Paranormal for the People

My Kickstarter project has made its funding goal with 5 days left on the clock, so thank you thank you thank you to everyone who contributed to that. It's a remarkable feeling for me, and I think it's just a remarkable model for supporting artists in general -- something I definitely want to do from this point on is keep an eye on Kickstarter for things that I can back. It's just really good karma, I feel.

As mentioned, I do have five more days, and hey, don't feel like you can't still buy in! The smaller amounts basically amount to pre-orders for the book, and that's always a nice thing.

I'm also working on a little Sherlock story that should be ready in a couple of days, because everyone needs a hobby. *g*

Post title is not short for relationship, but is my new mantra, as I try to get things out into the world -- many of them things that I have been hoarding and worrying over for a very long time. Because the thing is you can make the best widgets in the known universe, and if you don't SHIP THEM OUT, who cares? Watch this space for more in the very near future, but in the meantime, here's some old stuff. If you haven't seen it, it's new to you.


The Miracle Worker
SGA. Very short-sweet Ronon/Rodney story that takes place after "Inferno." I really genuinely like "Inferno." And I really genuinely think that sometimes people are not very nice to Rodney. Sometimes those people are me, but not this time.

Steadfast, Loyal, and True
SGA. I think of this as a kind of companion piece to "Fourteen Years," in that it's another attempt at a Unified Field Theory of Ronon, looking at the whole scope of his life and what he's become. Sort of a Ronon/Teyla story, but mostly Ronon/Melena, and about why Ronon's the kind of man who just can't stop being faithful to his wife.

Ode
SGA. Another supercute Ronon/Rodney, wherein I share some of my favorite Great Poems of the English Language, like the huge nerd that I am. Still, though, e.e. cummings is very hot, and that is the Profound Theme of this story.

Alpha Centauri
SGA. Oh, yes. This is my epicest epic ever to epic, a novel-length Ronon/Rodney/John love triangle/clusterfuck/OT3. Because I had no idea what I was doing when I started it, I think the first three chapters are a little rocky (especially 3, which was written well before we'd seen enough of Ronon for me to grasp his voice), but it gets better. Chapter 10 is, imho, the best thing I've ever written. It's sexy, it's angsty, it's romantic, it's everything you ever wanted without even knowing it. No refunds or exchanges.

Orleans
BtVS. Didn't you always want to know where Faith was, in the Wishverse? Well, I did. It's hard to write cheery Wishverse fic, for obvious reasons, and so I didn't. But it's a harder Buffy and a softer Faith and killer alligators and a little bit around the edges about the Powers That Be and a little bit about dying young. You know, light summer reading.

Pink Ladies
BtVS. You know who's really hard to write? Drusilla. But how great was she? This is the only vampire story I've ever written, so I really wanted to just go for broke, and I feel that I accomplished that. Blood, sex, death, madness, lesbians. The whole kit and kaboodle. After I slandered the God of Abraham in the story above, watch me for a change of pace slander the Triple Goddess. Good times.

Be Cool
SGA. Really my only straight-up McShep story. Rodney wants to be cool like John, because don't we all?

Lexicon
The Sentinel. An injury in the line of duty take Jim's ability to speak, and so of course it's a story about communication, I guess, but also just about the balance of power in relationships, about dependence and caretaking. I like that it came out kind of pensive but not really angsty, because I sometimes have a hard time not going to 11. This is hurt/comfort at a nice 7.5

Release Mechanism
SGA. Everyone has at least one Alien Sex Slave Planet story in them, right? John/Ronon, and what I like about this one is that along with being good, sexy dubcon fun, it's actually pretty funny. I try to be funny sometimes, with mixed results. This one works, I think. You know, for a dubcon story about slavery.

Pass/Fail
SGA MENSA!verse. With the Sheppard and McKay role-reversals of the MENSAverse, it occurred to me that Sheppard probably wasn't friendly enough to get past Ronon's defenses like he did in canon s2. I figured it would've been Rod instead, so this is the story about that. With bonus cute kids, because hey, canon.

ALSO SOMETHING NEW!

