The Red Room

Isabella, the kitten pictured in the previous entry, was spayed Friday. She came home with instructions that said she would probably be "groggy and a bit uncoordinated." I wished. I put her down on the couch, in the hopes she would just nap a bit. She got up, and went straight to the food dish for a bite to eat. Then, when I tried to take her to her dish of kitten chow, well. She ripped into me. She was struggling and biting and clawing and yelling so fiercely I was afraid she would hurt herself. I bled.

Yeah, I've got a war wound or two from that one.

It's a good thing the vet trimmed her claws.

Also, Isabella has herpes (yes, I know what you're thinking, and it isn't like that. Though I'll admit to being a bit shocked when I first heard, mostly because it's a virus, and she'll always have it). Feline herpes has respiratory symptoms, especially goo coming out of the eyes, and the vet told me they come back in times of stress, which includes being spayed. So I got some ointment, just to be safe...and she's just fine. She hasn't even been sneezing, one constant herpes cats have.

*

Also, I'm beginning to wonder if Isabella was properly weaned (she was found as an itsy bitsy lost kitten on the streets of Missoula) because, at the age of five months and a few weeks, she still nurses on me. I thought she would have outgrown it by now, but she still cuddles next to my shoulder and nurses there, purring and kneading the whole time.

Well, I'm sure she'll grow out of it, but until then, you can just call me Mama Cat.

*

Happy Halloween!

Luv, Isabella

The diary continues.

The necessary information is in the first post.


( business is business and business runs in the family )

It's a letter from the past, via youtube.

When I was in graduate school, this was sort of my signature song. One of my friends would dedicate it to me when he played it on his radio show.

Their live shows, by the way, were pretty much like this (well, minus the juggler). It's as close as one can get to seeing them perform at the Turf Club in St. Paul, circa 2001, without actually being there.





(Yes, I did once tell a cute eighteen year old boy, who was very aware I was nine years his senior, to do just that. I'm lucky he was so crazy himself he didn't mind.)

(And this is an entry I should have locked, because if certain of my friends saw it, the secret would be outed.)

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I've been working on a certain, tragically untitled (my father offered to help me with that, but trust me, this is not a novel one shows to one's parents) novel for so many years it bores me. Well, it also inspires despair--despair that I'll ever reach that happy moment where I finish it and like, never look at it again--but it's a muted, boring despair.

But, despite all that, I do find it interesting to come up with fan fiction for it. I think being exposed to fan fiction has been bad for me in some ways, and this is one of them. I'll be writing something, and I realize that I'm not just writing a novel, I'm making CANON, bitches.

And then I mock that by slashing my own characters. Because I would, and in fact, I would rather do that than the actual novel. (When authors rant about fan fiction, they almost always mention the horror of those fans! having their characters do things they would never imagine! In my case, that's highly unlikely. I would, and I do.)

Also pretty boy/everybody (he is shown in one relationship, there are references to at least two past relationships, and the rest is subtext) is practically, factually CANON, bitches.

I have actually come up with the dreaded high school!AU for this novel. I worked large parts of it out when I was on a walk, and should have been working on the CANON. It was surprisingly easy to put the characters, or at least, most of them, from the omg decadent fantasy city into a modern high school setting. I also realized, as I thought it out, that some of the characters had more options than they had in the original, and yet, they still have a lot going against them.

*

Sadly, writing this has not interested me in trudging back to the eternal, endless, boring goal of finishing the novel. I have the feeling I'll be doing other things before I go to bed.

Blast.

Lately, I've dealt with my angst (which I have already written about or mentioned in the previous three entries) by pulling knapweed. It's a noxious weed that takes over every inch of ground it can, and has been the scourge of this area for over twenty years.

You have to pull it out by the root, or it just grows back.

It's everywhere.

I don't know why I bother.

I have a feeling Don Quixote had more interesting windmills to tilt at.

This post will cover the most trivial, and dull, of subjects.


I have been working on my novel, the one that I can't seem to find a title for, for over six years. So I think it is probably understandable that the feeling it most often inspires in me of late, if one can really call it a feeling, is boredom. It bores me, even as I open the file, or start trying, through constant typing and retyping, to open or continue a scene. I'm bored. Really bored. I know it because the thought of starting a brand new, shining novel, like you must for nanowrimo, sounds interesting instead of frightening. I see people doing it on the internet, in their blogs, and their word count posts, and wish I were doing the same.

Because it would be a novel I haven't been working on, or avoiding, for over six years.

I wish I had finished it in 2006.

