Ce n'est pas une mise à jour. (This is not an update.)

Since I last posted, just 15 days shy of a year ago today, I have taken a number of exciting and fulfilling classes, graduated from library school with a perfect attendance record, done an internship with a non-profit that promotes the humanities in everyday life, written most of a dirty novel, gotten a second boyfriend who is meeting a lot of my visceral needs, and become gainfully employed in my chosen profession. (No, I'm not working in a library, but I'm doing data cleaning in a company that provides support services for libraries.)

I feel awkwardly like everything I do is unfinished. I still haven't looked straight-on at my grade report for my last quarter of grad school, I left some very large loose ends at the non-profit internship, I gave test decks of cards for my math game to teachers but then haven't checked back in with them.

I'm managing to stay focused on the writing, but I'm getting to the point where I need to do much more aggressive editing, and I think I need to define a victory condition. "I can rest on my laurels if I..."

At the moment, I think the victory condition may be:
1) Learn enough about how things get published to find out if all or part of my work is commercially publishable.
1a) If it is, make at least three serious attempts to get all or part of it commercially published.
2) If it is not, or if I get tired of rejection slips, self-publish online in a respectable format on a server that I pay for or otherwise control.

For those of you who already have logins to my writing wiki, hey! Come say hi! And if you've been browsing without telling me, comment, you bastards! For those of you who don't yet have logins, if you're interested in giving substantive feedback on some 1780's very gay vampire smut, give a holler. (Edit: 1780's, not 1880's. Pre-Rev Europe, not Victoriana.)

Special thanks to maribou and memegarden, the first two winners of the "Actually leaving comments in the wiki" award, to capnexposition and hesperide for feeding me and talking about my work in person, and meowse for reading every single word of my work out loud to me and very patiently not reading ahead.

Regarding staying focused on my writing, it looks suspiciously like the pattern when I am obsessed with any other piece of media. It's just harder because I can't talk about it with very many people, because a lot of people know from Xander and Willow, but not a lot of people can appreciate a conversation about Aldo, because they haven't met him. But just so you know, I'm a little obsessed, and my postings may reflect that. Brace yourselves.

I may still be sporadic. I'm dealing with serious social anxiety and not checking email often. I could use some help staying in touch. Phone calls help.

Happy birthday to my mom.

Did you go climb your tree this morning?

Happy birthday to Leonardo da Vinci, too, but I don't think he reads LJ. Anymore.

Killin' officers / Murderin' officers

So I've been imbibing a tiny smidge of media I didn't write lately, thanks to maribou, who turned me on to Sharpe's Rifles. I've both read the book and watched the BBC now, and enjoyed them both. The video adaptation felt rushed and clunky right after the book, but Sean Bean covers many sins.

For those who aren't familiar, it's Napoleonic infantry slogging, brutally described, which should send me screaming in the other direction. But it's also delicious character development, and honor porn, which I'm going to go make an LJ interest RIGHT NOW. (If you don't know what honor porn is, I'm not sure I can describe it, but if you like Bujold, you know honor porn. By the way, if you like honor porn, my work contains scads of it.) The main character is a lieutenant raised from the ranks, which is to say spat on by "real" officers and distrusted by enlisted men as no better than themselves.

But I had a point here, which was types of officers. In the BBC adaptation, there's a lovely little speech near the end, and it goes roughly like this (I'm borrowing someone else's transcription and have not verified its accuracy):

Harper: "Ye'll make a fine killin' officer, sir."

Sharpe: "A what?"

H: "Ye don't know about killin' officers?"

S: "No."

H: "Oh, now that's too bad, sir. I thought you'd 'ave known, coming up yerself from the ranks as ye did... There are only two kinds of officers, killin' officers and murderin' officers. Killin' officers are poor old buggers that git you killed by accident. Murderin' officers are mad, bad old buggers that git you killed on purpose, for a reason, for a country or a religion, maybe even for a flag. They're mean, murdering old buggers."

It is my opinion that Miles Vorkosigan is a killin' officer. Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood, at least in the first four episodes which I have now seen, is a murderin' officer if there ever was one. And I started thinking about it, because you don't need stripes to be in a position of authority where things of value are at stake and hard choices have to be made, particularly if you're a fictional character.

[Poll #1171534]

Edit: A summary of the first 48 hours of results (18 respondents) is available in the next entry.

If you think you can define honor porn or the difference between killin' and murderin' officers articulately, please attempt to do so in the comments. That would make me happy.