Dream with Our Eyes Open

"0 days, 0 hours, 34 minutes, 39 seconds left until Yuletide stories are due!"

That was a little too much brinkmanship for my taste .... !

The word count tool says I have 1319 words. The down side is that plot-wise, that's only about a quarter of the story.

> headdesk <

Anyway, I feel like garbage, so I'm staying home today. Maybe I'll be able to work on it, maybe not.

I come bearing icons for Yuletide! (Rather late ... I'm sorry!) They include general themes such as gifts and winter, as well as a few specific fandoms. A number of them are based on classic children's book illustrations or covers. Oh, and some are reprises of the date-specific ones I did last year. Enjoy!

Samples:

As of this moment,

• 34 people are offering to write Tamora Pierce - Tortall series or The Fifth Element fics
• 33 are offering Eureka (tv)
• 32 are offering Anne McCaffrey - Dragonriders of Pern, Frances Hodgson Burnett - Secret Garden, The Middleman (tv), or Sandman (comic)
  and
  
• 31 are offering Diana Wynne Jones - Castle series aka Howl series or The Mummy series (movie)

Hmmm. I would consider myself middling competent to write four of those (Pern, Secret Garden, Sandman, Howl), have experienced one additional one (5th Element), and have never seen/read a bit of any of the others.

I'm fascinated that Burnett's enjoyable but rather didactic children's story is as popular as any of these more recent items ... .

So I tried playing with the generator for a while, and I was averaging only 1 out of every 6 or so that I could even remotely possibly do.

I think my ignorance of TV is the major factor. I'm glad I didn't decide to play the "Roll Your Own Challenge" game!

We seem to have a pretty much all-Yuletide all-the-time thing going on ... I guess I'll join in the confetti throwing.

These are sort of scattershot ... I hit the first few things I recognized, and then got more systematic, starting with the letter T:

Blade of the Immortal | CJ Cherryh - Alliance Universe | CJ Cherryh - Chanur series | Terry Pratchett - Discworld | T.H. White - The Once and Future King | xxxHolic

I has Yuletide fic! (Or rather, my fic account does ... .)

Someone wrote me a tasty bit of C.J. Cherryh fic, about the Chanur series - my favorite!   XD   Thank you, Santa! I hope Herself will forgive us all for instigating/writing fic on her wonderful books ... .

Anify's Accord

This would take place after Chanur's Homecoming and before Chanur's Legacy.

My sister A., God bless her, finished reading it through yesterday, but we were out all day. She went over it with me this morning. She had good substantive points to make - some of which helped make the wishier part of the plot less wishy - and said that it was exciting and kept making her want to find out what happened next even though it's so long! (Final word count after revisions suggested by A.: 12,201 ... .)

Now I just need to strip it down into a good text file ... and there are lots of italics in this, for various reasons, so I need to preserve that. I may have to do this at lunch at work, so I can take advantage of my better text/HTML-handling tools there.

I have written 2,497 words! And I have only finished not-quite-three scenes of 10 in the story! I am writing a novella, I think!

But the first scene was the huge one, setting the stage, establishing what's wrong-wrong-wrong about the universe at the moment for the good guys. And it was just rolling on out tonight, which was good.

On the other hand, I don't know that I will ever catch up on my LJ's inbox.   >sigh!<   One cannot have everything ... .