Closing a few tabs

I've been absent for a while, and there is a reason for this. ( cut for family babble )

In other news, I am still working through a fairly large stack of DVDs, and have just got through the XF episode "The Blessing Way." Good idea. Good plot. Well, I think so. I don't know, because I haven't seen the season two cliffhanger "Anasazi", and I am still torrent-challenged and can't acquire it that way. (I want to see it! I want to see Scully shoot Mulder!) Still, this is not a show you watch for the making-sense component. No, my only quibble with it is the effects. I thought I would never in my lifetime see an episode of anything with worse effects than a) Stasis Leak, the episode of Red Dwarf that didn't have the budget for a scene in a shower cubicle, let alone actual spaceships, or b) the pre-remaster, not-for-DVD version of The Five Doctors. And that is awful. It features Sarah Jane being attacked by a giant black piece of lint, and Cybermen falling over clingfilm. I hereby award The Blessing Way some sort of, er, award, for magnificence in awfulness. Particularly as Doctor Who and Red Dwarf were made by the BBC on budgets of about £11.50 each, this is whole new achievement in awful.

Effects, that is to say - all three are great in other respects. ("Just a twinge of cosmic angst" is dialogue for teh win.)

Another thing I've been meaning to do is write up some reviews of the other XF episodes I have been watching, particularly Unusual Suspects and Post-Modern Prometheus. (I tend to write up reviews and do memes and make comments to myself in open notepad windows, and for PMP, I have apparently written: Um, perfection. Is what happens when you take Mulder and Scully, Frankenstein's monster, the line "the other frying pans that were, um, violated", comic book conventions, lots of thunder and lightning, the Jerry Springer Show, a subtle sledgehammer to the fourth wall and a liberal dose of Cher, film them in gloriously gothic black and white and name the end result "The Post-Modern Prometheus".

Actually, I think that can stand. That probably is all the coherency I can muster about that one. Except, of course, the episode title - also for teh win.

Um. I should probably be writing now, rather than rambling into an update field, as it is two am and this is the only time I get to write, but I sort of want to get a few unrelated things out of my head, the mental equivalent of closing Firefox tabs. I've done family stuff, the bad effects in The Blessing Way, episode titles for teh win, and I'll get to my current writing issues, and oh, yes, I also wanted to ramble for a brief minute about Snow Patrol. I wrote a few days ago about how completely and utterly wonderful Eyes Open is; now, after about fifty listens, I'm more convinced of that than ever. If I uploaded every song I wanted you all to hear, I'd upload the whole album - there's a grand total of one song I don't like - but I think you should all go and buy it instead. Still, because I can't resist:

What I love about them, I think, is the way the lyrics are heartfelt and poetic and delivered in such a matter-of-fact way. This is how I like my emo.

Snow Patrol - It's Beginning To Get To Me
and I tried to tell you before I left / that I was screaming under my breath

I love this one purely and simply because of the lyric quoted below.

Snow Patrol - Make This Go On Forever
the weight of water, the way you taught me to look past everything I had ever learned / the final word in the final sentence you ever uttered to me was "love"

And finally, one that will not fit into LJ's current music field:

Snow Patrol and Martha Wainwright - Set The Fire To The Third Bar
and miles away from where you are / I lie down on the cold ground

And something else I wanted to write about was, well, writing. I have two fics on the go at the moment. One is a mostly serious story that occasionally segues into comedy, and I've been writing it for a month, have hit about the seven-thousand-word mark, and have now stalled magnificently. I've more or less written myself into a corner, as this is the fic with the bad sex scene in it and thus it has a plot. The bad sex scene is written, if bad, and it's now the plot that's causing the problem. I know how it begins, I know some of the middle, and I know the epilogue. Actually resolving it is proving a difficulty. To this effect, I blandly asked amchau how, if pressed, she would fix a hole in the universe, and wondered if we could perhaps devote a telephone conversation to the matter.

Unfazed, she consulted her family, who with typical generosity, gave up a large portion of the afternoon to fixing my plot problem. This culminated in a joyous half-hour in which they reached a number of conclusions and conveyed them via the phone with lots of enthusiasm. I was very impressed by the thought being given to hypothetical nuclear explosions. This dealt with, they asked me for my help answering a question - how would I, as a teenager, rebel against parents who wanted me to turn the music up? (This being a problem suffered from by amchau's younger brother.)

After some thought, I said, "Join the Conservative Party." And got a round of applause!

Sadly, amchau has now disappeared into the wilds for the week, leaving me with an assignment: even if I don't write another word of the damn thing, I need a title for it. Because, as she said, I can't call it the bad-sex-scene fic forever. I'm working on this, and procrastinating on that front by writing a completely different story. This one troubles me in different ways. It's wholly serious and very much plotless, a lot more like something I'd generally write, and it revolves around the theme, mostly, of faith. And it is difficult to write about faith from the perspective of the non-believer.

This isn't the time or place to ramble about my religious/spiritual beliefs - or lack of them - but I don't, usually, subscribe to the "write what you know" thing, except in general ways. I mean, yes, write about being happy, or experiencing grief, or about freedom, because you do know those things, but more specifically that doesn't make much sense. How many people know getting snake-like aliens in their heads or serving in Korea, or whatever? But I think this is different. If I want to write from the point of view of a character with strong religious faith, then to write in character, I have to include that. But to write that convincingly is difficult when there isn't so much a lack of knowledge but just a lack, a space or gap in my head where the faith isn't. You can't research the elements of faith by its very definition. (I mean of course faith in the sense of the mental commitment, not the physical ritual.)

So I'm struggling a bit. I sort of think I'm grasping into the dark, writing about how what I think it must be like to believe, rather than how it really is. And I guess that goes for every occasion I write in the voice of someone not me, but this is a more extreme form of it, I think.

I think I might add to this later, tomorrow probably. Right now, writing.

Edited to add: Wow. That "melancholy" mood icon is extreme.

Fic:: Big Sky Country [XF]

Um, this is not the first X-Files fic I've written. It is the first I've finished, which is a wholly different thing. And it is an odd little snippet, at that; I mean, I hate the thing with the baby, I pretty much hate the last two seasons of the show, but, err. Hell. This is a fic about William, and colonisation, but mostly about William.

(With thanks to likethesun2 and insaneizzi.)

Fic:: Big Sky Country
by Raven
PG, The X-Files, gen

( William van de Kamp is special. )