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Octocon 2016
So Octocon was great fun. I went into it tired (because i was an IDIOT and i got a new phone on THURSDAY and i couldn’t get it to update properly and i stayed up until TWO IN THE MORNING getting it working right, the day before a weekend-long convention started!) and had a panel Friday night so I had to be vaguely functional through that, and more or less was.
It was a weekend of selfies because I didn’t have the camera with me a lot because I couldn’t find the purse that more or less went with my outfits. :)
Friday night pincurls & rebellion T that I designed. For some reason I always feel like a particular badass with the pincurls and do-rag. :) Got lots of compliments on the shirt. :) Ted was one of the judges for the Golden Blasters Film Festival, so he was busy Friday night watching the films, but we had dinner with Nicholas and Mikaela before that, and we managed a bit of saying hi to everybody before collapsing into bed at a relatively sensible hour. I had Saturday morning panels while Ted set up our stuff in the dealer’s room and went to get Young Indiana from Dad’s house, where he’d stayed overnight.
Saturday morning. The idea was to become increasingly glam throughout the day. :) 
Indy & Auntie Kate I brought about 50 jars of jam and jelly and we sold them all. I also sold some books, but the jam went really fast. O.O :) Ted, who had (has, poor guy) a cold, brought Indy home Saturday evening after Indy charmed everybody he spoke with all afternoon and was a genius at pitching the wares (“Magic & Manners! That’s 15 euro! RAVEN HEART is 5 euro! The jam is four euro each!”).
Indy and author Paul Anthony Shortt at the dealer’s table! 
Indy took this one. Slightly more glam. :) 
me & my boy I spent the day becoming increasingly glam…
Pincurls released! …until I was dressed as Agent Carter from the Marvel movie universe for the evening’s Rebellion Ball.
Gratifyingly, the moment I walked out the hotel room door someone said, “AGENT CARTER!!!” :) :) :) (The decorations for the ball were SO GOOD! The theme was ‘rebellion’ because the Irish Easter Rising was in 1916, so it’s a big thing around here this year, and they’d done up crepe paper banners with all kinds of symbols of SFF rebellions, and had screens with the Matrix code and it was great!)
Honestly, I had every intention of bailing on the ball around 10:30pm and falling into bed, except we were all having so much fun dancing and talking that I stayed up until the music ended, and then, intending to sensibly go to bed then instead of going to the bar, had someone say, “Agent Carter, your mission is not yet finished,” and that was pretty much an irresistable pitch, so I toddled off to the bar to chat until I almost literally fell over at about 1:30 and figured that was Quite Late Enough.
Rey & Agent Carter! 
Marvel represents with Agent Carter & the Winter Soldier (“the two loves of Steve Rogers’ life,” as a friend said!) 
My hat looked great on everyone. :) 
I took a super hot bath at 1:45am and felt good about my life choices as I went to bed. :) I thought I had two panels on Sunday and only had one, which was good because I was pretty loopy. Everybody was getting pretty loopy, in fact. *laughs* Octocon is a small convention, but it’s full of love and friends and we had a wonderful time.
Less glam on Sunday morning, but still rocking a pretty good eye-makeup game :) I *was* kinda crushed that I managed to get to not *one* of the Guest of Honor things, what with being either on a panel or at the dealer’s table during everything they were doing, but that’s the kind of thing that happens, so there you go. :) It was a lovely weekend and I got home last night and stayed up and talked with Ted a while, fell into bed, got up to bring Henry to school this morning and came home to take a 2.5 hour nap on the couch, which I really never do. I could go back to sleep, too, omg, but it was such a nice weekend. Thank you to all the staff and volunteers and everybody!
the author with her latest works :) 
Shilling for Dublin 2019! 
GoHs Diane Duane & Peter Morwood rendered speechless as they recieved the Golden Blaster film award for career achievement, as GoH Rhianna Pratchett applauds! 
This isn’t actually the last picture I took at Octocon, but it accurately represents everybody’s level of exhaustion by Sunday evening. :) -
weekend writing retreat
I had a little stress-induced breakdown this week (mentioned earlier under the cunning title “rage bot murder machine” or something like that) and consequently Ted sent me away for a weekend writing retreat this weekend.
My primary goal going in was to get the REDEEMER manuscipt to 90,000 words (about 4/5ths done), and my secondary goal was to write 15,000 words if I could (these two goals were separated by a wordcount of about 1500 words).
I wrote about 16,000 words, which comes out (roughly) to about 53 pages of a published novel, so that was a pretty good two days’ work. Not my absolute top speed (my best one-day-spree ever was 12K, and my all-time personal best was a 30K novella written in 3 days), but a very good weekend. I’m especially pleased because, due to how my brain is wired (I guess) I’d hit my primary goal but was looking at being Pretty Disappointed That I’d Missed The Secondary Goal, except I had an exceptionally good writing bout on the train ride home and raced well past the Secondary Goal for Bonus Delight.
