I should be in bed, but I just wanted to thank the person who nominated my rs_games fics Dissonance and Waking the Dead for the Hourglass awards. So whoever you are, thank you - it was a nice surprise to come home to that after a long day in a long week that's sadly not yet over. I am honoured that you thought enough of them to do that.

While I'm here - I don't usually do anonymous feedback things for fear of various things, but what the hell:

My thread in the anonymous writing feedback meme

Feel free to tell me it all sucks, haha.

I'm just testing the Dreamwidth crossposting function, so I might as well make this a real entry.

We're on the downhill slide towards winter now, and for a couple of weeks now the forecast has been for almost continual rain. Not surprisingly it hasn't actually rained for all that time, but still, it's depressing. And since this is NZ, on any given day you've got a good chance of rain whether they forecast it or not, and that's hard to get used to, even after almost 3.5 years of living here. It can be so lovely here when the weather's nice, and so drab when it's not. It's raining quite heavily right now, after a beautiful sunny day, and all I can think of is the fact that if it's still raining in the morning I'll have to go out in it, because I've got things to do, places to go and people to see. All I can do is cross my fingers and hope for sun when I wake up. Stupid weather.

I would say that I don't know where March and April went, but I do. They went like this:

1. Find out that I'm going to a conference in the US.
2. Prepare for conference.
3. Go to conference.
4. Get back from conference and spend the next 3 weeks writing the conference report.
5. Finish report, send to client, proceed to get absolutely no response.
6. Fall in a heap and get sick*.

* Not with swine flu. Missed that baby by about 3 weeks, which is more than I can say for three of my friends, who have spent the week in home quarantine after travelling home from the US last Saturday on a plane with a group of school kids from Auckland who at the present time are our only confirmed cases of swine flu. My friends are all fine, the danger period has passed for them and they get out of quarantine tomorrow. It's all been a bit silly, really. Not for the poor buggers who have died, of course, but the hysteria surrounding the reporting of it has been over the top, as always. Let's face it, the real winners from all of this news coverage have not been the general public, who could have learned something valuable if the news coverage had been a bit more balanced, but Roche and GSK, the makers of Tamiflu and Relenza.


As for what else I've been doing, I've been reading a lot, doing absolutely no writing at all fiction-wise, and getting hooked on Merlin. That Colin Morgan lad, he is charming in a geeky, jug-eared, nice-smile kind of way. And I am a dirty old woman. :)

In other news, because I have a habit of collecting journals on every conceivable journalling service in existence, I have a journal on Dreamwidth. I am Rian there. I have done absolutely nothing with it so far, but I'm going to try and get organised over the weekend, add some people and whatnot. So if you have a DW journal, feel free to drop me the name, especially if it's different from your LJ one. I'm not sure what I'll be doing with that one yet, but I'm reasonably sure that I'll not be copying my existing LJ entries over to it. I'll probably crosspost, but from now rather than doing it with the whole 6 (SIX!!!) years of this journal.

As soon as I get invites I'll give them out, so let me know if you want one. :)

Nine Inch Nails played Auckland tonight.

My ears will probably ring for the next week.

Trent Reznor is a god.

( I find this to be an incredibly poignant picture )

Everyone's probably seen it already, but here's the story.

ETA: and here's the video.

Obviously aiming to post every day was a tad ambitious. Maybe starting with once a week is a little more realistic.

I had other things I wanted to post about, but with what's going on in Victoria right now, it seems a little frivolous to post about anything else.

I don't know anyone there right now, but a friend here's parents were evacuated. They're fine, but they almost weren't, like so many others weren't. The stories are horrifying, and are bringing me to tears quite regularly. Which is stupid, but god. Those poor people.

I don't know about anyone else, but if I was that guy, I'd be freaking out.

...and then there's seven pages of shark sightings in New Zealand waters.

Excellent. Just when I was thinking about going for a swim.


In other NZ news, I've just watched Border Patrol, where they showed Harbhajan Singh coming into Auckland with 10 pairs of filthy cricket shoes. He's read the riot act and they take his shoes away to be cleaned. He has a little hissy fit because he doesn't want to repack his bag, and says that he doesn't want to come back to NZ ever again, and that Australia is so much better (bless). Because this show is a "best of", they finished off his segment by quoting what the results of the cricket actually were. I can safely say that the tone of the reporting was about as gleeful as these shows ever get as they reported that India lost both matches to the Black Caps, and that throughout the whole series Harbhajan Singh took only 6 wickets and made 53 runs.

OH, NEW ZEALAND. NEVER CHANGE.*



*But if you're going to, fewer sharks and freaking whales would be nice.

