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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.

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.

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 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?

Created by Anna Mo on Flickr.

So you may be wondering why my blog turned purple.

Today is Alzheimer’s Action Day.

Alzheimer’s is sort of a pet cause of mine. You see, my grandmother lies in a nursing home now, unable to recognize any of her children or grandchildren, only occasionally able to recognize her husband, and completely unable to communicate.

For more than a year now, the only two words she seems to still know how to say are “No” and “Yes”, and even those seem difficult to manage and are indicators of a lucidity that comes at rapidly decreasing intervals. She is trapped in a mind that no longer functions, in a body that continues on in good health in spite of the fact that she can’t quite figure out how to operate it.  She smiles one second and weeps the next, and can tell no one why she does one or the other.  At other times she seems petrified, afraid of some monster that only she can see.

The woman who taught me how to read and write can no longer form words.

And this is a disease that doesn’t stop with the afflicted. In some cases, the patient is the one getting the better end of the deal, for he or she can no longer know or understand what is happening to them. Alzheimer’s is as much a disease afflicting the caregivers as the patient.

When my grandmother became unable to care for herself anymore, unable to even manage basic necessities, it sent my grandfather into such a tailspin of depression that his own mind, once a mind that I considered one of the most brilliant I have ever known, has begun to fail. He has become paranoid, a conspiracy theorist, and so desirous of having something good happen that he has become every conman’s favorite mark.

It’s not his memory that is failing. It is his emotional control. It started when he was forced to become the primary caretaker for my grandmother, and worsened drastically when we were finally forced to put her into the nursing home and he was left living alone for the first time in his life.  Now, he is likely to soon be forced to go into assisted living, at the least, and my mother and aunt are considering a guardianship petition to keep him from throwing what’s left of his life savings away on sweepstakes, lottery, and investment scams.

For my mother and aunt, it has placed extra financial stress, while the emotional stress has been on all of us.

My greatest fear about aging is not pain or lack of mobility. My greatest fear is lack of self, for that is what Alzheimer’s robs its victims of, while their families are forced to sit and watch. It is our intellect, our memories, our histories and relationships, our pasts that make us who we are. Alzheimer’s strips all of that away. Alzheimer’s robs the patient of the very essence of what makes them who they are. And it is one of the top 10 killers in this country.

Alzheimer's Research Graph from the National Institute of Health

And yet it receives a fraction of the funding for research.  Relatively curable and non-lethal diseases such as breast cancer receive millions upon millions of dollars more each year for research into cures, while research dollars spent on Alzheimer’s, which will affect and kill many more people and cost many, many more dollars in healthcare costs, are just a drop in the research bucket.

So I work to make that drop bigger.  I don’t have much money of my own to give, so I do what I can to spread the word and fundraise.

Alzheimer’s disease is the only leading cause of death in this country that has no way to stop or slow the progression of the disease. The only way to find one is with research and research requires funding.

So if you have a few dollars to spare, head over to the Alzheimer’s Association to donate.  Help to save memories.

Geek Unity!

So I’m scheduling this post for the last day of Speak Out With Your Geek Out Week, which I heard about from the fabulously profane Chuck Wendig.

I’ve always been a geek. From my  first Commodore 64 to my first webpage, from Donkey Kong and Ms. Pacman to World of Warcraft, I’ve never not been a geek, even before I knew what the word was, and even while I tried to deny it with every breath while attempting to be cool in high school. (Lessee, I went through a goth phase, a hippie phase, a preppy phase . . . if there was a label to try on, I tried it.)  I know it seems extremely hipsterish of me to say that I was a geek before it was cool, but the thing is, I was. And I am still the most remarkably uncool geek you’ll ever find.

While I always loved sci-fi, comic books, rpg games, video games, or fantasy novels, I never really embraced or welcomed the thought that I was a geek, and for the most part these were things I did when I was Away From Other People and Never Brought Up In Company. (Except, of course, with the exception of my D&D group.)

Then, in college, I began to come out of the closet, so to speak (and not just about being a geek). This occurred in part because I met a guy who didn’t blink at me like I was some sort of unfeminine freak when I walked into his room and went “Ooooh! You’re playing Final Fantasy VII!” and partly because when I got to college I met other girls who were also into those things, so I didn’t have to hide that I liked them.  I stopped trying to be cool and different and just started being myself.  And somewhere in there I realized that my self is kind of awesome, no matter how not-unique and not-cool I might be.

I have to admit that I am in that rare position where I am geekier than my boyfriend, though we are both gamers. At Cons, girls tend to get asked “Oh, so you came here for your boyfriend?”.  When we go to a Con, I have to admit that he goes there for me. Which is usually readily apparent, as I’m the one in the ridiculous costume. He geeks out about the minutiae of video games and music. I geek out . . . about almost everything that I love.

And in some cases, I have been known to turn into a rabid fangirl. Complete with squeeing nonsensical jabbering and drool.

OMG, David Tennant’s freckles omg asdfghjkl!!!

Ahem. The BF would never do that. It would be undignified.

Except, possibly, upon meeting a certain Vulcan.

But see, that’s what a geek is. Geeks don’t love anything by halves, we go in whole haul. When you criticize someone for being a geek, you’re criticizing them for loving something too much. And yes, much of what geeks love may seem trivial and inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things, but is it really such a bad thing to love things so much?

