Curiouser and Curiouser!

A Christmas meme, festively stolen from frenchroast.

1. Eggnog or Hot Chocolate?
Hot chocolate, no question. Eggnog kind of creeps me out.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?
When I was a kid, Santa's present was often the largest, least expected gift that required the most assembly, so my uncle usually came over late on Christmas Eve to help Santa put it together and stick it unwrapped under the tree. Because they were buds, Santa let my uncle wear a suit just like his, eat some of the cookies I left out, and climb around on our roof making reindeer noises and ringing sleigh bells.

I was an observant kid, but otherwise not terribly bright.

( click here for more christmas. )

Went to see the new Muppet movie this morning. Spent the entire time either hooting like a lunatic or sniffling like a horrible sap. Shall shortly commence immense Muppet rewatch, beginning with The Muppet Movie and my Muppet Show DVDs, and ending with The Muppet Wizard of Oz before I go back to the theater and watch The Muppets all over again. BECAUSE OF THE AMAZING.

You guys. I am so happy right now. MUPPETS.

Y'all ready for a NaNo post?



( GOOD. )

What Random Word Are You? Your Result: Folderol "On the day following Antonia's death, all Madrid was a scene of consternation and amazement." And then apparently I need to fill up this description with 150 characters, so I'm adding this sentence in.
Faith
Agenda
Saucy
Vegetables
Unforgettable
Tailgating
Battery
What Random Word Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

As you see, I am the random word folderol. I have mixed feelings about this.

( I shall explain. )

Things and stuff:

1) I moved last week, and have since discovered that unpacking in a new house is vastly preferable to packing in your old house. I wasn't fully aware of this fact, as I somehow managed never to fully unpack in the last three places I've lived.

2) I have feeeelings about the Who series finale, but I have yet to find the words to articulate them. Maybe I will just rewatch the episode and then take pictures of my expressions as I grapple with the wonderful terrible incoherent mess that was...whatever that episode was called. The Wedding of River Song! Oh, River. I finally want to write fic about you. This is not necessarily a good sign.

3) I have been reading Dances with Dragons forever, but I never seem to get any closer to the middle, much less the end. Every day I read a few fantastic, soul-crushing chapters, and every night George R.R. Martin sneaks into my bedroom while I sleep and adds about 100 more eye-jelly filled pages. That George. The man loves his eye-jelly.

4) I've taken to watching Tangled as my pre-bedtime, post-eye-jelly soother. Soon I will know all the dialogue and begin muttering the lyrics of the songs in my sleep, alarming any jolly multi-millionaire fantasy writers who just happen to be passing through. Fic recommendations are highly appreciated; I've already read everything on AO3, but I figure there must be more somewhere.

5) The past two and a half months have been my longest writing dry spell in a long damn time. To be fair, the process of finding a house and moving into it has been rather time consuming, but I'm perturbed by my complete lack of motivation on all my various WIPs. (WsIP.) I'm seriously considering giving NaNoWriMo a shot this year -- I've planned to do it before, but always got distracted by fic before noon on the 1st. We'll see. That Portland hipster werewolf novel isn't going to write itself.

6) Community gave us another stellar episode this week. Whenever I think of it, I am filled with love and mini-pies. (They taste just like regular sized pies.)

7) I am trying to teach myself to like yogurt. It is not a pleasant process.

Waiting for New New Who to download. Twitching with anticipation. Writing a post.

Thanks to a recommendation from the wonderful and wise pendrecarc, in the past week or so I've devoured Terry Pratchett's young adult series about a young Discworld witch named Tiffany Aching, and am now wholly consumed by a renewed love of all things Pratchett. So I'm embarking on a reread of (hopefully) all the Discworld books, starting at the very beginning. The very beginning, of course, being the not-quite-wizard Rincewind and his adventures in cowardice and terrible bad luck, which I haven't read since I was about thirteen and never actually liked in the first place. But I am determined to do a proper reread, wizards and all, and I will not skip ahead to Wyrd Sisters, no matter how much I might want to. I've just finished The Color of Magic last night and am about fifty pages into The Light Fantastic, which is already a considerable improvement, so maybe Rincewind and I will make it through unscathed.

