There's nothing out there

one zip, then you zapped

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:30:28 GMT

Dear Yuletide Santa,

I'm afraid I don't have much to say to you, this year! I think I got everything into my requests that I wanted to say about specific fandoms.

As a general rule I like gen just fine; I like dudeslash just fine too, but het and ladyslash even better, and I also love a good threesome, as you might have noticed :D And I also really love awesome female characters, and happy endings, and . . . basically I'm really easy to please, honestly.

In any case: thank you so much for writing me something, and I'm sure it'll be fantastic, whatever it is!

♥

listen up, voices scatter

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:37:18 GMT

There is an upside to not actually going to any Halloween parties, and that is that I can dress up as however many people I like! In this case, three.

The theme for the evening is "clothing I own and love but rarely have any use for."

I consider myself a very lucky woman to own this sweater, but it has a gaping hole in the back I keep forgetting to sew up so it's not much good for wearing out of the house. It is excellent, however, for dressing up like my mom! So I did that.

The blouse is dark purple, and my socks are purple as well, but my camera refuses to believe purples exist so they just look muddy.

Okay, come on. You would do this too if you owned a suit this awesome, and a coat this awesome, and Chucks, and brainy specs. The specs were a bit of an afterthought, as you can see, because I remembered them at the last minute; I don't know how I even came to own them, since I don't usually wear glasses, but I think they suit me quite nicely.

And, right at the top of the list of "things I love owning but have no use for": a black velvet opera coat and high-heeled black Oxfords. The natural solution was to dress up as an Edward Gorey character, and if I'd actually gone out tonight this is probably what I would've worn.

I had my hair up in a pretty nice bun tied with a sparkly black beaded thing, but I couldn't figure out how to get that into a photo :(

I should probably stop procrastinating and start writing things now.

IMPORTANT ETA: when Geocities went down it took my Peter/Harriet mood theme with it, so they have now been replaced with the Farnon brothers. Best mood theme ever, y/y/mfy?

as long as I get somewhere

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:39:20 GMT

Have I mentioned lately how happy Sarah Jane Adventures makes me? Hint: really really really really happy.

But I want Eve/Sam fic and there is never going to be any :( Everything I could ever want out of a canon pairing and naturally it all happens offscreen.

we travel single all

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:52:47 GMT

You know what's great about lunchtime on Monday? Nobody wants to use the practice rooms at the library. Should you be so inclined, you can go and sit and play "Scarborough Fair" over and over again for two hours, until you almost don't suck at it and your wrists and the small of your back are miserable knots of pain, and it is awesome.

I'm just saying, my kindergarten piano teacher-- who used to tie himself into knots trying to get me to sit still for five minutes at a time-- would be pretty pleased right now. I know I am.

In less impressive news, I have been listening to the same three musicals over and over again so much that I wasted like five minutes this morning trying to find the song "Confrontation" in the Funny Girl soundtrack. While there is probably an awesome crossover idea in there somewhere, I think I may be suffering from too much of a good thing.

nothing of what you are about to see ever happened

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:26:45 GMT

I have no particular opinion one way or another on the existence of Disney's A Christmas Carol, but I wish it wasn't coming out now. I was very carefully brought up to believe that the Christmas season doesn't come until after Thanksgiving, and I firmly believe it should stay there. Christmas movies have no business coming out at the beginning of November.

Also, the commercials are making me homesick, which is equally premature and Generally Not On.

As a general rule, though, I am quite fond of November and December, despite encroaching schoolwork and costuming work and miserable weather. December means a train trip and Bethlehem and the Moravian Bookshop and Hannukah and Christmas; and November means just enough snow to be pretty, and buying a hot drink and curling up in an armchair somewhere and writing a lot. Because, yup, November is Get Your Shit Written Month.

