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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2cZgRBG:
good things:
posting chapter 7 gave me the impetus i needed to do a coherent almost-outline (i can’t outline for shit) of chapter 8 which, length permitting, will actually tie up the whole series, I can’t believe it. I mean, there may be some stuff that just gets “and they lived happily ever after’d!” summed-up, but at least I can do that. Or, “well, that wasn’t really okay but it has the potential to become so!” tied up, which is better than a cliffhanger, and my life has been a plague of cliffhangers. If that means I have space to write the fluffy sequels (and the one angst-fest-crazy sequel I really wanted to write), then good, but if I don’t, then I won’t get rotten tomatoes thrown at me for leaving things hanging.
Who knows how long it’ll take me, but. I got one of the somewhat-tricky action sequences written last night, AND noticed right away that I’d accidentally damseled Finn in it (for Reasons, it had to be Kes’s POV, and it’s often easiest to make the POV char the most active, so I’d given every one of the hero beats to Kes, and that would be fine except I went to all that trouble earlier to establish Finn as a total badass, and having Kes have to rescue him would kind of undermine that. So I managed to at least give one of the beats to Finn, and this is still an early draft so I can go back and revisit that. But the point of it is that Kes then gets to dad the fuck out of a deserving Finn, so I’m leaving that part in. (Crucial: dad not daddy. this isn’t a sex thing. i just think somebody really needs to pet Finn and hold his hand and tell him he’ll be okay and nobody’s going to leave him. Like, Poe needs that too, but he gets that. Nobody’s ever done that for Finn. Not while he was conscious anyway.)
I have to confront the fact that I’m coming to the end of this story and did not really get to spotlight Finn much, so. Maybe he needs a Finn-centric sequel, or at least a good fluffy reward-the-hero bit. Or maybe I have to hang my head and admit to not doing him justice. I maxed my stats in Poe’s Tragic Backstory and went off in a Kes direction with it, and that meant Finn didn’t really get his due.
and #2, I got the courage to mention to my coworker/supervisor that my raises from seven years of working here have all been obliterated by NYS’s raising the minimum wage, and he was horrified, and after I left, he called our boss, and talked to him, so I get a, perhaps token but existent, raise effective this past Monday. So it’s something at least. And I feel much better about my life for it. (Also, it means the boss is going to review everyone’s wages, because we’ve been effectively without a supervisor at this location for over a year and people haven’t been advocated-for in any kind of way, and there are probably a bunch of people in my boat and it sucks that the new kids are probably making more than old-timers in some cases.)
(It helped a lot that I was able to say, well, I’d planned to make sure I was here from Black Friday through Christmas, but since my sister can pay me more to make holiday wreaths than you’re paying me to be here and I’m broke as fuck after a half-time summer on minimum, well, pick which week of December you’d rather miss me, and he was like, oh.)
and bonus, #3: a not-good but hilarious thing: they’re remodeling the building we’re in at work, but instead of fixing the leaky roof or insulating the single-pane windows that don’t even have caulk around them or putting any insulation into the place whatsoever, they’re just building a fake second story in literal styrofoam on top of this building, so it looks new and bigger. It’s literal actual styrofoam, I have little bits of it all over me just from walking in the door while they were working on it.
This is modern construction. Buildings are built out of styrofoam. And the plan drawing made it look like there were windows in that second storey? They’re just divots. They’re probably going to fill them in with shiny dark plastic so it looks like windows. But they’re not windows, and they’re not even holes, they’re just recessed spaces in the Styrofoam, to look like the building is bigger than it is.
They haven’t even washed the 40 years of gunk off the facade of the first storey. They’re overtly just figuring nobody looks that close.
good things:
posting chapter 7 gave me the impetus i needed to do a coherent almost-outline (i can’t outline for shit) of chapter 8 which, length permitting, will actually tie up the whole series, I can’t believe it. I mean, there may be some stuff that just gets “and they lived happily ever after’d!” summed-up, but at least I can do that. Or, “well, that wasn’t really okay but it has the potential to become so!” tied up, which is better than a cliffhanger, and my life has been a plague of cliffhangers. If that means I have space to write the fluffy sequels (and the one angst-fest-crazy sequel I really wanted to write), then good, but if I don’t, then I won’t get rotten tomatoes thrown at me for leaving things hanging.
Who knows how long it’ll take me, but. I got one of the somewhat-tricky action sequences written last night, AND noticed right away that I’d accidentally damseled Finn in it (for Reasons, it had to be Kes’s POV, and it’s often easiest to make the POV char the most active, so I’d given every one of the hero beats to Kes, and that would be fine except I went to all that trouble earlier to establish Finn as a total badass, and having Kes have to rescue him would kind of undermine that. So I managed to at least give one of the beats to Finn, and this is still an early draft so I can go back and revisit that. But the point of it is that Kes then gets to dad the fuck out of a deserving Finn, so I’m leaving that part in. (Crucial: dad not daddy. this isn’t a sex thing. i just think somebody really needs to pet Finn and hold his hand and tell him he’ll be okay and nobody’s going to leave him. Like, Poe needs that too, but he gets that. Nobody’s ever done that for Finn. Not while he was conscious anyway.)
I have to confront the fact that I’m coming to the end of this story and did not really get to spotlight Finn much, so. Maybe he needs a Finn-centric sequel, or at least a good fluffy reward-the-hero bit. Or maybe I have to hang my head and admit to not doing him justice. I maxed my stats in Poe’s Tragic Backstory and went off in a Kes direction with it, and that meant Finn didn’t really get his due.
and #2, I got the courage to mention to my coworker/supervisor that my raises from seven years of working here have all been obliterated by NYS’s raising the minimum wage, and he was horrified, and after I left, he called our boss, and talked to him, so I get a, perhaps token but existent, raise effective this past Monday. So it’s something at least. And I feel much better about my life for it. (Also, it means the boss is going to review everyone’s wages, because we’ve been effectively without a supervisor at this location for over a year and people haven’t been advocated-for in any kind of way, and there are probably a bunch of people in my boat and it sucks that the new kids are probably making more than old-timers in some cases.)
(It helped a lot that I was able to say, well, I’d planned to make sure I was here from Black Friday through Christmas, but since my sister can pay me more to make holiday wreaths than you’re paying me to be here and I’m broke as fuck after a half-time summer on minimum, well, pick which week of December you’d rather miss me, and he was like, oh.)
and bonus, #3: a not-good but hilarious thing: they’re remodeling the building we’re in at work, but instead of fixing the leaky roof or insulating the single-pane windows that don’t even have caulk around them or putting any insulation into the place whatsoever, they’re just building a fake second story in literal styrofoam on top of this building, so it looks new and bigger. It’s literal actual styrofoam, I have little bits of it all over me just from walking in the door while they were working on it.
This is modern construction. Buildings are built out of styrofoam. And the plan drawing made it look like there were windows in that second storey? They’re just divots. They’re probably going to fill them in with shiny dark plastic so it looks like windows. But they’re not windows, and they’re not even holes, they’re just recessed spaces in the Styrofoam, to look like the building is bigger than it is.
They haven’t even washed the 40 years of gunk off the facade of the first storey. They’re overtly just figuring nobody looks that close.
