...

So, it happened.

After a little over a week working on these 31_days prompts, not to mention several weeks before that of fiddling with other assorted, related U.N.C.L.E. fics ...

... I dreamed about those two rascals.

It was a convoluted dream of watching The Odd Man Affair episode, only somehow it had gained a lot more content than it had in actuality and there seemed to be a whole subplot with Ecks and Wye and some assignment they were on. I can't even fully put together what was happening well enough to recount the plot while awake, except I was thinking "... Chrissy has a lot more screentime than I remember," and something about Wye having a daughter and mentioning her to Ecks. And I believe somebody got punched. And they were driving old cars, like, 1940s-ish.

And I was dreaming in black-and-white.

The themes have been interesting to work with. I was having the hardest struggle figuring out what to do with Monday's, "want to pet every monster." It would be fine in a fantasy setting, but how on earth to adapt something like that to reality? And then at last, the plot slowly started coming to me. I wrote a piece where Wye is terrified of the vicious dogs, since he doesn't like being around something with a mind of its own that could turn on him, and Ecks is just calmly sitting with one of them.

That was a day when I went out shopping a bit. I was looking for Pony stuff, mainly, the Octavia doll and any clean G1 Ponies. I went all through both warehouses of the big antique mall, but couldn't find any Ponies except a dirty G3. I would have bought her had she been clean. Sigh. I'm just not up to cleaning dirty toys that I have no idea where they've been or what they've gotten into. More power to people who deal with that sort of thing with ease.

I wish the other branch of that antique mall still existed. There were a lot more 1980s toys in it. Clean ones, too.

So I was pretty exasperated by that shopping trip, all in all, but at least I was pleased with the prompt that day.

Also, I finally got through the three Star Wars: Legacy of the Force books written by Karen Traviss and I went on to the fourth one I had out. I was only doing the Boba Fett ones. And I knew I'd miss Karen as the writer, but I didn't realize just how much. Troy Denning not only clearly didn't like Boba Fett, he apparently disliked him so much that he wasn't willing to make his book fit in with Karen's previous one! Continuity got completely unhinged.

In Karen's third book, Han and Leia's daughter went to Boba Fett for help and he was training her to go against her brother, who'd gone to the dark side. In the process, it was canon within the story that she found that Boba Fett wasn't as horrible as she had always thought he was. And she also found out that the reason why his marriage broke up was a lot different than what she'd thought. But then in Troy's book, Jaina Solo seems to still have as bad an opinion of Boba Fett as she did to begin with. And Boba Fett is very far removed from the reader; there aren't any scenes from his POV so far, like there was with Karen's books. I was surprised when Troy included a paragraph about how being a stormtrooper didn't mean the person was flat-out evil and that they were likely fighting for what they believed was right. He seemed to see in black and white so much, not even following previous book continuity, that it was a real surprise to see him include a shade of gray like that. He also didn't capture Mirta, Boba Fett's granddaughter, with as much fire and personality as she has in the other books. I don't think I'll have too much trouble getting that book finished up by Monday evening, when they all have to go back.

Honestly, I fell so hard in love with Karen's books and how she brought the characters to life that I definitely want to purchase all three of her books from that series, as well as every other Star Wars book she wrote. She did some that I believe take place during the Clone Wars and are about the clones. She brings them to life and gives them personality, instead of just being robotically programmed to obey every order given. You can tell she really got into what she was writing about and she loved the verse she created.

And Venus came, a day before the estimated arrival dates started! She is the right size, thankfully, albeit the right size is slightly smaller than what I remembered from F.Y.E. I remembered the correct size when I first got home, but then I started visualizing her as bigger than that.

I'm a little puzzled as to why I wanted her, because I do not and never have liked chibi-deformed style. But she is really cute and most Sailor Moon plushies are in that style, so unless I want to shell out a lot of money for a Japanese plush with the right proportions, I pretty much have to consent to getting chibi-style. They seem a lot more huggable than those Japanese plushies, so that's always a plus, and Great Eastern plushies' eyes are just gorgeous and so full of life. And the hair is so soooooft....

I still want the giant Sailor Moon plush, too. She would be pretty well aligned with my small Chibiusa plush, which was my original reason for wanting her instead of the small size Sailor Moon. And if GE ever gets around to making Mercury in the large size, I'll definitely have to get her. Jupiter I might get, but I'm not crazy about getting Mars. Still, if I actually ended up getting all the rest, I'd probably feel bad not to get Mars.

There's a small size Pluto out now, too. I wish F.Y.E. would get her, because they would hopefully be a little cheaper than Amazon. I must have Pluto, and I don't know if or when they'll make a big one of her, so I have to get the small one. I just hope I won't have to resort to Amazon, unless their price comes down a bit.