I’ve got my schedule printed out with all the classes I want to attend marked off, as well as the two panels I’m on.  I’ve got social plans from pretty much the moment I hit town to the moment I leave and I’m SO EXCITED.  Though, given I’m an introvert, I’ll probably be happy to quietly move stuff by myself while hubby is at work for the 3 days before closing next week.

Looking at the schedule of events and such at the conference, I’m really surprised at how much of conferencing is around new writers (well perhaps they are not all new writers) looking for representation.  Giving pitches to agents, taking classes about pitches and queries and…all manner of stuff that just sounds kind of stressful.

I am so glad I don’t have to do that.  Because I’d be so nervous I’d probably barf on a prospective agent’s shoes and that just wouldn’t be good for anybody involved.  I’m really excited that I can just go, learn stuff, meet people, and generally wallow in an environment of rampant creative awesome.

I’ve got audiobooks queued up (currently Frank Beddor’s Seeing Redd, second book in The Looking Glass Wars and following up with Nalini Singh’s Play of Passion, which will FINALLY get me up to book 10 and Hawk and Sienna’s story), healthy snacks bought for the drive, all the relevant addresses entered into my GPS, my car gassed up and clean, and my loins generally girded for awesome.

763 words to go to make my goal for the month.

First, the good news.

This morning Daisy STOOD UP ON HER OWN AND TOOK THREE STEPS!  Huzzah!

Ahem.  In more regular news, I have been kicking word count butt.  Sunday: 1042, Monday: 885, Tuesday: 1705.  I am within 1600 words of my 10k goal for the month and I’ve got today and tomorrow to do it.

After that is DFW Con, and as soon as I get back from that, we’re moving. Even I’m not nuts enough to think that I’ll be able to get any writing done during that span of craziness.

So, the plan is to finish the midpoint scene in DOTH, flesh out a few earlier things I decided needed to be added, then set it aside for the next couple of weeks.  After that, I’ll come back, do a read through and dive back into the second half in my new office/library, where I hope to be able to get back into my 15-20k a month routine.

Whee!

And because of my personal obsession with corralling stuff in boxes, baskets, and chests, a great deal of my stuff is already IN a container I can just take on over as is.  That’s totally impractical if you’re moving cross country (or have to move everything in a single day), but awesome if you have several days, which we will.  Moving locally is SO MUCH EASIER.

Of course, currently the forecast is for rain Tuesday through Thursday, but that’s next week, so it could change (please change).

I’ve taken to dreaming nightly about furniture placement, which is not exactly restful sleep.  Usually when I move, I take detailed measurements of every room and I use something like BHG’s Arrange-A-Room or Floorplanner.com to sort out where all the furniture is going.  But a bunch of my furniture is in storage, in attics, at my mother’s…and otherwise in places I can’t get to easily to measure it, and I haven’t done the detailed measurements of the new house.  So, it’s going to be a bit of musical furniture to sort out where things will go.  But that’s okay.  Because, FOR ONCE, we actually have enough space that we can pile stuff in assorted places like the guest room or garage until we figure it out.

I could say that I was going to take my time and ease into the whole settling in process, but I know myself too well.  Given I’m not 22 anymore, I probably won’t be staying up until 3 in the morning to accomplish things, but I will be focused on putting stuff away, getting it out of boxes, and probably pausing for lots of “Huh, I forgot I owned that” or “OH!  I’ve been trying to find that for two years!”  It’ll take longer to get up the pegboard and stuff to organize all our tools (which will be a refreshing change from the mess of a tool bag and tool boxes we’ve got).  When I’m done, it will be a thing of organized beauty!  Like Julia Child’s kitchen but for tools.

I expect my productivity in general to skyrocket once we’re settled as not so much of my mental real estate will be occupied with house stuff.  I wanted to get 10k this month, and right now I have 3k to go.  Conveniently, I have three days until I leave for DFW.  Am I gonna make it?  Dunno, but I sure as heck am gonna try!

