★ I've been called a Hikago BNF twice recently- once by someone I don't even know, but who apparently knows me. Can I tell you how weird that is? It's fucking weird. I'd ask if that meant that I need to start throwing random hissy fits and collecting minions to do my evil bidding, but the same things that probably make me a BNF also make at least half the of currently active fandom BNF's, so that probably won't fly. XD Guess I'll have to be a nice one. Come on, what fun is that?

(The minions would be nice, though, not gonna lie.)

★ Really regretting not asking for Hikaru/Waya for the Hikago exchange, because I've been hit by "ZOMG WANT THAT" really hard lately completely at random, and there's just not that much of it. Then again, asking for it wouldn't have necessarily meant I would've gotten it, either. Oh well.  Hopefully other people will write it and I'll be able to enjoy. ^_~ (Or, yanno, if people want to write it in the meantime, I certainly won't object. :P)

★ Speaking of the Hikago exchange: the good news is that I've reached the minimum word requirement, at least according to Open Office. The bad news is that it's nowhere close to done. What happened to my ability to write short fic? ARGH. (Well, okay, admittedly it would go faster if I wasn't going about it sideways, but that's what kind of has to happen with what was asked for, soooooo I'm doing my best to actually do what my recipient wants. ^_^;;; )

★ Pride was today. \o/ It was pretty fun, hung out with some people, though also overwhelming for someone as introverted as I am. I'm totally freaking EXHAUSTED now and it's honestly probably going to take me at least a week of avoiding IRL interaction to recover psychologically. (Notably, there was a table for a mental health organization or whatever- I grabbed a booklet on anxiety disorders. Heh. ^_^;;; ) On the upside, I got a really cute purple tank top with a rainbow butterfly on it. It's rainbowy but not in your face rainbowy. I'll have to try to remember to take a picture of it later. :D Also, Melissa Etheridge came over and did a song a cappella just for the hell of it since she was in the area for a concert anyway, which was awesome. In case you've ever wondered- she's amazing live. So now you know. ^_~ I also managed some free stuff, including a rainbow button with "Atheist" on it, some random stickers, and a few books. (For the curious-  Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, Two To Conquer by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence.) I actually left about a half hour early and didn't go to any of the after parties- I thought about it, but the bottom line was that I was totally fried. So were the people I was with, so I would've had to go solo, which I'm not comfortable with anyway. It's just as well.

★ It's been a very rainy June so far, so naturally, there have been lots of mosquitoes out and I've been getting freaking EATEN ALIVE. Seriously, there are 8 bites just on my right foot alone. ;~; I've been trying to keep benadryl on the worst places which helps, but it still sucks and I'm still a mess. SO ITCHY. And I've been growing out my nails a little bit, so I'm doing a lot more damage by scratching than I normally would. One of the reasons I hate summer- bugs love me. Ver blood is apparently delicious. (And no, before anybody asks, things like Off that are supposed to keep bugs away have never worked for me, even when I was a kid. I would be outside with my family after everyone was coated with the stuff and I would literally be the only one getting bitten. Ugh ugh ugh.

★ And in other news, my diploma arrived in the mail yesterday! Wee! So now that's safely tucked away in its folder. Pretty cool. ^_^

Sorry, guys. RL ate me. XD (And will continue to eat me for another few weeks, not gonna lie.) As always, you're better off checking tumblr (same name) these days if you want updates more than once every month or two. <_< I actually hadn't realize it had been that long. Anyway, so let's take care of the updatey stuff really quickly, shall we?

( A little rambly, but not too bad, considering )

(Edited because I forgot something.)

(Kept meaning to post this and then getting distracted by people/assignments/whatever. Oops. Anyway, for the December posting meme- degrees )

Talk about your writing process!
You mean besides that it's a mess? XD It's not so much a process as "Ver makes everything up as she goes along." Alright, well, I'll try and pull something together here.
 
When I get a bunny, regardless of whether it's something that was brought on by music or something else, usually it's just a small snippet of something. An idea for a part of a scene if I'm lucky, but usually I'm not and it's a line or two of dialogue. Unfortunately, what the bunny started out as gives no indication of how long it's going to end up being- "The Devil You Know," which is somewhere in the ballpark of 10k words and is my longest fic to date by FAR, started off in my head as just a scene of Hikaru and Akira seeing each other at a club. That's IT. Even the simple ones can grow completely out of control.  The bunnies just start multiplying on their own, I don't know how they do that when there's only one of them to begin with. Apparently plot bunnies reproduce asexually? I don't know.
 
