So I have an offering up at helpthesouth! Right over here.

G00/RAG and Captive Prince fans take note, as I'm offering one fanfic as well as one original fic. :D

I went to bed astoundingly early last night. I tossed and turned the whole night, dreaming of being trapped/hiding in a place that looked remarkably like the photos they showed on the news this morning. I dreamed that I got killed several different times--every time I fell back asleep, I'd get killed again.

Getting out of bed was very, very hard. I felt so heavy that I couldn't move my limbs. I couldn't convince my body that I was alive, despite rolling around and groaning and stuff. It was just so hard to move, so hard to be alive when I'd dreamed of getting killed all night.

And then I woke up, went downstairs, and saw the news. Obama had been killed; I'd gone to bed too early to hear it last night.

Creepy as fuck, man.

smut_fest updates!

1) I wrote for the first round, Echoes! It's very short, but still a whole story despite the short length.

2) Sign-ups for the second round are open! We're doing sci-fi this time. We had a lot of awesome authors last time, so don't be shy--we'll have some really awesome writers this time too!

3) megyal and I came up with some fun topics for future rounds, including folklore, darkfic, best friends, fluff, and supernatural. We're excited :D

On another note, dear last.fm, why do you play Shakira so much? It's not that I dislike her, it's just that it's the same damn song every time. Oh, you.

It's that time again: TMI time about my sex life!

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Wanted to post this separately from the APW stuff just in case someone ends up finding/linking to that, heh heh heh.

1) Went and saw Sucker Punch. My immediate reaction upon seeing it was to rage, but upon thinking and discussing it more with people, I think that this movie brings a very valuable element to the table but other people have already said this far more eloquently than I am able to.

2) Sweat lodge on Saturday. This is the e-mail I sent tensergorn when I got home:

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I felt a bit better on Sunday when I went over there to help take down the lodge. I brought Puffin with me, since I'm going to be house-sitting their house for ten days at the end of May and Puffin will be coming with me.

Oh. My. God. Puffin had so much fun. She was constantly running around, smelling things, and like a bouncy, happy sort of running around. It was soooo cute! And she made friends with the pony, Bolt, who is very human-shy. They touched noses, and it was just the cutest sight ever, this stocky pony stretching out his neck and puffin stretching out her neck and their noses just barely touching.

I stayed out in the field for probably an hour just writing, and Puffin just ran around the whole time-- a lot of the time near Bolt too, which made me smile. I felt very good by the time I left.

3) Em and I attended the Whippersnappers Atlanta Meet & Greet at Manuel's Tavern on Thursday. Abby, Noel, and Art were all there so it was just wonderful to get to see all of them again. I ended up getting uhhh pretty trashed. I think the Triple Sec was what did me in, in the end.

I completely forgot the name of the girl who ended up giving me a scalp/neck/shoulder massage, (she had very nice tits, I must confess, and nice thighs as well) but all I can remember from the end of the night is that it felt like so many people were touching me and it was just such an awesome feeling. I didn't feel embarrassed or ashamed to be the center of attention for once, which was another boost for me.

(Also, I got to kiss both Noel and Art. Fsdlklsadsk I love kissing people; words cannot express this adequately.)

On a related note,

4) I will be attending Frolicon. I've made arrangements for Puffin; I have a pre-reg; Em and I will either find a room with some floor space and crash there or sleep in the car. We'll bring blankets and shit again either way, heh heh heh.

It seems like such a basic thing, but at times punctuation can be complicated and it's important to know the rules and try to moderate your instincts. So, do you know the rules? I read through them and realized that I was doing a few things wrong, myself!

I highly, highly recommend everyone take a look, as it tells you what the standards are in the English language. Not that you have to follow these standards completely, but it's best that you know the rules if you're going to break them.

While I'm on the subject of punctuation: the interrobang, this fancy little number: ?! and !?. I'm not going to say that you should never use one, but I am going to say this: the more stories I see with them, the less I enjoy them. Use them, if you must, but don't use them thoughtlessly!

You can convey a more realistic sense of confused energy with words than you can with punctuation. I consider an interrobang a form of telling (as opposed to showing) and telling is something you want to generally avoid in stories, especially when the emotions run high and you want to have an impact on your readers.

Ahem, now that's done, I shall continue with the original intent of the post: everyone has certain punctuation that they end up relying on, for one reason or another.

I'm not talking about when one passage has a lot of questions because someone's confused, the next has a lot of exclamations because it's a shouting match, and the final passage has a lot of ellipses because the characters are out of breath. These are all examples of certain types of punctuation being relied upon because of the mood they convey; if you are tailoring the punctuation to the scene then you are doing a good job!

