ishte, posts by tag: writing - LiveJournal

Oh my sweet Goddess! I think this thing is finally finished.  It's past bedtime an I don't have time to post it tonight. Expect it tomorrow. Holy cow that was hard to write. lol.  I knew exactly what was supposed to happen and in the right order too, but link all together really did not want to happen easily

(This is a manually crossposted entry from my Dreamworks account.  If you haven't found me there already, look for me under the same username.)

So... I scheduled a week of vacation because honestly I need an F-ing break. lol. But I expected to be finished with the spring reset before I went, and it's NOT DONE after a WHOLE MONTH. Why? because a) it's HUGE, and b) right after we started working on it 5 people were out with freaking COVID (or in a couple of cases a couple of people were out pretending they didn't have Covid and refusing to test to prove it), one of those 5 was my primary help with the reset. The other person helping had a mini-vacation for her birthday over the long weekend and then was so behind on her regular duties that she has never been able to get back to the reset she was supposed to be helping with.

( Collapse )

So YAY! Things!

This was way longer than I expected

So Chapter 18 - What If?  It's finally taking shape.  It's 4 scenes (really 3, but the first one has a shift in PoV and a small amount of napping, that I split into two scenes. 


I finished Scene 1 last night. (Just barely) It's a lot of conversation. lol. It's not really much of anything in the way of consequential conversation. I think I'm just trying to give a feel of the comfort these two have with each other when there are no outside mitigating factors to interfere with their interactions. The idea that they can poke fun at each other, laugh and joke in a very casual way appeals to me on many levels.  So that took severals days of kind of mapping it out, acting it out in my head to get a feel for it... Funny thing is, I found that once I could get myself settled to actually write it, It came along pretty easily.  So last night I finished it. Adjusted the passage of time, and figured out the lead in to scene two.

Tonight, I finished Scene 2.  That was supposed to be about a 10 minute scene, and I think it was. Ed gets a couple of minutes to spend in his head space by himself and mull over a couple of things that he already knew about his feelings, and also something he is just discovering, and maybe something Audey said to him earlier just sank in pretty thoroughly.  I kind of picture it like a bead of water sitting on top of some dry soil, it's surface tension as yet holding it together and keeping it sitting on the surface. That's the seed Audey planted, and Ed's brain is the soil.  So something crossed his mind, and the surface tension on that water broke and it sank into the soil.

So Scene 3 is mapped out... sketched.  But I haven't written much of it. The sketch has a few snatches of conversation.  It's intent is mostly to introduce Al's girlfriend, Molly.  Now... Al says Molly looks like a movie star. lol... and in my head, she has a certain hairstyle and look, and so the other night while allegedly writing in my head, I searched the web for someone with that hairstyle. When  finally started zeroing in on it, a girl with that exact style and curling in that exact way, I realized that a lot of the photos I was clipping looked like the same girl... and that not only her hairstyle resembled Molly's, but her face too.  so I dug a little deeper into the photo that had first caught my eye, and it turns out she WAS a movie star back in the 1920s. So  it turns out that Molly looks like Marion Davies did when she was Molly's age.  But I'm told by both of them that Molly's brows are styled more naturally, that she is a dark brunette (and Mx. Davies was often a blonde) and that she doesn't wear her lipstick quite that pointed. lol.


Scene 4 has been sketched out for a while. (really they have all been sketched out) and has been mostly written for a week or two. This is the scene with the most meat in it. lol. You'll see.  I just need to decide how exactly to square it off and finish it to my satisfaction. It's been a long time coming. It also has some implied tie backs to One Kiss: Goodbye, which My!Ed and My!Winry both agree happened, and Ed probably thinks that's why he's feeling so awkward now.

Now it's bedtime. Time to go to bed.

