Tephie's Personal Bombshelter MarkII

1. Go to page 77 (or 7, or just hit page down 7 times) of your current manuscript.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.
4. Tag 7 other authors. They've all done it already I think.

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You are getting NaNo novels here. Yes, they are all "current", just some are more current than others. :D


NaNo'06 - By Destiny Stained

Synopsis: Read Nightfall? Now imagine that instead of a few hours of darkness that reveals all the stars you get decades of violent weather and dramatic climate change. Also, the most advanced technology in the known world is probably the tiny steam powered toys of that one foreign nation over there.


Nikkol watched Sierna settle into the sand, "You're going to nap? With everything we've heard today?"

"Seems to me that taking sleep where you can get it would be a good habit to develop these days."

The cave was silent for a while. The drone from the harps and the clatter of chimes seemed oddly muted. Sierna sighed softly, "I can't decide if I should tell you to go back north with your people or if I should ask you to stay here."

Nikkol sat up in surprise. "You want me to stay here?"



NaNo'07 - Dead Dolls

Synopsis: Cyberpunk, still without plot. (It's in world building hell stages.)


"It shouldn't take me long, but if the exploding grunts get to you, focus on the wall and the buildings rather than the killing field in between."

"Exploding grunts... great." Aeryn placed the pod and case on the table and settled into her datachair with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. "I'm tapped," she made a face and small sound of disgust, "in, and can things get any more revolting out there?"

Elyza chuckled, "If we knew what they were revolting against, maybe." She dodged Aeryn's blind swat at her as she passed her on the way to the table.



NaNo'08 - Escapement (Actively current! I was working on this a bit yesterday.)

Synopsis: Steampunk with too many plots. (I'm attempting to untangle them a bit so they make more chronological sense.)


Ian stepped through a door to the left of his desk, leaving Prudence and Sarah to study the strange instrument he had created.

"It looks a bit like an astrolabe," commented Sarah, "or rather, an armillary sphere, though I have never seen one quite so elaborate."

Prudence hummed a bit, "I suppose it's only reasonable, since it's a navigational instrument in some sense. I do hope Ian has written down how the use the thing, since I doubt it would be simple to read and I suspect he's unwilling to embark upon a journey of unknown duration just to read the thing for me."

"While traveling with you would be a delight, I'm certain; I doubt my business would survive my absence." Ian returned to the room with a suspiciously thick book, about twice the thickness of most pocket journals of the size, a small box, and a pair of keys.



NaNo'09 - [Still untitled]

Synopsis: I don't even know. This is the one that fractured and only stayed together long enough to get my 50k for NaNo. I have some ideas about fixing it, but they basically involve lifting out the characters, sweeping everything else away, and starting over.


Apollonia heaved a sigh. Right. Just wanting to be normal. "I hope you're wrong."

"Probably am. You and Abe, you like to ignore that people, any sort of people, can be downright stupid in their actions just because not being stupid is hard." Muriel, now stripped of scarf, cowl, and sweatshirt, sifted some loose tea into the mesh basket of her tea pot. "If I told you I thought something strong enough to hide a shroud from an agent had something to do with it, you would have latched onto that like a bear trap and you wouldn't have paid one iota to the possibility that the girl just didn't want to see it." She placed the now filled pot on the small table and plopped a felted cozy in the shape of a chicken over it. "Now that you have faced the idea that the girl looked the other way I can say I think something was meddling and the girl didn't know." She looked old and sad for a moment, "Well, didn't know for sure. She's pretty sharp that one, might have suspected."


NaNo'10 - Never on a Blue Moon

Synopsis: Well I started out with a problem on the moon base but we never seemed to get there....


She was dressed in business casual, charcoal grey slacks, cream top and a cardigan in a color he thought might be labeled 'old Victorian rose' or something. Her feet were covered in a pair of guest slippers that Kyle kept on hand to protect his floors from the horrors of outdoor shoes. "Doctor Samson-Greer, I presume?" she looked at him curiously, obviously expecting someone looking a bit more mainstream.

