.note on listings: All warnings and full descriptions are included in the posts themselves, so that information is not duplicated here as a general rule; the exception is for noting that a fic is AU (i.e. a total AU, not a fic intended to be canon but that ended up being jossed).

05.21.10: Harry Potter and Supernatural complete.
05.23.10: Stargate: Atlantis complete.
08.22.10: Without a Trace complete.
11.15.11: XMFC added.
total index word count: 871,913

NOTE: IF YOU'RE FROM GOODREADS, I DON'T WANT MY FICS IN YOUR DATABASE.

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( X-Men: First ClassCollapse )

Well two posts in two days.

I decided to go ahead and get myself a Tumblr (again). It's got one whole entry and you can look at it here. What I'm going to do with it, I have no idea, but feel free to friend/follow/whatever.

The reason my URL is theletteraesc is that some jerk just took 'aesc' and has done nothing with it. And may I just say, I find that incredibly irritating, considering that I'm aesc everywhere else in fandomland.

Well, it's a year later and I feel like a shit friend. Things got to the point where I'd been away so long, and it felt like it would be weird and uncomfortable beyond words to go back when everything's changed and people have moved on, and I would be stuck trying to get back the friends and conversations I should never have given up in the first place. It's one of the things crippling depression does to you, but it still feels like a very bad excuse.

The past 365+ days have been very eventful. I got an actual job that pays real money (in my field, more or less) and moved from my very tiny town to a very big city. My depression still lurks, but I've been busy enough that I can avoid thinking about it. In my work capacity I got to see siriaeve and torment her for a few days, which I haven't done in a very long time. One of the hardest things I've had to do this year is leave Finn behind, because he would not be happy as a big city dog, stuck in a tiny apartment when he could have a big house and a yard and his best friend for company. At the moment I'm home on winter break and I've been taking many pictures of him and forcibly cuddling him.

Part of me wants to come back, but it's just very weird, seeing as I basically exiled myself. Tumblr alarms me. I'm casually writing (and should be finishing) XMFC fic, although I'm also still trying to catch up from not being able to write for three months, thanks to severe repetitive strain that has (for the moment) been subdued by wrist braces and steroid shots in my elbows. But god it sucks when you write for a living and can't write... and then remember that, once you've fallen behind on writing, you will never in a million years be able to catch up.

Enough from me. Finn says happy new year.
 

So, yeah, I've not really been around much lately. My life this past year has more or less been a total fail, and even its successes haven't meant much. Mostly I've spent the year being severely depressed and self-isolating, even for a person with severe depression, and since everything I would have posted after December would have been along the lines of "My life sucks and I want to die whine whine moan complain," I honestly didn't see the point in posting much. Or, you know, at all. On the bright side, you've basically been spared a year or so of whiny, useless posts.

I have my doctorate now, for what it's worth, and that's about it.

Somewhere along the line, I lost the vast majority of the energy needed to do fandom the way I'd been doing it, and while I miss the community, I don't really miss the wank and the drama and the demand to keep producing stuff to feel like a worthwhile person. I've kind of moved on over to AO3 and dabbling in XMFC fic (don't even get me started on SPN, please), but mostly as a distraction from finishing my dissertation and trying not to think about what I'm going to have to find to do with myself.

This was not the "this is my first post back" post I planned on making. I don't even know if I will be back, in any meaningful sense.

But hi anyway. I hope you all are doing well and are happy.

Hello parakeets <3

I'm currently trapped in the circle of hell that is trying to finish my dissertation so I can defend it this decade. Coincidentally, it's also the circle of hell that is trying to get up the motivation to finish when all job prospects have fallen through, and really, what is the fucking point anymore?

Whatever. I suspect most of you out there have forgotten my existence, and I almost forgot it too. But then I remembered it's Valentine's Day and I do cards on Valentine's Day. So, here you go!



( Cas, Sherlock, and Sheppard would all like to wish you a joyous LupercaliaCollapse )

That's enough fun. Back to work.

Yes, another week has gone by. The good news? I have an interview. The bad news? It's just... one interview. And it's next week, so now everything's been pushed to the side so I can prep. Whatever. Anyway, here's a cow I met when going Christmas-tree hunting.



( is it local?Collapse )

Still sucky times here. For those of you who don't know what the academic job market is, it's basically a month and a half of sending in application materials that force you to assess how very inadequate you are as a researcher and instructor, followed by another month and a half of the most dispiriting, empty silence as you wait for the bare hope of a phone call setting up the first of what you hope will be two interviews. I'm in the dispiriting, empty silence stage, which is characterized by the complete undermining of your confidence in yourself and the increasing conviction that, next year at this time, you'll be shuffling part-time jobs and cursing yourself for not sucking it up and going into something that might actually make you money.

