Dira's Stages of a New Fandom

0. Something intriguing. (In this case it was actually the premise of the actual show! More often it's fic or art or a vid.)
1. Rapid canon immersion.
2. Song lyrics. (No, but seriously, "Romans 10:9" by the Mountain Goats is totally Patrick Jane's theme song. The chorus is ironic.)
3. Slash someone with Jack Harkness. (Jack likes men in suits!)
4. Ridiculous and/or bizarre AUs not covered in step 3.
5. Kidfic.

Tonight has included at least parts of steps 1-4 (I just now finished season one). It is possible that this is one of the rare fandoms that skips step 5 and moves directly to the optional step 6, deathfic. (Did I mention I just now finished season one? !!!!)



Only moderately related: in this recent TV Guide interview of Amanda Righetti and Owain Yeoman, Amanda relates that CBS did an internet poll asking whether people wanted to see Rigsby and Van Pelt or Jane and Lisbon get together, and Rigsby/Van Pelt won.

Owain chimes in [the scan is small, so a word or two might be off, but this is the gist]: But they give all four of us those horrible love abbreviations! We're RigsPelt, which is bad enough, but they're Jisbon, which sounds like something you might have to go to the dry cleaner to deal with.

Ever since I squinted my way through that, I have been giggling over it.

JISBON, YOU GUYS. JISBON.

(RigsPelt, though, seriously? Vansby would be kinda cute, if you have to have one, but RigsPelt?)

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* I'm Sorry, Ma'am, I Don't Speak Korean


Yeah, yeah, look who pimped herself into a brand new fandom after signing up for Yuletide.

Many thanks to missmollyetc for supplying the title and other useful phrases, and generally enabling my magpie fannish habits.


Cho/Jane. PG-13. 1,312 words.
Cho was freaking out about taking Jane to meet his parents, in the most entertainingly overt manner yet.

( Mian He, Ahjuma, Hangul Mal Mullayo )


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- I'm going back to work tomorrow! I am a little scared of what I will find there! I've been away for three days before, but this whole flu thing is weird and disorienting.

- YULETIDE!!! I think this year was the fastest ever turnaround from Yuleterror to knowing what to write and being really, really excited about it! And now, canon review and the slow mutation from the original idea to whatever I end up actually writing. This should be fun.

Yulewriter, if you have come to stalk me, my hopefully not totally unhelpful letter is here. Have fun! Everything will be fine!

- So on Thursday I pimped myself into Castle through the power of low-grade fever and contrarianism. Yesterday I ran out of Castle episodes to watch. So this morning I started on The Mentalist.

JANE ♥♥♥

Fic recs - Castle or The Mentalist - gladly accepted.

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I made a poll earlier, which (I hope) I posted only to Dreamwidth because it seemed at the time like crossposting and editing to point people to the poll and etc. etc. was a heroic task completely beyond me--

Anyway! I posted a poll, asking what I should watch while lying in my sickbed, and the poll was extremely helpful because I watched results come in and said, "Why is everyone telling me to watch LEVERAGE? I WANT THEM TO VOTE FOR CASTLE."

So then I downloaded some Castle and piled a lot more blankets on my bed because I couldn't stop shivering and apparently my temperature was 99.8, and then I watched the first episode and ♥ ♥ ♥. Hopefully not just because of the fever.

And now I will eat some dinner and wait very very patiently for the internet fairies to bring me some more.

WORK FASTER, INTERNET FAIRIES.

I mean, I'm sure Leverage is awesome and I'm totally going to watch it at some point! But Castle!

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It sucks. I am starting to hate my bed.


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I got a solid eight hours of sleep, ate some breakfast, and then signed up for Yuletide, working from the list which has been in development for the past few months.

So I can't really blame anyone but myself that I offered twelve fandoms, and selected (any) for all of them. Ahahahahha this is going to be fun.

While I'm at it, and the puppy is reasonably chill, I may as well do this, too:

Dear Yuletide Writer,

First off, SQUEE! You share some of my dear darling obscure fandoms! ♥ I will be delighted to see fic for any of these, of any kind, so please do remember to have fun, optional details are optional, and I will adore your lovely gift to me regardless of its color, fiber content, or whether both sleeves are exactly the same length. :)

Now! On to prompts and details and things...

( If you have already read Echo in the Bone... )

( If you haven't read Echo in the Bone, that's cool too! )

( Or maybe we matched on something other than Outlander! )

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12:00 AM - standing third row off the stage as John Darnielle leans down into the crowd to sing-scream "No Children" with us at the end of the encore.