As far as actual writing goes, I tend to write things as they come to me, which is usually not in any coherent order. The initial bunny is somewhere in the middle? Okay fine, I guess I'm writing that first. The next bit is the end? Alrighty then. I don't generally use filler text, either, unless there's something important I'm intending on putting there that I may forget about later. I mostly work in Notepad, so what this means is that if you looked at a story I'm working on, you probably wouldn't know what was happening half the time. It's just a jumble of seemingly random paragraphs, large spaces, and some short dialogue sequences. (The large spaces typically mean that I'm making a separation between what comes before it and after it- there's a scene change, but I'm not done writing the previous scene yet.) It's kind of a mess, to be honest. Sometimes I work in yWriter and that makes it a bit easier as far as keeping the bits separated. I tend to use Notepad because regardless of what kind of machine I'm on, everything can open a txt file. Even my phone. :P I know at this point it's outlived its usefulness, because everything I use will also open ODT/RTF files, but ehhhhhh.

So basically, what ends up happening is I have to figure out how all the pieces I have fit together. This happens along the way, it's not like I write all the pieces and am then staring at it trying to get it to go together like a puzzle. It's like... I'm making a quilt, and I have some of the squares made up already and know where I want them, but I'm also making things as I go. Often, I find that scenes naturally go together without a lot of effort on my part, but every once in a while I have to kind of nudge things along in the right direction. You can usually tell when I do this. XD

Also, I reblogged something on Tumblr yesterday that really applies to this post.

(Oh yeah, if you have a question/topic/whatever for me, the original post is here!)

It's been a while again since I've written, so I figured I'd check in and let those of you who don't follow me in other places know that yes, I'm still alive. See? Alive. :D So what's been happening? A lot of work, a lot of procrastination. I spent the morning sorting out the (admittedly, all over the place) fantasy section of my e-book folder instead of trying to write a story that's due Tuesday. You know, the normal. Oops. XD I also don't have internet at home right now, which complicates matters. This got really ridiculously long, mostly because of the school sections, so I'm just going to section the school stuff off for you guys by cuts. Which I don't normally bother with, but, well... you'll see. XD

☁ In case you're in Hikago fandom and didn't see my spamming, there's a new blind_go mini round out- GO SIGN UP. NOW.

☁ The new Phoenix Wright came out a couple of weeks ago. I feel so behind- I only just barely started case 4. I have Thoughts on it, which are partially good and partially ragey, but I'll hold off on getting too into those until I actually finish the game. So far... it's not that different from the others, concept wise. I can basically boil everything down to a short list of "things I've learned from the Ace Attorney games"
1. Prosecutors get away with EVERYTHING.
2. Don't become friends with a lawyer ever- you'll eventually end up dead or falsely accused of a crime, probably murder.
3. LGBTQ people are ridiculous/offensive/disgusting/only good for comedic relief/figments of your imagination/terrible people/any combination of the above, depending on the particular plot device service they're providing at the time.

☁ Midterms grades were fine- 4.0 for the semester so far. As usual, I just need to keep it there. ajdklsajd.

( Wibbling About the Future- Transfer Schools )

( Wibbling About the Future- Classes )

( Wibbling About the Future- Minors )

( Wibbling About the Future- Jobs )

( And last but not least... the Salem trip )

☁ ID's are out and fics are due for BG in about 2 weeks. Um. It might be time to think about writing something? XD To be honest, I do have an idea I've been kicking around, but it's something that I'm thinking about writing it as a short story for Creative Writing, since I have my first story due at the same time as BG. So I'm not sure if that's really a good idea. But I might not do it anyway, because the story is supposed to be 3-5 pages DOUBLE SPACED and that's basically nothing, so I don't know that I have enough space to do what I want with it for the assignment anyway. Meh. :/

☁ I actually did another one of those reviews! I recently replayed 400 Days to fix a couple of the stupid things I did in the first playthrough, so I wrote about that a bit. It is here. The cool/exciting but scary thing is that I've done two of these reviews and I already have two followers on that blog. O_o Oh. And by the way, if you've even sort of been thinking about trying The Walking Dead, it's on sale on Steam till tomorrow. It's normally $25 for the first five episodes and then $5 for the 400 Days DLC- right now it's 6.24 for the main game and 2.49 for 400 Days. I'm not actually sure how the PC version compares to the xbox version, but either way it's a steal. Just sayin'.

