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Mar. 29th, 2010 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseStuff:
I did finally buy myself the other bookshelf I have rather needed for quite some time (With some assembly confusion, even though this is the third of this same company and style of bookshelves I've put together, and the first two worked fine; and I find assembly of this sort of furniture dead easy).
This led to a complete rearrangement of my study, which now feels somewhat more orderly, though there are still a few piles of things in need of decision making (It also doesn't feel any smaller, even though we moved two trunks of fabric and sewing projects in here from the spare room, so as to make more space for abacchus (and anyone else who ends up using the guest room. However, between this and a cleaning out of my clothes closet, we seem to have a pretty gargantuan pile of stuff for Canadian Diabetes this time; fortunately, the pick-up's Wednesday.
So my room feels kind of spring-cleaned out, which adds an odd positive varnish over things.
Between that and a rather nice girl's night (which resulted in me getting very pretty, if somewhat pale, henna on my leg), I've been mostly in a pretty good mood.
Mostly.
To add insult to injury, my temp job that was supposed to run to the end of June ended on Friday; I was told on Saturday. The reasons range from several minor dissatisfactions in how I did things (Mostly more a case of the manager wanting things done very precisely her way, not my doing things that didn't *work*), my phone manner sometimes being too flat and not friendly enough (an ongoing problem for someone who doesn't actually like the phone much but keeps doing office work.) the fact that we just passed both the standard busy times of year (End of January and mid-March respectively) and the work is about to take a downturn; in short, nothing so much done wrong as just not perfect enough.
The agency continues to love me, just that office doesn't. That means so far:
One job took me on as a permanent employee and kept me for years.
One job took me on for a possibly short term and kept extending it (and my hours) for years.
Two places have asked for me back specifically, and more than once.
I've never heard bad feedback from the one-shot places (They called me to possibly return to one of these on a day I was already engaged)
Two places have chosen to cut off my term early.
That's overall in my favour. I'd really like the trend in places that like me to continue, though, and the others to become obvious aberrations over time.
Somewhat more positively again,
Labyrinth grabbed me thoroughly and hooked me in, to the point where I have *not*, after all, also been editing and tweaking Serpent Prince or Soldier of the Road. I can identify the moment it happened.
Scene one (One of the two written out completely) involved Heather, the protag, working through a maze trying to rescue her friend, Holly (Who was pretty much a macguffin rather than a character at this point) meeting a strange man in the maze, making a relatively harmless bargain with him for some help, and having him smooth talk his way into helping her further.
It now involves the two of them getting into several near arguments and near insulting matches, him being considerably more upfront about the fact that his actual goal is to get her to turn around and run away.
Then i hit the bit of dialogue where he tried to persuade her even a friend isn't worth it, and, out of nowhere, I thought, the times *she* lives in being what they are (Pretty much the ones we're living in) it would be kind of fun to have her say: "She's not. She's my wife."
At which point, I saved, and went to bed. Because as soon as I typed it out, that answer wasn't amusing, cutesy or idle. it had a kind of raw ache behind it; and never mind just the lesbian aspect, which is layered enough, marriage (or other relationships that are fait accompli) are often taken too lightly or dismissively in fiction, as if "And they fell in love" is the end of the story. (And I should note, this all happened three or four weeks ago, before a number of real-life events which made that even clearer to me, both in positive and negative ways).
If I *did* have the guts to make that change for real, the story had gained some real implications, and while I had a hard time seeing a downside within the story (the first half having been insultingly linear and free of subplots before), I also had to have the time to think through what those implications really were.
Well, Heather grew better layers, Holly (Whose name I really have to change, right, Sis?) started to grow a personality, period. I'm still leery of one thing, which is how to resolve the romantic quadrangle this develops. but it made me interested in where it's going in a way that "I want to save my best friend" doesn't.
