They're coming to take us away. Our internet, I mean, and also everything else in our house. The theory is that we will get our stuff back in our new house, and it will have internet on Monday, but not one other thing in this move has gone according to plan, so I'm not counting on that, either.

I am, however, hoping for a kind and naive neighbor with an unsecured wireless connection. If I don't get that, I will see you when I see you.

As I was shutting down my computer prepartory to moving, I found a number of half-finished posts and posts I never got around to, you know, actually posting. And I thought I would leave you with one of them. This I wrote after I wrote the fanfic warnings post, because, let's face it. Published writers need warnings at least as much as we do. So I thought I would come up with just a rough start - I mean, obviously there are many many many more warnings needed. Feel free to leave them in the comments. Maybe we can get together a definitive list.

(And, yes, I had at least one specific published writer in mind for each one of these. I offer bonus points, which can be redeemed for many imaginary prizes, to anyone who can guess which writers go with which warnings.)

Published Author Warnings

WARNING: I used to have a three-dimensional character, and then I fell in love with him, and now he is Prince Sparklepants Shinyhorse, the most perfect man/vampire/werewolf/demon/half-unicorn/whatever in all of creation. Also, if people criticize him, or my writing of him, I will go off the rails. On the internet. It will be funny in that way where you keep wondering why my family and friends aren't taking care of me.

WARNING: I write fiction, but I believe every word. If you don't, I will send my characters to kill you.

WARNING: If you read one chapter of any of my books, you will end up reading my entire body of work in a week and a half. After it's all over, you will find you are unshowered and vaguely sticky. You'll have blank spots in your memory and a pervading sense of shame you can only cure by fucking a stranger in the backseat of your grandfather's convertible. (If your grandfather doesn't have a convertible, you're out of luck.)

WARNING: If you read anything I write that isn't fiction, you'll never be able to read my stories again. (Special Certain Science Fiction Writers Corollary: If you encounter me on the internet, there's a 35% chance you'll give up on fiction entirely.)

WARNING: I am so done with this series, but, dude, I bought a house back on book 5 and I've got payments to make. Look forward to the next dozen installments, all of which will read like pastiche from increasingly unskilled hands.

WARNING: I'm not done with this series; I'm afraid of it. I spend all my time thinking of creative ways not to write another word of it. Please stop asking me about it; I'm already heavily medicated and hiding from my fans.

WARNING: I'm a big name. I don't have to listen to my editor anymore.

WARNING: I've decided I'm not writing the hard parts anymore. No more plot that makes sense! No more actual story! From now on, it's bad jokes and sex scenes all the way, baby.

WARNING: I don't think I'm my character. I just wish I was. She's shiny! And perfect! (Special Dorothy L. Sayers Only Exception: If you're Dorothy L. Sayers, you can get away with this. If you aren't, you can't. This means you. Yes, you too. Sorry! It was a one time deal, apparently.)

WARNING: I'm starting to hate my main character, but I'm not going to stop writing about him.

WARNING: I really love myself. A lot. Every word I write is spun gold in text form.

WARNING: I was really, really depressed when I wrote this. I'm hoping I can pass the trauma on to you.

WARNING: I did my research, and by god, you will know it if I have to hit you over the head with fifty pages of utterly extraneous exposition.

WARNING: I didn't do my research. If you notice, obviously you don't care about my art.

WARNING: I am completely fucking crazy. Seriously. All my sentences end with special crazy-flavored periods, and all my articles are special crazy-thes and crazy-ands. And that's just my fiction. In real life, I am even worse. I don't know why they're still letting me attend cons, or indeed leave my house.

WARNING: I...don't really get why we have to have women. I mean, in the species. They just bother me. I can think of only two uses for a woman:

1. To give birth to everyone in the story.
   
2. To act as anti-gay buffering devices. (Stories written since 1970 only.)

Fortunately, it turns out they can mostly fulfill these functions and still be a) dead b) entirely off the page or c) non-sentient.

