Riding a tandem bicycle is possibly the SCARIEST thing I have done all year. I mean I knew going in that the balance would be iffy, and that if I rode on the back I would have to trust the steering and speed control to the person in front, but that was the least of it.

( about riding a tandem for the first time )

And speaking of scary things - National Novel Writing Month! Yes, I'm planning to do it this year. I'm going to go back to my science-fiction setting from, uh, 2010? But instead of attempting to do, like, a plot or a coherent story, I am going to use this thing I just programmed:

The Les Miserables Random Chapter Generator

and let an extremely wordy 19th century French novelist decide what is going to happen in each day's writing, by way of pastiching said random chapter. Into pulp SF setting with characters vaguely based on 21st century European politicians. In plot based around the excitement and pageantry of economics. With bonus Stupid Language Tricks.

I don't see what could possibly go wrong here.

If anybody would like to be my writing buddy on the nano website, here is my mostly-unedited-from-last year profile on the nano site: melannen@nano. I'm basically just adding everybody back. If anybody would like to join me in random-chapter-ing, I am sure it will be delightful. And, as always, I will probably never get around to spamming my original fic filter with excerpts, but if you would like to be on it just in case, just let me know.

Okay, that's done, five minutes to midnight! Time to stare with despair at that three-year-old scrivener file.

I am so used to working right up against deadlines (whether self-imposed or not) that it feels really, really weird to finish something, and then not post it immediately. I keep finishing a part, and then going a reloading e-mail automatically for feedback even though I haven't posted anything, fail.

Why yes, I have reached that point in November when I am desperately accomplishing things in order to avoid working on my NaNo! That's basically the two things I love most about NaNo: the month before, when I can give myself permission to do lots of research and pre-writing without feeling like I should be just sitting and writing the damn thing, and the tail end of the month, when the sense of impending doom gives me that feeling of last-ditch freedom and my internal editor comes off on everything else.

(Not my yuletide letter, though. In my defense, I had it 75% written and then lost it all in a browser crash - oh, DW autosave, why are you so useless? - so I'm taking a few days to mourn.)

Also in the shadow of impending doom, I have signed up for TGS Big Bang. Yes, I should have known better, but I got permission to sign up to finish the Doctor Who Crossover of Doomy Doom, which I might actually do! Or at least manage to add 10,000 words to it in two months. (Although, having added up that I already have over 8,000 in one-and-a-half chapters of a projected at least eight, I may decide to just write the prequel - preliminary title "Jez vs. Atmos" - instead.

Here are some lists of other things I want to be writing instead of NaNo or important grownup stuff or my overdue Ace Manifesto:

People who should be paired with Jamie MacCrimmon in the period between "War Games" and Season 6b:
1. Duncan Macleod
2. Lord John Grey (Seriously, why has nobody written this one yet?)
3. Nestene!Rory
4. ??? (If you can find me two more I might even manage a Five Things ^_^)

Vorkosigan Universe Fanfic that Should Be Written:
1. The AU where Cordelia let them try the fast-penta in Shards of Honor, and the whole Barrayaran mess ended up in Mehta and Taylor's laps instead.
2. The story where Aral's first wife's death was faked by Xav's wife, who smuggled her off to Beta, where she became an LPST and ended up mentoring Kareen. (Also, the story where Xav's wife retired to Beta and wound up best friends with Cordelia's mother, much to everybody's horror. Possibly writeable as a Cryoburn follow-up.)
3. The story about how one of those other uterine replicators post-Shards of Honor contained the Emperor's half-brother, and how the Emperor found out, and what happened afterward.
4. The story about the time Miles and Mark and Ivan went to Cetaganda for a diplomatic meeting and "met" (by way of finding him trying to sneak into the Barrayaran embassy) the youngest Cetagandan Prince, who looks a lot like Miles - and his Ba servitor, who looks even more like Miles - and what happened after Mark told Cordelia.
5. The story about what happened the first Emperor's Birthday after Twitter came to Barrayar, and how they talked Miles out of firebombing the headquarters of @eyespycoc (without telling him that it was Mark's idea in the first place.)

1. Everybody who knows anything about British politics in the last 20 years should go read the THoC shared AU on the lolitics meme.

The House of Commons is an AU that postulates that BBC Parliament is in fact Britain's longest-running sitcom/drama, and the AU exists entirely in the form of press clippings with behind-the-scenes articles and interviews with actors on the show.

