many faded things

original fiction: Beyond My Imagination (for Shousetsu Bang*Bang)

causeways — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:25:13 GMT

Exciting times: my bb_shousetsu story is live!

In case you're unfamiliar with Shousetsu Bang*Bang, a short introduction from the comm's user info:

Shousetsu Bang*Bang is a webzine for original gay fiction/boy's love oneshot stories, intended as an online, English-language text equivalent of one of those All Yomikiri Bimonthly Summer Special 100 Extra Pages!! manga phonebooks where every story is about the torrid romance of an ordinary schoolboy and his soccer club captain - or a yakuza boss and his faithful lieutenant - or the prince of an exotic desert country and the emerald-eyed winged youth he rescues from the sawtoothed sand monsters of G'or, self-contained in 30 pages and heartwarmingly predictable. Our policy is to welcome all comers, from the most flippant bit of cliché to the greatest of literary works... as long as they have fellas in love in them.

So here's my first contribution to this fine literary institution:

Title: Beyond My Imagination
Author: causeways
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: original m/m
Word Count: ~20,000
Disclaimer: None!
Summary: Set in the late 1840s, nineteen-year-old Ben Hadley moves to St. Louis to work as an attorney, where he meets and becomes roommates with a young medical assistant named Charlie Atwood.

Illustrated by quaedam, who is all kinds of talented, and excellently betaed by walkawayslowly.

Read the story here.

crossposted from causeways | original entry | comments on Dreamwidth

author's notes for Beyond My Imagination

causeways — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:04:50 GMT

This story has been percolating in my head ever since I first ran across the Wikipedia article Sexuality of Abraham Lincoln a few years ago and started to babble at my friends about how awesome a fictional version of Gay Abe would be. While the story has evolved a good bit since I first started thinking about it, the basics, which were drawn from Abe Lincoln's life, stayed the same -- a young lawyer in the mid-1800s shares a boardinghouse bed with another man. It wasn't out of the ordinary for young men to share a bed at that time, and doing so didn't necessarily mean that they were banging . . . except when it did. Just like Lincoln!

I owe the title as well as some of the structure of the story to Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent", the last short story in the collection Interpreter of Maladies:

I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Huge thanks to quaedam for the fabulous art and for being super easy to work with! It was super cool to see these characters come to life.

And finally, I owe walkawayslowly big time for making her original fiction betaing debut, for telling me when there needed to be more sex (always), for trying to kill the colons (sorry!), and for being a generally fabulous sounding board. And also, y'know, for being my BFF. Thanks, buddy!</user>

crossposted from causeways | original entry | comments on Dreamwidth

EUROVISION!

causeways — Sat, 14 May 2011 21:19:18 GMT

As seen here:

i know it's wrong, but I love it. Love it, love it, love it. It is deeply disturbing on so many levels, and yet also completely amazing. If ever there was an act born to win Eurovision, Jedward are it. They are singing "Lipstick", and by that I mean singing in the loosest possible sense, but it doesn't matter because they are bouncing around and pogo-ing like demented robots who've eaten too many Haribos and I LOVE IT. This HAS to win, surely? Any other outcome would be unacceptable.

All you have to do is take one look at their haircuts and outfits to understand that these boys more properly understand the spirit of Eurovision than anyone else in the field:

GO IRELAND!

snow

causeways — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:23:16 GMT

Hi! It's been a while. I'm reading much more than I'm posting, which I guess doesn't say a whole lot since this is the first time I've posted in over four months. Oops. I'll try to write an actual post soon(ish), but tonight is not that time -- I still haven't quite escaped from a work-ate-me phase. In the meantime, let me just say that I may be a summer kid all the way, but my jaw dropped on the way to work this morning when I saw the snow on these trees against a bit of blue sky.

crossposted from causeways | original entry | comments on Dreamwidth

to one of my very favorite people

causeways — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:14:36 GMT

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, walkawayslowly!!!

I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day, and I cannot wait to see you in LESS THAN SEVEN WEEKS! <3

crossposted from causeways | original entry | comments on Dreamwidth

haiti fic fail: signal boosting and appropriation

causeways — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:42:41 GMT

tripoli8 's post was the first I saw about the massive, massive fail that is gatorgrrrl's J2 Big Bang, Caught Between the Earth and Sky. walkawayslowly emailed me about it shortly thereafter, and since I got home tonight my entire flist has been packed with posts about it, so you've probably already got some idea of what's going on here. If not, amazonziti has a great write-up and collection of links here, and though asteroidbuckle has locked the story down (and therefore the comments on it are missing as well, which is a shame, as I understand that there was some very excellent discussion on that post), you can see excerpts of the original story compiled by bossymarmalade here.

There are a lot of really horrifying things going on in those compiled excerpts, and I'm willing to assume that they are representative of the rest of the fic: portraying a black man (possibly the only black person with a central role?) as big and dumb and ultimately comparing him to an overly large cat (aka a big dumb animal); representing black women as voiceless and helpless and savage; presenting post-earthquake Haiti as a backdrop for Jensen Ackles, The Great White Hope, to save the ever-grateful poor black populace . . . And then, of course, there is the entire fact that post-earthquake Haiti is serving as the setting for a story about two white men falling in love and getting it on.