And sure, we nitpick and criticize and over-analyze our fandoms, whatever they are, but that’s all part of the fun. It’s part of loving what we love, really studying it and what makes it great.

There’s a lot of drama out there in the various geek communities too, where fandoms go up against members of other fandoms, where there are fandom wars going on sometimes decades long, but that’s something I’ve never understood about the community. Geeks need to unite and stick together, no matter what they geek out about.  If being a geek is about loving something passionately, why can’t we love each other too?

So I’m standing up in Geek Solidarity! I might even be convinced to hug a Twilight Geek!

Can I still stand with them in solidarity while pointing out weak writing and poor character development?

And, here’s the obligatory (partial) list of the Things I Geek About:

• Books (The physical kind. Of any sort. And bookshelves, because, well…)
• Writing
• Classic Literature
• Science Fiction and Fantasy TV, Movies, and Books, including, but not limited to: Doctor Who, Anything Jossverse, Star Trek (all of them, but most particularly TOS and XI – the Kirk/Spock Era), Harry Potter, anything written by Neil Gaiman, Cheesy 80′s Action TV Shows, and Almost Anything Involving Robots.
• Video Games, particularly RTS and TBS type games. I’m good at strategy, not so good at shooters (mostly because they make me carsick)
• Roleplaying (whether in digital form or pen-and-paper)
• Comic Books (I’m a Marvel girl.)
• Cooking
• Crafts (particularly geeky sorts of crafts, or incorporating fandom love into old fashioned crafts)
• Costuming

There are more, I don’t even think I could list them all if I wanted to, but those are the major Things That Make Me Go Squee. What are yours?

Lego Airship by Pmiaki

I’ve been a bad blogger lately.

Actually, I’ve been a bad everything lately. Spare time, such as it is, has been in short supply and when it came around I really just haven’t been in the mood to do anything. It’s been an effort just to keep up with my 1000 word/day writing goal.  That, and work at the office has been busy, leaving me little time to come here and crack out a quick post.

I saw Transformers, and it was actually good. I saw Harry Potter and cried like a teenager who’d lost her first love, pretty much from the moment that McGonagall kicked Snape out of the castle until the end. (Poor Severus!) I’ve been watching a lot of sci-fi shows that I never got to watch the first go-round because I never had cable growing up.  I’ve been playing some Minecraft, and  have a long draft post in waiting detailing some of the things I have built, but I want to finish and screenshot more of my creations before putting that post up.

There are airships. And hot air balloons.

I’m still here, and I’m still writing (currently a short about a time traveling flapper dress . . . ), I have just been a bit absent from the blog, but I’ll be fixing that in days to come.

Rawr. I am powerful secretary.

I’ve actually been on this weird self-empowerment stand-up-for-myself kick lately that is rather odd. Well, for me anyway. And I feel cute today. Which is extremely odd.

So I made it through the week alone and didn’t end up buried in a pile of mortgage documents and emails and actually got everything done, except for one thing.

I didn’t write. All week. I didn’t have any time to pluck away at my current projects at work, I didn’t have any energy to do so by the time I got home.  I did think about what I’m working on, and I think I solved one of the problems in “Consignment” – it will take some significant rewriting and deleting a few scenes and going backwards a bit, but now I know how to get the plot back on track. It had gotten a bit lost before, where a subplot threatened to overtake the main plot and really, there’s not that much room for extraneous threads in a short story.

So that thread gets snipped. Sometimes you have to do that to keep going.

Hopefully now that I’ve gotten past the Horror Week this year, I can take a page from Chuck Wendig’s book and “Finish the Shit that I’ve Started.”  I’ll be going back to blogging on my regular MWF schedule, barring unforeseen interruptions or random cat attacks.   I do think that perhaps I focused my blogging a bit too heavily on my writing lately and will be going back to adding in some other things that I also obsess over.

And back to my writing. A week without writing just makes me weary.

"Portrait of an Apple as a Young Man" by Michael Krigsman

I have the utmost respect for teachers.

You see, I know what they have to go through. I know what they have to put up with. I’ve been there.  I barely survived it.

It takes a special kind of strength to be a teacher. That’s something that I never quite realized when I  left school with my pretty English degrees in hand and a desire to live the romantic writer’s life – and of course, I could always teach until I got on my feet as a writer.

Not so much, as it happens.  Teenagers are scary.

And I tend to come off as a know-it-all without meaning to.  Even one-on-one, I don’t seem to have the right touch.  I am told that I start to talk to people like they’re stupid – when I don’t think they’re stupid at all.

No, teaching is not for me.  And yet, that is always the first comment I get when people  learn that I have a Master’s Degree in English:

“So, you’re a teacher?” or “So you want to teach?”

The truth is, I wish I could. I wish I had that sort of inner strength and patience (or outright tolerance for pain) that it takes to be a teacher. I’d have health insurance, which would be awesome. I’d be making roughly three times what I make now and actually not have to worry how I’d pay my car payment and buy groceries in the same week. Unfortunately, that job is just not for me.

But to all those teachers out there who can teach: You’re amazing superheroes, all.