It encapsulates everything that draws me to RPF fandoms: the fact that things happen and characters get starring roles that would *never* happen in a fiction verse, because they would simply be too overdramatic and too unlikely and to difficult to sell; the way we use RPF both to comment on real events, and to re-write them into a better world; the layers of reality and unreality, that wrap public figures' personae, both in RPF and in the mainstream press; the alternating detachment and overinvestment that come with modern media coverage, the way press information is filtered and turned into a story; and also the sheer collective fun of it all, of course, all wrapped up in a lovely package of fluffy fourth-wall-breaking meta fic.

It currently exists as six "articles" on the anon meme and growing, and they are all, universally, brilliant. Even if you usually squick on RPF, you should still go read; the stories are all about the fictional 'actors' who play the RL characters and their experiences, so it shouldn't trip anyone's privacy buttons (and it's g-rated, of course.) I love it so much.

(The other really amazing group AU currently going over there is the Strap!Verse, which postulates that party loyalty in the British Parliament is really enforced with whips. And canes. And straps. And bare-hand spankings. But I don't suggest you try that one unless you are already comfortable with RPF kink. And have an afternoon free - it has about 30 heavily interconnected stories already.)

2. 10 O'Clock Live is really happening! 10 O'Clock Live is the new weekly British fake news show starring David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr, and Lauren Laverne. As someone said on the Charlie Brooker community, this is either going to fail miserably or turn into the next Top Gear.

In the meantime, the new trailer on Youtube is making me very very happy. :D

Also HIGNFY is back, and I am totally writing a boarding school AU where Paul and Ian are classmates and make life hell for all of the teachers, because they can't be expelled now that Ian has photographic evidence of Headmaster Deayton's little coke-and-whores problem. (Causing trouble in Mr. Clarkson's chemistry class is difficult, though, because he usually manages to accidentally set something on fire himself before they get a chance to.)

3. Oh, if anybody wants an invite to the SEKRIT TORRENT SITE for British television, I have two to give out now!

(I believe the SEKRIT TORRENT SITE for Australian/Canadian/occasionally another Commonwealth country television is still in open membership; if you want to know how to sign up I can tell you.)

Also, if anybody wants an invite to Demonoid, I am not sure how many I have? But probably enough for anybody here who asks for one. Lots.

I also have an AO3 invite and lots of DW invites, while I'm at it.

Drop a comment here or a PM and I'll PM you with a code if you want any of those, first-come-first-served, no questions asked.

4. I am still not doing NaNo with a barely-disguised lolitics RPF sci-fi AU, but I did reactivate my NaNo account. With its less-than-10,000 user number. I may try to find any of y'all who are doing it this year and buddy you there, if I can figure out who.

Also I went and drew a cover image for it. Because I'd been staring at lots of great old SF paperbacks covers from the '70s while cleaning the things, obviously, and not because I'm actually going to write the thing.

But, I know a couple of times on gimp_gate people have asked for tutorials with scanned art and comics-style work. Would anybody be interested in a detail tutorial on my method for taking a pen-and-ink drawing and turning it into something that looks like this - computer colored and shaded and vaguely slick - using nothing but freeware, a digital camera, and a laptop touchpad?

I was going to say something along the lines of, "Okay, the good thing is that I still haven't signed up for nanowrimo. I have signed up for five new volunteer things, but at least I didn't sign up for NaNo."

But then I was messing around on the meme last night, and got a bunny for something I could maybe actually write for NaNo. I could write it as RPF crack and then change the names and then maybe actually sell it without having to do more than change the names; I don't actually care too much about it and it wouldn't take a lot of research and if I write it as RPF crack I might not start to get all overambitious; and it would come out as a simple, formulaic novella-length SF/romance; and I could set my goal at "end of story" rather than 50,000 words.

Arrgggh. I was being so good about not being tempted by NaNo!

***

...The five volunteer gigs aren't quite as bad as it sounds. The Candidates' Night is one time only. And so is the Rally, if they get back to me on that, plus I was planning to be at the rally doing nothing anyway. Tag wrangling probably won't start until after Yuletide, and will probably be patchy work after that. The Environment Trust researcher position who knows, but I've been meaning to put that in for months.

...and then there's the fact that I am apparently running The Ace Manifestos Project at asexual_fandom. Which was probably an unwise thing to sign up for, but I really wanted it to happen, and I went into a fugue state and had a rules post all written, so I figured wth.

It's a pick-a-topic, pick-a-date type fest, designed to be low on the organization needed, and the community seems like it's at about the right activity level to make something like this happen without going overboard or needing to much mod work, so maybe it won't all go down in flames?

