Teleidoplex

Dear Author,

Happy Yuletide! I've tried to give you thoughts to spark ideas, but if you have a bunny that you've been burning to write, please ignore my silly prompts and write that instead. As long as you avoid my DNWs, I prefer to get a fic that someone enjoyed writing to something where they had to backbend to please some random suggestion of mine.

I love all of these fandoms -- please don't take more words about a particular one as indication that I like it more. I just had more to say about some than about others. A fic in any one of them would make me extremely happy!

 
Dear Author, 

Thank you in advance for writing something especially for me! I've tried to keep things as open as possible while still giving you prompts that might lead to chewy goodness, but if you have an idea for a fic that you've been burning to write, please ignore all my suggestions and write that instead. As long as you avoid my don'ts, I prefer to get a fic that someone enjoyed writing to something where they had to backbend to please some random suggestion of mine.

I love all of these fandoms -- please don't take more words about a particular one as indication that I like it more. I just had more to say about some than about others. A fic in any one of them would make me extremely happy!


( Read more... )

***

I'm kitsunealyc on AO3, so feel free to look at what I've got there if you need more data on what I like. And above all: have fun!

Dear Author,

Thank you in advance for writing something especially for me! I've tried to keep things as open as possible while still giving you prompts that might lead to chewy goodness, but if you have an idea for a fic that you've been burning to write, please ignore all my suggestions and write that instead. As long as you avoid my don'ts, I prefer to get a fic that someone enjoyed writing to something where they had to backbend to please some random suggestion of mine.

I love all of these fandoms (I've written at least one fic in each of them), so a fic in any one of them would make me extremely happy!

( Read more... )

***

I'm kitsunealyc on AO3, so feel free to look at what I've got there if you need more data on what I like. And above all: have fun!

Dear Author, First and foremost, thank you thank you thank you for volunteering to write for me. I will try to give you sparks for ideas, but I'm a pretty easy cookie to please, so if you had a fic you really wanted to write that doesn't quite fit with any of my suggestions, please write the fic you wanted to write. That tends to work out better for everyone in the end.

( Read more... )

I spent a chunk of last night and all my morning lie-in-bed time trying to compose my recommendation for Netflix's Orange is the New Black. I finally gave up because the more enthusiastic I am about something, the more I lose any ability for persuasive language and just want to pound my 'this is fucking awesome' into other people's skulls.

Language. What's up with that? Where's my telepathic rail gun?

So I just want to say... Orange is the New Black. Fucking amazing. Ignore the horrible trailers. They are horrible. The actual show is brilliant in so many ways that it renders me as incoherent as if I was trying to describe all the elephant parts at once. It tackles race, class, gender, and queer issues. It explores over a dozen complicated character arcs and interweaves them brilliantly.

At its core, it breaks down the false categories of criminal and not-criminal in a way that effectively critiques our entire notion of criminality (in kind of a Black Helicopters way that doesn't flinch from looking at how terrible and inevitable and yet internally-logical the process of criminalization is. Blythe could totally write for this show). At one point late in the season, one of the (newer) guards tells an inmate that the only difference between them is that the inmate got caught. Nobody in the show is entirely horrible, and nobody in the show is entirely noble. the show manages to lay bare the flaws in our current system of incarceration in a way that doesn't come across as just liberal hand-wringing.

But most importantly, the show manages to do something I don't think I've ever seen a major media product pull off (or even attempt), and I think a large part of the success of the characters and the critique comes down to this: it uses a female gaze.

Only one of the actresses fits the Hollywood standard (the main character, which is a deliberate choice that I'll get to in a moment). The rest are all shapes, all sizes, all ages. And because of the way they are stripped down and put in the same khaki-and-grey shapeless clothes, the audience is forced to look at them as subjects rather than objects. We follow these characters through (pretty complex) arcs, and by just a few episodes in, every one of them is sexy as fuck because we're invited to encounter them as compelling, fully-rounded subjects rather than as objects that fail to meet the standards of the male gaze.

Watching this show was like my first time at WisCon.

The only hard point I had in watching this show was the main character. For several episodes, I felt like they failed with her, that she was the result of some studio exec's opinion that we needed a pretty, blonde white woman to serve as our entry into the world of the show.

