And a couple random plugs I've had nagging at my brain and forgot to post:

1) Garnier Nutrisse hair color. If you're looking for something more gentle on your hair (hi mom!), this is SO it. Nooo stinging itching burning whatsoever when I used it, and it smelled lovely the entire time. My hair's quite happy just now, I'm pretty sure it didn't dry out so much with this stuff. It's been about a week now, and while the red isn't quite as crayon-red as it was... well, part of it is probably that I'm still not good at distributing the goop evenly when dying. It's still very, very red, the color very vibrant, and it's all kinds of shiny. (Some credit undoubtedly goes to the L'Oreal color-protecting shampoo, Pantene shampoo for redheads, and John Frieda conditioner for redheads, and the different leave-in conditioners I use pretty constantly now. Mostly those just fix the frizz and keep the curls, though.) L'Oreal is still my fav, the color is fantastic, but this stuff just made my hair feel *happy*.

2) I'm always poking around for something to deal with the dark circles under my eyes. While magazines and websites keep giving me suggestions in the $30-$100 range... my budget's a little smaller than that. So I tried this concealer stick by CoverGirl that I spotted at the drug store, and it is working *beautifully*. CG Smoothers Concealer. It looks like a tube of lipstick - I picked it up in the "neutralizing" color, which is a bit yellowish, and perfectly knocks out the darkness of the circles. A bit of gentle smoothing-in when putting it on, and it doesn't clump into skin-crinkles at all. I like.

3) New favorite mascara! I'd seen an ad for CoverGirl's LashExact mascara - which was my previous favorite, as it adds just a bit of darkness and definition to eyelashes, without being really obvious, aaaand without clumping. (I'm awful at mascara, so I need all the help I can get.) But! There is a new flavor! Exact Eyelights - the stuff is tinted just the littlest bit, to make your eye color look brighter. So, mine is ever-so-slightly sapphire blue - noticable on the brush, but not on my lashes at all. Totally helps pick up the color of my eyes, which is working awesome, especially with the bright-red hair and pale skin just now. CoverGirl is my friend. I love MAX Factor's eyeshadow palettes, and I splurge on something randomly interesting looking now and again, but when I want something that just *works*, CoverGirl's a great bet.

4) Making apple crisp from scratch is TOTALLY worth the time and effort of peeling and slicing like ten apples. Holy crap. Tom had an awful day at work yesterday (came home a good half an hour late), and I fed him apple crisp, and he looked *so* incredibly happy, it so made my day. (Followed this recipe almost exact - added a bit of nutmeg and a smidge more cinnamon.) I'd had no idea what type of apples to use, apart from non-squishy ones, so went with McIntosh, and the stuff is freaking delicious.

5) Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End". Absolutely PHENOMENAL book. Tom and I both absolutely loved it. Audible's audiobook of it is an understated reading at first brush, but as you get into it...it suits perfectly. Loved loved. Tom's still in utter disbelief that it was written in like 1953, it's incredibly un-dated (apart from the party scenes, but the social nuances I hunt out for my own writing probably flew over Tom's head).

...aaaand I have successfully dodged being productive for most of my evening now. Back to the novel-grind!

 
It's a very strange thing, creating characters. Once they've started creeping into your head, you start seeing them in the outside world, too...

I'm on my laptop, so my music is handled by Songbird. (Which, btw, is AWESOME. Does pretty much everything I normally need iTunes to do, only, runs on Linux as well.) I was poking at the bottom frame, where there's the usual artist info...but there's also a running photo stream. Entertaining. I was listening to a j-rock band, Buck-Tick, who have this song "ROMANCE -Incubo-" that I totally love (especially when I'm writing Phistos). I watched the photo stream for a minute.

And then---

I saw Luce.



I have a good bit of trouble cementing my characters enough to draw them, though the image is clearer all the time. Luce took me a bit, but I've leaned toward giving him a Japanese look. Meres is the easiest to draw, Mephisto is (no surprise) also easy. Veri is *insanely* clear in my head, yet very, very difficult to get right on paper. Luce... I can see his silhouette much more clearly than his features, most days. But this... this is pretty darn close.