WARNING: Turns out writing novels really doesn't work instead of therapy, but that hasn't stopped me from trying. For the last 35 years.

WARNING: I wrote this thinking of the movie rights. It's not really a novel, per se - it's more of a pre-novelization.

WARNING: I hate you.

The first time I bought a car, I was 23. I had cash in hand. (From my father. Thanks, Daddy!) I was ready to buy. I knew what I wanted.

I could not get people to see me in the lot. I walked up and asked for service and was told it was too much trouble to let me test drive a car. ("You'd have to buy it," the car salesman told me. I'd have to buy it to drive it. Seriously. He said that. "I'd have to bring it down, and, well." I just stared at him and then left. After that, what else is there to say?)

When people did see me in the lot, I got treated like an idiot. Outright lies! ("It's this year's." It was last year's, and how could he think I would not see the sticker saying so?) Patronizing behavior! ("Well, first, let's talk about color. I know that's important to you girls.") Borderline actionable behavior! (I'm thinking here of the salesguy who kept pressing closer and closer to me and backing me against cars. I had no desire to test drive with him. All I wanted to do was get off his lot.)

By the time we were ready to buy, I was nearly ready to commit homicide. ( Car buying: less fun than oral surgery. )

I love love love authors who use warnings, largely because I rely on them. But, in addition to the big important warnings, I think we all also have fantasy warnings. Or, okay, I do. Here are just a few of the ones I long to see on stories - or, hey, I'd like to slap them on myself, sometimes.

WARNING: I wrote this same story five years ago, except then it was Clark/Lex and now it's Kirk/Spock. It's also been Angel/Buffy and Holmes/Watson. It's just my area of interest! I even recycled a lot of the sentences from the first two rape scenes, so you know what the really specially interesting parts are.

WARNING: I am going to use a tragedy that would normally be the main focus of any story in which it occurred (death of a child, death of a family, death of an entire race or culture, whatever) as a mechanism for getting my pairing to fuck. I am pretty sure that makes it more dramatic and arty. I don't actually intend to address any of the probable outcomes of this tragedy, like sadness, say, or maybe even some anger. It's just background tragedy. It's the kind of thing that is really seriously awful but people forget it and they are entirely all right as soon as they have some sex with the right person.

WARNING: There's a lot more to this story, but I didn't feel like writing it. Or any plot or characterization or anything, really. Mostly I just wrote "cock" a lot.

WARNING: All dialogue sounds the same to me.

WARNING: The content of this story is going to take an abrupt left turn midway through, and I'm going to attempt to keep the tone the same, so you're going to end up with, say, a story about rape told in a light romantic-comedy style. Whiplash is probable.

WARNING: I don't really have any plot left, but I wanted to write another story in this series because it turns out I didn't get to talk about their Christmas presents! It's going to be a very traditional Christmas, even though one of my characters is a Jew and the other isn't from this galaxy.

There are other warnings I'd like to see, too.

WARNING: Scenery Chewing by People Who Are Normally on a Scenery-Free Diet

See, okay. I would like to introduce a new concept that has probably been discussed a million times before but not by me and I am ranting and ranting means no searching through several dozen years of meta before posting.

This concept is: emotional range.

It is very convenient for us that terrible things usually happen to our characters in canon! (We will address what to do if terrible things don't happen to your characters in canon in a minute.) This gives us some idea how they will react to any terrible things we might do to them. (And, frankly, we do a lot of terrible things to them, but we also make sure they have lots of blowjobs. Perhaps it balances out?)

I realize this does not sound radical to most of you, but trust me, it is.

So, take Jack O'Neill. He's an especially convenient case, because the worst thing that could possibly happen to him has already happened, and we know exactly how he reacted. No, that thing is not Daniel's death(s); it's Charlie's. The entire planet could explode and not be worse than that. So his response to Charlie's death could be considered a ten on his emotional range. Probably everything - everything - else that happens to him, up to and including the end of the world, should be no higher than an eight.

