Hello, my lovelies!

So I know I haven't been over here in approximately a zillion years, but I know for a fact that I wouldn't have started taking writing seriously without the encouragement, feedback and assistance of my wonderful LJ gang. Just shy of a decade ago, I posted a tiny little snippet and than ran away from the computer flailing with nerves as usual. When I came back, a dear friend had left me a comment telling me that I had 'established myself with the big kids' and I remember having a little moment of "Whoa, have I? I better keep this up!"

Without moments like that and the years of solid, sincere support and lessons that followed, I know my life wouldn't be the same shape it is now.

So, y'know, I LOVE YOU GUYS. So there! Harumph!

Entirely related, for a change, I've sold a story to EDGE Publishing and am going to be appearing in Tesseracts 17 this October. I didn't think it was fair for long-time cheerleaders to not hear about that just because I haven't been able to locate them on Facebook or Twitter!

http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess17/t17-catalog.html

I hope everyone here is doing well and not getting swept away in the truly apocalyptic weather we've been having this year! I'm going to try a bit harder to stay in touch. Cross my heart. :)

So I logged onto LJ to check out a friend's post just now and was promptly sent an email to the effect of "Holy shit! Someone logged onto your account, bro! That's SUSPICIOUS and you should look into this situation!"

So, uh. Hiiii, folks! :D I still exist, I swear. Doing really, really well... Still plugging away at the courthouse, sending stories out into the universe, collecting an EVEN MOAR EPIC collection o' rejections, and adopting more cats. (Yes, I have two now. It was a life-or-coyotes situation, alright? My hands were tied!!)

I'm far more frequently on Twitter (@FennellFiction) and Facebook these days, so please feel entirely free to track me down on those venues, alright? It's strange not being even slightly up to date on you guys anymore.

After careful consideration, we have decided that we are unable to use your work but we wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere...

Aw maaaan! At least it's a kind rejection?

This day is just plain kickin' my ass, folks. Quickly, unleash the ultimate heavy artillery of cheering-up-ness!



And I can't even legitimately complain about the other stuff making me sad because it is so silly that I just can't. XD

So I have returned unscathed from the Comic Expo and fortunately wasn't one of the thousands of people they had to turn away at the door due to fire code regulations. (Oh, Calgary. Planning, preparation, and then ambition, okay? It's admirable that you want to be the Canadian version of Comic-Con, but methinks you broke a couple thousand hearts this weekend with that move.)

My mind is all a-boggle at how the event has absolutely exploded since I was there way back in 2007. I don't even know how much larger it was, but they went from about ten rows of folding chairs for the presentations to a stadium, and multiple buildings for the booths. Good golly, overwhelming! I think I spent about 90% of the time just staring around and beaming at everything!

Didn't manage to get too many pictures this time around, but lets go ahead and fling 'em on here anyway!

( Point your eyeballs at these!Collapse )

And that is all for this year! Next year, more bravery with regard to photos, and better planning, and a costume. *nod-nod*

* Addendum: He's not. He's fifty. XD At least Kita's paying attention, bwah!

Frivolous civil claim: $200 to file

Custom-made suit: $500

Amount you're paying your top-notch lawyer to sit in court: $600/hour

Hearing said lawyer stroll up to the counter and, with complete seriousness, ask if his re-filed documents had "passed the mustard"...? PRICELESS.

It's 'passed muster', man. Passed muster. I think I wounded something with my silent internal guffaw.

Here's one for hannahsarah and the ongoing "Williams Syndrome Kids Say The Darnedest Things" files...

I was chatting with Dee on the phone tonight and she was telling me all about some episode of Dancing With The Stars where the folks were sharing life stories...

"And oh my gosh," says she, "It just ripped at my heart cords!"
Pause. "... Tugged at your heartstrings?" says I.
"Yeah, that!"

Hee!

(She also proceeded to talk about "Wrath of the Titans" and call it both "Revenge of the Titans" and "Running with the Titans", but I feel that's a mistake anybody could make. *G*)

So apparently my dad decided to go snowshoeing in the mountains recently and came across...



Timber wolvesies!

He let a game warden know about them on the way out and he said it was a super rare sighting and that rangers who'd worked in the area for years hadn't even seen one, let alone two at once. Pretty damn nifty! I think I've only seen a wolf once in my whole life.