☁ We haven't even had a meeting for Pride Alliance yet and the drama is already starting. Ungh. First of all, we don't have a room yet. So not only do we not have a place to GO, I can't make any flyers to get new people in until that happens. Ungh. Shouldn't that have been done, I dunno, before the start of the semester? Maybe that's just me. THEN there's the logo stuff. I don't know if I ever talked to you guys about that, but basically, last year this guy made a logo for us. Not only was the file really low quality (seriously, anytime we used it at any size that was readable, it was all pixellated and it drove me up the WALL)... the guy who made it was a complete tool and there was drama there. Oh yeah, and Marcus made jokes about it looking like we were a gay communist group, so you can imagine what the logo looked like. XD It's also important to note that the logo had a rainbow gradient to it, we'll come back to that in a bit.

So this year I want a new logo for the flyers. I was like, okay, I'll mock up a couple of things and I'll show you guys what I've got. Meanwhile, The Tool is going, "I still have the logo from last year." Uh, no. So I posted two potential logos- one is a heart with a rainbow gradient, and the other is a standard rainbow with clouds. Nothing groundbreaking here, I wanted it to be fairly simple and recognizeable. Apparently people last year didn't know what the hell the logo was supposed to be, so. Anyway. I saw The Tool at lunch the other day and he was saying that the logos I made weren't inclusive. He felt excluded by the use of the rainbow. I'm like... what? YOU DID THE SAME FUCKING THING. So okay, it's fine if YOU use a rainbow, but if I do it, it's exclusionary? WHAT? I think part of it is that he has a gigantic ego and I'm not feeding it, so he's pissed. God forbid we not use the logo that HE made. But he's also kind of insane (for example, he's one of those Otherkin jerkoffs), so it's totally possible that he actually BELIEVES that as a pansexual genderqueer person, if he uses a rainbow it includes everyone, but since I'm a gay semi-androgynous person, I'm only talking to gay people. Funny how that works. The rainbow is an easily recognizeable LGBTQ symbol, so that's the best to use- and we can't POSSIBLY use the colors/symbols for all of the individual groups because there's a million of them. It's a flyer, not a packet, JFC. If nothing else, though, I know that Marcus is on my side. Partially because we're friends and partially because he really does like my logos over The Tool's. :)

It's going to be a long fucking year, you guys.

☁ Also, I've started watching United States of Tara and LOVE it. I'm almost done with the first season and I just started it yesterday afternoon. (Of course, it helps that it's a half hour show and not hour long episodes, but still. XD)

Anyway. I have to see about fooding and then studying a bit for a Stats test I have tomorrow, and hopefully writing SOMETHING for a bit. Later~ ^_^

18. The meaning behind your blog name
I have this as a line in the sticky note on both journals, but whatever. So. This was around... senior year of high school or maybe the year after that? So I was 18 or 19, and trying to figure out a new username that my family didn't know. I know this is going to shock you all, but when I was a teenager I was an angst bunny. XD And being the angst bunny that I was, I took one of my most prominent feelings at the time- that I was lost- and put it into a translator to see what came up. I decided that the Dutch "verloren" sounded the coolest, so that was my new username (I discovered later that it also means the same in German). I've often had to add some version of my birth year to it because usually just verloren is taken.

