a conspiracy of cartographers

+ THE FIC DRAFT IS DONE. It clocks in at 105k (...roughly 12k of which are porn), and it's off with Olivia right now, being beta'd. I feel really bizarre about this fic! I mean, I woke up today feeling really light and happy and excited because it's done, or done enough that I can actually think about anything else ever again, but -- among other things I've made myself emotionally compromised about Thor for life, so Thor 2 next week is going to be a difficulty. Amiel and I are going to the midnight premiere with a flask of mead, of course; and the funny thing is that, because we've only just made our fic deadline, if we post one a day starting Thursday it'll also be our fic-is-done-being-posted celebration. I really like the symmetry of that, and I also really like that it means this stupid fic is going to be like a bizarre week-long advent calendar countdown to Thor 2.

+ I have had so much wear out of my Thor dress lately! Obviously I wore it to NYCC, but I also wore it to a Halloween party Friday night and then to a come-dressed-in-your-costumes birthday party bowling session on Sunday. (Among the people bowling we had Kirk, Spock, Thor, Loki, and Martian Manhunter. Kirk and Spock took turns and were Team Enterprise; Thor and Loki were not a team. I did spectacularly well in the first game and spectacularly badly in the second, but in my defense there had been pizza and beer by then.) I am also working on Halloween, so ... gonna be barista!Thor. Looking forward to this kind of a lot.

- I got so excited about finishing the draft and having any free time again that I decided to get some finances in order and register for direct pay things! Then nothing would work in Chrome so I had to use Firefox, and one site worked after that but another refused to let me copy-paste anything into the email field, which ... is unfortunate, since I'm still doing ctrl+v every time I want to type the letter m. I'm putting this particular adulting shit on the backburner until I get a new laptop, but the latest in the ongoing laptop saga is that I got an email yesterday saying, sorry, your delivery has been delayed, we apologize for the inconvenience. At least this time they're not ... rescinding the product entirely? But this is fucking ridiculous.

+ On the other hand I finished the draft and I have any free time again! I also have very little work this week, which means I'm going to clear out the slush and catch up on tumblr and play lots of Dragon Age II and, assuming poor Housemate A actually gets home before midnight, make her play tons of Lego Marvel with me (seriously it is the BEST GAME EVER, like, Reed Richards literally turns into a giant tool, and HULK SMASH EVERYTHING, and the cut scenes with Doom and Loki are amazing). And I have plenty of time to do edits before posting, too! This week should be really pleasant.

+ FIC FIC FIC

i. I can't stop listening to Aims, Vienna Teng's new album. (Link goes to the soundcloud album stream she posted. Actual album comes out tomorrow!) Just want to listen to all of it on endless loop, particularly Level Up and Never Look Away. It is good fighting music, and being happy music. It's perfect as a ward against and an accompaniment to the onset of autumn; my brain doesn't know what to make of the cold, because in the general way of things fall and winter make me very happy, but last winter was the absolute worst and of course has attached sense memories, so ... we'll see how that goes. And listen to Vienna Teng on loop.

ii. Last week I went with a bunch of friends to see Dessa! IT WAS SO GREAT, of course it was; she played nearly everything I wanted her to, and I kept running into her in the bathroom because there was no proper backstage, so there was a lot of casual smiling acknowledgement while we washed our hands and I screamed internally. Also, quite by accident, friends I went with to the concert were my D&D group minus scribe, who was ... still out of the country, I think? Unsurprisingly these humans are excellent to hang out with whether or not we're slaying monsters and flirting with other monsters at the time.

iii. I just ... keep playing Dragon Age. Housemate A got Dragon Age 2 and everything! But my elf is nearly to the final battle and my dwarf is being the most hilariously best bros with Sten and I can't move on yet. (Also I got Wynne to ship my elf/Zevran; I'm not sure why I didn't get an achievement badge for that.) Polaris and I are considering whether when we run out of Dragon Age games we should try Mass Effect. I ... have the vague fannish osmosis feeling that it's good? I know some of you have played it! Please deliver unto me your Mass Effect feels, whatever they are; I would love opinions.

iv. Fic update: part five of eight complete! ONLY THREE LEFT. I'm starting to have this feeling like I'm hurtling shrieking towards the finish line, though mostly in a good way; I'm not sacrificing quality to time, it's only that I finally have my full complement of writing enthusiasm back. Getting it done is going to be a bit scary, though, because I want to have it all posted at the very last the day before Thor 2 comes out, which means I have to start posting it by very latest on Halloween, and I have to be done in time that Olivia can reasonably beta it, and ahhh. Current wordcount: 63,826. \o/

+ The majority of my physical Christmas shopping is done! Soon I will WRAP them and set them under the TREE and -- I really love the evergreens and shining lights and finding gifts and drinking delicious spiked cocoa on Christmas morning with my mother; I am ridiculously overfull of holiday spirit.

