The Secretary Will Disavow Any Knowledge

A random spate of thoughts before I dive back into editing:

Does anyone know of any alternate history books (novels) where the South didn't lose the Civil War and, instead, the CSA and USA exist side by side? I don't really want something where the CSA took over the entire US; just something where America was split internally into two separate countries. I'm rewatching the old North and South miniseries (not the BBC one, the Patrick Swayze one) and (my issues with it aside) I'm really intrigued by that notion and what stories would come out of it. But I have no idea if any stories like that exist or where to find them, if they do.

There's posts in meta_lj and announcements about a security breach on LJ from embedded media. Some/Most embedded media has been disabled. Other LJ clones and/or forks like DW have not been affected.

Writerly Neuroses: So, the way I have AKB plotted out, there should be about 75 chapters total. I haven't announced that anywhere or posted that on the story because I wanted to give myself the leeway to fudge, if it became obvious that another chapter was needed (which has happened often in this particular story). At the same time, I find myself really LOATHE to add more chapters, because 75 is such a nice round number and I'm OCD enough to not want to end on "an ODD number" (horrors!) like 76 or 78. *facepalms* This is not productive.

Okay, back to the grindstone.

For once, this is not a sixersfan problem.

Okay, so quietdiscerning is visiting and I'm showing her the movie Shelter for the first time. And we both vaguely remember that there were TWO different J2 versions of Shelter written by fandom. But we can only find one of them. So. ARE we totally tripping on kool-aid or is there really a second version, besides the one by nilsi_pilsifan?

Okay, here's the thing. All my layouts have come from other people or are the premade ones that can be selected with a simple click of the mouse or mouse-like equivalent. And I've known that this is part of my fannish and online education that I was neglecting, but it seems TERRIBLY COMPLICATED from where I am sitting. *sighs* However, I cannot depend on the charity of my friends forever and I really kind of DO want a layout on Dreamwidth and I'd like to be able to change my LJ layout without having to pester my friends.

So. This is my "teach a man to fish" plea.

The thing is, though there are certain realms in which I can pass for technologically proficient, it's just that. PASSING. I am base-freaking ignorant about how LJ (or DW) works, or how to make it DO anything or what all those codes and lingo mean. So what I need is a "Layouts for Preschool Level Idjits" tutorial (or explanation). The kind of thing you would give your not-technological granny (I specify, because I know there are plenty of techno-savvy grannies here *g*) who has just gotten her first email account ever at the age of ninety something. THAT kind of tutorial. Surely one must exist, right? Because the tutorial's I've looked at or been linked to have all been written in the equivalent of Ancient Sumerian, as far as I'm concerned and, in addition to giving me a complex, it's not actually USEFUL to someone at my technological non-level.

Is there such a thing? Help?

I know that I've been in and out lately. I'm hoping to be around more, as things start to settling to something like a "normal" life around here. *snickers* But in the meantime, I have a friend who needs help.

She's looking for examples of smut in any fandom (or even original, if it's linkable) where the top is significantly shorter than the bottom. Not like little person fetish fic, but just a story where the top is actually a few to several inches shorter than the bottom. Your extensive smutty knowledge (because I know it's out there) is much appreciated in her...ahem..."research".

(no, seriously, it is actually research)

Because she's on a pretty tight deadline, would you please only drop links to online smut? She doesn't have time to order books or anything.

Help, O Mighty Flist/Circle?

I've talked about my friend KA Mitchell here before. I recced her book Collision Course and, iirc, at least a few of you picked it up and liked it muchly (which is not hard to do; I love all KA's stuff, but Collision Course is absolutely my favorite thing she's written). Harlequin is doing their own version of March Madness and Collision Course is up for voting right now. More than that, all the m/m romances have been defeated, which doesn't seem quite right to me. I'm not asking people to randomly vote, just because KA is my friend, but if you've read Collision Course and loved it as much as I did, the ballots are open here.