A bit annoying to see him, actually, I'm currently avoiding him. I have a scene that should be from his point of view, but he's very intimidating for me to write, so I keep dodging it. ^^;


I have wiped out a character in the novel - Carey is no more! Carey and Adir/Adrian were pretty much the same person anyway, the only reason they both existed was so that they could argue with each other. So, now Adir argues with Nila, and took on Carey's relationships. Which culls a good bit of extra fluff out of the story. It has - finally - hit me that having eight main characters whose points of view I'm alternating between is a bit much. That's not even touching the periphery characters... who you don't really need to keep track of, anytime you see Claude someone mentions his paintings, anytime you see Mark it's pretty damn clear he's a priest, etc. So, Carey is totally gone, and I'm definitely not writing Nila's point of view, which I'd always neglected anyway because I didn't have anything interesting to say from his perspective.

I sat down and tried mapping out the relationships between my characters, and discovered I have, in fact, written a soap opera. I've moved large chunks of the story around in my binder like twice in the past twenty-four hours. And I found a new bonus to the Harper's Bazaar subscription my mom got me - fashionable foreign terminology!!! Azal is a language person, I realized he needs to throw random bits of other languages into his speech, like, obsessively. I took Spanish. Spanish is not a very Phisto language. So, in flipping through maybe two issues of an artsy fashion magazine - poof! A whole page of foreign phrases! Most of them French, and a few of which I still have to look up myself. (As Tom suggested, though, I really need some more obscure things, too. Old languages, Latin and Hebrew and things, I'd already planned on, but he pointed out that obscure things like, oh, Somalian, would be great.) Anyone has anything to throw at me, I'd appreciate it!

...I'm actually dodging Azal at the moment, too, I'm having trouble sorting out his particular voice. Meres, I've got, he's very artsy and a lot like me. (Apart from, y'know, the murdering people thing. His temper's a bit worse than mine.) Mephisto, I've got, obviously, I've been writing him for years. Veri is whiny. Adir is a scheming little aristocratic playboy, probably the most human. Luce gets very philosophical, he's full of lofty one-liners and abstracted psychology. Azal, I understand his motivations and his thought processes, but he sounds too much like Meres in places, and like Mephisto and Luce in others. Part of me wonders if I shouldn't cull him out as well, applying bits of his persona to others... but I think he's staying. Part of what makes him Azal, I could see Meres being, but... I think Meres' core is his love for Veri, I'd rather focus on that with him. Azal gets to be obsessive over the past they can't entirely remember. <3


In other news... next week is my vacation, YAY!!! Saturday after work, Tom and I are driving to Long Island. We'll stay with his dad a day or so there, then the three of us are heading to DC/Maryland, for a few days of museum-ing and coastal seafood. From there, swinging by North Carolina to stay with Tom's grandmother for a few days. Then... actually I think it's back to Long Island, since we're taking Tom's dad's car most of the trip, then back home again. Lots of driving, but that's no problem, I enjoy long spurts of gazing out the window, and Tom and his dad enjoy the prolonged conversation time, as well as listening to books and music and whatever. (That, and maybe I can make some progress on the gazillions of half-finished crochet projects I have laying around here...)

For something different, I bought a bottle of lime-flavored vodka. I think it is delicious. Tom thinks I'm insane. (Yes I am drinking it in SMALL quantities! I bought us some shot glasses at work a few weeks ago, so as to avoid the rum-mistake again.)

I have finally talked Tom into writing a novel, bwahahahahahaha. Of course, his approach to writing and mine couldn't be more different, but that just makes it interesting. He wants to have his whole thing plotted out before he starts in, whereas once I've got a character and/or a scene in my head, I plunge right in and see what happens. I really love the plot that developed out of Amaranthus, and I'm having ridiculous amounts of fun now in fleshing it out and making it all fit together snugly. Tom has a main character that I can tell already he really loves, and a general idea for a setting (that I'm not sure how much he's attached to), but he hasn't sorted out the plotline yet. A rougish gambler who probably has some spying in his past, and a world owned by corporations. Very manly, ne?

And then there's me, writing about fallen angels and social intrigues and the occult in Oscar Wilde's London. With copious amounts of pretty boys.

