wordcount 668
only 9 and a half more scenes to go

Steady as it goes. But everything is too condensed. These last few scenes are going to be very long. Or at least this current one is. It needs more. I think I'm going to have to pass the PoV around to make it complete.

After this difficult long one, I'll get to the ones that already exist in early, ugly forms and need to be rewritten, three of them, as I always love editing that should be a nice change from all this blank page work. And after that... Wrap up, break down, clash and end of story. The heroes will show their true faces.

I see analogies with the Charm special I was at yesterday. Man, that was heavy; the themes were sacrifice, death and how to cope with loss. Heroes doing what they think is right, but they are only human, and their decisions will always have consequences. I like stories where the stakes are high and where the heroes follow their hearts. Like Dr. Horrible, we do not always understand what it truly means to achieve what we are fighting for. Some wishes should not be granted. I love tragedy. You have been warned.

In other news, I am tired. Summer always means I don't get much sleep. I can't sleep with all this light. I'm lucky it's not warm or I'd have slept even less in the past week. I'll need to get at least one 10 or 12 hour night in this week just to make up for it all. And to prepare for the lack of sleep I'll have at Elbaria.

This is my last week of work before I'll have two weeks off. Finally more time to write. And my new little Digit is a lovely writing tool. Looking forward to that. Tonight Daniel will come by to show me a movie and we'll make up a Catholic character for his new Hunter campaign. We could use more players for this sporadic, Sunday-afternoon campaign btw.

Tomorrow is D&D, last one before a short break, because I'll be at Drachenfest during next episode. Thursday night is for a visit to a colleague who has had a baby. Wonderful woman, but I fear this visit will cause me to see more dancing babies. Friday, we have a trip to the Ikea planned, to finally finish our bedroom cupboard and get a kitchen cabinet to keep more bottles and glasses in, and some writing things. Saturday is the start of Elbaria, which will keep me and Jelka and Cabaray and his brother busy until Tuesday.

And after that... More writing!

Through my work, I have acces to several databases with scientific literature, like Elsevier's ScienceDirect. Today I spent some time looking for interesting articles about gaming addiction. While the articles that only ecourage the panic and ignorance around the subject of gaming addiction seem to get a lot of attention in the media, I find it odd that articles like this one below, that explain a lot about the nature of gaming addiction, are somehow ignored.

This is an abstract of an article from European Psychiatry, volume 23, issue 8, pages 212-218, 2008.

( cut because it's long and a little technical )

x-posted to girl_gamers

But this is just hot!

( Don't click it if you don't want to see Spock and Jim together!! )

Wordcount 986
Still 10 scenes to go

I need to make another summary and paste all the scenes in the correct order in a file, so my editor can make sense of it. I also need to go over my old reuseables, to see how and where I can use them. That might really speed up the writing of a few scenes. Ugh, it all looks a little disorganised right now.

In other news... Hot weather makes my feet swell up like waterballoons. Really odd. Didn't do much of interest this weekend. Little writing, some lotro, some roleplaying, some cleaning and stuff around the house.

Learned that Bim afraid of thunderstorms and tends to sit on a chair under the table, as if afraid the sky will fall on his head. He and Knikkertjes also caught another tiny mouse this saturday and they played with it far too long. The squeaking made my heart break.

A busy time is coming up. We spend tonight with Paco, who has just got back from his diving holiday. Tomorrow Fub will come over to help me outfit Digit with Ubuntu. And Thursday night Jelka comes over so we can go shopping for Elbaria. Saturday will see us playing Amber, and Sunday is a Charm Special centered on Anarion and Merel, who are seeking forgiveness for a terrible thing they did. What is my character Amelie doing there? Well, she cares.

Ok, that writing thing. Yay for copy-pasta. I might make this mess legible.

I'm really annoyed with this popular song, that in my humble opinion is totally sexist and no one seems to mind. It's a Dutch song, so I'll translate it here, and I won't be translating it fairly. Because I think it's so sexist, I'll try to highlight the sexism in. See if anyone still likes the song after that.

