Mmm, tea. The loving cup. Unless that's something else...?

Woke up this morning with a fic idea. No, wait. That's misleading. Alarm went off at about five to seven this morning, and I reset it several times. Can't tell you how much later for, as I was really not coherent enough. Had I been put on the streets I would have been shot through the head for being a zombie. And it never puts me in a good mood to see a tealight burning when I wake up - because it underlines just how little sleep I've had. So, for the next hour or so, while I was being quietly delirious in bed (and every so often startled by my alarm), my brain decided to start spinning a Mary-Sue fic in my head (inspired in no small amount by Copperbadge's Discworld baseball fic, I see in retrospect). I decide that it might actually be fun to write - I certainly won't take it seriously at all, and it was an interesting intellectual exercise on par with deformed!Draco (the most recent part of which is surprisingly - and perhaps hauntingly - beautiful).

Went to Design & Layout class for the first time in about a month. I is a bad girl. On the plus side, I got two of my assignments out of the way (the Instructional Poster finished rough and the Newspaper Ad), and then afterwards Greg and I went wandering through the city, and I took photos of alleyways for my DL brochure (Steph suggested that I do Threepenny, so I'm going to. I'm contemplating doing some illustrations of characters the way I illustrated the hashashim for my poster). Swung past Liaison, saw Liam briefly (he's getting married in a frock coat with a mandarin collar, the bastard. Because, y'know, I haven't been craving one of those forever).

Got home, sister was out on the front porch with miscellaneous notes, studying. Since it was a nice day (by which I mean, slightly warmer than I'd like, but passable providing no-one expects me to be anywhere and I can slog about in a thin t-shirt), I sat out there with her, and wrote a (rather self-conscious - one isn't used to writing deliberately bad fic) line or so before going inside to Research (specifically, what constitutes the British Empire? The Commonwealth? I know now what one superseded the other, more or less). I've written a page in my best script, but I'm afraid the plot is barely there at all (contrived at best), and what I'm more interested in is the Wizarding Culture in Australia that I created in my head, that I suspect will never get onto the page without it being an Infodump, even assuming the fic gets finished. Which would be a pity.

Anyway, as I said, I got about a page written before getting distracted by the final episode of The Chaser Decides (on video), Dinnerladies, Dalziel and Pascoe and Jonathan Creek. I think I am very pleased that I so rarely watch TV, as apparently I am hard pressed to move once there (though in my defence, it was my sister who invited my out for The Chaser Decides, and I thought Jonathan Creek was on at 8.30, but it was D & P. And Steph knows my weakness for British crime shows. Plus, Victoria Wood!).

So that's it - my day. Almost want to pick up the damn fanfic again, but I'm already too precious over whether the plot'll be shit or not. This is why I write drabbles and flash fiction - no chance for crises of faith halfway through.

Good lord, but this post has been positively filled with parenthetical asides. Also, it is very wrong that I was having more trouble getting an Australian voice in my head than a British one (in terms of language used in dialogue for writing, d'y'see).

In other news:
Turkey City supplies me with the term for LKH's problem:
Countersinking
A form of expositional redundancy in which the action clearly implied in dialogue is made explicit. "'Let's get out of here,' he said, urging her to leave."

Ooh, not to mention:
Laughtrack
Characters grandstand and tug the reader's sleeve in an effort to force a specific emotional reaction. They laugh wildly at their own jokes, cry loudly at their own pain, and rob the reader of any real chance of attaining genuine emotion.
I've just been reading my way through Obsidian Butterfly, and although that's supposed to be one of the best (or least worst) of the Anita Blake stories, LKH loses a lot of opportunities for us to feel sorry for Anita and her lost humanity when she mourns it several times every page. And she's always laughing at her own jokes. And they're generally not funny.

And in other other news, the spiders are coming to eat me in my sleep. There is a big fuck-off huntsman over my doorway in the corridor outside. Makes me wish I had a guzunder.

[Edit: I have survived the trip to the lavatory, but I ran like a girl Liam all the way there, arms flailing and knees kicked up high. Seem to have survived intact though, and the spider appears not to have dropped on my head (unless it's keeping it quiet so it can EAT MY BRAINS while I sleep).