helen-louise's journal

I realised last night, I'm on page 37 of my novel and there hasn't been a single female character yet. Not one with actual dialogue. One's mentioned in passing and the other is a horse - I hardly think this counts. The only exception would be if you don't know that I Only Write Slash and assume that the first-person narrator is a woman. Damn!

This is doubly annoying since it's fanfiction, so I'm stuck using the characters who exist in canon. In the scenes with the Blades (the Emperor's bodyguards), I've tried to use the female ones, but there are only two of those. Even worse - and for this I really am a bad feminist who won't be getting any biscuits, my original character Alix moans about a couple of female Mages Guildhall heads. Both of them are incredibly annoying & incompetent in the game: one, who only cares about her own research, not about the welfare of her fellow mages; and another, who has virtually no magical ability whatsoever and only got the job because of who she knew.

This really sucks and I don't know how to fix it. There is a female alchemist, and Oleta, the country's best Restoration trainer, who both have to be written into the chapter I couldn't face writing - oh, and a woman town guard. That's about Chapter 3 of this, if the novel was structured like that. Oleta comes up again in the second-to-last chapter when Alix is completely broken following [MAJOR SPOILER]. There's also a female archivist in the Mages Guild Library who has a part somewhere around the middle. Apart from those, I'd be adding women for the sake of adding women. Hmm.

In other news, I will be at neither the bisexual activists' weekend nor Birmingham BiFest. My body is beyond broken right now. In fact, I've had so much time for writing due to being completely unable to sleep because of pain :/ Right now I can walk about 5 m, and it's fricking agony. Dragging my arse into College today for the first time in two weeks, then home to collapse with the laptop. Urgh.

I am "okay". Magically started feeling better about a month ago, and have been working steadily on my PhD research ever since - but I am still buried up to my eyebrows in work and sinking.

I have a deadline of 6th July for my next report due in to the Graduate Committee, with ideally about 3 months of work to do between now and then. It's okay - I've discussed the situation with my supervisors and we've worked out what I need to do rather than what it would be nice to do, and got that 3 months down to what's possible in a few weeks, but nonetheless I am busy and barely coping.

Also, to make things worse, we have tickets to see Adrenaline Mob on 5th July, meaning that I actually need to get the report almost-completely-finished a day early. I am not missing that gig! It was bad enough missing Steel Panther, Mötley Crüe & Def Leppard in December, but they're all bands that I only "vaguely" like, playing in a big arena. I'm not missing the mighty Mike Portnoy playing METAL in a tiny venue!

So I am being a "crap friend". People are posting about difficult things in their lives, and I've been reading livejournal but hardly commenting on anything - even when the other person desperately needs comments! It's not that I don't care, it's that coherence is not happening awfully well. I need to find out again who is happy to receive blank comments (meaning "I have read this and am sorry that things are difficult for you right now, but I have no spoons for coherent thought"). Either that, or I need to get the copy-and-paste on my phone working better so I can paste that sentence in every time.

In other news, my birthday is mostly cancelled this year - due to the fact that I'll have to spend it working. I'm planning to be at BiFest on Saturday briefly, probably from 2.30-5pm. Let me know if you're going. Also we've been planning to go to Whipsnade Zoo for months (we need to see the bears. Bears are good for stress relief), and finally settled on Sunday June 24th. Let me know if you feel like coming along, especially if you have a car. It's possible to get there by public transport, but not desirable. The bus from the nearest station is only every 2 hours on a Sunday, and is timed so that you miss it.

Anyway, I'm sorta falling asleep now, so I'll post this and go to bed. G'night :)

I seem to be ill. Yesterday, instead of going to Oxford BiFest, I slept until 6.30pm. Eventually staggered out of bed, ate something, and sat on the sofa playing Pokemon and falling asleep. Went back to bed and slept until 2.30pm today, which is actually 3.30pm because British Summer Time kicked in overnight and they stole an hour from us.

I'm really not sure what's wrong. I'm sneezing a lot and have an itchy nose, but it could just as easily be an allergy as a cold. I just feel absolutely shattered and brain-dead.

Thank you all for nice comments on my last post, especially leback who wrote the best part of a complaint letter. Haven't managed to turn that into an actual complaint & send it yet, due to a severe shortage of spoons.

