Warhead On Legs

The donuts are definitely fueling it, but I am so gratified to have all the adulting for the immediate future, bar tax filing because no W2s yet, done for the time being. So gratified. I cannot begin to describe. My IRA is all fixed and happy, my general investments account has been reset so I can actually log into it online. With single goddamn word security answers because the last one had a security answer with at least 5 possible permutations and I couldn't remember which one I had entered. Let this be a lesson to me. If at all possible, security questions with one word answers. Or at the very least one possible permutation for a multiple word answer. Jesus. And all of my banking is under one roof, and my credit score is fucking ridiculous, which means I am leaving all of my credit cards open till the ones I'm not using anymore get tired of me and close themselves because I like my credit score at Fucking Absurdly Ridiculous Here Have All The Monies. Even if I don't use All The Monies. I like being credit score-ly virtuous.

I have a clean bill of dental health, I have a clean bill of medical health, I do not have to go back for a thyroid check like I usually do (this has happened at least the last two years, I get my thyroid checked because every other female in my family except my baby sister has low thyroid, it comes back borderline, I get it re-checked, it comes back fine), I have done all my financial shit, I have adulted like a fucking master this week. I even got my minimum 1k words done yesterday! Like a fucking master I tell you.

About the only thing that's a downside to the last few days' worth of productivity is the numbers on the scale are trending upwards rather than downwards. Still down from where I was a year ago, but that is the opposite of a trend I would like to continue, literally. On the other other hand, it's not exactly a mystery why that's happening. A week of migraines and head colds preventing exercise, plus brownies, cookies, and donuts, and crappy mac and cheese will do that to a person. Do better, self.



Oh god, Wednesday Reads:
I read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. Fascinating, heartbreaking in a lot of places, definitely a good look at China through the Japanese occupation and rise of Mao's Communism. Well written and engaging, too. Also now I want to go read the Communist Manifesto just so I can go "You're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. You're doing communism wrong." But I want to do that a lot of the time. I also read and finished The Raven Boys which I absolutely fucking loved. I have many thoughts on it, but nothing immediate or urgent, if anyone wants to discuss in comments. Except NOAH. Oh Noah. Nobody listened to you, did they. And I re-read Children of the Night, which I discussed yesterday.

Up next: Women of the Pleasure Quarters and a book called The Last Madam about a madam in New Orleans that, what the hell, it looked good. No idea how either of them are going to be, but they look like relatively quick reads for non-fiction. And currently I am working my way through Sanctum by Sarah Fine. I'm on balance enjoying it so far (Kindle says I'm only 12% in) but I cannot actually recommend this book. If only because of what it says about people who commit suicide, whether deliberately or inadvertently. So... take that for what you will.

Weekly Word Count: 3,966, the best week of the year yet.

Superhero Training: Well, so far I've managed two consecutive days with ballet and yoga exercises? Glad, on the other hand, that I cut things short to go do things like doctor's appointments or contacting investment places. So, tomorrow, will try to add in the bellydancing exercises and maybe a round of one of those superhero exercise things. Maybe. We'll see.

Oh dear god this day. So, okay, just so I know why I'm exhausted if my brain shuts down and refuses to write tonight (although I hope it won't) today I have: done day jobligations, including dealing with a bunch of fiddly little shit and clearing those off my desk. Booked an electrician, and gotten health insurance. See, with everyone going on Medicare because they have the olds, there's just not enough people left for us to qualify for group health insurance anymore, so off to the ACA I go!

(Yes, I am stubborn about this Obamacare bullshit, even if people are taking it back from the pejorative. Call it what it is, it is the Affordable Care Act.)

Anyway. I was on the phone with a guy for about an hour getting everything set up, he was very helpful. And cheerful! I appreciate a bureaucracy guy with a personality, we chatted some about my language skills and my password choosing skills and how nice it was to have someone computer savvy on the other end and we mutually thanked each other for making it easy. And it was! At least fifteen of those minutes were spent discussing extra options, rather than going back and forth over the same thing. I feel I ultimately made a good decision on my health care plan, he explained how I could add on extra dental if I wanted it, and it was good.