And if you HAVEN'T read Collision Course yet...well, you really should. :)

1. Is anyone willing to hook up a girl with Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream? I own a copy, but it's with the majority of my CDs in storage in Chicago and I'm having a 90's renaissance, musically. Also, and unrelated, can anyone hook me up with Ryan Adams' copy of Wonderwall?

2. Is there a free website service where you can plug in your relatives (and in-laws) birthdays and it'll send you email reminders or something? I could program it into my phone or something, but then when I lose the phone (and I will) or upgrade it (also equally likely) I'll lose the data or have to reprogram it all or something and what I want is something like gmail, where it's online and accessible and I don't have to worry about transferring data from machine to machine. I'm horrible with birthdays and it's only going to get worse when The Fiance's family is added to mine.

So I'm at one of the two Paneras in Frederick...and it seems to only have a single outlet. And it's taken. I have no words for how much this displeases me. I shall have to check out the other Panera and see if it's any better.

Daily Count: 1,560
Weekly Count: 6,664 (I'm changing my format for this to sync up with findyourwords, which statuses on Thursdays)
YTD: 6,664

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AKB: 1,560 words. OMG, that's more like it! Finished the Kane outtake; just need to polish it up and then I'll be posting it today. The "outtake" is now as long as any of the LONG chapters of AKB. *sighs* This just highlights my inability to judge how long it's going to take me to say anything. Of course, my initial ideas about the outtake were complicated by realizing what had "canonically" happend to JDM in the same time frame as the events of the outtake. As someone who likes to mess around with this whole writing thing, I don't know if there's a greater pleasure than the random, textural seeds I've dropped in the story coming together in ecstatic serendipity into something that feels both brilliantly inspired (at least in the eye of the beholder) and bigger than myself.

I talk a lot about my stories as an observer, a recorder, a transcriptionist and that's how I think about them, a lot of the time. Something that comes to me from elsewhere and that I only have the most ephemeral of control over: the choice of a director--to pick what details I want to illuminate and which I want to push to the background, the choice where to pick up or put down, the opening and closing of scenes. So when all these small details that I'm juggling (but have "no control" over) come together...it's like finding the final clue that solves the mystery. The one thing that brings into relief all the others, taking them from being mere details to being breadcrumbs along a path. And I full on LOVE that.

I don't know if the readers ever enjoy those moments as much as the writers do, but I also don't know that it matters. La Muse has be fully collared and shackled with no hope of escaping. But when it's good, he makes it DAMN GOOD.

Anyway. Not sure what I'm going to work on today. *pokes at WIPs*

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So I'm not really in popslash fandom, but I did have a brief, intense flirtation with it and became really enamored of Rhys' work (so much so that I borrowed her Chris for a cameo in The Killing Moon). I was telling nilchance and beanside about Book of Secrets and found out that her site has been suspended. O NOES! I don't even know if she has an LJ or if her work is available anywhere else. I would hate to lost Book of Secrets or MPREG...does anyone know if her work is available elsewhere?

Happy birthday to lostakasha, whose poetry-prose always leads me to embarrassing heights of fawning and despair that I'll ever be able to do with words what she does.

Oh, Nip/Tuck, how could I have forgotten you were back tonight??

Also, WHO HAS THE MARK RONSON cover/remix of The Smith's "Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before"? WANTSES.

Happy birthday elusive_life_77 & whosjeebus!

So, I was just reading an interesting post by someone on my flist (who I'll identify if she likes) about a book she's reading and it raised the following question:

Do you, as a presumable reader of books, think it's "better" for a white author to attempt to include characters of color and potentially screw it up royally or is it better for Clueless White Authors (and I'm using that as a sub-set, not a descriptor for the entirety of white authors) to "stick to their own kind" and write only about white characters? (sorry, I've had West Side Story music stuck in my head since yesterday)

Obviously the most ideal answer would be for writers to be savvy, knowledgeable and respectful enough to NOT screw it up and still be diverse in their writing, but if that's barred as an answer...what do you choose? And why?

