hogwarts gone wild

Ngk.

This is the first time I've been near a computer in days. I have comments to answer, and fest fics to review, and. Damn you, awkward living situation. Damn you to hell and back.

I'm actually trying to write something right now, and it's not working out. Allow me to explain, in the form of an IM conversation:

( in which i am ridiculous )

I don't even know.

There was fic last night! Bandom fic, even!

- Pictures of Me and You
Frank/Gerard. My Chemical Romance. R, for bad language and shameless rutting on a bus.

Right. Onto my incredibly exciting life:

- Work on my outstanding Harry Potter deadlines continues apace. I've made serious progress on the fic that's the latest -- Lisa! I love you! No, really! -- enough progress that I've mostly abandoned my earlier (if somewhat vague) ideas toward taking a bath with my toaster.

- Work on the My Chemical Romance Tattoo Shop AU of crack and possible fail has not started, sadly. But it will. Oh yes, it will. I can already hear Mikey's opening conversation with Ray, and somewhere in the back of my brain, Gerard is mumbling about needles. Mumbling, seriously. I know, I'm hilariously excited about a fic that I practically swore on a Bible I wasn't going to write, but I'm a big smelly liar like that, and wolfshirts is a disease. Also, wildestranger and jezzabe carry really big cattleprods.

- At work today, I was bitchslapped by a sex pollen fic bunny wherein Mikey all but mauls Frank in a club restroom. It was all hands fisted in shirts and hips pressed against the sink and the way Frank's tattoos were yellowed by the flickering, fluorescent lights, and that was before it devolved into disgustingly filthy porn. Accordingly, Bandom is having a Sex Pollen Meme as we speak. Unaccordingly, I can't play along. I'm way too backed up in the fic department. My deadlines -- Lisa! You're my favourite! Honestly! -- totally own my soul.

- MCR is going to be in Irvine the first week of April, and I am torn. I hate the Verizon Amphitheatre like burning. Of course, I wouldn't actually have to go inside, because it's one of those all-day outdoor ordeals, so I'd mostly be standing around in the parking lot. And I'm not familiar with any of the other bands, so. It's probably safe to assume that MCR is playing last, or near to last, but I wouldn't want to risk it. And I've learned calling the venue for performance times is pointless -- they want you to be there all day, because this raises the chances of you pissing your money away on overpriced beer and crappy food.

- My other option is to drive out to see them in Tempe, Arizona the last week in March. I'm totally crazy like that, and I lived in Tempe once, but. frontbits is flat out refusing to be crazy with me. Apparently, we're too old for pointless sick days from work and day-trips that are six hours one way. I am wholly unimpressed with her adult logic, but I am also wholly unimpressed with the idea of heading for the next state over with nothing but myself for company. The last time I was stuck in a car for a protracted period of time, it resulted in horribly pretentious Harry/Draco songfic to the tune of Nine Inch Nails.

- Regulus Black is still my king.

Title: The Problem with Eggnog, Uncommon Thoughts, and Sharing a Bed with Sirius Black
Written for: sleeper6
Rating: NC-17
Summary: In which Sirius is possibly naked, and Remus' mind is not the safest place to be.
A/N: For sleeper6, and rs_small_gifts 2007. Thanks to both wook77 and midnitemarauder.

( the problem with eggnog, uncommon thoughts, and sharing a bed with sirius black )

Title: A Few Conversations, Which are Mostly Related to Christmas
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG
Summary: In which there is cocoa, conversation, and more Christmas cheer than Crowley thinks is strictly necessary.
A/N: For prestissima and go_exchange 2007.

( a few conversations, which are mostly related to christmas )

Oh, Harry Potter.

Harry Potter.

You're demanding and abusive and your sometimes contradictory canon occasionally makes me want to kick puppies in the head, but I love you and I'll never, ever leave you. I may consider it now and again, particularly on cold, windswept nights when the rain is battering at my windows and you've drank away the rent money again and my inability to finish a story has left me feeling tired and undesirable, but I'll never actually do it. I tried that one time, I really did, but I made it as far as the corner liquor store before realising that you really do love me, almost as much as I love you, even if you have an awfully funny way of showing it.

