For once, I am watching C-SPAN live instead of BBC DemocracyLive!

GO GO SENATE GO

...watching Kerry and McCain bitch at each other about defense treaties with Russia beforehand is strangely soothing, actually. Even if it does come down to Kerry saying, "Dude, this is the goddamn US of A, you know we're just going to ignore anything in the treaty we don't like anyway, so can we just ratify the damn thing and move on" and McCain saying "GRR RUSSIA TERRORISTS GRR".

Aww, between listening to Kerry, and spending the morning reading HP fic to prepare for my next Ace Manifesto, it feels like it's 2004 again. Nostalgia FTW! And C-Span, always the cable channel of my heart.

I remember watching C-Span when BBC Parliament went video for the first time and C-Span re-broadcast their first PMQs, and the C-Span people were all cooing over how the MPs were panicking about their bald spots showing on camera and not being visibly asleep. ♥ (BBC Parliament is still more interesting though. Congress almost never gets personal. Or catcalls from the audience.)

ETA: "The Senate will please come to order. Senators please take their conversations to the cloakrooms." really.

If they keep up this awesome I might have to start a squee_span community after all. Luckily, there is approximately zero chance they will continue to be awesome, and we will soon go back to nausea-inducing fail, I am sure.

(Finally) posted my Ace Manifesto last week: Fox Mulder, Ace.

(Note to self: you have run into this before, you should remember it by now, if you post an intro post to a very old, very quiet fandom, and mention that it is old and quiet, you *will* get one of the two-dozen still active people showing up in your comments being deeply offended that you didn't mention them specifically.)

And vaguely connected to that, here are two fic recs: zortified has written asexual!Ivan Vorkosigan: Uneasy Lies The Head. I'm not sure how he's done it - that seems even *less* likely than ace!Jack Harkness - but it makes me happy that it has been done, and well. :D

And to prove that vanity googling sometimes works, I just stumbled on a fic that was written based on some old meta of mine, by aria: All That Remains. It is Highlander, Methos genfic, and it is everything I want in Highlander fic. Sometimes I feel like, even if I never write anything again, the amount of awesome fic that's been written based on ideas I just threw out justifies my existence on its own. :D

***

I have been writing a bit, though. And I've just been reminded that earlier this year, I made a commitment on 12in2010 to finish at least 12 stories over 2000 words this year. I think I might actually manage 12 over 1000 words this year, which is shocking enough on its own! But a lot of it's been anon, so it is difficult to keep track of. Here (mostly for myself) is my fic accounting for the year:

( 2010 fic round-up )

The other thing I pledged to do this year was read and review at least 100 books. I think I've managed the 'read' part, given a broad enough definition of the word 'book.' Review... well, I still have almost a month to finish the reviews! (I post my book reviews on LT, where they get just enough upvotes to assure me I'm not posting into a vacuum. Would anybody be interested in them being crossposted here? I've though about it, but never gotten motivated.)

Also I am apparently posting a thing, in parts, to doctor_and_master for their December fanfest, which is apparently How the Master Stole Christmas, complete with anapests and illustrations. <_< The next bit should go up late tonight, hopefully, now that I've found my stylus (again.)

Finished my yuletide letter! Hodgman, Zelazny, Madelyn Mack and Bucketeers. It is, as usual, way too long and elaborate, and I apparently got it in just under the wire before assignments went out, yay!

...since I made the yuletide letter into this huge scary over-elaborate obligation to procrastinate on this year, that means the story itself will come easy, right? Right? :D :D


Now all I need to do urgently, writing-wise, is finish my officially overdue Ace Manifesto for X-Files. Look, asexual_fandom people! I have bitten the bullet for you, and bravely demonstrated what happens if you sign up and miss your deadline! It is not scary at all! You should therefore totally go sign up if you haven't yet! There are lots of things still unclaimed that someone should write!

...okay, and I should also write another section for that anon meme fic. And finish that other anon meme fic. And, oh, right, nano, yes.

