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So, Vidukon! I had a lovely time - spent my morning on Friday writing in Starbucks at Paddington; headed westwards in a train carriage with two hen parties and nine fangirls, it was great - and we got to Cardiff with far less incident than last year; Cardiff itself is lovely, it has bilingual signage and smells like the sea, which is all I ask from of a place; and we piled off the London train and ran straight into fray_adjacent, which was super. Vidukon is a lovely little con - emphasis on the little; I think I knew almost everyone at least by sight, or through having met them last year - and the atmosphere was way more collegiate than some other cons I've been to.

I didn't go to everything, but I went to most things. Some brief notes:

-My favourite vidshows were the Pride vidshow (because, once again, Vidukon is the same weekend as Pride); the Same Song, Different Source vidshow (because, wow, I am kind of vid-illiterate, but a show like that really helps - it helped me draw out parallels and interesting themes where maybe I wouldn't've been able to otherwise) and Constructed Realities, which was probably the most fun vidshow. My suggestion for that show was "Closer", and it was fun seeing that on the big screen; also one vid of mine appeared, "we were born in a summer storm", which was also nice to see; but my favourite favourite favourite times eleventy million thing about that vidshow was "Papa Don't Preach", in which Jack Harkness is keeping his baby. I'm so happy about that vid. So, so happy.

-So, having only begun vidding as a result of last year's Vidukon, it was a major kick and blessing for me to see my vids on screen! As above I had one in the constructed realities show, and "Landsailor" of course appeared in the Aims Vid Project show. I very much enjoyed being part of that project, especially as such a new vidder - "Landsailor" was the third vid I made - and getting to see them all on the screen one after another was part of the whole community building thing I think is so important in fandom generally. It was great. I also got to see "Unsteady Ground", the vid I learned how to vid to make, on the screen in the Vidders' Choice show, and that was amazing: I mean, really, really amazing. Even a year's worth of experience makes me think I'd do it slightly differently now, but nevertheless, that was the vid of my heart and it was so so nice to see people's reactions to it in real time. Aaaah.

-And, finally. Premieres. I didn't have a premiere myself - I thought until the last minute I was going to make a Queen Arachnia vid for the lulz, but it never worked out - but I knew cosmic_llin had one and I'd been hearing static about that vid since April. It's a vid, they all told me, very obliquely, that is relevant to your interests. silly_cleo wanted to sit next to me for it. It was all very intriguing.

The vid is "Long Live" (by cosmic_llin), no content notes, all of Star Trek. Long live the magic we made.

Go watch it. I'll still be here when you get back.

Yep.

I think that it was out of consideration for my feelings that such_heights put it at the end of the show? When the lights came up I couldn't talk for a while. I just can't.

Actually, cribbing mostly from the comment I finally got myself to write on it (after the broken-hearted keening was over, natch), ( more on this )

I just... yes.

-I also made a vid myself and posted it during the con - not a premiere; I'm not that organised, though I did finally finish the vid on Saturday afternoon - and in case you missed it, here it is: we came to learn the sea, also about all of Star Trek! This has been the vid of my heart the last couple of months or so; like Long Live, it's a love song. A little sadder, as is my wont, but still.

-And though I had rather a miserable train journey home - drunks! smelly people! ticket shenanigans! - I had my laptop and a surplus of enthusiasm, so I vidded! I made 30 seconds of a vid, anyway. I have a lot of vid ideas at the moment - I'm still going to make an Arachnia vid at some point; I have a half-formed idea for a vid about sad robots - but the one that got made is this odd little creature, a vid about Star Trek, mind control and violence.

(As per, I have all the happiest fanwork ideas.)

Right. Work.

