Untitled - Everything Else

Untitled

Because every twittery slash fangirl has to have a rent-boy with a heart of gold story. And since it's me, not only is there a rent-boy with a heart of gold, there's an ancient but child-like dragon god and a fish woman. Taking over the world.

Stuff happens, things blow up, rent boy and god fall in love, blah blah blah...I am soooo ashamed of this story, you have no idea. The concept of Nenia and her people is kind of neat, though.

02/03 (hunter rethen heart)
08/02 (if wishes were fishes)

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Vagrant Story

I do love this game to pieces. Zombies! Religious wankery! Asspants! *cough* Nevermind.
12/04 (Lea Monde)

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Van Helsing

Horrible, horrible movie. Oh, the horror.

12/04 (doggy biscuit)

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X-Men

The Marvel universe now owns my soul. 'Nuff said.

I mostly fangirl Generation X (Skin/Chamber being my pairing of choice, though I adore all the kids and I'm mildly in love with Emma Frost) and Cable & Deadpool.

08/06 (genx, jono, angelo, under your skin)
08/06 (genx, jono, angelo, what you do with yourself)

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Zulu

Damn you, China Mieville, for making me want to write about hybrid races. Zulu is a lizard like photographer. Baz is a journalist who is more or less human. She runs into a dragon at a zoo and stuff happens, things blow up. No plot, just this one scene.

12/03 (in love)

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Other

These are all unrelated pieces of writing that don't count as poetry (I'll do another series of posts for the poetry). They're little writing exercises and things that don't quite fit under one category; some of them are groups of shorts from different stories.

03/02 (flying)
05/02 (fire)
07/02 (gray)
11/02 (suicide)
01/03 (new year)
01/03 (scream) (That was me, senior year.)
01/03 (bullet at tea)
01/03 (bartender)
01/03 (the letter l) (Lalalalala...)
03/03 (winterlight) (This concept is one of my favorites...)
04/03 (play dead) (I wish I could remember the story behind this.)
04/03 (ansty)
06/03 (orphan)
10/03 (sleep)
02/04 (three shorts and silliness- sos, fb, ffvi)
04/04 (cake) (Proof that the media can plant evil ideas in the minds of the weak.)
10/04 (roleplaying backstory)
10/04 (free thought1)
3/05 (free thought2)
8/05 (siege)
09/05 (zombie gore)
10/06 (frost and montly: the stupid vampire story)

The rest of S

Seventh Hour

Ah, my tendency to give things titles with the world "Seventh" in them. (Seventh Hour, Seventh Sword...)

One of our guest speakers at WFC had won some awards at some film festival for her short move, Seven Hours to Burn; she was a half European, half Indian woman coming to terms with her heritage after watching her grandfather's funeral pyre. The title comes from the fact that it takes seven hours for the average human body to burn completely to ash.

I don't have any shorts for 7H on this blog; there are a few on the NaNoblog, maybe...this was my story for NaNoWriMo 2002, after I attempted to use Song of Shadows instead and failed miserably. My other weakness, after inflicting all sorts of duality concepts on my character designs, is reincarnation stories. This one's a doozy.

Thousands of years ago, the world is run by super-powerful alien beings. Humans are slaves; their souls are kept on a string in the hands of their slavers. Innana is the head of the house of Uruk, and she's fallen in love with one of her slaves. He's a rebellious one, though, and she eventually curses him with the task of freeing humanity- from themselves.

Shennanigans ensue, and I realize now that Marcus and Asphodel bear a striking resemblance to Tiger and Delilah from Jennifer Roberson's Sword Dancer series. He's kind of clueless but ultimately a nice guy (which, I guess, Tiger isn't), and she's cold, sarcastic, and very angry at the world.

I know it'll take quite a bit of digging to find my Nanoblog at this point, but that's the only place you'll find any in depth information on the story. I wrote the first ten thousand words of it in one sitting; the next eighteen thousand were sheer agony to write, and the story doesn't really have an end. It can't, unless I blow up the planet, and I don't really want to do that, as tempting as it may seem.

I wrote it before going to the Shapatu of Ishtar last summer, unfortunately, so some of my Babylonian myths got crossed; Marcus' original name really should have been Tamuz...though you can imagine my delight when I found that the goddess Innana actually did have a human lover, and their love caused all sorts of trouble for the both of him- most notably, both of their deaths. >_<

I do love me my Sumerian mythos, though. Mmm, giant fish.

