*does little dance*

Hit 20k words tonight. It feels like an epic landmark to me. I'm probably about 40% done, I'm guessing. Maybe more. They're long chapters, about 4k average at this point. I think the rest of the chapters will likely be shorter because I'm using chapters to switch perspective (all in 3rd person) and I will want to keep it moving faster as the action really heats up.

Anyhow.... am doing little happy dance of minor triumph

*yay* 

P.S. I'm thinking of titling the series as a whole 'Daybreak' [obvious "break" tie in and abuse of metaphor (Into the Dark, Five Minutes to Midnight, Way Back to Daylight and New Day Dawning being the individual titles)]. Yes? No? Appropriate but cheesy?

Anyone on my friends list speak Spanish fluently (and preferably have watched Prison Break, too) and mind helping me with something? In the fic I'm working on, Sucre sees a video proving Michael's alive and I plan to have him spill out some semi-coherant rapid-fire Spanish declarations (the content of which is yet to entirely be determined). Despite having grown up in Miami, my Spanish is limited to curse words (which... useful in this situation, but still...) and I'd prefer to avoid using babblefish or the like. I will if necessary... It would be super, SUPER helpful if someone both speaks Spanish and knows the character. Pretty please?

P.S. Didn't write the last two day, but did a lot of brainstorming and note-taking. Have done a little over 1k so far today and still going strong... would love to finish this chapter tonight (aside from the Spanish part maybe). I'm a little over 19k words right now. YAY! 

Oregon beaches are not what you picture when you think "beach." Pine trees grow all the way up to the sand. There's more sweatshirts than swimsuits (the high was 63 today). And there are plenty of people here who take kite-flying and making sandcastles WAY too seriously. 

Tiny towns dot the coast, built mostly around tourism or fishing or shipping (or, in Tillamook's case... cheese). There are overpriced art galleries and hand-blown glass studios every few miles and saltwater taffy can be found everywhere. The dog-to-person ratio has to be about even and despite the number of hotels, motels and rentals, there are NO private beachfronts in the whole state. 

We went to Cannon Beach this morning, my favorite and the closest to Portland at just over an hour and a half drive. For some reason that defies my entire personality and life thus far, I woke up feeling energized before 7 am. This is a first for me. No joke. The kids were already up and so was Dan so we left by 7:30 and got to the coast by 9, easily beating the weekend rush. We left around noon, just when the vacationers seemed to be getting up and milling about town and grabbed some of my favorite coffee on the way out of town (Sleepy Monk Coffee, mmmm). The kids had a blast.


( Cut for oodles of pictures )

Why do I not have an icon that says *headdesk*? I need such an icon... like, yesterday. But I love this one and Baltar/imagination feels oddly appropriate for this post.

It took me an hour and a half to write a little under 500 words today. It was... just so frustrating. BUT... but I think I'm past the part that was bothering me for real now. It's all action-y at the moment and I don't have a clear vision in my head for how that scene goes down (exactly) and I'm annoyed so I'm calling it a night. I'm probably only 1-2k words away from finishing this chapter though, so with luck that might get done tomorrow (busy day, though... family picnic at the preschool then I work...).

Sigh. My plan to attempt at least 3k words today looks like a failure. I've scarcely managed 1k and it's been kinda like pulling teeth through this segment. Might switch over to working on one of the other stories for a bit if I can't get this moving soon and then just come at it with fresh eyes again tomorrow. The entirety of today's writing thus far appears to be that LJ has questionable taste in women, Linc can be super annoying when he's bored and southern Texas is big and can make for a very long drive... I need to hurry them up to get to a rendezvous with someone like... NOW.  

*is annoyed at herself*

So... I may have totally quit my job today. Gave two weeks notice (which, apparently, is shocking in the retail world) and completely left the door open to come back if I need and am able to. There's a lot of reasons for it but it really boils down to the kids needing more steady, reliable structure in their lives and the obvious but silent discontent from my mother at watching them so much. My last day is next Thursday. So... yeah. There's that. Too bad I came in to find that my immediate boss is on vacation for a week. Gonna e-mail him tomorrow because while that's a crappy thing to tell someone over e-mail, it's a crappier thing to hear through the rumor mill.