--

Quarter past seven on Sunday morning
I hear a voice that softly asks me
Are you awake, dad?
Are you coming with me downstairs?
Do you have to work or are you free today?
Are you going to take me out?
Time goes so fast
Seems like only yesterday that I held her in my arms for the first time
She is so pretty
And she gets more beautiful every day
I see how she changes every time I blink my eyes
But no matter how grown-up she becomes
She'll always be my little girl

Quarter past seven on Sunday morning
I hear the front door open quietly
Relieved I go to sleep, she is home
I would have liked to go pick her up
But she asked me not to come
She can find her way home herself
Time goes so fast
Seems like only yesterday that I held her in my arms for the first time
She is so pretty
And she gets more beautiful every day
I see how she changes every time I blink my eyes
But no matter how grown-up she becomes
She'll always be my little girl

Sometimes when I close my eyes
We're walking on the beach together
Her little hand in mine
Time seems to stop
Everything is as it should be
She needs me to take care of her
I hold on to her
The way she used to be
I hold onto her

Quarter past seven on Sunday morning
She hears my voice when I softly wake her up
Today is your big day
She is so pretty
And she gets more beautiful every day
I blink my eyes and see that her heart now belongs to another man
But wherever she may be
In my mind she is with me
She'll always be my little girl

--

Because girls have to be beautiful and they need their daddy to take care of them until the day they get married and then, thank god, there will be another man to take care of her. And notice the competition between the father and the husband here. First, her heart belonger to her dad, but now there is another man in her life.

And the only thing that matters about her is how pretty she is and who she will marry. Oh and no matter what she achieves, her father will never respect her as a person, she'll always be his little girl.

Everytime I hear this song, I need a bucket.

The sky is rumbling incessantly and a stormy wind is playing with the tree, so I opened the pane and the windows hoping to let some fresh air into the house. Bimfoodle loves the yard, he loves playing outside, but not now. He's cowering under the table, afraid the sky is falling.

Because the yard really needs an overhaul, and one of my recent posts yielded offers to come help, I am now announcing a new episode of Yard Wars: Revenge of the Humans. On 24 and 25 July, the brave and willing are welcome to challenge the evil green monsters that inhabit our yard in order to decimate them and take back our land. These dates have been unanimously chosen because the shops are open and Remco and I will be able to provide our heroes with anything they need, whether it's tools, cool drinks or icecream.

I do not expect everyone to jump up and go "Yay!" because really, just two helping hands would be fine. But the invitation is open because we like company. If you need directions, just email me at gmail, my username is the same there.

"Reply to this meme by yelling 'Words!' and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you."

And ingiechan gave me these words:

1.gamemaster
I have an opinion about what a GM should and shouldn't do, about how roleplay should work. It's about improvisation and entertaining each other. Not about rules or competition. It's a game, so I try to make it fun for everyone. This means that when I'm GM, the players are heroes and if they make an effort and have good plans, then they will succeed. The more fun the solution that they come up with is, the more chance it will work. I like to reward good ideas, not punish people for bad ideas.

I GM a lot because not everyone shares my opinion and I'm not a very fun player when the GM upholds different ideas as to what the game is about about than I do.

2.tuintje
The yard is becoming the stuff of nightmares, and I want it over with. I'm going to be planning a weekend of Yard Wars: Revenge of the Humans soon, so that we can take back our land and decimate the evil green monsters. After we wreck the place, we can hire a professional to make something pretty out of it.

3.electrische boor
Why oh why does a drill remind Ingiechan of me? Maybe because I once told her that I refuse to touch them. Powertools are things that I should not be handling. My hand-eye coordination is bad, and I will do more harm than good. It is the reason why we don't fix much things around the house, because I have more time than Remco, but I just won't do it, afraid to make it worse.

4.taal
Language is one of the most beautiful inventions of man ever. Amazing how my scribbling strange markings on a piece of paper can move other people so deeply. It fascinates me to no end how words help shape our thoughts, how the same word in different languages can mean so many different things, and the harmony in that somehow.