12:03 AM - make heart-hands at the bass player, last to leave the stage.

12:05 AM - apologize to iulia and oliviacirce for not showing them pictures of John Darnielle before they were exposed to his actual presence.

ALERT: IF YOU LIKE SKINNY GLASSES-WEARING NERDY DUDES WHO TALK ABOUT FRANZ KAFKA AND THE EXCUSES YOU MAKE TO GO TO YOUR EX'S HOUSE TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM ALL IN THE COURSE OF INTRODUCING ONE SONG ENTITLED "HOW TO EMBRACE A SWAMP CREATURE", YOU MAY WANT TO LOOK AT PICTURES OF JOHN DARNIELLE AND/OR GO TO A MOUNTAIN GOATS CONCERT.

Now you can't say I didn't tell you.

12:19 AM - drop oliviacirce off and make for Milwaukee by way of the blessedly brightly-lit Shell station and a couple of badly-needed bottles of lemonade. I may have screamed a lot and sung a lot. ETA: At the concert, necessitating the lemonade. Not at the Shell station. /ETA

1:30ish AM - DEER! He trotted out onto I-94 like one of those college town pedestrians who has picked his spot and is going to pass behind you, WHY ARE YOU SLOWING DOWN YOU'RE RUINING EVERYTHING. I swerved and braked a bit, but I'm not sure how much difference it actually made.

The adrenaline did perk iulia and I up for the rest of the drive, though.

2:05 AM - turned off the car in the driveway at my apartment.

2:08 AM - just checked my email one time before bed, and tweeted that I was home.

2:30ish AM - finally stopped talking to iulia and went to sleep.

6:30 AM - ALARM GOES OFF

6:35 AM - Actually get out of bed and go take a shower.

6:50 AM - Apologetically inform iulia that I'm done in the shower and it's her turn.

7:38 AM - Say goodbye to iulia, who is headed home to pick up her husband and then drive to Michigan, on my front porch.

7:40 AM - Leave for work.

7:55 AM - Open up.

8:05 AM - snack size Crunch bar.

8:35 AM - commence watching Wonder Boys on my laptop.

8:40 AM - open up IMDB page for Wonder Boys, marvel at appearances of Katie Holmes and Alan Tudyk.

8:55 AM - phone call from faculty member leading to more phone calls blah blah work thing.

9:02 AM - resume watching Wonder Boys.

9:35 AM - go wander around and discover that there is still no one else here.

9:50 AM - while watching Wonder Boys, check whether it is being requested/offered for Yuletide, ponder signup plans.

10:03 AM - pause Wonder Boys to teach a student how to make bar graphs in Excel 2007, which I am able to do because I google up a tutorial in the time it takes her to log in to her computer. In case you're wondering, they're called 'Column Charts' and you need to go under the Insert menu after highlighting the relevant cells, including labels.

10:25 AM - finish watching Wonder Boys.

10:27 AM - google up that one Terry/James Yuletide story from last year - elmathelas' Over the River and Through the Woods.

10:30 AM - snack-sized Crunch bar.

10:48 AM - get distracted from reading fic, start this post.

10:56 AM - finish reading, come back to finish post.


...So I still have an hour left at work, followed by an hour's drive down to iulia's place to puppysit while they're in Michigan. I think I can safely say I am no longer acclimated to chronic mild sleep deprivation. And I need a nap. And a lot of caffeine. And this entire bowl of snack-sized Crunch bars. Om nom nom.

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riverlight was the only one to cast a tie-breaking vote, so it's time for Bob getting knocked up, with, let me just reiterate, SOME GROSS BIOLOGICAL DETAILS, because that is how I roll.

(I mean, look, if you have enough unsuspected internal ladyparts to get accidentally pregnant through anal sex, then, logically....)

I actually told most of this in email to missmollyetc so there is ... quite a bit of it. Apologies for tenses jumping all over the place, it was ... many different emails.

~10,000 words. Bob/Gerard, Bob/Gerard/Frank, Frank/Jamia. Mpreg. (But no diagrams.)

Anyway, I was commuting with strangecobwebs and apparently listening to a fair amount of David Bowie in her car when I came up with this, so the story came to be titled ( Spiders from Mars )

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...And one time they did.

This was topical when I wrote it in email (as "something I want to write" although looking at it now it seems kind of ... written) a year and a half ago--in fact I think there must be some sort of factual basis for the precise date of #3 but I no longer remember what it was, did somebody find a marriage license?--and then I forgot it existed until just now, trying to dig up a piece of the Bob-gets-knocked-up story that I know I wrote down somewhere.

