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I started and tossed at least five blog posts last week. One was a humor post about life as a cat lady, which turned out not as funny as I hoped and a little bit repetitive of other similar “lists” I’ve seen elsewhere. Then there was my review of the last season of BBC’s Sherlock, which turned into a rant about slut-shaming within the feminist community (RE: the response to Irene Adler’s characterization), and I didn’t want my review of something I love to be full of rant, so into the trash it went too. The rest were all those sorts  where you start a post, get one sentence in, are forced to go do something else, come back two hours later, and can’t remember what you were writing about in the first place.

Some weeks, you just want to throw your pen in the air and say bugger it.

Fortunately, I did get a lot of proofreading done on This Ain’t No Fairy Story, which I’m actually liking on the first edit. This is an unusual experience for me. Usually I hate everything I write on the first edit and only achieve a minimal satisfaction with it after several rewrites.

This weekend, a water line burst at my house, leaving my entire yard like a swamp and sending my uncle out to dig a pit in the field where my well is, getting covered head to toe in mud, but getting the leak fixed. (I so owe him a cake.) I stayed home in case he needed to get into the house, which meant I didn’t get to see my B, but I did get to clean out my “junk clothes” drawers, which were overflowing.

You know junk clothes right? Those ancient and tattered things you wear when no one’s looking because they’re comfy, or you’re cleaning house and don’t want your good jeans bleach-spotted, or you’re painting or remodeling and don’t want stains on something nice?

By Saturday night I had one pile of clothes that were good enough to be donated and one pile of clothes that were too stained, bleached, or full of holes to give away.

However, it occurred to me that I do need new rugs for the kitchen. And several of the shirts in the unsalvageable pile were in colors that would go with the basic color scheme of my kitchen (which is brown, turquoise, and sage).

If you’ve never made a rag rug before, they’re fairly simple and, depending on the fabric and stitches you use, can be quite pretty. (There’s a good tutorial here.) T-shirts and sweats are really good for this because of the stretch. I wanted two 30 inch rectangular rugs and am practiced enough in crochet to free-hand the rectangles without a pattern, working one up in a sort of  spiral-with-corners and the other in a classic granny rectangle. (It’s like a granny square, but instead of starting in a circle, it starts on a longer chain.) I will post pictures of my rugs here once they’re completed.

It’s a great way to use up old clothes and keep them out of the garbage and landfill. You can use any of the common crochet motifs and stitch patterns for this, just grab a big crochet hook and your t-shirt yarn and go. You may want to make the bottoms of your rugs non-slip, and there’s an easy enough way to do it (I use this on the soles of house-socks too, to make them non-slip). Just get some puffy fabric paint in a corresponding color and paint dots or patterns onto the bottom of your rug, then follow the directions to iron and make the paint puff. Instant non-slip bottom.

So, I suppose I’ve been productive this last week and weekend even if the writing itself hasn’t been working all that well. Sometimes the brain just needs a break from spewing forth words on command.

I was a Girl Scout, once upon a time, and I have always been extremely proud of the Girl Scouts continuing moves to support equality and open-mindedness. Unlike Boy Scouts, which has banned participation of anyone who doesn’t fit into their narrow and bigoted world view, the Girl Scouts have actively supported inclusiveness of all girls and diversity among their membership, no matter what, and have done so from the very beginning of the organization. However, the Girl Scouts are now under attack for the very same supportive and welcoming policies that I have always praised, and from one of their own.

A Girl Scout is calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies in a youtube video. Why? Because Girl Scouts allows transgirls to join and participate. (Update: Looks like the Hate-Mongering Girl Scout has now set her video to private. Maybe she learned a bit of a lesson here?)

Here’s the thing. The Girl Scout Mission? This is it:

Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place.

And the girl in this video? She’s not making the world a better place, she’s spreading hate and bigotry and has become one of those people ensuring that the world is a more dangerous place for transwomen.  And all you have to do is read the news to know how dangerous a place it already is.  And here she is, wanting to stop one of the sources of income for an organization that has become one of the few safe places out there for a transgirl. For that, honestly, I think she should be the one banned from participating in the Girl Scouts.

