Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

I haaaaaaaaaaate having a cold. There's something about how prosaic the misery is - it's not like vomiting, which is so dramatic and debilitating. You just have to blow your nose over and over and over until your face hurts, and deal with the pain in your sinuses and down the sides of your neck from the drainage, and cough perpetually. Nobody else IRL takes your illness seriously because it's Just A Cold. And it lasts for weeks.

Well, I have bought an expensive chicken from the farmer's market to turn into soup. There will be matzoh balls. (I mostly try to buy my meat from the farmer's market which means it's expensive and so I don't eat it much at home.)

Deep into the Peneloise fic. It turns out that having Eloise recognize that she and Penelope are in very different positions (that is, that she has thin privilege and, uh, older-money privilege) is super cathartic for me.

Hacks feels like 30 Rock filmed more as a drama, I think. Like I can picture these actors doing exactly the same scripts but played a little more broad/slapsticky, with the 30 Rock background music. It's also interesting to watch s3 after having read (most of) a biography of Joan Rivers (it was by a journalist and wasn't very good, which is why I stopped reading it a bit after her husband died) and so having context for Deborah's desire to be a late-night host and her back catalogue of hideously offensive material.

Felt like utter shit this morning and I don't really know why. I mean, I did have a Work Flub yesterday that got me a "you did a wrong thing" email from my boss, but I feel like it's deeper than a response to that. Just burnout, I suppose. ADHD something or other from having been too on-the-ball earlier this week. Had a browse of MANY, NEMA, and Hartwick's job boards and found nothing at all for me.

OTOH feeling like this always gives me a bit more of a drive to write, because a) there's the remote possibility of magically being able to support myself by writing so I could quit (extremely unlikely but hey, so are so many good things one hopes for) and b) I find the idea of just going to meetings and dusting paintings while having coworkers know that even if they all think I'm a fuck-up, I'm a published author (technically already am but it doesn't count because of Reasons) very funny. This is all very silly but one needs something to cling to.

Paused working on the sequel novella to go back to finishing my novel because it is SO CLOSE. I could have the first draft done in like two weeks, or rather two weekends.

Yesterday I added three thousand words to Happy Secret! I only need-need two thousand more and I'm also within a few scenes of the end, so I suspect it will end up coming together with me hitting the minimum as I get to the end of the story. (This is so common for me ... I assume it's psychological, something deep in my brain paces myself to meet a minimum in a way I would never ever be able to consciously manage.)

Several big chunks turned out to be written in a very nineteenth-century style, so quite a lot of the work was rewriting them to not sound like ... that. I really wish it were not my default. It always means rewriting paragraphs from scratch rather than tweaking because it's like the entire way I structure and combine sentences is daffy. it's deeper than style, it's something to do with the coding of my brain. Why why why?

Aaaaaagh I need to sew to make clothes for me to wear! But I also need to write because Luna Press is only open for submissions on March 16 and I still have 5k to add to hit their minimum word count! Why do I have to have a fucking job to take up all my time?!

I keep forgetting that I bought a paid account and have dozens more icon spaces now. I don't know where my icons are from my old icon-making days though so I don't have anything to upload. I should make some more when I'm procrastinating from both writing and sewing.

CW is definitely not interviewing me at this point, I think. Ah well. I wonder if this current spate of curatorial jobs in fashion/textiles is a bizarre blip or if it reflects the museum field opening up and hiring more people ... or I guess maybe it reflects one fashion/textiles person getting a new job, and then their old job opens up, and then the old job of the person who gets hired for that one opens up, and so on. Looking forward to seeing who gets this one so I can compare myself to them and get depressed. (I was being defeatist at Sarah over how I thought being in collections for so long made people disqualify me for curatorial jobs and she was disagreeing with me because of people she knows who've made the jump, which I think was her being positive and supportive but unfortunately also implies that I just suck on an individual level and that's why I don't get interviews for these positions.)

I'm trying to finish my novel and I was making great strides - wrote several more chapters - until I decided to let myself have a little break and write some porn. And now I'm like "well I could write my one self-insert self-actualizing and thinking about stuff while locked in a room by the villain or I could write my other self-insert getting railed in a foursome," which is an unfortunately easy choice. (At least it is now! It's crazy when I think about how much more comfortable I've gotten with writing explicit sex over the past year.)

