(no subject)
What am I good for?
I know that if I were a Very Concerned and Deep Person I would be writing about the impending war, and my thoughts on it and all, but frankly, I've been pretending we don't have a president since 2000, so unless something war-like happens in my immediate vicinity (God forbid) that requires me to go into actual action (God forbid-er), I can keep on ignoring for a lot longer.
Although I should have gone to something over the weekend. I didn't do the protest marches out here because it rained and I had to sing that night and couldn't afford to get sick (or so I rationalized), but the next day there were candlelight vigils all over the place, and I have no excuse for no going to one of those.
monanotlisa, I love your new icon. I may just steal the Dubya picture and put devil horns on it.
Oh well. MoveOn.org is urging people to put a light of some kind in their windows to show that they still support peace, no matter what kind of fuck-you Dubya is giving the country and indeed, the world. If you go to the link above, you can sign up to say you are doing so and leave (best part) a comment as to why. At least my lazy ass can do that.
And in cat news...
I got new collars for my cats, because their old ones - as kjdraft so eloquently puts it, "looked like ASS." The ones I'd had for years had those safety thingies on them that give way if the cat strains against it, so that if they ever get stuck somewhere, the cat won't choke. They occasionally came off when the guys wrestled, but generally stayed in place, did a fine job. The new ones have those safety things too, but they're made by a different people. So Gromit goes out today, roughly two days after New Collar Day, and immediately comes back collarless - NAKED, if you will. I asked my little sudden nudist what he'd done with it, and of course being a cat, he was less than forthcoming. I looked all over outside, and came up snake-eyes. So NOW, even if I do find the damn thing, I will have no confidence in its ability to hang on to my cat's neck and properly identify him should he get lost. I may have to hunt down new versions of the old brand of collars, the ones I trust, although what's happened may have nothing to do with what brand of collar is being used. Just my own wacky theories.
And I swear, Gromit just does these things to see if they can be done.
And now, back to the important stuff - fic
In my little Ask Anne poll, deslea asked what got me to writing. I told her it was mostly fantasies I wanted to see worked out, but I forgot another very important motivator:
Word play. Titles that come to me first, and then beg to be justified, no matter how much twisting has to be done to achieve it, AND - here's the big "and" - do so believably.
"Done to Death" was conceived completely that way. I wanted to add something to the few Tara/Spike stories that were out there, and was thinking that I didn't want to do what had already been...you guessed it. Then I thought about one person being "done", as in done with life, and having that thrown up against "death", in the form of Spike. Strangely, death would be the thing that helped Tara live, which would then make Spike switch to being "done" - done chasing the Holy Buffy Grail and getting his ass kicked for his trouble.
See how fun that is? :P
(Actually, I did go round and round over the fact that I didn't actually believe Tara would ever be the kind that attempted suicide, and tried to find as much to support it as I could, then finally just went "fuck it - I wanna write the story and I'm gonna.")
I have a new one brewing right now. I think it's going to be another yes-I'm-still-teasing-everyone-but-not-yet-getting-down-to-it sequel to "DTD", with the narrator being...Oz. I've never written Oz before, but he's the only man for this particular job, because of the title I've thought up, which I'm...not going to tell you. :) It'd spoil things. But boy it's nice to have some reason to write Oz - Oz just rocks. I hope I do him justice.
Thinking about Oz, though, (which I was, in case you didn't click the LJ cut) makes me think about other things I might just write, which are more in the never-gonna-happen-onscreen-might-as-well-get-my-jollies-out-in-fic variety. For instance, I've always hated that the Willow-is-gay thing got so damn political with the lesbian viewers, and that the character is now essentially stuck on one path because of Joss and Co's fear of backlash. I mean, isn't a bi character even more interesting than a gay one? ::sigh::, I guess TV's probably even less ready for that, honestly, but a comeback of Oz or the "finally!" pairing up of she and Xander would be awfully satisfying. Hell, even though I don't like Willow/Spike, I've thought of writing one just so I could title it something like "Hello! Bi Still!" (as opposed to "Gay Now", heh, get it...?)
Wow, all this text - can you tell I'm no longer at the temp job? (Wa-hoo!)
