Blather, rinse, repeat

Just got back from the emergency vets again. This time Sano started limping, which he occasionally does, but this time it was worse than ever. It reminded me immediately of when Trisky started limping, same leg and everything.

Well, he's on meds and the Dr. (the same one who treated Trisky, she is excellent,) said she thinks he's probably got some lasting damage from the pit bull attack a few years ago that he will always have. He must have injured it again (I'm sure I saw him twist it yesterday, but there's hardly a day that goes by when he doesn't fall or twist his ankle or bang his paw on something--he plays so rough,) and she thinks it will probably be a life-long thing with him injuring it every once in a while.

Yay.

In better news, I finished my manuscript (again, with some changes) and this time I'm sending it right out, no query letter (they don't want queries; they want unsolicited manuscripts.) I have to write a cover letter though, and I've yet to find a good resource that tells me just what is the difference between a good query letter and a good cover letter. Also, they advise you to send a postcard that they send back to you once your ms. is logged in their database, to make sure they got it. But, I don't know what kind of postcard and that sounds like one of those little details that will get you automatically rejected. I mean seriously, wtf kind of postcard do I send? I'm sure they don't sell "we got your ms., thanks" postcards specifically for this purpose.

>_<

This Saturday is Raq's birthday party. I had told her once before about The Pillow Book and that she reminded me of the young empress Teishi, even as I reminded myself sometimes of Sei Shonagon. She said she wanted to read the book, but she couldn't find it anywhere, so it is one of my gifts to her. This is the message I put in the card to go with it:

"This is the book I was telling you about, with the character who reminds me of you--although she is less a character than an historical figure: the Empress Teishi of Heian Japan. She was a young Empress, only in her teens, yet everyone in her court still aspired to her grace and wisdom.

The writer of The Pillow Book is Teishi's attendant Sei Shonagon: a worldly, sarcastic, somewhat snobby, somewhat selfish 30-something who still likes to tell jokes and chase boys, but nevertheless is a great writer and very much admired the younger empress. The two form a friendship in their social circle of the court, although it is usually Sei, who is supposed to be 'older and wiser,' who seems to learn from Teishi.

Interwoven in the true story are idle lists, observations, poetry, jokes, rants etc. It is sometimes hard to follow since the pages were discovered out of order, with no dates on them.

It was written just over a thousand years ago, and what is startling is how little has changed throughout the years and cultures. Many of the same societal norms still exist today, as well as the same frustrations, loves, arguments, observations--and of course, the same kinds of friendships.

Otanjo-bi omedetou and Arigatou!

Jules"


That seems pretty nice, right? :)


( The D&D quiz. Apparently I am good, but bound by no laws. Go, me! )


I need to dye my hair. And get it cut. And get a postcard and write a cover letter and send out the ms. and go to Japan and go to school and be a teacher and have a baby. Oh, and I need to remember to pick up more toothpaste, too.

So check this out, today is six weeks exactly since DAW should have gotten my query letter, and I hadn't heard back about it, (read: didn't get the rejection I'd been expecting, but then, didn't get anything, which was more frustrating.) Then yesterday the postage went up from 39 to 41 cents. SURPRISE! So I bit the bullet and called the publishers. Those of you who know me, know that I loathe--LOATHE--talking on the phone. It takes a lot for me to just walk over to that sucker and pick it up, and I cringe when it rings. But I did it anyway, because I had to find out how the SASE was going to work, since it still only had the old stamp on it.

I talked to a really young sounding guy who was very nice, and who informed me that the submissions editor had been out for a while and had recently come back to work. Now he's backlogged with tons of manuscripts and query letters. He also said that they basically are accepting unsolicited manuscripts and that those were first priority. And that although they were backlogged, he would get around to rejecting answering those before he even looked at the query letters. And that since he mostly said "yes" to all query letters as long as they were clearly in regards to fantasy or sci-fi, I could go ahead and send the manuscript anyway.

...

O_O

So now my first order of business is to freak right on out the door. My second order of business is to get cracking on tuning up the crappy manuscript. That means putting down the book I had been writing (part three, even though I'd been slacking on that, too, in part because I couldn't see, but mostly because I got lazy,) and picking up part one again. Which, for the record, I'm SICK of reading that thing. I've looked at it so much that I have blind spots, I can't tell what sucks and what doesn't anymore. It's like saying the same word over and over again, after a while it doesn't make sense.