So if you know my real name, you (may?) know I have a grown-up blog elsewhere. This is not, by the way, intended to imply that fannish/DW blogs in general are not grown-up - just that mine joyously, unrepentantly isn't. Anyway, thanks to a kind friend who sent me a review copy, I carried a heavy proof of Charlie Fletcher's The Oversight all the way to Seattle and back, and didn't actually get past the first chapter; then I got home and resolved to give it the good old try and read it far into the night and screwed myself where jet-lag is concerned, but again with the unrepentance because I loved it. I wanted to write it about somewhere that's easy to link to publicly, so there's a nice long chewy review on my other blog, but sadly, I have no one to flail about it to because it doesn't come out till the beginning of May. Not to reiterate the whole review here, but gothic, macabre, lady-driven (pirate ladies! magic-using ladies! ladies rescuing ladies!) fiction that is objectively good and also hits about a thousand of my fantasy kinks (mysterious other London, check! Mysterious society of guardians and watchers, check! People carrying their lost cause banners to the bitter end, check!) - aaaaah. I like it a lot. I like it a whole whole lot, and if you like the sort of things I like, it comes out very soon, please read it and come talk about it with me, I am a fandom of one.

Since I started writing for myself again, rather than just fannish writing, I've had more than a passing interest in science fiction fandom more generally, and while I don't want to put too much weight on it and things like in terms of what is good and what isn't, I am pleased Ancillary Justice got a best novel Hugo nomination and I do hope it wins. It's lady-driven SF that does interesting things with gender, and while it's not the very best thing I've ever read, or anything, I enjoyed it very much as a novel of ideas. I feel like I came to fandom in the first place to find women in SFF - creating, consuming, politicising - and I'm emerging a little after ten years and finding that women in "mainstream" SFF are much more of an organised force than they were. Mainstream is in quotation marks because respectability isn't majority. For one thing, why do we want to be respectable, as fannish fans - we are queer, we are brown, we are women, we are intentionally and politically disruptive - and someone told me recently that more people participate in yuletide than vote for the Hugos, which is the sort of statistic that lingers in your mind.

Urgh I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, I meant to just write, please read this book, you guys, it's great. Tomorrow I am spending an entire day in my house for the first time in several months, it's gonna be awesome.

Another day! Still building taxonomies. It's... wow, I'm exhausted right now.

gamesiplay asked: You have a tag called "FIAWOL"; it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what that was an acronym for. What does fandom as A Way Of Life mean to you?

So "fandom is a way of life" is certainly a set phrase that's older than I am, and I don't suppose I use it in the same way as those who coined it did, or possibly many other people, but, anyway, here goes.

There’s a quotation sourced to Lev Grossman that does the rounds periodically about how what fandom is, basically, is, punk. Here it is:

( really aggressive towards the source text )

That's exactly it, to my mind. I guess, what I mean by fandom as a way of life is that fandom is important to me in the abstract sense as well as the day-to-day specifics. I think fandom is, both in substance and function, transformative. I’ve written before about how I believe that it was fandom, in conjunction with other things that mostly were also brought into my life by fandom, that transformed me from a shy and awkward thirteen-year-old to a shy and awkward, but settled-in-herself, adult. Fandom gave me community and the confidence to take my place in that community, and a cheerful cognisance that my community was really a global community: that I belonged to something greater than myself. But in some sense that transformation is over – I’m grown up now! Twenty-seven next month! What even happened? – and now I’m sort of getting ready to push off into that long haul of adulthood and I suppose, yes, it is the time to think about what fandom is to me now.

I guess, to be in fandom for me, regardless of whether I’m currently writing a 20,000-word epic story about Parks & Rec and alien invasions, or not; or whether I’m super-excited about a TV show about spaceships, or not; or if I went to four cons this year or none or wanted to but couldn’t afford to or saw fangirls last weekend or haven’t in months; regardless of any of those things: fandom is to make a choice, every day, to be part of a transformative world. To think, I can tell that story better, or differently, or just, with more cock jokes. To make people in power angry. To be such a threatening force in the world that we must needs take our place in the grand litany of women’s writing and art, and the writing and art of other subaltern groups, and be trivialised, demeaned and category-errored out of existence. Fandom is what teenage girls do (because, of course, to be young and a woman at the same time is the worst crime society can conceive of). Fandom is derivative and unoriginal (which is bad, unless it’s Margaret Attwood or Shakespeare doing it, in which case it’s innovative and literary). Fandom is theft (because to create a means of production of culture for no material gain is worryingly anti-capitalist). Fandom is nothing but badly-written porn (because mainstream porn is, of course, so suffused in quality, and young girls and women mustn’t be allowed to think for a moment that they can claim ownership of their own sexuality). I’m over all of that bullshit and people who peddle it. Those people are scared of fandom and they ought to be. Fandom teaches, you can retell the story your way. Consider how powerful an idea that is. Today it'll be the stories we tell ourselves about spaceships. Tomorrow, it'll be the stories we tell ourselves about justice. The day after it will be both of those at once.

