The thing about explorers is...

At some point I'll have a better, more comprehensive intro post up here, but for now, the important thing:

If I've friended you and you're wondering who the hell this is, I'm the artist known as likethesun2 and gamesiplay on Livejournal. My intention with this journal--we'll see how well it's realized--is to find a way to better integrate those two identities, the fannish and the personal. I probably won't start working on that in earnest for a while, until my life settles down, although I have imported all of the content from likethesun2 and plan to only post new fannish content here when/if I get back into fandom. Consequently, I'd prefer it if you commented on all fannish content here rather than at likethesun2. (I've already started the process of disabling commenting on LJ and redirecting commenters to the mirrored DW entries.)

In the meantime, I probably won't be posting much/any original content here, or indeed using the reading list much. But stick around and we'll see what happens.

Dear Yuletide writer,

( I am so easy, you have no idea. )

Love,
alreadythere (Epigone)

PS, if you want to skim my journal to get a sense of where I'm at, fannishly, feel free to. Just to let you know, though, that I'm just coming off what was essentially a year-ish of hiatus in fandom, so no, you're not seeing things, my last entry was really in May 2009. (Which was back before I had DW and was at likethesun2, all the content of which has since been imported to this journal.) But my tastes are all basically still the same!

Title: The End of All Our Exploring
Fandom: William Finn’s Falsettos
Pairings: Various, but Marvin/Whizzer centrally.
Rating and Warnings: R-ish. Spoilers for the show.
Disclaimer: Falsettos isn’t mine (nor, for that matter, is any of the Marvin trilogy). But I have a blast playing in it.
Summary: He believes that what patterns really refer to is the phenomenon where you know the end from the behavior of the beginning. And he’s never had much interest in seeing anything through to the end. Or, Falsettos: The Lost Entr'acte.
Acknowledgments and Notes: After spending most of my life loving this show, I finally saw it staged in February. And then again, for good measure. And then this happened. A few lyrics from the show are—with varying degrees of literalness—translated into dialogue here, and one exchange was lifted directly from the book by Finn and James Lapine (“So you think there’s hope for the kid?” / “I love Jason, but this is not his venue”). Thanks to petronelle, original cast member of the Fandom of Very Few, for giving me the go-ahead.

( The End of All Our Exploring )

Okay. I'm not totally sold on Kings yet, but-- man, freakin' Ian McShane. He is uncanny. He is not human.

On the strength of him and Eamonn Walker alone, I figure this show has me for at least a few more episodes, which should give it sufficient time to get really good if it's going to get really good. (Also to give me more Jack.) So consider this my placeholder: predictably like Jack, not yet sure about the show as a whole although it's visually stunning, but will watch Ian McShane and Eamonn Walker do anything they want to do.

You know what I've been thinking about today? BAD IDEAS. Foremost among them is this one: "Oh, hey, once you've gotten up the guts to finish this Falsettos story, wouldn't it be fun to write a sequel to that M*A*S*H ficlet from last year? Y'know, the San Francisco story where Hawkeye actually does go to the Bay Area in the mid-1980s and after much travail he and BJ eventually manage to live happily ever after together?"

That is a BAD IDEA. That would be a VERY LONG and AMBITIOUS and EMOTIONALLY TAXING story. I don't need another one of those.

And yet it seems that BAD IDEAS are always the most appealing.

Please to be saving me from myself.

In mostly unrelated news, does it ever happen to anyone else that you always want rare-fandom fic at the wrong time of the year... which is to say, at least six months before yuletide? This always happens to me. I feel like I'm constantly discovering that I crave certain fandoms and pairings in the spring or summer, and then by the time YT rolls around, the intensity of the craving is gone, on top of which I'm usually too busy in November/December to sign up anyway. And yeah: it's happened again. I really just want somebody to write me Perry/Arthur from Love! Valour! Compassion! And it's not going to happen. And that is the sad story of my life.

Boy, you know I'm far gone on a story when I start waxing sappily metaphorical about sports.

( So there was this time when I started writing Falsettos fic. And... that happened. And, twenty-some pages in, continues to happen. )

ETA for clarification:

• The subject line is not actually my opinion on baseball--though I do often feel like the odd one on the subject, since I don't particularly enjoy playing it or watching it. (Unlike Whizzer, I actually like hearing baseball fans talk about baseball more than I like watching it; they tend to do so beautifully.) It's a lyric from Falsettos.
  
• As a college-basketball fanatic myself, I don't mean to suggest that it takes a whole lot to make me get bombastic on the subject of sports. Only that the more into writing a story I am, the more inclined I am to wax sappily metaphorical in general, and about sports in particular.

I don't really do New Year's resolutions, but lately I've been thinking a lot about what a bad fannish citizen I've become. And I'm tired of that. So, here are the two fandom resolutions I've come up with for 2009:

(1) GIVE MORE FEEDBACK. I don't have to read more fanfiction than I already do, if the spirit isn't moving me (although I do suck at reading fanfiction as much as I should). All I'm holding myself to doing is giving more feedback. This means that if I like a story enough to read it all the way through to the end, I'm hereby committing myself to leaving some kind of comment on it. Preferably a comment that goes beyond "Thank you for writing; I enjoyed this," but in a pinch even acknowledgment of reading is better than complete silence, I figure. (Note: if you're on my flist and I don't comment on a story, that doesn't mean I didn't like it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it means I haven't started reading it yet, see above re: sucking at reading fanfiction. All that's changed is that now I've decided that the only reason I won't comment on a story is if I haven't read it all the way through. [Because trust me, I have reader's ADD; if I don't like a story quite a lot, I'll give up before the end.])

