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"She must be quite the handful," he said quietly. No need to risk waking the child if she wasn't much of a heavy sleeper. "A two-year-old with the wits of one several years their senior is not one I would be quick to volunteer raise. And yet, it seems the three of you are doing admirably well, particularly given the circumstances." Dilx shot Animus a questioning look. The red-headed man pressed his fingers lightly to his partner's elbow and said, even more softly, "TARDISes are, as memory serves, sapient, and thus might be of assistance in the matter, and while Headquarters has its advantages, it cannot be an easy place to raise a child." It wouldn't have surprised Animus if he could be heard, but it was more the spirit of the effort than anything else that made him lower his voice anyways, so he didn't mind.

She paused before continuing: “I don’t think Edward’s seriously hurt, judging by the fact that he can still walk. Anyway, he’ll almost certainly pick up a much worse injury before the end of the night. Or he’ll seriously injure someone else. I was hoping to keep him away from the alcohol tonight.”

"From what I can tell, we are celebrating having time away from work and decent food."

I'm Collin Frisbee on the site if you want to send me rude messages over it in order to slow me down and thus gain an edge over me in the competition.

I'm writing Lamppost Saint, a sort of episodic surrealist journey across a barren, haunted Sydney, starring a man in a full-body prosthesis suffering constant phantom sensations and generally having a tough time telling what's real and what isn't.

It's a sort of spiritual successor to an earlier story I wrote (that I have not shared with anyone here), and fulfils a very similar purpose to me, in that I intend to use it as a way to sort of - go nuts, I guess, and have fun with all the imagery and kooky dream logic.

It's based a lot on my interest in folklore and weird fortean cryptozoological kind of stuff, and was influenced a lot by Hellboy and stuff by China Mieville, and the way that, for instance, many UFO stories very much feel like old fairy abduction stories, but from a modern, more scientific context. There's this really bizarre and fun dream-logic to many old fairy tales and folktales, and capturing a sort of similar feeling, from a modern context, is one of my main goals.

I mean, there's actual plot there, too, no worries mate.

However it ends up, it has been fun so far!

For a moment, Gall lapsed into complete seriousness. "That would suck."

"And space is certainly an issue," Derik added. "The paperwork to request a move is insane, and Building Maintenance won't give me permission to knock down a wall..."

"So Plan C is to find an empty RC—one of the big ones—and just tack our number to it." Gall, who was a Viking, after all, grinned. "My girl Gremlin can even fix the console, so no one will know the difference. Oh, and speaking of Bad Slash hookups: if you really wanna do the whole nine-months thing, there's always one or two little bean sprouts that've been debugged and could use a surrogate. They've got the tanks, but..." Gall made a face that eloquently expressed her disgust with the idea. "It'd be a lot more like it was your own that way, right?"

(( I just recently had this thought about the problem of the usual tiny RC. I don't wanna change numbers, so this is my solution. ˆ_ˆ ))

I was bored, so I figured I'd share a few songs I enjoy and maybe everyone else could share theirs:
I already love this song, but I like this cover a bit more, and for good reason:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7yVUS5qKifg
A pair of songs that are good already, but also have acoustic versions worth listening to:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k2XKwuTU_jw
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTYYPqDtN8
This is actually a song from my cousin's band (I swear I'm not making this up), I just wanted to spread the word:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cLRVrNFqLEU
And finally, my current obsession, from the musical Hamilton. I don't know how many people here have heard the musical, but I want more people to listen to it...(borderline NSFW?):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VhinPd5RRJw
And this is just for starters, I still have more to recommend...

Well, I can honestly say I would not have thought of doing something like that. Though I find it too silly to be disturbing.

Still, I can't help but be impressed and a bit disturbed... Also, is that body paint? If so, how long did it take to put on (and get off)?

“I guess the ‘Happy’ in ‘Happy Halloween’ isn’t appropriate?” Chelsea said, shrugging. “I dunno, it’s not like we’re celebrating death or dying, right?”

"That sort of thing seems to have been the origin of this holiday, at least in my reading."

“Do you mean ghosts? Or spirits?”

I've tried to get started several years, but never even got in the first day of writing. But this year I did, so I'm very excited!

I'm actually cracking down on a fanfiction, Kathryn's Adventures in Middle-Earth (a stand-in title), which is, as you may have guessed, a girl in Middle-earth story. It's not satire; I've set myself the challenge of taking this premise and taking it seriously.