But oh god bureaucracy was exhausting. Is exhausting. In general, I'm glad (and I hope) I won't have to do that very often. Apart from all that I'm a little surprised I got all my day job stuff done. Most of it done. I also got up to page 126 for tomorrow in my Russian, did my Japanese this morning (two exercises), and for getting all this efficiency done I got a cookie from down the street. I'm not kidding, I went out and got me a cookie. And then I got some cheap books from the library even though I have a shitpile on my Kindle to read. 50 cent paperbacks, not library books. So. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Who Played With Fire, I haven't read the second one but I figured if I was going to get them in paperback, might as well. And something by Morgan Llewellyn.

Wednesday Reads got pushed to Thursday by virtue of Wednesday being insanely busy too, so there. What have I read in the past week. A lot, given that I was sick. Um.

Magic Burns and Magic Bites were actually surprisingly good, given that I pegged a bunch of the characters for their roles in the first ten pages. It's formulaic, but it's also entertainingly done, and I enjoyed the hell out of them both.

Cast in Shadow was... honestly, very reminiscent of my old Mercedes Lackey fanfiction group writing days. I don't think I'll be keeping up with this series, although it wasn't offensive to the eyeballs or anything. Just. That was a weird feeling.

I re-read Neuromancer a couple days ago, since it was $1.99 on one of the Kindle Daily Deals and I enjoyed it when I had the paperback.

I read Blades of the Old Empire, which wasn't bad, a little choppy/formulaic/idealized maybe? But actually pretty good in general apart from that, I'll probably pick up the next book in the series. Straight up fantasy, too. Without the usual fantasy horses that go all day and all night, though I imagine some travel time was elided because no one wants to read about resting horses or watering them or changing them.

And I started and am probably about halfway through with The Emperor's Knife which is... intriguing. I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but I'm enjoying it so far.

I'll probably try to finish Emperor's Knife this week and maybe read the first two Millennium Trilogy books, re-read in one of those cases, between now and next Wednesday. I'm still trucking through Long Walk to Freedom, but oh dear god. I mean, it's Nelson Mandela's life story, that hasn't always been a happy one. All this of course in between blogging (Haven's back! AUGH!), writing, getting work done, getting housework done, putting at least some of the garden away from the winter, I'm giving in and bringing the rosemary and mints in and potting them and putting them into the patio. And. And and and and and. Ugh.

( Gaeilge )

So, okay, yes, I got a webcam yesterday which should be here tomorrow, so I can Skype with or without video with [Redacted] as [Redacted] chooses and what even is my life right now.

I was going to read Iranaeus for Sleepy Hollow. I'm sure there was a good reason, I'm sure if I open the doc I'll figure out what it was, but damned if I can remember it off the top of my head. I think it had something to do with the Four Horsemen, because Christian theology scholar. Though trying to dig up what the fuck THAT was all about led me to three other research books. The list of books I should be reading right now is amazing and huge, between that and Helix. I really need to organize that somewhere. Especially if Amazon is going to continue to be a fucker and play keep-away with my wish lists.

Wednesday Reads
Well. I may have devoured all the current Walker Papers books with the exception of No Dominion, which I really really need to get and read at some point soon. After Portland, though, I'm keeping a somewhat rein on my spending, so even $6 books aren't something I'm just going to reach out and grab too much of. Plus I have that entire trip to Powell's I need to shelve and finish reading. Still. Walker Papers. Amazingly hysterically funny and good and clever and I absolutely love Joanne WalkingStick even if I want to grab her and shake her till her teeth rattle on occasion. I really love Morrison. I want a Morrison. (Though given some of the ways I get handled by my boy I suspect I already have one. I suspect I'm more like Joanne WalkingStick than I think. Oops.)

