So... I may be kind of ridiculously excited about the fact that after lunch today I am heading down to the Hobbit red carpet.

I feel a little bit disorientated, like, I’m excited about Martin Freeman because of Sherlock, I’m excited about Elijah Wood because of LOTR, but I know next to nothing about all the dwarves and stuff. I’m off to see a fandom that I don’t have yet but probably will within the next few months!

Anyway, no idea if I’ll get anywhere near the red carpet by then, apparently a lot of people camped out overnight. I’ll post pics if I get any though!

Wee!

Not sure if I can actually sustain working a 9-5 while dealing with anxiety issues and depression.

So, internets, a question:

Doing a Masters in Creative Writing at Victoria University... good idea or bad idea?

Hi hi!

Just FYI, like half the people on your flist, I have kind of abandoned Livejournal and am now mostly over on the dreaded tumblr. I am Prairie-Grass over there toots.

I'm not a 30-billion re-blogs a day lady, but would love some more people to squeal about Things with, so, you know, if you're tumblr-inclined, come hang out.


Second point the second (but not really):

Fandom wise, I'm ALSO like half the people on your flist and have sunk DEEPLY into the DEPTHS of Teen Wolf fandom. I am deep-sixed by the shirtless werewolves and their flaily human companion...

So there's that.

Meanwhile tonight after getting out of bed at 8:30pm, I am finally getting some shit done and listening to Florence's new album REALLY LOUD and it's awesome coz it's Saturday and my bro is playing video games online with my other bro so he can't hear me and my flatmate is in Brazil so she can't either. YAY FOR LATE-NIGHT LOUDNESS AND DOING OF STUFF!

I know I'll be happy if I go out. I know I'll be happy if I go out. I know I'll be happy if I go out. I know I'll be happy if I go out.

I know I'll be happy if I go out.

But all I can think of right now is how much I love being at home, and how there's fanfic and teen wolf and tumblr and borderlands 2 at home, and how I've had the shittiest week ever.

And I don't want to go.

This happens every single time I have to go out. And even I'm sick of myself, but I just don't want to go.

Sometimes being an introvert sucks.

I've discovered that in my old age I have become something of a pedantic arse. Hopefully my ability to laugh at myself prevents me from being that Annoying Guy who always needs to correct people on minor inaccuracies, but I think at times I come close.

In order to prevent this spiralling out of control into my visions of torch-welding villagers coming after me with pitchforks, I've decided to award myself +1 Friendship points whenever I hold my tongue instead of correcting someone.

This will be difficult for me, as there are so many people who are WRONG everywhere. If I do not fail miserably, I imagine I will level up extremely fast.


Working on Sekrit Projects this weekend...

So then I moved city and started a new job.

Christchurch kind of sucks these days, so I picked up and moved to Wellington, our fair capital (also for Reasons). I've never lived here before, but visited a few times. It's all-told a pretty sweet city to live in. More hipsters and hippies here, so I'm more amongst my own kind (although mimei would laugh at me to hear me describe myself as a hipster - which I'm NOT, for the record. ^_^).

My new job is as Corporate Admin to the Max! I'm working for a Government department. It's a bit of a culture shock to go from being the admin for the 15-strong staffed branch of a medium sized business, (literally working out of a HOUSE, because our office fell over in an earthquake) to working on the 10th floor of a huge office with a staff of over 100 just in our two floors. I feel a little like a gawky tourist from Hicksville staring at all the tall buildings.

But really, I can't stop staring at all the tall buildings! Christchurch has (had?) a bigger population than Wellington, but it certainly doesn't feel like big city the way that Wellington does. Chch had no restrictions on growth for a really long time, and being built on a flat plain meant that it just expanded outwards. Apparently also there was some weird law until like, the 80s or something that no buildings were allowed to be taller that some statue's hat. I dunno. Town-planners are weird. Especially when they're trying to recreate a English utopia.

Anyway, woot woot for new beginnings and such. Presumably the culture-shock will wear off at some point... ^_^;

Hi all, been a while since I’ve mustered up the brain to talk about anything. I actually have three different tabs open with drafts of journal entries, so let’s hope this one actually gets published, right?

Life stuff:

I survived my road trip. (Pic below.) And survived spending a week with my Dad. (I think the driving was the easier of the two.) ( Road trip... )


My Grandma died this week. I’m okay with it, she’d had dementia for 13 years so we all were glad her suffering ended. It’s still a downer though. Nuff said about that. :-/


Writing stuff:

I imagine many of you have struck this before, but I’m really struggling with feeling at the moment that I’m so close to the point where after just a little more writing, contacting an agent and a producer for my TV show is really really close, and in a nutshell, I’m totally freaked out. I’ve always been a pretty driven person, so I’ve never really questioned that one day I would get published, (simply because if so much crap gets published, semi-decent should be okay, right?) but now that it comes to it (especially with the TV show, because it’s so out of my comfort-zone) I am seized by this panic of ‘what if it doesn’t work?’ What if I try and fail? What if all this work is for nothing? What if no one likes it? What if they laugh in my face?