Or, let me put this another way, for people who didn't like number lines: if Jack survived Charlie's death - and he did! - he's unlikely to fall down weeping and cutting himself in the gateroom if Daniel breaks up with him.

Or let's take reboot Spock, who doesn't have a kid and ( probable spoilers for the reboot, although do keep in mind I haven't seen it ) Again, falling down weeping on the bridge if he breaks a nail is really unlikely. Unless you, say, shoot him up with some kind of massive inhibition-reducing virus (And has anyone done a challenge of redoing TOS eps in the reboot universe? Because if so, I want to see a MILLION RESPONSES for The Naked Time, which happens to be the only TOS ep I've seen and so very worth it.), Spock is not going to spend a lot of time sobbing into his pillow. (Which is good, because crying Vulcans are very bad for morale. In fact, I'm betting the Enterprise's alert scale goes something like this: yellow alert, orange alert, red alert, oh shit we're all fucked alert, and, finally, the dreaded crying Vulcan alert, which immediately enacts the wills of everyone on board, supplies them all with a powerful euphoric narcotic, and notifies their next of kin.)

Now, what if you are in one of those fandoms where the worst thing that ever happens to someone is that his toilet catches on fire? My first suggestion would be that maybe, just maybe, this is not the fandom for the festival of world explosion and child death. But, hey, fine, maybe you want to write that in MythBusters or whatever. Your choice! In that case, here are some rules of thumb:

1. Cutting is not everyone's first response to trauma.
   
2. If you let people fill in some emotional blanks, what they imagine will likely work better for them than what you've written.
   
3. Vomiting is not everyone's first response to trauma.
   
4. Some people cry. Some people hit things. Some people take over small nations. It's a good idea to know which type your character is and write accordingly.
   
5. Fainting is not everyone's first response to trauma.

These are just guidelines! If you want to write about how Grant breaks up with Jamie and Jamie faints and weeps helplessly and cuts himself and pukes on set, go right ahead. You might want to put a warning on that one, though. I suggest:

WARNING: This absolutely isn't intended to be parody or farce, but you could be forgiven for thinking it is.

WARNING: Relationships That Could Have Come from a Classic Romance Novel

You know, people often talk dismissively about virgins writing sex scenes, or insist that they can tell that the writer of a given sex scene has never actually had sex. This is not so much my issue. I've had sex, and there was in fact a three-year period of my life when I apparently did nothing else. And yet I routinely fuck up sex scenes when I write them - I'll get them back from my betas with gentle comments like, "In our species - which is what I thought John was! - men generally only have the one penis. I say this because you've given him two." I once wrote a penis-in-vagina sex scene in which, in the first draft, neither party removed their skin-tight pants.

My point is: it's easy to get lost in the words, and I know this. When I read a biologically impossible sex scene, my thought is not, "Oh, what a virgin" - because, what, virgins can't do research? My thought is, "Oh, how sad. I wish she'd had my betas."

No. My issue is when I read a story and hope the writer has never had sex or been in a relationship. Because, look, it's not supposed to be like that. Like, I don't know how to tell you this, but, say, Blair being desperately in love with Jim, while Jim totally thinks (not says, but thinks) Blair is an idiot and a slut and a basically worthless person but is helpless to avoid fucking him anyway, and what a bitch Blair is for tempting him in that way: that is not a love story. The only possible happy ending for that story is if Simon stages an intervention ("Listen, the thing is: Jim's just a dick. A great cop, but a total, total douchebag. Let me introduce you to someone a little nicer, okay?") and Blair moves the fuck on with his life, possibly after photocopying Jim's penis, reducing it to 75%, and then papering the squad room with it.

Or, to take another example - when two people are having sex, and one of them thinks something along the lines of, I am so turned on that if he tells me to stop I won't be able to, that is not an awesome and sexy thought. That is a thought that makes me cringe, because if it's true, that character is an asshole at best, and yet usually the story is inviting me to see "not being able to stop" (and those quotes are used correctly, because, seriously: you can always stop; there's no such thing as sexual inertia). Basically, the only way that can be romantic and loving is if, say, Arthur thinks it, and then Merlin says, "Hey, stop," and Arthur immediately does. You have to have the character prove himself wrong, or it isn't true love, it's time for Merlin to go cry on Gwen's shoulder a bit and then enter a happy relationship with - well, anyone. Gwen! Morgana! Lancelot! The dragon! Not Arthur, is my point.