(Relatedly, I loathe this pseudo-cute fannish thing right now of white fans saying things like, “Fandom loves [pretty white boys]”, or “I love [X], but of course fandom doesn’t, fandom only likes [Y] [because he's a cute boy] etc”. I am fandom. I have been fandom every day for thirteen years. It’s super-precious that you want to erase me for the sake of making a rhetorical point, except, actually, it’s not.)

And as well as that, fandom is love. Fandom is, well, fandom is how to be open to that – to look at the world and think, wow, there’s so much there to be excited about. Some people kissed on TV and it was awesome and it made me so happy and I want to go tell all my friends about it! Some other people successfully hit a small round object through a standing structure in front of thousands of spectators (and it was awesome and it made me so happy and I want to go tell all my friends about it!) There was a movie about giant robots! There was a book about spaceships for great justice! There was a story retelling another story that was itself a retelling of a story written 5,000 years ago by human beings just like us! (And it was awesome! And it made me so happy! And… you get it.)

So I guess the rumours are true and that fandom does skew young - in mind, I suppose, rather than body; because it demands of you the capacity to remain angry, to remain punk, to reject cynicism, to love them all and their faces so damn much. I think, at this stage of slightly unwilling adulthood, that's okay.

So Nine Worlds was - and is, as they're running for definite in 2014 - a massive, multifandom mult-track multi-everything fan-run con in London, only not London, actually, but Heathrow, and it was wonderful, but I am so tired I am falling over so please have some edited highlights:

-Night Vale cosplay! such_heights did a wonderful Cecil with a bowtie and stuck-on third eye, and I suppose I could've done Carlos if I'd thought of it earlier but I went to the fancy-dress shop near work and bought a hooded cape and practised looming at people, and then on Friday afternoon I made a sign reading: "DOGS ARE NOT ALLOWED IN THE DOG PARK PEOPLE ARE NOT ALLOWED IN THE DOG PARK say nothing and drink to forget" and we went round the con like that. And it was amazing! We got there on Friday and got ourselves registered and went up to the queer high-tea drop-in (there was a queer track, a fanfic track, a geek feminism track, inter lots of alia, I was totally spoiled for choice), and people kept on recognising us and coming to talk to us, and then they did a fanfic cupcake drop-in also and the organisers had got Night Vale tea from Adagio. (It tastes nice, but I refuse to know what's in it. It's Night Vale tea, come on.) such_heights and I made super-excited simultaneous noises. We met another Cecil over the weekend - T., the organiser of the queer track, who had fab purple headphones - and I'm almost sure I saw a third at one of my panels, but couldn't catch up with them in time to make happy noises.

(Also, you know why I could've done Carlos happily and comfortably, if I'd got myself a lab coat and a confused expression? Because he's brown. I love that and I love writing him and I love everything about this.)

-Fanvidding panel and show were awesome, but getting home on Friday night afterwards was a nightmare - the Piccadilly Line was part-closed, and we had to make this stop-motion journey being thrown off the train every few stops and getting on another one, and we got back round about half one and left the house again at half eight, which was not so much of a highlight but actually it was kind of fun? A lot of the weekend felt like a school field trip, like grabbing your friends and going on an adventure. And here is a small thing I find relaxing - sitting outside, getting some fresh air, and watching a sequence of 747s landing in front of me.

(Actually, the venue was basically the only bum note of the whole con for me - the two con hotels were great, but in kind of a food desert and really difficult to access by public transport or by driving. Part of me did wonder if it would've been easier to take the car, but by this afternoon I was very far from fit to drive so perhaps not.)

