not to be a forever-alone amount of in love with Flower Boy Ramyun Shop or anything, but...

YOU GUYS

The latest episode was SO good. SO GOOD.


It's the end of the third week, right? We're finally getting into the part where the heroine is facing up to her inadequacies and how she's been stifling her true self into something else, and this then brings the hero into confrontation with the true her--that he's been minorly attracted to all this time. BLAM.

There are two different scenes where she's trying to give him a clean break, and...we get to see Jung Il-Woo's excellence.

The positive reviews of his talent didn't really mean much while he was playing the fun spoiled-rich-boy bits, but in this one you get to see his heart breaking while he doesn't even really know WHY. Or what, even.



Of course, there was also boy-bickering and the set-up of the three rivals and the heroine all deciding to go in together to make the Ramen Shop a success, and the band-of-misfits dynamic is already slaying me.

The frenemy-boys are shaping up to be particularly hard on me, since there's no straight-up nice guy, straight-up clingy guy... This reminds me of the intersecting-triangles of Sunkyunkwan. Where you know from a certain point that you're going to break your heart over every single character, because you love them all, and they have conflicting goals.

Anyway, it was an excellent palliative against confronting the fact that there is no way to put all the awesome of Letters to My Nemesis into the query. Apparently, I actually wrote subplots...

okay, seriously.
this query thing is going to make me cry.

I spent yesterday morning in the bathroom.

[/pscyhe]
This was voluntary, inasmuch as it's ever voluntary to do a recording session with my brother.
Usually the mic is set up in his bedroom, but it's a song that's very fluid, and that we've performed a lot: he was having trouble getting the guitar track down. The obvious solution was to have me sing and him play for the recording at the same time.

So the isolated sound booths included the boys' bathroom. Not my favorite, but it's all for the sake of art...

First recording session of the year!

Other firsts of the past few days include
1st Rejection!
and on its heels
1st Submission!

I cut the fairies from Gift of a Riddle (the Ash Lad piece), partly enabled by having a different idea involving christening gifts...
I think it's better. Still sub-par, but better.

I'm down to only 2 queries out now--I need to send out some paper ones, research up a handful more names. This is boring, as updates go, but I thought it probably ought to be said. I have 5 rejections on the wall (whoa, Hanson ambush...) and one invisible one floating around somewhere.

Something new about this stage is being able to look at the manuscript and think, This is the best thing I can make it.

When I was talking with my mother the other day about the rejection stats, she began to bring up the possibility that I need to revise, tweak those first pages...
and without feeling defensive or guilty, I said:

No.
Those pages represent the book that it is. They are as good as I can get them by myself.

Both cool and scary to have brought a project to that point for the first time.



This guy is now looking at me on my desk.
Dear. You *know* you ought to be revising that last bit of the series.
Don't make me call Birch, now, hmm?


ozark_hoodlums was updated today, starting Chapter 2: Crime in a Land of Vigilantes

Today I got my first "please submit more" for a story rejection. ^_^

Rejection has never made me happier. Oh, Beastly, where shall we pack you off to next?

Now to go write today's quota of words in an amazing hour and twenty minutes!

I went rifling through an old notebook (one of my hodge-podge journals where I was journalling EVERYthing together which I like to do, but is dreadful for finding stuff) and came across a Bizarre Concept.

One of those "fantasy cliche" exercises spurred it (or so I would gather from their juxtaposition on neighboring pages). It's one of the notes I was completely puzzled over until I'd puzzled it out to the end:
    A culture where the names of the gods are chosen carefully to be invoked for identities at births...but a very slight mispronounceation invokes a certain god. The children are unalterably kleptos.
    Luckily, there's a thieves colony, because it happens fairly often.

That's a fairly malleable bit. It could turn to a story where the colony emerges as an odd thievery-accomodating culture, where it begins to plot revolt, where... see?

I've started a new blog mostly for myself to practice descriptive writing by making memories into stories. I really want to learn to evoke places, times, environments. To be able to better this:
" Instead of the echoing quiet of the display hall, the rumble of motors and squeal of shop doors surrounded them. "    A gem of originality, that...

And I wrote Escape Pod because it's been 2 months since I submitted.
That makes me a bit nervous.