I hesitate to call it National Novel Writing Month, because I'm not writing a novel this year; I was going to, and then I was going to finish last year's (which could take up another 40K easily). And then it got to be mid-October and I have three fics in progress that could easily be 30K+ each, and . . . yeah, I'd like to get these done someday. So my actual goal for November is a thousand words of either Zac/Vanessa/Ashley or Hilary/St. George a day, plus a second draft of the Link/Violet by the end of the month. I think this is doable; a mess, and probably not ~in the spirit of NaNo~, but hopefully productive.

And newredshoes, or any other Chicago folks, if you would like to have writing parties again this year I am all for it. :D?

and I'll live on forever

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:40:47 GMT

Ahaha so this thing where you write fic with three- or four-digit word counts? Completely awesome. Why did no one tell me?

Of course, now I've gotten started on this pairing I will never ever finish and it will probably end up being a longfic anyway, but, uh, here, have a bit more St. George/Hilary. It is the_antichris's fault, which is excellent; I rather missed having things be her fault. They always turn out so nicely.

Hilary got lucky; the Chronicle brought her home from Italy just a few days before the RAF brought Jerry home from North Africa. Which is why, today, despite a whole lot of promises she had made herself as a girl, she was one of a hundred (or two) wives (and mothers and sisters and children) crowding this train platform, all wondering what if I missed a telegram, what if he comes back too different, what if what if--

She almost didn't recognize him, at first; it had been so long (and felt longer) and he looked like he'd aged by even more. But his smile, when he stepped down and saw her, was just the same as ever: the wide bright grin of a nineteen-year-old boy who thought he could charm the very clothes off her back (and admittedly, had).

"I told you," she breathed shakily, when he was done kissing her (which wasn't for a very long time), finger brushing over his throat. There was only a tiny bit of a scar showing there, above the collar of his uniform, but she knew just how long it was and how deep the shrapnel had gone; knew from the letter he'd written her about it, when he'd already been recovering and it should have been too late for her to be scared. "I told you you'd be completely useless without me to look after you."

(She'd chosen to be angry instead: I never thought much of marriage to begin with, she'd written back. Don't make me regret it by widowing me this early in the process.)

"Lee," he whispered into her hair, just that for an answer; he hadn't called her that in years, because it was a ridiculous nickname and Hilary hated it. It was just that, today, she couldn't quite remember why.

with matching laces

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:31:00 GMT

So it turns out that drafting body blocks is the most relaxing thing ever. It involves exactly enough math not to be boring, but not enough to require actual effort, and I want to do it all the time.

In not-precisely-related news: I'm fond of Newsies and Hairspray and all, and Singin' in the Rain and Jekyll and Hyde are pretty great, but Funny Girl is the best of all possible musicals, and if you disagree something is clearly fundamentally wrong inside you and I should probably come find you and put you out of your misery.

How are all your days going! :D

the fun that it might be

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:24:10 GMT

Today I discovered that my NYR recipient loved my fic! And then I went to "class," which was actually sitting by myself drawing a hallway in a Victorian office building for three hours while I listened to musicals and strangers sometimes wandered by and told me I was doing a good job. (And when my professor came to check on me, I mentioned this and he said "I can see why! :D") And when I got home I discovered that someone had recced The Fraser Record (Excerpts) and there is HSM superhero fic.

It's like yesterday got two days' worth of suck and today got two days' worth of awesome. I am confused.

how much longer would you be mine

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:55:37 GMT

Hey! Hey, Internet. Guess what I did for the first time in more than two and a half years. That's right, guess.

---------

Title: The Social Climb
Fandom: The Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy Sayers
Pairing: The Viscount St. George/Hilary Thorpe
Length: 1435 words
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Note: written for mayhap in New Year Resolutions 2009; betaed by the_antichris and chocolatepot.

Uncle Peter would most likely have found some sort of entertaining symbolism in the phenomenon, but even Uncle Peter wasn't likely to be much help right now.

press the boost button

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:42:34 GMT

My Yuletide nominations are:

17 Again (2009)
Jackie Chan Adventures (tv)
John Bellairs - Johnny Dixon series
Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events
Michael Buckley- The Sisters Grimm series
Push

It's almost like I've completely failed to grow up! OH WAIT

I am going to go write my NYR fic now. Um. Yes.

hard aport, son

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:45:25 GMT

In which I make a pimp post about my terrible taste in kiddie television! Because I feel like posting videos, and none of you can stop me.

