clo_again

I'm trying to put together my Christmas list after constant nagging from the parents and so far, reasonably, I've come up with:

- The fancy new edition of Watership Down from Waterstones.
- Maybe some more notebooks (I have like five already but I'm stockpiling Leuchtturms pre-Brexit)


Unreasonably, I have:

- Days that are twice as long so I can sleep enough/write more
- my own house
- More annual leave from work
- More chapters on the three WIP fics on AO3 that own my life right now
- An annual pass to Masterclass (too expensive for a present; I'll buy it myself in the new year)
- The Platinum Kanazawa-Haku Fountain Pen (also too expensive AND I got a fancy Lamy for my birthday so I don't actually need another pen)
- One of these two Bengal kittens (they are around £600 each)
- An all-expenses paid trip to the Laver Cup in Geneva next year



I literally don't want anything feasible, or affordable, or that doesn't break the laws of time and space. I don't even know what that says about me. Is it getting old, when you either don't want little stuff or want intangibles instead?

Maybe I'll just ask for socks.

I am supposedly a tennis fan but it took a throwaway comment on a tennis blog for me to find out that Andy Murray had shingles back in February. Thanks, endless rounds of news coverage, professional tennis commentary, and tweets about tennis I've seen/heard since then. That kind of information is useful when one oh, is writing RPF about the personage in question.

It also makes me feel better about his generally appalling level of play this year, because the consensus seems to be that he made himself ill through overwork, overtraining, and stress, all of which is fixable (I've concluded that my six-week-long tussle with bronchitis that absolutely floored me for all of January 2016 was the cumulative effect of doing a full-time Masters for a year while working sixteen hours a week, then starting a new full-time job immediately after handing my dissertation in and working flat out until I inevitably keeled over three months later. I made it worse by pretending I wasn't ill and it briefly resurfaced two months later and the only thing that fixed it was taking some time to chill). Murray's played solid for the last three or four months of last year, trained solid for five weeks over Christmas, then made himself ill and tried to keep playing despite his body going WHAT ARE YOU DOING PUT DOWN THE RACQUET OR WE WILL CATCH SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOUR FINGERS FALL OFF.

Which is of course terribly frustrating and concerning for him, but works great for fic. Thanks for being an idiot, Muzz. Now maybe take a vacation.

-

Talking of writing, the thing I'm writing now (which is not the thing I am supposed to be writing, other than this blog post which I am extra not supposed to be writing instead of fic) is a bit strange, and sad, and I keep reading bits and wondering why I'm writing something that I find so disconcerting.

I was trying to write down a scene last night in bed and I kept falling asleep mid-sentence and waking myself up when my iPod hit me in the face, at which point I kept writing until I fell asleep again. In the end I had to summarise how the scene ended and give up. I don't even know if it's any good, or if I'm good enough to write it* but I want it written to get the disconcerting sadness out of my head and onto the paper- er, virtual paper.


* It's really hard on the internet to differentiate between honestly not feeling very good at something but believing the endless peppy tumblr posts about 'everyone feels like this! You're great!', and actually knowing something isn't very good. I wish I could win the lottery and go sit in a quiet empty house for six months to write without having to worry about going to work and being a functional human being and having to wear something that isn't pyjamas so I couldn't procrastinate out of just writing without it mattering, until I feel like I know what I'm doing.

Yesterday in work, the new interim manager told me that being smarter than ninety-five percent of the population was something I'd have to learn how to deal with and I immediately felt under incredible pressure to maintain my appearance of being smart at all times, because clearly I had somehow fooled him and apparently all the other managers into believing I was super capable. I do not understand how I give this impression when I spend some percentage of a work day playing Pokemon Go or, like today, wheat googling Serbian prison systems and Andy's Murray's medical conditions for fic. If that counts as super capable, what is everyone else doing?

I really should stop procrastinating by worrying about writing and just go write something.

I really need to get back in the habit of doing this. I mean, I'm procrastinating from writing to do this but when did I ever post to LJ when I wasn't procrastinating from writing? (tip: I was always procrastinating from writing).

