The Thessaliad Redux

Happy Christmas Eve to y'all!

So last night, I posted a bit of quasi-seasonal DA fic and mentioned at the bottom of the entry that I needed an AO3 account. I went to sign up for the beta and it told me that I could probably have an account in early January.

But then mitchy, probably in an attempt to hide from my DA fandom (which is entirely her fault, lest we forget *g*), sent me an invite bare hours later.

And then this afternoon (morning for her), ilyena_sylph sent me an invite too! My friends are awesome!

All this to say that now I have an AO3 account! My Christmas Eve is going to be spent archiving some of my longer fics, and maybe compiling some of my headcanon ficlets into single vignette stories, and possibly writing more and finishing old projects and...

Crap. CRAP. I somehow went back to fanfic. DAMNIT, DA FANDOM, STOP BEING AWESOME.

Oh well. At least it's not FF.net.

So I've been quiet for awhile, beyond the occasional rant. It's probably about time to rant about work, and why I need a new job, like, yesterday.

My co-admin was supposed to be leaving for greener pastures in September; something about having a job offer for something more in his skill set with a delayed start date. September came and went ... and there he was, still. Something about how he suddenly didn't have a start date anymore, but mentioned something November. Then January. It seems that the plan is that he's going to stick around until such time as they give him a date. Which, given how much they keep pushing it back, is going to be about half past never.

Senior management has always had a view to turning this particular admin job into a one-secretary operation. That secretary was supposed to be me, but since I'm still sort of in this 'float secretary' twilight zone and he's the 'official' secretary, and he's sticking around ... well, there have been reshuffles. I still have a job, but it is killing me by inches. See, I've been moved into a new department and the person whose long-term sick leave I'm covering for the moment left a complete unholy mess. I keep getting phone calls about appointments that should have been made months ago but weren't, letters that should have been typed but haven't been (the backlog went back to late August, pity's sake; I've spent the week whittling it down to mid-October and we might - might be into November by day's end), and messages that should have been passed on but clearly weren't, since nothing ever got done and the patient heard nothing back. So I get yelled at by patients a lot, particularly since IT has ballsed up my system access with the move and I can't actually make the appointments, and Central Bookings is staffed by baboons.

And then there are the people I share my current office space with. Look, I don't mind office chatter; I never have. Well, not usually. But when it's loud and I'm trying to type a clinic letter for a registrar who won't speak above a Scottish-accented mutter and trying to puzzle out medical terminology out of the mush over the noise, it doesn't help. Neither does the blaring of Heart 106.2 in the background; I like background music but I think one of the girls in the office is partly deaf, because it's right by her ear and she still cranks it. Plus I have discovered over the last week that these women are the sort who are perfectly happy to have Demi's divorce on the front page of the paper and yet bitch about celebrity culture. I can't help listening because it is too damn loud, and it all makes me want to throttle people.

(Also, if you want the window that is right by my left arm open, ask me if I mind before you do it. Do not lean over me, open the window and wander off. Particularly not when I told you just yesterday that sitting in a blast of cold air knots my muscles to the point of agony. ARGH.)

I've been in early and out late with minimal lunch for the last week. This looks set to continue in future. I need OUT. OUUUUUUUT.

But, yes, as mitchy points out, there are a few little cheery things, like late lunch at Belgos tomorrow. (Though I thought we were doing dinner? Eh, food and good company, and I can still lie in until at least midday.) Also slaughtering things in DA2; I'm doing the Rogue playthrough again because it's fun, in a "Waitaminit; the battle just started, where did all the enemies go? Oh, they're corpses on the floor already" sort of way. It's also at least in part research; I have this plot nug and it's turning into the longest fanfic I've written in over ten years and the longest DA fic I've written ... well, ever. It's turning into chapters and that is kind of scary and I don't really know about showing it to anyone, ever but DAMNIT, I AM GOING TO TRACK DOWN THAT UNHOLY PLOT NUG AND I WILL SLAY IT LIKE IT WAS AN ARCHDEMON!

*ahem* Right. Back to work. But fuck it, sometimes I just need a damn break and I can't hear my current clinic tape over my desk-neighbour singing along with the atrocious pop on the radio anyway. When this song is over, I can probably actually get shit done...

I'm on Tumblr now. Damn you, fay. DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL.

*ahem* Yeah, so I'm Thessalian on there, same as everywhere else. Follow if you wanna.

Beyond that ... lurgified. So very lurgified. Mostly this manifests in exhaustion but I refuse to sleep more than I already have because I have no desire to screw over my sleeping patterns more than they are usually. I ... kind of broke this resolution earlier when I decided to lie down with a book and some Criminal Minds as background noise and woke up three hours later with "Men at Arms" pressing my glasses into my face. Which is why I'm up and at the computer now; at least this way I'm unlikely to find myself wide awake at 1am because I slept through the entire damn day.

Not sure what to do with myself at the moment, though. Mostly now I'm just dicking around on Tumblr and Livejournal while hoping my lunch stays down. Though I find myself writing fanfic again - random acts of DA prompt filling right now, but I have to admit that getting even this peripherally involved in a fandom again is unnerving. After the whole Daria fandom BNF fiasco, I don't really want to get into that mess again. Then again, this seems a lot different, particularly in terms of community structure, so maybe I can actually just write and have a good time in this one. That'd be kind of nice. Plus it's good to unlimber the writing muscles again, as it were; it's been too long, what with one thing and another.