It doesn't help with the writing. I failed at NaNo and am trying hard not to fail at the dissertation. But when every other thought my brain produces is something along the lines of "YOU WILL NEVER FIND WORK IN YOUR FIELD EVER YOU LOSER," it's hard.

Uff. Sorry for the late update tonight. I was forced to be sociable.

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I hope I'll have actual fannish content soon. I'm finishing up a long-overdue Merlin comic, and having it done before Christmas would really redeem December for me.

Happy Thanksgiving, United States peoples! As always, John and Rodney ask for your clemency this year, so that they can watch the football game and have grub-and-crabapple pie.

Yeah, another stupid week. Honestly, I am fucking fed up at this point, with myself and with about 99.99999% of the world. Just fucking sign me out already.

( ... that Cas will be in more than 40% of the goddamn episodesCollapse )

34600 / 50000 words. 69% done!

Now I'm going back to having issues processing the salmon I had for dinner. Urgh.

Yes, things have been crap lately, so I've been invisible. Vomiting up negativity isn't terribly attractive. Also, I've been sleeping around ten hours a day in between trying to finish the pile of crap that is my dissertation, so that doesn't leave much time for anything else. Damn, but the switch back to standard time sucks all the life and joy out of me.

Just a short review tonight, mostly random, less nerd than last week.

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22491 / 50000 words. 45% done!

.eta: Bush would have failed my comp class so damn hard.
.eta2: Much more amusing to contemplate.

Big exciting news: I'm on antibiotics for a sinus infection! And also some amazing allergy medications. Feeling much better.

Now that I have delivered my State of the Upper Respiratory System Address...

( Chrysler Building!Collapse )

Hurray, I'm on Day Three of NaNo, and already I'm a bit ahead of schedule. I've been trying to push for 2,000 words/day, so I can have a day off every now and then if I need it, and so far it hasn't been too bad. At the moment, the big challenge is not flipping out over how badly my style seems to have stagnated; it doesn't seem to move the way it used to do. More poetry reading must be undertaken ASAP.

7020 / 50000 words. 14% done!

Augh, it looks so insignificant now D:

Also, I have updated the Casifesto with 6.06. It's a bit short, because NOT ENOUGH CAS, but still. "Where'd you look?" "Everywhere."



I'm definitely working my way towards some kind of upper-respiratory infection, and I feel hungover from the election anxiety/horror from yesterday. It's never easy, being confronted (again) with the fact that at least 50% of the country suffers from delusions comorbid with selective amnesia. In the meantime, I'm also twirling, twirling, twirling my way towards finishing my dissertation, although it's not "twirling," maybe, so much as "stumbling." God, I'm really starting to hate this thing, and I really hope--as long as I get an actual job--I don't get a postdoc for next year, because I really don't want to have to think about this thing any more. Ever.

The job stuff is just depressing me. There's nothing open in my specific subfield this year, only general medieval stuff, and that all goes to high/late medievalists. I'm starting to feel like the job I was runner-up for last year was really my best shot at employment, so maybe I should just start filling out those Starbucks applications now.

/sudden journey into depression /will to go on

When she came to visit me a couple weeks ago, trinityofone ended up spending roughly seven consecutive days being allergic to New England. Well, now it's my turn. I went up to Freeport today to winterize myself (more fleece! more wool socks! long underwear!) and sounded like the person who is Patient Zero in movies like The Stand or Hot Zone, whose snufflings and splutterings eventually lead to the eradication of 75% of the country's population and requires Gary Sinise to be really hot and be in charge of the few desperate refugees as they battle against evil. For the record, I have sounded like this for about a week solid. So, at last, I caved and took a Benadryl, and as of this writing it has been eight hours hours since I took the fucking thing and I'm still stoned out of my gourd.



These are gourds.

Consider this a warning that my episode review may not be terribly coherent. But it could be amusing!

( the truth and nothing but the truthCollapse )

Hurray! I had to take time to finish my bigbang art and then I needed a week to be comprehensively allergic and swollen-faced and gross, but the Casifesto--your one-stop shop for all things awesomely Castiel--is back up and running for S6.



Like I said, I've been sick this past week, mostly having to do with intractable allergies. There's also been a metric shit-ton of work to get finished, and that mostly has to do with my dissertation (a chapter and a half left *weeps* WHY AREN'T YOU JUST DONE????) and also applications for work next year. Tomorrow I will hit the halfway point, with twelve of twenty-four applications finished, but it should also be noted that I am completely fed up with the process. Just fucking hire me, people! I'm good, I swear!

Random other shit: I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, reworking Below Skyscrapers. If you're doing it and need a writing buddy, I'm narratif (same as my Twitter, because I am amazing and original). And, of course, between my dissertation and 1,670 words a day, I have an idea for a new D/C fic (Cas hosts a political talk show! There are improbable meetings! A ridiculous backstory!), and, you know a bunch more art to finish.

