Those occasional nights when you just can't bring yourself to go to sleep

So, admittedly, I don't do this often. And I rarely pull proper all-nighters. Normally I have to sleep for a little bit, even just an hour or two, or I explode.

And I'm so frickin close to exploding right now! I mean ohmygodChimera. I mean, oh my god, Chimera was probably the best episode of Sanctuary I have ever seen.


I say "probably" because I'm holding out hope, especially with that last scene, for the two of them getting together in this season. I mean, what with whatever government agency it is with a stupid acronym messing up the relationship from Tesla's side, it's not like it'll be drama-free. I mean, it's Teslen, it's not like it would ever be drama-free.


I'm shaking right now from having watched that episode just now. And that was catching up on two really amazing episodes of Fringe. I was worried that Chimera wouldn't be able to compete with their messing with time and reality. So much for that!


Okay. Now, to channel this wonderful spastic energy into something productive. Or just reading Teslen fics. Which is productive..... in terms of my sanity!

Haha! Yay!

If you haven't figured it out by now, go watch Chimera this instant. And if you want to especially appreciate it, watch it in the middle of the night so you get extra jitters.

Sequels

Normally, I try to stay away from sequels. Mostly because real sequels are just cop-outs. They're generally just throwing new drama into a plot that's already been tied up with an elaborate bow. So the sequel becomes like confetti on top of the bow, which just makes it look excessive, or a second bow on top of the bow, which just makes the whole thing look stupid.

But if you're tired of metaphors, I'll stop talking about bows. The point I'm trying to make is that good sequels shouldn't really be called 'sequels' at all. They're the kind where the original story isn't entirely tied up, and you need more story to resolve the conflict. Those are the kinds of sequels I like, and there are often multiples of that kind of sequel. Those kinds of sequels make up trilogies and quartets.

Why am I talking about sequels all of a sudden? I'm working on a sequel to The End... as I use this to procrastinate from actually writing it. (Ironic, really. I started this blog to talk about writing, and it's ended up as somewhere I can procrastinate from writing by talking about it. I never think to post here when I'm not writing....) And some of the time, this sequel is being stupid and obnoxious. Actually, all of the time, so far, this sequel is being stupid and obnoxious. But if/when I finish it, it will resolve that ambiguous ending for you.

I mean, if you want the ending resolved for you at all. I wouldn't.

The wonders of 250 gigs...

That's how much memory I have on my hard drive. Since the most of what I do is word processing and internet browsing (not that this poorly tricked-out netbook can handle much more), I still have like 90 gigs of free space, even though I don't think I've deleted a single thing since I got this computer two years ago.


(Useless Update: I have 199 files in my recycle bin. I'm pretty sure 175 of them are music files which somehow imported into iTunes twice.)

Returning to the point, however, requires me to explain a few things. For the first four years of writing fanfiction, all my work lived on a 1 gig flash drive. This meant: 1) I actually took the time to properly back up my things 2) When I was done with a story, I would toss it away on the backup drive and promptly forget about it 3) I started freaking out whenever my flash drive got close to full, because that meant I would have to not carry around one of the stories that my life depended on, and 4) I thought 1 gig was a lot of memory. Granted, technology changes so quickly that this was back when external backup drives were 80 gigs and the size of a small novel.

However, my point here is that because of that kind of disturbing practice of getting rid of all my stories in some obscure place where it wasn't easy for me to find them again on a whim, I never really went back to old stories, at least not unless I was willing to devote a bunch of time into digging them out. Now, however, because I never delete anything, I spent a bunch of time re-reading my semi-recent stuff.


Another advantage -- almost entirely for you readers -- is that re-reading my semi-recent stuff inspires me to finish it, or to realise that I had a fanfic sitting on my computer finished but not entirely good enough for publishing, that on re-reading I decide, screw it, this is going on the internet. Because if I was brave enough to post the awfulness that was Letters to No-One back when I was twelve, I can bloody well publish some of my lesser works now.

In conclusion, I have posted a new fanfic. No, it's not my best. Yes, I am stupid for leaving it on my computer for so long without publishing it. I'm sorry. It's okay; I'll make it up to you by returning to fanfiction for a while. Fanfiction is far more comforting than original stuff, because at least fandoms come with pre-made characters.