I didn't get any writing done today because I worked more than 9 hours and then came home hungry and tired and sore and gross (hi heat wave!). I'm hoping to knock out a minimum of 3k words tomorrow though (whether its in FMtM, an original story or that smutty prequel thing, I'm not sure yet... probably a combination of all of those) since we'd already arranged for my mom to take the kids for the day and I don't work (YAY!).  

1.4k words written today (puts me at 16.5k overall now) and I really, really like some of what I got done today. Probably just gonna do some background research before I head to bed (I work tomorrow. Booooooo).

My characters need a boat that sleeps at least 6 (preferably 8) for a few days and can travel a fair distance. Anyone know a damn thing about boats? I'm looking up stuff and I'm thinking it either needs to be a yacht or a really big sailboat (which, hi, very visible and not as fast, I presume?). 

If I've ever recced you any Harry Potter fic then you already knew this would be on my list somewhere. Arguably my favorite fanfic in twenty years of reading fanfic (shit that makes me sound older than I am!)...


( Ninth of 100 Fanfics I Have Loved - A Feast in Azkaban by NyxFixx (Harry Potter) )

Happy Mother's Day to the moms on my friends list! I hope you all have very relaxing days.

In unrelated commentary, I completely fell in love with the song Daylight by Ron Pope after hearing it on Pandora (and wholly relating it to the Michael in Into the Dark) so I went to iTunes and bought the whole CD. It's kinda on repeat on my computer. The whole thing. I love it rather a lot and highly recommend it. 

There was something else I was totally going to write and now I have no idea what it was... I hate that. 

2.3k words written yesterday and 800ish so far today. I'd love to get another whole chapter punched out tonight and maybe a little more in my smutty challenge thing too. Not a bad streak. I'm working on chapter five of FMtM now (out of... probably 15 chapters? Not sure here... Depends on exactly where I cut this story off and start the next one). Gotta say... put Agent Kellerman in a scene and the guy takes over. He kinda hijacked my dialogue. Also... I maybe have two tiny, very subtle crossovers going on that likely almost no one will notice at all... I'm kinda dying to see if anyone picks up on it. 

Anyhow, FMtM is currently 14k (which, yes, means I'm failing at my 1k-per-day goal right now, but progress is progress, yes?). I know there's all of like... three people currently writing Prison Break fanfic and I do keep getting requests for updates on how I'm doing on this, so I just thought I'd post it here for all to see. Keeps me honest on my word count, too. ;-)

Now... off to work on chapter five so long as the kids are entranced by watching Cars for the billionth time (bless you Pixar... bless you).

EDIT: Up to just shy of 2k today with chapter five possibly complete! I'm maybe astounded...

So a few days ago I posted this meme:

    Give me one of my own stories, and a timestamp sometime in the future after the end of the story, or sometime in the past before   the story started, and I'll write you at least a hundred words of what happened then, whether it's five minutes before the story started or ten years in the future. 

This was in the same post as I did the WIP meme wherein I mentioned this bit from a temporarily shelved PB fic: 

    She watches him move, long fingers curling around the handles to the mugs, and her breath catches in her throat. She doesn’t remember last night. She doesn’t. But somehow she knows exactly what the pressure of those fingers feel like digging into her hips, skimming up her sides, tracing lines along the insides of her elbows...

    “Cream? Sugar?” he asks, startling from her thoughts and making her flush. 


Someone posted asking for what happened five hours before that scene and... instead of a 100 word reply or drabble or something, it's somehow turned into a ficlet of its own? I'm like 1k words in and there's not even any sex yet (or kissing, even!) which is - I realize - what the poster was asking for. WHAT AM I DOING??? I have a hundred other things to be working on. Not the LEAST of which is Five Minutes to Midnight *headdesk*.

Why do I get the feeling that I'm going to be spending most of Mother's Day writing porn?

On an unrelated note, I really need new icons... 

1) I am home sick today because (unsurprisingly) I've caught whatever the kids have had. Low-grade fever, nasty rattling cough and very achy muscles. Calling out on a sunny "weekend" day at work during a one-day-sale when I had a nine hour shift and already called out for all my other shifts this week? Maybe not the best. Good thing I'm thinking I'm not gonna be there much longer anyhow. 

2) prisonbreakfic.net is down again? This makes me super duper sad. Hope its up soon because... I need my fix and I've read like 90% of what's on FFN and most of whats on LJ. 

3) Was there never a Prison Break blooper/gag reel? Whhyyyyyy??? If I'm just missing it, please someone tell me?

