corrielle

*stumbles onto the screen, looking slightly confused*

What is this place?  Let's see... looks like we've got fanfic, some very interesting memes, contests, challenges, communities, meta...

*getting more and more excited as she continues to list*

And over here are some fannish discussions full of equal parts intelligence and squee, and over there I think I see some pretty icons with witty and appropriate quotes attached... 

*drops to knees*

Can it be?  Can I actually have found my way back?  I have!  It's lj-land!

*rejoices and kisses the digital ground she walks (kneels?) on*

( And with that silliness out of the way... what have I been up to? (Teaching edition.) )

( The garden that ate my life. )

( Fandom Update: Wheel of Time, Burn Notice (spoilers for most recent eps), SPN, Deadwood, and PotC (some casting spoilers that are already all over the internet) )

Because I'm sitting around waiting to leave for the weekend and don't have the mental energy to post anything more useful... a book meme I got from donella.

( Insert facetiously pretentious 'I've read this and you haven't nyah nyah' quote here. )

2. Sabriel by Garth Nix

This was an exceeding dark young adult fantasy, but it was also richly textured.  The world had grit to it.

( Read the rest of the review. (Spoilers) )

3. Lirael by Garth Nix

Lirael is the sequel to Sabriel, and it picks up where the story left off, though several years have passed by now...

( In this book, the world that was outlined in Sabriel is developed more fully. )

I'm in the middle of Abhorsen, the third book in the series and a direct continuation of Lirael right now, and it's a wild ride.

4. Midnight Assassin by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf

This is a book about a real murder in a tiny Iowa farming community that took place in 1900.  I got interested in it because my literature class read a play inspired by the case.

( Some thoughts on justice and gender roles. )

More substantial post regarding recent activities may be forthcoming. Or not. For now... memes!

( Seven Random Facts )

And to close, a fandom meme:

Give me a character from any fandom I know at least fairly well, and I will tell you:

A) My OTP
B) The runner up
C) The anti-ship
D) My unpopular fannish opinion on said character
E) One person he/she never fell in love with, and why

1. The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

( Fair spoiler warning has been given. )

And now... my last book for 2009.

20. The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

When I began to read The Gathering Storm, I was hopeful and excited, but I had some anxieties in the back of my mind.  Was it going to be any good at all?  Was the plot actually going to start to move toward a conclusion?  Was the new author going to be good to the characters I love like they're family?

Having finished, I now know that the answers are: Yes, yes, and yes.

( lj-cut for a whole ton of spoilers, including a question that has been puzzling the WoT fandom for going on a decade. (No, it's not Who killed Asmodean? Calm yourselves.)  ) 

Needless to say, I enjoyed this book immensely.  It makes me feel good about sticking with the series, and I feel like a lot of the various threads of the plot are starting to pay off and come back together.  I can't wait for Towers of Midnight now, (ridiculously ominous name notwithstanding) which is supposed to be coming out in late 2010.

I read both of these quite a while ago, but didn't have time to comment on them here. 

16. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

( Pre-Columbian History This Way )

17. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

In the middle of the semester, I picked up another class from a teacher who was ill. She had assigned this book at the beginning of the semester, so I figured I was stuck with it, and so I had better read it.  I ended up loving it.

( Here's why.  )

For those of you who haven't been listening to me prattle on about this for the past six months, bigbanghood is the Robin Hood fic challenge I took part in that involved writing a story of at least 30,000 words.  We ended up with seven stories, each with an accompanying piece of art.  I just looked at my story's artwork a couple of minutes ago for the first time, and now that I've sat down from doing the happy dance of "Someone did lovely art for MY story!!!!" joy, I thought I should share the news with my f-list.

The big reveal post that lists all of the fics and links to first chapters is here, the first chapter of my story is here, and my art piece by shinysparks is here.  

Now, once I finish grading and get myself some more tea for my scratchy throat, I may start reading one of the other authors' stories... I can't wait to see what everyone else came up with!

