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Five query letters out today! Five! Hah! Take that, slacker impulses! But oh god, so very tired. Want a nap. Shouldn't take one. May exercise or stretch or something to get the blood moving.

Which, I really have to get myself moving. Have to pack for trip that may or may not happen tomorrow, depending on the weather. Which, thanks be to the powers that I don't have to drive on I-78, I-80, or I-81. Which apparently are hell zones right now with all the snow and ice and crap. Yeesh. We'll pass south of it, but we'll miss it. So very grateful.

Anyway. Have to pack. Have to finish putting away sewing stuff. Have to do writing for today. Um. Have to exercise. I guess that's it. I probably could get away with a nap. But I have the sneaking suspicion that if I lie down now I'm going to get up exhausted again, sleep longer than I mean to, and it's just going to throw off my attempted productivity groove for the entire day. Yeah, no. Slap my head phones on and it's stretches and weights for me.

Out of the last 16-18 BPAL scents I've tried, I think I've only really liked 2 of them. Which may or may not be bottles, I'm not sure yet. I still have four scents that I'd like to get bottles of, but it's not completely sucking the money out of my wallet. Which is good, 'cause I have college loan payments coming up. Yech. At least I've already mailed off my prescription money. And after I pay loans at the end of the month, one of them is a three-monther, so. Not so bad. Ooh. Hah. That's another thing I have to do. Review my Japanese and study my Russian. Somehow I'm going to manage to balance and maintain all my languages. No, really.

Hey, Nutty?

Since I'm doing pretty well with my whole fitness thing, I'm thinking of actually getting that tattoo on my birthday in May. Could I prevail upon you for some art? I can pay or trade in BPAL samples or something. *G*

[Fic] Long Way Home

Title: Long Way Home
Fandom: The Covenant
Characters: Caleb, Pogue
Prompt: Home
Word Count: 1,070
Rating: PG
Summary: Caleb leaves a disturbing message and Pogue goes flying home to take care of him. Written for lover100

Pogue went flying down the highway at speeds that would have killed someone without his reflexes. He should have been worrying about the police, but right now he was more worried about what was going on in Ipswich. Caleb's message hadn't sounded all that urgent, but if there was anyone in their group who knew how much Caleb kept things inside, it was him.

What did that mean, anyway? He knew Evelyn had been sick, but if she had finally… well, Caleb would have said. Wouldn't he?

Maybe he was just worrying over nothing. Yeah. Pogue was reading too much into things, he did that sometimes. It was a danger when you were with someone who kept everything inside all the damn time, and they'd talked about that more than once. Mostly just in the context of quiet concerns and some joking, though. They saved the arguments for who was using and how much.

Oh god. Maybe that was the problem, not Evelyn but Reid. Maybe Reid had backslid into his casual habits, started using again. Only it would be worse now that he was a logging truck.

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[Fic] BDL #74 - Narnia

Title: All Grown Up
Fandom: Narnia
Characters: Susan
Word Count: 559
Rating: PG
Summary: It was so easy to grow up, and leave Narnia behind.

It was so easy, at first. She and Peter were the responsible ones, they had to take care of the younger two. Peter when he was there, she when he was not. There were all these decisions to be made, most of which had nothing whatsoever to do with a magical realm in a wardrobe full of talking animals and mythical creatures. When she did think of it, most often it was right after keeping Lucy from saying something drastic like fauns aren't really like that or that doesn't look like a unicorn at all.

Time passed. It had a habit of doing that. They grew up slowly in the mortal world, grew older. Susan learned of the mystery of boys that were not her brothers, started to discover the effects of her smiles. The world of Narnia seemed more and more distant. And as they had been the only humans there, and rulers to boot, there had been neither time nor opportunity for romance. Her second youth was a boon and a blessing.

Lucy still talked about it, of course. Edmund indulged her because he felt guilty, Peter because he had always doted on his youngest sister. It wasn't meant to be exclusionary. Didn't start out that way.

But time passed, and days and dates passed. Peter never seemed to discover girls in the same way that she had discovered boys. Oh, there were little love notes and other girls in her class were always asking her what was going on in that boy's head, but nothing ever came of it. He and Edmund and Lucy were all too fond of each other, too likely to stay inside and play some sort of card game or Let's Pretend, as she called it now. It wasn't exactly natural, but it wasn't exactly unnatural either.

She learned to laugh it off as the memories faded into distant dreams. By the time Peter was done with school and on to college Lucy had stopped talking to her about much of anything of import or interest at all. There was no use in it. They didn't understand each other, the rift springing up when they weren't looking and neither of them knew how to bridge that gap.

Edmund looked at her as a bossy older sister, a babysitter to be alternately ignored or pouted at by turns. There had been a time, she remembered, when he had behaved. When he had been good and generous, or at the very least all right. What had happened to that boy? But it was an absent-minded thought and it never occurred to her that something had happened instead to her.

Peter and Susan had long talks about family finances, Edmund and Lucy's schoolwork, and how she was getting along with Lawrence Fillmore. If there was anything missing between them, he never showed it.

When news of the train accident reached her she cried more for being alone than for her lost siblings, whom she hadn't really known since they were children. It had been so easy to let them slip away, so easy that she no longer remembered exactly how it happened. Only that by the time Lucy was a grown woman she was also a stranger, and Susan was left to stand outside the door of the home her family had grown up inside.