257,976 words

That’s a lot of fucking paper

Wow.

It’s a good thing that Staples had cases of paper on sale.

Inside that 5” binder (12.7 cm for you metric types), is the 6th draft printed out, single sided, one page per sheet. 480 sheets of paper.

Then, I printed out each draft, each one 2-up, single sided, and included that, too.
Draft 1—106 pages (53 sheets of paper)
Draft 2—75 pages (38 sheets of paper)
Draft 3—122 pages (61 sheets of paper)
Draft 4—73 pages (37 sheets of paper)
Draft 5—110 pages (55 sheets of paper)

That’s 724 sheets of paper.

Do you know how many pages my 10-ish year old laser printer got out before it started to be a fucking wuss and jam every six pages?

About 50.

It’s been a very long day.

——

Add to that:

I wanted the BBC Radio 4 adaption of Mansfield Park with David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch - because YUMMY! - and the only place I could get it was Amazon.co.uk. Got my package today and was so excited to listen to it in the car tomorrow on my way to work and…

They sent me a fucking USB cable.

So now, I have a USB cable I didn’t want nor need and I’m on the hook to send it back to the UK.

I’m so annoyed right now I can’t even.

I’m supposed to get £8 back towards my shipping. That’s about $12… they better hope it costs me that much to send back. A penny more and it’s not going to be pleasant. It’s ridiculous that I have to pay to ship something back (and hope to hell it makes it through customs and to Amazon) when they’re the ones that screwed up the order.

*stabby*

(On the flip side - Amazon’s US store combined two orders, placed several days apart, and got them here today. That second order was placed with the 1-day shipping, so I’m kind of impressed that the timing worked out. That’s pretty random, but I figure I lucked out because the holiday fell between the orders. So wooo-hooo! US Amazon store!)

——

And if that wasn’t annoying enough, I had to call our mortgage company today to find out why, after 8 years of paying this loan back, all of our payments are going solely to the interest. At this point, by my calculations, it should be about 25% principal and 75% interest. I asked the girl to look at my most recent statement and… she couldn’t tell me. I then asked if she could pull up and/or send me a copy of the amortization schedule for my loan and it threw her for a loop.

Was it really that odd a request? Do people not know that lenders can give you a breakout of your payment and how much goes to serve which portion of your debt?

Thankfully, she figured it out and then told me she needed to talk to her accounting department to find out why my payments weren’t tying to the schedule she pulled up… I still haven’t heard back.

I didn’t think it was that hard a question. I suppose when your original mortgage company goes bankrupt and your loan gets sold to the lowest bidder, not once, but twice, the quality of the customer service tends to decrease.

In all fairness, she was quite nice and responsive when she figured out that she was dealing with someone who knew their shit, but I’m just annoyed. I want to know if any of my last two payments went to principal. If they didn’t, it looks like I’m going to have to cut my ties with their auto-pay system and not being able to break my amount due into two easier to swallow installments is really going to piss me off.  (I tried two-checks-one-envelope with them and that didn’t go over very well. They basically forced me to use their auto-pay system.)

——

I didn’t get anything done over my vacation and I feel kind of guilty about that, but there was slacking to be done.

I’ve put in two 60 hour weeks back-to-back and didn’t get paid fairly for them at all. I’m classified as this magically stupid thing called “salary non-exempt”. That means that any hour I put in over 40 gets paid at HALF my hourly rate.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s not my 40 hour hourly wage. Oh, no. That would be too generous.

How the calculations work are they take your total hours worked, divide your weekly salary by that amount to get your hourly rate and then take half of THAT.

Let’s say, using round numbers, that I earn $52K a year. That’s $1,000 a week, $25 an hour…

If I were a regular hourly employee, that OT would earn me $37.50 an hour. Which is - let’s be honest - completely worth rearranging my life for.

BUT.

I’m not.

So.

To continue, let’s assume that I worked a 50 hour week. That’s $1,000 divided by 50 hours and gives me an average hourly wage of $20 an hour. Divide that by 2, and suddenly each hour of OT is worth $10.

$10 multiplied by 10 hours OT is $100.

Completely ridiculous.