As a subset of that question, what white authors have you read that you think do a good job of portraying characters of color? My absolute favorites, I think, are barbara_hambly's Benjamin January series. She was also my gateway drug into George Alec Effinger's Budayeen series, of which I've only read the first book, but I'm intrigued.

*sighs* You know, as lame as I come off on this journal, there are UNTOLD DEPTHS of lameness that go on underneath it that I struggle not to tell anyone about. However, desperate times means that I have to out myself in this respect:

My chronic forgetfulness? Is chronic. And so I have a bad habit of lending things to people and forgetting that I have loaned them to you, my memory only to awaken when you are, you know, ACTUALLY HANDING MY BORROWED ITEM BACK TO ME. (Now that my secret is out, we are calling a temporary moratorium on any and all borrowing...at least long enough for y'all to forget this again, ya opportunistic bastards)

So. Imagine my surprise when I am going through my television DVDs to find a huge blank spot in between Newsradio and Numb3rs. I used to have a spreadsheet that had all my movies and televisions shows listed (to prevent just this problem; it even had a line for me to write down who'd borrowed it, on the off chance I'd loaned it out) but it apparently got lost between the Great External Crash of '07 and the Lonely, Horrible and Altogether Unkind Slaying Of PT's Laptop by Dell. I will fully confess being lame enough to go to wikipedia and google "List of TV Shows" and peruse the N's until I could figure out what was missing. And I did. Which brings me to the following (sad, lame):

SOMEONE HAS BORROWED MY NIP/TUCK DVDS AND I CANNOT REMEMBER WHO. IF YOU LOVE ME AT ALL, AND IT WAS YOU, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. And...maybe we could arrange for their return? *whimpers*

Now that I have thoroughly shamed myself, I return you to your normal flist viewing. *slinks away*

pyroblaze18 is doing a very short survey for her thesis here. If you have a couple minutes, would you please consider helping out a fellow fangirl get her bona fides?

So, I'll have the next piece of AKB up later today. (You're very lucky; I've had this part done...oh, almost since I started the story, gods help me) However, before y'all get used to this kind of output, I AM going to Wincon at the end of the week. And I don't write well while traveling. So. Nothing from Thursday through Monday at the VERY least. Barring miracles or unprecedented creativity. *petpet* I'm sure that darkrosetiger, telesilla, inlovewithnight, kellifer_fic and epeeblade (and maybe others! *bounce*) will keep you occupied while I'm gone.

I'm probably not going to keep announcing new AKB spin-offs here; if you want to keep up with it, I really recommend watching or joining whatwekeep. People have been really excellent linking through it and there's already so much stuff that I'm amazed. However. kellifer_fic has been delightfully susceptible to my whispers in her ear and wrote And Paid For, which features Jeff, Jensen, Jared and Chad...but a wonderfully evil Milo Ventimiglia and a sinister behind-the-scenes Adrian Pasdar. I am not so secretly hoping for more.

telesilla has posted more of her awesome Under Lock and Key (Dylan Neal/Kyle Schmid) here and darkrosetiger wrote the Joe Flanigan POV of telesilla's As Near to Love (As Love Will Ever Be) here: Are You On Fire (From the Years)? (Joe Flanigan/Dylan Neal).

epeeblade posted a really intriguing gen piece here regarding the (or maybe 'a') Catholic stance on the 'verse.

Good stuff.

Now here's the part where I come begging. Below the cut is a list of music that I'd like/am looking for. If you have (and would be willing to upload for me) any of the music listed, I'd be ever so appreciative. I have a long plane ride ahead of.

( Help me, Flisty-Wan-Kenobi...you're my only hope. )

At the suggestion of my co-mod, darkrosetiger, we've set up a comm for anything having to do with A Kept Boy. A place for discussion, other stories, art, fanmixes, whatever. Whatever you like, as long as it's related to the AKB universe.