I already made one mistake: I realized that I should have made more effort to make the first-come-first-served thing fair with time zones, instead of just starting sign-ups as soon as I was ready, but it was 'do it while ou're rolling or you'll procrastinate on it forever', so it was a trade off. And people can still sign up for other iterations of the Doctor and Holmes if they want!

(And by "people" I mean all of you folks who are reading this. Yes, you too. Especially you, stellar_dust, you should sign up for Jack Harkness.)

***

Oh! And something else I did while I was doing all the things? I made an Xenokink entry on Fanlore. Since it needed one. I know some of you reading this are also into xenokink; you should go help out with the entry (and if you don't want to edit the wiki yourself, you can comment here with stuff I should change/add.)

Today I went to the monthly fannish stitch'n'bitch that synecdochic has started giving, where there was much talking about NaNo but very little actual *writing* nano.

I did, however, pass around my planning notebook and have everyone writing something that should go in my novel. So, for the record, what the denizens of the Baltimore fangirl stitch'n'bitch think I should write about:

- ritual dance. Have one of these already! Actually two or possibly three, depending on where the line between "dancing" and "mating" and "murder" is.

- a product all your characters use, complete with a brand name and marketing. Don't have one, but know exactly where it can go in, for at least most of the characters.

- surfing on supernova shockwaves. ... I have surfing on air puddles, and on gravity waves, but I have no supernova. This one will take some shoehorning.

- Library dragons (and yes, I do mean mythical firebreathing dragons!) I will probably cheat and have these be in a VR interface, but I can totally do. (I already have a "scene in a library" dare from LT's nano group.)

- Traditional "bardic" tale with a twist ending (and a female with spine.) ...depends on whether it has to be singable?

-Boys sexxin'. This happens around my characters, but I had not yet decided whether do actually put in a sex scene or two, so that solves my dilemma.

-Advent calendars for all occasions! Heh. I can do at least a couple of these, no problem. Though they may not have chocolate in. And only one of my major characters would get the Advent reference right away.

-Penguins! - I agree, multiple penguins! This had me stumped, but if alien-creatures-that-are-penguins-under-vaguely-phenetic-classification count, then I know exactly where to put multiple penguins. They get to save the day!

-rats, polka dots and musical lessons too, because a reality warper wants people to be happy! I will have to think about this one. There may be knitting involved. --dude, this could totally be an *FTL piloting sim*.

-darjeeling tea. That, I can do.

-snakes (goa'uld or no). Should be doable as at least a passing reference, though my worldbuilding tends to lean more toward tentacles.

-a mythological creature coming to life. I will have to decide how far I can stretch that one.

I just opened a kit-kat bar that had absolutely no Crisp Wafers embedded in its chocolate! Rip off!

...In other news, am I allowed to attribute my complete lack of wordcount since Sunday to solidarity with the WGA writers' strike?

(But I'm almost half-done tagging my mp3 collection on this computer.)

ETA: OMG DENNY AND ALAN, HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.

There *is* stuff going on in my life right now other than NaNo (I spent eight hours hanging vinyl siding at a Habitat for Humanity site today) but of course, I feel like I shouldn't post to JF until I've done my writing for the day, and by the time I've finally gotten around to that, I don't feel like talking about anything else.

Thing I learned from NaNo today: Trying to be realistic with your treatment of language and have the MC not be at all fluent in the local speech has some excellent side effects: when you don't feel like writing out a conversation, you can just say that they're talking to fast for the MC to catch more than the gist of it, and summarize. Bonus: when you can't even write her voice effectively, you just remember that she's barely at a conversational speaking level anyway, and just go with it.

(current wordcount: 7055, which is about 2000 words for today and puts me more-or-less back on track after yesterday. Still crap, but the first plot interlude is done now, we're back to just exploring the world, so it should go smoother for awhile :D.)

Got seven-hundred-twenty words today, which puts me just over five thousand and still a whole day ahead, but it was like pulling teeth just to make myself start, and now I have to get up at six. D: It doesn't help that this scene I'm currently at touches on subject matter that I'm really reluctant to do a sub-par job with, and yet: still all crap. BAH! Well, there's no rule that says I have to show it to anyone else. Like, ever.

