InsaneJournal

Current mood:

annoyed

Goddammit, LJ! (And that WIP meme.)
So, now we have Strikethroughgate 2.0, which is gearing up to be even more annoying than it was the first time around. I am more annoyed, at least. This post here makes it pretty clear that LJ doesn't want fandom, they have no interest in hosting fannish content, and will make arbitrary and unpredictable decisions about what has artistic merit as they seen fit. U.S. obscenity laws allow them to do just that. And their new "report abuse" button frankly scares the hell out of me, not because it might affect me (chan is something I have no interest in), but because of the way it invites people to behave, turning each other in and reporting on each other as though we're living in a totalitarian regime. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but that's certainly how it feels.

At this point I have both a Greatest Journal and a Insane Journal. If I migrate anywhere, it will probably be to Insane Journal. I get a nicer vibe off of them than off GJ. And perhaps fandom is being paranoid, but I don't think so; I get the feeling that this is merely the tip of the iceberg and with LJ's nifty new "report abuse" button, a lot more people are going to get screwed. On the other hand, as many people have pointed out, this is likely to happen at any U.S.-based host eventually.

Still . . . leaving would be sad. I have non-fandom people on my flist that I would hate to lose touch with. I just can't put up with this crap anymore though, and LJ is relying on people's lazy and self-centered tendencies to keep them here. I hate to prove them right.

And now, that WIP meme, gacked from antennapedia and kivrin and a bunch of other people. It's funny, you know, I was just thinking the other day that I wanted a nice WIP meme. Sometimes fandom is telepathic.

When you see this, post a little weensy excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.

From the untitled floofy Harry/Luna post-war, pre-DH first time fic (the events of which are referenced in 21 Observations About His Relationship With Luna Lovegood, by Harry Potter):

“My eyes, my eyes,” Harry moaned, rubbing said eyes with one hand and trying to open a bottle of butterbeer with the other. He started in surprise as someone suddenly took the bottle out of his hand, and looked up.

“Oh,” he said. “Luna. Hi.”

She opened the bottle and handed it back. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?” she asked curiously. “The Three-Horned Snorkelback’s spit can be very harmful to the eyes.”

“Um.”

“They’re very sneaky, the Snorkelbacks, though the three-horned ones aren’t as stealthy as the four-horned ones, my father always said. But they like to live in old houses, so it’s possible –”

“No, no,” Harry said quickly. “My eyes are fine. It’s more my brain. Not,” he added, “in a literal sense. Just in the sense of having something I never wanted to see burned into the back of my skull.”

She twisted her head around. “I don’t see anything back there.”

“Um. I was being figurative. Again.”

“I see. Why are you sitting on the floor?”

“Seemed like the closest thing,” Harry said, frowning.

“Are you drunk?”

“No, just disturbed.”

From the untitled Remus-POV sequel to Five Full Moons with Nymphadora Tonks:

At home in their apartment, Tonks disappeared into the kitchen. Remus stood in the living room for a minute, looking around, and then went into the bedroom, where he pulled a shabby old suitcase out of the closet and started packing. Tonks came in when he was about half done, and watched him neatly fold a pair of trousers.

“You shouldn’t take that old thing,” she said. “There’s a brand new suitcase in the hall closet.”

He looked up. “That’s yours.”

“So? I’m not going anywhere.”

He looked down, and methodically folded a shirt. Sleeves in, careful creases, fold in half. “This suitcase has served me for years just fine.”

“Suit yourself.”

The books were next. He emptied the bookshelves quickly into a couple of boxes, which he then shrank and made weightless to fit in the last empty pocket of his suitcase. The living room looked strange without them. He hadn’t realized how much balance they’d given the room, until they were gone. It seemed tilted now. Off-kilter.

A couple of things from the bathroom, and then he was done. He’d been anticipating this for weeks now, if not months, and he’d been careful in the last couple of days not to spread out the way he would have usually. He’d wondered if Sirius had noticed, but he’d been so busy getting ready to go away to Hogwarts for the first time that Remus really needn’t have worried. All in all, it was a matter of minutes, really, to pull his things together, to separate his life from Tonks’s.

They stood in the living room next to the fireplace and looked at each other. “Write me,” Remus said. “And make sure I get his owls. They’ll come here.”

“Of course. We can take turns writing to him, or something. It’ll seem weird if he gets two replies for every owl.”

“Right.” He picked his suitcase up and picked up a handful of Floo powder, letting it stream through his fingers. “I love you,” he said, looking down at his hand.

There was a silence, and he thought she might not respond at all. He certainly wouldn’t have blamed her if she hadn’t. But at last she replied, very quietly, “I know you do.”

From the untitled Spike/Wood fic:

They go out together at night into parts of the city that Spike remembers from another century, another lifetime, but he hasn’t been in England since the ‘30s and most of what was once familiar got bombed into oblivion during the war. They drink together, sitting in a dim pub at a wooden, time-scarred table, and he discovers that her alcohol tolerance has definitely improved since last they did this. She sleeps in her own room that night, but she kisses him good-bye the next day, so all in all he ends up very confused. She’s going back to the Immortal though, not staying with him, and that much is pretty unmistakable.

Wood finds him while he’s still standing in the foyer, minutes after her cab has left. They look at each other for a few seconds, and then away.

“I don’t know why we bother,” Wood says at last.

Spike hasn’t the foggiest idea what he’s talking about; the only thing he can think of is that Wood is having some sort of strangely timed crisis about the point of fighting an evil that will never, ever be vanquished, since to do so would throw off the balance of the universe and probably end in a bloody apocalypse anyway. It’s stupid, that’s what it is, and it’s something Spike’s found himself thinking about more than he’d like in the last week. It’s enough to make him want to go back to being evil. He never had these sorts of doubts in those days. He supposes Angel probably had them too – it would explain why he always looked so constipated.

