magibrain

So I was looking up Kate Moreau's actress, because I was toying with the idea of doing some sort of Gunnerkrigg Court Realm of the Dead ficlet with her and I wanted to know which psychopomps would be fighting over her when some guy with a terrifying visage &/ bad costume showed up to offer her an out.

(That idea is backburnered because I realized I didn't have a plot for it. This happens surprisingly frequently.)

Anyway, I ran into the line, "At the end of 2012, Alex [Daddario] starred in the music video, "Imagine Dragons' Radioactive"."

Huh. Okay. I went to check that out.

This is one of those videos I've seen a grand total of once, both because I think the Lindsey Stirling version sounds better (strings! I fall so hard for string renditions of things) and because I'm not a big fan of the "pretty white girl, suffering white guys, and villainous brown men" imagery in the vid itself.

But... no, that's Kate. Engaging in some illicit underground muppet fighting. For the salvation of white guys and teddy bears everywhere. Not sure how to feel about this.

Part of me wants to prompt it as an AU on collarcorner, and part of me wants to go back to pretending that actors only ever exist in one role shhhhh.

You know, the worst part of this White Collar/Dangan Ronpa crossover is how everyone is so goddamn cute at the beginning, what with organizing into teams to explore their Super High-Level Office Dormitory Building, and, like, there's Elizabeth with a freaking label maker so they can label all the buttons in the elevator and Mozzie is theorizing about nanobots and Hughes has taken control of the rolling whiteboard and June is holding court in the conference room and you just know that in a chapter it's just going to be murder, murder everywhere.

I occasionally feel kinda odd about maintaining two blogs – this one and magistrate – because I post so infrequently that it occasionally feels like I don't have enough content to reliably keep one blog interesting, let alone two. But I do feel like separating my fannish content stream from my more real-life stream is a good pragmatic decision; in how I conceptualize my own life, they represent different spheres of interest.

(I toyed briefly with the idea of separating my original fiction/professional writing into a third stream, but then I noticed that I never posted in it at all, so to magistrate it went.)

Being someone who grew up as a writer in fannish spaces and is now also trying to get somewhere in the big, bad world of original fiction, I think a lot about how skills and paradigms do and don't translate. The different genre structures and conventions, the different skills each type of writing emphasizes or strengthens. (I notice that in my original writing, characterization is something people continually call out as one of my weakest skills. Which is still kind of a mindscrew for me, because in fanfic, a lot of people seem to enjoy my characterization. Then, with fanfic, I have something pre-existing to riff off; one of the consequences of growing into writing through fanfiction seems to be that I have less experience in how to establish and differentiate character in my own work.)

Anyway. Given the amount of time I spend musing about fannish vs. original spaces, I kinda have to raise an eyebrow at myself for needing to discover (and rediscover, and remind myself of, again and again) the fact that the criteria for success for fanfic and original stories are often wildly different.

I think it's something of the same way in which the criteria for success for a TED talk and an awesome discussion in a group of friends is different.

In original fiction, I have to spend a lot of time thinking about arcs and structure and pacing, and how the plot and the story inform each other, and how themes are deployed, and how to create a polished and technically competent work. And, I mean, don't get me wrong, those things are great to pay attention to in fanfiction, but I find that fanfic rises or falls on something more like, broadly oversimplified, its ability to be an efficient delivery mechanism for squee.

I think the fanfics I'm personally most proud of manage to hit both notes; they extend and expand beloved aspects of canon, but they also work as well-structured, polished and tuned-up technical works. But I also find myself, a lot of times, flailing over posting something because its pacing is a mess, the structure is lopsided, there's that one horribly awkward phrasing at the beginning that I can't think of a good way to get rid off, the theme is a contortionist, and the arc thinks about arcing and then veers sideways into a wall, and I have this horrible urge to apologize to everyone for punting it out into the world, and then no one seems to care. Which is reassuring, at times, and then at other times it's just a boatload of cognitive dissonance and the vague suspicion that everyone's just being nice because... some... nefarious purpose of their own? I think a lot of writers share this anxiety. I think this anxiety enjoys the fact that it doesn't have to make sense.

I used to produce a lot more fiction. I mean, that was something like a decade ago, when I was bouncing all around my million FFVIII fics, but I remember being significantly more prolific than I am right now. I think a major factor in my slowdown is the fact that I started turning my attention to craft, and really struggling a lot with the places where I could see something wrong but I didn't know how to fix it.

(Or where there wasn't a plausible way to fix it. If I go back through my braintics scraps collection, for example, there's a ton of stuff which flat-out does not work on a logical level, but which amused me enough to put scenes down. There's also stuff where the tone is too wildly self-indulgent for my sense of propriety, or where it's clearly just me working out my beef with a certain character, or where I looked at it and just went "Nope, not going to write that, because I'm not going to typecast myself as that author who only writes stories where horrible things happen to Sam Carter and the boys go D: and then the whole rest of the fic is only there to showcase how tough and embattled Sam is." (Yes, I have enough of those braintics to make it its own genre. I'm not proud. I also regret nothing.))

