(no subject)

Sick. Still sick, rather, even if mostly asymptomatic. I know this because of my learnings, and also because my body keeps trying to shut down and go to sleep mode while I'm trying to do things. Literally, I woke up long enough to turn my alarm off, went back to sleep, woke up some weird time later realizing that no, I hadn't gotten up and washed and brushed my hair (seriously, that's what I dreamed), I was still asleep. It helped that in my dream Khlyen was for some reason there waiting for me to something. I blame all the Nikita I've been watching, since the actor's in that too. Playing basically.... Khlyen minus the mentor thing.

Anyway. So, sick. Came downstairs, did some language quiz review, napped. For only an hour this time! I can tell I was sick yesterday because after getting a good 7-8 hours I fell back asleep for 3 hours? I think in the last 60 or so hours I've slept around 30+ of those. That's not physically normal for me. Normal for me is 6-6.30 hours of sleep most nights, 7ish on a night after capoeira when it's been really hard. I guess the plus side is, asymptomatic? But SO MUCH SLEEP.

The other plus side, I guess, is I'm reasonably well trained to listen to my body, which is reasonably well trained to go NO SHUTTING DOWN NOW AND GOING TO SLEEP.

I also did manage to put up a tumblr post of kitty pics, since DW is less than intuitive or friendly about putting pictures directly on here. At least as far as I can tell, and too brain-ickked to figure it out now. She's still pretty calm and chatty with us, though she did give us a heart attack by disappearing into the damn stove into a hole in the back while we weren't looking. The boy was all "she must have gotten outside somehow, don't worry she'll be back" and I was all "DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO TINY BIT." No, I'm not over that. But she's doing well, she's being introduced to other cats. Murdock and Maggie seem to be relatively fine with her, and by relatively I mean Murdock's not being any more of a shit than he usually is. Michelle and Mikey are still kind of cranky about the whole thing, but neither of them are terribly aggressive, so if she doesn't find any more goddamn hidey holes to terrify us by hiding in, she should be able to be fully out of the room in a few days. And she's very cuddly and friendly still.

I suppose it's now time for a nap again so I can try and do something else productive at the end of it all. Or at least try and keep current on things. I have some backlogged OC October posts to do too.

OC October: Day 24-25 - Malachy and the Nerd Girls

Day 24: Malachy.
I'm not sure what to say about Malachy, mostly because everything about him changed at least twice over the course of the book I was writing. I know he's a demon, and that he's at odds with his family because he's fallen in love with the mortal world and one mortal in particular. Whether his family means a good chunk of demonkind or just a small demon family ruling a particular section of Los Angeles I haven't figured out yet. He helps Sybilla with her powers and her life, fixing things with his own powers. What he doesn't tell her for a long time is that this is because she summoned him in a moment of panic, desperation, and need. He's bound to her in a way, but rather than manifesting and making her fight for everything he watched her for a little while after he saved her and her sisters from the monster incursion, and then he found himself falling in love with her.

I'm reasonably sure he's going to end up with a couple of brothers, neither of whom are fond of the humans. Most demons see the humans as inferior at best, food or amusement at worst, so his falling in love with one is a bit like a human falling in love with a cow or a horse, it's ridiculous and a sign of a deviancy or sickness in the mind. I haven't also decided if there are creatures other than the typical angels and demons in this world, though I did write some sprites and so on into the book. It's all very jumbled, originally it was intended to be the Kardashians as the Winchesters, and it still is, but that also means I have to figure out the magical hierarchy and structure and what's in this world and what isn't.

Still. Malachy. He's a good guy, a good kid, really, for all that he's a demon and probably older than all three sisters put together.



Day 25: Nerd Girls
Ah, the Nerd Girls! Nerd Girls is the East Coast version of the Kardashian Demon Hunters, and generally my fuck off response to people who denigrate and devalue teenage girl fiction, whether featuring or aimed at. The Nerd Girls themselves are a band of five girls who formed friendships based around their various nerdy interests and their school careers.

Starting off I guess with the first one who appears in my notes, Amber! Amber is the one who's preyed upon by an incubus, and this event and her friends finding out about it is what kicks off the events of the first book. She's deep into biology and chemistry, she wants to be a mad scientist when she grows up, or that's what she tells everyone. She's a third generation immigrant, well, children of immigrants, with a white American mutt Catholic father (she herself is more Lily-Holly Catholic even if her father's family would prefer otherwise) and her mother is mixed Chinese-Hawaiian. She herself is very connected with her mother's mother (Chinese) who fled to Hawai'i from an abusive husband, and found a good man and remarried a half-native. This gives Amber a whole lot of interesting family history that she sometimes talks about or listens to, and a large mixed bag of personal reflexes and family rituals. It also gives her an interesting albeit very protective and firm support structure against what happens to her.

