Sing me a story, laugh me a lullaby

I haven't done one of these in a very long time, due to the Great Flash Drive Crash of '15 taking all my furniture and textures with it and also having to learn how to use the programme again on a Mac. Which is honestly the same as using it on a PC, except for that fact that, while Macs are very easy to use and much more stable than my laptop was, I find it very difficult to locate things on it or find where I've saved things. Basically the folders of my Mac are a mystery to me.

Anyway, I did manage to work out how to build again, so I gave Mat a flat. When I write places I like to be able to picture them in my mind and I find decorating a living space for a character tells me a lot about them, like their tastes, styles, and colour schemes.

I had a bit of trouble rendering, but hopefully the photos are good enough quality to see what's going on.

( House Tour )

When I write, I try to use the grammar and spelling that the person who's narrating, or whose POV we're occupying would use. So, American characters use American terms and spelling, and UK/Commonwealth citizens use British terms and spelling, regardless of whether the fandom is American or British-based. For characters like Edwin Jarvis and Peggy Carter, who are Brits surrounded by Americans in an American setting, I sometimes run into problems with what the dialogue of the Americans around them should be spelled like. For example, when an American is talking about his mother to a British person, does my British narrator record him as having said 'Mum' or 'Mom'? Because there is a distinct sound difference there, and it's hard for me to imagine any American saying 'Mum'. Airplane or aeroplane is another one.

It's probably something I'm overthinking, but I do feel like reading dialogue where Tony Stark says 'Mum' takes a person out of the moment a bit.

Any thoughts?

A selection of Google from November's fic research:

shibboleths
1940's microphone
1946 calendar
archery terms
patron saint of canadian army
bufo toad
canadian army clergy wwii
english sounds hardest for germans to say
i'll be home for christmas
icelandic forms of address
newfoundland slang
parallax effect
sapper
past tense of dwell
germans can't say squirrel

Bad news: The story I've put several K of words into? Turns out, very not historically accurate due to my misremembering/confusing history.

Good news: Potential rewrite actually works better. Characters seem much more cooperative with this scenario.

Bad news: Potential rewrite still not totally historically accurate, but much less inaccurate than previous version.

Good news: Story set in universe with super soldiers and steampunk pseudo-nazis. Probably some wiggle room for inaccuracy.

September Googles for Stories:

flowers you can grow indoors
African violet care
down's syndrome
new york children's hospitals
pediatric pneumonia
master title
1970s coat styles
1973 musicals
cake flavors
connecticut stereotypes
hardy boys
honorary degree
napkin etiquette
new york to stamford train
paul flato

A selection of Googles from July:

- come josephine in my flying machine
- foxtrot basic
- ring composition
- vesper martini
- when did air quotes start
- plural of platypus
- when did modern guys start wearing earrings
- shabbat candles cover hair
- lord carnarvon
- seatbelts in limos
- kiffles
- how far is it to the moon
- thousand islands
- saran wrap history

This month's selection of 'Stuff I Put into Google for Stories':

- afikoman
- are seasons capitalized
- when did the word hippie originate
- strawberry allergic cross-reactivity
- legality of digital signatures
- how to calm an angry cat
- apgar score
- how to address a lord
- sussex England to paris
- cool hearing aids
- toddler adoption
- 60s yé-yé music
- congenital hearing loss
- chair for your purse restaurant
- blood clots in fighter pilots
- birth control pill history
- james bond weapons

Things Research for Stories in the Month of May:

lindy hop
wwii British navy ranks
when did clothing sizes become standardized
women's razors history
boeing business jet
charvet ties
Hanukkah 1972
when do brown eyes turn brown
lindsay snowstorm
new york mayor 1972
baby hearing tests
portable LP player
famous Philadelphia hotels
captain kangaroo
pearl harbor
abraham erskine
how to serve wine
goulash recipe

Due to my excess wordiness of late, I've had to do quite a bit of trimming down of stories, and I've ended up with superfluous scenes. I thought I'd do a little 'DVD Bonus' post of three of them, rather than just left them sitting around.

They were never edited fully, so there might be some grammar and wording mistakes.

The first one was going to be at the end of 'Memory Lapse', but I cut it due to length and it not saying anything I needed to say.

( Scene One: From 'Memory Lapse' )

This one comes from 'A Good Thing'. I wanted Anna and Peggy to have a conversation instead of just telling through narration that they were getting along, but the story was too long, and Jarvis and Peggy took the conversation over, so I ended up trimming it down to the end of the dialogue to give a sense of them conversing without it taking up too much room.

( Scene Two: From 'A Good Thing' )

This last one is from my original attempt to write 'A Good Thing', which was going to be from Howard's POV. It was going along all right, but after this scene Howard got very self-centred and concerned about his business, and I couldn't get him back to where I wanted the story to go, so I switched it over to Jarvis' POV instead, and transferred some of the stuff from Howard's part to him. Therefore, there are few similar lines in it to the finished story.

( Scene Three: Alternative version of A Good Thing )

Me: This story is really long. Maybe I should see if I can cut some of it out.
Me: *edits, checks word count again*
Me: Okay, so I've gotten rid of 12 words.
Me: Yeah, that should be fine.

In other news, a tumblr blog I follow had a link to Homestyler, which is an online, fairly easy-to-use floorplan builder, for any other people out there who like to create sets for their characters to exist in, or are trying to figure out a complicated layout.