raven | Entries tagged with fandom: magids

I've been asked by a couple of people what I think about the death of Diana Wynne Jones. The funny thing is, the last time I wrote about her, I was in a snit because I thought she was rubbish on race. I still do think she's rubbish on race. But, then, I say this a lot - I only get angry with people who are worth it. The reason I was personally offended by this was because in every other respect her books are lovely: so original and interesting and fluidly imaginative. I'm not in the same boat as those who are remembering her as a beloved childhood author - I read only a couple of her novels as a child, and actually read most of them for the first time at the end of last year - but the world is a sorrier and sadder place for not having her in it.

This lovely tribute to her by Neil Gaiman has the unexpected note that Nick Mallory, from Deep Secret and The Merlin Conspiracy, was based on the young Gaiman! How delightful. I adore Deep Secret, as you all know; that makes it even more real to me.

musesfool is doing a meme where you talk about ~~five~~ some fictional characters beginning with a given letter and offered me the letter K, so I am going to cheat slightly and point out that Nick's and Maree's real names are ( spoiler for Deep Secret ) so I can write about them.

-Nick and Maree Mallory (Diana Wynne Jones' Magids series). I love them both, but especially Maree, who is so brilliantly, teenagedly ridiculous - she's carelessly self-obsessed, she's mooning idiotically after her ex-boyfriend - but at the same time she's passionate, she cares about books, she adores her dad, and whether at a given moment she hates or loves Rupert, she does it with all the intensity possible. That's one thing I love about DWJ - her ability to write a whole, fleshed-out character as replete with contradictions as all the real people you meet.

-Keiko O'Brien (Deep Space Nine). I always liked the way DS9 handles Keiko, especially the way it portrays her unhappiness at having to give up her career because of living on Deep Space Nine. It feels real to me. I love her especially in "Accession" (thank you,

gavagai, for stepping up with Memory Alpha didn't), when she's returned from Bajor and Miles is overcompensating by spending every waking hour with her - so she engineers him and Bashir into going off to the holodeck together and enjoys the peace and quiet. That's what DS9 does best, I think - its small domestic dramas are as carefully handled as its space battles.

-Kingsley Shacklebolt (HP) - I do love Kingsley Shacklebolt. I love that he calms everyone the fuck down when they need it, and that he's the bodyguard of the Muggle Prime Minister. I didn't really like the purple-robe thing, in the films, but then

forthwritten and I fixed that.

-James T. Kirk - is actually not my favourite of the TOS characters by a long shot. But in the reboot, I do think Chris Pine does a fabulous job with him, strikes just the right balance between cocky and annoying, and I adore how fandom writes his relationship with just about everyone - with Spock, with McCoy, but specially with Uhura.

For music, she gave me the letter E:

Natalie Merchant - Everyday Is Like Sunday

One of the few instances of a cover I like much better than the original. This is a song about growing up in a northern English seaside town. Shockingly, I relate to it.

Placebo - Every You Every Me

I have immensely fond memories of this song. In the summer of 2005,

hathy_col had just passed her driving test and was driving a white Skoda with holes in the floor. Nothing deterred, we drove around West Lancs with this song turned up to eleven, and grinned at each other on something borrowed something blue / every me every you. Yes, now everyone's vidding this song to clips from "The Big Bang", but we thought of it first.

Dar Williams - Empire

Gorgeous voice, beautiful imagery and scathing post-colonial critique. I love her so.

Regina Spektor - Eet

I have no earthly idea what this song is about, but I like it.

I should go to bed. Have made progress on Remix, if you define progress as reading everything your remixee has ever written, and failing to find a hook upon lots of agonising, and then having a strange 3am-in-the-bathtub thought that is a great idea and will totally work and has only the minor drawback of probably making the remixee totally livid. I mean, it would me, if I were the remixee. Bah.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Semisonic; Secret Smile
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/699101.html

My con law prof, this morning: "You're contradicting yourself. Yesterday I asked you if you thought McKinnon's Indiana anti-pornography ordinance would be upheld by the Supreme Court. You said no. Have you changed your mind?"

"No," I said, "today you asked if I thought the ordinance was constitutional."

"You're a cynic, Ms. [my last name]," he said, thoughtfully. And when I opened my mouth to argue: "I didn't say you're not right."

I heart my con law prof thiiiiiis much.

On the whole, it has been an aggravating day. Apparently I am whatever the opposite of a First-Amendment cheerleader is, for one thing, and after that the Siren and I attempted to go to the pool: she had forgotten shampoo; I had forgotten where my towel was, we couldn't find anywhere to park, couldn't find change, forgot the third person we were supposed to pick up and then it started to snow. Not what one would call an enormous success.

That said I had a very nice dinner and have made a start on some work, so.