The Lily Maid of Atlantis
I usually do not post WIPs, but the thing is that right now I have a lot of unfinished things that really deserve better than to die of old age on my hard drive, and I feel like having tried not posting them and discovering that doesn't work, I would try the opposite. So, this.

This story will always be Bride of Ronon to me. It's -- AND I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH -- an OFC story, so expect whatever it is you normally expect from one of those. I realize that's pretty much kryptonite for a lot of people, but I would really like it if folks wanted to try this anyway, because I really have a soft spot for it. (It's especially fun and/or trippy to imagine it as an AU Drogo/Daenerys story, in a universe where Khal Drogo is, y'know, Ronon, and instead of dragons, Daeny is really good at baking pies.)

Eve of Darkness
S.J. Day
Tor, 2009

Amazon synopsis: "For Evangeline Hollis, a long-ago fling with a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks just became a disaster of Biblical proportions. One night with a leather-clad man of mystery has led to a divine punishment: the Mark of Cain. Thrust into a world where sinners are drafted into service to kill demons, Eve's learning curve is short. A longtime agnostic, she begrudgingly maneuvers through a celestial bureaucracy where she is a valuable but ill-treated pawn. She's also become the latest point of contention in the oldest case of sibling rivalry in history.... But she'll worry about all that later. Right now she's more concerned with learning to kill while staying alive. And saving the soul she'd never believed she had."

( so. many. spoilers. )

So I've been VV EXCITED about the HBO Game of Thrones adaptation, because I've been a fan of that series since forever (my copy has the old, ugly artwork of Some Guy Who Doesn't Appear to Be Ned, But Who Knows? riding randomly around Winterfell, I Guess). Obviously I went into the stratosphere when they cast Jason as Khal Drogo, because YES, OF COURSE YOU DO THAT -- it's like casting Alan Rickman as Snape. OF COURSE YOU DO THAT. You have to do that.

Anyway, it premiered last week, obviously, and I have some thoughts. I'll tell you the biggest, broadest ones right up front, but the single thing I reacted to most intensely goes under the spoiler cut.

In general: holy hell, it's pretty. It's gorgeous. So yay for that. I also am generally really pleased by the actors, with a couple of question marks in my head about casting/performance choices. Mark Addy is doing a fine job with Robert, but it's just slightly off to me: in dwelling on Robert's dissipation, they kind of seem to be missing the underlying sadness of Robert's character, which is that he is a *fighter* above all else, a man who was an amazing, competent warrior and commander, then got shoehorned by a society that worships prowess in war into governance, which, SURPRISE, requires an entirely different skill set. Robert is a shitty king and he doesn't enjoy it and has never been truly happy a day in his life since he took the throne, but he was once a giant among men, and it's the awareness of that comedown (his awareness and ours) that makes him easy to sympathize with, even through all of Robert's bullshit. I don't know that I see the former greatness in Addy's portrayal, although maybe it'll come out along the line. (They're doing a similar dance with Tyrion, whose "perversion" in the book was always much more about being a brilliant and bitter guy who was brutally honest about things that other people pretty up, more than about actually being more decadent or self-indulgent than anyone else -- which I don't think you'd get from this episode -- but maybe they're building to it?)

I'm also not totally sure about the guy who plays Jaime, but you know, Jaime is a difficult character, since he's probably changed more over the course of the series than anyone else. I'm keeping an open mind on that. I find the dude a little funny-looking, which is a slight hindrance with a character that everyone says all the time is the Handsomest Man in Westeros, but maybe that's me, and Jaime's a complicated enough character that they're smart to go with a good actor over the Handsomest Actor in Westeros, if the decision comes down to that.

In general the adaptation reminded me of how much of the wordcount of GoT (and the whole series, although probably less so than in this establishing book) is all about the internal worlds of these multiple viewpoint characters -- how much of what's interesting about it is Martin's existentialist perspective that the rules or the facts of building Westeros as a secondary world are not as significant at *the way that his characters believe Westeros works.* Everything you get as a reader is filtered through the inner voice of one particular character, so that there isn't really an authoritative narrator voice in the series -- the world is what people believe it is, and every conflict in the book comes, at the end of the day, down to people who have irreconcilable differences in the way they believe the world works.