I'm sorry about the terrible things I said the other night. I was angry. I didn't mean it. How about I make lunch while only wearing knickers? After we eat, we can watch The Breakfast Club and cuddle on the couch.

*

Here. Have some recs of the Bandom persuasion:

Everyday Mysteries in the Summertime is one of the first Bandom fics I read. It's also one of the first AU's I read -- it is, in fact, the AU that made me realise I should give the whole Bandom AU genre a fair shot. It's a Mikey/Pete wherein Gerard and Mikey work at a gas station, and its full of wonderful things like Frank and heat and ordinary tedium, and I loved it. Loved. When I finished it, the only thing I wanted -- other than to have written it myself -- was for there to me more of it to read.

Yes, well. wax_jism is an evil genius. The other morning I woke up Nightswimming, a deliciously hot and deliciously long Frank/Gerard sequel. This involves rain and ordinary tedium, and Gerard drinking too much and Frank trying to navigate around his mother's boyfriend, and it is simply spectacular.

Then:

A day or so later, jjtaylor wrote Buy Handmade. This is another AU, a Frank/Gerard wherein Frank and Mikey work as IT consultants and Gerard is, essentially, Gerard, but also there is Bob and Ray and fresh-baked bread.

This. Wow. The only thing I can say about this is that it's flawless. The sex is hot like burning, and the slow, delicious build-up is even hotter. This fic also slapped me up the side of the head, to the point that I had to go sit on the couch and veg for awhile. Frank spends the opening run nursing a resentful dissatisfaction about his job, and it's the same, exact resentful dissatisfaction I've had about -- well, all my jobs. And, for the exact same reasons: Frank realises he wants make things. He wants to work with his hands. He wants to create, and yeah, I realised that about myself a long time ago. I'd just never thought about it like that -- like, coherently -- and it was a little startling and awesome to see it all laid out in print. I hate my current job less that I've hated the others because at the end of the day I am working with my hands to some degree, but there's no real creativity behind it. When all is said and done, I'm dishing out espresso and milk to faceless people who, for the most part, don't care who's making their drink, as long as it gets made.

Look. Someone needs to keep me away from wolfshirts, ok?

Because, the crack. The crack. It is strong with these people, and I have no defence against it. None. If I keep nosing around there, I will eventually snap and write something utterly loltastic. Like the one where the My Chem boys open a tattoo shop, and Frank is constantly jumping off the counters and knocking shit over, and Bob has, like, piercing superpowers, and Ray noodles on his guitar when business is slow, and Mikey can convince the nervous, fence-sitting types to get the tattoo that's totally perfect for them with his mind. And Gerard's there too -- he does all the artwork, but he never leaves the loft upstairs because omg needles, so the customers think he's a figment everyone's imagination. Or an extremely talented ghost.

Failing that, there's always the multiband AU where they all work at Denny's and Spencer Smith is the snottiest waiter ever.

( cut for the xylodemon shopping experience )

Apropos of nothing: my computer fails at life.

Well. The best I can about today is: at least it's halfway over.

I'm having soy yoghurt for lunch, and it tastes -- well, not so great. I'm trying to decide if this is because it's a) soy yoghurt, b) banana flavoured, which I didn't much care for when I still ate dairy yoghurt, c) two days past it's sell-by date, or d) all of the above.

In other news, an idle xylodemon is a ridiculous xylodemon. I just sent a terribly late fest fic to beta, and what have I been doing while I wait, instead of something useful -- say, cleaning my house or doing laundry? Yeah, I've just been pootling around the internet. Shockingly, this resulted in me reading a metric fuckton of fanfic, from both HP and Bandom. And because I have no sense of continuity, I've been reading from both fandoms back to back.

Which got me to thinking about my reading habits in both fandoms. Turns out, they're quite different in one regard.

