Some years, September 30th is not a big deal to me.

• I survived the tornadoes of April 2011, and the re-roofing.
• I have a pretty good family.
• I missed Dragon*Con but I'm going to spend a week at Disney World later in the year.  I'm making a costume for the Halloween party there -- a costume I've long wished I could do.
• I survived cancer.
• I survived cancer treatment.  In fact, at one point I survived two and a half weeks of only being able to eat apple sauce or oatmeal. Hello, weight loss! Where've you been?!
• I survived finding out that, in a crunch, my parents have my youngest brother's back ... rather than mine.  Still kind of reorienting my world around that one.  It was not any of his doing at all, it was purely them.
• I read the very last Spenser book.  I've seen a lot of people praise the new guy, but he's writing fan-fiction, not the actual characters as established. Key elements of Spenser, Hawk, and Susan are missing from Lullaby.  Defining traditions of their interaction are missing.  I wish Ace Atkins well, but I won't be picking any more of his versions up.
• I lost 30 years' worth of hair growth. I started the sequel. I actually have to LOOK already to see my scalp!
• I got my City of Villains main character to 50 at last.  She successfully -- with a LOT of assistance -- faked her death, and escaped. Now she starts living her life for her own purposes, rather than the mastermind's.
• I wrote somewhat more than half a book.  As the mental effects of chemotherapy lull, I slowly redevelop momentum on writing the remainder.

This year's marker is worth commemorating, I think.

This has been one of the least awesome summers I have ever known.

First there was the point where chemotherapy became more than my body could really handle.  I lost the ability to multitask for a while. My short-term memory went pretty fuzzy.  I slept poorly, and I wanted to sleep almost all the time.  I couldn't eat anything but apple sauce for a couple weeks, too.

Then I started radiation.  My symptoms from that could certainly be worse, but this is plenty bad enough.

I had to accept, pretty early this year, that I would not be attending Dragon*Con due to ongoing cancer treatment.

And now....

... City of Heroes is closing down....

I have characters in mid-arc that I cannot give a satisfying conclusion.  I have content in the game that I will never get to see, areas I will never get to explore.  I was just starting to feel that I had the hang of base-building.  I've got a whole slew of fluff-fiction (fan-fiction for a roleplaying game's characters), only a small fraction of which I have posted to FFdotNet or VirtueVerse.

In a couple of days, I will get mad and start solving the problem of saving my memories and images of what I have created.

Right now, I'm grieving the loss of the reliably comforting hobby in my life.  There's no fixing this.

I find myself in imminent need of a wig.

I happen to have in my possession some yarn that looks disturbingly similar to my actual hair.

I am also, of course, an utter geek.  Even at my age!

Can anyone point me at a crafter of wigs for the local Goth scene in the Huntsville/Madison/Athens/Decatur area of northern Alabama?  I want a "rag doll" style yarn wig, that will fit me comfortably during the typical weather of this area's spring and summer, that can be at least hand-cleaned, and that has a chance of still fitting me after my hair grows back.  In addition to supplying the yarn I of course expect to pay for the quality of labor and skill, plus whatever materials are necessary to make the base layer for the cap.

I have maybe a couple of weeks before my head is naked, just in time for the entire sunny season.  I do have a couple of other lovely nerdy things to wear, none of which are hats -- wearing hats indoors is a little too much violation of customs I learned in my youth for me to not fidget.

Thank you to anyone who can make introductions for me!

 Around the end of May this year, I dug out an old file I had for the way a forum-based RPG session could have gone, if the GM hadn't resumed paying attention when he did.  The plot went in a much more heroism-packed direction as it actually played out, and I'm glad of it, but I was always pleased with a couple of the images I created for that alternate scene.  I saved it to one of my reference disks around 2004 and more or less forgot about it.

I was actually looking for something else when I found it again, but realized that my character's actual motivation for visiting Plot City had never gotten addressed.  There's a note at the end of another file somewhere, winding up subplot threads and summarizing results in the dénouement, implying that my character found her original target that night or the next day, imparted information without actually starting a fight, and they very civilly walked away from each other for once.

I actually don't have any other notes that the NPC has ever appeared on-screen again.  And given that he was technically not on-screen for that dénouement, either, and that he'd been designed as a counterpoint to my character's origin before he developed some wonderful personality of his own and then vanished off the face of the campaign....

So I started writing.  At first I was merely cleaning up the original "alternate version of reality".  I figured it'd make a nice writing exercise, antagonistic, slightly smutty, with a lot of body language and some squabbling between people who used to work together and really don't like each other.

Just after the ides of June, I'd done as much with that writing exercise as I reasonably could ... but the story was still going.  The next logical step was waking me up at three in the morning, distracting me when I tried to push my way through the next writing exercise in my list, and working its details out on the main screen in my head while I scrubbed the floors.  Finally I promised myself that I'd go back and remake the first four paragraphs to fit "second attempt to find NPC, day after Adventure, other end of the neighborhood in Plot City."