4) Recent kiddo pictures just because it's been a while...


( Ava and Shawn )



5) Off to attempt to write... if that fails I'm having a mini marathon because I really would prefer to be curled up on the sofa anyhow and the kids are at my parents' house...

The WIP meme: post a single sentence from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations.

Meme stolen from clair_de_lune because I can never ever pass this meme up. Just like last time, I'm doing another meme alongside it: Give me one of my own stories, and a timestamp sometime in the future after the end of the story, or sometime in the past before the story started, and I'll write you at least a hundred words of what happened then, whether it's five minutes before the story started or ten years in the future. (Keep in mind if you pick "Into the Dark" I may focus on characters other than the ones you might prefer or possibly yank bits from the as-yet-unposted "Five Minutes to Midnight" to fill the request)


( The WIP meme )

1) I just rewatched the episode "The Key" of Prison Break while doing laundry. God, I... I had almost forgotten how amazing season one was. How planned out and nuanced and just generally fucking amazing. Also? Wentworth Miller looked so, so much younger in season one. I love the salt-and-pepper stubble hair by the end of season four, but ... good God he's just fantastic to stare at.

2) Slightly relatedly, finished chapter three (11k words so far) of "Five Minutes to Midnight" last night. Mahone's perspective was slightly harder to write than anticipated but I got to write a part I was really looking forward to and I'm pretty pleased with how it worked out.

3) I know there's a few people watching my flist who are waiting for the aforementioned fic (I've gotten a few e-mails). Thanks so much for your patience guys. It's totally at the forefront of my mind and I'm actively working on it but there are so many characters and moving parts to it that I honestly can't post as I write chapters because I'm bound to miss something important. There are... 15 characters - not counting anyone on The Company's side - being dealt with at this point. Dynamics are complex and plotting the security features of a Company compound as well as ways to try and overcome them is exactly as difficult as it sounds. I'm being a perfectionist here and I want to get it right. So, yeah, I know I'm demanding a lot of your patience, but thanks for waiting and bearing with me. I'm going to give myself a target date of the end of July to begin posting this fic. If I can stick with writing a chapter a week, I should be about done with it by then (of course, that puts me at about halfway point for the series... but I'll jump off that bridge later). 

4) Kids are sick-ish so I called out from work today (and yesterday). I should probably care about that more than I do but I just... don't. The kids had me and Dan up a lot last night, so Dan came home early too with the intent that we drop the kids off at mom's and grab a nap. Turned out to get kinda hot today and the nap didn't happen but about 3 hours of cleaning did (all of it doing laundry. Yes, we have that much laundry to do). Progress was made, but I wouldn't say it's ... clean. 

5) Ummmm... Gonna go read for an hourish and then try and write once the kids are tucked into bed. 

How are your lives, flist???

Yeah, two in one day. Lots of lost time to make up for...


( 8th of 100 Fanfics I Have Loved [Red Means (Don't) Stop by mousapelli and victoria p.- Harry Potter] )

Just finished chapter two of Five Minutes to Midnight! I'm kinda gleeful. It ended up 6.4k for that chapter alone, which is longer than most of my fics LOL. 

*does happy dance*

*makes coffee and starts chapter three... on to Mahone's PoV!*

Question... When you're reading a chapter in a fanfic, how long is too long?

I'm at about 5k words for the second chapter of Five Minutes to Midnight and I have at least 2k more to go. There's some important stuff in there and I think some of it is pretty engaging but still... I like long chapters when I'm reading, do you guys? 

So I've had a bit of trouble finding both time and direction with my current fic project (Five Minutes to Midnight, sequel to Into the Dark). I wrote a bit the day before yesterday and then realized Jane said something reeeeeeally mean to Sara and even though it was a good line it was totally ill-fitting; she's got no reason to be mean and it creates oodles of problems that I don't want (line was "No offense, Sara, but as far as I’m aware the only part you’ve ever played in a prison break is opening a few doors"). So, I stepped away and thought about it for a bit. Gonna cut that bit and give her a snarky but not unkind line toward Linc instead. Essentially, this part is being super difficult to write because there's so many critical details about where the story is going (not giving anything away to let you all know that they're planning a rescue mission at this point, I think. And... I am not Michael Scofield, so planning a prison break like that does not come naturally to me. Maybe I need a tattoo?).  But, as I've reminded myself lately, the only direction I need when writing is forward. If it doesn't work, cut it. But don't intimidate yourself and hem and haw about problems without doing any writing. This is where I generally fail on longer fics. I'm determined that won't happen this time. DETERMINED.

