Oops.

Hi. Been awhile.

Sorry about that. The end of August through September so far has been a little nuts. I packed a whole summer's worth of cottaging into the end of August and then it was time for International Hussy Weekend in Rochester over Labour Day Weekend. cretkid hosted the annual gathering of thassalia, rubberneck, fbf and I at Casa a Rock Doc (now with fire). A fine time was had by all I think and this time I was the only one who came down with Captain Trips (original flavour). Two weeks later, I've finally managed to shake my cold in time for the first meeting of the Polaris concom - announced guests: Ben Browder, Adam Baldwin and Armin Shimmerman.

Yes, Ben Browder... 8D

In other news, if you haven't seen Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I recommend it. To paraphrase the great Kim Pine, if Michael Cera's career had a face, I'd punch it. So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed SP. As an insufferable Torontonian, I loved seeing Toronto playing Toronto on the big screen in a movie that proudly declares its location and influences - no passing Osgood Hall off as an Opera House or made-up hospital and university names (WTF, Rookie Blue). Michael Cera is an effective slacker hero but the movie really belongs to the supporting cast of Alison Pill, Keiran Culkin and Ellen Wong as Scott's bandmate, roommate and fake high school girlfriend respectively. Unfortunately, Scott Pilgrim the movie suffers from the same problem as Scott Pilgrim the comic book - you're never quite sure what Ramona sees in Scott and she suffers from a not-dire but disappointing lack of agency in the third act. Never totally objectified but never truly in charge of her own destiny, Ramona coasts on Mary Elizabeth Winstead's ability to project a depth and certain badassery to what could easily have become a rote 'dream girl' cipher. Director and adapter Edgar Wright never really pushes the rebarbative qualities of Scott and Ramona, which undercuts the climax somewhat but if you liked the book, you will love Scott Pilgrim vs the World. For the rest of us, Scott Pilgrim is well-made summer flick with more than enough fun to overcome an underwritten female lead.

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30 (non-consecutive) Days of Writing

8. What's your favorite genre to write? To read?

Lately, fanfic (if you can call it a genre; I think you can) is winning by volume. However, while my fanfic is all SF (Farscape, Roswell, The Sarah Connor Chronicles), my original writing is a mixed bag: contemporary horror, historical fiction, short fiction, poetry, fantasy. I think my favourite to write it fantasy. I like the grandeur of high fantasy, the ability to blow life up to maximum magnification it provides without the limitations and responsibilities of historical fiction. Historical fiction is life recreated in miniature, a revelation of exquisite detail. Fantasy is high drama, operatic and soaring; self-gratifying to write.

That said, I firmly believe there's a special hell for writers who create quasi-medieval settings without the least understanding of medieval society, economy and culture. Perhaps it's not surprising that my favourite genre to read is actually non-fiction, particularly histories of the late middle ages and the Italian Renaissance. I find books like The Devil's Broker and A Distant Mirror are not only more compelling and more dramatic than contemporary fantasy fiction, they're better written, while Caterian Sforza would find Cersei Lannister a silly and insipid creature.

I'm currently reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, which is a Swedish Twilight for adults with a Joss Whedon size zero faux-riotgrrl playing second fiddle to the Gary Stu protagonist and depictions of grotesque sexualized violence replacing Twilight's angsty teen vampires in love.

Solar by Ian McEwan, which is a hard book to like even thought McEwan's prose is itself a rich reward for reading. The protagonist, Michael Beard, is a loathsome solipsist of such extent that I rather hope the book reflects some sort of psychic purge for the author rather than think McEwan finds such a figure worthy of his time.

The Dancers Dancing by Eilis ni Dhuibne, an exquisitely observed bildungsroman set against the particularly Irish backdrop of an summer college in the Gaeltacht. It's taken me a tremendously long time to read as ni Dhuibhne's sharply observed depictions of the lives of 13-year-old girls has the habit of triggering unpleasant flashbacks to high school.

9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.

I just do? My ideas for stories tend to start as a sentence, a line of dialogue in my head. It repeats until I know who's speaking it or who's point of view I'm seeing and I build out from there. Normally by the time I can put a few paragraphs down, I've a sketch in my mind of who the character is. Over time, the sketch is finished, inked in and coloured... and then I normally throw it out and start over with a line here and a shadow there. Secondary characters, like baby horses, tend to emerge more or less fully-formed and capable of running on their own within moments. They are also more likely to be based on people I've met or inspired by other characters (fictional and otherwise). Protagonists are definitely anthropoid creatures and need time and effort and resources to thrive. The diptych of Katharyne and Rosyaln are probably the two protagonists who've emerged most fully-formed and changed least over time: Katharyne because she's drawn rather strongly from Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth I (and less so her historical counterpart) and Rosalyn because she was intended to be Not-the-heroine-of-every-sword-and-sorcery-novel-I'd-read-since-high-school, which is rather a more concrete character description than I normally have to begin. Since then, though, Rosalyn's character has been refined some with experiences thieved from Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Eileen Power's seminal^a-chem Medieval Women.


