The other day I realized it was approaching three years since I left for that semester in Spain (it'll be three years in mid-January). My immediate reaction was to think, "Send me back!" I've been in the same area except for several little trips around New York for a couple years now and I need to travel.

Let's get this started! Here are a few of the drabbles I wrote this past 30 days. Happy reading!

Disclaimer: None of the following fandoms, book or TV show or anime, belong to me in any way. I've only borrowed them temporarily and will give them back when I'm done playing.

Title: Roleplaying
Fandom: Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

( Do I have to die at the end? )

Title: Wardrobe Malfunctions
Fandoms: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe / [other fandom revealed at the end]

( Lucy was right, there's another world in the wardrobe )

Title: Employee Bonding
Fandom: Witch Hunter Robin
Warnings: Potentially slight OOC

( Who says fire has to be used just for fighting? )

The last day of my personal writing project was yesterday. I tallied up my numbers this morning. With a starting goal of 50,000 words in 30 days, I made it to around 19,900 words. I hadn't expected to make it but I thought I'd do better than that. Still, I had a lot of fun and was way more productive than usual.

( ramblings on word breakdowns and commentary behind cut )

I'm a member of the student group of the American Library Association. Recently we had a fundraiser to raise money to buy books for this children's center that's working on starting a library. Informed that the student ALA would reimburse me for up to $15 if I spent it at the book sale at a nearby public library, I went off this morning to shop.

Let me tell you, you can get a lot of books for $15. I'd heard of all the books I bought for the kids and read about half of them. Included are The Day Jimmy's Boa Are the Wash by Trinka Hakes Noble, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, and Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit. These kids have to start reading the good kinds of books early, after all!

(I also bought several books for myself because I have very little willpower. I also took several more out of the university library, even though I already have three others out. Like I said, little willpower. But I like it.)

It's early November and already the radio stations here are already advertising Christmas shows. I'm getting Christmas sale advertisements from stories in the Sunday newspaper with my coupons. Wegmans (grocery store chain) has set up their Christmas display in the seasonal section. One of the TV stations has started this "25 Days of Christmas" thing where they show horrible, made-for-TV movies. (And not even so Bad It's Funny, just Bad.)

Do Not Want.

It's not that I dislike the Christmas season, it's that it's still too early! So far the only think I'm looking forward to that it means we'll be moving on to the next stage of Yuletide soon.

Dear Yuletide Santa,

This is my first time doing Yuletide; I'm very excited. I hope my requests were written well enough to start giving you ideas for stories. I’ve never seen any fics for most of the fandoms I requested (and I haven’t yet written any myself), so in general anything in them will make me happy. I haven’t produced much fan fiction but if you click on the tag to the right for “fan fiction” you’ll be able to see what I’ve posted. Somehow most of it ends up being humor. I do love funny fic but the other genres are wonderful, too. I do like some characters more than others (names are given in the following sections) but I am good with stories not involving these characters if you can’t think of anything involving them, or the suggested prompts don’t work for you.

My requests:

( Peter S Beagle - Tamsin )

( Elizabeth Hand - Mortal Love )

( Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood series )

( Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian )

Have fun! I look forward to reading your story.

I love work-study. Today I got paid to write fan fiction. I originally thought the "study" part meant "study a new job" but it means "When there's no work to do in the office, study or do your homework." I also have a computer to use. This afternoon I hadn't brought any homework with me and there wasn't much work to do, so...time for non-nanowrimo! And it was insanelyfunny!fic, which made it even better. I hope to finish the story by the end of tomorrow (even though there's still plenty of homework to be done). It was a good afternoon.

I can't wait to sign up for yuletide.

Have been doing lost of good writing these past few days. Strictly speaking I'm still far behind where I should be but I'm having fun along the way. I'm trying to get as many completed first drafts done as possible, then once this is over I'll get to editing. Still just fan fiction that I've been working on so far. When I get stuck on one project, I jump to another.