+ ...most of my giftfics are still in their embryonic stages, but my absurd Marauders polyfic (15,000 words and counting, I am starting to think I am actually psychologically incapable of short things) has finally come to the point at which everyone is sitting down and talking logistics and there might even be sex somewhere in the next five to ten pages! (I am starting to think that this story has to end in some kind of AU, because Lily teaches Remus how to not get a girl pregnant with the exciting application of Muggle prophylactics, and everyone learns good lessons about proper communication and not switching Secret Keepers at the last moment or anything like that.) In any case, perhaps it will soon be done and no longer bewilderingly consuming my life.

+ My friend Chris just gave me a call (which I missed due to aforementioned Christmas shopping) to wish me a cryogenically frozen happy birthday, to be thawed at the end of the month on the advent of me getting older. I laughed like a hyena, and then saved the message, to listen to again on the 27th.

+ There is a plot brewing amongst various of my Dragon*Con buddies to have a drunken communal watching of Stonehenge Apocalypse. Now that I kind of care about Misha's face, and also now that I have some fangirls with which to watch it, my brain is going "is it D*C yet is it D*C yet let's watch it NOW!" It'll keep, brain. It will still be horrible next September.

+ I'm also just delighted that I am delighted. Fuck this Northern Hemisphere early darkness, I'm going to light this place right up.

To my complete bewilderment, instead of writing my Yuletide (which I am so far unstressed about; I have my whole outline and I'm nearly done with the obligatory canon review) I am instead writing Marauders poly fic. Peter is not invited to these poly shenanigans, but maybe he should be, because let me tell you guys, Remus is so obstinate and self-effacing at inconvenient times that we've now passed 10,000 words and there has been one kiss. One. Remus Lupin, we have passed the minimum requirement for undemanding big bangs! This is absurd!

I swear, you guys, I am no longer even remotely upset with Tonks for calling Remus out in the hospital wing in front of everyone. I am nearly at the same point myself.

i. Got a Pottermore account last night! From the tragically limited selection of usernames it offered me, I'm StormScarlet127, which should be extremely easy to remember; I can't decide whether it sounds like I'm a particularly metal Gryffindor supporter or an Ororo/Wanda shipper.

ii. Naturally this vid exists: arefadedaway has made an Erik/Charles vid to Rolling in the Deep, and if you have Erik/Charles feelings, you should RUN NOT WALK to see it; it is pretty much exactly the vid I have been craving. It has footage from all four films, and it made me clutch my face a lot (which -- "I clutched my face" is basically my go-to shorthand for "it gave me ALL THE FEELINGS," but that's because things that give me feelings make me literally clutch my face) and I love it so much.

iii. Things I have discovered whilst writing Ragnarok: it's slightly absurd that Hel isn't a Marvel supervillainess. Seriously, she's perfect. (And she's also kind of Mazikeen, which does not make her any less perfect.) This week seems to be stories about awesome ladies and the supervillains who love them.

Back home! Mildly exhausted, and living in that weird place where I want to organize my thoughts and talk about important, interesting things, but everything is coming out a jumble because I want to do everything all at once. Right now I expect that all I am up to is going through my billion accumulated tabs -- I am so delighted with Firefox's new tab grouping feature, seriously, it is the first 'improvement' in ages that is actually an improvement -- and reading a backlog of fic. I'm being utterly rubbish about replying to comments right now, but I think I can live with that.

I have a laughably huge pile of books to read, about half of them borrowed from Olivia. Seriously, the stack may fall over at any moment. I am also very tempted to rewatch all the Harry Potter films before going to see Deathly Hallows 2 in a few days; I would be tempted to reread the books, except ... no. Not in two days. I would drown in FEELINGS.

Oof, my brain really is a jumble. I suspect this post isn't actually as disjointed as it feels to me, but even so. Um, besides FEELINGS I also have a ridiculous mental list of WIPs? To make this post less scattered I will make the mental list an actual list, mostly for my own reference. ( Six fics in four fandoms. )

Today in things that are awesome:

+ Writing Thor/Loki sex DURING A THUNDERSTORM. I have been waiting like a week for this, weather! Thank you for obliging. (Oh my god it is pouring. Gorgeous.)

+ inkasrain's podfic of astolat's *THOR* primer! The primer itself is pretty great -- it is about the "totally not at all Loki-centric plot of the movie" -- and the podfic is funny and charming beyond words.

+ Ouroboros by feverbeats: Heimdall/Loki, and so great I can't even really stand it. Or even really talk about why I love it? It gives me so many Loki feelings that I don't have any words left. But you should read it, because it is really, really great.