I'm saddened by the fact that while asteroidbuckle understands that she's done something terribly offensive and wrong, she still does not really understand what she's apologizing for. (See here and here.) She's trying, but she's not getting it; that much is clear from that second link in particular.

A lot of people are talking about this quite eloquently, and hackthis wrote a post reminding us of all the stuff we should already know, but keep (as a fandom, or a world for that matter) collectively forgetting. The heart of the matter, IMO, is something nyoka wrote about: the issue of appropriating tragedy and other people's experiences for yourself.

I think it's perfectly fine to write about something that you did not personally experience, or about a person who is completely different than you are -- with the caveat that you do it respectfully. I think, too, that it's valid to use fiction (fanfiction included, though admittedly I've never seen it done well in fanfiction) to write about tragedy, even one that does not affect you personally, as long as you do it respectfully -- i.e., as long as you do not do it in an exploitative or otherwise offensive way. The issue of whether or not it's a good idea to write about a tragedy that is ongoing set aside, I truly do not believe there can be any debate about the fact that it was a deeply horrible idea to set a love story between two white men in post-earthquake Haiti, using that tragedy and those who experienced it personally as a backdrop. Haitians are not a backdrop, and neither is any other group of people. This is something that we need to get right.

A huge point that I think needs to be made repeatedly: getting this stuff right is NOT AT ALL just about not offending people. Sure, you don't want to offend people. The thing is, not doing something just because you do not want to offend people has a distinct tinge of, "Well, I think what I'm doing is fine, but I will keep it to myself because it might offend some easily offended other person," and that does not work at all. It's about RESPECTING other people's experiences. Of course white people can write people who are not Just Like Them; white people can and SHOULD, for that matter, because who wants to read stories that are about nothing but white people? But for the love of God, do your research. Learn about the history and the cultural context of your characters, more than you think you need to know; make their existence central to your story and not just there for some kind of "flavor"; and, most importantly, make them people. A great big black man with hands the size of frying pans who follows Jensen Ackles around Haiti is a cookie-cutter stereotype, not a flesh-and-blood person.

I don't think white people must stick to writing what we know, but I do think it's imperative that we do our absolute best to get it right when we are writing something we do not know, and that we be open and ready to learn when other people take time out of their lives to tell us that we've gotten something wrong. It's perfectly human to want to be defensive when being told we're wrong, but we cannot give in it to. If we do something wrong, we MUST apologize for it, and we must ALSO take the time and put in the effort to understand what it is that we have done wrong, if we do not understand it from the start.

A last link that I thought was really interesting, from a few years back (during a previous round of J2 RaceFail): Some thoughts on writing outside my experience by brown_betty

crossposted from causeways | original entry | comments on Dreamwidth

original m/m fiction recs, a couple slash recs, and some pictures of paris

causeways — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:03:04 GMT

I've been reading a lot of original m/m fic online lately, or fanfic that reads like it, but damned if I don't just keep getting pickier. See, I'm not really interested in caper, and for the most part I'm not interested in slavefic or BDSM, either (freece's Captive Prince is a story I am more than willing to bend the rules for, because so far it's fantastic; I've stopped reading it as a WIP, though, and the wait for it to be finished is killer). I generally like original m/m that's set in the quote-unquote real world, that's about characters I feel like I could know, that's about the randomness of who you fall in love with (not that that's a genre per se -- it's kind of the anti-genre, for that matter). I will of course make exceptions to any and all of the above if a story is fabulous enough, but my definition of fabulous tends more toward "lots of build-up and UST" rather than "lots of boning from day one." Just, you know. In case you were wondering.

So, recs! The first couple (both by the same author) were written for Shousetsu Bang*Bang (bb_shousetsu), "a webzine for original boy's love oneshot stories" -- which, incidentally, has just about THE funniest userinfo I've ever read. (Excerpt: "A story must be at least 1500 words long and contain one sex scene (soft R or above). This is because a properly descriptive sex scene needs about 1500 words in the first place. Sex-scene-less stories that are nevertheless works of coked-out yaoi genius will be accepted at the discretion of the Editor, but let's not be wusses here, c'mon.") I love these first couple of recs for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that the main characters are not all white dudes. Extra bonus awesome.

Heterogenesis by w2 (ladysisyphus)
original m/m | unrated (adult) | ~18,700 words
"Well," said Rishi, his eyes stung to tears by the absolute white of the hospital room, "here we are," and depressed the plunger on the syringe.
A researcher working on isolating a so-called "gay gene" falls for a subject in his clinical trial. I made the error of starting to read this story Saturday night around one-thirty a.m. after coming back from a party at a stable (don't ask, my life is weird), and was in no way capable of putting it down. (When I started to write this post, I got about a fifth of the way into reading the story again before catching myself.) Heterogenesis is really tight and well-crafted, all of the scenes propel the story forward and really count, and I really adore and empathize with all of the characters in it. Also, there's a hot cooking scene or two, and a hot man who has a crush on a "scruffy little nerd," as the main character thinks of himself, which made me grin like a fool.