As far as HP is concerned, AUs have never been my thing. I've read and enjoyed some of the milder sort -- say, where a single canon event was changed -- and I tend to give Bring Back Black fics a free pass, but I just can't get into the bigger, more epic sort. I'm a total whore for the HP canon settings and, to a lesser degree, the HP canon timeline. I know plenty of people like AUs, and I know some authors write them very well, but I 'm just not interested in the one where Remus and Sirius are working on a dude ranch, or Harry and Draco are fire-fighters in Los Angeles.

Oddly enough, this is in direct conflict with my Bandom tastes. Don't get me wrong: I love canon Bandom fics -- where the bands are on tour, or recording an album, or pottering around the same apartment/house/hotel on their downtime, but. I've quickly become a huge fan of the Bandom AU. Recently, I cannot get enough of the fics where they are all attending private school, or living in the same apartment complex, or going to film school, or working at the bookstore Jon Walker inherited from his grandmother. Also the one where Pete 'babysits' a slightly underage Patrick.

Huh.

Also, jezzabe is a vile enabler. I spammed her the other day with this picture of Gabe Saporta grinding on Mikey Way like it's his job, and jezzabe now wants me to write fic wherein Mikey acquiesced to Gabe's barbaric behaviour because of Gabe's smirk. And because Gabe promised threatened to show Mikey his basement.

*eyes HP to-do list*

*cries*

We got tipped out at the coffee shop today, and I may have spent a good third of my meagre earnings on a My Chemical Romance poster, like the thirteen year-old girl I secretly am.

It's just. I love My Chemical Romance. Love. They are beautiful and angry and honest and I want to take all of them home with me.

But. If we assume for a moment that I didn't already love them like burning, well. It only would've been a matter of time, because I would've had no defence whatsoever against The Black Parade.

( omfg )

Dude. MARCHING BAND UNIFORMS.

I have a bullet-proof kink regarding flak jackets. No, really. It's die-hard.

I really enjoy bandom fics set on tour, or fics where the characters spend large amounts of time in their van/on their bus, and that's nothing but self-indulgent nostalgia. They remind me of the years I wasted tooling around the Great American Countryside with all my worldly possessions in a duffel bag and a snare drum for a pillow. I miss that. I miss everything about it. Well, almost everything -- I don't miss the way a charter bus bathroom can stink so effortlessly, and I don't miss living off Doritos and Cup-O-Noodle -- but my point remains. And now I have pictures of one of my most favourite bands ever wearing single side-stripe pants and flak jackets.

adsfasdlfkjalsdjf

Here, have a picture of Gerard Way with his hand down his pants:

( i've never wanted to be a pair of jeans so bad in my life )

Also, this is what Gerard looks like with his tongue in Frank Iero's mouth:

( oh. wow. um. )

Or, we could talk about that time Frank humped Gerard's face.

( earsex is how mpreg happens )

While I have you here, I threw my name in the hat at the Feedback Meme.

There was fic last night:

- Things We Lost (and Found) in the War. [Snape/Minerva, NC-17]

Here, have a meme, wherein I talk about my writing:

(Stolen from either pir8fancier or rexlucus. Possibly both.)

Ideas.
Where the hell do they come from? Can you make those little fuckers show up?

Honestly, there's no rhyme or reason to this. Sometimes, I get bunnied by a sentence/situation/bit of subtext in canon. Sometimes, I find I want to explore the motivations behind a particular character's actions. Sometimes, something really silly or inane sets me off. Meme results, for example. Or a discussion. Or someone stringing together several random words in chat.

( cut for waffle. hp-centric, except for the paragraph wherein i speculate on how i would write bandslash. )

Title: Things We Lost (and Found) in the War
Pairing: Severus/Minerva
Rating: NC-17
Words: 6,700
Summary: Two people, two wars, and a few of the things they learned along the way.
A/N: For cjmarlowe and smutty_claus 2007.

( Things We Lost (and Found) in the War )

Thing the first:

Here's To the Night We Said Goodbye by themostepotente and ships_harry. [Remus/Sirius, R]

Penny wrote this for me nearly a week ago, and it is absolutely beautiful. Beautiful. It also has art that is so gorgeous that I could not stop staring at it. Could not. Thusly, go forth and read and view. I love it to bits, and you probably will too.

