stuff and things
Jun. 19th, 2016 09:57 amSo, I've spent the last week writing my thesis (and going to see apartments).
Our work week is Sunday-Thursday, as many of you are no doubt aware, well Sunday was a holiday and I took another 4 days at my own expense to write my thesis draft. It's technically due at the end of June, but I have health stuff and moving at the end of the month so, I wanted to try and get the bulk of it done early.
I'm glad to say it was a massive success - I wrote non-stop Sunday through Friday, and at the end I emerged with a 42 page draft. I still need to go over it and edit stuff, and make sentences not be 9 lines long and make sure everything adds up as I hoped it would, but. This draft is very close to done! I will send it to my professor nearly 2 weeks early!
It was very weird to be in that state of just hanging out at home with no obligations other than studying, for days. I really haven't experienced it since undergrad (we have a month of "exam vacation" at the end of each semester that works precisely like this) and I was very, very pleased to note that I did actually manage to get up and write every day, morning to night, and not waste a single day. Also that I was able to get the draft done without completely losing myself, because I did take reasonable breaks for food and watching shows and taking walks, keeping in mind that I still had a very difficult few weeks ahead.
I would have actually gotten 100% of the work done, editing included, if I didn't waste 2 evenings on going to see apartments. I wish it had come to something, but they were both viewings of desperation - nearly out of my price range, in an area with no parking, and then also turned out to be terrible for other reasons when I got there. I'm glad I went to see them for my peace of mind, but they definitely cost me the ability to get this draft DONE before I had to go back to work.
On Friday I got up, wrote until noon, and then got a lift to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shedonit's in the evening, and spent like 6 hours eating, drinking booze and walking by the sea. It was fantastic. For those not on twitter, I've made an old school collage of pics, lol.
( click for pic )
That superman cup is in there because it contained some truly excellent sauvignon blanc, which I sipped as I did my nails with fancy geometric glitter.
I was debating whether to push myself and edit the thesis on Saturday, but again I was afraid of pushing myself too hard in the middle of a hard month, and then when I woke up on Saturday I found out a poem of mine has been accepted for publication (more on that in a bit) and decided to take that as a sign that I should just take a day to relax and recharge before the work week. So, I went to the beach in the evening, got super annoyed by my parents for the second weekend in a row, and basically collapsed in bed by the evening.
And now here I am, back at work. God it was basically impossible to scrape myself out of bed this morning. I mean I working all of last week, but it was working from home, and getting myself to wake up and leave the house within 30 minutes of becoming conscious was torture.
Anyway, during my brain breaks when thesis writing, I read 85% of this 250k "Dragon Age: Inquisition" fic: Stuck on the Puzzle.
Iron Bull/Cullen Rutherford, explicit.
I have no idea what Dragon Age: Inquisition is (aside from it being a computer game) (the last computer game I played that wasn't Neko Atsume was Sims when I was 18), and I've never heard about the Iron Bull or Cullen, but this fic has been extremely, extremely fun nonetheless. Most of it is kink negotiation and porn, which, thank the good lord for 250k of that shit dropping in my lap during thesis week, and the rest (the plot, the worldbuilding, etc) I'm happy to say my years of reading fantasy made navigating that stuff extremely easy. So, a strongly recommended read.
I also, due to lack of options, watched the second (and part of the third) season of Peaky Blinders, BBC's answer to Boardwalk Empire. I have to give them credit that Peaky Blinders is still the same mediocre writing 3 seasons in, instead of devolving into the utter mess that Boardwalk Empire did.
Anyway, Peaky Blinders' second season has Tom Hardy playing the head of a Jewish gang in London in the 1920s, which was enjoyable. As usual they didn't do much with him, but they also portrayed him a way free from fail, and I got to see Tom Hardy wearing some distant relative of a haredi top hat and tzitziot and run a Jewish bakery that was in fact a cover for booze and gambling. (This is a show about gangsters, so all the characters have some kind of "legit" business that's a cover for other things.) Also, Cillian Murphy, even on vacation from the kind of demanding, grueling acting he was famous for in his youth, is still mesmerizing to watch, so that carried me through a lot of the boredom and misogyny.
Aside from that I recently binged on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a cute musical show based on romcom tropes, a kind of reversal where a story is told from the perspective of the standard villain. I enjoyed the music a lot, though I feel like I'm not invested enough in romcom tropes to enjoy this show fully, as I'm sure many other people will (I mean, one of the characters is literally a woman who's using romcom tropes as her escape from her dreary marriage and is invested in seeing them play out in real life). But I'm glad Rachel Bloom, the creator and star, got her own show, and I'm glad she gets to sing and act and be funny in it.
However, plot and characters aside, the musical numbers on this show are usually innovative, catchy and fantastic. My favorite ones are, ironically, with the main character's boss, lol.
