Birthday Presents Part 2

I don't know if it's me or the Chivas that wrote this, but it looks like a good beginning to a second Sasha Suter story.  

Mortimer handed his glass to the nearest attendant.  The room was spinning.  He needed to sit down.

The strength of her perfume stung his nostrils.  She took his hand and led him away from the crowd, and he followed blindly for he suddenly had an overwhelming urge to be elsewhere.  They passed a set of doors which she closed.  The click of the lock sounded final. 

“Sasha?” Mortimer whispered. 

“Shhhh.”  She pushed him back against a soft surface – a couch perhaps.

His mind was racing, but unable to grasp a single thought. 

“Sasha,” he struggled to sit up.  “Sasha, wait.  Please, just give me a moment.  Give me a moment to think about this.”

Her hands wandered adroitly over his body, sending through him a series of tingles that were simultaneously revolting and rapturous.

“Just relax and let me do the work,” she purred into his ear. 

His eyelids fluttered shut and his body surrendered.

As I said... is it me, or is it the whiskey?  Because I don't think I've this sort of sauce inside of me.  Other kinds of sauce, sure, but not this.  I've been reading more romance.  For... er... research purposes I swear!  And the thing that Birthday Presents lacks is drama.  There's no villain, no problem.  It's about Sasha realizing that she can be a woman and a fighter.  

I've discovered that that's a trend with most of my stories; I don't have any sort of frustrating scenes that make you scream "Why?  Why are you doing this to me?!?!?".  I guess that's because I've always hated those sorts of scenes in books that I read.  But if I'm going to write a sequel, it has to be about tackling scenes I've never written before.  Someone must get... I don't know... slapped or something.  That's been my whole exploration into romance so far.  It's always been a question of how far I can push myself, even if my face contorts permanently into a cringe.

Cause that's what I call fun!  :)

Quota for the month

7 episodes of Noragami (which I'm not sure if I like yet) and 6 episodes of Magi Season 2 later I'm finally out of anime to watch.  So worth burning most of my monthly internet quota.

Tomorrow is Wednesday.  Looks like I'll be editing another chapter of Birthday Presents.

Antihogwarts

I'm catching  up on the second season of Magi, and I've stumbled across what is essentially antihogwarts.  But rather than a school, it's a whole country.  And rather than deatheaters just killing them damn muggles (...those amateurs), these people are sucking their life force to fuel the magician's way of life.

I know this is suppose to be a kids anime, but... damn.

I'll see you on the lists!

THE LISTS ARE UP!  Man, talking about lists makes me want to re-watch A Knight's Tale.

Thank the heavens!  Sidenote, today they seem to be unable to decide whether to rain or shine.  But that's coastal weather for you - crazyballs.

And so, with Fyloe posting the list of stories for this month's contest, my compulsive checking comes to an end.  Now I can finally relax. I can go to the beach.  I can prance like a pansy through knee deep water full of baitfish and hope that a shark doesn't mistake me for lunch.

It took me but a moment to gobble up the one I hadn't already read (I had already gone all Sherlock Holmes earlier this morning to sniff out the other entries.  Aureus Lux's was the only one that had eluded me).

I'm really not sure on who I would vote for this month.  Usually, there's a clear choice.

Tante Liz's shares the same title as mine, which is cool beyond words, given that she is the reason why I entered this month.  It can't be just co-incidence (cue X-Files music).  The story itself is pretty cool too.  It's a convo between Zeus and Hecate about the 'death march' which all creatures that exist have to go through.  I like how she's mixed humour in with melancholy to pack a punch.  Great piece.

T Rasa also brings to the contest a refreshing and cute time-traveling piece.  Time travel is always a tricky topic to tackle, so he gets ball recognition for going there.  No animals this time, I'm afraid, but maybe Part 2 of the story is how the golden idol has mystical powers that summons badgers or something.  I don't know.  And I also don't know why I keep mentioning badgers around T Rasa.

Ok, I'm now way overdue to have lunch.  And watch anime.  And get a life.

Doppelganger

...No way.  It's Vert Glace the Anime.

Also, this looks so much like my younger brother, it's uncanny.

Death March

In the rush to get this done, I've eaten nothing but cereal today.  Having said that though, I'm now on to the second bowl of the stuff.

