Satelite 5

December has rolled around at last, and I have a thrilling plan for it. It involves two advent calendars and a whole lot of books.

( I have a tea advent calendar and a candle advent calendar, and my thrilling plan for the month is to make myself a cup of tea, light a candle and read a book for an hour each day. )

*Blows the dust off DreamWidth*

Okay. That went well. Hi! Life happened there for a while. I don't know who's still around, just about to go and find that out...

For those who are, ( an update on the State of Me )

TL;dr, life is good

Time flies when you're running around like a blue arsed fly...

So, another year gone. That's weird. I'm guessing there's no one around any more, which is sad. I miss fandom so much. But a lot has been going on in my strange little world.

Last time I posted (October 2015, wtf?), I had been working for about 4 months for a short term loan company and thought I might be being groomed for promotion, and I was in the process of buying a house. Today I'm sitting on the sofa of that house, with my two adorable kittens, waiting for the letter to come through the door confirming that I've had my second promotion. I really need to get back to blogging more frequently.

So I guess this is just a 'hey, I'm back' kind of post. I'll try to get back to updating more often, but I say that every time.

Last time I did this I'd just fallen off my bike, hadn't I? Whoops.

A couple of x-rays on my hand, over a week apart, proved thoroughly inconclusive, so they strapped it up and told me to keep it that way for about three weeks in total. Fortunately it was one of these gauntlets with an annoying metal plate up it, but with velcro fastenings so I could take it off to have a bath and the like. I worked my last two weeks on light duties, which mostly involved sitting on the reception desk and doing a bit of world building and research for NaNoWriMo and calling my old club once a night. I'm now unemployed and sending off a few desultory applications, but mostly I'm trying to get myself in gear to sort my trip to China. That's not working either.

I need to go back to my colour-coded to-do lists blue-tacked to the wall, otherwise I won't get anything done.

Right now I'm going to tick off posting my Reel_TW fic, which is very late but I sort of lost it. Sent off an unfinished version (why did I still have one, I wrote it two years ago), then had my posting day whilst I was on my jaunt around The South and got home to discover that I hadn't saved it in any sensible places. It has turned up, though, and it's been sitting on my fanfiction.net account waiting for me to get my brain in gear and format the LJ posts. I remember when this used to be something I could do in my sleep.

I think I need a routine again, and set times for writing and Not Simming. Good god that game's turned addictive again. There were months when I didn't play at all, and now I can't get enough of it. The passion is returning, hoorah! (It's just the passion for the wrong thing)

I am now officially dropping off the face of the world. I'll still be around on Twitter and Skype and Facebook, things I can access from my phone, but I'm only getting on my computer every couple of days at the moment.

I will be back in early October, with NaNo build up (I'm an official ML for the first time this year!) and hopefully photos of kittens, but I'm going offline for my last two weeks at work and then a week's holiday. I've thrown in the towel at my bingo job because of the commute and the hours, and I need to reclaim a bit more of my time for job applications anyway.

So I guess I'll see you all on the other side.

So yesterday morning I was in Hay-on-Wye, doing the bakery round. This morning I was in Halifax with my parents, aunt and cousin, and this afternoon I was in Slaithwaite (Slawit) watching morris dancing. Now I am in York again, but sorting out fic has not happened as much as it should have, partly because I have yet another job interview tomorrow morning. It's all go, apart from the fic. I do have lots to post, though, which is sort of exciting.

In the last few days I have ticked off Wales and England; Hay-On-Wye, Birmingham, Leeds, Halifax, Slaithwaite, Huddersfield and finally York, and that's just the towns I've set foot in, and discounting the ones I merely passed through. Tired Fiwen is tired, and should really go to bed and have anxiety dreams to properly prepare her.

Also, I have just been presented with a white chocolate mousse.