Mike Dies at the End by w2 (ladysisyphus)
original m/m | unrated (adult) | ~11,700 words
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.
If you liked Supernatural back in the day when there were ghosts and mysteries and shit (particularly if you enjoyed the Ghostfacers ep back in S3), I suspect you'll LOVE this story. It's a totally laugh-out-loud funny fuck-or-die fic that takes place in a haunted house. Trust me, you want to read this.

Note: I haven't yet read a story by w2 that I haven't liked. I haven't LOVED every one of them, but overall the quality of her stories is totally excellent. There are links to her master list at the bottom of the above stories.

Something about Mike Dies at the End really strongly reminded me of another excellent piece of original fic (probably just the gay boys and the haunted house, but whatever). This isn't a new story, but hollycomb just reposted the third part of it after LJ ate it, and though I'd already read it (. . . repeatedly) I went and read it again. Yup, still awesome.

To Come True a Thing Must Come Second by hollycomb
original m/m | R | longish, posted in three parts
Brandon is a nerdy high schooler who wanted to be a paranormal research scientist until he was teased enough to give up his belief in ghosts altogether. His old obsession is reborn when a classmate consults him as an "expert" on a haunting in his house.
I don't know anyone who does teenage love and longing as well as hollycomb does. When the main character in this story talks about how he's accepted he could never live without his boyfriend, you totally believe him. Also, though the twist confused me a little the first time I read this story, it worked better for me on subsequent reads. (Possibly the first time I read it I was having a dumb day.)

Speaking of hollycomb, this next story isn't actually original fiction, but it reads like it could be, particularly if you're not into the MLB RPS scene.

Conditions of Parole by hollycomb
MLB RPS | AU | Kyle Davies/Kelly Johnson | ~20,000 words
Kelly gets a part-time job working for Davies and Son Pool and Spa. He believes that dating Hiram Davies' beautiful daughter will set his life right, but her older brother has other ideas.
hollycomb writes these stories that are so thoroughly set in the real world, so full of detail, that it's pretty much impossible not to believe them. I'm always a huge fan of stories about boys falling all kinds of stupid in love with each other, and this absolutely fits the bill. This fic reads at the start like it's going toward a very cliched place (which wouldn't have been a bad thing), but then takes a slightly different turn (toward an even better thing). A commenter on it wrote that she wasn't sure where exactly the boys fall in love, and I agree that that bit is kind of obscured, but there's really not much else to fault here, due to all the awesome.

This last rec isn't even remotely original fiction, but it's a rare fandom, and trust me, it's great.

Sentimental Reasons by frostfire_17
Casablanca | Sam/Rick | teen and up | 16,570 words
"France and I have never had any major arguments that I can remember."
I haven't watched Casablanca in a number of years, and I had no idea that I needed this story. Oh, but I did, and so do you. I read on the author's LJ that she thought it could have used an extra 5-10K, and I don't disagree, but that doesn't prevent it from being one of the better pieces of fanfic I've read in a while. It's excellent, thematically, and the dialogue is ridiculously spot-on and awesome.

On a totally unrelated note, I went to Paris recently and it wasn't half bad.

Off to South Asia for two weeks

causeways — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 06:57:08 GMT

Visiting a friend I haven't seen in years and traveling around. I'm more than a little excited. Be good, enjoy yourselves!

Also, as I think is pretty obvious at this point, I'm not around lj as much as I used to, and am unsure that this state of affairs is likely to change anytime soon. If you want to stick around, I'd love to keep in touch; if not, I totally understand, and best wishes!

Just moved into my new apartment today

causeways — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:33:11 GMT

And my new neighbors are having loud sex that, initially, sounded a whole lot like a small dog whining. Welcome to the neighborhood, eh?

hello there, the angel from my nightmare

causeways — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:06:14 GMT

I just finished reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott on Thursday evening, which I enjoyed the heck out of. It's a book about writing, but it's also a book about learning to be still and really look, really see the world and distill it in your writing, about learning to see the truth clearly and to write it as best you can. This was the message in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, too, though I wasn't much interested in hearing it at the time (I was seventeen, and convinced that I knew better). My best friend and I joked that we were going to drive out to the creek of the book's title and take pictures of us peeing in it, and write our response to the experience of reading the book and making our own pilgrimage: Pisser at Tinker Creek. (This still makes me chuckle a little, which is how you know I have not even vaguely moved past the level of sense of humor of a nine-year-old.)

Anyway, Bird by Bird was great stuff, and I immediately ran to the post office to mail it to my mother when I was done with it, not just because she would dig the learning-to-be-still stuff, but also because Lamott's sense of humor is EXACTLY like my mother's -- dark and a little sick and deeply hilarious. That had a lot to do with why I loved it so much, I think.

