broadcast me a joyful noise

Dear new Google Reader layout: GO DIE IN A FIRE, Jesus Christ, I am operating on a very small EeePC here and I desperately need the ability to minimise the bloody sidebar so that I can VIEW WEBCOMICS without ENDLESS HORIZONTAL SCROLLBARS.

My lack of ability to produce words, any words, is reaching crisis point. I have had both the secret X-Men project and a crossover ficlet I'm writing for neenie open in Word for like a WEEK, and every night I look at the documents and feel like sweating blood and my brain just goes 'pffffblbt' and insists that I watch Top Gear instead. I HATE IT. But I've never been any good at forcing myself to write through that kind of mental fog without actively despising the process, and I am trying to steer myself clear of hobbies that I actively despise, you know?

My latest trick has been rereading all eyai ever (wait, no, if you're unfamiliar: read Emma's awesome pimp post instead) in an attempt to psych myself up for the next story, which Ji and I are probably going to cowrite somehow. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FANTASTIC GUYS, THERE WILL BE COPS AND MURDER AND I AM FINALLY BRINGING ANNA BACK INTO NARRATIVE PLAY.

(Agatha Verey, Superspy, is still going to happen, but it would first require me to plot out the entire counter-revolution ie. the final arc of the whole damn thing. And that would suck out ALL MY BRAINPOWER.

Also on the cards at some point: the shameless importation of Kenneth and Vanessa from the Wasteland RP. That's right, the inevitable fourth estate story. Nobody is surprised.)

If you have any eyai-related enthusiasm or capslock or words of encouragement, drop them here, I will attempt to ~absorb~ them and use them to alchemise my creativity into fucking existing again.

Uh in other news the new Florence & the Machine album is so great I am having trouble processing it, call back in a few days when my ears are not weeping rainbows of heady joy.

So a while ago during an eyai drabblefest I was all, oh yeah, I'd like to do a drabble or two about how Dominic and Julian's relationship began, because it happened mostly in the whopping great chronological gaps of Three Bags Full.

And...here's how that turned out.

Anyone who tries to say something along the lines of 'but Fahye, 7500 words is not a drabble' really doesn't know my writing habits AT ALL.

(Title from the Hunters & Collectors song 'When The River Runs Dry' which is a sneakily eyai-perfect song, to me.)

~

( Humans, after all, don't come with their own psychophysical lexicon, and they've had to work it all out for themselves, piece by piece, culminating in people like Dom who see the human mind as an exquisite circuitboard. )

title: Spacetime Acceleration Action-at-a-Distance Momentum III: Quantum Physics Strikes Back
by: Ji
for: Sares
location: Los Angeles, CA, the Future

( It was the Terrans. They poisoned me with science. )

homily

morning in the principality sees
the slow ticktock of those whose rhythms fall
by chemicals not clockwork,
minds pushing towards their own peak and
chasing Pipe dreams in the grey morning air.
dreams of our sort only:
the waking images pieced together
and projected onto nothing.
no act of sabotage, no guns
no speech no written law will force
the true dead dreaming into our heads.
the morning is a symbol. the morning --
is an arbitrary birth
for those who wake from nothing, or never.
our cogwheel hypnagogia lie parallel
to their gradual climb upwards into noonday smarts.

no place now for every god
who daily sang the sun into the sky,
and fewer candles every week
are lit by feebler hands than mine.
the larger picture (projected -- where?) suggests that this
was never my purpose; it was always yours.
the fires set alight in minds and
what we might call hearts
are of your devising, you who named me
something new
so all of me became the voice
telling gossamer tales of equity
to loop around their necks;
to draw them tight and willing
into the blazing dawn that they found in your face.

morning in the new world of ideas means
ownership of nobody by nobody,
your dream ambition called into being
by many voices all at once;
mine being the careful sound of history,
the record of your own desire.
but we are built on factory lines
and in this image was I made,
created unequal and infused with the spirit
of a searching need,
a fullness of existence that requires
an ownership of shining sorts;
never mine and always yours.

though given a biology to call my own
(I project, the image, the waking construction)
I might be in need of an afterlife;
might hold myself beloved of a God,
a faith full manifest and blind
and breathing through the work of my two hands.
my body would possess
all glorious redundancies
and in my dumbfound dreams the dust
would smother all our gears,
leaving only what remains when the clocks are stopped,
the faint grey mourning of the souls
we do not possess.