I mean, writing is going pretty well at the moment. For me, anyway; I've posted something within the last week which is a rare enough occurrence to rate as 'pretty well', and the thing I wrote when I had writer's block on the other thing is 2k plus and climbing, so I figure I'll get that done pretty soon before I work on the next chapter of before you come to evening. And I reread 10k of reaction-fic I wrote after Novak lost Wimbledon last year, which I'd relegated to my Dead Letter Box folder (for fic I have no intention of finishing) because I hated it and thought it was boring, but today I enjoyed it and was sad to hit the end of what I'd written, and frustrated. What were you thinking past self? I don't understand; you were on a roll. Quit quitting stuff.

I don't know if I'll finish it. Elements of it surfaced in the coming of the fall which I wrote a couple of months after, but all the set-up is done; the sticking point is that the scene I didn't write was The Scene That Was the Entire Point and Reason which are always the worst. But this one had snuggling. Maybe when Wimbledon rolls around again I'll be reinspired, or I'll post it undone over at clofic maybe, or maybe it'll be my writer's block fic for the next chapter of before. I guess clofic is going to be my work-in-progress dump over here, since all finished stuff is now going on AO3. If you want free snippets, or wips, or fic fanmixes or whatever, follow over there.

The other weird thought that occurred after rereading the Wimbledon Reject Fic; I've spent almost ten months now musing on The Fall of Novak Djokovic in one way or another, and I'm still no closer to having a grip on it or why I care. I've never liked Novak the way I like Roger, or Roddick or Muzz, not in the simple and uncomplicated way of wanting them to win everything they touch and being happy when they do. Novak's disingenuous and desperate for attention; I never quite believe him when he says the sky is blue and grass is green (like when he falls and hurts himself only to win the match, when he says he's injured, when he says he isn't, when he says he's fine when he's clearly losing weight, about to burst into genuine pained tears in the US Open final, when he falls and hits his head so hard in Qatar that Muzz came across the court to check on him), but I'm so used to resenting him for beating Roger and begging for attention and being gloriously untouchable, having him broken and off-colour is disconcerting. I know what I think happened after the French last year but Becker's gone and Jelena's pregnant again because we all know having a second kid when things are miserable is a surefire way to fix life's problems (except for all the ways it isn't) and Novak's still this weird echo of himself.

I don't like worrying about goddamn Novak Djokovic but apparently I am, anyway.

At least Roger is back on glorious GOAT form this year and is doing me a solid by skipping the clay season which I can never watch because it's on when I'm in work. Work is a whole 'nother kettle of fish (mostly not awful, but complicated).

The housing situation is at the opposite end of the extreme and is all kinds of ongoing disaster but I've procrastinated all my time away and anyway, there's not much I can say about it that isn't a complaint. Basically it's stressful and come June (our contract here ends July 3rd) I'm going to be a lot less chill about it than I am right now. Get back to me in a month.

I had such great plans for the last ten days that I've spent mostly vegged in pyjamas, eating Christmas chocolate. I was going to record everything I want to keep off my Sky box before I move! (I haven't). I was going to sort my wardrobe out before I move! (I've thrown one bin bag of clothes with holes in away, all from my washing basket). I was going to write all the things! (I've written 6.6k of Rogue One fic, mostly from words I'd already handwritten before Christmas).

The writing thing is really the saddest lack of achievement for me because I'm still circling the pit of sadness from R1 and I want fix-it fic, but I don't want to read any until this one I'm writing is done because I don't know enough about the SW verse to always spot what's actual canon background and what's made up, and I'm not risking writing anything in by accident. So basically I'm stuck re-reading the same paragraphs I've written over and over, and on no less than four occasions this holiday I have considered setting them (metaphorically, because I love my laptop) on fire because it all just seems like a bunch of wrong words.

I find writing generally a slog anyway and Star Wars is extra hard, because it's so important that you don't want to Get It Wrong - and then you Google things like 'why are there no AI spaceships in Star Wars?' and get fandom doing a giant collective shrug of 'eh, whatevs' which is reassuring. But also - so does no one care? Does everyone just Not Do That Thing? HOW DOES THIS EVEN WORK. Sometimes it feels like I'm being influenced by the over-arcing attitude of the internet these days being You're Doing It Wrong and I need to remember that the thing can always be fixed as long as there's some thing written down to fix in the first place.

