Let's see. Still working on Nanowrimo, and I have made about 9.3k words. I have lost interest in posting it on LJ for no one to read, but if you're tracking me or anything of the like, I am, in fact, writing.

It may turn out to be utter junk, but oh well. It does reinforce the feeling I got before of 'I have learned what I can from nanowrimo - I know I can crank out 2k words a day if I sit down and force myself.'

If they are 2k of words I am happy with is another matter entirely. I am also rarely pleased with what I write, which is why all of the positive response to Bacon has left me a bit reeling. People are so kind!

Pointer to deancastiel:

Title: We Don't Want the Bacon (What we want is a piece of the divine)
Author: Cog_Nomen
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,089
Warnings: War imagery, blood, very minor language.
Summary: There are some things war leaves behind, but one must trust that there is a greater plan.
Disclaimer: I'm just playing with the characters, and I won't claim WW1 either.

( Author's Notes )

I have read a small truckload more books since my previous post, most excitingly Flight of the Renshai, which I have been waiting for for five-some years, since the author's last work in 2004. I am also catching up with a lot of television shows that I either fell off of last year, or never caught - such as Supernatural which stupidly moved into a direct competition slot with LOST.

House 5 was slow in places, excellent in others. The finale was good, and I am excited to see where it goes this year. I am really happy that even if I miss an episode I can now catch it on Hulu without having to fuss over it too badly.

Supernatural 4 is so far quite good. I am toying with the idea of writing a fic on the premise of Dean only getting to sleep without nightmares when he dreams of Castiel. (Or his dreams are influenced by Castiel directly, however that works.) I'm wondering if I should wait until the end of the season to see how it goes before I do so.

Next week is Fringe 1, and I've started SG: Atlantis 5, and The Unit 3. I think I only have maybe an episode or two of the lattermost left, which is lucky because The Unit 4 comes out on the 29th.

Currently, I'm reading Perelandra at work, and Torsos and War & Peace at home. I took a 24 hour break from all three to tear through the Renshai novel. I have a pile of books 'on deck' as well. We'll see how many I can finish by the end of this year.

I've kind of fallen out of the habit of posting bits of what I'm working on. I suspect because I feel often like I am only talking to myself, and authors usually only do this to see if there's only interest in what they're doing, and what to work on next. Anyway, I am writing, and the proof is here.

Conflict Archaeology - FF7, Veldcentric
“Stop.” She said, jabbing him harshly as she pulled the thread through and he clenched his teeth on the edge of his glass of whiskey. “Or go.”

“I can’t stop. I won’t go.” Both statements came in the same tone, on the same breath. He spoke without looking back, into his glass to mute the sound, directing his voice back at himself with the angle of it.

“I won’t have you.” She tugged the thread, tied a knot. He could feel the press of her rounded belly against his back, gently moving over the curve of his spine. He lowered the glass, cupping the bottom with his free hand.

Untitled Tseng/Elena/Veld - FF7, Turks, Elena POV
“She’s not very good at patience.” Tseng manages to groan, and something in his voice sets her off afresh. Veld’s brows arch, and he looks back down at the other Turk for a moment before his hand falls away. Tseng’s tensed muscles slowly ease, and his breath stutters back into him before Elena thinks he even realizes he’s lost it.

Untitled Scout/various team - Team Fortress 2, BLU, Scout POV
Medic’s mouth turns into this firm line and he starts looking real stressed whenever anyone starts to get too close on the subject of how he and Heavy were too close. Scout can almost count the way his gray hairs were multiplying at his temples. Of course he keeps bringing it up, it’s funny to see Medic blow a gasket.

Not that he doesn’t appreciate what Medic does, just that Scout knows no matter how many buttons he pushes that medic won’t withhold any healing. Demoman had tried to convince Scout, when he’d been new, that Medic was downright insane and ready to amputate at the first sign of a splinter. It wasn’t until later – after weeks of avoiding the Doc’s attention – he realized that it was a joke. The sort that the whole team played on rookies.

Medic was more like a big mother hen than anything else Scout could use to describe him. ‘Clucky’, Sniper called the man. It was pretty right, as far as Scout was concerned. Medic tended to worry about everything, all the time.

( And to keep it from getting long, 2 clips from fics I'll probably never finish. )

Not that Salieri is unloved, just that I've had the same set for so long now. I'm trying out T-Rexes, the problem being that there isn't much variety in the available media. T-Rex is invariably either roaring, chasing things, or chasing things and roaring.

I have been reading Burndive, which is light science fiction that seems to have very little density of real thought provocation within its covers. I haven't been totally engrossed in it, that is for certain. All in all, I believe I shall probably finish it as quickly as possible and send it merrily along on it's way through paperbackswap.com.

I am also a bit of a crafter and an artist as I've mentioned, and the one thing that plagues me is the inability to use my hands while I read. PBS has failed me in procuring one of the books that I'd been interested in reading, Valis, so I obtained an audio copy to listen to on my Ipod while I've been working. I often keep its company these days, as there are a variety of historical podcasts to listen to.