And now I shall leave you with a dose of some ridiculous prettiness. Not Cas-related, but... really, just look. Seriously. His name is Roberto Bolle, he's an Italian dancer, and sweet Christ in Heaven is he beautiful.

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Ufff, what a day. I had to drive a couple hours out to Hanover to do research, which meant a four-hour round trip without a trinityofone to keep me company. What did end up keeping me company was horrible, wretched cramps, and the steadily-growing conviction that what was sloshing around in my uterus was, in fact, radioactive sludge. That was fun. And for the record, Dartmouth College officially has the most bewildering library I have ever been in. Even my undergrad library, where the stacks were so maze-like and poorly lit you felt like you were going to discover the dessicated, decades-old corpse of some terminally puzzled freshman, was not as bad.

So, I'm kind of in a dim frame of mind tonight. And tonight's episode is about vampires, which, let me just say... I fucking hate vampires. Full disclosure: like a lot of teenaged girls in the mid-90s, I too went through a vampire phase: Dracula, Gary Oldman being hot and brooding and star-crossed in the Francis Ford Coppola movie, Interview with the Vampire and the Anne Rice vampire corpus, and then it was over and now I look back at my fifteen-year-old self and am all "What the shit, fifteen-year-old self? WHAT THE SHIT?" I loathe Twilight for the simple fact that it contains vampires (the fact that it's horribly written is sort of a bonus). Alexander Skarsgard, fine, fine specimen of masculinity that he is, cannot induce me to watch even a microsecond of True Blood. Don't get me started on the Vampire Diaries. I don't even like Bunnicula, and that's about a vampire bunny.

The only episodes of SPN I don't watch when I'm marathoning DVDs are the vampire episodes. Yes. I watch the episode with the bugs, and the one with the phantom ship. I do not watch the vampires. It's not that I can't handle their challenge to the restrictions of heteronormative post-Victorian sexuality, their blending of human and animal, or their marginal-yet-intimate-other existence (really, vampires are so far from the margin now, come on), it's that I find them boring and stupid and overdone. Tonight feels almost like it might be the night of that episode with Paris Hilton. It's just something you watch for the sake of completeness.

Let's see how it goes, shall we?

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Bird of paradise by trinityofone (Dean/Cas) R | ~34,000 (MASTERPOST)
Sufferin' snakes, you guys! Here is Trin's and my entry for the 2010 deancasbigbang! "Bird of Paradise" is absolutely stunning, and it was such a privilege to get to talk the fic out with Trin and do the art for it--such a privilege and so much fun, and many thanks and hugs to her for the encouragement, kind words, and being awesome company in the car on our extensive travels through New England. Please go read her fic, because it's awesome--and also I recommend that you read first, because one of the images in here is fairly spoileriffic. But if you don't mind being spoiled, click on! Under the cut are the full-sized version of the cover, two other illustrations, and the soundtrack.



( Bird of paradiseCollapse )

It's that time of year again. Yes, time to send out applications for things and work on my moisturizing. Not at the same time. More happily, it's also time for knitting. And time for another SPN episode review!

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Woe, all good things must come to an end: I had to put trinityofone on a plane back to California today. My fun is over, and the real world resumes tomorrow, when I send out some more letters asking people to please hire me to teach their students about medieval stuff next year.

This past week has been a metric ton of awesome times, food, fic, squee, and so much more. One of the highlights may be our bizarre, unexpected detour into midcentury children's mysteries, especially the scintillating prose of those famous psychological thrillers, the Hardy Boys books. One thing led to another--possibly imagining Dean and Sam solving things like The Mystery in the Old House or The Clue in the Motel Room--and we picked up a copy of The Secret Warning, which features the boys ineptly solving something involving a golden Egyptian artifact, when not busy attending parties (that are over by seven thirty), weight-shaming their "friend" Chet Morton, and zipping around in their convertible. Their dad, Fenton Hardy, occasionally helps out when he's not having mad, hotel-room sex with his sandy-haired, muscular "operative," Sam Radley.

In the spirit of Franklin W. Dixon, most of the rest of this post will be written in the style of... well, Franklin W. Dixon, wherever they may be.



( the cut is the keeper of mysteryCollapse )

So this week is National Trin And Aesc Do New England Week, 2010 Edition. There has been much driving, eating, buying of books, and yes, making shrill noises over how awesome Cas and Dean are. (And there may be fic! With pie!) There's also been a lot of picture-taking, as we've made our way from state to state. Beneath the cut are 23 of them, and their contents include, but are not necessarily limited to: penguins, fishes, and a mummy.

( Boston, Portsmouth, Portland, and VermontCollapse )


.in other news: Yessss, I just downloaded logo-free 6.03 caps, which means... CASIFESTO UPDATE. Also, my exchange fic has been posted at some point in the not-too-distant past, but consider that a warning.

I have a trinityofone! Who better to watch Cas's return to TV with?

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