Lamott also devotes a ton of time to talking about a lesson I only just learned this year, and that, once walkawayslowly got through to me about it, seemed so obvious that I could not believe I had never known it before, which is: get to know your characters, for the love of God. So much of the original fiction that I've written has felt like it was missing its center, somehow falling flat, and it was because I didn't know my own characters. I've been writing a lot less in terms of actual stories since that conversation with Merrin, but I can tell you why my character's great-grandmother died when and how she did, and while it's highly unlikely that I will ever once mention it in the story itself, I know it, and that's the whole point -- it gives my character history, grounds her, makes her more real.

Bird by Bird also has absolutely one of the best lines about plot that I've ever read, a line that immediately made me run to my notebook to write it down:

That's what plot is: what people will up and do in spite of everything that tells them they shouldn't, everything that tells them that they should sit quietly on the couch and practice their Lamaze, or call their therapist, or eat until the urge to do that thing passes.

It made my breathe catch in my throat a little, because that's just it, really, that's it exactly: that is what I want to be reading, about characters who know better and do it anyway, whatever that it may be -- I want to read about them giving in to their urges and coming through it all okay in the end, eventually. I want them to pull through, but I want them to do that thing in the meantime, and I want whatever that thing is to be the inevitable thing, the only option there could possibly be for how they will actually act, even though we and they both know that they should know better. And that's what knowing your characters is about: knowing what that thing is, and why they would up and do it. That is what I'm going for.

*

I'm meeting a friend for drinks tonight. This friend is a cute boy, and it's not a date, it's so not a date, but I can't quite shake the date-like feeling, anyway. We're both new to this city, we've known each other for three years and some change, we're both single, and he's really cute -- that's probably got a lot to do with why I've got it on my mind. Years ago, when we first knew each other, he and one of our mutual friends had this huge messy UST thing going on, which I wanted absolutely no part of, and also he was way awkward back then. I feared the awkward when I met up with him for coffee a couple weeks ago, but it never appeared, except for a little bit of stumbling over his words as we were parting ways ("Want to get lunch sometime?", since we work near each other). I'm having a really hard time remembering why, exactly, I should not go for this. We've got a bunch of mutual friends scattered around Europe, but he and I don't have this great friendship that we'd be ruining or anything. Food for thought, anyway.

*

I'm moving out of my apartment, also. It's not my roommate -- my roommate is really great. It's my roommate's cats, one of whom is currently attempting to be cute by sleeping on my lap. It's hard to remember how much I despise them when they are being cute, but it's very, very easy to remember how much I despise them when it's six in the morning and they are meowing and clawing at my door. Earplugs are my very best friends, but I decided it was time to pony up and get my own place. I've already got a new place, as of the 15th, and got the lease for it in the mail yesterday. I'm a little terrified of what signing a lease entails (I'm just a little scared of committing to anything in this country) but am working on getting over myself. I'm also beyond thrilled about getting to pick out my very own IKEA dishes. One of my good friends and I compared notes a little while back and discovered that we both used to eagerly await the Williams-Sonoma catalog when we were nine or so, and would make lists of everything we wanted in our future houses. That should give you an idea of how deep and enduring my love of kitchenware is. The new place is a tiny little studio, but I like the area, love the balcony, and the price, she is RIGHT. Good thing, too, because I have lots of travel plans, and seem to have committed myself to even more while at a friend's party last night. Hey, cool. That's what being in Europe as a twenty-something is for, right? Traveling lots and saving no money!

oh, for the love

causeways — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:34:42 GMT

Via such_heights and sheafrotherdon: ...and Harrison Ford as Dr. Chen (at Angry Asian Man)

Excerpt:

Extradorinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser, opens in theaters today. It's a medical drama about a desperate father who finances a cure for the rare Pompe disease that is killing his children. It doesn't look very good, but it's noteworthy as yet another movie that should've starred Asians. Or at least one Asian actor.

Basically, it's a crappy Lifetime-esque movie about a father with very sick children who takes, wait for it, extraordinary measures to save his children, through starting a pharmaceutical company to produce the medicine they need. There's just one thing, though. The geneticist who develops the life-saving medicine, played by Harrison Ford, was not, in RL, a gruff old white dude in Nebraska, like the movie wants us to think. He was a graduate of Taiwan University named Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen, who was at Duke University at the time and who has been mentioned as a Nobel candidate.

Roger Ebert makes a really excellent point in the article I just linked -- Ford's character isn't even good. There's absolutely no reason for the fictional Dr. Stonehill to have replaced the real-life Dr. Chen at ALL, and one can only imagine that the story would have been far better in innumerable ways had they, you know, stuck with the ACTUAL FACTS. (It's not just the Chen/Stonehill switch that the story got wrong, btw -- Ebert goes into other factual hand-waving, as well.)

