New icon! I, uh, thought it suited me. ;)

So, surprisingly, this is a non-fic update, sandwiched in between me doing Saturday chores on Sunday. Believe it or not I actually put down on my to-do list "Update LJ with something other than fic updates" just to prove how pathetic I am. Heh. But I have been writing a lot lately, and as I was saying to trialia the other night, I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that I'm not buried neck-deep in papers and essays and assignments and reading and studying for the first time in ... well, since I can remember, really. November has historically been a really shitty month for me creatively due to all the deadlines, such that I have usually been able to get almost no writing done because of school. Obviously, school had to be the focus when I was still attending it, but I'm not gonna lie, it drove me UP THE WALL sometimes when I had to start on the umpteenth paper or whatever instead of writing.

This year I've got none of that, and so my muse has gone into absolute overdrive. Which is AWESOME. :D I whipped out two chapters of Insanity Underrated this past week and another last night, and I am praying to the fic gods that I can continue to use all this free-floating inspiration to push through the rest of the S2 arc and perhaps even into S3. That would be SO awesome, and might even allow me to finish up this fic by the time 2010 rolls around. Which would be more awesome still. Unlikely, perhaps, but awesome. I adore Insanity Underrated, I honestly do, but I don't particularly want to spend almost three years working on it like I have with To Ignite the Stars. Granted, TIS was always going to be a much longer and more ambitious project, and I knew that going in, but it still kind of ticks me off that it will be three years come June 2010 that I started it, and I am not even anywhere CLOSE to being finished. Real life has had a lot to do with that, since various collections of catastrophes have befallen me since June 2007, but still. I've never been able to write fast. It is a slow, painstaking process for me. I wish I could do it faster. >.>

( Thoughts on the latest plot arc of Insanity Underrated ... don't click if you haven't yet read Chapters 9-10 )

I began Chapter 11 last night, and wrote exactly 900 words of it before going to bed. In keeping with the unofficial NaNoWriMo theme, my word count since the start of November is 10,024, which, although probably still way behind where I should be if I was actually doing NaNo, is not too bad for me. This is, of course, not counting the work I did on the fic before November - Insanity Underrated is, in total, 29,860 words long right now.

*crosses her fingers* Fic gods willing, I should have more for you guys relatively soon. :)

All righty. I was going to hold my tongue on this. I was going to live and let live. But after some of the things I've seen and heard from fandom over the past few days, I can't help myself. I have to say something, even if it's short-ish, and even if it annoys some people on both sides.

I have to admit that I did not expect this kind of garbage - because that's truly what it is, garbage - from BSG fandom. I am not condemning all of the fandom. I'm sure there are some folks out there who, like me, are merely bemused and a little disgusted by the whole thing. I also need to preface this by saying that by and large, BSG fandom has been one of the most considerate, polite, open-minded, non-wanky fandoms I'm involved in. Maybe I just don't hang out in the wanky parts, or maybe I missed the wank, but either way, consider this: within a week of me starting to participate in SW fandom, I'd had my first flamer/batshit person, while I'd gone over a year in BSG fandom before I encountered anyone even remotely crazy, and said craziness wasn't even directed at me. It has been, for the most part, very refreshing.

The funny thing is, I've actually seen more batshit stuff since the end of the show than I ever did while it was running. And that's what I'd like to address - namely, what the hell happened?

( What the hell happened? My theories, under the cut )

Maybe everyone should just become a multishipper, like me! The icon is quite correct: we do complain less, I think.

But I'm not going to make you become a multishipper. Then, I would be forcing my opinion on you - and that's just not kosher, is it? ;)

*Insert requisite disclaimer here about all of the above being merely my opinion, this rant not applying to all BSG fandomers, etc. I have no desire to start even more wank, as should have been made quite clear. :)

So'm, I haven't posted much over the last few days because there hasn't been much going on in my life worth posting about, other than that I have a slight cold, and I don't think it's necessary for you guys to know the details of that. Heh. ;) My big focus this week, and much of last, has been writing To Ignite the Stars, and trying to push through a pretty major plot arc therein. I seem to have rediscovered my motivation, at least where TIS is concerned, but at the rate I'm writing I'll probably reach the A New Hope part of the fic by the time I'm, oh, 90 or so. *facepalm* I don't know what it is about this particular arc that's causing so much difficulty, especially since I've been visualizing it in my mind for months now.

