Rather a Story

Goodbye, 2014, I will not miss you. Here's to kicking ass and taking names in 2015.

I hope the year is treating everyone well so far!

Things are finally starting to settle into a semblance of normalcy over here at casa ratherastory. I still haven't unpacked all my boxes from when I moved from Montreal to Ottawa back in November, but all the important things are unpacked. Work is calming down, the dog is calming down, and the kitten is never calm anyway. ;)

2014 was really rough on me physically, emotionally and financially. Between the end of my relationship, the death of my cats within a week of each other (one of them highly traumatic), the renovations on my old house, the sale of my house, the move to another city, having the dog and my new kitten each have a bunch of health issues, and then needing repairs on my car, I'm kind of glad the year is over. That's only my personal problems, not even counting the murders of the RCMP officers in June, the terrible events of Ferguson and everywhere else, the honour guard murdered in Ottawa in October, and the summer of constant, unrelenting online misogyny and violence against women and trans people and people of colour. Almost everyone I know suffered personal losses and crises, one after the other. In short, 2014 sucked. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

I have a number of things I would like to get accomplished in 2015, some of them writing-related, and all of them designed to make my overall quality of life infinitely better. I won't bore you with the personal goals, but since this is my fic journal, I will list the few but important goals I have for my writing this year.

Writing Goals:

• Figure out how to write for the sheer, unadulterated joy of it again


• Update some of my 'verses. In particular Fusion, because I love that 'verse, and the Garden 'verse, because I know where I want that 'verse to end, and I'm not there yet.


• Write, edit and submit a novel for publication


• Outline all my current novel projects (I have four in various stages of conception and writing)


• Write every day in my "Morning Pages" journal, which is the best creative tool I've found for myself thus far


• Write 300,000 words by the end of the year (I signed up for gywo with this goal in mind)

I've also given myself a moratorium on signing up for challenges and exchanges this year. They used to be a great source of motivation for me, but this year I found that, because I was already pretty burned out, all they did was ramp up my anxiety issues and make me hate myself and my writing. So this year will be devoted to writing things only when they bring me joy.

If you would like, you may leave me prompts for any of my existing 'verses in any fandom (not that I have that many), or request time stamps/whatever for anything I've already written**.

**I am going to be SUPER picky about which prompts I accept for Fusion, so don't take it personally if I don't end up writing your prompt specifically. I get a lot of "Sam freaks out and Dean comforts him" prompts for that 'verse which, well, is not a useful prompt, since it basically describes over half the stories in the 'verse. ;) But if you have things you'd like to see, themes you'd like to have me explore, then please toss your hat in the ring! I have a big old playground and everyone is welcome!

Shamelessly stolen from de_nugis.

Tell me about a story I haven't written, and I will give you 1-3 sentences (or more) from or about it.

I haven't been writing much (apart from my summergen, which keeps getting longer on me and is giving me terrible trouble and I am worried my recipient will hate it and oh God... anyway), so this feels like a fun way to get back into the swing of things.

All my fandoms are fair game. That's Supernatural, H50, Leverage, White Collar, Avengers (and all related Marvel movies that I've seen), and if you know I watch a TV show but haven't written anything for it yet and feel like taking a chance, you should go for it. (Ones that spring to mind are Person of Interest and Teen Wolf, among others.)

Okay. Before I head out on hiatus, I figured I would make another much-overdue list of projects I have going on. Partly for my own reference (I plan to keep a copy of this offline until July) and partly because I seem to recall others enjoying watching me lose my mind over my excessive commitments. ;)

( Projects & Due Dates Under the Cut )

Due to some recent anon comments to my fanfic that were downright rude/possibly someone trolling me and other commenters in the entry, I am now screening anon comments AND forcing anon commenters to verify that they're "real" with CAPTCHA.

This sucks, because I know a couple of people do comment here who don't have LJ accounts. You can blame the internet trolls for this extra level of hassle in your lives. I will NOT have people coming in and being rude to me and to my friends in my own space.

Even if you think my fanfiction is utter shit (which is your right), I will thank you to mind your manners. If you can't manage that, I will delete your comment with extreme prejudice. Fair warning.