The Worst Month in the Best Possible Way: November

Goddess, I hate November. Especially since I've jumped on the crazy NaNoWriMo bandwagon, it's probably the busiest month of all twelve. Also, probably because it's already the busiest time of my year, I come up with tons of inspiration for stories and interest in keeping up with my TV shows and the desire to catch up on tons of great shippy fanfiction that I follow inconsistently at other times of the year. Actually, all of that is probably just my procrastination talking. Still, why couldn't November, like, be a bunch of months? Why couldn't the play happen in November, and NaNoWriMo in December? And all this inspiration for stories that aren't my NaNoNovel come to me in that awkward time after the play, but before the musical? WHY MUST EVERYTHING HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE?

Anyway, enough of this rant. I have to get back to procrastinating, after all. Heaven knows I wouldn't want to procrastinate my procrastinating by talking about it. So, instead, I'll avoid getting to a reasonable wordcount for NaNoWriMo for tonight and instead go read some of my Teslen fiction. Because everyone loves Teslen.

November is fast approaching

Wow. I can't believe it, but November is almost here. That is more than a little bit terrifying. For me, November is going to be a particularly huge month this year. First of all, I have to get all of my application to Carleton by November 15th. Secondly, it's November, which means NaNoWriMo, of course! This year, I'm going to shoot for 75k, even though, yes, that is in fact fairly ridiculous. Last year, I got to 60k without too much overt effort. I scraped most of it, but I knew where I was going -- so it made it worth it, of course!

In preparation for November, I am going to read over Strange book 1, mostly (though of course I would never admit this :P) so that I can remember what my characters are like, and what plots I've already figured out. Anyway, I'll probably be posting here sporadically again while I'm procrastinating from writing in November!

NaNoWriMo

Yeah, so I've officially decided as of about thirty seconds ago that I'm going to do it again this year. I can totally get in the habit of writing 2k words per day, right? That's not a big deal, right? I mean at the rate it's getting worse (which it really isn't, I have to say), then school work isn't going to be anything of a problem. And even if the play is something like a problem (which I honestly doubt it will be because I managed around it last year and I didn't have any faith in myself from previous experience to count on), then I still have half a month to finish the 50k.

But really, apart from saying this is absolutely something I'm doing again, I wanted to talk a little bit about what I'm going to be doing. I'm pretty confident that I'll be writing the second part to Strange. (I have another post explaining what on earth that is.) I say that this counts because it'll eventually be its own book, even if I have already written over 100k words for the whole story. So, for those of you who know -- almost another quarter of the whole entire story will be out soon! :D

I found my college!

So, here's to hoping that in five years, I can look back at this post and say I knew where I was going all along. Of course, I'd actually need to get in for that to happen, but I can certainly assure you I know where I want to go as of right now.

The school I'm looking at is Carleton College. It's out in Minnesota, and I just visited it. It was the most beautiful campus I have ever seen, and it had such a wonderful vibe. As I described to my interviewer, I felt like I already fit in because the mannerisms of the people coming up and teasing our tour guide while she was leading us around were just like the ones my friends used. It has a trimester system rather than a semester system, which is good for me because it would allow me to focus on my classes so much more. Right now, for example, I'm taking so many, different classes that I get confused sometimes as to different things which are all going on in my brain at once. It's confusing to try to do so much at once. Trimesters would let me focus on a few things, and also possibly take more because on average students take 9 courses a year.

Plus, the weather was absolutely perfect when we visited. What better sign could there be? (And they certainly get snow!)

The perfect sentence

Well, perhaps not the perfect sentence, but I certainly wrote a perfect sentence the other day. And, since here I am unable to go to sleep before I'm exhausted (ahh, the perils of being a writer), I decided that I would share it with you all.

In the hour before dawn, the luminescent sky tickles colour into the field of flowers.

 In my humble opinion, this is perhaps one of the better sentences I've ever written. I can use it as a prime example of the maxim "show, don't tell" that my English teachers, at least, have shoved down our throats for as long as I can remember. And, grudgingly, I would hap-hazarded my way with words into something more showy than literal, but never before have I been quite so proud of a single sentence.


