The Long List of I-Haven't-Posted-In-Awhile
I'm posting because I can - Toys is at his night class, and I'm home alone, drinking a beer and thinking about Buffyfic. About reading it, and how I haven't written it in an age, although I've thought about it a lot. (In that context, the news about Writercon happening for reals next year struck me as kind of depressing - at this juncture, since I've been such a tardy author, overall lax presence online, and generally shitty Internet friend, I doubt anyone would even want to talk to me in the flesh.) But there are a couple of fic masterworks I feel I should point to.
Excerpted from Chapter 10.
Spike had been surprised to see Buffy, but he'd played the gracious host, offering her his spot on the couch and letting Clem keep the ratty old recliner. She hadn't been fooled. He'd chosen to sit where he could slowly insinuate himself into a position that made it almost natural for him to lean against her leg.
And she'd chosen to let him.
But now he was standing up, and the spot on her calf where her flesh had slowly warmed against the curve of his back felt bereft.
Dawn poked her. "Buffy? Are you coming? It's an ice cream run!"
"It's a blood and smokes run, but you can come for the ride, Bit," said Spike, looking at Buffy as he reached for a crumpled pile of leather. "Want to chaperone, Slayer?" He tugged on his duster and stood waiting.
Stupid vamp. I bet he thinks he looks cool and enigmatic. He just looks needy. And hot. But mostly needy. His eyebrow quirked upwards, and his head tilted to one side so that the glow from the lopsided table lamp caught his sharp cheekbones and the lapis glow of his eyes. Well, neediness is there in the mix, anyway.
Buffy shrank into herself, sitting cross-legged with her arms around her torso. Going anywhere with someone who looked like that but was not kissable material due to evilness was of the Bad.
But there would be ice cream.
"We can bring something back for you." Dawn's voice was impatient.
"Okay." Buffy brightened at this compromise. Spike didn't look quite so pleased, but he held the door open for Dawn and followed her out into the cemetery. Buffy tried hard not to listen to the thud of their footsteps as they made their way to his ratty old car.
This was of the Good. Buffy had avoided closeness with the evil vampire. And she'd done so in spite of the lure of ice cream.
On the other hand, she'd let her baby sister go off riding in a car with the evil vampire and no seat belts. Not so good. Besides, if she'd gone along, she could have put in a good word for cheesecake. Strawberry cheesecake was sounding very, very good right now.
And she was now sitting in a crypt with two demons who were heavily into old movies and caramel corn. Neither good nor bad, but surely stupid.
Besides, Buffy didn't like caramel corn. And she was afraid to even comment on the movie, in which Katherine Hepburn seemed to be playing a lot of sports and trying to appease her boyfriend who was obviously a total dork. Why couldn't this woman see that he was only keeping her down and making her insecure?
Gathering courage, Buffy voiced her objections, and Lulu's eyes swiveled towards her. "He's just the fiancé. There's always a fiancé, and he never gets the girl." She didn't add, Everyone knows that, but she might as well have.
"Spencer Tracy gets the girl," said Clem in the voice of someone who is kind to idiots and people cursed with unwrinkled skin.
Buffy eyed Spencer. "He's not very tall," she objected. She shrank further into herself as Clem and Lulu turned to stare at her pityingly.
"Want some of these new Slim Jims?" Asked Clem at last, obviously searching for some common ground upon which to converse with a Slayer. "They've got peanut butter inside."
"Peanut butter?"
"It's a new thing." Lulu reached down and picked up a bag. "Like these wasabi-flavored pork rinds, or those new Stilton marshmallows. They're test marketing them in Sunnydale."
"They test market a lot of stuff here," said Clem. "It's a little-known fact that over 20 percent of snack food nationwide is consumed by demons. So if a new product can make it here, it can make it anywhere."
Buffy thought about this statement long enough to decide it wasn't Slayer business and she could stop thinking about it. It was no part of her Sacred Mission to protect junk food, no matter what was consuming it. (However, it did finally explain to her satisfaction the existence of Marshmallow Peeps.) She stared at the TV.
God, what don't I love about that? The way the little details build and play off each other, ironies and pop-culture winks - demons as product testers! - and the inevitable, beautiful character insights that missmurchison does so well. Awe. That's me right now. Awe.
Okay, you have to join the community to read this sucker, but ohmigod, is it worth it. (Please, don't click on this one unless you're of age. It's dirty.) Don't Stop
Excerpted from Chapter 7:
She obstructed his view of the ceiling, and his ire miraculously melted away. The Slayer was such a titillating study in contrasts -- powerhouse heavyweight in a 6 stone body; brazen nymphet who shyly covered her naughty bits as if he hadn't just spelunked them with his tongue.
