i have not been writing...

...because I have been indulging in two rather admittedly unproductive pasttimes: the Sims and fan fiction.

First, the lesser of the two evils. We just got the new "Ambitions" expansion pack for The Sims 3, and I've been having a blast with it. I stayed up until three a.m. playing last night, which is an hours-straight-on-the-computer run worthy of competition with some writing nights. See, you can actually play your sim at their job in this one, so it's obviously awesome. Or something. And having a dad working as a fireman all day and saving lives, while mom takes care of two toddlers and two babies who time their poops so that she's changing diapers all day...this is computer gaming at it's finest.

Second...fan fiction. Yeah. Occasionally I'm guilty of indulging a bit in what I consider the lesser side of writer-dom. Not to rag on any fan fiction writers who may be reading this (there aren't any, because no one reads this). You may very well be one of the fantastic writers who make me read fan fiction at all. The problem is that you have to sift through about forty stories that are full of misspellings (or worse, textspeak...omg lulz) and mostly just focus on romantic fluff (which, okaaaay, that's basically why people read fan fiction in the first place, but plot is good, too) and have zero literary merit, just to get to the two stories that are awesome and written in the tone of the original author and completely worth reading. But I digress...the point is that, yes, I've been wading through the swamp of fanfiction.com in the past few days, just looking for good stories to read. And, drumrollllll....

I found one. I found a story that I wish was a completed, published novel, because then I could truthfully call it one of my favorite "books" instead of one of my favorite unfinished stories. A Girl Called Mouse is a take on Cinderella (which is why it's in the 'fairy tales fan fiction' section, you see) but it's so completely original and well written...it's sort of reminiscent of Cameron Dokey's style, which I love, but so far I love this story muuuch better than Dokey's version of it. I even considered making an account on fanfiction.com (gasp!) just so that I could review the story and tell the author how much I loved it. I haven't (yet?).

And all this time, what's become of Thistleswitch? I printed out a complete rough draft. It's beautiful, with its black inky words and papery smell and hefty weight and neat little paragraphs. Though, perhaps I'm biased. I've been figuring out some stuff (finally figured out a bit more about the elusive Switching Spot!) and correcting the spelling mistakes that Word lets slip. And I finally named the kingdom that Aries, Niko and Merry are from! On top of that, I started a document for Jovie and Terrence's story, finally. I haven't written any of the story itself yet...but I'll get there. Soon. I can feel the thistleswitch-ish inspiration flitting around the edges of my mind, not quite close enough to use but certainly close enough to sense. And when it finally does make a solid appearance - probably by waking me up at four a.m. and DEMANDING that I write something RIGHT THIS INSTANT - I'll have a document all ready for it. And, to top it all off, I've come up with another story idea that I love and will probably use for NaNoWriMo this year, and I've added a couple ideas to my snippets document (though, I'm always adding stuff to my snippets document, so I shouldn't report that like it's something snazzy).

So, between the fanfics and simming spurts, it's been a successful week.