Frank the Vampire Slayer | PG-13 | ~5,000
Frank/Gerard, Brendon/Spencer

A/N: Considering I told you guys yesterday that I totally wasn't going to write this, please forgive the general stupidness of this story, and also the many, many probable mistakes. This is based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer the MOVIE, not the series. There's a huge difference. It's sort of slapdash, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

( Frank the Vampire Slayer )

Myself and more than twenty others were laid off from my company yesterday with no warning. We were called into meetings in groups of about five at a time, chatted up by the human resources ladies, and then abruptly let go. We were then escorted from the building.

This is a handout that was in our "bye bye!" packets. Don't you just love that exclamation mark? So cheery!

I'm still sort of numb and in shock. I can't believe I didn't get up and go to work today. I hate the idea that I have to start the long, annoying process of looking for work again. I actually liked my job. I was good at my job. But with the economy the way it is, my (former) company was forced to eliminate my job.

Thank you, George W. Bush, for this unique opportunity to be unemployed.

wow. My parent's have been and gone and I've spent the last week in Crimea. Underwater submarine bases (very James Bond) and amazing beaches. I'm dead tired though - translating for the folks was insanely difficult especially since they didn't seem to understand that Ukrainian and Russian are two different languages. I'll write more about the trip later - out of computer time.

The challenge was simple, the results complex and beautiful. yuki_onna (otherwise known as award-winning author Catherynne Valente) announced an invitational art show for the release of the concluding book in her two-book series, The Orphan's Tales. The medium in which people could work was unlimited; the theme of the show was art inspired by either book.

Now, it's always a little scary when you first read the book of a close friend. What if you hate it? What if it's dreadful? What are you going to say, "My, didn't they choose a lovely typeface for the text"?

I needn't have worried. The books are so luminously written that the pages practically glow. They are retold fairy tales - some familiar, some obscure - all twisted and turned to give fresh insight to the familiar icons of our youth. The tales are nested like a Russian doll, pulling you layers deep into the story of the story: a former slave telling the story of her life will lead into the story of how her master received his fortune by magic, which will lead to the story of the wizard's training and so on, until you are several layers deep in the tale. And then the layers will be added back, one at a time: the wizard's story finished, the master's story finished, and finally back to the tale that began the journey.

Honestly, if you haven't read the books yet you should stop reading right now and go order them.

...

Everyone back? Good.

The tale in the book that struck the deepest note in me (and in several others, as you can see from the other art show pieces) was the pirates. Their ship, The Maidenhead, has a tree for a sail, and the crew is made up of women who don't fit into society - a ship full of monsters, and proud of it. Also, the fabulous SJ Tucker (s00j) had written a song about the ship on the album she made to accompany the firstbook (you can hear a sample of the song on Amazon - go here and click on "Shipful of Monsters" ) I decided I wanted to make a quilt based on that tale.

But how to you portray a tree as a sail? It's a lovely mental image in the abstract; try to make it concrete and suddenly you've got all kinds of problems. I thought about an evergreen - the triangular shape lends itself to the image of a sail. But that didn't feel wild enough for this ship. Then I hit upon the notion of a weeping willow. They are trees that dance in breezes, and their long branches make a perfect stand-in for the ropes of rigging. I was getting close, but the pale green uniformity was still not quite the right look. So I changed that to deep tropical greens, and finally had the look I was seeking:


A slightly closer view:


Detail of the sea:


Detail of the tree:


Once I had decided on the look I wanted, I had to figure out construction. I knew I wanted the richness of lots of color in the water and in the tree, so would be working with small scraps of material. In the end, I stuck with the wild and changing theme of the ship and her crew. Except for the base shape of the ship and the bole of the tree, all fabric edges stand loose and subject to raveling - slow change over time, but changeable nonetheless. I spent a lot of time snipping bits of fabric, laying them out on the foundation fabric, standing back to look at them, adjusting, coming back the next day, changing the lighting, until I was finally satisfied with the look. At that point I added the silk cording vines in the tree, tucking their top ends among the leaves and branches and pinning them down. To add to the changeability of the piece, I skipped over the areas where the bottom end of a vine passes behind a cloth branch - that leaves those vines free to be adjusted to different shapes.

