Valyssia

Another year’s gone, ‘poofy,’ bye-bye. I’m older…and feeling pretty ambivalent about it.

The actual good part is all the reminders that I have some pretty nifty people in my life. That Merlin Lady and Miss Sparrow were kind enough to litter my Eljay profile with pretty pixel crack and Kerkevik even wrote a story for me. Plus, there were all the well wishes via PM, post and comment. It was very sweet. Nice to be remembered. Thank you.

I consider the last week in May to be my anniversary. I began to write fiction five years ago. My early attempts were kind of scattered and broken making it impossible to ascertain an exact date.

I had this conversation with a friend of mine tonight:

(6:28:49 PM) Valyssia: I'm lead around by Taming the Muse.
(6:29:10 PM) Valyssia: It's the whole ‘I must post at least one thing during the week’ mandate.
(6:29:19 PM) Valyssia: I’m 20 weeks into that.
(6:30:12 PM) Valyssia: So, yeah...that was the meandering way of saying ‘busy.’
(6:33:24 PM) Tamoline: I'm really impressed that you can do this.
(6:33:30 PM) Tamoline: I'd have burned out long ago.
(6:33:43 PM) Tamoline: But then there's a reason I very definitely do this as recreation only.
(6:34:40 PM) Valyssia: Yeah. It’s kind of rough. I've been doing exactly this for 5 years now.
(6:35:02 PM) Tamoline:  *hugs*
(6:35:08 PM) Valyssia: Treating fanfiction as a job. I really am an idiot.
(6:35:34 PM) Valyssia: I started writing at the end of May in 2007.
(6:35:36 PM) Tamoline: Well, apparently people need 10,000 hours to become really proficient at something.
(6:35:46 PM) Tamoline: And writing is writing.
(6:36:00 PM) Tamoline: Happy anniversary!
(6:36:09 PM) Valyssia: I have more like 15,000 now.
(6:36:30 PM) Tamoline: Congratulations, then.
(6:37:04 PM) Valyssia: At 60 hours a week, which is very conservative…
(6:37:08 PM) Valyssia: 15,600.
(6:37:29 PM) Valyssia: I writes guud fer a resun.

I count myself fortunate for all of the ups and downs I have to have the latitude to pursue a dream. That’s really what this is. More of a pipe dream, actually.

Don’t envy me. I don’t live well. I exist and I do this.

Most of what I know, I’ve taught myself. I’ve had a few people stop through and show me a thing or two.

Howard has been by my side for nearly the entire ride. He and I have learned to tell a story together. That much is really cool. I wouldn’t be where I am were it not for his patience. He taught me the finer points of punctuation. In fact, the story that served as a Petri dish for that lesson was the original Bloodletting.

Mad-Hamlet taught me to play with point-of-view. That’s why Flood begins with a primarily omniscient viewpoint, and then narrows after a few chapters to limited view. He taught me a number of other things about capturing voice and trimming a narrative during that time.

Once those early lessons were completed, I just kind of blossomed. I’m still experimenting, even now.

Anyway, thank you to all of the people who have helped me along the way. And thank you to my audience.

Here’s to the hope of five more good years.

I actually had a lovely birthday this year. Thank you for all of the kindness.

Thank you to theladymerlin and skargasm for the shiny balloons and the pretty pink pony for my Eljay profile page.

Thank you to kerkevik for the cute little drabble. No one has ever written anything for me before, so that was an especially wonderful treat.

Thank you to xclaire_delunex for the beautiful picture and the well wishes that preceded it.

Thank you to velvetwhip for the sparkly greetings and the kindness.

Thank you to whedonist for the sexy e-card, the amusing thoughts and the fresh Garbage. Gotta love Garbage.  

I wrote about a thousand words on my birthday. They were fun words and I very much enjoyed playing.

I watched Game of Thrones season two, episode seven. I’m waiting for the finale to render a verdict, but so far G.o.T. lacks something it had last season. I’m not even sure I can quantify what that is. I’ll simply say that I don’t believe it to be quite as good, which still places it head and shoulders above pretty much everything else on television. In fact, it could drop a couple more pegs and remain be perfectly safe. I hope it doesn’t.

