It's four in the morning, but I don't much care, because I made it to 25,000 words. It was slow going initially, but then things just started falling into place, and I stopped noticing the word count. I love it when that happens.

Halfway there!

Current word count: 25,143.

New goal: Get to 30,000 words by the 15th.

Story based Goal: To complete Chapter 5 of the novel.

In other news, romanticalgirl was absolutely wonderful and wrote a fic for me. I think that may have had something to do with my burst of inspiration; her stories often do that to me. Thanks again, romanticalgirl ! You're awesome!

And while I was taking a break from writing to surf deviantart; I saw something that was simultaneously amusing and disturbing...



I'm not sure there's anything I can say to make this any weirder. Feel free to have a go yourselves, though.

Current Word Count: 22,038.
Goal for today: To reach the halfway mark.

I'm currently a day (or 2,000 words) behind my preferred schedule, but I'm not too worried, especially with the weekend coming up.

I'm pleased with the way the novel's shaping up. All of the characters are behaving themselves, and I keep coming up with new ways to make sure the story ties together.

And then there are the moments where I sit back and realize that what I've just written is actually pretty good. The death scene I mentioned in my last post was one of them. And oddly enough, so was yesterday, where I wrote 2,000 words of porn.

Yes, you read that correctly.

( There's a reason I'm using this icon instead of the Plot Bunnies one= )

Fanfic

Drowning in the Absolute Yes by tree- Pride and Prejudice, R, Elizabeth Darby/Fitzwilliam Darcy.
A Prudent Light by tree- Pride and Prejudice, G, Charlotte Lucas.

Home by caras_galadhon- Sharpe, PG, Sharpe/Harper, Sharpe/Tom Garrard, Sharpe/Jane Gibbons.
Blue by latin_cat- Sharpe, PG, Sharpe/Wellington.
Truth by latin_cat- Sharpe, R, Sharpe/Wellington, Sharpe/HC.

First Time by latin_cat- Young Bloods, NC-17, Wellingtion/Mme. de Pignerolle.

A Star Looks Down Tonight by sparrows_lass- PotC, PG, Jack/Elizabeth.
Leap of Faith by mamazano- PotC, G, Jack, Turner.
Enter from the East by ubiquitouspitt- PotC, NC-17, Norrington.
Pillow Talk, or The Lullaby by sparrows_lass- PotC, ?, Jack/Elizabeth.
A Change in the Wind: Ch 2/2 by meowbooks- PotC, PG, Gibbs, Jack.
From Dusk to Dawn: ch 2 by sunsetdawn20- PotC, G, Will/Elizabeth, Governor Swann, Beckett, Mercer, OCs.
Blood Crimson: Ch 3 by phoenix_9664- PotC, G, Elizabeth/Jack.
Four Seasons by smithkingsley- PotC, R, Jack/Norrington.
Clueless by giselleslash- PotC, ?; Jack/Will.

Son et Lumière

Emma, Sense and Sensibility: 41 icons by word_never_said.
Emma: 21 icons by birdienl.
Emma: 17 icons by ice_and_snow.
Pride and Prejudice 2005: 136 icons by purplesuitcorny.
Emma: 36 icons by naybob.
Mansfield Park 2007: 30 icons by songstressicons.
Emma: 36 icons by ingenu0us.
Lost in Austen: 32 icons by molatime.
Sense and Sensibility 2008: 54 icons by songstressicons.
Emma: 25 icons and 1 variation by midenianscholar.
Emma: 10 icons by wunderkind_lucy.
Emma: 74 icons by arlene_rosalie.
Emma: 58 icons by meganbmoore.
Emma: wallpaper by nordmaedchen.

PotC fanvid: Blinding (Jack/Elizabeth) by cmgacrux.
Various Austen fanvid: Princes and Frogs (various Jane Austen movie adaptations) by wunderkind_lucy.

Temeraire fanart: Untitled (Temeraire, G) by ormery.
Aubreyad fanart: His Majesty's Ark (Jack, Stephen, G) by johanirae.
Aubreyad fanart: Romance (Jack/Stephen, PG) by johanirae.
Aubreyad fanart: Surgeon (Stephen, G) by johanirae
PotC fanart: Lost (Jack/Norrington, R, NSFW) by siriuss3.

Of historical interest

joyful_molly: Event tip: BBC Children in Need comes to Hartlepool Maritime Experience.
le_russe_satanshares an article about Joaquin Blake, an Irishman who fought for the Spanish against Napoleon – and delivered a rare victory against the French.
farothielshares the General Courts Martial for sodomy in Wellington's General Orders.

Miscellany and meta

astolattells us 'what happened next' after her story, 'Duende'.
immortal_jedioffers a POtC fic bunny.
refrainofdreamsintroduces the Georgia Regency Society.
bunchesofrosesasks how did Elizabeth get past the Guards outside Lord Beckett's office.
joyful_molly: Review: “Garrow’s Law”, BBC1: Episode 2 – Could the Real Monster please stand up?.
tattooedsirentells us Emma is available for pre-order from BBCshop.com.
johaniraeasks a few questions about Aubreyad timeline canon and Stephen's official rank.
rattengiftadvertises for Dances of Vice Festival III: The Grand Shipwreck Ball.

austen_blog: Austen Letters Exhibition at the Morgan Library.
austen_blog: Austen Funnies.
austen_blog: New Austen-related film releases in Netherlands.
austen_blog: Don’t give them any bright ideas.

Communities and challenges

blackpearlsailsdrabble challenge: The Dead.
cutler_beckettWednesday Prompt: Stocking.
jackwilldrabble challenge: Captain.
before_the_mast: issue 24.
look_sharpe: November Community Challenges. Month's Book is "Sharpe's Sword" and "Sharpe's Skirmish", Month's Movie is "Sharpe's Sword," challenge prompt is "Secret" and challenge character is Sgt Patrick Harper.
cutler_beckettWeekend Chat: How does Beckett celebrate a birthday?.
mandc_readwill be reading chapter 2 of Treason's Harbour this weekend.
aninfamousarmyis a new comm concentrating specifically on the British Army during Wellington's military career. It welcomes both factual and fictitious content.
aninfamousarmy: prompt table.

Got a link for the next issue?

Please comment and let us know.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.