In some ways, tv is a great medium for that, because the audience has the same perspective on all the characters: we aren't limited to any one point of view, even for the duration of a chapter. In other ways, tv is going to fail miserably, because you just can't get deeply enough into anyone to understand how who they are colors the facts you're watching unfold. It's most obvious, I think, with the Jon Snow stuff: yeah, you get that Jon Snow is the bastard son of the lord, and you get that the lord's wife doesn't like him. But because you get a lot in the book from *both* Ned's and Cat's viewpoint, there's just a huge amount of richness as to why Ned's sense of honor makes his kindness to Jon inevitable, and why Cat's sense of honor makes his kindness to Jon feel like a huge insult. There's no flatly correct answer given to that -- although modern readers with their modern values are going to default, in probably 100% of cases, to being nice to kids who had nothing to do with their parentage, Cat's *not wrong* that the obvious favor Ned shows to Jon reflects badly in the eyes of the world on the whole family. Robert provides for his bastards, but everyone understands that Cersei would fucking murder him in his sleep if he brought one to live with her kids, because it would be a gruesome insult. Cat lives with a gruesome insult every day from a man who otherwise appears to love her very much, and she's pissed about that and has no one *but* Jon to take it out on. Once you see that from her point of view, and you see from Jon's that he feels very keenly the lack of a mother in his life, since all knowledge of his own mother is kept from him and the woman who mothers his siblings can't bear to be near him -- it's just really poignant and complicated, a terrible situation where you can sympathize with everyone involved. That's the kind of stuff that makes the book intelligent and truthful, in a way that I'm just afraid the tv show never really can be.

Okay, but still, it's really gorgeous to look at, and I have high hopes that a lot of the intrigue plotlines are going to come out very well -- can't wait for the scene where Arya gets trapped down among the dragon skulls!

So, then. About Daenerys and Drogo. ( Hoo, boy. )

2000 AD: Justin Timberlake wants to take your order.

2010 AD: Justin Timberlake wants you to take his order.

If I didn't know the first song, would I find the second one so hilarious? Oh, yes. Yes, I would. I think I'm supposed to find it hilarious? Hopefully.

You know, following a celebrity for almost ten years is an interesting experience. Overall, in spite of some gentle mockery, I have to say that I picked an okay one when I picked my boy. In spite of how we were sometimes unsure back when he was just a pup, he turned out to be bright, funny, crazy talented, and almost preternaturally stable, for a kid who got his high school diploma handed to him on an arena stage. And he's still got Trace. Mere anarchy is indeed loosed upon the world in many ways -- but, Justin and Trace. So that's cool.

I AM BETTY'S POP RENAISSANCE. (Translation: if you haven't read any of my Betty Plotnick stuff, or haven't lately, maybe do! Some of it is not so great, but the better stuff is probably the best stuff I've ever written -- I think Mercy or Bide would appeal to almost anyone, and fans of my angstier, bitter-er writing would probably like Fire & Rain and Unarmed.)

Week 3 and I'm now at 26 stories on AO3 -- officially too many to fit all the summaries on one page, woot! Newbies this time around are:

The Bee-Charmer -- SGA. I don't know if I've ever written anything more family-friendly than this Ronon/Teyla piece; aside from a couple of "fucks," you could almost let your grandma read it. I like shy!Ronon, courting Teyla via hog roasting. Because what woman could resist a hot guy having a barbeque?

Ghosti -- due South. As anyone who reads much of my stuff knows, I have a particular fondness for grabbing onto one particular decision that someone makes in canon and going, What would happen after that if they did the exact opposite thing? It's a game that just fascinates me to no end. This one is the, What if they took those transfers after Mountie on the Bounty? story. One of the rare stories that I did actual research for, and like East O the Sun, West O the Moon, it manifests my obsession with the idea of Kowalski experiencing the wilderness for the first time. I still feel like I have another story on that theme in me somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. (On a random personal note, "The answer is fucking fish" is probably my favorite of the lines I've ever written that were supposed to be funny. That bit still makes me grin, and usually I hate going back and reading the alleged funny stuff in my stories.)