I know that if I were a Very Concerned and Deep Person I would be writing about the impending war, and my thoughts on it and all, but frankly, I've been pretending we don't have a president since 2000, so unless something war-like happens in my immediate vicinity (God forbid) that requires me to go into actual action (God forbid-er), I can keep on ignoring for a lot longer.
Although I should have gone to something over the weekend. I didn't do the protest marches out here because it rained and I had to sing that night and couldn't afford to get sick (or so I rationalized), but the next day there were candlelight vigils all over the place, and I have no excuse for no going to one of those.
monanotlisa, I love your new icon. I may just steal the Dubya picture and put devil horns on it.
Oh well. MoveOn.org is urging people to put a light of some kind in their windows to show that they still support peace, no matter what kind of fuck-you Dubya is giving the country and indeed, the world. If you go to the link above, you can sign up to say you are doing so and leave (best part) a comment as to why. At least my lazy ass can do that.
And in cat news...
I got new collars for my cats, because their old ones - as kjdraft so eloquently puts it, "looked like ASS." The ones I'd had for years had those safety thingies on them that give way if the cat strains against it, so that if they ever get stuck somewhere, the cat won't choke. They occasionally came off when the guys wrestled, but generally stayed in place, did a fine job. The new ones have those safety things too, but they're made by a different people. So Gromit goes out today, roughly two days after New Collar Day, and immediately comes back collarless - NAKED, if you will. I asked my little sudden nudist what he'd done with it, and of course being a cat, he was less than forthcoming. I looked all over outside, and came up snake-eyes. So NOW, even if I do find the damn thing, I will have no confidence in its ability to hang on to my cat's neck and properly identify him should he get lost. I may have to hunt down new versions of the old brand of collars, the ones I trust, although what's happened may have nothing to do with what brand of collar is being used. Just my own wacky theories.
And I swear, Gromit just does these things to see if they can be done.
And now, back to the important stuff - fic
In my little Ask Anne poll, deslea asked what got me to writing. I told her it was mostly fantasies I wanted to see worked out, but I forgot another very important motivator:
Word play. Titles that come to me first, and then beg to be justified, no matter how much twisting has to be done to achieve it, AND - here's the big "and" - do so believably.
"Done to Death" was conceived completely that way. I wanted to add something to the few Tara/Spike stories that were out there, and was thinking that I didn't want to do what had already been...you guessed it. Then I thought about one person being "done", as in done with life, and having that thrown up against "death", in the form of Spike. Strangely, death would be the thing that helped Tara live, which would then make Spike switch to being "done" - done chasing the Holy Buffy Grail and getting his ass kicked for his trouble.
See how fun that is? :P
(Actually, I did go round and round over the fact that I didn't actually believe Tara would ever be the kind that attempted suicide, and tried to find as much to support it as I could, then finally just went "fuck it - I wanna write the story and I'm gonna.")
I have a new one brewing right now. I think it's going to be another yes-I'm-still-teasing-everyone-but-not-yet-getting-down-to-it sequel to "DTD", with the narrator being...Oz. I've never written Oz before, but he's the only man for this particular job, because of the title I've thought up, which I'm...not going to tell you. :) It'd spoil things. But boy it's nice to have some reason to write Oz - Oz just rocks. I hope I do him justice.
Thinking about Oz, though, (which I was, in case you didn't click the LJ cut) makes me think about other things I might just write, which are more in the never-gonna-happen-onscreen-might-as-well-get-my-jollies-out-in-fic variety. For instance, I've always hated that the Willow-is-gay thing got so damn political with the lesbian viewers, and that the character is now essentially stuck on one path because of Joss and Co's fear of backlash. I mean, isn't a bi character even more interesting than a gay one? ::sigh::, I guess TV's probably even less ready for that, honestly, but a comeback of Oz or the "finally!" pairing up of she and Xander would be awfully satisfying. Hell, even though I don't like Willow/Spike, I've thought of writing one just so I could title it something like "Hello! Bi Still!" (as opposed to "Gay Now", heh, get it...?)
Wow, all this text - can you tell I'm no longer at the temp job? (Wa-hoo!)