You don't have to talk, I know it all

Someone posted to metafilter the other day about the 30th anniversary of Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels album, and I've been listening to it on repeat for a while, being all nostalgic and remembering the fantastic shows I've been to and what an immense talent she is. I never knew that some people considered it too slick and commercial; their loss, I guess, because I thought it was beautiful and I liked that it made her more accessible to people who might not have come to her art otherwise.

I am ecstatic about my Yuletide assignment. I struggled with whether to sign up this year, because I really only wanted one thing that I felt unlikely to get--since I'd forked up and missed nominating some things I wanted otherwise--and really only wanted to write one thing which I felt absolutely certain that I wouldn't get assigned, because only once have I ever really had that happen. I'm usually going "oh god, how do I fulfill this?" and panic spiralling.

It always works out, though, but this year I saw someone's DYA letter and their prompts absolutely sang to me, and I wanted SO BAD to write for them and I just thought, there's no way. I knew some people try to game the system, and I was sort of trying to figure out how I could do that, but in the end, the weird thing is it sort of worked out for me. It's really hard at times, ever since they instituted the "must offer two characters" rule, for me to find two characters to offer, but in some cases, I think my strange two-character choices in fandoms where nearly everyone requesting wanted two other specific characters I didn't feel qualified to write, helped me even without trying to game anything. And choosing fandoms to offer where there were no requests also probably helped me here--because in one case, there was only one request with a couple offers, and in another, no requests at all (a fandom I perpetually love, so I'm sad it likely won't be represented in Yuletide this year).

But man, was it stressful. I just only wanted that fandom to write in, and at first I thought maybe it'd happen, but then at the last minute people kept requesting it! I was constantly refreshing the summary and the letters app, and minim_calibre and I were texting till things closed at 1 a.m. here. So I was beyond thrilled when I got my assignment and it was the thing I wanted. The stars rarely align for me.

Now I just have to write the birthday-time fic for this year with enough time that I can fit in writing a longer story, otherwise it only gives me about 12 days for writing and I think this story might be a slow burn. I hope. I just also hope I don't get too much rush work in, which has been a problem lately. Rush jobs are so life-consuming.

My rush jobs have been weird, too. One was a book about insomnia, from a sleep specialist here in Seattle, and I'd never seen references and citations formatted the way these were. After poking through my books, I found out it was a legit style and asked on my copyediting email list, but I waaay underbid because I hadn't looked super closely at the bibliography and she needed the estimate asap, so there was no way I was going to track down every reference and fix it to Chicago style. Especially since it was just a proofread. Fortunately, since it was a reprint, the manager decided to leave it alone and just note it on the style sheet. But you learn something new every day, and even though I almost never do books with references/bibs, at least now I know how to recognize this style.

Then another one was a design-heavy journal with tooonns of swear words. That was actually fun, to read something where someone swears more than I do. A lot of the books I edit lately, especially romance, are so sanitized and marketed toward the middle-America audience of pearl-clutching ladies, and at times it wears on me, the bizarre substitutes they come up with for even mild swear words like dammit. But it's been nice to step outside of this box for a while; this production manager has also given me some great mainstream women's fiction that isn't romance, and that's been very nice.

We had some pretty disappointing and upsetting results in our elections yesterday; Amazon money being funneled into electing conservatives and shooting down affirmative action, etc. It's really depressing. There's a cult around this right-wing asshole who creates these awful ballot measures all the time, and they came out in force yesterday. My district choice is currently ahead in the city council race, but I am worried, especially because her opponent appeals to all the men with hate-boners for all the women on the council. I don't always love the council, some of their legislation is enraging, but overall, the incumbent is a way better choice.

I've been taking a Drawing for Absolute Beginners class for the past few weeks with a friend from the local slash gang, and I am just as terrible at drawing as I thought I'd be. I'm not gonna lie, I'm really discouraged. I see my friends who go out with Urban Sketchers and I will never be able to do that. I know, I know...practice, blah blah. But I just don't see that way. My whole work is about finding small details, corrections, and seeing negative spaces and stuff just doesn't work for me. I can't seem to judge widths and lengths, everything comes out distorted and wrong. We're probably going to take more of this guy's classes, but I'm not hopeful, based on my performance in this.

I guess that's all the news!