Mi vida loca, plus a Snapefic update

[fire_everything]

I feel a bit of a churl. For the last month I’ve had just enough spare time and energy to read f-listy posts as they went by, but not enough for the back-and-forth of commenting. This despite the fact that several of you were undergoing crises of fandom identity, making declarations of sexual identity, and posting delightful updates about your lives and kids. Since the posts on which I coulda/woulda/shoulda commented are all long gone by now, here is a brief summary of the responses I would have liked to have made to them at the time:

• shyfoxling, please don’t leave the fandom! In spite of your supposed lack of contribution, you have somehow managed to become one of my favorite folks to hairsplit trivial points of Potter lore with. I hope you’re feeling better about stuff lately.
• kellychambliss, in the words of a late-twentieth-century cinema classic, “I just know you’re gonna find your bike, Pee-wee!” If this makes absolutely no sense to you, how about “I hope you find your button, Snape"? OK, maybe I should just say it in English: I hope you get your fanfic groove back!
• stupid_drawings, your post about asexuality was one of the best things I’ve read online in the last few months. But since about a hundred other people had already pointed out what was great about it by the time I got there, I kinda let it slide. Sorry about that. But it was still great!
• drinkingcocoa, your girls are awesome. They have rockin’ hairstyles, too!

I really, seriously need a Time-Turner this semester. See the gory details below!

Perhaps the easiest way to explain why I haven’t had two extra brain cells to rub together lately is to make a list of the various things that have been in my handbag over the last few weeks (not, thankfully, at the same time).

• A copy of Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature
• A manual prepared by my co-worker on how to write a grant proposal that will actually get funded by my employer (drinkingcocoa, it's the very same one I mentioned to you a while back, which I am now reading for my own education; I am about to get some new and unwanted responsibilities at work.)
• A cheat sheet set of guidelines printed from my organization’s Intranet describing how the fuck our grant docket process works (Did I mention that I'm getting new and unwanted responsibilities at work?)
• Printouts of various chapters of my Snapefic for revising on the train
• The Wikipedia entry on the Dominican Republic (very well-written)
• The Wikipedia entry on Bolivia (not well-written)
• The Wikipedia entry on Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, who recently gave a speech at the college where I take evening classes (adequately written)
• A copy of Eat Pray Love, which is very much worth your time. (Unlike the movie, which I paid thirteen dollars to see one night when I knew I was too brain-dead to get any work done. The main problem with it is that Liz Gilbert’s voice, which lifted the book out of all the chick-lit/colonialist/privileged-Western-travelogue categories into which it threatened to fall, is almost entirely absent from the story. Also, Julia Roberts has way too many hairstyles and wardrobe changes.)
• A copy of Half-Blood Prince
• A copy of Joan Didion’s Salvador, a book-length piece of literary reportage on the civil war in El Salvador during the ‘80s, which I’ve owned for 15 years without ever reading. Despite the book’s being only 100 pages long, I have not finished it after a week.
• The Wikipedia entry on Che Guevara, after I realized I didn’t even know what country he was from (Argentina).
• Articles from the New York Times, El Pais, and the crappy English-language newspaper Dominican Today, about

1. The escalating drug violence in northern Mexico
2. The trapped miners in Chile
3. The fact that rich people steal more electricity in the Dominican Republic than poor people
4. The fact that the DR has, for some reason, not managed to make noticeable progress toward meeting the UN’s Millennium Goals (which include realistic items like “eliminate poverty” and “empower women,” and are to be accomplished in full by 2015)

• A copy of Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits, which I stupidly bought when I was between books after finishing Eat Pray Love, because it only cost seven dollars and Borders didn’t have the book I really wanted, Juan Gonzalez’ Harvest of Empire
• An email from my Spanish professor responding to my expression of concern about my level of oral comprehension and the disgustingly advanced speaking skills of a vocal minority of the class, attached to which was yet another article from El Pais about the escalating drug violence in Mexico to read for the following week
• Printouts of two short stories recently published by up-and-coming U.S. Latino writers in the New Yorker (Daniel Alarcón’s “Second Lives”) and the Boston Review (Patricia Engel’s “Desaliento”). Both of them were excellent, and I liked the Patricia Engel story so much that I think I’m going to pick her brand-new short-story collection, Vida, sight unseen as the topic for my final paper.

So, um…the Snapefic. Some of you might remember that it was due to be posted as part of the Marauder Big Bang, which is taking place, like, right now. In fact, if I can just get the necessary password from the mods (they’ve agreed to give me access to the site so I can do the formatting and posting myself), it will begin posting tomorrow. The crazy thing is that even after a two-week extension and an agreement that I would post last, the thing is still not finished. It will be posted by special arrangement with the mods as a WIP, with an initial post consisting of the first five chapters (roughly a third of the fic) and subsequent chapters going up on the MBB site as I finish them.

This is a weird arrangement with which I’m not entirely comfortable, and two weeks ago I actually offered/pleaded with the mods to drop out of the Bang so that I could have my life back and the mods could stop having to listen to my ever-erroneous projections of when the damn thing would be finished. The problem with that idea, though, was that there were two artists participating in the Bang who were doing banners or illustrations for my fic (not my idea, just the way this Bang works), and if I pulled out it would have left their illustrations without a backing fic, which would have been totally unfair to them. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because she’s just a constructive and helpful person, brighty18, the wonderful mod who has also been my beta, proposed the WIP solution above to keep me in the Bang.

As you may have gathered, this fic is really fucking long. I went through a period of shame over this, but at this point there’s nothing to do but own the length and frame it as a plus: it’s a whole novel about Snape! I know this is not exactly an unprecedented thing; drinkingcocoa  inadvertently did me a valuable service a while back by posting about several novel-length Snape fics that are (thank God) even longer than my own, thus saving me from any encroaching special-little-snowflake feelings I might have begun to develop about my World-Beating Snape Opus. Ironically, I had balked at reading a couple of these very fics, precisely because of their length.

So, I’m a hypocrite who’s going where several women have gone before. But so what? It’s a novel about Snape! Another one! You want to read another novel about Snape, right? Written in a semi-Rowling-ish tone, but with swear words, sex and other detritus of real adult life included? And with as many Potter in-jokes as I could squeeze into it?

And yes, of course Snape gets laid. What do you take me for?

For those who are interested, I’ll put a link up tomorrow when I post some extra thank-yous that wouldn’t conveniently fit into the regular header.



The fic is called Advanced Potion-Making, BTW. I'm pretty sure I stole that title from somewhere. 
Happy reading. For however long you’re able to stick with it, I really hope you’ll like it.