I also keep reminding myself of Neil Gaiman's comment saying that writing always feels like working in a mine and most days you've just got to keep chipping away. Keep flailing that metaphorical pickaxe, self.

*

In other news, as my last movie of a holiday season filled with movies, I watched The Book of Life. There were many, varied, meaningful, and worthy reasons for this decision, and if anyone mentions the fact that Diego Luna sings in it as a potential factor I'll deny forever knowing what you're talking about. Anyway it's beautiful and pretty funny and all about Mexican myths of the lands of the dead, and part of me is like, that would be so interesting to crossover with R1 -- except that would take such a tremendous amount of research that even the thought of it makes me want to cry.

So, hopefully someone more dedicated than me will write that. I can only swing one (okay, maybe two, three if I use my teeth) pickaxes at the same time.

*

Life news: we're signing on the new house to rent tomorrow. It's going to cut almost two hours out of my commute each day. My bedroom has a balcony (which I'm trading for my current ensuite, sad but necessary). I'm trying not to be too excited until we actually have the keys in hand (I first looked at a potential house for us to rent last February and it was a long year of disappointments).

But signs currently point to Actually Getting The Keys tomorrow on this one. Crossing everything.

I was just reading (read: procrastinating from writing) Versaphile's post about importing old fic to AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/5644.

I'm massively anti-deleting fanfic - I feel that once something has been released to run wild on the internet, you have no idea really who's read it or what impact that had on them, even if it's yours, even if it has your name on it; once it's posted, it should stay available somewhere forever. On the flipside, I've always been firmly set on not importing my old fic to AO3 because most of it I feel needs more editing than I'm happy doing, or was written when I still had no clue what I was doing other than bashing out words in a vague succession of sense, or is frankly (imho) terrible. All my old stuff is sitting around on clofic or in a much neater indexed collection on Insanejournal and that's fine. It isn't as if I'm locking it in a drawer; if anyone wants it, my username is the same everywhere.

But then- reading Versaphile talk about archiving fandom history and how important it is made me think that's irresponsible. Likewise the level of outrage I went through listening to a podcast discussing tennis slash last year, with a panel of four tennis ficcers who flat out stated that tennis slash "started around 2007 with Nadal/Federer" (hahahahaha I guess we all hallucinated all that Roddick/Federer fic that happened 2004-onwards, or that there was at least one person writing Roddick/Ferrero before that which no longer exists because the original tennis fic comm got deleted) implies that maybe fandom history is already getting fuzzy. Like all the teenies on tumblr who keep LOLing at oldtimers for including disclaimers on fic and then can't believe it when the oldtimers turn around and tell them The Epic Saga of Anne Rice's Lawyers.

So I don't know. Maybe I should see how much editing some of the longer things would need so I can post them with only moderate-to-crippling shame.

-

(Also, HEY, HEY I'M STILL HERE, HAI LJ. It's my fourteenth LJ anniversay on October 8th. Every year I say I should do something and every year I wake up in November and go "...ah shit, maybe next year.")

Man, having one of those days where I feel like I'm writing into the void and getting words down is like trying to claw them into a tree trunk with my teeth.

you and me (we are one and the same) - Tennis RPF, Andy Murray/Novak Djokovic, rated M. Vampire AU. 8,275 words.

“I am fine,” Novak says immediately, as if he isn't obviously being held upright by the wall alone, as if he doesn't look like he just got served up as dinner for a pack of wolves. His voice still rasps a little. “Andy, it is okay. I need just a moment and I will leave, it is not so bad as it looks.”

It takes a second for Andy to find his voice, a second more to breathe through the rising edge of panic he'd tried so hard to leave behind in Australia. “It looks pretty bad,” he says and has to pause to swallow when his tone pitches too far into shrill. “What the hell happened?”

Or, the one where Novak is a vampire and Andy should really know better by now.


---

Yes, I finished the vampire!Novak fic I started about five years ago because it's not as if I have plenty of other things to write right now. Oh wait, no. Scratch that. Reverse it.

Wow, LJ is running really slow for me right now; typing is taking a good five seconds or so to catch up. Unless those million updates Windows installed have done something which would be pretty annoying.

Life continues to be fair, y'all. Not won the lottery yet but soldiering on. About to embark on a serious Lie to Me marathon so, I'll let you know how that goes.