Then there's the wait period. We're looking at months here, maybe even a year. Do I send it to the hugest company I can find and just hold my breath, go about my life, and probably have it get rejected anyway in the end? Or do I shoot for a smaller company in order to get a quicker response and move on?

Truth is, I'm going to send out a manuscript one way or another no matter what, so I know that I do have to try to make that first draft into a real manuscript. And I'm going to have to send it to some company or other soon. Question is, which?

What should I DOOOOOOOOO?

/angst

I've been in hysteris for most of the day, the laughing kind. Well, MOST of the day, for some of it I was listening to anothe rbook. I still can't look at the computer screen for too long without going blurry and dry. This, oh my brothers and only friends, has got to stop.

Hhhhhhaaaanyway, yesterday I downloaded some MCR animated .gifs, I mean the real kind, like this:



which I sent to my Mom who replied that it didn't shok her, since she had watched so much baseball. Upping the ante, I sent her these:







She said she'd seen the last one on Cops, so was not shocked. However this one:

cracks everyone up.

G-WAY!

What else cracked me up, well, this one is a lognigsh story. Okay so a while back, you probably don't remember, I figured otu that Jared Leto is really Howl from Howl's Moving Castle. What you might not have guessed is that he is also Squall Leonhart from the original FFVIII. He's been transforming into him for a while, and last night when they won the Australian Video Award for Best Rock Video (yay, boys!) J.Le was going all military dress and I realized, the transformation is almost complete.




Just tell me you don't see it.

Anyway, so I was out trolling the internet for pics of Squall Leonhart like the 13 year old fangirl I have been known to be, when I finally came aross--quite by accident--the Uncyclopedia entry on Sephiroth. Which, in turn, led me to the article on CLoud Strife
Despite being a mentally confused, emotionally vulnerable cross dresser with funny hair, 90% of women, 50% of men, and 100% of people named Your Mom find him irresistibly sexy. The following is a list of characters that Cloud Strife has been romantically linked to in one way or another.

Aeris Gainsborough: Sweet and innocent flower girl from the slums

Aerith Gainsborough: Sweet and not-so-innocent entrepreneur from the slums. Aeris's twin sister, so far, Cloud doesn't know there are actually two of them.

Tifa Lockheart: Childhood friend, bar owner, and terrorist.

Yuffie Kissarawknee: Teenage ninja girl, thief. Was one of the teenage mutant ninja turtles but was thrown out for stealing their candy.

Barret, aka Mr T: They both deny it, but...

Etcetera. Which led me to Link.
Link has been known to utter screams and grunts for every bodily function he does. The reason for this is unclear, though it has been postulated that this is because Link is actually blind. The screaming is a form of echolocation to familiarize himself with his surroundings, when he doesn't have someone constantly telling him where to go - like a fairy, an owl, a boat, or a shadow demon or something. Then again though, how can he snipe people if he's blind?

Then, out of curiosity and boredom, I looked up My Chemical Romance.
The pack of emos consists of:

* Gerard Way; Homersexual, estranged son of Billy Corgan and Michael Jackson
* Mikey Way; concert tambourine player, occasional Napoleon Dynamite impersonator
* Frank Iero; Gerard's bitch
* Ray Toro; CEO of lawn-mower company
* Bob Bryar; some dude who once held a respectable job
* Milky Way; male groupie
* Brock; joined group after having a failing career on Pokemon


I LOLed, the part about Frank Iero slayed me.

And of course this led me to look up 30STM.
30 Seconds To Mars used to have a groupie named Bert McCracken, the well known hobosexual. They fell out when they realised he was infected with cat aids. They fired him and a confrontation came about on MTVs Total Request Live weeks later. And Bert was like "Jared I love you!" And Jared Lero was like "Get away from me!" And Bert was like "But the blowjobs! Think of the blowjobs!" Then Jared Leto goes "Get away from me, smelly little man!" and runs away. Bert then procceded to hump Gerard Ways' leg for the remaninder of the show. It was the highest rated show since Billie Joe Armstrong commited suicide live on air, after mistakenly hearing his own music. It was, according to a teenie bopper, "totally hoTLOL!!!!!!"11"

I am a bad fan. I found that really funny. There is also one about Stephen King that's funny, and, hell, probably most of them are pretty funny, I guess. ANyway, so that gave me a giggle today.

