I got my assignment and it is so awesome and it's a fandom that I'm really excited about and, in short. yay.

Hi, you! I think it's so, so cool that you volunteered (at least one of) my requested fandoms, and I hope you don't totally hate the prompt(s) that I have given you! I am so excited about all of them, even though they may seem completely unrelated and kind of odd.

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book, Nobody Evans aka Bod/Silas

I adore Silas! I'd really like a story about Silas and Bod and their relationship after the end of the book. It would be _plenty_ fine with me if that involved explicit sex, but it matters less to me whether you write this one as slash or gen, as long as their relationship is at the heart of it.

I just really do love Silas, and how almost-too-perfect he is as a guardian for young Bod, and how this situation is changing at the end of the book, and how it's going to change even more as Bod is growing up and Silas ... is still Silas.

Plato - Dialogues, Alcibiades/Socrates

I just think that everything would have turned out better if Alcibiades and Socrates had hooked up. Philosophy is sexy, yes, but philosophy in bed is sexier!

At about the age when a many people have an intoxicating but late regrettable philosophical fling with Ayn Rand, I was smitten with Plato. I now think even fewer of the proposals in The Republic would be at all advisable in real life, but I have always felt that Socrates should have slept with Alcibiades, even though I have been informed that I am missing the whole point of The Symposium. The whole point of The Symposium sucks, and they should have had sex. Maybe if they had, one of them wouldn't have been executed and the other exiled for being smartypantses; or perhaps it would have simply been all the more poignant. Either way!

Stieg Larsson -The Millennium series, Erika Berger/Lisbeth Salander/Mikael Blomkvist

I love all three of these characters and would be delighted to read about [them] in any combination (and also think they would make a fascinating threesome, sexual or otherwise).

So, these books ate my brain recently, and I've hardly stopped thinking about them since I finished reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. ( Cut for spoilers )

2745 / 50000 words. 5% done!

As you can see, I have some catching up to do. I had planned to spend the evening isolated at the local tea shop for this purpose, but then my parents and poodle decided to tag along, so we're sitting outside enjoying the unseasonably warm weather.

Next thing I know, my mother has a crazy woman recounting her life story, which mostly involves her various possessions, such as a $2,500 laptop, a $9,000 pair of miniature rottweilers (acquired in 'central Berlin, Germany'), and a diamond-studded skull and crossbones ring, being stolen from her by various persons such as her neighbor, houseguest and Zales jewelry store. She seems to have settled in with a large cup of some kind of yellow liquid and a cigarette and doesn't seem inclined to go anywhere.

I, um, guess this could be some kind of inspiration?

She's now claiming that her Maine coon cat (which, according to her, was invented in the 11th century by a man named Coon) can herd 7,500 sheep in an hour.

My mom's been recovering from sinus surgery, so we relaxed and mainlined a lot of fannish television this weekend:

• Both episodes of White Collar. We're both excited about this show, although not for precisely the same reasons. (Well, some of the same reasons. She giggled in the same places and remarked on the attractiveness of Matt Bomer.)
  
• The midseason semifinale of Psych, the second time for both of us, just because
  
• Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Midnight. I apparently found the last one forgettable when it first aired, because I had actually completely forgotten it, did not at any point remember anything about it, and am wondering if I somehow managed to skip over it. In retrospect, however, it has some really potent thematic foreshadowing for the finale, which we're saving to make sure we can watch them all at once.
  
• This week's installment of Masterpiece Contemporary. Although we're mourning the temporary passing of Inspector Lewis, the Contemporaries do have the advantage of being introduced by David Tennant (actual quote from my mother: "I keep listening to his voice and then I don't hear what he's saying").

My strategy for NaNoWriMo this year is to write a whole lot of nonsense and have fun with it and make sure that my so-called plot is flexible enough that I can make my characters take a road trip at any time if I feel like it. So far this is working out pretty well for me.

I think I've figured out what I'm going to write for NaNoWriMo this year, which is good, because November is presently hurtling towards us at a terrifying speed.

I've vaguely considered what I want to nominate/request for yuletide.

I still have three kinks to write to finish my line in kink_bingo. Maybe they'll get written while I'm procrastinating on the big two.