1. Today I was running errands, which somehow included going to a bookstore for American Gods. (Any relationship between my desire to own this book and my recent ridiculous fandom infatuation with a warped Marvel version of a particular mythology is purely coincidental.) I also skulked about the YA section, as one does, and stumbled across a paperback reissue of Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness books. Let me tell you, internet, the covers were amazing; they were so Hip YA Paranormal Romance that I wanted to cry tears of joyous laughter. The Woman Who Rides Like A Man had, far and away, the best cover -- google images provides a rather small and grainy picture of it here -- but let me describe it to you:

Alanna is slender, sexy, pleasantly androgynous, and is wearing a cute shirt from Forever 21 or something. On each side she is flanked by a strapping young man, presumably Jon and George respectively. George has folded arms and what may or may not be a leather jacket, because he's the tough guy from the streets! Jon is a sensitive guy with a semi-open shirt, and bewilderingly, looks exactly like I picture him! The point is, guys, I am so glad I don't have these covers, and I also love them a whole lot.

2. I kind of posted on tumblr about this, but I also wanted to say it here, so. There is this lovely quote by McAvoy re: Erik/Charles:

"It is a little bit of a mini-tragedy that him and Magneto don’t, you know, have sex and become married and become best friends." [via Daily Telegraph]

So the thing about this is that I am totally delighted that McAvoy went there, and knew what he was playing. I'm delighted about that the same way I love that Sir Ian McKellen said something about how X3 should have started with a panning shot of Xavier and Magneto in bed together. It is, in every conceivable way, totally amazing and lovely that the actors playing these parts know to queer the hell out of their subtext.

But you know what? I'd really like it to be text. I'd like it if we could move past Bobby's unsubtle coming-out-to-his-family scene, and past Hank's "You didn't ask, so I didn't tell," and realize that X-Men really is a great place to damn well start textually queering our superheroes. Making Charles/Erik canon would come with its own fun set of problems, like the fact that Erik is ~evil~, but I don’t care because it would be such a great start.

(Still: BECOME MARRIED. That is a really charming quote.)

3. My Loki AU That Will Not End has just broken 20,000 words. I have given up estimating how long it's going to be. In fact, I have given up on the notion of free will entirely, because I am fairly sure I am just here as a vessel to Loki's storytelling whims. I regret nothiiiiing.

I think it is time to admit that this is not a week-long whirlwind romance, and Thor is indeed my new pet fandom. All the signs are there: I keep refreshing the kinkmeme, and the loki tag on tumblr; I have downloaded fanmixes and tracked down comics (can we talk about HOW COMPLETELY ADORABLE KID!LOKI IS); I went to see the movie a third damn time, this time with some friends.

[Actually, an aside: after said third viewing, a conversation with my friend C illustrating a fundamental difference in our approach to this film:

ME. Loki is complex and damaged and weirdly beautiful and he makes my heart hurt!
HER. That's cool; I just want to rub my face all over Thor's abs.]

Anyway, my point is, I have fallen hilariously hard. The good fic is still frustratingly difficult to find, but it is good fun to be on the ground floor of an explosion of fannish enthusiasm nonetheless. And, maybe because good fic is still a bit thin in the ground, and possibly just because I have ALL THE LOKI FEELINGS, the fic I am writing has just, um, broken 10,000 words. And I am maybe halfway done. Maaaaybe.

Also, good fic thin on the ground does not mean good fic impossible to find, and so, insta-rec: Dominion by astolat; throne!sex, or, how to write perfect Thor/Loki in 500 words or less.

I plan to actually be productive today, but first -- the WIP meme! Happily I organize them by fandom or I would never find anything.

Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.

(Carmilla) alternate ending
(DL) the magician's mark
(dS) Burning Down the House
(dS) Neutral Zone
(dS) The Windhover
(dS-DCU) FRASER IS SUPERMAN
(DW) mad Ten
(DW) Such Deliberate Disguises
(DW) The Care and Feeding of Your Atomic Bomb
(DW) TIME WAAAAR
(HL) Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair
(HL-SV) A Business Proposition
(HL-WC) fusion fic
(HL-YW) Gathering
(HSM) Even If We're Miles (and Miles and Miles) Apart
(Narnia) queer Edmund
(Narnia) The Möbius Queen
(Narnia-YW) Wardrobe
(SV) Break
(Twilight) oh godddddd WHAT
(WC) ot3 fic!

In conclusion, I want to cross Smallville and Young Wizards over with everything (except each other) and yes, I do have both a High School Musical fic and a Twilight fic. In my defense they're both about queering the fuck out of the texts.

Also, IDK, there may have been a bit in the meme that got edited out in repetition about how you're allowed to ask what any of the fics are about? You can absolutely do that bit; we all know I am ridiculous and like to talk about my writing.