Some days you're lying on the couch, chilling out, reading Pros fic and pretending to write your NaNo.

And then your old boss calls you and says, "Hey, we have an opening at the library. Want it?"

And you rise from the couch, do an interpretive dance of glee, and say very calmly, "Yes, thank you, I would love to. When can I start?"

It's a page position, so I'm just going to be shelving books, 3 or 4 days a week, at minimum wage. Which is okay, since that was what I made up in the tech room, too. It cuts down on my "Screw Kent, I'm spending December in Cincinnati" plans, and I know there is ridiculous drama going on in the library right now, but who cares? I will have MONEY. And EMPLOYMENT.

And there is NO ONE HOME TO FLAIL AT RIGHT NOW. I guess I will just have to celebrate with a donut. *noms*

I am caught up on my NaNo.

This is actually a Big Freaking Deal, since I spent most of last week freaking out about final projects for my fall classes and thus got no writing at all done between Tuesday and Friday. (I got the first two done in time; the last two are due this week.) I went to Starbucks tonight and wrote for three hours or so. I added almost six thousand words. This is both good and bad.

Pro: My main character finally got his kiss!

Con: It was with the wrong person. >_< (He can explain! Really! Not that he has any reason to, because his love interest is "so far back in the closet he could apply for Narnian citizenship," but he'll explain anyway because he worries a lot and also explanations = word count.)

Pro: There was a zombie game!

Con: Innocent fauna suffered. Observe:


[the zombie game involves humans using Nerf darts with phosphorescent paint to "tag" zombies before they can touch a human player and turn him]

Movement across the green caught Jamie's eye in the darkness. He tracked it, aimed, and fired. There was a faint, startled sound, and a tiny phosphorescent dot scrambled across the ground and up into a tree.

"Uh," Jamie said. "I think I just shot a squirrel."

"Was it a zombie squirrel?"

"...Yes?"

"Then okay."


...Yeah, my story is kind of weird. Athens, Ohio: Where the zombies aren't real--but the werewolves are. :D

Dropkick Murphys--The Green Fields of France

I always think I can get through this song, and then somewhere around the third verse I just inevitably dissolve into tears. By the last two lines--Oh Willy McBride, it all happened again / and again, and again, and again, and again--I'm just a mess.

I have a thing about World War I soldiers--if you've been poking around this journal long enough, you've probably heard me ramble about Owen and Sassoon, how much I love them and how much I want to believe that they loved each other. It's why the song gets to me. It's why I'm so very susceptible to the "comrades in arms" trope. It's...actually responsible for quite a lot of little things about my personality.

Last year I made a Remembrance Day post (it is here), and it pretty much summed up exactly how I feel about today.

Anyway. I had to make myself a poppy, since we don't really do that here. I feel oddly happy about having one to wear now.

Ugh, yet again, I fail so hard at online classes. I forgot to email my prof my idea for an imaginary project for young-adult programming, even though I've been working on the project itself already. It's due on Monday, so if she says "Nope, someone else is already doing this," I'll have to start over COMPLETELY, and it will be my own. fucking. fault. (I still think that it's fucking ridiculous that we can't do overlapping projects, but I'll save that for the class evaluation at the end.)

I just really really hope that she doesn't tell me I can't do my project, because it would be so much fun: a writing program for young adults. Each meeting would focus on something different--characterization, world-building, genres, plotting--and there would be handouts with advice. We could have them read their favorite scenes aloud! There would be popcorn and Coke!

My favorite idea was to have a deck of "plot cards" at the desk, and when a club member is stuck on a plot, I let them pick a card. It might say "Zombies." It might say "Kill your favorite character." Nobody's going to make them do these things, but it might take the story in a different direction.

Blah blah blah. Short form: Sarah may have just screwed herself out of an awesome project. Fail.

