Night of a thousand cats
Well, actually, it's just the one. But she's making enough noise for it to be a thousand. How can something that small create so much noise?
So with craptacular predictability, the brain of fail (with, it does have to be said, some encouragement from the abdomen of fail) elected to have this be Attempted Flame Out Weekend. Y'know, because it was my long weekend off, after working a month of short-staffed shifts and doing things like speaking to halls full of people, and I could therefore decompress. Decompress in this sense being "I do not wish to actually speak with actualy voices to any people for at least 24 hours", because, well: brain of fail.
(I'd abruptly and suddenly reached my threshold level for dealing with social interaction, is what I'm saying)
Said not-talking thing didn't really work out yesterday (ugh, having to be an adult and go out and do things on my day off), and today was nixed by bumping into the housemate in the five minutes between her finishing work and going back over to her parents' place for the weekend (really, my kidneys? you couldn't wait ten more minutes before crying and insisting that maybe you were overworked or some shit. Ugh. I don't even know).
ANYWAY. I have hopes for tomorrow being an awesome hermitty day of awesome. Possibly I shall bake a cake.
ANYWAY (she says again)
31 Days of Writing
25. Give some examples of how various story ideas have come to you. What forms did they come in?
They just...occur? Seriously, least brainy writer ever here, guys. So not the target group for these questions (I mean, forms? If "messy and confused glob of thought that usually doesn't even have a starting point to grab hold of" is a form, then I have that!)
26. What stories haven't you written that you would like to write?
In short, everything in the WIP folder(s) on my laptop. In long, everything in the WIP folder(s) and also all of the ideas that I've had which are really freaking awesome, but I've never even gotten a garbled sentence scribbled down for most of them. At the top of that list is the River Song story (which is totally AU as to who River actually is--and don't get me wrong, I love who she turned out to be--but I also love this AU idea), and the Middleman story that I was going to write for Yuletide, but completely flaked on actually having the kind of brain that would come up with decent prose, but hey, have the comment train summary of the idea anyway:
"The narrative focus is on Wendy, going through a--ahem--standard day in the life of a Middleman in training, with somewhat of a sleep deficit due to following up on a string of bizarre thefts (because who in their right minds even wants 2.4 metric tonnes of cool whip?), so she's resorting to mainlining the rather awesome coffee she found in the back of a kitchen cupboard (Lacey probably bought it at an organic farmers market) in order to get through the day without driving the Middlecar into a wall. Or Ida (although, if she drove into Ida she'd maybe get a half-hour reprieve from all the 'little junkie that could' cracks before the OTSTK sent over a new model).
The problems (i.e.: what passes for a plot) become apparent when Wendy comes to the realisation that whilst she is going through her day as normal, said day seems to be happening entirely out of order. After several very confusing conversations with assorted people (Noser may very well make reference to the Time Warp, because I have no shame), it's finally discovered that: 1) 2.4 metric tonnes of cool whip (plus sundry other ingredients) are exactly what you need to manufacture your own miniature black hole (and now you know what they made the Large Hadron Collider out of), and, 2) Wendy appears to have been drinking coffee made from a rare type of bean that is a bit similar to Kopi Luwak except that instead of civet cats, think ptessaracts (sort of like what would happen if you looked at a dragon shaped like a gryphon--or possibly not--and renowned for their non-linear existence. Closely related to pterodactyls, ptarmigan and earthworms (worms are actually quantum terroformers that--due to a pay dispute (sauropods write bad cheques)--went on strike for so long that they devolved. That bloody asteroid 65m years ago didn't help, either)).
*counts her paretheses closed and takes a deep breath*
Anyway. It turns out that adding temporally undecided caffeine to a miniature black hole (please use Campbell's chicken soup as a mordant) results in the formation of a miniature white hole and--thus equipped--the ability to manipulate time and obliterate those bits of it that are Just Not On (all mornings between 5.30am and 7.30am, but particularly the bit when your alarm first goes off; Mondays in general; February. Because February is a stupid month) is sheer elegance in its simplicity!!! (number of ! subject to personal preference)
During more bounching around within her own timeline, Wendy manages to solve the case(s) entirely out of order, completely confuse everyone else in her life (and possibly ear worm Noser into thinking about the Time Warp in the first place), and spend some quality time with a flock of ptesseracts (who, as it turns out, know quite a lot about light aircraft, and the disappearing thereof).