"Tell you what, puffin." He pulled her down on top of him and placed her hand on his stirring groin. "Here on in, barring death and dismemberment, anything goes." He hissed as she squeezed his balls. "Can't say I mind a little pain with my pleasure."
"You mean it?" She walked her fingers up his torso to his nodding face and rubbed the pointed curve of his cheekbone. "'Cause I have been dying to do this."
Spike reeled from her powerful slap. The Slayer really put her back into that one.
Buffy was smug -- he so deserved that for anally invading her without so much as a 'Geronimo' -- until she noticed the pool of blood that had leaked out of his skull. "Oh my god, are you--?"
Before she could dote more -- which, for the best really, no good could come of doting -- he elbowed her in the chin and somersaulted her over his head.
"Oof," she said upon crashing into the adjacent coffee table, unyielding angles cutting into beyond-sore muscles.
"You're right, pet. That is fun." Revitalized, he rose from the couch and languidly fondled himself while he watched her squirm. "I don't know what gets me hotter though, giving or receiving. You?"
"Giving," she said as she kicked him in the face.
He shook it off with a wicked grin. "You sure about that?" He seized her ankles and lifted her ass off the ground. "Let's conduct a test, shall we?"
"What--? Ow!" Buffy was appalled as he proceeded to spank her like a disobedient child. "Ow! Hey! Ow! Spike! Put me down!"
"But I can't decide! You've got to help me, Buffy!" Laughing, he flipped her around to deliver firmer spanks and rub her belly against his hard-on. "I like pain much as the next vamp, right, but I really like causing it too. To spank or be spanked, that is the eternal question." Spank! Spank! Spank! Spank!
At first, it was humiliating. Then it became sort of soothing. And then she realized there was nothing in his arsenal that didn't make her ache for more. Hurt me. Punish me. Let me do the same to you.
Spike cocked a brow. Somewhere along the way she'd stopped struggling, stopped bitching, and had begun to arch up to meet his hand. Feeling between her thighs, he rubbed the silken liquid on his fingertips and said, "I see you have the same problem."
To get all historical about why I love this - and no, it's not such a non-sequitor as it seems, because this is a Season-2-based, they-have-sex-even-though-they-still-hate-each-other fic - I once had this view of the Spike/Buffy relationship, the gist of which was that it was totally and really progressive, as in, I honestly thought it was reaching something very sublime and true about power balances in male/female relationships, and how they're actually strongest when neither one has to surrender power to the other. And, in that way of fictional sci-fi devices, this was expressed in the show by the way Spike and Buffy physically beat the shit out of each other all the time. Genius!
I'm probably not expressing this very well. It's been awhile, and plus, see above: drinking beer. But this fic, I swear, gets it completely and exactly, what I saw - that here's two people who synch up sexually exactly because neither one has to do the surrendering, passive thing. At all. Or even overcome a natural inclination toward it. (And now that I think of it, I guess that explains why I've never really warmed to the dom/sub or "slave" genres - they don't do anything for me, either politically or in terms of personal kink.) It's twisted and perverted as anything I've ever read online, it's effin' hot, and I love it to death.
You know, I don't know if I've ever given feedback of any kind of nautibitz. As one of the first authors I ever discovered in fandom, I guess I've never quite worked up the nerve. Still too much... celebrity there in my mind, I guess. Like trying to talk to an actor.
Rock on, though, Nauti. You're awesome.
Can I keep going? It's a long night, and my spaghetti is cooking slowly.
This link in the vintage_ads community, of the Laugh-A-Lot doll, is a mind-blower. The comments are actually funnier than the video, which is actually not so much funny as kind of horrifying - yes, kids' toys used to be different! Really!
On that note, I followed one of those scrolling YouTube links and got this little item. It seems to be mislabeled in terms of era - the announcer says "1970" in the voiceover, so this is within my memory range as a bona fide target for their doll consumer demographic, and damned if I don't remember most of these playsets, although whether I actually owned them, my friends had them, or I just lusted after them in catalogs, I couldn't say. But I'm hugely digging that background music! Takes me back.