This is, of course, not entirely a bad thing: it lets me continually improve my writing, even if I'm not aware of the improvements as they're happening. (But I can go back and look at works from a few years ago – works that represented the best I could do at those times – and see immediately how I could improve them, and that's a humbling and kinda nifty feeling.) But it is, I think, something I also need to become more aware of. Because the other great thing about fanfiction is that it provides a space for me to play around with ways of telling stories in this fantastically open and engaging and forgiving environment, and that's also a fantastic resource for growth. Letting my internal editor set up roadblocks there isn't actually helping me.

(Besides, you people don't mind if I completely shed my dignity now and again, right? Maybe I'll clean up the ridiculous angstcrack scene where Neal is vaguely suicidal circa As You Were and discovers that Peter has an invisible dragon living in his house. Or the wtfery of the braintic where Sam Carter's consciousness gets transposed across a universal boundary and put into a partially-uplifted mountain lion who's a working animal with the USAF. I once heard the Pern books described as "tapping into the 'I want a PONY!' instinct, except for people who liked fantasy." You can probably tell which kind of kid I was.)

Title: U is for Unheimlich
Author: magistrate (magibrain)
Rating: T.
Genre: Character study, ghost story
Beta: Walked away.
Continuity: Canon-compliant.
Prerequisities: Doesn't really relate to any specific episode.
Summary: It's all ghost stories, sir.
Disclaimer: Stories told to certain audiences may have unanticipated results. Hear that, MGM? The opinions expressed herein are the properties of the characters and not of R. L. Stine. The door is open. Questions, comments and creepypasta can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for reading!

Author's Notes: This is 9,000 words. I don't know why it's 9,000 words. All I know is that I started out writing this the day I got the prompt, and yet somehow I still found myself finishing in a desperate throw-words-at-the-page rush at 2 AM the day it was due. WHY.

I'm sorry if this is absolutely incoherent.

---

( Not exactly a ghost story. )

AO3 has 114 works tagged "mutually unrequited". They're not all by the same author, so I assume the tag has to have some generally-understood meaning. Can anyone explain to me what that meaning is?

My partner introduced me to the WTFery of Dark Silent Hill, Google Maps version. (Just... go forward.)

Now I want a fic where this happens to Peter and Neal. They're just driving along, off to talk to a witness or examine a crime scene or authenticate a statue or whatever, and then suddenly the entire world around their car is a terrifying melting Goya and Peter slams on the brakes and, you know, horror ensues.

...I'm not sure I want to write this fic, but I want it to happen.


I have no idea what the hell happened to that Google Maps car. But it cannot possibly have been anything good.

And then circumstances conspired to make me write 2100 words of first scene for a potential treatment of White Collar slavefic. Trust me when I say that this was not what I planned to be doing today.

( World meta. )

( The scene. )

magibrain: ...and in case you didn't know how messed up Anat is re: Ba'al, she's also keeping him in cold-sarcophagus-storage now that the war is over because she knows he can't survive in this new galactic order but can't stand to kill him.

magibrain: SHE IS KEEPING HER FATHER IN A FREEZER BECAUSE IT'S THE LEAST MESSED-UP THEIR RELATIONSHIP WILL EVER BE.

You know, the fact that I've spent the last three days idly toying with the logistics of a Stargate: SG-1/Minecraft crossover probably says all it needs to about... well, everything, really.

(It would, of course, include functionality from the 12w17a snapshot, including editable books, and there would be a lot of speculation on the physics of the world and whether or not it's one huge and elaborate simulation. Crafting tables would take raw materials and visibly transmute them into items. Chests would appear to keep items in some sort of suspended animation so that nothing would age or rot. There would be advanced cognitive interfaces in basically the entire world to moderate how tokenized things like cobblestone would transmute into meter-high blocks when deployed. And you just know someone would try to open negotiations with a creeper and get swathes of the landscape blown up.)

[ETA: OH OH and there's also the phenomena that on the surface, monsters only seem to spawn if you're awake at night, leading to more speculation about the interaction of consciousness with the control structure of the world...]

Title: A Long Drawn-Out Breath and an Impossible Sky
Author: magistrate
Rating: T
Genre: ...slipstream. :|
Beta: 1 cuil: if you asked me for a beta and I gave you a raccoon.
Continuity: Nothing blatantly canon-defying, so far as I can tell. Some point in canon when they have naqahdah reactors. And Daniel.
Summary: I DON'T KNOW
Disclaimer: I am not Italo Calvino. The opinions expressed herein are the properties of the characters and sometimes of Ferdinand de Saussure. Caution: this machine starts automatically. You cannot swallow. Questions, comments and existential crises can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for... reading?

---

She was halfway up the mountain carrying most of Daniel's weight across her shoulders when a flicker of light caught her from the corner of her eye. She turned without thinking, saw some white insect disappear into the jumble of light and flora and scene, and then, in an instant, everything stepped back.

( Read more... )