I mean, do feel free to write stories in which people think stalking is insanely romantic, or whatever. But, again, consider using this warning:

WARNING: After you're done reading this, you'll wonder if you should make a small donation to my therapy fund. PayPal accepted.

WARNING: Roget Wept

True fact: you cannot imitate the dialogue or internal voice of a very smart character or someone with a great vocabulary (or both!) with just a thesaurus. Here's why, and I really want to put this in the largest font ever seen on the internet, but I will refrain:

You can only use a thesaurus if you already know and are comfortable using the alternate words suggested.

See, okay - there seems to be some confusion about this. When you look up a word in a thesaurus, you get a range of choices. They do not all have precisely the same denotation, and they sure as shit do not have the same connotation. You're supposed to look at the list, select the one that is most appropriate for your particular context, and go with it.

You're not supposed to just swap words in and out willy-nilly. The result is, at best, strange and stilted, and at worst it's extremely comical. It's hard to take Fraser's narrative about his true love seriously when he's marveling over Ray's glamorous and presentable penis, or to truly believe Uhura when she waxes rhapsodic about Spock's haunting ears and spicy fingers.

The suggested warning for people choosing not to follow this advice is:

WARNING: This story is best used as a Find the Unfortunate Not-Quite-a-Synonym game. Double points to anyone who can fill in the original word!

P.S. For the good of fandom's soul, someone needs to do drawings of him embracing her waste and her body going taunt, things like that. There must be SOME way to communicate why these are such painful errors, and I think art is our last best hope.

ETA: Oh my god, people, look what greensilver did! Embracing her waste and her body going taunt. It is AWESOME.

We're buying a house. Or we're trying to. This is a process that appears to be designed to teach you the folly of wanting to buy a house.

And the thing is, we already HAVE a house. We bought this one ten years ago, and the process was, okay, a little terrifying for first-time buyers, but it was nothing like this. The wrinkles that have been added in that decade:

1. They used to make you sign a stack of papers roughly the same size as War and Peace. (And you had to sign every single page.)
   
   Now, they make you sign (and sometimes also initial) every piece of paper in the world. We have twice - TWICE - had to sign a document indicating our understanding of the fact that people can farm. Not us, mind you. Just - people. Other people. Somewhere. They have the right to farm, and now we know it. After all, we signed a document saying we know it. Twice. (The Realtor who represented us when we bought our current house, who I miss more and more with every passing day, told us, "Every piece of paper you sign, that's a lawsuit." From this, I can conclude that every person in the state of California except us spent the last ten years filing property-related lawsuits.)
   
   
2. They used to give you all the papers in one big batch. This was scary, and also funny, because, see, I read everything I sign. It's like a sickness; I can't help myself. (I also read the agreements when I install software. There are some great lines in there, people, and I think I may be the only one reading them, because obviously the middle parts are written mostly to entertain the authors. I'm talking primarily about the parts with explosions.) Most people apparently don't, because last time, when we went to our Big Festival of Signing Documents, it took us hours and hours in the little conference room. Our escrow officer kept returning and asking if we had any questions. Or if anything was wrong. Or if we...needed anything. Every time she came back, the furrow between her brows was deeper and her voice was a little higher-pitched.
   
   Now, there are a few huge sets, but mostly they send you the documents in little batches. Every day. For months. So you get a full day to reflect on someone else's right to farm, and also the fact that you are not located in a flood plain, and also that you are indeed living in Los Angeles, where, it turns out, there are sometimes earthquakes. Then, the next day, you get to meditate mindfully on sixteen separate pages that basically say, "Hey, you're going to have to pay for this, you know." (You have to sign all sixteen, and also initial pages two and eleven, and the need to initial will not be obvious, and will require a further round of faxing.) This turns the Big Festival of Signing Documents into the Endless March through Document Hell.
   