5.telepathie
On the one hand, I laugh at experiments that try to prove that telepathy exists by letting test-subject try to guess at things. That is by far one of the most ridiculous things I have ever seen in the world of science. On the other hand I do not doubt that there is something like a sixth sense, that thoughts and emotions can be shared without explaining them and without physical proximity. Like Tonke Dragt suggested in some of her books: thinking is like sending out radio signals, only most people have somehow forgotten how to receive those signals. Luckily, some people have intuitively rediscovered their receiver. Mine works, more or less, though I don't know much about the controls. janestarz has a very sensitive receiver, and nokey has spent a lot of time developing his.

I challenge you to check if you have a receiver.

So... I saw this coming when I read through the requirements a month or so ago. I was never a very literary type. Says the writer, oh how ironic. Well, I should have known anyway, I was relying on my child-prodigy intelligence; it got me through high school and into college, so I trusted it again. And it failed me. Of course I can't get into a school like that on talent alone. So I can write pretty stuff. So I'm fluently and literally bilingual. That's not enough to become a real literary translator. I have the utmost respect for those translators now.

And I know that quite a few of them are intellectual snobs. Ye gods, those emails got ugly. "I didn't think she would make it" Someone hand me a bucket. I am not going to tell them I didn't make so they can snark at me too.

So, this frees up some time and money. What to do, what to do... Oh right, write a book, have a baby or two, live happily ever after.

There are problems with the homework and communications system at school. They were supposed to put our end-results online yesterday, but that didn't work. So they sent them off per snail mail. My classmates who work at home are now sending emails to each other with the results. One of them has passed, even though I didn't expect it, and one of them has failed and is really down about it. I'm pretty sure my results are waiting for me on the doormat at home, but I have no idea whether they will make me happy or sad...

I have been jealous of Remco's pretty little EEE for a while now, and I pondered buying something like that myself. Well, yesterday something silly happened; our IT department got a Netbook for free with our order of I don't know how many new PCs. They decided to give the netbook away, and we did a little quiz among the IT colleagues.

And I won it. Say hello to Digit, my new little friend on holidays and when I'm travelling! He's got a faster CPU than most EEEs and about 10GB of disc space. He rund Windows XP and he still needs a decent firewall, because he came with a trial of ebil Norton. And now I need a bag to keep him in and a little mouse, because his pad is just heinous.

This morning, my boss came in and asked whether my husband was happy with the Netbook. I told him it's mine and it's exactly what I've been looking for. He was a little surprised. Shows how well that man knows me and what the extent of his sense of humour is. I'm liking him less and less.

But yay I have a new gadget!

It's been quite a while since I wrote down what happened in D&D, and that's because we had a few slow nights. Let me try to summarize what has happened.

After killing the hydra and taking all those magical books and items, the heroes returned to Hoge Jan to sell the things they didn't need and receive the rest of their reward. The wizard was very pleased with the books and things and paid the heroes a rather sizeable sum of money.

After that, it was mostly Fabi and Paythan who wanted to investigate this new portal they had found; it was most likely the portal through which the swamp bulls made their way to the lands around Menethil and if they managed to figure out how to stop that from happening, the paladins of De Rechtvaardige might reward them more than for just killing another few bulls.

Somewhere during a dark night, Yng had a visit from an archmage from Dalaran in Versa, who told him thing that didn't make him too happy.

The heroes investigated the portal, only to find out that it lead to another swampy area that was a little backwards and far away from civilisation. Herds of swamp cows trudged through the waters there and the local population took good care of them, because their leather was quite valuable. A few men were building a fence around the area where the portal was, to prevent the bulls from going through. It looked like the problem was solving itself...

As soon as they had crossed the portal to the other side, Paythan's magical sword Silvershade started shouting. Since Paythan doesn't want the others to know that his sword can talk, he quickly asked him what the heck was wrong. Silvershade explained that he was looking for an elf woman called Lalaith, who was last seen disappearing through one of these portals, and Paythan promised to look for her.

In this little town, the heroes picked up some information about this side of the world; this was Snake's land and it was populated by Lycans who sometimes attacked the humans. This particular town was well-defended. Two local adventurer's, the Roodenburg brothers, exchanged some information about how to approach the Lycans, and in turn the heroes showed them the portal.

Fabi managed to catch a live swamp bull by charming it and he lead it through the portal and back to its herd.

