sometimes you need a story

Stargate Atlantis

An Inaccurate Telling by chellefic (Sheppard/McKay) this was romantic, sweet, and funny. :) I had a wonderful time reading.


Selfish by helenish (Sheppard/McKay) This was hot.


Supernatural

Five things Sam wishes he didn't know about himself by missyjack (Gen) This was sad but good.

a short list of semi-random things I have been thinking about!

1. I try really hard not to judge people for liking things I think are badly done (as in written, mostly, or even decently written technically but with characterization I don't buy/like) or which squick me, but I fail. A lot. Even with a constant mantra of YMMV to remind me I shouldn't.


2. Point one is related to nothing in particular, except the trawling of recs lists, which is dangerous for so many different reasons.


3. I have a thing I need to write, so of course I get slammed with an idea for a girl!Sam story. I should have known when this moring the iPod coughed up Just Another - that was pretty much the musical background while I wrote Beggars (well, that and So Much Mine) and then when I walked into the deli, She's Gone was playing. But I feel like I can't resist Springsteen-inspired stories, especially not when they take place in the dog days of summer and involve a lot of hot hetcestous porn. Um. YMMV, remember?


4. Speaking of fictional incest, thoughtful discussion here of a vid that tackles the topic vis-a-vis SPN, Heroes, and Firefly. I haven't seen the vid, but the conversation was interesting. I think I've talked before about what particular types of incest-fic work for me, though I've never really pinpointed the why (I am not sure I could; nor that I want to), but it's true that while I can and do enjoy the happy Wincest (as long as it is not too mushy or romantic), it's the stuff with the undercurrent of desperation/guilt/need - the knowledge of wrongness and the inability to not do it anyway - that gives me that queasy visceral thrill I am looking for, the thing that fascinates me about incest pairings to begin with. I find it difficult to find stories like that, even in SPN (maybe especially in SPN, where I desperately want some kind of hopeful ending for Sam and Dean), and even more difficult to write stories like that, again because I am a big fluffy puppy who just wants everyone to shag (not necessarily each other, in the case of Sam and Dean) and be happy.


5. I am not sure I will ever catch up on the TV I want to catch up on before summer's over (i.e., Mad Men and Middleman). So much TV, so little time!


6. I suppose I should get back to writing now. Plot is my nemesis, but I will defeat it! Or something.


7. [eta] I am amused that as soon as I hit post, iTunes played Love Spreads, the Crazy Space Incest theme song [let me put you in the picture / let me show you what I mean / the messiah is my sister / ain't no king, man, she's my queen] [/eta]

***

The 5 Most Ridiculously Unfair Kids Game Shows

Top 10 Brilliant But Canceled Shows

Also, if anyone has any Illyana Rasputin PB suggestions, please go to this poll (it’s at the bottom of the page).

Huh.

Rob Thomas wants to do a Veronica Mars movie.

I am torn, because on the one hand, I loved season one, and the characters, so, so much, but on the other hand, it could be really horrible. If it focused on Veronica and Keith and Wallace (and Weevil!), and maybe a case that had actual meaning to Veronica (hi, Lianne, we hardly knew you), I think it could be awesome. If it's just a Veronica Mars: FBI kind of thing, well, I might enjoy that, depending on the case, but really, I feel Keith and Wallace are integral parts of why I love Veronica. And it'd get poor Percy Daggs out of those damn Hot Pockets commercials. I feel so bad for him!

***

Supernatural

Revelations by marinarusalka (Gen) I really like the plot, character voices, and this worked for me. :)



Way Down Inside, Honey You Need It by onelittlesleep (Sam/Dean) This was really REALLY HOT.


Where It All Begins by mickeym (Sam/Dean) This was hot.


Persuasion by lazy_daze (Sam/Dean) This was really hot.


Buffy Vid

Creep (Buffy) by bradcpu (vid:recs:buffy) This vid blew me away on many levels. The editing was top notch, I loved the story, the clip choices, and the song was so perfect.

Dude!

Hixon needs to play like this during the season!

Three touchdowns in the first quarter!

My brother got his autograph at Giants camp by telling him they have the same first name (true, though spelled slightly differently); he also got Justin Tuck's autograph by telling him they named their new dog after him (also true). My nephew is at the age where he thinks this is kind of awesome. Two more years, and I'm sure he'd be facepalming in embarrassment (he's twelve).

A safety! I love it when they score a safety! And now, a fumble recovery for a td! Woo!

The preseason doesn't mean anything, but I do enjoy seeing them doing well.

***

This was taken from a few people on my friends list:

Go over to Wikipedia and enter your birth date. Then pick 5 events 3 births, and 1 holiday that occurred on your birthday.