ETA: Assignment came in! It is simultaneously awesome and exactly what I deserved. :D Thank you, Spirit of Yuletide!

You guys, I feel like a fic-finishing and obligation-meeting machine right now.

Not that I actually am, but I got my remix_duello fic in on time! I was going "OMG REMIXING IS HARD FOLKS" but then I realized, hey, wait, it's a remix, that means whenever I get stuck I can just crib from the original, which is *awesome*. It is probably not great by the standards of real remix connoisseurs, and I may have stretched the boundaries of what counts as a remix too much, but I'm (mostly) happy with it, and hay, meeting of deadlines happened, which means, because the AO3 challenge set-up is awesome, I now have a couple of no-pressure weeks to keep tinkering with it. Also I am looking at the melee prompts and trying to convince myself I don't need to start stories for any of them, no matter how much I want to, because I still have way too many other works in progress, plus kink_bingo and who knows what else.

I did, however, finish a five-month-standing WIP on the lolitics meme! And guys, guys, OMG, this is the first time I have *ever* finished something I started posting as a WIP and didn't finish within that first push of energy. I usually try to stay anon on these things at least for awhile but I kind of want to just strew sparkles around in general.

Also said story was coming-out and GLBT-activism themed, so it seems like a good segue into talking about Coming Out Day. Coming Out Day, as a day set up to help people claim a GLBT identity, always left me feeling left out and confused even as I was happy for the people who did come out. Because it took me a long time to find an identity I felt like I could claim. And even now that I'm fairly comfortable with it in myself? I still feel like I can't come out, like I don't belong in the coming-out narrative.

But, screw it. If I can write a fictional character's coming out, I can write my own. So, hi! You've probably already figured it out, but I don't know if I've ever exactly announced it before, so: I'm asexual, which means I have never experienced sexual attraction to anyone, male or female or other; and I'm aromantic, which means I've never particularly wanted to have a romantic relationship, or really understood what the point of them are.

( On coming out as asexual )

Anyway! I am also well in to finishing my intobar fic, weeks and weeks before the deadline! ...is there anybody who knows both Top Gear and Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars who wants to be first reader for ~3000 words worth of crossover? Since I actually have breathing space for a first reader, for once? (I suspect there *is* nobody else who's in to both Top Gear and Alan Mendelsohn, though.)

All of the above means I'm officially better off in terms of deadlines and missed deadlines hanging over my head than I was at the beginning of the summer! \o/ (By any sane standards, I'm still about to be buried, but I'm so used to that state of affairs that any lessening feels amazing.)

Also, common_nature seems to have picked up enough momentum that it might just keep rolling on its own, so I don't have that hanging over me as much either! Now I have to resist the temptation to start more communities. (The rules is no starting new communities until scheduled posting happens. No matter how much I want there to be materiality, the common_nature sister community for man-made stuff - and more_cowbell, the music sharing community for people whose main criteria for acquiring music is "I can't believe somebody actually thought it was a good idea to record that!")

And I'm, like, 75% caught up on my LibraryThing Recently-Read Reviews! Amazing. There's still, like, a whole pile of cryptozoology books, and a whole pile of Star Trek novels, and the read-not-owned list, and a huge pile of started-but-not-finished, but I am amazed that I actually broke through the block and did it at all.

Also, while I was organizing files & stuff around my new hard drive, I went ahead and updated my AO3 account and my DeviantArt account. My dA account has about a year's worth of mostly fanart added, most of which I never posted to this journal. There is some Top Gear and some Doctor Who and some of my original characters and some fiber crafts and etc.

I waver back and forth on doing more with my dA account; on the one hand, it is nice to have a place that's for visual art the way this place is for textual, and wandering there inspires me to work on my own drawing more, but on the other hand, dA's administration is pretty damn faily and has a long history of it, and it feels hypocritical to be getting more into dA when I've stormed out of LJ over much the same issues.

Does anybody know if there's a site that is to dA as DW is to LJ? At least as much ease of use, committed membership, and less admin fail? 'cause that would be nice. (Then all I'd have to do is find my stylus and maybe I'd finish more art and post it!)

