Just friendslocked all my entries. Currently my plan is to leave my fic posts public and everything else locked.

I will still be posting publicly at my Dreamwidth.

This isn't really fic, it's stupid meta speculation disguised as fic so I can fulfill my page_a_day requirements.

Let me know if you want me to explain any words.

( The First Time )

This entry was originally posted at http://bravecows.dreamwidth.org/7595.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

As part of my page_a_day efforts, I wrote some Wodehouse fic. It was trapped in Cephas's computer (under the document title "[afrai]'s writing DO NOT READ THIS MEANS YOU [CEPHAS]") but he kindly e-mailed it to me today, so here it is.

( The New Boy )

Comments at Dreamwidth

1) Yuletide: let us not even speak of it! (oh no oh no oh no)

2) Crochet: first scarf abandoned, left to moulder. First beret begun, turned into beanie, given to sister who actually wears it and looks cute in it. One could not ask for more -- and yet! Second beret begun upon; prospect of its turning out to be an actual beret looks good.

Also I made a rosette and stuck it onto my cardigan with a safety pin. It looks pretty good!

3) Real life: law school continues to be pretty much like what you'd expect law school to be. Fortunately there are compensations. Mostly I drink a lot of coffee and chat about racism with my friends.

I try to wear something different every day. I think big cities make me frivolous.

4) The request: as quite a lot of you know, I've been dating this dude called Cephas for a while now. He is very nice and sometimes writes poetry. Um -- this is embarrassing in so many ways! But he hasn't read anything I have written, apart from a million e-mails, so the other weekend I said, well, we've been going out for almost two years now, perhaps I will show you one of my stories if you promise not to laugh too loud. (He will not really laugh, unless it is a funny story. I'm just being neurotic about it.)

The question is, which one should I show him? I don't mind his reading slash or fanfic for embarrassing fandoms or anything like that; the main thing is that it must be decent, or as decent as possible. I don't think he'd mind reading a longish story, but I wouldn't give him The Sacred and the Profane, for example, just too sprawling. Any suggestions would be deeply appreciated.

5) Writing, apart from Yuletide: bitty, very bitty. I have been meditating on my schoolgirls, but not getting very far. Cephas has suggested that I not allow myself to buy things to wear (see #3 on frivolity!) unless I have written, which is quite a good idea, but I think will probably result in me going into word-overdraft a lot.

There is a bit below the cut: nothing very interesting, just feeling out the characters. The nice thing about schoolgirls is that they are an excuse for adverbs.

( Mizue on beauty )

Going through my folders, and it turns out I have been writing after all. At least, I've been writing more than I thought (what I thought I'd written: 0). I just haven't been finishing stories, or even really properly starting them in a I-know-where-this-is-going-and-how-to-get-there sense. Which is a real problem, but it's nice to read over this stuff and enjoy some of it in a trashy sort of way.

So! Fic bits, just 'cos. 1.5 origfic stories and 1.5 fanfic.

( Country house Bleach fic )


( The Five Houses of Siang (Bleach-ish) )


( St. Astra's School for Girls in the Colonies (original) )

let me tell you boss
if there are more disgusting
things than a boiled hand
in its third day of damp
disintegration i don t want to
see them

what i require at
this sensitive juncture is
cuddles and admiring noises
but what i get is a nurse
telling me elevation is a
good idea honey if i could ve
got drunk i would ve two days
ago when i made to pour tea
and poured instead on me
it s not the pain you understand
but the fact that it could
be taken by the unkind
as evidence of a lack
of intellect

well i have done brighter things
in my time now i have a mummified
right hand and go around something
like a mafia boss
one hand continually up
and seeking

if i can t be a good example
i guess i ll settle for being
a metaphor for the human condition



(with thanks to don marquis)

oh tired. I'm sorry I haven't been answering comments; I keep meaning to, but Real Life (and a flu, blargh) keep getting in the way.

I've been entertaining wild fantasies of writing a sort of Eileen Chang pastiche entitled Lust, Caution, Robots! for the next issue of imaginarybeasts; this would involve lots of beautiful jaded Shanghainese women in cheongsam smoking cigarettes and gazing at glamorous overseas Chinese men who look like Tony Leung with betrayal buried in their eyes, and steam-powered robots. I don't really know where the steam-powered robots come in. If you were a sneaky aunt from an Eileen Chang short story, what would you do with a steam-powered robot?

( Byakuya and Hisana for summer_queen, rogalianth, archangelbeth, moonsheen )

Again my intention to write up posts about the rats and gators of the New York sewers (I don't know what haunts Boston's sewers. The ghosts of tea parties past?) is thwarted! This time it was friends bearing fried chicken. O the inexorable demons of social life and fried food, with which every writer must struggle!

Two more ficbits, and a question that will perhaps not make sense to everyone on my flist: I am heaty. :( How do you make heatiness go away if you do not have easy access to guilinggao or liang teh? I have been drinking green tea, but it is a poor substitute.

( Mike and Psmith for yonmei )

( Rukia as a dragon for ruthi )

Beavering away at these -- I'm hoping to write two a day, but who knows how long my good intentions will continue to bear fruit. Thank you for requesting, and for the lovely feedback! I think the inherent goofiness of the idea has caught my writer's block off-guard (I imagine this as a white cube creature with mean eyes and a military jacket). -- 'Course, the fact that it's not term-time might help.

Reposting the others I've written for my own benefit, so they don't get lost in the comments.

( Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturohwait for copinggoggles )

( Renji and Rukia for incandescens, summer_queen, rogalianth and archangelbeth )

( Ford and Arthur for dancing_moon )

( Lex and Clark for jekesta )

( Kyouya and Tamaki for kaiserkuchen )

( Vimes and Vetinari for rachelmanija )

( Isshin for raucousraven )


ETA:

a) I didn't repost the one I wrote for Katy, 'cos. I'M SORRY, KATY. No, wait, you should be sorry!

b) The one thing I regret about my trip to Americaland is not getting these boots! The US size 7 I tried didn't fit me all that well, and they are from the Urban Outfitters where the indie peoples shop and apparently we do not like the indie peoples, and I bought another pair of shoes anyway, and they are a normal-ish price for boots but only made of canvas and in ringgit they cost NINE THOUSAND, and probably they would make me look stubby anyway and trust me when I say I do not need any help with looking stubby -- and I still yearn. Alas!

I need to write posts and posts about the Americas, but first, a meme that occurred to me while I was goyang-ing my kaki on the plane:

Give me two characters, and I will write a story where one of them is a dragon soul-bonded to the other.

Is that the best idea ever, or what? It totally is! For fandoms I have written in before, check out my fanfic page, though I might find some of them harder to write in than others.