#bright personal

[brightephemera]

I found a box of Affirmation Bandages among my effects recently. They’re sturdy plastic bandages with cheerful things on them. Such as:

You’re 100% Awesome!

Birds Sing For You!

You Are By Far The Smartest Person in the Room!

You Will Smite All Your Enemies!

It’s getting a bit...militant. But I can’t see where it goes until I get injured again (they’re not visible from outside).

[brightephemera]

The laziest scam in my voicemail box

“Hi, we are from the your television provider for this area [sic]. You’re eligible...”

[brightephemera]

Shelves Chez Moi

General fiction, graphic novels, and poetry by author/title

Terry Pratchett by publication date

Multi-author anthologies by publication date

History and philosophy by author or editor

Guides and references, including the Field Guide to Surreal Botany, by height

Textbooks and school notebooks by subject/author

Art books by subject/title

(by the bed) Books where I can open to any page and be delighted, including Roverandom, The Once and Future King, the complete Calvin & Hobbes, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

[brightephemera]

Some years ago I was at a tourist attraction and the attendant had a lovely italic font tattoo on the inside of his arm that read “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” I perked up and said “Vonnegut?” and he said yes and then I crammed into the tram and we never saw each other again.

I still think about him from time to time, though. I hope he’s okay.

[brightephemera]

Bright putters around

Recent projects:

TV: Farscape. Alkjgrhgaer. This is my third watchthrough of the show and I’m in that glorious stretch where there are two ***. Both legitimate, both real, and the crew is split across two ships where each ship has a ***. The show committed to extending this plotline through multiple episodes. Anything could happen. I love how weird this show is.

Reading: The Word and the Void trilogy by Terry Brooks. My first urban fantasy, back in the day. This time around I was a little put off by the writer describing a fourteen-year-old girl as “passably attractive,” but then, it was in her internal monologue and I judged that kind of thing about myself when I was that age.

(The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was such a good book zomg the vast solitudes the aching voices and the profusion of words, each seeking, selected with intent and care...wow)

Writing: PS:T, SWTOR silly interviews, Sarah Lilly’s Letters. I can’t sustain two posts a day but that’s fine. I got the initial inspiration out of the way.

Not Reading: I gave away almost two dozen books that don’t delight me. I hope they find homes where they’ll be appreciated. I have almost finished the first five-tier shelf in my read-stuff-I-own project.

Gaming: A friend said I should play Pillars of Eternity 2, which requires playing PoE 1. I had started PoE 1 after backing the Kickstarter, and the difficulty kicked me in the teeth. So this time I fired up story mode. We’ll see how it goes. Right now the alphabet soup of faction, ethnic, and geographical names is just washing over me sans comprehension. One good sign: I didn’t get an achievement just for finishing the tutorial. Gosh, I hate frivolous achievements. Anyway, I have greatly enjoyed classic isometrics - NWN2/MotB, DA:O, PS:T - so I’m looking forward to this experience.

[brightephemera]

We’re coming up on that time of year.

May 31st. The day I started writing.

Prior to 2012 I had a few limping fantasy projects in scattered text files around my hard drive, most of them years old. I had a binder of worldbuilding materials, historical outlines, maps.......but I never finished anything.

May 31st, 2012. A conversation on the SWTOR forums turned to stuff people thought about their characters that isn’t reflected in game. Separately, the game rolled out a Legacy feature that encouraged players to draw links between their characters. I thought, hey, what if my favorite two knew each other? And I wrote a few paragraphs about it. I wrote a little standalone, too.

An instigator to whom I owe everything said, hey, let’s make a fanfiction thread.

Seven years and seven novels plus hundreds of flash fics later, here I am.

Writing is an outlet, and a pastime, and a challenge, and a point of commonality with a number of clever, funny, nice people. I love it. I love brainstorming and outlining and seat-of-the-pantsing and developing and challenging and mix-and-matching. I love knowing these characters and exploring their stories. I love getting stories out where people can read them and connect to them and make them part of the stories in their heads.

And I do a lot of it.

May 31st, 2012. Thanks to the devs and writers. Many thanks to Archive Of Our Own, Rhyme Zone, Merriam Webster, Microsoft Office, and Urban Dictionary. Thanks a million to the fellow ficcers. Thank you all for joining me.

All this and more at @serialephemera .

[brightephemera]

Puffball. Make a wish!

[brightephemera]

I don’t have an anger problem, but my anger sometimes slows down and lowers the screaming enough to acknowledge that it has a me problem.