meridian_rose

I hadn't intended to be awol/afk but Christmas/Yule preparations happened and then Yule happened and I'm behind on my reading, commenting, writing, editing, emails. I was feeling pretty plurk after the fun of Yule was over but then I got a fic review and an ecard in my inbox which made me smile.

I'm trying to catch up, honestly :D So, bear with, please. I'll be online less overall the next few days but more than the past couple if that makes sense. And while I'm here, in case I get snowed under/LJ completely falls over/the internet breaks, I might as well make my Happy Christmas post to all my LJ and DW friends :D


I tried to find an ecard in multiple languages but had no luck, hence the above pic I made last year. I apologise if (1) there any mistakes in there: I took the translations directly from this site and (2) your primary language is not listed. Scold me in the comments and tell me what greeting I should have used :)

So it was way too hot and humid Tuesday and Wednesday here. Rainstorm on Thursday. More settled Friday. Sun and showers Saturday [yesterday]. Today? Sun in the morning, cloud cover, and now a thunderstorm with thunder, lightening and hail. In August. Hail. Seriously :P

Posting early because I'm clearly unreliable when it comes to precise deadlines :P



Magickal Graphics

Litha is also known as th Summer Solstice, Midsummer, Midsummer Night, Midsummer Night's Eve, Gathering Day, Sun Blessing, Gathering Day, Feill-Sheathain, St. John's Day
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image by Magickal Graphics

With best wishes to you all. I hope you find something to be thankful for and to be hopeful about today.

February the second is the pagan festival of Imbolc [Imbolg]. This festival of candles and light marks the halfway point between Yule and the Spring Equinox and we start to see the first signs of Spring; In America the day is Groundhog Day, when the groundhog predicts if warm weather will prevail or if winter will persist for six more weeks. For our ancestors, Imbolc meant they had made it through the worst of the winter and thoughts could turn to planting crops and looking forward to a more plentiful food supply.

The Goddess Brighid [Brigid, Bride, etc] is celebrated. She is known for healing, smith craft, and poetry. Imbolc was incorporated into the Church calendar as Candelmas and Brighid became Saint Brigid, renowned for her healing gifts; many wells and springs are named after her.

It is also a festival of milk, since Imbolc derives from the Gaelic word "oimelc" which means "ewes milk". Herd animals have either given birth, or are about to birth, the first offspring of the year and hence have milk to give.

With its focus on renewal Imbolc is a good time to spring clean, or begin new projects.

Correspondences: Brighid's cross, candles, poetry, agricultural tools, smith craft, milk, renewal, purification,fertility, yellow, pink, green, Basil, Rosemary, Bay, Oak, Strawberry.

Those in the Southern Hemisphere observe not Imbolc at this time but Lammas/Lughnasadh, which is the first of the harvest holidays.

About.com has more information about Imbolc

My sleep patterns are wonky this week; I'm just about getting enough sleep but last night I was up until almost two am. I didn't mind too much because I was reading this great Robin Hood fic that was rec'd to me a couple of times (A Very Guy Christmas Carol) and participating in a "What If" discussion over at the peoplespalace. It was nice to be around "real time" as usually of course I'm usually asleep when the Americans and Canadians are getting home from work and posting. I was glad to have the internet back to occupy me while I wasn't tired (plus I was still catching up on things anyway)

I can tell I went to bed late because I only had to read back twenty entries this morning rather than fifty or sixty that usually greet me on my flist :D

I even wrote a fic inspired by the discussion, which I'll post the moment I've edited with my Awake head on (after I've had tea. I need tea to function properly). I ought to have written it at 750 words.com as it ended up well over 1k, but I lost my four day streak to the internet outage (touch wood it's okay now) and I wasn't ready to start again until I was sure I had a chance of making it to five days this time.

Oh, and thanks to lar_laughs post, I signed up at storycubes - take a look, it's a different sort of prompt comm. And I signed up for episode20in20 again this round, so I can have an excuse to make "Justified" icons.

I'm slightly worried how much of "high" I'm on with all this signing up for stuff and feeling very enthusiastic. These things are cyclical and I know there'll be a day when I wonder what the hell I was doing taking on so many projects (and landcomms, etc). But I ought to be positive about it and remember that I do need a certain amount of downtime - less creative time can be used for editing or thinking rather than creating/doing, after all.

Snagged from munanna and mistress_triple. I hesitated to do this because a lot of my posts are more fanworks than personal posts, but what the hell.

Post a sentence or two from the first post of each month. And it's your year in review.
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The Stages Of Writing A Big Bang Fic

1. Decide signing up for a big bang fic is an AWESOME idea
2. Sign up.
3. Forget you signed up/get distracted by other fandom stuff
4. Get email/see post asking how many words you've done. Have minor panic.
5. Write 5k; one third of the way there!
6. Forget about the fic again
7. Get email/see post asking how many words you've done. Have major panic.
8. Write another 5k. Leave gaping hole where middle of fic/ending of fic should be
9. Optional: decide the whole fic is a pile of pants* and wonder if it's too late to drop out/restart the fic
10. Whine and complain to anyone who'll listen about the Evil Big Bang of Doom
11. Find anything else to do instead of writing. Call it research if you need to, make daft lists like this, refresh your f-list every ten seconds.
12. Realise you have less than a month of finish fic
13. Start on last stretch of fic; while writing the tricky middle bit, find yourself writing a far more interesting bit of storyline. Go over the word limit by at least 1k but still don't finish matching this bit up with the end. Or, if you're writing the end, have no idea when to stop and keep writing endlessly. It's starting to look like the final LotR movie which just wouldn't finish.
14. Finally finish fic! Yay. Send off to Beta if you have one.
15. Start editing and wonder if it's too late to start over. If you have a Beta they give you some minor corrections or stuff you might to reword. You decide the whole thing is terrible, just terrible.
16. Submit the damn thing. You hate it, can barely look at it, but it's done.
17. Swear never to do another Big Bang Fic. Ever.
18. See post about a Big Bang Fic – return to step one.

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Relatable? Any stages I've missed? Is there always a moment you swear "never again" only to be sucked in the shiny? :)

 Happy Imbolc, Imbolg, Candlemas, Groundhog Day, etc! It's February and it is snowing by the bucketload. Here's to Spring coming sooner rather than later.

So I got my first accusation of TL:DR the other day. I googled it to find out what obscure piece of internet jargon this was. Here's what Anil Dash says:
One of the great, definitive abbreviations for the social web is TL;DR. It stands for too long; didn't read, and epitomizes the short-attention-span crowd, the willfully idiotic segment of the online population
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2006/11/tldr.html