Off the prompt "cuddles."

Earlier today I very much wanted to completely quit my life here and go back to Cali and move in with ysobel and cook her grill cheese and curry and falafel every week. We could make dorky Merlin vids and I could find somewhere to work part-time and pay me crap to support my food habit, but I could stop worrying about the rent money and spend the rest of the day being her wife and writing fanfic that might be optimistic? Reading fanfic. And her library. Heh. Unfortunately I couldn't bring the children with me and through a bizarre quirk of bureaucracy I'm medically uninsurable if I don't complete another year at [current university] here and I do, actually, have a few commitments here that I can't walk out on. But isn't it a pretty fantasy?

I stopped off at Borders tonight to pick up my brother's birthday present and ended up taking home a pretty notebook, because while I found the Loki book, I've actually used all the pages up and the binding's coming undone. So. New year, new book. Paperchase makes a lot of pretty notebooks but I ended up picking not the one I thought was the prettiest but the one that made me happiest. It is very silly. It is covered in shiny flowers that look like they were drawn by a five-year-old and then preserved with tin foil. I just officially wrote the first words in it. They are I'M A FREE BIT, BABY, because that's how we're rolling this year.

(I, I do not know why blasting Bad Romance in my car cheers me up as much as it does. But at least part of it has to do with the radio edit version of the CD I have cracking me the hell up. You can't stop the signal, guys! She's a free bit! Whee.)

This entry will consist primarily of quoting people off my droll who made me laugh tonight. It's Follow... Tuesday? Sure! Why not?

thedeadparrot: I discovered after doing this one that apparently I am introducing each person I quote. Um, thedeadparrot! I have followed her for so long that I forget what awesome thing she did to attract me. It might have been FMA fic? I sort of went on a spree when I was reading FMA fic.

I believe that we should not be ashamed of writing fanfic. Yeah, I write romance. Yeah, I even write porn. Yeah, I did this as a teenage girl. And yeah, I sometimes daydream about characters. None of this should mean that my writing -- our writing -- is automatically worth less than that of some fanboy who daydreams about being Paul Atreides and about things blowing up and writes a script about his daydreams and then gets it turned into a movie. I am looking at you, James Cameron.

thefourthvine: I could quote all of every entry of hers, every single one of them make me laugh. She's been watching TOS for the first time and it is hilaaaaaarious. If you do not actively hate small children, ask to be on her Earthling filter, it is cuteness and awesomeness and wonderfulness and total quirkiness (they started calling him Earthling in the womb when they couldn't decide on a name, and I am still not sure they ever did decide on a name, because one of her worries was that they would just keep continuing to call him Earthling in perpetuity if they started then, and, online at least, they have). But most of the time, thefourthvine writes recs. Sometimes her recs go off on tangents. Here is one:

Benton Fraser has porn. I just want to repeat that, because I think it's a brilliant concept that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting: Benton Fraser has porn. Yes, this story is just as good as it sounds like it must be.

But there is a down side to it, and it is this: after reading it, I could not stop imagining the porn collections of other fannish favorites. Rodney McKay likely has roughly a terabyte of porn, but really only uses three short clips and one still photo. He's just completist. Jim Kirk (Reboot) also has the terabyte of porn, but he's actually working his way through it - he jerks off to something new every time. It's all hot if you look at it the right way, you know? Batman's porn does not bear contemplation and is certainly not something I would ever want to see, so I am pleased and comforted to know that it is hidden somewhere no one will ever find it, and also it is designed to self-destruct if anyone besides Batman touches it. Clark Kent likes the underwear catalogs. He's never been able to bring himself to get turned on by anything more explicit; he's always afraid his mother will walk in. (Lex Luthor's porn, it goes without saying, is his extensive Clark Kent memorabilia collection.) Methos's porn is called his memory. Jack Harkness's porn is called everything in the world, because everything is hot. How can you put a plug in an outlet and not get turned on? And laundry! All those dirty clothes, shirts and pants and trousers all touching, writhing together: clearly the hottest thing ever.

dragonfly: I recently subscribed to her (? --my default assumption in fandom, though it occurs to me that in this case I don't actually know) because I am reading every White Collar fic under the sun, seriously, White Collar makes me happy like you wouldn't believe, every night I check del.icio.us to see if anyone has recced new White Collar fic, and, uh, I like hers. Yes. Also apparently we are both giant dorks who are trying to figure out where the hell Neal's radius is on googlemaps.

So Sunday I met with my writers' group and they were critiquing a chapter of Mom and my mystery book set in Arizona. The people around the table told me they wanted to know more about the Native Americans I had introduced. Could the main characters have more interaction with them? Were they going to show up later in the book? I said, uh, no, not really, but if they were really that interesting ... So we started talking about Chekhov's gun and how if you introduce a gun into a scene it needs to get used at some point. Likening my Native American characters to Chekhov's gun, I said, "So you're telling me if I introduce some Indians into the story, I have to shoot them."

Stunned looks followed by hoots of laughter all around. Er, that didn't come out right.

zvi is smart and opinionated and, I find, often leading serious discussions I find important and want to take part in. Also she started Ladies' Choice, an AO3 collection for stories in which women enjoy having sex and do not have shame about it. I could love her for this alone.

Helpful advice what I have learned from fanfiction: If I accidentally have sex with someone with whom I would, in actual point of fact, enjoy having an ongoing sexual or romantic relationship with, I should not hastily begin apologizing for the sex, calling it a mistake, or otherwise characterizing it negatively. Because if the other person had enjoyed having accidental sex with me and would have liked to intentionally have sex with me in the future, they certainly aren't going to say so after I declare that it was a terrible idea, having had sex with them.

And, uh, one more--I read this at about two o'clock in the morning so that totally means I read it tonight today. It might not have been on my droll, exactly? But I deeply wanted to share it with like five people immediately and none of them were online, so here we go. Homo Ex Machina by toft is Sherlock Holmes fic--apparently the 1984 version, which imdb informs me is the Jeremy Brett version, which I hear is very good; not having seen it, my brain is currently slotting in RDJ and Jude Law for all versions of Holmes and Watson. In any case! In this story, Holmes is anonymously notified that someone is writing and publishing smut about them. There's a manuscript and pages go everywhere and lines of lurid, purple description keep catching Watson's eye and he is dying of mortification because--because--oh my god, this is probably a story spoiler, but so is the quote I want to pull--because he wrote it. This is probably my favorite line of narrative in the whole piece:

What on earth could I say? Holmes, I accidentally published a pornographic novella in which you and I perform a number of illegal acts, and now I am being blackmailed into making it a serial?

Because oh my god accidentally yes he did. But the awesome of this story cannot be contained in any summary, because the reveals keep coming. Holmes is always six steps ahead of everyone, right? So you can be well-assured that Holmes has even better secrets. I deeply want to quote some of Holmes' dialogue from later in the story, but whoa story spoilers, and really, part of the deep, deep awesome of this story is every time you think you've turned the twist there's a bit more. I just have to say: OH HOLMES. (Yes, that is actaully very like OH DEAN. Who knew?)