Oh my god, my brother has a touchscreen Sony Vaio which I am typing this from right now and I want one so much. SO MUCH.

Also, currently surrounded by five dogs all trying to see what I'm typing. It's hard to see even a touchscreen with Pippen's face in front of it. Yes, I love you too please stop licking my face.

In conclusion, MY BROTHER'S MENAGERIE IS INSANE. But he has the world's most amazing laptop aaahhh.

I've just noticed that scoobydumblonde has gifted me a pair of dragons and my face went :D , which is pretty amazing for a Sunday night. <3 Thank you! :D

Secondly, I am not dead. I've been meaning to make an LJ post for- er, yes, not actually going to count the days because that's depressing but some time!

In that time I have: bought a blu-ray player; played an awful lot (around 45 hours so far apparently) of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, most of it spent flapping around Skyloft on my giant red bird BECAUSE I CAN; got a new job (but in the same hospital); left my old job (by walking across the road to a different building); spent far too much money; decided not to do Wimbledon this year as I can't afford it after spending all my money; bought a piano-sized keyboard; failed to play anything recognisable on piano-sized keyboard; watched a lot of Suits; read of a lot of fic (mostly Suits); saw a spectacular production of Henry V with jesse_kips; read at least two fairly average books; watched the entire first season of Sabrina the Teenage Witch for the first time in years; thought a lot about how I should make an LJ post with all my Suits fic recs; started making this post, which will include at least one Suits rec.

That pretty much sums it up.

~

The Henry V production we went to was by the fabulous Propeller who I've seen do The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, and who have pretty much ruined Shakespeare done by anyone else for me forever. You can see a nifty trailer for their Henry V here and for The Winter's Tale production they're touring with it here. Their Winter's Tale even comes recommended by Stephen Fry! They're in New Zealand right now but they're touring the UK until August; I'm going to see Winter's Tale in London in July and honestly, if you even remotely like Shakespeare or theatre, go. Propeller are so amazing. I still mourn that they don't do DVDs so I'll never see their beautiful Twelfth Night again (see post title: the way Simon Scardifield delivered it was heartbreaking. Him not being in Henry this time was the only thing wrong with it.)

Did have the weird realisation halfway through Henry V that Dugald Bruce-Lockhart who plays Henry has been in all three of the Propeller productions I've seen (Petruccio in Shrew, Olivia in Twelfth), making him the only stage actor I've seen on three separate occasions.

When I confessed this, jesse_kips accused me of stalking. Then I also confessed that I'd slashed him with Simon Scardifield after watching Shrew (they kissed on stage, the entire play is basically them having epic emotional battles since they were Petruccio and Katherine respectively, what was I supposed to do?)

And then I remembered I even had a LJ icon of Dugald (see: this post's icon) and gave up on anyone hope of arguing that I wasn't a stalker. In my defence it's been mostly incidental; he is in a rather fabulous Shakespeare company.

I'm in the front row when I go to see Winter's Tale. Er. Maybe I'll keep my head down.

~

I started this an hour ago as an escape from tidying my wardrobe a brief update and there's still boxes all over my bed (woe), so wrapping it up with an incredible Suits/Avengers fic rec:

Sidekick by Closer, (who wrote the amazing Mike/Harvey Pizza verse.

Sidekick was written on the kinkmeme for the prompt 'Harvey Specter wasn't the rich renegade badass that plucked Mike from his potential life of crime. Tony Stark was.' It's well-thought out and hilarious and Mike's grandmother forces Tony to eat regular dinner and all the other Avengers show up (Mike teaches Thor yo mamma< jokes omg) and it's all so ridiculously in-character that it's almost unbelievable. Oh and if nothing else, SPIDER-MAN HAS A CAMEO. All of Closer's Suits fic is brilliant but I wouldn't be too sad to see her take time off to write more for Iron Man/The Avengers too because her Tony is amazing.

My one weird thing with it was that's Tony/Mike- and done awesomely - so even though Harvey shows up (as Tony's lawyer) it's obvs not going to have the same Mike/Harvey relationship. I felt a little sorry for Harvey missing out - Mike works for Iron Man; he's not missing out on anything - BUT I have just noticed that she's added a bunch of codas and there was the promise of a Harvey/Mike/Tony threesome so I'm just going to check that out.