-Saturday, I went to some great panels ("Heroes v. villains" on the literature track was surprisingly witty and delightful) and one very disappointing one; hung around lobbyconning for hours and hours, which was just fab, drank expensive airport-prices coffee, used the word "transformative" a lot; hung out with such_heights some more and had thoughtful conversations about life, then hung out with her and silly_cleo planning our femslash panel in the late-evening sunlight at an outdoor table at McDonald's. It was ridiculous and wonderful. I had a free hotel room for Saturday night courtesy of the Doctor Who track, and we all piled in there for some of the afternoon, and someone, I forget who, noted that you do feel guilty, paying your con membership and then hanging around with your friends and not going to panels - but, I dunno, I think room parties and lobbycon are as important, if not more so, than structured con programming. I guess I think all that talking, and laughing, and continuing panel discussions, and lying sleepily on top of the bedcovers talking about your wedding with someone who loves you enough to fly 8000 miles roundtrip to attend, and giggling about Tumblr memes in a deserted Piccadilly Line carriage at 1am, and love, and overpriced coffee, are - wait for it - transformative. And also, formative - constitutive of self, and the metaphorical ground from which you do the less fun stuff you have to do, in life.

(I really love the word "transformative".)

-Lashings of Ginger Beer Time did a short set, which I loved, and then it was queer rock geek disco time. (The first song they played was "20th Century Boy" - that made me happy. I'm told someone, when I left the dancefloor to find a drink and a bathroom, asked my friends if I was on something.

I leave this without comment.)

-Today was the day of ALL THE PANELS. Somehow, I don't know how, I got scheduled to be on five panels between 9.30am and 4.30pm. (This is where I sit still and am grateful for happydork and such_heights, who between them got me checked out, got me coffee, got me painkillers, and walked blithely into an afternoon panel to give me a pasty, among myriad other small kindnesses) Of the panels, the first one was "What makes a fandom?" for the books track and it wasn't quite worth missing out on giving the lovely hotel breakfast its due - everyone concerned was hungover.

The second panel was the Chicks Unravel Time panel, with usuallyhats and Una, and it was wonderful wonderful wonderful. It was so nice to read, and speak, in front of an audience just brimming with love and enthusiasm and insightful critique of Doctor Who and women in sci-fi and feminism generally and just, awesome things. It was like going somewhere you've never been and finding all your friends there waiting for you. And that was followed by the femslash panel for the fanfic track, which I'm still not sure I was the most logical choice for, but being on that panel was just a total joy, also: more insightful thoughts and productive discussion and people just being really happy and excited and passionate about queer female visibility, sexuality and lives. I loved it.

My third panel of the day was entitled "Is Doctor Who thunderingly racist?" and I was the only non-white person on the panel. I had been vaguely, then definitely, upset about this for quite some time. happydork offered very generously to sit in the front row and ask encouraging questions. I sat down with trepidation.

....and then it was awesome? I just... I still can't quite believe it, but it was awesome! The audience were sharp as whips, incisive, angry then productive, thoughtful and celebratory. They wanted to talk about Doctor Who as a colonialist narrative. They wanted to talk about Martha's story and its intersections with race and class. They wanted to break down Doctor Who in its historical contexts, and built it up again as a constitutive myth of Britishness. They wanted to take about its responsibilities in interrogating racism. I sat there and talked a lot and listened a lot and thought for a while I might cry from relief, then got over it. When I went out such_heights was waiting for me with the margarita I had demanded she bring me so I could weep into it; instead I drank it in happy celebration and wove my way upstairs.

(The last panel of the day was "Is fanfic literature?" which was good, and had a fluid exchange of ideas, but aaargh, I was so tired by then, with my empty martini glass and my bacon pasty.)

-At the end of the panel, I went back down to the dealers' room and went to speak to one of the artists selling her art at one of the long tables; I'd enjoyed speaking to her so much on Friday that I popped in when I could to keep her company, as she couldn't leave her stall to attend much of the programming. I bought a print off her, because she's a beautiful artist, and I'm a sucker for haunting line-art of corvids fluttering into paper distance. And as a kind of final benediction from a wonderful weekend, she gave me this.

I am very pleased with the world, and the small spaces I fit into in it, tonight.