Ji pointed out that it would make more sense for me to host this because my journal is busier and less locked! I make no promises that I willl actually write anything* because the end of Three Bags Full was meant to signify a return to the studying and sewing I was SUPPOSED to be doing all week.

*who are we kidding really

DRABBLES. GO. London or any other place ahem ahem Emma & Sares (nobody gets Australia, though -- that one's mine). Feel free to leave requests, fulfil requests, or just post drabbles about any characters you damn well please.

Okay, look, it's ALMOST DONE, but I have been making noise about this for so long that I figure I may as well post the first half now. Besides, the bloody thing's going to be epically long, I don't want to overwhelm you all :D

This story is a one-day-early 21st birthday present for my favourite person in the universe. Enjoy, Cosmas.

Notes! Returning to this world now that it has been expanded in such breathtaking ways was almost intimidating, but this was the one story I knew I had to tell (and now I have a whole pile of them multiplying in my mind -- watch this space, I guess). It was meant to be very concept-driven but then it grew eight main characters and became character-driven instead, which is probably a very good thing! I hereby gift said eight characters to the drabble-writers of the future: they're fun to play with, I promise.

This one covers a lot more ground than Fortuna Fugit (seventeen years in over 13,000 words, in fact!), references pretty much every other story that exists in the eyaiverse, and (by necessities both practical and thematic) it holds a lot of secrets. I know many things about these people that haven't made it into the story.

I haven't provided illustrations even though I have very strong mental pictures of all of the characters; the only thing I will tell you unprompted is that Tee looks like Richard Hammond's jaded street urchin twin.

( Tee's earliest memory is of his back hitting the Filter, hard, his sister towering over him like a tall bird with ragged shadow-wings. )

But most importantly, the eyai no longer want an expiry date. There are now so many of them working on their own code and compatability, coding coders, coding creation and innovation. But even if they don't need to sleep or fuck or eat, even if they can tweak themselves into single-minded pursuit of their own perfection, Tee's still a genius in his own field. He can still think in strange shapes, weird curves, twisted inspiration; humans are still good for something. They might grow old and die, but their brains will never be unable to spontaneously support an original way of thinking. Humans are their own fucking operating system; endlessly updated.

So Blacksheep transposes coding for the old eyai who are clinging to their new existence, terrified by the word obselete. It's a new world order and they do not intend to become disordered. Tee doesn't tell them that every society stratifies, that some people are always going to be left in the dust; after all, they're trying, aren't they? Pulling themselves up the ladder using whatever means available? He can relate. Humans can't choose how they're created but they can choose what they make of themselves: far be it from Tee to deny any being the right to a little self-improvement.

~

LOOK. WORDS. FINALLY. THANK FUCK.

*goes to bed happy*

Written by schiarire, archiving here.

( Risk. )

Written by schiarire, archived here.

( ascending analogy )

After much consideration I have decided to post this here rather than at the ficblog, because it's a bit of a slapdash personal project, and the first original thing that I've written in so, so long. Many thanks to villainny for saying nice things about it and for convincing me that my aesthetic allergy to the letter 'e' had to be put aside in the name of unambiguous pronunciation.

This is a belated & combined birthday present for ariastar and nextian -- I apologise for the oddness of this one, my dears, but I think you'll enjoy it despite its flaws.

(NB - a director's commentary now exists, but it tramples all over the continuity and contains bucketloads of spoilers, so read the story first!)

( You will never hear this again )