Oh, you want to know why I suddenly decided to write this perfect sentence? Well, truth to be told, I stole it. But then, does anyone come up with a truly original idea? We'd spent the three days of class before I wrote that sentence discussing a few hundred words in English class, written as an intro to an astronomy book, as a way to show us the proper way to write our college application essays. (Yes, I know. My English teacher IS bloody awesome. Although it's my Euro teacher who's English.) So, yes, blame any future philosophical questions on that mindset, combined with the fact that I'm tired but not enough so to go to sleep, which usually just results in me not caring whether the random string of words I throw together and out at the world actually make any sense.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Anyone who knows their literature should recognise the title as being on of Shakespeare's most confusing plays. Seriously, the more of it you leave out of an explanation, the more sense it makes. Simple version: Girl likes guy who is in a relationship with someone else. Lovers run away and things go a bit pear-shaped when a fairy trickster intervenes.

And even extremely dumbed down, it's not straightforward. Gotta love Shakespeare's comedies.

Anyway, the reason I'm making a post about it is because my school is performing it in November, and I'm... well, I suppose you could call my title "Assistant Director" or "Student Director" or something like that. So it's been eating up a whole bunch of my time, but in a way that's totally rewardingly worth it. So yes, it is an excuse. But with a plot as confusing as its is, comprehending it is a perfectly valid excuse.

Strange

I suppose that I should probably take the time to explain Strange, before I start talking about it and confusing the heck out of everyone.

Strange is the working title of my longest, original WIP. The 'original' part of it is more or less self-explanatory -- it takes place in my own fantasy world. The 'longest' part applies to everything you could think it would apply to. I've been working on it for five years now. It's nearly 100k words long. It has a massively complicated plot that can be simplified into 'girl is fated to win a major war in her country', but doing so really loses a lot of its fun.

Strange is about a girl named Leyha. She was raised in a foreign country, because her parents' love was incredibly frowned upon. The two sides of her family run two subsections of the country right next to where she was raised, and have a long-standing feud between them. When she is taken from the only home she's known at the age of fourteen by her father's family, she discovers that she is supposed to possess a great power that will help her father's family win the war. She eventually gets fed up with the way her uncle, who has power over the throne after her father's death, and his lords are treating her, so she runs away to the other side of her family, where her mother is still alive. Her alliance goes back and forth and gets more confusing as time goes on, because her father's family is the one that's supposed to be the "bad" side, according to people outside of the country.

The fun part of Strange is that it gives me a place to play with the ideas of "good" and "bad". They're words/ideas that have interested me for a while, and I have lots of fun little things that I've done in the way of playing with the two ideas, and our preconceptions about what makes something good versus bad, especially in literature and film. For example, the Menla (Leyha's father's family) have their symbolic colour as black, and they are seen as the evil side by outsiders, but it turns out that they're much less restrictive and much more open with their citizens than the Pilo (Leyha's mother's family) are. It's a whole lot of fun, especially because good and bad become nothing more than ideas by the time the whole giant story arc is done.

Right, so, the reason this is coming up at all is because I wanted to have a reference of what it is, so that when I reference it later, you guys know what I'm  talking about -- or can have somewhere to look. Also, I'm bringing it up because I'm nearly finished what is looking like it will be the first of three or four books (probably four), because apparently my story arc is too big. 100k words, where I am right now, is barely finished the first half of the expositionary stuff. So, yeah, I don't know who would want to read a 400k book in one go either...

Anyway, just wanted to let the fanfiction readers of mine who may actually, on occasion, look at this, that I'll be working for the next maybe week or so to get this whole first part finished so I can figure out what I'm doing with the rest of it. So I'll be around, but rather sporadically, and not really with fanfiction all that much. Oh well. Sorry guys.

Flooding = no school!

Apparently, this is how the minds of my school administrators work. Truth to be told, we have been experiencing rain to rival London here (remarkable because this is the Philadelphia area), and it's certainly nice to be out of school after only one day of classes, but that doesn't make the idea in and of itself and less ridiculous. Let's just cancel school because it's been raining for a million days and it's gonna keep raining here through Sunday.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up, other than because it's nice and ridiculous, is that I had time to write more of "The End...", but I ended up sleeping for 15 hours. No joke. I got 12 hours of sleep last night, and took a 3 hour nap this afternoon. So, I started writing more of "The End...", but I still have a lot more to go until it's anything any of you lovely readers would be willing to read.