Also if anybody's got a dA account and wants more watchers, let me know? I am bad at finding people but I do like having galleries to watch.

...I was going to post about the new stories on my AO3 account, but this post is already too long, so, um, later. Also, I need to stay strong and not take a week or so's worth of being on top of things, and spoil it by signing up for NaNo.

I was reading rm's PSA on Queer and it occured to me that one could, in fact, make a simple nine-patch quilted totebag, with eight symbols around and the rainbow flag in the middle.

G would probably be a pink triangle, either patchwork or applique.
A would probably be the AVEN triangle, though one could use the new flag.
B would be the pink-lavender-blue flag or triangle.
T would probably be either the three-pronged symbol (applique) or the pink-white-blue flag.
L would probably be either the linked symbols or a labrys; this would have to be applique.
for I I don't know; I don't know of any pride symbols for this specifically (please tell me if there is one!) but one could use the three-pronged symbol here and the flag for T
U would probably just be a question mark
Q again I don't know; if one uses the rainbow as the center square, what goes here? There is the queer anarchy flag, but that has a specific political meaning; I'm almost tempted to go with the leather flag, as that takes in some of the queer communities that often are sidelined in GLBT and also would be fun to patchwork, but it also excludes a lot of queerness. An applique lambda might work, though (or maybe a rainbow here and lambda in the center? Or rainbow flag for Q, and the center square embroidered QUILTBAG?)

For the liner/backing, I am regretting the fact that I always throw out the incredibly ugly prints with vomit-green cabbage roses that seem to inexplicably recur. :P

And you could do one side of the bag nine-patch, and the other side as one large square for some specific identity/community that's yours and isn't specifically in the acronym: two-spirit, blue-feather, a subset of trans*, bear, poly, faerie, pansexual, bdsm, pflag, a traditional log cabin or stone wall patchwork pattern, or some combination or personal symbol that IDs the bag's owner specifically...

Anybody have any better ideas for the symbols to use for QUILTBAG, or objections to the ones I used? Anybody else interested in making or owning one of these? :D


(...we are not even going to talk about the dozen crafting/mending projects already in progress, no. Anyway two of those involve patchwork already, and if I have to pull out all the quilting stuff I might as well start a new project too, right?)


And speaking of activism and symbols, I am totally going to the Rally to Restore Sanity. (Did anybody doubt this for a second? :D) I will be bringing a sign which displays the H in Sunrays, of course. Though I am debating coming up with one with an actual political message or international fake news reference as well. Who else is going? Does anybody want to get together a whole group with h-in-sunrays signs?

First: Asexuality prompt fest!

I will be hanging around there as soon as I get my head together enough. Losing most of a week to brain-destroying heat has left me feeling completely off-kilter in terms of writing and otherwise accomplishing stuff (I'm about twenty pages behind on the kinkmemes I'm already keeping up with...) On the other hnad, I've been reading real books! (Easier to handle in hammock than laptops are, see.) Apropos of that:

Dear Mr. Leonard R. N. Ashley, who wrote "The Complete Book Of Werewolves" that I picked up from the con.txt swap table:

You invited people to talk about your book on the Internet, so I think I'll take you up on it.

While I generally agree with you about the terrible state of the American educational system today, I have some objections to your statement that American schoolchildren ought to "tackle Henry James' The Turn of the Screw instead of reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple and other politically correct assignments."

Speaking as a young(ish) American who tackled both of those books in school (though neither as an assignment), Turn of the Screw is not actually a particularly good novel. It is, in fact, a fairly standard Gothic novel that has had all of the actually interesting elements of Gothic novels taken out, so that it can pass as proper men's literature. If you would like to read some good, serious gothic novels that are stylistically excellent, fun to read, and have serious things to say about both the genre and the state of humanity, I recommend Austen's Northanger Abbey or Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Oh, wait, those were both written by women, so I suppose that would be too "politically correct".