(2) WRITE. This doesn't necessarily mean "write more," because write more than what? Than I did in 2008? I wrote one story in 2008 and I've already written one in 2009, so that would be a meaningless goal. No: just write. Specifically, write at least one of the following five ideas that have been nagging at me, many of them for more than a year. In ascending order of likelihood:

• Michael Collins fic.
  "He, Too, Has Been Changed in His Turn" was fine--in fact I still like it quite a lot--but it wasn't a full-length story and it was written in one night. Write a real narrative. Do the research. Stop being intimidated.
  
• The Birdsong fic ("What Like a Bullet") about Weir and the subtextual story the novel seems to want to be telling.
  Probably going to have to trash the pages written in 2007 and find a better structural principle, but the fundamental idea is still sound and one or two central motifs are salvageable.
  
• The Stand fic.
  As of yet I have no idea what this story might be, but I'm kinda jonesing to write it anyway.
  
• The Slings and Arrows fic about Geoffrey and Darren in Godspell.
  Seriously. This needs to get written.
  
• [TOP-SECRET PROJECT THAT I CANNOT CURRENTLY DISCUSS.]
  Well, you know. I can't discuss it.

I am resolved.

What's on everybody else's 2009 to-write lists?

Okay, so who else is on Delicious? I finally gave in and got myself an account. I've only got the more interesting bookmarks from my default browser on there now, but I'm sure my compulsive need to organize will manifest itself over the coming days as I add LJ memories (i.e., more fandom-oriented stuff) and such.

So! If you've got an account, drop me a link!

Title: That Man That Is Not Passion's Slave
Fandom: Slings and Arrows
Genre: Slash and het; Geoffrey/...several people, let's just say.
Rating and Warnings: Somewhere between PG-13 and R, for sex and language. Spoilers for the pilot.
Disclaimer: Only the original characters in here are mine (though I steal some things shamelessly from theatrical history). The rest I'm just borrowing.
Summary: “. . . Even Gielgud dabbled in Hamlet homoeroticism. It’s not… that interesting a story.”
Acknowledgments and Notes: Written for loneraven's birthday, over at grimandancient. Thanks to very_improbable for once again fielding my dumb-amateur questions at every turn, and for turning me on (ha ha ha, pun intended) to how "cope" signifies in Shakespeare; to petronelle and iamsab for canon consultations; to abyssinia4077 for unwittingly planting the seed of this eight months ago by taking me to Stratford and letting me talk about Hamlet/Horatio; to the G.T.P. theater company for letting me hang out behind the scenes; and to the_acrobat for being a quick, perceptive beta. I couldn't have done this without them. Incidentally, I also couldn't have done it without Damien Rice, Campbell Scott & John Benjamin Hickey, Ben Carlson & Tom Rooney, and red wine. All of the original characters, radio stations, and theaters used herein are my own invention and are not intended to comment upon anything real (although sharp-eyed readers may notice allusions/tributes to the real).
PS, Montreal? Is in Quebec.

( That Man That Is Not Passion's Slave )

---

Hey, question for the Slings and Arrows-inclined among you:

The only thing we know, canonically, about Geoffrey Tennant's extra-Ellen love life is that he didn't sleep with anyone else between his breakdown and their rapprochement, right? (Oh my god, why do I say things like "rapprochement," I MEAN WHEN THEY FINALLY DONE SEX AGAIN.) And although canon suggests that they are The Loves of Each Other's Lives, and although one can infer, if one chooses, that Geoffrey has never felt quite That Way about anyone else... there's no reason that one has to infer that, right?

I mean. I ship Geoffrey/Ellen big time, and when it's convenient to my writing purposes (or rather, when it's convenient to Geoffrey's interior monologue), I have been known to infer that. I'm just saying, if I want to suggest that somewhere along the line Geoffrey could've had feelings for someone else, and that maybe even while he was with Ellen he wasn't completely oblivious to the rest of humanity, that wouldn't necessarily jar with canon, would it?

Yeah, I seem to be trying to write Slings and Arrows fic again. However, it is top secret, so don't mention it outside of this and any other locked posts. ALL WILL BECOME CLEAR LATER.

***
In other news, there really is no other news. But I have been rewatching House from the beginning (after bailing somewhere in the second-ish season?), having gotten re-hooked by that damn USA post-holidays marathon when I went home for Christmas. It was actually quite disgusting: the entire visiting extended family spent hours sprawled all over the TV room, trying to guess plotlines and forgoing all custom of exercise and refusing to go see Milk (for the third time) with me. So I succumbed. So did my oldest aunt, previously not a House-watcher; she had to leave to fly home in the middle of an episode, and called us from the airport to hear if the baby and the mother had survived. Anyway, to compensate you for your time, here's what's House has been doing to make me happy lately:

HOUSE [on a mistaken diagnosis]: It was so perfect. It was beautiful.
WILSON: Beauty often seduces us on the road to truth.
HOUSE [turning to look at him]: And triteness kicks us in the 'nads.
WILSON: So true.
HOUSE: This doesn't bother you?
WILSON: That you were wrong? I try to work through the pain.
HOUSE: I was not wrong. Everything I said was true. It... fit. It was elegant.
WILSON: So... reality was wrong.
HOUSE [dourly, popping a mouthful of pills]: Reality is almost always wrong.
--1x03, "Occam's Razor"

CAMERON [on a deteriorating patient]: Brandon's not ready for surgery.
HOUSE: Okay! Let's leave it a couple of weeks. He should be feeling better by then. Oh, wait, which way does time go?
--1x03, "Occam's Razor"

HOUSE: Are you... comparing me to God? I mean, that's great, but just so you know, I've never made a tree.
--1x17, "Role Model"