Without deviating too much from my original topic, Valis is extremely heavy. I'm not sure what I anticipated, but on the whole it is a very interesting (contrasting) viewpoint on the entirety of theological debate presented in a disassociated narrative that is interesting in and of itself. I find myself pausing the flow of words so that I can digest a bit. I'm not sure what I expected from the creator of A Scanner Darkly, but I think it simply did not connect in my mind that the two were related. The narrative and choice of words remind me a bit of Hunter S. Thompson - I suppose the ten years of time between publications could mean that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was inspirational to Dick when he wrote Valis, but I wonder instead if that we aren't getting more of a window into the mind of the drug culture on the whole between the two of them.

I can't think of a more compelling reason to never do drugs. Seriously, the anti-drug advertising campaign could consist of Valis and I'm pretty sure most children would run screaming.

As an aside, if you are an avid reader and you don't use PaperbackSwap.com, I highly recommend it. It's a great alternative to spending $8-12 on a book you're only going to read one time and it helps keep my shelves a bit less... erm, saggy. I feel better about passing a book along (Commander Adama was correct - never lend a book!) than I do throwing one away.

I will share with you a little secret, my livejournal friends. I define myself as an artist and not as an author. It used to be that the long silences in this journal were times of my life completely dedicated to bettering myself at illustrating. Recently, however, I have slacked at both. I go through creative cycles. It seems that this year will be far more tilted in favor of authoring than artistry.

And how does one author, you ask, when one is not writing at all? My mind is whirling up great piles of words, stacking them one against the other until it finds some combination that will set the whole waterfall in motion - like dropping that last coin into the shover machine at the arcade that sets the whole torrent of stored up tokens over the edge and into the catchbin for you to rake out.

In the meantime, I have been reading. I have conquered several history books, mostly in the order of Napoleonic era France, and I have been reading the Song of Ice and Fire series, which has entertained me greatly. I am roughly a third of the way through War and Peace which I expect is more than most make it through before the extremely dated style drives them off. It is not, in comparison to the other books I have been reading, very interesting. The characters at times drive me up the walls with their idiocy, but it provides a simmilar picture of the era as other period novels do, only with the backdrop of Russia and the war there. I think if Napoleon were not the looming threat and driving plot, I would have given up. I may yet, with five hundred pages under my belt and still a thousand to go.

Yesterday, I began and finished Fahrenheit 451. I must say I have not enjoyed a book as much as that one in quite some time. It feels like something I should have read in high school, it has that literary flavor to it, if you will. I find it more than a little interesting that something fifty years old can still be so relevant to the modern philosophy.

Today, I finished Howl's Moving Castle, at the urging of a close friend. I wonder why that novel has not been such a children's classic as Narnia, or the Dark is Rising, or any of the other novels I read in my (extreme, as I was always an advanced reader) youth. I found myself thinking that I would have liked to have it read to me, or perhaps I would enjoy reading it to my own never-to-exist children. It was quite different from Studio Ghibli's film in overall flavor and plot, but I enjoyed both in the way that I can enjoy L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and also like Sci-Fi's original Tin Man.

I have two new books on deck, Burndive by an author I was not previously familiar with, and the first of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels. In combination with that I have War and Peace in progress as well as Napoleon's Pyramids which is historical fiction dated in my most beloved era and about which I am decidedly uncertain (historical details are at points off, and it is much like watching modern action movies or television series with any working knowledge of how a handgun actually functions - you see things that are incorrect that you would never have noticed before and then you cannot stop looking!). I have also been slogged down in the middle of the fourth book of Stephen King's Gunslinger series for nearing two years now. I suppose I should be more interested in Roland's past - which I have been subjected to several hundred pages of at this point - but I find in fact that I am rather not interested in him as a boy at all, when I have already seen and conjectured about what sort of character developments he must have made to get to the point where he is at in the current timeline of events in the story. It is like seeing the pieces of the puzzle as individuals after having already completed it, or perhaps tasting the individual ingredients to a cake. Eggs and flour are not terribly interesting on their own.

...And as this went on much longer than I intended (as is so often my excuse!), I shall here draw to a close, with the shortest note possible to the effect of the fact that I am also playing Final Fantasy IV: The After, and considering writing some addendum to Castle on the Sand, in which Veld and Vincent's relationship is further explored.

Castle on the Sand
1920’s era FF7 AU. Various pairings, mostly ShinRa oriented.
Rating: M

Part 1
Part 2

( Author's Notes: )
TL;DR: Oh god I am so sorry. This fic is actually shorter than I originally intended because I refused to let it get past 20k.

Summer Occupation
L/R fic. Rowe/Jack. Summer themed PWP.
Rating: M

Fic at Springkink.

Another update:
Castle on the Sand (FF7, Various ShinRa related pairings) has been finished with a whopping 19,025 wordcount. I am likely going to have to post it to springkink in three pieces. I am somewhat ashamed of myself.

The L/R fic that is due this Saturday is still unstarted. However, I have some of tomorrow and all of friday to get it done and I think if it's much longer than 1.5 k, springkink will throw me out for overuse of the english language.