Okay, so. It's been just over 24 hours since NaNoWriMo started, and I'm 1814 words in. Apparently I am now writing a gay werewolf young adult novel, go figure. And just because one of them has curly hair and one of them has blue eyes does not mean that they're...okay, yeah, they're totally AU college-werewolf Bodie and Doyle, I won't even pretend.

Furthermore, the story now includes an all-girl punk band called Suicide Stalactite Joust. You probably don't want to know.

If it sounds like bad crackfic, that's 'cause it is. It's what makes NaNoWriMo so much damned fun.

So if anybody else is getting in on this insanity, I'm BurningTyger over at the NaNo site. Let's be friends!

Bleh, it's Halloween, and for the first time I am just not feeling it. I'd go out to the bars if I knew other people who were going, too--it's no fun to go out on your own. This is the same way I feel about parties, incidentally. I am not a good party-goer unless I know just about all of the people there. The only Halloween party I know of is happening at my friend's friend's house, and that is too loose of a connection for me to go and feel comfortable.

I think this might be the first year I haven't carved a pumpkin, too. Not really as much fun, doing it on your own. Plus I don't have my dad on hand to scoop out the "oopy-goopies" inside the pumpkin. ;) I don't even think kids come to trick or treat here--I live at the back of a big apartment complex. If they do, though, I have candy for them (and if they don't, I have candy for ME!).

I'm just kind of grumpy. My planned Pros Halloween fic didn't quite pan out--it's not creepy enough and the climax (not that kind, you pervs--that kind worked out just fine) is kind of illogical. I might post the Flash Forward crossover instead. Or maybe I'll just put on my Ravenclaw robes and get some homework done--after all, that's perfectly in-character.

Why LJ, how relevant of you. I just did this. ;)

Okay, a facebook friend of mine from high school is very much more religious than I am. I don't have a problem with that. But she made a facebook post fretting over the hate crimes legislation that the US just passed, extending protections to LGBT people. "Very scary stuff" was the phrase she used.

Scary? The very site she linked to, a religious news site, notes that the law protects religious speech from persecution--which is obvious, because any law perceived as infringing upon free speech would be struck down in a heartbeat.

It's a lot easier to argue these issues with people you don't know. I don't want to upset her, because I know her, and she's sweet. But people are murdered because of their sexuality. I don't care what your thoughts are on yaoi: that can't be tolerated.

*hops off soapbox*

...I wonder if the comment is going to stay up.

I would seriously love it if my brain would stop interfering with my body quite so much.

I'm going home this afternoon. Okay, I have not driven myself home before, so there's one point of anxiety--I do not want to get lost and die in Akron. Nobody wants that. Two, I'm going home to see a concert by Steve Chapin and Big John Wallace...and last time I saw them, I was a randomly sick/anxious mess. So there's point of anxiety #2.

Never mind that it was a year and a half ago. Never mind that I've made a ton of progress in anxiety-land since then. (Btw, Anxietyland would be the worst board-game ever.)

When I think about that concert, I remember how sick I felt through most of it--even knowing that it was my anxieties playing themselves out, it didn't change how miserable I was. It doesn't overpower the memory of Big John Wallace's voice soaring over the bridge in "Taxi," but it taints that memory a little, and I can't describe how frustrated and furious that makes me. Nothing should encroach on that memory.

(In case you do not know "Taxi," here it is. Yes, it's by Harry Chapin, not Steve--Harry was killed in a car accident in the early 1980s, and now when his brother does concerts, he sings some of Harry's songs in tribute. The voice on the bridge is Big John Wallace, and, like Art Garfunkel, his voice will still send shivers down your spine.)

Yes, this is an attempt to keep myself from going all lit-student crazy over certain spurious character studies. Deal.

I guess this has been rolling around in my mind for a while, but a recent rant over at fanficrants finally got me to put my thoughts into some kind of coherent order.

*clears throat* Hi, I'm Sarah K. And I'm a drabbler.

