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.

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.

ENOUGH

1+8, 3+3+3, 2+7, 9+0…and that’s just addition

I’m about 30 seconds from being done with Facebook.

I don’t want to go into details about my views on all the stuff that’s going around, but there’s been nothing but anger and vitriol in my newsfeed. Some of it I agree with wholeheartedly, but there’s more that I can’t agree with.

It seems that some of my friends are incapable of having grown up discussions about racism, murder, Orwell, class warfare, socialism, and even communism. (Yeah, that’s a very weird and varied list.)

I’ve been told multiple times that my political views are bullshit. That I’m an asshole for loving Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. That liberalism is destroying the world. That Ukraine deserves to be taken over by Russia. That cops are murderous pigs. That we need to have discussions about how cameras on cops fail people. That we need to have discussions about racism. That we need to be the ones to make the changes in our world.

Maybe not all of these were direct, but they were pointed enough to make me feel like shit.

I ended up having to unfriend the loudest voice and I may have to unfriend the second loudest. And that makes me sad because, for the most part, they are good people. They just aren’t making good choices when it comes to what they’re saying.

I am all for having conversations on these topics, but I know I can’t discuss them rationally because of my passion and my “bullshit liberal views” so I stay quiet.

If you want the world to change, then you should get off your fucking soapbox, take the time to learn what it is you’re shouting about, and then DO SOMETHING about it.

/end of rant/