tea berry-blue

A teaser for the OTHER Avengers fic I've been working on for the past four or five months is up here.

(lyrics by _samalander)

( Poem Below the Cut )

Soooo, every year, my dad buys me an angel statuette, and we open them a few days before Christmas. My brother gets a bear statuette at the same time. The statuettes are supposed to be reminiscent of a significant event from that year. So, like, previous to this year, I have a graduation angel from the year I graduated college, a cat angel from the year I got my first cat, a bee angel from the year I started keeping bees, etc etc etc.

You get the picture.

( cut for photos )

Okay, so this is the true story of today. There's a lovely reader over on Ao3 who wrote us a fanfic based on a letter Steve writes Tony 1796 Broadway. The letter is about a box of chocolates Steve remembers from his childhood. It's called "Simple and Perfect" by Filigree, and it's about Tony tracking down the same chocolates based on Steve's description of the box. Anyway, in the story, the chocolates are from a company called Li-Lac, and the box is gold and purple striped. Then today happened.

( totally cut for length )

OH ALSO. Who is using tumblr these days? I've been using it more lately. I'm teaberryblue over there.

Neglecting LJ!!!!

Still alive, still ficcing. Still think rainy_day is the pretty much greatest writing partner ever, kind of in love with my commenters, have gotten into the most amazing email conversation with greenjudy, who has amazing smart things to say about writing and makes me sound so much smarter than I am.

If you like the Avengers at all, go read:

1796 Broadway
Dear Captain America

Spending most of my social time hanging out with justatailor and nervousystem.

Cut all my hair off. It's pretty excellent. I did this thing where I shaved my head, drunk, at 12:30 in the morning, alone, without a mirror, and it is oddly one of the best haircuts ever.

Still playing ukulele, getting better at it, music is beautiful, might actually play a set in January. If I do, I'll let you know.

This is a thing that happened:



This is the dream I had last night:

I dreamed I was reading a book about three young wizards at a magic school. Very unlike Harry Potter: it was an ordinary American high school, and every year, the kids organized a Ditch Day that coincided with a specific celestial event. This year, the lunar what's its thing was on Valentine's day. Now, the girl of his trio had a crush on one of the boys. It wasn't a love triangle-- I think the third of the trio was gay and had a boyfriend who was not part of this trio. So she sort of did that teenaged thing of telling the boys "I don't have anything to do for Ditch Day." The object of her affection said he'd come up with a plan for something to do. Meanwhile, her other group of friends were organizing a huge school wide magical prank and asked her to take part, but she turned them down as she wanted to spend time with this boy. That morning, the boy in question sends the other two an email: "I've planned a bike tour of local magical landmarks! Here's the map; I'm starting now! Hope you enjoy it!"

Clearly not understanding that she actually wanted to spend time with him.

Incensed, she gets on her bike and rides off the map, cutting him off on his route. She blows up at him and says something to the effect of "if I wanted to spend my Valentine's Day alone, I would have--"

When the prank is set off and they are rained on by a deluge of tiny rubber ducks.

I did my usual thing of making all the Thanksgiving food ever. That'll happen tomorrow.

Love everybody!

Oh, yeah, right, and hi, people. I did this thing where I wrote a love song from Steve Rogers to Tony Stark. Because that is my life now. This is full of science nerd stuff.



Lyrics on Ao3

Dear Captain America actually has some actual plot. I'm discovering interesting things I hadn't ever thought about in re: writing before. Like that just because you can encrypt passages to make them as realistically difficult to decrypt as something a 12-year-old mathematical supergenius might doesn't mean you SHOULD when you have an audience. Especially an impatient audience. But the flipside of that is that I am pretty sure I can do a bangup encryption job if I ever actually need to. I'm also learning some of the limitations for writing plot-heavy one-sided epistolary fiction (it's easy to write suspense and cliffhangers, but if you want your readers to actually know what is going on, you'll eventually have to write some kind of exposition-heavy bit.)

rainy_day and I also started another fic, which I'm pleased by, because Dear Captain America is something that requires a lot of research and thinking even when it's not mired in heavy plot, and this is light and fun and letting me draw cartoons occasionally. Plus, it takes place a block from my office, so I can just refer to locations in a neighborhood I know very well. 1796 Broadway. This is MORE Avengers epistolary fiction, but rainy_day is writing for Tony Stark, and I'm writing for Steve Rogers.