06/05 (Marcus, lifetimes later)
12/05 (an ending, perhaps)
12/05 (he doesn't deserve this)

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Song of Shadows

The other crazy reincarnation story! Yu-Gi-Oh! with vampires, this one is. 500 years ago, the city of White Hawk was a swamp with a boarding school in it. Four of the students manage to get tangled up in a conspiracy of the undead and become vessels for four ancient spirits who exist solely to destroy undead. (Okay, only two of them do that; the other two are just the ghosts of previous students.)

After graduation, though, the kids all went their own separate ways; Aleksandyr Vassa inherited his father's land and title, and he married Giselle Byelesaid; problem was, Sable Arcturus was in love with him, but she wasn't half as pretty as Giselle, and anyway, Aleks didn't really have a choice in the matter. Gavin Creliss became very rich, but he was also in love with Aleks. The spirits that posessed them went back to sleep under the swamp, Sable was hired to kill Aleks, but then dies herself in the process (and takes out Giselle (her best friend at school) too), and Gavin, always an outcast but now completely alone, shoots himself in the head.

Cut back to the present. People keep dying, and they seem to all have these strange bite marks on their neck...those that haven't been drowned without the aid of water, that is. Von Paralda is a successful, if emotionally dysfunctional, lawyer; Ari'i Vahine was named after a Gougain painting and is generally accepted as being the most beautiful woman in the world- she's also Von's assistant. Cata Falk is a college student with an eating disorder and self esteem issues, and Zyn Margols doesn't know who the hell he is- but that's not his fault.

The good news? There's no hard feelings towards Sable for killing them all. The bad news is that not only are most of them convinced they've gone off the deep end, but one of the original spirits has gone rogue and there are still vampires running around all over the place. And even after they get things sort of under control with the rogue spirit, they all just get even more dysfunctional. All of them but Ari'i, of course; being perfect means you don't have to deal with messy things like nervous breakdowns, unless they're someone else's.

Character flow charts!
Aleks--->Zyn (only not really)/Moero (Shadow Master)
Gavin--->Von/Umbra (supplemental spirit)
Giselle--->Ari'i/Imbrium (supplemental spirit gone rogue)
Sable--->Cata/Nocturne (Shadow Master)

Each of the spirits has a background and a personality, but the Shadow Masters keep mostly to themselves unless called upon to help. The supplementals are more vocal and can manifest themselves outside of their hosts' bodies, but they're weaker. Von hates Umbra, and Imbrium resents Ari'i. It's fun. (Cata was originally Umbra's host because Nocturne needed to use Umbra as a conduit to Cata's consciousness. Zyn became Imbrium's host for the same reason, but Imbrium just took over his weak little mind instead.)

These all happen in the aftermath of the main plotline with Imbrium going rogue and all of them discovering who they are, and they mostly involve Von and Ari'i because I enjoy their dysfunctional relationship.

08/02 (cata umbra dr pepper)
02/03 (zyn explode)
03/03 (von kiss)
04/03 (grilled cheese aftermath)
05/03 (poison)
01/04 (von umbra alone)
03/04 (ari'i mothers)
05/05 (the four, rooftops)

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Stories from the Sunny Hill Cafe

Vaguely incestuous lesbians! ...only not. Sunny Hill doesn't have a plot; I think its supposed to be a series of short stories and vignettes that take place at the Cafe. It's what I'll write when I'm actually a writer, you see. Sunny Hill is in the middle of nowhere, and people tend to not find it unless their lost- and the people who run the place are just as lost as the customers.

They were married to three brothers (their names will all change, but for the time being they are Alethea, Alma, and Athena), but the brothers all died in a car crash and now they're stuck with each other. They have no other family, and no other place to go...

03/02 (Athena)

M - S

Mordant and Solneki

These guys appeared halfway through first semester of senior year in the form of a screenplay scene in my creative writing notebook. Mordant Bellicose's name is just a combination of obscure adjectives that I found in an obscure word generator applet; I was originally going to use the name for a minor villain in one of my abortive webcomic ideas, but then this character took it and ran. Mordant means bitingly sarcastic; Bellicose means warlike. They suit him.

