emma writes a thing

 I've been planning this surcote for ages and have finally started sewing it as of last night. I am getting a full sideless surcote out of a 1.4x1.4m piece of fabric, which is awesome, lemme tell you. Unfortunately, some piecing is required and that is going to be the bane of my existence, figuring that out.

Because I'm working in silk dupioni and a lot of this is cut along the grain I'm finishing all the raw edges before I attach things together, Might not look as pretty? but it's going to be soooo much easier to work with already-finished edges. Enough of the weft threads have just....fallen out of the sides that I can use them as my thread. I don't know if I'll be able to use them in the whole surcote but I can certainly use them for the bulk of it. Which is good, because literally none of my threads match this fabric. It's a purple-shot-gold silk, which makes it absolutely impossible to color-match.

I may actually need to rip out the seam I did last night if I've sewn the bias edge of the gore to the body panel...or just make that the back. Because I need to have a train on this (I don't need to but I want to, shush), so the gores need to be sewn in such that I can give myself a bit of a train. This is a court dress, dammit, and it's gonna be sumptuous.

I also need to pick up some fur to go around the sides. Mostly to cover the piecing, but also because white rabbit fur would look spectacular against this silk, I think. Unfortunately, what with CoViD-19 and all, I can't exactly go out and shop for it, and the market I was planning on buying some at got cancelled. Sigh.

I've got a few other posts I want to write though, so perhaps I'll get started on those. Procrastinate? Me? Never.

 Don't mind me, I'm just over here having one of those end-of-the-murder-mystery moments where the detective, Brilliant Genius that he (always a he, for some reason) is, has eighty-six different flashbacks that connect everything together and SUDDENLY THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED YAAAY.

So, for the last...forever, really, I've been stressed and exhausted and I've been blaming it on a lack of routine but it's been going on for much longer than I haven't had a routine, so that excuse doesn't really hold too much water. It's been getting worse, of course, but it wasn't caused by the lack of routine. I've also had basically no appetite for months now, too, which is very annoying because meatsacks do not have charging cables.

I've been living with my fiance & his parents for the past three years. Yes, three. The initial plan was I'd find a job and an apartment and...well, neither of those happened. So I've just kinda...stayed. And stagnated. And fallen into one mistake of a program after another. But that's kinda neither here nor there, where my current exhaustion is concerned. 

I think I've been stressing about housing (whether consciously or not) for nearly three years, because I am acutely aware that me being in this house specifically was not part of The Plan, and his parents have been very gracious to let me stay here, but for my own sake, my mental and physical health, I need to get out of here.

I don't know why this hasn't occurred to me sooner. I know that housing stress can completely fuck someone's mind up, I've seen the studies, I know how it affects high school kids' grades when they're worried about Life rather than School. But I never applied that to myself, foolishly assuming I had no housing stress because I'm in a stable environment and I know where my next meal is coming from, etc. 

However. I'm in a hot-and-cold relationship with my fiance's mother, where every single time I do something that my fiance gets grumpy or annoyed about she starts acting as if I am a horrible human being who is Ruining her Baby Boy's life (and do note that this does absolutely nothing to help my own supply of self-hatred) and she almost starts...berating me? for whatever it is I'm doing, and my fiance hasn't been stepping in nearly as much as he really needs to. I get scolded for not letting him do his work (well excuse me for wanting to interact with my fiance) or for stressing him out about the housing stuff...really, any time I'm not being the Perfect Girlfriend, it seems.

So I've been half-treading on eggshells for the last two-and-a-bit years because of this. She's also got her own deep-seated issues (which she refuses to get therapy for, another issue in and of itself) and will just go on and on for hours if you let her about her childhood and how much of a class-A horrid bitch her mother is (no, really, Nan is a piece of work, so I know she's not exaggerating there). She brings up stuff that happened 50-odd years ago, and it's clear that she's still not over it, and I'm here trying to work through my Daddy Issues (TM) and my fears of abandonment by my family and I literally do not have the energy to deal with her shit on top of mine.

It's not an abusive household, not by any means, but there's elements of it that I can see cropping up, in addition to general Boomer inconsideracy and conservatism with an added helping of religion-fueled puritanical ideas like not letting us even think about falling asleep in the same bed. Despite the fact that we've been engaged for a year. And we're pretty sure they know we sleep in the same bed when it's just on our own. But no, their house, their rules.

"So just move out" I hear you cry, and well, when you're unemployed, nobody's hiring you, you have a grand total of $8k to your name wrapped up in an American mutual fund that your own mother will be Very Mad if you take out...you're kinda stuck. The worst part is, my fiance and I can afford to move out. He's got the money, he's got an income, he's got savings. But he's not comfortable moving out, because he likes to make mountains out of molehills and beat dead horses til they're roadkill. I've been trying so hard to just Deal With It for his sake but I'm at my breaking point--actually I'm beyond my breaking point and I have been for MONTHS now--and I'm telling him that for my physical and mental health I need us to move out. 

And I have a huge amount of guilt telling him this, because I don't want to rush him. He tells me that he'll do things on his own time and he doesn't want to feel like he made a mistake in moving out too early. He's nearly thirty, for chrissake, with a stable income! Why is he still living with his parents??? (These are the thoughts I cannot voice, because it's scarily close to the shit his ex was saying, and I don't want him to think he's a failure and I'm gonna leave him because he's still living at home. He's not, he's had perfectly good reasons, but I am just...so frustrated. So done.)

