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In the past week, I have had three dreams in which the kidlet and I were responsible for trying to rescue babies, cats, or both. (Once we failed, once the dream caught us in mid-rescue with the ending still uncertain, and I can't remember how the third one came out.)

The spouse is nowhere to be seen in these dreams. I think it's kind of cool, though, that the kidlet now figures in my dreams as an ally in difficult and important work.

The Ballad of John Henry's CEO

by Resonant

When the owner was a little baby,
Sittin' on his nanny's knee,
He looked out the window at the old steel yard,
Said, All this belongs to me, lord, lord,
All this belongs to me.

Well, the owner said to the captain,
These new steam drills work a treat.
They work all day, they work all night,
They don't need to rest or eat, lord, lord,
Don't need to rest or eat.

The captain said to the owner,
If you no longer need these men,
They don't work all day and collect their pay,
Who will ride your railroads then, lord, lord,
Who will ride your railroads then?

The owner said to the captain,
Captain, don't you curse and frown.
You can't fight fate, gotta automate,
Keep the cost of production down, lord, lord,
The cost of production down.

When the captain told him 'bout John Henry,
The owner he laughed with glee.
Said, I pay John Henry for his strong right arm
But I get his pride for free, lord, lord,
I get his pride for free.

The captain said to the owner,
Which one will win the day?
The owner said, That's nothing to me.
I get my tunnel either way, lord, lord.
I get my tunnel either way.

John Henry died in the evening.
The captain began to weep.
The owner he ate a nice beefsteak
And went and had a good night's sleep, lord, lord,
Went and had a good night's sleep.

The missing notebook has been found!

It was in my gym bag, which means that if I swam as often as I should, I would have found it a lot sooner. It's like that joke about the mother and the silver ladle.

Anyway, yay for not losing many hours of work.

If you went away and came back under another name*, what name would you choose?

* sockpuppet? flounce? faking your own death? needed someone to argue with? suffering under the demands of excessive fame and fortune? defaulted on one too many challenges? can't bear to be associated with the Sentinel stories you wrote in the twentieth century?

Steve and Tony get in on the act.

So I wrote Steve Likes Tony in four days, using Written? Kitten! and e.ggtimer. And what have we learned from this exercise?

( Process navel-gazing cut )

OK, I knew I was old because my kid, who was in utero when I started reading slash, turned thirteen today. But it's been ten years since

cesperanza accidentally launched 101 Ways To End Up In A Shack In Canada.

I was still a beginner back then, and I can't even tell you how much the shack challenge influenced me; the 500-word length made it possible to explore new pairings, and I learned to spot the juicy center of a story and zero right in on it. It made such an impression on me that when I was writing Breaking and Entering, and I wanted to send Arthur and Eames somewhere that represented ultimate safety and comfort, I put them in a shack in Canada completely by accident.

So now we're doing it again! The details on the anniversary celebration are here, but the short version is that everyone's invited to spend 500 or so words getting pairings old and new into shacks in Canada. (Rumor has it there are actual cities in Canada, but as I've never been there, I prefer to think of it as entirely full of shacks.)

Works in this year's challenge are collected on the Canadian Shack 2011 collection on AO3. I wrote And One Way To End Up In a High-Rise On Lake Shore Drive, a little Fraser/Kowalski story, for old time's sake.

If you'd rather read the whole finished thing, it's up now.

Steve Likes Tony on my site
Steve Likes Tony on AO3
Avengers movieverse -- Steve Rogers/Tony Stark -- 3,100 words -- NC-17
One of them is very confused.

Continued from here and going NSFW pretty much immediately; hope that's not too much of a spoiler for you.

Edited, thanks to a comment by

bluemeridian, to reassure one and all that Steve continues to like Tony all the way through, though he likes some parts of Tony in a more personal fashion by the end than he did at the beginning.

-----

"Tony," he says helplessly. "What -- I don't understand."

It's like playing that game where you make a move and turn over all the pieces from black to white: all the things that have happened since he woke up are turning over and showing another side. He and Tony have been spending nearly all their time together for months. He's seen Tony's good sides and admired them. He's seen Tony's bad sides and either accepted them or helped him nudge himself out of them.

He *likes* Tony.

( Read more... )

Continued from here

"Look here," Steve says. "I know all you people expect me to be like everybody's grandpa, but I never looked down on a man if he wanted to go to bed with other men. Never. It's his business, and that's the end of it. And if you're one of those --" He falters at that, because it runs smack up against all these pictures in his head. Tony at a party with some gal in a fringed skirt, doing a dance that's not too much different from screwing standing up. Tony in a limo with a blonde whispering into each ear. "Or only some of the time, if you --"

Tony smirks at him, and he goes on doggedly: "But it's got to feel different for a fellow like that. Because what I feel when I'm with my best pal and what I feel when I'm with a girl I like, they're totally different feelings."

( Read more... )

Continued from here.

It works at first, and then it doesn't. He works out more, but it's pretty tough to wear this body out. And anything other than full-out exertion leaves his mind free to wander, which is just what he *doesn't* want.

It's probably bad to wish for another megalomaniac so soon after they defeated the last one.

When Tony comes down to the gym, Steve thinks at first that he'll be a great distraction, but he stays just as keyed up as before. It doesn't help at all. In fact, when Tony wants to spar, the idea just makes things worse. Maybe it's the similarity to dancing? Anyhow, Steve says, "No," really fast, and Tony makes an exaggerated hands-off gesture and says, "Fine, fine, no contact, I get it," and there's something stiff around his mouth like Steve's hurt his feelings.

