in which you are inundated with links
Firstly, as per the subject heading, I'm gonna link to some good online fiction. There's actually a lot of good fiction floating around online, but it can take some patience to find it, and I intend to be helpful in that pursuit to the three or four people actually reading my journal. So, then:
The Baker Street Record is crossover fanfiction for House Of Leaves and Sherlock Holmes, with some Borges thrown in for good measure. It's pretty long and the format is weird, as one might expect of a Mark Z. Danielewski pastiche. Still cool. Skip the sections labeled "Fragmentation 1/2" and "Fragmentation 2/2" if you do not want to read a fairly explicit Holmes/Watson sex scene; the sections are neat if you're into that sort of thing, but not crucial to understanding the plot or enjoying the story. spacklegeek and slingstone would probably both like this one, albeit for slightly different reasons.
Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Space/Time is a...like, viscerally...gorgeous short fiction/essay piece by the reliably awesome Catherynne Valente. It's difficult to describe. I think it sits somewhere between sci-fi, myth, and creative nonfiction, genre-wise, which is a tricky thing to pull off.
Beautiful White Bodies is a vampire story. (-ish.) A story about pretty, sparkly, charismatic vampires, at that. Normally, I'm not very interested in vampire stories, especially if the vampires are pretty or sparkly or charismatic, but this one's good, and quite creepy. And funny. It has Social Commentary mixed in there, too, which usually works but is occasionally a little heavy-handed for my taste. There seem to be a couple of typos, which I probably noticed only because I'm anal-retentive about that sort of thing.
The Regime Of Austerity is a weird little sort-of-fable that manages to be touching and bittersweet despite its goofy premise. I can almost imagine Kurt Vonnegut coming up with something like this, though the writing style itself isn't really Vonnegut-esque.
...I encourage all three or four of y'all to check them out.
Secondly...gosh, I don't know. What's even happened in my life of late? I bought stockings and garters. I changed my hair a bit and dyed it back to dark brown, realizing too late that I was making myself look a lot like Ayn Rand. I got some new meds, and may write some sort of pill review once I've been on them for a while. (I keep meaning to write pill reviews, mostly because I wish there were more of them-- I find them helpful, anyway.) My sister is always out with her friends or watching really awful TV in the basement, where it's cool. My brother works for a company that deals in human saliva and has a social life that revolves entirely around playing The Settlers Of Catan. His boardgaming friends are wary around me because the only thing he's bothered to tell them about me is that I got arrested and went to jail once*, which I guess seems strange and intimidating to middle-class suburban teenagers from a college town in the middle of corn&bovineland. My parents are usually working at their respective jobs too, as is usual. My dog is old and barks in his sleep. I look after the house and the garden in a kind of vague and negligent way: sometimes I cook things, and I pull weeds when it occurs to me to do so. My fingers are blistered from uprooting sassafrass barehanded. (Do not do this, readers. Always wear gardening gloves. I was being stupid and lazy.)
*For ten hours. For protesting/"disturbing the peace." It wasn't terribly badass.