I took a couple of days off at the end of last week and went to Oxford to see the lovely troyswann, whom I have known for years and years and years and is visiting our fair shores, and also catwalksalone and elbee512 and it was just totally delightful and did my heart good. Sal, whom I have known since I was seventeen, is just the best. I don’t know what we talked about, only, I think we talked about a lot of things, including fandom, and Shakespeare, and weddings, and driving distances in Canada and how they can be calculated with reference to the curvature of the Earth; but I had such a wonderful time. Cat and Elizabeth are also wonderful people whom I had not met before! We talked about Sports Night quite a lot. And we went for cream tea at Queen’s Lane, only with not quite enough cream, and in my case, not enough jam. Also, the little greasy spoon on St Giles, where we went for breakfast, is much nicer than I remember and does lovely cinnamon rolls. I don’t know how this account turned into a litany of the food I ate, but it was all so joyful that the cream and jam seem the easiest way to express it. And you all know this already but Sal is the best: she is just as good a storyteller in person as she is on the page. She told me a lot of stories and I went to many distant places while she told them.

Also, Oxford – Oxford in high July, with all the buildings looking so beautiful they might as well be made out of crystallised honey, complete with blossom on the tree outside the university church, and an air of respectable desertion around Exam Schools. We did a long circuit from Christ Church Meadow, along the riverbank and the university parks, round the back of the Botanic Garden and up onto Magdalen Bridge a bit along from Hilda’s, and everything was so perfectly green and still. I love Oxford, still, probably forever; Sal turned to me as we walked up the High in the light curving towards dusk and said, “Well, this does not suck.”

Yes. Exactly.

In the morning I drove home in thirty-degree temperatures in my car that has no air-conditioning, and in which you can’t open the windows because the car sort of rocks from side to side, and dissolved on the couch for twelve hours, and then on Saturday I had a hen party.

You see I didn’t actually want a hen party, but. hathy_col, who is not my bridesmaid (I don’t have any) but has taken on all the responsibilities with none of the fun bits, organised everything and told me where to turn up, and predictably, I was very wrong to have had any doubts. Although it rained, and the place we were originally going to was closed for a private party without telling anyone, somehow or other we ended up in a cocktail bar somewhere near Covent Garden, with a very long menu, and a sheet of paper on which were scribbled all of the drinks being subjected to happy hour. It was great. tau_sigma had a wonderful purple top hat with a feather in it. Maria turned up in the middle of the evening to tell me that she had been ten days on shift, and she’d left the baby at home, and she wanted cocktails (which were all long, sticky and tasted a little of cream and banana, which is basically all I want out of life). I was a bit worried that I was the only person who knew everyone, but I went away for a minute and came back to a table eagerly discussing the ins and outs of Vulcan sex, and such_heights and happydork talking about Vulcan babies. I had forgotten to eat lunch and got really quite drunk.

I don’t know who initialised the tradition of toasting me with each round of drinks, but it was a great idea and there were a lot of drinks. I think some of them were sweet and heartfelt and about my future happiness in married life; one was definitely me toasting my wonderful, passionate and fascinating friends; there was also, “To Iona! May her betrayal never be inevitable!” and my personal favourite: “To Iona! ...there is no Iona. Welcome... to Night Vale.”

Which brings us neatly on to:

( Welcome to Night Vale )

In conclusion, I love Welcome to Night Vale in a fittingly devoted and slightly scary way, all hail the great glow cloud. If anyone has a ficlet they wish written, please say so, I might just write it.

(Although, not the fic where the jet airliner that materialises in the high school gym is owned and operated by MJN Air, CEO Carolyn Knapp-Shappey, because apparently SOMEONE ALREADY WROTE THAT.

I mean.

Fandom.)

Dearest internet! As some of you will be (painfully) aware, soupytwist and I are running a con! It will be in the lovely city of Manchester (England, not NH) during the summer of 2014. If this sounds like a good idea to you, please help us out here with things you'd like to see at a British fan con, and also please help us name it!

This week - has been a week. I'm on day six without ever sitting down for long enough to eat an entire meal, so today Shim is making me one! With actual food! And hot, and stuff! It's gonna be the best.