My homework for this week: drafing a legislative amendment to a defence appropriations bill authorising funds for dredging a harbour, subject to two points of order: no separate authorisation of funds, and no affirmative substantive legislation. I am having ALL THE FUN IN THE WORLD doing this. I sometimes wonder whether I'm doing the right things with my life. Then I remember I am the only person in the world who actively loves legislative drafting, and then I don't worry so much.

(Okay, but I do love it! I do! It's like some kind of cross between formal logic, writing fanfic and doing cryptic crosswords, and it's a buzz to get it right.)

So, anyway, dredging of harbours. It's fascinating. Oh, and I finished The Merlin Conspiracy. ( about that - no real spoilers )

Oh, and, I knew this, but Diana Wynne Jones is rubbish on race. I've read ten of her books in the last six months, and it annoys me that only one character in all of those is brown. (And Nirupam Singh only appears in the one book!) I know people are going to object and say Tacroy, but, well, Tacroy doesn't come from, say, Asia in our world, or Asia in Chrestomanci's world, or wherever: he comes from the EVIL WORLD OF BROWN PEOPLE. (edit: I forgot Millie, as well - Millie, whose origin story is very indicative of her being brown, to my delight, but then this is never so much as mentioned again.) In Deep Secret, Rupert's list of potential Magids is supposed to cover the whole world - and somehow everyone on it is white. And in The Merlin Conspiracy, Pudmini is quite probably Indian, and she has an Indian name, and she's... an elephant. A talking elephant. But nevertheless. An elephant.

Oh, and Nick (and, presumably, Maree) is dark, but the narrative deals with this by telling us that he keeps being mistaken for Asian, and doesn't like it. And there's this running gag about how some of the other characters talk about his "Oriental mysticism", and I get the spirit of it - it's meant to make fun of the people who do talk about that sort of thing - but at the same time I sort of think, okay, is it that hilarious that the magic-using protagonist of a fantasy novel could be brown?

So much as I have enjoyed her books so far, I think I am setting them down for the moment. I have The Wind's Twelve Quarters from the public library, which is the last Le Guin short-story collection I haven't read. I'm looking forward to that one.

Current Mood: sleepy
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/695681.html

Despite the fact this story crystallised during a discussion of

kink_bingo, it still has hardly any sex in it. I am predictable.

gamesiplay betaed; thank you, sweet. Also, I am halfway through The Merlin Conspiracy, and possibly I should finish it before posting, but, you know, this is one of the ones you want out of your head. (I have been writing it for a fortnight, and also reading up on animal husbandry, tarot cards and various types of kink. The public library find me amusing.)

Fic:: Loose Ends
by Raven
4000w, Diana Wynne Jones' Magids series, Rupert/Maree & Nick. Not (quite) happily ever after, but almost.

( magic isn't something you do )

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: The Weepies; Can't Go Back Now
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/695452.html

Various fannish things:

-one of the requests that washed up in this year's New Year's Resolutions is a Diana Wynne Jones request for Deep Secret which is pretty much exactly the story my brain wants to write. So, er, yay, one person will read it? Also, I wasn't sure what the hell I was doing with it, but then I was hanging out with fangirls and

thingswithwings and

eruthros were making me giggle with their

kink_bingo modding travails, and then we got to talking about kinks more generally and I was complaining about how I am too ridiculously self-conscious to write kink usually and then suddenly the juxtaposition of that conversation with that half-written story and ah. Yes. That's why it wasn't working. Okay.

(I went from giggling to all-out hysteria when we started talking about Community. Okay, so I got shown this vid from

festivids the other day, and I was coming to the whole thing cold and said, "So, right, this is a show about two guys who are actually aliens come to Earth from another planet and they're observing humanity and having wacky homoerotic hijinks a la 3rd Rock From the Sun?"

APPARENTLY IT'S NOT, YOU GUYS. Apparently it's about students at a community college.

Anyway. It is in my netflix queue. I look forward to it.)

-Another thing from the same fangirl party! So, a few years ago

gamesiplay and I got drunk and watched Star Trek. (I know, I know, that is so something I never do.) Anyway, we watched "The Naked Time", which as well as having Spock crying and half-naked Sulu waving a sword around, I mean, as if that was not enough, also has the best line of dialogue in the entire franchise and indeed, in anything ever, which is this:

"Attention, crew. This is Captain Riley. At 1900 hours there will be a formal dance in the bowling alley."

Leigh and I looked at each other in total delight and said, "The Enterprise has a BOWLING ALLEY?"

So I only half-in-jest told

thingswithwings that I need to run a fic challenge where every fic has to be set in the Enterprise bowling alley. It can be plotty genfic, kinky Kirk/Spock involving skittles, Sisko taking Jake on a field trip, Picard being talked into it by his senior staff, Uhura pwning everyone with her fabulous bowling ability, anything, as long as it is in the bowling alley.

