RivkaT

( Felix! Mildmay! Vampires! Anticlimax! )

My very first Smallville story, The Presence of Fire, is up at the Audio archive, courtesy of cathexys.

( Jim Butcher and Ilona Andrews, heir to Laurell Hamilton )

Quotes for my commonplace book:

Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, So schlag' ich Dir den Schädel ein. (If you don't want to be my brother, then I'll smash your skull in.)

“We fed the heart on fantasy; the heart grew brutal on the fare.” Wm. Butler Yeats

"Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! ... Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected." Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

(Post title taken from actual grading story I was told by a professor who shall not be named.) Grading today; confronted with an exam bearing a note that the examinee had not noticed Part 3 until the end of the (8-hour) exam, and thus had not provided an answer, ensuring a pretty bad grade given that the question was worth 35% of the grade. I feel horrible for the student, but mainly I think because my embarrassment squick’s been triggered. Here is what I did beforehand: I announced there’d be three sections in class, each with a different format: short answer, essay, fact pattern. I posted the exam instructions on the course site before the exam; the instructions specify that there are three parts and set forth the percentages. On the exam itself, those instructions are repeated. On each question, the points available are marked at the beginning. The exam has “page X of Y” on each page. The third part took up several pages—it even had pictures, for pete’s sake! It’s an exam disaster, to be sure, and I do feel sorry for the kid. But sorry with a lot of argh attached.

( fiction: YA fantasy, Regency paranormal, and Patricia Briggs )

Philip Margolin, Executive Privilege: Margolin sent me an autographed copy for talking over some details for the in-progress sequel, so it’s probably churlish to say that I’m not a big fan of airport thrillers. But I press on nonetheless! An Oregon associate pursuing a death row inmate’s habeas case and a DC PI independently discover information suggesting that someone close to the President—perhaps the President himself—is a serial killer. It moves fast, anyway. The characters reminded me of Duplo toys: largely human-shaped, and moving around in an environment recognizable as an abstraction of our own; mostly not stereotypes, but not exactly identifiable people either.

But what I really noticed is how spoiled I’ve been by fanfic. And not just in the standard “fanfic is focused on stuff I like” way, though that too. But fanfic is the apotheosis of “give me just the good parts” not only at the level of plot/trope, but also certain aspects of writing. Margolin introduced his guy protagonist by having him look in the mirror. It’s cheesy and artificial and we have to let him get away with it because there are only so many ways a limited POV (standard in modern fiction) can describe the narrator. We don’t have to put up with it in fanfic, though, because regardless of source text fanfic gets to operate using audiovisual conventions: no description of main characters necessary. Skip the preliminaries, tell me something new.

Margolin is relatively competent with infodumps, and usually manages to have them well-motivated by the text: two people are out on a first date and telling each other their histories, or one lawyer summarizes an area of the law for another who is unfamiliar with that area. This is a problem for lots of plot-based stories, and it helps to have characters who canonically deal in infodumps, which I suspect is another reason I find it easy to like cop-types. It was simplest for Mulder and Scully: for them, infodumps were foreplay. Lex lectures Clark or, if Clark is unavailable, himself, because he’s always performing for someone, if only the imagined audience (which in his case is us). Sam and Dean tend to summarize, driving information out of dialogue and into narration, where I think it often fits best. Character backstory often has to be chunked too; one of the reasons Margolin seemed clunky was that he started out with what felt like too much description of backstory, though to be fair he left a good deal to be worked out later. See also: spoiled by fanfic, where we don’t need much backstory and so seeing what history characters reveal, if anything, tells you more word-for-word about the characters and the author’s take on them than it does in standalone fiction.

Query: anybody know if the Dreamwidth crossposter has fixed its cut-tag issues?

Rob Thurman, Nightlife: ( SPN fandom, why was I not informed? )

( The rest: Butcher, Martin's Wild Cards, Marshall )

Things that make me happy:

1. jadelennox on Ada Lovelace Day and women in programming.

