Alexandra Soroca 🎹 @SeventhMagpie@mastodon.art

Revised #introduction to reflect the state of my languages. 😋

I'm an amateur classical #pianist. Started learning properly at 34 and still going strong. Love Frédéric #Chopin. Admire Arthur #Rubinstein and Emil #Gilels, and am trying to model my playing on them (arrogant, I know 😅).

I love #cats and am enslaved to two of them. Love #sea, #sailing ships & books about sea adventures. #NaNoWriMo & fountain pens enthusiast.

I speak #Russian, #English, some #Romanian, and now study #Italian.

Dear neighbours. Anyone else, operating phrases like "Russian trolls", "kremlinbots" and other general dehumanising concepts, please step forward, so I could block you. Thank you in advance and sorry for the inconvenience. I'm not having this shit again here. There's Twitter for that.

Thinking about buying a fitness club membership. I have never trained this way, but looks like the time has come.

During the lockdown I've gained some extra weight (what with moving less and having 24/7 access to the refrigerator), and I don't feel comfortable with it. :/

Also, in my ripe old age :) it's too late to try and attract potential mates with just a pretty face. 😅 Now it's a fit body and an air of mystery. 😆

I'm sitting in the kitchen drinking tea. The window is closed, because it's autumn night and the air is cool.

Then a car drives up to the building, blasting some techno (or whatever) music. But since my window is closed, I can't hear much except for the beat.

Which repeats exactly the rhythm of my vibrator, if you go through the vibration modes sequentially. *gg*

I need to start closing tabs in my browser. Most of them have been hanging there for several months now. Clearly I don't need them.

A notorious neonazi nicknamed Tesak was found dead in prison in Chelyabinsk. Authorities say it was a suicide.

He's known first of all for organizing a hate group, that stalked gay men on dating apps and invited them on fake dates, where they were cruelly beaten and robbed.

The current version is more bitter. Characters have more dysfunctional relationships, the whole setting is darker. They fight, cheat and lie. None of them has a completely positive personality now. No happily ever after.

I seriously reworked it from the original draft between 2014 and 2018 (yes, I'm that slow), when it already was obvious that humanity is not getting any better.

And, of course, I have become older and more bitter myself, which translated onto the characters.

The plot is set in year 2021, and the main idea is homophobia in figure skating.

And the funny thing is, when I was initially writing it in 2010, I was uncertain if that would even be relevant by 2021. I thought that, likely, all homophobia would be extinct by then, thus making my story impossible.

Like I said, naive. :)

The initial telling was lighter, more naive. More simple, more straightforward. Partly because it was NaNoWriMo and speed mattered. And partly because I myself was younger then and still hoping for my own happily ever after.

Still, reading that old manuscript now I can say it was not bad at all. There's logic, there's motion, and some pieces of dialogue make me nod in approval even 10 years later. I do enjoy reading it. :)

I was able to uncover the very first, unedited manuscript of that novel from NaNo'10! Wow! I thought it was lost forever.

In later versions I made lots of cuts and edits, changed the main characters' lifestyles and, well, characters. Removed some of them. Changed almost all names.

It's really fascinating to see, how moving some accents and changing characters a bit results in an entirely new story out of basically the same plot.

I feel awesome. :)

Yesterday I spent ~3 hours straightening out the chaos of my old manuscript, notes, research etc.

Something was definitely lost, because I remember at least two research points that are not there now (how long does it take to heal a broken arm, and what is required for an unaccompanied minor to be let on an international flight).

Decided to rename one of the major supporting characters and make him a Kazakh. :)

Also, not entirely sure on who is/are the main character(s). 😂

Lately I've been feeling sudden tug to get back to the novel I started #writing during NaNo'2010 and have abandoned since then, unfinished. And I do mean sudden. Characters started coming to me in dreams, as if trying to shame me. :) Scenes were appearing in my head out of blue and out of order.

On Friday I gave up and went digging for my old working materials for that novel. :)

I woke up at ~10 in the morning today. :) That's the first time in well over a year. New eyedrops do not require early morning instillation, so suddenly I can sleep a bit longer on weekends. :)

The only downside is that the prescription change happened due to the condition worsening. :/

But seriously. This kind of shit needs to be banned immediately in all countries. People who have undergone this "therapy" tell horrific stories. This has no place in the XXI century.

Today I read an article about conversion therapy. Ugh. :(

And there was a gay boy, whom his religious parents repeatedly made see a "specialist" to try and make him "normal".

Thing is, the boy had lots of girlfriends at school. So that "specialist" told the parents that the boy had "caught the gayness" from the girls, so they needed to bar him from seeing them.

And I was all - sure, removing all girls from a boy's life will certainly make him heterosexual. :) It's even logical, sure. :)

I think I'm going mad. The Schumann style.

Russian sailors' dance from the Igor Moiseev ballet ensemble.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21yj2lEgrA

Nevermind, I found out by experiment. :) When you post an image, you can select location, and it will place the photo into the appropriate Place.

https://pixelfed.social/discover/places/101912/vladivostok

I wish I could edit existing photos to add location to them, though. :(

What is "Places" on #pixelfed and how do photos end up there? I see that there are few, and I'm curious.

A user has mixed up Lyon and Milan. *facepalm*

Humidity is so high, that I had to dry my towels in the washing machine, or else they were not drying at all.