Tidying? Pfft. Go read fic!

This post was originally going to be a Merry Christmas and then Happy New Year and then that New Year meme that does the rounds every December/January...

...and then I thought it'd got a bit past all that and I'd talk about getting fanfiction printed into bound books instead. (And then I left this post sitting half-written for about two weeks and I'm finally posting it in a rush just to get the damn thing off my to-do list.)

So on New Years Eve I was being somewhat sad and stuck at home with family + guests and, as I seem to end up doing quite often around Christmas and NYE for reasons of a nostalgic nature, I was idly re-reading some of the fanfiction that I've loved almost longer than any other fic: BagEnders. (For those of you yet to encounter the wonders of BagEnders, it essentially follows the premise of 'Let's make the original Fellowship from Lord of the Rings immortal, assume they've all lived through history, and stick them together in a three-bedroom house in the year 2000, with all the ensuing psychological, social and lack-of-personal-space issues you'd expect from being several millenia old and still having to live with Gandalf. It's rough and typo-filled and ridiculous, and still one of the best things I've ever read on the internet). It was written way back in internet terms - around 2001 - and it's been gradually disappearing from the internet over the years; the website crashed back in 2004ish and some stuff got put back up, but only the first series is really accessible on there these days. Various efforts have been made to save it but there's a general feeling that one day in the not-to-distant-future, it's going to vanish.

With some widespread Googling and much c&ping, I collected the last few chapters on series III on NYE, and sat back with a glow of contentment. Now it'll be mine forever! I'll always have BagEnders!

Until a snide little thought said, my computer breaks. Until they're no longer on the internet and replaceable. Then what?

Side-track: when I went backpacking around Australia a few years ago, I invaded the house of chickybee32, a long-term (maybe my longest actually!) internet friend. We met a long long time ago because of an epic-length fic she'd written called Bitter Wine and, while I was staying with her, she showed me a paperback book - Bitter Wine, neatly formatted and printed into an actual bound paperback by another mutual friend as a present. It was fic! In a book! With chapters and actual pages and collected stories in the same 'verse at the back!

In short? It was super cool. Fic in an actual book format. I can't be alone in thinking that's pretty nifty.

Ever since I've sort of hovered around the vague idea of getting my favourite fics printed into books because honestly, I re-read all the time. I read new books constantly too but if I'm cleaning my teeth or stirring the pasta or just want something to occupy my brain for half an hour without having to process anything beyond letters on a page, I pick up old books. I open them to random pages, I re-read paragraphs and lines or entire chapters, in pieces and snatched minutes. I've re-read my entire Tamora Pierce collection dozens of times and constantly have at least one of them on the go; I'm currently heading towards the end of Squire for the umpteenth time, after reading odd paragraphs while cleaning my teeth for two weeks.

I would love to do this with fic, but. It is tricky impossible to do this with a laptop. For a while I clung to the idea of getting a Kindle and filling it full of fic but that's hardly a safe thing to have near a running tap in the bathroom and I quickly realised it wouldn't be any sort of assurance of safety for much-loved fic in the long run; a Kindle is, basically, just a mini-computer and we all know what computers do in the end - break. Usually at the most inconvenient moments ie, when you've lost your backup/s.

So I'd been sitting on this idea of fic-books for a long time, without really ever getting around to researching it. I thought it'd be expensive, maybe, or there'd be copyright issues if the company noticed what they were printing (not that I'd have any intention of selling fic-books to anyone other than myself because hey, no and also not mine to sell and did I mention no? - but it kind of bugged me. So, I'd left it.

But with the thought of BagEnders graually vanishing, and it being the start of a shiny new year and also fic-books would be really really cool, I Googled for printing services. First option up was Lulu.com and, after browing for a few reviews on the service, I thought it looked promising. I spent about a day trying to format my BagEnders chapters into something approaching consistent - Lulu asks for .pdf files with all fonts embedded etc. which is super-easy to do with OpenOffice (on Writer, just go File -> Export as .pdf and hit save. Lulu has a step-by-step gide, although you may have to open an account with the site to read it - accounts are free and easy though!) but it's way more important for a book to be consistently formatted than a collection of chapters posted on separate webpages - chapter titles had to stand out, Author Notes to be italicised, footnotes etc.