But, as ever, I am valiantly carrying on. Chapter 49 is basically ready to post; it just needs one last editing go-over with Katie via IM, which we'll probably do in a couple hours or so. I've written 3,472 words of Chapter 50 but haven't yet reached said chapter's "Big Reveal," as it were, so I also need to do that today. I haven't even looked at the Drabble Request Post lately, though I do have a few of those ideas written down and some plans percolating in the old brain. However, as I said, my primary focus is TIS right now and I probably won't turn my attention to the drabbles (or those poor old birthday fics I owe some of you guys) until I'm finished this particular plot arc. I also really need to make a decision about bsg_bigbang, since said decision will affect what I do with Insanity Underrated and when.

Believe it or not, though, writing is actually not the main point of this post! Well, it is and it isn't, really. A couple of plotbunnies have been distracting me from writing over the last little while and I figure the best way to keep them from doing that is to put them in an LJ post and blab and ramble about them a bit. So, here goes.

( Attack of the Plotbunnies! RUN! )

All things being equal, I'll post Chapter 49 of To Ignite the Stars likely tonight or tomorrow, depending on when I can get it edited. The WS fic ... well, I'm hoping to finish it once and for all, and if I do, that'll also be put up asap.

I was going to blather about stillness community stuff too, but I think that's a topic for another, friends locked, post. So I shall leave you folks with this, and head back to writing and watching the hockey game.

Happy Star Wars Day, f-list! In truth I have no idea why precisely today is referred to as such - probably due to the date when A New Hope was released, but I'm currently too lazy to look it up. Heh.

I spent the first half of the day ranting about Prequel bashers, triggered mainly by reading the following tweet on Twitter: "Talk to your kids about the Star Wars Prequels, because if you don't, somebody else will." Cue Liz's back immediately getting up, and me bristling as I typed this reply: "Talk to your kids about SW Prequel bashers, because if you don't, somebody else will. ;)"

( Why I dislike Prequel-bashing, and why I think we should celebrate, well, just being SW fans! )

Look, folks, I'm not disputing your personal right to prefer the Original Trilogy, not at all. That's your opinion and you are perfectly entitled to it. But, all I'm asking for is a bit of simple courtesy. You wouldn't like someone to constantly demean and insult you for prefering the Originals, would you? Well, PT-lovers don't enjoy it much either when it's done to us. The bottom line is that ALL OF US, whether we like the PT or the OT, love Star Wars. And in my humble opinion, that's all we need.

ETA: As several astute f-listers have mentioned (well, more astute than I, anyway!), the 4th thing is probably just because it fits into "May the Fourth be with you!" But I liked my explanation better. ;)

MY MIND, SHE IS FRAKKED.

I don't know what to feel or think or ANYTHING. Andrew keeps asking me what I thought and I keep saying, "I DON'T KNOW, I DON'T KNOW" because I DON'T know. So here are some EXTRAORDINARILY DISJOINTED thoughts. Expect capslock. LOTS. OF. CAPSLOCK.

( SPOILERS BELOW )

My show is over, and I honestly feel like someone died. Stupid maybe, but dammit, no matter how ready I thought I was ... I wasn't.

Goodbye, BSG. I will never love again.

*SOBS*

Guys, I thought I was ready for this. I thought I was ready to see the beginning of the end. I thought I was mentally and emotionally prepared, I really did.

I'm not.

FUCK, I'm not. *sobs*

( Spoilers beyond this point, yo )

All I know is that suddenly, for whatever reason, writing my AU longfic - which I have tentatively decided to call Insanity Underrated - seems exponentially more important now. I can't say why. But dammit, it's something I've got to do.

Maybe it's like my own memorial to the show.

Fic is almost done! *dances* Well, the first part of it, anyway, since there is now no doubt in my mind that this will be a multichapter job. I still have to set up a session with Katie to do some major outlining - since no Liz Multichapter Fic gets written without a detailed beginning-to-end outline - but most of the details are already in my brain, just screaming to be let out. It will be long, spanning probably early Season 1 of BSG right to the end. It will be Lee/Kara. There will be OCs involved (though I'm not saying in what capacity). There will be smut. Basically, I'm looking at doing pretty much what I've done with TIS - exploring what would have happened had something small and minor changed in the lives of these characters. With Lee and Kara, it will be: What if Lee had not danced around the issue of his love for her for so long? What if he had gone after her right from the start? Specifically, right after she rescued herself from the desert moon in S1? Of course, since this is Lee and Kara we're talking about here, it won't be simple. They'll be kept in character, which means lots of hits and misses, second guessing and running away and repression and denials. But I think it'll be a fascinating ride. And I'm quite proud of what I've managed to do with what will end up being Chapter 1, which is extremely rare for me as a writer to say.

