I think part of the reason I suffered such agonies trying to finish the shortfic last night was because I was trying to force it. It didn't want to come, and I just sat and bashed my head against it until I had words down in some rough approximation of what I wanted. And I think in the process I lost or forgot some of what I was hoping to fit in there. Well, with any luck I'll manage to make myself take more time over the revision. (A prospect made more difficult, of course, by the fact that I'm currently in one of my "argh! I wish I were three people!" phases, because there are so many things I want to be doing simultaneously. I *just* got into revisions on "Sakura" 15, so I want to keep doing that, but I also want to get the shortfic done as soon as possible, and I have the other shortfic that still needs to be written. Add onto that miscellaneous other projects and *gasp* real life, and my head starts to spin.)

There's more I want to babble about, too, but I really should go off and do work-type things. Maybe I'll try to do another entry tonight.

Wow, I actually got a site update done. (Of course, if you're reading this you have to already know that, because only people who've seen my update page know this exists. ^_^) No fics, alas, but not for want of working.

You know, I wanted so badly to finish the Sorata/Arashi one-shot on Saturday, but I just wasn't able to get it done. So then I was absolutely determined to finish it today, and by god I did, but it almost killed me. The ending is in complete disarray, but I think I'll work on redoing that in a day or two when I've recovered. I've got the other CLAMP shortfic to work on, and I have to look at Sakura 15 again before sending it out to more prereaders.

And now I'm trying to watch Yami no Matsuei and do this simultaneously, which is a very bad idea, so I'm going to go concentrate on watching some bishounen. *g*

I FINISHED THE CHAPTER! And I did it in one afternoon, which totally rocks. It's immensely reassuring to find that I can still sit down and crank out a couple of pages in one go. Of course, they suck, but that's not the point--the first draft of everything I do sucks to some extent. That's what the fine art of revision is for. ^_^

So that chapter of "Falling" needs to sit for a while before I can go back to it. My guess is that I'll probably try to squeeze out that Sorata/Arashi oneshot that I was thinking about; then I might try to finally finish the revisions on "Sakura" 15. I'd like to work on the "eye" story, too, before that gets even more out-of-date than it already is. (AU is your friend. ^^)

My other fun hobby for the weekend has been downloading Kaleidoscope schemes. I've got this wicked cool ultrasleek bronze scheme on Sei-chan. It takes a little getting used to, because I think the designer used the OSX windowbar widget placements, so the close box isn't where it usually is. But it looks *so* nice. Maybe next weekend I'll hook up Narsus-sama again and make some sakura backgrounds. I really need one of the tree....

And I've been doing a touch of email clearing, including some C&Cs. So despite a somewhat unproductive start to the weekend, I ended up getting rather a lot done. Oh, yes, and among that email clearing was that great "drop a ton of admin on the CFFML" debacle, of course, which I'm still angsting about. I think I'm going to have to repost the invitation to submit sites for the resources page, because I strongly doubt that anyone actually read down that far. *sigh* Me and my big mouth...oh, well. It was meant as an honest attempt to improve the ML, at least....

Well, I posted huge quantities of admin-ish stuff to the CFFML, and now I feel a bit like a pompous, overbearing windbag. One of these days, I'll learn brevity. ^^ On the other hand, I think at least some of it is stuff that's useful to know. Tin seemed to appreciate it, anyway.

I *think* I've finished the Tamura/Rin scene in "Falling" 15; now I have just that little Jinpachi scene to do. He usually goes pretty quickly, so I'm hopeful. I'm also thinking about working on a short Sorata/Arashi fic idea this weekend, although in part that'll depend on how my email crunching goes. "Sakura" 15, alas, is still sunk in prereading. I really didn't *mean* to boggle all my prereaders! *sweatdrop* I have to read that one again and try to figure out what's going on with it....

It's a strange weather type of day. *Very* dark and cloudy this morning, a flurry of snow, a patch of sun, and now we're back to gloom again. A good day to curl up on the couch with Sei-chan (heh heh) and either write or catch up on mail. I might make some more progress at clearing backmails in the CFFML inbox today. I'm actually caught up with the last several months--there's just a huge stretch from late April to November of last year where I saved everything but didn't read it. I'm gnawing my way through that now. (Well, not *now,* but you know what I mean. ^^)

And my poor kitty-girl has to go to the groomer today and get an enormous mat cut out of her coat. I *do* brush her, really, but once she gets a tangle going she won't let me at it. She's had this tiny knot for months now, and since it didn't seem to be getting any worse I figured that it could wait until the spring, when the weather was a bit nicer. Then one day I turned around and she had this *huge,* monstrous clump attached to her backside. I feel so bad for her.