Most people expect someone with the title of doctor to wear a suit or look like a stereotypical academic wearing a sports coat and slacks, maybe a button down shirt and a sweater vest, or it if was particularly warm, a polo shirt. While Dan generally did wear slacks and polo shirts, occasionally even the sports jackets, and was not adverse to a nicely tailored suit, that was not what caught people's attention. The details tended to change frequently, but it was his hair that generally made people need to shift their mental gears on meeting him. For the moment he was sporting a mixture of thin synthetic dreadlocks, some were bright lime green, others sky blue, but most of them a shade of purple that looked nearly black. He'd left out the plastic tubing and was relatively sparkle free other than a few crystals sewn in here and there.



NaNo'11 - A Favour Owed

Synopsis: Tatsumi owed his old friend Bennu a favour. She didn't expect him to repay it with a small child.


Jaana blinked at the apparent change in topic. “Last I heard, yes. Complaining that more people call him Opa rather than Onkel these days.”

“You might want to have him over from time to time. If the twins see something then Nehi likely will as well. And of course Karen or myself can also confirm if we are here.”

“I had wondered why you were raising the girl, she has Power then?”

Bennu shrugged, “It’s less about her than it is about a favour owed an old friend.”

Apparently there is a kickstarter for a new steampunk RPG called Tephra. I found this out due to some freelance reporter not bothering to check that the account they were linking in their tweet actually belonged to the RPG.

I've been using the name Tephra online since.... hmm, I think 1996. It might have been '95 but I'm quite sure it was before '97.

Anyway, reading about the RPG is surreal since they just call it Tephra in their ad copy.

My standing in the Google search results for "tephra" have been falling for about a decade since I stopped doing my Paint Shop Pro tutorials and such. Maybe this will push me off the first page, that might be fun for change. XD

Massive catch up post is going to be massive.

On the knitting front, well I have a lot of works in progress and not that many finished ones. And it took me a while to get photos for those so there's a pile up. ( Knitting )

I think that caught up my knitting, other than the fact that I finished knitting my sweater months ago and have procrastinated so long on sewing it up the weather has become too warm to wear it. I'll have to sew the sleeves in and seam the sides and find out once and for all if I knit the sleeves too long. I think that's a big part of why I haven't done it yet, I'm afraid I'll find out I need to fix the sleeves. I keep telling myself I'm skilled enough that should the worst happen I can cut the cuffs off and reknit them shorter. If I cut the right spot it will be like grafting ribbing to reattach them. Slightly tricky, but possible.

Onto other things! I saw a video about making a bead ring and had to try it. ( Rings! )

The ring shots show off the white nails I was sporting for about a week. ( I had a couple other nail styles since my last post too. )

On the crafty front, I'm pondering Kindle covers. My birthday is today and my present from Hafoc needs a cover. :)

There are a lot of hair, make-up, and nail art pins on Pinterest and I think they finally got to me. It's been a long time since I painted my nails (and boy does the lack of practice show) and I've been seeing a lot of interesting takes on the French manicure so I decided to play.



Yeah... I think it's been a decade or more since I did a French, so this is more a "tipped" effect. Oh well, I mostly wanted to test how these two polishes looked together anyway.

[The weird light reflections are due to one being light from a window that looks out on woods and the other being an overhead light fixture.]

Bed color: Sally Hansen "Hard as Nails" in Rose Wine
Tip color: Sally Hansen "Chrome Nail Makeup" in Cinnabar

I like the effect. I also have the Chrome in Platinum and Royal Purple so I may try white with platinum tips later. I'm lacking in purple creme colors though, and I don't think the chrome effect would work next to a pearl, so the purple version may have to wait on me bothering to buy a creme purple for the bed color.

Especially amusing if you are a fan of both strains of the crossover.

