MeeJ

This is my new favorite thing, for now. (NSFW due to swearing in the very title of the page. Also, lots of shouty profanity, which is obviously one of my things.)

I've been inconsistent about my exercise for the past three weeks, which: these things happen when you go on cleaning jags and also have a two-year-old around the house, and also it's too hot for human habitation seriously what the hell tropical storms so selfish just blowing around when I have crap to do. I'm trying to keep up with it reasonably, since my birthday plans include - as they have for the past few years - running a number of miles in the lower double digits (and then eating all the pizza). I can reliably pull off ten miles without having to do overmuch preparation, so I'm considering I've hit a good point in my fitness. Also? I have a sixpack. I'm really very obnoxious in showing it off, too. I'll probably get better about this as I get more mature, but we've seen how mature I can be. We'll SEE.

I'm reading the new David Brin book. It's good, but he's doing the usual Brin thing of too many goddamned characters on their own tears for the first third and then what the hell!!!! Brandon Sanderson does this too, but he does adorable characters better than David Brin (David Brin still does much better dialogue and slang). So far: no giant squids. I don't know if I'm sad about this or not.

This is a documentary about a geisha in Kyoto. It is very nicely done.

Everyone should have seen "Gangnam Style" by now. If you haven't, Google it. I'M NOT YOUR MOTHER, I DON'T HAVE TIME TO FIND YOU LINKS TO EVERYTHING. Oh fine WATCH IT. Safe for work, I guess, but get some headphones.

I am trying not to stress over writing, trying not to make it about deadlines or "you HAVE to finish this", but just trying to ... let it flow. Sometimes this results in something stupid like a page of Graycloak insults, and sometimes it's turning into something cool, like the Vices/Virtues thingy Desnik and I are doing. I still have no idea where that's going, and that relaxes me immensely. I haven't been able to look at my forum tags for a while because the crippling guilt of OMG WHY DIDN'T I TAG BACK YET is cutting that right off. Baby steps. Baby steps. At least I still haven't hit the deadline of "when Walks finishes Kun-"

OH FFFFFFF

The Dark Is Rising
Avaryan Rising (not the Dark)
The Silmarillion
Death's Master
The Nonborn King
Jack the Bodiless
The Fionavar Tapestry
The Name of the Wind
The Proofhouse


I have a lot of new things to read but it's that time of year when my brain is so pulped by heat that I can't process NEW ideas. TIME FOR OLD ONES TO SIFT OVER.

The fall of Gondolin, Pwyll Twiceborn, mercenary Lylas and Aiken Drum and Mirain (the good one) and Merriman Lyons and Gorgias, dammit Gorgias.

I don't know yet that I'm ready for a Sandman reread; I do love Morpheus but sometimes I just want to shake him. (Which is totally the point.) I am also not yet ready for Strange & Norrell, although I bet I'll get to that after The Proofhouse, because (dammit) Gorgias makes me think of Mr Norrell.

I WOULD LIKE TO REREAD THE COMPANY, BUT SOMEONE STILL HAS MY COPY (I wish I'd written Aidi Proiapsen.)

Skeiler and I were being driven to Mexico by my bossmans, but on the I-5 south we got pulled over by the police - more than likely because bossman's car is kind of skeevy. The police was convinced that we were drugrunning, and his evidence was that I had, in my bag, two pairs of lacy ivory wedding gloves, the sort that my sweet sweet knitting book tells me how to make on excruciatingly tiny needles.

I eyed the gloves and demanded, SKEILER ARE THESE YOURS.

She made cute innocent face (I have no idea what my skei-bot looks like but in dream-logic I knew this person to be her anyway) and demurred MAYBE.

And I thought MAYBE???? COME ON SKEI-BOT EITHER YOU HAVE WEDDING GLOVES OR YOU DON'T!

This dream was in all ways fabulous, possibly scored by Jack White, and the prologue featured the Scourge singing "It Can't Be True" from 13. I'm not sure who was singing as Lucy, but it may have been Agatha. That image broke my brain.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: TODAY I AM GOING TO FINISH LAI VERSUS MIRAIN, AND POST IT, BECAUSE I AM AWESOME.

I found a slew of old fanfic ideas I had - mostly for Babylon 5, little snapshots of Talia Winters and Susan Ivanova and playing with the original concept JMS had, that Susan was going to have been the leader of the telepath rebellion. (Not that I do not love Lyta, but can you imagine Susan with her grief over both Talia and Marcus? I do not ship Susan and Marcus, mostly because oh she does not love him, at least she could have boffed him once, but he was her friend, and Susan had too few.) OH BY THE WAY THOSE WERE ALL SPOILERS FOR B5. YOU SHOULD HAVE WATCHED IT BY NOW ANYWAY.