Ah, the weblog...the place to confess all of one's guilt. ^^

I'm wearing my Aya sweater today. Okay, so it's really more salmon than glaring orange, but it's similar enough. Unfortunately, I just noticed the enormous holes under one arm. On the one hand, duh on me for walking around like this for however long; on the other, I rather hope they *have* been there for a while, because otherwise I've got a sudden infestation of moths in my sweater drawer, which will make me really unhappy.

I've been thinking about the distinction I made in the previous post between the two evils, Nakago-bad and Seishirou-bad, and where Legato stands between them. I think that, for me at least, the intense fascination with Seishirou lies in the fact that we knew him as a "good guy" for so long before his true nature was revealed. Oh, sure, we saw those glimmerings of darkness, of predatory nature, and we had Hokuto's whole speech about the Sakurazukamori and the two families as light and dark sides of each other, but I don't think anybody really believed that Seishirou would actually turn out to be quite the conscienceless, remorseless monster that he was. The presence of those shadows gave interest to what otherwise would be a rather conventional, enthusiastic genki guy. But just as the concealed but still evident darkness colored the character of Sei-chan the veterinarian, now that we do know who he is and what he does I think that echoes of the solicitous, gentle man that Subaru fell in love with still linger beneath the darkness, at least in our perceptions. Like Subaru himself, because we first knew Seishirou as a kind, good person (leaving aside the real first meeting, which Subaru forgot anyway), I think that something us will always see that in him, whether or not it truly exists. So there's always that tension between the evil of the Sakurazukamori and what he *might* be, and it keeps us yearning. Tension creates interest.

On the other hand, Nakago was forbidding from the start. Shogun of the army of the enemy nation, formidable in that big-ass armor of his, cold-faced and impassive, except when toying with his prey...when we finally got to see what *he* had been and why he turned out as he had, it was, as Shanti is fond of saying, too little too late. For the two of us, at least, that Evil Bad Guy face was too entrenched. Even though intellectually we understood what he'd gone through in his childhood, it couldn't cancel out forty-some episodes of stone cold, manipulative bastard, just as, for me, Seishirou's cruelty has never quite cancelled out his various kindnesses.

Maybe it just goes to show the power of first impressions, particularly when they're coupled with some kind of emotional resonance.

Now Legato...he could teach Nakago some lessons in being both hyperpowered and manipulative. I'm going to have to watch the first episode in which he appeared again, but I'm fairly certain that he was quite obviously a dark character from nearly the moment he turned up on the screen. (Vash's reaction is the key here.) Yet for some reason a part of me *wants* to like him--wants there to be some shadow of goodness underneath the face of evil--something that I never seriously felt for Nakago. Maybe part of it is that there have already been intimations that he's acting out of a craziness that comes from real pain--the bit where he leaves half the bandits alive to teach them the "pain of living," for instance. Maybe part of it is that he obviously has some tie to Vash's past, and I'm fairly certain that Vash was "made" in some way to be as he is, which implies that Legato was also "made" in a sense--and that what he originally was might be quite different from what he's become.

And part of it might just be that he gets real style points: "Can I have another fork?" springs to mind, as do his various efforts to mess with Vash's head, particularly the scene with the little girl in the first episode in which he appeared. Nakago was kind of stolid as a bad guy--yeah, he messed with various people's heads, but I don't think there was any real doubt in the viewer's mind as to what he was trying to accomplish. He was very driven, single-focused, mostly serious and not very reflective, and the viewer wasn't given any real reason to question whether his goals were really what they appeared to be. (It turned out that they weren't quite what we'd been led to believe, but it still wasn't terribly surprising that Nakago turned on his Emperor, even not knowing at that point about his childhood. His focus seems to have always been pretty much on power and the acquisition thereof.) Legato is very much an enigma, still (at tape 5), and I think that's a large part of his appeal for me. There are substantial blank spaces, and the character himself draws attention to them through cryptic comments and actions, so we figure that there must be something interesting there. So because we have interest, we study the character, trying to fit some order to his nature so that it makes sense to us, and the desire to understand does have a tendency to migrate toward the tendency to love.

