jmtorres

Something New by jmtorres.

Slash. Het. Crossdressing. PG-13.
Dean/Cas, Sam/Ruby.
4674 words.

Summary: An angel, a demon, and two fake girls walk into a bar.

For everysecondtuesday, who requested a story on the premise that the handprint burned onto Dean's shoulder is the angel equivalent of an engagement ring. Thanks to grey_bard for the beta.

Alternate reading option: AO3.

( Read more... )

Fucking fucking fucking fuck, I am not sure if I need to take this premise apart at the seams or leave it in all its heartbreaking glory as a commentary on the problems with the source material. I just. I really don't want to kill my girls.

The more this twists itself out, the more ambiguous Ruby becomes. And this started off as the "Ruby is actually trying to stop the apocalypse!" 'verse. It still is? But there's complications? I uncovered a Machiavellian sidescheme that turned out to be fucking central and the alternate title of this could be "You Always Hurt the One You Love" and oh my god. What the fuck. I hate my brain.

Things I am still trying to solve:
--Lilith's body
--Jimmy's parallel

Also, I have to ask, if it was Heaven locking Lucifer up with the seals, whose fucking bright idea was it to make it evil acts that break them? Why not "this seal shall break when a demon becomes human," "this seal shall break when a fallen angel regains her grace," "this seal shall break when Lucifer asks God's forgiveness"? I MEAN. COME ON. If the hotbox is time out, why not make it so that Lucifer can only come back when he's really sorry?

And if it wasn't heaven sealing Lucifer away, who was it?

Hey, is there any fic about Gabriel's vessel? I mean, he's an angel, presumably he has to have one, and presumably he had to get permission, because even Satan needs permission?

I am just going to remind myself that Gabriel did not actually appear in season four so there is no need to bump my cast numbers from six to eight. *headdesk* Though. Though it could answer the question of "where the fuck's the body coming from..."

Fuuuck.

I swear to God, focus puller is THE most important job on the Supernatural set. I know it's a stylistic choice but it happens so very often that I keep wondering if they've worked it out and determined they can save time and money by doing a focus pull instead of having multiple cameras or doing multiple set-ups.

*weeps* I named Ruby's body. Or Ruby named Ruby's body. And maybe I should stop saying body because it's not just the body, see? Coma girl woke up. Ruby named coma girl Janie because she's a Jane Doe. Ruby is a bitch. But RUBY LOVES JANIE THE BEST.

Castiel performed the ceremony, so it's totally legit.

Strange suspicion Sam is going to be jealous.

Seriously, you guys, the inside of my head is so weird right now.

Castiel is thousands of years old, or more, depending on how you want to play the mythology, but certainly not less, and Dean's life is a blink in the oceans, to mix metaphors. Why isn't there more Highlander style angst with this pairing? Not that I necessarily want to read more angst, I just don't get why it never comes up even long enough to handwave.

1. Why do people keep feeding @mishacollins straight lines?

2. How often do I get to meaningfully say the sentence "I just realized what this vid needs is more stabbing"?

Seriously. Also, I think he's trying to incite Misha/Obama RPF with a supervillian private island subplot. I wouldn't write it but I'd sure read it.

I realized where I'd been remiss in leaving out the part where Dean stabs Cas hello. I swear I'm going to have to put an extreme stab warning on this vid. All of the stabbing of s4! Some of the sex!

Jimmy and Amelia Novak won't get out of my head, and they're having marital problems.

I am strangely tempted to title the story of the dissolution of their marriage "Angels Don't Do Booty Calls."

Would it be cheating to bring in s5 clips on a vid about s4 to parallel Ruby's love of fries with Castiel's burger addiction? Especially given the fry clip is s3.

I appear to have accomplished 42 seconds of a vid tonight. Not so much in the way of homework, but yay vid.

This is a weird one in that... it's not fully formed in my head, but I'm not feeling the need to pre-clip for it. Like, I had a thesis centered on the choruses, and working on the verse has been... it's flowed. Like, when I get to each line I know what to do with each line, so I know exactly where to go get it. Mostly. There's been some cases of "Cas, could you please be a little more badass now" and "Stop simpering, Ruby, I swear to God, no one would know you were a demon." But like, most of the stuff has been just there, right where I need it to be.

grey_bard asked me if it was coming together so fast because I'd clipping for the last week, which I haven't been. I've been watching stuff? But mostly not even with intent, and so crazy out of order that it's kind of hilarious that I can tell a remotely linear story with this. Weirdly, I think that my vid-brain image memory must be connected heavily to my fic-brain plot memory, because while I wasn't watching with intent to vid, I was watching with intent to write. So a lot of stuff got entered into the mental encyclopedia that way, I'm guessing.

I should write up my workflow with Final Cut at some point, because the way I'm set up it's adaptable to clip or not to clip, whatever works best at a given moment. And I think this is key to letting your creative juices flow. Sometimes you need to hunt and peck for the best iteration of a repeating theme, sometimes you need to be able to ram footage straight from a whole episode file directly onto the timeline with no intermediate steps to slow you down and get in your way. Or I need, anyway.