Yes, I owned some of these dolls and their outfits, but I'd honestly forgotten that one of the dolls of this line was named "Glory." I do remember, however, desperately wanting a "Dale" doll- as a little white girl in the early '70s, I'd somehow absorbed "Black is Beautiful" to the point where I honestly considered the black dolls to be far prettier than the white ones. (Aesthetically speaking, I do find caucasian skin colors to be sort of... pasty and uninteresting, my own being a case in point, simultaneously sallow and semi-transparent, like the skin of a tadpole.) There was one doll in particular, a Barbie-sized doll- the Dawn line were smaller, more like 6 inches - based on that nurse show starring Diahann Carroll, Julia. (Admission: I had to look these facts up in Total Television, an indispensable tome if you're at all interested in a record of TV history, but that's a first - I always used to be able to remember those names off the top of my head. Which tells you something about just how intense an impression that character made - the character, mind you, not the show. The show, I can't remember a damn thing about. Ditto other highlights from roughly the same era, such as Angie Dickinson in Police Woman.)
I'm now watching Magnum Force on TV and avoiding the Presidential debates. (My heart, it can only take so much - this election can't be over fast enough, IMHO.) Dirty Harry and the perp du jour are driving around in the Potrero district, which is more or less where I work now, and ride the bus everyday, except that this is what it looked like the '70s, far less candy-colored and twee with yuppie redevelopment. Wow. When I moved to San Francisco at the tail end of the '80s, most of this landscape was still there, all faded industrial ruins and grass-choked sandlots. I forget if it's this particular Dirty Harry saga or another one, but there's one in the series with a chase scene through the remnants of the old train yards at the end of Fourth Street, all high grass and line shacks - I remember those. They're mostly gone now, just collapsed piles of hundred-year-old wood planks, slowly being reclaimed by nature.
I feel old.
Oops, I've been typing too long. The movie's over. On to Monster Quest.
Actually, this one's largely for monkey_junkey - check out this FANTABULOUS Stargate Atlantis fan comic, drawn by astridv. Just three pages in so far, but it's looking more kickass all the time. Woo!
Otherwise, I've still yet to really dive into the deep well that is Stargate fandom. I'm kind of afraid to, given that the first thing I ever heard about the fandom was that the shows were not so great, but that the fanfic was killer, and given that I've come to have so much affection for the shows? Not sure I should go there. Could be a time sink of epic proportions.
But, wah, last season of Atlantis? (bites nails) The day may come.
Okay, maybe I'll skip Monster Quest tonight. It seems to be a Dirty Harry marathon of sorts - AMC is proceeding on to The Enforcer - and I can't resist the siren call of '70s film.
God, these movies have a whole new vibe now that I've lived in SF for more than a decade. This is MY TOWN. Dude. And oh, Christ, is Eastwood actually driving a Chevy Impala? Holy hell.
OMG, he's on Fisherman's Wharf. I've totally eaten in that restaurant. It looks almost the same now.
Awwww... remember when they called cops "pigs" on a regular basis in film? Takes me back.
Time to stop. Apologies for the length.
Excerpted from Chapter 10.
Spike had been surprised to see Buffy, but he'd played the gracious host, offering her his spot on the couch and letting Clem keep the ratty old recliner. She hadn't been fooled. He'd chosen to sit where he could slowly insinuate himself into a position that made it almost natural for him to lean against her leg.
And she'd chosen to let him.
But now he was standing up, and the spot on her calf where her flesh had slowly warmed against the curve of his back felt bereft.
Dawn poked her. "Buffy? Are you coming? It's an ice cream run!"
"It's a blood and smokes run, but you can come for the ride, Bit," said Spike, looking at Buffy as he reached for a crumpled pile of leather. "Want to chaperone, Slayer?" He tugged on his duster and stood waiting.
Stupid vamp. I bet he thinks he looks cool and enigmatic. He just looks needy. And hot. But mostly needy. His eyebrow quirked upwards, and his head tilted to one side so that the glow from the lopsided table lamp caught his sharp cheekbones and the lapis glow of his eyes. Well, neediness is there in the mix, anyway.
Buffy shrank into herself, sitting cross-legged with her arms around her torso. Going anywhere with someone who looked like that but was not kissable material due to evilness was of the Bad.
But there would be ice cream.
"We can bring something back for you." Dawn's voice was impatient.
"Okay." Buffy brightened at this compromise. Spike didn't look quite so pleased, but he held the door open for Dawn and followed her out into the cemetery. Buffy tried hard not to listen to the thud of their footsteps as they made their way to his ratty old car.
This was of the Good. Buffy had avoided closeness with the evil vampire. And she'd done so in spite of the lure of ice cream.
On the other hand, she'd let her baby sister go off riding in a car with the evil vampire and no seat belts. Not so good. Besides, if she'd gone along, she could have put in a good word for cheesecake. Strawberry cheesecake was sounding very, very good right now.
And she was now sitting in a crypt with two demons who were heavily into old movies and caramel corn. Neither good nor bad, but surely stupid.