So! I'm just going to post this.

( Four or Five Times Frank and Jamia Didn't Get Married and One Time They Did. )

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#4 on the poll was the option called "The Two Short Ones Involving Gerard, genderfuck, and other favorite cliches of mine (Gerard/Frank)" and these may actually be fairly short because I never got all that close to writing them and I'm kind of hazy on the details. \o/

The cliches in question, in case you were wondering, were time travel and amnesia. Which, you know, obviously are crying out to be included in a genderfuck story.

( So, first, there was the time travel one, inspired by someone attending the Cobra show a group of us went to at the 9:30 Club... )

And then the gendersomething-amnesia story which I think I must have come up with by trying to deliberately smash my favorite things into each other.

( I mean: genderfuck amnesia fic. Come on. )

Up next: the (c.2007) Panic BDSM bunny which is really a very long pairings list OR the one where Bob gets pregnant and I really love me some offputting verisimilitude. However will I choose...?

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I just finished this and I have to post it right this second or it will continue dragging out toward infinity. Please excuse any infelicities you run into toward the end. :)

7300-ish words. I am bad at summarizing.

As best I can tell, the Bob Wakes Up with Ladyparts idea started like this, on June 28, 2007, talking to iulia about an interview with Patrick Stump:

dira: Patrick: Yeah, it was...was it 'Thank You For The Venom'? Can't remember the name of it, can't remember what song I played. But it was one of their fast ones.

ChartBlog: That's SO unfair. You wanna be doing one of their slow ballads.

Patrick: I chose that song! And I did pretty well, except Bob Bryar, the drummer, likes to set his drums pretty far away, and he plays with his arms instead of his wrists. And so I couldn't come up with some of the really fast fills, cos I don't have the arm strength that he does. He's a lot more buff than people give him credit for.

iulia: Mmmm, Bob.

dira: (...I kind of want to write girl!Bob fic, where switching fucks with Bob's upper body strength, and he's fucking furious about it.)

dira: (Like, yes, okay, his dick is missing, but mostly HE CAN'T PLAY THE FUCKING DRUMS RIGHT.)

...Obviously, Bob is my favorite.

The initial idea was reinforced by this video of Bob talking about and then playing Welcome to the Black Parade, in which he mentions that the big Black Parade kit was at the very limit of his ability to play, and that he was never actually comfortable with it, hence the dual kits starting on Projekt Revolution.

So over time this idea--Bob gets switched and can't drum right and hates it--turned into a whole Bob/Gerard story called, naturally, ( Juliet Loves the Beat. )

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1) I am going to see two concerts with iulia in the next two weeks: The Mountain Goats, and Greg Laswell. (He turned out to be touring in places other than Michigan after all! Like, Chicago! On a Thursday night! Caffeine is my friend! \o/) Why yes, I get all my new music from my flist and vids.

Madisonians: anybody else going to see the Mountain Goats on November 6? Anyone else interested in going to see the Moutain Goats?

2) Seriously, Torchwood calendar? An entire month of Jack and Gray? Seriously?

3) So I am kind of eh in retrospect about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and I stopped halfway through Yiddish Policeman's Union and remorselessly returned it to the library, but for whatever reason I bought Gentlemen of the Road at some point and on Friday (after finishing Libyrinth <3 <3 <3) I picked it up and then polished it off in 48 hours. So I guess third time's the charm for me and Michael Chabon novels.

It maybe didn't hurt that I mentally cast Zelikman as Paul Bettany on about page five. And that it totally surpassed all the vague expectations of slashiness I had attached to it. Also, I see it's nominated for Yuletide! *beams hopefully at Yuletiders*

4) Do you remember when I was summarizing bandom stories I am never going to write, and posting the summaries? Yeah, I'm still doing that, but it turns out I'm distractible and bad at summarizing. Which are two things that I'm sure no one knew about me up until now!

5) Writing the Southland telepathy story has gotten to the level of derangement where I have added "If You Could Read My Mind" to my regular playlist. Shut up, it's actually sort of appropriate. In a way.

(I am not sure what my excuse is for "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and "The Canadian Railroad Trilogy" except that the files are like right next to each other, and it's November, and shut up, Gordon Lightfoot is awesome.)

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I missed last week's Criminal Minds due to driving to Michigan for a weekend of drinking, not getting sick, and not writing, all in the excellent company of some of my favorite people.