It’s a strange experience for me because there are actually logical answers to each of those questions, but every time I answer them the question just rolls around and comes back as if the answer never happened. Is this what it’s like to be an irrational person? (j/k ^_^) Somehow I have to get around this freezing panic and finish my work. I don’t really know how.

Unrelatedly, (mostly,) said TV show recently pointed out to me (in the nature of non-sentient beings) that it would be much cheaper to produce, thus more likely to get picked up, if instead of being written in a futuristic post-apocalypse utopia, it was sans the utopia and just post-apocalyptic semi-third-world-but-with-cool-future-gadgets. While this was a good point, it has meant that I’m in the process of re-writing the whole blasted thing. Wah, brain, why be helpful, huh?

I’m taking part in thewritinggame to get myself sticking to my writing goals. Looking forward to joining in, I’ve missed the start due to busy busy.

That’s all from me!

This entry is in two parts. The first being from Sunday, which I wrote but didn't post, the second being from today.

Part One: Secret Masterplan 2012 - Day 001

Achieved so far:

- Made Masterplan. (It's secret)

...That's about it.

But it's a plan! A secret one that I will be secretly squirreling away at for hopefully the whole year.

Like a boss.

A squirrel Boss.

I got all the nuts.

So, my New Year's Eve involved a birthday party as per usual. We had a teddy bears' picnic! The weather was average so we didn't really picnic, but we did do three-legged races with our teddies, an egg and spoon race with out teddies, and a egg + spoon + three-legged + teddies race as well, which was fun, and my mother cheated her ass off! (Which is funnier if you know her because she's so Good and Kind a lot of people think she should be nominated for sainthood.

I've had my brother and his girlfriend staying with me since Christmas, which has been great but we;re all SO TIRED I think today is going to consist of what we like to refer to in these parts as SBA - Sweet Bugger All. At last! I've warned all parties that if they want to see me they'll have to approach me at my station in bed. I won't be moving until starvation becomes a concern. Maybe I'll get lucky and someone will come and 'force' feed me out of fear for my general wellbeing.

How was everyone else's New Year? Do tell.

Love love.

Part Two: Secret Masterplan 2012 - Day 002

Firstly, I want to assure everyone that force-feeding was not required, my brother simply made pancakes and I immediately got out of bed. That was at about 3pm though so it wasn't a crime to summon me at that stage. Also, I managed to read the entirety of Green Rider, by Kirsten Britan, (which if you like fantasy and haven't read it before, I recommend thoroughly) which I'd been given / chose for my birthday.

Secondly, this is Persephone and Hogsworth.



They are my awesome birthday presents from my flatmates who are accompanying me on my ROAD TRIP! I am driving off on an epic adventure tomorrow at 7am. I take the ferry across Cook Straight at midday tomorrow, stay with my brother in Wellington then move on to Taupo the day after to stay with my Dad. After that I will either have AVENTURS or I will curl up in Dad's spare room and read books and write and not move much at all other than that for a week. We'll see. Anyway, hopefully I will post some pics as I go. Anyway. I gotta go to bed so that I can drive across the country tomorrow! Woo!

I did eeeet!


With all of about 20 mins to spare, or the like, I got my draft in for the SamDean MiniBigBang!

MY BRAIN, MY BRAIN YOU GUYS!

I started writing on Sunday avo (it's Tuesday night here) with a fic I'd started YEARS ago that had all of 3,000 words done and a notes page, and wrote 6,000 words over 3 days and now apart from you know, making it not suck, and adding a sex scene and maybe another one or two to make the flow work, it's DONE!

Not only that, but I ALSO finished my creative writing project for class sans one last run-over to check that the final edits don't have spelling mistakes, so for a couple of snow days, basically, I have been a ninja. (I didn't get any work done of what I was being PAID for but eh, I work hard the rest of the time, it's a SNOW DAY, I should be allowed to fuck around.)

What else? Oh, YAY NEW HOUSE! (I usually hate shifting, but was SO UNHAPPY at the last place this is a breath of fresh air.)

Also, hoping to buy a car in a few weeks, if I can get the BLOODY IRD WEBSITE to work! Stupid me not writing down passwords.

In other news, please remind me that getting into politics just because there is currently a wet blanket and a used tissue as opposition to the right-wing party in this country is NOT A GOOD IDEA AND I WOULD HATE IT AND DIE WITH STOMACH ULCERS AT 35!

