(1) There is currently a lovely, well-displayed origami exhibit at Toronto International Airport. Some of the fabulous creatures (a phoenix made out of twelve sheets of paper, for instance) made me think of you lot:

From UK 2008

( more photos under the cut, click images to enlarge )
(2) Bilingual in-flight magazine + gate announcements = pretty cool

(3) There's an echo-ey sculpture here called Titled Spheres. I couldn't resist a couple of "A-roo"s while walking through. *sheepish*

Now to go back to throttling JJ working on the fic-chapter I had hoped to wrap up last night. Damn those characters and their hidden depths! ;-)

[continued from this entry]

So what does this mean in terms of my fascination with Ryo Maclean and Dee Laytner?

( spoilers for FAKE beneath the cut )

(And, on yet another tangent, it's probably no accident that I'm attracted to Ryo and Dee because of how they stand out apart from the herd: when you get right down to it, my basic Snape/Lupin dynamic could be summarized as "two guys who never truly had a prayer of fitting in with the rest of society eventually realize that their soulmate is someone likewise deeply damaged and similarly ruthless when circumstances and/or love compels him to be."

*rereads last tangent* And I wonder why my PWPs invariably spiral out of control? Jeez, Ribbons, talk about self-honesty...)

(And all of this said, I'm not sure I'll be doing any justice to the theme within the current fic -- it's not where the plot sprang from, and it's not the kind of story I've previously spent much time trying to write -- but it is giving some shape to part 3 that hadn't materialized before last night, which is good, because I really do want to finish this sucker sometime before Valentine's Day...)

[still with me? the squid'll be up in a minute, in the next post]

Busaikko-san, you are a NUT. And I freaking adore you. Domo arigato gozaimasu!!!

(A surprise package showed up today. From Japan. Its treasures include a squid-mobile. Photo TK!)

---

Writing log
LJ-springkink fic: finally broke past the paragraph I'd been pummelling into existence the past two days. 935 words today + some new insights on canon + several hours of research ...and an unexpected OMC, who ended up being a major reason the additional research became necessary. (And most of it won't even appear in the story -- it's just me wanting my timelines and schedules to correspond at least glancingly with canon and reality.) Seriously - 652 words in, I tried to put some words into a canon character's mouth, but they didn't ring true, and I couldn't think of anyone else who would say them -- and then the OMC suddenly sauntered into the scene with both a name and a personality, and the dialogue's got the right snap to it again, and his presence sorts out some other plot issues I hadn't dealt with yet, but ACK, this started out as a short fluffy PWP and so far there's been one belt unbuckled. Why have I not learned to run like hell whenever a prompt crooks its finger at me and asks, "Got a minute?"?

Yuletide fic: wrote the first half of the first line last night. The assignment is very well-suited to me, and yet it's something I wouldn't prompt myself into writing on my own, so yay algorithm!

...that one's spent too much time writing HP fic when one types "to snape out a comeback" and, for a brief-yet-too-long second, it doesn't look wrong.

Finished revising part 1 of the brain-chewing-up fic a minute ago. There was a single paragraph that took like fifteen drafts and WAY too many hours to get right. I'm not feeling sanguine about my ability to finish the damn thing on time, but there'll be at least 2000 words to post by then, and probably another 2K: it's one of those fics I can't not work on, even though it won't be all that special and I'm unlikely to net many comments for it, because I'm in love with how it's making me learn more about the characters and the world they're from, which in turn keeps reshaping the story in my head, which in turn forces me to consider how and where to place certain scenes and stretches of dialogue within the story (part of the problem with the first draft of part 1 is that some of it didn't need to be in the story at all, and some of it needs to not show up in the story until part 2 or even part 3).

(All that said, writing "Those I Can Save" was like this, and that turned out well, so hey, maybe my brain will crank into full gear now that it's finally squished itself through that Strait of Messina The Paragraph That Would Not Gel...)