Solneki doesn't mean anything, and he doesn't admit to having a first or last name. He's just Solneki. (His real name is Solomon Prufrock, but you won't hear him say that.) He wears a black suit and a tie covered in yellow smiley faces; also sunglasses, which he doesn't take off ever. He keeps to himself, mostly, and uses Mordant for odd jobs. They're sort of friends.

Their alternate univers selves are a bounty hunter and a half-plant scientist, respectively. They like being city scum better, so I never really went anywhere with the negative space idea. I never went anywhere with their original worlds/selves, but they, like everyone else, appear in Stella Matin.

10/02 (negative space)
12/02 (pre-negative space library)
07/03 (horseradish)
02/07 (50 sentences of NONSENSE)

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Project: Apocalypse

I was in ninth grade and obsessed with the Book of Revelations. Keep your comments to yourselves. *sticks out tongue*

This is like a lot of my stories in that there are clear lines between the good guys and the bad guys, and everyone has a direct counterpart. I still do that; I think of my characters in very black and white terms even though the ones I know best are not at all black and white people.

You've got the four horsemen of the apocalypse- the ones according to the random translation I had on hand, which means it disagrees with most conventional versions. So thats War (Casimir Tomov), Strife (Colin Murphy), Famine (Terese Delacroix), and Plague/Death (Thana). Those colors are white, red, black, and pale green. Then you've got the false prophet (Lucius somethingorother), the dragon (Belinda whatsername), and the antichrist (Nero Caesar). Those are the good guys, because I liked 'em better. On the other side, you have the Seven Archangels- Michael, Raphaella, Gabriel, Uriel, Sariel, Raziel, and Metatron. The last one may not have been named Metatron; I've lost the notebook. The bad guys also got a fallen Messiah, name of Cain.

They're all genetically engineered super soldiers- this story has very little to do with God at first- or even at last, since I tend to avoid plotting things as much as possible. Maybe they're the real deal- all I ever really did with the story was work out the revelation-based characters and the way they interact. The real reason for the story? To give me an excuse to give people scythes as weapons.

01/03 (nero belinda)
8/05 (nero, battlefield)

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Samurai Champloo

Sometimes I hate being a stupid fangirl. Oh well. The Edo period! Hip hop! Two great tastes that taste great together!

12/04 (mugen, post ep 14)
12/04 (post series)

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Seafox

Crazy pirate story. He's an accountant from another world, she's a mermaid with legs. They fight crime!

10/02 (arxi wakes up)

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A Series of Unfortunate Events

The movie was pretty, and I couldn't help myself.

12/04 (marriage)

Index: G - L

Godless Avatar

Uh...yeah. I'll start drawing this again, I swear. It's interesting, because this is one of the few stories that I've actually got a not-all-that-lame plot for, and I know all of the characters and major plot points. I'm just too lazy to get past the tenth page. This is a comic, but I've got a bit of script for it. You can check the keenspace site for more information.

09/03 (lied)

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Glare

No, no plot here, either. Just two characters and a lot of explosives. Kieran Ellis Black is the son or grandson of someone evil and powerful who did lots of science experiments on small children. Chiara is his sister, whom he doesn't find out about until he's an adult. He's got another sister who is completely evil, and they're arch-nemeses. That's all I've got, really. Kieran has black and orange hair, and carries grenades in his puffy vest. He occasionally goes berserk. Chiara lived in a cell all her life and is a bit slow on the uptake. That's it. And I've got two fragments for it. *sigh*

04/02 (chiara)
04/02 (kieran)

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Harry Potter

I have this dream of writing an Evil!Cho Chang fic, just to prove that Slytherins aren't the only evil house in Hogwarts. But then I remember that I despise the Harry Potter Fandom, and I can't really stand to reread the fourth book. The fifth book ruined all my hopes of Cho ever being a cool character, and made my fanfic obsolete. So I am sad.

I've also got crazy Remus/Sirius scribblings in several notebooks, but the only thing I manage to blog is something incredibly vague. It's only recognizeable as Harry Potter if you're me, and it's an idea I'll never finish because it irritates me. (Mostly James Potter irritates me, but he's kind of an integral part of it. Ah, well.)