Daaaaaamn, I thought kidlets were supposed to make one less creative, not MORE. Apparently it's having the opposite effect on me. o.O Anyway, jeebs83, as Liz's Official Kara/Lee Enabler, I suspect you will be happy. :D

( My meta on pilots - suffice it to say, I BELIEVE )

With apologies to Dido: "I will go down with this ship, and I won't put my hands up and surrender. There will be no white flag above my door; I'm in love, and always will be."

You know, I would almost say that this episode is the perfect way to end off the series. Obviously they're not going to do that, as we've still got - what, one more single episode and then a double? But still. I think it struck me for the first time tonight that this show is actually going to end. And that's sad.

( SPOILERS THIS WAY )

GIRLFRIEND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*HYPERVENTILATES!!!!*

( THERE BE MORE KARA SQUEE UNDER HERE, AND OH YEAH, SPOILERS )

Wow. I really see what was meant by the episode title, heh. And the lack of capslock is by no means an indication that I didn't like this one - just that it seemed really thinky, and gave us a hell of a lot to contemplate.

( SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT ... SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT ... SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT ... )

OH GODS OH GODS OH GODS OH GODS OH GODS OH GODS.

OKAY SO I CAN BARELY TYPE RIGHT NOW BUT I WILL AT LEAST MAKE SOME SORT OF ATTEMPT AT COHERENCE. MAYBE.

( SPOILERSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS )

PLEASE CAN IT BE NEXT WEEK NOW?????????????????????????????????

UM.

WOW.

I AM ALMOST AS GOBSMACKED BY THE PREVIEW THEY SHOWED FOR NEXT WEEK AS I AM BY THE EPISODE ITSELF. THEREFORE I WILL BE DISCUSSING IT UNDER A SEPARATE CUT FOR THOSE WHO WOULD PREFER NOT TO BE SPOILED FOR IT.

( Preview Cut )

( Episode Cut )

THINGS I LOVE

Star Wars
Battlestar Galactica
The Sens (ESPECIALLY THE WAY THEY ARE PLAYING TONIGHT OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!)
My Girlfriends
xkatie_kittenx
Obidala
Kara/Lee
Kara/Sam
ADAMA/ROSLIN, BITCHES
The TIS playlist
Obi-Wan Kenobi (even when he's over-guilting)
Lee Adama (even when he's emo)
The icon I'm using for this post (*gigglesnort*)
The Obidala Fan Forum (and all my friends there! *hugs you guys*)
The Oath

THINGS I HATE

Palpatine
The Toronto Maple Leafs
REFEREES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Anakin/Dormé ship. For any reason. At any time. Period. Do not bother to comment and argue.
SHIP-BASHERS. ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO TREAT MY FRIENDS LIKE SHIT. I AM COMING FOR ALL OF YOU! /Laura
Asswipes who talk shit about my friends, PERIOD
Fandom drama
Sidney Crosby
Darth Real Life
My body
TSN
The people at LucasFilm who can't be arsed to put out one, just ONE, book all about Padmé
Being behind on replies to comments and reviews, AGAIN

Wow, I hate a lot of stuff. Heh.

Also, hockey peeps, this one's for you: I've started a hockey blog! It's called Bleed Black and Red: News & Views From An Eternal Sens Optimist, and while I'm still tweaking the design and making a banner and such, y'all are welcome to check it out! I figured since I've been participating in OBC liveblogging of games recently, I should probably make a blog to go with it. That and I need somewhere to talk totally hockey, heh. Here's hoping I can keep up with it!

Also also, I changed my mood theme! Whee! *loves on animated!BSG*

GOOD MOTHERFRAKKING GODS.

( SPOILERS. VERY SPOILERY SPOILERS. )

Probably leaving out about five million things, but it's late and I've still got swicontest voting to post. Heh. Discuss away, folks!

Just for the record, it's somewhat embarrassing when you happen to be working on a particularly smutty scene in your multichapter AU and one of your old Journalism profs walks up and engages you in conversation while simultaneously peering at your notebook. *headdesk* I guess I should have expected it considering I was sitting in a relatively public area near the Journalism and Mass Comm department, but still. Heh. This guy's pretty open-minded, but I don't generally parade in real life my prediliction for writing about fictional characters having sex. So, I have to admit, my answer to "Hey Liz, you working on your next news feature?" was a muttered "Uh - um - well - uh - sort of - HEY I REALLY LIKED THAT ARTICLE YOU WROTE FOR THE CITIZEN LAST WEEK, IT ROCKED!" Without the capslock, of course. That'll teach me to write smut where my old professors can just randomly happen upon me. *facepalm @ self*

Anyway, so not the point of this post, but I wanted to mention it. Heh. ;) I've been musing tonight on the nature of drabbles vs. ficlets, these ruminations mainly having been prompted by a comment to last night's edition of jedi_news. There were a few cases in the post where authors of linked fics hadn't provided titles and word counts for those fics, and so I classed them according to my own personal classifications: anything under 500 words without a title gets linked as an "untitled drabble," while untitled fics over 500 words receive the designation "untitled ficlet." And although I obviously won't lose sleep over this next question, as a journalist who imbibed "avoid personal biases" right from first year, I'm now idly wondering whether I was wrong to impose my own classifications.