Not that I'd say I love Legato at this point--probably because I haven't gotten enough feedback yet from that study of him. But there's definitely that certain level of interest that could lead to something more, depending on how the character's development goes.

Hey, look--a thought! (And no, I am *not* obsessing on Trigun.)

This is me ducking out of email again, as I've pretty much been doing all weekend. *s* Well, I've been doing so productively, at least--I've done half my handwash laundry, washed the litterbox, and tidied my closet, fansub cabinet, and two of my bookshelves. I also noodled around with garden plans for this year (lots of work ahead, ugh) and read a little further in The Lions of Al-Rassan, which I do hope to finish before too much longer. And I did some preliminary web-research into local and national environmental groups. (Dark as it may be, that's a plus to having Pres. Bush in office--it's given me the moral imperative to actually stand up for the things that I've always said were important to me, because it seems likely that these causes are going to need all the help they can get. In other words, good intentions aren't going to cut it anymore.)

No writing this weekend, unfortunately, though I made some pretty good progress on Friday before shutting up shop. I'm right at the tricky bit in this next scene in "Falling"; I'm definitely going to have to try to plow ahead on Monday morning, because this is the kind of spot where I could get bogged down for ages. Considering that at this moment I'm writing on discipline rather than fire, that could be a big problem. On the other hand, if I can just get through this one moment believably, I can then lose myself in a couple of pages of Jinpachi rantings, and then this chapter will actually be done. (Huzzah!) Of course, then I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to work on next. I suppose either the next Drift, if the hormones swing that way, or the next regular chapter of "Sakura," or maybe I'll just march ahead on "Falling," since I'm already working on that. The sticking point, which I may have already mentioned--can't remember right now--is that it would probably be a good idea to write the next couple of chapters of "Falling" after this one all in one go before releasing them, because otherwise I fear I'm going to leave people on some kind of awful cliffhanger. I probably should also finish the concluding side story as well, to prevent some of the argh! factor. Well, we'll see.

In other news, I also watched Trigun 5 over this weekend. Man, Legato is bad, bad, bad. I still haven't decided if I think he's Nakago-bad (skeeze) or Seishirou-bad (fascinating evil). He's pretty, though. Evil golden eyes. *g* And sorry to all the slashers out there, but I think I like Vash/Meryl. She's just adorable. And they've so obviously got the sparks-flying "you annoy the heck out of me" love thing going, at least on her end. I'm sure it'll end in tragedy, though--or maybe in a "she's not ready for this, let her down easy but damn painful for sure" situation.

Picked up the second Sakura DVD today. Now I'm not allowed to get any more until I watch all of what I've already got. *g* But Kenshin 2 and Trigun 2 top my list for whenever that happens.

I guess that's really about all the procrastinating I can do right now. If I knew what was good for me, I'd update my website with the few pitiful things that I've got to put on it, but I don't think I have enough brain cell for that tonight. I don't know if I even have enough wattage to clear all my char mail, which is pretty sad.

There are other things I'd like to talk about, but I haven't really decided where this weblog is going yet--how much I want to say, what topics I want to stick to. Maybe some other night.

Ja ne!

I finished the scene! Yay! Of course, I'll need to rework it tomorrow, but at least I finally got through the Issei/Sakura/Alice bit of this chapter. Once I finish revising the ending of that, I can move on to Tamura-san.

In other news, I played a little bit of Majesty. It's really not that hard to play (at least, not at a basic level), but it's a fun brain-waster. I was working on a page for the Frequently Made Announcements for the CFFML, but I don't think I'll get it done tonight. Must go to bed soon.

*sigh* Would like to have some deep thoughts in this eventually, but tonight's obviously not going to be the night. Ah, well....