(I also kind of like that BOTH main characters, Gerald and Heather, are named after characters from children's story sources, his blatant and obviously fictional, hers marginally more subtle, and yes, her parents did it to her)
I did finally buy myself the other bookshelf I have rather needed for quite some time (With some assembly confusion, even though this is the third of this same company and style of bookshelves I've put together, and the first two worked fine; and I find assembly of this sort of furniture dead easy).
This led to a complete rearrangement of my study, which now feels somewhat more orderly, though there are still a few piles of things in need of decision making (It also doesn't feel any smaller, even though we moved two trunks of fabric and sewing projects in here from the spare room, so as to make more space for abacchus (and anyone else who ends up using the guest room. However, between this and a cleaning out of my clothes closet, we seem to have a pretty gargantuan pile of stuff for Canadian Diabetes this time; fortunately, the pick-up's Wednesday.
So my room feels kind of spring-cleaned out, which adds an odd positive varnish over things.
Between that and a rather nice girl's night (which resulted in me getting very pretty, if somewhat pale, henna on my leg), I've been mostly in a pretty good mood.
Mostly.
To add insult to injury, my temp job that was supposed to run to the end of June ended on Friday; I was told on Saturday. The reasons range from several minor dissatisfactions in how I did things (Mostly more a case of the manager wanting things done very precisely her way, not my doing things that didn't *work*), my phone manner sometimes being too flat and not friendly enough (an ongoing problem for someone who doesn't actually like the phone much but keeps doing office work.) the fact that we just passed both the standard busy times of year (End of January and mid-March respectively) and the work is about to take a downturn; in short, nothing so much done wrong as just not perfect enough.
The agency continues to love me, just that office doesn't. That means so far:
One job took me on as a permanent employee and kept me for years.
One job took me on for a possibly short term and kept extending it (and my hours) for years.
Two places have asked for me back specifically, and more than once.
I've never heard bad feedback from the one-shot places (They called me to possibly return to one of these on a day I was already engaged)
Two places have chosen to cut off my term early.
That's overall in my favour. I'd really like the trend in places that like me to continue, though, and the others to become obvious aberrations over time.
Somewhat more positively again,
Labyrinth grabbed me thoroughly and hooked me in, to the point where I have *not*, after all, also been editing and tweaking Serpent Prince or Soldier of the Road. I can identify the moment it happened.
Scene one (One of the two written out completely) involved Heather, the protag, working through a maze trying to rescue her friend, Holly (Who was pretty much a macguffin rather than a character at this point) meeting a strange man in the maze, making a relatively harmless bargain with him for some help, and having him smooth talk his way into helping her further.
It now involves the two of them getting into several near arguments and near insulting matches, him being considerably more upfront about the fact that his actual goal is to get her to turn around and run away.
Then i hit the bit of dialogue where he tried to persuade her even a friend isn't worth it, and, out of nowhere, I thought, the times *she* lives in being what they are (Pretty much the ones we're living in) it would be kind of fun to have her say: "She's not. She's my wife."
At which point, I saved, and went to bed. Because as soon as I typed it out, that answer wasn't amusing, cutesy or idle. it had a kind of raw ache behind it; and never mind just the lesbian aspect, which is layered enough, marriage (or other relationships that are fait accompli) are often taken too lightly or dismissively in fiction, as if "And they fell in love" is the end of the story. (And I should note, this all happened three or four weeks ago, before a number of real-life events which made that even clearer to me, both in positive and negative ways).
If I *did* have the guts to make that change for real, the story had gained some real implications, and while I had a hard time seeing a downside within the story (the first half having been insultingly linear and free of subplots before), I also had to have the time to think through what those implications really were.
Well, Heather grew better layers, Holly (Whose name I really have to change, right, Sis?) started to grow a personality, period. I'm still leery of one thing, which is how to resolve the romantic quadrangle this develops. but it made me interested in where it's going in a way that "I want to save my best friend" doesn't.
(I also kind of like that BOTH main characters, Gerald and Heather, are named after characters from children's story sources, his blatant and obviously fictional, hers marginally more subtle, and yes, her parents did it to her)
