Three words…

best use of that screen grab ever

Yeah, it’s that time again.

So far, I’ve had self / family / create / happiness / travel / J… I’ve been wondering what to use this year.

And I’ve been struggling because things are so messed up right now. I haven’t had any energy lately to do anything, let alone think about the future.

BUT… I think this year’s words should probably be writing / Ukrainian / knitting.

They’re way more specific, but I think that’s better. All three are things I really want to work on and make time for.

Of course, none of those things go along with the fact that I need to lose the 30 pounds I gained by stress eating all year, but maybe I’ll find a way to work it in to Ukrainian. Audio recordings and podcasts while running on the treadmill?

Yup. Birds gotta bird.

ringing in the new year with a little bit of cumbercutie

Original piece lasted maybe a thousand words… Decided to write a new Drarry piece, picking up from the chaos in the Great Hall at the end of the series.

It fits into my Broken!Draco & Broken!Harry head canon/universe so, why not see that that looks like?

So…

Knitting, writing, binging on “Grimm” and wishing I had tomorrow off like I was supposed to…

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

I miss writing already.

this is probably my favourite martin/jawn face

What was it my dad once said? Oh yeah.

“Birds gotta bird. Fish gotta fish. Writers gotta write.”

Charlie, everyone.

At least he supported the fact that I wrote like a mad woman. He kept me in college ruled notebooks and Bic pens for YEARS and never said a word when I dropped everything to sit outside and write.

——

So—Drarry is in its binder, marinating. Fermenting? Whatever. It needed a time out so that I could come back to it with fresh eyes in a little bit.

In the meantime, I can not get the voices in my head to shut up.

I thought I was going to pick up an old Johnlock piece, then I thought maybe an old Marlas piece, or even the Shenny fic I started and promptly got sick of. (Het is boring, I guess.)

Nope.

I’ve decided to start something original. NOT fan fic.

This ought to be fun. It’s been so long since I’ve written anything not controlled (to some part) by someone else that I’m not sure I can do it any more.

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.