News and a Meme

[rachelleneveu]

 Firstly, a meme borrowed from the lovely cysfics:

Pick a character from any of my fandoms - canon or one of my OCs, doesn't matter. Let me know who you've picked and I will write you a "ten things" ficlet describing my head!canon for that character. 

 

• Tessa is home from Potsdam, which means I have basically been living out of my car and spending most of my waking hours at both Harper's house and at Tim Horton's. The good news is she leaves for Missouri on Sunday, where she'll be spending the rest of the summer in the Ozarks working as a counselor at a camp for Jewish kids. I know it's an awful thing to say, but I am really, really looking forward to not seeing her for the next two months.
• My new job is kind of awesome. I work out of CDHS, the Health Services department at Buff State, and while I'm basically just a glorified receptionist, I will be doing actual editing on the articles grad students turn in later in the month, and I will be responsible for uploading the finished product to the CDHS archive. But I have a desk and a computer and a weekly paycheck! I have a very high window I cannot reach without a long stick (which is actually kind of useless because the guy who had the job before me somehow managed to lose it)! I have keys and I no longer have to hit up other, more important people to gain access to the copy room! I also have a metric fuckton of time on my hands, because absolutely no one comes into this building during the summer and I'm alone pretty much all day. So I will be using this time wisely: the work they want me to get done, of course, but also some writing when I have a free moment.
• My friend Ruby is back from Brockport, and she and I have gone to lunch a few times and have plans to meet more over the summer. Marie is home only for a little while - she's going off to Germany to work as an au pair for a year! - and Sunshine has finally emerged from his study-cave over at UB to meet me for coffee. And, oh, yeah, FOREST RANGER MCBUFF HAS RETURNED! He's been in Pennsylvania visiting his grandparents, but he and I are going to get together next week and I swear, I am going to hug him and not let go for, like, a full ten minutes. *sigh* I missed that boy so, so much. He's like the awkward, gangly brother I always wanted but never had. He will also never get his class ring back, no matter how hard he tries this time, because that sucker is mine.
• Last week, my computer, my baby, completely up and died. Well...okay, it's not dead-dead, but my harddrive is absolutely shot and needed to be replaced, and all the stories I've been working on in the past few months are gone*. The absolute destruction that ensued last week could have come from one of three things: I contracted a virus that my anti-virus software somehow missed and it corrupted all my files, "normal wear and tear" (which is what the good man at Geek Squad believes), or Todd in the Shadows has encrypted every existing picture of himself without his hood or Dread Pirate Roberts mask with a horrible, horrible virus in violent retribution for finding out what he really looks like. I don't think the picture I accidentally stumbled upon while looking at fanart even was his real face, but still...it is a very odd coincidence. ;o)
• Anyway, without my laptop to distract me, I've gone through about four books in five days: Rot & Ruin, The Lover's Dictionary, The Hunger Games, and I'm almost finished with Room. Room is very well written, even if it can be a bit confusing at times (due to the fact that it's told entirely from the point of view of a five-year-old) but this does work in its favor. There are a few parts of the beginning that are unbelievably disturbing, considering the context, but are glossed over because the main character, Jack, doesn't understand exactly what is happening. The Hunger Games was a really engaging read, and I'm just waiting for the sequel (Catching Fire) to come back to Audubon before I make any more judgements on some of the main character's actions. The Lover's Dictionary reminds me a little of Vera Pavlova's poetry: short, sparse writing that tells a story in pieces. I love the way it was set up, too, with a word for every letter and defined in its relation to love. Rot & Ruin, unfortunately, was a bit disappointing. It was an expansion from a short story that Jonathan Maberry wrote for The New Dead , and it just seems to go on for way, way too long. The short story, Family Business, was direct and to the point: it showed us Benny Imura's life after the zombie apocalypse, and how that related to his strained relationship with his older, professional zombie-killer brother, Tom. Rot & Ruin, while it starts the same way Family Business did, gave no additional depth to Benny or Tom and added new characters where there didn't need to be - the "Lost Girl" who survives on her own in the zombie-infested wilderness, nameless bounty hunters, and Nix Riley, Benny's love interest (that, quite frankly, seemed very out of place considering the tone of the rest of the story). Family Business is probably my favorite out of the entire anthology (even above Joe Hill'sTwittering from the Circus of the Dead and Max Brook's Closure, LTD.) and I definitely recommend choosing that over the actual book it spawned.

*Mostly. The Joe and Stacey one, a That Other Girl one, some of the meme responses, and the AU I promised for theladyisatiger (along with a handful of papers for school, two for Glee, and one of the two WIPs I'd had for Harry Potter) are, unfortunately, gone. The man who worked on my laptop said that he would try his best to retrieve my files for me, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. I have most everything else already saved on my flashdrive (miracle of miracles, an early draft of the J&S one was accidentally saved in the wrong folder), and I remember a lot of what I'd written, but I don't think I'll ever stop kicking myself for not saving everything sooner. :|| 

 

Comments

[theladyisatiger.livejournal.com]

When you say AU of the AU, was that the WIP you sent me that I still have a copy of? [/clueless]

Otherwise, that's awful dear heart, and I hope for the best for you. And your stories. Yes I'm a shallow bitch.

[rachelleneveu.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes it was. I took what I sent you out of my sent messages folder and am trying to rewrite it. I'm sorry that it's taking so long!

Thank you for your sympathy, sweetheart, but if you're a shallow bitch, then I'm the Queen of England. ;)