03/02 (Cho snowflake shadows)
06/04 (I hate James)

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Librarians

I can't even explain this one. Templar keeps horses and is a soldier of some sort. Paige is the Keeper of Books in a library at the edge of the universe, but she's been sent on a crazy quest by Destiny and is stuck travelling with Tem. I think at some point Templar rapes her and she dies and there's a whole lot of angst. But everything gets reconciled happily in the end, sort of.

Paige makes a brief appearance at the end of Stella Matin, as the owner of a bar called Templar's Rest.

02/02 (templar/paige doing it right)
05/02 (tomorrow)

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Lightning Bug
After the WFC, I was a little obsessed with the Icarus myth, Seal's "Kiss from a Rose," and lightning bugs. Nimita is Spanish for firefly, I believe. She lives in a tower. Stuff happens. I don't really even know, I just wrote this down because it looked pretty in my head.
08/02 (Nimita flies)
08/02 (if wishes were fishes)

Index: F

Final Fantasy

Okay, y'all know the series has my soul. Of course I've written pieces of fic for it. This is all Final Fantasy VI (III in America), except for one very vague and obscure and short FFIV (II in America) bit.

All the FFVI is based around a Setzer/Shadow pairing, because I'm on crack and like to pair random characters who don't interact in any way during the game. Setzer is a professional gambler with an airship and a dead girlfriend; Shadow is an assassin with a whole lot of angst and a daughter who doesn't know who he is. In my version of the story, Shadow sees ghosts, and Setzer can do nifty things with probability. There's actually a hugely complicated plot and backstory to explain all of this, but I'm so lazy it'll never get written. Possibly I'll explain my theories on the game in another post, since I do love to babble about my games.

IV
09/03 (cloaks-FFIV)
12/05 (kain, edge, mountain of trials)

VI
01/03 (setzer/shadow airship)
03/03 (setzer remembering)
*12/03 (setzer, shadow fall)
12/03 (setzer/shadow Yule)
01/04 (etzer/Shadow bored)
7/05 (ffvi, setzer, shadow, roadtrip AU)
12/05 (setzer, shadow, from the dead)
12/05 (setzer, shadow, ghosts)
12/05 (stone is forever)

VII
11/04 (ffvii, redux)
12/05 (hojo, crystalized)

Tactics
3/06 (ramza/mustadio, 50 sentences)
2/06 (ramza/mustadio, 50 sentences)

Index: B - D

Black Heart

This was the story inspired by watching too much Trigun. It takes place in a sort of western/cowboy/desert/radioactive wasteland setting, and the main character is an outlaw named Evlas Heart, also known as the Black Heart. Ev runs into an elf (they're mutated humans, commonly used for manual labor) and lends a helping hand to the poor kid and somehow gets caught up in a giant conspiracy of sorts. I don't really know what was going on, just that Ev did lots of gymnastics and a lot of people got shot. There's also an ex-sheriff named Samuel Dune who can't decide whether or not to kill Ev. The reason this story never went anywhere, aside from its lack of plot, was because I could never decide if Ev was a man or a woman dressed like a man. In the following short he's a man, because that requires the least amount of explanation on my part.
12/02 (bar bouncer)

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DDD
This was my story for the Nanowrimo 2001, which actually made it over 50000 words, even though I was nowhere near the end of the story and had, in fact, run out of things to write about it. DDD is short for Dream Deficiency Disorder; people who contract it lose the ability to have full REM sleep and thus gradually go insane and die. The people who can treat DDD are called Somnists; the main character is a Somnist in training, and her fiance just went into stage 7 DDD, a coma from which patients never recover. You can dig up the first few chapters of DDD on the website if you look hard enough; it takes place in the future, and there are aliens and drag queens and junkies. The fragment I wrote is a possible end to the story.
10/03 (ending)

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Death Note

Sonya's fault. So Sonya's fault. A bored genius teenager finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it; said bored genius (name of Yagami Light/Raito) decides to take over the world.

10/04 (drabble for Sonya)
12/04 (Raito, 100%)
12/04 (Raito/L stupid Christmas fic)

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The Demon Ororon
Beautiful manga; I highly recommend it to everyone. It even has eye-gouging!