Yearly check up yesterday, clean bill of health. Seems likely my "appendicitis" was ovarian cysts, and the doctor thinks PCOS seems plausible, but the weird nerve thing I have going on in my left leg/foot is more of a "huh, keep an eye on that" issue. Nobody called me fat, which I'm always worried about! I don't know if I've been lucky in the specific GPs I've had or if the hospital has some kind of really progressive policies or seminars on the topic ... but I've never gotten a talk about diabetes or anything, and they always acknowledge how healthy I am (blood pressure of 110/72!).

Started watching Hazbin Hotel, mainly because I heard there was discourse about it being Problematic for having dark stuff. It makes me feel very nostalgic, in a way, because the art style reminds me so much of 2005-era DeviantArt posters who were strongly influenced by Jhonen Vasquez and stuff at Hot Topic. And it's a musical show, and the voice talent is A+++ (Christian Borle! Daphne Rubin-Vega! Jeremy Jordan in a role I DON'T HATE!). It's on Amazon Prime and I recommend it if you like edgy cartoons with heart. And musical numbers. And a powerful demon who talks like an old-timey radio guy complete with fuzzy filter to make his voice sound like it's literally coming out of a radio.

Also watching the new Belgravia series. I was leery of it at first because the original Belgravia was, well, Julian Fellowes semi-trash, and Fellowes has only gotten worse (see: The Gilded Age) ... But I started it and was surprised at the level of quality in the writing and directing. Turns out it has nothing to do with Fellowes, which is probably why. I mean, much will depend on how the plotlines turn out - I'm only on the first ep - but it seems like decent period television. A bit gothic, even! The main guy is so fucked up from his father, it's delicious.

Finished writing my 1920s queer Cinderella retelling! I've found a few possible markets on Submission Grinder and I'm very excited to submit, although I'm also getting anxious along the lines of "I think this story is fantastic so it has be published in the most perfect outlet."

Been away so long DW logged me out again ...

Not much going on IRL, as ever. I've been allowed to do an exhibition of quilts - only to be up in December, so a lot of work for little gain, but it's better than nothing. Hopefully it gets good visitation to prove that non-painting stuff in the collection is valuable. 🙄 Though unfortunately I think TPTB already do think forms of folk art other than paintings are valuable, so this wouldn't make them do a turnaround on historic artifacts in general.

The fashion/textile curator position I applied for in San Francisco got canceled. Not fair! I didn't want to move to the west coast, but still - second time this has happened. I would like to be interviewed. I think I could kill an interview.

I finished a knitting project!!! Really like this yarn. I bought it at a trunk show locally and so I get to feel a little extra smug about it because I got it straight from the indie dyer.

I spent all of October going crazy about OFMD season 2 (and what a season it was) and writing fics for OFMD Kinktober (as well as a couple for Whumptober) - most of them not actually pornfic. Now I'm working on a handful of prompts for a January AU challenge, trying to make them solid fics in and of themselves by starting so far ahead rather than making 1-2k pieces that just dip a bit into the AU aspect as I usually do. The first one is set in the world of turn of the century music hall female impersonators, as you do. There's also a Ladyhawke AU all plotted out. An epistolary fic based on an AITA post. Several others that are just in the idea stage right now.

I have gone Good Omens mad. Watched the second season over the course of the first two days it was out, then rewatched it, then started at the beginning of season one and watched the whole thing through. Like a normal person. I wrote a non-s2-compliant post-s1 Ineffable Wives fic, then a one-shot all about s2, and am working on a post-s2 how-it-all-gets-fixed fic. I've written up a
lotttttt of things about it and will summarize below:

( spoilery thoughts beneath the cut )

I also read This is How You Lose the Time War because of that whole Bigolas Dickolas thing. I thought I would like it more because a) lesbians and b) rather an asexual love story, but I'm just too literal for that kind of literary-fairy-tale writing style. And then in a reversal from my usual cranky ace viewpoint, I didn't really buy them falling in love while exchanging the letters. Ah well.

My most literary OFMD discord server has a channel for original fiction, so I found someone there to alpha read my two old NaNo novels to see if they have good enough bones to be worth rewriting. So far they say yes, which is nice!

It took me forever because I have so little time for reading, but I finished Ocean's Echo! It was just as good as Winter's Orbit, although I felt like the romance was backgrounded a little bit (I'd compare it to the difference between MDZS and TGCF for the danmei fans). Still, I loved the pairing of the dutiful soldier with the tricksy pain-in-the-ass, it's a good dynamic.

