There's a dust storm in Sydney. Right to the gut this went for me; strange, the ways in which I still consider her mine. Also, CNN says it looks like Mars. I gotta tell you, when I went to Australia the first thing I was utterly struck by as the plane landed was just how fucking red EVERYTHING was. It's hard to imagine all that airborne, even looking at the photos and video.
So Mars! That story I posted last night, man -- I went through a lot getting that done -- tried relatively normal narrative structure four or five times and there was all this other stuff built around it -- a girl who was interested in pre-Empire human gender and sexuality who'd had books on Lashansky when Jack had been fucking her back in their Time Agency academy days, actually seeing Jack go back to Cardiff at the end of the story and reestablishing the greenhouse in the new Hub.... but when it finally had to be written and I didn't have the emotional whatever to keep fighting with it the way I had been, it got really spare, because all that other stuff distracted it from being Martin's story and Jack's story as opposed to "let's talk about how Torchwood fucks you up" which is really on the backdrop. Some of the stuff I had to pull out made me really sad -- I had a lot of great material around Martin's death and some of the other people in the house; Martin has a daughter, but I never got that fit in, just like I never got to talk about his childhood or his three older brothers or religion, but it's all there in my head. AND THEN, I almost didn't post the story, as I was like "fuck Torchwood, fix this and make it original fic" but that story felt less honest to me than this one -- that would be making people up, and these were real. My process about writing is weird. Anyway. I'm glad it's done.
The range of panels for this Gallifrey One in Feb has been announced. Go look. If a couple of them don't make you go Oh, Rach..., you haven't been paying attention.
There are two mosquitoes living in our bedroom. They are only biting me. They are waking me up each night. I am miserable. Last night, before bed, Patty tried to kill them, chasing them about the room with a cane (it's the only way we can reach the high ceilings).