RANDOM: I love when singers shout the eff word. I don't know why, I hear it at work everyday. Context, maybe.

What doesn't give me a giggle is the fact that I really want to write some more and revise some crap I have written, and I can't, because I can't look at the screen for too long! Blogging does't take me very lon and I don't feel the need to correct too much lately (you guys all know that I type much better than I have been recently, I really haven't been looking at the screen too muh,) but it's different when I'm actually writing something. SO I'm pretty fristrated abotu that. I miss that stuff, you know? And I have some ideas I'd like to write, only I already outlined them and the actual writing of them would take really, you know, seeing what I'm writing. I never realized until now how much I rely on looking at the screen, words make much more sense when I'm reading them. Typing without looking, I'm only hearing my own voic ein my head, which is reandom and unpredictable, veyr stream of consciousness. That might be okay for LJ, but it's terrible for what I'm working on. So. yeah.

In the same vein, just before my surgery I went back to some computer painting which I hadnt' done in about a year. Actually I ahdnt'd drawn anyting in about a year until I made a fw new ones. Then I went back and revised some old ones. I figured that after my surgery I'd take a look at them with my nice, new eyes and see where I'd messed up, but I still can't actually see that well, so....

Anyway, so in the middle of writing this, I forgot I was writing it and started computer-painting, even though I can't really see. And then--duh!--in a comment to a previous post, a friend reminded me that I have my contrast and color turned way down. SO all the stuff I did tonight, I have no idea how it really looks, heee, because, NO CONTRAST! And very little color and very, very dark. But there are ones I did before the surgery, so there's no excuse for those.

Thing is, a few weeks ago I decided to update some drawings, and I also made a decision to drastically change the look of one of my main characters. Oh, big deal, who cares what the character looks like, I know, but it was a sort of ocnscious decision based on certain predjudices. It's not like I want to have an agenda, but I thought that it woul dbe interesting to represent him this way. THESE FILES ARE BIG! Click if you're high speed. So Kris, ( meet your new look: )

See, I wanted to define him by light and by lack of color. Which is very hard to do if you have absolutely minimal skills. And that one with LIllia is brand new. Guess what? I like it.

I updated a bunch more. ( YOu knew this was how Sahrek would end up, right? )
It was a natural progression, you know?

Jin's not too different, but I added a background. ( Lookit. )

Then I tried to redo Leander and I think I messed up. This is the one I tried to do tonight. ( Clickitywhee. )

I dunno, which is better? I'm not going to magically become a better visual artist or anything, but I kidna like the backgrounds I added, 'specially the one behind Sahrek.

Welp, now I've totally lost my train of thought. I hate that I'm posting these, I hate being oen of those unpublished hack writers who posts pics of characters that people ahve already forgotten. But don't fear, I did sen dout that query letter, so it's not like I'm sitting on these stories, right, amd just doing gratuitous doodles? YES.

EVERYBODY BURN THE HOUSE RIGHT DOWN!

I just want to commemorate this moment by saying I have finished my query letter and SASE (folded into thirds the short way!), put them both into a neatly addressed #10 envelope, and am sending the entire cafloofling thing out tomorrow morning to DAW books, betches. This is after FIVE HOURS of cutting, snipping, re-wording, hacking, hair-pulling, chest-beating, soy-drinking, knuckle-cracking, and general OMGWTF-ing. I went through six envelopes, not liking my handwriting on one, neglecting to put "Miss" before my gender-nonspecific first name, having the stamp on crooked, trying a 3-way fold the long way (duh!) and botching some envelope/letter origami that probably bordered on paper porn.

Now I eagerly await my first reply. If it's a rejection, I will gladly accept my first real rejection and tack it to my bedroom door, then I'll rework the query letter and try Silverleaf, because they sound cool, too. And so on down the line. I'll paper my door with rejections if I have to. If it is a request for the manuscript, I will cut my own throat with the manuscript begin the hair-pulling process all over again. I will not vanity-publish. Eventually, I'll pass the sentries at the gates of publication. "What is your quest? What is your favorite color? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

So, yeah.

ETA: EXCEPT I WROTE THE WRONG DATE AND HAD TO RE-PRINT AND MAKE A NEW ENVELOPE! It's funny. Really, it is.

