Dreams and Swords

RIP Anne McCaffrey

I am terrible at talking about authors who affected me or deaths in general. So. The Harper Hall trilogy was one of the earliest pieces of fantasy I read, and it's one of the pieces I will pick up for comfort rereads.

First of all, thank you for whatever you write for me this year. Please have fun and try not to stress over this. Unless you're like me, where running around and going "aieeee!" is part of the fun. ;-)

I am generally into all sorts of stories: adventure, romance, drama, comedy. Since this is Yuletide, I definitely do not want a deathfic, and for the most part, I'm not particularly interested in angst. I'm also not interested in a fic that's solely smut; I'd rather have some plot going on alongside the sexy times. (I'm not really expecting smut to come up with any of my prompts, but I figured I'd throw that out there.)

( Fandoms, Prompts, and Expansion on Same Behind the Cut )

Ganked from all over.

- Open up your music player. Hit shuffle.
- Record the first few lines of the first thirty songs that come up that do not give away the name of the song. Skip instrumentals, but don't skip the embarrassing ones.
- Make hapless LJ denizens guess the song names and artists. Google is cheating. For musical songs, the name of the musical is acceptable in place of the artist.
- Least hapless LJ denizen wins admiration. That's right; the points are something you'll never see, just like Pat Buchanan in the White House!

( Music of the Niiiiiight )

Writing this story is a... weird process to me. I'm throwing story bits at a wall to see if they stick! Sure, I started out with a very basic idea of what was going to happen, but now I have this whole other subplot moving in from left field, and yet another subplot lurking in the wings. This is so strange!

Usually, when I'm writing, I have a fairly good idea of what I'm trying to accomplish. I had the final scene in mind for "Ember, Ash, and Kindling" from the very beginning, and I was just writing to reach it. But this NaNo is just "words! I must words on pages!", and shockingly enough, to me, I haven't used SUDDENLY, NINJAS to increase word-count yet. All the fights so far were planned.

Also, I'm finding that being willing to stick in [name] or [city] helps me a lot with just keeping things flowing. I can come back and hash out names later.

The really tricky things so far have been making sure I keep my continuity guide updated as I write and not getting too distracted by Luna posting new fics.

Speaking of fics, I still haven't finished off Oracle Zuko. I know what the last scene needs to be, I'm just not sure how to start it off. "All art is recovery from the first line."

Of course, I keep looking at the story as it is now and wondering if it's a satisfying story. I am sure Floranna will be happy with it (Floranna, I love you, but you'd probably be happy with two thousand words of Oracle Zuko/Jet smut in the woods), but I'm not sure if it's going to be worth the wait for anybody else.

I suppose this is what beta-readers are for: to tell you if you've fucked up the landing.

Can't manage NaNoing tonight, so I'm dorking around with my Days of Future Past DZ AU. Angstpocalypse!

---

Needlenose eyed the circuit laid out in front of him critically. The pattern of its teal leads against the pink semiconductor irritated him. It was ugly, jarring and tangled, almost impossible to set up for a fabber to produce. He couldn't achieve the visual effect he wanted without sacrificing its functionality, and he couldn't make it mass-producible without sacrificing both functionality and aesthetics.

Sure, he could make up for the loss of efficiency by splitting everything across five or six circuits. But they still wouldn't be mass-producible, and they definitely wouldn't be chic.

Besides, Perceptor made fun of him for how many of his Spinister-chips he already had installed.

If he stopped insisting on the colors, he could rearrange the leads to achieve functionality and mass-producibility.

"I like the colors," Needlenose muttered, antennae flicking back.

Putting so many of Spinister's sensor-baffles in one circuit was difficult enough without frivolous patterns and colors.

"If I wanted something completely utilitarian," he snapped, "I'd go to Shockwave."

In another room, he heard and felt Hairsplitter sigh and Sunbeam say, "Dude, you're arguing with Spinister again."

So he was. For years after Spinister's death, he hadn't understood why he couldn't get over the helicopter. He'd had thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lovers throughout his life. Some of them he'd even cared for as much as he had Spinister, and they'd faded from importance inside a year. But Spinister stayed in his head.

Or, rather, Spinister stayed in Singe and Hairsplitter's heads.

[Bex]: I suspect my Nano is going to be a lot of "and now Becca describes this cities and its customs in detail because hey, word count, and she will sculpt this all into a story next draft"
[Rin]: that is most Nanos
[Kep]: *is thinking a lot of mine will be "and here is faux historical documents 'casue, word count and this way we have filler material for the back of the book..."
[Bex]: "and now, Revenant and Counterpoise have kinky robot sex and I try to remember Counterpoise is an it, not a he or a she"
[Rin]: personally I'm trying for "and now Rin describes this one cultural detail via sexy makeouts"
[Rin]: ahahahaha
[Kep]: Aww yeah
[Rin]: there will be a LOT OF making out
[Pux]: "And now, Rafe angsts/Monica is sweet/Chantelle kills shit/Rin has a hat."
[Bex]: Aw yeah! Hat!
[Rin]: A HAT A HAT
[Kep]: HAT!!!

