the rain. And I love to drive. But when I was driving home from the garage tonight, I was mostly thinking, "Damnit, I have to do something about that stupid windshield. And the wipers." Sigh.

Bed now; more tomorrow, I think.