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So. Friday, I headed down to Staples to grab a can of air and a cooling pad for my laptop. For a while now, I've had awful problems with it overheating, and finally I'd had enough. Man, opening it to blow out the dust was like doing surgery, ugh. I'd never taken the back off a computer before, so I was pretty nervous. Didn't help that the dust was absolutely caked onto the fan, yuck. But so far it seems to be running well now, though whether it's because I cleaned it out or because of the cooling pad, I can not say.

The fest stuff has been going well. All the assignments for Eurofunk were sent out a day early, much to my relief. And so far almost everyone seems to be able to work with them, which is also a relief. Putting together good prompts was hard, as it always is, but I think mostly it was okay. It helps that this time I thought to ask people if they'd be doing art or writing. The only issue I worry about now is whether people will feel able to work with the characters they're assigned. It's an issue with Eurofunk vs Nordipalooza; a larger pool of characters for assignments means that there's a greater chance of someone being assigned characters they don't know what to do with. But mostly, I hope, it'll be okay.

Recently started listening to Sabaton after someone pointed me toward the Carolus Rex album. Metal songs about history? Yessss please. They've done stuff with other periods too, but I haven't looked into the other albums yet - too busy digging this one. 8) Not even gonna' lie, I kind of want to make a Sweden-centric FST just so I can put "Lion From the North" on it.

Writing is going... uh. Well. It isn't going as much as it should. But in my defence, work sucks up a lot of my time and energy. Hopefully I'll get something finished soon, or failing that, I'll at least start working on my Eurofunk story, because I do have an idea, sort of. The problem is that in general, right now I have a million ideas, and no time to write any of them. Hopefully I won't drive myself nuts with this. ... And hopefully, once I settle in more at work, I'll have a bit more energy at the end of the day, and I'll be able to write every now and then!

Here's the verdict on my work so far: Reasonable get-up time, reasonable get-home time. And I get weekends! They seem to be on a rotation of 8-hour days for one five-day workweek, 10-hour days the next week. That's kind of weird, but compared to the "ten-hour workdays for ten days, then four days off" thing I had going before, I think I'll like this better.

Mind you, I still have no idea what my job actually is, but I guess I'll figure out eventually. (That's the beauty of the oil sands/construction industry. Nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.)

Finally finished reading and commenting on all the Nordicfest entries last night. I promised someone on the anonmeme that I'd put up a journal entry of personal favourites; guess I'll do that on the weekend. I'll probably set it at "stuff I liked and would read again", that always works.

Anyway, now that I've finished that, I can finally throw myself completely into Eurofunk. I haven't been as with-it and on the ball as I should be; I should have been putting together prompts the last few days. Ach. Well, I'll do a few tonight, a few tomorrow... It'll get done. We've already had about 25 people sign up, which is pretty good! I'll probably put up another advertisement on Tumblr tomorrow or something. I have no idea what size this thing will end up being, but it should be interesting.

Gah... A friend is doing the amazing favour of sending me a cross hairclip (yeah, like Norway's. I don't care if it's nerdy, I need this in my life) and I don't know how to thank her. I'll probably end up writing a fic of some kind, but I don't know what. She loves Norway/Netherlands - and so do I; good gods, I have so many feelings about that pairing and some day I'll come up with a really awesome idea for it, I swear - but Netherlands is such a pain in the ass to write. Maybe some Norway & Denmark gen instead... ach, I dunno. I'll have to think about it. Hmm. 8|a (Pfft, it's a good thing she doesn't read this journal)

Regardless, it means I should really work on finishing this other fic - I worry that if I don't get it drafted before I start anything else, then it'll never get done, and that would be terrible.

Okay, so. First things first. I have a job! I start Tuesday! Pay isn't as great as what I had before, but the hours seem like they'll be less horrific, and - more importantly - I'll be working again. Awesome!

Anyway. Signups for easterneurofunk go live in the morning. I still have a lot of things I need to do - especially now that I'm going to be working, I really need to get prompt lists written up ahead of time - but now that the ball is rolling, I figure it'll be easy enough to get everything done. I wonder how many people will end up joining this one... In the Nordic fest, we had about 40 people. About half of them had to drop, but that still meant we had a ton of submissions, which was nice. Maybe it'll be about the same amount this time around.

Managed to get a little bit more written on that fic. It's coming along nicely - not as quickly as I'd like, but good. Can hardly wait to be done, though. I really want to edit this thing, because I've gotten a lot of really useful advice on characterization from a friend who loves the dude I'm writing about, so I'm absolutely itching to put that into play.

