RivkaT

It seems somehow unfair that my Yuletide pinch hit is practically writing itself when my original assignment was taffy-slow. Time pressure is a strange thing.

( Sedaris, needlework technology, music and copyright law, Churchill, the racial wealth divide, books we loved as girls, and evolution  ) comments on DW

1. My own website won’t recognize my login! This makes me worry. The CMS is nice in many ways, but I am starting to realize how vulnerable I am now that I rely on something beyond the hand-coded html I can make myself.

2. I’ve been using this free file-hosting service Dropbox, and I think it’s great for document management—I keep all my works in progress, as well as other stuff including teaching materials, in my Dropbox folder. That means I can access them on all my computers and on my iPhone and have changes automatically updated across all my devices. It’s good for joint writing projects for the same reason. You get 2 gigs free, [ETA: I've maxed out on free space, so I'm not asking anyone else to sign up via me any more.  I still recommend the service though]. I’ve been using the service for nearly a year, I’m highly satisfied, and I only get email from them when I’m near to filling my space. So anyone interested in trying the service/helping a girl out, I encourage you to check it out.

3. I’m also on Google Wave now, though I still don’t know what it’s for. I’m rivkat and if you want an invite or if you want to connect there, let me know!

4 etc. Realms of Fantasy has made its Feb. 2010 issue available as a free download on its website. Aside from the skeevy naked-girl art from Frank Wu, I found the stories largely entertaining; Harlan Ellison, Leah Bobet, Euan Harvey, Aliette de Bodard, and Ann Leckie are the authors represented.

( Middleman, Wild Cards, original slash, urban fantasy )
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Fic rec: Mistaken for Strangers, by bellatemple . As an acafan I couldn't not love it. And if you think about the SPN-fan relationship as indicated by the show, the title gets even better.

( Werewolves, assassins, dragons, young offenders, and whatever it is that CJ Cherryh writes )
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( Wilson, Bazell, Price, Pratchett )
( Halloween costumes of dooom! Roooaar! )
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I wrote for three and a half hours on Friday!  It felt awesome.  This semester has been kicking my butt, for reasons I can't figure out.

( Pat Conroy, xkcd, John Winchester's Journal, Wm. Sleator, alternate histories )
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( high school shenanigans, very good YA demons, M Butterfly, anti-sprawl design ) comments on DW

( KJ Parker, Diana Wynne Jones, Rapunzel variant, lesbian romance )

Quote:
Often I cared nothing for the woman I made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding from me.
H.G. Wells, Secret Places of the Heart
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( Crusie & Mayer, Coben, Mitchell )

Quotes:
No one expects the fannish inquisition! – turns out this has been independently invented a couple of times, but it seems appropriate now
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. – John Updike
To a first approximation, every animal is an insect. -- J. Kukalová-Peck, paleontologist (seen at imnotandrei’s journal)
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Rec: giandujakiss ’s new Castiel vid “A Charming Man,” which I was privileged to beta. It’s exactly the argument about Castiel and what he is/does/portends for Dean, and how he fits into and upends Sam and Dean’s lives, that I wanted to see. Great use of internal motion and lyric matching; superfast cuts.

( Mostly strong women ... ) comments on DW

Things that are slightly annoying: (1) I tried to use a header on my DW (Dean and his weapon!), but I’m only getting the bottom half of the picture. ETA: Yay, fixed!  Thanks, sage . (2) I have filled ten squares of my cliche bingo card, no way I’m making a blackout, and of the ten only five are in a line! Sigh. (3) Got my first flame in years, so, ow, but I will eventually recover, as if from a UTI.  Imagine I had a really scathing reply for my anonymous coward, will you?
( Lemony Snicket, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming ) comments on DW

Best simile I’ve seen in a while: “He’s as useless as a marzipan dildo.” (In fairness, my second thought was: mmm, marzipan. So maybe the insult didn’t have entirely the intended effect.)

( Harry Dresden, Middleman, Lucifer )

( Dead girls, original slash, Jewish angst and sex )

( 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 )