ratbones

So first of all I guess I should say I'm alive, I'm doing alright, and I'm beginning to get back to some normalcy, even as the world...well. You know. (Did I mention that my car's engine was destroyed by an inconvenient mouse? It was still cheaper to fix it than get a new one, and, well, I LIKE my old Civic, but I had a little mental breakdown when it happened (twinning!) and then I went months without it. It's home now and it brought the missing piece of my brain with it.) I started in earnest on a backburnered (novella-length) fic idea in January and since I usually can only work on one thing at a time, this means my final little push of editing for Holy Thorn is delayed. Maybe I'll fit it in in the midst somewhere - I'm trying to find the exact right amount to push myself. Same old story there. I think I'm a little bit afraid of taking real steps to make the jump from ~amateur~ author to ~pro~ author. Um. Who am I kidding. I am very afraid. So I'm gathering my strength.

But the real reason for the post is this: fanbinder hellebored has done me the MASSIVE compliment of binding a physical author copy of All-Consuming for me. It is sexy and clad in leather, just like Zhao Yunlan, and I cannot wait to put my paws on it. The process is detailed in their post here along with photos. I love the look of it - helle was really able to manifest the vibe and mood of the fic into reality with this, and I couldn't be more pleased. Also I just learned a lot about how books are put together - I know so much about the words part and, it turns out, so little about everything else.

I've had a few friends suggest to me that I could have copies of my long fics printed for myself, but I don't know how to begin to make a book look good, even if I "just" had to typeset and come up with some kind of digital cover design. It would be so so difficult for me to generate something even halfway decent. So to have something so much better than decent exist in the world just because helle wanted to make it...well, it's tremendously meaningful and I'm gonna treasure it till I die, basically. It elevates the contents of the story to be clothed so beautifully, just like a really good outfit makes anyone hotter. I might even read it.

At this point I think it's safe to say 2024 has been a Murphy's Law kind of year for me, and I'm in an especially Murphy's Law week of it -- the least of my problems is that my well pump went bad four days before I'm due to take an international trip. While I was in the shower. With shampoo in my hair. But I have some pieces of news that really cannot wait for a calmer moment. Also yes I have since been rinsed.

Somehow I managed to finish editing my novel manuscript amidst all the...everything. My betas are at various stages with it (thank you to them!) and I'm feeling fairly good about it. I am champing at the bit to write some fanfic, which I really haven't done since I started writing the novel apart from a couple weeks last November. I just want people reading my work; it drives me nuts to have no audience. Also I haven't written something properly plotty for my OTP of the past two years and I have a plan for that, if the universe would give me a sec.

I made a small lil website on a shoestring budget to house info about the novel as it comes, and I set up a mailing list to go with it. The mailing list is going to have a welcome email but that part of the workflow stumbled into the fracas I've been dealing with this week and died, so the welcome email will not exist till after I get home in a couple weeks. If you sign up for it now, you'll still be on the list and you'll get whatever news updates I send out. It works, you just don't get a confirmation. (If you're subscribed here, you...don't really need to subscribe there, at least for the foreseeable future, because I post everything here eventually, and in greater detail than I'm likely to email about it. But there it is.)

The process of setting up a site at all, even a simple one, was very intimidating to me, but the treat at the end is that I have the url ratbones.net at my disposal and something decent-looking occupying that space. That's fun. I also had some help from cyberbrain (testing, fixed my favicon) and my bestie sylleblahsome (made the logo!) and even my childhood best bud (more testing). By the by, ratbones.com is taken but empty. I wonder if my nemesis, the Ramones cover band of the same name, owns it, or if someone's just sitting on it for greed reasons.

I can't decide whether I want a headshot on my site. I'm not using my pseudonym for anonymity, I'm using it because my legal name is common and I like being Ratbones better...but it does have anonymity as a side effect, and I can't decide how much I value that. I'm not exactly out here writing sneeze fetish novels or ideological manifestos, but on the other hand, I sorta hate it when people IRL who are not close friends find out about the writing thing. I just don't want to talk to them about it. Also, who knows if someone will decide they hate me at some point? I think I'm noncontroversial but the internet can make controversy out of anything.

Time to go see how many autumn-weight outfits I can fit in a carry-on. Cyberbrain and I are hanging out next week! Yay!

