Tricked!
Dear achariya, that was a dirty trick! Now I have Carameldansen on the brain, and I am seriously thinking of ways to get the MP3. *facepalms* Oh CRAP.

*cheers*
Looks like kevinsensei will finally rejoin us here in Japan. Are you sure you want to be an April Fool, Kevin? *laughs* Anyway, let me know what you're doing and if you need help settling in again!

Livejournal
Apparently there is a Livejournal Content Strike. It starts at 9am on Friday and goes to 9am Saturday, I suppose. *sighs* Considering how dependent on Livejournal I am for my social circle, I'm not sure whether I want to join it.

My F-List Is Unique
Wow, all the votes for PWP and smut. You guys. *chuckling* Is my smut really all that hot? I definitely remember someone else telling me it wasn't.

Musing About Plagiarism, aka "When Is It Re-Telling, And When Is It Copying?"
Both this post (thanks to issen4 for the link) and this one talk about the line between fanfiction and plagiarism. Reading the posts (and doing a bit of link-surfing on my own) reminded me of Planeswalker. There are similarities, the biggest one being that the book in the post was originally a fanfic dusted off to become an original. It touched a nerve, and we all know what Ai does when she's looking to procrastinate.

( About 1000 words worth of soapboxing under the cut. HnG spoilers for the insei examination arc and beyond. )

Look At The Time
Good lord, I need to stop soapboxing. It's 4pm and I've done nothing but watch Hungry Heart Wild Striker all day (except for this entry and some LJ comments). I have in my hands Stein on Writing, delivered today--I'll be reading that before settling down with more background work. It IS my day off, though, and I do need a bit of a rest, so I shouldn't feel so bad about not working on PW or anything else.

ETA: One Million Words
thephoenixboy, considering I can do 1000 words of meta on a semi-regular basis at the drop of a hat, and I've been writing offline for years, I suppose I'm closer to one million words than I originally thought?

ETA2: Thank god for IRC archives. Now I can get the final three episodes in two hours instead of nine.

On Betas
Inspired by a post by mmorpgsforlife. When you think of a beta, what do you think of? Copy editing has its place, but what the writing world (and most writers need/crave) are good editors. We call them good betas, here in the world of fanfiction.

( This got a little long. )

^_^;;; Wow. That was long. Sorry Sparky, that was a bit of TL;DR. But when one sees the opportunity to tell things from this side of the fence, it's so very hard to resist that soapbox ...

ETA: I have to hasten to say that this is only true for me! O_o I don't know how other writers do this. I know one writer I beta for, ontogenesis, has a slightly different process from me. She thinks a lot more about her plot and characters before she even comes to me, and sometimes she just shows up with a few thousand words and goes, "Okay, your turn." However, I'm a very conversational type of writer. I don't write in isolation. I've tried it, and I can't--I fail horribly when that happens. Like I said, this is my point of view from my side of the fence. ^_^ That's all.

Also, I have to emphasize that not all my fics get this treatment. ^_^;;; For example, Tohoku was very much a mostly-narrative-beta sort of fic. Caramel took a LOT of concept-beta-ing, but minimal narrative-beta. His Grandfather's Dragon was very much a mash that needed a lot of narrative work and scrutiny, but Promise was so short nothing much was changed after the first draft hammered out. (There was another one for the Dragons AU that came out to a draft of 1000+ words. It did not survive beta and died.)