Speaking of which, I had a PROCEDURE a few weeks ago which involved getting injected with something that instantly made me lose my short term memory (spy drugs!) and then had a large tube shoved down my throat, (oOOooO) in conclusion, FUN! (Especially coz the results were good.) Except the fun may go away coz they just got in touch a few days ago with me to have another appointment, which they said they wouldn't do unless the histology showed something. :/ Everyone is assuring me it's all fine, just routine, but I'm gonna call and check coz if it is just routine then I'm not going coz I've already had about a million days off work now for random shit like this!

Okay, Peeji is not nervous, no, not at all.

Whee! Off to bed coz the rain is melting the snow. Wah.

Comic books have become a BANE to me. Between DC and Marvel, basically they've got every possible character, power and concept covered by their enormous, bloated, wonderful, annoying sphere of influence.

It doesn't help that because I've interacted with these canons at various times, I keep accidentally plagiarising them without realising! Some things I know I came up with myself so I'm willing to fight for it if their happens to be a similar thing in comic-verse, but other things I just can't be sure. Last night I was trying to find a name for a character who was a Russian teenage boy who was a big, quiet, shy, family-orientated guy and something of an artist. I'd originally called him Andre but then realised that was my cousin's name, so could get me into trouble, so I was going through babynames.com (my SAVIOUR!) and I saw 'Pyotr' and really liked it, but I suddenly got this weird inkling. I new X-men's Colossus was Russian, and kinda nice, but he's BARELY in the X-men cartoon, so I didn't know much about him, and couldn't remember his first name. Luckily I've learnt to be suspicious, so I looked it up anyway, and sure enough, Piotr Rasputin, also known as Colossus, a shy, quiet man with a love for family and, surprisingly, a fantastic artist.

*headdesks*

Luckily I hadn't written him in yet so I can make some changes. Swapped his and another girl's powers so it brings out different things, made some personality-changes. Siiiiigh.

Then I was trying to figure out a code-name for a different character, was thinking 'puppet-master'. Again, a suspicion came over me, and upon checking, I find that BOTH DC AND Marvel have a villain named Puppeteer/Puppet Master respectively. SIIIIGH.

I'm off to have lunch.

P.S. My Nana died on Tuesday. Had the funeral on Friday. It's been a really tough time and I'm not dealing too well with the stress of that plus losing two weeks in my last month of Uni between flying to Wellington to see her in hospital and the funeral and stuff. PLUS I have crazy job-related shenanigans going on. So yeah. Um, barely-functional Peeji is barely functional. :/

Hi all. Been ages I know, ra de ra.

PSA entry is a PSA.

A few things of note:

1. I'm changing my LJ handle. page_r is finally transforming from a random name that people confuse with an obsession with pagers, to prairie_grass. This will occur shortly, just thought y'all should know.

As part of this, this is gonna stuff up Dreamwidth for a bit, because I can't afford TWO name-changes. THUS, what is happening, is prairie_grass already exists at dreamwidth, but is not linked to page_r at dreamwidth. I'll be uploading (downloading? side-loading?) my livejournal to that journal soon, and posting a PSA to the old one that the links will die when I eventually delete it, but all the same content can be found in the new one. Does that make sense to everyone? I doubt there will be TOO many people with links to fic or whatever at my Dreamwidth account, so hopefully it won't cause a major inconvenience. Please re-friend the new account as you so desire.

2. My thesis is due in four weeks, as well as the first part of my original novel. As you might understand, I am a little crazy right now. A year and a half of work finally coming to a close! @_@ Don't expect to see me much before then. Though after that I might suddenly be around a lot bugging everyone! XD

3. I'm gonna be taking part in the Sam/Dean OTP mini-big bang this year. It's not a huge amount of writing and everything I've been working on has been so Srs lately that I want to do something fun. Wooo!




Also, my reaction re finale? \o/

Now, off to engage name-change!

Bad guys don't carry clipboards any more, they have tablet-PCs. Or evil smart phones. Highly evil. This is so important to remember, we don't want no clipboards with their brown-ness, and their ancient metal clips that grab fingers, and certainly not a pen attached with a STRING (heavens!) wandering on stage.

No paper, either, probably. Bad guys, especially science-y bad guys are far too advanced for paper and shun the thought of natural products in their places of evil science.


I'm working on original fiction at the moment for class, (can you tell?). The first 10,000 words of a novel. It's quite strange for me to be returning to standard prose after working on scripts for so long, plus it's hard to gear down from one creative project (script) and gear up for a different one that, while it's been sitting on the back-benches for years, hasn't really had my attention in a long time.