Thing the second:

I'm having difficulty sending emails with attachments. And by difficulty I mean I simply cannot do it. I send them, and gmail tells me they are sent, but they never reach their intended destination. Also, copies of these allegedly sent emails do not appear in my Sent Mail folder, which means I cannot verify that I've sent them to the right address, nor can I prove that sending them was not, in fact, some really just some wild hallucination on my part.

I had this problem with smutty_claus -- for whatever reason, my computer gave merry_smutmas a pass -- and I'm having the same problem now with hpvalensmut. I'm going to deal with it the same way I dealt with smutty_claus, but I'd like to find a solution before my other fic fest deadlines rear their ugly heads, so I don't keep commandeering the computers of my family and friends, armed with a diskette of gay porn and a slightly panicked look in my eye.

Anyone? Bueller?

I love you, Pete Wentz. I love you like a fat kid loves cake. At this very moment, I specifically love you for Bang the Doldrums. I want to think it's your I Broke My Gay-Above-The-Waist Rule for Mikey Way on Warped and All I Got Was a Lousy Invitation for His Wedding (to a Girl) song, but. It also nicely sums up the present state of both my current and unhealthy romantic entanglements.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: I just read over my hpvalensmut fic, and a fair portion of it doesn't make sense. I mean, it doesn't make sense, even for me. This requires some emergency retcon work, and I don't have time for that, because it's DUE RIGHT NOW OMFG.

I hate you Sirius Black. I hate you like burning.

i. My dad is in the hospital. Again. Because he fell down. Again. Nothing is broken, apparently, but his knee is swollen, and he can't walk, and if this is anything like the last four times he's done this, it'll be another three weeks until things are back to (almost) normal. I swear, one of these days I'm going to surgically attach his walker to his body, because he and my mother are both too old for this shit. It worries me when he's laid up, and watching her sleep in hospital chairs and survive of bad cafeteria food freaks me the fuck out.

ii. At this very moment, I am writing three fics at once. Three fics. At once. Why the hell do I do this to myself?

iii. Speaking of those three fics: Shut up, Sirius. Please. For the love of toast, just shut your god-damned mouth. I know I'm asking a lot, but. If you'd talk less and frot more, I'd be writing two fics instead of three. Also, the posturing. It's not helping me help you get laid, all right?

iv. Oh, Patrick. Patrick motherfucking Stump. I have no idea what you're mumbling about on The Carpal Tunnel of Love, but you're voice makes me want to shag you into the ground, regardless.

v. My size and scope of my embarrassing and incredibly infantile crush on Gerard Way cannot be textually rendered. This is probably for the best.

OMFG.

Why didn't any of you tell me that Fall Out Boy is made of awesome and win and slash?

No, really.

I SERIOUSLY HAD NO IDEA.

( cut for excuses, flail, and maybe a picture or two )

So. Who's got the Pete/Patrick porn?

I've already read everything by femmequixotic, marksykins, and iphignia939. Twice. Any pointers you lot have would be loved and cherished.

Seriously. Don't make me write my own.

- The Beginning of Be Mine by anon. [Harry/Snape, NC-17]

This fic is spectacular, end of story. It's got brilliant writing, a brilliant premise, and brilliant characterisations -- never mind the banter, snark, and hot hot sex. Snape is wonderful in this, Harry is equally wonderful, and I just adored the cameos by Remus, Regulus, Draco, and Neville. Did I mention the premise is brilliant? I can't get into it without completely ruining everything, but yeah. Brilliant.

- The Haunting of Grimmauld Place by anon. [Ron/Sirius, NC-17]

Christ. Last April or so, I wrote a Ron/Sirius fic simply so I'd have one to read, and now merry_smutmas has given me two in a month. This post-Azkaban Sirius is so quietly perfect it made my skin crawl -- he's confused, disconnected, and more than a bit dirty, and Ron is just wonderfully... awkward.

