Warhead On Legs

I slept last night. It took a double dose of melatonin (in hindsight perhaps I should take melatonin and then put down the novel so as to avoid the adrenaline rush that at least felt like it cancelled the stupid stuff out) to do it, but I slept and it was glorious and I didn't even have the hangover the next day. Also as far as the illness goes I'm down to periodic sniffles and the typical wheezing of an asthmatic. Which, ugh, but I figured that second would happen for a few days. No capoeira for me tomorrow, we all three of us are very bad about keeping me sat and not overstraining my stupid broken lungs. I'd blame my teachers not knowing what an asthmatic can't do but no, no, I'm just as bad.

BLEGH.

Fun stuff: I budget crunched and determined I did have enough to start buying Makeup Geek shadow pans on this past paycheck, which spreads them out over more paychecks which is very nice. And then I seem to have successfully made will rolls against buying more makeup brushes I really don't need, self, I don't care how stressed you are.

Although since I started this post the day has gotten increasingly faily in small but irritating ways until the UPS software I literally need to do my job blew up and now I'm just stress eating eclairs and want to buy all the makeup until I stop being too rage-y to write. HATE.

I did not so much figure out something about Long Road last night as figure out that I am not too clever to not have to do the thing the way, and so some of that should be easier when I get back to it. I also went ahead and decided that since I haven't been looking ahead at any of the stuff I already wrote for this portion of Malachy I might as well delete it all. Which I did except the last scene because I looked ahead and decided okay, that was the girls and Keith, that seems in character for the conclusion, that can stay. Everything else can go, so now I have a better idea of what I've written and how much I have yet to write and hopefully since I'm not cutting and pasting and measuring anymore, this will go a lot faster. Or it would have today if the day hadn't been full of ducks nibbling me to death.

That was definitely not allergies. She said from her vantage point of On The Couch With A Bucket Of Tissues Next To.

All right, so today's writing will only be brainstorming and wiki-making and we'll see if any of it's coherent later.

I hate being sick so much I cannot even tell you. My sinuses are trying to push my teeth out of my head.

I'm having weird capoeira feelings today, which is that after a disastrous game last weekend (not the entire class! Class was overall great! Just one disastrous sparring session/game [they call it a game in capoeira] that left me feeling OH MY GOD I CAN'T DO THIS) I just don't want to go back and face everyone. And by everyone I mean my two teachers who have been the only damn ones there the last few classes. And. Ugh. Anxiety is a fucker who can go die in a brainsoup of some kind. Probably exercise endorphins.

Other than that, hey, either the boy changed his mind about gardening or he did all the things he wanted to do because when I got home yesterday the only thing left to do was to strip off the bed. Which we did after pizza was consumed because of reasons and also being too tired to cook. Pizza will also be consumed tonight, since it's a capoeira night goddammit, never mind what my various weasels say.

In utterly unrelated makeup news, I decided to make my own nudes palette of only mattes because every other palette I have has half shimmer shades and look, I like these but if I want shimmer and sparkle I have literally about a hundred loose powders I can use. Okay? Okay. I figure I'll get me a bigass palette and slowly stock it with various nudes and other potentially useful mattes, muted tones or what have you, to be backgrounds to my sparkle. Because I'm getting sophisticated in my makeup looks, wot! God help me. I've been practicing with the palettes in my care package and I'm slowly getting the hang of it, I think! Very slowly. But still, enough to invest a bit more into the whole thing. If it doesn't work out I can fill the rest of the palette with contours or something. Although the shade and light palette is working out pretty damn good.

Now I just need to conquer this concept of eyeliner as it applies to how I do my eyes. Because what the hell. Also lash curling. I need to get the hang of lash curling.

Writing continues. I owe Starlight three wiki entries as of today, I need to get on that, but those should hopefully go by fast if with a lot of bracket notes. And I've been working on Malachy, and I need to contact an entertainment lawyer because actions have happened that none of you saw. That will probably happen tomorrow on account of today is a capoeira day and I barely have brain as it is. And then I need to figure out how the fuck I'm going to pay lawyer fees, son of a bitch. I forgot about that. Maybe that's what credit cards were made for, though. Argh. Stupid money. If I'm really lucky though the receptionist will listen to the situation and say "Okay that's like half an hour, the fee is $50" and I can just pay. Aaargh why does life cost money.