It’s so DE-motivating, it’s like working for the old Director of Finance again.

*sigh*

——

I’ve been so crabby and I haven’t wanted to be all bitchy here, but DAMN! that felt good.

My. Fucking. Feels.

ahhhhhh…memories

My last save date on the earliest draft is 12 February 2014 - I’ve spent almost a year writing this and…

I did it. I finally finished it.

The Drarry fan fic is compete. Done. Stick a fork in it.

29,508 words in the first draft.
20,852 words in the second draft.
32,137 words in the third draft.
20,061 words in the fourth draft.
28,418 words in the fifth draft.
127,000 words in the sixth draft. (Exactly!)

I wrote something that I’m pretty proud of and it only took me 257,976 words to get there.

And that’s before I tear draft number six to absolute shreds in the editing process.

Speaking of tears, I’m going to have to label it with the archive warning “Major Character Death” - and even though I always knew it was going to end that way, I was crying as I wrote both the final chapter and the epilogue. The middle part definitely needs some fleshing out and the beginning needs some work, but I am fucking PROUD of that tear jerker ending.

I’m not sure if I’ll publish it on AO3 right now. It’s dark and hits too close to home - and that’s even without my being happy with the depictions of both Broken!Harry and Broken!Draco. Plus, I’ve tried some different things in this fic. I’ve pushed my writing abilities to the edge and I’m not sure what others will think.

It sounds completely mental, but it’s frightening to think of someone reading this after all the work I’ve put into it. Terrifying, even.

But it’s done.

Wow.

Draco Malfoy - fact and fiction

draco malfoy

JK Rowling - if you’ve been living in a Harry Potter free world - has created the ultimate Harry Potter fan site and it’s filled with new bits and pieces about the World of Harry Potter. (Pottermore, if you’re curious. It’s really quite awesome despite the fact that it’s twice sorted me into Ravenclaw.)

This Christmas season, she’s been releasing a new tidbit every day. Today’s was about Draco.

As I’m writing slash about Harry and Draco, this really excited me because I’m digging in deep to the extended canon to flesh out the characters. Granted, I’m ignoring the epilogue to some point, but there’s still stuff going on around Harry that does hew close to the epilogue.

I get that JKR is upset that so many people like Draco and romanticise him, create relationships between he and Harry, and generally think he’s completely renounced his old life.

BUT in saying some of the things she chooses to say in the new piece published today, she’s kind of fuelling the idea that maybe he can change. That he is particularly damaged. It’s that pain that gives life to my version of Draco.

Rephrased from Pottermore (mostly because I can’t lift it from the site and I don’t want the copyright infringement Dogs to come after me) with added commentary by yours truly:

The ability to feel pain is an essential part of humanity. Draco’s ability to compartmentalise / deny pain and suppress inner conflict may have really fucked him up, which makes it easier for him to be the bully JKR portrays throughout the books.

While Draco can be a bit of an arsehole, JKR writes him as a person of ‘dubious morality’. Then she goes to say that Draco is not concealing a heart of gold and won’t ever be besties with Harry. She goes so far as to say he becomes a watered down version of his father and that his wife doesn’t hold the intense hated of Muggles that Draco grew up adopting and partially discarding.

The wonderful thing about fan fiction, and the alternate universes that comprise our fictional worlds, is that we can take an aspect of a character and expand upon it, or change it. I know that Draco’s always going to be a Malfoy, that he may not ever like Harry although he is civil to him in the original epilogue, but why can’t I take that damaged person and play with him?

I know she’s possessive of her characters - and I totally appreciate it - but it bothers me that she needs to keep going on and on and on and on that she hates how people view Draco.

If anything, it makes me push harder to really flesh out and bring to life the damaged side of Draco. (Sorry, JKR.)

Four hundred plus pages and over one hundred thousand words (in the sixth draft alone) and I think I’m close to capturing it.

Editing’s going to be a bitch.

Life lessons learned from Doctor Who

you definitely need a hand to hold

The best part of a new series of Doctor Who is the never-ending deluge of NewWho episodes in the days and nights leading up to the premiere. (Well, at any rate, it’s better than seeing a never-ending list of ST:TNG episodes in the TiVo menu.)