It wasn’t just a matter of my being on the losing team (you know how everybody’s all Team Edward!  Team Jacob! when love triangles show up).  It was how the whole thing was dealt with.  As a watcher, I just didn’t buy the ending for either guy or the girl.  Now, when it’s done well, I LOVE a good love triangle.  The best example that springs to mind for me is Julie Kagawa’s Iron Fey series (Team Ash all the way!).  That one worked for me because Kagawa does a great job making you believe in Meghan’s connection to whoever you’re supposed to be rooting for in whichever book.  She’s not some wishy-washy Mary Sue who twirls her hair and goes, oh, gee, I have these two great guys interested in me, whatever will I do?  In Book 1 Meghan falls for the Winter Prince Ash, who, early in Book 2 becomes a total dick (he has very good reasons for it, which we find out later).  It then makes perfect sense for Meghan to turn to BFF Puck, who, bless him, has been in love with her forever.  But she’s CONFLICTED about the whole thing, and in the end when Ash wins out, we’re not feeling like she wound up with the wrong guy (even though we feel very bad for Puck and Julie, you damn well better give him a girl in this next trilogy because he needs one!).  The whole emotional arc of all three characters was extremely well developed.

Now of course we can’t have that expectation in a two hour movie.  You can’t do as much in that time frame as you can across three books.  But here’s where This Means War fell apart for me.  **SPOILER ALERT for THIS MEANS WAR**  We have our two heroes: FDR (played by Pine) who is your classic arrogant womanizer (and what the hell kind of name is FDR?) spy and Tuck (played by Hardy), the gentlemanly Brit, who has a 7 year old son with a woman with whom things hadn’t worked out (there’s not much backstory given on this).  It starts off well.  Tuck is a charmer (he’s British, y’all–of COURSE he’s a charmer) and a gentleman and FDR is kind of a pretentious asshole.  But heroine Lauren winds up making a physical connection with him to make her ex-fiance jealous (you know, the classic, random smoochies in public even though she’s made it clear to FDR that she’s so unimpressed at the flashy, show off kind of date he tried to take her on), which then nets him an opportunity to show another side of himself besides the flashy womanizer.  This kind of transition annoys me.  Oh, I’m a man ho, but I have a hard time trusting people, I’m really sensitive and shit.  Can you tell I was Team Tuck?

Hubby and I both felt like we were supposed to be rooting for Tuck from the get go, as he was (to us) the better guy.  He was far more genuine a person.  So we go on and Lauren really likes them both and then apparently she decides that the only way to decide is to sleep with them.  Both heroes vow not to do it (as they  made rules about this engagement on the front end so that it wouldn’t muck up their friendship), but of course FDR doesn’t resist at all when Lauren initiates.  That would be the point at which hubby and I got kind of disgusted with the movie in general.  I’m sorry, I don’t have any respect for heroines who sleep with multiple people.  And I don’t have respect for heroes who stab their best friends in the back.  So movie goes on and Tuck gets his shot in the sack, and he’s all emotionally vulnerable and admits he’s in love with her and then there’s a nice fade to black.

She’s conflicted and consults with her BFF who gives her the advice “Go with the one who makes you a better person.”  So we arrive at the point where she’s apparently going to make a choice (which appears to be Tuck) and then FDR shows up because of a case that’s been going on in the background the whole movie (part of the rules was that Lauren wouldn’t know that they knew each other).  The two get into a brawl and Lauren gets kidnapped by the bad guys.  Okay, so the guys have to come together to rescue the girl.  At this point I’m starting to wonder if maybe she’s not going to end up with EITHER of them (she’s quite shocked to find out that they are spies).  There’s the dramatic chase scene and a moment where in order to survive circumstances, she has to dive toward one or the other of the guys.  There’s an explosion and when the smoke clears, she’s with FDR.