So yeah. I cut 42 seconds of a vid tonight, which, seriously, comes out to something like six or seven seconds per hour, which is... a lot, really. That's like, the night after Vividcon extension deadline pace, niqaeli can attest. There is no deadline on this! I don't know what's gotten into me! I'm usually a lot more methodical. Well, that's kind of a lie. Let's say, I'm usually methodical for two months and then finishing shit in a fucking hurry last minute. I do not usually start with the fucking hurry. This is weird for me.

I am probably jinxing myself by even saying this, but I think I can get out of this story at under ten thousand words. For those keeping track at home, I had previously thought it was going to be a thousand word story, sworn I would cut it off by five thousand, and given up in despair around seven thousand. I have written the last scene, which boosted me over eight thousand. Unfortunately I have not written the next-to-last scene, and I am having weird balance issues which lead me to suspect I need more than one scene still, therefore: I can probably get out of this story at under ten thousand words.

Right now I would settle for being able to get out of this story, regardless of how many more words it wants to be. I mean, seriously. It can be fifty thousand words long if it can also be done now. If I could just figure out how to make the thing balance right, I could stop feeling like it wants more scenes just to mock me with its insane word count.

Links I am keeping track of for later because I am too lazy to log into delicious away from home--
http://everysecondtuesday.dreamwidth.org/35958.html
http://vichan.livejournal.com/392184.html
http://community.livejournal.com/whitecollarfic/80709.html

I was considering whether I could get away with going back and forth on the narrator in cracky crack dorkface angst vid, but I don't think I actually have to. The lyrical narrator castigates self as often as other, so I don't have to switch POVs to call them both on being little shits. Viewpoint purity will be maintained!

I will be cracking out with artistry and vision.

(On DW this is a GIP post. I haven't bothered to update my icons on LJ and probably won't.)

So I had the experience, watching Farscape, of being spoiled with spoilers so over-the-top unbelievable that I did not believe them and therefore I watched events unfold essentially unspoiled. It was early season three, there had been two Johns for an episode or two, and I asked ysobel how long until one of them died? She asked me where I was and I told her and she told me I had to wait for an episode near the end of the season and I did not believe her. At all. I thought she was being cryptic so as not to spoil me. I thought she was making it up. The more of the season I watched the more incredulous I got until eventually I said to her, "You... you told me." To which her response was sort of, "Giggle? Yes?"

At the time I treasured that phenomenon. Dear show, you went there, I didn't expect you to, I so far didn't expect you to that even being told you would I didn't believe it. Yeah.

I say "at the time" because I've had this experience, both in the hearing about and the telling about, about fourteen times since I've started watching Supernatural. I feel like most statements about the show should be prefaced with "And I mean this literally." I have a new apology in my fannish vocabulary: "I thought you were kidding. Apparently I was wrong."

So this icon is about one of those moments. I'd been told ( 5.10 spoilers )

I had to apologize to grey_bard for not believing her about that one.

Secondarily: Castiel. SQUISH.

I have now officially seen all of season 4 of Supernatural.

(Still remaining: two episodes of s1, about half of s5, and most of s2 and s3.)

Apparently I just ship everyone. Like, not everyone-everyone? I don't want this to turn into a pissing match because I already know of at least two four 'ships that would be worlds of NO for me, but at least two of which I know exist in actual written fanfic form--but seriously, I kind of ship almost everyone. The process of my realization went: I figured I had like, two, three, four... ships... on this show... and around that point I realized that in fact the accurate description of the way I ship this show is in fact "clusterfuck." Usually I organize into some functional form of poly but oh. Oh they're all completely dysfunctional. This should really come as a surprise to absolutely no one.

*headdesk*

I feel like crap. I feel like I lost my weekend, and alas I didn't even lose it to sleep or I'd feel up to more right now. No, I lost my weekend to writing White Collar fic and watching Supernatural. (In other news: I appear to have actually acquired a Supernatural plotbunny I want to keep. Who knows when or if I'll write it, I have seasons 2, 3, and half of 4 and 5 to catch up on, but it amuses me.)

Writing... I'm sure you're all aware that my intended thousand-word thought experiment got away from me and is now the better part of seven thousand words. I actually culled a few hundred out of it last night because there's one section that was 1500 words, which is about three times longer than most of the other sections, and I'm trying to figure out some way to fit into the structure. There's... I've been told, of its content, that there's two pieces of plot that need to be there and one sentence which is the linchpin of the story, so it's not like I'm battling extraneous crap here. Gah. I haven't tried the 1300 word version on anyone to see if it works as well cut down, but even so that's not cut down enough. I'm wondering if there's a way to space out these pieces across--even two scenes instead of one would be better. Also, I was told it needed more snark in this section. I'm pro-snark, but I'm finding it difficult when Peter and Neal are both trying so damn hard to get through to each other, hopefully without being forced to actually say anything about anything. Clearly they should be using snark to not say what they're trying to say.