I have a TON of grading to do still. I didn't get very much done on that front this weekend because we had a lovely guest at our house on Friday and we ended up unwrapping my copy of Star Trek and introducing her to that specific brand of crazyawesome, and on Saturday, Rae and I took the little boy she used to nanny for to the LA Zoo and we got to see snow leopard cubs playing with their mom, a male lion trying to mate with a very uninterested female, and a creature called a coati that came right up to the bars because he was very interested in my glazed almonds. I think his nose was practically prehensile.  There was also the most enormous eagle I've ever seen in my life--it was a Stellar's Sea Eagle that's native to Russia, and its head probably would have come up to my hip if it was standing next to me.  I'm so glad we went... every time we go, I am fascinated all over again by the infinite diversity of nature.

I also have NaNo and the fandom challenge I'm participating in... I'm behind in both of those, too, which is my own fault for not working on them when I had the time and watching all of season 3 of Burn Notice again over the past few days.  Still, I haven't been completely unproductive this weekend...

Today, in order to catch up with everything I:

Did the dishes so we could start the week off clean.

Wrote 3,000 words of my NaNo novel, culminating in a very long visit from the exposition fairy. I'm now only 6,667 words behind... and I'll be more behind to tomorrow, but I made a big dent today, and I'm less behind than I would be if I hadn't done anything at all.

Posted the first five parts of my Wolf's Head fic on the Big Bang Hood site.  I'm SO embarrassed that I'm the last one left to post, and formatting takes me forever.  Copy/pasting from Microsoft Word doesn't work so well sometimes.  My paragraphs are inconsistently indented, and sometimes weird symbols show up when I actually post.  So, I spent the afternoon going through and making final corrections to the chapter, copy-pasting into notepad to clear Word's weird formatting crap, going back and manually making sure that all the paragraphs are the same and have space between them for easier web reading, and manually inputting the italics and previous and next chapter html.  There has to be a better way to do this... I just don't happen to know what it is. I've got some ideas I'm going to try tomorrow that will hopefully speed things up.

Coming up, I've got more students essays that are going to be turned in, Thanksgiving at my parents', at least Saturday of LosCon, the end of Nano, and I can't even begin to think beyond that. *gasps for breath*

I had a 3,000 word day yesterday, and I had another one the day before that.  If I can keep this up for a couple more days, I won't need the word count I got from the fic I attempted to write at the beginning of the month to pad my final word count.  Things are moving along nicely.  My story has had lots of visits from the exposition fairy, which I don't try to reign in one bit.  I've done almost no world building for this project, so whenever my characters start rambling about past events or other kingdoms or how magic works, I let them.  It's world-building by the seat of my pants, and it's deliciously entertaining.

caedhe and I finished our Robin Hood series 1 rewatch last night.  It's been fun for me to go back and watch those old episodes again, but... ( Spoiler cut for anyone who hasn't seen the end of series 1 and actually cares. )

It's strange to me that no matter how many times I've seen this episode, no matter how well I remember exactly what's going to happen when, I still get really upset every time I watch it.  There are actually a lot of fandom moments that do that to me, and I'd love to know what does this to other people.  So... if you want to...

List five fannish products (episodes, books, movies, etc) that are still as heartbreaking today as they were when you first saw them. Here are mine...

( Spoilers for Firefly, Angel Season 5, PotC:AWE, and Robin Hood Series 2. )

And now that you're thoroughly depressed, to cheer up, list five fannish products that are still as good as they were the first time you saw them.  Here are mine...

( Spoilers for Robin Hood, Doctor Who (9th Doctor), Buffy Season 5 )

Some people remember the JFK assassination, some people remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated and when the Apollo mission landed on the moon. I was a little late to this world for all of those things.  For me, the Berlin Wall coming down is the first big world event I remember clearly and whose significance I really understood (other than a presidential election... I remember learning about the election process with Bush v. Dukakis in '88).

( Here's what I remember. )

First of all...

Happy Birthday scifichicx!

I hope your birthday was a good one.  I can't think of anyone who deserves it more.

