Antennapedia

Sitting on my desk at work right now: two bottles of Four Roses bourbon (single barrel and small batch) and a bottle of Bruichladdich. Am bummed because I have them because a coworker is moving to Canada suddenly. SURPRISE CANADIANS! Sigh.

I just caused my fic archive tool to generate this sortable story index listing, but I'm pretty much convinced it's useless. You can talk me out of that if you wish.

9000 words of story written for posting Saturday, and I probably need another 6K followed by revision to reach some point where I'm happy with it all. There are some good bits in there. But why does everything I write these days become an exploration of loss or grief? Oh. Right. Never mind. But it is somewhat annoying when all I set out to write was some frivolous prawn.

Also, wank: see this and this. There are a lot of people out there on the net whose minds do not run in straight lines, and it can take a while to see enough to realize this about them. This person is definitely in the non-Euclidean geometry camp. Avoid. Take the advice given in the two posts I link to. There's more on metafandom if you have some free time to burn.

I have banninated because I don't want to show up in that person's friends listing. Grr.

Someone found my fic archive using the search phrase "how do you get rid of gun powder residue", and I am thinking that alas! "Gunpowder Tea" probably didn't answer this person's question.

My plan for my second summer_of_giles posting day this Saturday: Giles, Xander, an attic in Cleveland, tattooing, knives, angst, sex, and a bit of Giles-Buffy friendship. Am unhappy with my name for the series, and am tempted to just call it "Chilly Scenes of Winter" after the playlist I compiled to get me in the mood for it, which is in turn named for the Ann Beattie novel. Which was influential on me stylistically, and I should probably re-read it some time this decade, but I don't want that specific tone in my head right now. In truth there is John Donne in my head now. Therefore, wrong title. Hmm.

Honestly my head is full of noise at the moment, noise that interferes with the deep flow state required to write. From fandom insanity to writing neuroses to work upheavals to the boring need to do dishes: I'm spinning my wheels on the launchpad and spitting, I don't know, itch.

Submarining until further notice to write madly and badly. IM will be off. In fact, all networking will be off.

I'm attempting to write GX while sitting sideways in my armchair, with Macbook on my lap. Also, I am drinking a Sangre de Agave from David Wondrich's Killer Cocktails. And you?

The mood of the icon is, alas, not quite right. But it's the closest I've got.

Friends, the Kitten(tm) is seriously into Wensleydale cheese. She mugged me just now and ran off with a chunk. My cat mugged me.

Yesterday's poll has "voyeurism" edging out "sleepy/unconscious" by a single vote, with the others also-ran. You all are either indifferent or want Giles in charge, so I will obligingly write one or the other of those two with Xander in charge. Nyah.

Have joined the masses and purchased a season pass to Dr Horrible from the iTMS. Haven't watched it yet, because it's still downloading. Mr P and I are in the middle of watching Death Note, which is about a million times better than the other animes we've tried. Except Trigun, which we loved and will be watching more of. Also, sometime soon need to write up a description of my first month going to the gym and working out intensely. Not right now.

Today I was thinking about my fanfic reading strategies and how they've changed.

Obviously I am a genre-hopping multi-shipper with a maniacal focus on one character. I'll read Giles with anybody, and probably would try writing him with anybody, though my own favorite pairings have settled out as Buffy, Xander, and Ethan. My decision to read or not read something is never based on slash-vs-het-vs-gen, or even on the ships advertised. It is always based on the name of the writer, or if I don't know the writer already, on the first paragraph of the story. I am more likely to persist through badness with my favorite ships, but these days I'm back-button-happy even for those. I find myself far more able to cope with rocky prose than with bad characterization or cliched situations. Rocky prose can be fixed by working with an editor; lack of imagination can rarely be.

Tell me, friends! How does this work for you? What's your strategy?

I've been staring at khaoschilde's new manipulation of young Giles all day. The Giles of "Gas-Ring Alchemy" looks like that, though he's a bit shaggier. Add to this her manip of young Ethan looking properly Seventies-haired, and you have 'em close to how I see them. (Both images are shirtless but otherwise worksafe.)

None of this has been helping me write anything in an unrelated storyline with an approaching-fifty Giles in Cleveland with a mop-headed Xander. ( And I'm stuck, so therefore... )

This review of K J Parker's Engineer trilogy in Strange Horizons gets at what I'm liking about Parker's books. Parker's prose is also refreshingly straightforward.

Okay, I'm off to write GX angsty character-driven not-quite pr0n. Though it would be nice to know where my spouse is. Huh.

I re-outlined the 1974 timetravel/Highgate Cemetery story and had a dismaying realization. I'm looking at about 30K words, and most of what I've written will need revision to fit the new approach to the story. Upsides: the story has some balance now, far more of Giles's father and his Slayer, far more of my adaptation of our wonderful Highgate tour guide (cigarette-smoking cooler-than-you protoGoth teen), lots more Highgate vamp-slaying action, and at least 50% more young!Giles-Buffy snark. Same pleasantly high angst levels at the climax, though.

It's all good, despite the extra work, and the story is starting to feel right in my head at last. I'm looking forward to some creepy atmospheric writing. Highgate is such a great place.

There is approximately zero chance I'll finish even a first draft in the next 11 days, so what you're getting is the already-in-first-draft-state Giles/Xander kinky-prawn-plus-angst Cleveland short pieces. Four of them. I have cleverly chosen the prompts to avoid completing a bingo line.

