You guys, I'm not the sharpest tiger in Siberia. This place is seriously dead, but I just have to.

Day One of Snowpocalypse: *goes to Brooklyn to an offsite rotation without a shovel in a snow storm* *comes back to a half-buried car, has to dig it up with a windshield scraper* As a fun addition, I came home to discover an ass-deep snowbank in the yard and had to literally dig my way inside.

Day Two Morning: *goes to work with a little shovel* *drives into a snowbank, gets stuck and has to dig out for the next 15 min* *is late for work*

Day Two Evening: *cannot see shit through the windshield covered with road salt and mud* *pours water on it, which freezes instantly* *cleans it, drives to a gas station and does the same thing again* Some random gas station attendant saw me scraping my windshield with an air of sad resignation and came over with a can of de-icer, like, What are you doing, you strange creature?

Day Three Evening: *cannot get the apartment above 62 degrees with two heaters going* *contemplates leaving a water trickle in the kitchen lest the pipes freeze* *doesn't do it* *gets the two-days delayed shipment of dried figs, loses all care in the world and gets fig-faced instead*

Day Four: *wakes up to frozen pipes* *unfreezes with a blowdryer* *gets hit in the face with an airborne mousetrap* (don't ask; at least there was no dead mouse in it) *loads laundry* *an hour later, finds the clothes swimming in soapy water in a dead washer, finishes in the bathtub, throws them in the dryer, and calls landlady for help* *an hour later, finds the washer half-empty, with the water now on the floor and walls* *picks electrical wires out of standing water* *thinks about her choices*

Dare I go to a grocery store? Texted a friend to whine, who invited me over to sleep and do laundry if I blow out my power. (And I'm, like, a doctor or something.)

YOU GUYS I AM LOL'ING SO HARD I'M GOING TO COME OUT OF LJ RETIREMENT AND BREAK THE LOCKED POST RULE JUST FOR THIS EXCITEMENT.

LOOKIT, House of the Rising Sun. So some dumb bunny on Tumblr entered an AO3-based case fic challenge and thought the way to do these things is to rip off my work. In the same fandom even. In the same SPN case fic category. You guys, Dandy In the Underworld has its own fanfiction. This is so meta I cannot even. Two people PM'd me about it this morning - otherwise I wouldn't have seen it. Not only does it rip off the plot of "Dandy", but it then follows it scene by scene, with minor adjustments to entire paragraphs and chunks of dialogue. You know, mangoes become beignets, Uncle Cornelius becomes Grandma, Ivan becomes Oliver.

When I was fourteen and learning to write, I'd plagiarize lines of dialogue that were too awesome to resist. But even at fourteen, I'd stop at one line and keep the thing on my hard drive anyway. Maybe rewriting someone's work scene by scene and flopping around to make your own sentences is how you learn to write. I believe that doing translations of books for fun as a teenager made me a better writer. The whole difference is that YOU KEEP IT ON YOUR HARD DRIVE. You shove that pride where the sun doesn't shine, and you do not post the misbegotten thing anywhere under your name. Not until you write your own misbegotten thing. Mine was tentacle porn. It won a contest. I couldn't even show it to my friends for a year. It was short and full of typos and tentacular, and it was all mine. The pride of winning that contest by popular vote, on some social media site, in some fandom that no one cares about - that pride is all mine.

I'm going to adjust my query letter to agents. DEAR AGENTS! I've been ripped off twice (that I know of) in my fandom years, and one of those by an actual show writer (see the questionable episode of the WWII submarine). Clearly I'm awesome. Take Nobody and Wormwood for publication! It's the cat's pajamas and will make loads of money. OODLES. SO MUCH MONEY. It'll be a movie, and David Kross will be in it with his sexy German, and Russia will probably blacklist me for offending their patriotic feelings.

Love, Tiger, who learned through plagiarism like everyone else but had the good grace to keep it in the drawer.

UPDATE: The whole AO3 account was now taken down. The person actually responded to my WTF? on Tumblr, owned up to plagiarism, apologized and didn't try to make any excuses. This is just some silly kid who got carried away and unfortunately had to pay for that stupidity with the loss of all her AO3 posted work. I respect admitting to your shit and learning from it. We should all be so smart.