Besides, Buffy didn't like caramel corn. And she was afraid to even comment on the movie, in which Katherine Hepburn seemed to be playing a lot of sports and trying to appease her boyfriend who was obviously a total dork. Why couldn't this woman see that he was only keeping her down and making her insecure?
Gathering courage, Buffy voiced her objections, and Lulu's eyes swiveled towards her. "He's just the fiancé. There's always a fiancé, and he never gets the girl." She didn't add, Everyone knows that, but she might as well have.
"Spencer Tracy gets the girl," said Clem in the voice of someone who is kind to idiots and people cursed with unwrinkled skin.
Buffy eyed Spencer. "He's not very tall," she objected. She shrank further into herself as Clem and Lulu turned to stare at her pityingly.
"Want some of these new Slim Jims?" Asked Clem at last, obviously searching for some common ground upon which to converse with a Slayer. "They've got peanut butter inside."
"Peanut butter?"
"It's a new thing." Lulu reached down and picked up a bag. "Like these wasabi-flavored pork rinds, or those new Stilton marshmallows. They're test marketing them in Sunnydale."
"They test market a lot of stuff here," said Clem. "It's a little-known fact that over 20 percent of snack food nationwide is consumed by demons. So if a new product can make it here, it can make it anywhere."
Buffy thought about this statement long enough to decide it wasn't Slayer business and she could stop thinking about it. It was no part of her Sacred Mission to protect junk food, no matter what was consuming it. (However, it did finally explain to her satisfaction the existence of Marshmallow Peeps.) She stared at the TV.
God, what don't I love about that? The way the little details build and play off each other, ironies and pop-culture winks - demons as product testers! - and the inevitable, beautiful character insights that missmurchison does so well. Awe. That's me right now. Awe.
Okay, you have to join the community to read this sucker, but ohmigod, is it worth it. (Please, don't click on this one unless you're of age. It's dirty.) Don't Stop
Excerpted from Chapter 7:
She obstructed his view of the ceiling, and his ire miraculously melted away. The Slayer was such a titillating study in contrasts -- powerhouse heavyweight in a 6 stone body; brazen nymphet who shyly covered her naughty bits as if he hadn't just spelunked them with his tongue.
"Tell you what, puffin." He pulled her down on top of him and placed her hand on his stirring groin. "Here on in, barring death and dismemberment, anything goes." He hissed as she squeezed his balls. "Can't say I mind a little pain with my pleasure."
"You mean it?" She walked her fingers up his torso to his nodding face and rubbed the pointed curve of his cheekbone. "'Cause I have been dying to do this."
Spike reeled from her powerful slap. The Slayer really put her back into that one.
Buffy was smug -- he so deserved that for anally invading her without so much as a 'Geronimo' -- until she noticed the pool of blood that had leaked out of his skull. "Oh my god, are you--?"
Before she could dote more -- which, for the best really, no good could come of doting -- he elbowed her in the chin and somersaulted her over his head.
"Oof," she said upon crashing into the adjacent coffee table, unyielding angles cutting into beyond-sore muscles.
"You're right, pet. That is fun." Revitalized, he rose from the couch and languidly fondled himself while he watched her squirm. "I don't know what gets me hotter though, giving or receiving. You?"
"Giving," she said as she kicked him in the face.
He shook it off with a wicked grin. "You sure about that?" He seized her ankles and lifted her ass off the ground. "Let's conduct a test, shall we?"
"What--? Ow!" Buffy was appalled as he proceeded to spank her like a disobedient child. "Ow! Hey! Ow! Spike! Put me down!"
"But I can't decide! You've got to help me, Buffy!" Laughing, he flipped her around to deliver firmer spanks and rub her belly against his hard-on. "I like pain much as the next vamp, right, but I really like causing it too. To spank or be spanked, that is the eternal question." Spank! Spank! Spank! Spank!
At first, it was humiliating. Then it became sort of soothing. And then she realized there was nothing in his arsenal that didn't make her ache for more. Hurt me. Punish me. Let me do the same to you.
Spike cocked a brow. Somewhere along the way she'd stopped struggling, stopped bitching, and had begun to arch up to meet his hand. Feeling between her thighs, he rubbed the silken liquid on his fingertips and said, "I see you have the same problem."
To get all historical about why I love this - and no, it's not such a non-sequitor as it seems, because this is a Season-2-based, they-have-sex-even-though-they-still-hate-each-other fic - I once had this view of the Spike/Buffy relationship, the gist of which was that it was totally and really progressive, as in, I honestly thought it was reaching something very sublime and true about power balances in male/female relationships, and how they're actually strongest when neither one has to surrender power to the other. And, in that way of fictional sci-fi devices, this was expressed in the show by the way Spike and Buffy physically beat the shit out of each other all the time. Genius!
