Don't tell me women are not the stuff of heroes.

Probably won't significantly affect anyone, but I look to be incommunicado until Friday, should anyone want to say hello. Catching up on everything should be fun.

THE FANFICTION LOVE MEME

(The title line is a lie; I will probably do this again eventually. I'll try not to do it too much, though.)

I just realized something about my shipping preferences: I will ship anything, but I can't seem to have a true hardcore I-wish-to-write-epics-and-manifestos-about-it OTP unless the relationship between the characters is the emotional core of the story. See also: Revy/Rock, Michael/Francis, etc.

How dreadfully unimaginative of me.

(The source of all the my-shipping-tendencies-related grumbling that has been spread across various sites lately: I'm trying to decide whether to sign up for thelittlebang. The thing is, six months ago I would have scrolled on by under the assumption that I don't have a 15,000-word fanfic in me, but - apparently I do. Only, that was an accident, and I'm not sure I could actually do it on purpose. Especially because I have no idea what I'd write.

So, uhm. Stuff.

( Life/Christmas/Family/whatnot/babble )

FANNISH STUFF.

( Inception/Narnia/fic/babble. Uhm, spoilers for The Last Battle which came out before I was born? )

Anyway, so, yeah.

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

( I'm curious about how they determined this list. )

- I have, once again, run headlong into the question of how one refers to non-white people without causing offense when things are set in a fantasy world. I mean, say you have an African-American character. Wait... this world contains neither an Africa nor an America. Huh. In that particular case, I guess "black" could be the solution, but I'm never sure whether that's okay or not. But, say, you have an Asian character. Wait, there is no Asia. Hispanic character? ...What Spain? I mean, there are areas in the world that are similar to these areas in culture and geography and whatnot, because I am too lazy to make up a whole boatload of fresh cultures because other cultures are awesome and deserve to be glorified in fiction. (Down with the standard pseudomedieval Europe setting, I say!) But these places aren't actually called any of the above. So how do I refer to these characters without falling headlong into racefail? I mean, I hear about the lack of minority characters in speculative fiction, and I think it's bad, and it shouldn't stay that way. Not fair. And I want to be a part of the solution, but I can never figure anything out. So far, my method has been to mention, say, chocolaty skin while describing my non-white characters, but it always feels inadequate. And a really cliched description. (And let's not even get into the persistent little voice at the back of my head going "You're a WASP. You live in a tiny town where almost everyone is either a WASP or a white middle-class Catholic or an archetypal redneck. What makes you think you can write these characters without doing everything Wrong?")

- In much less serious stuff, I was (in the depths of my disease) slumped on the couch flipping through Netflix's Watch Instantly thing. In the recommendations I see Firefly, which I've been wanting to see just to find out what the fuss is about. One very long pilot later, pretty much the entire household has trickled into the living room and is enraptured. I believe the household has a new favorite show. Excuse me while I go feel smug beyond belief or reason.

- On the Warfront is now at 1,208 words. 4,000 looks like it might be a possibility (if I could just stop feeling brain-dead and stuffy, IMMUNE SYSTEM). I absolutely love putting two characters together and just letting them talk. It almost always creates several hundred words of dialogue that I had absolutely no intention of writing when I sat down. It just sort of... shows up, under my fingers.

-I have got to track down that "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia" icon that somebody had. And come up with some clever text to go with the Liberty/Justice femmeslash painting so I can make it into an icon too. Does anyone else think it looks an awful lot like the sailor/nurse end-of-WWII shot?

- MOCKINGJAY. It has finally come into my possession; priorities will be skewed highly for the next few days.

- I should just sneak around the house with a camera while people are reading, and send all the resulting stealth shots to people who claim that boys don't read books about girls. Between one of them hooked on Beka Cooper and the wars over Katniss, this house is plain old proof of how stupid it is.

So, due to a buildup of moroseness of varying levels of justifiability, I set myself an assignment. Now, and whenever else I feel mopey, I am going to take a stupid premise and not leave the computer until I've posted at least 1,000 words running with it. I'm posting this now so that I can't back down. Today's premise:

The entirety of one school's GSA, i.e. one lesbian cheerleader, one probably-bi school newspaper geek, and one back-of-the-classroom easy-to-miss gay guy, set off cross-country in a miserable clunker with nothing to keep them from killing each other but chocolate, the summer reading, and an iPod full of songs from old movies and every cover ever done by Glee

I told you the premises were stupid.

Edit: I actually did it, too!

Discovery: Feet of Clay is the name of a Discworld novel. It is also the name of a rather melodramatic detective novel by Ruth Birmingham which contains quite a few improbabilities and stereotypes about small towns. Should you, perhaps, go to request a novel through an inter-library loan system... always check the author as well as the title.