Tseng/Elena/Veld fic now has eight handwritten pages that need to be typed in, in addition to the previous parts.

I haven't written in so long that apparently when I look at paper words just happen onto it. They aren't necessarily any good, but it feels strange to pick up the pen again and be unable to stop the forward momentum. I know, unfortunately, it can't last.

R.I.P David Carradine.
1936-2009

I don't usually react with such shock to an actor's death, but in this case I just felt I couldn't understand it. He always seemed to be someone who was so at peace with himself.

Thank you for the entertainment and everything else, Mr. Carradine.

Fic due the 13th (L/R - Rowe/Jack) - unstarted, unconcepted. I am awful, but this one is a gimme for me that I believe I can finish in a short period of time when I finally get the inspiration

Castle on the Sand (FF7, Tseng/Elena, Angeal/Zack, Reno/Rude, probably some combination involving Rufus) - due the 19th, currently 6,622 words and only a portion done. This is shaping up to be another monster of an AU that I really didn't want to be so big, only I have a hard-on for history and I keep adding large passages of setting and period research.

Untitled non-springkink fic (FF7:AC, Tseng/Veld/Elena) - I should not even be working on this and yet this monster keeps coming back and exploding out of my closet while I try to get inspiration for Castle on the Sand. I'm pretty sure no one will even like this combination of Turks. I have about 1k words actually typed in, the rest to be copied from various notes at some point. Hopefully some point after I've finished the stuff I have a deadline for.

I hardly ever use this thing for anything but author-work, but today I encountered a metaphor for life that I figured I would talk about a little. Feel free to skip.

Being the standard american mix of races, I have eaten a lot of pasta in my life. I rarely if ever have time to make my own sauce, and so for the longest time I used jarred sauce. My favourite, if anyone else remembers this, was Five Brothers. That was some of the best pasta sauce I've ever had. Several years ago - probably longer than that but I only felt the lack in about 2005 - Five Brothers disappeared off the shelves.

I felt the loss keenly and I have been making my own substandard pasta sauce since then, stubbornly refusing to switch over to another brand because I had a loyalty to Five Brothers.

This week, I just did not have time to make pasta sauce. So I bought some Bertolli, because the commercial jingles catch in my head. (They are sung to the tune of Opera, I can't help it.) To my surprise, it was quite acceptable, and eerily familiar.

It turns out that in 2002, Five Brothers changed their name to Bertolli. I've had the internet at my disposal all that time and I never thought to look up what had happened to my favourite brand of pasta sauce.

I suppose the moral of this story is that sometimes the answers are there if you look for them.

Today's Word Count:
18,022/50,000

Yet again, I wrote all out of order and mostly wrote stuff from the end today. Hopefully more in sequence tomorrow.

I'm not terribly pleased with it so far, but it is indeed a start.

2,056/50,000

I write all out of order, so my whole wordcount probably won't be included in every post.

( Cut for the first part. )

Word Count: 41,024

The novel is complete. This is a major problem. I have a couple of beta readers looking it over for possible parts that need expanding upon, but even then I doubt I can wrangle more than 2-3,000 more words into it without seriously destroying my pacing.

What this may call for is a second short story to be written that fills the remaining word count. I'm not sure exactly what I would want to do yet, but I'm considering something in the same universe to keep with the spirit of the Nanowrimo project.

This is the first time I've ever run into this problem! My previous two nano's just petered out around 30,000 or so words with a whole ton of stuff left to write. Hmm. Dillemas.

Word Count: 40,003

Dillema! The story is more or less complete, and I am 10,000 words shy of my goal! There are a few scenes to be written here or there, but certainly not that many words worth! This may be tricky to overcome.

Final Wordcount:38,006
Writing Excerpt:
Ahead of them, light began to filter through the trees in brilliant sheets. The soft snowfall had coated the ground here much more thickly, creeping past the loosely tangled branches above to crunch beneath their feet. For the first time in what seemed like an age, Althea saw an end to the trees.

“We must not leave its sight.” Althea said, suddenly. At the last tree she stared out at the open land before her, white with thinly spread snow and shining in the unfiltered sunlight. It hurt her eyes, the brightness after all the time spent in the soft muted light of the wood.

Not really a night, but a successful day, I'd say.
Word Count: 36,126

The ending is completely written, all the way to 'the end'. I now have roughly 10,000 words with which to craft a whole lot of the middle into a story that leads from here to there. I may be able to do it, but I suspect this story will need to surpass 50,000 words when I go back an edit it into a final form sometime later.

All in all, I am in love with it, and I still don't feel sick of writing as I often did at this point in each previous year. I will probably work some more on it today, because now it's all the downhill slide.

If you're Nano-ing too this year, keep it up. If I can make it, you can. Just keep writing, just keep pressing on. The finish line is more fun when lots of people make it there!

Word Count: 34,046

Tonight I can't offer a writing sample, as I devoted most of my time to writing the ending. :) Sorry! I only made 1,000 words yesterday, so I didn't post the wordcount update here, but tonight I made up for the missed words from yesterday and achieved today's wordcount as well, so I am back on track.