2. I am slogging through my SV story at about ten words a day, but I know how it ends at last, and so I put myself up for auction at Sweet Charity! I am offering:

A story, at least 1000 words but possibly a fair amount longer (past auction stories are in the 15,000-25,000 range). Fandoms: SPN, Chuck; SV or crossovers with anything I know by negotiation--I will try Buffy, SCC, or almost anything else if I think I can make it work. Gen, het, slash--again, I'll try almost anything, though my strength is taking standard tropes and putting a bit of a topspin on them.

3. I am almost caught up on professional reading, and hope to give away a bunch of fiction soon. This will include three Marjorie Liu books:

( sadly, not a rave review )

( Stephen King, free downloads, metal girl, K.J Parker )

( sf and fantasy recommendations )

( m/m erotica, alternate reality, Star Trek spinoff )

Not content to consider me not a real American (and gee, that’s historically unprecedented and not at all scary), the McCain campaign doesn’t think I’m a real Virginian either. [Edited to correct misattribution.] I believe I will let my real Virginia vote express what I think of that. Also, my new icon’s going to hang around for the next few weeks. Incidentally, I voted early (other US folks, check out Vote for Change to see where/whether you can too). My husband asked if I didn’t want to wait. He: “Something might happen to change your mind.” Me: “… Demonic possession?”

( Wild Adapter and After School Nightmare )

Please help! I need the name of an unmade horror movie that Dean Winchester would kill to see: the horror version of The Magnificent Ambersons or the Nic Cage Superman. That is, it should be an actual missed opportunity in the annals of moviemaking. Help me out and I’ll write you a drabble of your choosing.

( review: Joe Hill short stories )

( Kat Richardson, Tanya Huff, Mark Del Franco, Steven Brust )

1. Note to self: “Gourmet burritos” at the Oakland airport aren’t.
2. If you aren’t reading Yahtzee, you should be (keyboard/drink interface warning).
3. Is it wrong to love that I’ve now seen and enjoyed two Sam/Dean Sam-POV vids set to “Next Contestant”? (Boy howdy do people enjoy touching Dean’s face.)

( Reviews, Scott Westerfeld edition )

Scully! Rebecca Traister speaks for me (no spoilers).

I suspect astolat’s Queen of Spades is better: “In 1963, [Cyril] Connolly published a parody of Fleming in the London Magazine. ‘M” has conceived an illicit passion for 007, who is told to get himself done up in drag, go to a nightclup, and entice a kinky visiting KGB general, who turns out to be ‘M’ himself in disguise (‘I’m sorry, James,’ he says forlornly at the unmasking. ‘It was the only way I could get you,’ at which Bond’s ‘long rangy body flared out above his black silk panties,’ before he cuts his boss short: ‘I thought fellows like you shot themselves…. Have you got a gun—sir--?’).” Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Bondage.

( Love and the FBI )

I could spend hours at this site: the TV tropes wiki. The entry for Plot Tumor includes this gem: “Compare: Adaptation Decay, Flanderization, George Lucas Love Story, Jean Grey Escalation, and Motive Decay.” This is not a wiki about citation, but it does feature deep fanlove, though everyone tends to make fun of the fanworks that they don’t themselves consume. (Perhaps I should add an entry on My Kink Is Fine, Yours Is Bad—but the overall sense I get is that most people who contribute think Everyone’s Kinks Are Funny, so I actually didn’t feel attacked.)

( superheroes and a cyborg woman )

( Nick Sagan )

( Doll, The Cain Saga, Demon Diary )

A Washington Post article uses Strikethrough, among other incidents, to discuss the difficulties of defining and protecting free speech online. It's interesting that the article, while clearly free speech-friendly, turns the suspended LJs into "fiction," eliding the fan element. That makes sense--it's yet another thing that would have to be explained, detracting from the larger story--and yet I can't help wonder what other flattening has gone on in the other stories of suppression recounted.

( Sedaris, superheroine poetry, Buckley )

( Butcher, King, Crusie, Gibson )

My fiction offering already sold, and I can't promise two to-order stories in that timeframe, but kate_nepveu had a great idea that I copied: I'm offering a fiction critique from a legal perspective.

And while I'm in a good mood, here are some recent books I enjoyed:

( hard-boiled colonial sci-fi, fantasy for Jim Butcher fans, and mindbending coming-of-age sf )