Reading, Writing and Shivering

It's bundling up tine again. The state has plunged back into the deep freeze today. It's days like this that make me happy for that little bit of extra weight (oh...all right - too much extra weight) that I carry because it is a bit of extra insulation. Today, with temps back in the sub-zero ranges I'll take every bit of extra insulation I can get and be grateful.

I have now read through Binky's Big Bang story and I loved it. What a fun romp. I have highlighted passages throughout the piece for possible illustration and will be starting on them quite soon. Realizing that I was missing some extremely important colors that were necessary for these, I dropped by the art supply store yesterday and picked up ten more pastels to assure success in the coloring portion of my illustrations. If nothing else I'll have fun trying a new media. I'm using a brand called PanPastels and they are super-cool. So I now have 30 colors and a lot of ideas, I need to track down appropriate photos to work from and I'll start the drawing parts by the weekend.

I succeeded in my Bechdel Challenge story, posted on time. It's not an earthshaking story, but it's friendly and easy-going. I've certainly written stronger stories than this, but it holds together, the character interactions work well, and it fits the criteria of the challenge, so all is good. Now I'm getting back to work on my latest O-fic submission. I think I've figured out the twist, and the main character is wonderfully fun to write, but I still have serious work to do before submission and I have a long way to go. This climbs to the top of the pile, LOTR Community story notwithstanding. I also promised to contact some reviewers about Dragonthology, so I need to get moving on that. I was hoping to work on it for a while yesterday, but my "empty" time filled up incredibly quickly.

Aearwen and I had a wonderful hour+ conversation as we usually do on Wednesdays. What I really love is that even though we talk about writing and current projects/problems, we push off into other areas also. Yesterday we discussed music - not only what types of music we loved to listen to, but also our own musical education backgrounds and the instruments that we played. Someday we'll meet face-to-face and it will be like meeting a long-lost sister. So much fun!

Stay warm, stay happy, and don't let those deadlines get you down...