1. Zeke and Luther

Yeah, yeah, a kids' show about two white guys and the one guy's sociopathic sister having ~*hijinks*~. Revolutionary. I know. And I thought Zeke and Luther was kind of bland at first, but it grew on me-- it's not nearly as good as Even Stevens, which was created by the same guy, but it's still a lot of fun!

Also, it is really, really gay. I've been trying really really hard lately not to ship white guys together just because they happen to be on the same show, but . . . no seriously, Luther spends most of his time latched bodily onto Zeke, and they're absurdly codependent and say they love each other like once an episode, and at the very least it's intolerably cute bordering on gay.

Also, Brian Stepanek is on it sometimes! He owns a donut shop.

2. Jackie Chan Adventures

See, this show is actually good. Ostensibly it's about a college student named Jackie Chan who works at his cranky old uncle's antique shop in San Francisco, and his little cousin Jade lives with them, and they run around battling an organization called the Evil Hand for a bunch of powerful demonic talismans-- different ones each season. It is a ridiculous amount of fun. Uncle complains at everyone constantly, Jackie kicks ass but inevitably ends up getting captured, and then Jade shows up and saves everyone's asses even though she promised she was going to stay home and safe this time no really. There are a bunch of great recurring characters, too, mostly Latino-- there are not many white characters at all-- and also a small plush superhero called Supermoose. I can't understand how anyone could ever hate this show.

Jade is one of my favorite characters in anything ever, seriously. I love seeing a mouthy nine-year-old girl get to outsmart and beat up thirty-foot bad guys every single episode. Plus she was a ninja queen once, and her BFF is an enormous ex-sumo-wrestler named Tohru who was a bad guy at first but then became Uncle's apprentice.

There are time travel episodes, and parallel-universe episodes, and kung fu battles in space! And on top of all that, Jackie Chan shows up at the end of each episode to answer a fan's question! I have learned from watching this show that he is scared of swimming, that as a kid he wanted to be a cartoon character when he grew up, and that if he weren't an actor he would want to be a jet pilot.

I can't find many short clips from it-- YouTube mostly has entire episodes-- but here, have the credits :D?

Also, Adam Baldwin is in it sometimes! He plays one of the bad guys' henchmen.

search for signs of passing

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:51:14 GMT

So we seem to have skipped autumn entirely this year-- we've gone from 80-degree weather to 40-degree weather in about two weeks. Half the population of Chicago, including me, was in H&M today frantically buying up gloves and scarves and hats. In other news: I broke out my long wool coat today, I've switched from iced coffee to hot, and I'm on the Amtrak website checking the train schedule so I can go back to Bethlehem for Christmas. Next up: emailing the Moravian Bookshop, the only pleasant retail workplace in the world, to see if they can give me hours for a couple of weeks. Winter is coming whether I like it or not :/ I could swear I saw a snowflake today, but I choose to believe I imagined that.

Piano-relearning is going smoothly, so far! The library conveniently had a lesson book called I Used to Play Piano, which claims I probably remember more than I thought and is turning out to be right. I had a few scary minutes when I discovered that, despite playing one instrument or another for sixteen years, I couldn't quite remember which rest was which; but I got over that okay and am having lots of fun.

Now if only I could learn to dance >:(

which doesn't fit the code

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:53:54 GMT

I went to the Coming Out Ball last night! It was fun-- not a life-changing experience or anything, which I was vaguely afraid it would be, but there was music and I danced to it and it was fun.

Also, and most importantly, I got dressed up. And was quite pleased with the results! If not with my photography.

try central park, it's guaranteed

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:09:46 GMT

So I was going to stay home on the computer all day today, like a good little shut-in, and then for some reason I have forgotten manasseh started telling me all about what a moron her elementary school (or middle school, or something) music teacher was. And I found myself getting really really butthurt about this, because if there's any topic that sets me off for no good reason it's talking about how shitty art and music education often is.