...so, yeah. There's a story in there somewhere, I swear o_O"
25. Give some examples of how various story ideas have come to you. What forms did they come in?
26. What stories haven't you written that you would like to write?
27. Do you have any works in progress?
28. Do you visualize scenes when/before you write them? Or do you go by how the words sound in your head? Both? Something else entirely?
29. What do you do when the words just aren't coming?
30. Do you like to tell stories orally as well as writing them down?
31. What's your policy on remixes, podfic, and other transformative work?
30 Days of Fanfic
25 - Music - Do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain "mood" to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?
I usually have some kind of noise on in the background; it's a toss up between the telly, a dvd and music, though. I don't have any specific writing playlists or anything (ugh, that would involve more planning and organisation than a kitty of very little brain is capable of) like that.
25 - Music - Do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain "mood" to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?
26 - What is the oddest (or funnest) thing you've had to research for a fic?
27 - Where is your favorite place to write, and do you write by hand or on the computer?
28 - Have you ever collaborated with anyone else, whether writing together, or having an artist work on a piece about your fic?
29 - What is your current project or projects?
30 - Do you have a favorite fic you've written? What makes it your favorite? And don't forget to give us a link!
And, just to make this the incredibly long post of many cuts (and yet exactly the kind of post that I love reading on Dreamwidth and avoid if at all possible on LJ *hearts DW*), I feel the need to blather on about my little druid.
Who, okay, so she's been capped at 85 for a while now, so hardly little- *handwave*
So I actually flew through Orgrimmar today (heading to Azshara to clear out the lowbie quests for achieves. And, okay, also to totally park Indi's Netherwing drake's glowing black butt on top of my brother's orc shaman. Except that he decided to zepplin to EK to do fishing dailies and, man, I am over Stranglethorn at the moment) and ended up picking up the World Shaman breadcrumb quest from the Earthern Ring representative at the portal ring. Despite my initial misgivings (I am a faily player and level 85 mobs hit hard omg), I figured what the hey; the starting cinematic was freaking awesome, and wowhead assured me that the final reward was a choice of sweet epic cloaks.
So, um, spoilery for the Horde-view of this quest chain.
Anyway: you get breadcrumbed in to porting to Nordrassil to witness Thrall (who is still this little noob Hordie's Warchief, Garrosh can go suck it) performing a restoration ritual with the Aspects of Life (Ysera and Alexstrazsa appear to have a competition on who's Sin'dorei form can wear the least amount of clothing *eyeroll*), which gets rudely interupted by a bunch of Twilight's Hammer agents, who silence and stun the whole group before turning into Druids of Flame (at this point, I went D: a bit because Druids of Flame means Firelands, and I am really in the minority here because I hate Firelands so much. I'm hoping it's just a rerun of the thing I had with Vashj'ir? One plus point Firelands does have over Vashj'ir: no naga. If there turn out to be freaking fire naga or something, you'll probably be able to hear my scream of irrational anger from five hundred miles away), zapping Thrall into his constituent elements (literally, in that punning way Blizzard have), and then arsing off.
Side note: I know that Druids of Flame are bad wrong evil and all that jazz but, maaaaaaan, I kinda desperately want my flightform to be a kickass firebird because the animation is just pretty.
Anway, then you're into the quest-chain proper and you end up accompanying Aggra to the four seats of the elements to aid her in saving Thrall (Air in Uldam, on all those floating platforms off the southern cliffs that aren't the instance entrances; Water in the Abyssal rift in Vashj'ir, Earth in the rift in Deepholm, and Fire at the base of Ragnaros' throne in Firelands) by, uh, basically killing the shit out of elemental mobs and elites for a set number of points.
The thing that made it pretty awesome (despite me being the failiest boomkin) was that this is a relatively new quest, and it's neutral to both factions (and I'm on an incredibly high population server), so there were about 20 other people running around at the same stage as me. The awesome-awesome thing is that said people were both Ally and Horde and within about 30 seconds of the first elite Air elemental blowing everyone off the platform to plunge to their deaths (except me and the other two druids who managed to spam our flightforms in time), there was this unofficial accord of us against them--entirely without any kind of chat or emote intervention--and we grouped up and just steamrollered over everything.