This is probably the part I laughed hardest at in the entire show, where this character decides to have a few people over:
And this is my second favorite, his song about realizing he's bisexual:
And here's a song that's a bit more typical of the show, where the main character agrees to go on a date with a dude she's not currently in love with:
*
Anyway, on a final note (I'm still awkward about stuff like this, what can I say), on Saturday I woke up to the news that Strange Horizons wants to publish a poem I submitted, for their July special. I have... many many feelings about this. Mostly it's that I've been writing poetry for about as long as I've been writing prose, but as an adult I've written it rarely, usually as a response to states of intense emotional turbulence (writing poetry helps me cope) and I've never wanted to be a poet, for a whole bunch of reasons, one of them being that I find poetry a really stress-free, just-for-me pursuit and it's nice to have something creative that I am emphatically not trying to make money from.
Like, I can't tell you what a privilege it is, actually, to be able to spend time and effort on something you don't plan on selling. Every hobby I've ever had I've always been encouraged to monetize, and most of them I have. One of the reasons I don't let myself spend time on drawing or painting anymore is because I feel like I'll never get good enough to sell my work so it feels like an indulgence I can't afford.
Which is why I don't have a directory for my poems. I write them when I need to, when writing helps me deal with life and the inside of my head, and then I forget about them. And that's an enormous indulgence, for me, and one I've greatly enjoyed. I don't have to agonize about it being good enough, I don't have to satisfy any outside standard, they're just for me.
But I decided to send this poem in because a few things happened simultaneously: I was feeling like shit about my writing career (a fucking year of editing a novella, my fucking god), I'd just found out I was losing my apartment YET AGAIN for like THE FOURTH YEAR IN A ROW, I was physically in pain and unable to sit in an office chair, and Strange Horizons announced a July special issue.
I debated for a long time what I could send them - just to make myself feel better, feel productive. I could pitch a review, or an article, but I didn't have any good ideas. I could try to write a story, but that would take so much time and effort, and the chances were so slim, I thought I couldn't handle a rejection right then. So I decided to write a poem. I had a lot of feelings, and little ability to cope, and the poem helped. It wasn't the most original thing, but it was words on a page, and it kind of had a plot, and I liked it.
So I sent it in. The first poem I've ever submitted anywhere. The first I've shown a living soul since I was 16.
And... it got accepted. It got accepted. To a publication that pays money for poetry. That has a poetry department with several editors. For a special issue that was heavily advertised.
I don't want to be a poet. I don't even know how to list this thing in my bibliography when it comes out. I have no interest in turning poetry, my one little indulgence, into something that has to sell.
But... it got accepted. I've been writing poetry since grade school, and I've never gotten any indication from the world as to its quality, and this isn't some kind of objective standard either, but... it's a publication, that pays money, and wants my poem.
That's... I'm still pretty shocked.
Our work week is Sunday-Thursday, as many of you are no doubt aware, well Sunday was a holiday and I took another 4 days at my own expense to write my thesis draft. It's technically due at the end of June, but I have health stuff and moving at the end of the month so, I wanted to try and get the bulk of it done early.
I'm glad to say it was a massive success - I wrote non-stop Sunday through Friday, and at the end I emerged with a 42 page draft. I still need to go over it and edit stuff, and make sentences not be 9 lines long and make sure everything adds up as I hoped it would, but. This draft is very close to done! I will send it to my professor nearly 2 weeks early!
It was very weird to be in that state of just hanging out at home with no obligations other than studying, for days. I really haven't experienced it since undergrad (we have a month of "exam vacation" at the end of each semester that works precisely like this) and I was very, very pleased to note that I did actually manage to get up and write every day, morning to night, and not waste a single day. Also that I was able to get the draft done without completely losing myself, because I did take reasonable breaks for food and watching shows and taking walks, keeping in mind that I still had a very difficult few weeks ahead.
I would have actually gotten 100% of the work done, editing included, if I didn't waste 2 evenings on going to see apartments. I wish it had come to something, but they were both viewings of desperation - nearly out of my price range, in an area with no parking, and then also turned out to be terrible for other reasons when I got there. I'm glad I went to see them for my peace of mind, but they definitely cost me the ability to get this draft DONE before I had to go back to work.
On Friday I got up, wrote until noon, and then got a lift to
shedonit's in the evening, and spent like 6 hours eating, drinking booze and walking by the sea. It was fantastic. For those not on twitter, I've made an old school collage of pics, lol. ( click for pic )
That superman cup is in there because it contained some truly excellent sauvignon blanc, which I sipped as I did my nails with fancy geometric glitter.
I was debating whether to push myself and edit the thesis on Saturday, but again I was afraid of pushing myself too hard in the middle of a hard month, and then when I woke up on Saturday I found out a poem of mine has been accepted for publication (more on that in a bit) and decided to take that as a sign that I should just take a day to relax and recharge before the work week. So, I went to the beach in the evening, got super annoyed by my parents for the second weekend in a row, and basically collapsed in bed by the evening.
And now here I am, back at work. God it was basically impossible to scrape myself out of bed this morning. I mean I working all of last week, but it was working from home, and getting myself to wake up and leave the house within 30 minutes of becoming conscious was torture.