Oh. Sorry guys! lol. I'm not going to get it posted today as expected.  I have just wasted too much time looking at cool things like ceramic fire balls and now it's 23:25, and I'm NOT going to finish this in 35 minutes and post it.  I had the outline. The outline is done. It's already mapped into yWriter (which I also wasted a fair amount of time fiddling around with the last few days too, because it's an upgraded version that works a little different from what I'm used to, and certainly more to play with on yW7 than on yW2, which was what I was using earlier.  So I decided to get used to it by setting up a project for this story, with character charts and so on too. Sketched out the scenes, thought a little more about what Molly looks like.  I've got a good picture in my mind now.  I wish I could draw people. lol. Someone draw me a Molly and I'll draw you a house

Anyway, tomorrow is my day off, and I have intentionally planned very little. We're expecting snow anyway, and frankly, I'm still suffering from exhaustion. I have a bazillion loads of laundry to do, and I need to tape the winter window frame into the dining room window if I'm up to it. 

Otherwise, I'll be concentrating on Chasing the Trail - Chapter 18: What If...

So... I got this big monitor and now it's possible to watch stuff on one side and do stuff on the other.  So I was watching FMA 2003 Episode 38 a little while ago. The episode is mostly filler even to the alternate story that was told in 2003 to be honest. Only a few references of any importance occur. So in this episode Ed and Al arrive in some rando town after their vehicle breaks down, and the two of them get into a fight.  Eventually, towards the end of the episode at sundown, Ed goes looking for Al. Al is sitting down by the river just like he would do in Resembool when they were little kids.  Next to him are three small toys he has transmuted out of the riverbank clay.  1) a horse (initially shown to be fancy and detailed in full tack) 2) a simple touring style car of the time period.  3) (I assume this is the first one he made) looks to me like a poop emoji. Lol

Now I'm wondering if I ever noticed that before, and if not, why didn't I? and if I did, why didn't I remember it?

Well, I've mostly got my new computer set up. Of course I get to come down with some annoying bug this week and feel like crap all week... (Not CoViD-19... just stupid guts made super delicate and susceptible to the slightest little thing by a lengthy period of very high stress allowing me to get some stupid bug.  I'm not feeling well enough to go to work, but mostly not sick enough to stay in bed all day.  So in the interim of the time I don't feel to crappy to do ANYTHING at ALL, I sit here and work on setting up my computer or writing.

So... For the most part, the computer is set up the way I want it.  It's now been a matter of finally transferring data from different places.  Now my office computer Aka Silver Drake becomes the secondary computer.  So files from there are copied here. It never had all my files in the first place. That was done weeks ago, and the thumb drive used for that transfer was all moved onto the Vaio aka The Dragonette.

The Dragonette, I only moved a limited number of files to in the first place since I only intended to continue using it for writing, so the writing files of which were the most up to date are moved to the Dragonfly. The music files I found on the Dragonette are also moved to Dragonfly now, and I sorted them as well. So now the Vaio is finished.

Last I guess is going to be moving things that have remained on the Fire Drake computer (predecessor to the Silver Drake) which I never moved all of completely.  Mostly this is Photos, Music, Artwork, and Manga. lol... SO much that It's going to take several trips back and forth with the thumb drive.  Right now... Loading Manga, Writing I did not transfer in the first place, and my other eBooks.  Music is probably going to be the biggest. I'm 100% sure that the music I moved from the Vaio was minimal, because it's only what I found on my backup CD's and put on to listen to.  I mean, I have to wonder how much of The Crüxshadows I'm going to be able to listen to on Amazon Music! Lol And I have quite a lot of it. So the transfer goes on. The trick here is that the FireDrake (aptly named) Overheats EASILY, so I have to be careful to make sure it doesn't get overloaded while copying.  It's on the fan, and it's fairly chilly up here (I have a heated blankey. But I have to really watch what it's doing. It already went to sleep once on me.

Meanwhile, I am working on Chapter 18 - What If...  I set a soft deadline for January 15 and I intend to try to meet it. I decided to start using yWriter7 to work on this. I already use it when I'm working on Gaia's Song, but I had never really thought to use it for something more 'trivial'. lol.  But I think it's going to be helpful to stay organized too. 

I hope so, because I've spent a good part of my evening researching stuff. lol

Pro: I'm off on a Saturday for the first time in forever.
Con: I'm working on Sunday instead of Saturday because Sunday is PINK SUNDAY and I have to be there to run the event. Bleh.