What I am talking about is, when you do a ctrl+f on your document and find, oh, 62 instances of an ellipsis. Or 47 instances of a dash. Or 96 semicolons-- all in a story that's, oh, let's say 7,000 words or so.

That means that, on average, every 149 words, there's a dash. Every 113 words, there's an ellipsis. Every 73 words there's a semicolon. If you want a measuring stick for exactly how much text that isn't, the above two paragraphs, the ones that start with "I'm" and "What," together are 126 words.

My own go-to punctuation is the dash. I use it to do all sorts of things--no matter what I'm writing. I nearly always ends up having to go through the story at one point or another and evaluate whether I really need dashes there or not. For instance, in the piece I'm working on right now, which is 52,000 words long, I've used it 489 times. That means that I use it every 106 words or so. I obviously need to go through this story and evaluate whether or not these dashes are essential!

Since I am aware of that tendency, I can fix it. I can replace dashes with semicolons, with commas, or even separate it into two sentences.

So I'll ask you-- what are your go-to punctuation elements? What do you find yourself using over and over? I guarantee you that everyone has these, and it's important to be cognizant of your own, so figure out what yours are! And better yet, figure out how to fix them.

Last night I took Red Diamond ecstasy. According to various sites, it's notorious for being clean (ie, not cut with speed/meth/whatnot) but weak, so I was excited about it! Em came too, because neither of us wanted to take it alone, and I have to say: it was an amazing experience.

It only lasted about three hours, but that's barely shorter than the normal time for pure ecstasy, which is right around four hours or so.

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Dear World at Large,

It's fine if you don't like celebrities, and don't want to hear about them. I actually agree with you a bit, because I don't normally give much of a rat's ass about them either.

But this whole thing with Charlie Sheen? It's a very classic case of undiagnosed bipolar, and it's important that people know that having and NOT treating (or self-medicating with drugs/sex/whatnot) mental illnesses is dangerous and debilitating.

So, really, please continue disliking hearing about celebs because it makes me respect you. But don't whine over being sick about hearing about Charlie Sheen, because in this case it's not just about a celebrity.

It's also about raising awareness of mental illness, and that subject matter is kind of important to me.

Thanking you muchly,
me

I took Emily out to dinner last night, for V-day. It was very nice! It's been something like two months (maybe as much as ten weeks) since I've seen her, so it felt really good to just... have my friend back, sitting there talking with me, and all that stuff.

We also talked a bit about Tens, and the reasons why I like her, etc etc. It was a good conversation for me, good to actually sit and talk about that a bit because nobody else has actually asked me those sort of things and they're questions that do need answers.

After dinner we went back to my apartment for sexytimes, and on the way we stopped and talked to someone named Amanda who lives in my apartment complex and had told me a few times that she liked girls. Amanda asked if we were drinking, and if she might join us, and of course Emily and I are both thinking: fuck yeah, threesome, so we said yes.

It took her a while to get beer and join us, during which time we reserved a room for Dragon*Con. (So, so excited about this!) It was kind of a pain, because all of the overflow places we called were booked up, and so as a kind of last-ditch resort we called the one official hotel that was fuckoff expensive but not booked solid, and found out that we could get a AAA discount that would pretty much bring the room price down to the Dragon*Con rates... blahblahblah, lots of negotiating later, we find a room at one of the booked hotels but it's fuckoff expensive so we're only booked for Friday and Saturday nights. I figure $50 for the cab back to my apartment isn't that bad, really, if we're going to have a room the rest of the time.

Anyway, Amanda finally joins us, and Emily and I are kind of, you know, making out a bit. Because we do that. It's required. And Amanda's just... watching. It was kind of creepy! Like, how are you going to just sit and watch when two girls are having sex and inviting you to join them? When one of them starts undressing you?

In the end we concluded that Amanda was remarkably straight, but it was certainly an interesting experience. Object lesson in spotting straight girls, I guess, which is always helpful!

(As usual the music is so apropos-- Amanda is blonde.)

A few cool things:

Tuneage - a blog for anyone who likes a wide variety of music. Hoshit, these people got everything and they're normally (for me) spot-on about the quality of the music too.

Elbo.ws - Music blogs out the wazoo, but they vary in quality but they normally have downloadable content so that's a plus.

Blog @ Sinthetik.com - just a lot of cool stuff, though I will warn that it's not always safe for work and the NSFW stuff is not behind cuts, so keep that in mind when approaching this site. I really like the fact that a lot of the pictures this person posts are women that are bigger. It helps to remind me that yes, overweight girls are pretty too.

everydayprompts - A comm I started because I couldn't find a community that was only prompts. No people posting crap, just prompts, pure and simple. Yay~!

In other news, I wish DW had LJ's last-fm thing, because I really like that.