I was wrong. Stick with her. Her character arc is such a surprise, and so worth it by the time you get to the end of the first season.

So... yeah. That's my spoiler-free, probably completely unpersuasive pitch for why everyone needs to watch this show, and why it should win all the Emmys ever handed out, and why it can teach us all a lot about writing complex, compelling characters.

Cheers!

Alyc

It also occurs to me that I never posted the fics that I wrote for Yuletide (and the New Year's Resolution I posted after Yuletide was over).

Here they are. Two are elfporny goodness based on an old Mercedes Lackey Bard's Tale novel tie in. One is a missing episode of Community filled with Renaissance Faire shenanigans.

Death and the Dancing Girl
Fandom: Bard's Tale/Castle of Deception by Mercedes Lackey
Pairing: Naitachal/Eliathanis
Teaser: Death is no barrier to a necromancer.
Rating: Elfporny, Nec-romancey

Music and the Mad Maudlin
Fandom: Bard's Tale/Castle of Deception by Mercedes Lackey
Pairing: Naitachal/Eliathanis
Teaser: Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.
Rating: Even MOAR Elfporny, Moar nec-romancey, totally a fix-it fic

Survey of Medieval History
Fandom: Community
Pairing: Gen, all characters
Teaser: The peasants are revolting when Greendale hosts its first Renaissance Faire.
Rating: Revolting, but PG

I live above a bar. Not just a bar, but a real dive bar. I like most elements of my apartment, and even the bar doesn't bother me most of the time, but yesterday situation become untenable.

Yesterday morning when headed out to my car to drive to work, I discovered that some asshole had pried open the cover to my gas tank, removed the cap, and stuffed a white t-shirt into the hole.







Okay. Annoying.  I figured someone had just siphoned some gas, so I removed the t-shirt, bent the flange back into place so the cover would close again, and drove off.

And immediately noticed massive engine issues that had not troubled my car the previous day.

So I turned right back around and took it to the mechanic next door and asked if they could check it over. Which they did, and confirmed my suspicions that someone had probably put something in the gas tank. My completely spurious guess was beer, but it could have been anything, really.

A few hundred dollars and a fuel tank flush later... the car is running well enough, but smoking a lot. Supposedly that will tone down after a while? The mechanic was really great, though, in that he put me at the front of the queue and got the work done fast enough that I was able to get my car this morning.

But... here's what gets me. I think most people can agree that coming down to find that someone had poured beer into your gas tank would be a really shitty way to start a day/week/month. Like, hearing that, you would go 'man, that would suck if it happened to me.' So what sort of asshole do you have to be to go to some random stranger's car, turn off that feeling of 'that would suck if it happened to me' and do that to them? Like... seriously. I can sort of grok the kinds of thoughtless harm we do to people to fulfill our own needs. I was annoyed by but understood people breaking in to my car to rifle through my console looking for loose change (which has happened twice so far this year). But... this... I just don't get the sort of empathetic disconnect that would make it possible for someone to do this kind of deliberate harm. I mean... it's not like they even get to watch the result of my distress. I just... I don't get it.

But that was not my only encounter with assholery yesterday.

So I submitted a police report, knowing that there's not really anything they can do, but very gratified to know that they've now digitized that shit, so I can just go online and file the report and not have to take up anyone's time or talk to anyone.

And then I called my landlady. Now, I prefaced the conversation by saying that I understood that this wasn't her responsibility, and that I didn't think there was much she could do, but I wanted to let her know that I'd had several instances of vandalism recently, and to inform her of this one in particular. All that I asked her to do was talk to the owners of the bar downstairs and ask them to keep an eye on their patrons and try to discourage their regulars from vandalizing the cars in the lot.

She was extremely unsympathetic. At first she suggested that it might not have been people from the bar. It might have been people using the alleyway behind the apartment, because people used that alleyway. I told her that in the nine months I've been living there, I've gotten pretty familiar with the use-patterns around the building. The alleyway is used only rarely, and mostly by people walking their dogs. The bar sees pretty frequent and often belligerent traffic, and that it's very likely that it was the bar. And then I asked again if she could just talk to the owners and encourage them to discourage their patrons from this sort of activity.

