beccastareyes

Last night I dreamed that I was visiting my mother and aunt at my grandmother's old beach cottage*. Somehow I had lost track of time and had to convince them that I needed to pack and leave for the bus to Logan Airport that day, Monday, May 25th, because I had a flight to catch. Somehow, I had forgotten what the date was and had assumed it was... well, the 19th. There also was the sad feeling that I hadn't spent enough time at the beach on my vacation, and the urge to dash off to the beach instead of packing.

Maybe it's because I can't visit the beach this year -- things are just too uncertain because I don't have a job and might need to be available for interviews -- and didn't last year because I had my dissertation to finish.

Also, for some reason, there were cats in the kitchen, trapped by a baby gate, because no anxiety-based dream is complete without a surreal element.

* Grandma left it jointly to her kids. Since two of them didn't live in the area and one had a beach cottage of his own, they decided to sell it several years after my grandmother's death. Sadly the developers who bought it tore it down to build something with multiple stories.

I'm here, so I'm slowly getting back. Cassie and Heather have wireless internet, so it's fine to hang around with the laptop, writing or goofing off as Heather translates cheesy Japanese dating games for practice. Makes me want to adapt my longer stories as visual novels or something, though I'd like to know more coding to do something like Ace Attorney Investigations. I can get Ren.py* to run on my computer, but something like RPGMaker won't run unless I get a windows emulator. There's ways to integrate ren.py with other Python codes, but I don't know Python. (Not that I couldn't learn Python...)

Speaking of stories, I have about 7,000 words on my current work. Here's what I have to do writing wise:

Big Projects
-- In the Shadow of the Flames for scifibigbang, due by the end of July.
-- Some work on the Untitled Firefly story for the Finish-a-thon, due mid-August. Which means I need to rewatch Serenity at least, and maybe another couple of Firefly episodes.
-- Something for the fantasybigbang. Signups close at the end of July, and the writing period is 10,000 words due at the end of October.**
-- NaNo, but that's not til November.
-- I want to finally get my old webcomic down as serial fiction. Someday...

Small Projects
-- Short stories (or fanart!) for areyougame, which is running in July.
-- Short stories for no_true_pair, which is running in August.

* Ren.Py or RenPy is a set of Python code to write visual novels. (Ace Attorney is the most common series outside of Japan.)

** I like Big Bangs for letting me stab at my to-do list. Which is too long.

So, I mentioned this on Facebook, and booked my flight, but I should post it here. Normally I take a vacation in the summer up to New Hampshire to spend a weekend with my extended family -- and I time it so my mother and brother are up there as well. The last two years, I took a vacation back to Nebraska for events (my sister's wedding and my brother's graduation).

This year, though, I'm helping lasafara and her bird move across the country from her home in Pennsylvania to crisi83 and uncreativity's place in Oregon. So I get a road trip, some tourist time in New York City, a stop in Nebraska to see family and friends, AND some time in Oregon. Plus, states I've never been to -- Oregon, and I've never driven through the Rockies, just to them, so it looks like I'll get to see Idaho and a tiny bit of Utah.

I assure you, I will be blogging and posting pictures.

(Katie, we totally need to come up with a nickname for this trip. Last year the galaxy group in my department had '5 Bs Across America', where Ann/"Banana" and Betsey moved Sabrina/"Brina" and her two bulldogs (Bella and Chewy/"Bad Dog"), to California for Sabrina's postdoc.)