Mind you, now that I'll be working, and what with the fest stuff and all - well, working on that story might need to take a backseat for a while. But, that's all right. I fully intend to finish it eventually. 8)

( Real-life tl;dr. Feel free to skip. )

Anyway. Been doing some work on the Eurofunk fest; so far that's going well. It's really nice to not have to throw it together in a matter of days like I did with Nordipalooza. But I should probably step up the pace a bit - it'd be nice to have everything finished (or at least drafted) by Sunday, I think.

Updated the Nordic Index and the Baltic Index yesterday. Didn't take as long as I thought it would. Strange that there was another request period so soon after the last one - I guess people are writing more now because school is out for some of them, maybe.

Still working on that fic. The one that ate my brain before, that is. I've reached the difficult part, so things are slow going. I suspect that I'll have to cut out entire paragraphs when I start editing it, ugh. But I'm going to keep going - and hopefully just power through this difficult scene and finish it - so that I can get it done. I must admit, partly it's because I'm really interested in seeing how people respond to it. (And then on the other hand, there's a part of me that thinks people won't read it, because of the pairing. Which is also a way of people responding to it, I guess.)

...Also, I really, really need to start studying Norwegian again. I've slipped so badly. I pretty much stopped while I was working, because I simply did not have the mental energy to handle even English at the end of the day, let alone a second language. But now, I have a little bit of time, so maybe it wouldn't hurt to practice a bit.

I've slowly started archiving my fanfiction, but it's kind of a cringeworthy experience. So much of the stuff that I wrote in 2009 is utterly terrible, and even if I was proud of it back then, I can't stand looking at it now. I'm just uploading it for the sake of completeness. Well, maybe somebody will like it. (update: And... now I just deleted everything I archived because I felt it was too embarrassing to put it on Ao3. Sigh. Maybe I'll use a DW as my main backup...)

Recently pre-ordered the APH volume 3 (..and also 1&2) in English. Already have vo.03 in Japanese, but it'll be nice to have something I can read - and that can sit on my shelf. Scanlations are okay, but I don't really prefer them. I know there was a bit of a fuss about the release due to the use of the Tokyopop translation, but after reading through everything, I'm not bothered about it. (Though, I wasn't to begin with).

Lately I've been a bit down in the dumps, which results in me being only in the mood to read published fiction, not fanfiction. It's a bit frustrating, since there are still a ton of fics from Nordipalooza that I haven't even looked at yet. Well, I guess I'll wait until I'm in the mood to read those things. I'll be able to enjoy them properly, then.

Though I haven't been reading fic lately, I have been writing a bit. There was a period of about five days when my internet was down, so I worked on something I started writing around March 2011. I finished the draft when I was in Sweden last autumn, but by then I was so sick of looking at it that I didn't want to work any more. So, anyway, now I've edited that - mostly. It needs another go. I've also been working on something new, but the pairing is very, very, very niche, and involves a character that I have only written once (in a short fic with no dialogue), so I'm feeling really hesitant and unsure about it. I'm having trouble wrapping my hands around this guy's voice, and I'm worried that in the end it won't be very convincing. Well, I'll do my best.

A friend and I were recently discussing the possibility of holding a fanwork fest centred around the Eastern European characters. It sounds good, and I'd love to help them organize it (... well, I'd probably be doing most of the organizing) but unlike with the Nordic version, there would be a few problems with figuring out how to do it. Firstly, there are a lot more characters in Eastern Europe than there are in the Nordic Five (depending on how you define 'Eastern Europe' for the purpose of this). This means a lot more character combinations, and if we do it assignment-based, a lot more possibility of assigning characters that a person can't (or won't) write. Secondly, what concepts would we emphasize? With the Nordics, I put lots of emphasis on family and togetherness and writing uncommon duos rather than the big two, etc. But "family and togetherness" doesn't work as well for Eastern Europe, and these days, all inter-Eastern-Europe works are uncommon (Lithuania/Poland used to be very popular, but now on LJ one hardly ever sees fanfiction with them, for example).

... So, it's a matter of figuring these things out. I like the idea - I haven't written Baltics in forever, and it might give me some good ideas - but it really needs work. Not to mention, I do want to hold a round of Nordipalooza again. Simpler than the spring version; three prompts, pick at least one, do minimum 500 words or one b&w drawing. There were a lot of people in the spring version who dropped because they weren't able to finish both on time, or who were only able to do one. So an easier version might be better.