Oh, and I've looked ahead, and I have to turn the current chapter 11 into two chapters--and change just about every word. I'm not looking forward to that one.

Right now, I'm on chapter nine (which also has turned out to need more than a bit of work), and pg. 205 or so. This is the part I wrote for the first time in the summer of 2004. It is not a time I remember fondly, only one that I'm glad is gone. I wrote the end of this novel then, in a notebook because I didn't own a computer, for something to do after my tomcat, who I had known since the day he was born, had disappeared. And now I have lost another cat to the woods and the unknown. It's time, once again, for this novel to do its work, and its worst.

*

Then there's the diary I'm still working on, even if not at the moment (and which I will post here, in large chunks, on occasion). I'm working on it mostly because the most I'll get out of this is finishing, and well, outlasting other, and more popular, diaries. But it's hard to finish a challenge when the indexer goes awol, as happened a while ago. This is tf.net, so no one was going to be the meanie to suggest it was past time for someone else to take over the sock. The sock, you know, made just for these sorts of occasions.

Finally, the previous indexer came back, and all's well. It did lead me, before that happened, to think about a few things. I mean, it is only fan fiction, and not that important (I do laugh, in my mean, lone dog way, at people who think that say, the H/D world cup is serious bizness). But it seems only fair that if you agree to run something--which is a different level than just agreeing to write a 2000 word fanfic--you should let at least make it official when you have to step down. We all know more important matters come up. There oughtn't to be any shame in it.

*

Finally:

I know I shouldn't think of new projects, but should instead finish up the ones I have and leave the building, but. But I can surely break that guideline to write the western, bisexual "steam punk" novel, maybe novel, I dreamed up to the cliffhanger a few nights ago? Right.

My cat has now been gone, missing, M.I.A., for four days.

The only thing that has amused me of late is when one of my sisters, after telling me there isn't anything she can do (as she lives in another state), said if that there was, she would be searching every inch of the woods, twenty four-seven, until she found the coyote responsible. Then she would kill it and remove the cat bones from its stomach.

(I know. This is the sister who once, during a car trip, came up with Jedi Academy rap. My brother must have told her about the EU books, because it involved Leia & Han's kids rapping to them about turning to the dark side.)

At this point, I inserted reality into this fantasy by reminding her that she would never be able to catch a coyote, and if she did, there was no way of knowing it was the right, and guilty, one.

*

My father reminded me that if it was a coyote (and I may never know) or a lion, it would be over almost instantly. She wouldn't suffer.

And at least I haven't had any dreams. I woke up this morning from a rather realistic and gross dream involving vomit, and I was just glad I hadn't found my cat, in glowing-bright dream light, only to wake up.

Sadly, this is not the post of promised kitten pictures.

Emily, one of my cats, did not take well to the new kitten. That's an understated, subtle way of saying she had a scary, bulge-eyed look, followed with equally scary hisses, every time she got near her. She entered an extended sulk. But that (people have told me) is how Siamese are. Then she didn't come in one night. She wasn't there the next morning. Or the next afternoon. That was yesterday, and she has been missing for almost forty eight hours.

It doesn't look good. On one side, there's the highway, with the speeding, killing cars of idiot tourists and idiot locals. The coyotes are everywhere--I heard them howling last night. She was out and about during the prime hunting hours. And that's not even counting mountain lions, bears, and other predators.

I did go down to the highway today, and didn't find her. The white cat (who was gone for two, angst filled days in 2006 that I know I posted about) came with me. She hates the highway, so I didn't think she'd go that far. But she is a devoted, loyal follower, and there was one point where I thought she was going to cross the road after me. Several cars were charging towards us. But she didn't, and I went back to her side to make certain she didn't.

People, mostly my parents, have told me Emily is likely all right.

I find myself thinking, Yeah right. That's what they said when my boy, Cinnamon's brother, disappeared in 2004. They were wrong, as days piled up into weeks, and finally a month, of being depressed, and of constant, constant dreams that he had come back, and I never knew what happened to him, only that he never came back. And? I've already had the dream that Emily came back. I'm afraid to know what that means.

If Emily does come back soon, or even tonight, like the white cat did three years ago, and this post becomes silly and melodramatic, I'll be happy. It's what I want, really. But I count on nothing. If she doesn't, well. I know how things will be in the next days, the next week, the weeks, the next month.


*comments closed for this one post. I'm not up to it.

Last week, my parents and I were coming back from an out-of-town trip. It was night, and the only light came from the headlights. An animal crossed the road in front of us. It took me a second, and too long, to realize it was not a fawn, but was, in fact, a coyote.

