Monday again, strike up the band...

Back at work, after a somewhat hectic weekend of the Great Housing Search, a party, a club outing, and not a whole heck of a lot of writing.  My old stories did get approved for posting on Daughters of Sineya, which is very exciting, even if last time I checked no one had yet read or reviewed them.  I'm just going to avoid the inevitable sense of disappointment which comes from having no one read my stuff, by reminding myself that the bulk of the posters and mods for the site are in a different time zone, and that they'll likely get around to approving of me at some point.

There was one of those wonderfully poetic and primal moments which comes of having a dog and cat in a small apartment together, yesterday afternoon.  I was laying on the couch, roomie and dog were in her room sleeping.  Cheyenne came out and lay down with me, to watch some TV.  Roomie (Kate) went to use the powder room, so dog (Nicky) came to investigate the other rooms, and found us on the couch.  He walked around the coffee table, passing inches from the no-longer-purring cat, with increasing speed and anxiousness.  He did it a few more times.  He stopped in front of the TV and stared.  He circled the coffee table again, pausing to sniff Cheyenne, who was still amazingly calm at this point.  He stood in front of the TV again.  Kate came out at that point.  Nicky came back close to the couch, and barked.  That's about when all hell broke loose.  The cat started hissing and scratching (she's a tough kitty), the dog whined and barked again, we yelled at both of them.  The cat then made a mad dash in the opposite direction of all the noise, while the dog was distracted giving his mom 'what did I do?' face.  When Nicky went to investigate her hiding place, Cheyenne bolted around the other side of the box she'd gone behind, and escaped back into my room.

There are lots of boxes all over the place, right now.  We're both slow packers, and there's lots of stuff all over the apartment, in little storage nooks.  Last book club/reader's circle in the apartment tomorrow night (sniff. sniff.) which means most of the packing is currently confined to non-public areas, although I did manage to re-create the leaning tower of Pisa with plastic storage bins in the dining room.  The most unfortunate thing I can see about the large pile of boxes, is that most of them were pre-packed; not a whole lot of packing up loose things went on, yet there is a massive pile.  They do make an odd art piece, though.

Starting at the Beginning

The hardest thing about writing FAA, and the reason it's taken me nearly two years to get through 11 chapters (with an interlude after chapter 7, so 12 sections) is that my brain likes to say "Hey, I finished" after each.  So really, it's been like writing 12 stories mentally.  They all interconnect, the way a chaptered fic should, but they were each written seperately in many ways.

I'm including a spoiler alert at this point, because I like to use my LJ to ramble about stuff.  If you're reading FAA avidly, and don't like spoilers, just leave now.  The rest of this entry is all about my writing.  For those of you not reading FAA and not inclined to, you may not find this especially interesting, but then, you might.  I use way too many commas.


Chapter 12 is either going to be much easier, or much harder, because I'm coming to the end of what's covered in the episode, and I have a good deal of action that needs completing before I can get on to the sequel.  And the sequel is planned out already, in that I have plot points, and a vague timeline which places it before the third story, which is Penny's wedding on Fourth of July weekend, 2004.  So, It's Thursday evening, April 28th in Chapter 11.  The story ends sometime Monday.  And the sequel covers May and June.  Third story, July 4 weekend.  Fourth story, probably Christmas.  I haven't decided whether Christmas will be in LA, Lake Tahoe (don't ask), London, or New York.  I suppose it depends on where people end up after the summer.  And, for those of you who read "Saying it in Song", obviously the third story is also when Buffy moves to LA, although Buffy and William's date in Madrid I mentioned will be covered in the second story, as will Wes' move to Rome, and the recruiting of more renegade former Watchers.

Obviously, I need to hire those monkeys who write Hamlet, or I'm never gonna finish this thing.