autobotscoutriella

Things I meant to write this weekend: a lengthy list of OC-focused drabbles. The unnamed Cybertronian crab creature Cybertronian-fauna post. A chapter for a WIP that's long-overdue for an update.

Things I wrote this weekend: A three-line list of job-switching pros and cons.

Oddly enough, I had TONS of motivation while at work. No clue where it went.

So as I was working on some close reading for my sunshine_challenge wishlist-fulfilling offer, I realized that though it feels like I've been here forever, I only made this journal after I graduated college. And as a result of that, nobody here had the opportunity to witness the greatest worst pun I inflicted on the academic world, which originated in the same class where I learned to close-read. Today I intend to fix that, because what's the point of puns if no one else ever hears them?

One of the topics we covered for that class was the memento mori as a literary device, in which the author includes a symbolic representation of some kind of death (a skull, a ruined city, and so on) as a way to draw either the characters' or the reader's attention to the concept of mortality. It showed up in several of the short stories we were assigned to read and was something we (students) were encouraged to use as part of our essays, so it came up a lot.

Unfortunately, the professor for that class (who is a delight and I'll never forget him) tended to pronounce mori as more-ay, and once I got that image stuck in my head, I couldn't get it out until I made the thing and showed it to my professor. He laughed hysterically and pronounced it "delightfully insane".

May I present...



...The Memento Moray.

Because he's a moray eel. And he's a bulletin board for mementos. And it sounds like memento mori...



(This is why I will never be able to make a living on Etsy.)

And now that I've inflicted that on all of Dreamwidth, we return you to your normal irregular fic-posting cycle. Close-reading will resume in the morning, so if you haven't seen yours yet, don't worry, it's coming! Edit: please pardon the HTML fuck-up, it's very late.

There's nothing quite like being woken up by a combination of an excited cat and a stranded firefly to prompt the urge to write, apparently.

Brain, please, it's midnight, I have work in the morning, now is NOT a good time to fix that One Plot Hole.

(No fireflies were harmed--it was carefully caught and removed outside. Cat was compensated for the loss of her new glowy toy with some catnip leaves.)

-pops head out from under a pile of WIPs and work stuff-

So in addition to being the Library Finder (the person who can find any item on the shelves, no matter how out of place it is), I'm now the Designated Mammal Remover due to apparently being the only person on my weekend rotation who's comfortable catching and removing a mouse from under the computer desk. I wonder if I can put that on my resume...

And in other animal news, a pair of ducks has moved into the apartment swimming pool (which has been closed for rain), so I'm hoping to have some local ducklings eventually. Not so good for my summer swimming routine, but it was adorable last year and I was hoping they'd come back.

That's about it on the news front, in case anyone was curious.

-vanishes back under a pile of WIPs and work stuff-

I was so close to getting a chapter and a short fic done tonight...and then I picked up a book.

Whoops.

On the bright side, "Trail of Lightning" by Rebecca Roanhorse is really, really, really good, and I'm pretty sure I'll be buying both it and the sequel even though I told myself no more book purchases until I finish the stack I have checked out from the library.

So when I was in middle school, I was obsessed with both oven-bake clay crafts and the Redwall books. I also owned one of the giant Animal encyclopedias that had pretty much every species you could possibly imagine, with pictures. The result of this combination was that I spent hours looking up every species mentioned in the books (the Eurasian versions, not the American ones! I had standards) and carefully sculpting tiny one- to two-inch clay figures based on my favorite characters. At one point, I probably had thirty or so of them; they weren't particularly detailed, but I knew who they were supposed to be and built them a cardboard abbey to live in.

I thought they were all pulverized or lost when I moved out, but GUESS WHAT I JUST FOUND.

I've gotta figure out how to post pictures here, because these things are hilarious. (And adorable, in a very Uncanny Valley sort of way. I...am not much of a sculptor.)

I am of the not-at-all-scientific opinion that the cold weather has frozen my brain. Writing is HARD when all I want to do is curl up in blankets and sleep.

I've been living in the Midwest my whole life, you'd think I'd have figured out this whole icepocalypse thing by now, but apparently I revert to Must Hibernate when it happens.

I've never actually done a fandom challenge before, just lurked in the background and watched other people do it, but this looks fun, so I'll be attempting this over the next couple weeks! (I should...probably make an icon for it, tbh. I have little to no experience making icons, so if anybody knows where I might be able to get an Official Snowflake Icon made by somebody with Icon Experience, please let me know! I'm still a bit iffy on the Icon Etiquette around here, so I don't want to just take any without permission.)

(Wow, that was a lot of Unnecessary Capitalization.)

ANYWAY. Snowflake challenge, coming soon to a journal near you!