Imagine that you’re at Hogwarts for the first time, and the Hat goes on your head. “I’m so sorry,” it whispers to you, before saying loudly, “Slytherin!”

It’ s your first year. You’ve won the House Cup and you’re getting ready to celebrate.

And then Professor Dumbledore awards just enough points to take the win away from you, with no warning to the House that had won and now lost.

Can you imagine how that would feel? The older ones and Snape trying to convince you that Dumbledore doesn’t hate you? Them trying to convince you that the entire school doesn’t hate you simply because of the colours you wear, while the words taste like dust and lies in their mouths and sound like the lies they are to your ears?

You spend the next six years trying to rise above what everyone thinks you to be, you want to scream and shake the blood purists and the bullies and yell at them, “Stop being what they hate! Stop giving them a reason to hate us more!”, but experience has taught you they won’t listen.

You’re small for your age, you always have been, and in your third year, a pair of bullies beat you bloody for what happened to Hermione Granger and her teeth. It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t, but you were there and you wear silver and green. Professor Snape finds you and takes you to the hospital wing where you have to stay overnight and he is so angry he’s white because the bullies got twenty points taken away each and that’s all. “What do you expect, Severus? They have witnesses saying that he attacked them first. Obviously they went too far, but they have the right to defend themselves.” You roll away from the words, unable to stomach them.

It’s not the first time you have to spend the night in the hospital wing.

Every Sorting, you whisper for every child, “Don’t be a Slytherin, don’t be a Slytherin.” You wouldn’t wish on anyone this hatred from people who don’t even know you and simply hate what you are.

You’re in your seventh year, almost free of this place that’s so magical to most but has become a hell for you and things get so. much. worse. You are expected to cast torture curses at your fellow classmates. You, who cried the first time you had to feed one of Hagrid’s creatures a live animal, have to torture people you’ve gone to school with. But the Carrows are scary and you don’t want to be on the receiving end, so you do it.

Every time you do it, it gets a little easier and you think that maybe, everyone was right about you. You are evil, you have to be, or you’d be able to stand up instead of hurt. Everyone that hated you, they were right, they were right, they were right, and you start breaking apart.

Imagine that you’re at Hogwarts for the first time, and the Hat goes on your head. “I’m so sorry,” it whispers to you, before saying loudly, “Slytherin!”

We currently have no internet of our own, but Irish's bosses are awesome and told him to bring me to the office in the off hours so i can hop online. They're really nice and keep inviting me out to office parties; I feel almost like an unofficial staff member here. We're here until November, at which poing we'll head back to Ireland. I'm loving the weather here; Irish thinks it's hot, while it feels like home to me (but we're used to about 30 degrees of difference for what's "home"; I'm used to weather being around 50 in winter, with the dropping cold happening periodically, and 100+ in summer, with 90 or below being oddly cool, while his winters are in the negatives, and his summers are around 60-70 degrees), so it's no wonder he's dying of heat. I'd put the temp here at around 80, 85, with about 60% humidity, which means for me, it's nowhere near as bad as what i'm used to, and for him, it's a lot worse than he's used to.

I've been walking into town multiple times a week, which means about a mile up a STEEP hill. It's bad enough that even Irish is feeling the strain when he walks up it, and he's 1) in much better shape than I am, and 2) used to walking up hills. I started off having to stop at lesst thrre times on the trip up, just because of my thighs and ribs, but on the last few trips I've managed to not need to stop. I don't know how much weight I've lost because I will not allow myself to own a scale (I get too focused on numbers and then I get obsessive and it's just healthier for me to pay attention to how I'm feeling than my weight), but my jeans are hella baggy now, and I know that my waist is about ten inches smaller than it was when I left the States in January. For my birthday, I bought an excersise ball and a twist board, and they've seen a lot of use.

The place we're currently living is fantastic, and we've been adopted by the landlords (the lady comes down every Friday for two hours, to help us clean and visit with us). Unfortunately, we'll be moving elsewhere at the end of the month, something about the way the house is zoned. The landlords are really sad we'll be leaving, and I'm going to miss them.