Doctor Melvin was rather sad to leave the quaint little town, because it was the only place where he had ever seen a Konditorei. But the others wanted to get back to Menethil and swindle the paladins out of more money. When they got back to the city, they found out that one of the paladins, by the name of Valandir Melandru, had single-handedly caught a live swamp bull and the whole city was in awe of him. The heroes tried to ignore him and went to speak with one of his superiors.

Brother Aaron agreed to pay the heroes a sum of three thousand gold pieces because they had found a way to keep the swamp bulls permanently out of the lands around Menethil. He didn't ask for any further proof or justification of their deed, because they showed him the medals they had gained for catching the Schnoodaards. He also agreed to let other people of importance in Lumoon know that they were real heroes, who could solve the more complicated and dangerous problems a country might have, and he asked them what they should be called.

And the heroes answered that they shall hencefort be known as The Fabulous Fabi and his Posse.
Tune in next time for their new adventures.

wordcount 0
still 11 and a half scenes to go

I have been engrossed in lord of the rings online this week, ecstatic about the new Warden class. Not something I should be doing, but oh it's so much fun. Also work has been really busy, hence the large number of work-related posts in the past week.

But it looks like we're back to the quiet summertime work now, so I can get back to writing. Though I should be working on scene 12, I'm still changing some stuff about number 13 right now. Anastaszia rightfully remarked that it needed more scenery.

Friday saw me shopping with Janestarz, and I discovered the shop where I want to buy my bras for the rest of my life. The clerk at the store taught me a thing or two about how bras should fit and that I should really wear cup E instead of D, though a 75F fits me real good too. Ugh, they got bigger again...

Remco's is not complaining, even though I'm getting heavier again too. Soon I'll be officially obese. Like I care... I have had a belly all my life, but the flabs on my back make me uncomfortable. I don't know what to do...

On Saturday we spent most of the day playing games at the Biljartpaleis with other CB members and on Sunday we went out to Charm's Pirate Special Event to entertain the less lawful players. The weather was ghastly, with a horrible torrent of rain, after which the air was damp and hot. I hope the players had fun, but Remco and I were definately exhausted after the whole thing.

Today I'm meeting with my coach at work again. I wonder what she has to say and what she wants me to talk about. I have some stuff in mind I want to bring up though, so that's good. I just hope I won't cry. I don't want to.

We'll see what this week brings us...

According to some ladies in Belgium, tomorrow should be a bra-free day. They say the bra is a symbol of women being oppressed by the media to be an object of beauty and all that jazz.

Those women must be seriously small-breasted. I really don't care what anyone thinks the bra symbolises, it's the instrument that makes me capable of standing up straight without feeling sweaty or painful, it shapes my flabs of flesh into an attractive looking bosom. I am not going anywhere without it. I love my bra, and I need it. It was not forced upon me (though one could argue that gravity forces me), I want my bra.

Tomorrow is a great day to go bra-shopping with janestarz !

damanique gave me these words:

1. Publishing
The more I go to the translator's school, the more I learn that the Publishing World is a little man's world full of intellectuals who hold high standards to literature on the one hand, and who value the way they present themselves and the way others present themselves highly. Like politics, only surprisingly enough, authors, translators and publishers are a lot more idealistic than politicians, it seems. As an author, getting published relies on two things: one is skill and originality, if your writing is not somehow interesting to the publisher, no chance. The other is marketability: the publisher is going to have to make people buy it, and if he hasn't got a vision on how to do that, the book is not really going to go anywhere, I guess.

2. Fantasy
I have always been a bit uncomfortable with normal fiction. It's so close to reality that I get very obstinate when things happen that "would never happen IRL". In fantasy, because it's so much further away from reality, anything is possible, and I'm much more capable to accept the story the way it was written. I like fantasy because it gives us the liberty to explore things that are not possible. Epic adventure stories tell us much about human nature, maybe even more than normal fiction does, because of the new perspective.