Q assists with an away party in Equestria (click for full size)



GLaDOS writes to Princess Celestia

I called in today to find out where I could park for jury duty on Monday, if I had to report in (I was planning to wait until after 5 to call, in case it didn't get settled until late this afternoon). I found out how the parking works, which is super easy, but more importantly I found out that ALL my potential trials have been canceled. My service is complete and all I ended up needing to do is to get excused for last Monday since I was in California.

I am feeling a bit at loose ends at the moment... I had a schedule for the next week and a half. :D

As part of my Christmas doings today, I redressed my dolls. I was just going to redress Rico, into clothing she would not like much I admit, but while I had her down and headless I swapped her neck S-hook for Anjeni's (and tried Namid's on her, it's too large for her head). Then, since I had them all down and headless, they all got changed for the holiday.

( Photos under the cut. )

I've tweaked this a bit from the original, and I'm including some tweaks I haven't tried yet but I am certain will work.

You will need a crust for a single crust 9" pie. I like using a shortbread crust for my sweet pies. The recipe makes enough for a double crust 9" pie but it freezes well, so you can save the second half of the dough rather than cutting the recipe.

Since my crust has a lot of butter in it I omitted the one tablespoon of soft butter that the original recipe requires to be rubbed over the crust before filling.

Pie Filling:

¹/₄ c + 1 Tbsp sugar
¹/₂ tsp cinnamon
3 eggs
¹/₂ tsp vanilla
2 c applesauce

Optional crumb topping:

¹/₂ c chopped walnuts
¹/₂ c flour
¹/₃ c brown sugar
3 Tbsp soft butter^*

Preheat your oven to 450°F

Prepare pie filling by blending the sugar and cinnamon together to avoid cinnamon lumps in the finished pie. Beat in eggs, then add the vanilla and apple sauce. Pour into your prepared pie crust. If you aren't using the optional crumb topping, dust the top of the pie with cinnamon.

To prepare the crumb topping combine all ingredients in a small zipper bag (sandwich size works perfectly) and massage until well mixed and crumbly. Sprinkle over the pie filling. Some of it will probably sink into the pie.

Bake the pie at 450°F for 15 minutes.

Reduce the oven temperature to 350°F and bake for 30 additional minutes.

Cool completely before serving.

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* This is the untested tweak. The original crumb topping recipe called for 1/3 cup of butter. The pie with this butter rich version of the crumble is in the oven right at this moment so I can't tell you if it worked yet, but I think less butter would be better in any case.

I think this one was made possible, or at least much easier, by Scrivener. So when I get my 50% off winner coupon on December 5th I think I'll be using it. :)

For the record, 50,893 words. :D

Given I pretty much started over twice, first by doing a time jump on the main character and then by shuffling chapters, there is a lot of very heavy editing and rewriting needed before this even has a hope of seeing the light of day. I like it. Things I thought to add at the very end of the process (the last three chapters, pretty much) mean I really, really need to rewrite, but I have a much better idea of what I need and what I don't.

The idea I had mid-way through the month, to toss at least three of these characters and the basic set up into my 2009 NaNo story, is still digging at me. Given how much would have to change about them and the situation to make it work I may still do it and keep this story. All the characters would get new names and probably new faces and would end up very different I think.

Remember how I pruned my bookmarks from 3500+ down to under 700? Well thanks to Firefox Sync being stupid they are all back. You see I fired up the laptop, which I forgot was set up to sync, and it put them all back in the version on the sync server, since it does that without asking you if it should even if there are huge discrepancies between the two files. So of course, when I booted up today my desktop synced and FUCK they're all back.

Really, is it so hard to make a sync service that designates one machine as the Master so when you tell it to use that machine's data to overwrite the sync data it then doesn't let the subordinate machines fuck it up?!

I need to go in on the laptop, delete the bookmark file there, and then redo all the bookmark clean up that took me weeks all over again.

Fuck you, Firefox Sync, with a porcupine, sideways.

It's been a while, so NaNo status catch up time.