Because I just spent four hours twisting my brain into pretzels over this puzzle, I'm gonna share. From this blog. Now you twist your brain. Highlights are mine, because I came up with several solutions before noticing these conditions.

You are curious whether your butt is big or small. Unfortunately, you lack the ability to accurately assess the size of butts. Fortunately, there are three rappers before you. You are of their preferred gender, so they are willing to collectively entertain exactly one yes-or-no question from you, to which they will each give an answer.

One rapper likes big butts and cannot lie. One rapper likes small butts and always lies. One rapper likes all butts but shares your inability to assess butt size, and will answer yes or no at random if asked whether a butt is big or small. You do not know which rapper is which. All the rappers know all other facts relevant to the situation, including everyone's identity and butt preferences.

Before you are able to ask your question, one rapper receives a booty call (the size of the booty is unknown to you) and leaves the room. The other two rappers remain and are willing to pronounce on your question. You still do not know who any of the rappers are.

To determine the size of your butt, what question should you ask them? (You may assume that all butts can be classified as either big or small and ignore contextual factors, e.g. from the presence of Oakland booty.)

So, to emphasize. R1 cannot lie. R2 always lies about everything. R3 likes all butts, and will answer honestly UNLESS you ask about the size of a butt, in which case he gets confused and answers randomly. The ultimate goal is to determine your own butt size. Only one question, yes or no, the same question to all three.

( My solutionCollapse )

Far be it from me to attempt to derail any charitable campaign at all. But I want to explain the reason I've been stomping my boot about this zika auction.

( Hide yo wife, hide yo kids, hide yo husband, zika is coming to YOUR barbecue partyCollapse )

Well, OB wasn't quite vile enough to deserve a Fuckunicorn, but I'm still happy that it's over. Coming up is internal medicine for 12 weeks. I hear good things about the rotation, except that I worked in one of the best cardiology centers in the country before med school, and the preview of what cardiology is like in this hospital has me shivering in my socks.

Also, no scrubs again :/

I'm going to complain about something fandom has been doing from my troll cave. ( Feel free to disagree and all thatCollapse )

In other news, I reserved a place in Florida for the winter - another room in someone's house, but meh, I'll have my own place when I have a job again. A friend I haven't seen in a few years will be coming down from Minnesota in January for the HP World, and I'm super pumped about hanging out with her. She asked me if I was anywhere on the interwebz, I gave her my LJ username and have been walking around for the past couple of days, wondering if I shouldn't question my life choices, because wincest. It's strange to NOT be freaking out. The friend is a fellow fangirl, and I've possibly reached the age where I don't give a fuck anymore.

I accidentally stumbled into a strange land, you guys, and crabwalked out of there as quickly as I could. It's the one-star reviews of The Martian on Amazon. I initially went over there because I'm a horrible person and have been meaning to leave my single star on this piece of trash and explain why. I would've given it negative stars if that was an option.

And then I observed that, apparently, fans of the book haunt the negative review pages, down-vote them fiercely and leave deeply intelligent comments along the lines of "lol you're wrong, the book is sheer genius, and also your other reviews demonstrate poor literary taste, and also 6000 people who love it are clearly right, and also let me fix your grammar for you, and also I pity you for not getting the book, and also I will pray for you, and also your're WRONG WRONG WRONG". I need that kind of adolescent drama over a book review like a hole in my head, so I chickened out.

...What was that even? Why don't I get such idiotic wave of "you're wrong!!" on my reviews of diet books, surgical tools and medical textbooks or, for that matter, any fiction book I ever reviewed on Amazon? Strange. I mean, seriously, with the level of batshit the male geek fans of The Martian have whipped up over there, all they need is to form a fandom and start writing femslash. Conveniently, there are three female characters. Two of them break into tears at some point to complete the emotional impact of a scene, and one says shit like "Fuck me raw" in business meetings.

If I needed any more reasons to hate The Martian with a power of a thousand burning suns, here it is.