Otherwise: I worked a lot this week. Did a quiz-based networking event out in Girton, which I enjoyed even though we did terribly badly, and I'm apparently the department's new favourite person because I knew the meaning of the word "crepuscular" and thus we didn't come last. Saw the Gaslight Anthem at the O2 in Brixton, which I would have enjoyed more if I hadn't been dog-tired, but oh the Gaslight Anthem. They did "The Queen of Lower Chelsea" and I can basically be happy forever now. And yesterday I had a sequence of work disasters, rain, rain, more rain, got soaked getting to the station and forgot that the major drawback of the cut and cover Tube lines is that they go at twenty miles an hour, but I went to see Dar Williams at Bush Hall with happydork and it was delightful. She's so beautiful and talented and oh, even when she sings songs I don't have a particular liking for, she still sends shivers down my spine because of how ridiculously talented she is. I love her. And she is also the best. She came on and sang "The Light and the Sea" and it ended a bit awkwardly and then she looked at her audience as if noticing them for the first time and said, "Whoa, did I forget a verse?" Her backing musicians nodded sadly. I love her.

Also this week: my best friend in the world moved away for two years. Some of you I think may have a minor inkling who she might be. She's in the process of becoming; she's going away to be glorious. I will miss her so.

And now here we are firmly in autumn, I am sort of resting and sort-of having grim-spectre-of-the-future to the point where I can't sleep at night (this, with months to go before definite unemployment! I am such a failboat) so let's talk about serious things.

Firstly, muskratjamboree, I am going. It was a total, day-of impulse decision - I know some people have literally been waiting years for registrations to open! - on the grounds that I can still pull out and god knows there would be a grateful person on the wait list if I did, but you know, I'm not going to pull out, I'm going. I love Boston, I'm apparently a grown-up now (?) and I'm going! Who am I gonna meet there? Tell me!

Secondly, Fringe is giving me feelings all over the shop. Peter! Olivia! Walter! Astrid! Etta! Even September, for goodness' sake. And you know, I think it really is because it's at heart a show about family, that which you're born with and that which you find. Which is why I love Deep Space Nine, too, and seems to be what I want in my speculative fiction TV. (I am oddly hesitant to class Fringe as SF - I sort of want to call it a kind of heavy-tech fantasy.) I am not quite caught up - am halfway through "In Absentia".

Also. "The Day We Died" universe, the sort of greyish white one? The one Peter lives through in the machine, anyway. Is it the only instance of a married straight couple on TV, who are happily married, who have different surnames, and it's totally not a thing? It's the only one I can think of.

And thirdly, there is no thirdly, it's time for lunch.

I went home for the weekend on Thursday night, actually spent my study leave studying, then gave up on that sometime on Friday afternoon. hathy_col's hen party was epic and fabulous; I laughed a lot, ate cream and scones, played 'Pin the Appendage On The Gentleman", dressed up as Susan Sto Helit, drank awful psychedelic cocktails in an eighties glam bar, met many marvellous people and saw many marvellous people again, danced and danced, and poured myself home down the M6 yesterday feeling rather like toothpaste does when you've squeezed it out of the tube.

My favourite part was being greeted the following morning by Colleen saying mournfully, "I killed Whitney Houston."

(As she killed Michael Jackson by going out dancing the night of graduation, bets are being taken on whom the wedding reception will kill. The good odds are on Status Quo.)

My second part was arriving at the flat on Saturday afternoon and being invited to explain to the other sixteen women in the room how I know Colleen to start with.

"I met her on the internet," I said. "In 2001."

And now I'm the bridesmaid at her wedding. What a wonderful world.

The slightly alarming coda was being asked by one of the other trainees today, apropos of nothing, "How did you get the white stuff in your hair?"

It is charming, I think, that my colleagues find my Secret Other Life quirky and endearing. Even when pictures of me holding plastic weapons appear on Facebook.

In other news there is no other news. I have two weeks and four days left in agriculture; I really, really love the Gaslight Anthem; Shim and I are watching a lot of Scrubs and apparently I have many feelings about Dr. Cox and Jordan; oh, and I haven't seen this week's Fringe yet! Too much glitter, too much dancing. I'm working on it as we speak.

Last night I was driving very gingerly down the A14 in the thick fog, with nothing in front or in my mirrors but grey and black, thinking, the only way out of this is through. Two weeks, four days. So much glitter, so much dancing.