(it was kind of awesome. I may have mentioned)
Side note the second: so I've heard some horror stories about cross-faction fighting for these quests on PvE servers where some douchenozzle(s) flag(s) for PvP before diving into the mass of fighting players and mobs with the express purpose of getting hit by any AoE spells, therefore pinging the caster to PvP without them necessarily noticing (which, this may just be my faily observation skills and the fact I've never raided and am not used to keeping track of PCs, but I can understand how that can happen, particularly in the last zone with all the fire-effect graphics), meaning that rapidly all the PCs end up PvPed and then the douchenozzle(s) call in reinforcements and roflstomp, corspe-camp and are generally the griefiest griefers who ever griefed. And I was kinda worried because, man but Aszune-EU has some griefy players on there (they always seem to roll gnome or nelf for Ally, or any flavour of DK Hordeside (seriously, wut, Aszune? You're putting me off the idea of ever rolling a DK)), and that seems exactly like something that would happen.
Except that it didn't! We totally had a 50/50 split of Ally to Horde, and a pretty even weighting of melee/dps (and even a resto druid on the Ally side and a holy priest Hordeside who were nice enough to be flinging heals at the appropriate faction), so even the elites went down in short time and we all motored through the entire quest chain in less than 30 minutes.
:D :D :D
So anyway, beat down the fire mobs, free Thrall, and then get ported back to Nordrassil to "witness the end of Thrall's ritual *wink wink*" which turned out to be Thrall asking Aggra to marry him. D'awwww.
And then epic cloaks happened :D
In other WoW news, after this I think I finally managed to get my head around the concept of reforging (clue: my brother went "reforge, you idiot") and trotted off to the TB reforger to futz around Indi's stats in an attempt to make her more boom!chicken and less roast!chicken. Which mainly consisted of trading off strength and mastery stats for hit, spirit and crit. strike stats.
Possibly Indi fails less now? I should really launch her at some 85 mobs and see if I notice a difference.
Also on DreamWidth, comment where you will!
So with craptacular predictability, the brain of fail (with, it does have to be said, some encouragement from the abdomen of fail) elected to have this be Attempted Flame Out Weekend. Y'know, because it was my long weekend off, after working a month of short-staffed shifts and doing things like speaking to halls full of people, and I could therefore decompress. Decompress in this sense being "I do not wish to actually speak with actualy voices to any people for at least 24 hours", because, well: brain of fail.
(I'd abruptly and suddenly reached my threshold level for dealing with social interaction, is what I'm saying)
Said not-talking thing didn't really work out yesterday (ugh, having to be an adult and go out and do things on my day off), and today was nixed by bumping into the housemate in the five minutes between her finishing work and going back over to her parents' place for the weekend (really, my kidneys? you couldn't wait ten more minutes before crying and insisting that maybe you were overworked or some shit. Ugh. I don't even know).
ANYWAY. I have hopes for tomorrow being an awesome hermitty day of awesome. Possibly I shall bake a cake.
ANYWAY (she says again)
31 Days of Writing
25. Give some examples of how various story ideas have come to you. What forms did they come in?
They just...occur? Seriously, least brainy writer ever here, guys. So not the target group for these questions (I mean, forms? If "messy and confused glob of thought that usually doesn't even have a starting point to grab hold of" is a form, then I have that!)
26. What stories haven't you written that you would like to write?
In short, everything in the WIP folder(s) on my laptop. In long, everything in the WIP folder(s) and also all of the ideas that I've had which are really freaking awesome, but I've never even gotten a garbled sentence scribbled down for most of them. At the top of that list is the River Song story (which is totally AU as to who River actually is--and don't get me wrong, I love who she turned out to be--but I also love this AU idea), and the Middleman story that I was going to write for Yuletide, but completely flaked on actually having the kind of brain that would come up with decent prose, but hey, have the comment train summary of the idea anyway:
"The narrative focus is on Wendy, going through a--ahem--standard day in the life of a Middleman in training, with somewhat of a sleep deficit due to following up on a string of bizarre thefts (because who in their right minds even wants 2.4 metric tonnes of cool whip?), so she's resorting to mainlining the rather awesome coffee she found in the back of a kitchen cupboard (Lacey probably bought it at an organic farmers market) in order to get through the day without driving the Middlecar into a wall. Or Ida (although, if she drove into Ida she'd maybe get a half-hour reprieve from all the 'little junkie that could' cracks before the OTSTK sent over a new model).