 
I have always had an incredibly hard time taking things out of my stories. For a long time, it was basically impossible for me to cut scenes out. Once it was there, it was there for good, I'd just kind of polish up the stone and hope it looked a little prettier, even though it might be totally out of place.

I actually remember the first time I cut a significant chunk out of a story. It was Mackie's history, which I don't think I ever posted anywhere due to its lack of an ending. I was working on it while sitting on the roof of the back porch on Eagle Street. I drew this great big X over I think a whole two paragraphs. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, it was thus HUGE emotional thing for me.

So I've learned to do it, but it's still really freaking hard. I hate the thought of losing anything I once had, of any idea being lost. Hanging onto a copy of the story as it was originally written has helped worlds - I know the original thoughts are all still there somewhere. I still have the original text files for each of my NaNoWriMos, buuut, I also have newer copies. Of "Amaranthus", anyway, I think that's the only thing I've gone back to, uhh..

I've been working on "Amaranthus" the last few days. Haven't gotten far yet, but it's been really good to have taken about a year away. I have been over this story like five times already, and I'm only NOW finding freaking typos. Where the time-lapse really helped is with phrasing. As I mentioned to Kellie (in an email pleading for grammatical advice), my creative subconscious has really, really weird phrasing. I just added in a bit for the first Mackie chapter, I realized there was too much focus on everything going on around him and not enough inside his head, so I snuck inside his head for a minute, and this is what came out:

"That old game. I grow weary of it, of the trouble of it all, of hearing endless variations of it from others. It is such an old game, played without thought by most. They could at least take the trouble to make it more interesting, to make their deceptions the artforms they are capable of being... there is a sort of honesty to flagrant lies, but clothed in glittering shrouds, seen but not seen..."

This is how my untamed creative impulse writes. It is even more convoluted than, say, my posts here. Here, I'm mentally talking, so at least it vaguely resembles speech. Every now and again, I silently read bits of my stories aloud, and my lungs can't handle half of my sentences. Run-ons are everywhere, and I have a comma issue. Fragments get strung together into run-ons. Via commas. While this works well enough for, say, distracted thoughts of an unstable mind (i.e., basically every Phisto ever), it makes you stumble while reading sometimes.

...admitting you have a problem is the first step in fixing it, right?


Anyway, I'm pretty sure I got shivers re-reading my prologue (which was originally a free-standing mini-story...doesn't look like I ever posted it though), which is fantastic. I'm very, very attached to that scene. The first chapter I really feel is a great introduction to their world, and the balance of creepiness and art toward the end of it is better than I'd expected. I'm working on the second chapter, Mackie's, today, which was suffering from a lot of bulk. There were like three conversations at least half a page long that had nothing to do with the story at hand. They gave some background atmosphere, but took way too much time to do so. So! I hacked up one conversation into little bits (which may yet get smaller), and took chunks out of another, and added in Mackie's wandering thoughts, and I think the whole thing is actually beginning to look cohesive now. Which it wasn't. Which was driving me nuts, because, hi, it's Mackie, and I love, and I really don't feel I've done him justice in awhile. (Though I discovered TWO! more scenes of his that I'd started in on some time ago, that I'd totally forgotten about, and I think they'll be really nice.)

If anyone feels ambitious enough to volunteer to read bits and offer feedback, OMFG PLEASE TELL ME. Tom absolutely hates both my writing style and my topics. Maybe not *hates*, but, uh, has no interest in. Old-fashioned is not his thing, and pretty boys are not his thing - though he's been invaluable with, say, murders and whatnot.

I really am determined to one day publish this beast. I have no commercial hopes whatsoever for it - there's no motherfucking happy ending with The Perfect Boyfriend (who sparkles in the sunlight) and a kid named after half the members of the family and living happily ever after when married at the age of eighteen, while having the overall intelligence level of a newt. (No I'm not annoyed that something as poorly written as "Twilight" has sucked in every female of my age demographic and then some. I was minorly sucked in too, but, good god, is that REALLY the story that people want?)

...I like my Phistos. They scare the shit out of me some days, but I love them anyway. <3