Use white paper, but not TOO white. You could possibly get away with light grey or buff, but it's not worth trying, because you probably won't! Use only the American Flag stamps. Fold the SASE into THIRDS and put it in behind the letter. Use a business letter format, but make it personal. Do not open with a personal introduction. Open like a business letter, by stating your reason for writing. But avoid that dry approach at all costs! Open with a hook! Just don't be too cloying about it. Describe the plot briefly but vividly. Sum it up in one paragraph. No, two! DO NOT spell the editor's name wrong. Use a fancy font for your header, but don't use a fancy font. A professional header is not necessary, but you will need a professional header. Use Courier New 12 point for the body of the letter, but be sure to use New Times Roman instead. Give a word count. DO NOT give a word count. Mention it if you're writing a series, unless you really shouldn't be mentioning it. Offer to send either the manuscript or some sample chapters ... but whatever you do, don't offer either! Just offer the entire manuscript, after all. Be polite and thank them for their time. But don't ever thank them for their time because that implies that you expect them to give you their time. Include all of your past publications, but if you don't have any, then STFU. Most of all, do it right the first time, because if you try again later, the editor will remember you!

Think I'm exaggerating? Google "query letter tips" and see what comes up. I have not made up or exaggerated a single thing I just wrote up there. Maybe the COOLEST part of this whole thing is that I found three very helpful web pages on this subject and I bookmarked them. But Netscape, being a douche, has suddenly stopped saving my bookmarks as of today and I can't remember which words I Googled to find them. HURRAY.

I swear to god, the next step I'm taking is to write a letter that says "CONSIDER MY NOVEL OR I WILL PUNCH YOU IN THE VAGINA. Sincerely, Hopeless Hack Novelist."

Today I went for a free consultation for Wavefront Lasik surgery. The appointment was at 4:30 didn't get home till after six. They had to do all sorts of stuff because of the problems I've had with my eyes and whatnot. They put some numbing stuff in there, poked my eyes a bunch of times, checked the dryness levels, peeked all around in there and whatnot. It looks like I am a pretty good candidate for the surgery, so we went ahead and scheduled it today. I go for a pre-op thingie on April 10th, where they basically make maps of my eyes and all kinds of fun junk like that. Then for one last checkup on the 16th, and then the 17th of April I'm off for the surgery. It was the earliest they could get me in and I couldn't turn it down.

So far it looks like I can get the Lasik. (*knock on wood!*) If they find, after a few weeks, that my eyes are really dry, then I'll have to get the PRK. (When he peeked in there he said he saw a lot of really dry places, but when he did the tear test it wasn't so bad. He attributed it to the fact that I'd only just taken my lenses out.) If I get the Lasik, I'll only have to miss 2, maybe 3 days of work. If I have to get the PRK I'll have to take a week, and during that week I wouldn't be able to drive, or read, or watch TV. O_o Or probably write, for that matter, unless I was typing with my eyes closed. So please I can get LASIKS PLS!

Until then, I can no longer wear contacts except for maybe once or twice, and only for a few hours. I think I will wear them to the 30 show on March 23, which will still give me a few weeks without them before the surgery and won't screw anything up. So I'll be in glasses from now till then. And then after April, holy crap, I won't need either anymore! I can't wait to stop wanting to constantly claw my eyes out while wearing stupid lenses! I can't wait to not have to clean smudges off my glasses or put sunglasses over them while I drive, which looks just as stupid as it sounds. A part of me will miss the look of glasses, because I pretty much do like my wire frames and I use them to hide behind them when I don't want anyone looking at my face. But it will be so freeing to not need them, and April just can't come fast enough.

The doctor also said that when I get into my 40's I will probably eventually need reading glasses, but that if I didn't get the corrective surgery then I would have to rely on bifocals, or wear glasses over my contact lenses, or switch between glasses and lenses for looking up and looking down (distance and reading,) or get two different lenses and cover one eye while reading. Uhh, no. Especially if I plan to still be writing then.

Also, the price was surprisingly reasonable, and for those who are good candidates for the Wavefront, this doctor does not charge extra the way some doctors do. He said that if you're eligible for it you should get it, and if not then not, and it shouldn't affect the price. O_o He seemed a really decent sort, and I was comfy with the whole thing. He also said that I could have pre-operative Valium if the idea of it made me nervous, and I declined. Valium might only make me sick, anyway. I don't like stuff that makes me feel foggy and weird.

