pack it up, pack it in

[dragonlady7]

Well. they're going to have to start showing the apartment soon, so I have to start making it look presentable. that'll be a neat trick, given how much crap I have to pack and how little space I have in which to lay it out to pack it, and then where am I going to put it once it's packed?

So I'm starting off with things we're not going to need for a while. last night I had Dave sort through the loose CDs and put them back in their containers. He has a mania for listening to CDs and then stacking them on the floor instead of putting them back into their cases. Given that we haven't listened to a CD since iTunes came out, it struck me that it was about time to put the stacks away.
So he matched them up with their cases, and in the process we found about a dozen CDs that we'd forgotten to rip, and so hadn't listened to in a year or more.
So, I imported those-- his CD drive isn't very good and if there's so much as a scratch it fails to read the CD. Given that he stacks his CDs on the floor instead of in their cases, of COURSE there's a scratch or fifty on them. So...
Anyway, now I have Mermaid Ave Vol II, L7's Smell The Magic, Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, Siouxsie and the Banshees' Hyaena, Mighty Mighty Bosstones' Don't Know How To Party, and assorted others safely ensconced in my library, and have driven the total count well up over 7000 songs even when i went and deleted the duplicates I had (to burn an MP3 CD i have to first convert the files from AAC to MP3, and that makes duplicates. I was keeping some, to burn another CD, but decided to just get rid of them-- who else is going to want my entire Bad Religion catalogue? Fuhgeddaboudit.)

Also, Corey was kind enough to send me the mp3 of Subdivision, a song on Revelling | Reckoning that i wanted. So i'm all full of semi-new-music goodness. Which hopefully counts for something in the "motivation" department.

More generally, when not packing and cleaning (I scrubbed that goddamn kitchen floor on my knees with a sponge, yo) I have been doing a lot of writing for the Henneth-Annun Story Archive of late. It's Lord of the Rings fanfiction, and it's a selective archive-- submissions have to undergo a double-anonymous 9-member review before they get approved. Not saying there's no crap up on that site, but there's a great deal less than usual.
It's also really well-coded, and I like that. I have a lot of stuff posted in the members-only section, where you can put up unfinished things for critiquing and feedback and of course, just for fun.
I do have one story that's been approved for the public archive. I linked to it earlier, and will link to it again here because I am shameless. The Clasp Undone, featuring distorted Middle Welsh poetry fragments stolen from Professor Higley's coursepacks.

Ah well. I feel like my writing's matured. First the three months of relentless plot-formation, and now a month and a half of refining that-- writing for an audience, and a highly receptive but also highly critical audience at that, is very satisfying as well as challenging.

And secretly I'm hoping that by wooing fans among these sorts of writers, I can perhaps win some good beta-readers for The Novel. I'm going to have to overhaul it, and I think I'll start that just after we move. I'm going to be looking for work bartending, i think-- I don't want to get myself sucked into another souldraining office job, not just yet, so while my deferment on my student loans holds out, I'm going to learn bartending. it can be good money, particularly if you are as busty and immodest as I am, and I have a great desire to try something new. Also, there are bars everywhere, so if my nefarious scheme to escape to Europe works out-- they're much more likely to hire me off the books if I can't get a work visa than an office job is. So...
Ideally I'd try to get a fellowship at a university and earn my keep that way, but having bartending to fall back upon can't hurt. You know, they've outlawed smoking in pubs in Ireland too-- can you imagine? Those feckers smoke while they sleep, so how they can drink and not smoke eludes me.
But anyway.
That was kind of a brain dump. i'm trying to become a more faithful blogger again. I think it's amusingly ironic that almost everyone reads this at my livejournal, where it's crossposted, but I'm going to redesign the movabletype site and it'll be awesome, I promise. The movabletype site gets search traffic of all kinds because I rank so high and rock so hard. ;) So all the lost strangers-- surf on in! Hi! And leave again, because I don't actually write about sweet things to do for your boyfriend-- that entry was sarcastic!
Aight. I should be cleaning.