I've set myself a couple of other challenges as well; I generally avoid first-person narration because it's hard for me to get into characters' heads, but this will be told in the form of a series of letters from the titular Kathryn to her mother, who is presumably still alive and well in the real world. I used to write a lot of letters as a kid, so I thought it would be easier than straight-up first person. So far I'm discovering it's really not.

I also discovered today that because the first half of the letters are written with some time between the events and the writing and the second half are written more or less immediately after the events, character development is a difficult thing to show. Some of it is happening days, weeks, or even months before they're written about and the narrator will be somewhat aware of it. Some of it, though, is happening in the immediate past and it's unlikely she's going to realize how she's changing and growing. One thing I'm trying to work in is self-contradiction. Earlier this year I read the diaries of Christopher Columbus and it was fascinating to see how his viewpoint changed as time went on. As an example, in earlier entries he thought of aloe as a very valuable commodity and gathered as much of it as he could. Later entries, though, referred to it as a very commonplace thing and he stopped collecting it. I suspect this is because he discovered how common it is in that part of the world. This is naturally never overtly acknowledged in the writing of the diary, but the diligent reader can pick it up. I'm hoping to capture a similar quandary in Kathryn's letters, for the purposes of both realism and character development.

But then, I probably shouldn't be thinking of this too much at this stage. It's just the first draft. Still, if I manage to pull it off properly, I think the letter format will be one of the great strengths of the story.

I'm stretched a bit thin this time around. I've got two short films to write, produce, direct, edit... and two essays as well.

That being said, I am halfheartedly poking at a superhero story featuring two old favorite Mutants and Masterminds characters of mine, Phantasm and Galeforce. One's a petty supervillain, one's the star hero of her home city, and together they form a sort of buddy-cop alliance.

Yours sounds much better thought out.

"I was not sure if 'Happy Halloween' was appropriate, since this holiday seems to have some connection to death."

You still have my address, right?

HG

"OhTruthI'msosorry," he said, before he'd even gotten off the ground. "Is anyone hurt? I didn't slam into anybody too hard did I?" He brushed his hair out of his eyes again. "OhTruththehorn. Nobody's impaled, right? Should I go get Medical?"

*high-five* Have a box of Every Flavor Beans and a mechanical pencil!

I forgot to get a website account this year, probably because last year I did one of the summer sessions.

This year, after consulting 7th Sanctum's random plot generators more times than is probably healthy and having to drop my original idea, I'm reimagining the story of the Golem of Prague as being about a group of programmers for a fantasy game instead. Jury's still out on whether their dream of an autonomous protector AI goes horribly wrong or entirely too well.

Yes, it's that time again: NaNoWriMo, 30 days (29 left!) to write a full, 50K word novel. It's one of the best ways I know of to break the 'I should probably start writing' jam, and I heartily recommend it to everyone. And remember, as the old motto says: No plot? No problem!

Predictably enough, I'm on the website as Huinesoron. This is my sixth NaNo, and this year I'm trying something a little different. (No, Nesh, not Quon Vet.)

Hearthfires is a collection of short stories covering a bewildering variety of topics. The one I've started is the tale of Ceridwen, a mage in the service of the last reigning Prince of Wales, but the plan includes everything from a Greek Mythology mystery to a post-Singularity... uh, mystery again, come to think of it. It's not all detective stories, I promise. ^_^

So who else is taking part? And what are you working on?

hS

Good old Cuztec.

hS

“I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty happy!”

Lemon put her on her partner’s shoulder. “Chelsea, please.” She looked concernedly to the wizard. “Is something wrong?”

Zeb paused, then amended, "Well, she'll be two next month. I think that's close enough. I'm not really sure what a human would be like at that age..."

"Time Lords mature more quickly," the Aviator said, rejoining them. Elanor was fast asleep in her arms, face buried against the crook of the Aviator's neck. "Well... not exactly. In terms of intelligence, perhaps, but emotionally..." She kissed the top of Elanor's head. "She's still just a toddler like any other."

but Edward was too intent on his zombie impression to move until it was too late. His hunched position made him harder to knock over, but the speed of the collision and the weight of the other person sent them both flying in opposite directions.

Kat ran forward and grabbed her hat, which was now rather squashed. She began carefully manipulating the fabric, trying to repair the damage.

Edward stood up very slowly. “That,” he said, “is why I don’t like parties. Now I’m going to get a drink.”

“Edward,” said Kat reproachfully, “you know you shouldn’t drink! Remember the time you flooded the entire room?”

But he was already gone. Kat shrugged, and decided she couldn’t be bothered to chase after him. There was a fun night to be had.