I love everything about writing drabbles. For me, the firm word-count is one of the most exciting challenges. I love taking the spark of a story idea and building a frame around it, choosing the most vivid words so that I can use as few of them as possible. I even love the harried frustration of "DAMMIT I JUST NEED TO CUT TWO MORE WORDS!" and "WHERE DID THAT HUNDREDTH WORD GO, IT WAS JUST HERE A SECOND AGO, I SWEAR!"

I've seen the occasional suggestion that drabbles are only writing exercises, or must necessarily be snippets of a larger story. Those are true, I suppose, in a sense--that all writing is a writing exercise and that everything is part of a larger narrative--but the point of a drabble is that it can, in a sense, stand alone. (Of course this doesn't apply to drabble series, or anything.)

You can experiment with drabbles. I like making things lyrical in a way that might not work in a longer fic. Of course, not every drabble is going to work--not every plot is cut out to fit this form, just like not every poem is meant to be a sonnet or a haiku or, god forbid, a villanelle. (I tried to write a villanelle once; it hurt.) I can't even tell you what exactly it is that makes a drabble work for me, but I can look at my writing and say "Yes, this works" or "What was I thinking?" There has to be a plot (and I use the term loosely) and some sense of completeness, of closure to the drabble.

And that's really my favorite part--pulling everything together with the last line. That's what a drabble hinges on for me. Whether it's a punchline or a gut-punch, the last few words are always the most important. It can be a twist ending, or something that's understated and pretentious. Profound! I meant profound.

So under the cut I jabber about some of my own drabbles and why I think they work or don't work like I wanted them to. Yes, I went all the way back to my fanfiction.net account for this--there was cringing, people. Although I went back and read "Lay of the Fall of Gondolin" again, and I think I will always be pretty damned proud of that poem.

( Self-indulgent nattering ahead. )

And in conclusion, 300 word ficlets, or triple drabbles, really ought to be called Tribbles. That is all.

And then some days I am reminded why I am destined to be a reference librarian. For example, when my brother calls me at midnight going "WHAT THE HELL IS THE NAME OF JOHNNY QUEST'S DOG?" (It's Bandit, yo. Because he's got black markings on his face like a mask, which I just realized this exact moment.) Also, he forgot Race Bannon's name. Tsk, tsk.

I could have gone on--Dr. Quest's first name is Benton, Race's daughter is called Jessie and only exists in Real Adventures, the AI in Real Adventures is called Iris, Race has an old girlfriend called Slutty McHookerpants Jezebel Jade, and once I wrote Benton/Race sort-of porn, but that was more information than the query required. And there's no point in confusing the patron with an overload of information or freaking them out with the fact that Race and Dr. Quest were totally doin' it.

Yeah, I'll get back to that 6am assignment for YA Lit now...

...I has a car.

A 1997 Pontiac Grand Am with 83,000 miles on it. It's sort of a metallic silver/blue, and it runs "like a bat out of hell," as my dad is ever so fond of saying. I drove it around yesterday to test it out, and then Dad and I washed and waxed it while listening to the Bengals inexplicably beat the Ravens. Dad said he had more fun bitching about the Bengals and washing the car with me than he would have if he'd gone golfing that afternoon. I think he's lying, but it actually was fun.

And he knows enough about cars to know that my car's in good shape. Brand-new oil change, updated brakes, power locks, radio with functioning CD player...

Aaaand no tags, so I can't drive it anywhere. >_< And I can't get tags until tomorrow, because today is Columbus Day. I had a complete panic attack (Mom will vouch for it) when I realized this, thinking that the bank would be closed and I wouldn't be able to get the money to pay for the car to drive back to Kent to live in the house that Jack built. Surprise! The bank was open. So was everything else in town...except the DMV office. Lazy punks. So I drove the car up to lunch and then back home, twitching around looking for cop cars at every corner. (There weren't any.)

