loaded_march

Geez.  It's about time.  I swear, I'm my own worst editor.


** Note that I've had to split this part into two chapters for AO3.



Part Ten: Desperate Measures
Word Count: 91K
Summary:
Excalibur lost a battle, their advantage, their loved ones, their heart and their soul.

A broken Captain, a shattered team, and no one to trust.  Their mission has been full of secrets, the present is the broken past, and the only thing that's left to do is to enact desperate measures.

I managed to meet my word count goal by the skin of my teeth (the usual 3K per weekday or 15K total), but I failed where it came to the writing homework.

I am not done yet (gah!) but my plan is still to have Part 11 finished by Christmas, if not posted by then.  Or rather, after Christmas day, because there was a disturbing number of people who read it when they should have been opening presents or spending time with their families, or, God forbid, sleeping in, and I don't want to take away from that.

But given the current time frame, I doubt I'll be able to get Part 11 betaed (by someone who's not me) in time for two reasons:  it's too close to the holidays, and I don't want to give anyone the task of dealing with my hackneyed monstrosity when they should be wrapping presents, fighting off crowds at the mall for that last Marios Bros DS game, and staying up all night freaking the fuck out because the Christmas shopping?  It's not going so well.

Wait.  That last part might be just me.  No, don't ask me how the shopping is going.  Because it's not.

Anyway, as a side note, I am wondering if there is someone fluent in Welsh who might be willing to help me with a translation of a few phrases?  They are mostly dialogue and I am adaptable to "your best fit" or "whatever slang actually works here", and I will give context (but no snippets) to help make that "best fit".

I... have more words?

Yeah, there's been a spectacular failure to keep track of word count this week.  All of my writing has been done in snatches and grabs -- instead of at breaks or at lunchtime in a good chunk, it was five minutes here, fifteen minutes there, maybe twenty if I were really pushing my luck.  See, I'm working on a time-critical experiment in a restricted-access lab, and going in and out is a pain, because it involves putting on a Tyvek suit like this one but not really (because, cheesy, flirty pose aside -- and no, that is not me -- there's so many things wrong with that picture on a health-and-safety level that it isn't even funny).  It's just easier to stay in the lab for longer stretches of time to get shit done.  The downside is that as soon as I step out, I'm mauled by angry bears lab rats mutated zombies needy colleagues, and I end up with less piss off so that I can write time.

But I have 10 parts for sure, and this is a guaranteed minimum 50K, but is probably actually a little bit more because I keep going back to earlier parts to add more words.  So, at this point?  I've completely lost track.  Sorry.


In other news, because while I kinda like being locked up in a restricted access lab, the work I'm doing kills brain cells a little bit, so I kind-of sort-of didn't do a whole lot of homework this week.  On two days, I wrote little blurby things for book two of an original fiction thing that I'm not going to share because, well, original fiction, and who cares about that when there's fanfic! I didn't write anything today because I used up my last creative reserves to write a bitchslap email so subtle, no one but the person on the receiving end will realize there's a bitchslap.


Anyway, the two homework assignments I am sharing may or may not be related.  I haven't decided yet. 

( Homework! )

I said Friday, and as it turns out, it's Friday holy shit when did that happen, I lost two days, I thought it was still Hump Day so here's the quick and dirty on the metrics for LM #11.

I've explained before that I work in sections, and that my sections are saved in different documents.  These are equivalent to chapters.  So I don't have a total word count because I'm not writing in Scrivener, which has a handy feature called Project Statistics, which I obsessively refresh whenever I'm in Scrivener. 

But, no.  Not this time.  I'm writing in plain old Word.  I could import the files, I suppose, but I'm too lazy.  No Project Statistics for you.

However, I can give you a ballpark estimate.  The chapter length varies from part to part, but in #11, the going average is around 5,000 words.  Bearing in mind that once I get the ball rolling, the chapters get longer and longer, first by 500 words, then 1,000 words, and (what looks likely to be soon) 2,000 words, I'm going to be seriously underestimating the total word count by the end of this, but, hey, I don't think anyone will be complaining.