Meanwhile, I'm rereading Passage, and I don't even care about the endless cycle of running around and missing phone calls, because the characters are fabulous and actually read like real people, and also HE SAW DEATH, AND IT LOOKED LIKE THE TITANIC.

...Two more weeks of OB. This is torture and taking forever.

...or The Last Ship episode review \o/ You guys, I have no time to sleep, cook food to ward off scurvy, answer emails, run, write, edit, shower or pick my nose, but I watched episode 2.1 of The Last Ship! There is one more to be had this week.

I cannot deal! Oh the the cheese! Oh the drama! Someone told me that the captain is Dr. McDreamy from Grey's Anatomy, and I nearly peed my scrubs with glee. *slams down bucket of popcorn, puts boots up on the desk*

( 2.1, in which band aid fails to save a life, and Michael Bay rips off HitlerCollapse )

I cannot with this show /o\ The power of stupid is NUCLEAR. I was supposed to be in bed two hours ago.

I almost finished the last season of The Killing finally, and it sucked. I love that show and I love that they quit once they were done telling the story, but damn, that last season. Can they possibly drop any more parallels, subtle as an anvil? Suddenly everyone was having the exact same melodrama, everyone wanted to coddle that kid, and half the drama was abandonment issues. I rolled my eyes a lot.

On a similar subject, there was a fandom discussion I won't link that included somebody trying to discuss authorial intent and somebody else jumping in to cry about how we can't know what Carver wants/likes/means unless he is asked directly while locked in our basement hooked up to a lie detector. (The basement is my addition; the polygraph isn't.) I'm not going to talk about SPN because I don't give a shit what they do in recent seasons, but authorial intent though!

I think our perception of authorial intent is a big part of enjoying the work. This is one of the main reasons I fucking hate House MD: I don't get a feeling for a moment that the creators are aware of just how much of a failure the character is in his chosen profession. I get a feeling that they think it's cute to be all surly while you insult total strangers who are vulnerable in your care, and it's so adorable to force critical life decisions on them because you hold this fancy degree and everyone who doesn't is a moron and doesn't know what's good for them. See, it's outrageous fun how people trust him with their lives and he gives them zero respect and less credit than I'd give a jellyfish. Because he is such a surly genius, hur hur!

I might be wrong, because I don't actually keep the creators of House in my secret room behind the midget door, hooked up to a polygraph. But that doesn't matter. What matters is how I perceive the intentions behind their creation. Take Silence of the Lambs: I'm sure that the author LOVED Hannibal to pieces, or he wouldn't be writing him. But I never for a second get an impression that the author is unaware of the horror that his character is, or intends Hannibal to be some cutesy person who is so outrageous and so adorable and so much better than the rest of us because he dares to abuse whatever power he has (as a therapist, as a friend, as a host of a dinner party). This is why Twilight blows chunks: not because it portrays an abusive, manipulative relationship - you can write those and win, just watch Stephen King do it - but because the general impression is that the author is passing off stalkery creepiness as demonstration of super special love.

The topic is relevant right now because writing is the most infuriating process, and I'm writing an invasion plot. I love my character but she's a horrible person. I didn't know that this additional layer of writing was there. We all learn that intruding into your own story to preach through the character's mouth is a NO-NO and a sign of shitty writing, but it appears that you have to do it, just subtly. Can your character do something horrible and be totally unaware of it? Absolutely. But at the same time the reader has to somehow sense your presence behind the scene and know that you're not condoning that behavior. I'm trying to do this by ruining her good fun, and it's one hell of a challenging scene. For instance, that stupid college movie, Sorority Boys, while not being a deep movie at all pulled it off very well. The characters might think it's cute and fun to pretend to be women and go live in a sorority house to ogle all the half-dressed chicks, but if the movie's moral lesson was "...but the chicks they get to see aren't hot, oh horror, haha hairy armpits", I'd never watch past the first half hour. So what happens instead is they end up seeing shit they really don't want to see - and that's not hairy armpits but real decent women with their hurts and joys, and the characters are bummed out because now they see these chicks as real people and feel things they didn't want to feel. It's a stupid movie but it did this one thing right.

