Hi and welcome!

All Most of my fic is unlocked and can be found under the 'fanfic' tag on the left( or under here.Collapse )



Feel free to friend me, or defriend me, and comment away because it makes me feel special.  I don't friend back automatically anymore, but if you would like to be added to my friends list, drop me a line here.  I don't friend empty or idle journals.  Also, since I'm in Australia, I won't add anybody to my flist who makes a habit of posting spoilers for episodes of shows I haven't seen yet. 


Things wot I love:
Schmoop
True Love
Meta
Smut
Long, Plotty fics
Short, sweet fics
Squee
The Fandom community
Pointing and laughing
People telling me I'm pretty

Things wot I don't love
Kerfuffles I or my friends are involved in
Poeple taking shit seriously
Bad writing
Bad writing
Bad writing
Spoilers outside of cuts
Intolerance
Evil!fics

Things wot I just don't get
Bandom. Sorry.

Tell me I'm pretty!

So I’ve been thinking recently about things I’m supposed to do and how sometimes I don’t want to do any of them.

( Thinking about kids and marriage and stuffCollapse )

I have a confession: I used to eat books.

It drove my mother mad. Around age 7 I started collecting Enid Blyton books, so every time she went out shopping she would duck into a bookstore and pick up one I didn't have. They'd started republishing everything of Blyton's around that time, so there would be a new one out every week, and it was an easy thing she could do to make her oddest doesn't-like-sparkles-or-ponies daughter happy.

So I would get the book of the week, squeal, do a little dance, hug my mother, and sequester myself in my room with the latest tale of spunky loyal girls at a boarding school learning important life lessons, or spunky loyal children on a farm learning important life lessons (but not anything about, like, reproduction, god no) or spunky loyal children in strange twisted fairy-tale-fable adventures with anthropomorphised picture book illustrations. I would read it fast, and then slow, and then put it on my shelf with all the others. I liked that mum always took care to get the same cover themes, so they all looked lovely on my shelf. I like the hardcovers, the snap it made when I shut it. I liked the way my fingers went black when I'd been reading for hours, and the way I could tell that I'd been eating apples while I was reading because the pages got all wrinkled and stained.

And I liked to eat the paper.

I'm not sure if my parents already thought I was an odd little bird by this time or not, but I suspect so, and this only cemented their opinion of me. I'd left a book in the living room, and my mother picked it up and noted that all the corners had been torn from the pages. She asked me what I had done, and I shrugged, and said I had torn the corners out and eaten them.

You what, she said. Something in her voice made me cautious.

I like to... eat the paper?

Are you hungry?

No.

Does it taste good?

Not really. It doesn't taste of anything.

Then why?

I just like to.

Since this was not remotely the oddest thing nine-year-old me got up to (I spent several months in third grade sleeping on the floor next to my bed for no reason at all, refused to wear shoes, and stored sandwiches in my desk until they went moldy) and mother dearest had four other relatively normal children who never painted their ceiling navy blue or ate things that were manifestly not food or read the dictionary for funsies and also to figure out exactly what "promiscuous" meant, the subject was dropped.

Later, she wondered if I could eat newspaper or catalogues that were going to be thrown out, instead of my books. No, I said. It's not the same.

I don't have those Enid Blyton books anymore; they disappeared sometime during the high school years, and I don't eat paper anymore. But I still collect books like a packrat. I still love the feel of paper and the smell of it, the excitement and delight of turning that first page, the satisfying snap of the cover at the last page. I still wait twelve months for every new Terry Pratchett book so it can match the paperback collection I've got on my shelf. I value books as objects, as things I can hold, things I can display, things to have.

But. Books are the words contained in them. Likely the next big tech purchase I will make will be an ereading device of some kind; I think it will suit me down to the ground to have books at my fingertips anywhere and everywhere. I already read so much fic online, so god knows I know it is just as genuine and affecting and wonderfully written as a physical book; it loses nothing of consequence in the change of medium.

Except the taste of paper. (It's very dry, if you were wondering.)

You and I are no longer speaking.

Vatican Reprimands a Group of U.S. Nuns and Plans Changes

( I am tired of defending a thing I stopped believing in a while backCollapse )

Title: Yours to Miss
Author: fools_game
Bands (and/or pairings): PatD/Young Veins, Ryan-centric, gen with background Brendon/Sarah
Rating: PG-13 for cursing
Word count: 5040
Warnings: None
Summary: The invitation to Brendon’s wedding is stuck to his refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a brightly-coloured chicken. Ryan Ross is not in Panic! anymore. Ryan Ross is not doing much of anything right now.
Author notes: I volunteered to pinch hit and got a mix about Ryan Ross. I loved the mix, but what I knew about Mr Ross was mostly "Did not discover the Beatles until he had been a professional musician for several years" and "possibly a cokehead." I feel this has been journey of learning for me! I learned all sorts of funny little things about RyRo, for starters.

Written for spencertized's Mix A Minor Fall and Major Lift. Beta'd by lalejandra with baffling speed and wonderfulness considering I emailed her out of the blue with thirty-six hours to spare.

( Yours To MissCollapse )

In 2004 I worked in a position that had me living in a small country town in NSW and travelling around a lot to a bunch of even smaller country towns to work in their tiny schools. I was eighteen at the time and naive as fuck, and the country was in the grip of the harshest drought in decades.

To a country like this, weather is not just weather.

I have been to towns where you can fill a glass of water from the tap and watch the sediment settle to the bottom, because the town dams are below 5% and sucking up mostly dirt. Where you can't get clean, ever, not really clean, because the shower leaves a layer of grit on your skin and "hard water" actually means "just like H2O only crunchy".

I have met kids - not infants, but four and five year old children, who have never seen it rain. Rain is a TV thing, a book thing, as foreign as magic or the Queen. Something far away.

I have been to towns where there are suicide hotline posters in every store, and the ones who use them are the men aged 45+. The men who have sunk their lives and health and ambitions into land that is now little more than desert, into crops that flat-out won't grow or stock that is starving. And they can't afford to keep the stock, but nobody's buying because everybody's in the same boat and the market is so glutted some places are charging the farmers to take the cattle off their hands.

I have seen these men and women go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, throw literally every last resource they have, into getting just one more year. One more year that they plough and plant and pray for just one day of rain. Because that one day of rain could make the difference between scraping by for the next year, or losing everything.

And then it doesn't rain.

And then the ground dries out and the nutrients leech away and the top soil sets into a crust and that crust hardens and solidifies over a couple of years. And then it does rain, and the rain runs right the fuck off because the ground has forgotten how to absorb it. And if there's a lot of rain, you get floods. And then the rain stops and the sun come out and the water goes away and you're back where you started, but with flood damage and a moldy smell. And the dams are full or at least have water in them, but they're contaminated with algae or oil.

Fucking weather.

In the spirit of the day.

I sometimes wonder if the twin oddlinesses of remaining a virgin at the ripe old age of rapidly-approaching-twenty-seven and reading an awful lot of progressively more kinky fiction and other non-fictional writings in the past… oh, fifteen years, jesus, has it been that long - has left me with kind of weird approach to sex.

( You know, theoretically.Collapse )