Love In The Asylum

What with work and life and being in a lot of fandoms with either an overly strong narrative voice or an intimidating amount of back-canon to worry about, it's been about six months since I've written anything. Two years since I've written fic that wasn't for Yuletide.

This week I got over 1000 words down, and I've got the next scene planned.

What did it take to get me back into writing, after all this time?

Fucked-up manipulative dub-con gaslighting porn where Hannibal fucks a drugged up, half-delusional Will and then convinces him the sex never happened. That is what I am writing now.

I am so totally going to hell for this.

1. Go to page 77* (or 7) of your current manuscript.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.
4. Encourage other people to do it!

From a short story I finished this summer, now very very slowly revising.


Alex bites his lip. It isn’t impossible that the man he thought he saw ducked out of view before Lauren could catch a glimpse of him. Not impossible.

“Nah,” he says. “Thought I saw something out my window, that’s all. Probably staring at my computer for too long, you know?”

Lauren nods slowly. “Well, I’ll keep a look-out for anything weird,” she says. “Excepting you, of course.”

Back inside his apartment, Alex double-checks the locks on his window and the chain and deadbolt on the front door, and after some thought, wedges a chair underneath the door handle for good measure. He isn’t sure how much good it would do, but it makes him feel a little better. He still twitches at every sound the shifting plaster makes in the wall, every bone-grating scrape of tire treads in the parking lot, until he falls exhausted into sleep.

Important conclusions about the Poetsverse colourofasying and I reached today on Skype:

1. Oscar Wilde's relationship with Bosie is more or less a trainwreck from the very beginning, since Bosie is an spoiled, insufferable little snot who steals from him, cheats on him, and talks him into a cocaine habit. But it hits rock bottom when he gets publicly outed by getting caught in a club, coked out of his mind with Bosie and a couple of rentboys, and Bosie promptly dumps him because a broke, disgraced, possibly-in-prison boyfriend is no use to him at all. Robert Ross pulls some strings to keep him out of jail and not fired from the magazine, gets him into rehab, and yells at him until he stops moping about the whole mess. Wilde returns to the London scene with a fabulously successful novel he wrote about one of the other patients he met in rehab. And then he teams up with The Band to write a rock opera that is not a thinly-veiled account of him and Bosie, no really it's not we swear. The album is called Pictures of Dorian Gray, naturally.

2. John Keats is in a polyamorous puppy-pile of a relationship with Cowdon Clarke, Charles Armitage Brown, Joseph Severn, and Charles Dilke. They share a converted loft/artist's studio that is one step away from being a commune. Leigh Hunt used to live with them, but when The Band started taking off and Keats got more successful things got weird and awkward and they started fighting, and eventually Hunt stormed off in the middle of a screaming match and never came back. Now they've mostly made up, but they've also realized they make better friends with occasional benefits than housemates. All six of them met when they were teenagers at a traditional and very-posh boys-only boarding school. Hunt was Keats' Greek tutor. The rest of The Band can't really tell any of them apart and just calls them all John's Groupies.

3. Every serious plot arc has a secondary plot arc about Lord Byron getting into sleezy hijinks. Pranking reporters who say mean things to Yeats. Sleeping with Shelley's sister. Showing up at Tennyson's door at 3 in the morning to ask about STD tests. Orgies in hotel lobbies. And of course his semi-annual drunken men's room hatefuck with Oscar Wilde.

Graduation is tomorrow! Hopefully I will not fall off the stage or drop my diploma or have to stop my family from getting into a brawl in the middle of the church. Got my fingers crossed, just in case. :)

I am back from my reading! Which went awesomely, by the way. It's weird - the idea of going up to a stranger and asking for directions makes me start to hyperventilate, but I have no problem at all with public speaking, once it's a group larger than about ten or so. So I was a little bit nervous about this (and I think I was bright scarlet the whole time, I have no control over my blushing), but mostly it was a lot of fun. All the other Levinthal students were great (omgggg some of the poets, so awesome), and I got several very flattering compliments about my reading/story. All in all, a smashing success!

Here is the except that I read. It is from one of the short stories I've been working on this quarter, Drowning Thessolonike, which is about a brother and sister meeting for the first time after their father dies in prison. Fun times!


They talk about Michael’s job as a dermatologist – more embarrassing rashes than life-threatening surgeries – and the skin cancer conference he’s in town to attend – boring speakers, but good swag at the demo booths – and Aubrey tells him a few jokes about the sociology department at the university, and that gets them through most of the meal. They’re onto coffee and picking at the leftover breadsticks before Michael starts asking her questions about their father again.

“I just want to know more about what he was like,” Michael says, taking another sip of wine. Aubrey notes absently that he’s on his third glass now. “You have to have some good stories about him.”

She sucks in a breath, feels her shoulders tense, but after a few seconds of sitting there she relaxes again. This is easier than it seems. It’s the same kind of thing her teachers always asked in class when she was younger, when they wanted to give them essays they didn’t have to think about. Write about a family trip. A day with a parent. Your favorite memory. She’d kept a mental list of stories that were acceptable, just true enough to be interesting but with anything censored out that would have led to awkward questions. It wasn’t like anyone was going to notice if she reused the same stories from year to year. It wasn’t like Michael would be able to tell the difference now.

