seanan_mcguire | ASL, fictional people influence my wardrobe, ow my brain.

I have all these things I want to talk about. Like, my little running junk file contains about three dozen links, and a long list of blog topics (written in my customary all-caps shorthand, so the word "fuck" is pretty heavily represented—sometimes I'm a Kevin Smith movie). Instead, I spent much of my morning mastering the phrase "working for our robot overlords—did I say 'overlords'? I meant 'protectors,'" in American Sign Language. This is a highly useful phrase, and one which I am currently using quite a lot. Sure, I'm using it quite a lot because I just learned how to say it, but the theory is sound.

Other things I can say in ASL:

* The turtle couldn't/can't help you/me/us.
* I will kill you with a chainsaw now.
* I have a parasite inside my brain.
* Ninja!
* Giant metal Santa Claus.
* The salad of infinite despair.
* Moose lobotomy time. Call the moose lobotomist.
* Die in a fire.
* The Black Death.
* Octopus fellatio.
* Science/mad science.
* I want to eat your brain.
* ZOMBIE.

Naturally, I have learned these specific phrases because they are extremely useful in my daily life, and not because I enjoy signing "the salad of infinite despair" at people when they annoy me. Honest.

My current adventures in ASL are strongly fueled by the fact that I have essentially managed to freezer burn my brain as I race through Deadline like I'm being pursued by a pack of rabid weasels. The book is about 15,000 words from over, and I have a very solid idea of what all those words need to be; it's just a matter of getting them onto the page. I alternate between wanting to snarl at anything that keeps me from writing, and wanting to keep myself from writing, since soon, I won't have a book anymore. There will be other books. There will be edits and revisions on this book. But it won't be the same, and it will never be the same again, and after this, I only get to spend one more book in this universe. That's going to hurt. In the course of three volumes, I'll have essentially written four and a half Toby books-worth of story (these are big-ass books), and that makes the Masons and their companions really well-established denizens of my head. I'm going to wind up writing the parasite trilogy just to get myself through the grieving stage. This is, by the way, why I am drowning in series.

(I have friends who only write in single volumes. Bam bam bam, book book book, done. They view my addiction to series with horrified confusion, and some of them have commented that they wish they could do that. In the spirit of the seaweed always being greener in somebody else's lake, I envy the people who can write a book and be done. The closest I get to writing a book and being done is plotting to give certain characters only one POV volume in the InCryptid series. My brain is wired oddly.)

One of my "waiting in the wings" protagonists is a woman named Alice Price-Healy (Verity's grandmother), whose tastes run to camouflage pants, fabrics that can be easily treated for bloodstains, and lots and lots of weapons. She's a hopeless romantic, having spent the last thirty or so years spelunking through the various dimensions surrounding her own as she tries to find her missing husband. Who is probably getting punched in the face if and when she finally finds him, since she's been scared to death for decades now. Anyway, my darling

fireriven pointed me to something on Etsy, and in browsing the seller's other items, I found a red glass heart pendant with an old-fashioned six-shooter charm dangling from it. I stared. My inner Alice announced her covetousness.

I bought the necklace. It arrived in yesterday's mail, and it is awesome. Best of all, when someone asked me where I found it and what made me buy it (since I don't buy much jewelry that isn't from

chimera_fancies), I was able to honestly reply "Oh, the one of the people who lives inside my head told me to." Sowing confusion is fun!

Seriously, though, I think my brain is bruised. I'm going to go home tonight and knock out another 3,000 words or so before watching Leverage, and tomorrow night, I'll go home and knock out 5,000 to 8,000, since I have no bedtime on Fridays. And after I do this a few more times, the book will be over, and I'll need to start occupying my time with something else. Like The Brightest Fell, and starting Blackout, and petting the cats. Oh, and learning how to say "behold, for now I wear the human pants" in ASL.

You know. The important things.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Jonathan Coulton, "Chiron Beta Prime."