   
3. They used to use technology - well, if not for good, at least not for evil. The last time we looked for a house, our Realtor would email us the current listings that matched our criteria, and we'd email her back with a list of the ones we wanted to see. Beyond that, there really wasn't any technology involved except the telephone. And the laser printer.
   
   Now, though, it's not so much with the email. (We can, after all, do all our own searching of the MLS, right there on a million websites.) It's the faxing. Apparently, there's a law that says that every one of the documents we have to sign (remember: all the paper in the WORLD) has to be faxed at least three times or we're not allowed to buy the house. And we do not own a fax, because I won't buy a machine unless it has at least one function I actually look forward to using, so this means a lot of me chauffeuring documents around town like I gave birth to them.

My basic response to this whole joyous process has been twofold:

1. Somewhere very early on, I lost sight of the house altogether. We've visited it a few times, sure, but we've spent easily three thousand times the hours with the documents than we have with the actual house. As a result, I keep forgetting that eventually we will supposedly, you know, have a new house. Instead, I dream of the day when we won't have any more documents to sign. I imagine that this will be nice for me in the future, in that if we ever actually do get the house, I will be delighted - a house! When I was only expecting a significant reduction in the amount of paper in my life! - but right now it sucks.
   
   
2. I spend a lot of time playing Realty Roulette. This is where I think of a place we could conceivably live - Iowa City, Iowa! Pittsfield, Massachusetts! Manchester, New Hampshire! (and rock on, marriage rights states, for giving me more places to play with) - and then I go to realtor.com to see what kind of house we could get there for what we're paying here. (By the way, if any of you knows of a real estate listings site for, like, Canada or New Zealand, that would really help me expand my Realty Roulette.) Since I never check San Francisco or New York City, the answer is always: a lot more than we can get here. A lot. Acres of land! Lakefront property! Historic homes gorgeously remodeled! Enough bedrooms for us to have five more kids! (Not that we would, mind you.) Enough square footage to host every fangirl in the state of Iowa simultaneously!
   
   And then sometimes I get really crazy - this is especially on the days when the house-buying process is so horrible that I am ready to go live in a tent in the wilderness, like, how hard could it be to baby-proof the great outdoors? NOT AS HARD AS BUYING A HOUSE, let me tell you. On those days, I go check out real estate in areas where I know we will be able to afford a palace. Turns out, for example, we could pretty much buy all of Flint, Michigan. Not that we'd want to - no one wants to, which is the problem, as I understand it - but we could. We could get together with some other like-minded folks, take over the town, and turn it into the Fannish Oasis! And then my mind spirals off into the awesome library we will have (it will have a zine section and a dedicated archives computer and a children's wing with only non-poisonous toys, and reading groups dedicated to classic badfic and cliches), and the awesome hotel we will build for cons, and the community garden, and eventually I've managed to forget about the fact that I am once again going to get into my car, with my car-hating child, and drive to Best Beloved's work to get her signature on documents that must be signed today or the world will fall into the hellmouth. Or so the email from the Realtor suggests.

Anyway. Today was an awful day, a new low in house-buying. (Anyone want to move to Flint with us?) So I developed a new mental escape, which consists mostly of imagining how various characters from various fandoms would handle this. Like, all those stories in which, say, John and Rodney buy a beachfront house in California? Not going to happen. When they get the document from the title company (and this assumes they won't need a mortgage, by the way) that requires them to list everywhere they've lived for the last ten years, what will they put? A basement in Colorado? Abducted by aliens? I bet they don't sell houses to people who are missing five years of their lives. I mean, we've lived in the same place for ten years, and there's some question about whether or not they'll sell to us.

Benton Fraser would probably carefully, correctly fill out every single form, returning it precisely as indicated, having read and thoughtfully considered each one. And then have a wild bout of hysterical blindness which could only be cured by the repeated application of snow. Canadian snow. (It cannot possibly be this hard to buy a house in Canada. Canadians are sane, right?)

