but his tattoo was of a lady in the nude, and my mother thought that was extremely rude.

I sort of wish I had a black eye. This chin bruise is confusing in appearance, and people just don't know whether to look at it or not. It's dark purple now, and visible from across the room, and Z couldn't talk to me this morning without cracking up. If you don't know what it is it just looks like I have exceedingly poor hygeine and/or an affinity for eating blackcurrant jelly from a bowl without using a spoon.

I think I have a ready-made Halloween costume, at least. Although it would be in poor taste to use makeup to give myself a black eye and call myself a battered woman, given what my one coworker is going through. (At least he doesn't give her black eyes.) We're not allowed to dress up in costume at work, although HR insists that's the TSA's rule, not theirs. (They don't want people out of uniform coming through the security checkpoint.)

Reminds me a little of when a friend came to visit me, and like an idiot wore his Johnny the Homocidal Maniac costume through airport security. Huge boots? Leather trenchcoat? Buckles all down the legs of his pants? GREAT idea! (It helped immensely when, when they frisked him, he cracked up because "it tickled". They didn't think that was weird or threatening at all.)
But we're not pointing fingers at neopanda. He was very young then.


My chin is actually a bit sore, which is annoying given that I am somewhat of a mash-face-into-pillow sleeper. It was also irritating when Z went to kiss me, which is something he does seldom. I think I managed admirably well not to flinch.
I should have little business cards for the Queen City Rollergirls so I can hand them out instead of explaining why my face is black and blue.

I am trying to get a decent photo of the bruise to post to the rollergirls' website. We're beginning a gallery of them. This is a bruise Mia sustained in a fall some weeks ago-- she's the girl who knocked me down. http://www.queencityrollergirls.net/img/photos/fred.jpg She named that bruise "Fred". I think I'm going to name mine like the National Weather Service names hurricanes, so I won't have to recycle names for some time. So, mine's Alfonso.

Work today, work tomorrow, then two days off in recompense for the extra days I'm working these two weeks. It averages out. I'm so thoroughly not a fan of working Sundays, but, well... I'll live. Wednesday night there's a kickoff party for National Novel Writing Month's Buffalo chapter (are you signed up there, that_redhead?), and I'm sort of dithering over whether to try to attend that or the Rainbow Rink open skate. It may well be moot, given the flight schedules, but, well, I dunno.

And the novel? It's a disaster. I don't have an ending. I should know by now that I need an ending for these things before I start writing them. I have to come up with something. The plot is not cohering and the last thing I need is to launch off on another frantic writing binge when I don't know how the thing's ending. That's been my downfall for two complete novels now, and it's highly irritating. I want something salable, dammit, not yet another rambling too-long thing!
So I'm trying now to split the novel into three acts, and to impose a strict wordcount deadline on each of them. I am aiming to produce a manuscript that is complete at 70,000 words. No more. It needs to be a slim novel. I have to prove that I can write one.

Which means I need an ending. Augh!

little less than half a hour

I meant to go to bed like two hour ago. Well, I am in bed. But I was going to go to sleep. And I'm not asleep yet.

I made a six-plus-hour playlist. Good for me.

I still don't have a plot. I tried to separate the major events of this novel I'm trying to write this coming month, into three major acts. But I sort of got hung up on the fact that I really don't have a clue what happens in the end. I have a couple problems: the secondary character has to be from a different time or place than the first, and I just haven't managed to pin down where. I'm not sure how important it is.

I wish, at times like this, that i understood how other authors do it. What do I need to actually worry about, and what's just me being worried for the sake of appearances? Does it really matter? Will the reader actually manage to get it straight anyway?

I wish, I just wish, I had a better idea of where I fit in in the world, and i don't mean what my purpose is, I just wish I had a sense of perspective. Like, at all.

If I could get FTP access to my website I'd post y'all some songs. I can't, though, so, not now.

Oh, Blogger's broken: I had a good Airportbartender story, but it was all, "Oh there's a Javascript error" and wouldn't post it, for about three days. I left the tab open and kept coming back to it periodically, until Z sent me a link to a funny video or something and it crashed my browser and in a blink I lost about twenty open tabs, each of which had something I had been intending to address.

Tabbed browsing is both a blessing and a curse. More to the former, as i used to do the exact same thing in separate windows. Small mercies, i guess: I'd still lose everything when the operating system crashed, as it used to way back then.
I don't miss those days.

Ah, I'm too tired to get a jumpstart on NaNo. I've done it five (six?) goddamned times now, there's not really much suspense in whether I'll succeed or not, if I just do the same thing I've done in the past.