I feel more or less unprepared (as usual) for Pink Sunday.  It usually happens earlier in the season, so I have both the sense of unpreparedness for my event, AND my feeling of unprepared to start the flurry "exit" activities to shift my department from holiday shopping back to normal shopping, AND preparing for Spring resets on every brand on the cosmetics wall in late January then STRAIGHT into Valentine's Day prep. Lol.

Technically it's not my job to do the resets, and now we also have a new position in our store, Inventory Specialist, but our IS is new to the job (but not as new to the store.) She and I are on the same page and same way of thinking on a LOT of things, but she's never done a coswall reset which is actually 13 resets at once plus 1 additional off the wall.  LOL. So I HOPE that my boss will let me be involved intimately with the coswall reset.  Almost always the individual resets that I don't at least supervise end up not being done correctly, sometimes with massive problems.  Like l'Oréal last year, which I had to basically redo from scratch it was such a mess, and 4 or 16 bays of internal barcodes were accidentally removed by a third person when the first person didn't communicate very well to the third person what she was actually supposed to be doing, which was NOT removing all the internal barcodes.  SO yeah... I hope it goes smoother with me and the IS and possibly a specific shift manager handling everything.  I'll have to add this into my notes to discuss with the Store Manager at our meeting next week. I think this is also her first spring coswall reset in this store, but I can't remember. She might have already been here, but if she was it was a matter of weeks.  Not to cast shade on the last manager, but I like this manager a lot better.  Mostly it's just that we see eye to eye on more stuff.  The previous manager was a bit of a controller (and CHEAP OMG, gods help us if we needed to order replacements for things. This manager is more likely to WANT us to be empowered come up with solutions and implement them ourselves.

Still working on Roy's house.  Still writing chapter 18 in my head with nothing on paper, but I'll probably start getting into the keyboard on it in the next few days. It's just been super busy at work, and SUPER busy on my day off.  Lawyer meeting scheduled to take 30 min took on HOUR and 30 min... Next item on my list was to call the gastro doctor to ask again about my stupid pill, and they were already closed by the time I walked out of the meeting. BLEH.

Oh yeah. I also cloned the pattern from my festive holiday vest (which is wearing out. Poor thing is threadbare) Expanded it an inch or two because I'm not shaped like that any more, and learned how to add a dart.  I bought cheap clearance fabric to make a mock-up to make sure I've got the dart and the expansion correct before I cut into my good fabric.  If it goes well though, one of the fabrics is a pretty nice green plaid, and the other is a white one white snowflake pattern. So if it works, I'll have another slightly less festive holiday waistcoat that could be for Yule, or St Patricks Day if I wanted it to be. We'll see.  Today all I did on it is mark the dart on the fabric from the pattern, and mark the seam in from the seam allowance. (I made a big seam allowance, so I can let it out in places it needs to be if it does.  I can always trim it when it's done.) I had some scraps big enough to cut a couple masks, so I sewed a couple of seams on them. I probably could have finished them, but I wasn't in the mood. I'm tired tonight and just want to sit on my ass.

Anyway that's my status report. lol.  How's your week been? Ready for Santa? 

No. I didn't. I'm a big fat liar. 

However, I'm in the process of drawing it for Chasing the Trail because I realized that now that Ed's more mobile, I need to understand more clearly how Roy's house works.  I still haven't got it figured out completely. I realized that the way I had it pictured when I first started writing it, did not match the way I initially drew it. AT ALL. So I started thinking about how it was shaped and how things fit together, and since Roy has said at least a couple of times that his house is actually connected to the building he works in, I have to work out how that works too.  Obviously, the house was at one time the house of some official or another. Now it's Roy's, but his house is a private residence that is somehow directly attached to an official building. So now I think it is attached, but it is not directly attached exactly.  Roy has a finished basement.  That's established in story, as he has some kind of workshop down there, and I think his house also has a garage under it.  So it must sit into a hill where part of the house is more underground than another part. That MORE underground part is where a long hallway runs completely below ground from the private home, to the office building attached to it.  I haven't sorted out what official would have used the house before.  I probably won't unless some other official mentions it in passing. It's not important to the story in any way anyway. (snicker).