So there I am pulling the health card, and it feels manipulative, and I hate it. But I've been crying for help, begging to move out for months now, and I've been getting the equivalent of a pat on the head and "that's nice dear, please quiet down so I can work" for it. 

I'm scared of going back to where I was in 2014. Five years ago I was heavily suicidal, unmedicated, in a beyond-dead-and-rotting relationship that wasn't healthy when it was briefly alive, laying on the bed staring at the ceiling thinking about jumping off the sixth-floor balcony but not wanting to ruin someone's walk with their dog. So I didn't jump. I couldn't take meds then, so overdosing was out. No guns, and that's messy, and so is slitting one's wrists in the bathtub. I can feel my thought patterns slipping back into that. I had to take a Valium last night just so I could sleep and all I could think was "maybe I should take these more often, they're nice when I want to stop caring" and I know that's the road to addiction, so if that's not illustrating my mental health I don't know what will.

I think all of the above is just a very long-winded way of saying "I'm exhausted because despite my living situation being fairly stable I'm under immense housing stress and it's only taken me three goddamn years to realize it." Yay.

From Prompt Dump: Any, any, Boy, you're gonna carry that weight/Carry that weight a long time
Additional prompt fodder, randomly generated at springhole.net: a hidden compartment, paper, a revolver, and a friendship.
I'm trash for Sess/Kag, and I've wanted to try something a bit different and more sci-fi. Most of the prompt stuff hasn't yet come into play, but it will...eventually. Next chapter, probably.

Here, we do not weep. Even when we have committed terrible atrocities; even when we have lost all hope. In my time here I have slaughtered entire settlements in the name of the Mistcatchers. On Ayma-6, I killed my first child, on orders from my superiors. If they are to be believed, this child was Chosen, and in taking their life I prevented innumerable deaths. On Prom-2, a woman begged for mercy, desperation in her eyes as she shielded her newborn baby. In a moment of weakness, I gave her a quick and painless death, and took the child to raise as one of our own.

This girl's future is not unlike my past. I was raised by the Mistcatchers, a series of faceless, nameless women who taught me stealth, to cloak my heart in ice, to coat my tongue in honey and take a place on the left-hand side of powerful men, always walking two steps behind as a proper woman does. I learned which poisons are undetectable and when to use each one, how to dispose of an identity as one might dispose of a broken watch, and how to conceal as many weapons on my body as I could. My current record is fifty-seven knives and needles, though my primary Mistress has managed seventy-two. She is taller than I am; this is only expected.

On Ka Prime, I became a companion to a Senator, a man so unimportant I never bothered to remember his face. I fucked him, of course, as any senatorial companion does, called his name in moments of passion as contrived as his marriage. I used him, as he used me. He liked to be whipped, you know. Most Senators do--I think it's a way for them to absolve themselves of any lingering feelings of guilt.

I have been dominant, submissive, and everything in between. My latest assignment, I am told, prefers a submissive woman, and so I return to the first identity I adopted, though with a different name. He will know me as Kagome.

I spend way too much time worldbuilding when I sit down to write. I get bogged down in the minutiae of the world before I actually make characters who live in it, and then when I get to character creation, I'm spending forever trying to make backstories and find names and I never get around to making them *do* anything.

So maybe I should just do the worldbuilding without wanting to write a story, and make characters without stories in mind. But then I'll end up with dozens of half-finished worlds. Ugh. Stupid ADHD, always keeping me from doing what I want to. Why can't I finish anything?

Speaking of finishing, I really should write another chapter or two for First Days. I think I last posted to it in July? Way too long ago. I think I'm at their first Adult Date? Should probably reread the thing before I write more on it. Welp. I've been wanting to showcase the firsts of S/K's relationship, but I'm also wanting to showcase more deep and intimate things. No sex because HAH I couldn't write a good lemon to save my life. (well, I probably could, but I'm just gonna...not.)

But I want to explore the troubling side of their relationship rather than just all the happy sunny fun parts. I've already done that a bit, with Sesshoumaru getting all mad at Kagome over stupid high school bullshit and ragequitting their relationship for like five years until OH LOOK they're at the same university in the same coffeeshop and the last time they spoke Sesshoumaru was busy being an ass and Kagome was busy calling him on his shit and now they've awkwardly tried to move past it and they've admitted their TWU WUV (honestly tho I love the Grumpy One is soft for the Sunshine One cliche which is why I'm all over this pairing) and now I've gotta write their First Date and I don't know what the hell to do for it. I've never had Proper Dating experience because I've kinda fallen into all my relationships (hooooo boy) and I don't know what to do on a Date when you're at the getting-to-know-you stage and doubly so for the getting-to-know-you-AGAIN stage because that's where they're at. My fiance and I kinda had that stage but like, we were ultra-LDR so we didn't *~*date*~* we just sat on Skype (actually Google Hangouts for the most part) forever. Back In the Day when we first met it was on MSN but that got killed between us MSNing and us admitting Feelings.

ANYWAYS I don't know if I want to add in another conflict, though, because I feel like the high-school-bullshit blowup they had was hard enough to write? But something needs to happen, maybe An Accident or some other Traumatic Experience. Maybe the Traumatic Experience could result in them moving in together. Hmm. This could work.

...I've just written the subject for this post because I can never really title them until after I've gotten on a roll with posting, but I feel like I'm gonna have a lot of Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco circa 2008 style titles, because who doesn't love the long-ass run-on titles?

Back to waffling, I suppose. Maybe in Word, this time, instead of on the tablet, because the sticky-back thing that has the stand attached keeps trying to fall off. Very frustrating.