Happy (late) New Year, and stuff · 6:01pm Jan 9th, 2014
I would have posted this sooner, but it was my intention to get Chapter 4 of Way Back Home out before the end of the year, and then post this on Jan 1. That didn't happen, though, because I mistakenly believed that wireless internet would be something you could actually get in Manhattan.
See, I took a train trip with my family to NYC to watch the ball drop, and our hotel was demanding $17 per day to use WiFi in the rooms. Wanting to not pay that meant having to go downstairs to the lobby for the free WiFi, and that wasn't much of an option either. About 1/3 of the entire human race was camped out down there, twiddling with iPads while sprawled out across the couches in their pajamas, at all hours of the day. I checked down at 10am and 3pm one day, and 2am the next, and there was never any difference to the amount of people down there. The result of having so many people draining internet from what was probably a pretty shitty service to begin with was that it took over two full minutes to load the Fimfiction front page. I remember back in the AOL days, my dial-up wasn't that slow. I tried using my phone as a hotspot, but for some reason my laptop just straight-up refused to connect to it despite the phone having a solid 4G network signal. Couldn't figure out the problem, and I refuse to do any important web-based business from my phone, so updates didn't happen in time. Apologies. Wasn't what I had in mind for the end of the year, and I was really disappointed.
Still, we had a decent view of the ball from the street outside our party:
(That bright thing in the middle is the ball, I promise...)
and even though my family's definition of "let's go sightseeing!" is "let's wander around and go from this bar, to that bar, and just drink a lot! It's fun to pay $10 for a Coors Lite, I swear!" it was still a worthwhile trip, I suppose.
Oh, speaking of absurd pricing, the hotel bar/restaurant thing had what is perhaps the most pretentious combination of words I've ever heard - "artisanal cheese plate." Cost $26.
I don't even know how to respond to that.
So, Happy 2014, and so forth. I'm going to try and branch out a bit this year, writing more of WBH as well as some new projects I've been thinking about for awhile. Might even collab with a few people, we're still working out the details. What I could really use is people kicking me in the pants a lot more and bugging me about updates, and stuff. I have an awful habit of sitting on my hands and wasting time, and I don't like that about myself. This fourth WBH chapter should have taken less than a week to write, and it would have if I'd bothered, and that's something I'm going to try really hard to break out of this year. I'm not comfortable with the speed or quality of the words I'm putting to paper, and that's not acceptable.
I did, however, spend 16 hours on a WiFi-less train on the way back home (I... didn't plan that, I swear), and except for a few hours I slept, bathroom breaks, and the minutes it took me to eat a sandwich I picked up in Albany, I pretty much just wrote the entire time. Literally, keys were being pressed, full-on typing mode, for nine or ten straight hours, thanks to the wonders of very strong coffee and a lack of anything else to do. The result is a horrid mess of unedited slop that should probably just be put out of its misery, but if I can twiddle around with it some and make something tolerable out of it, that's another whole chapter or so, maybe a few days from completion. What a way to follow up two consecutive two-month delays.
Thanks for sticking with me, those who actually follow me. I hope I can, like... do stuff this year. That would be just a wonderful change of pace, I think.
Happy New Year. I'll have to take a look at the new chapter sometime this week. Hopefully it's a fun one.
> Artist
> Anal
I'm an artisanal cheese plate. Buy me
It's actually just a few scenes I'd intended to go in the next chapter, but the word count exploded and so I cut it in half. Next one will be better, provided I can salvage most of the text from the train. It's pretty terrible.
1702080 I'd definitely pay thirty bucks to [insert a bunch of horrible sexual puns about butts here]