Herrenvolk -- Smallville. I think I wrote this during the summer after the first season aired, so it's kind of interesting to go back and see what I thought the future might look like for these characters. Yeah, it didn't turn out to be that. I don't quite know what kind of a story this is, except that it's one of those things I like to write where a character muddles through the complicated different types of love he has for the people he cares about, in this case Lana, Chloe, and Lex. This is the type of the story that makes me want to drive a pick through my eye when I'm supposed to come up with a pairing label. But I do so love writing them that it's worth it.

In the Hands of Yes -- SGA. Ta-da! Almost without a doubt the single most popular thing I've ever written, back on the internet at last. If you managed to miss it the first time, it's one-half Aliens Make them Get Married Rodney/Ronon adorableness wallow, grafted on to one-half of -- something else entirely, God knows what you'd call it. Something about John. It was actually inspired totally and completely by the quote at the end of the story, which I ran across in a college creative writing class, which got me thinking about how to write a story where marriage wasn't the Happy Ending of the story, but that still was about a happy marriage. This is also more of a unique story for me in that there are some homophobia themes in it, which is just not my wheelhouse and I usually avoid writing. I think it works because it comes in third for themes, after "Commitment is kind of scary" and "Your other relationships change after you stop being a single person."

Lexicon -- The Sentinel. Speaking of marriage, I think one thing that anyone with half a functioning imagination worries about when they make a long-term commitment is what will happen if they're ever in a position of needing to give extensive care to a sick or injured partner. It's universally scary, and therefore great story conflict. It's interesting to me that, while that was the story I wanted to write, by giving Jim the POV here, I really put a lot of distance between the story and that issue, and it became a story much more about a very self-reliant person adjusting to needing care and accommodations that he never expected to need. I think Lexicon is a really good story, but I just find it interesting that it's not at all the one I started writing.

Penitent -- SGA. Man, I still resent having to use this title; I wanted to call it "The Long Goodbye," which is a vastly better title for this story than it was for the episode, but it seemed weird to do that. In my head, it'll always be called The Long Goodbye. Another story that defies my ability to label it -- Teyla gen or Teyla/John? What about the Rodney/John and Ronon/John? I think I kicked some Rodney/Ronon into it just because even by my standards this was a really fucking bleak story without it. It's deathfic -- I'm always willing to warn for character death when it happens at the beginning of the story, though not when it spoils the ending. This is not a spoiler: John is all kinds of dead in it.

Sibylla ti theleis -- due South. I guess TS Eliot just serves as a challenge one has to rise to meet as a writer, or maybe you always bust out your A game when someone tells you you're going to be writing gift-fic for Kat Allison; for whatever reason, I think this is probably the most fully competent thing I've ever written. And that sounds weirdly backhanded, but it gives me a good feeling! I often feel like I'm a very interesting writer with moments of genius, but I rarely feel like the things I write feel *done,* in a sense. I just get to a point where there's an ending and I'm like, this'll do, I like this pretty well. This is maybe the one story I've ever written that I wouldn't change a word of. I just think I got it right.

Witness -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a side of Dark Angel. Not really a crossover per se, except that it sets up what I think is a kind of interesting fusion of the BtVS universe with the post-apocalyptic Dark Angel mythology. I was pretty much entirely wrong about who would survive the series and who wouldn't, of course -- not that I was really trying to guess accurately. It's always tough to write a "redeemed" version of an anti-hero character; you don't want to take a character like Faith and reshape her out of all recognition to make her a (to use Joss' parlance) champion again -- but on the other hand, I really love redemption stories! I actually really like this fusion universe, and the story does more to set it up than it really does to take advantage of it.

While all y'all were arguing about Adam and Kris, I have to admit that I stopped giving a shit the minute Allison left. So while I like both Kris Allen and For Your Entertainment well enough, what I'm saying is,

ALLISON'S ALBUM IS OUT TODAY AND I AM VERY, VERY, VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT! SERIOUSLY, SO EXCITED! EEEEEE!

Aaand, off to listen.

