Follow Me Into The Desert, As Thirsty As You Are

Survived the first day of school, and have the familiar feeling of not knowing if I'm excited about what coming up, or if I to want to curl into a fetal position in a dark corner and whimper to myself.

Also, managed to pay for publishing brat's European vacation. The total for all my books came to a whopping $267.01 and I still have one more to buy.

So, now I'm tired and wired at the same time.

Still have two more classes to go to and find out what they're going to want me to do. Also, it turns out that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm going to be spending 4 hours straight in the same room. As you can imagine, by that third hour I’m as twitchy as a junkie coming off her fix.

I'll be back to being enthused about my classes later. Right now I'm too keyed up to go to sleep and too tired to be any good at reading and leaning.

Thank god for livejournal, eh?

Also, I wanted to let my flist know about a really cool, easy challenge that's coming up: 14valentines.

"It's meant to raise awareness -- and hopefully as a result increase participation in community women's groups. 14 Valentines will run for two weeks (14 days) for the first half of February, ending on Valentine's Day, also Victory Against Violence Day.  The mission of 14 Valentine's isn't to solicit money for the cause -- as anybody who has worked at a nonprofit knows, money does not fix all or even some of the problems -- but instead of remind everybody that there is a cause, that it touches each of us every day and that we should embrace the agency we're lucky enough to have and do something good with it. We're all global citizens -- we're a global sisterhood, too."

Basically, you write/draw/vid/create a piece of something and then post it on the day you signed up for (and the theme of the piece doesn't have to match the theme of the day. Easy right?)

Plus you get to play with academics, women in the arts, body image, domestic violence, economics/wealth, women's heath, hunger, peace movements, reproductive rights, sexual abuse, voting, women in sports, women and work, plus you can pick your own cause.

I admit, when I first saw this I was like, ‘great idea, but I don't write fic for issues, I write for the characters’- and then all the strong damaged chicks who like to feed the plot bunnies showed up.

Come on, how could you give up a chance to write about great women with chinks in their armor?

We Have Snow! That I Don't Have To Drive In!

It snowed! Just a dusting, but still, SNOW! That I don't have to drive in! Score!

Also, I came across a hilarious rant on fanficrants regarding smut.

Just her intro totally owned:

"I don't mean, oh, yeah, I've seen enough smutfics to understand the obscure language people use to describe sexual acts, and any smut you throw at me probably won't surprise me... no, I mean I have seen enough smut in my time that anatomical errors on your part will be noticed, noted, and mocked by me. I mean I've probably read about boys in more positions than twelve books on kama sutra could offer you if you were in bloody India at a bookstore specializing in kama sutra. If there were blackbelts in desensitization to smut, I would probably have used those blackbelts to BDSM tie someone up by now. Really."

And than she gave good things not to do. But the into! Win!