Tiptoe talks about fan fiction on her non-fan fiction blog, Part 1 of 3

There’s a meme going around on elljay where people pontificate on the 10 favorite fics they’ve written. Since the whole point of my hiatus from livejournal is to get over myself, I think it would be awfully bizarre of me to wait until I return and then immediately post a bragfest. Therefore, I’m posting it here, and I’m determined it won’t be a bragfest. I’ll talk about the process of writing, the seeds of inspiration, varying my style, and the things that make me proud and pleased about each. In the end, it will be about me, and about writing much more than it will be about fandom.

I’ll post a few quotes from fics that are for mature audiences only and talk about that process behind the “More>>.” I won’t be explicit or use explicit quotes, though.

This was gonna be a mother of a post. Huge and long. (Oh, wait, I just said I wouldn’t be explicit…) So I decided to split it up. Nos. 10-7 are in this post and then I will post 6-4 and 3-1 another time. I exhaust myself!

We interrupt this blog for a brief love letter.

My husband is perhaps the most patient, forgiving, hard-working and long-suffering soul I have ever met. I don’t show him half the respect and gratitude he deserves, and somehow he is still willing to put up with me. I am honored and blessed every moment I have with him.

I love you, darling.

“It’s beautiful, but…” and the secret language

I’m going to put the majority of this behind the cut in case family members don’t want to hear about what non-Jewish practices may occur in our interfaith homes. Think before you click, guys. I warn you now. THINK about it.

If you don’t want to click the “more,” I will provide you instead with the following joke, courtesy of NPR’s Peter Sagel:

Christmas is a very important holiday for Jews. It’s when we celebrate the birth of the only Jewish man ever to meet his mother’s expectations.

(rimshot!)

How to bring the fun back to fandom

So it’s December and the Great Countdown to my Return to Elljay has begun. I therefore am thinking about how best to return in a way that will have everyone all excited and wondering how they ever survived without me. (Delusions of grandeur are mostly for drama’s sake here, but I wouldn’t dream of pretending I’m hoping for a decent reception.)

So my major thought goes as follows: I leave LJ. LJ Heroes fandom starts to suck bigtime. Coincidence?  Well, probably. But who better than Our Lady of Unending Babble to bring the fun back to fandom? And that’s what I plan to do. Assorted ideas for how lie beneath the “Read More>>”… if you are interested, please, folks, please, provide your own ideas!

What’s the opposite of writer’s block?

Why must my teeth now hurt, in addition to everything else? I’m despondent. Two days out of surgery and I’m back at work, despite a rather painful commute. And now my teeth are bothering me. It’s never over, is it?

So the biggest disappointment of this particular medical adventure is that I don’t have what I thought I had. This is a disappointment because it was a perfect explanation for a very, very distressing symptom in my life, and now I am once again at a loss to explain it or ever conceive of my life free from it. There are things that I will forever associate with pain that nobody should have to associate with pain. I guess I will need to learn to live with it.

I’m going crazy on the book-writing front. I’ve been writing and rewriting the first four chapters like mad. Imagine Miranda’s not upset at what happened in Chapter 1 when she gets to the end of Chapter 2. Imagine she is. Imagine she’s suspicious and curious. Imagine she’d prefer to run away from it. I just can’t decide which reaction is truest to her character.  And what about the scene I added at the beginning of Chapter 2? Does it dilute or heighten the suspense? Does it draw a significant contrast or is it superfluous? I have no freaking idea.

That and I seem to be unable to write anything but “Miranda felt…” or “Miranda thought…” or “It felt ___ to Miranda” or other such constructions, things that just don’t hold up and shouldn’t be necessary. I think I must be in a hating week. I’ve considered on more than one occasion cutting out all my secondary characters entirely, even though their presence is vital. I don’t know. It’s quite frustrating.

I’m excited to return to elljay at the beginning of next year. My husband bought me a permanent account, which is great. I’m going to use it almost exclusively for fandom stuff and for memes and whatnot, those lj-only things that are so useless and so fun. God, it will be nice to be heard again. But I’m going in with several ground rules which I will announce on my first post back. They include “you can crosspost like mad and you can participate in love memes, but you cannot complain about lack of comments or love on anything at all and you cannot post asking for more comments.” There are more.

Also in the annoyances department, I throw the dryer door open as far as it’ll go and lean over the washer to pick up a load of laundry. I straighten up and without fail my head hits the swinging door smack in the center. Damn you, dryer door!!

Terrible luck today, and why I’m afraid of making friends

Today I’ve had nothing but terrible luck. Never mind the original piece of bad luck, which I shan’t get into. Mom is coming down for my surgery so I needed to get the car cleaned out for her visit; I went like five miles down the road and stopped in a gazillion gas stations and not one had a vacuum. So, fuming, I headed to the grocery to play the lottery and get a mocha. Well, I lost all 3 of the scratch cards I bought (my luck is usually quite good on scratchers) and the Starbucks was out of mocha!! Well, great, I thought, at least I can use some of this angst to write well. Right?

….. I didn’t have a PEN.

:headdesk:

Sudden late-night thoughts on slash

(Warning: generalization, of course, and just a theory.)

I think being into slash is about wanting to see the world as it could be. Wanting everyone to be comfortable in their own skin and with their own hearts, no matter what lies beneath. I think it’s about the beauty that comes when one human soul comes in contact with another and they find they fit together, no matter what the shell may look like. I think it’s about pushing relationships and tensions further than they are supposed to be able to go, taking it to the next level, because in a world without fear, that would be okay.

And I think it’s wishful thinking. I posit that many people who are into slash create that world because their day-to-day world is so far from it.

They’re not comfortable in their own skin. They don’t feel that people see past their shell to the beauty in their soul. They never push that relationship to the next level, because their world is full of fear.

Tiptoe and Hedgehog Do Heroes, 3×11 Edition

Recorded– duhh– last night between 9 and 10.

NARRATOR: Previously, on Heroes…
TIPTOE: Mohinder was naked.

DAPHNE: You don’t know me.
TIPTOE: [as Matt] Sure I do. I’ve known you for twenty-four whole hours.

HAITIAN: I must stop [inaudible]
TIPTOE: Did he just say he was going to stop Sam and Dean?

Dispatches from the Cape of Cod

recorded over Thanksgiving weekend at my family’s home in Dennis, Mass.

There isn’t an artist in the world that can match the look of the sea in morning, when it’s calm. How its colors run, aquamarine to navy, then back to aquamarine, then royal blue, in these jagged stripes. And then the very thin, dark blue line where it becomes the sky, and how the sky stretches upward like it’s a canvas. You can see seascapes all your life from any number of different artist, and you can appreciate their beauty, but there’s nothing quite like the real sea. Its sense of limitlessness.

And the place where the land touches the sea is like a doorway to another world. Here you’re on the cusp.  You’re between worlds. It’s a quiet limbo. And it makes sense to me, after so long, why people are drawn here. There’s a rhythm to the sound you hear. There’s a unique feeling to the sand beneath your feet. All your senses are touched in a different way than they are anywhere else in the world.

After 30 years of preferring pools and mountains, I think I finally understand what it is to love the sea.

Heroes thoughts, and a request for writing advice

So let me start with the hook that will drive you all beneath the cut to see more: Last night’s Heroes.

I remember when Mohinder being a scientist didn’t mean he could do all manner of things, including interpret post-modern cave paintings to divine the source of the approaching apocalypse. Incoherence Suresh, Ph.D.