That's not entirely true. This isn't life this is following an aspiration the smartest way I can manage, and paying people for their time and skills that they earned with effort and time and paying money themselves, and that's all fine. I'm just also annoyed at my own life and lack of sufficient funds to do all the cool shit I really want to do. ... on second thought maybe I'll call an entertainment lawyer now. Just so I have that less of an unknown quantity in my head.

Toooo many things going on at once, and this is me trying to do too many things at once, and I should go to capoeira tonight just so I have to take a couple hours to do what's in front of me, that's physical work with a bit of brainpower for focus and tactics. I need focus and calm and that's not happening right now because too excited about the Redacted. Ugh.

Ooogh okay self, you can do your eyes around your exercises but the rest of your makeup you do need to sit down and do and then maybe you'll be scrambling less to get everything in the right order in the mornings? Oy. Today I had... okay less of a large amount of time than I feel like I did, but still. And I still ended up scrambling because I tripped over my makeup routine. But on the plus side I did my back PT, which I've been neglecting for way longer than I should have. I do need to write down my new makeup routine/order now though, so I don't completely forget it. Given it's new.

I am totes turning in all my credit card points for Sephora gift cards though, in the event that we get to have a girls ditch Con for Sephora hour or two at DragonCon.

I may have gone a bit nuts over the weekend. I tidied up my vanity area so all my boxes fit. Not so much all my stuff, there's a knife box with lipsticks that I need to figure out where they go, but the boxes fit is the important thing. I mopped a little over half the upstairs and 3/4 of the downstairs. Of course I swept up first. I put away a bunch of things that had been hanging out waiting to be put away, took out a bunch of trash, cleaned out the fridge, and did the usual weekend laundry/dishes. Oh, made pizza dough. I was going to make bread dough but by that time it was like 10pm. I sorted out my physics binder so that my indexes for each section were actually goddamn legible. Put away a bunch of crap on the coffee table, wiped that down. Put in the downstairs window AC unit with the help of Uncle Elf Lord.

Spring cleaning a month late? Actually probably this was more to do with having pushed deadlines all last week and weekend and then this weekend not having the boy so I could blast music while I cleaned and deciding THIS PLACE IS A PIGSTY I AM THE WORST HOUSEKEEPER EVER CLEAN ALL THE THINGS. As I do when I just get past a deadline.

Not much else of interest going on. The boy's coming back from his parents' a day late because of illness, which I had better not get dammit. And hopefully he's not coming with rifles or a giant antique lamp or any other weird shit that he's come back with in the past. I have two maj... three major projects to work on, none of which I think are line by line edits? I don't even remember what the hell I was last editing. Starlight is about to hit rewrites in a couple weeks, Malachy is in major overhauls, and The Anthology Formerly Known As White Lightning is in writes ish. So okay. Entirely doable and a lot of fun. But still not much interest just yet. Or at least not the kind of frenetic running in circles screaming my head off interest. That was last week.

(As a random point of interest though, I've been thinking ahead on Malachy and the Lifestyles girls some and I need to watch more things with Taylor Kitsch in them.)

Well. I had every intention of getting more sleep last night. And I went to bed not necessarily early-early, but a half hour early or so.

And then the boy woke me up at 2.30 in the fucking morning, not that he meant to but I woke up, and I didn't get back to sleep till 4.30 in the goddamn morning because my brain is a fucker that likes to torment me and not let me sleep and my nervous system joined in the act with the too-sweaty-too-itchy-too-cold-in-this-one-spot shenanigans and now I'm at work, exhausted, AGAIN. YAY.

I am so goddamn tired spending $200 on makeup so I could get to Platinum status on Ulta seemed like a good idea. That is how damn tired I am. Besides, if I'm going to do that it's going to be with my girlfriends at DragonCon. At this point it's probably a good thing that I already got all the other really expensive shit I wanted. Frye Boots mostly.