Last week, my mom and I drove a bit more than four hours to see the solar eclipse in Ohio. I've had this eclipse in my calendar for almost a decade, but still just kind of ignored booking somewhere to stay until barely a month ahead. Luckily we did manage to find a place, an Airbnb in a small suburb with no other attractions, for a decent price. And while I can see the appeal of going to the shore of Lake Erie or somewhere else with a big party, I am not a crowds girl myself, so ending up in kind of a nothingsville was fine. That's something I love about astronomy. You don't have to be somewhere special. You just look up.

( The whoooole story. )

The next day I compared my sketchy phone photo of totality to the latest solar pictures from SOHO and went, oh, shit, those bright spots aren't random! I've flipped and rotated a picture from the LASCO coronagraph from the 8th to demonstrate the comparison. LASCO is an instrument that creates an artificial solar eclipse within itself by blocking the disk of the sun, so it shows the same coronal streamers that were visible to the naked eye during totality, but, um, a lot clearer. Streamers are bigger but not as bright as prominences; that big red prominence I mentioned isn't visible in either image as a distinct thing. (I'm guessing LASCO has it blocked out along with the surface of the sun.) It was within that extra-bright part of the corona along the bottom. So neither of these pictures shows what I saw, but they do show something interesting. This is not the sort of observational astronomy you can usually do with an unaided cell phone camera!

I've been psyching myself up to make this post for...I was going to say "days", but, like, months? It can no longer be delayed. The first draft of the manuscript I've been working on for over a year is done (has been for a while) and I'm working through a first round of edits. I have a beta already engaged (sylleblahsome, my bestie), but I'm looking for one or maybe two others.

( The deets. Probably too many deets. )

I got sick last week. Properly sick, the way you get sick as a kid: vomiting followed by a day and a half of fever that turned my life into a series of naps separated by brief effortful ventures out of bed just long enough to feed the cats or get more water. I'm finally back to normal, mostly, but the real kick in the teeth was that after my fever broke, I still really had to lie around all day for a few more days while my strength came back and it slingshotted me back into insomnia. So I was sleeping for ten or twelve hours a night, but also lying wide awake for two or three hours around dawn.

I'm a chronic insomniac since childhood, with some days/months/years being worse than others. Never an up-all-night insomniac, more of a lying-there-for-a-couple-hours-feeling-awful, wondering-when-I-might-sleep type. In the past year, unless I'm deluding myself, I think I've gotten an incrementally better handle on it, so it was really disheartening to be back in that cycle. However! As soon as I could, I brought back the various elements of my routine, and the last couple of nights I managed to sleep through the night again (also for a more normal 8-9h). Yay!

The lifestyle modifications I've instituted to get decent sleep are pretty obvious, and most of them are fairly low-effort when they're part of the routine, but it took a lot more effort to incorporate some of them into my life. Some of these I've been doing for years and some of them are new because I quite simply did not want to do them and it took ages to submit to the need. I made a list. Figured I might want to reference it later. And while I'm only an expert on my insomnia, not yours, I do have a LOT of experience and it might help someone else. (I'm open to questions too.)

-Work out in the mornings. This is the hard one but it has lots of additional benefits (heart palpitations: cured. stress: lowered. back pain and other random pain: reduced. bod: hot.) so I keep at it, in a rather less-than-hardcore way.
-Get outside daily.
-Take vitamin D.
-No caffeine within 6 hours of bedtime. Dinner shouldn't be too late either.
-Shower at night.
-No phone in the bedroom. Okay, I read my bedtime fic, and then I get up and take my phone to my desk before sleeping. I bought an actual alarm clock.
-Eye mask, white noise machine, earplugs (available as needed), humidifier. Thermostat down at night.
-Consistent bedtime/wakeup time...I still struggle with this one. Ugh, bedtime.
-Also I have to stay on top of my allergies so I can breathe through my nose comfortably.

I'm probably missing some.

Prevention works better than cure for insomnia. Once I'm awake for more than ten minutes at an hour when I shouldn't be, I'm just going to be awake for as long as I'm awake. Every insomniac knows that trying to make yourself sleep is not only futile but a special exercise in self-torture, not that that fully stymies the urge when you've got stuff to do the next day and you know you're gonna be tired. There's one plus side to it, which I've discussed before, which is that lying in a quiet dark room with nothing to do is a great way to generate ideas and mentally work on writing; I have a physical notebook by the bed for that, since my phone was banished. That's far from surefire, though. Sometimes I just go into a depressive spiral and begin to loathe every aspect of my life. So I don't recommend inducing insomnia for the creative benefits.