Deep down, I like my morality tales and if I feel that some universal justice is violated, it's enough to make me hate the work, which is why I'm using the example of moral undertones. But whatever your bubble gum flavor, the point is, maybe we don't need to lock Carver in the basement and come in with a lie detector to question him about his intentions in order to feel unsatisfied with his creative work.

for cassiopeia7

The thing is, I grew up in Russia, where WWII is still a very big deal, much more so than it is in the US today. Before Hollywood films became widely available, my childhood TV entertainment consisted of fairytales and war movies. (And I gotta say, not all of those movies were suitable for kids. Got a few mental scars from that entertainment. I once watched an anime about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, having figured that if it was a cartoon, it must be for kids! The cartoon images of people puking blood, burning alive and starving to death are still in my head, thanks.) There were war memorials everywhere: monuments to soldiers that people brought carnations to, a tank we used to play on as kids, abandoned pillboxes over the beach, naval guns up on the hills in the woods protecting the harbor. In school, a disproportionately large portion of the curriculum was dedicated to WWII, in history as well as literature. "War literature" was an actual studied period. You can say I grew up with it.

But every country first and foremost teaches its own history, so when I first watched "Band of Brothers", I didn't like it, because this wasn't the war I knew. Western Front history is wildly different from Eastern Front, and both from the Pacific. Which, incidentally, I knew nothing about other than Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb. I only started reading up on the Pacific for the BB2014 research, because I wanted a warship drifting in that ocean.

I'm a sucker for stories about heroism, sacrifice, bravery and people acting their best under the worst circumstances. WWII history is all horrors and heroism. Look at Garbo, the one-man fake German spy network, who became a double agent on his own initiative, despite being rejected by Allies at first. Look at the all-female anti-aircraft unit that defended approaches to Stalingrad to death against overwhelming forces. Look at people evacuating kids and delivering supplies to Leningrad at night by trucks over a frozen lake. Look at junior officers with six months of sea duty taking destroyers out to sea to defend Pearl Harbor with half the crew on board. Look at the Polish railroad workers risking their lives to save kidnapped kids. Look at the medics who went to the front lines unarmed. Look at the US Marines defending some measly hill with knives, rocks and their bare hands after they ran out of ammo. Hell, look at the British, holding down the fort after all of Europe fell around them. I can go on and on about all the people who joined or supported the war effort back home because they wanted to, because it had to be done, because it was their duty. I respect the hell out of those people. I don't know of any other historical event that would touch and scare and move me as much as the Second World War does, or make me believe in humanity as much as it does. It's all in the actions of people who fought in it, or lived through it, or died in it. It's about entire countries acting their best under the worst possible circumstances.

I'm so jazzed about this December meme and everyone's posts! Let's have a kiki, motherfucker \o/ (Except my head hurts a little, possibly from banging it against Fort Lauderdale sidewalk earlier, so I'm just going to post and go to bed and hope I can start an IV tomorrow with three fingers out of commission. Why yes, I did start preparing some December meme posts in advance, to ensure their coherency.)

I love talking shop. If you guys have something to share about your own writing technique and challenges with first lines, titles and characters, I'd be thrilled to hear it!

( Fic titles, first lines, favorite fics and tragic heroesCollapse )

Because all the cool kids are doing it and because it was so much fun last year to read everyone's responses, I'm going to give it a shot this year. Here we go: pick a date and give me something to yack about in a post and I will try and make it interesting or at least funny. Medicine, food, Velociraptor Island, books/TV/movies, writing, fic, WWII, Russia, IDK, first fic ever (it was tentacle porn)?

In other news, I'm done with the peds clinic, I'm roasting a goose tomorrow, and I've been writing some. I've never really realized how much writers must love their characters, all of them. I want to hug these guys and cry. Yesterday, I was writing about a half-living, half-mechanical creature named Engineer being visited by a catfish, because both of them work for a cannibalistic monster and the monster is very displeased. Writing is the worst hobby ever, other than perhaps collecting poisonous snakes in regions of the world where they don't keep the anti-venom around, seeing how these snakes don't live there. (That's a real life example.) As I write about visiting catfish, I keep thinking that with 99% probability, no one but me and maybe three other people will ever read it, and that's a poisonous attitude to have. Keep writing, self.