I feel like there should be more to this entry but you know what? No. I'm going to go home, heat up some spaghettios, take off at least the most colorful and smeary parts of my makeup and pass out for an hour. Then I can figure out what I should be doing other than writing. Well, rewriting.

I swear I exist, but I just spent the last 48 hours going through Turing Shrugged with lireavue to take out all the little dinky edits and strikeouts and bracket notes and so on so I could format it for submission to this one press and I have absolutely no brain left I was hoping to get it done in one day, but apparently it's a two day job.

(This should actually feel way more impressive than it is given that the damn thing's almost 100k words long. And we went through it in two days.)

Anyway. Tomorrow will be the great reformatting and then both of those PitMad submissions will be off and the third one... mmph. And then I can get back to the five other projects I have in progress.

Well, two and one that needs tweaking. AGAIN. Fucking New Amsterdam.

I saw Wonder Woman! I had Thoughts! ( Spoilery spoilery thoughts )

I think I have run out of words on Wonder Woman. We went and saw a 10.30 showing because it was that or this coming Saturday due to the boy's and my schedule, ugh. We got home at 1 in the morning and went to bed at closer to 2 and ugh. But it was so worth it. I did cry at the No Man's Land scene, and several other places as the boy keeps reminding me with amusement. And there was one part towards the beginning when every woman in the audience was audibly laughing for several minutes. I'm pretty sure anyone who's seen it knows exactly the scene I mean, it was just... the shared knowledge and experience of women.

But ugh, am exhausted. I can't tell if I'm exhausted and sneezing because I'm sick or because I didn't sleep much last night and there are allergens out there. And besides that no, Elf Lord, I do not need to stand back and let the guys do the heavy lifting, I'm tired, not weak or incapable. I swear, most of the time the men in my family/at my work (one and the same these days anyway) are okay about such things but sometimes they take the weirdest streak of "no, let me lift that."

Dude. You literally hired me to be your shipper/handler and sling the heavy boxes. What up with that.

Probably driven by my lack of sleep I did PitMad on twitter and got not one but two bites at the apple on the first round of tweets so, um, yay? I have no idea about one publishing company but the other at least looks solid. I'm leaving out the book currently in a state of [redacted] and all the older books that I haven't looked at in ages and probably could use a rewrite because I was a different writer ages ago. Yeah, we'll leave those out. But still. Turing Shrugged got a bite. Long Road got a bite. Two different books got bites, what even. I'll do another round of tweets tonight I guess. What the hell right? Apparently this is the year for unexpected metaphorical heart attacks. Better than literal ones.

Um. Okay, for my own future reference it seems like it's thirty minutes from the inciting event to where I can calm down and think about anything again. But in the meantime, keep working on the current projects, keep working on Helix, keep moving there, pick up... something. Pick up and try to resume normal routines? I don't even know what knocked them out of whack this time. No, wait, I do, birthday week festivities. So, all right. Pick languages back up next week, I think with Arabic it's about time to start on the grammar if I can flip through the alphabet book this weekend and determine that I'm as good on the letters as I'm going to get without attaching them to words regularly. And sort through my mental Workshop, and away we go.

I mean none of these nibbles might turn into anything but boy it's exciting isn't it!

I still haven't seen Wonder Woman yet. I know, I know. I'm being good and waiting for the boy so we can see it together. Although after last weekend I don't know why. I was all asleep all set to go to capoeira in the morning, wake up at 6am and roll over expecting to see him snoring next to me and no boyfriend. It's six in the morning. The fucking birds are singing, the sun's streaming through the balcony door and into the bedroom, and what the fuck. Cue panic, texting, wondering where the hell he is. Of course he's on his way from game. At six in the fucking morning. Without texting me to let me know he's been late up talking to the Dwarf. He brought home apology donuts but still, I cancelled capoeira because there was no way I was going to be able to stay up to yell at him, go back to bed at 7-7.30, wake up again early enough to change and get to class and be awake enough to do goddamn anything. And this fucked up my entire sleep schedule for the weekend and now I'm half asleep at work and I'm still pissed off.