ANYWAY, yes, back to the word count.  I have seven documents, so that puts me anywhere north of 35,000 and south of 40,000.

Unfortunately, I have no ETA.  Remember when I said I sketched out the outline?  That I had three pages, single-lined, double-sided of outline?  Outlines are awesome.  I totally respect anyone who puts work detailing outlines to follow so that they know what they're writing next.  I am not one of those people.  Outlining, for me, is a teasing lie.  A filthy, misleading lie.  I could look at that outline and think, "Yeah, I'll be done soon" and I'd be wrong. 

Obviously this means I'm not following my own outline.  I've gone off-roading, my GPS is down, my compass is in the rapids back there, my ATV ran out of gas, I'm in the middle of freaking nowhere, night is falling, there's an unseasonable cold snap on the way, but at least I have my trusty flashlight --

-- had my flashlight.  The batteries seem to be dead.  Yep.  They're dead.

I'm not going to say I'm lost, because I'm not.  My map might be a little soggy and a lot useless, but I know my way out of here, and it's somewhere... thataway *points wildly*.

(please send help)

I really should keep better notes, but this has been bugging me for a while.  So, for absolutely no reason that has to do with Part 11, does anyone happen to remember if I gave Will a surname?

I *smish* you!  I got pumpkin cookies!  Thank you!  Happy Halloween, everyone!


I have good news and bad news.  I'll start with the bad news. 

The bad news is, life is conspiring against me.  I'm being run ragged, and when I come home, I have just enough energy to load the document I was working on, stare at it for a long time, and wander off, because my brain is in desperate need of an overhaul.  To give you an example of why:  I went to work early today -- if 5:30 AM can be considered merely "early" and not "what the fuck is wrong with you" -- because, for some reason, there just isn't enough time in my regular workday to finish everything that needs doing. 

I've pretty much worked straight through from 5:30 AM all the way to just after 5 PM, when I crawled home and waved a white flag.  I didn't take any breaks, I didn't stop for lunch, I did not pass 'GO' and, erm, head to the bathroom until the situation became embarrassingly dire and I had to cut someone off in mid-sentence with a hurried "HoldthatthoughtI'llberightback" while I did an awkward runshuffle down the hall.

That's been something of how my week has been, and you'd think that by Hump Day, things would settle down, but I don't see any sign of it easing up until late on Thursday, maybe early Friday.  Apparently, I had the nerve to start on some of my own work while the rest of the workplace went and had a crisis, and no one believed me when I tried to explain that there are other, perfectly competent people who could help out with the problem, so please go away, because my time critical stuff trumps their time critical stuff.  That netted me a hearty laugh ("Seriously, dude, I wasn't making a joke") before someone grabbed my elbow and hauled me down the hall to their office ("If you don't let me go right now so that I can stop this chemical reaction, I am not helping you file the paperwork to buy a new fumehood").

Anyway, what that means is that I'm doing my time critical work with their time critical work and not remembering that today was Halloween until someone scared the shit out of me by jumping out of a doorway while wearing a fairy-slash-vampire costume.

No, really.  A fairy-slash-vampire costume.  With pink-and-green wings over an emo black turtleneck and scandalous miniskirt and purple balls bobbing over her head on sproingy springs glued to a headband.  There was black eyeliner and black eyeshadow and Day Of The Dead facewhite paint and black lipstick and a dribble of red goo down one corner of her mouth and neon green Dracula teeth that came flying out at me like something from the Addams Family when she shouted, "BOOOO!"


Yes.  Well.


Now that I've decontaminated myself from the fairy-slash-vampire saliva, I will apologize for burying the good news so far down in this email that you've probably totally skipped over it.

The good news that, even though it took me 2.5 days to get there, I have 3,000 words to Part 11 of Loaded March.





^*Translation: The more things change, the more things stay the same. Or, as a corollary, the more shit you shovel uphill, the more you slip on the slop and fall face-first in steaming cow-pie.