alara_archive

Okay, perhaps "this beautiful green earth will soon be mine" may be overstating the case, but at the very least, the house next door will soon be mine. Yatta! (Or as Dora would say, "Lo hicimos!")

See, I live in half a duplex (a house that has been divided in half to be two houses, common in big cities). I have four kids, and four cats, and a husband, and a housemate, and maybe another housemate in a little while because my sister-in-law needs a place to stay, and I own stuff. And I live in a city. We bought the place when we had three kids because it had a big yard and, during the height of the real estate bubble, it was barely within our price range, and it was in a decent school area, which in a city is not easy to come by. But the overcrowding has been painful to deal with.

No longer! For twice the price, we will have twice the house. When we bought the current house, I wasn't working, and my credit sucked, so my name is not on the title. So this house is being bought with my credit, my salary, and *my* name only on the title -- it's intended to be a primary residence, but Tom, since he owns our current house, could only have bought it as an investment property, with so much money down that we couldn't have managed it. I have no intention of using this thing as an investment property -- I'm gonna *live* here. And also in the house next door, the one I live in right now. But mostly in the new house, because it has never undergone rounds of lead abatement that ripped it to shreds and didn't get properly restored afterward, and it does not have cats (and it will not have cats; they will be restricted to the other house. We'll see if my breathing improves.)

It's taken since April, because the house was being sold as a short sale. (Short sales take months and months and months. The "short" doesn't refer to the timing; it means the owner is selling for less than he owes the bank, and therefore needed bank approval, which takes forever to get.) But we got the approvals back, so we are moving forward at last! Hopefully we'll close on it and move half our stuff into it mid-January.

I didn't mention that it has a hot tub, did I? And three stories of deck? Our house has a huge yard; the house next door has no yard. But three stories of deck and a hot tub. Woot!

So back in 1992-93, before I got into the Internet, I started writing this really, really awesome cyberpunk-with-psi-powers novel, featuring an albino, neutered telekinetic assassin who's a double agent, and a shapechanger with multiple personalities, one of which is a werewolf, and a teenage girl with telepathy and cyberpathy, who narrowly avoided becoming an ego-destroyed conduit for an artificial sentience and now has a secret that could shake up the world. It had anime physics, it had made-up future slang, it had extra genders and superpowers and multiple double crosses and all in all it was essentially a paean to the Rule of Cool.

And then I got into Q, and started writing Only Human, and ran out of steam on the project. I only ever got two and a half chapters into it.

My top priorities right now are still The Cold At The Heart of the Light and Play Like God, but I think I'm going to resume work on Hands of the Bright. In typing in the handwritten third chapter, I've observed that my writing has improved slightly -- I can tighten things up and remove some "she said" type phrases -- but overall I'm surprised how well the thing holds up. I guess I shouldn't be -- I still like the opening chapter of Only Human and it was written contemporaneously with Hands of the Bright.

Also, I found the opening few pages of an original story set in the backstory to The Green World, which riffs on X-Files rather than on TNG like "The Green World" does. That, too, was pretty good and deserves for me to finish it one of these days (although, honestly, "The Green World" itself probably deserves it more.)

(BTW, all links in this post are going to original work friends-locked on alara_works; I friend everyone who friends that journal, but I do need some way to control who gets to read my original, publishable work before it's published. So if you want to read any of this, friend that journal and I'll give you access.)

New Star Trek fics (at least, new in the sense that I haven't linked them here):

Two for matrithon:
Loving the Alien: Lwaxana Troi's entire life has been about her love for aliens.

Goodbye: The story of Captain Silva LaForge, Geordi LaForge's mother.

One for startrekbigbang:
West: Your Possible Pasts: Second in "West" series (though written third). Q gives Janeway a gift containing all the memories she lost to temporal loops and other such incidents.

One just for fun:
Mad World: Chapter 1, Unreliable Omniscient Narrator: I have no idea how many chapters this is going to be. Dixon Hill's having a day; the cross-town bus has square wheels, his landlady Worf is going to cut him with a bat'leth if he hasn't got the rent, Durango the gunfighter is looking for him, and he trips over a homeless bum who claims to be God.

Not a fic project:
Created trek_bookverse, for fanfic set in or featuring the characters from the Star Trek novels.

Totally unrelated to Star Trek:
In honor of the remake of The Prisoner, featuring Ian McKellan, a 99-word ficlet for the original series:
It's A Beautiful Day

Also, got Chp. 2 of Cold Light finished and Chp. 3 started.