Also, I'm getting back into the beta-reading business because applying to college and stage managing (assistant directing?) the play isn't enough stress to add to school work, so if you have anything to read, I'm up to the challenge :P

Difficult topics make the best stories

Really, they do. At least, with my sadistically poetic muse, they do. For example: The End Is Where We Start From, my latest Sanctuary fic.

I wouldn't read the following if you haven't read the first chapter of the story, or you don't plan on reading it. The fic is rated "M" for good reasons: violence, sexual situations, and language.


Helen dies. Nikola is upset and angry and suicidal. And yet, in the midst of all this pain and suffering, my muse decides that there is quite a bit of beauty. I love her. And I hate her. But mostly I love her right now, because she's being nice and giving me something to write about.

Of course, this comes at the price of writing the death of beloved character(s), completely messed up sleep schedules, and sobbing as silently as possible at two in the morning so I don't wake the family.

Character death, however, is apparently one of my favourite difficult topics. I seem to have a penchant for characters who killed themselves when loved ones die. Look at FLW as well as "The End...". Look at my original fiction: My first short story involved death, and the short story I like most at the moment involves infanticide. Something in me just cries out to talk about death -- in the most beautiful way. I don't begin to understand it.

But then, my music is sadistically poetic, after all.

Four Years

So, I was looking at my ff.net profile to prove something to my boyfriend, and I realised that I've been on ff.net for four years to the day. It's kind of incredible. It's kind of timely, in a way, for me to return to fanfiction when I did, so that I'd be calmly resting in the waters of familiarity when I realised that it's been four years.

Wow. Four years. I've come so far since then, as anyone can tell who looks at my really old fiction. When you look at shameless self-inserts like TTLT, or disorganised rambles about irrelevant topics like What-Ifs, you can see how my immaturity was what I liked writing about. And now, especially when you look at "The End Is Where We Start From" (Let's see... TEIWWSF... okay, wow, that looks weird), you can tell that I've really grown up a lot since then.

I like having ff.net at my disposal. I'm glad I managed to stick with this silly thing I discovered with the help of a friend close to six years ago. I'm glad that I've been comfortable enough to keep up my messing with other people's characters in order to develop my writing skill, and that, in turn, has led me to working on my own original stuff. Also, gathering the courage to post fanfiction led me to gathering the courage to post original fiction, and with both of them getting better as I go along, I find that reading reviews of my work is why I keep writing -- and posting. Because I know that, somewhere out there, there are people crazy enough to enjoy my writing as much as I do.

Irene

Any of you with vague knowledge of... well, I guess really it would be weather patterns but I'm sure it's made news elsewhere should have a good sense of the fact that I'm not talking about a person. I'm talking about a hurricane, which is making it all the way up the eastern seaboard, with a direct path over Philadelphia (which is where I live).

I mean, what the heck?! Hurricanes don't make it this far north! Come on, I don't want to have a tree fall down on my house! In fact I don't really want to have one fall down anywhere in my vicinity, but my neighbourhood is full of big, old trees and I can almost guarantee that one of them is going to fall. I do love power outages, but not on Teslen day! Not when I'm trying to enjoy one of my favourite ships! Not when I don't really have time for another excuse to keep me from working on my schoolwork!

Anyway, if I disappear off the face of the Earth for a few days, I've probably just lost internet. I'll survive. Let's cross our fingers, knock on wood, and throw salt over our left shoulders to ensure that my computer doesn't get fried in any power surges with the electricity going out. I'm sure it'll be fine.

I hope.

Hey, Muse! Choose more appropriate times!

My muse has a PENCHANT for arriving at like, the worst possible time. I mean, granted, being as stuck in fanfiction as I am right now isn't very helpful in getting my summer work done before I go back to school. But still, even if that were my only, problem, my muse particularly likes to arrive at one in the morning when I'm trying to fall asleep.


So, naturally, when I was trying to fall asleep this morning, I was struck with an awful and heart-wrenching idea that I couldn't put out of my head until later, and I promptly spent three hours writing a Teslen fanfic that had me sobbing by the time I finished it. It's also my first foray into writing anything that has to be rated M. It's violent. It made me sob and now is making me mad, as I keep going with it. It started when I took a prompt for Teslen day (the 27th) from the GW forums and ran in a direction that I can guarantee no one was expecting.