I am almost done with Stray Souls, which is a newish book set in the world of Matthew Swift. Things I did not know! Also that there's a new Tiger and Del book, also that there's three or four more books in the Paksenarrion world. I may or may not have gotten the two new Matthew Swift world books (now called Magicals Anonymous for this series) and the new Tiger and Del book. I restrained myself from getting the Paksenarrion books, mostly because I was already buying shittons of Hellblazer collections. So, yes. Plenty to read upcoming.

Still need to finish Long Walk to Freedom and Women Who Run...

I also picked up a book I now rather deeply regret, A Study in Silks by Emma Jane Holloway, which was categorized by bookstore and publishing company as Gaslamp fantasy/mystery and actually seems to be a romance novel. In that most of the time the heroine, instead of solving mysteries, is focusing on which of two men she would like to keep. Uh. Both men are of course fascinated by her for no reason they can discern, and tell us so repeatedly and often, ad nauseum. The prose teeters between descriptive and insipid, and I don't think that's just because the author accidentally a romance novel when she meant to write a mystery. The character list is far too vast, the plots are far too numerous, to the point where the author loses track of who's talking to whom at at least one point that slipped through. Now, I've lost track of whose point of view I was writing from but never who was in the room or talking and acting at the time, and the only reason I can come up with for that is that she has too many fucking plotlines going on at one time, and too many POV characters. Only half the mysteries were tied up by the end, which although it's a trilogy, left me unsure of whether or not her pacing skills could hack it, and I have no inclination to go after any more of her books. She may be a better romance writer than a mystery writer, but A Study In Silks was so misleading and so disappointing that I took forever to read it and am now probably just going to donate it and get it out of my house. Also, Sherlock Holmes' niece? WHY? There is no earthly reason for that to have been the case, let alone for her to be the daughter of some long lost Holmes sister. It's like bad fanfic.

Anyway. I think I'm at the point where my brain is going fast enough that I need to write shit down in small steps or I will trip over my own feet. I have no idea how I achieved this level of hyper, but I dislike it immensely. Especially since it's more nervous than productive energy.

Got through the first page of the third chapter, I forget what page that is, and had to force myself to stop looking at necklaces and jewelry on Etsy because I found three or four pieces I'd really like to get. Including, okay, one ring that I will get to replace the ring I lost and so my hands balance out, but the rest of it can bloody well wait for a while, I have spent more than enough getting ready to be a proper lady in Portland. Bad Jag. Just because you got a windfall doesn't mean you need to spend it omg all right now, plus there's the fireplace to repair and the media center to get.

I have really bad discipline when I get into a AUGH SHINY mood. And apparently that's now. Still. And the ring has to wait till I get home and figure out how tight or loose my dice rings are on me anyway, since I know those were a size 7 but the ring place does quarter sizes. Calm down, self. Really. It'll be okay.

(Bat wing boot spats! Augh!)

... No, too late, distracted by butterfly wings (from ethically sourced butterflies! I love that phrase now) and the beautiful jewelry they make. From now till Portland, I think, Inara is my spirit animal.

On the plus side, this is probably a good mood to write about faerie people. Away I go! Now if I can just remember which parent was the Sluagh and which was the Daoine Leanan Sidhe. Leanan! Father, Leanan Sidhe, mother, Sluagh. Yes.

Oh! Wednesday Reads

Which is sort of Wednesday Media Consumed. The past couple weeks the boy and I have been rewatching Fringe and we're finally into the part I haven't seen before! Which turns out to be only season five. So, okay then. Also it caused John Noble to follow me on twitter, which was not only creepy, is he... yep, still following me. So creepy. I hope I meet him at DragonCon this year.

I've also been reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon again. It always amazes me how much some of her entries, the things like "Things Which Are Hateful" or "Things Which Are Elegant" or "Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster" are still relevant and vivid, around a thousand years later in a different country and culture. It's good re-reading, though. I'm enjoying it.

I think this week for future reading I might pick up the second Walker Papers book. And a re-read of Women Who Run With The Wolves. Yesh. This seems good.