Am coping a bit better but have had a cold for the past week. So that's been a chest infection, a sinus infection and a cold, all one after the other. Seriously, what is wrong with my immune system? I'd be concerned if it wasn't for the fact that I've been like this my whole life, and nothing makes me more likely to catch a virus than going out with a bacterial infection, and vice versa. I have been using my taxi allowance to get to and from college, which makes me feel pretty weird - guilty, even. I feel bad about fossil fuels being used to transport just me. But I honestly haven't been capable of doing the extra walking needed to take the Tube or buses :/

Brighton BiFest last Saturday was fun and it was good to see various people, such as barakta, mattp, a_musing_amazon and anarchist_nomad. Didn't make it down until the evening, so I missed all the workshops, and the_kumquat, conflux & adjectivemarcus... well, hopefully will see them in London soon. The games room was awesome, though playing giant Connect 4 against topbit is a waste of time because he'll win. My ability at most of the common board-type games is way below my intelligence level because I'm an only child and never had anyone to play them with :/ Mind you, I did beat Richard at Connect 4, but only because he lost concentration for a second and put his piece in the wrong place. Hmm.

Wow, there's a lot of tags on this post!

I am so very tired again/still, and slightly stressed.

( List of stuff I need to get done before Monday night. )

Today I went to Brighton to take part in a Brighton BiFest committee meeting. I am the Webmonkeymistress & Cake Wrangler. I have posted a poll all about cake on the bifest community and those of you who are going to Brighton BiFest should fill it in!

Also, I realised I haven't actually posted the date of BiFest here, so: it's Saturday 9th February 2008. Please come!

Oh gods. It is 7am and I've been awake since 5.45 with astonishingly bad pain.

( TMI! )

September appears to be the month of birthdays. Happy birthday to mjl, polyfrog, bethdeth, chrismoose, jhaelan and serenejournal belatedly, and happy birthday in advance to jenett, emperor, wispfox, lindsical and 36 for your forthcoming birthdays, for my track record suggests I won't get round to posting anything about it on the actual day unless someone else reminds me. Happy birthday to anyone else who has a September birthday but doesn't list it on livejournal, and I suppose I should probably say happy birthday to all the October people as well, because that sort of organisation's not my strong point.

Birthdays are important to me, but they tend to be more important for people that I share physical proximity with. If I don't know you well enough to send you a birthday present, then I probably don't know when your birthday is. There are people that I'm not geographically close to who I send presents to, but they tend to be "I saw this and thought of you"-type presents rather than "for specific occasion" presents. Hmmm.

In other news, I am physically exhausted right now due to ringing about 15 potential students. It's the fact that when I call them, I have to put on a fake happy telephone voice, and sell myself with my qualifications. I used to do telephone market research interviewing, so I can handle business calls perfectly well when I have a "script" to follow, but it's still tiring to have to sound upbeat and organised and someone you want to give money to. Of my 15 potentials, I've obtained 3 definites, so it was worth doing, but still...

Tomorrow I'm getting up at the crack of dawn (10am) to get the train up to Manchester with artremis. We're staying overnight in a hotel just round the corner from the BiFest venue, where we shall be on Saturday along with a whole load of other people. And cake. I am making chocolate crunch cakes with Montezuma's wonderful organic Fairtrade vegan chocolate, golden syrup & cornflakes. Hopefully there will be lots of other vegan cakes there, yes? And possibly even some low-fat vegan cakes. I might manage to do my gingerbread, if I have a bit more energy later. And, uh, I just went to link to the gingerbread recipe and found I haven't typed it in yet, so I'll do that shortly.

Am freezing cold, and sick, and miserable. People who have irritable bowel or other digestive woes may know this one well - feeling like your whole gut is stuffed full of wind, with strange pain and cramping sensations that are spasmodic and slightly random; always there, but some seconds worse than the next few seconds. And at the same time, being so cold like there is a giant icicle inside you, and feeling like if you could only warm up you might feel better - and indeed, putting hot things on your sore belly or back does help with the cramping, but not with the coldness. Drinking ordinary room-temperature water feels like drinking ice, it makes you even colder than how you already feel. And even after you force yourself to think of a hot drink that you can tolerate without getting nauseous, it warms just a small section of you while the rest cramps up around it. Ow ow ow.

Went to Brighton for BiFest and Dyke Modern. Yesterday was good, but "eventful" - in a bad way. (I should point out that none of my loved ones were directly involved, and the most serious injury suffered was me injuring my finger on a toilet door lock and it going all bruised and purple - and this wasn't even related!). Proper write-up will follow when not dead. Today was just good without the "eventful", apart from the parts involving trains - but it started too early after not enough sleep.

Tomorrow is still scheduled to involve me teaching a two hour "group" class at 9.30am, but fortunately doesn't involve having to go to Epsom like it was going to - however, even then, I won't finish work until about 8ish. Blergh. I wasn't terribly sure how I'd manage this anyway, but with this horrible gut cramping and the strained muscles in my shoulders, tummy and back? Oh God.