She is, or was before the attack, a gregarious and energetic girl, often the recipient of a gag order when watching TV shows like Fringe or X-Files because she'll go off into tirades about how the science is bad and real science could be so much cooler if they'll only use it. She sometimes talks about how she could totally kill people/make zombies/destroy the world over dinner, all the scientific trivia she's accumulated, and during the ebola outbreak she was all "oh this isn't anything to worry about, we should really be worried about this other horrible thing." She's coming back to that more slowly now, though it remains to be seen whether she'll regain her old spirit.

There's Zillah, commonly known as Zi or Zee. She's a metalhead and has several fake IDs, just old enough to be a young college student, just enough to get her into the local clubs to see concerts. Not pushing it too hard. She has these friends and she has a whole other group of friends, almost all of them older, who view her as sort of a baby sister even as they teach her how to do all kinds of minorly illegal things oops. Her parents aren't too worried though they do warn her not to get caught, but that's only because they think the worst thing she's doing is smoking weed and drinking one or two beers at a party illegally, not learning how to boost cars and fake IDs.

There's Frankie, too. Frankie's a bit weird even by the Nerd Girls' standards. She's a knitter, always has a ball of yarn and some knitting needles and if she's not knitting she's sewing up ends or something else. She's very quiet, wears baggy clothing and long skirts and most people think that's because she's ashamed or afraid of her own body. Sometimes she thinks that too, but she's also more comfortable with her limbs covered, and that's just how she feels. It's also partly solidarity with Rebecca, who is at least trying to be a conservative Jewish girl. She's also a literature and some kinds of music nerd, classical and folk and filk. She's a theatre nerd, which dovetails neatly with some of the other girls' nerdery and she and Zillah have a whole bunch of discussions, often, about the merits and flaws of folk rock like Tempest and Coyote Run.

A lot of her quirks of behavior, not that her friends know it at the start of the novel, are because she and her entire family is magically active. She uses her knitting as a focus for her magical powers, which aren't extensive because she doesn't push herself much. With her family in hiding, so to speak, from people who look for magic workers like herself, it's easier to stay under the radar if she only uses her powers for finding lost objects or untangling cords for tech. This will of course change once they find the incubus in their school and realize the stakes are going up, but it'll change slower than for another of her friends.

Libby, short for Liberty, is a huge anime and cosplay nerd. She builds her own costumes every year for the one convention she and Rebecca can go to, putting some effort both into the costume itself and also into concealing pockets for weapons or tools which Rebecca then makes her take out again. She's also a spy nerd because of that, studying everything from various Revolutionary Wars and their spies to Cold War spy technology. What Amber does with science movies, she does with spy movies and shows. She's also very familiar with historical spy biographies, and sometimes does cosplay from those eras as well, not that anyone recognizes it. When Agent Carter came out, however, she did put together a full Carter outfit, getting only minor flack for being a black girl cosplaying a white woman. This comes up with relative frequency in her cosplay, as does Rebecca's not quite accurate costuming, so they're used to fighting for their space in an already seen as eccentric field.

She's also a computer nerd, some programming, some hardware. She shares the hardware aspect with her best friend Rebecca. In the future this might lead to her being sort of a technomage, as she is the one who discovers the magic inherent in the world and pushes to using it. She's got quite a temper and also quite a protective streak, and apparently her deceased grandmother isn't quite so deceased, turning out to be a ghost mentor in her life once she figures out what she's looking at. It also pushes her to do some unwise things, resulting in some self injury/illness, so there's that.

And finally there's Rebecca, a conservadox Jewish girl who is nonetheless a cosplay nerd, incorporating the requirements of her faith into her costumes with dare-you-to-say-something aplomb. She helps run theatre tech, will in her senior year be running theatre tech for at least one of the shows in her school, and geeks out with Zillah and Libby about the engineering crossovers between their various habits and interests. She's the reserve and restraint on Libby, too, talking her down from wild ideas and responses to problems in their life, and often playing the other side in the arguments her friends get up to about what they should do about things, or about the world in general. Her mother isn't sure about her pursuits, worries that they may unfit her for marriage and doesn't want to see her ruin her chances, etc. On the other hand her mother is also very enthusiastic about her daughter going to college and becoming a competent woman in her chosen field, so that differs some from other conservadox families. (Some, not entirely.) Rebecca has several siblings as well, whom she helps and tutors as she can. She's definitely the mothering influence of the group.