where his civilizations, including our own

Thanks for the snowflakes guyz! Very appropriate since I just saw snow fall for the first time. (I'd seen it on the ground, just not in the air.) Consider yourselves all snowflaked by me.

So NaNo is done, I did win. But I didn't really get the same rush of inspiration that I did last year when I was so busy and struggling to get it done. I think this year I spent too much time on it to get that frenzy of creativity, but not enough for it to be "good" like finished-good. So it was kind of a discouraging experience in that way, but at least I did it, and later if I want to turn that material into something good, it's not going anywhere.

Somewhat similarly I am done with posting a fic a week. The plan was to do it for a year, and I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I think it's reached the point where it's counterproductive. I did write a few things that were good, but it has become evident that I can't and shouldn't write things quickly. They come out... um, bad. How embarrassing! Well, live and learn. Next year, how about Fic a Month?

And now to clean up to make room for forthcoming Christmas tree.

Finishing Nano later tonight. It was... well, I guess I can post about it when I'm done. This bit is actually from my first day of writing.

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( I've got a secret, said the girl on TV )

At 35k+, I have adopted a new title: Annoying Things That Really Happened, More Or Less, Grrr.

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( excerpt )

Oh snap, I failed last night. No words, so now I'm a day behind at 23,401. I think I can catch up today, though.

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( excerpt )

Still going, 13,338 right now. This excerpt isn't anything special, except for not being embarrassingly incoherent! Ah, Nano...

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( another excerpt )

Whoops, this was supposed to get posted yesterday, but the wifi kept flickering and I gave up.

My Nano's off to a decent start, keeping up the par pace for the first two days. It's going to be your standard sort of novel about regular people who frequently get emo about their problems. Exciting, I know! Since I did urban fantasy/adventure last year I thought I'd throw something different in the grinder.

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( excerpt )

I'm doing this collaborative conlang project dealie. The idea is that I take someone else's conlang and derive a daughter language from it (using plausible principles of historical linguistics, hopefully), and then someone derives a language from mine, and so on. Everyone gets two weeks to finish.

The details are of no possible interest to anyone who isn't a linguistics geek, but I did decide to kill two birds with one stone and make up an extra sample text. The person whose language I was assigned to work with had made up a very patriarchal farming culture to go with it, and suggested that some of their descendants would domesticate the horse and become nomadic, so I went with that.

I hope the unicode stuff doesn't just get wrecked for most people.

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A raid on the garden people

( English: The year I became a man, some of our sheep had died, and so my father wanted to raid the garden people )

( Ingomo: Lo tɯká:zone:v no, ta œnó saŋ sí:bo: iŋomœ́ŋhɯː: ca áje:zo:, ky zɯ: cí:kejigo notɯnó ótabola:pol sœ:gɯsávu:kavogu:v sa )

( And for any actual ling geeks, the interlinear gloss )

The background on Dean Thomas is awfully interesting. If I ever knew about it, I must have forgotten (though frankly I've forgotten more about the HP series than most people could bear to know).

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G, gen, 370 words.

The Railroad That Went Nowhere

( When Dean was very little, he used to see a train that no one else saw. )

Sequel to this one.

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( In the God-House - G, original, 650 words )

I dreamed this -- exactly this, pretty much. I fixed the internal logic a bit, but didn't really add any details. It was like watching a movie. WTF brain.

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( The summer that horses flew - G, 1200 words, original. )