you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well

In answer to the people who have been inquiring, yes, I am working on the next chapter of Death's Dare.

When my computer crashed last month, I lost the most recent copy of chapter ten and I didn't recover it until two weeks ago. I've realized that I need to do some major restructuring of my plot outline (ha, what plotline, you say, to which I respond with a, you're correct, there is no plotline except UST, how clever of me), so most of what I'd written for chapter ten is useless now anyway. In short, I'm hoping to finish a chapter within the next week. Maybe.

As for the Demigod Snatchers...I might have been too hasty in posting that. The more I look at what I have, the more I hate it, so it may be getting yanked sooner or later, never to see the light of day again. /dramatic moment


I should be studying for a test right now...

Picked this up from antistar_e. Super long snippets under all the cuts.

Pick five fics that you've abandoned that you wish you'd finished. Post a snippet from each fic and tell us where you were going with it and why you have to leave it.

( Twilight, Edward and Rosalie, Five Moments in Edward and Rosalie's Relationship )

( Stargate Atlantis, John/Teyla, Buffy the Vampire Slayer AU )

( Transformers, Sam/Mikaela, Five Times Same Almost Tells Mikaela First )

( Percy Jackson/Harry Potter crossover )

( Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Percy/Annabeth )

1. Pick a character, fandom or pairing you like.
2. Turn your music player on and turn it to random.
3. Write a drabble/ficlet related to each song that plays. You only have the length of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts and stop when the song stops. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do five of these and post them.

I picked the Percy Jackson fandom. Obviously. Spoilers for all books, etc.

It is fairly hard to do this meme when a good chunk of your music library is audiobooks and your iTunes player insists on playing a chapter file EVERY OTHER TRACK. Or movie scores, which is why three out of the five ended up being score tracks.

( The Results! )

Dear brain,

Now is not the week to be feeding me:

a. Epic fic ideas for the pjo_fic_battle. I cannot write what will probably be a 5,000 plus word adventure fic in two days, let alone two of them.

b. Of all things, a Twilight and Percy Jackson crack crossover fic where Percy and some kind of combination of Nico or Annabeth meet the Cullens and wackiness ensues. (I watched the movie for the second time last Friday, all right? ITS IN MY BRAAAAAIN) Or that SG-1 crossover idea. (I am honestly surprised I haven't done it sooner because it would just be SO EASY to make Daniel Percy's long-lost uncle by rewriting Sally's tragic past and ACK NO STOP)

c. Fic ideas in general this week. I've got about two more articles for the newspaper to write, a presentation to plan, photos and a collage due, as well as another essay. I probably should not be spending my time writing a fic.

Please save such ideas for a more opportune time.

Love,
Me

Don't you hate it when you discover you've written yourself into a corner? It happens to me fairly often, and I never find myself in a terribly bad corner with plot issues or anything. It's usually conversational corners. I'll write an entire conversation, and then get stuck midway through it because I don't know how I'm going to end it or transition away from it.

That's why some of my fics usually get abandoned. I have dozens of unfinished stories on my laptop that have hit a corner in a conversation that I just don't know how to get around or my inspiration just decides to curl up and die in. I'm in a corner with my Rachel/Nico fic now, but I should find my way out of it eventually. I think that corner has more to do with the fact that I have my laptop back and there is no longer a sense of urgency like I had with the other chapters. Hopefully I can get some work done this weekend.

I'm just needlessly distracting myself on Internet to avoid writing; you wouldn't believe how many times I've checked the Percy Jackson section on FFnet this week to see if there was something there to distract myself for a moment (resounding answer: OF COURSE NOT). Part of the problem with writing in the Percy Jackson fandom is that there's not a lot of other fan fics or authors to be inspired by, and inspiration definitely helps with the writing process. I seriously cannot wait for the movie to bring new blood into the fandom - I don't know how many more shitty Percy/Annabeth fan fics with a "OMG MY SUPER SPESHUL OC IS GOING TO BREAK THEM UP WILL THEY GET BACK TOGETHER??!" summary I can stomach anymore.

So anyway, to get some inspiration for my Rachel/Nico fic, I went hunting for some photos of people who fit my idea of older Rachel and Nico...and I found them! :D So I present watermarked Older Nico, minus the weird beard, and older Rachel.

I love doing dorky stuff like this. XD

I need someone to bounce ideas off of for two epicish PJO fics I'm writing, and that I want to have a few chapters of each posted before school starts in a couple of weeks.

One's a Nico/Rachel romance and the other is an AU where Thalia's the child of prophecy instead and Percy never goes to Camp Half-Blood, just to give you a general idea. I actually have a full chapter written for the first, and just a prologue and lots of future scenes for the other. Anyone who'd like to listen to me ramble and/or read one of the things over to give me an opinion would be appreciated!

Colorado Gazette Intern Plagiarizes from New York Times.

I saw this on one of my professor's Facebook pages, and even though it's a little old, I decided to post and comment on it since I'm currently a newspaper intern...that actually applied and was rejected for this internship, actually.

Let's just preface with the fact that I don't understand plagiarizers -- at all. Maybe it's because I like to write and writing comes easy to me, or maybe it's because I am writer, I realize how hard some people slave over picking the right words and phrases. I can understand the envy that comes reading something somene else wrote and wishing you had written it, but that's why the English Gods invented these awesome thing called citations and footnotes and works cited pages, so you could use someone else's words in research papers without being a complete douche about it.

And let's just add on that I don't understand so-called journalists who plagiarize even more. I don't know about other journalism schools, but at USD it is pounded into your head that maintaining your credibility and intergrity as a journalist is the most important job you have after reporting the news, because once your credibility goes, so does the readers' trust in you and your organization. Without your credibility, you are f-u-c-k-e-d as a journalist. So you don't make up quotes, facts, or people. You double and triple check your facts before it goes to print. You apologize when you make a mistake, and print a correction. You don't write a story with an agenda in mind from the get go or trying to prove a political point. And you don't fucking plagiarize. Because someone always catches you.

I don't know what this chick was thinking. I don't know what was more idiotic of her - plagarizing from the New York Fuckin' Times or plagarizing in a profession that's made up of the world's biggest snoops. Seriously, plagarizing in a newsroom has to be the worst idea ever -- because, hey, it's not like journalists read things other journalists write or know how to use Google or won't hesistate to kick your ass out and never give you a job again once they find out that you have no intergrity whatsoever.

What a fucking idiot.


Also, the newspaper intern within would like to send a big FUCK YOU her way for making the rest of look like incompetent college students.

Now I remember why I haven't been writing fic at all this year: papers, papers, papers.

I've got three full ones due this week, a 4,000 word short story draft, an art evaluation for Ancient Egypt, and the introduction/bibliography of my mini-thesis due next week - and this doesn't even count all the small reaction papers I have to do for Women's Studies and International Media.

Curse you and your rigid MLA guidelines for crushing my creative spirit, academia! *shakes fist*

I have to finish the other Percy Jackson fic I started sometime this week, otherwise it will languish in the fic graveyard for the rest of the semester and neither of them will be published.

I want to enter this contest.

My favorite of the worst openings:

The tiny boat got tossed around on the ocean like a pinball in a pinball game played by a player who was really good at hitting all of those bumper things to get a really high score.


Joanne watched her fellow passengers - a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they thought was a witch - there was a story here, she decided.


Timothy Hanson, Commander of the 43rd Space Regiment in the 52nd Battalion on board the USAOPAC (United Space Alliance Of Planets Attack Carrier) and second in command to Admiral L. R. Morris of the USAOP Space Command, awoke early for breakfast.


She had the kind of body that made a man want to have sex with her.