Tonight, we watched “Vincent and the Doctor”. (I’ve blogged about my love of this episode before.)

It’s kind of timely… for me at least. And here’s why:

Robin Wiliams committed suicide. It was all over the news. It sparked discussions about depression. Both good and bad.

Maybe you have to be clinically depressed/suicidal to understand why someone who seemingly had it all would kill themselves… but if you don’t, take a lesson from Eleven’s time with Van Gogh:

At the end of the episode, the Doctor brings Vincent to Paris in 2010 so that he can see the exhibit about his art. In front of Vincent, Eleven asks the curator his opinion on Van Gogh. The curator says, “To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

Think about that for a minute.

One hundred and twenty years after he kills himself, Van Gogh is brought to Paris to see a celebration of his art, hears that he is the world’s greatest artist, and it isn’t enough for him. He still kills himself when he is returned to his own time. He still kills himself, fully aware of what people think of his art, of HIM, a century later.

Did you catch that, internet?

All the love and admiration in the world, and it wasn’t enough to free Van Gogh of his demons.

So why should Robin Williams be any different, huh?

(And yes, I know the difference between fiction and real life, but in this case? Not such a big stretch.)

Trying to breathe

dancers, suzy-q, 12.07.14

First, let’s get the unpleasant stuff out of the way…

I have been keeping an eye on what’s going on in Ukraine to the point where I know what’s going on over there better than I do what’s going on in my own country. (Selfishly, yes, because their joining the EU and introducing visa-free travel is important to me, assuming I can gain citizenship. Hey, at least I’m honest.)

I have to say, I’ve been blown away by Putin’s actions since February. He knew he was losing Ukraine to the West, so he wigged out and tried to distract them. Call it a simple view of a complex problem, OK? The fact that he went after an area that was where his naval base is located was pretty obvious, but didn’t seem as important as his insistence on protecting “ethnic Russians”. I’m sorry, but that’s like Ireland invading Boston to protect “ethnic Irish people”. From what I can tell, he was “leasing” the area the Russian Navy was using from the Ukrainians. If they joined the West, he might have lost that. The rest of it? Pure bullshit.

This thing with the Malaysian aeroplane being shot down? Until it is proven otherwise, I firmly believe that Russia was behind it. There’s too many coincidences, the main one being that there was a missile being fired at a plane in an area where several planes had already been attacked. Plus, it’s not like Putin hasn’t (allegedly) been behind the killing of innocent civilians to get what he wants. (“According to the theory, the bombings were a successful coup d’état organised by the FSB to bring future Russian president Vladimir Putin to power. Some of them described the bombings as typical “active measures” practised by the KGB in the past.”)

I need to stop now before I go on an incoherent rant. I can’t stand getting into political discussions because I become all passion and less fact (even if I know exactly what I’m talking about before I start.)

——

In other unpleasant news, our old man has been having problems breathing. It’s to the point where I’m cancelling plans just so I can have as much time with him as possible.

The problems are intermittent and it’s been very hard to find a pattern, but when they happen they’re fucking scary as fuck. Our vet has seen him three times, we did a trip to the Emergency Vet, and we’ve even brought him to a ‘specialist’. While they couldn’t agree on the best course of action, and were not quite sure what it was being caused by, we finally landed upon a diagnosis: laryngeal paralysis. Basically, his larynx isn’t working as well as it should be and it’s blocking his airway. Once it gets bad enough, our only option is surgery. Aussies live anywhere from 12 - 20 years depending on who you talk to, and Apache is 13. Arsey died a few days before she turned 13, so to say we’re worried is an understatement. I don’t want to subject him to surgery if we don’t have to, but I don’t want him to essentially suffocate, either.

It’s not been pleasant, to say the least.

We’ve started with little things: keeping the house cool so he doesn’t overheat and pant is the main one and seems to be working well, even though it’s 100 degrees outside and the humans are bundled up in blankets when we’re home. The other big thing we did was invest in the best vacuum we could find. I did a shit ton of research before we invested in a Dyson Animal. (We paid a metric fuck ton to get the version with all the extra attachments, too so we didn’t have any excuses not to dust.)  Arsey was allergic to pet dander (YES! She was basically allergic to herself.), so trying to keep the master bedroom spotless is a priority since that’s where a lot of the problems occur. The amount of dog dander in there is probably unhealthy… despite our best efforts, we have trouble keeping the room clean. Two dogs’ll do that to you.

