I don't know what to say.

On the one hand, Obama is president. I feel so much more hope and possibility now than I did last week. The news came yesterday while I was in rehersal: my stage manager's mother texted her, and she interrupted our runthrough to say "You guys, Obama is president!" That completely disrupted rehersal for a while, of course. There were jumpings up and down, and screamings, and cryings, and our director let us go in time to catch the last half of his acceptance speech. I cried again, because yes we can.

On the other hand, Prop 8 passed. Words cannot express my disappointment and sadness. There are so many people in California now who cannot enjoy a basic human right, because the church-based groups mistook the government for a religious authority. That's basically all it is, and it makes me hurt inside. On the bright side, I suppose, those who are already married will stay married. There's nothing people can do about that. But those who were going to get married? They have nothing now, and I cannot understand the kind of mind that would accept or encourage that.

On the right foot, our government is so very clunky and impossible and slow to act that it's really hard to get anything irredeemably stupid done. I have hope that with Obama as president, we may be able to overturn Prop 8, either by reamending the California constitution or by fighting it up to the Supreme Court. I believe that someday we can make this better, and I believe that we have hope now, which we didn't have before.

Also, Prop 4 is looking like it's not going to pass. Which makes me happier.

AND VIRGINIA WENT TO OBAMA. You guys, OMG. Virginia has been Republican for the past ten elections or something like that, and it went to Obama. That says something. Part of it must be my baby brother finally eligible to vote, but there's something else there too. Virginia, adopted home, I'm proud of you. Keep up the good work.

I just realized two things.

1) Spite is excellent motivation for writing.

2) I figured out why I ship Aral/Cordelia so much. There seems to be this trend lately in fiction and movies of marriages that don't work. That irritates me. I feel that there can be fully as much drama in a marriage that does work as in marriages that don't, and having lived through the implosion of a marriage in the past three years, I don't want to read about/see it. I want to see couples who fight and bicker and still love each other. It is possible, Hollywood-types.

I feel like more fiction depicting such couples might cut down on the number of divorces, if only by demonstrating that it is okay to fight with someone you love. Lois McMaster Bujold gets it dead to rights with Aral and Cordelia. They hurt each other all the time, but they forgive each other and move on. More positive depictions in fiction might help replace the Harlequin romance stereotype.

To explain 1: I got so sick of seeing all these stories in my Fiction Workshop II class about marriages that imploded or otherwise didn't work, so I wrote a story about one that did. Pretty much just because.

Dear Vorkosigan Saga Fandom:

Is it too damn much to ask for some Aral/Cordelia fanfiction?

Seriously! They've been quite happily married for thirty years, they've successfully parented lots of kids both belonging to them and not, they've survived God knows how much shite, and they're definitely still having sex. There is so much potential! Not to mention opportunities for porn![1]

So why is there no fic?

Disgruntled;
me

[1]On a related note, why is all the porn slash.

Our room is full of flowers today. There's Sami's autumn assortment, and my irises (they're my favorite flower; always used to bloom around my birthday at home, so I've come to associate them with good times). There's also the glass ones on my little glass donkey that my mother sent me quite randomly, and the flowers on my fuzzy unicorn poster. Baby Krishna has no flowers this month, alas, but there are flowers on the prayer flags and flowers on the covers of half my books.

I really enjoy flowers. When I was growing up, we always had some in the house, usually on the kitchen counter. Sometimes they were flowers that my mother had grown in our garden, and sometimes they were something we picked up at the grocery store. I knew it was around my birthday when we had irises in the vase. My mother's birthday meant roses or carnations, and my father's meant bluebells. My brother usually liked snapdragons. Any time I had a play, there were tulips in the vase.

You could tell the seasons of the year by the flowers in our vases, too. Winter meant sunflowers, usually, or whatever was on sale in the store. Spring was the baby daffodils that sprang up in the woods behind our house. Summer was assortments, but there were always hyacinths and lilacs in there from the bushes on the front lawn. Autumn had honeysuckle and the tiny bluebells that never bloomed until late in the year. We would have crocuses in March and rhododendrons in April. It was such a lovely way to grow up.