Bookmarking lots of goodies to read later (like in January, at this point), but I couldn't resist checking out LJ-ladycat777's bit about Barack Obama discovering the Stargate Program, which includes this gem:

It could be a test, but Barack doesn't think so. At least, not the kind of aggressive, thrust-chinned tests he's still being given by most of the military personnel he meets. Winning them over is frustratingly slow going, but it's not unexpected and Barack knows he can out-stubborn anyone but his wife.

Very fried and frustrated with self at the moment, but I also got told after this morning's sermon that I had beautiful hands. I'll seize my cheer where I can...

A Massive (Literally) Guilty Pleasure: reading through the ginormous RPF character lists on the Yuletide Master List of Fandoms/Characters. (Nothing against RPF, but these are Really Long Lists and I Ought to Be Doing things that Pay the Mortgage, but they comprise such a staggering collection of recorded geekery/potential horror that I cannot tear my eyes away.)

And I'm trying to resist the temptation of "RPF-20th c. Scientists," but it's going to be a near, near thing.

I am also exceedingly amused that the RPFs on the ineligible fandom list (for not being rare/obscure) are "The Daily Show" and "Good Eats/Mythbusters."

Here's the official pre-signup info post with lots of useful links on how to have the mostest fun at the clambake.

I don't know if it'll be on this year's list, but I did catch sight of Verbotene Liebe on the Master List.... *cheerfully baiting friendlist*

Sorted out some of the off-kilteredness of the current fic (currently at 2K), at least in terms of identifying where its dead spots are. I don't know if I can fix them in fourteen days, so, I dunno. For now the plan is to keep researching/writing it at full scale and then to scrape out some sort of stand-alone drabble if need be.

New fic: When the Night Falls on You (FAKE, Ryo/Dee (and arguably Lupin/Snape, heh), 2000 words), in honor of lore.

busaikko!Snupin sighting: The Muggle War, an unfinished piece. This was for a Fantasy Fest request I'd made before DH, which was worth it not only for what did get written, but also for the discussions preceding it (I'd forgotten karasu_hime's reaction to my anon comment -- rereading it just now made me grin like a maniac. And further up in the comments there's Lore not-so-innocently observing that the prompt might have been cast as busaikko-bait to begin with).

Speaking of being a maniac, I'm now up to 1479 words and five six bulletpoints on the current fic. ( meditation on wordcount gone gonzo )

[On a side note, I really, really should know better than to visit tvtropes.com at this hour. I nearly quit writing two minutes ago after reading the entry on Badass Bookworms (OMG SO GUILTY...*flails*), but dudes, now I'm going to have to try writing a Crouching Moron Hidden Badass, just because.

*stares with dismay at the sentence I've just written*

WHERE THE HELL DID YOU COME FROM AND WHAT THE HELL DO I DO NOW?

Send plot-hatchets. Fic eating head. *whimper*


ETA 1:11 a.m.: 669 words tonight. Go me! *wipes drops of blood off brow and falls into bed*

Title: Harried
Words: 200
Fandoms: FAKE and HP
Pairings: Dee/Ryo; reference to Snape/Harry
Rating: PG
Summary: Green eyes. Black hair. Forever breaking rules. Harry Potter? No, Dee Laytner.
Warning: Noncon involved, and I'm mean to Snape and Lupin. Please don't hate me -- that's just how the bunny hopped.

( So help me God, we are NEVER going to England again.... )

If self-inflicted WTFery was an Olympic sport, my brain would be sagging under the weight of its medals by now. (The fact that it currently wants to generate a Diana Spacey/Berkeley Rose/Katou/Iwaki foursome smutfic instead of parsing shipping regulations is totally failing to persuade me otherwise. *headdesk*)

Title: Histories
Author: bronze_ribbons
Words: ~ 1750
Fandoms: Haru wo Daiteita and Harry Potter
Pairings: Dumbledore/Mochimune, with allusions to Filch/Pince, Dumbledore/Lupin, and others
Rating: PG-13? I want to rinse my brain with shochu regardless.
Beta: the super-fast and ever-precise aunty_marion *mwah!*
Notes: Stand-alone ficlet -- NOT a part of the "Encore" universe I seem to building in spite of myself. This isn't really snapelike's fault but I'm blaming her anyway, because it was a conversation related to "Hazard Cast" that spawned this bunny. Cross-posted to youka_nitta.