Girl Scouts is all about empowering girls and turning them into strong, independent women. It’s just the sort of confidence-boosting organization and help that a girl in a particularly difficult situation might need.  Allowing transgirls to join and participate could very well save lives, by giving that child a community where she is welcomed and included.

So here’s what I propose: Let that boycott proposal have the opposite result, and let the GLBT community and our friends come out to support this organization that has been so supportive of us. So here’s the plan:

Buy All The Cookies.

I’m trying to eat healthier, but I’ll buy boxes as gifts and give them away all over the place if I have to. (While reserving one box of my favorite, Thin Mints, to stick in the freezer at home, of course.) I’ll buy what I can afford and do whatever I can to help.

To find a place where you can buy cookies, just go here: http://www.girlscoutcookies.org/ and they’ll give you the nearest cookie station, or alternatively you can contact your local Girl Scout Council to find out how to contact and help your local troop or how to donate, if you don’t want to buy cookies.

Help them out. They deserve it.

So you all know that I am a devoted Whovian. It’s also no surprise to anyone who follows my twitter or my tumblr that I am just a wee bit (only a tiny bit, just slightly) obsessed with David Tennant.

I was looking for an inspiring fitness challenge for the new year, and here it is:

 
In honor of Doctor Who and David Tennant (and, of course, the Proclaimers and the Sue from Catering, and Dancing Ood Sigma, who is epic), in 2012, I will walk 500 miles, and then when I’m done, I will walk 500 more – and I won’t stop there. If it goes to 1500 miles, or 2000, so much the better. Plus, I’ll be walking it on my elliptical while re-watching the last 6 seasons of Doctor Who.

Of course, I’m not the only person who has turned this video into fitness inspiration, there is a tumblog devoted to it already. Go join in there if you want to take the challenge too!

Death as the Hogfather. (From Terry Pratchett's book of the same name)

It’s hot. The closest that we’ve come to cold weather was mostly just wet and muggy.  Wet and muggy, of course, results in me looking like Hermione Granger after a spell went bad (that is, if Hermione Granger ever had spells go bad).  I’m hand making most of my gifts because I’m broke, which really, I don’t mind because I love crafting and cooking, but they feel a bit lackluster even done up in pretty bows with Christmas Robots on. I mean, does my aunt really need mojito scented bath salts?

I’ve been rereading my (still unfinished) NaNo novel and while there is definitely a gem there under all of the usual NaNo Must-Get-That-Wordcount-Up-NOW craziness, I find myself thinking “WTF was I smoking” more often than I would like and am feeling extremely frustrated.  The novel does make me laugh in all the right places, fortunately, which is necessary for a satire of all the things I love most about the fantasy genre, and my central characters are all cuddly as hell. I luffs them. Even the bad guys. After re-watching the Lord of the Rings movies with B, I realized that my elf ranger character doesn’t do nearly enough gazing wistfully into the distance, and aim to rectify that. This may be difficult, as my elf ranger has a personality like a very skinny Miss Piggy. But I imagine she can do it, if only so she can appear mysterious to her companions.

I based her on a particularly peppy cheerleader I knew in high school.  Except she’s friendlier, and likes boys who wear dresses.

I really like how my Christmas Tree sparkles, and the outside cats really like it too, they love to sit in the window and watch it shine.  The inside cats like to sleep under it in ridiculous piles of cute. I want to have a sparkly tree all the time. But Christmas itself is hard to get excited for when the coldest it’s gotten is “just a wee bit chilly.”

It’s not beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  It’s beginning to look a lot like London fog. Except without the cute boys and girls with sexy accents and scarves tied like ascots.

I need to get back into the short story market, which I always abandon around mid-October in favor of NaNoWriMo madness, but inspiration is being slow to strike. I’m in a writing funk, and when I’m in a writing funk, it tends to turn me into a bit of a scrooge no matter what time of year it is.