I haven't seen the movie, but I HAVE read the script, back when it was The Untitled Crowley Project -- I interned for the production company behind this movie a couple of springs ago. At the time that I read the script, I was totally aware of how crappy a script it was, but had not thought to go through and fact-check. What the scriptwriters and the people behind this movie did to the actual story is not just sad and upsetting on a racefail and fact-fail front, it also reduced a complex and potentially very compelling story into something that nearly put me to sleep while reading it. I can't imagine the movie is any better.

what do hp fic and food blogs have in common? this post.

causeways — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:26:30 GMT

Apparently I still read HP fic! But dude, it's helenish, who wrote Close Enough, which is not only my favorite Harry/Ron fic but also one of my very favorite pieces of fanfiction in ever. Helen writes emotion in a way that it gets up under your ribs and grabs you by the gut and twists, just a little, and she writes characters who aren't very in touch with their own emotions, or who are too stoic or stupid to act on them, or who do act on their emotions and manage fuck things up with the person they love for ages. In addition to Close Enough, see Semaphore for another example of what I'm talking about (Sports Night, Dan/Casey, longish).*

Helen hasn't been writing so much lately, but I pop over to her LJ every now and then just to see what she's up to, and found this:

Theft of Assets, Destruction of Property by helenish
HP, slightly AU | Draco/Neville | NC-17 | 23,061 words
Surely it is a mistake to allow a single youthful indiscretion to cloud an already promising career.

It is a modern Harlequin AU with a side of indulgent awesome, not to mention all the food description you (okay, I) could ever want. Have I mentioned that food blogs are my new crack? For example:

smitten kitchen (with which I am more than a little obsessed)
food in jars (which makes me want to get into canning)
Not Eating Out in New York (which makes me wish I still lived in NYC a LOT. :( no Union Square farmer's market visits for me.)

Anyway, go read Theft of Assets, Destruction of Property -- good times will be had by all!

*And if any of you guys have awesome Sports Night recs that you've been holding onto, I would love you FOREVER if you gave up the goods.

we lift our hands and pray over your body but nothing ever happens

causeways — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:56:23 GMT

Happy 2010! I haven't quite gotten my New Year's resolutions worked out yet, though I've been asked about them repeatedly. I would, however, like to use my LJ more, since I accidentally renewed my paid account in November (meant to turn automatic payments off and did not)!

I was with old friends over New Year's, in the city where we all studied, which was lovely. We watched firecrackers go off in the streets and danced until five in the morning and staggered out of bed in search of Chinese food in the morning which was, alas, nowhere to be found. After that we lounged in bed and quasi-napped and I, in the process, finished reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

I went into that book completely unspoiled save for the blurbs just inside the cover, and I really think that's important for this book, being as unspoiled as possible. N.B.: I would not really recommend reading the blurbs. The blurbs speak very highly of the book, obviously, but they also told me more than I would have really wanted to know, going in -- even though the prologue is a huge ol' chunk of foreshadowing itself, the reviews give it a little too much color.

Having said that, I know how I feel about spoilers, which is that I HATE them a whole lot for things I am really invested in (I was invested in this book from the moment I opened it, which is a very high rec right there), but I know not everyone is like that. I already spoiled walkawayslowly (who would have been pretty pissed had she not known the spoilers I gave her) and one of my RL friends massively for Edgar Sawtelle. I can say, without spoilers, that David Wroblewski's prose is beautiful, and that that level of richness is what I aspire to.

Spoilery from here on out.

Having said all that, I was so, so disappointed in what he chose to focus on in the ending. I know we had hints of tragedy throughout, and those damned blurbs at the front of the book had me forewarned that I was getting into a modern retelling of Hamlet, though I did my best to put them out of my mind. But the thing is, Edgar Sawtelle's strengths had shit nothing to do with Hamlet. In fact, the first time I felt really thrown out of the narrative was when the ghost of Edgar's father appeared in the barn. I was incredibly relieved when the story returned to what it had been doing so well all along -- being a story about an intensely insular family, Wisconsin, and a bunch of remarkable dogs -- and damned pissed off about the last seventy-five pages or so of the story.

It felt to me that there were two novels going on here. On the one hand, there was the novel Wroblewski wrote, which was fantastic and beautiful and rich. On the other hand, there was the novel Wroblewski wanted this to be, which was a Wisconsin retelling of Hamlet, plus dogs and some details and, you know, stuff, and in the last seventy-five pages, Wroblewski sped the pace up madly from where it had been throughout the rest of the book, made Claude ridiculously, unbelievably evil (and not evil where you sit there HATING him, because I can really get behind a character who makes me want to SCREAM for the injustice of how they treat a character I empathize with; but evil where I sat back from the book and went, "That just cannot even be happening, nobody actually acts that way," which I cannot get behind at all, because I'm thrown right out of the story again) and then finally, Wroblewski shoveled the novel he had into the wheelbarrow he wanted it to fit into, made Trudy weak and useless (the woman, how FITTING.), and sent the most WORTHY of the dogs off to live in a wilderness utopia where they will, presumably, all mate with Forte and create the master race of creatures.

Haha! I'm just a little bitter.

Here's the thing. All the reviewers are sitting there eating the Hamlet shit up with a spoon! BUT IT IS NOT GOOD. There is no part of the high tragedy bullshit that is good. About two sentences in to this novel I knew that I was going to love it, that its language was going to curl around me like, yes, one of those extremely magnificent Sawtelle dogs and that I was going to carry it everywhere with me and read it at all the moments I could and never be apart from it for an instant. And you know what, the language, the writing itself, really is that good. Sentence for sentence, it is truly that wonderful. And funny! And damned inventive! And I absolutely despise that it fucked with me so thoroughly.

