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Snarry, Harry and Tery, and inappropriate Christmas carols
I spent the better part of my weekend feeding my Snarry hunger. During work I idly bookmark various recs if they look halfway promising, and I finally got time to sit down with some of them and decide yay or nay. But not before spending a good 12 hours or so reformatting and printing out the existing chapters of the Tea Series by Telanu, all 556 pages of it...chuckling and gibbering to myself all the while as I slid a few hundred yards further into madness. I couldn't help it. The story is perfection, perfect enough that I want to read it in bed before going to sleep at night, which is out of the question if it's only on my hard drive.
It's so GOOD to be back in the grip of a full-fledged obsession again.
Tery didn't understand at all. Not only did she snark about the massive amounts of paper I was using (until I pointed out that I bought it), but she was horrified when I chose to compile the pages into a used (but still in almost new condition) work binder with the word "Surgery" on the spine. Tery has this bizarre hangup where she has to buy brand new materials for every project. She'll use five pages in a composition notebook and then discard it, buying a whole new one the next time she needs to write. Her defense is some nonsense about needing a "clean slate" for her creative energy, but if you tear out the used pages, what you have left IS a clean slate and nobody's the wiser (unless you're freakin' Rain Man or something). Such wastefulness (but means plenty of free notebooks for me, so it isn't all bad).
After completing my labor of love (or "my precioussssss" as I refer to it....I know, how original), I was ready to begin navigating the treacherous waters of fanfiction. I've never loved anything enough to really get into the fanfic scene (I dabbled in a bit of Xena slash and even less Buffy/Giles) so there was nothing to prepare me for the very bad writing that is presently consuming oodles and oodles of bandwidth space. This is the problem with starting with such a pinnacle of talent -- it's all downhill from there. I know what you're thinking: sure, it's easy to sit and criticize without ever lifting a finger to try it myself, but that's the bed in which every writer must lie. And there are some truly bad, bad, spectacularly awful stories sitting on the internet, just waiting to suck up gobs of your time that you will never get back. I don't have a lot of free time, so I violently resent these pieces of smeg trying to steal it.
For instance: "At the End of All Things," which has something to do with Harry receiving the magical equivalent of chemotherapy, naturally administered by Snape, though there is no reason given why the school nurse wouldn't be the more obvious choice (other than the fact that she just isn't sexy enough). The author of this piece is clearly in the medical field, as they go into very involved descriptions of the procedure. There is such a thing as TOO involved though, and this certainly falls into that category. Sorry, cancer and chemo treatments really don't light my Christmas tree, if you know what I mean.
Speaking of too involved, I started on another, "Mirror of Maybe," that started out pretty good. Harry is sucked into a mirror where he's trapped for 13 years, coming back to the present within 20 minutes but with the mind of a 28-year-old man stuck in his 15-year-old body. In the future Voldemort has been defeated, leaving Harry a battle-scarred War Mage named "Ash." (Unfortunate choice of names there: Ash Potter??? Pot Ash????) I was willing to overlook all the Terminator overtones, was silently gritting my teeth every time Harry referred to Snape as "Sev" in his mind (arrrrggggghhh), until the author devoted practically an entire chapter to explaining in excruciating detail the complex metaphysical intricacies of a spell Harry uses to disguise himself in the present. I. Don't. CARE. Go back to your damn Dungeon Master's Guide and Evil Dead DVDs and STOP WASTING MY TIME.
I won't touch anything with a rating of mpreg (male pregnancy) with a 10-foot mouse cord. I will cheerfully accept a world of magic and even borderline pedophilia, but men getting pregnant from their gay lovers? This is such an appallingly stupid concept I was hesitant to tell Tery about it, even if it meant proving that plain old Snarry wasn't the most degenerate level of fiction out there.
*sigh* So it's back to wading for me. As a consequence I've gotten quite adept at speed-reading the first chapter and knowing within a few paragraphs if it's what I want. A snap decision, perhaps unfair judgment, but there is simply too much and life is way too short to spend it reading shite when there are real treasures to be found like the Tea Series.
Tery's a good sport though. When she's channel surfing she'll always stop on a Harry Potter special for me (they aren't in short supply these days with GoF opening up). She likes to rub in the fact that Snape barely appears in any of them (much like he barely appears in the movie), but I pointed out he would become much more important in the next two.
"Oh, I heard they weren't making any more," she said offhandedly.
"Did you now?" I humored her.
"Yep. They said 'enough is enough'."
I said it was perfectly understandable that they'd just walk away from the single most lucrative franchise since Star Wars. Quit while they're ahead and all that. I don't envy her. It's got to be hard being one of about 20 people on the planet who don't care about Harry Potter. I imagine them as Death Eaters, meeting in secret, biding their time and waiting for their chance to take over the world again. Not an easy life, to be sure.
Thoroughly unrelated, this morning in an Albertson's inventory they played "Here Comes Santa Claus." Not terribly noteworthy, except there was a line in there that I didn't remember from childhood that seemed very out of place. It was:
"So let's give thanks to the Lord above that Santa Claus comes tonight"
I was raised in a good Catholic household and our version didn't contain this line. I thought it was inserted as an insidious plot by the poor, oppressed Christians who are having the holiday RIPPED out from under them by callous store employees who refuse to say "Merry Christmas" (I mean really, people....is this honestly the biggest problem you can think of in the world today??), but Tery assures me it's always been there. I say it's a jarring clash of Christianity and secularism, kind of like Jesus and Santa duking it out WWF-style on South Park. And I won't have it, I tell you. I won't.