To heck with Twitter. Plurk is the right microblogging service for fandom.

Title: Liegeman 2/7: Bruises
Prompt: 49. Heart
Pairing: Giles-Xander friendship, Giles/Buffy, Xander/Anya
Rating: FRAO
Summary: Fish and chips are eaten; Xander makes deductions; Giles follows instructions.
Word count: 3000
Notes: All Blackmail stories, in order. The best way to think about this series is as "kinky sex leavened with a season 4 retelling". D/s themes.

( Sunnydale had exactly one authentic English pub... )

"The Pirate Planet" is indeed 100% delicious crack.

Just gonna crunch until I have the next segment of Blackmail postable. Want to get back to posting at least one medium-length thing a week.

This will tell you what I worked on during the day today: Hate TurboGears. Hate Pylons. Hate Django. None of them are as good as the Ruby frameworks, in particular because Python ORMs bite the big one. The problem with the Ruby frameworks is Ruby. Which is a large enough problem that I'm going to put up with Python. Or check out Storm, which seems less stone-knives-and-bearskins-ish than the others. Pylons + Routes + Storm might be less objectionable than the other choices.

Oh, Python. Why are your enthusiasts such fans of wheat germ and brewer's yeast for dessert? A little syntactic sugar never hurt anyone.

ETA: The right answer is in fact Pylons + Routes + Elixir.

I'm going to go finish reading Bujold's latest Sharing Knife book in the bath, with Lush. Meanwhile, you can tell me what I'm going to do with myself this week. ( Yes, behind the cut it's a POLL. That never happens around here. )
ETA: Now that I think about it, that really should have been "Chandleresque".

I was reading metafandom, as one does, and I read a link from prehistoric_sea about preferences in kinkfic. And also as one does, since I'm also writing kink_bingo prompts, I have my own thoughts about the process. ( Behind the cut, because not everybody wants to read about this kind of thing... )

Plans, plans, plans! I haven't wittered about fic in at least five minutes.

( Plans for that GX series and other prompts discussed... )

Yesterday had strong idea for angsty Giles/Buffy friendship with background of kinky G/X, to continue storyline ignited by kink_bingo prompts. Have short fic outlined. Now, which prompt would fit? Rummages through list. Really not thinking breathplay here. Crossdressing? Ha. Hand fetish is not so bad, 'cause there's a lot of stuff about hands there for various reasons. Except, um, for the total lack of sexual contact in an angst-fest about murder and paternalism. And other things. Will move as far as smarm cheerfully, and no further, thus making kink prompts a bit--

Oh snap.

In another sense, the prompt table served its purpose admirably. Because I needed more ideas and more dangling storylines in my head.

Oh snap.

Random question in re: story archive design for single-author archives. Um, which is a fancy way of saying "hey, that web site where I sling up all my stories".

With 74 stories to list, the index page begins to be long, and even the series list is long. Is this length still manageable? Do you want serieses broken out onto their own pages, or is keeping them on the index page with all the info in one place better? Do you browse for things you haven't read or instead want to zero in on a specific story?

If you wanted to, say, find all of my Giles/Jenny stories, how would you do so? Is it obvious or not?

I realize you're a bit of a skewed audience, since if you're commenting on this post you're more likely to be a regular reader. The experience of somebody who drops in and wants to find something interesting to read is different.

I need to find a new way to display information in the story header sections. It's absurd to have things like "Date:" there when that's self-explanatory. Some day, some day I will have a reasonable archive design! I have next week off, and I think one thing I'm going to do is write the web app portion of this project. Or at least start it. Right now you don't want to know what I do to inject new stories into the database. (Okay, it's not as bad as it might be: I edit yaml by hand.)

Today was my day at summer_of_giles and I have posted four short pieces. All Giles/Xander, all rated mature for sexual situations and themes. Post-series, set on the once-canonical Cleveland Hellmouth. They're written to prompts from my kink_bingo card, but are not particularly kinky or smutty.

"Bootprints" (prompt is "vehicular")
"Bent" (watersports, but fluffy)
"Banter" (dirty talk)
"Weapons" (knifeplay, thus has mild bloodplay)

I have two more to post, one of them finished and ready to go. But the next one in the sequence is definitely not yet finished (the emotional tenor of my first try at an ending was all wrong) and it's the centerpiece of the storyline. Maybe tomorrow? Or tonight if I catch fire in the next two hours.

A long series of incredibly spoilerish yays ( safely behind a cut... )

The non-spoiler version: That was fun! Completely crazy, but fun! Can't wait until next week.

From subduction via paian, a new sort of meme, revised slightly.

Behind the cut are three Wordle images created from stories I'm currently working on. Here's how it works:

1. Pick one and take a guess at what might be going on. (Or just make something up.) Write at least a one-sentence summary of what you imagine the story to be about.
2. I'll take those summaries -- one from each of the first five commenters, more if inspiration strikes -- and write snippets, which will hopefully bear no resemblance whatsoever to the actual story I'm working on. If your summary nails the actual story, I'll post a snippet of the actual WIP instead.
3. You can write your own comment ficlet inspired by the words.
4. Or you can run away with a plotbunny of your very own.
5. And you can do this yourself in your journal if you feel like it.

( I really need to be finishing one of these for Monday... )

I love the internet: xkcd_boomdeyada.