In an attempt to pull myself out of this funk, I am offering my Fanficcer Services to anyone who wants a story tailored specifically for them as a sort of smutty Christmas/Yule/Whateverthehecklemas gift. Because I’ve often found that when I can’t write anything else, sometimes it’s relaxing to step into someone else’s world for a little while and write something there.  It gets the juices flowing, so that when I get back to my own original work, things come more naturally and less like pulling teeth.

So here’s the deal:

1. Pick one fandom from this list (to ensure it’s a fandom I’m familiar with): Star Trek (TNG, TOS, or any movie relating to the characters therefrom); Doctor Who (Any era); Torchwood; Sherlock (BBC and/or original stories); Harry Potter; Being Human (BBC); NCIS (I have a crush on Abby and I know one of these things is not like the others, so shutup); Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Firefly.
2. Gimme a Prompt! Some idea of elements you want in the story, doesn’t have to be much. Note: I don’t do crossovers unless the shows are part of the same universe. Or Sherlock-inna-blue-box, which is my one exception to the rule.
3. Tell me what pairing, if any, you want. Het, Slash, I go all the ways.
4. Tell me what content rating you want it to be.  I may, or may not be able to fit this but will generally try not to go above what you want.

Put your answers in the comments, I’ll write them in the order they come and send them to the individuals personally.  I’m finishing up one gift-fic right now, then I’m all yours.  However, these holiday gifts likely won’t be done by Christmas – think more like New Years.

In every house that I have lived in, there is a room that isn’t there.  It shows up, without fail, in every dream I have that takes place in those houses, in such extreme, realistic, technicolor detail to the point that part of me still expects to find those rooms even when I am awake.

In my mother’s house, it was an entire extra invisible floor. By day, my mom’s house was an ordinary one-story ranch. By night, a staircase exists where my closet used to be, and up those stairs is a large room with gleaming wooden floors, a slanting ceiling, and dormer windows.  When I was a child, this room was filled with my favorite toys.  As a teenager, the toys gave way to electronics, as an adult, well, the electronics stayed, but they made way for several large shelves full of books. But some things always remained constant: the light golden wood of the floors, the cream colored walls, an antique standing mirror in a corner, ballet barres lining the two longest walls, and a large fluffy bed that hung from the ceiling.  Looking out of the dormer windows would give me exactly the sort of view I would have expected to see, had I been sitting on the roof of the real house.  The dimensions and layout of the room were so precise, and so accurate, and so real in my mind that this room always felt real to me, even as I would open my closet doors and find only clothes, no stairway.

It didn’t take long after I moved into my new house for it, too, to gain an Invisible Room.  In this case, it is an extra kitchen, situated somewhere between my living room and the back bedroom (now the cats’ playroom).  I have to step down several steps into this kitchen, and it is decorated as if it had come straight from the seventies, all in golds and browns with golden stained butcher block countertops and brown linoleum, elderly appliances and potholders that were either crocheted or woven on those square potholder looms that we all had as children.  A brown, round formica table with metal legs sits in the far corner near a window-wall that opens out onto a patio that also does not exist in reality.  Over the table hangs a macrame-encased basket holding a spider fern.

In neither case are these invisible rooms “dream” rooms. They aren’t rooms I ever particularly wanted, just rooms that, when I went to sleep, my brain seemed convinced actually did exist in my house.  Except for the hanging bed, most of the contents of the rooms are things I 1. already had or 2. don’t particularly want in the first place. They are not particularly special in any way. In my mom’s house I already had two bedrooms to call my own, I certainly didn’t need a third. And while, in my own house, I might occasionally wish for a bigger kitchen, I definitely wouldn’t decorate my dream kitchen in brown and gold, with brown appliances that look older than I am.

I try to remember the rules these rooms have taught me, in my writing. The things that have made them so real that even when awake, some part of me expects to find them where they are in my dreams.  It’s always in the small details, the things which make a setting come alive in the reader’s mind, allows us to picture in detail a huge castle like Hogwarts, or the tiniest of hobbit houses.

I know I can’t be the only person whose mind invents rooms that aren’t there, but there are other things that might have gained a permanent foothold in our dreams that don’t exist in real life. Have your dreams added rooms to your houses, or members to your families, or passages to places you’ve never been?