August 17th.

Events
1. 1807 - Robert Fulton's first American steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
2. 1908 - Projection in Paris of the very first cartoon, Fantasmagorie realized by Émile Cohl.
3. 1945 - Animal Farm by George Orwell is first published by Fredric Warburg
4. 1998 - Monica Lewinsky scandal—Bill Clinton admits to it.
5. 2008 - American swimmer Michael Phelps wins eighth gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, surpassing Mark Spitz for the most gold medals in a single olympics.

Births
1786 - Davy Crockett
1893 - Mae West, American actress
1990 - Rachel Hurd-Wood, British actress

Holiday
Saint Hyacinth of Poland

In other news, I’m in the middle of working on an application for Illyana Rasputin, for an X-Men related RPG. I’m just having some trouble coming up with non-overused blondes (who aren’t too old or too young to work as a 16 1/2 year old--I briefly considered Saoirse Ronan, but she seems too young) that would work for the character. If anyone happens to have any ideas, just put them in the following poll.

Poll #2202 Who Would Work For An Illyana Rasputin PB?
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Please Write In As Many Ideas As You Can Think Of

Cannot brain today.

Have a poem:

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

~Billy Collins

***

Saturday I was pretty much gone the entire day. Did the monthly meetup with the Houston Browncoats at this really good chinese resturant and ate lunch, then went to a birthday party for a slash writer (pros fandom mostly I think) along with other fannish friends and we went to a Magic Show resturant. The food was awesome, I loved the company, and the magic show was neat. Afterwards, we headed back to the b-day woman's house and had cake and talked for a few more hours and finally at midnight I had to leave because I was getting kind of tired. it's just way too much fun hanging out with fan fiction people.

Then on Sunday, woke up messed around with trying to find the best way to convert RTF's to PDF (tried Times New Roman size 12 font it was too small, then tried size 14 and that was too big. Tried Arial and it just never looked right. Ended up settling for size 13 times new roman because in the wise words of my elder brother, sometimes you just have to leave things at "good enough") I was floored by this concept and it's amazing how many revolutionary ideas I get standing at the deli waiting for someone to slice ham for me. I've been trying so hard to make things "PERFECT" and I spent HOURS and felt like I got nothing done.

So decided to settle for good enough for now. I did mange to fix the margins which I was very happy about. So I think over the next week I'll check out the other PDF/LRF files hosted at the Ebook Archive. And with the PDF's I created I'll go back through and re-master them. As for the LRFs, while waiting in the IMAX theater to see the Dark Knight (which by the way was PACKED and we got there 40 minutes early!) I had my ebook reader and decided to see how the LRF fan fiction files looked. The font was VERY TINY so I'm going to over this upcoming week gather all the LRF files and use a slightly larger font with converting. (thankfully, I think this number is less than 4)

What really weirds me out about converting documents is that I'm converting novels to LRF using the exact same settings as I used for the fan fiction stories and those novels turn out readable. So not sure what is up with that. I'm predicting that because most of the novels are starting out with LIT and HTML containers that it makes a bit of a difference from my fan fiction RTF master copies. (at this point I think I should add a disclaimer to the archive letting people know that the RTFs are the REALLY GOOD copies and the other file types are less predictable) Though I am now trying to change that. But I really want good PDF versions for me if no one else. Because I like having graphics embedded in my stories and RTF is still buggy on my PRS-505.

So anyways, back to the Dark Knight. It was my second time watching and omg it was still riveting. If this movie isn't nominated for Best Picture I'll be VERY DISSAPOINTED. As far as I'm concerned this is the best movie I've seen this year in every way that counts. Iron Man comes close second but it's just not the same...and i'm not a movie critic so I can't say why I feel that Dark Knight deserves Best Picture Nomination (and win) and not Iron Man.

After the movie, my brother and I stopped by Best Buy to pick up more memory for his computer, then went shopping for food, and came home. (memory was a bust, will have to return to store tomorrow) and we just had a make it yourself dinner night. I think I ate too many twizzlers and my stomach felt unsettled...which sucked because my left over spagetti was AWESOME.

Then we spent the rest of the night watching Full Metal Alchemist which is still my favorite anime series I've seen in years. I love the Elric brothers and the first time I watched I cried my eyes out so many times! this time i'm prepared for the angst but it's still heartwrenching. So anyways, I dug up my old favorite FMA icon. :) I'm glad I'm allowed 1200 icons at JF now. I keep finding more icons to add. :)

Stargate Atlantis

Indelible by shaenie (Sheppard/McKay) INSTANT REC!!!! This story left me incoherent with glee. I LOVED the plot, the character voices, and it's long and lovely and it all fits together beautifully. I love the way technology is used and I couldn't stop reading once I started. I can't recommend this story highly enough. One of the best stories I've read this year in SGA Fandom. At this point, you should already be at her website reading. :)


Vorkosigan

By Example by sahiya (Miles/Gregor) I loved the character voices and the outsider pov.