The solution to this, obviously, was to go to the public library, borrow a book called I Used To Play Piano, and go poke at a piano in one of the practice rooms for an hour and a half. I thought it went well, considering I haven't touched a piano in twelve years-- well being an extremely relative term in this case, but still. When my life went completely to shit at the beginning of 2008, one of the things that went with it was music; I hadn't touched an instrument in like a year and a half until today. I hadn't noticed either, so it's not really a huge deal, but it was nice and maybe I should get into the habit of it.

I've never rly thought of myself primarily as a ~creative~ person, for whatever reason. Except that I have spent this week sewing things, writing things, drawing things, playing piano, reading things, and watching movies. So possibly I should rethink that point of view.

since the world's been turning

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:14:09 GMT

Man, you know, sometimes you have a hugely long week-- awesome, but long-- full of awesome but long days. And you wake up Wednesday morning, and on the one hand you get to sew things in school today! But on the other hand, it's six-thirty AM and you feel gross and it looks like the week is never ever going to end.

And then you go online and discover that someone has written AU fic where Zac Efron is a superhero and things just look a whole lot better.

whenever this world is good to me

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:44:16 GMT

My life: still boring, sorry folks.

I spent all day reading Barney/Robin fic, because I am somehow invested in Barney/Robin now even though I don't watch HIMYM and don't ever want to. I took a brief break to check the Yuletide section for A Series of Unfortunate Events, and was pleasantly surprised at first to find a couple of Kit/Olaf and Lemony/Beatrice fics; and then I got surprise Klaus/Violet porn and hightailed it right out of there. I am annoyed at what there is of Snicket fandom for having crap taste in pairings, and I am annoyed at Yuletide for having a format that doesn't allow for warnings or even pairings.

Anyway, this reminded me that I still owe a NYR fic if I don't want to get banned from Yuletide permanently, and this year's exchange is creeping up awfully fast. And, y'know, I was going to do Research and Work and write a nice long plotty shippy fic about Hilary Thorpe and the Viscount St. George fighting crime together . . . but I'm writing two tricky longfics already, and one of them is close enough in dynamic that I honestly don't know if it'd be worth it. So I'm going to see if I can BS a couple thousand words about them in the next couple of weeks, and if something more comes of it later on then something more comes of it.

Preemptively, anyone want to beta a short Lord Peter fic, if I can hammer something out? :D? Is anyone still here, or have you all gotten sick of me talking about fic that never appears? I know I am. I wish I could finish something.

PROTIP

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:03:23 GMT

Establishing a LGBTQ+ lit award specifically for LGBTQ+ writers: not actually the same as racism!

Since this seems to be a difficult concept for some people.

charges of arms dealing

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:32:39 GMT

Big or small, tell us about a time in your creative or artistic life when you were criticized for your creative decisions or told "no". Did you abandon your new idea? Refine your new idea? Or did you reject the criticism and proceed full speed ahead? Tell us about your thought process during this time. Do you regret not following through on your idea? Or are you now grateful you didn't go out on such a precarious limb? How do you think the criticism or denial affected the further development of your creative work?

The first time I took a college art class, at the end of my freshman year, I was excited beyond all reason. At the time, I was a history major at the University of Chicago, and completely exhausted; the idea of a class that involved not hundreds of pages of reading and dozens of pages of writing, but making things, felt like a breath of fresh air. Even better, a friend of mine had just sent me an idea she had for a comic script that she didn't expect to be able to develop herself, and I thought I might be able to use it as a starting point for one or two of my assignments.

Luck, as it seemed, was in my favor. One of our assignments was to design a page from a comic book, and the final assigment was to create a book— treating it primarily as an object, rather than a text. I was ecstatic; my friend was ecstatic. I was going to make a comic book! Of course, my drawing skills weren't all that great, and I didn't have that much time, and my professor wasn't that big on the idea; she thought it was far too much work for the time allotted and for my capabilities. However, I figured that I could work around both those things by making a deliberate stylistic choice to use simple, silhouetted flat black-and-white art and to never show any of the characters' faces, and really, how hard could it be to draw, ink, scan, and letter a sixteen-page comic in two weeks?