( After seeing Katou Youji perform... )

Woke up with a plotbunny. A vicious plotbunny. A plotbunny that's not going to leave me alone until I depict Remus Lupin collaborating with Sawa Nagisa on a script that then sends Iwaki and Katou to a drama festival in Kentucky --

*cries* snapelike, what have you done to me? *wails*


---

I have also just been molested by the most aggressively affectionate cafe cat I've ever met. Moggies do tend to like me, but I've never encountered one that climbed onto my chest and then repeatedly headbutted my chin as the BYM hastily rescued my Cubano. It can't be a BPAL reaction, I didn't put any on today...

David Sedaris, on hearing some of his earlier writing quoted:

“I thought, ‘It’s too dense, and it’s trying too hard.’ ” Though his prose slips down as smoothly as a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar, he goes through the sort of process described by John Kenneth Galbraith, who said that “I do not put that note of spontaneity that my critics like into anything but the fifth draft.”

For Mr. Sedaris that process involves at least seven drafts and a great deal of reading aloud new pieces while on tour, listening to the cadences of the sentences and noting how the audience responds: when people laugh, when they lose interest. “You realize you’re repeating yourself or being lazy,” he said.

- Sarah Lyall, in today's New York Times

At the moment, I'm more than a little addled from strep, sniffles, and cramps (fun times), so this will be sketchy. Please bear with me...

Over at "Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books," there's a discussion on sane exes in romance...

which got me thinking a bit about how Tonks, Sirius, Lucius, and others are dealt with in Snape/Lupin fic...

which in turn reminded me of the time pixychelle defined "Blackening": the process of turning a character into an abusive, cheating, evil monster in his/her actions toward and/or relationship with the character of your choice, paving the way for the other character of your choice to sweep in and save the other in a schmoopy explosion of H/C.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a soft spot for fics that suggest (or outright show) Lupin connecting with Snape to a degree that no one else has managed, and vice versa. In my personal fanon, they both have exes, even if I don't always depict or refer to them. I'm trying to think if I gravitate towards one type more than the others...

Types. Hm. Lessee. There'll be some overlapping here:

Not Really An Ex, Because It Was a Sham Marriage
... because one of them was a decoy or impersonator
... because someone else got Tonks pregnant
... because Tonks wanted to become a mother, and Remus agreed to help
... because it was a way to confuse and distract everyone else from whatever they were really up to

Bad Exes
... abusive Lucius
... abusive Sirius
... immature Tonks or Sirius
... deranged Tonks or Sirius
... abusive, immature, or deranged OC

Dead Exes: Sirius, Lily, Tonks, Regulus, other Marauders, misc Slytherins ...

Exes That Don't Count
... because it wasn't about love, just sex and/or comfort
... because it wasn't really love, it was just a crush
... because they were one-night stands or non-con encounters

Exes That Do Count
... who are still somehow involved in S or L's lives
... ... because they share custody of Teddy
... ... or are inveterate matchmakers
... ... or because they're portraits that can't resist kibbitzing
... who have unfinished business with S or L
... ... because they have something to atone for (such as lying to one about the other)
... ... or because S or L must resolve something with them (such as why the past relationship failed)

Hm. There may be a story I need to write lurking somewhere in all that. Not tonight, though.

Your thoughts? Categories I've missed? exes you've written? types of ex-relationships you'd like to see?

pixychelle? When I saw this factoid on a BBC list, I immediately thought of you:

7. A haddock's mating call starts as a slow knocking sound, before turning into a quicker hum similar to a small motorcycle revving its engine.

