Exploding Poohsticks

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.

Saints and sugarplums... I just caught sight of a scale model of Minas Tirith during the Battle of Pelennor Fields - built out of candy

The builders' progress pics

*admires*

More decluttering of the bookmark stash:
[Disclaimer: I have not read all of these links all of the way through. I don't know if/when I'll ever get around to doing so. But there's a feast for thought here several times over, and I'm more likely to look them up here than three Firefox submenus deep (I know, I know, that's sad...)]

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock" summarized in two lines. The same thread has LOLcat for the Makers.

Shooting script of The Princess Bride

Sulky_rhino's crossover fanart masterlist.
Sulky_rhino's fanart making fun of fanon masterlist.

Kassrachel's "On Judaism and fandom". I bookmarked this post and its comments in part because I may want to reread them the next time a majority vs. minority race/religion/etc. debate flares up in fandom, and also because its themes include (1) the right to stay disengaged from a debate when one doesn't feel compelled to say something and (2) fandom being "basically midrashic" (which is essentially what I was rambling about a couple nights ago...).

Sistermagpie: "Canon does not exist" (which one commenter suggested would be better titled "nothing is really canon")

BPAL log:
Kindly Moon - limited edition; tester
Lab description: Utterly ethereal, an exquisite expression of love: moonflower, lotus root, white gardenia, beeswax, peach blossom, blue musk, stargazer lily, golden osmanthus, ti, sandalwood, hyacinth, ylang ylang, and a touch of vanilla bean.
Ribbons's reaction: Smells like juice and musk, but more pleasant than "Paris." Not offensive, but I won't be ordering more of it. Two samples do not a representation make, but given my reaction to "Long Night Moon" (which I also thought on the sweet side) I'm wondering if Moon scents aren't my thing. (The LE series that has worked well on me so far is the Zodiac.)

Shameless squeeing:
Listened to some more of Cedar's reading of "The Hounding of the Baskervilles" over supper. Oh, is she good. *glee*

Spork-watching log:
( Deadly Hollow as a variation of midrash )

[This is part of a comment that ran away with me over at ellid's. Slightly revised, both for context and because I'm compulsive...]

I think of Rowling not as our era's Tolkien but as its Conan Doyle. Seriously: amazing characters, inventive plots, lots of inconsistencies and improbabilities, some sterling passages of writing (e.g., Snape's opening speech, the end of "The Final Problem") amidst long stretches of less inspired exposition (e.g., the Mormon backstory in A Study in Scarlet), and a relatively healthy attitude towards derivative works (Gillette to Doyle: "May I marry Holmes?" D to G: "You can marry him, or kill him, or anything you want"), and both creators notably less invested in their creations than their fans. Doyle was a good man who, among other things, made a fool of himself in public over his belief in the occult; judging from her other deeds to date, I'm likewise inclined to think of JKR as a good woman who just doesn't happen to be intellectually deep or consistent.

(And this is definitely a case of a pot calling a kettle black, because while I flatter myself as being somewhat gifted at brute analysis, I'm hopeless at philosophy, critical theory, theology, etc. I can't understand any of that stuff without a sharp pencil, a ream of scratch paper, and preferably someone else's study guide translating the thickets of theory and jargon into layman's language, and no matter how much time I spend on it, it all slides out of my head as soon as I put it away.)

Given how messy (IMNSHO) the final product is, I can totally see JKR having considered and/or believed multiple versions of her characters' fates during the, what, 15 years she was working on the series, and failing to remember that she'd disclosed one set of intentions to the public, etc. Again with the glass half-full schtick, it means the part of fandom that cares about authorial intention (i.e., the meta writers and lit crit folks) now has license to go to town, because if the writer herself can't keep track of her own plans, readers can favor widely divergent themes/theories... Given what has shown up in this year's fests in response to canon's plotholes/disappointments, I figure every time JKR initiates another wave of WTF it's more straw for fandom's geniuses to transform into entertainment gold.

Opening sentence of Quidditch Through the Ages:

No spell yet devised enables wizards to fly unaided in human form.

Initial reaction: either the narrator of QTtA or DH is unreliable
Follow-up reaction: HP Lexicon lists the publication year of QTtA as 1952. However, the edition released to Muggles in 2001 mentions a 1994 Quidditch match (and several other events between 1952-1994, so one can't argue typo).
Watsonian interpretation: Snape devised his flying spell sometime after the publication of QTtA in the Wizarding world (1995? But it had to be available in 1991, because Snape confiscated it from Harry in SS/PS, and Oliver Wood had it checked out the previous April).
Watsonian interpretation x 2: QTtA was discreetly updated with additional chapters on more recent events in the manner of NYT obituaries and books such as Van Loon's History of Mankind (where the original author's name remains on the cover in order to sell it, but it includes chapters penned by another author after his death)
Watsonian interpretation x 3: Text of DH automatically takes precedence over text of QTtA, because DH narrator is omniscient (and therefore by default is not wrong) whereas QTtA narrator is a wizard (and therefore could be either wrong or underinformed)
Ribbons' reaction: Och, tae hell wi' it! *stomps off to write broomstick/blowtorch*

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.