As it turned out, the answer was: really, really hard. Seemingly impossible, in fact.

In an ideal world, I could have taken all summer over this and done it well. Unfortunately, I needed to have it done by a rapidly approaching deadline, and have it done well enough to merit being worth 25% of my final grade. Much as I hated to admit it, my professor had been right: I'd bitten off more than I could chew, and I didn't have the time either to finish what I'd begun or start over from scratch. Instead, I was going to have to adapt.

At one AM the day of our final critique, things finally clicked into place. I didn't have time to produce a dozen more full-size pages, but I did have the time to grid out a sixteen-page storyboard on one giant sheet, with panels laid out and tiny text bubbles glued on but no actual art at all. And that was what I ended up turning in, along with a few full-size pages in various stages of completeness and my friend's original script with my notes scribbled in the margins. I hadn't done what I'd set out to do, but I do believe that my ultimate solution fulfilled the actual assignment better than my original idea. A comic book, just a plain finished comic book, would have just been about the story; what I turned in was not about the text of the book but the process of making it.

The original risk I'd taken didn't succeed at all, but that failure had forced me to adapt radically and for the better, and it is an experience I still try to keep in mind whenever an especially ambitious project doesn't seem to be going as planned. It is in that spirit of adaptability that I chose to leave the University of Chicago but take advantage of living in this city to investigate Columbia instead. It is in that spirit that I say: my choice to attend art school is a huge risk in and of itself, but whatever comes of my experience here, I plan to make the best of it no matter what.

smile for the cameras cause you know they're gonna trash you

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:24:02 GMT

Internet. Internet, I am too tired to deal with things like this.

I mean, I am 95% sure that's trolling, and addled trolling at that. But 5% of me is going OH GOD WHAT IF IT'S TRUE. Because really, I can deal with getting jossed by BSG (even though my version was better) and I can deal with getting jossed by Lemony Snicket, because that's really my own fault for writing forty thousand words of fanfic before rereading the enormous complicated canon. But getting jossed by Hairspray would really just be embarrassing.

(I bet my version would still be better, though.)

every time you come around

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:52:48 GMT

Ahahaha so, my day. Incoherence forthcoming.

I made it to Costume Construction exactly on time: win! Except then I sewed a placket onto a cuff inside out, somehow, and got to stick around halfway through the Construction II class picking out all my seams and redoing them. So I left that class kind of irritated with myself for being a ditz, consoled myself with a sandwich from Potbelly's, and went on to the lounge where I had the vague idea the LGBTQ folks were meeting this afternoon.

The lounge was empty except for me, so far, so I decided to be awesome and proactive and go get a mirror to do my self-portrait homework, because drawing in front of other people makes me fidgety and self-conscious, because I suck. So I went and got a mirror and . . . voila, some old dude with a briefcase brought in three other old dudes with briefcases on some kind of tour, so of course I froze up, because I was the only other one there and I was conspicuous and old guys with briefcases can of course detect fail, which I radiate in huge waves, like sharks smelling blood. So instead of doing my homework I sat there and darted nervous glances around in between digging holes in my arms, until eventually they went away, at which point I gave up all hope for ~~humanity~~ myself and put the mirror back. And discovered, in the process, that Common Ground was actually meeting three blocks away.

I am not entirely sure why, at this juncture, I did not just give up and leave campus entirely. But I didn't.

Instead I actually went to the Common Ground meeting, like a remotely sane functional person would do. And I talked to people! And said things in the meeting occasionally! Until halfway through, when the malfuncitoning part of my brain (which is most of it) suddenly reminded me that I had actual negative relationship experience and nothing to contribute and I was completely useless and should just get out already. The catch to this was, there were about twenty people in densely packed chairs between me and the door; so I just spent the last half hour sitting quietly in the back corner hoping no one would notice that I was crying for no good reason.