The problems (i.e.: what passes for a plot) become apparent when Wendy comes to the realisation that whilst she is going through her day as normal, said day seems to be happening entirely out of order. After several very confusing conversations with assorted people (Noser may very well make reference to the Time Warp, because I have no shame), it's finally discovered that: 1) 2.4 metric tonnes of cool whip (plus sundry other ingredients) are exactly what you need to manufacture your own miniature black hole (and now you know what they made the Large Hadron Collider out of), and, 2) Wendy appears to have been drinking coffee made from a rare type of bean that is a bit similar to Kopi Luwak except that instead of civet cats, think ptessaracts (sort of like what would happen if you looked at a dragon shaped like a gryphon--or possibly not--and renowned for their non-linear existence. Closely related to pterodactyls, ptarmigan and earthworms (worms are actually quantum terroformers that--due to a pay dispute (sauropods write bad cheques)--went on strike for so long that they devolved. That bloody asteroid 65m years ago didn't help, either)).
*counts her paretheses closed and takes a deep breath*
Anyway. It turns out that adding temporally undecided caffeine to a miniature black hole (please use Campbell's chicken soup as a mordant) results in the formation of a miniature white hole and--thus equipped--the ability to manipulate time and obliterate those bits of it that are Just Not On (all mornings between 5.30am and 7.30am, but particularly the bit when your alarm first goes off; Mondays in general; February. Because February is a stupid month) is sheer elegance in its simplicity!!! (number of ! subject to personal preference)
During more bounching around within her own timeline, Wendy manages to solve the case(s) entirely out of order, completely confuse everyone else in her life (and possibly ear worm Noser into thinking about the Time Warp in the first place), and spend some quality time with a flock of ptesseracts (who, as it turns out, know quite a lot about light aircraft, and the disappearing thereof).
...so, yeah. There's a story in there somewhere, I swear o_O"
25. Give some examples of how various story ideas have come to you. What forms did they come in?
26. What stories haven't you written that you would like to write?
27. Do you have any works in progress?
28. Do you visualize scenes when/before you write them? Or do you go by how the words sound in your head? Both? Something else entirely?
29. What do you do when the words just aren't coming?
30. Do you like to tell stories orally as well as writing them down?
31. What's your policy on remixes, podfic, and other transformative work?
30 Days of Fanfic
25 - Music - Do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain "mood" to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?
I usually have some kind of noise on in the background; it's a toss up between the telly, a dvd and music, though. I don't have any specific writing playlists or anything (ugh, that would involve more planning and organisation than a kitty of very little brain is capable of) like that.
25 - Music - Do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain "mood" to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?
26 - What is the oddest (or funnest) thing you've had to research for a fic?
27 - Where is your favorite place to write, and do you write by hand or on the computer?
28 - Have you ever collaborated with anyone else, whether writing together, or having an artist work on a piece about your fic?
29 - What is your current project or projects?
30 - Do you have a favorite fic you've written? What makes it your favorite? And don't forget to give us a link!
And, just to make this the incredibly long post of many cuts (and yet exactly the kind of post that I love reading on Dreamwidth and avoid if at all possible on LJ *hearts DW*), I feel the need to blather on about my little druid.
Who, okay, so she's been capped at 85 for a while now, so hardly little- *handwave*
So I actually flew through Orgrimmar today (heading to Azshara to clear out the lowbie quests for achieves. And, okay, also to totally park Indi's Netherwing drake's glowing black butt on top of my brother's orc shaman. Except that he decided to zepplin to EK to do fishing dailies and, man, I am over Stranglethorn at the moment) and ended up picking up the World Shaman breadcrumb quest from the Earthern Ring representative at the portal ring. Despite my initial misgivings (I am a faily player and level 85 mobs hit hard omg), I figured what the hey; the starting cinematic was freaking awesome, and wowhead assured me that the final reward was a choice of sweet epic cloaks.