“Dunno,” Spike says, since Wood is looking at him like he actually expects an answer. He decides a pint of blood is in order and heads into the kitchen. “Didn’t think you white hats were supposed to wonder about those things. ‘Sides,” he adds over his shoulder, “you had your mum, didn’t you? Thought that was all the reason you needed.”

To his discomfort and dismay, Wood follows. “No. I mean . . . why do we bother? With them?”

Them. Slayers. Spike doesn’t answer while he retrieves the blood from the fridge and heats it up. Wood waits, and the silence is not a comfortable one. He takes it from the microwave, stirs it so it’s evenly heated – nothing’s worse than blood you think is warm that turns out cold – and finally looks over at Wood again. He takes a long sip, smacks his lips deliberately, and answers, “Well, I’d say for you, what I said about your mum still applies.”

Wood’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t deny it. “And you?”

Spike shrugs and starts to slouch out of the kitchen. “I’m love’s bitch,” he admits without glancing back. “Always have been, always will be. It’s my bad luck I don’t seem to get a lot of choice about it.”

From the Coupling-based Harry Potter fic significantowl and I batted back and forth for awhile last year:

“Is this how you’ve managed?” Harry asked after a drawn out moment of rather contemplative silence. “Imagining Hermione in bed with various women?”

“Well, I certainly don’t want to think about her shagging another bloke, now, do I?” Ron replied reasonably. “Anyway, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Or me, for that matter.”

“But how is imagining her having sex with women better than imagining her having sex with a man?”

Ron stared at him incredulously. “How is it not? I mean, first of all, it gets Malfoy out of the way, and secondly, I am strongly against blokes in my personal fantasies or in my . . . personal fantasy material.”

“Yeah, but she’s still having sex with someone who isn’t you.”

Ron waved this away. “Ah, well, I’m sort of past that, you know? I don’t really want to have sex with Hermione anymore. Not literally. That girl’s a bloody lot of work, and there were all these, these feelings. And she read books about it and used to get that voice sometimes, you know the one where she kind of imitates McGonagall?”

“Not during –” Harry said, aghast.

“Oh yeah. Sometimes I felt like McGonagall was in the room, watching, like when we had our Transfiguration practicals and she’d award points for style. It was pretty nerve-wracking.”

Harry stared at him for a moment, mouthing wordlessly. “You felt like McGonagall – never mind! I don’t want to know any more."

From the untitled Stephanie/Ranger/Morelli fic:

Looking back on everything, I decided to blame Mary Lou.

Mary Lou and I have been best friends since time out of mind, even though she’s got a husband and two kids and I have a hamster and a somewhat questionable relationship with a guy who first got me to play choo-choo when I was six and he was eight. But no matter how little you have in common, your best friend is the person you call when you think you might be pregnant, or need someone to take you shopping for just the right slutty shoes to wear to your ex-boyfriend’s wedding, or (apparently) when you discover at the age of thirty-two that you really, really, really like gay porn.

From the untitled Snape/Lupin post-war, pre-DH fic:

An hour later Snape watched the team of mediwizards file out of his room, his mouth clamped shut on a most creative diatribe against the medical establishment in general, St. Mungo’s in particular, and the undoubtedly deficient intelligence of the ancestors of the mediwizards themselves. Having been spared the tongue-lashing their incompetence so richly deserved, the general mood of the group was intrigued and cheerfully baffled. Snape’s mood, on the other hand, was somewhere on the outer rim of “livid” and getting worse; he had never before realized how much he relied on his razor-sharp tongue to relieve his temper.

“We won, by the way,” Lupin said, when the door had swung shut at last behind the mediwizards. “In case you’re interested.”

I figured as much, you mongrel, by the fact that you and I are both still alive. He had to settle for glaring, but Lupin seemed to catch the point all the same. He grabbed the roll of parchment and quill that had been the mediwizards’ collective best efforts towards a temporary solution, and wrote, Who’s dead?

From Death Penguins (the untitled Vorkosi-verse novella):

Miles sighed and stood, resigning himself to the fact that no one was going to materialize and entertain him. They had to be approaching the last wormhole, anyway, which meant that this particular stretch of uselessness was close to being over. Not that he would be much more useful once they’d reached Komarr; he had the feeling that uselessness was part of his new job description as Lord Consort. He couldn’t help but think it probably explained why Barrayar had had not a few mad Empresses. No one ever talked about them much – they tended to be hidden away in the attic when they became more annoying than useful, which wasn’t hard to do, all things considered, when your primary function in life was decorative – but they were there in the history books if one cared to look. Miles had found himself caring in the days before the wedding, and his foray into the Imperial Residence’s biography section had left him faintly chilled. Bored to madness had been his private diagnosis, and he counted himself very lucky to have other titles and identities he could assume when necessary – Lord Vorkosigan, of course, but perhaps more importantly Lord Auditor.

But not Admiral Naismith. Not anymore.

It had been a long time since that had stung – he hadn’t really looked back at the Dendarii with anything like regret since he’d said yes to Gregor years ago. But Allegre’s news had rocked him almost as much as the news of the wormhole had; Gregor’s deception had added insult to injury. For the first time in almost five years, Miles found himself itching to put on his old grey and whites and find out if they still fit.

Not that he would ever be allowed to. Or at least the Lord Consort certainly wouldn’t.

*sigh* The only one of those I can really envision finishing at this point is Death Penguins. The Snape/Lupin intrigues me though; I still want to write some Harry/Luna, but it'll probably be something totally different.