Seriously, it's the best holiday. And all throughout October, Halloween episodes of TV shows and movies and movies are shown. The bad, cheesy ones are just as good a the truly scary ones. This morning I saw The Haunting (original version) for the first time and it's pretty creepy. Not so much "Scream and jump five feet into the air" but "The suspense keeps building and just how freaky is this going to get?" Who knew mere pounding on walls and the door could be so scary?

I found out that it's based on a novel by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, and now I think I'll have to read it. I think Rosemary's Baby was originally a book, too.

I don't know what it is that's making me post on LJ so often this October, but I like it!

So I'm working on a writing exercise that involves the painting "Proserpine" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (see my user icon). There's a pomegranate in it, I got to thinking about the Persephone myth, and...

How awesome would it have been on so many symbological levels if in the movie Labyrinth, Jareth had given Sarah a pomegranate instead of a peach? I started grinning just thinking about it. The only drawback is that a pomegranate is a hell of a lot harder to eat.

It's Day 9 and I've gotten down about only 3,200 words out of 50,000. Whoops! Still, I'm having fun. Anything that gets me a little more motivated is useful. I have a lot of homework to do this week but few things actually scheduled, so maybe that'll help.

Last weekend I returned to my home city for a Halloween party thrown by friends. We do theme parties; this year it was Heroes and Villains. I went as Super-Librarian. ("Able to leap tall bookshelves in a single bound! Fastest shelver of books! Bounty hunter of people who don't pay their library fines!") Good times.

At this moment I want so much to see a production of The Lady's Not For Burning by Christopher Fry. I'm not usually super-into theatre but I first heard about this play while reading Tam Lin by Pamela Dean. About a year ago I finally read the play and fell head-over-heels in love with the dialogue. (I did indeed copy about three pages' worth of quotes into my paper journal.) I'm a prose and poetry girl, but I want to be able to write like that! Get the play from your library, bookstore, book website, wherever, just read it.

The original plan was to participate in NaNoWriMo. Recently I decided to do yuletide for the first time year, which would mean starting a short story at the same time I'm trying to write a novel in one month. Okay, I thought, and changed the idea to writing 50,000 words of fiction on anything during the month of November. Then a couple days ago I got an idea for a story that I'd like to have posted for Halloween. So I'm amending my version of NaNoWriMo even further.

The goal: 50,000 words of writing in 30 days, starting today. Fiction, poetry, creative essays. If I really get stuck near the end I might start including writing in my paper journal. Work on my novel and revisions on previous stories won't be included unless I write giant sections that weren't there before. I very seriously doubt I'll make it, but I need something to get my creative juices flowing. It would make more sense to do this in November proper, when I'm not stressing about classes for the spring and planning a trip this weekend, but I'm doing it anyway. I feel like being ridiculous at the moment. Best-case scenario: you'll have several fics from me in the near future (starting with the one for Halloween. I'd really like to finish that in time). Worst-case scenario: you'll be amused or annoyed by continuous cryptic ramblings of a writer's-blocked mind.

ETA: Wrote over 900 words in longhand this afternoon/evening. Not a bad start.

The news stories are just insane this past week. First, everyone's watching a homemade balloon fly around Colorado for several hours, because we believe there's a 6-year-old boy inside. The balloon lands and it changes to "He's not inside! Oh no, did he fall out somewhere?" The good news is that he was found hiding in a box in the attic. There's been some speculation that the family staged it but I don't think it's been proven. In any case, it's certainly not the best parenting to have an object that could easily carry away one of your children out of reach within moments.

And now there's a Justice of the Peace who refused to marry an interracial couple. He's well within his rights to not like interracial relationships. Fine. Whatever. But interracial marriage is now legal in the U.S. It's been legal for decades. If you take on a job knowing full well that you'll be asked to do something that's legal but you personally disagree with, and then you refuse to do it, you should find another job. And anybody who starts out an argument with "I'm not a racist, but..." should be immediately disqualified from continuing.