There's nothing there YET (I am a slow moving and lazy person and she has been more than patient with me), but one of the things that darkrosetiger suggested would be good to have is a kind of FAQ about the universe, some of the stuff about how it developed, who the various entities (like Commerce and the Laborists) are, etc. However, I'm not really sure what y'all would be interested in knowing, if anything. So I'm going to throw this open to the flist at large.

Those of you who read AKB...what kind of questions would you like to see answered in an FAQ type format?

Okay, I need fictional legal advice.

The situation: A gay man agrees to serve as sperm donor for his lesbian friend. The friend has the baby, but dies a few years later. Her partner doesn't want custody and never legally adopted the child. The mother also wants the child to go to the gay man, as the godfather and biological parent. So he takes the child in. The mother's family later decides to sue for custody.

1. I assume that, as the biological parent, that, unless the grandparents can prove he is somehow an unfit parent, the father would be given custodial preference. Is that correct?
2. How prejudicial do you think his homosexuality would be in REALITY, regardless of what the law says?
3. What would the grandparents be looking at/for to prove that the father is an unfit parent? What kind of evidence (beyond character witnesses) could the father to produce to prove his claim of fit parenthood?
4. What's the process of all this? Presumably the grandparents would get an attorney and file a claim...the father would be served with notice he's being sued...then what? My expertise starts and stops with an encyclopedic knowledge of crime shows. *laughs* So any advice, suggestions, embroideries you could give me would be AWESOME.

I know about little_details and I will go over there eventually, if I don't or can't get the answers otherwise, I just prefer to ask at home before I go out and about, yk?

I have a...well, possibly uninteresting story to tell, but before I get to it and potentially lose you, I have a call to action. ktmagik is on a search for GOOD, SHORT, GEN or lightly sexual Criminal Minds fic. As I've never seen the show, I don't have the vaguest idea of where to find it. But, I know my flist is widely interested in many things and I hope you can help. Please comment with links if you know of any. I, and ktmagik thank you.

But.

Dudes. It is crazy out there today! We're having what *I* would consider a late-fall rainstorm (and I use the term 'storm' loosely) in the midwest. I don't know what to call it here in "sunny" California, but man. It is CRAZY out here. I woke up this morning to the power going out. As it was about 7:30a and today is my day off and our HEAT is electric, I said "fuck it" and turned back over to get some more sleep, hoping/assuming that the power would be back on by the time I woke up and thus, the world would be more palatable to the taste.

But alas, twas not to be. I finally couldn't sleep any more at around 10a and the power was still out. And the apartment, she is cold. The wind is blowing and the rain is falling and it still looks dark outside and I begin to feel concerned how widespread the outage is. NoCal is ill equipped for hard or long rainfall. And I was supposed to have lunch with shotofjack today. So I called her to make sure she even felt up to braving the maelstrom outside and she volunteered to call the restaurant to make sure they had power. Which they did. So we agreed that we were going to still meet up and I decided to take a nice hot shower to try and warm up.

Shortly before I left, the power came back on but there was still no internet. My evening with no Live Journal spread out before me in all its horrifying display, as we have the most crackpot cable company EVER. Anyway. I left to go meet shotofjack. First of all, my apartment complex and the whole road down to the highway looked like it had been attacked by Tim Burtonesque flowergirls from Hell. I got on the highway and his the 380 interchange to the 101 and saw one car had slid off the road entirely and a minivan was stopped crossways across the left two lanes of traffic. On the way down to San Mateo, I saw another four cars (without any real visual signs of damage) stopped on the sides of the road. In San Mateo, I saw a BMW in backed up sewer water up to its undercarriage. On the way home (and though the rain had stopped), I saw another two or three cars off the road and a man trying to put his own car's bumper in the trunk.

I know it puts me in the Mean Girl category (and I have precious little shame about that) but I am just...TOO AMUSED. It's like the end of the world!

Anyway, as you can see, I have internet back. And heat. And I am snuggled up with my cats attempting to write. I had a FABULOUS time (as always) with shotofjack. Those of you who do not have your own shotofjack should envy me deeply. DEEPLY.