supermouse

I'm alive and still haven't had Covid-19, but given how transmissable the current strain is, and the exciting new ways uk.gov seems to be finding to get just the right level of infection and death, I'm not sure of making it all the way through the three years or so I expect the entire pandemic to last.

You'd have thought that, since I've spent the last few years unable to leave the house most days unless someone is with me so I can switch my brain off and just follow (and there is no one so that means one or two outings per year for the last... three years?) that the pandemic wouldn't have made much difference. I don't go out anyway, I got food delivered anyway.

It has. I used to live through other people mentioning things they did, a lot more than I realised, to have that sense of 'going out'. Also, watching people go through their various breakdowns is not exactly fun, nor is wondering whether people have gone quiet because they're stricken, and whether those stricken will make it.

Writing fiction, writing bad fiction has been a huge solace. I have imaginary people to be company, in a world where things are either fine or fixable. Given I have chronic daily migraine and stopped being able to tolerate any painkillers at all, being able to be out of my head matters very much. No one is ever going to see any of my first drafts, and one of my more self-indulgent fanfics is now the rough basis for an actual novel I'm working through, my third of the last two years. This one is set in an alternate universe, and so can't suddenly be pandemicked out of sub-genre.

I have two finished first draft novels as a revision exercise, I suppose?

Posting fanfic is going well. The Harry Potter franchise is massively problematic, I don't pretend it isn't, especially since JK Rowling decided a huge amount of my friends weren't supposed to exist or live their lives peacefully and helped push some ugly reactionary ideas as 'feminism'. It had major problems even before that.

The actual fans, at least where I hang out, are pretty decent and the world is very, very easy to write fixits in, or extrapolate and embroider. It's like the world is just bad enough and just good enough to use and to want to fix, and just simple and just complex enough to keep straight and be interesting. So, my fanfic is Harry Potter fanfic.

Anyway, my happiness yesterday was by getting not one, but three comments approving of my last posted chapter, and that was a big deal to me!

How are things going with you?

Last night I read about plate tectonics. Today I made a map, starting with the plates so I could get the landmasses in the right place. Then I got distracted and got it wrong anyway, but it's a decent enough map. Although I splotched a lot inking it in. Nothing which can't be fixed with Tippex and a razor blade. I'm trying to tell my perfectionist self *not* to start all over again a third time, and to just go ahead and add in mountains and volcanoes.

I am seriously thinking about buying an Ursula Vernon original piece. She very rarely does something which I don't like.

I stayed up very late tonight watching My Little Ponies - Friendship is Magical. I looked it up on Know Your Meme because MLP gifs were turning up on various comms, decided to have a look at episode one on YouTube and became interested in it as something lighthearted and fun to watch. I have *no idea* why it's become so popular with 18-34 yo males but now I'm enjoying it too. There's plot and humour and decent 80s-style artwork and even a Benny Hill chase in Episode 3. I also now have a strong urge to hunt out Powerpuff Girls DVDs.

I need to get back to learning languages before I lose all the ground I gained this month. I haven't lost interest; I just forget and then it gets to be too late in the day to learn (the longer I am awake, usually the more headache I have and the less I can concentrate). Irish Gaelic's a total sod to get the hang of, because the literal meaning of the words is so unlike how they translate to English phrases, so you can't take bits of basic sentences and bang them together in new ways to make a new basic sentence like you can with Spanish or French or German or Italian. And that's before you get down to the tenses apparently changing depending not only on how many people there are, but also what they're doing, where they're doing it and whether they're likely to do it again. With French and Spanish, I advance slowly but do seem to actually be learning. Irish, I have to start all over again from scratch if I so much as go and make a cup of tea. I keep going back though, because I love trying to guess what to say and then clicking the little button to see if I got it right. It's very much Language Learning for Gamers.

There's an allotment tea party on Sunday and a game next Saturday so I could be unusually social this month. I was really touched to find out L has missed me being there. I've missed going too. I explained about being housebound most of the time, so if I can't go, she'll drop off the stuff I left behind last year.