So there I was, standing on the subway platform crying like a character in a shitty indie movie, because I suck and I know that I suck and I really didn't want to go back to being that person who could never leave her room because she couldn't stop bursting into tears in public from sheer self-loathing. And then, by some bizarre miracle, despite being on the train to the workplace I usually avoid at all costs because it and most of the people there are profoundly upsetting: I actually talked myself down from this shit for once. It was kind of awesome. And when I got to work I discovered that most of the guys I hated are gone, and the CEO from whom I was supposed to get my paycheck had gone on his lunch break and never gone back, but the guy I like was there and gave me cracked software and promised to write my letter of recommendation to Columbia.

THE MORALS OF THIS STORY ARE. I still kind of suck, but I'm okay with my own suck for the moment, and I am going to write some fic tonight and it is not going to be ~*~the best fic ever~*~ but it will suck substantially less than I do. Also: fuck homework, I'm doing that shit tomorrow. And also: I might go to the LGBT folks' welcome reception Wednesday afternoon! I might even talk to people. Like, in real life and everything. WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN.

where do we go now

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:06:24 GMT

Yeah, so you know how some days Alfred Borden loves his wife best and some days he loves magic best? Well, I am not actually [spoiler] but it feels like it sometimes; some days I'm a useless waste of self-pitying carbon and some days I'm a superhero. (There are very few days in between.)

I spent the weekend being a sobbing waste of carbon over having to drop out of polybigbang, but then I watched a Phineas and Ferb marathon and felt a little better. And as of yesterday, thanks to blue_monarch and deconcentrate and my boss, I am a superhero again! I am a superhero who can sew a seam, and shoop things so well the photographer I work for is going to recommend me to more photographers, and write awesome fic even if I can't meet a deadline with it! And I am also a superhero who is going to be assistant costume designer on Batboy: The Musical. I'm not entirely sure what an assistant costume designer does, but I intend to be awesome at it.

what's your rush, what's your hurry

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:13:07 GMT

Today I learned to use a sewing machine, spent seventy dollars on drawing supplies, and went to a department meeting where the new department head made a big excited speech about how the world needs more female playwrights writing about women and actors of color playing traditionally-white roles.

I go to the coolest school on the planet. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

like motorhead and the grateful dead in a game of twister

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:57:16 GMT

> First day of school! More importantly: first coffee of the school year. Mmmmmm.
> Two days till I have a functioning computer again thank you God.
> Still the only prospective Illustration major in the world who can't draw. Cannot wait to see the advisor's face when I tell him that.
> New roommate coming tomorrow aaaaaaaaahh
> The Red Eye, a virtual paragon of hardassed investigative journalism, tells me that public support for having the Olympics here is falling off. THANK YOU, CHICAGO. KEEP THAT UP.
> polybigbang is five thousand words in. If I can hit 20K by the 20th, I'm sending a draft in; otherwise I'm dropping out. I think that's fair.
> The links at the top of my LJ layout have suddenly vanished, though I haven't changed anything in the CSS or display settings. Anyone know anything about this?

legend has it

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:53:16 GMT

noh8_disney noh8_disney noh8_disney

COME JOIN ME, FLIST. You know you want to. >:)

friday we're cool, monday we're freaks

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 08:53:31 GMT

Hello, Internet! I am still wigging out, because my computer is still being crappy, but I am sort of settling into a constant lowlevel wigout until Tuesday when I can get into the school library and start using reliable computers. This still really sucks.

Tomorrow I think I will clean my room, do laundry, and have a nice Labor Day party at home by myself; I bought hot dogs and buns and relish and everything. And attempt to work on fic longhand. I really don't hold out much hope for polybigbang at this point, but I might as well try.

I have seen Taking Woodstock, Gamer, and Julie and Julia in the last week or two, and have thoughts on them! Those will appear Tuesday, if I remember to post them.

In the meantime, a movie-related poll: folks, who are some actors (male) from the 60s or earlier who were actual good guys? Like not sexist, not racist, etc. So far my mom and I have come up with Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Yul Brynner, and DeForrest Kelley.