Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  occult

Now that was neglecting the brog. I saw the Harry Potter movie when it came out, and read the book afterwards to check for accuracy. Someone asked what age the books were intended for. Thirty, I’d say - I see people reading them on the T nowadays about as often as I see people reading Ayn Rand. (There are no other patterns.) Ayn Rand is very, very popular, but nobody admits it.

Back to the movie. It looked like it cost a fortune; I wonder what’s left to the imagination after a show like that. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was addictive, but when I finally put it down, I realized it wasn’t The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by any stretch of the imagination. There was something amoral about it, something like what David Brin talks about in his Salon article about Star Wars. (Snagged that link from a blog…) Harry Potter, like all the Skywalker children, was born into the right family. The foundling-king is an old, old story, but Grimm had morals. Harry Potter needs a good moral, besides don’t stare in the mirror too long.

But it was a good book.

Yes, I’m still up. Yes, it’s far too late for this, but I made a mirror at Prohosting.

It’s really late, but I finally put up The Silent Movie of the Soul, my first Buffy fic. This story has been much improved by Jintian’s suggestions, especially that whole POV thingy there. Nice beta if you can get her…

I think I’m becoming addicted to editing - it was actually fun to go through this story umpteen times. Now that I’ve abandoned the field, I’m not claiming it was a victory. It’s just bedtime for Buffybot.

Oops, freeshell just went down. There’s no Buffy on the mirrors because they won’t let me upload. Sigh.

It’s late, I’m still editing those Buffy fics, but I had some thoughts that must get blogged:

One, I’ve tracked down my muse. Not to get her to write on command, but I’ve figured out what she writes, and what I write. It’s not as simple as saying she writes the good stuff and I crank out the puff pieces, though that would be close. The muse writes the first-person stories (”The Dance”, “Ambassador”, “148″), the mythic short-stories embedded in other fics (”A Maquis Holiday”, “Marriage is Irrelevant”), and, of course, the vastly underappreciated filks (”The Wreck of the Voyager”, “Chakotay”, “Yesterday, When I was Borg”). Sorry I didn’t link all those - they’re all on the Voyager page, except “148″ which is BtVS to appear.

My other thought of the night comes from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, the movie. That was a cheeseball bit of writing on Joss Whedon’s part, and I think it’s what makes him a fanfic writer. We all write fanfic because we take the show too seriously (I have a whole theory of Taking Things Too Seriously, which is going to have to wait for my next turn at bat on Zendom), and The Great Bird of the Hellmouth seems to have taken his Vampire/Teen B-movie too seriously in exactly the same way.

And he keeps on doing it… I know I should be working on that novel, but I Keep On Doing It Too, in scary capital letters. I Can’t Help It. Somebody Stop Me…

I’ve pared down the menu to your left, and added the Sev Trek Bluffy cartoon to my Buffy page. And the Buffy fic is almost done…almost.

What’s the deal with Yahoogroups? It took me days to get onto the BetterBuffyFics list and link it to my YahooID.

Thank the gypsies I kept trying, though, because I’ve already read some Better Buffy Fic, by Avalon. She was a J/C writer once, too - maybe that explains her appeal.

On the down side of Better Buffy Fic, I tried another link to a fic whose prose was far too wooden for me to get into. It was on fanfiction.net and had literally hundreds of glowing reviews, which makes me bitter because the one fic I posted there (A Light Beyond) got one review. Count it, one. Fanfiction.net went down for a month a few hours after I posted it, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Ahem. I wasn’t going to beg for feedback. Since I still have the account, I should post my Buffy fic there, just to see what happens.

Well, another first for me: I thought I’d never do the squicky unpopular couples until I went all C/7, all the time; I thought I’d never switch fandoms and now I’m Buffying; and I thought I’d never pay for free web space, but the check is in the mail. Soon I’ll have somewhere between 200 and 400 MB of space on Freeshell - the details are a little vague to me - as well as ftp and ssh.

The flurry of feedback is over - it’s a good thing it ended before it went to my head. Adrian Hilton wrote, “you have a twisted, twisted mind.” Thank you, Adrian. That’s my kind of feedback.

I’m off to fight the newsserver again.

Well, I tried to post A Maquis Holiday to ASC, but I think my newsserver wasn’t in the mood. I’ll see if it shows up tomorrow. And I took the Art Test:

I like that better than the Name Game.

If your friends all jumped off bridges in their blogs… Seema did it, so I had to do it, too:

There is, by the way, no such thing as being “too independent in your thinking.” What’s in your name?

Did someone declare an International Day of Feedback and not tell me? In the few short hours I’ve been awake (yes, I was up all night writing an “After Life” episode insertion), I’ve gotten feedback for my Buffy filk (from a fellow filker, of course) and for three old Voyager stories (The Unity of the Multiverse, Thrive, and The Bottle of Bajoran Blue Wine, for those of you who still remember the agony and the ecstasy that was VOY).

To be fair, one of the feedbackers wasn’t sure that I wrote Thrive. Maybe B’Elanna wrote that one…it’s hard to recall the details now. VOY is getting all misty and rosy on me. (We have a word in Portuguese for the sort of nostalgia you have for the old country that you fled as fast as the steamship would carry you away at the time: saudades.) But honestly, Feedbackers Appearing from the Woodwork, I wasn’t begging for mail. B’Elanna’s awards are enough recognition for me, until I round up that elusive Hugo.

Why do I do it, if not for the feedback? Well, in the words of The Great Bird of the Hellmouth,