March 2021 - Day 1

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Here is the place to tell us about your daily success (or the lack of it)!
May the magic be with us all!

FYI: I'll put up the daily posts between 6 and 8pm, CET, each day. The exact posting time might vary due to RL issues. My apologies.

Comments

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

No actual writing for me today (too many chores), but I've been playing various scenarios in my head concerning "Sea Flower". One of them being a dance done by Zirán, a slave woman from Khambaluk (one of the farthest and largest Haradric realms in my little corner of the Tolkienverse that has certain similarities with medieval India). The dancer was inspired by Indira Varma as she appeared in the Kama Sutra film and is the concubine of the leading male character, a nobleman in Umbar.

The other one is a bull game, based on the one they do in Camargue, France. The peculiarity of this game is that they don't harm the bulls in any way; the animals have some kind of brooch fastened to their foreheads, and the participants have to snatch the thing without being impaled by the bull. Basically, it is a game of speed and skill, as the men participating are not armed in any way. I need to get certain characters sent to participate in the game, so that they can meet by accident, as it would be important for the plot.

For those not in the known: the story take place a few decades before the events described in The Lord of the Rings, featuring a very minor canon character who's only mentioned in the genealogy of the Princes of Dol Amroth. Aragorn, Imrahil and Denethor also make appearances, and so does Finduilas, the mother of Boromir and Faramir.

Sorry for being so verbose. I'm actually trying to inspire discussions about the works themselves, not only pats on the shoulder for the word count. (Which I don't even have today...)

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

I think you will have a good deal of fun figuring out how to get your characters to participate in the bull game. And the game itself sounds like a grand lot of choreography for you to work out, too. Do you plan to have Aragorn, Imrahil and Denethor play the bull game? Sounds very lively!

[elmey.livejournal.com]

I'm one of those people who never made it through Lord of the Rings, so will be useless for this discussion :( But I like the way you investigate the nooks and crannies of Tolkien's world, carving out areas you can populate with your own characters. I also like a sport where the Bulls aren't killed!

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Those ideas sound really promising! I like the bull one, where the animal isn't hurt...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

That sounds really interesting. Dol Amroth and its neighbours is a really good place for using our own mental images, and our own thoughts on the culture. I enjoyed surgsteelfic's take on it being very like New Orleans, but in my own head I have sometimes toyed with it being rather Venetian.

Would you see the bull game of the Camargue being a tradition of Umbar?

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

Just dropping by quickly today because I have actually been doing some of the things I was hoping to do:

Pros BB — not written anything more (and can't speak much about what I have written because the rules require I keep the plot under wraps) — but found a useful poem from an unexpected source that chimes with one of my minor plot points.

Move story — working on this right now, fourth chapter in. I'm giving it a light re-edit as I go to improve the use of punctuation. I was actually looking for a poem to illustrate this story when I ran across the useful BB poem. Still not found quite the right one for this story, so may give up...

MFU WIP — so, I don't want to give too much away because spoilers — but this is one of a few stories I've written without direct speech — I think this will be by far the longest. Be interesting to see how it goes down when I post, which I'm very much hoping I will have done, or be very close to doing, at the end of this Pico.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Congratulations to having work done and good luck with the WIP!

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

You have a good many irons in the fire. When does the Pros BB explode? I haven't ever seen the show, but I have meant to do so for years. I should see if it's streaming somewhere.

Move story — not sure at all what a Move story is.

MFU WIP — this is the only fandom I've written for, so I am particularly interested in this:) How long of a story are you thinking it will be? I do look forward to seeing it, and how it works without direct speech.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

That all sounds like progress - even if words as such didn't get done, you've cleared the way for it.

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

Thank you for driving the bus! With everything you've got going on, my hat's off to you for taking this on! Deeply grateful to you!

Day 1:
I worked on my Easter story for an hour. Transcribed some notes and some html I had experimented with on AO3 to embed a link to a surprise mini-story within an image.
Then I went to check on my recipient's request on MFUWSS, to see if she wanted something fluffy or angsty, because my drafty notes for three scenes are a hodge-podge, and I thought I'd better look before I leaped into angst if she wants fluff...

And I was shocked to find a Weekly Reader had posted to MFUWSS this morning! I have been ill, and haven't done the Weekly Reader yet!!
So I got sidetracked on what had happened. In the end, I decided I had to have made an error on the scheduled entry date.

And now I am grouchy and am going for a walk.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

What is the MFUWSS?

I always cheat with AO3: I post my stuff to LJ first, with links and images and whatnot, then copy and paste everything to AO3. That way I have everything ready-made.

As Murphy's Law says: Do you have a difficult task? Assign it to a lazy person. They'll find the simplest solution. *g*

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I hope the grouchies go away?

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

I got a few sentences written for my essay.

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

What is your essay topic? Good luck with it.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Oh good stuff! I'm relearning - after all these years - how much fun writing essays isn't.

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

I need to get my rumpus in gear and moving!
:^)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I like that expression (my mum used to say she needed 'a burr up the bustle', which I suspect came from

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I like that expression (my mum used to say she needed 'a burr up the bustle', which I suspect came from <emher</em> mum, and I find myself using it sometimes...

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

Oh, I like the sound of that expression. I haven't heard that, but I get it — I grew up with getting one's butt in gear!
'Butt' sounds so crass compared to 'Rumpus'!

[elmey.livejournal.com]

Spent a good part of the day trying to get an appointment for the covid vaccine; the process is ridiculous and includes checking multiple websites, trying to figure out who's getting a few deliveries this week (local pharmacies tend to get 100 or so at a time), who has an active waiting list etc. And this is for a county of 330,000 people, mind you, not a rural area. Won't bore you with the details, but got a whiff of a few slots going on line at 4 PM at our Dept of Health, kept an eagle eye on the clock, and was ready to click like a clicking fool at 4:00:01.
I got lucky!!!!
Have an appointment on Friday at 3 PM. So relieved. It should not be this hard though. They had 558 slots available. Sign ups closed by 4:03.

So with regard to my story, did little writing bur mostly brainstorming on and off during the day. Have the germ of an idea and will wrestle with it in peace tomorrow :)

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

Hope your Covid jab goes well, we're ploughing through millions every month, so I expect I will have been jabbed by summer 😊

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the appointment! It'll be a relief (we won't get ours for ages, but we are much safer than most from it)

Brainstorming is good :)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I've been doing a first-year writing elective for my online university course over summer, and I just got back the final assignment, which was to write 1350 words on 'Place and Encounter' (an encounter between two characters, with an emphasis on making the place it was in an integral part of the writing).

Being me and devoted to making my own life harder, I decided to do a 'discussion' in a cemetery between a ghost and a cat (really a monologue since the cat didn't even miaow :) so the rather less than spooky ghost had to do all the talking (and I suspect sounded a lot like what I would were I dead).

Be that as it may... I got a high distinction!!! Given the course is for fun, not employment, that is way more than I was hoping for :) My tutor suggested I keep working in it to expand into a full story, I may put it aside to think about and do just that.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Alas, I lacked...but I will be making an attempt tomorrow for sure!

*HUGS*

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

There's always a tomorrow. *g*

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

My personal target is 3,000 words for the month. So far I have only thought about them. But they were positive thoughts, honestly!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

That's what matters: be positive!

[candidlily.livejournal.com]

Day 1 and I'm already behind on checkins. 😅 864 words written on my WIP with the closest deadline.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

You aren't really behind until I haven't posted the next daily entry. And you were almost four hours ahead of me. ;))