Everybody's posting their NaNo stuff, and it's all so much better than mine that it's making me all depressed. D:

I have 4,230 words, but that's mostly due to forcing myself to push through even when I knew that I was just spewing crap. Also, I installed wc.exe for word count of .txt files (it's part of the unixutils package that lets you use all the nifty unix command-line utilities on a windows command line.) Unfortunately, I forgot exactly how to set it up to work as a right-click menu option in windows explorer, so I've been forced to actually run it through the command line ... which means I have a record of just how many times a day I check wordcount.

Anyway, did I mention that it's all crap? Well, just to prove I'm actually writing (and, of course, to grovel for ego-boo) here's the first few lines of the first chapter, one of the few bits I'm actually okay with:( Read more... ).

Feel free to critique my first-paragraph-writing skills.

This is me, lindentreeisle, and kyabetsu trick-or-treating! We were spinking.


(I am the baby spink. They are the momma spinks. Until we traded costumes partway through.)

Then we wheeled and dealed over our candy (of which there was lots!) and now we are preparing to start NaNo in an hour! (Yay NaNo!)

ETA: 2,000 words! 2,000 words of utter crap, but it's prologue, and that's always utter crap anyway. But it's done!

So I've been using most of my spare brain cycles reading and thinking about NaNo. This is the level where I'm at: I have just realized that I have exactly *one* honest-to-god male character in this story. "Honest-to-God" being taken literally: I do have a couple gender-variant characters who would probably in modern culture identify as male, but in their milieu, when they get down on their knees in honesty, they identify either as female or thirdsex.

All the other developed male characters are either dead before the story starts or are killed soon after my character meets them. The only cisgender man who gets much of a speaking part spends most of his appearance in the story running errands for his girlfriend. ...That's kind of cool, considering that I didn't do it on purpose at all. And that I'm supposedly writing a patriarchal culture.

Anyway, I've been meaning to post more world-buildy stuff in the last month, but, um, not so much, and writing starts tomorrow! One thing I did get written up, rather than just marked in a library book, is my world's cosmology: Anyone writing in a fantasy world is writing in a world where the basic underlying principles are at least a bit different from ours, and I think it's important that the writer know what those principles are. My *characters* won't necessarily know, or they might have a lot of it wrong, and it may never come out in the story that they have it wrong, but I have to know what's possible, what's impossible, and what's absolutely necessary for the world to hang together.

It was especially tricky for this universe because I want it to be a world where the gods are present and magic works - but I also want to be able to use this world for alternate-history fantasy stories set anywhere from earliest prehistory all the way to near-future speculation. So I had to come up with a cosmology where Gods were present and magic works for *every* religion and belief system ever, from animism to m-theory, with minimal fudging necessary.

Um. Tricky. But I had a lot of other people's efforts to draw on, so here's what I've got, and I think it'll work for at least this story's world, with enough options left open to make it work for others, too: ( It starts with a bubble in the deeps. )

Tomorrow: Draw maps, work out language phoneme charts for naming, make last plot outline. Oh, and make a Halloween costume.

Fandoms you should never, ever get confused with each other:
MASH and Supernatural.
('Ah, it's the famous Winchester stamina,' he says, and I blink.)
I bet Sam and Dean totally have a Great-Uncle Charles up in New England somewhere that Dad never talks about except they went there that once when the thunderbird ripped Sam's leg open all the way down and Uncle Charles sighed and moaned and wrinkled his nose a lot, and then fixed it.


Two things I wouldn't care about at all if it weren't for certain people on my flist:
The Red Sox are going to the Series! wOOt!!
(I wonder if I'll have my multifandom Baseball AUs recs set ready to post for the start of Game One tomorrow?)
Ronnie O'Sullivan lost! Waaaah!!
(I wonder if anyone ever has written a snooker AU. --Lust Over Pendle totally doesn't count, no matter how sexy Neville was bent over a table with a cue.)


Gilgamesh the king of Uruk invented a ball game once, according to the Sumerian story "Bilgames and the Underworld". He cut down a possessed tree to make a bed for Inanna, and with the leftover wood made the equipment for the game. Then the game became so popular among the young men that the women they were ignoring got angry and kicked the equipment into the netherworld, so Gilgamesh's manly life partner Enkidu volunteered to go down and get it back, but Enkidu didn't follow instructions and got stuck down there, and Gilgamesh had to make a deal to let him hitchhike along with the sun-chariot the next day to get him back to the light.

To which I have several reactions:
1. Man, the Gilgamesh stories were much cooler before somebody went and turned them into a tragic epic.
2. So very, very manly.
3. What is this game? How was it played? HOW CAN I PUT IT IN MY NANO?
4. When (and where) on Earth did Gilgamesh meet up with Hunahpu? And which of them was more gay?(Has anyone investigated similarities between Old Sumerian and Quiche?)