*yawn* Okay, so I probably shouldn't have spent quite so long on IRC last night. It was fun, though. I haven't been on in weeks, so I figured it was about time. I was going to start playing Majesty, the fantasy kingdom sim that I got yesterday, but somehow I was too brain-fried to take the plunge. And I won't have a chance tonight, because I'm going out to the movies with Sheri (we're finally going to catch "Vertical Limit" at a second-run movie theater). I might be able to start on Thursday, if Sheri doesn't come over to watch last week's "Buffy" and "Angel" with me; Friday's out because of gaming. Maybe I should just save it until the weekend anyway, when I'll have enough time to get into it properly

"Falling" is still muddling along, though I got a bit hung up at the end of the current scene. I have to figure out exactly what Issei's picking up from Alice, what he sees when he looks at her, and the brain didn't want to function at all this morning. On the plus side, I've only got maybe another paragraph to go, and then this scene will be done.

Argh! Okay, I'm too hungry to write any more right now. Maybe later I'll have thoughts more profound than what to have for lunch.

Well, it was a quiet weekend, but at least I got Narsus-sama (my old video-enabled Mac) hooked up to the DVD player and was able to make some Tokyo Babylon screen caps for Sei-chan's desktop. Unfortunately, Narsus-sama can only capture video at 640x480, so the images got a little hazy when I enlarged them. Still, they work pretty well, since they're mostly shadows of shiki-chan and ghostly overlay effects. Duh stamp on me, I didn't catch any of the cherry tree bits at the beginning of part 2 (I tried, but it was early in the process when I was still figuring out how to use the software, so I muddled them), but I'll probably go back and do those later this week. At the moment I've got Sei-chan's desktop set on a randomizer (at least in theory), so I'll have a chance to try out various pics and see how I like staring at them for long periods of time. (I'm still not sure whether those giant staring Seishirou-eyes are going to freak me out.)

Oops, Quicktime installer's done. Better get back to work....

Well, it looks like Rin won out, because I was working on "Falling" today. After paying my visit to TekServe and getting my memory added, of course. (My god, I can actually use Photoshop on the new laptop. The mind boggles.) I didn't get terribly far, but I made decent progress for first-draft writing on the first day of working after a long break. I also have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing in the next few paragraphs--or more to the point, how I'm doing it, because I always more or less know *what* I'm going to do in a fic. It's just the actual process of getting there from here that involves a bit of struggle. Now if I can just keep the plot bunnies of anything else from springing up and biting me, I'll be all set.

Not much else to report at this time, other than that adding entries from Lynx has its own perils--ie, the lack of a date and time stamp. I'm not sure how that happened this morning, but I had to go back in and add them from the edit page, which then meant I ended up with two of the same entry, and I had to delete one.

Oh! And I finally got the tapes of Yami no Matsuei and Gravitation I'd been waiting for. Only watched the first episode of the former (which is actually episode 2 of the series; odd tape), but whatsisname, Tsuzuki? And those eyes? *meow* Hisoka is pretty too. Okay, stupid thing to say--*everybody's* pretty in this show. Pity I can only understand about one word in fifty.

And since I really have nothing more intelligent to say, I'll close up here for the night. Ja ne!

Me: Of course, you *do* realize that me naming my computer "Sei-chan" is about the third most cliche thing I could do, right after naming *myself* "Sei-chan" or some variant of "Seishirou no Miko"?
Sei-chan: Indeed. [charming smile] And your point is?"
Me: .... *sigh*

And if there are any Seishirou no Miko's reading this (although there really shouldn't be, as I haven't announced this page anywhere yet), my apologies. But you have to admit--it's been done.

Why, oh, why am I afflicted with evil laptops?

The last one was Rin-chan, named after the adorable and psychotic eight-year-old from "Please Save My Earth," who lived up to his name with occasional acts of sheer perversity. (Like the time a random sound clip went off in a broken-down, pitch-dark commuter train with a horde of angry businessmen and -women sitting all around me--and it was the endless demented laughter clip.) I'd been *going* to name the new one Lan, after the gentle bishounen techno-god in "Clover," but no, the laptop promptly informed me that it was going to be Sei-chan. And it wants a suitable background. Not to mention the wrangling we just went through trying to set appropriate highlight colors....

So then we had to go through and do another version of the menus and highlights in shades of blue, saving the green and amber for use whenever I get around to making a matching Sei-chan background picture. *sigh* Never mind the fun we're going to have when I start writing on him for the first time. He's already lobbying for the next "Sakura" Drift.