Anyway, aside from writing, let me tell you, I really lived it up. I bought a new pair of jeans (€12!). Had to, the thighs were going in the pair I was in. I went crazy and splurged on the Nice Shampoo from the hairdressers’ shop. I took a bath at the hotel and shaved my legs. I am a *party*. *animal*.
A party animal who is going to bed now, having used up all her brain this weekend. #snxxt
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Mental Health Day
I asked for a Mental Health Day as a birthday present from my parents, and yesterday got to take advantage of it. They collected Young Indiana at about 9am, leaving me to sit quietly and finish reading my book without interruption (!).
Book finished, I toddled into town and met a friend for lunch, which was great fun and involved a lot of laughter and probably too-loud voices. :) After that I got a 90 minute massage, after which I was going to have an eye exam but I decided focusing was too much work after that massage, and I spent the rest of the day in a state of blurry sleepies.
I did, however, manage to stop by Chapters and pick up the two birthday books that had been ordered for me, and now I have to not read them right away. :) I was too tired to cook dinner (Young Indiana had woken up at 4am, and although he eventually went back to sleep, it was only for about 90 minutes, so I started out tired.), so we had a delicious repast of sandwiches, and I collapsed into bed at 10pm to sleep the sleep of the just until 8am, whereupon I had to get up and go doze on the couch for 90 minutes. OMG, I was tired.
Also, over the course of the weekend I had four or five inches of hair cut off, and redyed and re-striped what remained (which is a lot; it was down to the small of my back).
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good morning, world
Busy weekend!
Look, I know it was busy, why is it so hard to remember what I did?
Well, among other things I went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel with Mom and Dad, which was fun. I hardly ever get to do things like that with them. :)
I actually spent most of the rest of Sunday at the cinema cafe, writing, and I got a heartening 4700 words written–an entire chapter in this new project–over the course of the day. The book is at just under 21K, I’ve got all the major characters and most of the minors introduced, so now it’s on to the muddle in the middle. It’s been sent off to beta readers who will tell me if I’ve done anything totally unforgiveable and then I’ll, er, hopefully just get to charge on to the finish line. :)
Oh! I also stopped by the new location for SubCity, our local comic shop (and got the Hawkeye graphic novel :)). The new location looks great, lots of room and a lovely big huge wall of graphic novels–it’s terrific! So that was fun, too. :)
Saturday was a day with family and going to the farmer’s market (the very nice girl there to whom I brought Christmas candy and had not since seen was *effusive* in her praise of the candies, which was lovely of her ♥ :)) and going to the park and things. I watched a bit more Beauty and the Beast (Steve’s writeup of month two of our re-watch is here, I hain’t done mine yet), and…yeah, just a busy and pleasant weekend.
Oh, hey, this is maybe the neatest “books you should read” list I’ve ever seen. (It reminds me of a time in college when I’d ordered copies of Lloyd Alexander’s Beggar Queen trilogy from Waldenbooks (where obviously I shopped ALL THE TIME), and when I picked them up, the guy ringing me up said, “I ordered myself copies of these too, because you always have great taste in books.” That was pretty cool. :))
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Everything is awesome!
I haven’t liked a “hit song within the context of a movieverse” so much since “Backdoor Lover” in Josie & the Pussycats. I thought the movie was at best moderately amusing, but the song, I find hysterical. Also it’s better than almost anything for clearing earworms, and I’d far rather be singing “Everything is awesome!” than the theme song to Sheriff Callie. @.@
(I asked on Twitter what special level of hell was reserved for people who put “Everything is Awesome” as their ring tone, and a friend said it wasn’t so much a special level as an *ironic* level, wherein one was forced to listen to it on repeat for the rest of eternity. :))
The weekend was very pleasant. Ted had gaming, so I ruthlessly abandoned him to it, gave Young Indiana to his grandparents, and went off to Pubcon, which is what happens annually in March when P-Con doesn’t. A number of people I didn’t expect to see were there, and we had a nice quiet evening of sitting around chatting, which was really nice.
And then I slept in until 10:30 on Sunday, with a brief wake-up at 8am to admire how stunningly wonderful it was to have slept until 8 without any interruption.
I spent yesterday afternoon walking up to the nearby gym-with-a-pool, which proves to be too far, realistically, for me to walk to at 6 in the morning. It’s about a 25 minute walk and for me to actually do it it probably needs to be about 15. And the first bus in the morning is way too late to be of any use. I suppose the next step is finding out whether my bike, which has been out in the weather for … some time … is tune-uppable or if it’s a lost cause. It’s not ideal anyway, but it would do for a while. Or I could go to the other one that doesn’t have a pool but is a 15 minute walk for a while, maybe. #wibbles
