On the magibrain.

[magibrain]

I like to externalize and anthropomorphize the creative, idea-generating part of my brain. I call it the magibrain. This is because I like to maintain the illusion of (admittedly geeky) dignity, and the illusion that I have good taste and some sort of ingrained sense of what makes a story work. There's a degree of effort you have to put into something to make it look effortless, and this is part of the effort I put into seeming like I know what I'm doing.

But anyway.

The magibrain is, in my characterization, a levitating brain with a cartoony face, tiny little arms made out of grey matter which it usually carries tucked up against its body, and a prehensile brainstem. It talks very quickly and with a lot of exclamation points, is extremely mischievous, and has no shame.

Some of the most triumphant examples of the magibrain's hijinkery on the Stargate: SG-1 side include turning Daniel into a sentient Deathclaw, getting Daniel possessed by a noncorporeal being that nourishes itself on (and thus makes a point to cultivate) angst, giving Jack the power to see through the fourth wall, and getting Sam captured, tortured, hunted, recaptured, and implanted with a symbiote by Ba'al.

It's also responsible for conversations like this:

magibrain: j0.
magistrate: Oh, dear.
magibrain: Got an idea for you.
magistrate: What is it?
magibrain: It's a Redwall fic.
magistrate: Er... whah? This is new.
magibrain: It has to do with an otter.
magistrate: This is cool.
magibrain: He disguises himself as a wolf and leads and army of vermin to survive.
magistrate: This is cool.
magibrain: It's a darkfic psychological thriller.
magistrate: ...STOP. NOW.
magibrain: A tense story of how a person with two faces forgets which one is real!
magistrate: I am not darkficcing Redwall.
magibrain: And Khor could make a cameo as a rather mischevious fox!
[ed. Khor is one of the darker and less-predictable of my original characters.]
magistrate: Khor is going nowhere near Redwall, ever.
magibrain: Also, it could have cross-species slash.
magistrate: Excuse me while I try to spork my mind's eye out.
magibrain: And violent angsty death!
magistrate: Shut up now. Shut up and die.

Back in the day, when I was ficcing for FF8, I really would write just about anything that popped into my mind. That accounts for how ridiculously prolific I was back then. I've since developed a keener desire for respectability and started filtering out the stuff that fails to pass certain checks of rigor. But if any of you remember the ANGST MACHINE which nearly ANGSTS JACK O'NEILL TO DEATH, that's, um, pretty pure, unfiltered magibrain, right there.

The thing is, for all that I grouse and complain about it, I do love the damn thing. It's what keeps me from getting bored, reads me bedtime stories, and, yes, it is the river that carries the tons of silt and mud but also the nuggets of gold. Because even when most the time it's giving me plots like "the team runs into a giant hall of mirror artifacts and Jack and Teal'c get sent through a malfunctioning one into a universe where Sam was never allowed to join the Stargate program and Kinsey probably took over and some other weird crap also happened, but the upshot of it all was that Earth got taken over by Mars or someone and the entire global and interstellar political arena has gone totally bizarre and crapsack, and, like, the main economy in this universe is a sort of panem et circensis industry where the slightly-nuked Earth is only half-controlled by any Goa'uld, but that doesn't matter because the only way to bring in money and goods to survive is to be amusing to them, as they've more or less given up on converting the population into slave labor, and anyway, the punchline is that Sam spent the last six or so years of her life making a name for herself by pitfighting Jaffa. And then they have to bring her home! She goes by Kotan." ...well, even when most of the time it's giving me ideas like that, the rest of the time it's giving me ideas like Beneath a Beating Sun or Ya Vas Lyubil.

Besides, the magibrain never gives me ideas that don't entertain me. If I'm not being entertained, my attention wanders, and the sim running in the back of my brain cuts out. Easy-peasy.

One of the things I do with the sims that stick around long enough or give me more scenes than summaries is to type out the little snatches of them in a GMail conversation I've been having with myself since about 2006, with the result that I have quite a lot of bits and pieces written out, which this journal was originally going to be a place to showcase. (For an example on that "quite a lot" thing, the Sam|Ba'al|Anat braintic canon has about 30k words written in it, even though it's all ridiculous and doesn't even pretend to come together into a coherent fic, arc, or even scene, and bits of it contradict each other 'cause it's too much fun to play with the variables.)

So. If you see anything tagged with a note that says it's from the magibrain, beware! It probably has a high content of crack, melodrama, plotholes big enough to fly a tel'tak through, and contrivance upon contrivance upon contrivance. The one claim I do make is that it tickled me in some way, and hope that in some way it might also tickle some of you.

...now stay tuned for what I'm sure will be several posts rambling about the Ba'al, Sam and Anat Sagas....