broadcast me a joyful noise

Tonight was a glorious edifice to introverts and fanpeople and our idea of an awesome Saturday night, because ryokophoenix and I found REAL NEAPOLITAN PIZZA in Surry Hills and ate it the proper Neapolitan way, and felt both nostalgic and mildly superior to everyone else in the restaurant (as we do), and then we wandered down Oxford Street and were home by 7:40pm which is, uh, when most people START their Saturday nights.

And then I got a lot of writing done. And waved my arms at apiphile about it.

Highlights from said arm-waving:

- By the way, do you know what I want. To exist. Somehow. ARTHUR/BILLY PRIOR.
- YES YES YES EMOTIONAL CLIMAXES ARE MINE. TAKE THAT, ARTHUR, YOU DIFFICULT PRICK.
- This was not meant to be a chaste romance. Arthur is just a FUCKING VICTORIAN MAIDEN.

Del: I feel somehow indebted to you for the phrase "techno-Hogwarts".
Me: IT HAS MOVING STAIRCASES OKAY. And -- lots of video screens.

Arthur and I are...resolving our differences. The deal is: he maintains some semblance of emotional consistency, and I don't raise the rating of the fic above PG-13. It's going swimmingly so far.

"Another party? You just had one!"

Arthur's look managed to communicate that Merlin was an ignorant and uncultured beetle, whilst simultaneously being attractive. Merlin gritted his teeth and hated the both of them; himself for having appalling taste, and Arthur for being -- Arthur.

"That was a Christmas party, Merlin," he said, insultingly slow. "This is entirely different."

What's that? Am I finally getting some work done on my WIPs?

YES I AM.

If I wasn't working on the Merlin heist fic then I'd probably have to kill myself out of sheer shame, but I'm also surprisingly close to finishing the sequel to my old Ouran cohabitation fic. So you can have some of that one as well:

He returns to his own reading and politely ignores the fact that Haruhi stares at the same page for almost three minutes, her eyes focused nowhere in particular and flickering tense with every flash of lightning. Finally she closes her book again with a sigh and scoots herself closer, her head dropping onto Kyouya's shoulder.

She's silent until his arm is around her and she is curled against him, her warm bare legs lying across his. And then she says, soft and assured, "We'll get him back."

They've always called each other out when it comes to emotional manipulation, that's the way they work, so Kyouya could easily tell her that she didn't have to lull him into a sense of protectiveness before he would accept her comfort. But it would be a lie.

Whatever the excuse, I feel the overwhelming need to make a PSA post. Because my current eyai story, entitled three bags full, JUST PASSED 10,000 WORDS.

what the hell what the hell

I used to be able to write short things. This is all Groundhog Gay's fault.

1) My iMac is in Canberra and is being couriered up to Sydney. SO CLOSE. SOOO CLOSE. Though when it arrives I need to get my hands on a USB-USB cable and then start the long, arduous process of transferring all my shit over.

2) I, um, have a teensy little academic crush on one of the neurologists at hospital. He made us a DVD of himself demonstrating the neurological examination on an intern, and he looks kind of awkward in it and makes lots of jokes and he has the nicest Welsh accent ever. AND HE'S A NEUROLOGIST. HELLO SPECIALTY OF MY HEART IF IT WEREN'T FOR THE SODDING FRACP REQUIREMENT.

3) The last 30 seconds of this song are like a really good orgasm. Turned into music. GOODNESS ME, DISNEY, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING.

4) Still writing! Eyai AND the Merlin AU! ( I'm going to keep throwing snippets at you, it'll keep me motivated. )

Of course the most expedient method would be for me to work on ONE of them until it's finished, but I find myself completely incapable of picking one over the other.

I have finally identified the two major obstacles standing between me and the Merlin fic I'm currently trying to write:

1) It needs -- not a PLOT, per se, I know the basic outline, but plot details. Technicalities and twists. And it's not the kind of story where the plot can flow organically if you know the characters back-to-front, even though that will be useful. Bringing us to the fact that:

2) It's essentially an ensemble piece, even though I'm only using one POV character, and I don't know this fic's versions of the characters well enough yet. And even though I think character-simming is going to be the best way to fix this, I don't need them to just talk to me, I really need them to talk to each other, and that means simming five-sometimes-six people at once. Which, you know, I only sim VERY OCCASIONALLY as it is, and this is going to take up a lot of brainspace.

But I think it'll be worth it, if I can get everything to work.

Yeah, I'm being deliberately vague; I harbour fond hope of keeping this one a surprise, so Claira & Inept are my Secret-Keepers and the rest of you will just have to put up with a lot of ambiguously worded hair-pulling.