I didn't write at all the day before Thanksgiving. My motivation hit the dirt and buried itself six feet under. I managed not to let myself fall more than a day behind after that and managed to catch up again on Friday.

Then Kris decided to derail me with my Christmas present. I've posted about that more completely at my "archive dolly stuff" journal on LJ.

For those that don't want to read that, well there are some photos under the cut that will explain things. ( Looky what Kris gave me! )

This is a slightly modified version of a recipe I discovered via Pinterest. I've doubled the amount and adjusted the seasoning.

Note that ¹/₄ cup + 2 Tbsp equals ³/₈ cup, if you are fortunate enough to have a ¹/₈ cup measure.

3 lbs boneless skinless chicken breast cut into 1.5-2" chunks
1 c flour (approximately, for dredging)
vegetable oil for frying

1 can (12 oz) orange juice concentrate
¹/₄ c + 2 Tbsp brown sugar
¹/₄ c + 2 Tbsp ketchup
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 Tbsp salt
¹/₄ tsp red pepper

Dredge the chicken pieces in flour and brown them on all sides. You don't have to cook them through, just get a nice golden brown on them. Put the browned pieces in the crock. Unless you have a much larger pan than I do you'll have to do the chicken pieces in 2-3 batches.

Mix up the other ingredients in a bowl and pour it over the chicken in the crock. Give it a good stir and cook on low for 4-6 hours.

I cooked this batch 6 hours as the recipe stated but I think it would have been fine with just 4 hours. My crock has a notorious hot spot and with all the sugars in this recipe it got a bit dark in places even though I stirred it every couple hours and turned the ceramic liner end for end half way through. It still turned out tasty though. :9

By nine words, but I'll take it. :)

So far I've been meeting the quota every day, though the writing for the most part has not been easy. Today I actually got a good run out of the aftermath of a difficult birth of all things. First I set myself up to write a child and then I toss a birth into the mess. I do have to wonder what my subconscious is up to this year.

I'll be finishing this chapter tomorrow, it needs about another 1300 words, and then I'll be skipping a year and a moon again for the next chapter. I'm a bit more interested in these chapters, Karen is old enough to be a person with a mind I can get into and I have to start working in signs of things to come in order for the last chapter to make sense.

I'm resisting the urge to just jump ahead and write the last chapter even though I've known what will happen in it from the very start. I know if I write the end I won't be interested in going back and filling in the gaps. In fact I may write up to that last chapter and then jump back to write the first chapter, the one that used to be at the end and is therefore blank, before I get to that last chapter. We'll see. If I have enough words to meet the 50k goal in writing the last chapter without writing the blank first chapter I'll go for it. There's enough rewriting to do in the beginning of this thing that I having nothing in that first chapter in the editing stage wouldn't be any worse than not.

It's been a week, I should probably update those of you that care.

When last I wrote on the subject I had mentioned thinking about jumping my key character, Karen, up three years in age. I did do that. Scrivener's index card synopsis feature and document notes made it really easy to just to through and leave myself notes about the new age she should be in each chapter. So I did that on the eighth while finishing up chapter three.

While ending chapter four I noticed something I really should have noticed before NaNo even started. I had misplaced the blue moon. So, after beating my head on the desk for a bit, I went and fixed that. One index card on the cork board dragged from the end of the manuscript to the beginning and then going and readjusting all the ages again took care of the bulk of that. Now I have four chapters to either rewrite or time shift plus one entirely empty new first chapter.

Then, while writing yesterday, I had a flash of either brilliance or insanity. I've been having a lot of trouble writing this story, which is nothing new since I've had that problem with previous NaNo stories, but I have a pretty good idea of why with this one. The first problem I've already addressed some, that's Karen's young age. Shifting her three years older helped but it still means when I go back and rewrite the beginning I'll be writing a four year old. The other is that I'm writing this four (and five, and six, and...) year old child in a world with a level of technology roughly equivalent to the late eighteenth century. Now I don't think I'm quite as badly off as most Americans are with history, and growing up in Massachusetts gives you mandatory history of things like Plymouth, Salem, and field trips to Old Sturbridge Village, but this doesn't help that much about two and a half decades later when you need to know the minutia of daily life in the late 1700s.