As for The Color Purple, I will grant you that, particularly in terms of pacing and structure, it has a certain lack of polish. On the other hand, it's an absorbing book that takes risks, tries things that had almost never been done before, says things that nobody else was trying to say, speaks to people nobody else was speaking to, and does it all very, very well, if not perfectly. I am sorry if there was not enough girl-on-girl, racism and gore in it for your tastes (per your previous recommendation of Moon Dance*, with its lesbian cowgirls and savage Sioux tribesmen.)

Also I am not entirely sure why you felt the need to make that comparison in the middle of what was ostensibly a survey of werewolf literature, but I am sure you had your reasons.

Kisses,
Melannen

P.S.: I am actually working on a lesbian werewolf novel myself (scattershot and very slowly, but I am), since con.txt - two years ago? Four years ago? I forget - when one of the mods in a panel about original writing said that she was still looking for the first Great American Werewolf Novel, as she'd never seen one. I suspect it won't have enough girl-on-girl or racism for you, either.

I am used to books about the paranormal and anomalistics, especially ones about "savage monsters", having at minimum a fairly high level of passive background racism (along with fairly high levels of ablism and often misogyny and classism), but this one was toddling along being reasonably okay, if extremely and smugly idiosyncratic, when suddenly, *pow*, right in the face. Repeatedly. (The 'politically correct literature' rant was only the start :/ )

I would like to state for the record that the books I left on the con.txt swap table were books I actually liked that I happened to have extra copies of, or not enough storage space for, or to have left the fandoms of. Unlike apparently nearly everybody else who left books, who appeared to be clearing their libraries of authors who had proven to be homophobic/racist/misogynistic/pedophilic and/or copyright hypocrites. (All that Card and Bradley and Gabaldon and Heinlein and Bear and etc, it was like a nostalgia trip through the last two years' worth of fail.)


...Oh, and while I am at it,

( Dear Mr. R. D. Schneck, author of 'The President's Vampire', )
*I have not actually read Moon Dance by Somtow, or any of his other work; it's possible it's a very good book, but Ashley's description somehow did not give me confidence.

The reason I haven't posted on DW for awhile is that I, basically, only have the time, energy and emotional stamina to make one substantial post/comment a day, so when I'm doing a lot of posting elsewhere, my personal journal tends to go quiet.

And for the past two weeks, instead of larking around DW talking meta and coming up with creative excuses for why meta is all I do, I've actually been *writing* and *posting* fic on a fairly steady basis with reasonable output - I've written and posted something like 12,000 words, which is more than I usually manage in a year, and I'm so astonished at this fact that I've just kind of been stepping back and trying not to do anything to jinx it.

...unfortunately it's all for the British Politics RPS kink meme, and it's all anon, so you lot don't get any benefit out of it. (Unless you're also on that meme, in which case, secret handshake!)

I'm staying anon about which of those are mine not because I'm unwilling to admit to writing politics RPS - first of all, this isn't my first go-round, and second of all, I had a birthday party right at the height of the coalition negotiations, so pretty much all my RL friends have probably figure it out anyway. But I really do think anon memes work better when most of the people on them stay anon, so, anon I am staying. (I will note that a disproportionate number of the unclaimed fills with SamCam in them are my fault, but you probably could have guessed that.)

So. British Politics RPF. What the heck, self? And as a consequence, while there are as usual wonderful and insightful meta discussions going on around here, all I really want to say is "In this RPS fandom they really do send secret messages through color-coded accessories!" and "even Michael-Freaking-Feldman ships it!while being even more couple-y than usual with Jim Packard" and "I like the Speaker!" (Warning:streaming rm audio at the second link, youtube video at the third. )

The problem with this fandom is that reality keeps outdoing the fic. I mean, the fill I was hoping to finish tonight had a line in it that I was debating taking out, because I kept thinking "The Prime Minister would never actually say anything *that slashy* on television", and then -- he did. Which is the nice sort of being outdone by canon. But the reason I'm writing a journal post instead of that fic is that we've had the bad sort of canon, too. This story centers around a character publically coming out, and tonight, one of the more likable people we're writing about just got forcibly outed in a fairly awful way. :/

And it's one thing to glee over a hypocritical homophobe being forced out, it's another thing entirely when it's someone who's repeatedly turned down opportunities for real power in order to stay true to pro-glbt principles.