Okay. I'm midway down page 30 and Russian is hard, yo. No, the most frustrating part of this is how I'm reading along, picking up words, but I still only know words in the sense that most of these are familiar or I can pick up fragments of words and link them to other words etymologically. Frustrating. Bit by bit, I know, marathon not a sprint, but still.

I might try to get to the bottom of page 31 anyway just because that last paragraph was a huge chunk of the page.

Did manage to finish both a chapter in Graves and the line edits for the Deli Counter story at least up to the point where I need to throw a whole other scene in, so I guess I'll put those in tonight and then work on the other scene tomorrow. Tonight I really, really need to work on writing something. Anything. Argh. I need to get a USB keyboard because while my ... I'm an idiot. I can move my USB keyboard to my netbook while I'm on that. The thing is, my netbook keyboard is okay, but it's getting harder and harder to register the pressing of the keys presumably just from hard use (I'm very hard on my keyboards) and while that's okay for chat where I'm not trying to get out 10k words in a hurry, that's immensely frustrating for writing. So, okay. Tonight I take the USB kb off my desktop and onto my netbook for the moment, since if I'm on the netbook I'm not using my desktop, am I. What I really need is one of those laser keyboards.

I even remembered to finish and post that damn blog post today. Though no doubt it was incoherent. Ugh. My brain feels a bit like I'm swimming in molasses or something. I have a sense of the things I should do, I just can't bring myself to do them.

Okay, so. Wednesday reads! Because the only media I've consumed lately is TV and I have nothing in particular to say about that at the moment. Except that I still want to write more Ruby/Gold and I still refuse to watch any more Once Upon A Time than I already have. No, fuck no, you can't make me, not even for Robert Carlyle.

Read
Urban Shaman by CE Murphy has done the thing that some series do to me, where I read it and instantly I must have ALL THE BOOKS RIGHT THE HELL NOW. It's the Female Detective Protagonist In Urban Fantasy's less common variant; the heroine is Celtic-Cherokee drawing power from both sides, a shaman more or less by cosmic manipulation and how nice, you saw a problem, go fix. She has a hilarious cabbie sidekick named Gary who reminds me a bit of my Nameless, a police captain who shares her dubiousness about whether or not she's an actual cop (officially she is, but) and with whom I SHIP HER LIKE BURNING AUGH. And a number of other friends. Also she kicked Cernunnos in the balls. Twice. The author somehow manages to write somewhat florid pulp prose, which is impressive if not quite I think what she was going for. And I want all of the books right the hell now. Also I have decided that the one way I can tolerate doge meme is if it's filtered through the lens of Coyote. Because fucking Coyote.

Inside Straight I really enjoy the Wild Cards books. I don't know that many people who have read them, and the one person I know off the top of my head who has only like the first three, but I like most of them. There are a couple in the back half of the series I can do without. Inside Straight was everything that I liked abut the Wild Cards series, people being people, prejudiced, kind, terrible, faithful, fervent, goofy, flawed people who get stuck with a power or a mutation or both because of a virus, who have to deal with the way the world reacts to the virus first, before the world stops to see them as people. People who make bad choices. Who make up for those bad choices. I never get tired of reading these books. (Though between Inside Straight and Fort Freak I think I like Fort Freak better.)

Swallowing Darkness, Divine Misdemeanors So, yeah, the week kind of sucked in a massive way and I ended up spending the entire weekend curled up with one book or another. Fairy porn is my decompress. It's mindless, it's pretty, and it goes by quick and leaves me fairly relaxed.

Reading
Still plugging away at The White Goddess. Oh Graves. You are so tedious sometimes. And pretentious.

Up next
As it turns out, Suicide Kings was NOT the first Wild Cards book of the second (third?) series, Inside Straight was. So, um. Up next, more Wild Cards? Which makes it ... Busted Flush. Possibly more Walker Papers series if I pick them up. Possibly something else I have MANY books I haven't yet read. I do actually need to read the Book of the Courtier. At least the cheap copy I got at first, possibly followed by the copy Anna got from the library.