So tomorrow, I get up stupidly early. I drive down to the DMV. I bring along the printout that says I don't need to have my Social Security card (which is handy, because I don't know where the hell it is), and I say "Hi, please register my car and also give me a license plate." Then I make the four-hour drive back to school and maybe get there in time for my 1:30 class, even though it's horrible and I'll drop it if I can.

Vanity plates are expensive, which is actually a good thing, because it's probably the only thing stopping me from getting something absurd like "37 45 OTP" on the tags. (That, and the discovery that valid Ohio plates require at least 4 letters--so something like "CI5 OTP" would work...) "METRICBOX" and "ALTRUISM" are both too long, which is sad because there's nothing I like better than stupid family jokes that nobody else in the world will get. ;)

Now she just needs a name. I can't think of any silver-blue starships, though...

Poking around this journal, you may get the impression that my life is all sexy fanfiction and bleak wastelands of library science. But this is not the case.

I also crochet.

I finally learned when I was in the midst of my lovely 2007 breakdown--it distracted me from all my anxieties. I never did finish that first Ravenclaw scarf, but I loved sitting in front of the TV, watching the Red Sox own the Rockies in the World Series, thanks in no small part to Jacoby Ellsbury in the outfield (*fluttery sigh*). Then I made other scarves. Then an afghan, which of course I finished in midsummer when it was too warm to use it. (It's not that warm anymore--it is wrapped around me as I type.) Lately, though, I've been moving into THREE DIMENSIONS. Below the cut are the pictures of the three things I'm most proud of, all done from patterns that I bought at Planet June.

( When dinosaurs roamed the...living room? )

It should be noted that the painting in the background of the first and last pic is a KRH original--my sister Kathy is incredibly artistic--and it's actually hung straight, even though the webcam distorts it.

Okay, my Digital Preservation group sort of figured out what we're supposed to be doing. I took a quiz, posted a discussion question, and added comments to the other group members' posts. Suddenly this weekend is looking ever so slightly less terrifying than it did before.

For the record:

YA LIT
--PATHFINDER
--Readings/discussions
--Assessment

DIGITAL PRESERVATION
--Additional discussion comments
--Migration exercise

COLLECTIONS/ACQUISITIONS
--Question for guest lecturer (due Tuesday)

METADATA
--Quiz (due Wednesday)

I should...probably get a datebook or planner or something. But we all know I'd keep it up for exactly two weeks and then forget that it ever existed.

And no, self, downloading the Steam port of Dark Forces I does not count as work, even though you got to mention it in the Digital Preservation discussion. Even if it is only $5 and you remember all of the cheat codes.

Hi. I'm currently in the middle of my scheduled mid-semester panic attack. I am taking far too many classes, I am already behind in the online courses, and I have no fucking idea what I'm doing with any of it. On top of that, all I really want to do is play Warcraft and watch Pros episodes, even though I know that's escapism and I do not have time for escapism. Even escapism that involves Onyxia or lads in tight pants.

I have a pathfinder due on Monday and the professor hasn't gotten back to me about my topic choice, so FUCK IT, I am doing one on college applications. I can't even document that I ever sent her a list of my choices, though, because last week's links aren't available anymore. So she might email me tomorrow and say "No, you have to do a pathfinder on teen eating disorders" and I'll have to start over even though it's--did I mention--due on Monday. Also I have to read like 19 more YA books for the class over the next six weeks or so, even though I know I'll wind up cheating and using books I've already read.

It should be comforting that the rest of my digital preservation class doesn't know what the fuck is going on either, but it isn't. It's just driving me even crazier because we're all sitting in the buggy Vista chat feeling stupid together. We're getting no feedback from the prof as to whether or not we're doing anything right. And it seems like I blink and then it's Friday and everything's due Sunday night (if not before), and I'm rushing to get everything done at the last minute.

Ugh. I just want to go curl up and sob for a couple of minutes, but that's not productive. I also have to call Zeus and let him know that I can't handle getting together for the RPG tomorrow.

