3rdragon

Another snippet

2025-08-15T23:31:22Z

This one is just called Cinderella Man in my Scrivener document.

I have no idea where it's going.

A PARTY, NEAR MIDNIGHT

Clumps of people are standing and talking. Quiet jazz plays in the background. FELICITY is standing near the wall, holding a glass of grape juice and chatting. ELEANOR, dressed in a suit, stands among a group of businessmen. Their conversation is inaudible, aside from a word here and there: "market...futures...prices..."

ELEANOR
(voice pitched low)
Well, gentlemen, my wife is waving for me. Have a good night.
ELEANOR walks away quickly, footsteps loud. She rounds a group of speakers as FELICITY pulls away from her discussion. They collide. Most of FELICITY's juice winds up on ELEANOR's shirtfront.

FELICITY
Miss Harrowgate! I'm sorry, I didn't see you--

ELEANOR
(trying to hide fear with scorn)
Excuse me, Miss. I don't believe we've been introduced.

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Oh hello

2025-08-08T15:42:04Z

I haven't been here in ages, but kadharonon inspired me, and I have a lot of random scribble fragments sitting around on my hard drive, so I figured I could post some of them.

Let's see... I found this the other day:

Lonely Chemist Finds Solace Among the Octopi

Simone Beauville and her husband just celebrated their union in an aquarium wedding. “My colors were baby blue and teal,” she said, grinning, when asked about the decor. “It goes so nicely with white.”

The couple met a few months ago at that very same aquarium. “It has been something of a whirlwind romance,” Simone admits, “but from the first, we felt a very deep connection. A deep-sea connection, you might say.”

The 32-year-old works at a high-powered pharmaceutical company in the Boston area, and says that she values the opportunity to relax in the evenings after a long day developing drugs to treat cancer and auto-immune disorders.

“I’d been looking for someone for a long time,” she says, when asked about how the two met. “You go through online dating, and it’s very grueling. A real meat market, and let me tell you, a lot of the guys you meet are definitely past their sell-by date, so to speak. It’s just exhausting.

“I was with a girlfriend at the aquarium, talking about my most recent date and how awful it was. It got to the point where I said to her, ‘You know, I’d rather date one of the fellows here than any of the guys I’ve met online. And, like, I kind of noticed that he looked interested, so after she had to go, I came back, and just started talking to him. He was so easy to talk to, didn’t talk over me, or get bored, or change the subject to something else.”

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Sure, I'll play

2018-12-31T00:39:39Z

100 Sf/f Books You Should Consider Reading in the New Year [Tor.com]

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Things I did in 2017

2018-01-01T03:06:23Z

I haven't replied to the Three Big Accomplishments of 2017 question on Twitter, because I don't feel like I had Three Big Accomplishments in 2017, but, weirdly, I got inspired by tkingfisher's GIANT LIST OF STUFF. I realize that this is bizarre, since a normal reaction to that list would be to run screaming in the opposite direction, but, I dunno, I can do a list. Pick Three Big Accomplishments? That's hard. Write a long disorganized list? Much more my style.

- I wrote 108,128 new words and spent upwards of 22.3 hours editing/etc. (The imprecision because I started counting editing hours partway through the year.)
- I wrote a first draft of Parallax, cleaned it up into a reasonable second draft, and sent that out to beta readers.
- I turned Little Hab in the Big Crater (2015 NaNoWriMo) into a serviceable draft of On The Spokes of Sector H and sent it out to beta readers.
- I started three novel-or-novella-length projects, none of which are going anywhere at this particular moment, but all of which seem like they might: Expeditionary, Falling Sideways Past the Sun, and Requiem for a Childhood.
- I think that vorindi and I had some good discussions about stories and plots and what works and what doesn't.
- Short fiction? I think I did some short fiction. I definitely cleaned up "Naughty, Nice, Nothing" and halfheartedly sent it out to a few places. It looks like I wrote "Field Promotion" this year, too.
- And today I started the next pass of On the Spokes of Sector H.

- I attended three (I think it was three? at least three) rallies/marches things.
- I called my elected officials (and some appointed officials, I think), A LOT. Significantly more than I had ever called them before. And did some resistbot, too.

- I got my act together to get a tooth pulled and actually get orthodontia, and my teeth are already better-aligned and easier to keep clean.

- I went to Rotterdam for work, by myself, for two weeks, and led trainings with our staff there. (And while there I saw Kuekenhof and Kinderdijk, both of which are lovely, in different ways.) I want the US to do city planning and infrastructure the way the Netherlands do. Not sure how to make that happen.
- I was in charge of buildouts for two floors, which I had previously participated in but not been in charge of.
- I set up a switch all by myself that A said that was good.
- I solved my 3,000th Zendesk ticket last month sometime (most were not this year, but it's still a nice milestone).

- Since I was in Europe anyway, I visited T&C in Norway for a weekend, which I've wanted to do for years.
- I went to Arisia and Conbust.
- I saw Ursula Vernon, Yoon Ha Lee, Daniel Jose Older, Malinda Lo, and E.K. Johnston (and got books signed).

- I gave a sermon about the Parable of the Workers.
- I completed my third year on church council (and I'm going to hit my three-year term limit any minute now, so then I can STOP being on church council). This year we made good strides towards moving from three-hour meetings to two-or-even-one-and-a-half-hour meetings, which I will consider a victory.

- I joined iNaturalist.org and contributed 70 observations.
- I did some bookbinding for the first time in eight years. Not up to what I was producing in Spain, but I also don't have all the nice equipment we had at the school, and I'm pretty pleased with the book.
- We got a proper shelf to mount our plant lights on. No more plant lights all over the corner of my room!
- vorindi and I spread 7 cubic yards of mulch and 1 cubic yard of soil. (That is too much. We should get less next time.)
- Relatedly, we accidentally started a feud with a neighbor, dealt with the fallout of that, and discovered that a number of other neighbors don't like her either.
- I tried started a hugelkultur garden bed. We'll see how that goes.
- I made a hoophouse for the garden (and discovered that hoophouses are WAY easier than cold frames).
- I briefly had enough shelf space for all my books, but need to do some reorganization to be able to fit the two I got for Christmas.
- After a several-year hiatus, I fell into two(!) IRL tabletop games and have found myself GMing a third over Google Handouts. It's good to game again.
- I found people with whom to play board games occasionally and played for the first time: The Captain is Dead, Evolution, First Sparks, Power Grid, Splendor, Bunny Bunny Moose Moose, Antidote, and possibly a few others that I'm not remembering. I did not like Antidote at all and was meh about Power Grid, but would play all the others again, and particularly like The Captain is Dead. It's also good to boardgame again.
- I saw a partial solar eclipse.
- I turned 30, and held a belated party at which we fit 11 or 12 people and one dog into our shoebox apartment.
EDIT: I also read 126 books.
And paid off my student loans. That was definitely a thing.

And now I'm going to go to sleep and start the new year well-rested.

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