So I missed Kung Fu tonight but I did all my situps and leg lifts anyway, because I kind of start to feel squishy and slow if I don't do them these days. Then I took a shower and went outside with my telescope to look at Venus, all the while thinking how awesome it would be to not need glasses to look through the telescope. It's going to be fabulous and I just can't wait.

Right now I should be working on tightening that manuscript, but I'm intimidated, sick of the freaking thing, and just don't seem to have the spit for it. Blast! So I'm looking at other stuff I wrote instead, like an old, ooooold compilation of short stories and one novella I wrote right after college. I can see where I've grown, but what is alarming is that I can also see where I haven't grown. My basic narrating voice is pretty much the same, maybe just less intrusive than it used to be and slightly less clumsy. But still entirely self indulgent, and with many of the same rhythms. On the other hand, some of that stuff was actually pretty good, was really funny and snappy, and I had three really terrific characters that I now kind of miss. A shape-shifter named Tommy, a quirky alien named Randy, and a demon named Leander. (Yes, the name Leander has been with me for many years. The name made it into three or four of my old stories, actually.) I almost wanted to rewrite the silly thing using those characters. Then I realized that it represented something I'd long left behind, and I decided to leave it where it was. That's an odd feeling for a writer, I think--even a hack writer like myself.

Laura is taking my mourning dove and my goldfinch tomorrow, which will be awesome, both for the birds and for me. And then in about a month and a half it will be baby bird season again and my kitchen will be overtaken. Uhh, I can't wait.

I currently have six separate Word files open, and I think that's a record for me. There's this one, which is "blog34", there's "scraps, deleted scenes", "EI needs an outline", "ideas for query letter", and then the manuscripts, one and two. THAT'S A LOTTA WORDS. YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT, BABY?

Today was a day of signs, don'tyaknow. Tai Chi and Hula were pretty much as they always are, although I found that I was really focused in Tai Chi, more than usual. We ended up doing push-hand drills like they do in tournaments; basically tests of balance and intuition against an opponent. You have to root your stance and then you and your partner (opponent, I guess,) put your hands together and move them in a rhythmic circle, and then eventually you try to push each other off balance. The only way to avoid being pushed down is to know when the other person is going to try to push you, and then you kind of slip out of the way. So you have to sort of read the other person's movements and judge when they are going to make their move. To my delight and surprise, I was really good at it. Afterwards, my hands felt tingly. In Hula it was just Claudine and I, and we did Ipo Lei Momi, O Keahi A Lonomakua, and we started to re-learn Hanohano Ka Lei Pikake. It looks like if I really want to do Hahani Mai, I'm just going to have to bust it out on my own again.

So anyway, the signs. A few of you know that a few days ago I made a locked post wherein I posted the first draft of my query letter and asked for feedback. THANK YOU HUGELY to the person who answered me. I've given it a lot of thought and have reworked it, and will probably rework it some more following that advice. So after class and rehearsal today I had some grocery shopping to do, but my first stop was at Border's to pick up the 2007 Writer's Market. I found one exclusively for novels and short stories (which was dumb of me, 'cause I remembered only afterwards that I have recently been looking to do an interview in a magazine. You see how totally airheaded I can be? I disappoint myself, honestly.) Anyway, I flipped to the index to look at the Sci-Fi / Fantasy entries and immediately saw the Daw company. When I flipped again, I was a page away from their entry. I liked what I read in their entry, although it looks like they are taking manuscripts and not query letters right now. GAHH. The query letter, at least, is a gentler way of breaking into it. Over the years I've gotten comfy with the idea. But I started thinking that hey, maybe I would just go for it, you know? Allez-y, gehen sie man, gehen sie, GANBATTE. On my way to the next store I had to stop at, I got behind a car whose license plate read, "DAW" and then some numbers. I wish I would have looked at the numbers but instead I merely almost hit an old lady crossing the street and then drove the rest of the way in a high state of WTF. Whether or not Daw ever accepts my manuscript is not the point. The point, I think, is GANBATTE.

But now all I can do is look at the manuscript for the first book and think how much it sucks.

Whatevs. GANBATTE.

