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I've been writing sporadically this week. The scene I've been working on has been stubborn, and I've been unsure of my grasp of the characters. I'm looking forward to the next scene because it feels (at least for now. We'll see how it is after I start it) as if it should flow fairly easily. LunarGeography has found a workable method for bribing me. She's got a collection of Miazaki movies, and I've seen almost none of them. She's offering to show me one for each section I complete. I expect I'll have earned the next one before I see her next since I'm only a page or two from finishing the current bit.

She's also let me put up one of her stories on my website so that things don't look quite so empty. It's an NC-17 Ruroni Kenshin fic that ended up homeless after fanfiction.net got rid of all the NC-17 stuff. I'm trying to persuade her to put other stuff up there, but I don't know whether or not anything will come of that. She's trying to locate all the pieces of one story, and another was written as a gift for Utsuri and so can't be posted without her permission.

I finally got the WK Yaoi list to accept a posting from me. I'd talked to the list owner, and she told me that the server where the list and its webpage are housed had been under attack for a while, that that was why I'd been unable to post and had gotten nothing from the list for so long. I was glad to have an explanation and glad that list hadn't just disappeared. At any rate, I posted my url with a message stating that I'm looking for an additional beta reader for part 2. I've gotten one volunteer. I don't know if I'll get any further response.

(no subject)

Now that I've put together my Christmas wish list and sent it out, I have to restrain my impulse to buy some of the things I've requested. It's hard because I know that I won't get most of what I listed, but I'm sure that anything I buy for myself I guarantee that someone else will buy. Since I put the anime that I want on that list, I may not go to Wizzywig this month. I'm almost completely certain that no one will buy any of it because it's not necessarily all that easy to find (Hey, they often complain about the mass market paperbacks I list being hard to find) and because they're a little more expensive than the standard DVD.

I did try to include some easy, relatively harmless items. I'm fairly sure I'll get Monsters, Inc. from someone, and somebody's going to pick out a parenting book or two for us. Beyond that... I'll probably get the gloves and maybe some gift certificates (though my in laws don't like doing gift certificates very much). The specific books I listed would be easy for me to find in a Border's or a Barnes & Noble (and dead easy on Amazon), but... The CDs might not be as easy because my taste runs toward folk music, but I did cite urls for the more obscure stuff (which are generally the titles that I really want to get my hands on).

I don't know how far Scott's gotten on his holiday shopping. I usually leave it up to him to find everything for his family while I deal with mine. My family doesn't do wish lists, so I don't have to wait to see them (and they get whatever I happen to come across, mostly Swiss Colony stuff these days). Of course, not having a list makes buying for people like my brother-in-law-to-be nearly impossible. I've only met him once and haven't got the slightest notion of what he likes or doesn't (apart from my sister and their dogs).

(no subject)

I need to invest some time soon answering e-mail. I've got quite a backlog. Some of it's kind of difficult. There's the friend from high school who's going through a divorce. I feel bad for her in a sort of vague way, but... We've kind of lost the connection that we had. Our friendship was based on the fact that she came the closest of the people around me to having something in common with me and that, although I didn't share many of her interests, I was nicer to her than her other friends. (Yeah, that's an awful thing to say, and I probably wouldn't have said it even a year or two ago, but it's true. Even in high school, I refused to treat people like crap based on shifts in the social pecking order. No matter what I did, I wasn't going to fit in, so I wasn't going to help keep the system going.)

The divorce sounds unpleasant particularly because she doesn't want it. She's a religious Catholic and would prefer to work at repairing things. This is the second time, her husband has announced that he wants a divorce. Last time, he suddenly changed his mind, and I think she may be hoping it will happen again. She's terrified because she married at 20 and moved straight from her parents' home to living with her husband. They have no children (she can't, and he's making that the center of his decision but stating it as not being able to deal with "not being able to give her children" (he refused to consider adoption)), thank goodness, but they do have a rather aged dog who she's going to be stuck with. He wants the house, says he'll assume the entire mortgage (she's not convinced he'll be able to get financing), and wants her to move out NOW.

I rather think she's better off rid of him, and I've thought that since the first time he pulled this crap a few years back. I've kept my mouth shut, though. I don't even see her once a year and have no real concept of what her life's like. Even if I saw her every day though... Telling her what to do would be wrong. Of course, I suspect that if we lived close enough that we could see each other frequently we've have drifted completely out of contact already. Funny how distance actually helps maintain the relationship.