Started reading The Belle of Belgrave Square, an 1860s romance by Mimi Matthews. I picked it up because I read the first book in the series last year and found it pretty enjoyable - the love interest was a tailor/couturier with English and Indian ancestry, which is extremely unusual for historical romance (which is normally like "aristocratic/gentry white men ONLY"). Was a bit more hesitant this time because the love interest is apparently an older white military officer with a bad reputation for harshness (per the first book), but just in the first chapter the implications seem pretty clear that he's actually someone from the guy's unit who stole his identity and is now honorably taking care of the officer's illegitimate children. The heroines of these also have real problems - the first one had a sister who was "ruined" and this one has dickensian hypochondriac parents - so all in all they are satisfying stories with satisfying obstacles.

I mean, I'm only just into it and I already care even though they're an m/f couple, and I can't tell you how little I can be bothered for m/f couples in fiction these days. (It's really hitting me lately how little effort so many book and tv writers put into selling you on the couple.)

Speaking of the gays, I finished and posted another lesbian blackbonnet fic yesterday - A Perfect Pair. (I do not like the title but titles are hard and it's okay enough.) The process of writing it was really interesting because I had no real intention of it becoming sexy, events just ... happened that way as emotions carried things. I'm not generally a writer of sex scenes (I think this is only my third Explicit fic on AO3, out of 78 works? No, second, apparently the omegaverse Austen fic was M) and I nearly always have more interest in focusing on the romantic rather than the sexual, and no the two things are not inherently separate but I adore people staring into each other's eyes in the moonlight and generally have no interest in actually writing an escalation to sex - even writing kissing for me is like, eh. Not anymore, I guess!

(I have been learning a LOT about myself in the past year ... I went from "I'm bisexual in that I don't just admire women aesthetically, I think" to "oh, now I understand why some bi women call themselves lesbians," and I don't think this is unrelated to why I'm like finally discovering the appeal of sex at the same time I start getting more into f/f. Would have been useful to figure this out before 35, but oh well.)

There were multiple original writing projects I was going to try to do this month, but they just ... did not happen.

I forced myself to wrap up the second volume of my three-volume novel, and got a couple of friends from Tumblr to look it over for an alpha read just to reassure me that it's worth continuing with. So far one has finished it and was VERY enthusiastic, which is helpful. Now I need to write that third volume ... that's the really exciting one, of course, because it has the culmination of the romance and the final reveal about the heroine's parentage, but it also has some holes in the outline. And of course writing for myself is never as fulfilling as writing for AO3 because you get so much lovely, lovely feedback with the latter.

Finally got myself to sign up for the Renegade Bindery typesetting and binding exchanges, overcoming nearly two weeks' worth of procrastination.

I've started writing a new WIP, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, based on the idea "what if Stede got to the dock and Ed didn't (and then things got really dark)?" Also posted a few more chapters of Prisons of Our Own Perceptions ... A fic called Waitin' For My Dearie that's basically a DW entry about why I identify so much with Stede asjdklasjklda and another, Be Careful, It's My Heart, which is another AU, where Stede somehow does everything in ep 10 faster and gets back to the ship while Ed is still in breakup depression mode. (More than halfway done with my next A Kiss On The Hand fic.)

Some time ago, I got blocked by someone who used to follow me on Tumblr, I'm pretty sure due to Discourse. It's a weird feeling, because I tend to reblog meta with a variety of viewpoints, I don't take hardline stances on fandom stuff (I'm a ship and let ship, stan and let stan person), so there's two options: 1) they were annoyed that I didn't take a hard line on something they believe ought to be banned (people being interested in Izzy Hands at all), or 2) they were offended by my "Mary is great but plays her own part in her and Stede's disconnect" and "Stede Bonnet is autistic" takes. I don't mind mind except that they didn't just softblock me (when you block someone to make them stop following you without realizing it, then unblock them), they fully blocked me, so I can see when they've been having a conversation in the replies to a post but I can't see their half of it, which is annoying - so I keep asking myself, what did I do that was so wrong that they couldn't just disengage from me but had to make it so I couldn't see or interact with their posts?? It is neurotic but like I said, I'm just not used to being blocked. Going to try to be less mentally ill about this but it's this or being worried about bears all the time, so.