We also justbarely managed not to hit a skunk. It gave us a warning spray.

*

Every time I sit down, I get a kitten on my lap.

I know: my life is just so hard.

Yes, I have a new kitten.

She just got here today, and she's been busy exploring and sniffing everything, and finding a place and napping there. She's itsy bitsy--I don't think I've been around a kitten this small for over ten years, since Cinnamon and her litter mates were little.

Oh! She just tried to climb onto my bed, and stopped when she saw two big, startled adult cats resting there. Uh oh!

Pictures to follow as soon as I take some.

This is, as the header says, my entry for the Dear Diary challenge at tf.net. I'm also going to post it here (despite my confused instincts) because sometimes the narrator will write things above a PG rating.

That said, on to the pertinent information, and the cut.


Title: Or
Characters: All original.
Timeframe: The original trilogy
Warning: Ordinary characters! Oppressed men!
Summary: The diary, or possible subversive document, of a middle class Kuati young woman.

Disclaimer: Not mine.


( Dear Diary: Today I was depressed and my mother was greedy )

This post will have content.

Well, I suppose I ought to admit that my attempt to quit writing, forever and for all eternity (extremely melodramatic pause) didn't work as well as it should have. I tried; I ought to have tried harder. (It does remind me of one of the times in college when I wanted to quit, told my friend, and she said "Yeah right." Apparently, I waited over ten years to try to prove that I could.) But I can say that things won't, and can't, be as they once were.

I'm no longer attempting, even in the most sporadic of ways, to publish my work. The publication I had in 2008 has turned out to be my last. I do have a story, with original characters in copyrighted settings, I'm posting for the Dear Diary challenge. I was going to quit that back in January, and was even poised, ready to type, to officially drop out, but I couldn't do it. So I didn't do it.

I think I continued partly because I only have one reader. Less pressure that way. I still mean to finish that, and a certain novel I know I've mentioned before, and maybe two or so other things. I don't know how much I'll write after that--only that it will (very) likely never leave my sweet, loving, and safe trunk.

*

I was going to write more about writing, but I got bored.

I will say that it was nice when I was at a bookstore, and saw the cover story on Poets & Writers about the latest hot young agents, and I realized I don't have to care (or let's face it, pretend to care) what these people think about writing or anything else ever again.

*

But I did spend my birthday, before I came down with a cold, writing the scene in The Novel that involves the pretty boy in the bath. It has, like, "plot" development in it too, if utter self-indulgence, even in a novel I don't intend to publish, even on the internet, isn't enough for you. It was fun, even if the fun was mixed up with typing, and deleting, and rewriting sentences and other nitpicky stuff.

Also, this is the scene where the pretty boy apologizes for the Classist Remark he made in an earlier scene. Shockingly, he is not perfect. Luckily, perfect characters are dull.

Then I got a cold, which I am (hopefully) mostly over. I did not take sick days. Apparently, I can only do that after death. Instead, I sweated a bucket on my way to a certain point at ****, and then sweated another bucket coming back.

*

And that is enough, and more than enough, for now.

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven't gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven't gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

I did this meme for pg. 23, and now (after two sad and pathetic years) I can do it for pg. 123.

(Yes, I know, I meant to quit. What can I say.)

*

--Oh, Marisol, you said, and I couldn't tell what you wanted to say. You looked at the chocolate box, and then picked it up to see inside, and then at the dressing table, and a shadow-dark wine bottle with a bunch of bleeding red flowers stuck inside. I'd seen them in the garden, and the public park, but I didn't know what their name was.

--Those aren't mine, Marisol said. She had smoked the cigaret into a stub, which she pressed out on the dish, and sat back down in her chair. I watched, and you watched, as her dressing gown pushed up past her knees. --I'm afraid His Lordship saves flowers for her. It's a lucky thing I don't care for them.

Yes, I'm only posting to show off this icon.

*feeling slightly ashamed at being the 1 zillionish person to do a GIP.*

It's been a long time (over a month, but I'm not keeping track) since I posted in here. And it's true that I haven't had much to write about. It's been boring. It's been cold, really cold, and fucking cold, and then back to just cold, and then warm. Snow melted, and then froze, and became ice. And by ice, I mean I should have strapped on a pair of ice skates to get around for a while there. It's not so bad now that it snowed again.

Well, this is Montana, and it only happens every year. (Although it isn't *every* year that it was so cold one morning the buses at my old, and not missed elementary school/junior high, couldn't start. And apparently they didn't really mean it when they said they wouldn't cancel school until that happened, as they still expected children to risk their lives and limbs so they could spend another day learning nothing... Oh, I'm not bitter at all.)