“The summer I was seven,” she says steadily, “Dad decided one day he needed to teach me how to fish. So he stole his buddy Charlie’s extra rod and threw his tackle box in the back of the pick-up and we drove up to Cochiti. Dragged me out of bed at three in the morning, drove 50 miles to get to the lake, and we can’t catch a damn thing. He’s sitting there, pounding back Coronas and getting more and more pissed, and I’d rather be playing in the mud, but he’s going to teach me to fish, damnit. He keeps saying that.”

She pauses. It’s always hard to get the inflections right on this part of the story, to convince whoever she’s telling that it’s actually supposed to be funny. She’s had a lot of practice at it, though. “So finally he just loses it. He stands up and and says “fishing this way is for pansies,” and takes Charlie’s .22 out of the back seat of the truck and just starts shooting into the water, at all those fish he’s sure are right there. Five different people called the cops on us, and we got banned from the park. And we still didn’t catch any fish.”

She doesn’t usually mention the fight that he and her mother got into when they got home and she found out what he’d done. That part wasn’t really very funny.

Not that Michael’s laughing in the first place. Just kind of staring at her, eyes a little wide, like he’s not quite sure how he should be responding. “You have to be making that up,” he says finally, and a small sarcastic voice in her head says of course, what do you expect from a dermatologist from Cleveland. But that isn’t really fair.

“I swear on our father’s grave,” she replies instead. “He was kind of a crazy drunk. I haven’t even told you about the time he set the juniper bushes in the yard on fire trying to clear weeds. I’ve got a few stories I can tell you.”

This, Aubrey thinks, is where the whole thing starts to fall apart. Because she means it as another joke, gosh, wasn’t dad wacky, but she can tell as soon as she says it that all she’s done is make Michael feel sorry for her. He’s back to folding his napkin fastidiously and not quite meeting her eyes and she just – she’s never been able to handle other people’s pity. It makes her feel weak, out-of-control, puts her on the defensive, and that’s not quite Michael’s fault but he doesn’t have to sit there looking so damn disappointed.

“Forget about it,” she says, folding her arms tight across her chest. “It doesn’t matter.”

I'm alive! More or less! Geez, what a week though. I've been - okay, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was really stuck on my first story for my Levinthal tutorial? I finally got a draft done YESTERDAY. So the last week and a half has been an ongoing drama of my tutor sending me increasingly pointed emails asking if she's ever going to see this story, and me staying up all night to write and still, somehow, not producing any actual words. I don't actually remember much of anything that happened since Tuesday (aside from brief flashes of Margery of Kempe, which would be hallucinatory on a good day), and I'm now in that post-writing stage of obsessive "oh god this was the worst, most pointless story ever written, my tutor will hate me"-ness, but! The important thing is that I finally got it written. And I've taken today off to recover from the whole mess.

Here are some things that are making me happy today:

1. This part of my story where I got to make up an anecdote that was not in fact directly inspired by anything my family has ever done but still sounds perfectly like something my father would have done. I may hate the rest of this story passionately, but I do love this whole paragraph.

“The summer I was seven,” she says steadily, “Dad decided one day he needed to teach me how to fish. So he stole his buddy Charlie’s extra rod and threw his tackle box in the back of the pick-up and we drove up to Cochiti. Dragged me out of bed at three in the morning, drove 50 miles to get to the lake, and we can’t catch a damn thing. He’s sitting there, pounding back Coronas and getting more and more pissed, and I’d rather be playing in the mud, but he’s going to teach me to fish, damnit.”

She pauses. It’s always hard to get the inflections right on this part of the story, to convince whoever she’s telling that it’s actually supposed to be funny. She’s had a lot of practice at it, though.

“So finally he just loses it. He stands up and looks at me and says “fishing this way is for pansies,” and takes Charlie’s pellet gun out of the back seat of the truck and just starts shooting into the water, at all those fish he’s sure are right there. And that’s how we got banned from Cochiti Lake.”

2. The Sherlock/Tumbling fusion AU colourofsaying and I came up with the other day. In which John is the captain of the boys' high school rhythmic gymnastics team, Sherlock is the anti-social but gifted ex-thug/newcomer to the team, Lestrade is the well-meaning coach, and Mycroft is Sherlock's mom. TEEN!SHERLOCK IN A SPARKLY PINK LEOTARD, TELL ME IT WOULDN'T BE AWESOME. Or, you know, made of crack, which is almost as good.

3. Everything about this post on arsenalbbs. This shouldn't really come as news to anyone, but Thierry Henry is pretty much the most flawless human being on the planet. I am constantly amazed that the universe has been able to fit that much sexy into a single Frenchman in a suit. Of note in the comments: crazy!Jens Lehmann, Leo Messi running into a tree branch, and a Pepsi commercial where Cesc Fabregas blows Thierry Henry a kiss. I swear, sometimes I love this team so fucking much.