I guess it's that time of year where we're showered with vids! Makes it easier to accept the end of summer.
( This way to the recs )

So I got home this evening and my apartment wasn't blowed up. I was quite relieved, I must admit. I'm not sure I mentioned this, but when I got home on Thursday night, there was a note on the door saying that the plumber was coming on Friday to replace a faulty gas valve, so they were turning off the gas all day and we would all have to re-light our pilot lights after it was all fixed. For those of us who weren't going to be home, we had to let Mean Super know, and he would take care of it.

So I called and left a message saying I wouldn't be home, after I hurriedly cleaned all the stuff off the top of my stove - I have a cutting board that I use as a burner cover and I just pile stuff on there since I don't have any counter space (Sam and Dean are actually living in my apartment in I've Got Some Beer and the Highway's Free, and my kitchen actually is only about 5'6 inches wide - I have a tape measure, and I'm not afraid to use it) - and Mean Super's Nice Wife called me back and I told her I wouldn't be here, and my stove didn't have electric ignition or whatever, so someone would have to light the pilot, and then I spent occasional moments this weekend wondering if there'd been news of a big explosion on the Upper East Side. Well, when I wasn't sleeping. I went to bed last night at 9:30. Went out like a light and slept through until 6, and then went back to sleep until 9:30. Man, I totally needed that.

So I was glad everything was still standing when I got home.

***

Man, it's ridiculously sugary here right now. On a whim, I bought some Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies (I was on line at Duane Reade and they were right there), and put them out at my desk, and I had ice cream for lunch, and then co-worker M. brought me a cupcake from some meeting people were having on the other side of the office. This cupcake is covered in a huge mound of buttercream with an Oreo nestled into it. There are what look to be nuts of some sort beneath the buttercream but closer investigation shows them to be squishy to the touch (yes, that is the technical term), so maybe caramel? Or peanut butter? And the cupcake itself, under all that foofaraw, is chocolate.

I am trying to decide if I am really decadent enough to eat it after having ice cream for lunch. To be honest, the idea is making me queasy atm. So is the scent of the Oreo.

Speaking of food, dinner last night at B. Smith's was quite good. Mmmm...fried chicken, garlic mashed potatoes and then chocolate mousse for dessert. Sigh. And I didn't feel like I'd bathed in grease afterwards, either, which is usually the case with fried chicken.

I then stayed up way too late watching Nastia Liukin win the women's all-around gold. I am kind of a zombie today, and yet, they keep making me work.

***

I posted a story last night:

I Got Some Beer and the Highway's Free
Supernatural; Sam/Dean; pg; spoilers through 3.16; 10,700 words
Sam couldn't help but grin, wide and happy, all frustration melting away at this sign that Dean was here, even if he wasn't all the way back from there yet.

This is kind of my version of hurt/comfort, wherein it's nearly 11K words of comfort with no actual hurt inflicted in the story (that part comes from canon, yo). It's exceptionally self-indulgent in some ways, which means I love it a lot and as soon as I am over the "I have been looking at this so long I hate it now" thing, rereading it will make me very happy.

I was going to write a whole big thing about it, but nobody really cares about that but me, and I am basically a zombie all hopped up on sugar, so I can't hold onto a single train of thought at the moment.

So I will just say I really like how the story turned out - I've had it in my head in one form or another for a long time (well, the ending, anyway) - and I hope other people like it, too.

***

Is it time to go home yet?

***

The SGA Big Bang Challenge website is up and running.

And I know I shouldn't make any complaints but I think I got used to the way the spn_j2_bigbang intergrated the artwork into the story. Right now it looks like you have to download the artwork seperately. Maybe I'm wrong I haven't had the chance to go through the stories and strip all the code from the story yet. Maybe the stories I checked were so large when I scrolled through I overlooked the images?

I can't wait to read the stories, almost all of the summaries caught my attention.

Just wish they didn't use the three column website layout on every single story. I'm such a formatting snob it's just not even funny anymore. I think my patience for website designs is at -1000% Especially, now that I'm converting so many stories over to RTF to add to my Sony PRS-505.

Also, in other random news. I've been monitoring the Ebook Archive site stats and it seems like this week no one has been visiting. :( I'm thinking maybe everyone that owns a book reader is on vacation or the intial interest has tappered off so only people who actually use the site are coming. It also could be I haven't been able to add a lot of new stories this last week and a half because I was on vacation myself and I never seem to add stories on weekends.