I have about 25,000 words written on a series. This makes me ridiculously happy, but I'm apparently insane because I have at least twelve stories planned out. (One of the books needs something, though, because the plot is just not along the same lines as the other plots; I'm going to have to figure out how to add the type of thing that's in all the others to the existing plot. But that's seven or so books down the line.)

I've been reading the Game of Thrones books, and eh. I like the characters a lot but the more i read the books the more I realize I don't like them. I'm reading because I want to know what happens to the characters I like.

I've been watching a lot of Nickelodeon and Disney shows; this isn't unusal for me because i love Nick and Disney, even if I am a grown ass woman. Mostly, i've been watching them because I still don't understand Italian and I can mostly understand what's going on with these shows. I'm almost starting to understand diaologue, even when I don't recognize individual words. (I don't know how to explain it; I have no idea what the words that were said are, but about 50% of the time, I can tell you what the English sentence was. I seriously have no idea what the Italian was, so I can't look it up, but I know what's being said in English.)

I want to see movies. I miss movies.

Okay, first, a disclaimer: I am currently tripping balls, thanks to codeine I had to take for a migraine. (Fun fact: when I tried to tell a friend that I took codeine, my autocorrect changed it to “I took cocaine”. Because apparently that’s a thing I do? I promise that I have never taken cocaine. Are you kidding me? I’m allergic to marijuana; these people at Wal-Mart reeked of it last Spring — I think it was Spring — and I had a three day migraine from it that was bad enough my parents had to come get me because I couldn’t drive myself anywhere. If I were the type to do drugs, which I emphatically am not, that right there would kill any desire to try anything.)

I told the spouse-type-creature (you know, the one that turns into an octopus) about the autocorrect to cocaine, and he told me it’s okay, I’m not pregnant, so I can also jump on a trampoline and drink alcohol. I laughed.

All of our extra money just got eaten up by an emergency repair to our vehicle yesterday. The window got stuck partway down, just enough you can reach an arm in. There are two problems with that, unfortunately. One is that Spouse-Type-Creature works in a high crime area. Oh, he’s perfectly safe, but leaving a vehicle with a window like that is pretty much begging someone to steal your car. We need our car, not least of which so we can drive to Rome. The other problem is that we are in Ireland. The land of rain. If someone miraculously didn’t steal the car, the interior would be ruined. So the window got fixed, but it ate up all our margin that we’ve stocked away, and now we get to spend the next few weeks living on pasta and milk again. Oh, well. I tell you, I’ve had more milk in the last month than I have in... pretty much the last year, actually. I really didn’t drink milk a lot. It’s just not something I liked all that much. But the milk in Ireland is really good. I’m going to miss it while we’re in Rome. I’m looking forward to the drive, though. We’re going to buy a scrapbook and I’m going to pick up post cards whenever we stop for petrol. I used to have a really great post card collection, and I’m going to start it back up. It’s a shame that I don’t have my post cards from my time in Asia, but oh well.

I have quite a bit written for what will end up being the first book of a series, and I’m rather happy with it. I’m having to do research again; everything I’d previously researched was lost. I have a pretty good memory, but I’m having to refresh my memory on things. Of course, it helps that I’m making up the location, but it’s still based off of a real place, and I want to make sure that little details are as correct as I can get them.

I miss world-building. It’s good to be doing it again.

I feel like Artax and Atreyu in Never-Ending Story, walking through the Swamp of Sadness, and I know I should be Atreyu and keep going, but right now, I’m just a sad horse sinking in the swamp.

I’ll be okay. I just gotta keep slogging through.

Round 4.2 of the Circle of Friends Remix is now open for reading at cof_remix.

Title: Love is Only Heaven Away (The "Ghost in You" Remix)
Author: sroni
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine. These characters belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.
Original Story: “Absent Ghost” by velvetwhip, though this was also influenced by All The Saints Are Dragons after I started remixing Absent Ghost.

( “Love is Only Heaven Away” )

Round 4.1 of the Circle of Friends Remix is now open for reading at cof_remix.

(Sorry I was late!)

Title: Falling From Your Grace (the “Same Old Chains” Remix)
Author: sroni
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine. Faith, Buffy and Connor/Stephen are the creation of Joss Whedon; Scotty and Dex are the creation of evil_little_dog.
Original Story: “Trappings” by evil_little_dog.