Towards the end I was sick of staring at the thing and I figured I'd save what I had - which was almost a completely-formatted version of series I and II complete with all the comic strips originally drawn for the fic by Calima that are still available on the website - and upload it to Lulu just to see. I wasn't intending to print it yet - I still wasn't sure it was a great idea - but I wanted to test the Lulu process and so, I hit publish and followed the steps and I'd designed a cover to fit the A5 format using another one of Calima's illustrations and-

-and yeah, I got to the final step and it was there looking at me in all it's shiny temptingness - and I clicked publish.

(Aside: Lulu claims that you are "publishing" these books and will go some way to make it seem official, offering you the option of an ISBN and prcntages of sales etc., but during the creating process they offer you three options: publish outright and make available to buy, complete with ISBN; publish privately for only you to view/purchase; and another option that I've forgotten and probably isn't that important since the other two are the ones we want. For fic-books, I'm pretty sure the option will always be "PUBLISH JUST FOR ME" because you get royalties or some such if other people buy something you've 'published' and even if it's your own fic, that's getting into pretty sketchy territory legally. I can't stop you doing it, but I recommend you don't. Seriously. Don't.)

So I'd published the damn thing, formatting errors and all, and when it took me to the private-to-me book page after, I ordered a copy. With series I and II included plus illustrations (I didn't think I could fit III into Lulu's 740-page limit), it came to 612 pages for an A5 paperback which cost £10.34, plus £2.99 p&p. If you order multiple items - as far as I've tested anyway - p&p goes up by £1 per item; there may be a limit on this or there may not. For 612 pages though, I figured that was pretty good.

( Three days later, it arrived (image heavy) )

A few days after BagEnders arrived, I got twitchy with the knowledge that I could create fic books. This time I wanted to test things I'd learned from BagEnders (smaller font size, margin sizes etc.) but I didn't want to spend another entire day formatting, so I looked for a fic that was already formatted pretty perfectly and that would c&p as such. Plus, it had to be something I'd re-read enough to justify the money, and long enough to justify the book. With all that in mind I went for The Student Prince, a modern-day Merlin AU by FayJay. I re-read it fairly regularly, it's a proper book-length at 147,000 words, plus it wasn't too NC-17-rated (I'm still not entirely comfortable sending anything too dubious off to some company somewhere to print because hey, they might not read anything they're sent but then again, they have to check the printing and such; I didn't want to risk them banning me before I've even got started) and it had the nice bonus of, on the surface, looking like just another King Arthur story that anyone could've written without reference to the TV show. Formatting was mostly a simple matter of c&p, making sure the chapters started on a new page, and finding a cover design. Published it all up, ordered - £8.51 + £2.99 p&p; it came in at 525 pages of US trade paperback size, which is larger in surface area than A5 so they probably charge by page count instead - and ordered. In the same thee-day turnaround, it was dispatched and arrived.


( The Student Prince by Fay Jay )

So, that's Lulu.com and fic books. I like Lulu a lot; the step-by-step process is easy, and the print inside the book is sharp and perfect. Even the comic strips have printed beautifully. Aside from a few hiccups like the cover type and margin size - which I guess is why they recommend you order proof copies of everything you 'publish' - I have no issues with the two books. I love them and I'm going to keep them for a long time; I've already formatted several other of my favourite fics into .pdf files waiting to be printed, along with an anthology of all my favourite Stargate: Atlantis fic because it all seems to be around the novella-length instead of novel. Someday in the future I'll have a bookcase full of my favourite fic, bound and shiny and free from the threat of computer malfunctions.

~

Other stuff is happening. Today I went to a wonderfully unexpected old-fashioned Penny Arcade in Southport; I lovedlovedloved the third episode of Sherlock; Silent Witness is hopefully going to be on again next month which I'm super-excited about; I'm still working at the hospital a a temp, although I'm feeling like that may not last too much longer; I've read many wonderful non-fic books; I'm going with jesse_kips to see the marvellous Propeller perform Henry V in February and I can't wait.

But all that will be another post, because I should've been in bed an hour ago. :)


eta: Oh dear god that was an epic amount of html!fail to fix. NOW I AM GOING TO BED.