See how I go back to work and the posting slacks off? Probably not surprising. However, not tonight. Tonight there's some more book reviews.

( American Gods - Neil Gaiman )

( Past Mortem - Ben Elton )

( Heart-shaped Box - Joe Hill )

( Victory of Eagles - Naomi Novik )

( The Masqueraders - Georgette Heyer )

While I am fully in support of scientists getting scientific tattoos*, I feel that this is taking things entirely too far.

Even though I will admit that they are much more horrifying and incredibly indestructible in real life, I am forced to ask: WHY would someone DO that to themselves?!?!

More importantly, why would someone work with the fucking awful things in the first place. UGH. HIDEOUS.




*If I were to get one, as a former gene jockey who worked with radioactivity for 90% of her life as a lab rat, I'd get either a DNA strand or a radioactive warning sign. Or, if I wanted to get really technical (which, let's face it, sometimes I do), the RNA code responsible for mRNA stability in the 3' untranslated regions of oncogenes and cytokines. *ends geek talk*

Since I have only one more day of holidays left (ALAS), it's time to post some holiday snaps.

Since this was my third Christmas in New Zealand, I made my family come to me this year. There were seven of us, and we rented a holiday house up in Northland for a week. Living together like that with my extended family was an enlightening experience, which I personally found fairly stressful a lot of the time, but luckily my reputation as a hermit allowed me to lie around and read rather a lot, and they've all gone now so I've got nothing to complain about.

( Christmas 2008 )

As I said in a previous post, I've been making a conscious effort to read more books. As a child I read a lot, but the habit dropped off as I got older until it become non existent when I was doing my PhD and subsequent post-doc - spending all the hours god sends in the lab isn't really conducive to doing lots of fiction reading, sadly. But since I'm no longer a lab rat I wanted to take it up again, and I'm pretty pleased with my tally for the last 12 months, even though it's nowhere near the number that some of you have read. Compared with my previous number of none at all, I think managing to get through twenty in a year is pretty good.

Anyway. I'd been meaning to jot down a few thoughts about the books I read but never got around to it, but I'm going to try to do that now, since it will also make getting back into the habit of posting regularly easier. So here goes, behind cuts because I'm polite like that, although don't expect anything overly in-depth.

( Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel - Susanna Clarke )

( Autobigraphy - Eric Clapton )



These next two were an attempt to read outside my comfort zone - the romance novel was never something I was overly interested in, but since I'd resolved to read some different things, and I have several friends who read these types of books now, so I decided to have a crack at it. A very careful crack, based on recommendations from trustworthy sources only. So far, I have come out of the experience relatively unscathed, although I will say that the predictability of the genre bothers me. There is just no suspense when you can read the back cover and see who's going to end up together. I'm getting more used to that now I've read a few more, but it's still an issue for me.

( Lady of Quality - Georgette Heyer )

( The Reluctant Widow - Georgette Heyer )

OK, that's it for now, since that just took ages to type up. It's good to have these things written down though, for posterity and all.

Only a few more hours of family time left. In the absence of peace and quiet, a meme, gacked from irreparable.

( 2008 meme )

I am back home now after the Christmas break away, but still have family obligations to attend to, so catching up on online things is sporadic at best. It'll be 2009 in most if not all of the world now, and I'm finding how quickly time is going hard to wrap my mind around. Although I'm not really that sorry to see the back of 2008, truth be told - it wasn't an awful year, but it wasn't an overly good one either, so good riddance to it.

I have hopes for 2009, most of which revolve around me being proactive in various areas of my life and actually doing some things rather than just allowing things to happen to me. Other things I'd like to do would be to write more, read more, and post here more. I suppose we'll see how all that goes, but I'm going to do my best, anyway. No time like the start of a new year to turn over a new leaf.

Title: Cast the First Stone
Prompts: Banish, church bells, chimera
Word count: 995.
Notes: Adult themes, disturbing content. Written for mind_spark's Holidays 2008 challenge, where I had to incorporate the prompts outline above in 500-1000 words. Thanks to irreparable for checking it over for me, and for advice on the religious aspects.

***

Marcus stood leaning against the window of his private chambers, the unfinished wood of the windowsill rough under his arms even through the linen of his shirt. The clang of the church bells was loud, even here, so that his head was vibrating with it. From his vantage point he could see a steady stream of villagers trudging up the hill towards the church, following the sound of the solemn chimes. As they got closer he could see that some of them were clutching Bibles to their chests, others crucifixes or rosaries. They walked silently, looking straight ahead or down at the ground. Marcus couldn't blame them; it was only mid-morning, but the pall of smoke and ash hanging over the village made it as dark as night, the red glow of the volcano in the distance stark against the gloom. The smell of sulphur was almost overpowering, the air surrounding him almost hot enough to scorch his nostrils every time he inhaled. Beads of sweat trickled down his back. Marcus lifted a hand and tugged at his collar, trying to loosen it, but it might as well have been a hand around his throat choking him, unforgiving and immovable. He swallowed convulsively and took a deep breath, closing his eyes only to snap them open a moment later.