I'm glad I have my irises. They make me smile.

1) Ursula Vernon is pissed, and with good reason.

My thoughts on the matter? I believe that no one should constrict or constrain an artist to produce something. This puts me at odds with the publishing industry, somewhat, in that they seem to believe they can contract people to produce a specific product, exactly to their outline (romance industry, I'm looking at you). This isn't completely constraining, though; a writer has to have a certain amount of enthusiasm for the project in order to contract to create it. Writing to prompts is also different, as a prompt will give you an opening, but will not tell you what to write.

On the other hand, I can sort of see where the email writer comes in. Not as regards Billy Collins, of course; he's one of my favorite poets and I find him very accessible. However, throughout my academic career, poetry has had to mean something, and it's usually a meaning completely opposite to what was given. This sort of analytic reading of poetry drives me batty. It implies that for a poem to be a "good" poem, it must be either entirely metaphorical or entirely inaccessible (T. S. Eliot, the Wasteland, I'm looking at you!). Now, most poets don't believe this. See, Billy Collins, Paul Zarzyski, even T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Academics, though, certainly do.

Newsflash, academics: just because something's fun to read doesn't mean it's automatically trash.

So it seems to me that this is more a problem of how we read than of how we write. If we cannot enjoy something, we tend to say that it sucks and throw it away. Okay, fine, whatever, you're not constraining the author at all, you're simply exercising your right as the audience to ignore them. However, when you then say that because you don't like it, nobody else can because it's trash, and the author must immediately change their ways, then it becomes a problem.

2) Sherwood Smith, on writing and memory

For me, the books that bring back my childhood most clearly are The Neverending Story, the Hobbit, and Tamora Pierce, most especially her Alanna series. I can remember sitting on my bed, curled up around my teddy bear, reading with absolute amazement. The idea that somewhere there were people that dreamed just like me was such an irresistable one. I remember being absolutely stunned that people could dream like that, the same way I did. Up until then, I thought I was alone. I think that's when words became my friends. The Neverending Story in particular made me feel as if I could quite happily spend the rest of my life stuck in a book.

I've never lost that feeling, not really. You may have noticed. :D

1. List your top seven ships
2. Put all of them in order of your love for them; 7 to 1, 1 being your favorite.
3. Name their fandom.
4. Supply photos for said people.

( These are really in no particular order: I ship them all about equally. AKA, like burning )
And, of course, the traditional ( Super Secret Really Really Really Embarrassing Slash Ship below the cut. )

So I just finished reading Mary Called Magdalene, by Margaret George. I chose to read it because I enjoyed George's other books (The Autobiography of Henry VIII and The Memoirs of Cleopatra) despite their length, and because I've always been interested in and curious about the Magdalene. However, I find myself curiously irritated by Mary Called Magdalene.

I think part of the reason is because it feels so much like "women's history." I use the term carefully here, not to suggest a derogatory attitude towards people who research the lives of ordinary and extraordinary women in the past (I come from an all-girl's school, people, that'd be stupid and hypocritical of me), but to express my irritation with the people who insist on shoehorning women into places they simply would not have occupied. In this novel, Mary Magdalene manages to be an ordinary Jewish woman who then becomes the center of the group of disciples, and, according to George, the only one who remained with Jesus throughout his trials and suffering. The apostle John gets a mention as does the Virgin Mary, but all the glory belongs to Mary Magdalene. She also falls in love with Jesus, though thankfully George does not go the Dan Brown route and claim it was returned. Beyond this specific objection, I have no reason to account for my annoyance with Mary's character.

Another issue I had with the novel is that it goes on too long. I ended up skimming the last hundred or so pages, since they did nothing for me and merely served as a chance for George to talk about the early Christian church. Had she written them in the same engaging style as she did the rest of the story, I might have read them; however, she chose to write them in a summary, formulaic voice, styling them "The Memoirs of Mary Magdalene." The lovely turns of language and knack for dialogue are all gone, and it was simply uninteresting.