Just for those who might not know: A few years ago I wrote these huge fanfictions that were fairly popular. I liked some of the characters so much that I decided to quit that particular fanfiction and write original fiction using some of those characters and their stories. One of my favorites was the criminal anti-hero Sahrek, whose main power was one of suggestion; like a really strong hypnotist he could make you see what he wanted you to see, to the point where he could change what he looked like. Anyway, I always described him as having dark hair and blue eyes and that people found him attractive ... when he wanted them to. Blah blah blah, one scene I wrote had him getting captured and then using the chains on his wrists as a weapon to hit people with in order to escape. I was always partial to that scene.

I always imagined Sahrek like a kind of Nicholas Lea (X Files's Alex Krycek) and, briefly, Jonathan Rhys Meyers (before deciding that he was too pretty to be Sahrek.) Mostly he was always very Krycek-looking to me and that never really changed too much. But you can imagine my surprise and almost alarm when I saw ( this picture. )

Holy crap.

I had to do ( this: )

Now, don't panic; I didn't suddenly get talent or anything. That's a photomanip, badly done at that. Really the only things in there that are mine are the grass, the stupid tree, a bunch of chain links, longer hair and the crappy buttons on his coat. I really just painted over the rest, keeping within the lines (most of the time. Well, some of the time.) I didn't want to change too much of that pic; the position was exactly, but exactly the way I'd always pictured a moment in that one scene, and I had to have that face: Paranoia with a tinge of petulance. I only changed it the tiniest bit, just shapes and shadows, but I tried really hard to keep that expression.

Yeah, I stole it and made it crappy. Get over it. :P

"End of Book Two"*























*(With lots of tweaking, adding, and subtracting.)

I know I've got a few writers and readers on my f-list, and I know--as much as anyone can know anyone over the internet--that you are cool people. If you had a hint of homophobia, you wouldn't be on my f-list, so that's not even an issue.

Anyway, you've all seen my rambling posts on the fantasy stories I'm writing. Even if you haven't read said ramblings (which, likely, most people haven't,) I guess you must know that they exist. So a few months ago I added a very weird element to the second installment of the fantasy stories, and it's basically the main character going from world to world to meet different versions of the person he loves but can't seem to win over. I've tried to vary her different personnas over different times, cultures and whatnot. Her latest incarnation is a gay man.

When I write, it's usually impulsively. I had this story planned out, like I have all my stories planned out, and then something always happens to throw it off track. It goes its own way. The damned thing writes itself. So I didn't set out going, "Oh, hey, a gay character, what a novelty." I just had this idea for this guy, and he's dying of cancer. I put this man in the scene, and the next thing I knew, he was gay, and hitting on my lead character.

Once I realized that he was gay and this was what was going on, I thought for a second--just a second--about being careful, about avoiding stereotypes and cliches, and about being inoffensive. I quickly shot that idea right the hell out of the sky, and decided to just write. There would be no need to actively avoid cliches, at least not any more than I try to avoid them with writing anyone else. That was so freeing.

I think it worked out. I love this character, the way he talks and functions and gets by. He's open about his life, and then I just left it at that and let him be himself. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I wrote him right, though. I can't lie: I'd like some opinions. I don't want to solicite them, and no one is ever obliged to answer, but I might post this one chapter to my f-list anyway, because you never know if someone will, I don't know, decide to have a look.

Then I started thinking, Imagine if I ever got the nerve to write a query letter? Imagine if I ever got published? Okay, so I think that all the time, yeah. But this time I thought, Imagine if people actually read the damned thing? There'd be a small contingent of slash fans (not all, but some,) for whom this very brief scene would be catnip. There's no subtext to fantasize about: it's all there. And I thought, I'll bet some of them would do exactly what I didn't want done with this character. They would use him to fetishize homosexuality. I've already decided that in my fantasy world wherein my books get published and people actually read them, I am all for fanfiction. I'd totally read them, even the bad ones. I'd even read the MarySues that came along to save Sahrek from his Life Of Crime, and I'd laugh about them. But I'd laugh good-naturedly, because dude, people would be reading my stuff. But if fic writers came along and fetishized homosexuality through a gay character that I'd written, that might bug me out.

Anyway, who knows, I might post that one chapter to my f-list. Now, try not to get too excited or anything. ;D