It's so GOOD to be back in the grip of a full-fledged obsession again.
Tery didn't understand at all. Not only did she snark about the massive amounts of paper I was using (until I pointed out that I bought it), but she was horrified when I chose to compile the pages into a used (but still in almost new condition) work binder with the word "Surgery" on the spine. Tery has this bizarre hangup where she has to buy brand new materials for every project. She'll use five pages in a composition notebook and then discard it, buying a whole new one the next time she needs to write. Her defense is some nonsense about needing a "clean slate" for her creative energy, but if you tear out the used pages, what you have left IS a clean slate and nobody's the wiser (unless you're freakin' Rain Man or something). Such wastefulness (but means plenty of free notebooks for me, so it isn't all bad).
After completing my labor of love (or "my precioussssss" as I refer to it....I know, how original), I was ready to begin navigating the treacherous waters of fanfiction. I've never loved anything enough to really get into the fanfic scene (I dabbled in a bit of Xena slash and even less Buffy/Giles) so there was nothing to prepare me for the very bad writing that is presently consuming oodles and oodles of bandwidth space. This is the problem with starting with such a pinnacle of talent -- it's all downhill from there. I know what you're thinking: sure, it's easy to sit and criticize without ever lifting a finger to try it myself, but that's the bed in which every writer must lie. And there are some truly bad, bad, spectacularly awful stories sitting on the internet, just waiting to suck up gobs of your time that you will never get back. I don't have a lot of free time, so I violently resent these pieces of smeg trying to steal it.
For instance: "At the End of All Things," which has something to do with Harry receiving the magical equivalent of chemotherapy, naturally administered by Snape, though there is no reason given why the school nurse wouldn't be the more obvious choice (other than the fact that she just isn't sexy enough). The author of this piece is clearly in the medical field, as they go into very involved descriptions of the procedure. There is such a thing as TOO involved though, and this certainly falls into that category. Sorry, cancer and chemo treatments really don't light my Christmas tree, if you know what I mean.
Speaking of too involved, I started on another, "Mirror of Maybe," that started out pretty good. Harry is sucked into a mirror where he's trapped for 13 years, coming back to the present within 20 minutes but with the mind of a 28-year-old man stuck in his 15-year-old body. In the future Voldemort has been defeated, leaving Harry a battle-scarred War Mage named "Ash." (Unfortunate choice of names there: Ash Potter??? Pot Ash????) I was willing to overlook all the Terminator overtones, was silently gritting my teeth every time Harry referred to Snape as "Sev" in his mind (arrrrggggghhh), until the author devoted practically an entire chapter to explaining in excruciating detail the complex metaphysical intricacies of a spell Harry uses to disguise himself in the present. I. Don't. CARE. Go back to your damn Dungeon Master's Guide and Evil Dead DVDs and STOP WASTING MY TIME.
I won't touch anything with a rating of mpreg (male pregnancy) with a 10-foot mouse cord. I will cheerfully accept a world of magic and even borderline pedophilia, but men getting pregnant from their gay lovers? This is such an appallingly stupid concept I was hesitant to tell Tery about it, even if it meant proving that plain old Snarry wasn't the most degenerate level of fiction out there.
*sigh* So it's back to wading for me. As a consequence I've gotten quite adept at speed-reading the first chapter and knowing within a few paragraphs if it's what I want. A snap decision, perhaps unfair judgment, but there is simply too much and life is way too short to spend it reading shite when there are real treasures to be found like the Tea Series.
Tery's a good sport though. When she's channel surfing she'll always stop on a Harry Potter special for me (they aren't in short supply these days with GoF opening up). She likes to rub in the fact that Snape barely appears in any of them (much like he barely appears in the movie), but I pointed out he would become much more important in the next two.
"Oh, I heard they weren't making any more," she said offhandedly.
"Did you now?" I humored her.
"Yep. They said 'enough is enough'."
I said it was perfectly understandable that they'd just walk away from the single most lucrative franchise since Star Wars. Quit while they're ahead and all that. I don't envy her. It's got to be hard being one of about 20 people on the planet who don't care about Harry Potter. I imagine them as Death Eaters, meeting in secret, biding their time and waiting for their chance to take over the world again. Not an easy life, to be sure.
Thoroughly unrelated, this morning in an Albertson's inventory they played "Here Comes Santa Claus." Not terribly noteworthy, except there was a line in there that I didn't remember from childhood that seemed very out of place. It was:
"So let's give thanks to the Lord above that Santa Claus comes tonight"
I was raised in a good Catholic household and our version didn't contain this line. I thought it was inserted as an insidious plot by the poor, oppressed Christians who are having the holiday RIPPED out from under them by callous store employees who refuse to say "Merry Christmas" (I mean really, people....is this honestly the biggest problem you can think of in the world today??), but Tery assures me it's always been there. I say it's a jarring clash of Christianity and secularism, kind of like Jesus and Santa duking it out WWF-style on South Park. And I won't have it, I tell you. I won't.