- A Soliloquy in Eight Words by snegurochka_lee. [James/Snape, NC-17]

Oh, God. You all know I'm a sucker for James/Snape, but this is exquisite. It's AUish, in that it supposes Snape was in love with James all those years, rather than Lily -- which, as it turns out, is a fic premise I didn't know I wanted to see until I was reading it with my face pressed to the monitor. This is the kind of AU I revel in; the kind where the flawless writing makes the deviation from canon a perfectly plausible situation. Lee did a fantastic job of fleshing out the early James/Snape friendship, and I am amazed at how she managed to stand James on his head and keep him completely in character.

My distressingly short year in review:

41 Random Facts about James Potter [James, PG]
Forty-one things James thought you should know - 31 Dec 2007

( seven more )

So. Who wants to guess what I wrote for the anon exchanges? I participated in merry_smutmas, smutty_claus, and go_exchange.

Title: 41 Random Facts About James Potter
Character: James
Rating: PG
Words: ~2,200
Summary: A few things James thinks you ought to know.
A/N: I realise 41 is an odd number, but that's precisely the number of things James was willing to talk about.

For snegurochka_lee, because her James and my James should get together for a cup of tea.

( 41 random facts about james potter )

Well, I managed to weasel my way into rs_small_gifts after all, and the fic I wrote has been posted:

The Problem with Eggnog, Uncommon Thoughts, and Sharing a Bed with Sirius Black. [Remus/Sirius, NC-17]

In which Sirius is possibly naked, and Remus' mind is not the safest place to be.

This was meant to be a recs post, but I'm too tired to code it just now. Tomorrow, then.

Yes. Tomorrow.

Happy Christmas and/or Any Ordinary Tuesday.

In other news, you should go read this right now:

Map of the Problematique by sullensiren. [Remus/Sirius, NC-17]

Welcome to the flat that James, Sirius, Remus, and Peter share, and that Lily patronises on occasion. The flat has rules, and not only are we told what these rules are, we learn exactly why they are put in place. This is completely and utterly fabulous -- the voices, the dynamics, the R/S relationship, everything. These are my boys, from the green take-away to the thoughtless nudity. This fic is funny, sweet, and sad at once, and all around, just wonderfully done. The rules themselves are hilarious, and bonus points for fantastic visual aides.

Big hugs to those who listened to my working-on-Christmas-Eve whinge. Your good vibes went to a good cause; I was switched to a morning shift, which I just finished.

Allow me to point you to a few shiny things -- mostly art, as I'm horribly behind in the fic department:

FIC:

- but he frowned like thunder and went away by jamesly. [Remus/Sirius, PG]

This is wonderfully bittersweet and painful. Here we have a Remus/Sirius relationship that didn't work out, and it's perfectly achy, because if a Remus/Sirius relationship didn't work out, this is precisely how and why -- because of boyish bravado and an inability to communicate. Actions only speak louder than words when the person on the receiving end is willing and able to listen.

- Goat Song by anon. [Aberforth/Snape, NC-17]

This is fantastic. Simply fantastic. It's the peek inside Aberforth's head I've been wanting since DH -- complete with commentary about Albus. Snape is wonderfully done, and the writing is amazing.

If you want more fic, snegurochka_lee and themostepotente have recs here and here.

ART:

- The Ecstasies of Flying, Floating and Falling by anon. [Harry/Draco, R]

This is far too beautiful for words. Far too beautiful.

- A Snaco Vignette by anon. [Snape/Draco, NC-17]

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

- Ink Stains by jadis31. [Remus/Sirius, PG-13]

This is an illustration for wook77's Life Through Ink Stains, and it is love.

- Which One, Sir? by kasche. [Remus/Sirius, PG]

In case you haven't noticed, kasche is quietly buying my soul, one image at a time. See things like Mirror in the Bathroom for details. This is gorgeous. I want to keep Remus' perfect little arse for myself, and the look on Sirius' face is priceless.

OTHER:

- pir8fancier has a very interesting post about the difference between HP and LotR here.