The Life and Times of El

Somehow I volunteered myself into doing coffees for a Breast Cancer Awareness breakfast at uni tomorrow. Two hours of frantic coffee-making interspersed with pancakes. I'm happy to get more practice and it's for a noble cause, but I'm under no delusions that this is anything but (yet another) method of procrastination.

Things To Procrastinate About

1. Literature review for generic-science subject. I've stopped counting the days it's officially overdue and gone onto how many days I have left to hand it in before they won't accept it. New method of counting current stands at 3.

2. femgenficathon project. This is really quite unforgivable. I didn't start writing it until about a month before the due date, and I can't find the will to fix the thing. My brain sees 5000 words of fic and goes 'no, too hard, move on'. Added to that is that the first draft had a plot and was relatively easy to write, while the reworked version is going to be reflective, and probably a lot shorter. I'm really not sure at all where the reworking will go. I've had this problem with other fics - there's 3000 words about Beruthiel on my hard-drive. I like those 3000 words. I would really like to post those 3000 words, but the fic's not finished and yet where it stops is a logical place to stop, although it's incomplete. It's been that long since I wrote the first 3000 words that I'm wary of finishing it off with a completely different writing style that shows the join between writing so clearly. I wonder if adding extensions to houses is like this. Maybe I have Fic Renovation Anxiety Syndrome.

3. Top Gear/Transformers crossover. I promise I've not forgotten it.



On the other hand, my reading list is coming along nicely:

40. Silverthorn
41. Master and Commander
42. Dawnthief
43. Post Captain
44. Warrior
45. Warlord
46. Mortal Engines
47. The Princess Bride
48. Prospero's Children
49. HMS Surprise

Now I've begin The Mauritius Command, which will take my list to #50 and thus complete 50bookchallenge! Huzzah! (Although there's a Temeraire novel in there somewhere as well, so I may have already completed it. It's getting hard to remember.)

On the 50bookchallenge, that is.

25. Stardust by Neil Gaiman
26. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
27. Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen by Arielle Eckstut
28. Swing By Sailor by Catherine Dyson

 Thanks for all the book recs, guys! I'll go and plunder my local libraries as soon as possible.

Books read:

8. The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion by Loren D. Estleman
9. Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail by Stephen R. Bown

What I learned from reading the books: 

1. Estleman desperately wants to make movies. The story isn't bad (motley bunch of actors perform plays in the Old West and rob banks while the audience is distracted) but the book reads more like a film script.

2. Scurvy is directly responsible for everything that happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, and the discovery of Australia.

3. Nifty fact number one: the Inuit, although their traditional diet is completely made of meat, do not get scurvy because there's a lot of vitamin C in seal livers and kidneys.

4. Nifty fact number two: the British got the name 'Limeys' because of the huge amounts of limes their merchants bought to ward of scurvy.

Here endeth the lecture. Happy Australia Day, everyone!