And on an unrelated note, OH MY FUCKING GOD, UPSTAIRS PEOPLE. If you are going to have a dog, in defiance of all the apartment complex's rules, could you at least CLOSE YOUR FUCKING DOOR so I don't have to hear it YAPPING? I don't want to be the fucker who tattles on you, but you are tempting me so much right now.

For squeeful, who totally cheated at the never-will-I-ever meme.

Wrapped Up In Books
Doyle wants to visit a bookshop.
Good Omens/Professionals (Bodie/Doyle and Aziraphale/Crowley)
812 words

( You were racing in a car... )

I'm friends with the entire family of one of the twins' friends on Facebook. Jes's mom just posted a status update about Skyline nights after volleyball games, and...damn, that was a weird burst of homesickness. Not just for the chili, but for the hilarity that inevitably ensues when our two families get together.

The twins turned eighteen a week ago. I can't even comprehend that. I remember when they were born--hell, I remember Mom telling us she was going to have twins, and how I couldn't stop giggling after that. (My only brother said that if they were both girls, he'd make Mom "put one back," and being three years old, he didn't really get why we thought it was so funny.)

I've watched the girls grow up, and I hope I've been a decent big sister to them. I'm the oldest, so I don't know how it feels to have your big sister run off to college and leave you. I know how it felt to be the one leaving, though, and it was pretty miserable for that first semester. Lisa always surprises me when she talks about being my "little sister," because I've never really felt the year-and-a-half I have on her. But the twins are the babies of the family...and of course they're not babies anymore.

I guess what I'm saying is that I've watched them grow up, and I'm still surprised at how brilliant and poised and clever they turned out. And if they like having Firefly nights when I'm home for a weekend, then that's just a bonus.

Yeah, I posted that Never-Will-I-Ever meme, and then without prompting I went and did the main thing that I swore Never-Would-I-Ever write for Pros fandom. I'm going to blame squeeful for it, even though it's not really her fault. How someone can have the cracked-out simulcast we did, and then write this...I don't even know.

Title: We Will Become Silhouettes
Fandom: The Professionals
Pairing: Bodie/Doyle (slash)
Summary: What if the atom bomb couldn't be defused? Drabble.
Warnings: See the lj-cut at the bottom for warnings.

( We Will Become Silhouettes )

( Warnings )

Okay, so apparently there's this meme floating around called Never Will I Ever... and the point is for y'all to suggest three stories you think I'd never write, and for me to write a snippet of at least one of them in the comments. So go for it! Crackfic will probably ensue.

Yes, I do have a massive Dragon*Con Post o'Doom to put together, and I will! I promise! Er, someday.

I just met Craig Parker.

I am never, EVER going to stop smiling. He is the nicest person in the entire world, and that smile, I can't even. I just. He even let me babble about missing the Fellowship con six years ago and how he read my name as a fanfic winner and and omg <3.

I have a flight to catch in three hours. Until then, I'm going to go find somewhere quiet to melt with glee. :D

Oh god, classes start TOMORROW and I finally got into the YA Lit class yesterday and it's going to be so much work so I'm probably dropping the evil metadata class and did I mention classes and TOMORROW? Oh yeah, and there's that thing in Atlanta this week, or something. And I still need to find a way to get to the frigging airport on Thursday morning.

Maybe it was anxiety, but I was up most of the night feeling terrible last night. In the "Man, I don't want to go to bed because if I wake up sick I will totally fall over some shit on the way to the bathroom" sense. On the bright side, I had a totally vivid mini-dream where the girl from "Female Factor" came to, er, thank Doyle for saving her life, and he gave her a cup of tea and sent her to bed. Alone. I can only imagine how hard Bodie would laugh at him. ;)

But I'm feeling fine now, and it's 60 degrees outside and cloudy--it's fall, people! Now to put on my purple plaid jacket and go for a walk.