Likewise, I'm behind on my 100 Things posts and replying to some comments/feedback. Oops! Will def get to the replies today and get some writing done here shortly, but IDK if I'll get my 100 Things post done today. Those take way longer than I'd anticipated because I keep wanting to list older fics and I remember that I loved them but not why so then I end up rereading them and.... there goes an hour or three. 

TL;DR - Have been bad about writing/replying. YAY NAPTIME. *Goes to do both*

First day back at work since having to be out all week because of a family emergency (my grandfather is very ill so my mother flew back to take care of him for a bit leaving me without childcare. He's a couple weeks from 90 and while he's sort of doing better for the moment, we pretty much know that this threw him for a loop and he won't ever really recover... If he'd eat enough food to survive on, that'd help a fair bit though...). Anyhow, this is not really about that. This is about me being at work and therefore not doing other things such as a) writing and b) posting my 100 things post for the day. (Note to self: Win lotto soon). 

So, I'm doing a 100 Things post I had in my back pocket for a day where I had little time. Here ya go... and do remember that the 100 Things are "100 Fanfics I Have Loved" not necessarily "100 Fanfics I Would Rec..." because otherwise this might seem a bit self-centered...


( 7th of 100 Fanfics I Have Loved (The "Box of Brotherhood" Thread by Andacus and Isis_uf - Harry Potter) )

I'm trying to do a "100 Things..." post every day, as you might have noticed. I'm also trying to get 1k words minimum written in "Five Minutes to Midnight" every day... I have a couple days to make up for this week (am at 1.2k of 2.7k I need to get done today to be up to speed but it was Really. Good. Stuff! Probably my favorite part thus far. I'm pleasantly surprised at how well it worked out.). Thus, this post almost got pushed off for tonight. Buuuuuuut... here you go.


(Yeah, I dropped using the graphic every time because it's just so darn big. But, you all know what I'm doing here right? Right.)


( 6th of 100 Fanfics I Have Loved (Safe House by MsGenevieve - Prison Break) )

{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

Once upon a time, I was an enormous - ENORMOUS - Roswell fan...


( 4th of 100 Fanfics I have loved... (Persephone's Footfalls by Elizabeth - Roswell) )

{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

So I've come to the undeniable realization that I don't bookmark NEARLY enough of my favorite fics. NOT NEARLY ENOUGH!


( 3rd of 100 Fanfics I've Loved... The Ancient Curse of Bast (HP/West Wing Crossover... yes you read that right) )

So, back when I was writing "Where Monsters Lie" (*hides*) I listened to a couple of songs on repeat as I wrote (James Blunt's "Goodbye My Lover" mostly... which turned out to be more depressing than I'd anticipated after the first hour). But other than that I haven't usually listened to music while I write. I've found it distracting and too hard to maintain focus. But now that's... not true? Maybe it's the kids' influence. Maybe it's that ANYTHING to melt away the day is better than residual tension from the day or - if I'm bold enough to try and write while they're awake - because music is ten million times better to listen to than Thomas the Train Engine while writing.

On a related note, I'm pretty certain that I inadvertantly named "Into the Dark" after a Death Cab for Cutie song that very likely played on my Howie Day Pandora station (shuddup, I'm totally trying to channel 2005 here, okay? also, don't knock it if it works...) while I was brainstorming fic ideas. Similarly, in making out bulleted plot points I maybe created a barely-there crossover reference set for Five Minutes to Midnight that 99.9% of people won't get, simply because of the way I worded one of the plot points. 

I need to remember my motto of six years ago - Shut Up And Write! - and wrap up this post to go stare at FMtM some more...

{Take the 100 Things challenge!}
Since half my flist seems to be doing this (YAY) and I finally thought of a topic I can blog 100 times about (easily), I'm taking part, too: 100 Fanfics I've Loved. Some will be fairly embarrassing probably because I loved them when I was young and far less discerning. Some will be guilty pleasures. Some will be by BNFs and some will be totally overlooked by most people. Some will just be the best things I've ever tripped across. I'm going to try to hit on at least ten different fandoms with this, too.

So let's kick this off! 


( 1st of 100 Fanfics I've Loved )