( The Questions (and answers) )

Day Two: How Many Characters Do You Have? Do You Prefer Males or Females?

Interesting segue from "your favourite writing project" to how many characters do you have, from a discussion of a finished product to a discussion of process - at least in part.

( One protagonist, two protagonist, three protagonist, four... )

Day Three: How do you come up with names for characters (and places if you're writing about fictional places)

( Naming is not re-naming )


( The Questions )

Still not feeling myself, still not loving the world, my place in it and everything. Meanwhile, my friends have strange ideas of how to help me fight depression - ficlets zombies, hook-ups and bad, bad things:

"The Zombie Wars of Pride & Prejudice" - self explanatory, I think.

"Mother of the Future I'd Like to..." - SPN/SCC. An edited version will appear at some point: my cat was sitting on my chest and arm as I tried to type the last paragraph.

"That's Gonna Leave a Mark" - SCC. The prompt for this was "John accidentally shoots Sarah" so it's not my fault.

The others are en train and anybody else wants to leave a prompt, do your worst. It's going to be hard to top Pride & Prejudice with zombies.


Nota bene - it's not that these don't work, mind you. It's that you would find them listed under the standard of care in the DSRM IV, is what I'm saying. So, really, I celebrate the bizzare and the slighty unhinged in my friends. For, lo, they are awesome.

More Joy Day is a fucking awesome idea. We could all use more joy, more often.

Today is also "no really, you will finish or at least get a respectable leg up on chapter three" day. And, well, I'm 2,000 words into what is going to be the chapter from hell and while I spin off into the ether, wondering what the hell I was thinking and how anyone could be interested and all those other thoughts writers have on days when the writing Is Not Going Well, I thought there might be a TSCC fan out there who might get a kick out of reading a snippet from the enormous Sarah Connor Chronicles fic that is currently marinating on my hard drive. That said, this snippet itself is... not exactly joyous, eh?

( Untitled TSCC fic, rated teen for language, spoilers for movies/series to date )

My life writing assignment drained my batteries pretty dry this week. This is what's left:

Saw:

Iron Man - Robert Downey Jr. was great as Tony Stark, the effects were cool, the script funny and Jon Favreau dialed Gwyneth Paltrow back from gratingly annoying to tolerably charming. On the other hand, the big bad was ludicrous and in our post-The Incredibles media reality, there's no excuse for a bad guy to be caught monologuing ever. Stay until after the credits.

Persepolis - awesome and intense and searing - at some point I will have more to say about this but it's too rich in my mind right now. I need to digest a little more.

Bones - Booth, Brennan and a baby made for fun TV. Bones is definitely my favourite forensic procedural - not only do the girls get to be smart but it manages to avoid much of the female death porn that is CSI's stock-in-trade.

Speaking of CSI - the most recent episode was boring even as background viewing while I caught up on a week's worth of newspapers in my room. And last week's Supernatural was even worse. Couldn't make it through either episode. Ick.

Read:

Half of Anna Karenina - stupid Russians! Write shorter books. Also the title is a lie: the book is really about this dude Levin who's Tolstoy's Gary Stu and thinks well-intentioned and terribly patronizing ideas for how to improve the lives of the Russian peasantry. I should look up how the Leninists felt about Tolstoy - I can see it going either way.

On Writing by Stephen King - the dude knows his stuff. A bit of a refresher, particularly after this past year, but all stuff that needs to be said.

Realized:

Lena Headey as Sarah Connor (TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES) pretty much saved my sanity in February: grad school in a foreign country - lonely and depressed and February. It was ugly up inside my head and watching Sarah Connor kick ass helped, put me back in touch with the 18 year old inside of me, her enthusiasm and her passion. I should probably send a thank you card.

I write really well about my own life. I need to find that same voice and momentum in my writing about my fake lives and that probably comes from rewriting, rewriting and rewriting until I find the truth in it. Writing about myself is more about how much truth I leave out (I'm no James Frey - it's all true but it's not all of the truth - there are things, even when you're writing confessional memoirs, that no one else wants, needs or has a right to know about my life). It's finding that line that's the hard part.

If you're feeling oppressed by your grad school advisors, all of who think you're wasting your time writing a horror novel, there's no one better to read on writing than Stephen King.

"If you were on a desert island with only 10 blank pieces of paper and a pencil, what would you want most to write?"

