mandolin | No rest for the weary, hm?

Well, for those who haven't guessed, the con report will have to wait til next week. I'm flying out to Chicago tomorrow and spent all night last night resizing and formatting digital photos to take them in for printing. (I don't trust Target to crop my photos.) Didn't get done til after 11 last night, and given the inevitable state of panic that will ensue early tomorrow morning - whether we're ready to go on time or not - I'm not adding anything new to my plate this week. I'm quite glad I did take lots of notes this weekend.

Oh, and as for the website-related stuff: This is also why I'm not touching my website or my fanfic this week. (Come on, I'm home for TWO DAYS in the middle of the week before taking off again, where would I find the time?) I plan to get caught up in the next couple of weeks, but until Monday I will have no time to start in on anything. So please don't fill up my box with "Why haven't you finished this?" or "I demand that you update now!" e-mails. (I get these a lot more often than you'd think.) :)

Here's what I would LIKE to have the time to do in the near future:

1) Get my G2003 con report and photos up. This has highest priority. 'Nuff said.

2) Revise "The Key and the Sword." I need to cut out the unnecessary stuff, trim certain fight scenes, make it less epic... part of me is now thinking that Buffy and Giles shouldn't appear til later on in the story. Another part of me has been pointing out that I have no idea how that will work since someone has to inform Dawn about the Compass. (Also, it would require deleting or heavily chopping some of my favorite scenes, like Dawn defending Adam in the courtyard.) And I need to come up with a BETTER reason for Dawn's visions than the one I currently have written down *cough*deus ex machina*cough*

3) Finish Part 19 of "Sharp Edges" so I can post Part 18 without being lynched. Rhiannon's stubbornly boring as all hell, and nowhere near interesting enough to distract Jake as much as I need her to. Irons wants to do more than simply keep the Boss from getting power, but if he finds out about the Key then that's ANOTHER wrinkle that'll drive the fic to 50 parts if I let him in on it. Ethan and Giles are waffling on when Giles should find out Ethan's involved - although his reaction is already set in stone. And Spike's been complaining that I haven't gotten to the scene where he gets to compare Ian to Angel.

4) Do something about my long-abandoned Gargoyles series. This may come as no surprise to anyone, but I look at almost every story prior to "Night Shift" and cringe. (There's a reason I haven't written a story for the Nameless Series in four years.) The stories need work, and my obsession with "Rent" a few years back was shoved in there much too often.

More importantly, I have very little affection for my original characters anymore. Drew never properly developed for me, and his inconsistent character irritates the hell out of me. Clans Laramie and Denver uniformly suck, with the exceptions of Colleen and Razor, who are minor characters. Sarah's mildly amusing, but Callie is whiny, Handsaw's just there, Rachel's too hyper, and Sam isn't really mine. I don't want to rewrite my old stuff, I don't have the strength, but part of me would like to go back and revise "Weekend Off" through the absolute mess that is "Relatively Speaking." There were some good ideas in there, but they were buried in the unnecessary crap. Pulling in my TP crossover was a bad idea. Hell, turning "Lessons" into a series was a bad idea.

5) See if there's anything left of the Now and Again fandom. Yeah,

now_and_again has gotten more traffic, and the N&A fanfic list has been revived somewhat, but I still need to update my N&A site big time. Still can't record decent sounds (it's the damn cable), but I can fix the episode summaries, maybe put up my "Why this Page STILL Exists" essay. The links page desperately needs an overhaul. Zen's N&A page is long gone, and I have yet to find a site with the kind of extensive material she had. Meg and Paula still have good sites, but the masses of screen caps are sorely missed. And I need to get rid of the webring code since the ring was taken down.

And I DO have some N&A plot bunnies that aren't dead. Thing is, the creativity demons for these are not dead, but they've had the sense to shut up while I'm working on other things and haven't exhausted my interest in them as a result. (No, the "Not Again" creativity demons died a while ago. If anyone wants to PICK UP the story for me, go right ahead, just let me know you're continuing it.)

6) Get NTSH running again. Heh, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Lastly, a sign that I've been reading LJ too much: I was listening to "Bring Me to Life" for the nth time in my car this morning - after reading and agreeing that it would be a great theme for a Gargoyles music video - and all of a sudden, I finally made out the lyric "I've been sleeping for a thousand years, it seems..." and nearly choked on my breakfast.