Suburb of Heaven

I am sitting on a Thor/Valkyrie/Bruce story and am at the point where I need to tackle the [Sex Goes Here] bit. I can't seem to sit down and write it.

I feel like writing but can't figure out what I want to write...except I'm in the mood to do something schmoopy or smutty or, or...

So I dug out this old meme that I've already dug out once before. Pick a pairing (het, slash, femslash are all okay) and I'll write a short scene where they share a kiss (or, uh, more than that.) Crossovers welcome unless they break my brain in half (although at this point breaking my brain is almost the point because this is the same meme that resulted in Bunter/Eliot from Leverage kissing, and may have been the one that resulted in a Castle/Buffy crossover that has inexplicably become a very well-loved story, so what the hell.) I will do my best.

Fandoms: Buffy, Avengers movieverse, Dresden Files, Leverage, Firefly, Constantine movieverse, Sayers, Bourne, Castle, Jennifer Crusie, Vicki Bliss, Star Wars (yes new movie has gotten me thinking), MacGyver, Heyer, Lord of the Rings movieverse. Am happy to try fandoms that are not my own but am not responsible for making you cry because of terrible characterization based solely on things I've seen scrolling through Tumblr. No refunds.

This coming week is going to be on the rough side, stress-wise. I'm doing some stuff at work that is Big and New and I am hoping I have organized everything but of course am scared that I haven't remembered to do something important that will screw things up. Plus it's stinky hot out, the kind of heat that just wears you down and makes you want to crawl inside and hug an air conditioner, and it saps the will out of me. Oh! and of course I'm crampy and irritable and hormonal as well.

I hope I will feel much better by Friday, and that everything goes smoothly.

Bemo's birthday was yesterday so we had chocolate cake and ice cream and friends brought over port and good chocolate and we played Cards Against Humanity and were happily raucous.

I'm also trying to nudge myself into writing more,but not fic. Instead I'm trying to work on the original book I've been trying to do for years now, but always find myself stalling out on (I hate plotting.) Maybe I can get something going with it finally.

My fic writing has slowed down very much, and I'm not sure whether to do the whole Yuletide/Leverage Secret Santa/Be Compromised gift exchange this go-round. On the one hand, it might get me writing again, on the other hand I might be stuck writing something that's coming very hard and getting stressed about it. I haven't bothered with any of the nomination business for Yuletide, so I would have to hope that things I want to write do show up - the Rivers of London series, for example, might be fun although I don't know that I could write in that voice.

Anyway, I'll think about it.

Oh my gosh, so gorgeous. The art was ravishing, the little spirits such a nice nod to Spirited Away, the story held together so much more. More of this, Korra people.

In other news I have my assignments for Yuletide and the Clint/Natasha Secret Santa, and am excited and am starting to noodle through ideas for them.

This is why none of the half-hearted attempts at novels I've started will never become anything - I generally can't plot for beans. Here is the unfinished bit of sequel to I Act Out And You Act Tough, a Leverage/Buffy crossover featuring Eliot and Faith and their encounter somewhere on a lonely back road. I wanted to have Faith meet the rest of the Leverage crew, and I have, but now I need to come up with some sort of con the team can pull on the vamp crew they've called Faith in to cope with, and my brain resolutely refuses to provide one. Maybe I should just start looking some up and cram one or two in to get me writing something, anything, to wind this story up. Or maybe they can start an elaborate con and Faith gets impatient, says "fuck this," and starts killing vamps. Except that would sort of diminish the Leverage side of the story. Arrgh. Suggestions or comments gratefully accepted.

( shipping up to Boston )

As seen everywhere. I had to go back aways because I'm not an especially prolific writer - the plot bunnies only hop past once every so often. And there are a lot of things I admire that I feel no need to write for, while some pairings just seem to generate more stories out of me. Style-wise, I don't know that I can interpret much about my own tendencies. I try to go for punchy, I guess? Like everybody else?

A little bit of commentary with each first line.

( all under here )

Went to the 4 hour driver's ed class (after getting a ticket for rolling through a stop sign) and honestly, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected. The instructor was engaging, and people participated enough so that things didn't stagnate. The class was about evenly split between older ladies and younger kids (I was one of only a couple who could be described as middle-aged). Towards the end, the group of older ladies got a little chatty and clueless, and the young dude behind me was getting increasingly more irritated with them, but thankfully the class ended soon thereafter and I didn't have to turn around and try to set him on fire with the power of my mind.

We also saw several long PSAs that were all dealing with texting and cell phone usage while driving. They were pretty effective. I can only imagine how horrible it would be to know, as in the case of one of the stories, that your sister lost control of her car and hit a bridge while trying to read your text that said, simply, "Yeah." I don't text or use my cell phone while I'm driving, but I do fuss with my ipod sometimes, and I think that's a habit I need to break.