(And can I just pause the rambling about RPF here to say: I am completely incapable of taking the MPs' expenses scandal seriously. Do you know how much I wish my politicians were just spending public money to split the mortgage with their boyfriend or get the moat cleaned, instead of, oh, accepting free housing at a Dominionist Christian brainwashing center that requires them to go to "counseling" sessions in which they're taught that everything they do is moral because they've been chosen by God for power? SO MUCH I WISH.)
( More thoughts on RPS. )

So. Anyway. That is why I am writing meta tonight instead of fic. Perhaps tomorrow I will spend my post-writing energy actually writing one of the other DW posts I am backlogged on doing! Or put in some real work on prepping the con-txt panels I'm modding! Or go take refuge on that other anon kink meme I've been haunting and write another Charlie/David kissing on panel shows fill (because there can never be too many of those!)

...or perhaps I will spend the day just obsessively following the David Laws coverage and trying not to cry. Or write fic where he is a tiny cheerful dragon teaching Boris how to fly. :)

(I feel like I should have something to say about this story other than D: and putting it in a fannish context, but my Thoughts on the ethical complications of being in a politics fandom for a country I am not in or from is another post at least as long as this one was.)

ETA early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA

I was going to wait and post this later, with a much more elaborate stastistical work-up, population variables and meta-analysis - because I think it's interesting in its own right - but the ongoing conversation I'm seeing, and the extremely clear result I'm getting, is making me think it's more important to get the facts out there, than to make them pretty.

So: Are slashers straight?

I spent an afternoon and evening finding all of the polls & surveys of slash demographics I could that included a question on sexuality. Some I already had bookmarked, some I found through google, delicious, and following citations in academic papers. I'm sure there are more out there, and if you have links to more more polls I would love to add their data to my analysis. But you know what? The results of the ones I've found are pretty consistent, across a large range of survey population. And it is, to be quite honest, not the result I was expecting, even as a slasher who does not herself identify as straight, and is used to finding people like her in fandom.

Are slashers straight?

( Over half of slashers self-identify as somewhere on the spectrum of lgbqqa. )

So, over 9 polls, in a variety of slash subfandoms from the late-teens yaoi set to the mid-thirties meta fans set, dates ranging over 7 years. Only onetwo polls had less than 50% queer participants, and that wasone of them the earliest one, and even they were at 37% and 47%. The median percent of queer participants was 59.7%, and the mean was 61.5% 60.8%.

SO when people say things like "slash fans are appropriating queer experience", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't real" or "male voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the queer community."

I think the question of how queer women can appropriate queer men's identity, and the damage that can be done when gay men speaking about themselves are drowned out by women, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

And SO when people say things like "slash is a legitimate way for straight women to express their sexuality", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't relevant" or "straight voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the slash community".

I think the question of how straight women's sexuality interacts with queer sexuality, and the ways straight women's sexuality defines slash, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

Can I say that one more time? I like saying it. Science makes me happy.

THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

ETA: People in comments have pointed out math errors that change the numbers slightly: I've added corrections in the relevant places. The conclusions still stand, however (for now.)

ETA 2 early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA 2

So yesterday, I was going through the ol' box o' porn comics at my local comic store (as you do) when I found a comic that I absolutely had to share with fandom.

...specifically with Good Omens fandom. Because who else can truly appreciate blatant lesbian pron, illustrated in a style not entirely unlike Betty & Veronica, written by Neil Gaiman, about an angel and a demon who get so bored and lonely being stuck together on Earth for millenia that they decide to spend all the rest of time having sex with each other?