3. Reason
I'm a perfectionist and an intelligent person, I used to believe that everything has a reason. And I still think that situations are easier to accept if you understand the reason behind them. I have always felt the need to disobey rules, if the reason for those rules was "stupid" imho. The reason behind everything is more important to me than the situation itself. Hence I spend a lot of time thinking about reasons, and from this also stems my ability to always forgive wrongs that have been done to me, and my ability to empathise with a lot of people, my people skills, because I understand their reasons. Reasoning is very important to me.

4. Sensitivity
I used to know a woman, an artist, who gave me drawing lessons. She lived alone and never got out much. She and I really connected and she told me about being highly sensitive. I was 18 before I fully understood that the way I experience life is not what everyone else sees. I understand now that not everyone can feel their own bowel movements, their hair on their back, the way their clothes fit around their body, the air moving through the room, on top of hearing the radio, everyone's footsteps, voices and the airco, all at the same time. I understand now that not everyone sees all those details I can see, and certainly not everyone can hear other people think. I understand now how it wears me out, especially if some of those factors are "louder" than I like to have them. I don't talk much about it, because I don't think many people can uderstand, but this is me. Everything at the same time.

5. France
The country that my parents fell in love with. A beautiful country indeed, but the people... Recently, a movie came out called "Les Ch'tis" about the difference between French people from the North and from the South. Aside from being a very entertaining movie, it showed the people from the South exactly as I have got to know them at high school: lying hypocrits who choose their friends based on what people would think of them being friends, not based on whether they like each other for who they are. There are some exceptions, and those became my friends at school. But I really don't mind not living in France anymore.

A lot of documents go through my hands at work, mostly scientific literature, because I have to scan them and redistribute them. Today I came across the name of an author: Proudfoot. All I could think was: It's a hobbit!! Yay for LotRO distracting me.

Most of the documents I scanned today were about a special drug that neutralise narcosis or overdoses. Apparently this drug sometimes causes seizures or cardiac arrests. Ye gods, the poison doctors will throw at us, thinking it might save our lives...

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. My words given to my by fub .

1. LARP is a hobby that combines roleplaying with costuming and hiking. It involves a lot of improvisation and some acting skills. It is my favourite emotional outlet and a really fun way of spending time with friends.

2. Storytelling is an artform. When writers do it in a book or a movie, it is recognised as such, but it can be art in many other forms too. It's my favourite way of being creative, probably because it doesn't involve hand-eye coordination. :P I feel like I know a thing or two about storytelling, and I can get very critical about books and movies and amateur story-writing because of that.

3. Clothes are what we use to cover our bodies. I like clothes, because there are many different styles and I just enjoy dressing up. I think the clothes a person chooses to wear say a lot about that person, and therefore I select my own clothes with great care. I hate to wear shirts with print unless I explicitly agree with the print, and I hate patterns that make my eyes hurt. I'm picky and I usually end up wearing dark clothes without special features. But I like that.

4. Balance is everywhere. The fact that Fub chose this word for me makes no sense, but at the same time it does. The Youtube film of that Iranian woman who was dying, it was horrible to film such a thing, but it was also good to film it and show it to the world. War and revolution are terrible things that mean chaos and death, but they bring on many changes too. There is balance in all that.

5. Reading is something I don't do a lot. Which is strange, because a writer is supposed to read a lot too. That's how we learn about writing, by reading. But because I'm so critical about other people's writing, there's not many books that can hold my attention. If I get bored or annoyed half-way through, I have no qualms to put the book down and neve pick it up again.

What was I thinking? Kneeling with mr. Migraine bearing down on me... And just when I was getting some nice lung-fulls of fresh air, a tractor ploughed through the park behind our house. I can't stand that noise right now...

Our garden path, a lovely little S-shape of small red bricks, has gone missing. After being attacked and almost killed by moss that made the little bricks crack, it has now been abducted by the grass and I haven't seen it since.

The garden is a real mess. And who can blame it for turning into a jungle when no one ever spends time with it? The grape vine is climbing up the berry tree and the blackberry is having a pissing contest with something hideous from the neighbour's side of the fence about who has the biggest brambles. The pond looks slimy and green with duckweed slithering under the big lily leaves. There is just no place anywhere in the garden where the green monsters are not trying to take over.

I feel like it's bigger than me. Can I just order a new garden somewhere online? I don't want this one anymore...