trovia

*snickers*

geekbynight wrote me a lovely ficlet using the title of one of my own fics:

How to live and love as an amputee, by Brendan Costanza

You all have to go and read it! It's awesome. It's about Brendan and Kat and losing an arm.

My protagonist and his wife have three-year-old twin boys.

Don't ask me how I ended up in that predicament, because I have no idea.

I know nothing about children whatsoever. Remember how I once wrote Hoshi in that Gaeta/Tory kid!fic? His total befuddlement in the face of his new children? He is me.

I've already found plenty of stuff on what stage of development the kids would be in. But do any of you know good sources or would you share any anecdotes that could tell me what it's like to have a child that age (and two of them!)? Those of you who post about their kids - maybe old posts about the day-to-day pains? I only have vague idea about how time consuming having two three-year-olds would be, whether you can leave them alone for a time while you go and do the laundry, how crazy they would drive you really, whether this is a time when it starts getting better. I would also appreciate any pointers on what would constitute normal behavior of twins that age towards each other. Be joined at the hip all the time? Get annoyed with the other one? Jealousy issues? Depends? I know nothing.

A long time ago in my days in the German Harry Potter fandom, I was asked to write meta on how I write action sequences. It took me a very long time to come up with something, because it's such a complex topic, but eventually I did it. It doesn't quite translate, but I've tried to summarize the most important points for you. Forgive me if anything doesn't make sense in English / sans examples. I'll happily provide new examples if anything is unclear.

( On Writing Action Sequences )


Cheers! :)

Red Thunder by John Varley

This is the first of the books I read that you guys recommended to me two weeks ago. lorrainemarker told me to read John Varley's Titan, but as that one isn't out for Kindle and Red Thunder is, I decided to start here. Thank you for the rec, Lorraine!

Dude, Red Thunder is like scifi for young adults. Is there even such a thing? This is YA literature if I've ever read any. It's the kind of book you can picture a fifteen-year-old space geek having outlined when he was bored during French lit. How would I go about building a space ship? Hmm... I would have to handwave the engines into existence, of course. Mind that this is not a bad thing. It's just not what I expect out of a scifi novel that I did not find in the YA section.

So we're a couple years in the future, and China and the US are both on their way to Mars. Problem is, China is gonna be there first (oh noes!) and the US ship might possibly explode. So when a group of four young adults, one ex-astronaut with a drinking problem, and one retarded yet charming genius scientist stumble upon the perfect ship engine quite by accident, they decide to build their own space ship, and be the first people to land on Mars.

Then most of the book is spent on the logistics of building a space ship with limited resources. This is interesting if you have a kink for organization. As I said, a fifteen-year-old could have made this up meticulously, then built a story around it to justify its existence.

It's a good book. It has really good characters. Just from reading it, I would not have thought that the author is an old, white, straight Texan guy. The protagonist is a Hispanic son of an almost-broke hotel owner, dating a rich white chick with a controlling father. It's all very diverse, and the dynamics ring true to me. This is why you can ignore the ridiculousness and sheer geekiness of the premise and just read the whole thing until you're finished.

Varley's writing is rather flawless. There was the occasional paragraph where he could have done better, but in most books I read, I notice a lot more of those paragraphs. He might want to work on his visuals. Because if a group of young adults makes it to Mars, being full of awe, I want visuals to go along with it that make me be in awe, too. Here's where a writer might want to work the magic of words. Varley does not do the magic of words. He's a little too much in love with logic and logistics to have real flair when it comes to words. But he does good characters, straightforward plot, and there's joy in putting up with his cheesy premise. Also, he knows his audience. I am about fifteen years too old to be his audience, but that's okay.

Next up: three or four novels to do with the thesis. Then, more scifi.

Answers to the meme proposed in my last entry. Feel free to leave me some more prompts there! This is fun.

( Fifteen Characters )

( Wolverine and Tonks are working for the President. Tonks wants Wolverine to be fired. Why? )

( Sarah Walker and Magneto are stuck in a closet... )

( Buffy Summers and Magneto are working together to solve a kidnapping... )

( Which two characters would you choose to travel to space with you? )

( Tonks has a dark secret. What is it? )

( Julian Bashir and Gaius Baltar find themselves aboard the TARDIS and are drafted onto the Torchwood team. )

We haven't done this one in a while:

1) Make a list of fifteen characters first, and keep it to yourself for the moment.

2) Ask your flist to post questions in the comments. For example: 'One, nine and fifteen are chosen by a prophecy to save the world from four. Do they succeed?' 'Under what circumstances might five and fourteen fall in love?' 'Which character on the list would you most want on your side in a zombie invasion?' 'Write a drabble in which three and eleven fight crime.' (...possibly not technically a question.)

3) After your flist has asked enough questions, round them up and answer them using the fifteen characters you selected beforehand, then post them.

Here's the picture of Gaeta (with curls!) by Hungry Spider that I won at the Yuletide Comment Contest. Isn't it pretty? I love his smirk. When I was talking to Hungry Spider, I sent her the deleted scene of Gaeta and Dee snickering about Adama and Roslin for reference, and it totally shows. :D

Happy Gaeta, everybody:



(click to enlarge)

I'm gonna send her the link to this entry, so feel free to pay her a compliment in a comment.

It doesn't come up a lot, but there's possibly no movie genre closer to my heart than that of sports movies. Definitely not psychological thrillers, although there are some amazing ones around. Also not war movies, although really, there's not much of a difference between a war movie and a sports movie, technically, except in regards to the bodycount. That's the thing about sports movies: They're the only epic genre that doesn't involve death and mayhem. In a way that I think people who don't like sports often don't get, there's something incredible about sports - something glorious and beautiful exactly because it's so inconsequential.* It makes shapes lives in these major ways... just because we let it.


(*Except when it starts wars, or referees are shot. Both of these things have happened, but we'll disregard them here. Just for the record, I don't usually like sports movies in which people die.)


So! Really good sports movies. No special order (and a total coincidence that it's all ball games - I watch the other movies, too - there just aren't that many):

( Read more... )

lls_mutant, kappamaki33 and I want a place where we can talk about writing our original fic. Privately. Closed membership comm. Small group where we know everybody. Without having to worry about talking about original work online and who might read or steal it, without having to specify whether we're currently speaking of fanfic or original fic (because it's just really different). Just a place to geek out together about all those things not fandom related, and talk some tech. Post fic, too, if we feel like it. Meet fellow original writers.

Would any of you be interested in joining?