No, wait, actually the appeal of that is probably pretty broad. :P So here:

( The Angel and Demon had been in Breme for thousands of years. They had no one to talk to but each other. They made bets with each other to while away the time... )

The 6 (small) scans behind the link are definitely PORN COMICS - very much NOT WORKSAFE, be warned

Although I didn't scan any of the actual pron pages. And Cherry was actually the best of the lot, both art and writing wise, so if you want to find out what happened to the publican's soul after the angel and the demon got ... distracted, you should totally find your own copy! I followed the s_d rule of posting less than 1/4 of the total story. Also other story in the issue features a still-timely parable about the perils of sleeping with Republican politicians. (I pulled out Cherry #22, too, featuring "The eXploitation Files", but that one's a present for my sister, so ya'll don't get to see it yet. :P )

Why do modern striptease dancers usually start their shows already three-quarters naked? I mean, sure, Dita von Teese moves like an ancient fertility goddess (I'm totally figuring out a way to put a striptease scene in my NaNo,) but compared to, say, Gypsy Rose Lee or Georgia Sothern or even Dixie Evans, she's mostly finished by the time she starts.

Not that I have any objection to sparkly corsets. Mmm. Sparkly corsets.

...but, but, what's the point of striptease if there's no mystery? I love the long gowns and the diaphanous skirts and the little flashes of leg, the bare wrist that seems like the sexiest thing ever when it's all you're allowed to look at, the elegant girl on the town who lets you see just a bit more than is proper, and just a bit more, and she could stop - any minute - if she wanted to - but maybe she doesn't want to!

Whoever did the cinematography on this vid understood that, but they put in most of the mystery with the camera angles. It's lingerie fetish as much as it's classic striptease. Even when she starts out in a long gown, she steps out of it right off instead of teasing properly like they did in the old days. I'd just as soon watch her be plain old naked --- (She does naked really well.)

And no, I'm not just bitter that I could probably do a tolerable Gypsy Rose but there's no way I could pull off what Dita does. :P And I'm also not bitter that there's so little video footage of the classic-era girls, no not me.


Georgia Sothern was 11 when she started stripping professionally. I'm not sure how I feel about that, except that this video could probably get you in trouble with lj.

Movie night tonight was "Flesh Gordon".

It is an excellent movie. Not that it's, y'know, good, in any conventional way, but the people making it went in knowing *exactly* what they wanted to create, and they created it *perfectly*.

And - okay, this is going to sound very silly - but it felt more *real* than a lot of other SF movies, because really, it was the first movie I've ever seen where the alien culture *didn't* adhere to modern Western standards of modesty, and all of the wink-nudge subtext got to be actual text. It was just so .. refreshing, in a worldbuilding sense, to finally get to see flesh instead of artful drapery.

Plus, the plot actually hung together a lot *better* than any other SF film I've seen with a similar effects budget. Better than a lot of SF films that actually *do* have an effects budget. (...and I may have let out an embarrassing squee noise when I saw Bjo Trimble's name in the credits.) Really, a spot-on parody, the kind you can only manage by both mocking the conventions of the original and *doing them better*.

(It doesn't hurt, of course, that it was basically what you'd get if you filmed many of my favorite fanfics.)

(Oh, who am I kidding: I just want to see Colonel Sheppard hook up with Prince Precious (for justice!) while Dr. McKay slaves away in the laboratory and Teyla leads the Amazon army to freedom and Atlantis writhes under the cruel effects of the Sex Rays.)

(...Matt said the movie reminded him of Torchwood. I approve of this comment.)

(...Anyone up for a Flesh Gordon crossover ficathon? At the very least I may have to request Flesh/Precious for yuletide this year. Although if we did a fest I could totally even figure out how to rip it to avi, since kyabetsu loaned me the DVD.)

(she loaned it to me for iconing purposes, but I ought to wait on that till I finish with Tek Jansen. ...who also needs to land on Planet Porno, come to think of it ... so you'll have to make do with the '70s soft porn icon I already had uploaded.)

The latest redaction of the fic-for-sale kerfuffle has turned into a discussion on Making Light about fanfic, mostly from a pro-writing point of view, and because it's TNH, and TNH knows where it's *at*, it's also mostly pro-fanfic (in the other sense of pro, that is.)

