Geri-chan's Journal

It's a little bit early, but wishing everyone on my Friends list a Happy Thanksgiving--may you enjoy lots of turkey (or tofurkey if you're a vegetarian) and pumpkin pie! ^_^ I baked two pumpkin pies myself, and am looking forward to chowing down on them tomorrow with my family. (And if you're not American, I wish you a happy day as well.)

As I mentioned earlier, I was working on a story about Ash, but thanks to this drabble challenge on youka_nitta, a persistent plot bunny about Onozuka from Harudaki demanded to be written, so I ended up working on that instead. Since I'm incapable of writing a drabble, it actually turned out to be a fic disguised as a series of drabbles, and it should be ready to post tomorrow. Then hopefully I'll be able to get back to my poor neglected werewolf!

Once again, no time for a detailed post today, so I thought I'd mention that InsaneJournal will be having a special sale on Friday, Nov. 28th, for permanent accounts, paid accounts, and extra userpics. (Most IJ users have probably already seen the announcement, but just in case you haven't heard, or for LJ users who come over to IJ to comment on fic and such. Either way, it's a good opportunity to snag a permanent account.)

I already have a permanent account, but I might buy the extra userpics, even though I haven't used up all of my 300 slots yet. It's just so cool to be able to have an icon for every conceivable fic or occasion! I wish I had more icons for my LJ, which is a free Plus Account. It's not that I can't afford a paid account; I just didn't want to give LJ my money after the whole strikethrough debacle. Things seem somewhat better now, but I'm still a little leery, and two of my favorite fandom communities, snapedom and lupin_snape, have completely or mostly moved over to IJ anyway.

(Public service announcement over. ^_^)

As for my fanfic projects, now that I've finished the two Petshop fics I was working on, I'm moving on to a couple of short fics about Ash, my OC werewolf from the Always series--at least I hope they'll be short, since I tend to get carried away at times. And then I want to really buckle down and work on my long-postponed post-DH Snupin plot bunny, and maybe squeeze in a short Harudaki (Embracing Love) fic, since evil lore gave me this plot bunny about a missing scene where Iwaki finds out that Katou concealed the truth about Asano. ^_^ (The actual bunny is in her comments to my main meta post.)

Some good news: according to this news post on HPANA, Steve Vander Ark's new book, "In Search of Harry Potter," has been approved for publishing by JKR's lawyers. As I had mentioned in this earlier post, JKR's agents had asked to review the book to make sure it doesn't violate any copyrights. A rather petty move, in my opinion, since it was obviously a travel memoir rather than a reader's guide or encyclopedia, but at least the book is good to go now, and I'm looking forward to buying it as soon as it becomes available. (I notice that neither Leaky nor Mugglenet reported on this HP-related news--is this an anti-Steve bias, not wanting to report anything positive about him or maybe not wanting to encourage people to buy his book? I'd expect that from Leaky, but I thought that Mugglenet was at least attempting to be objective.)

I'm trying to polish up my Petshop fic "Decisions," and hope to have it up by tomorrow night.

For any Bones fans on my Friends list, I have a question about Angela and Hodgins...

( Spoilers for the current season below... )

I'm still trying to keep up the National Blog Posting thing, so today's post is about Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors.

I first came across his works when a friend loaned me a copy of one of the Sandman graphic novels (Season of Mists), and I immediately got hooked. Sandman is about a godlike being known as Dream or Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams. He and his siblings (Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, and Destruction) are collectively known as the Endless, and are living embodiments of the concepts that their names represent. The characters are complex and compelling, as is the universe that they reside in.

Generally, I avoid discussing politics on my journal because it's my fun fandom space, my way to get away from reality. But recently reality and fandom crossed paths when I was browsing the Fiction Alley forums.

As I mentioned in this previous post, I've been watching the Season 2 dvd set of NUMB3RS. I've seen all the episodes when they first aired, sometimes multiple times in reruns, but it's fun watching them again, and I really enjoy listening to the cast and crew commentaries.
( Read more... )

It's National Blog Posting Month and I thought I'd make an effort to post more often, although I don't know if I'll actually be posting every day. We'll see how it goes! So anyway, I was watching the NUMB3RS Season 2 dvd set, and found myself hit by a couple of plot bunnies...

Just a quick update to say that I've turned anonymous commenting back on, since squeaky has announced that he has turned on human verification for anonymous commenting--take that, spammers! Apparently there was enough spamming going on to be a significant problem, and it seems like a reasonable way to deal with it. If the spamming continues, then I'll turn the anonymous commenting off again, but I'm pretty sure most of it was done by spambots.

Once again, I'm reminded of why I'm happy to be on IJ. Sure, there are technical problems from time to time, but I'm willing to forgive a few problems as long as there's good communication between management and the users. Plus, I know my journal won't be deleted without warning, and I got a great deal on a Permanent Account. ^_^

Okay, now I've got to get back to writing fic, so that you guys have something to comment on!