I'd want to write a plan for getting off the fucking island, is what I'd want to write. God, what sort of a silly question is that? Who thinks "ooh, trapped on a desert island. I have 10 pieces of paper, this pencil and a bloody fucking lot of coconuts. I know - time for a sonnet!"? No, if I were trapped on a desert island with 10 pieces of paper and a pencil, I'd save the paper to use for kindling, the pencil to use for starting fires and write in the sand: it's a desert island. Lots of sand. All you need is wet sand and a stick - presto! notebook. I mean, it worked for the Egyptians. Or you know, I'd use it to write my suicide note. Because I fucking hate the tropics. Hate them. I'm an Anglo-Irish Northern European white person - I am not designed for desert islands. I do not tan. I am designed to herd sheep across craggy, rain-swept moors. Not a lot of UV radiation on your average rain-swept moor. You never see Heathcliff wandering about saying "Oooh, better put a hold on that brooding while I reapply my SPF 30." So fuck your desert island and your 10 pieces of paper and your pencil, I'm off to the pub! So there!

If only that last bit were true.

Well, today I finally typed up the 1,600 words of chapter two I wrote in February. The interpersonal stuff cooks, I think but fucking hell, it was hard work getting that from notebook to computer screen.

Watched the final episode of Ashes to Ashes, which wasn't as good as the first season of Life on Mars but picked up satisfactorily in the last ep and, the Beeb tells us, will be back next year.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who series 4 begins next Saturday.

Right now, I am trying to edit poetry, which is a bitch because I'm afraid of editing what worked right out of the poems. It's given me a massive whacking headache, which means I don't feel like doing what I really want to do which is finish the Sarah Connor Chronicles fanfic I posted the other day.

All of which is by way of saying *whine* *grumble* *bitch* *bitch* *moan* *curse*.

This icon seems an appropriate metaphor for my day.

eta: fuck HTML with a giant Belgian bunny.

QED I am over the 'flu and recovered from my holiday (Vienna and Venice, baby! Whoo!) and still and giant nerd. Or geek. I'm not sure which. Anyone have a definition handy? How do you know if you're a nerd or a geek? And what is the difference? Or should I just accept that I'm generally socially retarded and a bit odd and leave it at that?

In other news:

There is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles comment fic in the comments to the above entry courtesy of taraljc who took me at my "you are a bad woman-oppressing fanfic writer" word and wrote Derek/Sarah angst to atone. No one is sure quite how we've managed to oppress women by writing stories about cool women like Sarah Connor and Aeryn Sun, but I aim to write (and encourage others to write) angsty pre-smut until we figure it out or the patriarchy surrenders. Whichever happens first. Or I get bored. Or strike porn. One of them.

Could Summer Glau be a nicer person? Now I want to go rewatch all the River Tam bits of Firefly again (I have promised myself that I will stop rewatching TSCC before I memorize all the dialogue).

This is what Benicio Del Toro will look like in Wolfman. This is not what the werewolves in my story will look like.

Ever.

How many versions of the "The Green Fields of France" do I fucking need? Three strikes me as one, if not two, too many. Surprisingly, of the three I have - The Fureys, Shilelagh Law and the Dropkick Murphys - the Murphys' version was the best.

What the song really needs is a June Tabor or a Shane McGowan cover. If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know.

Oh, what the hell people - Sarah Connor does not bake, okay? It's not a tough thing or a feminist thing, it's a baking-is-a-giant-fucking-effort-that-requires-time-and-actual-culinary-skill thing, which would be two things we've established that Sarah Connor has never had much. Why do you think the Connor family lives on pancakes? It's something a ten year old with a spatula and a hotplate can cook. *faceplam* Jesus.

On a related note - I need a better Latin translation for "Bad fic fucks you up worse than crack" than Fabula Mala Fissilis Deterium Cupidare. Anyone who's Latin is fresher than mine care to help?

PS - I want a t-shirt that says "Coming This Summer: River Tam Beats Up Everyone." - I wonder if it's XKCD or Joss Whedon I need to convince?

Things that delight me today about living in Ireland:

Having to dig 15 pages into the sports section to find the Superbowl result,

Walking under the sunshine for a change (I should really go for a bike ride but I'm feeling lazy), and

Surviving having my first piece of poetry critiqued in class (the tremor in my voice when I read the first bit out loud was not so cool, however - sometimes I forget that I'm supposed to be a tough-ass bitch).

The thing that makes these even sweeter, of course, is the Superbowl result itself. New York, baby, New York!

For some reason, I feel really positive about Clinton this afternoon.

Also, please remember it's SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES day today.

She's finished!

With time to take a nap before going up to college to hand the fuckers in!