That left the sea looking rather empty, so I added silk cording to it as well. I then hand-basted everything down, sandwiched with the batting and backing, and free-form quilted the layers with metallic thread. For the tree, I straight-stitched along all the shapes and added lines of quilting that followed the flow of the branches, but the sea I just stitched wave shapes haphazardly across the surface. In the large sky spaces, I quilted in other forms: a griffin, another ship in full sail, three geese flying, the names of the ship's crew, and the first line of the song's chorus: Sing of the Maidenhead, lass of the sea. Once all that was done, I hand-stitched beads and metallic thread embroidering in the sea and the tree, and added brass findings as ship details. The large red-orange bead along the ships railing is, of course, Captain Tommy's fox tail.

And then I didn't get around to photographing it before it had to go away to the auction. Fortunately, Cat loved it so much that she had to have it for her own, so I can go visit it now and then. And the last time I was there, I took these pictures with my Blackberry. They are pretty poor, but at least they are something. One of these days I will get over there with a proper camera and take decent pictures, but I wanted to at least get these up. Of all the quilts I've made over the years, I am proudest of this one.

The big challenge for me in my final weeks at Clarion was characterization. Frankly, I’m not much good at it. The main complaint I got was that people kept referring to the folks in my stories as “Ferrett in a mask,” and that’s true – I have a strong voice in this blog, but when every person we meet in my fiction speaks like I do, that’s a weakness.

So how do I fix that? Here are the final lessons.

Write From A Different Space.
“Ferrett,” my instructor asked, “Where do you write from?”

“Uh… My hands?”

“No, no - do you write from your head or the body?”

I’d never thought of it that way before. “I write from the head,” I said, tapping my temple. “I’m very in their minds, about what’s going through their thoughts at a given moment. In fact,” I mused as the thought sunk deeper and deeper into me, “I barely see what they see at all.”

“Write from the body,” my instructor suggested. “You wrote about a fifteen-year-old girl in this manuscript, but we didn’t feel that. It felt like you. But if you’d written it from the body of a teenaged girl, starving, high up on a girder as she’s waiting for a charity boat to come down the river with her food, you’re going to notice different things.”

Suddenly, it snapped into focus. Before, I’d had a teenaged girl and I wrote her from the mind – which was my viewpoint of me, thinking what I’d think if I was there.

But the question had put me into a different space – I wrote from the perspective of, “What’s it like to be up there?” then suddenly the sensory details sorted themselves out. My plot had placed my character on that girder…. But once I body-thought, I felt what it was like to be that hungry. I put myself in the cold of being so high up, the wind whipping across my arms, seeing things from a different point of view.

My concerns changed. Because as opposed to being all intellectual, I was worried about very minor, telling details that fleshed the story out a lot more. I’d known that yes, my character could fall off the bridge that high up, but it’s funny how much more vital that seemed when it was my feet on that rusty rail, the river a hundred feet below.

And best of all, my emotions became more vivid when I wrote from the body. When I was concentrating more on what it felt, physically felt, to have that heart-thrummy nervousness of a first love or the deadened-nerve muscle apathy of a serious depression, then it rang truer when I wrote about it.

Everything changed from there. I’d put myself behind the eyes when I wrote, which could get me so far… But what I needed was to inhabit that other fully. And it’s a subtle difference I don’t think I ever would have gotten on my own.

Every Character Paragraph Must Make A Decision.
I’d read my instructor’s books, and they had whole friggin’ paragraphs talking about their characters' states of minds. Just like I did!

But when they did it, it was showing. When I did it, it was telling. And I didn’t know the difference, so I asked why.

My instructor said, “The trick is, every paragraph has to be a decision that the character makes. And the character has to make that decision using what they see. That’s how you show.”

I squinted, not quite getting it. “Can you give me an example?”

