Maru's Mun Journal

I wrote a Milliways fic about Hannibal playing chess with Dracula and remembering his first visist to Paris that is pertinent to all the things, among them the de-aging plot that started in Milliways tonight.

It contains headcanon which is just an open invitation to be Jossed, but never mind...

Spontaneously, an idea fell into my brain, and I picked it up and wrote it:


Ignominiously Incognito Among Ignorants

X-Men, post X-3, past Erik/Charles

After losing both his powers and Charles, Erik Lehnsherr is condemned to go on living as a nobody.

And with this, my Avengers fanfic of the Loki/Tony flavour is done and dusted.

Special thanks again to paceisthetrick for the beta reading!

At long last, I've found something to crack the point where I was stuck with my Avengers fanfic, 'Bag Of Cats'.

I inserted just a dash of smut at the place where I was stuck, faded to black on it, faded in again where I needed people for the actual plot to continue, and took it from there.

The rest came out in one big chunk, having sat all ready in my mind for months.

It's finished, the beta (our lovely friend paceisthetrick, to whom I am very grateful for her decommafication of my writing and her very useful observations otherwise!) is added to the doc, all is done and waiting for the dusting.

Then, I can post the chapter and the coda, and turn my mind to new creative ventures...

There was a documentary just now about the popular German 19th century writer Karl May, who stands out for having colourfully and very successfully written about things and places he only knew from books, more or less pretending that all those invented adventures had been his own when during that time he'd actually been in Saxonian jail for having been a con man -- some of the things he did actually sound rather like something Moist von Lipwig might have done.

There are issues of the dreaded cultural appropriation things around what he wrote, and also strong slashy undertones, but that's not at issue.

What astonished me was the way the documentary makers went around in the man's library that is still in the house he built from the truckloads of money he made with his novels, pulled out books and went 'Oooh! It is all in here! He read books about it and then used what he learned from them! Amazing! Look, here are his notes in the margin!"

Erm.

I have got news for you. That's what we all do when we write about places where we can't go, or times we can't unfortunately not travel back to. 17th century sailing ships, both of the naval and the piratical kind? Scythians wandering with their wagons? 6th century Rome in its death throes? St. Petersburg in 1916? Mount Athos, especially if you're female?

It's called research, dudes, and combining research with imagination is what allows us to tell captivating tales that feel real and gritty, even if they're not, and we've made it all up.

Okay, we don't claim it was us who did all that. If we do, nobody usually believes us, and our main charrie will be branded a Mary Sue. Actually, to be quite blunt, May's first person narrators 'Old Shatterhand' and 'Kara ben Nemsi' are the biggest literary Marty Stus ever written.

But still, my mind boggles at the thought that these documentary film makers thought that 'research + imagination = storytelling' was anything to be very astonished about, in turn.



In other news, I was just defrauded out of an entire hour! This will force me to reset ALL THE CLOCKS in the house and make me intrinsically late for days on end. And I need to catch a train on Thursday. Waugh, world, why can't we stop doing this? It has been proven it's useless.

As of today, I am officially a published author of short fiction in an anthology. Which is up on Amazon.com and printed on dead trees, so it counts.

I officially crossed over.

Thanks to wiebke for kicking that almost-dead project back to life!

With the brilliant new Star Trek movie, fanfic writers and readers are rediscovering K/S, the grandmother of all slash.

So, as a service to those only now getting into this, I offer you my old fics in that fandom:

The Demon of Beta 55
First-time fic set during the Original Series and trying to stick as closely to its look-and-feel as possible, including the cheesy special effects, and resetting all to 'start' for the next episode. I wrote this in 1993 before I had ever read and actual K/S fics that were mostly in hectographed zines at the time; I had only heard of the concept, and re-watched all the eps recently. This is my take, at the time, of what it would be like.

Mastery of the Unavoidable
'Established relationship' fic steeped in fandom and set  between movies 1 and 2. Picks up some of the thoughts I had about slash on the one hand as I had read it by then, and the RL gay people I knew at the time (1994) and still know, largley thanks to... -- well, read the story!

I was just testing the new A9 search engine(Google + Amazon + IMDB, nicely done) by asking the obvious, and when I aked for "Dmitri Pavlovich" the first thing it brough up was - my Wikipedia article, as stolen by some commercial free encyclopedia which simply uses Wikipedia and adds ads. And a bit further down, again. And then the actual Wikipedia link.

What the web has to say about Dmitri now is what I found out!! Schoolkids and students the world over that have to mention him in the course of their studies will go with what I had to say about him. It doesn't say it was me who said so, such is the nature of Open Source (unless you have the Wikipedia version, of course, which has version histories for all articles), but still, I am tickled deep magenta! I am the one now who got to tell the world who Dmitri was.

Woah!

I had this idea about four weeks ago and have been working on it on and off ever since, finished it on the train going hubwards north, then schiarire betaed it for me (Thanks ever so much!!!), and now I'll post it.

I hope you like it. It's the night after Locke went home, and it's about everybody who was around at that time (at least the active characters).

Only members of the discworld_rpg will probably be able to make sense out of this; everybody is quite welcome to read it as well, of course. If you like what I gave your character(s), of course it's yours to keep...

( Night )

...and brings ruins to life.

With the right sort of story to go with it, even a derelict old building is newsworthy:
http://www.dotcomtod.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=11730&mode=flat&order=0&thold=0

(Sorry, link is in German; only wiebke, floppy_hat and japanologist can understand this properly from among you. Still, I'm proud of the accomplishment.)