They're both getting a really good reception, or it seems like it at least, since this isn't something I've really done before. 1796 Broadway (and yes, that's a not to 84 Charing Cross Road) seems to be getting an even better reception than DCA is getting, which is pretty neat.

So, that's a thing that is fun. rainy_day is awesome.

I also spent the weekend with justatailor in Connecticut at my parents'. We went to the Big E and ate all the things, and then pretty much vegged out on Sunday and ate more of the things. I made maple walnut gelato. It was a good, fun weekend and I was really happy that justatailor got to see the barn!

Gonna go to whiskey tonight, and then tomorrow we get the first episode of Agents of SHIELD, and I am probably going to go watch it on a big screen! So excitement.

<3 <3 <3

Still writing the Massive Avengers Fanfiction of Doom.

It's kind of wild, because I've never done anything like this before, it's up to almost 30k words, and it just keeps writing itself. Details I planted earlier in the story are coming back to haunt the characters as if I planned it, and I totally didn't. I know what happens for the next couple years' worth of letters, at least. It's grown into a fanfic not just about Tony Stark, but also about Polybius (which, if you don't know about it, is one of the greatest hoaxes of all time), and the two somehow mesh perfectly. Alcoholism and fuel cell technology have crossover threads that work perfectly in ways that I couldn't have planned out better if I'd tried.

I don't write like this, usually. This feels a lot more like roleplay than like writing, which is perhaps why I'm being so prolific with it. Usually, I have to plan everything painstakingly, and it still doesn't make a load of sense. This just works, so neatly, and I don't know how that happened. I keep wanting to write so I can find out what happens next.

rainy_day and I are planning on doing a series of letters together, and I'm super excited about that.

Another thing that's happened: I know I've told many of you about my incredibly atypical dreamlife. I have always had dreams that come together like fully-formed narrative stories, that I am rarely a participant in. Over the last year or so, I really haven't had many of those dreams. I've had very normal, mundane, often nonsensical dreams that I think are the kind of dreams most people usually have.

Monday night, I had a dream that was like my old dreams. It took place in a Medievalish fantasy setting, and opened with a lady and her two servants in a coach, returning to her birthplace. She was in disguise, because her own family had been ousted and their lands taken over by a new lord.

The lord welcomed her as a guest, not aware that she was the heir to the family he'd overthrown, and his favorite dog immediately took to her with a lot of affection. The one person who recognized her was his personal guard, who had been her childhood friend. He confronted her in secret and asked why she'd returned, and she told him that it was to find some scrolls that contained part of a magic spell she needed to complete her training as a sorcerer.

The lord, meanwhile, tells her that she's welcome at his house, and may sleep in any bed but the one set aside for the king's visits. He says that there is only one member of his household who has the privilege of sleeping in that bed.

She sneaks into the libraries to search for the scroll she needs, and thinks she's been caught, but her guard friend reveals himself and holds out the scroll she's been looking for-- and confesses that he's been in love with her since childhood. She's not sure what to do with that information. He shrugs it off, and tells her to think about it, and that if his affections are returned, she can find him that night, guarding the most important member of the house.

She goes to dinner with the lord, who feeds his favorite dog under the table throughout the meal. While they are talking, thinks fondly on her memories of the guard. She's not entirely sure what she wants from him, but she decides to find him anyway. When he's not at the door to the lord's bedchamber, she goes on a hunt, until she realizes that the most important member of the house must be the same person permitted to sleep in the room reserved for the king. So, she seeks out that room. It's unguarded, from the outside. She pushes the door open and finds the guard dozing on the floor...and the lord's favorite dog in the bed.

And that is when I woke up! Seriously. On that punchline!