So anyway, December meme? I'm striking out a few days reserved for relocating from Florida to New York and settling in.

( December memeCollapse )

This here is a post of TV land frustration, because I want to watch Homeland and this Internet is SO GODDAMN SLOW I will watch one episode in about four hours. So yeah, Homeland. If it involves politics and the Middle East, I generally want nothing to do with it, but yesterday I flipped on the TV for something to watch while doing exercise. Half of the channels are sports and the other half are reality shows, in which men and women with dramatic voices talk about someone about! to do! something! extremely! exciting! and dangerous! Seriously, I watched turtles lay eggs the other day, because that was the least annoying thing on. Until it got to sea turtle sex. No thank you. I hope that thing was a tail and not a dong, except I think it was two in one. I also once saw half an episode of NCIS (New Orleans?) and thought it was pretty annoying. Well, this time it was Homeland halfway through an episode. And I got SO SUCKED IN. And now watching it download on iTunes over this Internet is like turtle sex all over again: slooow in a bad way, and someone is gnawing on your flippers.

WHAAAAAA, Homeland! I wanna watch some! Flying Spaghetti Monster clearly wants me to go write instead.

Watching SPN start off again and you all get excited have been fun! ( Some heathen grumblings under cut. You know better than to look if that is like pee in your CheeriosCollapse )

/end trollishness

Today, I met a friend for some delicious sushi and caught all the updates from the old (and still beloved) workplace. One nurse I knew was very likely fired for stealing narcotics. There were some sketchy, awful people I've worked with over the years, and he wasn't one of them. He is a super nice dude who bakes pretty cupcakes for his wedding anniversary, adores his wife, never lets a bad mood show and gets broken up about a patient. I once called a code on his patient who suddenly arrested on the monitor, and it was the worst we had in about 15 years because the surgical team reopened her chest right in the room, and I remember the nurse was seriously upset by this, even though he couldn't have seen it coming. IDEK. There is a part of me that expects a person with a drug problem to be a horrible troll, and then they aren't. And then the one person who turns into a horrible troll before my eyes never actually touched drugs.

The book on Pearl Harbor (The Day of Infamy by Walter Lord) is really good stuff, even though I'd never expect a history book to be exciting. But it is! That's assuming your curiosity about the attack on Pearl Harbor extends beyond the Wiki article. I even stopped reading Tiger's Wife for now. I also found a promising-looking book on the naval battles of Guadalcanal and the Ironbottom Sound :D (Again, IDEK. A girl needs a hobby.)

I swore off writing for the next three weeks to finish preparing for the Exam of Doom and then stayed up until six in the morning to bang out a short story about a San Juan hotel and its giant golden birdcage, from which no bird of paradise is allowed to escape or else disaster will strike. I'm actually pleased with this one. And now I have two stories in the clutches of editors, awaiting decision.

I BUSTED OOOOUT!

Thank you, everyone, for the lovely support through the two days it took to get my butt off Velociraptor Island and back to civilization. I have stories to tell once I can see straight. There were FOUR flights which felt pretty peachy on a double doze of meds, and there was a hurricane, and hand-holding with a stranger for two hours, and cassiopeia7 in Chicago. We went exploring the bowels of O'Hare airport and found monsters and traps and much creepiness, and it was very Neverwhere, and I have photographic evidence, in which Deb is like that fairytale princess who is so beautiful that if you look at her face, we have to chop your head off, so you see her beautiful artistic hands instead. I will report later, but for now, I'M DOOOOONE! Velociraptor Island shrank into the distance forever. I have cat tonight, and no cow will moo under my windows. And everything is well in the jungle :D

Two posts in a day, whut?

I've officially crossed over to the dark side. Whether or not the dark side wants anything to do with me is another question, but I did it. I've joined the ranks of fic writers trying to submit an original story for publication. Oh shut up, it's an epic moment of facepalm over here.