It also prompted me to look up our old thread about George the plotbunny. Sadly, my plans for the near future don't really have room for either quantum!Snupin or the veterinary!Snupin x Sherlock crossover that prompted this scene (originally scribbled 7/24/2006):

Hamish looked at the empreg blissfully snoozing on Lupin's palm, and
then at Lupin. "Surely even someone with your powers of denial has
noticed a trend here."

Lupin returned Hamish's gaze evenly, but too exhausted to feign
courtesy. "Yes. I am now completely convinced that your great-
great-grand-uncle slept with his flatmate's wife, because your
personality is definitely more Holmes than Watson."

Hamish replied with an elegant shrug. "There was no accounting for
threesomes back then. And just because I'm descended from Hufflepuffs
doesn't mean I'm a marshmallow. And along those lines, I really would
like to know what you plan to do about Snape treating our office as
his personal Ark."

( For the writing geeks. Spoilers for the story. )

( Saints (and McKay) be praised for time to revise! )

( More on scribbling and wibbling )

On the sixth day of Christmas, my loves presented to me a Sir Impey/Viennese Opera Singer ficlet (from Swooop, who spoils me rotten) and a bag of really terrific tea (from westernredcedar), which helped make for a very pleasant end to 2007. At midnight, I was sipping my second cup of tea and going through some pages at Distributed Proofreaders. (I fell hard for George A. Birmingham's A Padre in France (1918), an account of working as a British Army chaplain during WWI.)

On the seventh day of Christmas, I didn't do much in the way of writing or reading, but I did walk the dog and parts of my house are now less ooky. I also looked over a chapter of a friend's novel-in-progress and typed up a quasi-detailed crit of it. regan_v rec'd my Snape/Lupin in Chicago fic. (And speaking of recs, Nineveh posted an excellent cross-section of Wimsey recs at crack_van last month. (ObDisclosure: she says very nice things about Bringing His Lordship Around and its companion drabble.)

On the eighth day of Christmas, I woke up way too early, partly fretting over things not yet done and partly musing over whether I had gotten too detailed in the crit. It's just occurred to me that, being by nature a poet, I am not the most efficient writer or critiquer of prose, because I operate primarily at the micro-level of words rather than the macro-level of narrative structure. I've tried following the popular dictum of gutting out the proverbial "shitty first draft" and then going back to finetune everything, and it not only doesn't work for me, it kills the fun.

It's a different ballgame when one is writing on contract; I can force myself to "get it done, fix it later" when my mortgage payment depends on me turning in x thousand words or y hundred slides on time. But when I'm writing "for the love," spew-drafts just end up wasting my time, because I tend to discover the truth about my characters in how they (fail to) talk and appear to each other (which is how I repeatedly end up delighted when they say things I hadn't expected...). I know that many writers do a lot of world-building and character-sketching before they ever write the first line of their stories, and I imagine I should try more of that myself - but, again, I work instinctively at micro- rather than macro-level storycrafting, and that's how I've sometimes discovered I've got a plot on the wrong track: when I stall out trying to come up with the right words, or if I try to skate past a scene that really needs to take place onstage, that's when I'm most likely to realize I need to reconsider what I had in mind. I don't see these things at the macro-level, because there, everything looks like it's plausible; it's when I tell a character, "You need to say this now" and she retorts, "You're making me sound like a SNL parody of a Bronte heroine" that I realize, oops. (This was my deal-breaker when it came to the seventh Harry Potter book: I realize Lupin's "It is I" speeches are a very small part of an exceedingly long book, but the combination of melodramatic and illogical is still too much for me. I cannot deal with it, even though I know a number of intelligent people who aren't fussed by it at all. Chacun à son goût.)

As Bear often points out, there is no one method that works for everyone: you have to go with whatever gets you to sit in the damn chair and write. Spew-drafts work for a lot of people, many of them far more successful than I, but for me, they're pretty much the equivalent of riding an exercise bike with a too-low setting: they take up too much time for too little reward.