And I don't know the Supernatural boys that well, but I'm guessing they'd either shoot someone or exorcise the whole damn realty profession no later than ten days into any attempted home purchase.

Anyone else have suggestions for how fannish people might handle this? I would be interested to know, because maybe there's a coping method I could borrow that's better than my current one, which consists of:

1. Fantasize, with the help of realtor.com.
   
2. Eat mint chocolate UFOs.
   
3. Cry.

(And, yes, I've already considered switching to exorcism. Does anyone know how to draw a pentagram around the state of California? I can't be the first person to have wanted to do this.)

Sometimes you may say to yourself: all these people have me friended. And yet I posted a story (or a link, or four extremely compelling pictures of my cat, including one where she almost had a ribbon on her head) and many of them have not commented! You may wonder why. You may even be downcast in your wonderment and confusion.

Well, wonder no longer! I have been doing some careful research on this very topic, and I have all the answers.

• 15% of the people who have you friended have since left for greener fannish pastures, or perhaps for somewhere outside of fandom altogether (it's sad, but it happens; fannish scientists are working round the clock to discover a cure, except for the four hours they spent reading that Jack Harkness/Brian O'Conner epic last night). They no longer read your fandom-related posts. (Or, alternately, it's cats they don't like. My point is: whatever you posted doesn't interest them.)
  
  
• 15% were planning to get back to that post later. It's open! It's in a tab! Or it's in Read Later! Just...wow, busy, you know how it is. (Of course, if you're counting every comment and comparing it to a master list, maybe you don't know how it is. In that case you'll just have to trust me.)
  
  
• 10% of the people who have you friended think you're boring. (Sorry! Sometimes science means having to say the hard truths.) They scroll past you, or they filter you. Or maybe they think everyone they have friended is boring, and they don't read their friends list at all; their friending is just a social nicety. It would probably be better if you believed that last one. Yeah, this segment is the one we'll call "social niceties."
  
  
• 10% of the people who have you friended weren't reading the day you posted. Someone had horrible news and came home and went straight to bed with a dog and a hot water bottle. Someone has food poisoning and is puking too much to go near her computer. Someone is addicted to a flash game and can't click away until she beats level 77. Someone is in the South Pacific having a lot more fantastic sex than you ever have or ever will; she isn't thinking about you or fandom right now. (Okay, she's thinking, "I have to use that the next time I write Merlin/Arthur, or John/Rodney, or Bertie/Jeeves - ooo, yeah, Jeeves is probably mega-kinky." But she's not missing her friends list, is my point.)
  
  
• 10% only read you on a phone, or a netbook or internet tablet that's impossible to type on, or a Kindle, or in five minute snatches at work or between dragging kids to soccer or whatever. They love you, but they never do manage to get back to comment.
  
  
• 10% of the people who read you only lurk. They lurk everywhere. Maybe they can't type. Maybe they have tentacles and can't find a tentacle-ready keyboard. You don't know. And do you really want to risk displaying your prejudice against the betentacled?
  
  
• 5% of the people who read you are still pissed off about the comment you didn't reply to. You know the one. (You reply to every single comment you get, you say? Even the ones obviously from bots? Even the ones LJ forgets to notify you about? In that case, these people are sulking about an inadequate response you left them, where you missed the point or missed the question or failed to thank them or sounded snarky. You can't please everyone. Not even with an incredible facility at hitting "Reply.")
  
  
• 5% of the people who read you are still pissed off about that post you made. You know the one.
  
  
• 5% of the people who read you are pissed off that you didn't comment on one of their important posts. They're withholding sex - sorry, I meant comments - until you understand how important they are, and maybe send some flowers or something.
  
