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Saturday, April 27, 2002

Warning: This entry rated R for bad language, bad attitude, and meteorological obscenity.

Memo to the Weather Gods: OK, assholes, listen up and listen good. You know what today is? That's right, it's four days before May 1! And also five weeks since spring officially started! Now, you know what I do not want to be doing four days before May 1, and five weeks after spring officially started? Right again! I do not want to be scraping an inch of snow off my fucking windshield so I can drive to the fucking store to get a pack of fucking cigs!!!

I mean, Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, guys! I know this is Minnesota and all, but this. Is. Ridiculous.

I would also like to send a Drop-Dead-o-Gram to the brain-gremlins who are whapping me with guilt about not having updated here in, like, forever. OK, so I haven't updated, so I suck. I offer no entertainment value to you good folks who have taken the time and energy to click in here. My life is boring. I have no brain. This week has been hell on a biscuit, plus the goddam story has sucked me back in -- we're up to 85,000 words, folks, and the hits just keep on comin'. Ray is now screaming on the phone to Stella. Fraser is freaking. I'm reading passages to the cat, gesturing illustratively, and she is so not impressed.

Whooo-HOO! Big thunder/lightning flash! Right in the middle of the freakin' blizzard! OK, Weather Gods, even though you still suck, I give you back a point or two. Cause that was, like, really cool.

OK, back to the story. Ray is now fixing a jeep. Woo-hoo. This is so fascinating. Not.

Sorry, people, actual content will return at some point. Maybe tomorrow.

Posted @ 08:49 PM CST [Link]7 comments

Monday, April 22, 2002

OK, I'm about to break the one New Year's resolution I've managed to keep so far. The one that says, "I will not rain on others' parade by talking trash about any show that I have not earned the right to trash-talk about, through serving an extended period of loyal if occasionally embittered fanhood."

I'm breaking it because I cannot keep myself from saying that tonight's Angel episode gives a whole new layer of meaning to the word crapfest. I'm just -- gaaaahhhhh. Man. I don't even have words for it. It would, on the whole, have done my brain cells much less harm to instead spend that entire hour chugging Everclear straight from the bottle. (And I would've had more fun into the bargain).

Must go scrub my cranium out now. I may never be able to eat pancakes again.

Posted @ 09:22 PM CST [Link]12 comments

Sunday, April 21, 2002

Last Monday, when the trees were still bare, it was 91 degrees; today, now that the trees have begun to leaf out, it's snowing, snowing heavily, has been snowing all day long. Such is April.

I'm making a beef bourguignon, so the house smells marvellously savory, and I'm polishing off the red wine that didn't end up in the stewpot, and grinding away at writing, as I have been all weekend. Pushing through scenes, mostly by force of will. I'm writing more externally these days than I ever have, or am trying to; looking at sequences of events, describing them from the outside and in that way trying to get at what's happening underneath, rather than feeling my way outward from within. Not the most rewarding way to write, for me, but a useful skill to try to pick up.

Something really startling happened to me, not long ago; I was digging through the chaos of my desk in search of a blank computer diskette, and in the back of a drawer I found a ziplock baggie with several diskettes in it, one of which was labelled "FF," my usual abbreviation for fanfic files. I stuck it in the computer, opened it up, and then just sat and stared at the screen for a while. On that disk were two stories, dated 1996, that I had no memory whatsoever of having written. I mean -- I'd totally forgotten about them! Spooked, I opened up each document, took a peek, and then closed them up fast and sat whimpering for a while. Yes, gals and pals, back in the dim distant past, when the world was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a woman, not yet known as Kat Allison, not yet even aware of the existence of slash, who sat down before the keyboard and perpetrated . . . . Mulder/Scully smut! And lo, it was vile, and displeasing to the eye; it did suck like unto a Hoover, and blow like unto someone puffing into a double-belled euphonium.

Gaahhhh. I haven't really read through either of these things with much care; I was a bit too freaked, not just because I'd actually written them, but even more because I'd so thoroughly blocked them from my memory. My brain is even better at self-preserving feats of repression and denial than I'd thought. At least I didn't post either of these anywhere, or I hope I didn't.

I do have (like many of you, I'm sure) a ton of unfinished/unposted stories of whose existence I am well aware, and every once in a while I click into one of these and scan through it. This is sometimes reassuring--I'll find a well-turned sentence, or a cool bit of characterization--and sometimes disheartening, because I really haven't given up on any of these, I still intend to finish them someday, but at times I feel a bit like someone putting a candle in the window for her lover who was lost at sea many's the long year ago. I look at people who are cranking out lots of good new stuff in new fandoms, and I think maybe I should just get with the program. But then I remind myself that there are still people writing/posting ST:TOS stuff, for heaven's sake, to say nothing of XF and HL; I tell myself that if a story's basically good, it'll still be good a year or two (or three) hence. And with each of the unfinished things, I do still feel interest and excitement about the basic story concept; I still want to write them. It's just figuring out some way to make this happen faster, somehow. Discipline, good work habits, all that worthy stuff.

Posted @ 05:21 PM CST [Link]6 comments