Which makes it an interesting challenge, working with someone else's rough draft. I tend to be impatient with other poets who try to do this with me, because I don't see it as the best use of my time: I don't want to be distracted with things the writer already recognizes as wrong and knows how to fix; for me, the primary usefulness of a beta is to point out the things the writer doesn't realize aren't quite right; to help the writer grope his/her way towards solving the things s/he does realize are off but can't suss out how to resolve; and to catch the typos the writer's missed because they've gone over the same pages too many times. But many people -- perhaps the majority -- don't share this expectation, because it's concept first and cleanup later for them. This in no way means their methods/expectations are wrong, but it does explain why some critique arrangements work out significantly better for me than others. (Though I will add that, over the years, the biggest problem by far has been people flaking out on reciprocation. I don't automatically crit with strings attached, but if the arrangement was proposed as an exchange, I will get annoyed if you fail to grant my work the attention I gave to yours.) I've done best with writers whose egos are as strong as mine and who are as no-holds-barred about getting every last punctuation mark right.

So, fearing I'd gotten too micro with what should've been a macro-crit prompted part of this, but reading Justine Larbalestier's post on rewriting is what pushed it into becoming this morning's morning pages [1], as it were. And now it's time to finish breakfast and get to work.


[1] Not actually a habit of mine, but sometimes pre-work blogging like this ends up performing the same function.

[Partially x-posted to my personal journal.]

My current fic is still putting me through the wringer. Aaaaaaaaaagghhhhhhhh.

That said, I feel confident claiming that it does not contain any phrase as bad as "her powerful ethnic muscle."

Quoted by several folks on the f-lists:

...the ACT of writing is hard. When Buffy was flowing at its flowingest, David Greenwalt used to turn to me at some point during every torturous story-breaking session and say "Why is it still hard? When do we just get to be good at it?" I'll only bore you with one theory: because every good story needs to be completely personal (so there are no guidelines) and completely universal (so it's all been done). It's just never simple.

- Joss Whedon

*tears self away from SnuSa tangle to focus on billable work*

PSA: If you're writing HP fic, do not use the word "graduate" wrt Hogwarts. To quote flamewarrior's page, "We don't graduate from school, only from university - and a graduate is someone who has completed a degree course. We simply leave school."

[This is one of those things I was clueless about myself until something came up in LJ's hp_britglish comm, and now it throws me out of a story when I see it. I happened to peek at two fics this weekend that had intriguing plots but multiple references to "when we graduated"... *sigh*]

BPAL: Tried "Despair" just now (decant of a discontinued scent). First impression is that it's actually rather sweet. Description from Kelly Neumeier: Roman chamomile, rosewood, cypress, Rose Otto, lavender, sandalwood and ylang ylang. It's on the light side -- not unpleasant, but not a standout for me.

Tears of the Phoenix: received acceptances today for two poems and three drabbles. Wheeyay! (Note: they're still taking submissions until 1 December.)

SnuSa: The good news is that I figured out what-all was wrong with the story before inflicting it upon my beta, for a change. The bad news is that I'd already eked out over 6,000 words -- some of them real darlings, too! -- and more than half of them aren't going to end up in the new version. The good news is that I'm 1,095 words into the rewrite and it's so much better than the original draft it makes me want to dance. The bad news is that it's shedding yet more light on yet more plot-cracks, and they're probably also going to require structural renovations rather merely a bit of solder and sandpaper, and DAMMIT, WHY DOESN'T MY BRAIN LOCK ONTO THESE THINGS WHEN IT'S SUPPOSED TO instead of truffling around? Cripes.

Anyway, I've had to request an extension. It's frustrating in that I'd anticipated being done by now, but being granted the time to finish it properly is a Very Good Thing. Also, aggravating as this plotbunny has been, I'm simultaneously entranced by its shenanigans: I thought I understood where it was headed next, and I thought I had a solid grip on the title, the opening line, supporting characters, setting, and a whole host of other details, and that I was stalled only on finding the precise words for the scene I'd reached. It's maddening having to chase the beast all over creation, and it will hurt if, after all this, I end up flat on my face, but right now I keep tumbling around bits of story in my head and trying to suss out how they might fit together, and they keep surprising me, and that makes me giddy.