(I still need to do that, by the way.)

And then I let the story go where it was trying to go.

More than sixteen thousand words later, I realize that "where it was trying to go" is a farkin' novel!
It's utterly unpublishable, of course.  Too dependent on a particular continuity, too many characters in the background and foreground integral to the logic of the piece but owned by someone with better lawyers, too tiny of a niche audience.  And in that audience, nobody's going to be thrilled to read a story centered on Fellow Player's Character.
It's also just getting to the point that the adventurers are starting to get enough of a clue about the A plot so they could maybe dig their way out.  I'm not even halfway done.  In fact, I stopped writing so I could do a little research and worldbuilding:  I'm maybe ten paragraphs away from introducing new characters, a specialized theft-for-hire set who're absolutely not remotely like Leverage, being rather villainous mercenaries of the "Robert B. Parker"+"Dark Champions with some powers" career path.

I've got about a month and a half before my turn at the gamemastering chair is expected to complete, but there's Dragon*Con in the middle of that.  I'd really prefer to be finished with this before the next patootie settles into the GM spot, because I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to be able to focus on any other character or adventure while this book is being made!

I cannot recommend it enthusiastically enough.

(Also, the trailers were pretty delightful.)

I live just south of Capshaw in Madison County, Alabama.

I'm alive.  I'm fine.  Our house is mostly fine.  We just got power back today, actually a day or two earlier than we'd been planning for it.  Thanks profusely to the Huntsville Utilities crews and visiting crews who have been working 'round the clock to get us functional.  Thanks also to Publix, which got itself open and restocked on Thursday so people could buy peanut butter and fresh-baked bread, and not starve.

Very tired.  May go cycle laundry and then nap.

that is sending door-to-door proselytizers into my neighborhood, a few interesting points you might contemplate:

1. A not-insignificant number of the homes whose doorbells you'll ring are inhabited by people who sleep during the day.
2. I see that you're all dressed up and displaying your piety in public.  You already have your reward in full.
3. Justify as not-arrogance the underlying theory that you shall go forth and interrupt the lives that strangers have had placed before them by your own Lord, and instruct these strangers on what they ought to be doing instead.

My longest-running superhero genre roleplay character is called "Feral" when she's fighting crime, but if I were a superhero, I'm extraordinarily confident that my supername would be "Maximum Verbosity".

I have seven of nineteen " failed date" segments written and posted.  One really needs a complete re-edit, because it stinks, but I posted it anyway.

Today's Thursday.  Self-imposed due-date is Saturday evening.  In the vernacular of The Kids These Days:  I suck.

Where, in the name of space monkeys, does one buy flavor syrups for tasty beverages (alcoholic types AND/OR coffee types AND/OR soda types) in this day and age?  I just want coconut syrup, for pity's sake, not the "piña colada" mixes that claim to taste like coconut and pineapple, and often list no plant matter in their ingredients whatsoever.

Why do so many of the LJ Styles leave so much real estate empty on the screen?

To do:

• More writing.  Three segments are particularly short, not sure what's going to happen with the other freakin' nine.
• Today is Thursday; wash sheets and towels, scrub toilets, dust and de-cobweb one of the common rooms.
• Make legs and feet more presentable.
• MORE WRITING.  That end segment, "date succeeded", is going to be medium-length, which seems to mean a page and three quarters.
• Find out what's the deal with Brute Force Leather:  try yet again to use website contact form.  If it doesn't immediately mail me some sort of "oh hi, you used the contact form" message this time, call them.  "Whatever happened to my corset, ordered and paid for last DragonCon?"  Gotta be some reasonable explanation.
• Thaw substances for Saturday dinner.  Possibly do some pre-cooking.
• Exercise.  Also throw skunk for Mifune.  Also sit with Belle and pet her a while, in hope of re-establishing nonadversarial relationship.
• Meditation Times may wind up being skipped today, as when will I fit it in?
• Call Mom.
• More writing!

Updates:
Brute Force Leather:  Successfully contacted, and corset will be on the way next week.
Another segment done, edited, and posted; ten to go.  Some of the trouble with these is that the male lead has had very little on-screen time, and the GM hasn't done a whole lot to establish personality (or ethical boundaries, or style).  He's got courage, and some presence, and has yet to fully adjust to the idea that Vanya is actually capable of taking care of herself in combat.  (He has, however, already been thoroughly chewed out for the Sheer Dumb of jumping in front of her during combat.  Won't happen again.  Probably.)

Belle is not interested in being petted, or indeed sat with, much less re-establishing any nonadversarial relationship where I am the Alpha Broad.  Sigh.
I am just about beat.  Segment partially written, but I'm starting to get to the point where everything I write is dumb.