Okay...  So anyway, (snicker) I have been working on the floor plan of his house for a couple of weeks in the scant spare time I have because HOLIDAYS YO! I do work retail after all.  I need to understand how the house works before I can get my head around the next chapter. I know what is going to happen. It's outlined in my head. I've  been writing this chapter in my own head for YEARS now.  I'm excited to finally be to this point.  I can't wait for Winry to say "Is that for me?" lol.  I just hope she actually says it!

The point here is: I built a house.  No... I'm lying. I didn't built it. I just took my first floor plan which is more or less complete now, and played the Sims 3 all day making the floor plan into a kind of stupid looking version of the house in my head.  However, I'll share it with you. I'll draw the house later on now that I am starting to understand it. I can't really draw for very long on the computer or do it for days in a row like I want to, or my shoulder will ache, so I have to pace myself. (Plus working retail during the holidays! lol) but since I did this thing. I'll share it with you all.  It's a big house, but probably not as big as it looks. It's bigger than Ed's house though for sure.  Probably twice as big.  I made some comparisons, and I'm drawing to the same scale. Ed's house has a two car garage on the  back half of which is converted to living space, but his basement is only under half the house I think. It only contains the mechanicals for his house and doesn't have any finishing. Also, Ed's house is a story and a half with no attic space at all. All the upstairs rooms are right under the roof and dormers.  Roy has two full stories plus a pretty big walk up attic.  Still trying to understand the upstairs and how/if the attic stairs are stacked.  The main stairs are stacked over the basement stairs, but I"m not sure if the attic stairs are stacked. or not. I'm not sure I want to loose the aesthetic of the stair rail in the wide upstairs hallway by stacking the attic stairs on top, but I know that architecturally speaking that's probably the best way to have them run. I'll look at it some more when I can.  In the mean time. Look at the house I built (not! Honestly I hardly ever actually play this game. I just use it to build houses. Also, I don't care for the dynamics of Sims 3 gameplay with the characters. Sims 2 was better for that.)

Roy's House

Thanks for reading my ramble. Oh yeah. the front fences are incomplete because I was being petty about there not being any gates wide enough for a driveway or even the wide walkway that would work if I decided to actually USE the house in actual game play, so I just left big gaps.  I also wasn't able to capture the concept of the garage being under the house on the low end of the yard because DERP I chose a flat lot! lol  But I made the driveway out of MARBLE. LOLOL.  It's probably not really made of marble.

I'm just stopping by here.  Honestly, I feel like hardly any of my friends are using livejournal any more. Photobucket totally destroyed all my beautiful themes that I worked so hard on.  It's been so long that I don't really remember how to make them again and I don't want to waste time making new ones... or learning how to adapt my old ones... OR taking the time to find a new place to serve the images from.  So I'm back to boring default layouts.  At some point I did apparently move my cute little cloud mood icons over to LiveJournal Proper.

So I'd love if anyone is still here, to get a comment so I know you're still around. I know there seemed to be a mass migration to a basically duplicated service, but I don't remember what it was called, and since I haven't been LiveJournaling with any regularity, I don't know if it's still that active either.  FxcxBook has pretty much ruined everything.  I hate it so much, but but that's how I stay in touch with family and friends so....

Since I've been writing again, having finally figured out WHY I haven't been writing, I've made some changes to my setup. No longer using my office for writing.  It's not comfortable. It's fine for stuff I need an office for, but I needed my swing arm and couch setup back. So I've been writing a lot more recently. Chasing the Trail FMA fanfiction has two new chapters and a third underway. I've been working on Gaia's Song some too.

October this year was extremely unkind to me, so I'm still in recovery from that.  The stress got me pretty sick for a while, but Docs and meds seem to have me on the right track for recovery from that, and my stress level has started to decrease now that I'm starting to feel better physically.  It kind of sucks when you're sick because you're so stressed out but being sick is the thing that has put you over the top of your stress tolerance.

Anyway, I'll leave it there. Give me a shout out and i'll try to check back and see how things are going.

PS if you have a photo sharing site you use to serve pictures, let me know what you're using and I'll check it out.  I told Photobucket to kiss my ass.  I took everything off of it and uploaded one 'artwork' that basically said "Goodbye Photobucket! You suck now" lol