So, the flash of possibly insane brilliance... what if I hadn't set this story in the past? What if I had set it in an alternate universe current time? Like I did with my last two NaNo stories (which is probably why I didn't, at least subconsciously). If I did shift it to a "modern" setting, could I make it in the same world as my 2009 NaNo story?

That one, for those that don't want to go looking at my old posts, didn't really gel into a single story. It ultimately fractured into a bunch of flashbacks as I was struggling to get to 50k at the end of the month. I had decided that when I got back to it I would probably break it up into a series of short stories.

I wrote a lot of notes yesterday, about what I would need to do to shift this story into the same world as the one from 2009. There are quite a lot of things that would have to be changed to make it work. The culture between alternate magical late 1700s and alternate magical early 2000s is very different. I wrote down all the ones that came to mind immediately and the wrenches they threw into my plot (I actually have one this year) and some possible solutions.

While I was doing that I was also wondering if I could, or should, introduce these characters to the ones from 2009. That lead to another flash of inspiration and now I have to change Apollonia's career over in the 2009 story. Changing that makes the story that was trying to evolve around her so much easier! It's enough to make me want to beat my head on the desk some more because it was so obvious what her career should have been. Looking back it was really clear that I was subconsciously shoving her in that direction even while I was trying to write her story. So I have a pile of notes about how I need to change her career, and how by doing that I can take those sections of the story that didn't fit together that well and shuffle them around and suddenly it all works.

I think, if I weren't using Scrivener this year I would have had a meltdown over this story. I would either have one long text file with several chunks separated by white space and notes and would have been scrolling through it for ages trying to keep all the notes updated. Or I would have splintered the file into multiple new files and would have had to splice them to do the final word count verification version. Scrivener lets me keep all those outdated bits I wrote in discrete chunks and allows them to be included in word count without forcing them to be in the same file as what I'm working on now. It also lets me write notes and keep them separate from the story. If you hadn't guessed, I really, really like Scrivener. :)

The first one I saw:



Found by Hafoc on LJ.

There is, of course, a pony version:

Well I made it to 10k on Sunday so I'm managing not to fall behind, but I have yet to get a full day ahead at any point (the closest I came to that was the first day).

Yesterday revealed that chapter two will need a complete rewrite, not just heavy editing. This was not surprising really, I knew I was going to be working on that chapter again because it was pretty horrible. Though I didn't think I would be tossing almost the whole thing out. I didn't want to get bogged down there, so I slapped a paragraph about what I needed to change, and some ideas I had to fix things, and continued on with chapter three.

The structure of this novel is both good and bad for me. Good in that I can just slap a paragraph saying "trash this and start over" and jump the year and a moon gap to the next chapter. Bad in that each chapter basically starts "cold" since the last events I wrote about happened a year and moon ago.

At least I can hammer out absolute crap for a chapter, which is "just" 3850 words, and then time jump and try again. In hindsight, I should have thought about significant events to happen in each chapter before I started writing. It would have been easier to do that if I weren't locked into specific months (well, moons, but close enough) for each chapter. It is hard to think of a significant event in, say, May at age two, and then one in June at age three.

I also think that maybe I should have reconsidered the age for Karen. I didn't want her to be any older than 16 at the end, which led me to starting the story with her just a year old (so she would end the story at thirteen) but I'm thinking now that maybe I should have started her at age four so she would end at sixteen, just so I wouldn't have to write a small child for so long. I have zero experience in raising small children (or not so small children for that matter) so I've added an extra burden or research to my writing this year.

Perhaps I'll switch gears, after this chapter, and jump her age up. I know I'll be rewriting these first chapters anyway since chapter one had its own problems and chapter two is set to basically be rewritten entirely anyway. I could probably shift chapter three by three months and make it the new chapter one. I suppose I will decide that when I get to the end of this chapter.

