a fool's musings

Boreas by Waterhouse
Fool, said my muse to me,
look in thy heart and write...

Warning: Adult Content

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the five Ws, or, all about me

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current mood: current mood

"pathological and unbalanced"

Items of Interest

    Music
  • Walk On - U2
  • Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
  • If I Can't Change Your Mind - Sugar
  • Sick of Myself - Matthew Sweet
  • Town Called Malice - The Jam
  • One - U2
  • The Space Between - DMB
    Books
  • Lord of the Rings
  • Catch-22
  • The Neely Trilogy
  • Absalom! Absalom!
  • Possession: A Romance
  • Foucault's Pendulum
  • Dreamhouse
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  • I Capture the Castle
  • Sandman
  • Waking the Moon

    Shows
  • Angel

    •
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in reruns)

    •
  • Alias

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  • West Wing

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  • The Simpsons

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10.01.02 - 12:53 p.m.

my sordid past

Woohoo!

Got my refund check from the other broker - the whole $500. Plus the credit check from AMEX, so I'll be depositing some cash today, baby.

***

More on Evil and redemption of evil characters, fantasies of bad boys, etc. is up in the LJ.

***

This dating survey is going around. Everybody's doing it, so why shouldn't I, right?

The one who seduced you and fucked you over and broke your heart in a million pieces and laughed about it:

Buffy? X-Men Movieverse? Angel? Could be all three, though they didn't really *laugh* about it... Well, Joss might have.

The old flame you don't see very often any more but whom you still really enjoy getting together with for a few drinks and maybe a pleasant nostalgic romp in the sheets:

Homicide

The mysterious dark gothy one whom you used to sit up with talking until 3 a.m. at weird coffeehouses and with whom you were quite smitten until you realized he really was fucking crazy:

Smallville

The one you spent a whole weekend in bed with and who drank up all your liquor, and whom you'd still really like to fuck again although you're relieved he doesn't actually live in town:

Harry Potter

The steady:

X-Men Movieverse

The alluring strangers whom you've flirted with at parties but have never gotten really serious with:

Star Wars, LotR, Harry Potter

The one you hang out with and have vague fantasies about maybe having a thing with but ultimately you're just good buddies 'cause the friendship is there but the chemistry ain't:

West Wing

The one your friends keep introducing you to and who seems like a hell of a cool guy except it's never really gone anywhere:

X-Files, Trek of any vintage <- just no interest there...

The one who's slept with all your friends, and you keep looking at him and thinking Him? How the hell did he land all these cool babes?:

Sparkly Dancing Boys

The one your friend has fallen for like a ton of bricks and whom she keeps babbling to you about on the phone for hours, and you'd be happy for her except you just know it's going to end badly:

Smallville, RPS of any sort

***

Still doing the word count thingy. Am contemplating possibly graphing it when I'm done.

I am so geeky.

Sigh.

~victoria



link

[current mood: tired, busy]
[current music: Axis (Bold as Love) - Hendrix]
[random quote: Here we are in our summer years Livin' on ice cream and chocolate kisses]

~*~

09.30.02 - 10:27 p.m.

semantics and salvage

I ramble about evil characters and why we like them over in the LJ. (the link is fixed now. Sorry 'bout that.) It's rather incoherent, and I suggest you check out Unanon's LJ first, for the links to various other discussions that spurred my post.

Livia and others are discussing fanon - good fanon vs. bad fanon. It's interesting. Because I don't think *all* fanon is bad, but there's some stuff that makes me *cringe* when I see it.

I tend toward canon-whoredom. I admit it. I like the characters to be recognizable, and for the characterization to be easily backed up by the source material.

Hooker!Rogue? Eight months on the road, baby. It could *so easily* happen.

Everything I write, I try to make it a plausible extrapolation from the source text. Sometimes it works - that's good fanfic. Sometimes it doesnt - and while a story that doesn't have solid canonical roots may be a great story and well written, it probably fails as fanfic (Mercy comes to mind here.)

Then Jenn discusses word count, and she's right. I did say I was most comfortable in the under 20K word range. If I were less tired and more user-friendly, I'd even link the entry. But not tonight.

Now she's got me wondering how *my* stories break down by word count. Hmm... I may have to tackle that project. I don't think I'd do *all* my stories, but a good sample size.