Second, as I'm sure most people know, I'm participating in a Robin Hood fic challenge right now, and we're looking for some artists who want to do art for the stories that have already been submitted. I think that some of the people who had originally volunteered have dropped off the map.  So, we find ourselves in need of at least four artists who are interested in participating.  I know I have some pretty talented folks on my flist, so I thought I'd spread the word.  If you're a Robin Hood fan, have some artistic talent, and want to do something fun and cool for the fandom, check out the artists' sign up post here and the revised due dates here.  What do you get out of this, I hear you ask?  Well, you get a banner for taking part in the challenge, you get to read one of the stories before everyone else does, and you get to do something nice for an author who has put a lot of work into her story. (I think I'm safe in using "her" here...)

And finally... Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh The Gathering Storm came out today and I don't have it yet because I ordered it on Amazon yesterday because it had a really good pre-order price and I don't know what to do with myself. *ahem* Sorry. This is the first time since I was in London that I haven't had a new WoT book on the day it came out, and it's making me twitchy.  I'm not even done rereading Knife of Dreams yet, so it's not really that big of a deal. Except it is!!!! There are people out there READING IT right now, and I'M NOT!  And considering the amount of grading I have left to do tonight, that's probably a good thing.

Just... passed... 23,000.... words. *collapses*

That means that I have 7,000 words to write if I want to have a complete draft in by the 26th.  I can do that, right? RIGHT?  (In all actuality, I think I can do that... and if I don't quite hit the word count or have to turn in a detailed chapter outline for the last section, I don't think anyone involved is going to kill me.)

I... can't believe I've gotten this far.  In the last few days, I've learned about medieval arrow extraction techniques, herbs native to England that stop bleeding, and the length of an arrow shot from an English longbow.  More research than the writers of the show probably ever did, but I'm having such fun learning these things... I'll be going over the whole thing with a fine-toothed comb once the draft is done, but on the whole, I'm pretty happy with what I have.  People seem to be reasonably in character, and I'm having fun working with a very different set of relationships than the ones in canon. I don't think I've written this long of a fanfic since 2005 when I finish my Peter Pan fic and my Patriot fic.  (Is it any coincidence that my next spate of writing long fic features around another gorgeous, dark-haired baddie? I don't think so.) Apparently, I just needed an extra push to get off my rear and write.

In short... I. Love. This. Challenge. Massive kudos to jedi_of_urth for organizing it.

I am coming down off a major writer's high right now. 

I spent a good chunk of this afternoon writing a very pivotal scene in my bigbanghood fic, and by the time I was done, I had so much adrenaline running through my veins, I could feel my heartbeat in my toes, and I felt like I could run a four minute mile if I needed to.  I was in the middle of the scene, wondering why my body's "fight or flight" response was kicking in, and I suddenly realized that I was having my viewpoint character's reactions.  (Yes, it's Guy... not a surprise, there, but pretend for me like it is?)  It was weird.  When I was finished, I had to go outside and do something for a while to burn off all of the excess energy, so I watered all of the plants and then made myself sit down and eat some leftovers slowly enough that I could actually taste them. (I fixed honey Dijon pork chops and cauliflower last night... not as complicated as it sounds.  My meat recipe went something like this: "combine bottle of Lawry's marinade + defrosted meat + skillet + fire."  Still, it was delicious.)  

I haven't felt this excited about a writing project for a long while.  I've been writing regularly for a few days, and I've managed between 1,000 and 2,000 words a day since Wednesday, and it's on now.  I'm actually getting to the point where I look forward to sitting down each day at the computer because I can't wait to pick up where I left off, rather than putting it off because I'm dreading the prospect of having to produce all of those tiresome words. I'm still behind where I wish I was in terms of word count, but with a little bit of luck, I'll be able to continue to tap into the reserver of self-discipline I seem to have stumbled into and actually have a draft of my story completely finished by the time our first drafts are due.

In other news...

My classes are going well.  They're all huge, and there are a couple of kids in one of my classes who think they're too good to be there, but unfortunately, (for them and for me) they're not.  They're also guys who think that because I'm a young-ish, fairly soft-spoken female who is painfully nice and understanding most of the time that I won't reign down fire on them for goofing off in my class. They're wrong, and if they don't shape up, they're about to find that out. The majority of my students, though, seem to be nice people who want to improve. 