*gets off of soapbox*

Meme received from bwinter

Reply to this post by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

( pomegranate, ballet, academia, vampires, gothic (art), state of New York )

Does anybody know if the new season of Merlin is going to be on American TV right away, or just through the BBC and Internet for now?

Remember a while back when I talked about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I was at the bookstore today to get my work schedule for next week and guess what I saw? Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I kid you not. I read the back cover and all I have to say so far is that Colonel Brandon seems to be some sort of part-man, part-sea monster. I know we can theorize, but I really do wonder what Miss Austen's reactions to these retellings of her books would be (no sarcasm intended). P&P and Zombies didn't really light me on fire but I must say that, if I have to see Austen fan fiction on the shelves of bookstores, I'd rather be seeing this than a thirtieth book about the offspring of Elisabeth and Mr. Darcy.

As a preface, I recommend reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to anyone. It's a fantastic story and you have a large number of translations to choose from.

I spent four days this week working a cash register in a college bookstore. It's their first week of classes and the students were forced to spend ridiculous amounts of money on textbooks. I had a little fun when they were buying books for literature classes. The following was the highlight of my Thursday:

( mild spoilers for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight )

I'm going to be laughing about that all night. God bless medieval lit.

Today was going well to begin with: the internet is now hooked up in my apartment and I got to visit with my parents. At a garden shop I found a "grow-these-flower-bulbs-inside" kit for...autumn crocuses?! Since when do they bloom in autumn instead of spring? It seems there's a variety I didn't know about. Unsurprisingly, I couldn't resist Exactly a week in my new apartment and I already have three indoor plants, as well as a potted lavender on my porch.

It just kept getting better. Browsing through children's DVDs on sale, I found the packaged set of...The Storyteller! I was planning on being good and not making any unnecessary purchases this month, but I knew I couldn't pass up the opportunity (and it was on sale). Actually, if I wanted to get into extreme rationalizing I could argue that any work by Jim Henson are a necessary purchase!)

The Pride and Prejudice with zombies book has been out for a while now, and people are still talking about it. I haven't read it yet but do want to see how it reads. I have yet to decide yet to decide if I like the idea of the "author" keeping about 85% of the original text and merely replacing some words with zombie-related ones. It's on my To Read list. The other day coming into work at the bookstore, I noticed a new novel on display. I think the title is Mr. Darcy, Vampire. I briefly skimmed the back cover; I don't remember much of it but I assume it focuses on Mr. Darcy trying to restrain from drinking Elizabeth's blood. (Sexual metaphor, yay!)

Jane Austen fan fiction published in novel format has always been popular, but it seems that within the past few years it's taking a bent to the weird. (I don't remember who first said, "Everything's better with zombies.") Not too surprising, given how saturated the literary market is with vampires these days. Most of the Austen-inspired books I see on the shelves follow Mr. Darcy during the events of P&P, or Darcy and Elizabeth's children. I have yet to see anything for Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, or Persuasion. Most of the descriptions don't sound too bad. One novel, however, needs to be placed in a Hall of Shame. To be fair, I haven't read the book. But reading the description on the back cover was more than enough. I think the title is The Trials of Miss Mary Bennett. From what I recall in the description, the book is outlined thus: Mary Bennett is forced to take care of her mother until Mrs. Bennett dies. Mary has turned into a remarkable beauty with violet eyes (I am not making this up). Since P&P ended, Jane has turned into a mindless baby machine, Darcy is abusive and hates his wife's family, and Lydia & Kitty are lushes (that bit isn't too far from the source material). I believe Lydia decides to become a feminist journalist and ends up kidnapped at one point (of course). I wouldn't even be surprised if White Slavery turned up at some point. Just for shits and giggles, I read the description to a co-worker who reads a lot. Her jaw kept getting lower and lower. I solemnly swear that I am not making this book up. What was the author thinking?!?!