“Sure. Let’s take a Western.” And my instructor hunched down, adopting an uncannily accurate Midwestern female accent as their demeanor transformed into something else entirely.

“I don’t like him,” they mimicked, peering off at an imaginary person at the bar. “His hair’s too slick. His shirt’s been washed too much – there’s no dirt on it. He’s been sipping his beer for an hour, and he thinks I haven’t noticed but I have because everyone else is getting drunk and he’s hiding that he’s not. No, he’s a city slicker, and I’m not trusting him one bit.”*

My instructor straightened up.

“That’s her coming to a conclusion,” they said. “You can see what she thinks is important, and that forces you not only to be more specific with your level of detail, but it also tells the reader exactly how that character thinks. Which means that by the time we get to the end, we have followed the character through a small narrative arc that concludes with what they have decided to do.

“Every paragraph should be a decision.”

I vowed immediately to steal this technique. It seems to be working quite well.

Blogging Teaches You Bad Habits
The worst habit I have picked up is you.

See, when you write for a blog, you write to an audience. So you speak in general terms, because that’s the best way to connect. When you talk about how people experience universal emotions or best practices, you default to “you.”

You know why? Because you sound like an egotistic dick if you use the word “I” all the time. Even if it’s absolutely true, rewriting the previous paragraph as, “When I write for a blog, I write to an audience. So I speak in general terms, because that’s the best way to connect….”

…well, that distances your audience from you. It reminds them that this is your opinion at a time when you’re trying to sway them with the siren song that hey, everyone feels this. So you use “you,” and if you’re clever, it works.

Or I should say, it works in a blog essay, which is essentially a personal letter to each person who reads it. I’ve written a lot of solid pieces where I invited the audience to think of themselves in love, or in hatred, and they’ve generally gone along with it positively.

My first few stories had the characters slipping into discussing their universal desires for love and affection by talking about you, the reader. That’s great in a blog, when you know you’re a reader. But in a work of fiction where I’m trying to make you forget that OH HAI, BIG ARTIFICIAL CONSTRUCT HERE and have you fall into the story, I need to have the character and only the character feel that emotion. Which, strangely enough, works better in fiction.

Your evocation is completely reversed.

Every Character Should Get What They Need.
Endings are tricky. Out of like sixteen stories a week for six weeks, I think we’ve had maybe seven stories total that had endings that worked out of the box. Most of them needed tweaking to sing, and many of the endings (including, yes, many of mine) just didn’t fit with what we knew.

But my instructor had a very good point.

“At the end of the story,” they said, “The lead character should get what they need. That’s not necessarily what they want – in fact, it usually isn’t – but they should get what they need. Even if, in some cases – especially horror stories with awful or clueless protagonists – what they need is a terrible death.”

That’s been a useful way of looking at endings, because the ones that worked generally gave the characters what we felt they needed to have. The ones that didn’t work generally didn’t stem organically from the characters – they came from plot elements that we didn’t care about.

“Giving them what they need?” That’s hard. Because that means you have to have an ending that fits those characters precisely, and no other. Sure, it’s nice to end every romance with the heroine and the hunky male kissing by the seaside, but isn’t there something more unique to tease out here? Some resolution that makes this story something that you can’t get anywhere else, because the conclusion depends on a handful of unique people?

Oh, that’s scary. But when it works, that’s when you do the real magic.

* - NOTE: The instructor obviously did it a lot better than my memory of it. Danke.

I'm done! My sgabigbang art is done and submitted, and I didn't even need my extension! (I had dispensation for 4 more days, but no, oh, no, I had to just about kill myself to get it in on the official due date.)

*collapses*

Now to figure out my next fannish project. I've got a lot of RL stuff for the next month, and two drawings to figure out, but I'm jonsing to be writing. Still, I don't have a plot idea that's grabbing and shaking me, so if I can hold off for a month or two on writing, I might actually be able to do all the things I need to do. *crosses fingers*

Hiya,

I remember reading this fic a loooong time ago (years) and haven't been able to find it again. I may have even asked for it here before ^^". I can't really remember, but it's worth another try!

