greetings from the left coast

I get the best ones when I'm awake in the middle of the night. Wait, is 4:30 the middle of the night?

1. So many "we're going to purge your journal because you haven't logged in for 2 years and have less than 3 posts" emails from LJ. It got me all nostalgic for those good old RP days when I couldn't wait to check my email to see who my character of the moment would be interacting with.

That was fun. I could never do it at that same frenetic pace again, though. But yeah, it was fun.

2. Dragon Age: Inquisition. I'm some 33 hours into my second play-through. I went female human mage this time. She's pretty kickass. I liked my Lavellan Inquisitor too, though. He was great. This time I imported from the Keep (for all of Origins, Awakenings, & DA2). My girl Hawke romanced Anders and kept him around even after his big misdeed. Last night in Inquisition I got some really beautiful dialog about that.

At 4:30 in the morning I had a formula all worked out for it. If I remember, it went something like:

if DA:2(Romanced!Anders)+(StillAlive)
   then DA:I(my!heart!broken)
   then PlayerNostalgia=active

That's my brain telling me to replay DA2 now that I have a sweeping view of the whole storyline.

Also, I'm reading the comic books. Alistair + Isabela + Varric = Happy Me.

3. NaNoWriMo is going. It only took me a few weeks, but I'm finally picking up steam with my writing. I wasn't sure that was going to happen. I'm glad it has/is.

4. I'm not doing holiday cards this year.

That's about it. Be well, y'all.

If you feel like writing a fic, all the prompts for I Need My Fics are available now on AO3 right here. I have my eye on... oh, about 90% of them, but I always say that. The story reveal is on Monday at 9pm EDT, but we leave the prompts up forever. Or for whenever!

In other news, my mother-in-law is getting settled nicely into her new place. I realize I'm probably in the minority in the grand history of daughters-in-law when I say it's great having her five minutes down the street. Am I spending more time with her? Yes, but it's pretty delightful.

We're getting a new garden! This was supposed to happen back in May, but all good things take their time, I guess. The plants arrive today and will be put in tomorrow. When we first moved here the garden was filled with plants that require a heavy amount of water (roses, hydrangea, lawn, and so on). Since we're in a serious drought, we had to redo our sprinkler system to one that uses far less water and change the plants to those that are drought-tolerant. (Sometimes it's expensive being eco-sensitive, but it's so worthwhile.) We have a recirculating source of water for the birds now, and by next week will have a much more viable garden with no grass to mow and no water hogs requiring a lot of maintenance.

Writing... not so much. I had inspiration for a story and wrote the first paragraph, but I'm still letting the plot sort of settle in my mind. I wrote a little thing on characterization on Wordpress if anyone's interested. Also, both Happily Ever Afterlife and Dragonthology are free to borrow on Amazon if you've got a Kindle account and Amazon Prime. (If you don't, they're still both available for purchase.)

I'm thinking hard about NaNo. I might save this new novel idea for November, which isn't so very far away. I can do the necessary research first and maybe come up with an outline. I'll see; it's tempting.

( NaNo in a nutshell )

In non-NaNo news, I found this article in the New York Times about not giving away writing to be very interesting.

How are all of you?

Yikes.

I think I just decided to do NaNoWriMo this year.

Luckily, I have no shortage of story ideas... only of good story ideas. Help me, Obi-Wan!