I feel like that cliche metaphor, in which you climb a mountain and realize that there is a bigger one in front of you. I believe I've done a pretty solid job in fic writing, put out stuff I can be proud of. Now I'm looking at this whole new world of published works, and it's scary out there. The magazine I sent the story to has less than 1% acceptance rate, so I'm not really holding my breath, but not submitting anything gives me 0% chance, so there is that. I haven't shown it to anyone, even though a couple of kind people offered, because I needed all the courage I've scrounged up so far to send it and to continue sending it to places after this one bounces it. Yiiiiikes. Seems that the smart thing to do would be to continue writing stories of various lengths and subject matters, to have more stuff to submit until somebody wants something. That sounds like a plan. I'm a little bummed out because writing in isolation is not nearly as much fun as in fandom.

Well, the conclusion is, thank god for medicine. I shudder to imagine trying to make money with this. Gonna go study now, so that I could succeed in the more sensible area of life.

Today, I'm upset and very bitter about one school thing that didn't affect me but hit a lot of my classmates. Again. But you know what? This here is the field where I grow all my fucks - you will see that it is barren.

Instead, THE LAST SHIP \o/ ( There were evol Russians!Collapse )

Back to studying now. Less than three weeks. Can we say 2.5 yet. YES WE CAN!

I keep watching The Last Ship on the power on empty hopes that it will turn into a good show when it grows up, because the premise, oh the premise! It has a cool destroyer and an unfortunately-not-zombie apocalypse! ( It fails meCollapse )

Why, Michael Bay, whyyyy?

UNLEASH THE KRAKEN \o/ It's Big Bang time!

Fic title: Row Charon Row
Artist: lightthesparks
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word count: 22.5K

Warnings: graphic bloody ghosts of US sailors; minor but very spoilery! [Spoiler (click to open)]temporary character death

Summary: Every night, a WWII destroyer ghost ship rises from the Pacific and drifts until morning, dreaming of the torpedo strike that sank her. A sea monster with a ghost ship collection has been trying to trap her. Sam and Dean, hearing reports of a sea monster, go on their first marine hunt, with disastrous results. Sam is dragged out of the boat and Dean jumps after him into freezing water and nearly dies but is rescued by the ghost ship’s crew who still believe they’re at war in 1943. Dean has to find a way to escape the ship and save Sam without getting shot by the increasingly suspicious captain. The sea monster wants Sam to go on board and sabotage the ship – in return for something Sam has lost, unknowingly. But he has to do it before the torpedo comes at dawn.

ART MASTER POST
PART ONE ... PART TWO ... PART THREE
NOTES ... AO3



Timestamp: Owl of the Waste Places, though there are no Winchesters in it.



1. Things are consistently misnamed here. Everything on a ship, from bathrooms to directions, has its own special name. I don’t speak that language, and luckily for me, neither do the Winchesters. Sometimes I know better and sometimes I don’t. My deepest apologies to anyone who has ever worked on a marine vessel of any kind and will probably cringe all the way.

2. There are some vague references to Little Monsters in the Tide but you don’t need to have read it. The connection is of themes and locations rather than of any plot events.

3. I shudder to imagine the errors this fic is probably crawling with - about the US Navy, the Second World War and life on a ship in general. There have been at least two major fuck ups barely caught and corrected thanks to an entirely unrelated piece of research. I can just see some whale of an inaccuracy merrily floating by me while I waffle over whether it's appropriate for a captain to roll up the sleeves of his uniform.

MANY THANKS:

To lightthesparks, BB partner, creator of fabulous art, collector of zombies and a very cool chick. If I ever had to choose between a skilled artist and a fun collaborator, I'd go with the latter, but wow, she was both. Did you see that art? O.o Go look at that art! It's the creepiest horror art to ever creep. Thank you for working with me, and for being prepared like a squirrel for the zombie apocalypse ♥

To tsuki_no_bara, for convincing me that a case fic at sea needed to happen, for the many extremely helpful brainstorming emails, for encouragement, for the general Big Bang squee and for putting on a matching pair of judgey pants every BB season.