I wasn't going to enter this month, I really wasn't.  For the first few days I played around with the idea of maybe doing a short Shadechaser story that incorporated all the interesting facts that I picked up when going on the tour through a rum distillery in Bundaburg.  I didn't end up following through there.

Then this morning, I was going to sneak in a bit of Vert Glace before I chained myself to the table to do some reports, but I've received a PM from Tanteliz.

Well, the game was on.

In the next 6 hours between tutoring a student, going grocery shopping, doing my laundry (including hanging it up, thank you very much), and going around to check out the open houses in my area, I cobbled something together.

So now, please join me in ushering Death March into the world.  It's dedicated to my partner who is working this weekend after already working Monday to Friday, and also having pulled another 6 day working week last week.  Blasphemy, right?

...I'm really not looking forward to writing reports.

Descriptions

So I've noticed in a lot of romance stories, clothing, particularly women's clothing, is detailed to the max.  In the latest chapter of Birthday Presents, I've tried to play with that by describing what people are wearing.

...but reading over it, the descriptions I feel halfway between cheesed off and amused.  It's like we're playing pretty prince of parties.  At one stage, I found myself struggling to describe the colour of the pants that Orion was wearing, and in frustration, I cut out the line altogether.  So now, there's no description of pants.  He's not wearing any, for all I know

Friday night in

How did I not know that there was a whole other two seasons to Natsume Yuujinchou?  What the hell was I doing in 2012?  Oh, the agony of not having enough quota to be able to downloaded it all!  I've fallen way behind on anime watching with this puny 7GB a month.  Right now, I'm slowly making my way through Magi, which is a happy anime set in magical Arabia and surrounding lands featuring  Aladdin as a Magi (powerful magical creature) and Alibaba as an adventuring prince with serious insecurity issues.  I tend to pick stuff that's not too heart wrenching to watch.  If I get invested in characters, I'd rather they not die, thank you very much.  Maybe it's because I'm up to my elbows in human brain muck during the day, but I've developed an aversion to any entertainment that's even remotely likely to be traumatic. coughGeorgeRRMartinImeanyoucough.  

The February prompt for the Labyrinth writing contest is up, and I'm huming and hahing about entering.  On the one hand, it would be something to do other than the writing guide I started out of boredom.  But on the other hand, I don't know if  should be spamming the contest all the time.  And after all, I wonder if it's all procrastination that slows down my progress with Vert Glace.  

FACEPALM

I would say I'm a reasonably patient person.  But....

much ado about nothing

I woke up with a migraine this morning, so anything bright is the enemy.  What a shame that instead of proper curtains, all I have is thin white mesh hanging from my windows.  I've taken the day off work to languish in agony around the house, but apart from locking myself in the cupboard under the stairs Harry Potter style, I don't know what I can do to get away from it all.

So rather than stewing in idle despair, I've spent the day thus far editing and updating stories on fictionpress to at least satisfy that whip wielding task master inside me.  I've even done Shadechasers, more for my own amusement than anything.  Here they are:

Birthday Present Chapter 10

Shadechasers Chapter 4

Game in Play Chapter 8

I'm being a bit naughty with Shadechasers by just writing 1 - 2 chapters in advance of what I'm posting.  And I have no idea where that story's going.  I think my motivation for writing it is just to continue the banter between Duck and Dawn.  So far, she's got a couple of good lines coming up, including: "I will take your genitals for key ring decorations."

Transit

Flight's delayed, which means an hour or so of watching the skies darken and trying not to buy more greasy fast food.

There's not much going on in the writing sphere, but plenty in the cultured drinking sphere.  

Cultured drinking?  What's that you ask?  Well, on Saturday I went to a fancy pants restaurant where the waitress paired wine up to enhance delicious food.  I had the best merlot ever... a shame I can't for the life of me recall what it was.  It was the desert wine that got to me, I think.  The next day, I felt positively awful.  I'm not even sure if I'm fully recovered now. 

Coming down to Brisbane a bit earlier for the monthly meeting always gives me a chance to hit the book shops.  This month, my conquest is Dangerous Women, an anthology of short stories about (wait for it) dangerous women written by ye old favourite fantasy writers.  I'm hoping it will give me even more pointers on how to write women.  Here goes.