( “Falling From Your Grace” )

Meme from snickfic:

“I think that many of us like talking about our and linking to our work but are embarrassed to do so without excuse, so I am making us an excuse. Behold, the Seven Days of Self-Promotion Meme, inspired by another recent meme but with more categories, all obviously customizable as you see fit. Notice that the categories are very broad, so you can talk about your art or vids or meta or whatever if you don’t write fic.

The Days:
1. Something old
2. Something new
3. Something you made for someone else
4. Something you made just for yourself
5. Something for a major fandom/pairing/character
6. Something for a minor fandom/pairing/character
7. Something you’re just really proud of

And then other people can read your discussion and follow your links to your fanworks (and maybe comment on them?) and you can read their discussion and follow their links and comment on them, and it will all be lovely.”

---

So, this is Day One. That means something old. For me, I have to decide how far back to go. You have to keep in mind that I started writing fanfic when I was … I’m not actually sure how old. I wrote Star Trek fanfic in my diary in purple crayon, so chances are, I was under 10. I started quasi-seriously writing fanfic when I was around 14, and that stuff will never see the light of day ever. I started finishing stories when I was eighteen.

So I guess I’m going to have to pick “ God Save the Queen ”. It’s undergone changes since I wrote it; between me finishing “God Save the Queen” and Aadler working with my finished portion of “Queen’s Gambit” a year or so later, he realized that he needed to rework “God Save the Queen” in order to make the stories fit together better. So while “God Save the Queen” is absolutely better than it would have been without that, it’s also not the original product — which is nowhere near being a bad thing, just something to keep in mind.

I started cooking Christmas dinner at one o'clock this morning.

Actually, the story goes back even further.

My mom and I decided on Sunday that we were, in fact, going to have a proper Christmas dinner. This meant that two days before Christmas, I had to go to Wal-Mart to get everything we'd need. I made a list. I then promptly forgot said list sitting on the dining room table (it's right next to the front door), waiting for me to grab it on the way out. Managed to survive Wal-Mart, and, more importantly, Wal-Mart survived me and I managed to not punch anyone in the face, though holy hell, sometimes it was a close call. In all seriousness, though, while I didn't really have to work hard to repress the urge to not punch people, I did have to work to not start yelling at people to just move, damn it, or run them over with my cart. I made it out to the parking lot before I remembered some rather crucial things (lightbulbs, toilet paper, that sort of thing, that we wouldn't be eating, obviously, but is still rather necessary). No way in hell was I going back into that madhouse, so I decided hell with it, I'll stop at one of the two dollar stores on the way home. I stopped at the first of said dollar stores, picked up a few of the things I'd forgotten, chatted with the cashier, dropped the stuff I'd just bought in the trunk, realized that I was rather desperate to use the restroom, ran back inside, and it turned out to be a good thing that I did so, because it was while I was in the restroom that I realized I'd still forgotten the toilet paper and lightbulbs. As well as the stuff for green bean casserole, and if I don't get green bean casserole, well, heads are going to roll.

I managed to wrestle the turkey and everything inside in only two trips (and if anyone calls me weak again, I'm hitting them with the sixteen point four pound turkey and the two three litre bottles that I carried inside in one hand while wrestling with the doors, the fence, and the dogs), read the directions for the turkey and defrosting, and put in the fridge.

This was Monday.

On Tuesday, it suddenly hit me: I don't know how long the turkey is supposed to defrost. So I hop on the internet and discover that refrigerator defrosting for a turkey that size? Yeah. It's gonna be four days.

Well. That's not really a possibility.

So I wrestle the turkey in the bathtub, where it stayed all day (I refreshed the water every half hour like I was supposed to, except for the few hours that I left the house but the water was SO FREAKING COLD that it really wasn't an issue). We wrapped gifts, I chatted with my dad who's home for Christmas... At about eleven thirty, the turkey is still not defrosted, even though it's been in the bathtub for fourteen hours and my mom tells me that I can just cook it overnight at 250. (Did I mention that, for the first time, I was in charge of Christmas dinner?) So I smothered the turkey in butter, wrapped the buttered turkey in bacon and got it stuffed with bacon and apples (in the future, I'm going to cut the apples larger, use more stuffing and not put the stuffing inside the turkey because that was a pain in the ass to get out when it was time to eat), smothered it in more butter and apples, and stuck it in the oven. It made it in the oven at one thirty in the morning.