Everybody has just under an hour left to sign up for Yuletide! You should do it. Even if your squee is feeling really harshed right now. Because it's worth it, and you'll regret it if you don't. And two of my requested fandoms still don't have any offers. :( (I only offered about 1/10 available fandoms this year, which is less than last year ... well, proportionately less.)


In other news, I just got two new friends over on lj. Which puzzles me, because I haven't done anything over there lately except get wanky and get called on it. Although if that earns me new friends, go me! I think I will have to go back and edit my top post there to make it clearer that I've moved, though, just in case. Then I ended up reading a bunch of old entries, and dude, I used to be awesome. What happened?


IN other news, who here is still missing their paid account icons? Do I need to go ask at support, or should I be patient a bit longer? Because I want to put up NaNo ones already, dammit.

(The poll in my last entry came out strongly in favor of NaNo blather, btw, so I'm going with that. Feel free to defriend whenever you get sick of it.)

[Poll #292](Quick NaNo summary, if you care: Sword&Sorcery set in vaguely Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Plot is currently nebulous; will be doing a lot of playing with worldbuilding, especially gender, and a lot of wibbling about worldbuilding. What plot there is, is kind of the traditional Chosen-One-Kills-Evil-Wizard storyline, but backwards and upside-down: Evil Wizard already killed, Chosen One has to live down the weird instead of living up to it. ...Will probably give up within about a week, but all bets are off. Also there is an ancient Sumerian glam rocker.)

Damn it, the two posts that I saw on m_f, jumped over here, and breathed a sigh of relief that nobody'd posted them JUST SHOWED UP. Dear flist: just because it's on metafandom and it's full of fail doesn't mean you should wank it.

In fact, if it's on metafandom it's probably full of Serious Business and you probably *shouldn't* wank it. Go look for something wacky and irrelevant, please.

(How quickly one gets jaded!)

Anyway, I went to do food prep for this fundraiser the local homeless shelter is doing, and as I was prepping about two hundred hard boiled eggs, I started thinking (as you do) about what the characters in my head would be doing in that situation.

Thing is, while the characters currently living in my head would totally have let themselves get roped into a church fundraiser, they live in early-copper-age Greece. Did they even *have* hen's eggs? I don't think they did. Did they have other kinds of eggs? (Were there quail eggs in Greece? Would there be quails in my alternate-fantasy-Greece with the Mediterranean landlocked?) Would they have fried things? What would they have fried them in (olive oil, I suppose? Or would there be animal grease to use for that? Is early Greek olive oil as messy as cheap American frying oils?) Was everyday cookware in the Mediterranean glazed, or sealed, or what? How would you have gotten grease out of it - did they have soap? Did they have hard soap? Would the rare copper have been used for cookware? (How would you cook in pots of unalloyed copper?) I know there would have been octopus and eel, but would there have been crab? How about other shellfish? Did they have mayonnaise? Would they have used cream sauces at all?

...sad thing is, last time I was working in this universe (NaNo four years ago) I actually read a book of Bronze Age recipes. Do I remember the relevant bits? NOOO. I have never missed being in walking distance of a University library more than now.

This is why I never get anywhere in actually writing my original fic. This is also why I was originally so attracted to fanfic - at least there, the canon is FINITE. 'Course, I still never get around to watching the canon when there's wikipedia articles I could be reading. It's also part of the reason I write in fantasy and SF universes instead of the real world; you can pick a point at which you've done enough research and it's time to just make shit up. (Not that I've ever gotten to that point. At least with the Copper Age mediterranean (and even more so when they eventually go to the Sahel) there will be a point at which I've exhausted what is currently known. I'm just not there yet. (I wonder if it would be a good use of my time to re-read Homer?)

Spent most of the afternoon and morning working in the yard. I can't decide if it's awful or awesome that the black walnut tree is fruiting this year. We'll see what my opinion is after I've picked up another four or five bushels of mostly-rotten nuts. (Feel the burn in those thighs!) Haven't decided yet if I'm going to try to shell any this year or not - I did a bunch two years ago, the last time it fruited, and my fingers were this absolutely lovely mahogany color until mid-October. Then Mom, who has a vicious PUT IT IN TUPPERWARE instinct, sealed them up before they'd had a chance to cure and they all mildewed. Bah.