It's getting long. It's looking to be at least three parts. Its working title is "Feeding". It came from a challenge that was supposed to be to write about Nikola's bloodlust at some point that Helen helped him with it, and it drastically and darkly degraded from there.

Okay seriously, what is with my inability to wake up properly?

This morning I woke up at about half seven after getting only six hours of sleep (yay fanfiction! :P). When I managed to get back to sleep, I had a really weird dream which my subconscious told me was about Stargate which doesn't make any sense because the extent of my experience with it is that my boyfriend yesterday told me he likes it. Oh, and Amanda Tapping, of course, but that's not really a helpful connection either. Anyway, in my dream, I was this semi-key person who was going around doing stuff, who had just previously been confusing me (the viewer) who had told me (the character) that I (the viewer) would have to pause a lot because the medical stuff they were discussing usually went way over my head so I had to take a step back and thing until I got it. Oh, yeah, and apparently (according to my subconscious) Stargate is about vampires.

Yeah, right, okay, that makes sense. And then I woke up and was fighting with my mum and I had slept the entire day away... and then I actually woke up.


And this is coming a few days on the heels of my weird semi-lucid half-awake confusion over whether I was Helen Magnus, Nikola Tesla, or myself.

Toasts

I'm not talking about the slightly-burnt bread. I'm not really talking about what you do with alcoholic beverages, either. I'm really talking about a new collection of one-shots which I started posting yesterday, for the Sanctuary fandom.

Toasts is, IMHO, a fun collection looking at the development of the relationship between Helen and Nikola. First off, you should know that I am a HUGE Teslen shipper and a major Tesla fan in general. I love him. He's arrogant and sexy and brilliant, and Helen is utterly perfect for him.

Okay, so, I know the first two in the series haven't been too terribly shippy. I was trying to stay true to canon, and where the stories lead me while staying in that wasn't to their professing their love for one another. Oh well. The next one should be good -- with a title like "Toast of Love", what else would you expect? :D

Does anyone else think it's funny that sometimes story ideas run away with you? First this was going to be a simple one-shot, and then two, and then three, and then five, and then four, and now I think I'm back to five again but one of them will end up really smutty if I keep the current title which didn't seem as bad the first time. Oh well. Fun stuff ahead!

About Me

My name is Lucy. You may or may not know me under another name. My many personas include thecolouryes, thecoloryes, TCY, Lucy, Nyssa, moonchild94, and others, but they're really more or less not important.

I'm (currently) seventeen, and the first thing you should know about me is that I'm a complete Anglophile. My Scottish Keyboard-Pal on fanfiction.net awarded me the title of Honourary Brit. I have no idea what it means exactly, either, but I like to boast about it ;)

On the subject of my creative endeavours, I have plenty. I've been reading religiously since I was about seven, writing stories since I was about eight, writing fanfiction since I was about twelve, pretending I have the skill to make banners since about the same age, watching Doctor Who/Torchwood/a few other brilliant BBC shows since I was about fourteen, and been mental since about... well... I could blame it on the concussion I got when I was eight, or my mates who are just as... unusual, shall we say, as I am, or blame some combination of the two, but who wants to blame when it's so much fun?

And, I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are mad.

Why not the colour no?

If you're here, I'm about 65% certain that you have, at one time or another, wondered why on earth I use the name "thecolouryes" (or the American spelling) as my username on just about everything. The answer, in fact, comes from all the way back in 8th grade. (Wow. I'm finally so old that 8th grade feels like a while ago.) Back then, I was close friends with a few people who would get together after school once a week in the art room and mess around with the art teacher's supplies. One day, I was hanging out with them there and playing with paints and mixing colours and things. When one of my friends asked me what colour the weird mixture of paints that was somewhere like "dark puke green" (imagine the green-ness of puke, only much darker so it's not an awful colour), I answered "yes" because that was my default answer to things, especially when they weren't yes or no questions. And thus, "the colour yes" was born. Somewhere along the way, I decided to start using it for all of my usernames, and it's stuck. If you see anything to the effect of "the colour yes", it's more than likely me.