stgulik

The sidebar on my livejournal Friends Feed includes blog posts from sites that pay to advertise there. So far, the only blog that has ever shown up is Oh No They Didn't!, a gossip site. Once in a while I see something click-worthy.( Read more... )

I'm in the process of beta'ing a third piece for the sshg_promptfest. All of them have been/are terrific. You people are in for a very good fest, if these three are any indication!

As for me, my piece is done and has been farmed out. I'll send it in with time to spare. Nice to be on time! If only I could learn this trick when I write for my job.

I am at that low point in the fanfic writing process where, whenever I think about my piece, I shake my head, my shoulders hunch and my eyebrows go all whooshy. When I get to this low point, I reassure myself of my minimum standards: 1) I had fun writing it, and 2) I believe it meets the prompter's requirements. Anything more will be gravy.

This month, I resigned my post as validator at Hawthorn and Vine. After two years (or was it more?), I feel I learned everything I set out to learn. It's time to give over my evenings to family activities. It was a very interesting time, and the other volunteer staff are awesome. If you ever want to read or write a Dramione, I encourage you to head over there.

Hope everybody's Valentine's Day was lovely. As darklotus said yesterday, "we don’t need to love just our sweethearts or lovers - love, luckily, comes in  almost endless variety and levels of intensity - And that, to me, is a good enough reason to celebrate!"

Groom and I have celebrated many a Valentine's, and now we know exactly what to do for each other. He brought me beautiful flowers, and I brought him Skyfall on Blu-Ray. Then we went out to a Japanese restaurant and said eye-rollingly mushy things to each other all evening.

Meanwhile, Girl stayed home and cooked dinner for her boyfriend. She's not exactly a cook yet, so they ate nachos and ravioli and drank sparkling apple juice. She was generous to a guest, which was the main point; as far as the menu, she'll get there one day.

Girl just celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Unlike last year's ghetto Harry Potter-theme, this year's party was just going out to the movies, followed by pizza, cake, and several hours of some kind of murder mystery game in the living room. There's also a nebulous plan in the works concerning taking a couple of carloads of teens to Santa Cruz to play on the boardwalk for the day. We'll see. Watch this space for pictures.

Beta work lately has been interesting and diverse. I'm primarily editing teddyradiator's o-fic. The characters are deep in the dungeon and an antagonist has shown himself. And celestialbeing1, who lately suffered a broken wrist, is happy to report she's recovered enough mobility to be able to flip people off. She sent me another chap of Broken Dreams, which is posting on TPP.

Thanks for all your good wishes yesterday. I could honestly feel them across the miles. Today I am almost back to my old self, hardly able to comprehend the thoughts chasing through my brain yesterday.

On the beta front, when it rains, it pours. A few weeks ago, one of my regular fanfic writers told me she would have a piece ready to edit in a while. So I thought, in the meantime, I'd answer a request on hp_betas to edit a new piece. That person didn't immediately send me her piece, so I signed up a second time on the beta site.

As you can guess, this is the week that all three pieces were emailed to me. O_o  

I can handle it and everything, but it's just ridiculous the way Life throws your responsibilities your way in fits and starts. Such a disorganized way to run a universe. I intend to write a strongly-worded letter.

The practical upshot of this is, if anybody wants to chat on Gmail the next few evenings, you know where I'll be. My handle is p.stgulik. Feel free!

Back when I first got accredited on Perfect Imagination, and I was a green beta with no experience, I agreed to take on an angsty Dramione.

The author felt pretty sure it would be only 75k words or so.

One year, 54 chapters, and approximately a gazillion words later, I just now sent off the last pages.

We're done!

Pop the cork - it's Champagne Thursday!

Yay, temporarily caught up on all beta activities! I'm talking rivertempest's yet-to-be-posted Snupin, teddyradiator's Labour of Love, and even the long-running fic I've been editing since May, which posts over on Granger Enchanted.

Speaking of behind-the-scenes work, I've been accepted as a validator at Hawthorn and Vine, in their K thru PT department. This is my first full week on the job, and I think I'm doing an all right job learning what all the buttons do.

Help a girl out here! Somewhere, not too long ago, I saw a tongue-in-cheek article listing the Most Overused Words in fan fiction. I meant to read it, but then I must have blithely surfed away, and now I can't remember where I saw it. It might have been attached to a site's submission rule page.

Ring any bells? Can you help me find it again?

So, I took the quiz all you cool kids posted today, and got some pretty remarkable results. Anyone who's had me as their beta can attest to the evil truth ...


I am Blue/Green
Take The Magic Dual Colour Test - Beta today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

Good morning. Amazingly sleepy. My head is still swimming with beta dreams. Whenever I do beta work right before bedtime, I have beta dreams, which are like regular dreams, except for several major differences.

First, people in these dreams are almost exactly like regular dream characters, except they carry their  personalities outside their bodies. A personality is nearly invisible, resembling a silo of swirling, translucent smoke that floats above a character. Nobody remarks on other people's visible personalities; it's as normal as skin. And at crucial moments in a dream, I am capable of stopping the plot and messing with the personality silo of any character, changing the dialogue and all subsequent decisions.

Second, at these same crucial moments, I also run back and change elements. In last night's dream, I added cars to a passenger train so my characters would neglect to sit together when they boarded. You'd have to have been there. On second thought, it's a good thing you weren't, because I might have messed with your personality silo.

Got an email this morning from Perfect Imagination, the beta-testing site, reporting its own shutdown. They'd closed the site to new people looking to become accredited betas, so it's not a complete surprise, but I'm still sad. Without a site like this, it will be hard for non fanfic-writing betas like myself to prove their creds and get "work."