So all at once this week I got the news that Eastwick and Dollhouse have both been cancelled, which makes me sad, because the former was SO FUN and the latter was VERY GOOD. I suppose if both of those things could have happened in the same show, that'd be neat, but it's an imperfect world.

My only worry now is whether or not they'll put out the 13 episodes of Eastwick on DVD (they seem to be planning to burn them all off...sometime...which, great. See, this is why people don't like to commit to new shows. We know that not only will you cancel them, you *won't even tell us* where to find the episodes you've already filmed. Which just comes across as petty.) Other than that, I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that a show with four foxy, funny grown women and Paul Gross was in my life briefly, and then gone. TV fandom makes you philosophical like that. Anyway, now I'll just have to watch the spinoff in my head, where Kat and Joanna quit declaring their eternal love for each other and just *do* something about it, already. Actually, the sitcom about Joanna trying in her wonky, spastic way to be the big, gay stepmother to five little kids would be FUCKING AWESOME -- I mean, they should actually put that on the air! People would totally watch that show. If you somehow missed Eastwick, grab what chances you can now. The pilot is a little clunky, as pilots often are, but it gets consistently better and better, imo.

On a related note, as the year winds down and Best of the Decade stuff starts to pop up, The AV Club just posted its list of the best tv shows of the last 10 years. (I can't say enough nice things about AVClub, which is the smartest, coolest place on the internet to get your non-fannish entertainment news & analysis. Okay, the one bad thing I can say is that it's gotten so popular over the last couple of years that a good article can get well over a thousand comments, which means it's a full-time job to keep up with everything happening on AVC all the time, and if you don't jump on an article within a couple hours of its posting, you're buried on page 3, so there aren't as many conversations happening in the comments as there used to be. But it's still cool.) I think it's a totally reasonable list (particularly in combination with their supplementary lists of one-season wonders and best episodes from shows that didn't make the main list), so bear in mind I'm not picking on AVC's list as such when I note that only four of the 30 shows had a female headliner, and holy shit, that makes me sad.

After being sad about that for a while, though, I noticed one other interesting thing, which is that three of those four shows -- Veronica Mars, Freaks & Geeks, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- were actually centered on teenage girls (or closely post-teenage, in the case of the back half of Buffy, the part that falls in the 2000s). That means that of the list's 30 shows, ONE was anchored by an adult woman -- 30 Rock. I found it not remotely coincidental that the grown woman who stars in that show just happened to get there by starting out as a wildly influential writer-producer, so that basically my take-away from this list that if women want to star on great tv shows, they're apparently going to have to plan on building them by hand.

In fairness, lots of the shows on the list featured amazing actresses in amazing roles. Battlestar Galactica is so female-heavy that Mary agitated with me to include it as the fifth "woman headlined" show on the list, and I almost went for it. Big Love is a similar actress bonanza, and I don't think there are really better acting roles out there than CJ Craig on West Wing, River Tam on Firefly, or Carmela Soprano. I haven't gotten off my ass to watch Six Feet Under or Mad Men (I know, right?!), but I am assured they have all kinds of cool women. Which is all great, but it still makes me sad to realize that on some level, even the best writers in the medium seem to feel that either the stories or the audiences demand that those characters work in the service of the overarching Heroic Narrative of some dude.

Anyway, I still have True Blood in my life, albeit between seasons. While Joss has been crafting his skillful but incredibly grim treatise on the nature of objectification, Alan Ball has been more Joss Whedon than Joss Whedon these last couple of years in his ability to whipsaw between shock-value, hilarity, hotness, and thoughtful meditations on the human condition as viewed through the mirror of the nonhuman. Although I swear to Zod that if he turns Eric into a fucking whiny-ass pansy like Spike, I'm going to hunt him down and skin him.

Ever been stuck for ages on a particular scene, only to realize that the reason you can't make yourself go back to it is that, deep down, you know nothing is actually going to happen in this scene? D'oh!

Anyway, clearly I have to do Something Else here, but rather than just delete it, I thought, what the hell, DVD extra. Dunno that it'll make much sense, but there were some pretty lines that deserve a decent burial.

( elfpunk novel-in-progress: the late, lamented beginning of ch. 12 )