where his civilizations, including our own

Whoa! Um... I wrote a lot. About being transgendered, and specifically being happy about it. I don't know if anyone wants to read this! But here it is if you do.


( I became consciously aware that I didn't want to be a girl when I was about 13 )

I shipped some of my books to _hannelore. This is very exciting! (Yes, me rambling about the minutiae of moving far away is going to carry on until August. I've never moved more than an hour away before, sue me.)

Obviously they're books that I don't read/use all the time, or I wouldn't be sending them so soon, but they're books I care about and want, or they would have gone to the donation pile. So it's meaningful to me, because I r a book geek.

Almost all the little kid books from my kidhood are long gone, but I do have some amount of older-kid and YA books left, the ones I liked. I have to admit it's exciting to think about _hannelore's son reading them when he gets older. I was keeping them solely because I liked them; I never had aspirations of having kids. But now, with the reality of it, it seems very different from the vague concept of "kids" that didn't interest me at all. Hannelore Jr. is a real human being whom I like. It might be different if I didn't know him, or if he was just a baby.

Life is occasionally interesting. >:D

I logged Wednesday's words after midnight, but I'm going to write again in the morning, so it'll just look like Thursday was huge. 1892 words per day to win.

I didn't even attempt to make an excuse for why I'm not going to my dad's house for Thanksgiving. I have enough going on that whatever he thinks of me is really not high on my list of concerns. Since he clearly does not hold me in high regard no matter what I do, why bother trying to influence it? He certainly doesn't bend over backwards trying to make excuses for his callous behavior towards me. Caring about his opinion gives him more power over me than he deserves. I don't say it in an angry way, just resigned.

So instead of putting myself through all that, I'll stay home and write.

so Mah Novel is in the form of the diary of one of the characters, which was mostly inspired by reading Pepys's Diary. Pepys wrote about everything in a largely unvarnished way -- the current entry as I write this is about his ongoing urinary tract issues -- and it's striking how often he goes out and does things and sees people. I frequently need to mine him for ideas of what people did after work, before electronic forms of entertainment.

( i gave up watching tv quite some time ago )

I keep thinking I'm going to post something. :P

( hm )

My phone ringing on the morning of my day off:

Boss: I'm trying to do the t-shirt inventory and I can't find it it isn't on the clipboard or in the folder where did you put it

me: wut

Boss: Oh here it is never mind it was just a bad dream go back to sleep

me: k zzzzz

I suppose it's possible this didn't really happen.

Other highlights of the day: Locking myself out of my house and having to force the window open.

( unrelated to that )

Yes I post nothing but amusing work stories and pictures of dead WoW bosses. But. Something is happening. I'm so unhappy. I think I have an idea of how to become less unhappy. Not really ready to say what. It might just be a passing fancy, you never know with me. To work it out I might need... a journal. I never write just to myself anymore.

Unrelatedly, _hannelore sent me a pair of socks. It was kinda Dumbledore-y for a moment.

Mmm... quiet.

I was looking through my old LJ entries seeing what sorts of things I had posted on past Christmases. Holy crap, I used to be funny. I mean predictions for 2005, that was gold. I'm sure I'm not that funny anymore.

I also found that I wrote a fandom year in review post for 2005, which I imply that everyone else was doing, but I don't remember it at all. I am now going to review 2007 for no reason. Well really, so that I can look back on it and remember all this shit next year.

( 2007 )


Plans for 2008... continue to progress as far as we can before it all starts over again. Then shed our epics for level 71 greens and break the dynamic spawn rate in Northrend.

Also I need a new planner! I love the one I have, and it is so sad that I must part with it. I can never find the exact same kind of planner the next year.

I was going to post a relevant screenshot for each month, but then that was too much work and I didn't have any cool ones, so here's something random.

( nice doggie )

The title of this post, by the way, derives from a guildmate attempting to reference the saying "capslock is cruise control for cool", and managing instead to say:



This cracked me up so much I had to screenshot it, and then while looking through my screenies couldn't figure out why I had taken a picture of us just standing around rebuffing.

In the writing project that only _hannelore is allowed to see, I was using France as a model for the homeland of the POV character, giving him a French-sounding name and so on. When I reached the point where he was going to be so ashamed of what he was writing in his diary that he would conceal it by writing in his native language, I had to stop and spend a day modeling it. Of course it's a cipher of French with various tweaks, and that was just fun.

Zavre a nu brun. Se brun gov nule mapo ku nu straven te nule rabul. Se brun sor te plum e plum, o pulbe su atandrebe. Fral skelen. "Su mapo kranas kilme," bu. "Vutibe su zavrebe te du."

( traduction )

Listen to it. Forgive me, I have a cold. But yeah, HEY BONUS: That's what my voice sounds like now, kinda.


Then somehow the writing system needed to be modeled after Cyrillic, in that the letters look familiar, but if you tried to sound it out you wouldn't get it right at all. It's an abugida! I like those.

( l'image )

Before I got into LJ fandom, I basically just hung out with conlangers. And that was fun, and I learned a lot, but sometimes the culture of it is sort of stifling, in that there's too much value placed on having a magnum opus conlang of maximal detail and realism that you've worked on for twenty years. Not that I decry these -- I have them too -- but I just don't think they're "better" than a cute little toy lang you make in five hours and then never touch again. This is a toy airplane, and this is one too, and so is this. They all succeed at modeling an airplane, but it's level of detail, zooming in and out.

To put it in fandom terms, you can write an epic novel, or a 2000 word story, or a 15-minute drabble, and I see no qualitative difference, they just are what they are.

It's hard to compare conlanging and fic writing, though, at least for me. I find writing very challenging, and most of my satisfaction comes from feedback. I don't know if a story is "good" until someone says they liked it. Conlanging just... gives me pleasure. It may take work and concentration, but it isn't hard or frustrating in the way that writing is, ever. It's nice if someone admires what I did, but it's a very distant concern, which is probably why I find it hard to motivate myself to post my stuff anywhere.

I get that a lot of people moved off LJ, so there isn't exactly a home to return to, but if nothing had changed I'd probably be less likely to post at all. As I said in the past, my LJ was basically performative, in that I wrote what (I thought) people wanted to read. Not that I wrote anything I didn't want to say, but there were also many things I wanted to say that I did not think would be interesting, so I didn't write them.

( they don't stack )