4. As soon as I post this, I'm making double fudge brownies. :)

I'm not sure if the action-movie dream I had last night is a sign that I should watch less anime right before bed, or more, but wow, that was an unusually coherent plot. (I know dream posts are annoying and self-indulgent, but dude, if I didn't want to be self-indulgent I wouldn't be keeping a public journal, so whatever).

When the dream started I was an ordinary high school age boy living in a large high-rise apartment complex with a lot of friends and a nice boyfriend. Things quickly got kind of odd, though. The friends were all acting weird, and the boyfriend was going to great lengths to avoid me, including hiding in his apartment and pretending to be sick. Dream-me was getting seriously freaked out, so finally one of my dream-friends took me aside to explain what was going on - at some point in the past we had all been part of some secret MIB-style alien fighting organization, but something traumatic happened to me and I disappeared. When I turned up again a year or so later, I was de-aged and amnesiac, and couldn't recognize any of them or tell them where I'd been. Hence the boyfriend acting strange, because we'd been lovers before, and he was finding the whole thing extremely hard to handle. When she told me this, it triggered the recovery of some of the lost memories, which were...not pleasant (the big traumatic event seemed to have been the graphic murder and mutilation of my mentor and wow, that's the first time I can remember puking in a dream). So I ran back to the apartment complex to tell the boyfriend what I'd remembered.

And then the apartment complex was attacked by the alien enemies we were supposed to be fighting. In the confusion, I wandered off to another part of the city and stayed there for a few hours. But when I came back to the apartment, everything looked different, and the landlady in the front of the building told me I'd been gone for six years. I'm not sure how to explain how terrifying this was in-dream, to not only have this huge chunk of my life missing again but to know that my friends had probably been suffering the whole time I was gone. The missing time also muddled up the rest of my already-shaky memories a lot worse, so I had forgotten again some of what I'd remembered before the attack.

The rest of the dream was a lot of sneaking through the apartment building, which was occupied by the aliens, trying to figure out how to set up a secure base from which to attack them, and occasionally getting jumped out at by aliens I had to figure out how to fight off. There may have been crawling through airducts. The stairwells figure prominently in my visual map of this dream. Also, a lot of trying to find my way back to the boyfriend. I usually hate this kind of action dream because even in my dreams I'm pretty incompetent, but this time I managed to not die pretty well, and I think when I woke up we were in the process of launching a major attack. But this part of the dream is a lot blurrier.

I don't know, I feel like there are seeds of an actually interesting sci fi drama kind of thing in there, maybe something cyberpunk-ish. The memory tropes are interesting, if nothing else. I may have to put that one on file for later consideration.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Guys. I just found out that I got into a Levinthal Tutorial for next quarter. THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME.

Have I ever mentioned the Levinthal program here? I totally have never mentioned it, have I? Well! For those of you who aren't English majors at Stanford (ie everyone but aestheticized *waves*), the Levinthal tutorial is kind of the high point of the undergrad creative writing program - students who get into the program spend all of winter quarter working one on one with a CW graduate fellow (and the Stegner Fellowship is legitimately awesome in its own right - Robert Pinsky was a Stegner. Tobias Wolff. Raymond Carver. Ken Kesey. Lots of awesome here, is my point!) on a self-directed creative project. It's really intense, and also really competitive; most years there are ten slots open each for poetry and prose tutorials. Getting my application together was a somewhat crazy process of completely rewriting one of my older stories at the last minute and then sitting there anxiously for the next month waiting to hear whether or not I made the cut.

But I guess it paid off, because I did and now I'm doing a Levinthal! And this is not a very coherent entry, but I'm basically sitting here in a daze going OMG I GOT IN!!! so this is what you get. GUYS THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AMAZING.

One of our writing exercises for today's class was to write a prose poem about being thirteen. I think the original prompt was to write about someone we were close to then that we aren't close to anymore, although some of the other responses went rather far afield of that. Not so surprisingly, it's kind of hard to pare down a long, emotionally complicated relationship into two hundred words. But I do like how this turned out, I think. I'm also finding that I like the distance that writing in third-person about myself gives me - this memory still has some sting to it, for various reasons, but writing about myself as someone else puts it far enough away that I can think of it on a craft level, and not just a personal level.


( She was thirteen and he was thirteen )

(I also got Robert Louis Stevenson, James Joyce, and Dan Brown, depending on which fic I used. I think my love of pulp adventure fantasy is showing, isn't it?)

So I've been seeing this blog post about fanfiction making the rounds on everybody's flist.

For the record, I've never heard of this woman or her books, although I probably won't go to any great lengths to seek them out now. And I apologize if this isn't all that sense-making, because I've been awake a really long time and my brain is wobbly. But reading everyone's replies to this author has made me think about a few things I wanted to blunder my way through, and what is a blog for if not subjecting people on the internet to my ill-conceived rambling.

( In which I am long-winded )