Friday, December 30th, 2005

Time	Event
11:18a	who are you, boogaloo, we've seen ten of you just this morning Back from my extended vacation to the hometown! Actually, I got back Tuesday night, but after a fourteen-hour drive (14! Why do I do this to myself? Next time I drive home, I'm making Mary come with me for that reason alone) I was in no shape to do anything, and then yesterday I woke up and found that my mild cold had turned into a GIANT, SOUL-SUCKING COLD FROM BEYOND THE VOID. So I did what any reasonable person would do -- I stayed in bed all day, ate a tin of Christmas cookies, and tried to convince people in chat that there is *too* a vv compelling reson to be a Teal'c/Daniel shipper. (It really all boils down to: candles.) Anyway, the trip was good! Staying out as late as my 20-year-old sister makes me feel young *g* -- particularly when I could then get up and do things before one in the afternoon, unlike my 20-year-old sister. My father's church has this nifty movie theater on the third floor, with actual movie seats and a popcorn machine and surround-sound, so kind of the geek highlight of my week was taking my shiny new copy of Serenity up to the church with my family and hylomorph and dcaspall and gwyndolin to see it on the big screen once again. shoesbaby would have been there, except for the part about being a loser with other friends to go visit -- and by the way, y'all, I'm still not convinced there's such a person as "Katrina." You just got that name out of the newspaper, didn't you? In less cheerful news, my father and sister continue to hate each other, but I really think it's the kind of thing that will be self-correcting once they don't actually have to live together. My grandmother is, you know, barely there anymore -- she has a particularly severe form of dementia that may or may not be Alzheimer's depending on which doctor you're asking -- and I was really happy that I went there in October, because at that point she had no short-term memory, but it was still obviously her you were talking to. You just had the same conversation over and over in about eight minute intervals, because that's how long it takes her to forget what's been said. But at this point, I mean, she's just not...I mean, there's really no earth logic there at all. But given that she also has emphysema and no one expected her to live this long at all, I was treating the October visit in my mind like it was the last time I'd see her -- so in a way, I was very well-prepared to feel like I wasn't seeing her now, either, if that makes any sense. They're selling her house in March, and we're in the process of picking it over and taking the things we need or want for family reasons, and I got the only thing I've been saying all along I wanted to lay sole claim to, which is an old ceramic butter churn that sat, all my life, next to the step up from my grandparents' den into their kitchen. When I was young, my grandfather (who died right after I turned nine) used to hide candy and toys and whatnot in it, and as soon as I'd come over to visit, he'd make a big fuss over how I had to go check the churn, because I was the official churn-checker (I was the only grandchild at the time) and I had Important Work to do before I started goofing around. He made it sound like a very significant job. *g* Anyway, that was the thing I wanted, and I have it now. Now I'm home again, and due to the overlapping nature of our family vacations, I am still without Mary -- it's going to be like two weeks by the time everything is said and done, which is far longer than we've been separated since, uh, the year 2002. It's weird! I mean, it serves its purpose, since I have two more stories that need to get finished in the next few days, so I really shouldn't be lollygagging around letting Mary entertain me, but that's pragmatism, pah. Okay, enough silly personal stuff. I have pretty much given up on my usual holiday project of reading all the DWNOGA stories all the way through, but I'm at least touching all of them and giving them a page or two's chance to win me over -- because you never know, with Secret Santa stories! I'll kick out a few recs, but like I said, I'm still in holiday-fic-writing mode and I've probably overlooked a ton; this is a very non-scientific survey this year. (1 Comment | Comment on this)