Twenty-four hours, four cups of coffee, four hours of sleep, 7200 words and umpteen twitter status updates later, I finished my legislation take-home. Thank you, everyone who said nice things to me during the long, long night. And I am very glad I never have to do that again. I am still somewhat wrung out another day on - I do think, seriously, that a take-home is the worst of both worlds: with a three-hour exam you build up to it, you ride over it on a crest of adrenaline and suddenly it's over and you can sleep. With a paper you can take your time to know what you're doing. Instead you get the faintly panicky ill-feeling for a whole day, while your brain dribbles uninspiringly out of your ears and you find yourself writing twelve hundred words on "Is Congress hopelessly dysfunctional?" while the world tips around your head.

After it was over I stretched like a cat and prowled about my apartment for a bit, then rolled over and fell asleep fully dressed on the top of the covers, and then the Siren took me out for ice-cream and gossip and after that petra and thingswithwings appeared and were kind to me and my softening brain and took me for dinner. We had tapas al fresco with a surprisingly nice pinot grigio, and it was one of those perfect spring evenings laced with the perfect mixture of tired, happy and tipsy. We sat there through the sunset and talked about fandom and laughed a lot, and it was just delightful. At some point we got to talking about kitchen utensil AUs and Sad Fics What We Have Known and I remember telling T'wings she was the second person yesterday to talk to me about Draco/Neville, which was kind of delightful.

I dunno, I've been blessed in life by having a lot of fannish people to interact with in my daily life - because, y'know, sometimes you need that - but I don't always have the pleasure of talking about my writing woes to other people who write. At some point last night I was explaining tipsily that I am trying to write this story, right, and it was going to be short, right, and it was going to be a sweet little OT3 story, that was all, and suddenly I started thinking Things and now it's a story about ownership and feudalism and what. (T'wings says I am the second person she knew to have a problem with a silly little story turning into one about conceptions of ownership. I am delight.)

edited to add: has anyone, yet, invented an app or tool that will take a chunk of prose and change its tense from present to past or vice versa? I hate it when I realise that's what a story needs.

Speaking of delight, I think I need a nap. it's a beautiful sunny morning in Ithaca and in an hour I have to help the Siren carry all her minor kitchen appliances through Collegetown to the law school. I am sure this will happen entirely in a sensible fashion and there will be no laughing at or with.

Oh, and! For Remix, I wrote Distillation (the Anticlockwise Remix) (HP, Sirius/Remus, Peter), a remix of Connection Concotion by ineffabilitea, and while it is not the best thing I have ever written by a long shot, it is not the worst.

Naptime! Then appliances and paper-writing. I love the spring.

Precisely three weeks from now I will be half-asleep above the mid-Atlantic. So close, so far. In the meantime I am subsisting entirely off peanut butter, whisky, gummy vitamins and battered Galaxy bars, and spending my time either working, failing to sleep, reading decade-old SG-1 fic or wailing on Shim down the phone. I have done approximately a quarter of my outlining and a quarter of my paper writing (my professor writes: "Nice start - why don't you write about due process?", to which my response has not so far been "DO I LOOK LIKE SOMEONE WHO KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT CON LAW DO I" only through a magnificent quantity of self-control.

On Thursday morning I got up at twelve, stared at the ceiling, went back to sleep. Then hit said ceiling at a hundred miles per hour half an hour later, hit the shower, found clothes, managed to have earrings in and boots on, even, by the time the South African Siren wandered in, looked around and said, "...you just got up, didn't you."

We ran out to the car, which was stuffed with people. "I drove past them all at the bus stop waiting for buses that wouldn't come," the Siren explained, and the bleakness of the sky seemed particularly telling. "It's a day to be kind, I think."

I agreed, squished myself in, and was a model of togetherness and poise, until we got to where we going, and I jumped up and down and shouted, "Shit, I forgot my TICKET!" just in time to be introduced to the Siren's mother, who is looking more regretful by the moment at leaving a southern hemisphere summer. ("I'm so glad she's making friends," she told me gently, a little later, while I was desperately trying to give off the impression of being put-together young professional rather than half-asleep work-crazed caffiene-deprived woman.) The Siren, who is all kindness, really, clapped me on the back, refused to be intimidated by my sheer grey-weather incompetence, ran me home to get my ticket and brought me back again.