To cassiopeia7, for the never-ending support, for contribution to several key scenes, for the beta work and for watching inappropriate uniformed elevator dances with me. I cannot thank you enough for everything you’ve done to get (and keep) this fic moving.

To sonofabiscuit77, for brainstorming emails, for encouragement, for the beta reading, and for being so enthusiastic and supportive, as always. Also, fake mpreg physiology! That was too much fun. Don't think I'm not running around still, telling people about it.

To wendy for organizing this all for us. I don't know how you do it, I really don't.

I think I need a break sometime soon, preferably one longer than three hours, because the degree of repulsion these lectures are producing is nowhere near proportional to their badness. They are pretty easy lectures. Still, goddammit, I need a break soon before I end up in the campus ER breathing into a paper bag.

Did you guys know that there is a new TV show called "Last Ship" and that it's post-apocalyptic and involves a destroyer that was out at sea for four months, keeping radio silence, and thus missed the whole shebang? And that the reason they were at sea was to let this scientist work on a super secret project that was actually about a vaccine against the virus that caused the apocalypse? (No zombies, though.) This is apparently a book. (Don't laugh - I've been in the jungle for the past two years, minus bookstores.) Awesome premise, right? And there is a destroyer!

( So I watched the premiereCollapse )

Meanwhile, it's officially Monday and people need to start posting their Big Bangs already. GIMME! Two friends are posting this week. My pom-poms are ready. (And so are the judgey pants but that's not for you guys.)

My dreams, when they're not about resuscitation, are about grocery shopping and searching for sushi, quick quick, before it's time to fly back to Velociraptor Island. So ready to go home in nine weeks for good. Oh my god, TWO YEARS.

Okay, I did it. Because I have so much time on my hands right now, I stayed up all night and well into the morning writing this thing. But I do feel more sane now, if 30 IQ points dumber for lack of sleep. I'm fighting a writing block on originals, and the sneaky way to do it is write about OCs from SPN fics.

DISCLAIMER: No Winchesters here whatsoever! No SPN canon characters at all. Except for one buried and obscure reference to John Winchester, because clearly you can't chase them all out completely. I have fic for readership, and this is for my personal writing experimentation, so I promise not to disown anybody for not being interested.

( Character blahCollapse )

( Owl of the Waste Places. No Winchesters! None. Sorry.Collapse )

My neighborhood (called, no kidding, Moo Cow Trail) is overrun with teenage cows, and they're trouble. The baby ones are scared of everything, the big adult ones don't give a fuck, and the teenage ones are playful and hyperactive and want to headbutt, headbutt and headbutt some more. Nope nope nope nope nope! So much nope! The locals laugh, of course. Nope! The thing running at me across the field weights five times as much as I do - I'm not headbutting that. I don't care if it wants to play or sit on me, because the result will still be a flat little Tiger crepe. So I take a different road now and go running very close to the water, to escape into the sea from the beach cows.

Trying to study for the local and national exams, and medicine is coming out of my ears. I know nothing, least of all bugs. And drugs! And cancers! And biochem! I'm studying all day long and have nothing to show for it. Haven't touched Big Bang in ages. It needs a beta, at least two more editing runs and a more coherent ending. Yeah, SDMB is not happening this year.

But a writing brain never rests, so I'm thinking about things to write, and I'd like to write a short little original story for a change. Just to show that I can, because every time I think about writing an original, my brain shrivels up in terror. So to bypass the block, maybe I could take my own original characters from SPN fics and put them into a story of their own. I realize how few people will read it but hey, that's alright. 1. Sergio from "Love and Crocodiles" met Ivan from "Dandy In the Underworld" once, when Ivan blew by in his new Maserati and splashed Sergio with mud, and Sergio had to extract terrible revenge, because he may work at Safeway but dammit, he is the son of Ammit the Heart-Eater! 2. Darren Leigh from "Row Charon Row" met Sarah Barabu from "The Witch Is Dead" when he spent the summer of 1925 with his grandma in Florida and was hired by the strange neighborhood lady to trim the mushrooms and flowers from her back, where they grew especially wild from the grief of losing her husband, and she liked his bright hair and sent him home with tiny yellow roses and maybe tried to eat a piece of his soul because she's that kind of woman.