The line where Trudy's thinking about Edgar's feelings about Gar's death, thinking about how they were never going to have what they had had before, because what they had had with Gar had been the golden thing, the perfect life that only came once and never again -- that line made me gasp with how wonderful and bittersweet it was, and that's kind of how I feel about this book, except also ANGRY, because it could have been right up there, you know? It had a nice place on my favorites list all warmed up for it, and I absolutely ache for what could have been, with this book. It's a damned shame.

I already gave this rec to walkawayslowly, but if you're looking for a book that is really fantastically well-written and also WILL NOT FUCK WITH YOU LIKE THAT, read The Gathering by Anne Enright. It's about an Irish family coming together for a wake, which sounds morbid and shit, but believe me when I say it's great.

causeways — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:38:32 GMT

Accidentally burning the office down because I forgot about the five pounds of sweet potatoes I was somewhat illicitly baking in the office oven would probably not have been the best way to ring in the end of my third full week here, so it's a really good thing I wasn't in any danger of any of that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

causeways — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:46:48 GMT

Hope everyone who celebrates is having a lovely day! November is an odd time to have moved to another country, and I haven't quite gotten to the point of having a set group of friends here yet, so it was really excellent to have not one but two different coworkers invite me over for Thanksgiving. I'm grateful for that this Thanksgiving, and for having the opportunity to live in another country right now, because that's a pretty darned cool thing. And also I'm grateful that my family is safe and together, even though they're far away.

i could never be malicious though i seem so bittersweet

causeways — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:17:47 GMT

I was eating pumpkin soup for dinner, and this song came up on iTunes: pumpkin soup // kate nash Too freaking random -- eating and listening to the same thing!

Do you guys have any favorite house-decorating blogs/websites? I am soon to gain a bigger room than I have had in . . . ever, actually, and am going to need some kind of inspiration regarding what to do with it. I'm inheriting a wardrobe and a couple of bookcases, but beyond that I have right around 21 m2 (approx. 210ish square feet) of space to decorate. That is kind of a lot of space.

said yes to the girl about the apartment

causeways — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:54:37 GMT

So hey, that's pretty cool. As of December first I officially have a home! Which means, this weekend? IKEA weekend. Yeaaaah buddy.

apartment hunting

causeways — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:24:52 GMT

LJ! Help me make my life decisions!

View Poll: apartments

I just really clicked with this girl! (You can stop planning our wedding any day now, Lauren.) My gut says go for it, but I am second-guessing myself, because seriously, who finds the apartment they are going to move into on the first try? By accidentally emailing the person about South Africa, no less.

a surprise to no one but me: standardized test results are no good.

causeways — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 09:04:47 GMT

Dear LSAT people,

I really don't appreciate you sending me my LSAT score early. It isn't that I didn't want to know it, you understand, but that I didn't want to know it at 11:45 on a Friday night when I was most of the way to drunk off wine at late dinner with a friend, and was happy and full of too much pasta and veal and really just wanted to go to bed and sleep off that Little Italy dinner. Instead I felt compelled to check my personal Gmail right before I went to bed -- which I know isn't your fault, LSAT people, but really, did my results have to go out on Friday evening at 5:00, on a day when I was too crazed to check my Gmail until I was about to collapse into bed?

So now, instead of having had a night of glorious, half-drunken sleep, I have been miserably restless all night (and we are not even all the way through the night!) and am now awake at a little before five in the morning because I was definitely not sleeping, and I kept thinking that maybe after all that wine I'd hallucinated the LSAT results email, and my LSAT score isn't actually as bad as all that, and really I should just get my laptop and check.

Sadly, I was not hallucinating, and my score really is that bad.

I mean. Not THAT bad . . . but bad enough that, if I decide I actually do want to go to law school, I should really retake the LSAT, and fuck me, that was the whole point of taking the LSAT now: having this part of the equation out of the way.

It's honestly most upsetting because I came out of the test feeling really good about how I'd done on it, and what I got was right around the level of my very worst practice test score. Ugh FOREVER.

And really, this isn't the biggest deal in the world. Even if I do decide to go to law school, I don't actually have to apply to the top ten schools; or if I did, I'd still stand a chance of getting in -- the rest of my application is (or will be) really strong. It's entirely possible that I won't end up going to law school at all! It's not as though law school is my only option.

Regardless, this is not what I was hoping for here, and I greatly dislike the feeling of getting shitty results on something I felt confident about. Like -- awesome, I LOVE finding out that my confidence in my abilities is wildly misplaced.

And LSAT people, you can say whatever you want about it being my fault I did poorly and not yours, but you still owe me this night's sleep.