Anyway.

My writing, the hobby I have spent (or wasted) most of my adult life on and have a degree in, is going pretty badly, and that's an understatement. I would say it couldn't be worse, except I'm quite sure it could be. I did quit writing, and put all of its results in a box in a storage area that is childishly easy to reach across all that snow. It just reminded me of how I tried all the other arts -- and sucked at all of them. So I might write more stories, I might finish them too, but it's still true that I quit, in a certain point of view, because I won't post them or share them with other people. I have quit that, for good, and force willing, forever. I think the one unpopular, tanking thing I'm posting at tf.net is enough.

I am still looking into possible new hobbies, and ones that I do not need a community, "beta readers", or (shudders) critpeople to make it worthwhile.



*comments are disabled for this post. Regular commenting access will resume with the next post.

Sometimes it's ok to pimp yourself out. Post a list of your top five fic-favorites you've written, regardless of fandom or the reason you love them. This isn't about the BEST things you've written, but what you LOVE most. Then tag five other people to do the same. Everyone else in the world should do it...

Well, if you put it that way...

Since I'm mostly done with fan fiction (well, there are several wips I'm afraid to mention by title, and another story I'm going to write, but by the time I finish that, in 2025, we may be getting the internet downloaded straight into our brains or something), this will be a trip down to memory lane. And to prove I'm not doing this in a pathetic attempt to get readers, I'm not providing links.


1. Shock and Awe This is my most recent (and one of my last) stories, written this summer for the star wars fic fest. I'm not actually sure if I like it though; it's not that sort of story. I would say I was disappointed it didn't have more readers, except that I'm surprised anyone read it at all.

2. Into Hell I don't pretend that I have any really, truly original ideas. But I can safely say that no one else in Stars Wars and its fandom has, or ever will, write a story like this one.

3. Wrong Things When I write an original female character (oh my god!), and have her bang an obscure, usually one dimensional EU character, I do it without blinking or apologizing.

4. Decoy This story shows one thing, if nothing else: When Padmé is good, she's so very good, but when she's a bitch, she's better.

5. The Winter Queen I'm pretty much the only person who likes this one, and there's probably a good reason for that.


Also, "Aerena, with her sun eyes" receives an honorable mention, for punching me in the face for, like, fifty pages, what with the present tense and all. I won, though.

Herding cats.

Don't let anyone tell you it's easy.

Once I stop posting, it really is hard to start again.

Anyway, I've been working on a story today (which lets you know that this entry shall not contain any writing boo hooing, though if I wanted to, that would just be too bad) that I first started in 2002, and tried to finish in 2006. Hopefully this time, this time, I'll finish it. I won't say what it's about, partly because it's usually best not to, and partly because someone from my real life read the first and early pages back in 2002. I will say that I put in a bit of what I think is painfully, stupidly obvious foreshadowing.

And, well, if people still can't get that, then I'm sorry. They're not tall enough to ride this ride.

*

I also worked on the novel, and finished chapter three in record time, well, a record time for me. Probably entirely because it's considerably shorter than the first two.

*

I've realized that if I were to ever adopt a white tomcat, I would probably refer to his testicles as snow balls.* (That's because I have said at times that my female white cat, who is being picked on by a more aggressive cat, needs to grow a pair of snow balls. Which caused my father to refer to her as S-no-w Balls. It's soooooo bad, I know.)

*

And since I can't top, or make up, for that one, I think I'll close here.



*Until I take him to the vet for a certain lil' operation, of course.

Untitled (yes, still and possibly forever untitled)

Word Count: 28269 words

Page no. of the typed manuscript: 79
Page no. of the handwritten one: 55

*

And that's after I compressed a scene, or at least, thought I had. But it is the bottom of pg. 55. Too bad it's also the bottom of pg. 79.

It's going to be far, far longer than I wanted, unless I manage to cut out great swaths of words later on (and besides that one sex scene). I'll just have to try to worry about that later, if I worry about it at all. It also has a stately (boring is a subjective pov, I type, with a finger wag) and rambling pace.

I'm about to start on the part I've mentioned before, though it was months ago. The play, the one that I want to be a rococco fairy tale, is about to begin. Then I have to do figure out some other stuff that I shall keep to myself, as I've discovered that writing about writing processes bores me.

*

Other than that?

I think I have lost the knack of blogging.

Either that, or run out of appropriate and allowed subject matter entirely. It would be so much easier if I could just make things up, and write from the point of view of a fictional character, instead of merely behind the mask of a pen name. It would.