I was going to write something about Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, but that might require watching it again. OH TEH NOES!

I had also some snippets about Narnia and the fate of Susan. I hated a Neil Gaiman story on this subject so badly that I never finished the other stories in the collection. I don't really know that I could write Narnia fic - I am not a deep enough theologian nor an efficient enough plotter - but I always wanted to punch Rabadash in the mouth (and then Lewis went and did it better).

I don't really have a lot of fandoms. I wasn't allowed to play video games growing up, so I missed out on a lot of the sweet RPGs that influenced a lot of my friends. (Fortunately pinkhouse is playing Suikoden now so I can see what happens!)

If I'd had the foresight to sign up for Yuletide, I'd demand a darkfic about Anne Remillard actually being Fury, or about Kassafeh building a tower of her ow - ... ... ... Actually I might write that one, incorporating pomegranates and the hopelessly cross-eyed guardsman. No one seems to read Flat Earth but me and twelve-year-old girls of various ages and genders (which: okay).

I always used to get deep narrow flashes of inspiration for fanfiction - particular reaches from the canon that I wanted to explore. These days I very rarely write with canon characters - well, no, that's only true for World of Warcraft, in which I write my rp characters rather than - say - Thrall or Varian Wrynn. I understand that this is also Richard Knaak's usual m.o., except when he's character-assassinating dwarves or the blue dragonflight (Kalecgos is not qualified to be an Aspect, oh FIDDLESTICKS). ... I could write about Kalecgos being awful and Tyrigosa and Haleh smacking him a good one, I suppose. I know it would make Cal happy.

I think that the moral of this story is that I need to write more snapshots. Oh hey! I had one for The Irresponsible Captain Tylor! And like NINE for Bastard!! I can't say a word about BSSM, as it spawned Graycloaks (tangentially).

In other news: I have all of my Christmas shopping done. BOOM!

At this point, I'm just not going to watch House to spite you.

You, personally.

12. In what story did you feel you did the best job of world building? Any side-notes on it you’d like to share?

... :D :D :D

( I WILL SHOW YOU FEAR, IN A HANDFUL OF ICE )

Man, I have to get snappier on these. Two-day responses? Pish posh.

I was in all of the advanced classes in high school; in college I was permitted to opt out of English, literature, what have you, entirely, and jumped on that option like a toad out'n Calaveras County.

In high school, I was given the usual gamut of books to read - Frankenstein, Moby-Dick (which Ms. Gage hilariously insisted upon calling "Moby-Whale" in a worthy attempt to avert sniggering), Great Expectations, Lord of the Flies, ek cetra. Like most/all of all y'all, I had already read all of these books long before the tender savageries of ninth-grade English, and was bored stupid for the in-class discussions. I'm not faulting my teachers for this. They were probably delighted that students were reading anything past Sweet Valley High. (Ms. Jordan - all of them were "Ms.", even Ms. Patterson who was so obviously a missus that she gave up and began writing her name on the board so - caught me reading The Vampire Lestat in class once while I was waiting for something else to happen, and reamed me out. "What on earth is that?" "Um. I wanted to see what the fuss was about." "... Fine. What is all the fuss about?" "This guy never seems to have to pay for his mistakes." "I don't want to see that book in here again, it's not worth you." This was my first encounter with contemporary literary criticisms.)

My quibble with my English teachers was not that they made me read the Grand Western Canon, but that they never made me curious to look beyond it. I'd already delved into Austen, Dickens (blergh), Faulkner, and Steinbeck from my parents' bookshelves. (Tortilla Flats is my daddy's favorite book.) Fine. But not in four years of obedient essay-writing and earnest talk of symbolism did there arise any recommendations for other good authors. I mean, I wasn't asking them to be all Harold Bloom and boom forth "THESE ARE GREAT AUTHORS (and none other)", but I would've liked to have had mentioned at some point that if I liked Faulkner and Steinbeck, why not look into Joseph Conrad (whom I found also on my parents' bookshelves before some jackass tried to make me read Heart of Darkness), and from Conrad, go on to Ford Madox Ford and Henry James? Am I spoiled by Pandora?

What I am getting at, in the most roundabout kind of way, is that when I got slammed for reading Anne Rice in a class that was all about understanding the Western canon and book-larnin about Romeo and Juliet and some god-awful mess hight "The Scarlet Ibis", I took from that book a trail that led me to Poppy Z. Brite (glergh) to Tanith Lee (YAYE) to Julian May (flippin sweet) to David Brin. My teachers couldn't even be bothered to mention Ring Lardner or D.H. Lawrence.

I'm not blaming the downfall of American literacy on my high school teachers' failure to encourage curiosity about the entire body of work open to Young Minds, but: I had to find out about Saki from Stephen King.

( My favorite short-story author. )