11:48a	2005 pop SeSa recs, vol. 1 The Earl of Rothinghamtonfordshire This was a big, big winner for me. I expected it to be a crack-ficcy romance novel parody, a la those Harlequin stories they were doing over in Atlantis fandom last fall, but it's not! It's teenage Nick, deciding it can't be that hard to write a novel! Only he went to bus school, so, harder than you'd think. The story is just gold -- funny as hell, and able to jab the boys without seeming mean-spirited; Nick is dumb as a box of hammers and Justin is totally self-absorbed, but in *endearing* ways, not that kind of "look how superior we, the readers are" way. I particularly loved the Backstreet group meetings, because it's harder, in my experience, to find good BSB whole-group-tomfoolery than it is to find the same thing in NSync fandom, and this is *very* good. Almost every line in those scenes is entirely quotable, but this will have to stand in: "Look, Nick," Howie said, "the point of this whole meeting was not to tell you what we didn't like about your book --" "It wasn't?" Kevin said. "You all thought we were having a meeting to talk about what we didn't like in Nick's book?" "I didn't know," Brian said. "I just go where I'm told." AJ said, "I thought there was going to be food." And if that doesn't make you want to read the story, well, Jed, I don't even want to know you. Perfect and Unattached struck me as very similar, and that's not a bad thing. They're both Howie/Nick stories set "currently," and although their plots have very little in common, they just have a similar sense of chronicling the ups and downs and peculiarities of daily life on tour, and as in the last rec, excellent, excellent use of BSB group dynamics. They're both nice, low-key love stories of the, "Hey, how come I didn't know I was in love with him?" variety, a genre I'm fond of, and patience is rewarded and happy endings abound, and even though I'm not keen on this pairing, I had fun reading both. They're also both quite long, which is often a negative for me, but I didn't mind so much this time, and I know lots of people love the long ones, so that's all roses. And I don't know if it was drawn from a real concert moment or not (with these guys, it's hard to say), but the image of Kevin with a thrown bra tied around his head will be with me forever (that one comes courtesy of "Perfect"). A Cable Car Named Desire is one you might really like or really not, depending on your tolerance for genre gimmicks. It's a hardboiled noir detective story set in post-War San Francisco, and the author absolutely has the sound of the genre down cold -- so if, like me, you enjoy the dames-and-gumshoes patter, it's fun to read, but it might grate on you if that's not your thing. There's some pretty solid history in it, actually, about the early years of such a creature as a gay community and its relationship to the war, and a nice use of early-Cold War stuff, although the plot gets increasingly rushed and perfunctory as it gets toward the end (don't they always, with these deadlined stories?). Actually, there were a couple of things about the end I wasn't too pleased with, but once again, if you're a noir fan, the fun of reading it should trump the pacing and other assorted problems. This story is one of those that you get in popslash where you can't help thinking that with the names changed, it'd make a nice short novel for some queer press somewhere -- particularly in this case, where the story really needed a bit more elbow room to put some suspense into the last act. Everything In Its Place Really, the only thing wrong with this story is that when you read GSF, you expect more porn. This is as close as it gets to gen GSF, with the emphasis on the group dynamics and whatnot, and really, where's the freaking porn, guys? I've noticed overall this year is gennish, with a lot of sort of old-school kiss-in-the-last-reel endings. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Anyway, this is a sweet, funny story; it's not the first fic in the world to try a patch-job on recent history and reaffirm that, no! They still love each other -- just in, like, private -- where no one can see! But it's one of the most successful. Hell, the writer almost had me convinced, and I am vv bitter and cynical about this kind of thing. JC faking an ancient prophecy from a Chinese sage that says they have to have an orgy in order to save the world from destruction is pretty fucking priceless. (3 Comments | Comment on this)
12:50p	2005 pop SeSa recs -- vol. 2 Gratuity It's hookerfic, only not the normal kind. One of those Sex-in-the-City-esque AUs, which I don't always like, but I don't always dislike, either -- Justin's friends buy him a night with an upscale escort, and who's more luxury-goods than Lance Bass? Some of the dialogue felt slightly off, but some of it was *fantastic,* and Justin trying hard to be a respectful john, puzzling out the etiquette of the situation, was too perfect. About halfway through I started to sense there was a twist to this story, and I thought I had it figured out, but in fact I didn't, quite, so that was fun. The other guys have small but well-done roles: Chris was *irritating* and adorable, rather than the usual fan schtick of him being adorable and secretly smooth and brilliant, and JC was daffy without being, you know, stupid (It's usually best to ignore JC when he starts reminiscing; otherwise you end up talking about the