Title: Be Fruitful
Series: G1, mostly cartoon
Characters: Dr. Susan Hoffman/Onslaught, Hot Spot, Blades, the Constructicons
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2100+
Summary: Onslaught is pregnant. He doesn't understand how that can be, since he hasn't slept with another Transformer in millions of years. What with being locked in a box and all.
Author's Notes: For those of you who don't keep track of obscure comics characters, Dr. Susan Hoffman is made of awesome. Also, this fic proves that I love Dr. Hoffman/Onslaught like whoa.

For the purposes of this fic, I am assuming an established relationship between the two of them.

( Be Fruitful )

Toying around with an Aerialbot (Slingshot)-specific table for 6impearfics. It's probably really self-indulgent to use my adminly powers to make it an official prompt table.

Playing around with them as they were in the early days: arrogant and young, utterly certain of themselves and unsure of the people around them.

---

JAILBAIT
Innocence defiled. Sticky pink bubblegum and the thick, sweet scent of orange and cherry lollipops smeared over a breath of heady womanly perfume.

ZEPHYR
A gentle white scent, breezes laced with the scent of springtime blooms and citrus. Lemon, lemon verbena, neroli, white musk, white florals, white sandalwood, China musk, bergamot and a drop of vanilla.

SWANK
Simply cool, the essence of Lounge: the scent of a crisp pomegranate martini.

HURRICANE
The Dark Side of Air: a high pitched, tangy, clear scent -- light China rain deepened by murky vetivert.

JUKE JOINT
A bawdy, gleefully wicked and unruly scent: Kentucky Bourbon, sugar and a sprig of mint.

THE BOW & CROWN OF CONQUEST
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

Nobility and haughtiness befitting the Antichrist: sage, carnation and cedar with lavender, vanilla, white musk and leather.

- work on Oracle Zuko; I may be in the downhill slide
- work on the Halloween vid
- make Seanan lyric icons
- bake bread

Southern Gods is possibly the best piece of cosmic horror I've read in a long time. Largely, this is because the hero and heroine do things, unlike Lovecraft's protagonists and William Hope Hodgson's heroine. Just because the universe doesn't care about us, or is outright inimical to us, doesn't mean we shouldn't do things. Besides faint, LOVECRAFT.

(A lot of Lovecraft's cosmic horror never really got to me as scary - I love the strangeness of it. I guess this is because the existence of the Mythos deities doesn't strike me as negation of the existence of my own deity. Also, either way, the idea of the universe not caring about us doesn't bother me.)

Way back in the 1870s, a young boy dying of tuberculosis gets offered a bargain with a dark power that came out of the woods around his plantation home. If he takes up his father's sword, kills the people in the house, and eats his brother's heart, he will be made well.

Fast-forward to the 1950s. Bull Ingram, a WWII vet from the Pacific theater, gets hired by a Memphis DJ to find two people: an agent of his who has gone missing and a mysterious bluesman called Ramblin' John Hastur. His music drives the living to madness - just hearing a recorded sample of it almost drives Ingram into a killing rage - and raises the dead. There's power in it, dark and terrible.

Meanwhile, Sarah leaves her abusive husband and takes her daughter with her back to her family home on an old plantation. She decides to care for her mother, who is dying of lupus, and her daughter Franny is just delighted to meet Sarah's friend Alice's two children. They run around as happy little hellions.

Sarah takes up translating a book from her parents' library as a way to pass the time: Oposculus Noctis, or The Little Book of Night. For you Mythos types, there are some familiar titles in that library. Very familiar.

Things gradually go to hell as Ingram tracks down John Hastur and Sarah translates that book. When Ingram winds up injured at Sarah's home, things really kick into overdrive - we have Father Andre show up to explain the cosmology, and Franny gets kidnapped to be used and violated to open the way for the Old Ones.

Jacobs does a really good job with this book. The descriptions of the pictures in the Necronomicon are the first time I've understood how a Mythos book can damage someone's sanity. It certainly damages Sarah's, and he does a good job of describing the mental shift they induce in her.

The setting is suberb - everything really feels like the Deep South to me. The unfolding, creeping horror is excellent done, though I think having Father Andre explain the cosmology of this universe detracted from it. To me, not everything needs to be explained. Having so much explained felt like it detracted from the strangeness of it all.

There was something going on with Sarah and Alice's friendship, though I never quite got what it was.

The ending of the book sent chills through me.

If you have abuse or rape triggers, do not read this book. Both of them are treated as very bad things, and very little of it is on-stage, but it's present enough.