Let’s review that BFF advice, “Go with the one who makes you a better person.”  And…she goes with the secretly sensitive, best friend backstabbing womanizer, whom she’s managed to reform?  BAH.  Nice guy Tuck loses out.  Oh, but maybe not, because now that it’s come out on the local news (which covered the car chase with the bad guys that ended in fiery explosions) that he’s not really a travel agent, the woman who is the mother of his child is suddenly willing to be in a relationship with him?  Ok, maaaaaaaybe I’ll let that slide, as I’m romantic enough to invent the backstory where the reason they didn’t work out was because he had to lie to her all the time about his job, but STILL.  This felt very contrived and too convenient, Oh yay, we get to be a family.

All in all, I did not really like Lauren as a heroine.  I didn’t feel any real emotional struggle and I didn’t truly buy her connection to either of these guys, so the whole thing left me very unsatisfied as a watcher.  I feel like with love triangles, the author should have in mind  from the get go who the heroine (or hero…depending on who is being fought over) is going to end up with and make a compelling argument for both possible love interests, but still make it clear which one is right and why. /rant

What about you?  Do you like love triangles?  What are your pet peeves about them?

Retweeting links?  Go for it.  If you wanna tack on a short line about why whatever you’re linking to is awesome, that’s even better.

Sharing posts on Facebook, on your own page and your friends’.  Cool.  By default Facebook grabs a little excerpt, maybe a picture, and links back to the original post.

Adding somebody’s link to your mashup of awesome, this is a great tactic.  Some of the best content I’ve read on the internet has come from mashups.

Pinning something on your board at Pinterest with a nice line about what you like about it.  We love when you do this.  And that’s how Pinterest is designed to work (now anyway since that brouhaha where people were posting whole articles/recipes/posts).

Reblogging on Tumblr, which does a fantastic job of attribution, so you can chase something back to the source.

It’s reblogging on other blogging platforms where the trouble often starts.  Why?  Because people often don’t do it correctly.  The entire point of reblogging is to share someone else’s content in a way that gives the source credit and will drive traffic back to that original source.  So all the people who post someone else’s entire post are not really reblogging.  They’re plagiarizing.

In most cases they don’t know it.  They’re trying to help, to share.  And they get really put out when you ask them to take your content down, not understanding why we are upset that they want to share our content.  You all know how I feel about plagiarism, so it’s often hard for me to hang on to my temper in these cases.  But I add a few more chains and politely explain that the CORRECT way to reblog is to post an excerpt of the original post and link back to the original source.  Sometimes it makes a difference, sometimes it doesn’t.

I’m not a fan of reblogging in general (outside of sites like Tumblr, which are designed entirely around reblogging) because too many people use it, not as a means to share, but as a lazy blogging mechanism.  The latest case where I contacted someone about my content was someone who had a blog that was nothing BUT reblogs.  What the heck is the point of that?  Blogging is about creating YOUR OWN content.  Regurgitating a bunch of other people’s stuff, even if you think it’s great, is not a blog.  But that’s departing from my point.

If you’re going to share someone else’s content, make sure to do it right and give credit where credit is due.  As I tell my students, it’s far better to over cite something than not cite it at all.

What?

While I haven’t been formally doing weights, haven’t been running, haven’t been doing at least half what I usually do, I’m down that much?  Apparently the slight calorie restriction and all the Daisy curls and squats related to her daily care have done the trick.  I’m not anywhere near as toned as I’d like to be, but I’m pleased that I’ve still been making progress while the routine’s been massively disrupted.

I also gave some thought to the fact that sometimes you just need to rest, you know?  I read a book a while back on repairing your metabolism and one of the things it stressed was that you start out by doing nothing.  Eating low calorie and allowing your body to recalibrate for something like two or three weeks.  I blew it off because I am really bad at doing nothing (I know you’re so shocked by that).  But maybe there’s something to it.  Lord knows I never slow down until something happens in life to make me.

Since Daisy had her FCE, I’ve been trying to focus really hard on taking care of me while taking care of her.  When hubby broke his leg a couple years ago, I got SO SO run down doing literally everything (I joke about doing everything, but I didn’t know what it was like to REALLY do it until he couldn’t help with anything), and I didn’t want to see that happen again.  Hubby’s been totally awesome, taking on most of the night care duties so I can get sleep (as I just flat don’t function without sleep) during the week so I can actually work.  And since she’s improved and doesn’t take as long to eat, he’s getting up a few minutes earlier to feed her so I can get an extra half hour of sleep in the morning.  Forget jewelry.  That’s love.

