And Better Time, Better Times, Are Coming Still . . .
The happiest of birthdays to the most wonderful of women, mswalter!
I think it is only fitting that she and maudgonne have birthdays so close to one another. They complement each other in the best of ways.
And, it gives me two opportunities to talk about two of my favorite people.
Seriously, y'all know how awesome mswalter is, right? She is amazing. She is one of the funniest people I know. She is honest, but never tactless, ambitious, but never ruthless, and one of the most self-disciplined people I know. She's endlessly generous to her friends, and endlessly tolerant of her family (you can tell that she loves them utterly.) She's one of the smartest people I know, and one of the best writers, by far.
She's who I want to be when I grow up, really.
In other news, Ryan Ross's Twitter, which apparently exists to document his epic fail at life, is making every moment of my day a little bit brighter.
Also,
Meme thing: Post a single sentence extract from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations. No more than one sentence!
1) "Oh ho," Caleb said, and Ryan tried to remember, tried to stay in this room on his knees, on this night. "Perhaps I didn’t give the boy enough credit. I think he’s just figured out that he’s tonight’s main attraction."
2) And okay, maybe Ryan used to call Security to come up and kill spiders in the shower and when he thought that there were monsters under his bed, but that had been years ago, and that had mostly been because he’d never had anyone else he could call, at least not unless Spencer was staying over.
3) It wasn’t until later, when he was calling his own mother for the third time in as many days, that it occurred to him that Brendon may have understood Ryan’s complicated grief better than anyone.
4) "It's possible," Ryan said in a dull monotone, "that my childhood may have fucked Spencer up just a little."
5) Your father is a rock star. Until seven hours ago, Melody had been pretty sure that sentence, like basically everything else that left her mother’s mouth these days, was a total lie.
6) "I’m not going to some crazy re-education camp in f-fudging Utah, I’m not teaching war-torn Cambodians about the wonders of Joseph Smith and I’m sure as h- heck not spending the next year on house-arrest homseschooling just for being a little bit different."
7) They had never planned to get married; had, in point of fact, spent a considerable amount of time and trouble to avoid it. He had certainly never planned to ask her on a dusty bench in front of the Burger Spot in Techachapi in front of a U-Haul carrying all the worldly remains of Dawn Atwood.
8) The problem here was that - goddamned magic-hour tableau or not - this kid didn’t remind Ryan of himself, not really. This kid with his sad, dead eyes looked just like Trey.
9) “Lehman phone,” he whispered to the man kneeling at his feet, in apology, and he felt Tony slide off his dick with a sigh of his own.
10) “Your father drives a Crown Vic? For real? How did you *not* know he was a Fed?”
11) She’d been handed off at the airport like a package gone astray, from the raw-boned Turkish army officer who’d accompanied her in blessed silence to a thin-lipped American diplomat named Harkness, whose hair was gelled into an eerie approximation of Gordon Gekko’s in Wall Street, and whose damp, limp handshake showed off perfectly manicured hands.
12) When Jim had finally opened the screen in front of John’s bowed head, he’d simply sighed and said, “It’s not a sin, John. Not the one you’re thinking of, anyway. I can’t keep absolving you for sins you don’t commit.” In the end, though, he’d heard John’s confession. He always did.
13) They’d discovered that with careful maneuvering they could fit in it together, hips only slightly overlapping, but most often Jensen would come home from the campaign office late at night to find Wentworth on it sideways, his knees flung over one arm, the horse lamp perched on a stack of old textbooks on a kitchen chair behind the other, the shade with the authentic lariat border tilted precariously, the half-exposed lightbulb beating down on the pages of some law text as if they themselves had committed a crime.
That is literally every WIP I've got opened on my hard drive right now. And I am amused that I've got three different Ryans in three different stories, two of which are fandom. Also, feel free to ask questions if you'd like -- not that there's anything that interesting to tell, really.
I think it is only fitting that she and maudgonne have birthdays so close to one another. They complement each other in the best of ways.
And, it gives me two opportunities to talk about two of my favorite people.
Seriously, y'all know how awesome mswalter is, right? She is amazing. She is one of the funniest people I know. She is honest, but never tactless, ambitious, but never ruthless, and one of the most self-disciplined people I know. She's endlessly generous to her friends, and endlessly tolerant of her family (you can tell that she loves them utterly.) She's one of the smartest people I know, and one of the best writers, by far.
She's who I want to be when I grow up, really.
In other news, Ryan Ross's Twitter, which apparently exists to document his epic fail at life, is making every moment of my day a little bit brighter.
Also,
Meme thing: Post a single sentence extract from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations. No more than one sentence!
1) "Oh ho," Caleb said, and Ryan tried to remember, tried to stay in this room on his knees, on this night. "Perhaps I didn’t give the boy enough credit. I think he’s just figured out that he’s tonight’s main attraction."
2) And okay, maybe Ryan used to call Security to come up and kill spiders in the shower and when he thought that there were monsters under his bed, but that had been years ago, and that had mostly been because he’d never had anyone else he could call, at least not unless Spencer was staying over.
3) It wasn’t until later, when he was calling his own mother for the third time in as many days, that it occurred to him that Brendon may have understood Ryan’s complicated grief better than anyone.
4) "It's possible," Ryan said in a dull monotone, "that my childhood may have fucked Spencer up just a little."
5) Your father is a rock star. Until seven hours ago, Melody had been pretty sure that sentence, like basically everything else that left her mother’s mouth these days, was a total lie.
6) "I’m not going to some crazy re-education camp in f-fudging Utah, I’m not teaching war-torn Cambodians about the wonders of Joseph Smith and I’m sure as h- heck not spending the next year on house-arrest homseschooling just for being a little bit different."
7) They had never planned to get married; had, in point of fact, spent a considerable amount of time and trouble to avoid it. He had certainly never planned to ask her on a dusty bench in front of the Burger Spot in Techachapi in front of a U-Haul carrying all the worldly remains of Dawn Atwood.
8) The problem here was that - goddamned magic-hour tableau or not - this kid didn’t remind Ryan of himself, not really. This kid with his sad, dead eyes looked just like Trey.
9) “Lehman phone,” he whispered to the man kneeling at his feet, in apology, and he felt Tony slide off his dick with a sigh of his own.
10) “Your father drives a Crown Vic? For real? How did you *not* know he was a Fed?”
11) She’d been handed off at the airport like a package gone astray, from the raw-boned Turkish army officer who’d accompanied her in blessed silence to a thin-lipped American diplomat named Harkness, whose hair was gelled into an eerie approximation of Gordon Gekko’s in Wall Street, and whose damp, limp handshake showed off perfectly manicured hands.
12) When Jim had finally opened the screen in front of John’s bowed head, he’d simply sighed and said, “It’s not a sin, John. Not the one you’re thinking of, anyway. I can’t keep absolving you for sins you don’t commit.” In the end, though, he’d heard John’s confession. He always did.
13) They’d discovered that with careful maneuvering they could fit in it together, hips only slightly overlapping, but most often Jensen would come home from the campaign office late at night to find Wentworth on it sideways, his knees flung over one arm, the horse lamp perched on a stack of old textbooks on a kitchen chair behind the other, the shade with the authentic lariat border tilted precariously, the half-exposed lightbulb beating down on the pages of some law text as if they themselves had committed a crime.
That is literally every WIP I've got opened on my hard drive right now. And I am amused that I've got three different Ryans in three different stories, two of which are fandom. Also, feel free to ask questions if you'd like -- not that there's anything that interesting to tell, really.