THEN she started gaslighting me. She said that she hadn't received any reports of vandalism from the other tenants. I told her that I'd talked to two of the downstairs tenants, and both of them park their cars two blocks away because they've suffered vandalism before that they associate with the bar patrons. She suggested that I do the same. I told her that I am a small woman and not a burly dude like the other two tenants. I have to look out for my safety, and that does not include walking two blocks home after dark. Nor do I want to have to walk in the cold/rain, nor do I want to have to walk two blocks with groceries. And since I can never predict what night someone might decide to vandalize my car, I would have to consistently park far away. And no, I'm not willing to do that.

She remained unsympathetic, and she wouldn't agree to talk to the bar owners. I'm going to talk to them myself today, but I don't think it will have the same weight. I now wonder if the reason the other tenants didn't bother to report the previous vandalism to  her was because they figured out what I was too stupid to realize, which is that reporting it to her would only be an exercise in pointless frustration.

So... assholes abound, in a variety of flavors. And I... am looking for a new apartment.

It's all because I forgot to bring my lunch today.

I was standing in line at my work's cafe, waiting for my grilled cheese to go with my tomato soup, when Flashdance... What a Feelin' came on.

Before I knew it, I was absently bopping my head and mouthing along.

Before the song ended, I had an overwhelming desire to watch the film again. I mentioned this to a co-worker. He pointed out that Flashdance is on Netflix. Nooooo! I thought (and said) Noooooo! It will be bad. It will be so bad. It will be [title-redacted-so-as-not-to-hurt-maladaptive 's-feelings] bad!

And then I thought... well... if it's really bad, I can wash away the bad with the awesomeness of The Avengers (I've been on a Loki/Thor kick recently).

And THEN I thought... I could write an Avengers/Flashdance crossover fic where the Avengers have to go undercover as Flashdance dancers for some contrived reason, dancing ridiculously over-choreographed routines that no actual stripper EVER performs! In bright costumes! To cheesy 80's tunes!!

Just... just imagine: Hulk smash! Water... SPLASH!!

::wibbles::

I... I might HAVE to do this.

I'm sorry to the world.

Let this be an object lesson. NEVER forget your lunch!

Because god knows I'd never be able to do all this if I was in a relationship. That shit takes time and energy!

I lost my document with my goals for last year, so I'm posting this year's document so I can check it/keep track. Sorry for the detail. If I don't break it down, I'll never get it done.

SMART Goals:
Finish and revise Chiaroscuro and get it out by mid-year
Resume shopping Mr. Mystic
Revise and get into submission nine stories from my current pool
Research and write first draft of next novel project (TBD)
FogCon, WisCon, ReaderCon, World Fantasy
Participate more in Codex reviewing
Work on CW2012 Anthology
Kick Butt; Take Names

Schedule
1. Finish first draft of Chiaroscuro, dammit; Update marketing/submission documents and resume shopping Mr. Mystic (Jan)
2. Revise three stories from pool for submission; start research/reading on next novel project (either Herriot-with-fairies or real-life mermaids) (Feb)
3. First revision of Chiaroscuro and send out for first reads; continue novel research/brainstorming/outlining (Mar)
4. Revise three stories from pool; Start work on next novel project (April)
5. Revise three stories from pool; work on next novel project (May)
6. Second revision of Chiaroscuro and send out for critique; draft marketing/submission documents; poke CWesters for anthology submissions (June)
7. Work on next novel project; anthology? (July)
8. Final Chiaroscuro revisions, start shopping; work on next novel project; anthology? (August)
9. Work on novel; anthology? (September)
10. Work on novel; anthology? (October)
11. Work on novel; anthology? (November)
12. Finish novel; Yuletide (December)

Pool of stories to revise:
In Death You Will Find Me
The Girl Who Married the Ocean
The Blood Carousel
The Lullaby of Allentown
The Clockwork Muse
Monkeyskin
A Song of Sixpence
The Hollow Girl, or Sam's Tale
First Contact
The Preserved Head of Jeremy Bentham