The squirrels get nearly all the good ones anyway. Anybody know how to tell a good nut from a bad before you shell it? Because that's a *lot* of effort for a very few good nuts.

Then I spent the evening shelving books on my LibraryThing.com account. It's not solved yet, but the remaining books are a lot more manageable now. (For those who haven't encountered me in hoard-brooding mode before - I live, with all my worldly possessions, in a 15x20 foot bedroom. Among those possessions: well over a thousand books. And I acquire new ones at a rate of about five a week, although in a good month I can easily do four times that. So it's a never-ending puzzle to get them shelved = good thing I love messing about with books! ATM I have eight separate bookshelves of varying sizes in the room, not counting the line of books across the top of my dresser, and I sleep on the top bunk of a bunk bed with a reading nook on the bottom. For all that, the room's surprisingly open and airy when everything's stowed away where it belongs.)

So now instead of four tall piles of random recent books under my bed, I have a pile of classic literature and a pile of books on the writing life and a pile of books that might be relevant to my NaNo. And *everything else* is shelved, which I honestly didn't think I'd manage until about five minutes before I finished. Yay!

(Yeah - I know what I'm doing for NaNo already, mostly thanks to limyaael's fantasy rants. I'm starting a good month sooner than the last five years though, so hooray! No worries, though - I'm fairly well certain I'll just do all the worldbuilding and then give up on the actual writing a week in, like always.)

A quick, very spoilery scene from many years in the future to put me over 5,000 words before noon.

Galatea, main spaceport receiving bay
Approx. standard year 1050 AB, second morning
Dasa & Ruth.

( Dasa finally gets married. )

Okay, Mom's watching CHUCK NORRIS on the Hallmark Channel, and they just aired a commercial for a
Special TV Event rom com about the stresses involved in writing an *entire novel* in only 30 days.

I just ... what?

But I did say I'd post to this filter a few days ago. And then I came down with a sudden case of Jedi nights, and didn't make the time for it.

So meanwhile, I've been waiting for NaNo to start with bated breath, and needed something to occupy me in the meanwhile. Something that involved thinking about my story, but not thinking about it *too* hard, because thinking about a story too much gives me writer's block. I know that some writers like to cast their stories with pictures of actors or random shots off the internet, but I've never really done that for two reasons. First, I find staring at bunches of pictures of actors to be *very boring*. Secondly, my imagination isn't really all that photographic. My characters don't look like actors, they're people, and like the people I know in real life, my mental images of them has more to do with emotional colorings and non-visual impressions than it does with what they are visually. But by that same token, I know I need to get better at putting the solid sensory impressions into what I write, and figuring out how those mental shapes translate into appearance (even, perhaps especially, with a story where most of the characters are psychic to some degree or another.)

So I cast them with Impressionist paintings instead. :P And post-Impressionists. And Expressionists. And Cubists, Modernists, Symbolists ... basically if it was painted between 1870 and 1970 and wasn't Realist it was fair game. (This is SF. Realism is so passé.)

Actually, these aren't even the characters: the character list was too long to code on a night when I still have homework. So instead, I have portraits of nine planets. ( Nine small images under the cut. )

These are, as of now, some of the more important planets to the story. Mind you, I don't promise to write about all of them. Or only them. And they may not actually wind up looking like they look here. Because tying myself down to a list gives me writer's block.

It's a week and a day until NaNo, so it's high time I made my annual NaNo header post.

For anyone (is there anyone?) who doesn't know what NaNo is, National Novel Writing Month is a huge yearly challenge, the terms of which are to write 50,000 words of story in exactly thirty days, in the month of November. This will be my fifth year so far. (My NaNo registration number only has four digits. I feel *old*.) So far I've yet to break 10,000 words, but I'm doing it a bit differently, so I have 'opes. Feel free to nag me when I start to slack off.

Anyway, this year I will be posting my nano work locked, tagged, filtered, and hopefully daily, on this lj. If you want to read, nag, beta, mock, heckle, kibitz, or just watch, this post is your one-month chance. Speak up and I'll add you to the filter, even if you aren't already on my flist. (Some of you will be added even if you don't speak up, particularly if you're doing NaNo, or you've already expressed interest. But don't count on it, 'cause my brain can be like a sieve. And this is also your place to speak up if you *don't* want on, no hard feelings.)

...oh, you want to know what I'm going to be writing about? Well, in short, it's hard-SF origfic. With psychic powers. ( Fic headers yay! )

(::poll)[Poll #851804]