So, um, spoilery for the Horde-view of this quest chain.
Anyway: you get breadcrumbed in to porting to Nordrassil to witness Thrall (who is still this little noob Hordie's Warchief, Garrosh can go suck it) performing a restoration ritual with the Aspects of Life (Ysera and Alexstrazsa appear to have a competition on who's Sin'dorei form can wear the least amount of clothing *eyeroll*), which gets rudely interupted by a bunch of Twilight's Hammer agents, who silence and stun the whole group before turning into Druids of Flame (at this point, I went D: a bit because Druids of Flame means Firelands, and I am really in the minority here because I hate Firelands so much. I'm hoping it's just a rerun of the thing I had with Vashj'ir? One plus point Firelands does have over Vashj'ir: no naga. If there turn out to be freaking fire naga or something, you'll probably be able to hear my scream of irrational anger from five hundred miles away), zapping Thrall into his constituent elements (literally, in that punning way Blizzard have), and then arsing off.
Side note: I know that Druids of Flame are bad wrong evil and all that jazz but, maaaaaaan, I kinda desperately want my flightform to be a kickass firebird because the animation is just pretty.
Anway, then you're into the quest-chain proper and you end up accompanying Aggra to the four seats of the elements to aid her in saving Thrall (Air in Uldam, on all those floating platforms off the southern cliffs that aren't the instance entrances; Water in the Abyssal rift in Vashj'ir, Earth in the rift in Deepholm, and Fire at the base of Ragnaros' throne in Firelands) by, uh, basically killing the shit out of elemental mobs and elites for a set number of points.
The thing that made it pretty awesome (despite me being the failiest boomkin) was that this is a relatively new quest, and it's neutral to both factions (and I'm on an incredibly high population server), so there were about 20 other people running around at the same stage as me. The awesome-awesome thing is that said people were both Ally and Horde and within about 30 seconds of the first elite Air elemental blowing everyone off the platform to plunge to their deaths (except me and the other two druids who managed to spam our flightforms in time), there was this unofficial accord of us against them--entirely without any kind of chat or emote intervention--and we grouped up and just steamrollered over everything.
(it was kind of awesome. I may have mentioned)
Side note the second: so I've heard some horror stories about cross-faction fighting for these quests on PvE servers where some douchenozzle(s) flag(s) for PvP before diving into the mass of fighting players and mobs with the express purpose of getting hit by any AoE spells, therefore pinging the caster to PvP without them necessarily noticing (which, this may just be my faily observation skills and the fact I've never raided and am not used to keeping track of PCs, but I can understand how that can happen, particularly in the last zone with all the fire-effect graphics), meaning that rapidly all the PCs end up PvPed and then the douchenozzle(s) call in reinforcements and roflstomp, corspe-camp and are generally the griefiest griefers who ever griefed. And I was kinda worried because, man but Aszune-EU has some griefy players on there (they always seem to roll gnome or nelf for Ally, or any flavour of DK Hordeside (seriously, wut, Aszune? You're putting me off the idea of ever rolling a DK)), and that seems exactly like something that would happen.
Except that it didn't! We totally had a 50/50 split of Ally to Horde, and a pretty even weighting of melee/dps (and even a resto druid on the Ally side and a holy priest Hordeside who were nice enough to be flinging heals at the appropriate faction), so even the elites went down in short time and we all motored through the entire quest chain in less than 30 minutes.
:D :D :D
So anyway, beat down the fire mobs, free Thrall, and then get ported back to Nordrassil to "witness the end of Thrall's ritual *wink wink*" which turned out to be Thrall asking Aggra to marry him. D'awwww.
And then epic cloaks happened :D
In other WoW news, after this I think I finally managed to get my head around the concept of reforging (clue: my brother went "reforge, you idiot") and trotted off to the TB reforger to futz around Indi's stats in an attempt to make her more boom!chicken and less roast!chicken. Which mainly consisted of trading off strength and mastery stats for hit, spirit and crit. strike stats.
Possibly Indi fails less now? I should really launch her at some 85 mobs and see if I notice a difference.
Also on DreamWidth, comment where you will!