I could write my last chapter now and get ahead in the word count, Scrivener's work flow makes that ridiculously easy, but since that's the only chapter where I know what I am going to write I'm saving it for the rush to the end.

And now I should settle in to write my 1667 minimum for today.

I was in the mood for "bread baked with stuff on it" so I played around with a recipe and came up with this.

I use a bread machine to make the dough.

1 c warm water
2 Tbsp olive oil
¹/₂ tsp salt
2 tsp minced garlic
1 Tbsp rosemary (I used dried, but you could use fresh)
3 c flour
1¹/₂ tsp dry active yeast

The resultant dough will be very soft and a bit sticky, so lightly flour your sheet pan and your hands before turning it out. I like to line my sheet pan with a piece of non-stick foil.

Give the dough a couple turns on the floured surface and pat it out into a rough 13x9" rectangle. Poke it with your fingertips to dimple the surface. At this point you can top it with whatever you like. I gave it a light coat of olive oil (spray, but you could brush it), some grated paremesan/romano/asiago blend, sliced black olives, and shredded colby.

Set in a warm spot to rise about 30 minutes, I heat my oven to about 80°F before I turned out the dough and then turned it off. By the time I was done slicing the olives it was just a bit warmer than the kitchen so I left the bread in the oven with the door ajar to rise.

Heat the oven to 400°F (remove the bread if you were rising it in there) and bake the bread for 20-25 minutes.

The result has a nice crisp crust and a fluffy interior. I may use this as a base for a bready pizza crust in the future.

11/16/11 - This makes excellent pizza crust. Just top it and bake it without letting it rise.

I know, you're all excited by both of those topics. ;)

I finally managed to get a spot of Not Raining to get some photos of my doll knitting.

First up, that doll shawl that has been done and blocked for months. It's been waiting so long for a photo it almost needs to be blocked again.



( Two more photos under the cut, one is not the shawl again. )

I'm almost a full day ahead on my word count already with 3101 words right now.

This year I actually have a planned story structure, a beginning scene, an ending scene, and signposts at specific points in time to stop and write. We'll see if this makes things easier or not when I'm further along.

Another new thing for this year is that I'm not writing one big plain text file with nothing but multiple returns or scene dividers to break things up. This year I have the trial for the Windows version of Scrivener running. (Thank you clare_dragonfly for letting me know there was a Windows beta!) The plan is to win NaNo and use the 50% off coupon I will earn to actually buy this software. Last month I spent some time importing my old NaNo stories into Scrivener and even just using it for editing like that made me want it.

( A lot of babbling and some screen caps under the cut. )

Goodness I got wordy. Pity it wasn't novel content. :)

Peter S. Beagle spoke at Anthrocon about how he did a set of stories based on the seasons, each story used the same characters and advanced one year and one season from the one before. I thought that was a very cool idea. So I tried to think of other things that came in "sets" like the seasons so that I could use them as a theme to link stories/chapters/scenes together that way.

One of my old art idea files had an entry about using the names of full moons for a set of drawings. So that's the set I've been poking at, thirteen named moons. Each section of my NaNo would be about four thousand words built around the name of a full moon, progressing in order.

After visiting Wikipedia for a list of full moon names, I tried picking out which names I wanted to use. That has turned out a bit harder than I had expected. I don't want to repeat names, and I prefer the names be somewhat poetic (Moon Before Yule is not making muster). At the moment I'm contemplating two names per moon for most of them, and I haven't decided which moon to start with nor what season to place the blue moon in. I have a loose idea of trying to make time pass in the story so that it takes a (lunar) year and a day.

As you can see, the idea is very vague.

So, anyone have some ideas to toss into the mix? Or a suggestion of something else that comes in a "set" that I could use rather than full moons? I considered astrological signs and think the Chinese would be easier to work with than the western but writing twelve animal themes might be a bit monotonous.