parody contest: 527

Today’s goals: send out at least three languishing stories, follow-up on a slew of stories sent eons ago, and go over a story I wrote last year, for rewrite. As well as other sundry things, like e-mail and scrubbing the master bathroom and an SCA project and that sort of thing.

Ack, I just realised we’ll be in Portland next week and I don’t know what project(s) to take with me. Ken will be working for two days, so I’ll have that time to focus on work. Do I write two more short stories? Do I try to get back into AETW? Ponder ponder.

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Three stories pulled, one story determined to be at a dead market, six follow-ups sent with one more to go if I can track down the address. My list of stories to mail is now appropriately longer as well. Oy.

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Ack. Well, we have new cell phones, and a new provider. (T-Mobile, if anyone cares. Guess I was blinded by Catherine Zeta Jones.) Actually, we couldn’t decide between two phones, so we each got a different one, because we have 14 days to return them if we don’t like them. What’s cool is that at .mac, we were able to print a list of phones that will iSync, which allowed us to narrow down our choices to three than T-Mobile carries. One we rejected out of hand because of particular features, but we were torn between the other two. We’ll play with them on our trip, and make a final decision then. And I’ll feel far less worried every time I use my phone, because we got a reasonable number of minutes and T-Mobile is nationwide, as opposed to Verizon, which charged me every time I sneezed in the direction of the phone.

This whole process took forever, so we grabbed food at the mall, went grocery shopping, and finally staggered home. Suffice to say I haven’t mailed any stories or worked on ALNM, although Sarah sent another chapter for review. I did, however, start a weird little parody story for, of all things, a winery website contest. I’m parodying LOTR. Story must include a cigar and a spaceship and at least one mention of a wine from the winery (extra points if more), and extra points if it includes the phrase “the unfortunate incident with the kilt”. I still need to add that last part. The Aragorn character (named after a wine, of course) has just entered and will tell a story that includes that phrase, but I need to figure out what the story is. Anyway, it’s way too easy to slip into Tolkien’s writing style, although clearly I’m not doing it as well as he did.

When I started putting the books out in the library, I sold the copies of LOTR that I’d bought in the UK (ordinary paperbacks that I picked up to read before the first movie came out). The ones I had in storage (now out on the shelves) are old and worn, and smell…like an old bookstore. Like something I read when I was younger. Familiar and comfortable. FOTR has pencilled-in brackets in one chapter, probably my guides to what I read in a college speech class when the assignment was to read a work of fiction. (I read Galadriel’s refusal of the Ring, my hands-down favorite scene. A guy in the class, who so help me god _was_ an elf, I swear—longish blond hair, slightly tilted eyes, tall and slender—read the Balrog passage. I had such a crush on him, and he wouldn’t give me the time of day.)

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We watched another ep of season 2 “Angel”, one that implied past child abuse and thus got me all tense (as in, realising that I’d been gripping Ken’s hand really hard for the past 20 minutes or so, and my shoulders are creeping up towards my ears). It was actually a good ep in many ways, but just hit one of my stress triggers.

And now to bed.