In other news, press inspection went well, although off to a very slow start. (I got there at 8:00 in the morning, and didn't actually see any pages until almost 2:00 in the afternoon.) Did a lot of reading, though, which was nice. I always recommend Patricia McKillip, but "A Song for the Basilisk" is particularly good. (I also ended up reading an issue of "Cosmo" while I was waiting for press inspection to start, because I figured that "any minute" I was going to go on press, so I didn't want to plunge into a book and get lost. It was...rather entertaining.)

I also got afflicted with yet another idea for an OmiKen Weiss fic, although I'm really not sure I should write it. On the one hand, it makes use of a scene that I really wanted to share with the world and that won't fit in any of the other stories, plus it addresses an interesting thought that I discovered in the Helen Luke book we're working on. On the other, it reprises some of the themes of "Catch Me," and I don't really know if I want or need to go there again. Plus I have so many other works in progress right now. I think I'm going to give it a few more days of pondering, at the very least.

And now I'd better get off to bed: it's decision day at work tomorrow, and I also have to make yet another trip up to TekServe--those diddlyboobs in shipping forgot to install my extra RAM. (At least I'll get a 10-cent Coke for my trouble. *g*)

So I ended up getting the Powerbook G3, mainly because it wasn't much more expensive than the iBook and had more features. Of course, either is probably overkill for my needs, and at the moment I'm feeling deeply nostalgic and/or guilty over letting my beloved Rin-chan slip away. It's pretty telling, though, that the shop wouldn't even take him when I tried to *give* him away to them for spare parts. ("But he's got extra RAM in him!" "Nah, don't think so.") I guess I'll hang onto him, and maybe someday when I'm feeling really nostalgic I'll salvage him. In any case, I should be getting the new machine some time this week. Now I just have to name it.

It's press inspection tomorrow, so I won't be online for the day, maybe not until late Wednesday. I like going on press inspection, but it's not going to be as productive with no computer. Maybe I'll just settle in and do some reading for a change. If I can't make a dent in my fanfics, I can make a dent in my shelf of books to read. ^_^

I spent more time sleeping today than anything else (uncharacteristic for me), but it was still a relatively productive day. Got laundry done, and--more importantly--cleared the most essential mails from my inbox. I need to work on clearing the CFFML box next, before I lose all the progress I made during those couple of weeks around Christmas.

Also got comments done on Kristin O.'s awesome new fic, which hopefully will be released relatively soon. It's "Clover" again--and this one'll break your heart.

Off to bed, before I get sucked into the web again. (And hopefully today's sleep overdose will cure me of that recent dragged-out feeling.)

So finally I've got the weblog layout more or less done to my satisfaction, and I'm ready to start posting for real. Hurrah! Of course, I'm still not sure whether this is going to be a serious journal, a fun waste of time, senseless and rather fatuous blatherings, or simply another stagnant web page. But I'm at least going to give it a go.

Anyhow, the state of the union on this first evening: I'm just recovering from a cold, which has had me too tired and dragged down to do email at all this week, which means that I'm as far behind as ever. I also have a papercut right on the tip of my finger, making typing a bit awkward, so I don't expect to get too caught up this weekend. I haven't done much writing either, since Rin-chan (the laptop) has been nonfunctional for the last week and a half, and while I've been doing some small amount of work in one of my old spiral-bound notebooks (pitifully labeled "Laptop" now), progress has been slow and sketchy. And of course there was the aforementioned cold to slow things down even more.

On the plus side, though, I'm feeling enthusiastic about various projects, so hopefully when my energy picks back up I'll start working on them afresh. I've really got a yen to work on one of my OmiKen fics that have been lurking about in the background; "Falling" and the next "Wings" sidestory are also strong candidates. And it's supposed to snow all night tonight, which means that tomorrow will be perfect for cocooning in my room and working on various emails and things. (I owe so many C&Cs....) If my finger holds up, that is--you know, it's really unpleasant to have to wash your hair with a papercut on your finger, especially if it's right where a band-aid won't stay on. Yowch!

And the only other pressure hovering over my head, now that work is all quiet because the magazine proofs have gone back to the printer and the book project has gone out to the designer--drat, I've still forgotten to call him and make sure he got it!--is the question of which new laptop to get to replace my darling Rin-chan. *sob* He was a great laptop for a little over four years, which is forever in computer time. (But he doesn't predate the first half of "Falling." Now that's scary.)

Off for a little more mail, and then ice skating on TV....