There was also a young woman in class who valiantly tried to argue that the cop giving her a speeding ticket meant that child abusers and murderers were running free, but that got pretty briskly dealt with.

I've been helping with the kids classes at the dojo on Saturday morning. It's amazing how flexible and energetic the little boogers are. And how differently they learn. There's a redheaded little boy who doesn't have a lot of body coordination yet, but he's really intense about getting things right, and he screws up his face and silently watches everything like a hawk.

Have been rereading Heyers. Need to reread my Yuletide source material. Am a little intimidated because my assignment seems to want, essentially, original fiction, and I don't quite know in which direction to go.

Fandom: Dresden Files
Title: Files
Rating: Gen, all-ages
Summary: A Justine POV vignette, set sometime post-Blood Rites and pre-Changes. There's a question she needs Harry to answer. In the meantime, she's learning other things, and filing them all away. Written for Yuletide 2010.
Disclaimer: All characters property of Jim Butcher. I just enjoy taking them out for a spin occasionally.

( Harry Dresden’s information was, of course, in our files. )

Although the later letters of Dorothy L. Sayers are a lot more heavy to go through, as she's answering a lot of mail on heavy theological topics, vol. four has proved, like the others, to contain a lot of interesting gems. First of all, Sayers is a brilliant writer whether she's producing a mystery novel, a play, a translation, letters, or something on a religious topic, so you get her wit and dash and verve throughout. I came across some of her observations on Narnia, and how Lewis wrote women, and thought people might be interested in hearing some of them whether you agree or disagree.

From a letter dated 21 December 1955, to Barbara Reynolds

"I'm glad you got hold of Lewis (C.S.). I like him very much, and always find him stimulating and amusing. One just has to accept the fact that there is a complete blank in his mind where women are concerned. Charles Williams and his other married friends used to sit round him at Oxford and tell him so, but there really isn't anything to be done about it. He is not hostile, and he does his best, and actually, for a person with his limitations I think he didn't do too badly with the Lady in Perelandra. What he suffers from chiefly, I think, is too much Romantic Literature, far too much Milton, and, as you can see from Surprised by Joy, a life bounded by school, the army, and the older universities. ...(Here, Sayers advises that no person should be allowed to be a don unless they've done time in a job that gets them out into the bustle of the world - she recommends backstage at a repertory theater specifically - to get a person loosened up and more emotionally free and also for gaining experience with the wide vagaries of humankind.) He is probably frightened at bottom, like most of these superior males, and, like Milton, is capable of being clumsy and even vulgar - a think you never find in Dante or Charles Williams, however eccentric or exaggerated their ideas about the sexes. Still, there it is - a defect, like a squint or bow-legs, which one has to put up with or ignore as well as one can."

She goes on to talk about his religious conversion and how they can be frightening things to experience and praises his gift for being able to invent new worlds "both beautiful and plausible" [she compares him to the "dreary mechanisms of the space-fiction merchants, and I wonder what she had read by them...something like The Cold Equations, perhaps?] and for letting girls have big active roles in the adventure stories.

From a letter dated 10 Feb. 1956, to Barbara Reynolds

"I'm glad you and Kerstin [Reynolds' young daughter] like the Narnia books. I can understand that the slaying of the Lion might be a bit frightening - though I was a very tough-minded beast of a child, and always insisted on having all the bloodthirsty bits read to me, to the great horror of my elders. ... And it is interesting that she should have felt the atmosphere of tension right from the start. All the books have that tension; I think it possibly comes from the writer's very strong sense of the reality of good and evil. The Silver Chair is a very good one, and so is The Voyage of the Dawn-Treader. And they all come out right in the end! Also, the girls, on the whole, are given as much courage as the boys, and more virtue (all the really naughty and tiresome children are boys); and they are even allowed to fight with bows and arrows, thought not with swords - a curious sex-distinction which I don't quite approve of; as though to kill at a distance were more feminine than to kill at close quarters! [Sayers then goes on to praise Marfisa, a female warrior in a text that continues the legend of Roland. Marfisa is apparently a really tough chick, and now I want to read these tales very badly.]"

From a letter dated 28 March 1956, to Barbara Reynolds:

"C.S. Lewis has just sent me the concluding Narnia Tale - The Last Battle. Don't think I should try it on Kerstin yet awhile - it really is rather terrifying. Everybody is killed in a railway accident, and they all go to Heaven - very apocalyptically. But that isn't so frightening as the earlier part, over which there broods a rather awful sense of the whole world being caught in a sort of totalitarian trap like a fairy-tale version of 1984. It would be all right for a toughish child who could get through it at one sitting, but if read slowly in bits might lead to anxiety and nightmares."

I really like the name Kerstin.