I was going to do one, then decided I am too lazy and too tired to do it. Instead I am going to focus on New Year's resolutions and coming up with a writing plan. I didn't make my personal writing goal of 2011, but I came out of it with a very respectable 570,000 words which is 65k more than I wrote in 2010.

The short version is that 2011 was a year of pushing my boundaries, fanfic-wise. I wrote a full-length RPS fic for the spn_j2_bigbang, and it was also the year that I ventured into writing m/m slash, thanks to Hawaii Five-0.

I want to do more writing in 2012, get my momentum going again now that I won't be taking trips or moving or doing anything else that will require lots of mental energy on the house front. We shall see. I'd also like to go back to my original fic, see if I can't ignite some sparks there as well.

There will be plenty of other resolutions, too, but none of them involve writing and therefore are of limited interest to the people who read this journal, I'm sure.

As you may have noticed, I have been posting everything to Dreamwidth lately and crossposting to LJ. This is because LJ shows no signs of correcting their fuckery with the latest updates, so I'm making sure things are backed up elsewhere. I am letting all my paid accounts & extra icons lapse, because I don't see the point in financially supporting a service that not only ignores its userbase, but in some cases is actually insulting to them. The ratherastory journal is staying put, but I'm going to try to avoid having to import my content to DW, since I forget often and when I do the wait times are quite long.

The one thing that's a little irksome is that the master posts of my fiction all link back to my LJ entries, so I will have to go in and fix all those links by hand eventually. Eesh.

Hola all!

So, as I said in a previous post, I am taking a mini-break from the internet, starting at midnight and finishing December 18th (inclusively).

I'm not going to be completely gone. I have a few fic commitments due in December, so I'll be posting a few times. I'll also be checking my email once a day in case of "emergencies." However, for the rest I will not be checking LJ, Twitter, or any other part of the internet for two weeks.

(I'm kind of amused that my hiatus is starting at the same time as the SPN hiatus, but I think that may just be amusing to me)

With any luck, this little two-week detox will be just the thing for me to get my RL shit together, to get a lot more writing done, and to come back refreshed and excited to do fandom stuff again.

If you need help with anything relating to the comms I help to run, my co-mods will be happy to answer your queries.

Everyone take good care of yourselves in my absence, and I will see you on the flip side!

Hey folks!

Anyone know where I can get some logo-free high-quality downloads of Supernatural? I'm looking for all seasons, but I'll take what I can get. :)

Thanks!

So I've decided that for my own sanity I'm going to unplug for the first two weeks of December. I'm going to go 90% offline from December 3rd to December 18th inclusively. No Twitter, no LJ, with a couple of minor exceptions.

I've been spending way too much time online and not enough time in the "real" world, and my outside life has been suffering for it. So I'm going to detox for a couple of weeks, and hopefully return with a newfound sense of balance between work, life and fandom.

There will be a couple of exceptions to this rule, because I have commitments that I fully intend to honour:

1- I will check my emails once a day in case of "emergencies."
2- I will be keeping up my monitoring of ohsam with regards to the fic challenge
3- I will be posting challenge/exchange fics on my appointed posting dates

Otherwise, that will pretty much be it. I'll be focusing instead on my writing (without distractions), on getting my house in order and on de-neglecting all the lovely folk who live near me in the flesh.

In short, if you feel like you're not hearing from me much in early December, that will be why. :)

First off, hi to all the lovely new people! *waves*

Okay, so the 7.03 comment-fic meme is still going strong! I am working night shift and moving and packing and dealing with building inspectors, so I apologize for not being more on top of the master list of fills. I SWEAR I will get it updated as soon as humanly possible. LJ being glitchy is certainly not helping.

ANYWAY!

You should go and look at all the juicy unfilled prompts and FILL THEM ALL! ;)

We will go back to your regularly-scheduled programming soon, as soon as I have my life back in order.

/end transmission

My Delicious account is back from the dead, except it has amnesia. ALL my links have vanished.

I am so pissed off, I can't even. All of harrigan's hard work is gone.

I guess I'll get back to it eventually, figure out what the hell these "stacks" are. I like pancakes, but I don't see what the point of stacks are otherwise.

Delicious is also being a prissy bitch and informing me that I must not have "opted in" when I was supposed to. Hah. I did it for both my accounts, so they are full of it.

Any other bookmarking sites out there that people like? I am willing to switch over at this point, since I have to start from scratch.