12/04 (othello, mitsume, reckoning)

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Dreamscape
This was an actual dream I had; there were two guys, a blond and one with silver hair. At one point the silvertop said something along the lines of "There are people after us with really big guns, and it's all your fault!" and I decided to write down the whole thing. It's sort of an alternate universe Mafia story, only not at all. Leo and Quinn are a pair of nobles who accidentally get teleported into the middle of a gang war, and they're stuck with each other until they can either get home or kill the people who are trying to kill them. Dreamscape touches on a couple of other plotlines, because the walls of reality are very thin in the story. This story is where I keep the concept of The Cloisters, a hotel for people on the run- as long as you're there, you don't need to eat or sleep and you cannot get hurt in any way. But as soon as you leave, all bets are off. Also, there are rat people, and Quinn's endless list of girlfriends, most of whom share some characteristics with Leo. This story is very silly and has no plot whatsoever, but it's also got a waffle maker named Oedipus, so who's really counting?.

05/03 (fall)

Index: A - B

Aggregati
I don't even know where this came from. Futuristic society with god-figures and nano machines and racial prejudices like whoa. The main character's an ass, but he's hot.

12/04 (Vaz, Asha, college students)
12/04 (stalking Vaz)

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Bleach
Such a shiny, shiny anime. Such shiny, shiny characters. Mm, shiny. Shiny like Ikkaku's head! *fails*

12/05 (ikkaku, contingency plans)
12/05 (zaraki, conundrum)

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Black Heart

This was the story inspired by watching too much Trigun. It takes place in a sort of western/cowboy/desert/radioactive wasteland setting, and the main character is an outlaw named Evlas Heart, also known as the Black Heart. Ev runs into an elf (they're mutated humans, commonly used for manual labor) and lends a helping hand to the poor kid and somehow gets caught up in a giant conspiracy of sorts. I don't really know what was going on, just that Ev did lots of gymnastics and a lot of people got shot. There's also an ex-sheriff named Samuel Dune who can't decide whether or not to kill Ev. The reason this story never went anywhere, aside from its lack of plot, was because I could never decide if Ev was a man or a woman dressed like a man. In the following short he's a man, because that requires the least amount of explanation on my part.

12/02 (bar bouncer)

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DDD
This was my story for the Nanowrimo 2001, which actually made it over 50000 words, even though I was nowhere near the end of the story and had, in fact, run out of things to write about it. DDD is short for Dream Deficiency Disorder; people who contract it lose the ability to have full REM sleep and thus gradually go insane and die. The people who can treat DDD are called Somnists; the main character is a Somnist in training, and her fiance just went into stage 7 DDD, a coma from which patients never recover. You can dig up the first few chapters of DDD on the website if you look hard enough; it takes place in the future, and there are aliens and drag queens and junkies. The fragment I wrote is a possible end to the story.

10/03 (ending)

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Death Note

Sonya's fault. So Sonya's fault. A bored genius teenager finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it; said bored genius (name of Yagami Light/Raito) decides to take over the world.

10/04 (drabble for Sonya)
12/04 (Raito, 100%)
12/04 (Raito/L stupid Christmas fic)

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The Demon Ororon
Beautiful manga; I highly recommend it to everyone. It even has eye-gouging!

12/04 (othello, mitsume, reckoning)

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Dreamscape
This was an actual dream I had; there were two guys, a blond and one with silver hair. At one point the silvertop said something along the lines of "There are people after us with really big guns, and it's all your fault!" and I decided to write down the whole thing. It's sort of an alternate universe Mafia story, only not at all. Leo and Quinn are a pair of nobles who accidentally get teleported into the middle of a gang war, and they're stuck with each other until they can either get home or kill the people who are trying to kill them. Dreamscape touches on a couple of other plotlines, because the walls of reality are very thin in the story. This story is where I keep the concept of The Cloisters, a hotel for people on the run- as long as you're there, you don't need to eat or sleep and you cannot get hurt in any way. But as soon as you leave, all bets are off. Also, there are rat people, and Quinn's endless list of girlfriends, most of whom share some characteristics with Leo. This story is very silly and has no plot whatsoever, but it's also got a waffle maker named Oedipus, so who's really counting?

05/03 (fall)

I just found a recipe for Blueberry Boy Bait.