T minus fifteen days to move.  My living room currently looks like a liquor store with all the boxes we’ve gotten from there.  Great for glassware!  One of my BFFs is coming Sunday for a packing party and dinner.  She’s paying her way by bringing a dolly FULL of boxes (unfolded ones) from work. 

Makes it hard to have room in the noggin for things like, you know, plot.

Still, I’ve been making some progress.  395 on Sunday (the rest of my day was spent going to see The Avengers–OMG AWESOME–and having an Iron Man marathon).  Only 22 words on Monday, but I realized during the nap I took instead of writing (yes, sometimes sleep takes priority) that I was going about the scene in the wrong POV.  So I made that switch.  Then yesterday, I got a whopping 1262 and finally finished the bloody scene.  On to the MP scene today.  If I can have a few more days this month like yesterday, I might actually make my 10k goal, despite DFW and moving.

Which phone calls? you ask.

The ones from the students who are dissatisfied with their grades and wish to a) argue their way to a better one, b) accuse me of prejudice, or c) claim my math was wrong.

Today’s phone call was all three.  God save me.

My class is very straight forward.  The quizzes and tests and exams are totally objective.  They either get the question right or they get it wrong.  The discussion question portion is worth 20% of their grade and if they answer the question correctly, show me that they can properly cite their sources, they get the full 10/10 each week.  As a reward to students who mastered the material through the semester, anyone who has earned 90% of the possible points before the final is exempt.  So in this particular class, that’s 423 points of a possible 470.  Anyone falling below that mark has to take the final, which is worth 100 points.  Ergo, anyone taking the final has their grade calculated out of 570 points.  This SHOULD make sense to anyone at the college level.

Sadly, it doesn’t.

First this student thought that 443 points after the final should be enough for an A since the people who had 423 BEFORE the final got an A.  Um. No. That’s a C.  And with the sanction handed down by the Honor Council for her plagiarism violation earlier this semester, it’s a D.

Then she basically said I was unfair, unreasonable, that my class was ridiculously hard and that she never stood a chance even before the plagiarism and that no one understood the assignments, and she’d really tried to get help and access to the library to do the assignments but couldn’t, and she is SUPPOSED to graduate and why can’t I change her grade.

Gee, because the other 29 people in the class, less the other plagiarist, managed to do their assignments on time, honestly, and to some extent correctly.  And because in three years of teaching this class, I have never had anyone have the alleged problems with the assignment that she has.

If graduation was so important to her, then maybe she should have considered, I don’t know, actually WORKING rather than expecting to just be HANDED a grade she didn’t earn.

This is a serious problem in our society.  All this nicety, get a ribbon for trying, average is okay, support for mediocrity is DESTROYING education.  Where is the drive and the reward for excellence?  Instead of patting everyone on the head and acting like half-assing is okay, have some effing expectations.  Make them work.  Make them EARN their grade.  Make them learn that the world is not about hand outs (or shouldn’t be–though it is to a certain segment of the population) and freebies.  It’s about HARD WORK and accountability for one’s actions.  You want to pass my class, then you damn well better show mastery of the material and actually WORK.  Don’t go around claiming you tried when you showed no improvement and never asked anyone for help.

That particularly drives me insane.  The people most in need of help won’t ask for it, and then when they get the smack down at the end of the semester, they claim it’s our fault because we didn’t spoon feed them.

THIS IS COLLEGE.

And if this kind of trend isn’t reversed, it’s going to continue to devalue education even more than it already has been, which is a tragic state of affairs in a country where most of the low end jobs have been shipped out of the country, leaving a huge segment of the population who are ill-suited to the rigors of a traditional college education without acceptable jobs to apply for.  Then the educational institutions are lowering entrance requirements because they need the tuition dollars, whether these folks are capable of performing at an adequate level or not.

It drives me crazy.

Idiocracy.  It’s happening now.