So I watched it tonight, and, well now.

( I absuse punctuation a little and then Iulia accuses me of being predictable )

PS, that ellipsis under the cut tag? All shoved up next to the word to the left of it? Is kind of killing me right now. I maybe have been doing too much proofreading lately.

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Two things I find rather enchanting, in part for how much they indicate that, no really, people of my grandparents' generation were also people like us, and their entertainment was not all that different from our entertainment, when it had a chance to be: antarcticlust's post Our Scandalous Great Grandmothers: Feminism & Pre-Code Hollywood and, via copperbadge, archive.org's collection of early film blooper reels, from 1936-1947.

And furthermore, this awesomely fantastic photo of female firefighters at Pearl Harbor. ♥

emilyray has written an awesome story about dragons, princesses, and lawyers' children: A Love Story.

And I have just now finished reading Pearl North's first book, Libyrinth.

HOMG, y'all. It's an entire book about BOOKS. AND LITERACY. AND GIRLS KICKING ASS AND GETTING THE BOY AND/OR GIRL ACCORDING TO THEIR INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCES. (Um, is that a spoiler? Sorry! IT'S AWESOME!) THERE ARE ENDNOTES, OKAY. ENDNOTES. Never has Ibid. so warmed my heart. Also: hijjinks! And singing! And people locked in total opposition to each other who both have understandable but opposite goals and values. Also, a lot of books. (Um, bad things happen to some of the books, but I am going to assume that secretly there is some kind of LOCKSS system going on and they are not really lost forever. La la la!)

Also, just for minoanmiss: BULL DANCING. HELL YES, BULL DANCING.

Go! Read!

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1) Oh my God I am going to be Out Among People outside of working hours and outside of fangirl circles every day this week. Even Monday, if we want to count breakfasting with my parents as Out Among People, which it probably should, really.

2) I got up and worked out before work again today. The BioBrite sunrise alarm clock is AWESOME. Thank you, nine years later, for introducing me to the whole idea, resonant8!

3) ellen_fremedon's The Scourge of Trion, y'all. AMAZING. All the action feels just like watching a really done Doctor Who series, except in this one the Doctor gets laid. And, and, just. OMG, go read. It's really really okay if you only know New Who! But you may afterward really really want to know more about this Turlough fellow. I know I do. *g*

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...Not really progress in fighting the power, unless it's the power of inertia. But hey, inertia is powerful stuff!

Which is to say, I am s l o w l y shifting all of the story pages on my website (there are 217, give or take some epilogues lurking around here and there and, oh God, all those ones I left in /m/ after they got their own directories to keep from breaking links) from the black-on-gray hand-coded html a la my own private 1998 to shiny lovely black-on-white accessible black-on-white format thanks to Lim's CSS templates.

So I'm up to all of 35 out of 217, but I promised myself I'd post about it when Get Loved was up, and there it is. :)

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1. Do you ever experience this thing where you are walking around all day wearing whatever bra you're wearing and it's completely fine and then you walk through the door and you suddenly have to take it off RIGHT THAT SECOND OH GOD?

2. Will you still respect me tomorrow if I give up the ghost on this book about math that is clearly not intended for laypeople who last took a math class twelve years ago and switch to, say, a YA novel about kidnapping?

3. Do you know how much I love you all, anonymous love memers? (Hint: A LOT.)

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1. I am here on misspamela's anonymous love meme (and hey, it's (optionally) anonymous, so it doesn't matter where you have an account)!

2. STAR TREK GAG REEL OMG.

3. From Lauren McLaughlin (author of Cycler, genderswap YA novel) a twelve-minute short film about a boy named Zack who wakes up with ladyparts which is ... apparently a Tampax ad? It's strangely compelling even if fandom has taught me well and thoroughly that tampons are not the answer to that problem.

4. Forget Columbus, let us celebrate Emperor Norton I.

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I BLAME JAY LENO. Motherfucker. Southland is AWESOME, for the record, and if it doesn't get picked up by a cable network so the cliffhanger from S1 gets resolved sometime before 2011, I will actually cry. ACTUALLY CRY.

but yeah I guess I have more time to finish the damn fic now.

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WHO HAS ALREADY READ AN ECHO IN THE BONE? WHO WANTS TO SQUEE WITH ME ABOUT THE ENDING?

( FAIR WARNING: I LOVED THE ENDING TO TINY PIECES EVEN WHEN I REFLECT THAT WE WON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT UNTIL 2013. )

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