mating habits of ticks or how many slices of Kraft cheese it would take to tile the living room floor is on my ballot for best single line of this year's SeSa.) Imaginary Boyfriend Ah, magical realism, how we've missed you! The perennial popslash theme of real vs. ideal, in a sweet little story where Chris wakes up one morning and Joey is his boyfriend, and it's just a little too good to be, well, real. Somehow, writing on this theme with Chris and Joey, the least idealized of the guys, makes it feel very fresh and interesting -- it's not about marketing and packaging and media standards and yadda yadda, but just about how you naturally tweak people in your head just a little tiny bit to make them better than they are, and what it feels like to realize you can stop doing that after all. A Sad Variety of Woe I'm reccing this with some caveats, because I think it was written a little stiffly, and something about the style made it distancing when it should have been intimate and painful. The future-tense didn't help; you can't use two strongly distinctive tricks in one story, and the premise was already strong enough. This is an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind riff, and I loved it for looking at that issue of, what do you do when you know for sure that you've lived through something so remarkable that for the rest of your life, nothing else will really compare? I thought it was particularly interesting that Justin had done the same thing in a sense, putting this vast gap between his old and new lives, and even more interesting that his friends *assumed* his motives were the the same as Chris's, even when they weren't exactly. I particularly loved the semi-meta concept that they're saved by a fangirl who can't quite bear to let go of them; yay, fangirls! I think this story needs a rewrite with the help of a really experienced beta, and that if it got that, it would be fucking amazing. As it is, I like it anyway; it's definitely worth reading. Hard to Say I'm Sorry: A film about *NSync From the genre of Phantom Fourth Album/Tour stories, and I can't sum it up better than Steve Fatone when he says "Justin Timberlake, former boyband member turned solo artist turned boyband member again turned amateur documentarian. Does he know what he's doing? No, but isn't he cute?" A technically brilliant story, very entertaining with some nice, hot sex at the end, and my only complaint is that I think there was so much gold in the idea that *Justin,* of all people, has decided he needs to film this himself, that the story could really only get around to mining part of it. This is a nearly perfect road-fic/romance, and I'm probably being just difficult and picky to point out that it could have been a genius psychological investigation into Justin, too. How many brilliant stories was I expecting this author to turn out in one sitting? *g* It's great; there's nothing not to like, so read it. (I'm just saying, there's a really interesting remix lurking in there somewhere, too.) (2 Comments | Comment on this)
3:27p	2005 pop SeSa recs -- vol. 3, the Timbertrick edition Gradually, Then Suddenly If I'd written a story this year that I actually liked, I would have hoped it would be something like this one. *g* This is a lovely, airy dive-bomb through history, lighting gently on all the various phases of Chris and Justin's relationship, hook-ups, freak-outs, teasing, romance, bitching about losing their spark, the whole life cycle of a long relationship in grand swoops, telling exactly what it needs, no more and no less. This is one of those stories where nothing really happens, and yet you feel like it's been packed dense with drama and suspense and whatnot. Gorgeous. Reclaiming If I just said There are fifteen moments Chris regrets in his life, and eleven of them belong to Justin, would you go read it? Sure, you would! Because that's a brilliant line and you know it is. This is one of those stories that feels horribly sad and yet twists up at the last moment and makes you fantastically happy -- this pairing seems especially good for that kind of thing. There's not a note hit here that other writers haven't done many times, but the writing is just masterful, and it's always good to sit back and let someone who really knows how to write go for it -- reminds you that even if there are only, whatever, seven stories in the world, none of us are going to run out of things to read anytime soon, as long as people like this keep wanting to write for us. Rhymes With Moon I just like this one because it's a textbook example of how to write a PWP. They pretty much just have sex on a beach, but it's so perfectly *them* that it wouldn't make sense as a story with any other couple. It's just charming and dorky and hot, a candy-kiss of a story. (1 Comment | Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2005/12/30 [Calendar]

Next Day >>