Read her comments - it says stuff about fanfic which I've wanted to say for a long time, and is much better written than I could manage it, too.

And then docbrite left a dissenting opinion in a comment.

(And no, I will *never* get used to the way that really amazing people can just pop up out of nowhere on the internet and jump into a conversation. It's almost as bad as suddenly finding out that the professor whose class I'm slacking off in is the same guy who came up with one of my favorite theories. And at least as cool.)

Poppy Z. Brite's opinions on fic really aren't that difficult, as anti-fan authors go. All she really seems to be saying (in this and other comments by her that I've fallen across) is that she's tried but she doesn't like writing or reading it and so she doesn't see why anyone else should either. That's a fallacy that most *fans* get beaten out of them pretty early on these days, so at least that's one thing we've got going for us. But that sort of calm but patronizing comment from somebody I respect is at least as disturbing as the most vitriolic idiocy, because it'll twig my 'I want to be liked!' reflex and then I feel bad. Plus, it almost sounds reasonable on first reading.

In the comment I saw today, docbrite compares fanfic written about her work to somebody sneaking up and goosing her husband. "Sure, it means they care, but ick."

Ms. Brite, you've got the wrong metaphor. We're not molesting your husband. We're dating your daughters.

(This isn't really aimed at docbrite, by the way, but at the attitudes of anti-fanfic writers in general, especially those who are far less reasonable about it than she is -- her metaphor today just gave me a jumping-off point, because I love doing indecent things to other people's metaphors.)

( So basically, fanfic=sex. Just metaphorically. Not literally. Well, usually not literally. Really. )

There's no such thing as just a story.

ETA: And in the normal course of Internet serendipity, a languagelog thread about a young published author who has been accused of plagiarism on much the same basis that cassieclaire was, back in the days when ff.net was young, and the mixing that is an inevitable part of the creative process. Cross-pollination on a much smaller scale than story, and *still* inevitable.

And while I'm at it, some enlightenment from my flist: stellar_dust explains why writing original fic instead is not the answer; beccaelizabeth solves the mystery of why the concept of fanfic has to exist in the first place. webbapettigrew sells some more books! p.s.: if anybody cares more than me about buying me birthday presents, hint. chaucerhathblog gets a c&d.

Monday night, both of my laptop's PCMCIA card slots stopped working, so until I get around to fixing that, I won't have 'net access on the laptop. I get to see how long I can last without being on lj every single waking hour!

The universally positive reaction to my last post surprised me. There are many things which would keep me from making headway in politics. My myriad personality flaws are one of them. My actual political positions are another. So I thought perhaps I'd elucidate one of them, as an example. Although it's probably not the best idea to post this when I won't be online full time to get comments, I will anyway, since my sister said I should.

Recent discussion about abortion rights on several fronts (and the fact that I'm apparently ovulating, since I've been dreaming I'm pregnant for the last few nights) has finally inspired to type up my own views on abortion. I warn you that a) this is insanely long and digressive, b) like my rant about gay marriage from several years ago, it is in the nature of a tertium quid, guaranteed to offend everybody regardless of their position on the subject, and c) it contains Bible slash.

( Big Damn Abortion Post )

This entry is pure brain dump*; hopefully, this will take care of such things for awhile and I can go back to talking about things like how John Sheppard is totally Sir John of the Round Table (seriously, who else would marry an Ancient chick and then get distracted by Sir McKay and *forget* he'd married her?) and the squirrel with three eyes that lives behind the Geography building.

*With gratuitous footnotes.



( Three things you should never talk about in mixed company: Fandom, sex, and politics. )

A completely different Harry Potter Mary Sue, because, well, they're fun and easy to write, and I'm behind already.

I did not *intend* for this to be femmeslash-really-but once I brought in the Fritz Lieber crossover they refused to behave.

First part here

( Rated R for three naked girls in a tub, language, and, um, mpreg. )