I checked on the turkey at seven, it was still nowhere near done, so I went back to sleep. We opened presents at around nine forty five, I checked on the turkey again, still not done. At eleven, I got impatient and bumped it up to 350, and started prepping all the other food to go in the oven. At the last twenty minutes of the turkey cooking, I went to put the green bean casserole and the biscuits in the oven and realize: NOTHING ELSE WILL FIT WHILE THE TURKEY IS IN THE OVEN. All that effort to make sure everything came out at the same time? Just went out the window. So I finish the turkey, get the casserole and the biscuits in LICKETY SPLIT, heat up the gravy, already made the mashed potatoes and they're warming up. Started attacking the turkey with a knife to get my mom's plate as ready as possible in the meantime (we were going to have a nice sit down dinner together, but she was in a lot of pain, so it turned into her staying in bed and Dad and I eating in the living room), spent at least ten full minutes trying to separate the drumstick from the body before deciding screw it and ripped it off with my hands, and then realized that I'd burnt the biscuits (not badly, but enough that I noticed). Got the plate to her, let Dad get his, and then got my own food. Bacon turkey and apple stuffing is a success! I'm excited! Next time, I'm going to add more apples, actually use the pear I got, and stuff the sides rather than the bird, but nothing caught fire, I didn't require stitches, and the food tasted good and didn't poison anyone, so SUCCESS.

And now I have all kinds of stories going round and about in my head.

Round 3 of the Circle of Friends Remix is now open for reading at cof_remix.


Title: Between the Lines of Fear and Blame (The “How to Save a Life” Remix)
Author: SRoni
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: PG-13. Nothing that you wouldn't see on the show.
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.
Original story: No More Be Grieved" by eilandesq

( “Between the Lines of Fear and Blame” )

Seriously, when was the last time I actually updated this thing?

Okay, well, the gist is: I'm still engaged (yaaaay), still getting married in July in Ireland (yaaaaay), am currently in Arkansas. I have a friend moving down from New York in two weeks, and Aadler and I'll be going to get her, my brother visits from China with his fiance and her mother for two weeks, friend from New York that we'll call Q and I will be moving into a place that my family owns together, looking for jobs and such, and plan to move to Ireland together come March. That'll all be happening in the span of three weeks. The getting Q and bringing her down and my brother and company visiting, I mean. Not the moving back to Ireland, since, you know, March is more than three weeks away.

I have so many ideas for stories, you have no idea (though I'll admit that I'm starting to leave fanfic behind). I still love reading fanfic, and I'll probably keep doing short stories in different fandoms, but if I'm going to put a lot of time and effort into something and it's going to be long enough to qualify as a novel, I'd kind of like to do it as an original work in the hopes of getting it published. I have four ideas for series that I plan on starting soon; one is going to be a fantasy collaboration with Irish and two of our friends, so we'll see how that goes. Irish and I've co-written short stories centering around two characters that when we add them all up come to about 120,000 thousand words. I'd like to clean those up, set them in their own post-apocalyptic world rather than the Fallout world, turn them into a continuous story broken up into chapters, and see what we can do with that. One of the other three, the first book has about 20,000 words to it already and I just. Need. To. Work. on the damn thing. And then the other two will have to wait until other stuff is done, because seriously.

This isn't counting stories that I've already started and have most of the way done, btw. I still want to clean up "Can't Go Home Again" and bulk it up and really world-build on that one. I definitely want to re-work (probably pretty much from scratch) the first long story Original Fiction that I ever did. I have a Sci-Fi that I had most of the way done, and another Sci-Fi that could be but seriously needs to be completely revamped because it's freakishly similar to Firefly even though I wrote it before I'd seen a single episode.

Plus there's the stuff that I need to be doing, just for life in general, like, you know. Finding a job. Working. Earning money. Saving said money. Getting to Ireland. Marriage counseling. Figuring out what the heck I want to do with my life as far as a permanent job situation goes, so that I can go to college without wasting my money.

You know. Basic things.

I guess that's my update tonight. I'll try to post once a day. :D We'll see how long that lasts.