One thing I've used for a long time, since college, is the podcast Sleep With Me, which is a quirky little thing unlike most other sleep story podcasts/apps. They're bedtime stories, but they most closely resemble a souped-up one-sided version of the sort of conversation you have with someone when you're both trying to fall asleep. Meandering and pointless, vaguely entertaining but unimportant, mundane rather than meditative. I do like a good sleep meditation, too, if I'm in the right mood.

Saw Oppenheimer today and I have thoughts.

This film is visually incredible. It uses exclusively practical effects, and uses lots of them in super-artsy, beautiful, haunting, abstract ways, as well as for the more obvious concrete stuff: ( positive, negative, and neutral observations; idk what even counts as spoilers in this case but there might be some )

cyberbrain prompted me to watch the two Enola Holmes films a couple weeks ago and I sort of meant to post something about them but hadn't. Conveniently, she's made a post detailing a bunch of opinions I agree with, so I'll link that. (Mild spoilers in the post.) I also commented there with some more opinions (first comment thread, big spoilers there.)

Here are a couple truckload of stray thoughts that I still had swimming around.

( Character and story structure stuff, spoilers are mild )...That's it. Final opinion: a good time, will watch the third movie. Most of my favorite scenes involve Enola and Sherlock interacting, so keep that coming, please!

Yesterday I had a hot bowl of mac and cheese in front of me. I was desperate to put those noodles in my belly, but also kind of distracted by video games, and so I was swallowing some bites of mac without letting them cool off on the spoon long enough. Listen, as far as I'm concerned the main advantage of being a grownup is I can do the things I wanted to do at age 9 but nobody will yell at me now. This is all normal behavior for me, typical Wednesday night.

( noodle saga cont'd )

I spent all of yesterday afternoon and evening babysitting an ancient kerosene heater in my house, more to keep the pipes warm than to keep me warm, and going about my business in the dark, every task made more effortful by having to carry around a light source and position it just-so. By 10 PM, it became clear I would be going to bed without electricity, and it had fallen to 0°F outside not counting the violent wind chill. I fought with my backup heater and sat with it in the basement for a while to put a little extra heat down there and try and stave off pipes freezing while I slept, and hefted a ton of bedding down the stairs, and hauled the kerosene heater outside to refuel it, which really can't be done with anything but bare hands, which was excruciating.

Eventually I passed out in my pathetic squatter's nest by the full and hot heater, in a moderately chilly house, underneath both cats (I have to write about that sometime, I acquired two cats).
( Cut for woe (everything's fine now) )

My cyberpunk fic Rapture is fully posted on AO3! I'm riding high on the thrill of clicking post on the last chapter. I don't know if I'll be having deeper thoughts about the writing process or whatever at some point, but for now, just yaaaaay!

Back when I finished drafting the last few chapters, I posted here that chapters 14 and 15 together (at the time unified as a single chapter 14) were 14.6k words but would get longer. As posted, they're 18.9k words. Lol and lmao. I added four scenes/big parts of scenes that were previously nonexistent, but I always add words in the normal course of editing. For that matter, I said the total word count would be above 95k and it is actually just below 104k, so words got added elsewhere too.

Oh yes, this does mean the last chapter is massively long on its own (over 10k words.) There's actually a logical middle point where I could have split it in half, but that would have left my final chapter on the short side, comparatively, and I didn't want to do that, and, okay, I'm babbling. Excited!

(I feel like I've lost touch with reality a bit while trying to fine-tune such a long chapter, so if anyone notices any goofs, let me know. That goes for the whole fic, tbh. But just fixable goofs. Dropped words, mixing up who was on the left of whom. If there's a plot hole somewhere that breaks the fic and invalidates multiple chapters, I don't want to know, just let me live.)

Rapture (103978 words) by ratbones
Chapters: 15/15
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Shěn Wēi, Zhao Yunlan, Ye Zun (Guardian), Special Investigation Division | SID Ensemble (Guardian)
Additional Tags: Cyberpunk, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Case Fic
Summary: In the towering neon-lit half-underground metropolis of Dragon City, a cryptic homicide case brings together Dixing Register Department field agent Shen Wei and an unusual detective by the name of Kunlun, who may not be what he seems.