I'm probably not expressing this very well. It's been awhile, and plus, see above: drinking beer. But this fic, I swear, gets it completely and exactly, what I saw - that here's two people who synch up sexually exactly because neither one has to do the surrendering, passive thing. At all. Or even overcome a natural inclination toward it. (And now that I think of it, I guess that explains why I've never really warmed to the dom/sub or "slave" genres - they don't do anything for me, either politically or in terms of personal kink.) It's twisted and perverted as anything I've ever read online, it's effin' hot, and I love it to death.
You know, I don't know if I've ever given feedback of any kind of nautibitz. As one of the first authors I ever discovered in fandom, I guess I've never quite worked up the nerve. Still too much... celebrity there in my mind, I guess. Like trying to talk to an actor.
Rock on, though, Nauti. You're awesome.
Can I keep going? It's a long night, and my spaghetti is cooking slowly.
This link in the vintage_ads community, of the Laugh-A-Lot doll, is a mind-blower. The comments are actually funnier than the video, which is actually not so much funny as kind of horrifying - yes, kids' toys used to be different! Really!
On that note, I followed one of those scrolling YouTube links and got this little item. It seems to be mislabeled in terms of era - the announcer says "1970" in the voiceover, so this is within my memory range as a bona fide target for their doll consumer demographic, and damned if I don't remember most of these playsets, although whether I actually owned them, my friends had them, or I just lusted after them in catalogs, I couldn't say. But I'm hugely digging that background music! Takes me back.
Click to viewYes, I owned some of these dolls and their outfits, but I'd honestly forgotten that one of the dolls of this line was named "Glory." I do remember, however, desperately wanting a "Dale" doll- as a little white girl in the early '70s, I'd somehow absorbed "Black is Beautiful" to the point where I honestly considered the black dolls to be far prettier than the white ones. (Aesthetically speaking, I do find caucasian skin colors to be sort of... pasty and uninteresting, my own being a case in point, simultaneously sallow and semi-transparent, like the skin of a tadpole.) There was one doll in particular, a Barbie-sized doll- the Dawn line were smaller, more like 6 inches - based on that nurse show starring Diahann Carroll, Julia. (Admission: I had to look these facts up in Total Television, an indispensable tome if you're at all interested in a record of TV history, but that's a first - I always used to be able to remember those names off the top of my head. Which tells you something about just how intense an impression that character made - the character, mind you, not the show. The show, I can't remember a damn thing about. Ditto other highlights from roughly the same era, such as Angie Dickinson in Police Woman.)
I'm now watching Magnum Force on TV and avoiding the Presidential debates. (My heart, it can only take so much - this election can't be over fast enough, IMHO.) Dirty Harry and the perp du jour are driving around in the Potrero district, which is more or less where I work now, and ride the bus everyday, except that this is what it looked like the '70s, far less candy-colored and twee with yuppie redevelopment. Wow. When I moved to San Francisco at the tail end of the '80s, most of this landscape was still there, all faded industrial ruins and grass-choked sandlots. I forget if it's this particular Dirty Harry saga or another one, but there's one in the series with a chase scene through the remnants of the old train yards at the end of Fourth Street, all high grass and line shacks - I remember those. They're mostly gone now, just collapsed piles of hundred-year-old wood planks, slowly being reclaimed by nature.
I feel old.
Oops, I've been typing too long. The movie's over. On to Monster Quest.
Actually, this one's largely for monkey_junkey - check out this FANTABULOUS Stargate Atlantis fan comic, drawn by astridv. Just three pages in so far, but it's looking more kickass all the time. Woo!
Otherwise, I've still yet to really dive into the deep well that is Stargate fandom. I'm kind of afraid to, given that the first thing I ever heard about the fandom was that the shows were not so great, but that the fanfic was killer, and given that I've come to have so much affection for the shows? Not sure I should go there. Could be a time sink of epic proportions.
But, wah, last season of Atlantis? (bites nails) The day may come.
Okay, maybe I'll skip Monster Quest tonight. It seems to be a Dirty Harry marathon of sorts - AMC is proceeding on to The Enforcer - and I can't resist the siren call of '70s film.
God, these movies have a whole new vibe now that I've lived in SF for more than a decade. This is MY TOWN. Dude. And oh, Christ, is Eastwood actually driving a Chevy Impala? Holy hell.
OMG, he's on Fisherman's Wharf. I've totally eaten in that restaurant. It looks almost the same now.
Awwww... remember when they called cops "pigs" on a regular basis in film? Takes me back.
Time to stop. Apologies for the length.