No love,
me

you drive to europe in the rain

causeways — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:39:37 GMT

Public service announcement: you should be watching How I Met Your Mother. I love that show. I'm still a little ways into season two but I have been absolutely adoring it. It is so funny and gut-wrenching and just all-around great. It is probably surprising to no one that Barney Stinson is my favorite. <3 Neil Patrick Harris <3

I also, at my friend's urging, finally watched Dr. Horrible the other day, which was good times all around. Something about NPH's face (as Billy) really reminds me of Nathan Fillion as Mal Reynolds, and which made Nathan Fillion's Captain Hammer brutishness even more of a delightful contrast.

But back to HIMYM -- if you are current on the show's canon, or if you don't mind spoiling yourself a little (I am in the latter camp), then you should absolutely read this story: metal heart by the_spin, which I found via theoret's rec. It's 24K of the kind of het I want to write when I grow up -- totally believable and excellent and did I mention funny as hell? Just read it.

stranded in this spooky town

causeways — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:51:40 GMT

I usually hate taking my computer to the Apple store to get repaired, because inevitably they will be running behind and everyone will be all kinds of cranky and I'll sit there for about nine gazillion years until finally it's my turn and they tell me my computer is dead dead miserably dead.

Today, though, I was just going because of a really superficial thing -- there's a design flaw in the MacBook that causes the casing where your wrists rest to get indented and often eventually crack, which had happened to me. And then an actual piece of my casing fell off a couple weeks ago. Granted, a very small piece, but it's still kind of disturbing to watch your computer literally fall apart.

Anyway, I took it in to the Apple store today and came out, an hour and a half later, with brand new casing and, awesomely, a whole new keyboard! I've spent a lot of time whining to anyone who will listen (Merrin, my roommates, my mother) about how much I hated my keyboard, and for whatever reason? The new one is waaaay better. Maybe this will make me write more!

Haha. Don't hold me to that.

There's a lot of stuff going on right now! In addition to my very busy schedule of computer repairs, I am taking the LSAT on Saturday! I will be so glad to be done with that, because I also now have an actual date for my transfer to Frankfurt! Like, ish. Early November! There's some debate as to when I will actually be physically flying to Germany, but somewhere between the 2nd and the 4th of November pretty much for sure. (My current boss, my future boss and I are in the middle of a stalemate on that one. Will update about the actual date once my flight is booked.)

Regardless, we're talking like . . . just over a month away. Ah! So I've made myself a Life List, which is the list of all the things I need to do before I move along with the things I've been meaning to do for the past thirteen months and haven't quite gotten around to, including but not limited to:

- find someone to sublet my apartment
- go to the doctor ("the doctor" here being taken to mean . . . eeeevery doctor)
- pack and ship my crap
- actually get clothing dry cleaned (. . . for the first time)

Et cetera! We do have one lead on the subletting front -- one of my coworkers who's currently living with her parents way the fuck out in Queens -- so I just spent a couple of hours cleaning up my room and the kitchen and vacuuming a little in preparation for her stopping by after work tomorrow to see the apartment and meet my roommates. Because that's the thing that's a little bit tricky about finding a subletter: I'm friends with my roommates, who are also all friends with each other. I can't just like . . . find a random person to do it and head for the hills.

The good thing is that my roommates are pretty excellent people (usually) and our apartment is awesome (always). Our building has a pool and a gym and a roof with a fucking amazing view of Manhattan and beyond. I am just hoping my coworker and my roommates like each other, because I'm sure we'll find someone to sublet regardless but this would just be sooo easy, and it would be excellent to be able to check that off the Life List.

It's kind of terrifying to think of how soon I am going to be living in Germany again! And having to figure out all of those delightful things that my study abroad program didn't make me have to deal with, because we were coddled (bank account, cell phone, finding my own apartment . . . joy!). But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, I think. Figuring out the New York end of things first would be the logical way to go. Regardless, if anyone has any awesome tips re: German cell phones or apartment finding and wants to share them, I would very much appreciate it!

your dad was a truck driver?

causeways — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:41:44 GMT

Holy shit, I am a little in love with Generation Kill. That show is right up my alley in, oh, EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, and Colbert is hot and Fick is hot and Ray is hot and also hilarious and Trombley is a ridiculous freak who makes me laugh in PAIN and everything about it is just so, soooo good. I think it has a better grasp of irony than any show I've seen in . . . pretty much ever, and I LOVE that about it. It doesn't let you forget that war is hell, particularly this war (for the soldiers and Iraqis both), but at the same time it makes you care about these men in a way that I don't think Band of Brothers did even a third as well, which was my one major complaint about BoB -- much as I love that show like burning, I never felt (with a few exceptions) that I knew those characters very well. GK does not have a bit of that problem.

I think I would love the show just as much if I hadn't already read a good bit of Brad/Nate fic, but let me also throw out there that GK fandom is REALLY FABULOUSLY TALENTED and it surely didn't hurt to be watching with that in mind.

I've started reading Generation Kill the book as well, which I'm enjoying a heck of a lot. I'd read the Rolling Stone articles before, and thus far (about thirty pages in) the book seems to be just like them only longer and better. Which, hey. No bad there!

