the_rck | (no subject)

That story that's ready to post needs tagging, and I'm stumbling over it. I also need to reread to evaluate the rating for the dratted thing. I found the right title for it in under ten minutes, a snippet from Emily Dickinson.

I have, at this point, 35 works in progress that have at least an opening paragraph. I know which I ought to give first priority, but I think I need to set a goal for next year to try to finish more of these stories. A number of them are partial chapters of things I've been working on for a while. Others are part of one series or another. I think I'll feel more accomplished if I finish some of the standalones. Maybe.

There are two things with deadlines that are each about halfway done and, in theory, quick to complete.

There are eleven standalones, three of which were meant to be PWP and aren't going that way. I think they'll write easier if I let go of the porn part being necessary. Only one really fits the prompt that inspired it anyway, and that's the one that's most likely to produce smut. Six of the eleven are things I started in October for my

letsgetshitdone challenge. Maybe I should be glad life distracted me from that-- I'd have a lot more things in this section if it hadn't.

There are five stories that are part of multi-story series but that ought to tie up well enough to be a single story that doesn't require follow up immediately.

There are three stories that are sequels to other, singleton, stories. None of those stories are necessary to complete the previous stories; they just pick up a bit later in the same timeline.

Everything else is either a chaptered WIP or part of a larger series in ways that make it harder to complete or even to know when it's complete. I'm eyeing two of those and realizing that they're actually documents with the seeds of about six different stories that I wandered into while trying to do something else entirely. I'm not even going to try to split them apart until after I finish a few other things.

I don't see anything that I'm willing to label as abandoned.

At any rate, I have a list and am going through it to try to guess which stories are most easily finished and least likely to spawn seventeen sequels/AU branches.

I'm also thinking that I can move Occlusion to AO3 if I set it up as a series rather than a chaptered work. What I've got is disjointed enough that each part makes sense separately. Well, sort of. That disjointedness is why I haven't previously posted it there.

Apart from the things with due dates, my main writing goal today is the 443 words I need in order to hit 300K words for the year to date. That seems like very little, like I could open any of these and manage that much.

I'm getting crankier and more reluctant to deal with family gatherings that involve food. There aren't any good ways to accommodate my needs, especially when I look at things that might be safe in that they contain nothing I know to be unsafe but that contain things that I haven't really tested yet. That category includes pretty much everything at restaurants and that's prepared by not-me people (including Scott. He can't track the long list and just no longer really tries, just hands me ingredient lists so that I can figure it out).

I discovered last week that Quaker's flavored mini rice cakes, the sweet ones, contain sucralose. That means I can't eat them without getting sick, but I'd never have thought that they would.

At any rate, I know that my list of things I can't have is onerously long. About half of it is trace ingredient stuff-- inulin, sweeteners, herbs, spices, nitrates and nitrites. Weirdly, I'm completely and 100% okay with MSG which is something I've been told for years and years is the evil behind all sorts of ailments.

Also, people look at me weird when I say things like, "Garlic's safe-ish before 2 p.m. but not after. Earlier makes it safer. How about we have the big, flavorful meal as soon as we get up in the morning? Just don't use eggs." My list of safe/sometimes safe/never safe foods runs seven pages in Gdocs.

For me, dealing with my food issues is a lot like trying to decide whether or not I can go on that family outing that will involve hours of walking. It's not necessarily that I can't; it's that there's a price tag that I can't check in advance. I'm just becoming less and less willing to gamble that I can pay.

At any rate, I'm going to need to take my own food for Thanksgiving. I resent needing to do that in this case even more than I would if Scott's parents or sister were hosting. (I think the resentment is more that I had several weeks when I thought we'd eat at home and was looking forward to being able to prepare things I knew I could eat.

Cordelia's choir fundraiser yesterday got cancelled. They were suppose to rake leaves for payment, but there was enough snow on the ground to make that difficult. There's less snow today, but there wouldn't be enough time after school lets out, not even with it being an exam day, to get everything done by dark. Tomorrow, there's only one exam, so the kids will be done by 9:30. The choir director wants them to rake leaves then.

I'm not convinced that she'll find the dozen drivers that are needed, not on a Tuesday on such short notice. Also, the forecast still calls for more snow between now and then. I'm kind of at the point of wanting to tell her that I'll donate $10-$20 for Cordelia not to have to go. Cordelia's been complaining about the prospect for about a week now, since well before the rescheduling.