Gah.

One of the other things that I dislike about the new blogger interface is that I can't publish entries in bulk anymore. It takes all the fun out of one liners like this. *sigh*

I'm working on indexing everything I've written over the past two years, and creating a glossary of sorts for every story concept. This may take a while, so I'll put it up in pieces and then link to it in the sidebar- that's one of the things about the new blogger that I *do* like. Each entry is now its own webpage, like livejournal entries are. Just click the timestamp at the bottom to get to the url. (Makes my life so much easier, it does...)

Gratuitous Babble! (Catalogue)

You know, there was a time, long past, when I would update this thing four, five, six times a day- and it would usually be something entertaining, if slightly in-joke-ish. Now I'm lucky if I make that number in a month, and that makes me a little sad.

It's not that I've run out of things to say, or that I've run out of ideas; I doubt that'll ever happen because, let's face it, I'm a crackhead and there's always random shit firing off in my brain.

This summer has been particularly pathetic in terms of volume, though, and I don't really have an excuse for it. I'm not working eight hours a day like I was last summer (granted, I spent those eight hours on the internet, making it much easier to post, but still) and all the recent life-stuff going on should have provided me with plenty of inspiration.

I think I've gotten past the point of actual laziness to the point of extra-special-mega-ultra-uberlazy. Hence why I'm making gratuitious excuse posts like this one. (I could go back to doing one liners, you know. But that'd take too long, since Blogger's redesign runs ridiculously slowly on either of my comps.)

So! Summer of 2001, there were scads of new ideas; Seventh Sword, Revolution, IQ (which I swear I'll draw someday, honest), DDD, the end of Boffo (though that didn't actually happen for another year or so and *still* hasn't been put online), Black Heart (there is actually a snippet for that on the blog somewhere), and more art-things than you could shake a stick at.

Summer 2002 was full of various traumae in the form of WFC, Kev's new job, Shojocon, and...me being a jackass. Oh, what a jackass I was. But there were still all sorts of art-things, a ridiculous amount of bad poetry, Song of Shadows, Firefly (which I'd forgotten I'd thought up until I went back through the archives), and Seventh Hour (yeah, okay, so I do shitty generic urban fantasy/sci-fi like a two-dollar whore with repeat customers, shut up).

Last summer got me Godless Avatar, the orphan thing, and a whole lot of angst over the parents, but at least then I was doing shorts for other concepts; Boffo and Solneki, and at least a little poetry. I kind of had an excuse for doing very little between mom and dad and college and that bloody job.

This summer? All I've got is Stella Matin, which hasn't made an appearance here because it can't decide what tense it wants to be written in. (The main character says past tense second person, the main support says present first person, the primary minor characters say past third person, and they all want more screen time than they deserve. If I knew what any of them looked like, I'd totally make a comic.) June wasn't so bad, but last month was pathetic. Really pathetic.

Of course, since I'll be effectively gone for the second half of this month, I don't have very high hopes of getting much done, but I'm going to try. More book reviews! More baaaad poetry! More stupid story fragments! More art, god damnit! More movie reviews, too, but I guess I need to go see movies for that...*cough*

Definitely need to get back in the habit of carting around a notebook and then transcribing things...that's important, especially now that I do most of my writing on computer. Should reorganize ideas and things, definitely. Should stop being lazy, most definitely.

We'll see how that goes. (I can't believe it's already August...)

I don't need to be anything other than a prison guard's son
I don't need to be anything other than a specialist's son
I don't have to be anyone other than a birth of two souls in one
Part of where I'm going is knowing where I'm coming from

I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately
All I have to do is think of me and have peace of mind
I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I gotta do
Or who I'm supposed to be
I don't want to be anything other than me

I'm surrounded by liars everywhere I turn
I'm surrounded by imposters everywhere I turn
I'm surrounded by a identity crisis everywhere I turn
Am I the only one to notice?
I can't be the only one who's learned

I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately
All I have to do is think of me and have peace of mind
I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I gotta do
Or who I'm supposed to be
I don't want to be anything other than me

Can I have everyone's attention please
If you're not like this and that
You're gonna have to leave
I came from the mountain, the crust of creation
My whole situation made from clay, dust, stone
And now I'm telling everybody

I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately
All I have to do is think of me and have peace of mind
I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I gotta to do
Or who I'm supposed to be
I don't want to be anything other than me
I don't want to be
I don't want to be
I don't want to be
-Gavin Degraw, "I Don't Want to Be"

Love this song. Great sentiment, great sound- very good for screaming along with in the car.