There's a fine line between a run-of-the-mill introvert and something more worryingly hermit-tastic, methinks, and I often have to wonder which side of that line I've set up camp upon. Does anyone else get exhausted after being around too many strangers? And, like, require a significant period of complete silence and isolation to recover from it...?

Well, anyway. Here is a Viking chest! :DDD



Line art by me, carving and construction by mah buddy. Once he stains it and puts some banding on, it's going to be amaaaaazing.

I have started two new stories this month rather than finishing the story which I said that I would be finishing. And of course the one I'm most fond of at this point is the one that makes me headtilt at the most dramatic angle. *facepalm*

( Charlie Fayton had never understood the insistence of terrified children that there was a monster living under their bed.Collapse )

So I've stooped to using my little doodles as blatant bribery. *g* snakewhissperer doesn't get to keep this picture until she's completed the agreed amount of swimming, mwuahahaha.

But you can't expect me to just keep it sitting in a drawer here for another couple weeks, can you?

( Unstable characters, stable relationship.Collapse )

Aw yeah, all set with opening night tickets for The Hunger Games because my friends are amaaaaaazing and tolerate me yelping frantically at them from Calgary about how tickets are all going to be sold out if we don't buy them RIGHT THIS MINUTE... Look, in my defense, the earliest showing was indeed sold out by then and I was supposed to be pretending to listen to purportedly clever people lecture us about work/life balance and personal effectiveness. Heh.

BUT YES. I am excite! :D As mentioned on Twitter, I was under the impression that Hunger Games was basically an Americanized version of Battle Royale and (having gorged myself on Battle Royale a few years ago) I wasn't particularly interested. But my words, they have been eaten with relish since then. Nom nom nom, tasty words. And I do so love being able to take part in some collective excitement. Which is probably why I will grow up to be a fine upstanding cult member, but, y'know. *beams*

In other thrilling news, these fine folks over here put together a list of all authors eligible to be nominated for the 2011 Aurora Awards for Canadian sci-fi/fantasy. One of whom happens to be yours truly. Which means my name is totally on a list that also includes Kelley Armstrong, Cory Doctorow, and Douglas Coupland...

Manic delight, y'all. *g* Manic delight!

No, to the best of my knowledge I am not nominated and have no hope in hell of that happening with authors of that caliber in the mix, but allow me my little triumphs here, would ya? *G*

PS - After seven months at the court, I appear to have earned not one but two nicknames in the space of a week. 'Mouse' and 'Astrid'. One of these is a timid rodent. One of these is an animated Viking. ... I think you can guess which one I'm championing for. (Anyway, my mom already calls me Mouse. Heh.)

I strolled in to work today and found a couple of the folks already there just grinning at me in a suspicious fashion. So I went over to the board where the team leader makes her notes and found in GIANT CAPITAL LETTERS:

"Employee of the week is: MEGAN! (So you cannot fire yourself, quit, or go on strike. :D)"

... with flowers and smilies all around it. XD Oh, my team. They make me giggle!

Oh my good golly, I am jittering around the place, my left eye is twitching, and I've succumbed to desperation-drinking for the first time since November. O_o WHY? Because they made me team leader for the week, for the second time ever, and I am SO BAD AT IT.

Well, no. Correction: I am a very good team leader for the other members of my team. I made sure everybody was taken care of and got their breaks and got to their kids' appointments on time. However, brilliantly, I failed to schedule any assistance or fail-safes for myself for the entire afternoon and thus became the sole member of the first-line team. And then my cash register and it's keyboard stopped talking to each other and I had to do everything manually... *FACEPALM*

Eye-twitchy Megan at end of day: "Supervisor, I would like to strongly recommend that we fire the team leader."
Supervisor (who tends to take my opinion seriously and thus looked horrified for a brief moment): "... Wait, aren't you the team leader this week?"
Megan: "Yes. Yes, I am. And I am firing myself."
Supervisor: *grinning* "You don't have that authority."
Megan: "Then I resign."
Supervisor: *loling* "Then I reject your resignation!"
Megan: "THEN I AM ON STRIKE."
Supervisor: *walks away laughing*
Megan: "... I WILL MAKE PICKET SIGNS IF NECESSARY."

Threat of signs notwithstanding, I am still team leader tomorrow. *woeface*

Last night I dreamed that I was a zombie. Not just any old zombie, but an extraordinarily fat male zombie that the other zombies had decided to eat because A) there were no humans around to nom, and B) evidently I looked delicious. So I started running away, but then I figured out that I could fly and tried crashing through various skylights to escape. And then the other zombies realized that they could fly too and the whole thing devolved into this epic aerial undead dogfight! :D!

