February 10th, 2005

Illustmaker me

Wrong turns

Chapter Fourteen (The Evans Temper) of Shifts is up at SQ, tweaked to put a bit stronger emphasis on Remus's appearance charms, to reinforce that Petunia doesn't know who he is.

I hate taking wrong turns. I wrote about 1100 words of a scene last night to start the next chapter, realized I was struggling with both language and plot logic, and ditched the whole thing at 3:30 a.m. The new scene I started is better (more focused, less of an issue with, "Wait a minute... they still have several hours before they should be even starting to talk about this...," plus, hey, Sirius welcoming Remus to the House of Black), but obviously, it's going to run yet another day late. Grrr. I realized I'm also going to actually have to commit to a theory about how the Order communicates, other than the portraits, since Snape's communication forms an important part of the chapter. And I can't wrap my head around how the white bird thing Dumbledore sends Hagrid is more efficient (or less noticeable) than Umbridge's fireplace.

Good Lord, I'm getting severe stage fright.

Which is fun. I always liked the work-up to a performance. But I'm in total fingernail rapping, toe-tapping mood.
Illustmaker me

Subway

I'm normally an extreme egalitarian who doesn't believe that women doing jobs will do them any differently from men doing them. After all, a job is a job.

But it occurs to me that if women designed more subway cars, we wouldn't have long seats running parallel to the aisles. These are sadistic devices, obviously created by a man who never had to get home after a long day of work wearing a knee-length straight-skirt and wishing that chastity belts would come back into fashion so he wouldn't have to give himself muscle cramps keeping his knees closed so that the entire other side of the train couldn't see what color panties he had on.

That's all.