But, T'wings notes, the reason I am so delighted by this is the simple fact: I like worldbuilding. I love Star Trek, but show me the non-Starfleet Federation, too! I want to know about Federation politics, its sports, what happened to Scotty when he was an undergrad, what the characters do when they're not saving the world. (And why, why, given that Deep Space Nine is a Cardassian space station in Bajoran space under part-Federation control with joint leadership, at the front line of the clean-up effort after a fifty-year oppressive military occupation and the gateway to a stable wormhole to a completely different part of the galaxy - WHY ARE THERE NO LAWYERS. Where are the LAWYERS. Why is the whole show not just "Star Trek: Law & Order".)

So, yes: if I did run a small drabble tag or post a few prompts, would there be any interest in this? Would people other than me think it would be fun to see fic about Starfleet off-duty, and the rest of the world, you know, Federation politics and sport and law and novels and holo-entertainment and restaurants and all that stuff?

-...and finally, in matters fannish. A meme, nabbed from

musesfool

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

[Fic, here.]

Werk time.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: The Wailin' Jennys; Cherry Blossom Love
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/694160.html

This post is about three entirely unconnected things, but who needs cohesion, certainly not me.

Firstly,

gamesiplay gave me five of my icons to talk about!

( icons )

Here is the second thing I want to talk about. So, I wasn't really interested in reading any books by Diana Wynne Jones that weren't Chrestomanci books, but then I finished Deep Secret a couple of days ago and really loved it, so. Please recommend me others! I have read all of the Chrestomanci ones, The Merlin Conspiracy is on its way to me, rec me others so I can go and raid the public library. (I should mention that I haven't manged to get into Howl's Moving Castle - I'll give it another try if y'all think I should.) But yes, please rec me books! Mostly I like her dialogue and character relationships, and the writing-for-the-adult-audience better, but I'm open to persuasion.

(Oh, also, so, the problem with finishing Deep Secret, and I'm sure I am not alone in this, is that I now have the nursery rhyme "How Many Miles to Babylon" permanently stuck in my head. My usual solution to this problem is listening to the offending song a couple of dozen times to get it out of my system, but no one seems to have ever recorded it. I keep humming. It's very frustrating. Moving on.)

...and lastly. The third thing. Star Trek. What a shock. But

calapine listed her favourite episodes of every series the other day, and I thought it should be a meme. Mine are, not of all time, but at the moment: "The Corbomite Manouever" (TOS); "The Inner Light" (TNG); "The Visitor" or "In The Cards" (DS9); "Blink of an Eye" (Voyager) and "Shuttlepod One" (Enterprise).

The funny thing is, both

calapine and

gavagai listed "Counterpoint" as their favourite Voyager, and I'd never seen it for some reason. Now I have, and I liked it a lot - it's a delicious Janeway story, unusually sexually charged for Star Trek. And compiling the list, I'm struck by just how many really, really good Trek episodes there are: I mean, for every awful episode involving HYPER-EVOLUTION INTO REPTILES, there's one like "Measure of a Man" and one like "Duet". (I cannot watch Duet without crying. I also manage fine through "Far Beyond the Stars" until Sisko says: "For all we know at this very moment, far beyond all those distant stars, Benny Russell is dreaming of us", and I weeeep.)

Also, I think Voyager is unfairly maligned. It maybe doesn't have as many high points as TNG and Deep Space Nine, but when it's good it's very good, and it has some underrated episodes, especially in the later seasons. "Latent Image" is a fabulous, meditative piece about the nature of life, and this bit, I think, is one of the nicest scenes in any episode:

( there's a time and a place for philosophical discussion )

Note how beautifully it pases the Bechdel test! So beautiful. I love it.

There's also "Memorial", about war, and "Human Error", which I completely adore and no one else does: it's a tragic little story about Seven of Nine, and it makes me sniffle a bit. And "Lineage". It's a final-season Voyager episode about B'Elanna, and it's a story about racism, and it gets it; I mean, I'm only half-kidding when I say, you know why I'm not sure I want kids, watch Lineage. Do anyway, it's great.

Anyway. What are your favourites, maybe I haven't seen them, and I'd like to.

Now, to bed. Finally.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The Weepies; Living in Twilight
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/693674.html

You know, there are times, such as when you've trudged half an hour over half a mile through ankle deep icy sludge along unlit streets, that you just have to stand for five minutes under the first streetlight when it comes and evaluate your life choices. And then when you find out that after all that, no, the buses aren't running (the Siren: "Don't they have that "we never close down unless meteorites obliterate central NY" policy?") I think you are justified in going home and spending some time writing fanfic and reading and feeling sorry for yourself.

On the bright side, I got the whisky bottle open. Thank you for all your help in that matter, I toasted you all while waiting for my feet to defrost.

Thank you also for the lovely things y'all said about me on the love meme! I was really touched and felt very loved, especially because of the sonnet, wow, and although I did not get to go dancing with

livrelibre tonight as planned, life could be much worse.

Right, so I got in and spent my evening curled up finishing a novel, Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones, and now I want to talk about it, because it was great. ( about that )

In short: I want fic and