Of course I didn't go through every one of those fics and perform actual word counts myself. It's not my responsibility to do so, and I'm often tired and/or pressed for time while completing the JN updates. So I use my own system, as is the case in other areas of the update. (I don't want to puzzle over whether something's news or miscellaneous, if a pic belongs in "Pictures" or "Graphics," what indications should appear for SW icons in multifandom posts, etc., so over a couple years of doing JN I have developed the aforementioned system.) And it works fine for standardized stuff. Not work-safe posts are always going to be not work-safe, multifandom posts will remain multifandom posts, and once I've made up my mind that an item belongs in News I usually leave it there. With the possible exception of News/Miscellaneous, these things don't have multiple interpretations so far as I know. But the drabble vs. ficlet thing does, and so that's why I'm wondering a bit about it.

When dinosaurs ruled the earth and I last wrote a drabble, it was most definitely over 100 words, but I still marked it as a drabble because in my view, it wasn't long enough to be a ficlet. By comparison, the stuff I do for TM (or will do, if they ever get around to accepting me) is usually 500-600 words, and Kara!pup has a "ficlet" tag on her journal for just such occasions. No one has yet questioned this, although that could simply be because no one pays attention to her tags. (And they should! The pup's tags are entertaining! *whiiiine* XD) But I definitely realize that some people have different definitions of what constitutes a drabble and what does not.

So, this brings me to my questions for you, the writers on my f-list. What, to you, constitutes a drabble? Where does one draw the line between a drabble and a ficlet? At 100 words? At 500 words? At 1,000? Do you get annoyed when you see a "drabble" or a "ficlet" defined as something you don't believe it to be? If you need to make an executive decision about what to call a drabble and what to call a ficlet, what would you say to people who hold the opposite viewpoint?

[A few notes: 1) Although this post is public, I will in all probability not be linking it on JN simply because I don't want the person who commented to me to feel singled-out or picked upon. 2) Similarly, while this might have been a good topic to address solely to my fellow editors, I'm looking for wide-ranging opinions on this, so restricting the discussion wouldn't really be appropriate. 3) Now I really really want to do that drabble request meme again. Sigh.]

Not quite as overwhelming as last week, by my estimation, but still pretty awesome. Let's discuss, BSG f-listers!

( Here be dragons ... er, SPOILERS )

See, Deborah? Only one post. LOL. ;D

I ... I ... I OMGGGGGGGGG. HOLY FRAKKING FRAK.

( YES, YOU'D BETTER BELIEVE THERE ARE SPOILERS UNDER HERE )

IN CONCLUSION: I LOVE LOVE LOVE MY FRAKKING SHOW. HOLY CRAP.

GUYS!!! GUYS GUYS GUYS, RUN, DON'T WALK, TO YOUR NEAREST BOOKSTORE AND BUY Wild Space. RIGHT FRAKKING NOW.

Most of you probably know that, in general, I tend to eschew the EU. I'm only vaguely current with its canon, and in fact most of the time I pretend that aside from Leia and Han's marriage and the birth of their kids, the stuff that comes after RotJ did not actually occur. It may be that those books are well-written and their plots compelling and all the rest of it, but I have issues with the direction the EU has taken and its emphasis on depressing plots that really make you wonder why they fought so hard to defeat the Empire if things would just continue to go to hell in a handbasket afterwards. EU books that take place during the Prequel Trilogy are a little better, and there are some OT exceptions to my dislike - most notably The Courtship of Princess Leia, Tatooine Ghost and the novelizations, plus the little biographies that have been written about Obi-Wan and Anakin. I was okay with the TCW movie novelization, okay but not blown away.

Turns out the "blown away" label was being held in reserve for another book, a book I'd heard about but had no intention of reading, until today.

I had a couple gift certificates for Chapters burning a hole in my pocket, so Andrew and I went down there in the course of our normal Saturday errands. I checked out the Star Wars section and, on a whim, picked up Wild Space. I read a page. Hmm, seemed interesting. Read another page, and another, and before I knew it, I was hooked. As in, line and sinker.