Blegh. If this sick feeling doesn't go away by MCM this weekend, I'm going to be intensely pissed off. Just saying. Though with the state of my health lately, I sometimes really do feel, in the words of Bill Hicks, like a virus with shoes. Or fuzzy slippers just now, but same basic thing.

News on the fic-plagiarism is that the fic is no longer up. Dunno if that was before or after the email the guy who adapted the fics to prose format sent to the FF.net abuse team, because I did flag up in the reviews that, actually, FF.net has a TOS that looks very unfavourably on that kind of thing. To be honest, don't really mind. It's down, and I'm sure there's some blog somewhere in which the perpetrator of this is wailing about the unfairness of it all. But seriously, that was just ... cheap. But it's over now, with minimal drama, and I'm hardly going to dwell on it. Someone learned not to go around stealing things where people might notice. All's well.

Job news is better. The consultant wants to meet me tomorrow morning, half past nine. This is an 'old-fashioned consultant', and I know exactly what that means, so I think I'll handle the meeting okay. Must also mean that my references cleared okay. Not that I didn't expect them to, but you honestly never know with some of the bullshit I've had to deal with in previous jobs. So tomorrow is Moment of Truth. I feel like a contestant on one of those Pop Idol programmes or that thing mitchy watches where these girls are competing in a talent search for the chance to play Dorothy on the West End stage. Just hope this 'old-fashioned consultant' isn't a Simon Cowell clone.

In other writing news, I finally slogged through that other chapter of Birth Rites that was giving me some trouble. Chapter 22 is going a lot more smoothly, thanks. It's an interesting perspective to write from, with minimal to no dialogue for a good while, but it's a lot easier than the last couple of bits. Therein lies the problem of building to a climax of the kind I ended up with - you end up having to do the thing justice and then being convinced that you aren't and ... gah. I'll be glad when this one's done. Then I can let it sit for a month (while noodling around with Dragon Age fanfic or something to keep my hand in) and then read it with a marginally less biased viewpoint. And when I say 'biased viewpoint', take it to mean 'viewpoint in which I think the entire thing is a waste of hard drive space'. Heh.

Oh, and edit to add: the other thing I forgot was that there's a new bit of DLC out for Dragon Age today. No, I'm not moaning about being unable to afford it. Actually, I don't even want it. Look, the whole thing's called "The Darkspawn Chronicles", and while I get that sometimes it's interesting to play from the villains' point of view, it helps when the villains in question aren't a mostly mindless horde single-mindedly bent on killing everything in its path. That shit'd fly with Awakening, where it'd probably be really interesting to play the Architect, but Origins? Playing as the darkspawn? That's mindless gore-fest and I'm actually really disappointed. (Plus they seem to have taken no note of what courses of action Alistair disapproves of throughout the game because ... dude, I get wanting werewolves and golems running around, but ... meh?)

So it's with a tiny bit of schadenfreude that I note people in the fan communities saying that actually, it's got crash issues whenever the battles get too big, and given that we're talking about the final battle here...

A fanfic

Well. Fanfic. Yes. Um. *subtly tries to stuff her faded, dusty BNF banner under the sofa*

Okay, well, some of you know all too well that I used to do the fandom thing big time. Between 1999 and ... I dunno, 2003, I was heavily active in Daria fandom. I wrote fic. Lots and lots of it. I still get fanmail from time to time (I have no idea why). In the end, my time in fandom brought me some wonderful friends and a great deal of practice writing dialogue but so much grief and aggro that I more or less backed all the way out. I mean, I still kept the circle of friends (*waves at them*) but I haven't written a piece of fic in years.

However, my favourite to write was "Battle Royale: Beyond Blunderdome". No, I'm not going to link to it. If you're on LJ, or know where my LJ is, there's a link to Fan Fiction by Canadibrit and you can see all my semi-secret fanfic shame. Otherwise, take it as read that it's a retelling of the Japanese film "Battle Royale" with the Daria cast playing the main characters. "Battle Royale" is a gruesome, horrifying sort of film whose plot boils down to "In an attempt to cull the unruly child population, the government implements a programme where entire classes of students are dumped on an island, given supplies and a weapon, and the following set of orders: kill or be killed. Basically, they are set to killing each other off until only one is left alive. And oh yeah - it's televised".

That one was a challenge. It involved a lot of research on the book and film, a little bit of tweaking to ensure a wider range of Daria character involvement, and a few twists on some old fandom memes. Also the ability to render some serious brutality in prose format. Mostly I wrote in script format before that, and never got quite that graphic (leaving aside some fairly impressive shootings in "Tour of Duty"), so ... seriously, challenge a-go-go.

I've not really thought much about fanfic since leaving Daria fandom. I've read a few bits and pieces, but nothing much, and certainly haven't written any. So I can't be as talkative about this day's bits as I'd like. But you never know - with my DAO fandom growing the way it is, and the fact that I'm strongly considering starting all over again with my Elven Mage now that I actually know more about playing the game and might not die stupidly quite so much while seeking out the best and funniest cutscenes, I might end up with something story-like out of it. For now, though, my Daria fanfic stands collecting dust as testament to the fact that yeah, I wrote fanfic too.