Further work on “Friends with the Monster” can be found here.

Round 7 of the Circle of Friends Remix is now open for reading at cof_remix.

( “Friends with the Monster” )

Once again, sroni has gifted me with cover art, this time for “Lesson the First”. Endnotes are now posted to match.

( Notes under the cut )

( Info under the cut )

Sign-ups are now open here. All previous participants are welcome. Anyone who is interested — and has enough Buffy or Angel stories to qualify — is invited to check us out and make inquiries. cof_remix is deliberately kept small, but we’ve never turned anyone away and never hit our maximum number.

This event was originally intended to supplement RemixRedux, since I enjoyed remixes so much. Now, with that remix seeming to be in abeyance (and I hope that’s only temporary), it’s my main fix. Come one, come all, invite your friends and spread the word.

It’s always been fun. Time to go for one more.

In this post I recced one of pprfaith’s works (“Glitter Is Forever”), commenting that it didn’t allude to how Buffy had become one of the Avengers in this private ’verse. Well, I followed out enough links to find out, and the result was worth it.

“i have seen nearly every city” relates how Buffy and Natasha got to know one another, and what it meant to them, and — eventually — how that led to Buffy joining the other proto-Avengers to deal with the Chitauri attack in NYC. Lots of good lines, interesting insights. Worth reading and then going back and reading again, and then bookmarking for further later re-visits.

“tonight, let us not become tragedies” is more a supplement than a sequel, but nonetheless a valid and profitable side-work. Check and enjoy.

I was supposed to have three days off in a row (today was the first), and I had plans for how to use those days. Things change; I have a chance to pick up a half-shift tomorrow — and the week was going to be a bit short otherwise — so I’ll be going into town to start at noon. Then I’ll hang around a bit, have a dine-in early dinner (at Popeye’s; yes, that’s my idea of luxury these days), then swing by the Vet Center for a meeting with my veterans’ group, then home after that to take the next day off. Not exactly hard labor, but some adjustments will have to be made.

According to sroni, Conal is now in a more-or-less regular room, still getting dialysis to bring things back under control but recovered to the point where he has his laptop with him to occupy himself while he convalesces. (Unfortunately, the big worldwide ransomware wave took out the network at the Dublin hospital, so at last report he couldn’t get much connectivity.) It’s an ongoing process, with more to be clarified and settled but with progress continuing.

And that’s it for now.

Last year I set myself to do a dozen stories — I listed them, with abbreviations for the titles — and wound up coming not even close to finishing. This year I was going to finish that out. Not doing so well on that. I’m less than two thousand words into what will be the fifth of the twelve (as listed in this post, the one that first announced my intent), and I’m stubbornly determined to finish it before I begin another. And it’s resisting me, and I’m letting other things delay me in focusing, and … Yeah. Familiar story.

I’ve also signed up for this year’s summer_of_giles. That’s not exactly invariant, but after my entry in 2013 I’ve skipped only 2015. (Invariant would be RemixRedux; the only year I skipped that, after beginning in 2006, was last year when it didn’t take place, though for a while it appeared that it would. Disappointing.) I already know what I intend to do for it, and it won’t be a major effort, but a small note in the eventual personality of Rupert Giles. Not one of the twelve originally posited, though, so it won’t get me any closer to my goal.

My son in China just sent me a query about how I go about planning for a story: detailed advance notes, vague outline, or just jump in and fly by the seat of my pants? I’ll have to consider how to prepare my answer in a form that will make sense … and caution him, likewise, that everyone who writes goes about it a different way, and the right way for any individual writer is the one that works for him/her.

What seems to work best for me is being on military deployment. I don’t get to do those anymore, though, so I’ll just have to find some operable substitute.

sroni’s husband Conal is still in the hospital, but much improved. It got a bit extreme there for a while; he spent two days in a medically-induced coma, to head off brain-swelling from all the fluids he was having to process (some from his condition, some medicinally added to treat his condition), and he’s been out of that for most of a week now. He’s even out of the ICU, and his blood sugar is now only 150-200% of normal instead of 600%.

After the original report that this was diabetes, the overall diagnosis keeps changing; they probably won’t know for sure till he fully stabilizes. There’s definitely pancreatitis in there, but it can’t yet be determined whether this is pancreatitis aggravated by diabetes, pancreatitis precipitated by diabetes, diabetes aggravated by pancreatitis, diabetes precipitated by pancreatitis, or pancreatitis leading to diabetic crisis (but not actual diabetes). If we’re lucky, it was the last one, some as-yet-unknown infection bringing about pancreatitis which brought about diabetic crisis.

There’s been luck already. My wife Susan (sroni’s mother, yes) has been a professional nurse for decades, and some of the practices and terminology in the UK may differ from ours but enough came across for her to suspect that that they were treating — or laboring mightily to prevent — multisystem organ failure. MOF is one of those things like heat stroke: however it comes about (and can do so from different causes), it WILL kill you unless actively stopped from doing so. We’re clearly past that point by now.

I didn’t really have any idea how bad it was (or could have got) until after the major threat was over. Susan suspected, I think, but 1) she has a depth of vocational knowledge that I lack, and 2) her experience has predisposed her toward pessimism, in that the worst outcomes are the ones she’s dealt with on a regular basis. I’m just pleased that things have resolved themselves as smoothly as they have.