Shameless self-promotion: two sonnets at Contemporary Rhyme (about Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli)

SnuSa: Forward progress since Friday has been maybe 15 words. Not for lack of trying. Gah! Net progress, however, has been more around 400-500 words, what with revising earlier parts of the story. They're not quite fixed yet, but they're less glib/clunky/wrong/BORING than they were before, and I know a bit more about what's going to happen next...

*pokes dubiously at the dough and puts the bowl back on the radiator*

Plotting of a different kind: stopped by the tea shop, but it's closed this week. Foiled! (but only temporarily...)

Stuff in the way of writing, obstacle inflection: Work. Chores. The ongoing back and bronchii crap.

Stuff in the way of writing, supposed-to-be-working-on-right-now-besides-the-SnuSa inflection: 1 essay, 1 flashfic, a dozen or so poems, and a crit.

Good things: Sweet surprises in the mail! (*clings to busaikko*) Picking the BYM up at the airport. Shrimp grits. Flannel sheets.

1. The characters in my SnuSa fic-in-progress keep surprising me. This is pretty cool, even though it means the fic is still chewing up my brain.

2. sistermagpie is one of my favorite meta writers, and she's apparently a regular participant in LJ's deathtocapslock comm, which I stumbled across this morning. I haven't gone through all their archives yet, but I'm overjoyed by the posts I've read so far, both because the Jabootu Bingo cracks me up and because misery loves company: I've spent far too much time this week trying to reconcile sections of the Potterverse that make no freaking sense when one peers at them too closely, which is what one strives to do when trying to write a fic that doesn't totally draw-and-quarter its source and grind its bones into pimento-polluted sandwich spread...

Er, uh, where was I? Oh yeah. Canon driving me batshit. I happened upon several threads yesterday in which the majority sentiment came across as "anyone who criticizes Jo on anything is an ingrate, an entitlement whore, or a delusional shipper," which made me wibble over the future of our planet. So it soothed and reassured my snarky skeptic's soul to see the good folk at deathtocapslock echoing my "Bzuh? WTF? Squid on the mantelpiece sighting! Um, no..." (albeit more coherently and in more detail).

Also, the following exchange endangered my laptop:

kaskait: Ginny is like an Ayn Rand heroine for kids. *shudder*

baeraad: A surprisingly great deal of HP is like Ayn Rand for kids. Except that Ayn Rand had this thing against laying down your life... =]

(A confession: I actually like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged -- but I see them as soap operas for meritocrats. The Objectivist clique in my first college dorm had a collective reputation for being insufferable and out of touch with reality.)

3. I find the sloppiness more crazy-making than it should be, but JKR still gets mad props from me when it comes to the Potterverse's ability to inspire other people and make them think (even when they go down routes she neither intended nor endorses). A week ago I told another fan that DH had killed my interest in analyzing the books as literature (as opposed to treating them just as source material for fandom mayhem), but two nights ago, I started research for a proposal I'm now planning to submit to Reading Harry Potter, to Terminus, or both, and right now it's simmering at that delicious early stage where I'm feeling rather clever and inventive and full of possibility (as opposed to the "OMG what was I thinking and why did I get myself into this!?" part. Which is as inevitable and aggravating as dog fur on my sofa, but there I go digressing again).

4. sigune's Knave of Spades portrait of Snape.

5. Readers are still finding and commenting on the Lord Peter/Bunter I posted last month.

6. Trading e-mails with a friend about an author (not JKR) who'd made a provoking post-canon statement about one of her characters. My friend, addressing the author in question: "Eh. Win me over, writermonkey."

And now it's back to the SnuSa fic, with the hope of doing exactly that.