(no subject)

[bubosquared]

So the power went out at work just as I was in the middle of a long-ass entry, which is consequently now trapped on the work computer, but on retrospect, that’s not a bad thing, because since I started that (rather whingy) entry, things have started to look a lot better.

For one thing, my problem with actually getting at my money seems to be solved (knock on wood). I have a bank card! Not activated yet, but still. I also have cheques! I am inexplicably pleased about this. Cheques! I’ve never used cheques! This is so cool!

The gas has been connected, and the kind gas man (possibly in exchange for the show I only afterwards realised I must’ve given him by wearing hotpants and a tight t-shirt—-It’s hot, okay?) showed me how to light the oven, and I’ve figured out how to go about getting a TV license and a connection to the aerial (sp?), despite an earlier frantic scramble for my keys, I have not yet managed to lock myself out of my apartement, and things are coming together slowly but surely.

And thank fuck for it too, because the stress has been getting to be to the point where I woke myself up at four this morning with a blinding, near-migraine headache, and while it wasn’t quite a full-blown attack (by which I mean painkillers had at least some effect and I could still, you know, see), it was enough to make me cry in pain. Ow. Hate.

Okay, so, right. Will be doing a shitload of shopping tomorrow, for things ranging between a duvet over some filing stuff (will get back on that) to screws. For my desk. Because the original ones are in my dad’s toolbox, in Belgium. *facepalm* And I need to set up my desk before I can set up the rest of the boxroom, so I spent most of yesterday evening sorting through all the crap I’ve collected over the years. Man.

Apart from enough notebooks and scrap paper to feed a small third world nation, and a number of doodles and drawings dating back as far as 1999 (my self-portraits have long hair? The fuck? I cut my hair in ’96!), I also found all my handwritten stories.

First of all, the things I wrote between ages nine and eleven, which consist mostly of your average clichéd ten-year-olds-foil-stereotypical-villain’s-plans, but I still think they’re better than half the stuff I remember reading at that age. Which is fairly sad. Even sadder is the realisation that my spelling, grammar and punctuation were better at the age of nine (my spelling in Dutch has since been royally screwed--twice--by this New Spelling nonsense) than half of the people I see online. I’m scared now.

Then we hit the stuff from my early teens, in which my heavy SciFi phase and my penchant for horror manifest themselves, most notably in The Shadow Without a Face (I know, all right?) and The Black Mirror, the only story I ever actually "sold", and the one that set off a three-year writer’s block because a teacher volunteered me to write it to sell at a school fair with a horror theme and I really don’t work that well against a deadline like that.

After the block, somewhere in 1996, there’s a smattering of notes and snippets of fantasy, and, of course, poetry. Yes, I used to write poetry. There is a reason I don’t write poetry anymore, and that reason is that it sucks. One might say it sucks dead bunnies. Through a straw, one might even say. This isn’t just the Mary Sue of poetry, it is the ff.net Mary Sue of poetry. Good god. I mean, apart from the Typical Teenaged Angst Poems—-and those are bad enough, and make me want to pick up my seventeen-year old self and force-feed her prozac, because all this obsession with death (not to mention Revelations) cannot have been healthy. Man. Anyway, apart from that, I wrote an epic poem In rhyme! Clearly something very wrong with my brain there.

Of course, that epic poem was written for VRStory, an experiment in co-writing gone … well, not quite wrong, but very bizarre nonetheless. Apart from aforementioned epic goddamn poem, it also has a blatant cameo by a dead poet, and not-quite-blatant cameos by friends and foes and dear god, what did they put in those school lunches anyway?

Er, right, onwards into 1997ish, and my first fanfic. To be precise, the original, handwritten version of In the Name of the Father. I daren’t even look at it, that’s how embarrassed I am about that. Oi. And then there’s a plethora of stories, including things like my first HP story, and something I never typed up called Vamps in Space, which I can barely remember writing but which looks like it was planning to become a Buffy/Space: Above and Beyond crossover. I am now officially afraid of myself. O_o

Also, my first RPS (Matt/Ben!), the original version of things like Lust and Polar and various snippets and story ideas and notes for HP fic, and man. I am such a magpie.

That/s one of the biggest advantages of handwriting stories, of course--you have a permanent record of everything you ever wrote. And this is why I need the filing thing, because apart from the handwritten stuff, I want to keep a printed hardcopy (and a softcopy on CD) of all my writings, just in case.

And in unrelated news, I passed on the Good Job Karma anothersuperboy gave me way back when to sonatine, and it worked for her too! Clearly we’re on to something here. :D