Part of me wishes I could be writing the middle ten thousand words of this novel, or even the end. I don't know about other writers, but I almost always have a very sound concept of how a story will end, and all the drama involved, long before I have a clear grasp on the rest. Beginnings are the worst, because I actually have to convince the readers to love these characters as much as I do, when it seems like it should be so obvious they should already know.


Meanwhile, university is in tents! I'm gonna take my camera in next week and maybe make a video, because it's just so surreal. No news yet of when I'm going to be back in my building. Working from home and glad the BF and I shifted before the Quake, coz in my old bedroom I couldn't sit at the desk, and I really find the idea of writing an entire hons thesis from bed to be a painful sounding excursion.

(I've been away lots and not replying to comments much lately. Apologies! And thank you to the people who posted on my HELP! post a while ago. Promising myself that I will improve my internet responsiveness over the next few months.)

Hey guys. Just thought I should update here for anyone who is concerned. Me and my family are all confirmed okay. Our houses are alright although there's been some damage here and there and water is out in my Mum's and brother's places.

A very close friend of both my brother and by best friend was caught in his shop in the central city and didn't make it out alive. I didn't know him well but it's still a really hard thing to deal with. I can't imagine how frightened he must have been.

No other confirmed deaths yet amongst my friends etc but they're still pulling people out so we really don't know what's happening. Out here in the suburbs things are pretty okay. One of my best friends' home is flattened completely though.

We're going in search of food, later. I forgot to stock up after the last one.

Yeah... that's all to say at this stage. If the water situation gets really bad we're going to move out of the city and go stay with my Dad in Blenheim for a few days.

Just really glad I didn't go to work yesterday. Sometimes being lazy is a good thing.

Love to all. Thoughts are with anyone who is in a worse situation than we are.

~Peeji

I desperately need your help!

(Contrary to all appearances, I have not died, and I even have plans to inform any who care of the various things that have kept me away for the last four months AND an attempt to be more interesting in general that should begin very shortly, HOWEVER, in the mean time...)


It's an emergency and I believe you have skills to save me!

I'm doing a paper this coming semester that involves writing 10,000 words of original fic. Which would be amazingly exciting, but my university's creative writing department is pretty fail, and the only person they can find to supervise me is "unfamiliar" with Sci Fi as a genre. ;_; The story I'm writing is an urban fantasy/sci-fi mixture and my supervisor wants me to recommend her some books to use as a "point of reference" that are in that genre.

My problem is, I'm hitting a total blank. I don't tend to read Sci Fi, I watch it. This story is kinda spies with superpowers, so think X-men, Alias, Dark Angel, a lot of the DC and Marvel comics cross fantasy and sci fi really well, all I need is some sweet technology being used with superpowers or something. Surely that's not too much to ask? You guys know of some really good novels in this genre, right? Even chuck in something really cliché and trite to show what I want to avoid if you can?

Ask your friends, too? Come on, with the power of the internet we can do anything, right?

Okay, so I'm coming back to the internet in two days after my last assignment for the year goes in, but I was just compelled to post because I just hit my minimum-goal for mininanowrimo of 3,000 words (100 p/d) and we're only 6 days in! Woot! And that's WITH working on the world's most massive assignment. My very hopeful goal is actually 10,000 and I'm also on track for that.

Wrote 2,000 words of nummy Spike/Xander porn on Thursday. Whoops. XD

I MISS PEOPLE, AND I MISS THE INTERNETS! SEE YOU GUYS SOON!

So, as you may be aware, it's October. For many people on my flist, this may simply mean it's time to think about pumpkin-carving designs and stocking up on that extra layer of merino. For those of us hanging out in the southern hemisphere who just happen to be attending university, it means that the end of the school year is only a few measly weeks away.

Around me right now is a room full of extremely stressed-out post-grads. It's quite a marked difference from the start of the year, when everyone was full of enthusiasm and you only saw a select few of the students. Now, the number of students has swelled by at least another ten, (who the hell ARE all these sociology students? I swear they just keep popping out of the woodwork. Maybe they're breeding...) and the work has changed from a slightly fun attempt at being a 'real' student into this horrific hair-tearing panic as people progressively realise that these deadlines are non-negotiable, and only two weeks away.

I don't have to hand in my thesis until next year, something which I am so profoundly grateful for I have no words. Seriously. I don't think anyone this year is going to be able to make the deadlines without doing a week's worth of all-nighters. I'm still looking at that later this week. I probably would tonight if I didn't have to be at Kung Fu. Fu is pretty much the only thing keeping my stress from exploding out of the top of my head right now. That, and other forms of exercise.

( Cut for me ranting about exercise and my fear of being overweight )

So anyway, two massive assignments, much stress, no money, job application to go and I'm outta here for the year!

To finish, have a picture of the blossom at the bus stop last month!