I did enjoy the language prior to that little interlude. Margaret George has a way with words that make her seven- and eight-hundred-page books worth reading. For example (off a randomly-opened page in Mary Called Magdalene):

"Something seemed to slow her, and she turned and looked carefully at each face. She looked directly into each woman's eyes, although usually she felt it was impolite to do so. Dark-brown eyes, so deep they looked black; eyes fringed with such heavy lashes they threw shadows on the woman's cheeks; eyes the tawny yellow of the shells of tortosies; even one pair of startlingly blue eyes, as blue as any Macedonian's."

Gorgeous description. George specializes in these and usually delivers five or six a chapter.

I'm not sorry I read this book, but I am confused by my irritation with it. I quite liked the story up until Mary fell in love with Jesus, at which point I started skimming and skipping. Perhaps I'm too Christian at heart to quite like the idea of Jesus being in love, or maybe it's simply part of my own beliefs about what makes divinity. It could even have been my feeling of "I know this story, get on with it," though I don't think so, as I was enjoying the book up until then. Either way, I just stopped caring about Mary and her troubles.

If you like me are interested in Mary Magdalene but don't feel like investing the time in this brick of a book, I much preferred Donna Jo Napoli's Song of the Magdalene. It's elegant, concise, and much more emotionally affecting.

1) I have new headphones! The old ones fell apart in my ear. It was most distressing. Fortunately, they were still under warranty and the nice guy at the Apple store took my word for it, so I have new ones for free! *cuddles new headphones* I also had a fun conversation with him.

Me: Hi. My headphones fell apart. It is most distressing.
Guy: Whoa. They really did. Well, let me take a look and see why they fell apart.
Me: I did nothing unusual to them. I was only listening to music and they fell apart.
Guy: Would you raise your right hand and repeat that?
Me: Sure, but I haven't got a Bible, just Oscar Wilde.
Guy: Close enough!

2) Speaking of Oscar Wilde, I am reading some of his plays. I just got through Salome (very strange, not at all like Wilde's usual tongue-in-cheek humor. Has some lovely language, though, and it must be pretty visually stunning) and The Importance of Being Earnest (one of my favorite plays ever and always worth a reread), and am currently in the middle of Lady Windermere's Fan. I'm also reading Mary Called Magdelane, another of Margaret George's bricks; Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk, a memoir of growing up in a polygamist family; and The Serpent's Shadow. If I continue reading books at this rate, my books-read list for July will move into three pages. New record.

3) Got more work done on Glass. I think this seperating it out into different POV files and writing it that way is extremely helpful. I may have to give up my flashbacks from Gabi's POV idea, but we'll see how the rest of them turn out. I may rewrite them from Lionel's POV to leave them in. I've decided that, because Gabi is at the center of everything, I should maybe leave her a bit of a mystery. After all, her nonresponsiveness or her simple absence is a huge part of all the plots. So, I shall discuss with my co-author and we shall see.

4) Deposited my paycheck. YAY MONEY.

5) I kind of want to cosplay as Sarah Jane Smith. I may even just put a costume together and be her for Halloween. 'Cause, well, she's awesome, and I think her waistcoat-and-shirt look would be really flattering to my figure. Plus, I want those boots. Well, who doesn't?

6) I have been falling behind on my RPing lately and I do not know why. It's like I sit down to do it and my brain goes "HA no. Fuck off down the model village." Then I am confused as to why my brain is quoting Hot Fuzz out of context when all I want to do is knock off a decent post so my RPing partners don't hate me. V. sad. Please be understanding.

7) I am dying for lack of fluff. I've been writing Kyrie and Glass and Glass's prequel lately, all the angsty bits with people dancing around things they don't want to say, and I just want to read something silly and sweet and fluffy, goddamnit. It probably doesn't help that all the active relationships in my RPs are a) in the awkward morning-after stage, b) in the awkward holy-shit-did-I-really-just-say-that stage, c) both a and b, d) in the awkward goddamnit-do-I-have-to-tattoo-it-on-my-forehead stage, or e) in the awkward I-really-like-you-but-this-can't-work-for-outside-reasons-so-I'll-just-keep-my-mouth-shut stage. I want to read or write something where people are in love, full stop. Can someone prompt me, please? Any fandom I'm familiar with except Avatar, or original.

