Hey, it's Jeff's birthday! Everyone wish Jeff a happy birthday!

So yesterday I said to myself, self, there's hardly anything going on at work today. You can watch your movie from Netflix in the morning (so you can put it in the outgoing mail before the mailman comes by around noon) and then spend the afternoon editing Willow Bough.

Yeah, well. I watched the movie (another Marmalade Boy disc, which ended on a WTF moment again!) and then had lunch and settled in to do editing...

Except I didn't feel like it. I could not make myself give a shit about Cheng or Genji yesterday. I was in a Scum mood.

I have these whole groups of people who live in my head. Gaming characters, writing characters... Most of them are pretty quiet most of the time. Some of them are old characters who only pop their heads up from time to time, and then subside back into obscurity. The more active characters - the newer ones, or the ones who've made big impressions - they don't always get along.

And I don't mean that they fight with each other. That would be schizophrenic of me, don't you think? But their personalities are so different that I can't hold them in my thoughts at the same time. It's a little weird, who can and can't cohabitate.

Kevil can coexist with just about everyone, as it turns out. He's very adaptable. Bards are like that, I guess. I have trouble controlling his speech patterns if he's with the Scum, but his overall personality doesn't shift too much.

You'd think sweet and (relatively) innocent Tarri wouldn't be able to get along with the Scum, but I have no trouble loading them into my head at the same time.

But I can't do Tarri and Zoya - not any of the three versions of Zoya I've got. One of them starts to shift in the other's direction, and that's just not right.

Nor will the Scum tolerate the presence of the Willow Bough cast. They're too philosophically different. The Scum is about fighting the odds, and Willow Bough (as the title might imply) is about accepting and bowing to fate.

So I spent yesterday working on finishing a Scum story that I'd started over a year ago and gotten stuck on. I got stuck on it again, but Karen gave me a couple of ideas that got the ball rolling. Yay, Karen!

So that was yesterday.

Today I'm going to really, really try to get to Willow Bough. If only because I don't have any other projects worth working on.

And I'm having lunch with my sister-in-law, Sam. I'm looking forward to that.

Have a great weekend!

--Liz