Honestly? I've thought about changing it. I really have. But for one thing, it's too much work to change my username or get a new account EVERYWHERE, and also... this is the name everyone knows. I half suspect that even if I changed it, everyone would still call me "Ver" anyway. So then the point is what, exactly? XD


☁ Watched ParaNorman today. I wasn't really expecting to like it, but it was cute. ^_^

☁ The 1am thing yesterday didn't happen- I'm hoping for today- but it was in the interest of a good cause, hopefully. I uh, kind of realized yesterday that I have NO online presence as a writer, at least nothing that's semi-professional (and by semi-professional, I mean not fanfic or a personal journal like this, at least. My standards are not terribly high for "semi-professional." XD). So. I figured that I should probably work on that. It can't HURT, at any rate. I apparently made a Wordpress account at some point, so I used that to make a new blog and put up a post on it. Here we go. Mainly it's going to be video game reviews, I think, and gaming topics in general, because that's a pretty reliable source of material. And because my dream job basically involves me wearing jeans and a t-shirt to work and getting paid to play games and write about them. XD Not that there aren't a million gaming blogs already, BUT this will be a kind of online sample that I can use. Probably. If I don't stop poking at the writing, anyway. I'm hoping for a once a week schedule, but we'll see. I think by now we all know how things with me and planning go. XD

☁ Turned in BG. Managed to pull off two fics, somehow, I don't even know how that happened. It was originally all part of the same idea, sort of, but... eh, it's complicated. Anyway. I was Vanessa and wrote two Hikaru and Waya fics- one pointless gen and the other smut. *shrug* I was terribly obvious and didn't bother to hide it. I was hoping that the pairing would throw people off at least a little, but uh, I guess not. XD Guessing didn't turn out too bad, though! 5 out of a possible 8, which is my best showing BY FAR- I have been known to get zero right, after all. Of course, if I'd actually looked a little more closely at some of the hints posted later on, I would've realized that a couple of my guesses were obviously wrong, but whatever. XD

☁ Somehow got talked into trying Naruto again, but of course I was only 7 eps into it to begin with and that was ages ago, so I just started it over. It's. I dunno. Kind of obnoxious. I can see why I didn't really feel a push to continue it before.

☁ The book cataloging is getting ridiculous. I've been taking a break, so there's still everything on my bookshelf at this point plus what's in the closet and whatever else I find that I'm not seeing right now- but the manga should be done, anyway, minus the first 13 of Hikago. I'm up to a total of 174 books and not even close to done (we won't even discuss how much of that is manga). I think I have a problem, you guys. XD Also recently I had decided to try and organize my ebook folder, because that's a huge clusterfuck, and all I can really say about that is... holy GOD, why did I do that to myself? I don't even know how it got like that.

☁ Money stuff for school is mostly taken care of, I'm waiting for the last grant form to go through, but it's nothing that's a huge deal right this split second. Like I can pay my bill and stuff without it, anyway. Re: school stuff, now all I have to do is get my certificate of residence (I'd like to do that tomorrow, tbh), pay my bill (by the 15th, but would like to do it next week to get it done and over with), get my books, and figure out exactly where my classes are and how tight I'm pushing my transport time on a couple. So that's coming along nicely.

☁ As far as RL circumstances... not a lot has changed, for good or for bad, at this point. I've been taking a bit of a hiatus on the cleaning because I've basically felt like shit the last week (yay for being female- not), plus being distracted with other things, see next cloud bullet, but I'm hoping to get back on track in the next couple of days.

☁ So remember how my laptop was overheating and I wasn't sure if it was the heat or something else? It was something else. -_- After some investigation, I discovered that the fan was no longer working. I'm not comfortable taking apart the laptop, since I can't get to the fan without pulling apart the ENTIRE thing (which is stupid but whatever), and it's not worth paying Best Buy $200 bucks to put a new fan in a four year old laptop, soooooo as much as I didn't want to spend the money and didn't want Windows 8... I didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. I bought a new one. XD I have named it Phoenix. :3 It was less than the previous one, under 400 before tax, so that wasn't bad. I've been super good about money over the summer, so I'm not going to beat myself up over spending the money or anything. Specs wise, I just wanted something that was at least as good as what I already had for relatively cheap, which was actually more difficult than you might think? Go figure. Sooooo I have another Toshiba- because fuck, I beat Haru all to hell and it still lasted four years, and above all else I did not want a Lenovo (very bad previous experience with IBM, and Kelly having to replace her Lenovo laptop TWICE since March does not help my opinion of them. I told her not to get a damn Lenovo. But nooooo, she didn't want to listen to me. Pfft.) Anyway. I still hate Windows 8, but I knew that already. Classic Shell makes it bearable, fyi if anybody on the flist ends up having to deal with this OS, though I still keep triggering stuff to pop up by accident. Grrr. The keyboard is pissing me off, at least until I get used to it. So there are minor frustrations with it, but that's true of any new device, especially with something like a laptop. Mostly I love it. It does what I need it to do (including connecting to the internet without a problem, which I was nervous about after the netbook), zips along speedily, and so far has handled everything I've thrown at it with grace. (It IS worth noting, though, that the "max temp" on Phoenix is significantly lower than it was on Haru- Haru's was 212, on Phoenix it's 194. Go figure.)