To get back on topic:

After dropping $700+ on a vacuum - dude, my dad would keel over dead if he wasn’t already at the price - I was hoping it would live up to the hype. It sucked up like 10 canisters of fur and dust. Our 10+ year old Hoover used to get overheated, blocked, or otherwise useless after the first five minutes. I ran that damn thing for half an hour and the carpet probably has more shit in it, but I got grossed out. Seriously, the fur situation in the bedroom was so bad, the Wonder Hubby used to take the dog’s brush and literally brush the fur out of the carpet, just like it was the dogs’ undercoat.

We also bought a second fan for the bedroom. It seems that the combination of a VERY clean carpet, fresh sheets and the extra fan to move the air around worked well last night. He didn’t wake me up with his wheezing and the room smelled better than it had in a very long time. It wasn’t nearly as stuffy as it gets, either, so BONUS! All this to say, our life is about to become housecleaning hell, but it’s worth it. HE’S worth it.

Damn dogs and their short life expectancies.

——

In happier news, I took over 1,100 pictures at Ukie Fest last weekend.  I couldn’t get through them all, but I got a few great shots of the dancers. There was guy sitting in front of us who kept moving so I lost a bunch of shots because the camera would autofocus on him. I tried to focus the lens on one point and switch it to manual but it didn’t work well with the dancers.

I had what we jokingly called “Ukrainian-American Tourette Syndrome” - I kept yelling out the Ukrainian words that I knew. I struggled a lot and I didn’t find anyone to talk to. It was obvious we didn’t belong there - Suzy-Q is a resort and the same families have held court there for generations. I know that much from what I heard growing up… and I lost my rightful place when my mother stopped going. My proudest moment was when I bought a patch for my GORUCK Radio Ruck and the guy told me how much my purchase came to. I also said “дякую” about a thousand times. Good practice, if nothing else, for a word I struggle with. (I blame the fact that the ‘y’ is pronounced ‘oooo’ - it’s something I consistently stumble over, no matter how many fucking words it’s in.)

While I’m STILL not where I want to be with the language, I wasn’t nearly as miserable as I was in 2009. I’m making strides to regain what I lost, and I can’t be upset over that. I’m proud that I understood about half of what I heard, even if I struggle to say what’s on my mind.

——

There’s some stuff going on at work that I can’t talk about online, but it’s making me miserable, too.

I can’t escape the situation because of my position in the company, but I did discuss it with one of the people involved.

Will it change things?

I don’t know…

I going to stay with the company long enough to have them pay to get me out of the US, but once I start the Ukrainian citizenship ball rolling, I may lose that patience. That’s probably why I’m stalling on requesting the birth certificates…

Right now, I struggle to find my happy at work, and I don’t want to be unhappy there.

——

Life goes on - I’m working with Memrise, trying to stay active on italki, and failing miserably at both..

I’m writing my Drarry fan fic and while draft FIVE is still not behaving, I’m happier with this version of the characters. Are they still out of character? Yep. But they’re still close to my head canon, so I’m going with it.

Yesterday was both Benedict Cumberbatch and Jared Padalecki’s birthday. It sounds weird to say this, but both men changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. At the very least, meeting C & L at Supernatural’s BosCon got me hooked on tumblr and (re)introduced me to fan fic… which then - after travelling a very long and windy road - led to me become a ‘published’ author of Benedict Cumberbatch character focussed fiction.

It also led me to attempting GISHWHES twice. I’m forever changed by those experiences as well…

However, it’s heartwarming to be part of such wonderful fandoms. I know I’ve said this before: the SPN fandom may be as dysfunctional a family as they come, but I feel more at home with them as I had with my own family. And the Cumbercollective? Same thing. SuperLock forever, bitches!

OK… I need to stop stalling.

Off to spend time watching a bunch of language videos I bookmarked but haven’t set aside the time for. Seems like the best way to spend a Sunday…