... And then I woke up and was convinced right up until about 9:30 that it was Sunday. *shrug* My brain is a muddled place.

Tenuously related only by the fact that it also involves monsters, my self-discipline went splort and I've started writing this little story that's been amusing me in my mind for a couple months now. (Dr. Frankenstein moves to the suburbs, yo. O purest genius!) Which means that my Serious Business lit-fic thingy isn't being finished, but damned if I'm not having fun writing about monsters and lonely kidlets, as I seem to do when left to my own devices. XD

So I've been doggedly carrying this dream-fragment around with me for a few days now because my subconscious brain pitched a fit and demanded that the concept it had created was so fantastic that I needed to bring it back to the waking world with me. So I memorized it in my sleep and now I can't un-memorize it.

Basically, there was this team of superheroes (or possibly super-anti-heroes, given the amount of havoc they were wrecking) with nifty powers and what I thought to be the coolest hero-names ever. They were, wait for it... Malware, Godmode, Hi-Tech, Voodoo, and Ghoul. Their names were proudly emblazoned on the front of their costumes, y'see, which was how I knew.

...

Oh, subconscious brain. You insisted that this would somehow make me rich and famous if I just remembered it. So far all it's done is make me giggle. A lot. Tsk!

(Malware was basically Harry Dresden to boot, so sleep-brain was cheerfully disregarding copyright infringement matters as well. Double tsk!)

I will admit to liking 'Godmode'. *g* It's like something a geeky teenager who accidentally stumbled into superpowers would dub himself! Like 'Kickass'. But geekier.

So you know that first time you sat down and decided "You know what? I could write fanfic. I could totally write fanfic! Look at the crap that's out there; it'll be so easy!"

... AND THEN IT WASN'T EASY AT ALL?

This, I feel, is the perfect summation of that moment. In musical form.



Also, it makes me laugh so hard that there may have been tears. XD

Holy crap, it's been over a month since I've posted here! DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER ME? O_O

Suffice to say, I'm alive and well, for a definition of 'alive and well' that encompasses trading in a week-long head cold for a violent stomach flu and then deciding rather masochistically that, hell, since I couldn't keep anything down in any case, I might as well try to kick the coffee habit. *cough* Yeaaaaah. I've had half a cup this morning just to keep the worst of the 72-hour withdrawal at bay and am feeling distinctly more human.

In job news, my position has been extended until the end of March (whoot!!) and the manager says she has 'plans' in terms of how to keep me on after that, so I'm ridiculously pleased. Especially since next Friday would have been my last day otherwise. Still loving that damn job. Still not bored.

In writing news, the rejection letters continue to flow... but at least that means I'm consistently putting stuff out there, right? *G* The writers' group gals and I are thinking about putting together some sort of collaborative blog over yonder on WordPress so, y'know, watch this space! ;)

Hope everybody is doing well. Please believe me when I say that I haven't stopped reading my flist, I've totally just fallen down with the posting thereon! ... And I enjoy how the Internet is a place where a sentiment that can essentially be translated as "I've just been stalking you in silence, that's all" can be interpreted with a great deal of friendship and good will. XD

*hugs to all*

... It's like Clifford the Big Red Dog, feline edition! *adores*

For anyone who's been having trouble locating a hard copy in bookstores, a digital version on the latest On Spec with my story and interview in it is now available: HERE

Guess what? It's the lovely jackiesjunkie's BIRTHDAY today! *G* Go ye forth and tackle that gal with boisterous affection, because she more than deserves it.

Hope you have a fantastic year, my dear, filled with inspiration, relaxation, and all manner of wonderful things. *glomps and happy sunshine*

IT'S FRIDAY! I've made it through an entire week on cash with nary a dollar unaccounted for, and that's taking in daily sums greater than what I will make this entire year. Nobody threatened me, nobody swore at me, one lady thanked me for being so pleasant, and another said "Hey! Photo-radar lady! I remember you... You made me laugh last month!" :D

Thus, it is time to watch Billy Idol leap around like a moron while battling unconvincing zombies with... with electrified sex appeal or something?

YES, I DO BELIEVE IT IS TIME FOR THAT.



(As earlier yelped about on Twitter, it's taken me, like, four months to notice that the first digits of my court ID number are 007. Clerk. Court clerk. License to file...)