I think my favorite thing about it, though, is that it's a definite upgrade. I've said before that my laptop was hardly state of the art when I got it (and neither is this)- but you know that rating system Windows has? Old lappy was something like 3.3 or 3.5. This is 4.8. In both cases, the score is based off of the graphics card and everything else is AT LEAST a full point higher. When I turned on the Sims to double check that my saves would work, I was like, holy shit, they look like that? O_O It runs so much smoother now, without all the jerkiness and lag, and there's so much more detail. Like wow. Amazing.


Okay, I need to shut up and just post this already, so. Next time~!

Okay. So I know I owe you guys a legit update entry at some point, but I did want to make sure that I documented this one thing before I inevitably forgot to.  ^_^; So when I got that e-mail that said I'd won that writing award, it came with an invitation to a ceremony for the people being published where everyone would read their stories.  I said I would, because really, how often am I really going to be able to do that? In the moment, I thought it was pretty cool. I didn't consider my social phobia until later. Whoops?

( This got longer than I planned... )

...you know, I keep trying to post more, and I'll type something up, but then I don't post it and I wait so long that I have to rewrite half of it because it's no longer valid. Whoops. XD

( Blah blah blah )

So basically, things are generally going pretty well at the moment. I'll probably be singing another tune in a month when I'm trying to write four different research papers, but eh. XD

Okay, first things first- I did post something yesterday. It wasn't for NaBloPoMo like I've been doing, I forgot to do that, but I did post something privately, and that's what counts to me. I'm not doing it for a prize or anything, just for me, so basically you're just going to have to trust me. ^_~ Actually, for the curious, it was fic. I've been doing that lately- when I'm too lazy to go get my flash drive, I'll put stuff on livejournal so I can access it from a different computer later, edit it as I please, come back home and have the latest version right there for me. It's usually fic, but sometimes school stuff- I have notes on William Faulkner for short story, for example. Which I need to stop doing, really, because my LJ is getting ridiculous with all this extra stuff. Anyway. So what's up there for yesterday is actually the fic I ended up finishing off and posting today. Yes, I finished fic! Amazing, right? It's not the best thing I've ever written, that's for damn sure, but it's something. It even works for cottoncandy_bingo , which I've been neglecting and just realized that it's due at the end of December. Whoops. ^_^;;;

Not a whole lot happened today, just art history, short story, and pride alliance. Only one person showed up to pride alliance that wasn't in the executive committee. Which makes me nervous because we have the information table for Transgender Day of Remembrance next week. Sigh. Oh, and Treasurer and Co-Chair fought for half of it. They butt heads, because they're both attention whores that can't shut up. It was a long meeting. -_- At least Secretary wasn't there. He's a nice enough kid, don't get me wrong- he has Asperger's, and I think he has a mild mental retardation on top of that. So he just talks A LOT, and very loudly, and takes ages making any sort of point (if there even is one), and I just... does it make me a terrible person to admit that I don't have the patience for that? I think it does. XD I could never be a special ed teacher. I have all the respect in the world for that, but I just can't deal. Ungh. Oh, and have I mentioned that we keep getting kicked out of our club room by another club? The other advisor is SUPER RUDE and is always like, "We've been in this room for 20 years! blahblahblah." Yeah, well, they didn't reserve the room, so it's ours this year. Go away. Only problem is that OUR advisor is never there when this goes down, so we always end up folding, because what else are we supposed to do when this woman is being a complete bitch to us? It's going to be a looooooooong year, you guys.

I'm so tired. Definitely have to go to bed earlier than I did last night- I did laundry yesterday and my clothes just didn't want to dry, so I ended up going to bed around 1am. Waaaaaay too late for me. I'm a zombie. x_x