In the meantime, I still haven't written the ending. I know what piece of information needs to get transmitted to Neal and I know how that needs to get reflected back to Peter for narrative resolution, I just can't write it. Partially because I'm fucking around with the 1500 word monster scene and partially because the scene I'm in the middle of is threatening to turn into a 1500 word monster as well, if I don't figure out how to end scene and go somewhere else for the next important bit.

And I still don't have a title.

And echan can make me shriek "Ew" repeatedly just by saying "spanking" now.

And last night I discovered the absolute, over-the-top, practically parody of itself bad epitome of the story my story was written in response to. Before I was writing about something that happened here and there, seemingly unintentionally and unthinkingly in stories I otherwise enjoyed, but whoa, this story was non-stop, all-singing, all-dancing, in your face for the entire story. Dude, some people like to play with feathers, some people need the whole damn chicken, apparently. It was hilarious. But probably only to me. From all the comments, people enjoyed it as a serious work of drama, so I think I'll respectfully refrain from naming names.

So I started in on the fourth season of Supernatural today (skipping quite far ahead of where I'd been before) out of an interest in Castiel. After two episodes echan decided that the easiest way to answer my incessant questions was to skip ahead to 4x09 and 4x20, respectively "fun sextimes with Ruby" and "how the Holy Tax Accountant got touched by an angel."

I suddenly have this huge interest in Jimmy Novak. I want to squish him! For the first part of the episode I very much thought he was going to go home and find his family already dead, and then he started lying to his wife about how he'd been crazy! But he was ALL BETTER NOW! and started wondering how he would ever be a fit vessel for Castiel again, since I knew he'd be in season 5, and then as the denoument approached I rather feared that he'd become a vessel again because his family was DEAD. So I was relieved at how it turned out, all told? And also a bit smug to have called that clearly his daughter was going to be vessely as well, if what made him special was in his blood. Also I really wish Dean had grabbed Castiel and turned him around and made him give the wife and daughter a few platitudes about Jimmy fighting the good fight because he loved them.

I want Jimmy Novak fic. I do not know where this would even fit anywhere in the canon unless you twist things sideways and suggest Castiel can/would let Jimmy out now and again, but I have a sort of horrific desire for Dean/Jimmy. I don't know what is wrong with me.

Recs?

echan said something to me about SPN fandom being in a tailspin about the possibility of season 6, my summary of it was as follows:

The Network: This show is high-rating and money-making! Why would we cancel it?
Fandom: WHY GOD WHY.
Kripke: You know the whole apocalypse thing is too big, what if for season 6 we gave them a really simple thru line, you know, as simple as season one and being on a quest to find their dad.
Fandom: ...Oh. Well if you put it like that...

echan then suggested it would be completely hilarious if Ackles and Padalecki refused to play ball, since reportedly they have said OMG IT'S DONE too.

I then suggested Season 6: Castiel and Gabriel on a roadtrip across America to find their father.

I then wondered, if I posted the idea to my droll, would someone write it for me?

Decide what this is about
Write a second verse yourself
~from Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

I would first like to say: I am really, actually shocked by how strong my feelings are about this episode. I, I don't even know.

I subscribe to the validity of multiple interpretations of a work. I think that this is the underpinning of most modern media fannish (largely female) interaction with our shows. I think it is foolish and irrelevant to tell someone they're interrogating the text wrong. I don't think there is a wrong way to interrogate the text, even if I disagree with your specific conclusions.

( spoilers to follow )

Cutting lab, cutting doctor's appointment (I'm *better*), watching Supernatural and reading fic, haven't done my homework yet, contemplating going to class in an hour.

My dreams threw me all off-kilter today.

In other news: Neal Caffrey's FACE.

I've had a terrible bunny. Please tell me someone's written it. Stanford era bodyswap fic: Dean wakes up with Jess, Sam wakes up on a hunting trip with dad, wackiness ensues.

So I've been reading Supernatural fic.

I don't watch the show. I can recognize Sam and Dean and tell them apart but really that is all. I don't participate in the fandom. I don't actually care one way or the other about Wincest (and am likely to skim past sex of any kind)[ETA: to clarify: I will read Wincest, I just probably won't be reading the sex]. What I'm here for is:

Crack. Especially long, plotty crack.

Dean adopting Hufflepuffs is win. I enjoy the genre (I assume at the small quantity I've read, two different stories on a theme implies the existence of a genre) wherein some form of hellspawn starts following them around and they can't get rid of them and eventually give in and train them to hunt or swear or whatever. I am apparently capable of enjoying completely non-supernatural AUs. My favorite part of Jack Kerouac's Guide to Becoming the Anti-Christ was totally the wedding, although the part where Sam knocks the internet out is fairly win, too. I have decided, without ever actually seeing her, that I love Ruby.

I am afraid to dive in face-first. I humbly request your recommendations to guide me. Crack! Long, plotty crack! Who can feed my addiction?