( Read more... )

Continued from here.

Steve tries not to think about sex too much. Young men of his generation still considered sublimation to be a positive goal, and Steve has had a lot of practice.

Besides, who's he going to think about?

( Read more... )

I want to write a story where Steve really likes Tony. Like, he really really likes Tony. He likes being with Tony. He likes spending his free time with Tony. He doesn't like it when Tony spends time with other people, and if they're not people he approves of, he'll cut them out -- he's good at that, does it with such grace that people go away feeling like something *nice* has happened to them; hey, Captain America noticed them specifically! Captain America has something special he needs done that *only they can do*!

Meanwhile, Steve gets to spend a lot more time with Tony. Because Steve likes Tony.

[this was fifteen minutes on Written?Kitten! as I try to see if I can re-train myself to write on keyboard as well as in longhand.]

( Read more... )

Guys, I'm sick. I feel like I've been sick for a million years. I had the entire week from Christmas to New Year's off, and I spent the whole time sick. The lymph glands on the right side of my neck are so swollen I can see them in the mirror, which, just, gross, all right. (Obviously I'm better or I wouldn't be able to complain this much, but better is not the same as well.)

I've committed to give a Twelfth Night party in my house next Saturday, which strictly speaking is Thirteenth Night, but I rescheduled it because the spouse had a conflict on Friday, only now he has a conflict on Saturday as well.

The following weekend I have to do the annual luncheon. My former liaison to the governing board, who was so infirm that she confined her participation to calling volunteers for me, has rotated off the board. My new one is young and vital and actually uses e-mail (yay), but she's weirdly slippery, and it's hard to get a grip on her preferences, even in answer to a question like, "So do you just want to call volunteers, too, or did you want a different division of labor?" Which means that I don't know whether I'm getting any help at all, or what shape it's going to take, or whether she's going to be unhappy because I laid a bunch of work on her or on the other hand unhappy because I won't let her do anything or make any decisions. And it's generally not helpful to call people up and yell, "I am very cooperative, damn you! Just watch me cooperate!"

Also the annual report. Don't even ask.

Also the kitten (did I mention we got a kitten? I suppose that should have been in a good news post, if I ever made any of those) is the most expensive free cat we ever got, and I still haven't paid off the Christmas bills.

Plus I was going to spend this week writing like crazy, and obviously I didn't do that because the only part of me that was active this week was my white blood cells.

So, you know. Woe is me.

I am not pleased. I've lost a notebook that had about a third of my current wip in it, along with sundry assorted other things that I don't even remember what they are. I very much fear that this means I will have to clean dusty places.

Anyhow. Here, have some kidlet-heavy overheards.

Kidlet: "I thought you were going to let me have the house to myself today! Put your shoes on and leave! Shoo! Shoo and be shod!"

( Read more... )

The new car has an iPod-capable stereo, something I've never had in my life. So I can put all 309 of my four- and five-star Christmas songs on it. I'm having a lovely time.

So I thought I'd share some stuff with you. Come inside. ( Read more... )

Taken from

ellen_fremedon:

Tell me about a story I haven't written, and I'll give you several sentences from that story.

I love this meme. It's like getting to wander through the Slash Annex of the Library of Babel.

[edited to change the terms of the meme, because apparently I'm incapable of sticking to "between one and three sentences" unless I write torturously long and complicated sentences with an illegal number of semicolons]

Whenever I'm exploring new characters, I always enjoy asking myself two things: Can they sing? and Can they cook?

Tony (all these people are film canon only, sorry): Well, we have canon that he can't make an omelet, and my first reaction was, if you can't cook an omelet with twenty-first century nonstick technology, you can't cook anything. But then I reconsidered, because an omelet actually requires a peculiar sort of kitchen zen: you have to pay it continuous benign attention without monkeying with it. And Tony's attention does not work that way.

But what if you gave him a food where the whole point was to monkey with it? Like stir-fry -- once it's in the pan, you basically have to just keep messing with it. Also it's done really quickly, which is good given who we're talking about here.

Also I suspect Steve does all the tedious chopping for him.

( Steve, Natasha, Rhodey, Pepper, Fury, and Coulson )

Anybody out there in Italy, from Italy, or otherwise very familiar with Italian? I need help with some names and some slang -- not contemporary but older.

Thanks so much to all of you who sent condolences on the death of the ladycat. It means a lot to have people who understand.

The kidlet tells me that the ladycat came to her in a dream and told her what kind of cat to get for Christmas. No more purebreds, is the ladycat's advice in the kidlet's subconscious. The kidlet asked her friends at school whether it was disrespectful of the ladycat that she wanted to get another cat this soon, and her friends told her to think of it as "carrying on her legacy."

The spouse heard this and said to me in a resigned voice, "I guess we're going to be getting a kitten for the boycat to eat, aren't we?"

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Res ipsa loquitur

Daring rescues

The Ballad of John Henry's CEO

Rejoicing

idly

New Avengers storylet: "What You Call a Shack"

The how

Canadian shacks!

Avengers story: Steve Likes Tony

Steve likes Tony right up until the end of the story

Steve still likes Tony

Steve likes Tony some more

Steve continues to like Tony

I want to write a story where Steve likes Tony.

Self-indulgent woes

Overheard

Christmas music

Nonexistent stories meme

Kitchen Avengers

Language & culture help: Italian?

Felinities

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January 2012

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