I know, for example, that my longest completed story to date (A Harbor in the Tempest) is barely 26K words iirc. So is the other really long one - The Mutant Bride. Hell, I don't think any of my series even crack 30,000 words.

Consumption is at 40K right now (I think) and it's unfinished, and that's the longest I've gone.

7K-15K words seems to be my typical range, though I've written drabbles (100 words) and the occasional longer story (I think The Soiled Dove is about 23K words).

Novels are hard, and fanfiction novels, where the rewards are mostly intangible, are probably harder -- not in the writing or the selling, but in the sitting down and making things reconcile and knowing you could be Jossed at every turn in the however many months it's taken to write the thing.

I mean, Consumption is AU. Even more AU than usual, because it doesn't take the events of the movie as a starting point. I know there's a link out there defining Alternate Universes and Elseworlds and Alternate Histories, and again, too lazy to look it up now, but from what I recall, I don't think I agreed with the definitions.

Elseworlds is easy enough - Logan and Rogue in Regency England, or Lex and Clark as Lewis and Clark, or Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon as samurai in medieval Japan.

The characters are recognizable, even though their setting has changed completely.

I guess it's AH and AU that confuse me, as I've never used the term Alternate History. To me, an AU is something that either diverges from canon somewhere significant (Buffy doesn't sleep with Angel, he never loses his soul; Magneto's machine works, the X-Men fail, Rogue dies on the Statue of Liberty; Baby!Clark is found by Lionel Luthor instead of the Kents etc.), or loses it entirely (Rogue and Logan continue on the road and are never stopped by Sabretooth or rescued by the X-Men; Rogue and Scott are street hustlers who end up at the X-mansion when Scott contracts TB [the plot of Consumption, btw]; Lex and Clark meet in Metropolis instead of Smallville; Sirius Black gets Harry first and takes him on the run instead of placing him with the Dursleys) - yet even here, some elements of canon are included (how Logan and Rogue met, how Harry's parents are killed), or woven into the story in a different way (I defy you to find a Logan/Rogue AU story that doesn't include the impaling).

So I'm getting all bogged down in terminology and semantics.

I mean, the Wishverse is a canonical Alternate Universe of the Buffyverse, one in which Buffy Summers didn't come to Sunnydale in time to stop the Harvest.

It's possible that the "real world" of "Normal Again" exists someplace other than Buffy's head.

In fact, I'd say that there's a whole big parallel universe thing going on in the Bverse with the introduction of Dawn and her insertion into the other characters' memories when she didn't exist in the first four seasons of the show.

There's very possibly a Buffyverse where the Key was destroyed by the Knights Who Say Key before she ever made it to Sunnydale, so what we call the canonical Bverse is probably really the Dawnverse.

And now I'm confusing myself.

Anyhow, fanfic novels = neuroses because of the possibility for Jossing at every turn. The brilliant way around that is to do like Yahtzee and Rheanna did with Splinter or Jenn did with Jus Ad Bellum and set the story in both universes.

Me, I don't think I could keep all that straight, but I'm also not sure I've got the chops to make it as a novelist. Which isn't a bad thing. Before I started writing fanfic, I'd pretty much given up on myself as a prose writer altogether, having settled on poetry for most of my writing, since this thing called plot confounds me.

~*~

In other news, the Knicks are already in trouble.

*snerk*

~*~

In moving news, the salvage guys came today and cleared out all my furniture. One of 'em is taking the futon home, and one is taking the baker's rack, both of which were still in excellent condition, so I'm glad someone's going to get use out of 'em, even if it's not Marg and Dom.

So Daddy and I packed up the miscellaneous stuff that was left over, and labeled and taped everything, so I am ready to move.

And I'm exhausted. I came home and slept for two hours, and I'm still tired. Work tomorrow and Wednesday, and then Thursday is the big day.

I can't believe it's actually happening.

~victoria



link

[current mood: tired]
[current music: Standing in the Way - ASH]
[random quote: wish I could lay your arms down and let you rest at last wish I could slay your demons but now that time has passed]

~*~

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The painting is "Boreas" by John William Waterhouse. Again, not a muse, but I like her. She suits the color scheme.

The quote is from Sir Philip Sidney.

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