Let it be noted that this is about the . . . fifth? seventh? fandom that fourfreedoms has nudged me toward. Lauren has good taste in fandoms. GK fandom: KEEP BEING AWESOME.

On a totally unrelated note, last night I watched the pilot and second ep of Glee, which I also enjoyed a great deal. I'm not entirely convinced yet that I think it can sustain itself for an entire season or more as a TV show and that it wouldn't have been better suited as a movie, but I will keep watching for now for sure. Although did anyone else find themselves wanting to scream at Schuster's wife? Oh my God, he is so cute and Justin Timberlake-ish. WHAT DOES HE SEE IN HER. That is all.

four fast years

causeways — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:37:34 GMT

One week from today, my youngest brother is going to be in his freshman dorm, in a suite with five other freshman boys. (Bet you can imagine how awesome that place is going to smell.) He's going to a college much like mine, in terms of size and politics and academic standards, and wow, do I ever hope it's a good experience for him. He's had a pretty shitty past year and a half or so, and much as he acts like an entitled snot a good bit of the time, I hope that college is a good experience for him, that it's easy for him to make friends and keep them, that they'll be the kind of people who can push him to learn and grow and understand himself better without pushing him away. I hope that college, both academically and socially, stretches him and doesn't break him.

I hope, too, that he comes out of college feeling the way all of my roommates feel about their college -- that it was a wonderful and difficult and entirely rewarding time, that it's a place to miss and be happy to return to for reunions. I'm particularly bitter about my own college experience right now after having spent a weekend listening to one of my roommates wax rhapsodic about how much she looooved her college, but it's a jealous kind of bitterness -- I wish my college experience had the same kind of happy nostalgic sheen to it that hers does, and I hope for that for my brother: that it's good for him while he's there; that he misses it when he's done.

he was her long, bright future in the middle of a wrong, dark road

causeways — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:43:18 GMT

Ugh! My roommates and I were going to go to the Jersey Shore this weekend, had rented a car and everything, and now we are not going, not because of drama (drama happened and was resolved!) but because my mom and my youngest brother are miserably sick. UGHHHH. Such a badly timed sickness! Who the heck knows if our schedules are all going to coincide well again before the end of the summer. :\

In happier news, this morning I got up early and worked on original fic. Maybe someday I will even FINISH SOME OF IT.

Also, I spent a while at work listening to Jay Brannan sing on YouTube, after winterweathered recommended his music, and then Googled him a little, and his bio amuses me greatly.

FIC: Mildred: A College AU (J2, NC-17)

causeways — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:01:41 GMT

FINALLY. THANK GOD.

Title: Mildred: A College AU
Authors: causeways and walkawayslowly
Artist: heyhoolou, her art post is here. Tell her she is awesome!
Word Count: 62,131
Pairing: Jared/Jensen
Rating: NC-17
Official Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jared in possession of his heterosexuality will immediately switch teams upon enrollment in college and first contact with Jensen Ackles.
Original Summary: Jared goes to college and is gay for Jensen Ackles. It's a real shocker, sports fans.
Real Summary: No really, that’s all that happens. For 60,000 words.
Disclaimer: Jared, Jensen, and all of the other real live people we mention belong to themselves. Sadly. The OCs are ours, all ours.
Authors' Notes:

Kelly thanks: walkawayslowly, for suggesting that we cowrite in the first place, and for waiting patiently for me to move past the laughing-in-her-face stage and into the "omg fine" stage; for not murdering me during the many, many periods of story-related emo; and for still being my very favorite person on the entire internet (and beyond!) at the end of it all. I can't think of anyone with whom I would rather have a child that is also a piece of fanfiction. You say that's slightly creepy? I say that's how we roll.
girlmostlikely, for a very fantastic beta, and for being one of my very first fandom friends, back when I was new and writing about Wincestuous adventures in prison. Those were good times.
nemoinis, for being so excellent as to offer to beta even when she did not know half of the authors, and for doing a fantastic job while she was at it.

Merrin thanks: causeways. I understand the key smash when I first asked her to cowrite now, and all the laughter. See, she'd done this before, and I really hadn't. If you are not familiar with the process, it is one arduous task. Similar to giving birth, I would imagine, or climbing a mountain, even though I have only done the latter and not the former. I have a new measure for a friend now, and it’s someone who will cowrite 60k of coming-of-age (and out-of-the-closet) rps with you and still be your friend at the end of it.
girlmostlikely, for agreeing to beta even though she knew how long it was going to be, and how much time we weren’t going to be able to give her. thanks also for pointing out our ACTUAL posting date as opposed to the posting date we THOUGHT we had. Love you, babe, you are the BEST.
nemoinis, for ALWAYS betaing everything, even my crappy popslash. and for being one of MY first fandom friends, back when I thought "slash" fic meant "stabbing people with pointy knives."

Kelly and Merrin both thank: heyhoolou, for picking our lame summary out of a whole list of summaries, and being an INCREDIBLY awesome artist; and the spn_j2_bigbang mods, for running this wild rumpus again.

MILDRED: A COLLEGE AU