But I did get the goddamn synopsis done, with one bracket note remaining in until I can go home and look up exactly which damn demon lord that was. Now I think the next week is apparently going to be all Malachy all the time because of Redacted while I wrap my head around it. At least most of it is typing shit up and getting things logged and hopefully I won't have time to panic. Because oh boy wow there is panic. And vicarious happiness because it means a friend [redacted] that [redacted] is going to [redacted] but .... nngh. If this all pans out you guys I am going to explode.

(I wouldn't expect any of these things to become unredacted anytime soon, so I'll try not to talk about it too much. But my head's about to explode.)

On the plus side, my urge to buy all the makeup has dropped now that I have an urgent project to work on and a sense of joy and hope again. Politics is seriously draining my energy and getting me down and ugh. It's hard to be hopeful or energetic about working on my writing when I'm writing it to publish it myself and so on, especially in this kind of environment. And way too easy to get distracted by shinies.

Still. I managed to do some Helix murderboarding last night! And Malachy is sort of falling into place once I apply pressure on the pieces and ass-glue to get it all written down. So that's good.

Why is life. Why are bodies. Why can't I just have a busy day a work and then go to capoeira without my legs seizing up in the calves and lower thighs? Why can't I have that?

Tired. So very tired. But I did get a full day of work and writing and capoeira done, so that's not nothing. I still hate the White Lightning story and barring a miracle that anthology is so not getting out on time, but at least it'll get out eventually. I'm working on it, just. Argh. Plus Starlight is going well, plus Malachy and Nerd Girls are/should be going well, so there's that. As well as can be expected in a day when anything can derail me into a we're all going to die because of Spray-Tan Castro's ego spiral.

I don't have any new makeup squee for you today. I did another round of the Nyx highlighter drops under powder and over primer, it seems to work reasonably well but not any significantly better than the powder highlighter I have. Although it's not any more expensive either, which is good. I really definitely want to try the Cover FX enhancer drops for entertaining HI I'M A DISCO BALL ON LEGS, but that'll have to wait possibly till Christmas. $42/bottle whaaaaat (although truthfully it'd probably take me a year to use it all. Still.) But yeah, no new makeup insights or fun and games today. I'll try out the Kat von D contour palette tomorrow. Practicing palette shadows is evidently going to have to wait for a weekend, because the last two nights I've been doing it while exhausted and baggy under the eyes at the end of the day and that seems like a poor plan.

Also I took three tries to spell palette so maybe I'd better totter off to bed now.

I was so gleeful to get my boots back that I got the boy to teach me how to shine boots like he was taught in the military, and apparently this involves fire. Guess who spent the better part of an hour last night lighting boot polish on fire. You get three guesses and the first two don't count.

(Of course this led to a number of amusing conversations where he'd say in a very long-suffering voice "It's on fire" and I'd be all "Yeah, I know, I know" with a grin that would probably be unnerving if he didn't know me well.)

Still watching too many makeup videos of how to do a this eye and that eye and cat eye and one eye two eye red eye blue eye I need more palettes and also two weeks of paid vacation time where I can just sit and fuck around with this stuff. Having dug out a really old smoky eye type neutrals palette (okay not that old but still) and messed around with it I have discovered that I am actually messier with palettes than I am with loose powders. Which is entirely the lack of practice, but still. 2017 is the year of escapism by makeup. The Urban Decay primer potion is also A Primer, for experiment noting, but the applicator is terrifyingly pokey. Why, Urban Decay. Why do you want me to stab myself in the eyes.

(I could just use shape tape but I want to conserve that for the luggage I'm carrying around under my eyes.)

I have no idea where the day went. I did get most things done but not nearly as much of it as I meant to while at work, meaning by the time I got up to play with makeup it was late and i was exhausted. For a day when I didn't actually have shipping to do it turned out to be surprisingly busy. Restocking and organizing will do that, I suppose.

Blegh. Maybe tomorrow I'll take another shot at palette/pressed powder shadows and actually get something out of it. And if that doesn't work, I do at least know what I'm doing with the loose powder ones! Something I never thought would happen. Heh.