  
• 5% of the people who read you have broken internet connections right now. Fucking Comcast.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you hurt their hands this morning.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you currently have a broken spacebar.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you are heavily medicated. Their loved ones have taken away their keyboards for everyone's safety.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you are seriously undermedicated. Their loved ones have taken away their keyboards so they still have friends when the meds kick back in.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you read you in bed, and a loved one has threatened to take away the keyboard if they type at night anymore.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you are sockpuppets. They're only going to comment if they want sparkle pens.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you are, in fact, commenting, but they're doing so by telepathy. If you're not getting the comments, well, obviously something is wrong with you. They can't be held responsible for that.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you are aliens. They can't ever pass the prove-you're-human test, and for some reason they get the CAPTCHA every time. They are thinking of filing a lawsuit against LJ.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you cannot comment for religious reasons.
  
  
• 1% of the people who read you haven't figured out that you have to hit the "Post comment" button in order to get the comment posted. They keep typing like it's an IM box, and nothing ever shows up, and they just do not know why. They've submitted several complaints to Support about this. (It's possible you didn't want to read their comments anyway.)

But wait, you say! That's everyone!

You're right. It is. So, hey, if you get any comments at all, you have beaten the odds. You must be really awesome and special. Can I friend you?

(P.S. I don't comment a lot, but I'm probably reading. And I'll repeat what I said in my info: I love all the comments I get, except the ones from the spambots who are cordially invited to DIE DIE DIE, but no one ever should feel obligated to comment here. I get the lurking, I really do.)

I haven't been sleeping much lately. This means I've reading a lot of FF. (Yes, even more than usual. But, on the bright side, not quite enough to qualify me for an intervention at the Fan Mental Health Clinic.) Which means that it's time for another damn rant. (If you're new here: in rants, the cut tag indicates mean-spiritedness and general pedantry. Click at your own risk.)

I swear that I will get back to recommending actual FF very, very soon. And it will be even sooner if we could all attend to a few small matters before I lose my mind.

( And notice how I didn't say I'd loose my mind. )

Really. No doubt about it. Shit in the process of being lost as we speak.

( I have a new credo. It is crass and mean and wrong and offensive as hell. Wanna see? )

It's time to discuss a very sensitive topic that I know you will all handle with maturity and respect for your classmates. Yes, it's time to discuss...orgasm.

I heard that, norah. One more remark out of you and you will be staying after class, young lady. Also, fanofall? Don't think I don't see you rolling your eyes.

Yes, orgasm can be a beautiful thing. When a person (or assistive device) gives pleasure to another person, that's a lovely, selfless act, and one we - last warning, people - as mature adults can appreciate. Or mature teenagers. Whatever. 'People old enough for porn' is the concept I'm trying to get across here.

Of course, orgasm can also be, well, a little less than beautiful. Particularly in certain kinds of fictional endeavors. Because, see, sometimes a person can be reading along, and then there's a sudden incursion of screaming and fainting and smelling salts and Mr. Darcy with a riding crop, and that person might think, "Did I just take a detour from Smut Boulevard onto Victorian Novel Lane? I...wow. I didn't know you could do that in spats." Or that person might think, "Jesus, what the hell is wrong with me? I've never done that."

And yet I know some of you out there in readerland have done that, and now is the time to tell me about it.

I'm trying to assuage my own fears of serious abnormality, here. (Yes, really. Well, mostly. Well, partly, anyway. But I also tend to assume anyone I can hear laughing is laughing at me. I never said I wasn't paranoid, if you think back.) I'm also trying to figure out how often these things honestly happen, and under what circumstances. (Because I am nosy. No, there is no better reason. What reason could be better than that?) So let's remember the honor system, OK?

And, truly, no shame attached, no matter what you answer. For one thing, I included in the list items I could answer 'yes' to, and I'm not going to tell you what they were. (Well, OK. Possibly with begging. The right kind of begging. But then, the right kind of begging can get pretty much anything from me.) This should encourage those of you who can answer 'yes' to any of these to believe I'm right there with you, just in case you forgot to bring your sex-positive confidence with you today. And since I can't answer 'yes' to all or even most of them, people who can't check anything should also believe they're in good company. (You can decide for yourself if I count as good company or not.) Furthermore, no one can see your answers, and you should feel free to comment anonymously. Internet + sex + anonymity is pretty much the recipe for sharing, isn't it? So share.