~

Entirely unrelated to the above, does anyone know what the hiphoppy song that samples Dragostea Din Tei currently floating around the radiowaves is? And, um, where I could acquire a copy?

Problem solved!

I remember doing this earlier in the year, and I found it very cathartic. This post is for anyone in the middle of writing a fic (or many fics!) and it's so we have a chance both to share illustrative snippets and to bitch about how recalcitrant out fics are being.

(Also, PSA: I'm not doing Yuletide this year because I finish exams on November 28th and then I have exactly one week in which to frantically go shopping for Europe and then I leave on December 7th! So...no.)

( My four most pressing/promising WIPs are under the cut )

Fantastic weekend, yes, but the other shoe has dropped. Onto my head. Where it is currently trying to strangle me with its shoelaces. I have so much work to do. If I actually think about the amount of work I have to get done in the next three days I will collapse in a shivering wreck. And all I want to do is work on my oh_shit_santa fic (um, oh shit, due in a week? PLOT, I NEED PLOT) or my Narnia fic, which I spent most of last night working on because I finally got hold of The Call.

Do you want your uncle's blood? Nikabrik asked. Do you want your throne?

But it's Peter who gives you the both of them, in the end, simply by turning his sword and offering you the hilt with the golden lion atop it. Once on a battlefield and once in farewell, and both times you hold his gaze in gratitude and in shared awareness of the crowd below. Everything is a symbol. You're learning.

I adore writing Caspian <333

But first: I still haven't gotten my energy back from the weekend, and considering I have three separate clinical assessment tasks to do tomorrow and have to wake up at 6am...I think it's time to nap.

Weirdly, despite the fact that I got a good result on the RFA, I feel more reassured about my progress in the course by the fact that I totally aced today's mock-OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) on vital signs and infection control. It's one thing to have a piece of paper tell you that you're good at memorising facts, it's another to walk into a room, pull out your stethoscope, and assess someone for postural hypotension with complete confidence that you know your shit.

Right now I have reading and research to do, but consider this a statement of intent:

Tony opened his mouth and realised that there was just no good way to tell your best friend that your semi-sentient housekeeping software and your personal assistant were bullying you with warm blankets and soup. Besides, Jarvis would hear it all anyway, and then be politely sarcastic at him about it for days.

"Well," he stalled. "I mean -- oh, that's the CIA on the other line, talk to you later buddy alright?"

He slammed the phone shut and spent some time staring at it, half expecting it to leap out of his hand and beat him around the head for being such a colossal dumbass. After a couple of minutes, he turned it off.

"Done," she says finally. "That's all I can do for now."

Sasuke opens his eyes and he's smiling, but not at them. "Done." It doesn't sound like an echo. It sounds like a prayer. There's blood all over his face.

"You fucking asshole," Naruto says.

~

I think...my writing ability may have returned?

Nobody make any loud noises or sudden movements. This is a fragile state of affairs.

*taps at the keyboard very, very gingerly*

~

ETA: Holy shit, I think I have managed to get SUNBURNT on my EYELIDS. Very attractive.

Ji wanted a list of things currently making me happy.

1) This fic, omg, it is everything I ever wanted out of Naruto fandom, even if it took me a long time to find. It's got fairy tales and Sasuke talking to snakes and basically I read it three times in a row when I first came across it, that is how utterly charming I found it.

2) Debussy understood that a work of art, or an effort to create beauty, was always regarded by some people as a personal attack.

3) The weekeeeeeeeeeend.

4) I'm reading a dry but interesting history of psychiatry at the moment, and today in a half-hour break between lectures I wandered down to the Nicholson Museum just off the main quad and looked at the 'Freud's Collection' exhibit, which included lots of Egyptian artifacts from his office, and videos introduced by his daughter Anna, and the actual throw rug from his actual couch, which was many many kinds of cool.

5) The French Blend coffee that I know is just sitting in the door of the fridge waiting for me to put it in my baby insulated plunger.

6) The fact that profound_poppy and I tried out the new-ish Mexican-and-crepes (??) place at the union building, and we now know that it does good crepes. Mmmmmmcrepes.

7) Temari turns her face upwards to catch even the strongest sun. Temari's hair is a constant fair mess and when she dances from rock to rock, her fan whips a roaring spinning violence out of the air and she is beautiful. She is the sand and she is strange and she is far more trouble than Shikamaru ever expected to find himself sleeping with.

(Ummm, so yet another fic is dragging me along in its terrible claws, but this one has all three of my favourite characters in it AND ALSO a whole section about my not-very-secret Naruto OTP, plz see above, so...yay?)

Wow, this is like way back when I just talked about BSG non-stop and everyone on my flist got very sick of me. SORRY GUYS. ( It's a civic duty thing )