went to dinner at my parents’ with middle-little

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went to dinner at my parents’ with middle-little sister and we managed to have a CIVILIZED discussion about gun control, donald trump, hillary clinton, and several other things, in which my father participated. It was. It was unprecedented.

He did try to make the point that Trump wouldn’t be able to single-handedly actually dismantle the entire US political system on his own, and Mom interrupted him to point out to us that BY THE WAY HE’S NOT VOTING FOR TRUMP, and I was like, I’ll take it.

Also my father now owns the same model of smartphone I do, so I helped him configure it. He kept turning it off and I was like… you can just put it into sleep mode, that works too. He was extremely good at using it, which was startling given that he’s never used one before, but he’s actually very technically adept, he just doesn’t know the QWERTY keyboard because he comes from an era when men didn’t learn to type. But hunting and pecking is actually not really a disadvantage on a tiny mobile keyboard, and I taught him the screen rotation trick. 

He has yet to send a text from it, to us anyway. But we know he knows how to.

An installment of Where On Earth Did She Hear That Farm Baby Mysteries:the other day she went to a..

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An installment of Where On Earth Did She Hear That Farm Baby Mysteries:

the other day she went to a playground with Grandma. There was a raised platform with a roof over it in one corner. She insisted on standing on it, declaring, “This is the Medal of Armor!” When anyone else came by, she would extend her arms and exclaim, grandly, “Thank you for your service!”

We have not been able to figure out where this came from. 

jawnbaeyega: There’s something about the way

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jawnbaeyega:

There’s something about the way Finn said “That’s the only name they ever gave me” that breaks my heart. He sounded so resigned, so nonplussed, so matter of fact–as if Poe had asked the time, Finn had given it, and Poe seemed confused, to which Finn just shrugged and replied “that’s what the clock says.” He didn’t sound sad or particularly broken up about it and I realized it’s probably because he didn’t know what was stolen from him.  

Of course Finn knew what families were and that some people got to grow up with them. He understood what parents and siblings were. He knew enough of the concept of friendship to want it. But these were all things he’d never had and knew he’d never have. So, Finn pushed them from his mind. 

Since birth, Finn was told that he could never change his circumstances. So, what was the point of complaining, he reasoned. Why wallow? His hand had been dealt and so he worked to play his cards to the best of his ability. 

Because Finn isn’t self-involved. Finn doesn’t pity himself. Finn is selfless, almost to a fault.  

That is why it was never anything the First Order did to him that made Finn decide to leave. It was what the FO did to others: the teammates they told him to leave behind, the innocents they ordered him to kill, the teammates they led to slaughter. 

That is why every new experience and person is so precious to Finn. He’s discovering the life he never had–the person he wasn’t allowed to be. And he greets each new discovery, not with an understandable sadness borne of deprivation, but with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of exploration.  

A nickname? He’s always wanted one. Tries it on. Finds he likes it. 

A pilot. A friend? Gone too soon. Finn clings to the only remaining piece of him. 

A scavenger. A look. One he’s never seen before but is immediately determined not to lose. 

A reunion. He runs to it.  Embraces it. 

A righteous battle. Innocents to defend. He dares Death to come get it. 

When Finn awakens, he’ll find Rey, friendship, love, family, a future. All the things he thought he’d lost. Finn will embrace each new revelation the way Finn always does: not with the sadness of “this is what I missed,” but with the joy of “look at what I’ve found.” 

Oh. Not only did I completely miscount and i actually have seven chapters of Never Wrote A Letter...

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Oh. Not only did I completely miscount and i actually have seven chapters of Never Wrote A Letter (and did so from the beginning), I also think that in order to have a snowball’s chance of hell of updating on any kind of schedule I’m going to have to split 5 in half and move the climactic action sequence into 6, because I just have a bunch more setup that needs to happen. So uh. It was supposed to be 7, I erroneously said 6, and now I think it’ll be 8 chapters actually. But. Uh. We’ll see. 

Why am I so bad at organization? 

Kes Dameron suddenly appeared at Finn’s elbow. Finn hadn’t been able to get much of a read on the man, but he had done enough research to figure the guy was probably worth being a little bit afraid of. 

“You saw Poe,” Kes said.

“Yes,” Finn said, and felt his face get very slightly hot, remembering how mortified Poe had been when he’d realized Leia had such close tabs on his sexual activity. Finn understood that Poe was upset not because attachments were forbidden but because there was some kind of stratification of relationships, where it was embarrassing to disclose one’s sex life to people who occupied a different relationship niche. A father was definitely in the not-to-disclose segment, though Finn couldn’t grasp the subtleties of it yet. He just knew that he was wrong to be nervous that an officer might discover his personal attachments.

Kes read something in his expression, and his face softened. His expression had been almost always unrelentingly either grim or forbidding, but it softened sometimes, and it was clear that he was not normally a grim person. The lines on his face spoke much more to smiling than scowling.

Annie pre-preps crew lunch for tomorrow’s chicke

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Annie pre-preps crew lunch for tomorrow’s chicken processing, while Aaron makes crew lunch for today’s crew. This kitchen gets a workout! (at Laughing Earth)

howlnatural: the most fun thing about being a fic author

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howlnatural:

the most fun thing about being a fic author is when you know what’s supposed to happen but when you go to write it you realise that, for the event to be plausible, you need to add another 2k of development and establish like six extra things before you can even get to the scene you need to write, and by ‘most fun’ I mean fuck everything someone take this fucking story away from me I’m on strike

torrilin replied to your post “Oh. Not only did

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I am super happy to hear it’s going slow coz it grew on you.

I mean, I expected this level of grow, that’s normal, but when you add in that I miscounted, that makes this a whole lot longer. 

if I weren’t so tired my eyes were falling shut at 7:30 pm I would be confident of finishing by tomorrow evening even with a full day of chicken processing tomorrow (…ugh) but I am so tired, friends. I am. And the thing’s only 4500 words long, and I moved a big climactic event to the next chapter so this one could end on a suitable beat, and then I can’t figure out what else I could put in without wrecking the pacing. So. That’s annoying. Either the length will be way off (which is acceptable, I suppose) or the chapter will be late, and i don’t want to do that again. 

Because the main climax thing is what I’m going to have to 100% rewrite from scratch, and I just need a lot of time and attention to do that. And it’s a huge chunk that will take up more than the remaining length I’d want to allot to this chapter. 

Anyway. Even the few little bits I have in this chapter, I still need to finish scenes that are sort of stuck, so. 

I am so tired I’m just rambling. We’ll see what I can manage. I might do okay. Who knows. 

I intentionally underwrote the length on the thing becuase i knew it would grow. The rough draft versions of all these chapters have been like 6000ish words; I’ve added like 4k per chapter on this whole thing. But. This one was like 12000 words before I cut out the climactic scene and moved it, and growing. 

So we’ll see what I do. Where am I? What’s my name again? What were we talking about?