"I don't see why we're here, of all places..."

"Quit being such a- a yuppie in training! We're here to watch, mostly. You know. To remind ourselves."

"Of what, precisely?"

Opal glared and shoved an ice cream cone in her husband's direction. She bit viciously at her own, a dripping construction of mint chip and chocolate fudge, and sat down beside him with a surly thump.

Tyler sighed, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket. He handed it to Opal without looking at her. "Here. You've got chocolate on your nose."

"You're impossible." She took the handkerchief anyway.

"Yup."

They sat in silence for a little longer, eating their ice cream. The park was crowded; it was a sunny Saturday in June, and everyone was out enjoying the weather. There were clusters of children playing soccer and making noise while parents chatted idly nearby; other couples, much younger and probably much more in love, wandered past holding hands; a group of rebellious teens sulked over contraband cigarettes in the shadows of the old playground. Tyler preferred the place when it was quieter, but there had once been a time when he would've been in the thick of things, making as much noise and as much trouble as possible.

Things changed. He stared bitterly at his ice cream- it was coffee, and he used to hate coffee. He'd somehow turned into his mother.

"Look." Opal leaned against him, bright and warm. He followed her gaze to a pair of girls across the path. They were laughing and leaning on each other, bare skin flashing in the sunlight. "They're in love. Do you see it?"

She still had chocolate on her nose, but he ignored that for the moment to examine the couple more closely. It was there- the way they touched each other, the way they smiled; equal parts shyness, joy, and simple lust. Not that lust ever made anything simple, but it was nice to see it not interfering with people's lives for a change.

"They don't quite realize it yet, but they will. Just wait for it..." Tyler shrugged and watched, feeling slightly voyeuristic. The girls settled down in the shade of a tree, still talking and smiling- and then the taller one leaned down to whisper something just as her friend turned her head to say something else, and their lips met in a clumsily choreographed kiss. They jerked apart, blushing furiously, eyes sparkling. The shorter one leapt up, pulling the other with her, saying something they both laughed at. They held hands as they walked back down the path, still laughing.

Opal leaned back against the bench with a satisfied smirk. "First kiss. Those are always the best, you know- the ones that mean the most."

"Is that what we came here to see? Other people in love?" The implication stung, though he knew he deserved it. "I know I've been busy lately but-"

"Shut up, Ty." She used his nickname derisively, impatiently. "And stop feeling guilty, because that's not the point of this. If I wanted you to feel guilty, I would've taken you somewhere else."

"So what was the point, since I seem to have missed it so completely? You'll have to forgive me if I don't see the big picture here, I'm a little slow sometimes." The sunlight was giving him a headache. Yes. That was the reason he was being so defensive, nothing else. Certainly not because she'd hit a nerve, and not because he had anything to feel guilty about.

Opal licked melted ice cream off her hand and gestured expansively at the park, splattering her hand even further. "Look at them. The children, the parents, the lovers- they're human. Real people. And sometimes I get tired of feeling like I'm not a real person, so this helps to remind me. We were like that once, Tyler. Things have changed, but they haven't changed that much." She turned to him and smiled a crooked smile. "I still love you, and I always will, no matter how much of an ass you are."

There was a lump in his throat that didn't really belong there. Definitely the ice cream's fault. "We're turning into our parents, you know."

"It's called growing up." She always had to be the mature one, didn't she?

"We should stop. Growing up, I mean."

Her eyes danced. "There's a swingset over there."

He looked at his ice cream cone. Most of it had melted onto his knees; he threw the remains into the trash beside the bench and stood. He'd never liked coffee much anyway. "Race you?"

"You're on." She was up and running before the words left her mouth, but he caught up with her easily anyway and swung her over his shoulder. He ignored her kicking and squealing as he carried her the rest of the way to the swings, his laughter lost in the bright noise of the summer day.
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Excuse me, I need to gag myself now. They're cute, though, if slightly dysfunctional.