End of Vacation

You probably wouldn't know it, but I was on vacation this past week. We didn't go anywhere, and Delilah was in dayhome for Monday - Wednesday, but we were on vacation. Allen and I got a lot done around the house, our patio has furniture, burnt out light bulbs were replaced, Allen got a new side bar to rearrange his desk (the shelves are Ivar - I love Ikea) and actual chairs for our sitting room. We repaired a leak in the eavestroughing and enjoyed the ability to lounge in bed and be a married couple without kid for a few hours a day.

Thursday, the fun began. We took Delilah to enjoy some of our favourite things around Edmonton, many of which she'd never seen before, Fort Edmonton, a U-pick farm for Strawberries, Jurassic Forest. (Okay, sadly we didn't get to do that last one. We went to Morinville to meet up with Grandma and Grandpa and the wind and rain were way too much to endure.)

Things started falling down on the weekend. I hadn't been sleeping very well and woke up Sunday exhausted. I'd spent all of Saturday running from one thing to the next, stayed up too late with a little girl who wouldn't sleep, and woke feeling like my head was stuffed with cotton. I could breathe fine, but my brain just refused to fire. We had plans to take Delilah to see Cars 2 as the weather was still less than fabulous, but got there late and the show sold out. We made it up to her by letting her pick out a movie to buy (Finding Nemo as it turned out, so Pixar still gets their money ;) then absconded to my office, leaving Daddy to deal with daughter while I tried to get my head functional and some of the many things I wanted to do done.

Sadly, it wasn't work on a publishable manuscript, sorry. There's a new contest in the Twilight fandom called The Canon Tour. To those of you familiar with fanfiction, but not with Twilight fanfiction, this might seem a little odd. In almost any other 'verse, writers keep to the rules. If you want to tell a story about Inara from Firefly, you talk about the Companion house and lifestyle, you don't stick her in the porn industry of LA. If you write Harry Potter fanfiction, you don't put him in an american High School, he's still a wizard at Hogwarts. Well, Twilight Fanfiction writers, apparently, never got that memo. They make the vampires human, change their ages and give them careers, pair them up with anyone they like... I'm not saying it's a bad thing. With the sheer VOLUME of Twilight fanfiction out there, I think it would exhaust the pieces Stephenie Meyer left them to play with (on the other hand, there is a LOT of HP fanfiction...).

Regardless! My point is that not all or even the majority of Twilight Fanfiction includes Vampires and Werewolves that follow the characteristics Meyer gave them. So one brave woman opened a contest to bring more of them to the forefront.

I have written approximately six pieces of fanfiction that are AH (all human, completely disregarding the story as established in the books). For reference, that's about 10% of my fanfiction, a little less. I got into fanfiction to write the scenes and stories that only got brief mention in the books, to explore alternate scenarios where someone made a different choice. To me, that was what fanfiction was for and so that's what I wrote. When I saw the contest, I wanted to support it. I didn't expect to get completely sidetracked by the story I chose. Full possession by the characters. 11K in two days. Yeesh. At least I'd already gotten a few hundred words of Cargon's sequel written at the in-laws'.

Speaking of Cargon, and finally bringing my post back to the big news. Signed copies are now available! Go ahead and buy me out. I'll order more! :D

PS: I need a beta for that piece if anyone is willing or interested. Thanks!

Now, Monday not only means the end of vacation, but that I NEED to get to work. *sigh*