Rae and I went on a mini Labor Day vacation that took us up the coast a ways.  We spent a lot of time at a place called Moonstone Beach near Cambria, and we drove up to San Simeon so I could take Rae to Hearst Castle for the first time. I have a lot of pictures that I'll post soon.  It was a nice break, and exactly what I needed before school got crazy.

These are the first two books in the Mistborn trilogy.  I'm trying to read all three of them before The Gathering Storm comes out so that I can get a sense of how Sanderson handles long, multi-novel plot arcs.  My feelings on the matter so far?  Guarded optimism with several niggling caveats.

14. Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

 

( Oh so many spoilers. Yes, including the big one at the end.  )

15. The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

 

( On to book two and more spoilers.  )</span>

 

To sum up: Sanderson is often very good at complicated relationships between people and races that don't understand each other very well.  This bodes well for his foray into the WoT world. However, he has lots of scene with people standing around and talking and planning rather than actually doing.  This worries me.  The WoT series is already very talk-y.  It doesn't need any more of that than it's already got. He also tends to give big events less focus than I think they deserve, and that worries me as well.  But, to end on a positive note, he's really good about describing the workings of "magic," staying within the rules he establishes, and explaining new developments in a plausible way.  That's key for anyone who's going to try to be writing about saidin and saidar for fans who have been meticulously paying attention to how they work for going on twenty years now (Eye of the World was published in 1990…).  I'm hoping that Mr. Jordan's plotting and notes and the experience of having written a trilogy like this one already will alleviate some of the problems I've mentioned.

I don't want to make it sound like I didn't like these books... I liked them very much.  I think I'm just getting to be a more critical reviewer in my old age. (Old age being just shy of thirty, in this case... though I feel much more crotchety than that.)

</span>

Though I haven't gotten around to posting my comments in the rewatch threads for the last two episodes, I do have thoughts.  Loud, occasionally-squee-filled, occasionally-angry thoughts.

So, here are my musings on "Parent Hood" and  "Turk Flu."

( 1x04, or, Even GUY Isn't That Callous  )

( 1x05, or, Welcome to the Gang, Djaq!!!!!  )

I was up at 5:30 this morning so that I could get to my class in Sylmar at 7:30.  My morning class is huge, and the room I'm in is cramped, though there are enough desks for everyone.  Sylmar was covered in smoke that had blown in from the fire, and it was hard for me to breathe, and I'm usually not terribly affected by things like that. It was bad. 

I did my notes for my Tuesday class tomorrow and made sure that I was on top of things there... no sense in letting that fall behind just because it isn't my only class any more.

Yesterday, I had a fun chat with a whole bunch of other lovely RH writers... but I put off working for my syllabus this morning and tore my hair out over it until far too late at night.

I set myself a goal of writing 1,000 words for my RH fic today, and after several hours of writing, I did it!  It was a tough section... especially since I happen to care about historical accuracy and I was doing lightning-speed-research and fact checking as I went. The next chapter is a lot of action, so hopefully that will go more quickly.

Things I found out:

Does it snow in Nottingham?  Yes!

Would a well-off woman in the late 1190's have a Book of Hours? No, but she might have had a Psalter.

How many t's in the RH2006 version of Will Scarlet(t)? Two.

What color are Will/Harry Lloyd's eyes?  I don't know! I pulled up several different groups of screen shots, and they are either grey, blue, green, hazel, or brown depending on what he's wearing and the lighting.  Pick an eye color, Will!  In frustration, I rearranged my description so eye color isn't mentioned any more.

My class at Ventura started a week ago, and my classes at Mission start a week from tomorrow.  So, before I plunge into the land of "Teaching Three Classes" again, here's what's been up with me lately:

( Real Stuff )

( Fandom Stuff (Lots of True Blood spoilers, and one big Burn Notice Spoiler for the Mid-season finale) )

I'm certainly post-happy tonight!  Because I miss thinking about all of the fandom characters I write... here's a meme.

Give me a character or a pairing and I'll give you something from my personal headcanon about them. Can't promise I'll come up with anything particularly interesting for all of them (I HAVE MY BIASES, AFTER ALL), but I'll certainly try!

( Sunday: Doctor Who (trailer spoilers for Waters of Mars and The End of Time) and Torchwood (CoE spoilers) )