I'm not going ot read too much into this. E-ink ebook readers are still relatively new and rather expensive so it may take awhile before more fan fiction readers glomp onto the technology.

I Got Some Beer and the Highway's Free
Supernatural; Sam/Dean; pg; spoilers through 3.16; 10,700 words
Sam couldn't help but grin, wide and happy, all frustration melting away at this sign that Dean was here, even if he wasn't all the way back from there yet.

Thanks to angelgazing for handholding, and to luzdeestrellas for amazing beta work. Title and cut-tag text from Bruce Springsteen.

( I got some beer and the highway's free / and I got you and, baby, you've got me )

Feedback is adored.

~*~

on tonight's Burn Notice, there is the non-MacGyver SG1 dude and a (new model) Chevy Impala with a tricked out trunk. Hee! Also, Method Man. Cool!

Also, "Your metaphor is digging into my cankles" (from that Lexmark commercial) is possibly the funniest thing I've heard IN DAYS.

*goes back to editing fic*

***

Arrgh! Why does everything I write today SUCK?

I have had this idea for a while, and it's one of those things I thought I was going to build loosely around a structure, but I am being hampered by, well, by canon in one sense (or my own read on canon, anyway, based on the very last image of NRftW) and by my inability to write anything that doesn't SUCK. And I haven't even gotten to the double simile yet.

Possibly I should give up on the attempt at third person omniscient narration. Possibly I am too bound up in the structure. Possibly I just really SUCK and should attempt to work on something else and hope I will figure out how this idea can work before it actually gets jossed (I mean, I know it will be jossed, but somehow I mind less before it actually happens and I am actually done with writing it).

In much better news, fleurdeleo and I are supposed to be having dinner tonight at B. Smith's, because I have been craving fried chicken all week. I had originally called my mom and asked her to make it for me tomorrow night since I will be going out there, but this is definitely a welcome, if more expensive, alternative.

So I went to get an iced cappuccino for lunch, and the girl brings the cup over and is like, "There is too much foam!" Well, if you ask me, there is NEVER too much foam, but she was right that she couldn't put the lid on without making a complete mess, so I picked up the cup and took a couple of sips so the lid would fit. Then I had to make sure I didn't have a foamy milk mustache.

Sadly, the foam shenanigans meant no cinnamon sprinkled on top. Sigh.

And in conclusion, FOAMY.

***

New big boss is trying to turn us all into morning people - I was actually in before him this morning (well, five minutes before him - I was on my way to the ladies' room to wash the commute off my hands when he passed me in the hallway) - but I refuse! I don't want to be one of those freaky morning people who fall asleep at 9pm because they got up at the crack of dawn. I hate going to bed early. I've always hated it, and I've never grown out of hating it. Being in bed before midnight - before 11:30 most nights now - is making me crazy. My evening is totally truncated.

You wouldn't think having to get up half an hour earlier in the morning would make so much difference, but somehow, it really, really does.

***

On to happier things. I don't generally insta!rec things, mostly because I'm lazy, and I will be reccing them at the end of the month anyway, so why duplicate the effort, but yesterday I read one of the most amazing stories ever:

Homing by [anonymous]
(Supernatural; Ellen; gen; 24K words)

It's Ellen's origin story, starting when she's ten and ending just post-AHBL2. Through skillful weaving of three different timeframes, we get a beautiful portrait of Ellen (daughter, hunter, wife, mother, woman) that feels true to both canon and character, with vivid evocations of people and places and emotions. It's moving and completely engrossing and beautifully written. I really don't have enough superlatives to convey how spectacular this story is, and how much more it makes me love Ellen Harvelle, how much more real she feels after reading it.

Go, read, give feedback! Seriously!

***

10,105 words!

and just sent off to luzdeestrellas for beta.

I rule!

*does the I finished a story dance*

Admittedly, since it is one of my stories, it is 10K words in which almost nothing actually happens, but you know, 10K words!

It felt a lot like writing Bring Back Black, actually, with a couple of minor differences.

Sigh. I feel like I haven't finished or posted anything in forever (since my birthday! almost a month. that is a ridiculous length of time for me!) so I am really happy about that.

***

Hello, hipbones...

***

and it's very weird because I didn't wake up again until after 1pm (after a night of tossing and turning because the Nightquil totally failed me!!!!) and now I'm restless but still feel like crap and don't feel like doing anything.

It's weird how I could go days feeling like I have too much to do and not enough time and then I have days where I think I have the time but don't have the energy to accomplish anything.