(no subject)

Some amount of being in a small space with a lot of strangers ahead of me today. Our nephew's graduation party is this afternoon from noon for 4 p.m. at his home. It's nice outside, so I expect some part of the party will be in the yard. Scott and Cordelia have just left. I'm not currently able to manage the drive up there (about 25 minutes) without frequent bathroom breaks, so Scott's going to come back for me later on. I think he'd have put off going until later, but we promised to pick up the breadsticks his sister ordered for the party. Those actually need to be there when the guests start arriving.

I know our nephew won't really care that much if I don't show up at all, but his parents will, and I will. Scott's of the opinion that this is a bad combination of the anticipatory stress of the event with the other things that have hit me this week. He's probably right. It's just... I rarely used to have this sort of problem around events like this.

But, as soon as Scott and Cordelia left, I started feeling a little better. That argues very, very strongly for anxiety. I think I might lie down for a while after I post this.

Scott bought a card this morning because trying to design and print a photo card was going to be too time consuming and difficult. The printer hasn't been doing well with anything like that. He was nodding off through most of the morning because he worked 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. and then did the grocery shopping. Yesterday's shift was nasty, too. One of the water lines broke, and (of course) it was the one furthest back so that getting at it required shutting down and moving three other water lines.

I mostly cat waxed yesterday. I got a fair way toward cleaning out the last of duplicate emails. I think I've got one folder of about two hundred messages to weed and sort. Discovering that putting a copy of a message into a folder that already held a copy would not produce duplicates made the whole process much, much simpler because I just consolidated things without trying to determine if they were duplicates or not.

I need to find a first sentence for the fic I'm starting. It may not be a sentence I keep, but that first sentence is what breaks the dam. I'm thinking that I may just do stream of consciousness in the character's POV to see what I discover about him. That's worked in the past to shake things loose when I wasn't quite certain of the voice.

There's a multi-fandom remix running with signups now. They're not restricting fandoms, though, which I can see as a potential problem in knowing what to offer to write. For past remixes, I've had some overlap in what I offer for remixing and what I offer to remix, but mostly I've gone through the list of possibilities and written down fandoms I think I could do. Then I weed that list down to the maximum I'm allowed to offer to write.

I'm remixable in Weiss Kreuz, Chronicles of Narnia, and Chronicles of Amber. The other fandoms that look potentially workable all contain crossovers or have one of the three stories not quite hit the minimum word count. If the pod_together fics were revealed, I'd qualify for Labyrinth and (if that's what I end up writing for my second story) The Pretender.

Ah, well. It's not as if I didn't already have half a dozen other things that I want to do during that window. I think I should pass on this one.

Looking for brainstorming help

I'm going to bed soon, but I'm going to be looking, tomorrow, for someone familiar with The Pretender who is willing to a sounding board for a couple of story ideas as I try to figure out what to do with them. I'm focusing on Sydney, mostly, unless I find a compelling reason not to. I'm also trying to pull together ideas about some relatively minor but recurring characters interacting with him.

I'm in the US and on Eastern time. I'll probably be getting up around 10 a.m.