Closing his eyes was not a good idea. Closing his eyes only made the images more sharp, and Heaven knew they were sharp enough already.

( Read on... )

I suppose I should make an effort to post before the end of the year.

In a couple of hours my family arrives for Christmas, and tomorrow we are heading up north to a holiday house for a week, which will be nice. What was not nice was getting a phone call from my aunt a little while ago from the airport, telling me that my uncle left his meds at home. Four kinds of essential meds. So we'll be starting off the holiday by going to the doctor.

Which is of course a lesson in how NOT to start a relaxing holiday.

Anyway. After we go to the doctor things should start to be relaxing.

I can't quite believe that 2008 is almost over. It had its good points, but in general it wasn't the best. Certainly health-wise it was reasonably bad, and professionally the last two months saw me swamped with so much work that I barely survived it. I'm not sorry that's over, and I won't be sad to start a new year.

In other news, I wrote something in the last couple of days, something original. I like it, so I'm going to post it. For posterity and all that.

It's Federal election season in New Zealand at the moment; the Kiwis go to the polls on Saturday, so things are gearing up for the final lap.

Despite that, today all eyes were on America. And America came to the party, at long last.

Congratulations, guys. I'm very happy for you, and for the rest of the world, because we will all benefit from this change, whether we live on American soil or not.

This time in two days I'll be on a plane to LA, on my way to a conference in New Orleans. I'm very pleased to be able to do that under such circumstances - even if Louisiana is still a red state, and even if he's not president just yet. He will be, and that's what matters.

Good on you, America. You did the right thing.



The puppy thing really made me laugh. A lot.

Name: rian219
Title: Waking the Dead
Rating: G
Word count: 5665
Warnings: Off-screen character death. Alternate universe.
Summary:
"Am I dying? Is that why you're here?"
"Do you feel like you're dying?"
Remus snorted. "A lot of the time, yes."
"Well, you're not."

Author's note: written for round 2 of rs_games. My prompt was the following: Taurus (April 21 — May 20): Like a garden that has endured a long winter, your leaves have shrivelled and your stems have withered. But with Venus now in your sign, your zest for life will return and inspire an old and nearly forgotten dream. A revival has begun. Thanks to irreparable and Suzene for the beta. This version of the fic has been edited slightly from the games version, mainly to remove typos that slipped in there like the sneaky little buggers they are.


( Waking the Dead )

Just a heads up before I get offline for a few hours:

Giveawayoftheday.com is giving away a free copy of the novel writing software Liquid Story Binder XE.

According to the blurb, Liquid Story Binder XE is a uniquely designed word processor for professional and aspiring authors, poets, and novelists. Writing software for those who require the editing ability of a commercial text editor as well as a document tracking system. It is for those who want the freedom to create, outline and revise but are tired of losing track of their work.

Usually it cost $45 US to buy, but for the next 8 hours you can get it for free from the giveaway of the day site (provided you install and register it within those 8 hours). I suspect I won't have the time to fully explore its capabilities for a while, but the ability to storyboard and utilise a timeline in a fairly visual manner seems more and more useful to me as my word count increases. And it's free, so why the hell not?

Well. I don't even know what to say about this -

US planned nerve gas attack on Australian troops

Wow. The arrogance of that is astounding.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

So, the reveals for the first round of rs_games are up, and my team - teamposthogwart - won! So there you go. Congratulations to my fellow team members, and commiserations to Team MWPP. You'll get over it, I'm sure. :)

Anyway. Now the reveals are up I can claim the fic I wrote. It's called Dissonance, and it's pasted in all its angsty glory below. Enjoy. :)



Name: rian219
Title: Dissonance
Rating: PG-15
Word count: 6,686
Warnings: Character death, disturbing imagery. Alternate Universe.
Summary: Dissonance (noun): lack of agreement; the inconsistency between the beliefs one holds or between one's actions and one's beliefs.
Author's note: Written for round 1 of the rs_games. My prompt was the QAF quote "It's not lying if they make you lie. If the only truth they can accept is their own." Thanks to irreparable and Suzene for the last minute and very speedy beta, as usual.


( Dissonance )