(Which also means, for the record, that if you folks want to pimp this I'd be grateful. I definitely want to hear from all of you, but it'd also be very cool to get answers from people other than the Egregiously Tasteful and Talented Cohort.)

( Get busy, people. )

So. Work.

Also, fandom. Because when work goes sour on me (and lady, make up your fucking mind; sorry, but you have no idea how that needed to be said, and the people who know about the violent offenders will understand this comment), I reel into the welcoming, porny arms of fandom (it's my metaphor and I can damn well fracture it if I wish, unlike certain violent-offender-obsessed people, who are not allowed to touch my metaphors, thanks), only to get. Well. Ranty.

What can I say? I give to fandom what I can't use in my everyday life. Which means I give: 1) sarcasm, 2) enthusiasm, and 3) my rapidly-decreasing tolerance of humanity. (Go away, violent offender lady. And while we're at it: go away, violent offenders. Go - offend yourselves.)

( And if you thought that was nasty and mean-spirited, you should see what's behind the cut. )

Life has been unkind to me and mine lately, which has driven me straight into the logophagic part of acquiring a very large new fandom. As always, it's making me testy. During these periods, I read an enormous number of stories, and I'm usually trying to back-engineer the canon, and, well, I'm not at my all-time most tolerant. Which, let's face it, is not really all that tolerant anyway. In short, it's time for another mean-spirited FF rant.

( Don't say I didn't warn you. )

[Note: this is a fannish LJ, not a political one, so no election comments will be found herein. If you're curious about how I'm feeling, email me and I'll tell you.]

First, I have to say how disappointed I am that I even need to write this, but it is entirely clear that I do. I have in my possession a small collection of flames regarding the content of this LJ. They all have one thing in common: they are pathetic. I mean, there was a time in this world when a flame meant something. I grew up grinding my teeth as I chanted, "Do not feed the trolls" like a mantra. It used to be difficult to move on without responding. And do you know why? Because those trolls were actually good at what they did. They wanted to piss me off, and they succeeded.

From this LJ, though? The very best flames have made me laugh. Most have just left me worried about the future of bitter rhetoric. So it's apparent to me that if I want flaming as an art form to be preserved for future generations, I need to act now. Thus, I'm offering the short course on "Flaming for Dummies." Because evidently some people out there really need it.

( Habits of Highly Effective Flamers (and When I Say Flamers, for Once I'm Not Talking About Gay Men). )

I've been many things in my time: a fan fic bitch, a word bitch, an obsessive bitch. And now, having been converted to the wonderful world of fan vids, I'm preparing to be a vid bitch. (No, actually, I don't think I ever am something other than a bitch of some sort. It's a gift. Of a kind.)

( Why, yes, one more fannish activity is just what I needed to make my life complete. Or, well, completely insane, at any rate. )

In other words: I've lost it, and it's time for another bitter, mean-spirited, entirely unnecessary rant. If you're still in the dewy-eyed phase of FF love - in other words, if you see nothing wrong with "Harry eagerly mouthed Snape's huge, aching, weeping cock, laving it with his tongue and nibbling it until Snape screamed with his gushing release" - don't look behind the cut.

( Some Words, Phrases, and Concepts That I Never Want to Read Again )

Fan fiction is a genre of memes, and not just idea-memes and plot-memes and pairing-memes. Words and phrases also spread through the fan fiction community. (For that matter, so do unrealistic ideas about sex in general and gay sex in particular, but that's a rant for another day.)

Warning: my rants are mean, petty, and bitter. If you can't get into that, don't look behind the cut.

( Fan Fiction Words and Phrases That Should Lie Fallow for a Decade )

This is the Fametracker Forums post that started this livejournal, slightly modified to fit your screen. A statement of Slashy standards! A declaration of war on bad fan fiction! A piece of living history!

( The Fan Fiction Manifesto )