Stuff

So I said in my last blog entry that everyone else seemed to be doing well, even though I wasn't ... and then I come back and see "Blocked!" and "Overwhelmed!" and "Something in the Air (I can't write)" ... and I'm thinking: NOOOOOOO!!!!!111!1!!11! I don't wanna be contagious! o.O

Okay, I guess upon thinking it over more, when I said "everyone" before, what I meant was Robert. He has put aside his Mariner trilogy in favor of a "throwaway side project" ... which I believe he mentioned in his last blog entry. Well...

6 days into it, he's managed to crank out 33,000 words per day every day and is approaching 200k words.

33,000 words per day. For 6 days. And he's not done yet.

I'm lucky if I can make 33,000 (fiction) words in a month. (I would say "year" but then there's my two Nano Winner certificates staring at me from the wall, so that would be untrue.) I'll just take comfort in knowing that he's been doing this for 4 more decades than I have, and that maybe when I'm his age (20 years from now), I'll be able to do that too. But good lord. :(

On the bright side though, my cable went out last night. This wouldn't normally be bright, but for me it was. It meant no Internet, and it cut me off from my Diablo 2 addiction. I decided to take it as a sign that maybe I should write something.

I'm 726 words into the What is it to be Human project. :) It came out pretty good, too, a lot better than my other intros, though it might also be confusing to people who haven't read the game. I sort of jumped right in where the last thread ended for Aaron, with Aniqa leaving the bookstore. My hunter guy, Craig, then picked up with that - Aniqa leaves in a huff and goes down the street, has an infodumpy conversation with her lackey about what had just happened in the bookstore, and now Craig has taken aim with his sniper rifle and is about to shoot her.

And that's where things are now. This would be the point where someone comes along and interrupts, and I haven't decided whether that should be Rumen or Hernando. Probably Rumen, actually. In the game, Hernando is at this point doing something else with Aaron and would be too busy to go gallivanting around town. And much as I had intended to depart from the game plots, I find that I can't. How it's written in the game is how it has happened, and I can only go forward from that without changing anything.

Rumen, however, isn't actually doing anything in the game right now. With Damisa gone, and no signs of ever coming back, he's just kind of wandering around aimlessly.

Speaking of the game. It's come back to life. Suddenly the other two people in it are playing again, exchanging posts daily. Neither of my characters are active at the moment (Aaron is in bed, and Rumen is wandering aimlessly), but I'm reading along to their stuff and enjoying the plot twists coming out of it. There are very few games where I actively want to read along to the threads where I'm not involved, and at this point WIITBH is the only one that I read in detail, without skimming. (I make a lousy lurker of other people's games for this reason.)

So now I'm trying to think of people to coerce into joining the game, and see if we can make the thing rise from the ashes. I'll be by to nudge Robert back into it too, just as soon as his life is settled down again in a couple months or so. ;)

The other big thing on my mind right now is a lengthy, detailed conversation with a conservative Christian woman I've known since high school. I'm in the process of outing myself to her. So far we're in the middle of Gender Dysphoria 101 and how it's a birth defect and not a choice. She's mostly in the "but you are too a girl! for reasons XYZ!" phase and well ... I guess I'm going to get lots of detailed practice in coming up with good responses to all of that. Which is good, even though it's also painful, because eventually I need to have this conversation with my brother again. I take comfort in having watched way more extreme FTMs meet with the exact same thing and knowing that if they can still get accused of being girls even while they're practically neanderthals, I'm definitely not alone. It's easier to not take it personally that way.

And that's where I am at the moment. Hope all of your blocks dissolve soon and the words begin to flow! :)