*crawls back into respiratory pathology*

Hey ladies!

I'm really unsure if cassiopeia7 wants me to pass on the word or not, but I figured that all her friends here must worry about where she went off to, given how lively and lovely and chatty she normally is in the fandom, and I hope she'll forgive me. She's apparently in a hospital after a bad asthma attack, with no phone or Internet. She must be bored out of her skull. I have no more information. So send some good wishes her way and let's hope she can bust out soon.

UPD: ...Aaaand she is out \o/

Big Bang reveals are up. Everybody is paired up and looking awesome! I just love our fandom so much today, for producing so much goodness to last us all summer. You guys rock. We really kicked ass this year with so many cool summaries.

ephermeralk and I win the Big Bang, though. With tentacles. Clearly, tentacles are the secret key to world domination.

I got paired up with the fabulous lightthesparks - seriously, what's NOT to be over the moon about? I mean, did you see that art? Go look!

I can finally claim "Row Charon Row" as my baby in public. I have never, holy shit, put as many hours of research into a single fic, and it's probably still halfway wrong. I've written term papers in the past on less research. So if five years from now I'm at a really weird party and somebody says, So, what would've been the rank of a commanding officer of a destroyer in World War Two and how would he be addressed on board? Or, So, what was the navigation system like on a Fletcher class destroyer in 1943? Or, So, how many aircraft carriers did the Japanese lose in the Battle of Midway? I'd be like, OH PICK ME! I'm a fountain of useful information. Unfortunately, the type of trivia that usually comes up at parties I go to is more along the lines of, So, how many romantic pairs can you name in Sex and the City? (I'm a big WWII nerd, always have been, and this fic was a great excuse to research the Pacific Theater, with a lot of Wiki-hopping on the side over the Western and Eastern Fronts as well.)

On that note, the break is over. To welcome new students to the Velociraptor Island, it rained buckets and buckets, the water turned brown and got shut off and the horrible winged termites came out in a swarm and crawled toward the light, that is, inside. I was sitting there like the biggest troll, with two large buckets filled, three days supply of drinking water and all lights off. Like, MWAHAHAHAHA!

You guys, I'm in love ♥ _ ♥

Because I need words other than my own to marinate in and to keep a healthy perspective while editing the BB, I've been reading books on Kindle. I don't like it but there are no bookstores around, so Kindle it is. I have about fifteen books waiting back home, and one of them is Slaughterhouse Five. It seemed like a waste but whatever, I bought it on Kindle.

Kurt Vonnegut, you guys. Kurt Vonnegut is my new literary hero. He writes like I want to write in a million years when I grow up. The perfection, the precision, the cleverness of his prose is currently making me weep and stomp my feet and bounce up and down in my chair. Goddammit, why is this the first time I'm reading his work? I do remember that, in the bookstore, I overcame all reservations about the book after reading Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. (He was a valet to a preacher, expected no promotions, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid. Just, can I roll in it? For a year?)

I tried, many times, to love Ray Bradbury, because the man wrote pure poetry, amazing and intricate and beautiful. But I just can't. After three pages of Bradbury's style, I just want him to say "The horse jumped over the fucking fence". I have yet to make it through a single story by Bradbury, and I keep trying because they're so beautiful. But Vonnegut, WHAAAAAA, this style, this prose is everything I ever want or ever want to be in literature. And now I'm pissed that I don't have my hard copy of the book to underline the shit out of these sentences. Can I have all of his essays on writing now please?

Look, you guys, what tebtosca made over here! It's a voice meme, in which you can hear your fandom buddies talk. And you can (a should) record your own little segment. IT IS SO COOL, you guys, everybody sounds so lovely and I just want to hop around there like a rabid mountain goat on crystal meth and just click on all the voices and all the accents. Doooo eeeet! So that I could click on your voice recording, too! Because I know too few people there and I want to know what y'all sound like. Go listen to your buddies.

Here is mine