Explaining Thanksgiving to foreigners is difficult, as my adviser swiftly seems to have discovered ("We thought the Native Americans suffered," said YJ, an earnest chap of Chinese descent over dinner, and he gave up) but nevertheless, the law school took pity on us all and said they would pay for us to have lunch with the graduate-and-international-students' association. Lunch was, actually, surprisingly nice. Tobermory and Baby E had kept some room for us, and we went to get the food. It was informal - you had to serve yourself and eat off melamime tables - but the food was extortionate in quantity, and the sweet potato was sweet and the turkey wasn't dry and there was good coffee. The desserts were lacklustre, but you can't have everything in life.

Halfway through lunch Tobermory stood up and said, "I'd like to say, I'm thankful for all my friends. Except Iona" - to laughter and applause and people making affectionate faces at me.

I waved a regal hand and ate more pie. A lot has changed in the last fifteen weeks of my life, but it certainly hasn't all been bad.

Afterwards the Siren dropped me off home, and I should add my apartment is a biohazard right now - it's full of discarded articles, sweet wrappers, unwashed dishes and laundry, and to add final insult I had a wee incident with a hole-punch and everything's covered in chads, so help me God - but it was looking suprisingly cosy against the backdrop of the bleakest day I've lived through recently. One oddity of the last week or so has been strange, sporadic power cuts: five- or ten-minute intervals heralded by nothing but a sub-audible whine. Because I spent a good deal of my formative years in Delhi, I have an instinct for a loss of power, even in daylight; it's like the world around you has taken a breath and not let it out, an unspoken question hanging on the suddenly charged air - and then you look up and there are no figures displaying on the microwave or whatever, but just for that second, you know, without being told. That's what Thanksgiving daytime was like, on a bigger scale - bleakly grey and freezing cold of course, a cold I associate with bad things coming, and that loss-of-power desertion; no one on the streets, something missing at the heart of things. It's a lonely place, sometimes, this.

So I got home to my tip of an apartment, and turned on all the lights, and all at once it was warm, and welcoming, and nice, despite the bleak feeling outside. I curled up on the couch and got an hour or two of work done, drinking tea sent in the post, feeling rather okay about things. And once I'd done that, I called a cab and went out again.

See, I had kind of had my doubts whether this was a good idea - whether having more than one Thanksgiving meal in a day was going to get a bit Vicar of Dibley - but then I thought, you know, what the hell, I will love seeing thingwithwings and eruthros and livrelibre, and they will totally not mind if I don't do their delicious spread the justice it deserves.

That.... was not an issue. Oh, food. More turkey, sweet potato, squash, delicious salad with walnuts in it, a kind of bombastic pinot noir and my subsequent re-realisation that I can eat more than anyone else I know, especially when I am living off a diet of peanut butter and whisky. We got tipsy, talked politics - somewhat depressingly; though we rounded it off with a solid conclusion that clearly the world would be better if we became pirates and went around dispensing loot and social justice - and watched "Dalek", the first new Who episode which features Daleks. (obv.) livrelibre is in the enviable position of just starting to watch Doctor Who and is being shown it in increments. (I cannot wait to show her "Blink".)

"Dalek", actually, holds up to the rewatch. I hadn't seen it since hathy_col and I were at a con in Milton Keynes back on the weekend it first aired (I remember now, we'd been wandering around all day with little badges marked "Dalek Virgin", and the second word handily came off for the second day of the con.) I was watching it, and there's a marvellous woman in it who is Van Staten's assistant, and gets him dumped by the roadside in the end, and I was watching it thinking "...is that? Yes, it is Osiris from SG-1!"

Of course, reading back my own review of the episode from 2005, I apparently had this exact same revelation in almost the same words when watching it with Colleen. I am so smart. So I wandered home, fell asleep on my couch - and managed to move myself to my bed during the night, which is, sincerely, an achievement - and have made it through the next couple of days without what one might call major crazy. Three weeks, three weeks.