1) You know you're a Harry Potter geek when...you spot a motorcycle with the license plate "GRFNDR" and think, "Ah, that must stand for 'Gryffindor'--the owner must be a Harry Potter fan!" I wasn't able to hang around till the owner came to back to confirm that, though--and I didn't want to seem like a stalker/nutcase in case it stood for something else. But it made me grin, imagining that it might be Sirius's flying motorcycle! ^_^

I apologize to any non-IJ users who want to comment on my fics or other posts, but I've been getting anonymous spam messages recently, advertising free mp3s and porn and such, so I'm disabling anonymous commenting for now. I do cross-post everything on my LJ, so you can always comment there--unless the spammers show up there, too! >_< Grrr...may Professor Snape cast a hex on them!

Hey everybody, go check out the awesome Summer Fest artwork that the_bitter_word made for my story Happy Birthday, Severus! It was a fic/art exchange, and I was expecting only a single illustration, but instead I am receiving an entire pop-up picture book of my story! She did an incredible job illustrating all my favorite scenes from the story, from the humorous moments (Dumbledore holding the cartoon-snake pajamas) to the sad and poignant ones (young Severus slipping away to his room while his parents fight and his birthday cake sits on the table, uneaten), and the sweet ones (Lupin arriving at Snape's door with a birthday cake hidden behind his back, and Snape and Lupin clinking their glasses of wine in a birthday toast). (When I receive the actual book, I'll take some photos and post some scans of it.) Please go and tell The Bitter Word just how awesome the artwork is!

I think most of my Friends list has already seen these, but in case you're interested, my gifts to The Bitter Word were the stories The Return of the Slytherins (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5) and The Werewolf Jamboree.

Okay, here's part 2 of recs and ramblings, and also weird plot bunnies eating at my brain... (Part 1 is here.)

lore made this wonderful post on coming out of the yaoi closet, so although most of my Friends list are HP slashers, I thought I'd share a few of my favorite yaoi titles, and non-yaoi titles that have slashy potential.

EDIT 7/23/08: Oops, just realized that I forgot to warn that there are a few minor spoilers below the cut, but I try not to reveal any big surprises, and I'm not giving away anything that hasn't already been officially published in the US.

I was browsing Metafandom on LJ, and came across this post on "why the editor-in-chief of Ace and Roc thinks there's no print market for m/m romances". *rolls eyes* Obviously this editor has no knowledge of the very healthy yaoi manga market in the US, or about all the women who read slash fic on the web. Anyhow, in answering my reply the OP mentioned a couple of small publishers that have GBLT Young Adult lines that I might be interested in. Which reminded me of a couple of excellent YA authors who write about gay characters, Alex Sanchez and Brent Hartinger. I looked up Hartinger's website and found his blog, which has this hilarious Sex and the City parody video that he and his partner did on gay marriage. If you're a Sex and the City fan, you'll love this!

Apparently they have a video blog called "Two Gay Guys," so I'll have to go check out their other entries.

For any Matsuri Akino fans, I just wanted to mention that I made some icons of Genro from Genju no Seiza and posted them over at my LJ. Please feel free to help yourself.

 Thought my Snupin friends might enjoy this humorous little cartoon about a "werewoof"! It's a Dork Tower strip by John Kovalic. Dork Tower used to appear in Dragon magazine before it ceased print publication, and it's near and dear to my heart, because it's about a bunch of role-playing geeks, and I used to be a total Dungeons and Dragons geek in high school and college. I haven't gamed for awhile, but I still consider myself a geek at heart! ^_^

You know, it's funny that this cartoon appeared today, right after I read this essay by Neil Gaiman, in which he was talking about where a writer's ideas come from: Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven't come together before. ('If a person bitten by a werewolf turns into a wolf what would happen if a goldfish was bitten by a werewolf? What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?')

In this case, I guess it's "what would happen if a dog got bitten by a werewolf?" ^_^

The Waterstone's postcards are online here! This Leaky Cauldron article tells how to find Rowling's story in case you have trouble. I'll cut for spoilers in case anyone doesn't want to be spoiled, but I do want to say that you absolutely MUST go read the Neil Gaiman postcard, especially if you like werewolves!

 I know there are some people on my Friends list who would probably appreciate this awesome Teddy Lupin/Charlie Weasley drawing by venturous. I'm generally not a big Weasley-smut fan, but this drawing is just beautiful. And I love how detailed and intricate Charlie's dragon tattoo is! Please note, it's NC-17 and NWS.

And I meant to mention this on my last post, but I forgot--I am totally hooked on the Torchwood TV series! I've heard people raving about it on Metafandom because of its bisexual characters and canon slash pairing of Jack/Ianto, and I finally got a chance to watch the first season on dvd. I love sci-fi, and sci fi + slashiness is just full of win, but what really got me hooked was John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack Harkness, the head of Torchwood. I swear, this guy just exudes charisma, and he is so compelling to watch. I think the show would not be nearly as good without him.

Last month, I started getting porn spam posted to the comments of my fic Homecoming on the Moonshadow archive. (The story can also can be found here on my journal if you're curious.) I was startled, because I've never received any kind of spam from Moonshadow before, but I figured it was just a random thing. However, the spam comments have continued to pile up, and I notified the archivist, and she said she'd keep an eye on it.

The weird thing is it was just that one story--although recently I've started to get spam on Fathers' Day, which I just posted there, and I got a few for one of the A Sort of Fairytale chapters. Even weirder, I've checked through the recently posted fics going back about a year, and unless I missed something, I'm the only author getting spammed!