Fraser and Ray K are tied up in a warehouse and Ray is bitching Fraser out for getting him into trouble. This goes on for a while and in the end Fraser dislocates his shoulder to get them untied.

I'm pretty sure it was hosted at the DS Fiction Archive, but that really doesn't narrow it down, huh ^^

Thanks for any attempts!

A WILD STUNKY JUST APPEARED JUST OUTSIDE THE BALCONY.

I HOPE I HAVE ENOUGH POKEBALLS TO CATCH IT.

!!!

I don't actually like guns.....however I have this small thing for John and his weapon. Beware may be hazardous for your health.

Now I know I'm going to a bad place...anyone going to join me?




Armed and Dangerous .

Okay, so I was going to bed, and then I read all of your entries on what it's like to be home and how much you miss your Clarion friends and the sadness of the breakup of your group.

And though I was tired, I then went out to the lounge to talk movies with my Clarionmates for another hour, because when are we gonna have this time again?

I blame you for lack of sleep, Clarion West. But not enough to start, y'know, a gang war.

 I am looking for a story that was loosely based on Janet Evanovich's book "Wife for Hire"  I remember that was in the summary and that it was on a site that had a lot of AU stories that were based on novels.  But that's all I remember.  Hopefully someone will know the story or the site.  Thanks! 

Found!  Links in comments. 

Looking for a Fraser/Kowalski fic, Kowalski POV. And what I remember is that Ray's interested in Fraser, but he turned Fraser down when they first met - that while they were getting to know each other and spending time together, then Fraser went to kiss him and Ray pulled away, with the shocked thought along the lines of "oh god, all this hanging out and everything, Fraser thought we were dating." And Ray tells him he's not gay, there's awkwardness, they become friends, and of course, Ray falls for Fraser after. I thought it was Speranza's Ping, but that's not it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

First of all, Mallozzi went to the set of Brain Storm today (and David's been Twittering with geekish glee over the course of shooting:) You wanna see something that is the BEST THING EVER?

( Geek Overload! )

Secondly, last night mandybear27 innocently asked me how I saw Rodney as a child.

( I had some things to say )
Apparently I have a huge backstory in my head that I've always used when writing, but seeing it written down on the page is...wow.

 My Small French Fry Contribution...enjoy and I love feedback!!  

BTW, my first attempt at McShep.  *wipes away sweat*

AUTHOR:  stagnation13
TITLE:  How to Quiet Dr. Meredith McKay:  A Discourse on Holes
RATING:  PG
PAIRING:  McShep, Established Relationship; Ronon and Teyla are sitting there listening to the ranting as well
LENGTH:  Think of a Small French Fry
SUMMARY:  Team Sheppard are stuck in a hole without any light whatsoever and The Good Doctor will not shut up without an intervention.
DISCLAMERS:  Not mine, and I am not making any dough off of anything SGA.  The characters have been washed and pressed before handed back.

Title: Season Tickets
Pairing: Fraser/Kowalski
Rating: All ages
Word count: 536
Notes: nos4a2no9 asked me for F/K established relationship, and this was what happened. It answers the letter, though not the spirit, of that request.

( Fraser was pining for Ray )

So my final story got critiqued today. It was pretty much positive, which is nice; I think everyone wants their last story to be good.

Tonight, I read six stories, watch Buffy: the Musical with my comrades, and probably stay up wayyyyyy too late doing the final edit. Life is good.

Two more nights and I see the greatest love of my life in person. This is better than life.

This is a dom sub story. It starts will John as a captain I belive and he is on leave and is headed to a particular hotel were he is going to meet an escort so that he can have some fun before he goes back. This is a special escort because they have no problems with being submissive and spanks and such. John uses a different name and when he gets there its a young Rodney he meets who also used a differnt name. Rodney really turns out to enjoy what they are doing more than any of the others John has been with and he thinks to him self it would be easy to get use to having Rodney. The part at the end of the weekend I think it was and then meet up again much later in Atlanits and end up getting together. I very much want to read this again so thanks in advance to whom ever finds it.

Sagegypsy