( In which I wax poetic on Wild Space, squee over shipping and turn into Ramble McRambleypants about Obi-Wan's characterization; possible spoilers may slip in beyond this point - I've tried to keep it mostly vague, but spoilerphobes should probably steer clear )

I haven't quite finished reading the whole book - I'm about 100 pages in as of this writing - so I expect I'll have a more coherent, book-ish review once I finish. Call these some ... very happy preliminary thoughts.

And go buy the book, or get it out of the library. DU EET. You know you want to! XD

This is something I've seen basically all around my f-list, but I'm giving credit to trialia and taragel because they posted the coolest versions of it, the versions that I'm now going to proceed to steal. :D First, I'm going to list every single thing I wrote in 2008 - shortfics, TIS chapters, ficlets, claim fics, fest fics, whatever. These will be divided by month and subdivided by fandom, and at the bottom of each month will be two numbers - a total word count for the month and a total fic count for the month. After the December fic and word totals I've put a fic total for the year and a word total for the year, and after that will be a series of questions ganked from taragel about what fic I'm most proud of, my best fic, my most underappreciated fic, etc. etc.

Also, note that some fics will not show with the correct date stamp since they were re-posted to my writing community after their original posting date on this journal. This is because I prefer to link to jedionpaper wherever possible - as I no longer put up fic here - but if you're really picky about making sure I've matched fics to their correct month, you can look back through amidala_thrace's archive. The original posts are all still there. ;)

Now, onward!

( Liz's 2008 Fic Roundup )

Apropos of nothing, I discovered to my annoyance that apparently you can't backdate journal posts in a non-personal journal (i.e. a community). Who knew? >.> This must be a recent development, however, because several communities I belong to have entries that say they were posted in the 1970s and 1980s, which is obviously impossible without backdating since it's waaaaay before LJ even existed. Anyway, my sincere apologies if you guys got spammed with a couple of fic reposts tonight. I tried to backdate them, only to be told that there was an error because users aren't allowed to backdate in communities. :( (And as I subsequently added to those posts, Deborah, you don't need to link the fics in jedi_news, because they are reposts.)

Seems like I've been using the word "squee" a lot in my titles lately. Maybe because there's a lot of stuff making me happy? I guess in some ways that's true - my icontests are doing well, I've got a plan in place for starting up obidalastills again, my muse is chugging along, I just put the finishing touches on another TIS chapter, I've got a ton of new friends (*waves* Hey guys!), BSG has reentered my life with the webisodes and the premiere of S4.5 on January 16th, and I'm on my way to solving my LJ problem.

Plus the fact that things are starting to wind down for the holidays - at work, the final submission deadline for our holiday issue is tomorrow, which will remove a metric shitton of my stress, and school is over for another semester so I have a lot more "me time" (which, if you hang around me for long enough, you will learn that I treasure). The last couple days I've woken up with this huge smile on my face, a la Kara in my icon. Boyfriend says it's actually kind of nauseating, but cute. Hehe. And it's the holiday season, and despite the busyness I love this time of year.

Anyway! Liz's Ridiculous Happy Sunshine of Optimism is so not the point of this post. Last night I had planned to talk about the webisodes but found myself too tired to do so; therefore you should consider this the Official Webisode Squee Post. Some general bullet-pointed notes are under the cut. (I love bullet points. Yes, yes I do.) SPOILERS for the aired Webisodes so far, obviously, so if you haven't seen them yet, DON'T CLICK.

( Gaeta!!!!! )

As for my LJ issue, I'm thinking what I'll probably do is begin to move some personal stuff over here, friends-locked of course, on a gradual basis until I'm using only this account. It seems like a logical thing to do given that most of the communities I moderate are linked with this journal, and it would be a pain in the neck to transfer them all. So, I hope you guys won't mind getting a little more of me than maybe you bargained for. Not like that, you pervs. XD Heh.

Last but not least, I want to thank taragel for tipping me off to the existence of caprican_dame, a recs journal for Lee/Kara fic! I highly recommend L/K fans head on over there - there's some oldies-but-goodies listed, but also some new and awesome stuff that I hadn't seen before. Each fic comes with a link and a description of why it deserves to be read, and there are tags for different kinds of L/K stories (happy, sad, angsty, kinky, etc.). I've had a lot of fun rereading my favourites, not to mention discovering new fics! (And HEE, I just checked it and two of my fics got recced today! :D But seriously, I'm NOT just recommending it because of that. I meant to put it in last night's post, but ended up forgetting. Head on over there, guys! You'll have a ball.)