The floodwaters have receded in York - although they got a lot higher than they were when I was taking photos - and the river has given up the barge it stole. She's called Ermintrude, apparently, and she looked very sad as she emerged. The problem with the Ouse is that, even this far inland, it's tidal. So when you think it's dropped a bit, you realise that that was low tide and it's not actually dropped as far as you think, or it may even have risen a bit. Two weeks it took from starting to rise to dropping back to something approaching normal levels. I'm used to the Calder, which is incredibly flashy (that actually is the technical term) and the floodwaters can disappear overnight and leave the river crystal clear. The Ouse is nothing like that - it's always silty and slow, slow to rise and slow to fall. It's gone for now, but I'll be very surprised if that lasts the winter.

I'm still unemployed, and I've heard back from all my interviews. I have another on Monday, and I've done a bit of temping, but for the moment it's still pretty empty. The upside of this, of course, is that I have time on my hands. It's nearly NaNo, so I've been plotting and preparing, and I have also written a whole chapter of my on-hiatus monster Torchwood fanfiction. I'm going to get another couple of chapters done and get into the rhythm before I start posting, having done a chapter here and a chapter there for about two years, but I'm really hopeful this time. NaNo will kick start me.

Speaking of NaNo, one of our very good friends from the Yorkshire region has a graphic novel out with Titan. He wrote the final comic strip in the Torchwood magazine, and now has a detective noir novel called Harker out. It's pretty damn awesome, and he's a cool dude, so you should check it out. If you're going to New York Comic Con, you should go and see him, too, because he's trading York for New York for the convention. His name's Rog Gibson, and he'll be on the Titan stand, so if you're there you should go and say hi and tell him Gala and Lali sent you.

He'll probably tell you that the deathbat is coming for you, but you don't need to worry about that, we've got it covered.

And it's now quarter past eleven, and I should make Lali go to bed and rest her injured... we don't have time for that list. Too much furniture removal lately, and not enough sleep. Tomorrow will be a day of writing, if I get my way. So for now, adieu.

It's been a while. Over a month since my last update, in fact. I've finished all my uni work, thank goodness, and I'm now waiting for my results to find out how I've done. The last few, dissertation, exam and two reports, were all due in within a fortnight of each other, but we got an extension on one of them. It's all done, though.

I've got a conference, a festival, a couple of trips, Eleventh Hour and God only knows what else coming up. All the while I'm starting to apply for jobs, waiting to hear back from the job I really, really want, and generally starting to get Real Life (tm) going again. Need housework and sleep and food. I'll do a proper update soon, once I've got a better handle on what's going on.

But, thing is, I've been away for ages and there is no way I can catch up on my flist, so what is your news? Pull up a seat, grab a cup of tea and a slice of cake if you so wish and let's catch up :) (Suggestions of offline catch-ups are most welcome, but I can't really do anything about them until July at the earliest. Unless you're doing 11th Hour, in which case laligin and I will see you there.

I'm a bit out of it at the moment. Don't cope well with the cold, as you probably know by now, but I've been getting out more than I usually do because I've been going to see laligin. I only have two days at uni this year, which means starting at 9 on Tuesdays and finishing at 6.30 with a three hour gap in the middle, but also means that my motivation on the other days is negligible.

Even fic isn't really picking me up. I'm head over heels for Mycroft/Lestrade at the moment, and I have loads of stories I want to write, but it just seems... I dunno, I just can't actually make myself do it. Pen to paper is going better than fingers to keyboard, but it's still not really happening. I'm really, really glad I decided to go on hiatus, because the last thing I need is any pressure on that front.

Do need pressure on the university front, though. For my dissertation, I've got about half the responses I need on my survey, and I need to get more discussion going but I don't know what I want to talk about. I also need to start bringing my lit review together, but I need to see my tutor before I can start that so I can sort out the framework. As always, if you're a Torchwood fan and have ever considered going to Cardiff, please pop over to tw_tourists and tell me about it, tell your friends about it, etc. The latest entry is and I'm asking for your memories of your trips to Cardiff.

Wanted!
( A beta reader and arse kicker to get me through this lot: )

It looks crazy when I put it like that.