Here's a thought, though: Why doesn't every fandom have at least one good Discworld AU fic? Or does every fandom have one and I just haven't noticed? Because there's absolutely no reason why there shouldn't be at least fifteen fics in which Sherlock is a wizard ostracized from Unseen University who's constantly badgering worldweary Captain Lestrade of the City Watch as he attempts to solve the crimes of the Ankh-Morporkian underworld.

Mycroft as Lord Vetinari's right hand man? John the Igor sharing a cup of tea with his BFF Death? Sherlock vs. Granny Weatherwax?

Ankh-Morpork fits particularly well with Sherlock, I think, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other places on the Discworld that would fit with plenty of other fandoms. Strangely, though, I can't think of what I'd do with a Doctor Who/Discworld fusion, which somewhat disproves my Doctor Who Can Be Crossed Over With Anything theory.

Hmm. This I shall have to ponder.

When I was still working at Borders, I had a co-worker who was virulently anti-vampire. 

He wasn’t the sort of booknerd to be shy about his opinions. “There has never been anything good that had vampires in it,” he would say. “Not a movie, not a TV show, not a book. Not ever, no exceptions.”

The rest of the break room usually had the good sense to ignore this. I’ve never been known for my good sense.

I’d bring up Buffy, Bela Lugosi, Nosferatu. Let the Right One In, Dark Shadows, and Love at First Bite. What about Christopher Lee in the Hammer Horror films, I’d say. What about Willem Dafoe in Shadow of the Vampire? What about the Count from Sesame Street?

And what about Ann Rice? he’d answer. What about the cult of Edward Cullen? What about a quarter of the romance section, half the sci-fi shelves, and pretty much the entirety of Young Adult?

I really hated losing that argument.

( Part One )

So pendrecarc (who is an awesome person) is doing an interview series for the female character focused Holmesian comm furtherinterest (which is an awesome comm) and if you go here (for livejournal, which is occasionally awesome) or here (for dreamwidth, which I rarely use but still find pretty awesome) you can read the questions she asked me, and the answers I gave. I think her summary says it best: 

The author of "The Anatomist" bares all!

Her COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP with rough drafts...!
The Sherlock fic she's PANTING TO READ...and
A TANTALISING GLIMPSE into her current WIP!!!

Meanwhile, your intrepid moderator tries very hard to pretend this is an episode of "Fresh Air", and by a supreme effort of willpower the conversation does not devolve into Laurie R. King fangirling and odes to Peter Wimsey's monocle.

It is actually very much like an episode of Fresh Air, I think, only with more discussion of sociopathy, genderswap, magic, and what a weird dude Arthur Conan Doyle was. Basically, there is awesomeness. Oh, and a number of unfortunate attempts on my part to be witty and/or insightful. The and is the worst. Oh boy, that and.

 

So you guys may or may not have noticed, but I suck at finishing WIPs. (Should really be WsIP, I suppose, but that's just ridiculous. WIPs it is.) Part of my problem is that in the last two years or so I've become entirely unable to keep stories within the scope in which I originally conceive them - they just get longer and longer, and while I always promise myself I'll wait until they're complete to start posting, the truth is I probably wouldn't post anything at all if I held myself to that. Component Parts is a good example - for the two months or so while I was working on that fic on a daily basis, I was still totally consumed by all things Star Trek. But you know what happened? Two months went by and the fic was getting more and more ambitious, and I suddenly all I wanted to think about was Arthurian legend and this absurdly epic Merlin fic I'd started by accident one night. That turned into The Goose Girl, which while technically complete was meant to be followed by two more stories of equal length all about Arthur becoming king and Merlin finding out that Bess was Nimueh and then the whole Lady of the Lake Mordred insanity, and oh I had such plans. Then I started a little Journey's End fic called Tomorrow Is a Long Time, and I was off again.

So. If you're curious (and even if you aren't, which is more likely) here's a rundown of my WsIP file, and those fics that I expect to emerge from it, blinking into the light, and those which will probably rot there, dessicated and forgotten. Yummy.

( WIPs, or: fics you've forgotten you ever read, which was probably for the best, really. )

Stolen from the ever-fantastic earlgreytea68:

Pick a character and I will give and explain the top five ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them. Any and all characters welcome (including ones I haven't written but might know about...)