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I don't live in England, do I? I could swear I lived in the United States, but if you could just check, just to make sure... no? Oh, drat.

Oh well, maybe we'll get to see this next year...

Christmas Music

genebreshears would be shocked to know that I haven't listened to any of my own Christmas music this year. Or maybe he wouldn't, since he knows I hardly ever buy a tree or even put up lights. But anyway, I haven't listened to any of my Christmas music. For one, I hardly ever listen to cds these days... I listen to music on my computer or on my iPod. My stereo system still isn't set up to play music, and thus my only chances to listen to a cd are in the car, or possibly on my computer at work, or when I drag along my portable walkman cd player (which seems massively bulky these days), or sometimes I'll listen to a cd on the portable cd player in the bathroom off of my bedroom.

And I don't have any of my Christmas music ripped to my hard drive, which explains why I haven't been listening to any of it.

Despite this, I really do own an awful lot of Christmas music. Possibly even more than genebreshears, who is an absolute Christmas fanatic. But then, I'm a music fanatic, as my friends well know. I have more pop-rock and alternative rock music than probably anybody I know. I own more metal cds than likely anyone I know. I almost certainly have more bluegrass, celtic folk, world music, blues, and classical music on cd than anyone I know. So maybe it follows that I have more Christmas music than anybody I know, although genebreshears does own a lot, so he might possibly edge me.

Tonight I got a bug to rip some of my Christmas music to my hard drive so I could play it... maybe do a small Christmas concert for a few friends in SL or something like that. So I've gathered all of my Christmas cds together and placed them in several stacks near my computer, and started ripping my favorites. I did a quick count, and it seems the number of Christmas cds that I own is... 92. That includes a few that I'm pretty sure genebreshears would refuse to own himself... all of the Bob Rivers Twisted Radio Christmas cds, for example.

Still, that's a lot of music to own and never listen to. And I really like some of it, quite a bit, so I'm going to have to play some of it over the next few days. ^_^

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Yesterday I got to work on a story other than my Christmas story or my Ian St. Ritz story. As people know, I have a series of Vashti stories that I plotted years ago that are still unwritten (or unfinished). I have three that take place on Hautikivi, but of those the most important one to finish is very probably the one that explains how she got off of Hautikivi. For all of these stories I have ideas in my head, scenes and dialogue and such that I've never written down. For the story in question, Bitch, I have very little actually written. I pulled it up, looked at it, and then decided to start somewhere else... with the story Hair of the Throug that Bit Me. This is the story that explains how Vashti wound up on the Iktome, and the reason I decided to start there is because the story is at least 2/3rds already written. This makes it easier to get into the heads of the characters, because I can read what's already there first. And several of these characters are also characters in the other story, so that's a good thing.

It's a complex story, written from more than one point of view and following several different characters with different motivations, and I've always struggled to figure out how to present the story in a way that makes it obvious what the main plots are and to show them progressing... because I haven't always known what the main plots were, and the story has often felt like it was going nowhere.

Anyway I wrestled with it for a bit, and I've been thinking about it since last night. I am, yet again, thinking of opening the story with a completely different scene. I've had a lot if different opening scenes for this story over the years.

Anyway, at least I'm working on something. ^_^

And because I haven't linked him enough yet... genebreshears