My neighbor, Karen, brought me a cute card and took to me to see The Avengers, which was incredibly sweet of her. I understand the popularity now. I haven’t had that much fun at a movie in memory. Not in recent memory, but in memory. Strangely enough it wasn’t a film that I found myself wanting to analyze. It was just fun for the sake of fun and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Raw mind candy of the tastiest sort. Very curious. Thank you Joss.

The day wound down with Femslash Today. I was a wee tad late in compiling my issue because of the film. And my father called while I was working. We had a pleasant chat about movies and television, goings and doings, and moving. He and my step mother have found another place to live. He only badgered me a little for my insistence that I finish my Buffyverse projects before I wander out into the snark infested waters of producing original fiction. He’s concerned and he means well. He was also quite flattering. All of the above makes such speeches tolerable, if not enjoyable. A pep talk with guilt.

*laughs*

I concluded my day with a little bit more of The Hunger Games. I’ve been listening to the audiobooks and thoroughly enjoying them. I love the casual style of the first person prose Suzanne Collins produces. Her protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, is wonderfully accessible, sympathetic and well rounded, a strong, yet beautifully flawed female character. The supporting characters are rich. The environments well rendered without weighing the narrative down. I’ve spied a couple of technical issues that have bothered me, but overall the series is very good.

The wound she describes Peeta having in the first book would be a ‘how are you going to spend the last fifteen seconds of your life?’ sort of injury. To my mind he should’ve bled out long before infection or blood poisoning set in.

I also had a great deal of trouble grocking how Rue might jump tree to tree and not rustle the branches, thus alerting the ‘career tributes’ to her presence. The ‘tracker jacker’ scene was particularly difficult for me to get my head around. Perhaps there was some wind that I missed in the narrative that masked the sound? I don’t know. The reality is that while a ninety pound girl sounds very petite, the leaping is still the equivalent of chucking nearly two bags of dog food at the top of a tree and expecting silence.

Yes, I know, I’m a bitch.

I can’t help it.

Hope that doesn’t spoil it for anyone. Feel free to disagree. That won’t be anything new.

First of all, thank you for this. My reserves were running pretty low.

I’ve had a lot of on my plate lately, not all of it good. I have an inherent ability to make work for myself. It’s sad. The latest pile started as a help desk ticket. I kid you not. All I did was request that something be fixed and that one small, helpful act landed a pile of work in my lap that I probably won’t dig out of for a month.

Now that isn’t a bad thing. Gods and goddesses willing, the majority of the badness has passed. I’m looking forward to accomplishing some positive things in the coming months. I can’t really talk about them now, but you should start seeing the results in the next few weeks. I’ve roped a couple of other good folks into lending a hand. I hope that what we do will inspire some people. I’d love for our energy to produce a return that makes others smile. That’s always a wonderful thing.

So basically, that ‘Monday working on BuffyWorld’ thing has been put on hold for now. I have another heap of busy work that needs to be done before we can roll this project out.

And all of that leads me to some bad news about Bloodletting. It’s been coming anyway. All of these other smaller things and more have forced the issue. I’m going to have to put the story on hold too. Now that’s just from a publishing perspective. I have one more chapter to release that still needs a little work. I should be able to get that out by a week from tomorrow, but meeting my regular production goal is laughable now. I’ve put too much into other things recently and that’s cause me to get behind schedule.

The reality of the piece is that it’s just too broken and too incomplete from here forward for me to adhere to a regular schedule. I need to dig in and finish it before I begin to publish again. I just don’t want to hang myself on it. The story has already bitten me once. That makes me leery. I hate making projections because things never turn out quite the way I want them to, but if I had to guess, I’d say mid to late February for completion.

So, if you were really into it, you have my apologies. I am willing to take on a few additional pre-readers, if you just don’t want to wait. What that entails is simply reading as the story is completed and weighing in. I listen to feedback and if there’s something that is perceived as a problem and I agree, I will do my utmost to fix it. If I disagree, I’m inclined to explain and listen to the counterargument. Communication is a wonderful thing.

I’m also grateful for any minor corrections that people offer, but that isn’t a necessary part of the job. What I want most is a sounding board.

Contact me via PM if you’re interested.

Here’s to another, better year.