8) Speaking of prompts! Is anyone interested in an X-files/Doctor Who oneshot? I've had one percolating, and I have a beta on the line, but I don't know if anyone would be interested in reading something with Six and Samantha. Other possibilities include finally finishing my gorram Christmas fics (July is a new record), finishing up my Mulder/Scully fanmix (I think I need to see the movie again first), trying my hand at that one NaNo novel again, finishing and then rewriting Confidence (or maybe I could just skip to the rewrite?), or just watching Doctor Who until my brain liquifies. That last option is looking better all the time.

To pass the time for you while I reread His Majesty's Dragon and sequels and finish Victory of Eagles.

Post the first lines from your last twenty-five fics and see if there's a pattern (or something like that).

( Here we go, in reverse order. )

Hmm. General patterns seem to be me playing with language more and more. I start out messing around with Space Between the Seconds and by the Dalek Invasion of Discworld I've nearly gone overboard. Thank you, darling beta! A few of these, namely all the Dresden Files fic and The Dalek Invasion of Discworld are me consciously trying to mimic the author in question. Interestingly, I've only started out with dialogue in three fics; I was under the impression that I did it a lot more. I also seem to start out right in the middle of the story and explain things later. Very Doctorlike of me, I think. So! What do you think?

Whoa damn. I may be humming "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" for the next, oh, month.

( Adventures in LA, a Kindred Spirit and Sweeney Todd: or: Why Kat is Now Broke )

Bloody Chris.
Some observations whilst waiting for him to shut up.

1) Ian totally said "fuck" in a children's show on public TV in 1963. That's hardcore, yo.

2) My Ian/Barbara ficathon entry is on crack. CRACK I TELL YOU.

3) Hey, it's a silver box! We don't know what it is, it could be a bomb. LET'S POKE IT WITH A STICK.

4) TheDoctor uses Logic! It is very successful! Seriously, Ten, you used to be sensible back when you were One. Hell, you were smart and tricksy as late as Nine. WTF happened?

To be added to as I think of it.
Also, I won't be on tomorrow night; going to see Sweeney Todd with Lauren Molina (aka Elaine on WW). Awesome? I THINK SO.

WARNING: This post consists of a great deal of self-analysis in the context of society that, while it may explain last weekend's PostSecret of sorts, may also stray into TL;DR territory. It is cut for your convienence, but feel free to read and agree or disagree as you see fit.

( Beyond the edges of this map lie great herds of the mysterious teal deer... )

Intriguing thing I came up with while researching costumes for WW*:

The Operative and Book have a very similar costume theme, at least series!Book and movieopening!Operative. Compare this picture with this picture. They both wear a grey top: with the Operative, this appears to be some sort of jacket, with a collar that, while never closed, could echo Book's clerical-esque collar on his grey shirt. The Operative wears a black shirt beneath the jacket, while Book occasionally wears a black jacket. Both men have dark-colored trousers, both have similar color schemes. Coincidence?




*I know this shows signs of hopeless geekitude, but I did come up with some rather interesting factoids. Frex, Murphy has a lace-up leather vest and leather bracers that she always wears out in the field, since both are enchanted with the same spell that Harry's duster has in normal Dresdenverse to ward off cuts and magical blows. She also usually wears her hair in a crown braid, which means both it's at least shoulder-length and that Alex and Harry must've gotten good at braiding (presumably Nina Grey taught one or both of them). I'm working on standard uniforms, Jen, and Gabrielle now.**

**If you're as geeky as me and would like a costume design for a character, drop me a word and I'll see what I can do. Odds are you'll get a wordy description rather than a sketch, because my artistic skillz are nil.