Anyway, during my brain breaks when thesis writing, I read 85% of this 250k "Dragon Age: Inquisition" fic: Stuck on the Puzzle.
Iron Bull/Cullen Rutherford, explicit.
I have no idea what Dragon Age: Inquisition is (aside from it being a computer game) (the last computer game I played that wasn't Neko Atsume was Sims when I was 18), and I've never heard about the Iron Bull or Cullen, but this fic has been extremely, extremely fun nonetheless. Most of it is kink negotiation and porn, which, thank the good lord for 250k of that shit dropping in my lap during thesis week, and the rest (the plot, the worldbuilding, etc) I'm happy to say my years of reading fantasy made navigating that stuff extremely easy. So, a strongly recommended read.
I also, due to lack of options, watched the second (and part of the third) season of Peaky Blinders, BBC's answer to Boardwalk Empire. I have to give them credit that Peaky Blinders is still the same mediocre writing 3 seasons in, instead of devolving into the utter mess that Boardwalk Empire did.
Anyway, Peaky Blinders' second season has Tom Hardy playing the head of a Jewish gang in London in the 1920s, which was enjoyable. As usual they didn't do much with him, but they also portrayed him a way free from fail, and I got to see Tom Hardy wearing some distant relative of a haredi top hat and tzitziot and run a Jewish bakery that was in fact a cover for booze and gambling. (This is a show about gangsters, so all the characters have some kind of "legit" business that's a cover for other things.) Also, Cillian Murphy, even on vacation from the kind of demanding, grueling acting he was famous for in his youth, is still mesmerizing to watch, so that carried me through a lot of the boredom and misogyny.
Aside from that I recently binged on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a cute musical show based on romcom tropes, a kind of reversal where a story is told from the perspective of the standard villain. I enjoyed the music a lot, though I feel like I'm not invested enough in romcom tropes to enjoy this show fully, as I'm sure many other people will (I mean, one of the characters is literally a woman who's using romcom tropes as her escape from her dreary marriage and is invested in seeing them play out in real life). But I'm glad Rachel Bloom, the creator and star, got her own show, and I'm glad she gets to sing and act and be funny in it.
However, plot and characters aside, the musical numbers on this show are usually innovative, catchy and fantastic. My favorite ones are, ironically, with the main character's boss, lol.
This is probably the part I laughed hardest at in the entire show, where this character decides to have a few people over:
And this is my second favorite, his song about realizing he's bisexual:
And here's a song that's a bit more typical of the show, where the main character agrees to go on a date with a dude she's not currently in love with:
*
Anyway, on a final note (I'm still awkward about stuff like this, what can I say), on Saturday I woke up to the news that Strange Horizons wants to publish a poem I submitted, for their July special. I have... many many feelings about this. Mostly it's that I've been writing poetry for about as long as I've been writing prose, but as an adult I've written it rarely, usually as a response to states of intense emotional turbulence (writing poetry helps me cope) and I've never wanted to be a poet, for a whole bunch of reasons, one of them being that I find poetry a really stress-free, just-for-me pursuit and it's nice to have something creative that I am emphatically not trying to make money from.
Like, I can't tell you what a privilege it is, actually, to be able to spend time and effort on something you don't plan on selling. Every hobby I've ever had I've always been encouraged to monetize, and most of them I have. One of the reasons I don't let myself spend time on drawing or painting anymore is because I feel like I'll never get good enough to sell my work so it feels like an indulgence I can't afford.
Which is why I don't have a directory for my poems. I write them when I need to, when writing helps me deal with life and the inside of my head, and then I forget about them. And that's an enormous indulgence, for me, and one I've greatly enjoyed. I don't have to agonize about it being good enough, I don't have to satisfy any outside standard, they're just for me.
But I decided to send this poem in because a few things happened simultaneously: I was feeling like shit about my writing career (a fucking year of editing a novella, my fucking god), I'd just found out I was losing my apartment YET AGAIN for like THE FOURTH YEAR IN A ROW, I was physically in pain and unable to sit in an office chair, and Strange Horizons announced a July special issue.
I debated for a long time what I could send them - just to make myself feel better, feel productive. I could pitch a review, or an article, but I didn't have any good ideas. I could try to write a story, but that would take so much time and effort, and the chances were so slim, I thought I couldn't handle a rejection right then. So I decided to write a poem. I had a lot of feelings, and little ability to cope, and the poem helped. It wasn't the most original thing, but it was words on a page, and it kind of had a plot, and I liked it.
So I sent it in. The first poem I've ever submitted anywhere. The first I've shown a living soul since I was 16.
And... it got accepted. It got accepted. To a publication that pays money for poetry. That has a poetry department with several editors. For a special issue that was heavily advertised.
I don't want to be a poet. I don't even know how to list this thing in my bibliography when it comes out. I have no interest in turning poetry, my one little indulgence, into something that has to sell.
But... it got accepted. I've been writing poetry since grade school, and I've never gotten any indication from the world as to its quality, and this isn't some kind of objective standard either, but... it's a publication, that pays money, and wants my poem.
That's... I'm still pretty shocked.
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