This weekend my family visited the Minnesota State Fair, where my brother was broadcasting live video over amateur radio from a weather balloon that they had tethered over the University of Minnesota building. We consumed massive quantities of food, all of which was fried and/or on-a-stick, fought our way through massive crowds, probably swelled by the absurdly-chilly-for-August weather, and boggled at the spectacle all day long, and still managed to miss, for instance, that there were vets performing surgeries on pets live somewhere on the premises. The Minnesota State Fair is terrifying. If you get a chance, you should go.

____________
* Warning: do not, I repeat, do NOT see the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair, even if you know some or all of the people who are performing it. The titular song is a vicious earworm that will haunt you for decades. It is not worth it.

Two down, three to go! I had the hardest time thinking what I could write for this kink, so it should be all downhill from here, right?

Division of the Two Lands by mayhap
Egyptian mythology. Set/Osiris. R. 704 words.
Written for kink bingo (kink: knifeplay). Set's embrace was as tempestuous as the whirlwind, as all-consuming as the grave.

( When Set was born he did not cry as other infants do. )

Hahahaha I just realized that the deadline for kink bingo is in like two weeks. Fail. I have my whole themed bingo line planned out with rarelit pairings and their associated kinks, too!

Um, maybe if I write really, really quickly?

The unaired episode of Dollhouse is better than any of the aired episodes and has more interesting ideas than the first six episodes put together. When can we start bypassing network creative interference and releasing direct to other media?

Also, ( Mild spoilers. )

This weekend we had a tax holiday, so I finally replaced my dysfunctional iPod and you should hopefully not have to hear me complain about it any more, especially that one day where it wouldn't play any given file from beginning to end but selected something itself at random and started playing it somewhere in the middle and went on until I had sort of figured out what I was listening to, at which point it would switch to something else, until I thought I was in some sort of fever dream. I definitely shouldn't have to complain about that any more.

There was a sort of average-to-middling amount of shopping going on at the Country Club Plaza, except in front of the Apple Store, where there was a line half a block long. And apparently this was the least crazy day.

While we were waiting in said line, I won a T-shirt for naming the year the first iPod was released and what its capacity was. (They didn't ask me to quote the full text of the relevant Slashdot post, but I totally could have done that too.) Although I could have also won T-shirts for naming the astronomer who sued over his name being used for an Apple internal build and giving two of the five original iMac flavors, I felt this would have been unsporting and other people deserved a chance to win.

Like my late, lamented iPod, it has been named Serenity.

It's a social networking site ... for tea drinkers!

Upon returning to our apartment, Stan and I were greeted by a suspiciously damp and gently decomposing mouse. Despite careful cross-examination, the cats are revealing nothing. (I scooped it up and took it out to the dumpster, because Stan was too busy standing screaming on tables like women in early Sixties sitcoms.) This was not particularly awesome.

However, this morning I got to hear wisdomeagle preach at her church, which was very awesome, indeed! The topic of her sermon was bread, and yes, there were even edible examples!

Sam was in town for the weekend, so he got to come with me, and we played a bit with our new Sims Mark III. So far all I've really done is make one house with myself making a healthy income from writing Dan Brown parodies such as The Lost Symbologist and The Bosch Cypher, and another house with Pete Wentz staying up all night and making inappropriate forum posts and Patrick Stump actually, you know, playing the guitar and stuff.

After finding the mouse, Stan and I suddenly found ourselves really in the mood to do some deep cleaning. Not that anything was that dirty, but ....

In honor of my brother's brief visit this weekend, last night we revived the tradition of the Viking bonfire. We pillaged a bottle of locally-brewed mead from the liquor store, built a fire in our backyard and, toasting each other Viking-fashion, read aloud from the text Danny selected, the Prose Edda.

Danny, who did the honor of the reading this time, was highly bemused by the prologue, which manages to combine the creation story from Genesis, a smattering of geography, a bunch of genealogy with unpronounceable names, a Trojan founding myth à la Virgil, and then, finally, the Æsir, although even familiar figures like Odin insisted on having twelve more unpronounceable names. I advised him to drink more mead and it would all make sense.

He got more into the swing of things with the the Tricking of Gylfi, which had plenty of proper Norse mythology, although also plenty of unpronounceable names, which are inevitable. The night was gorgeous and nothing like a typical Missouri July night, and much fun was had by all.

Drinc hail!

My first kink bingo entry! Oh, I do love revisiting books that made me all squirmy inside before I had any idea why.

Accounting for Tastes by mayhap
The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman. Jemmy/Horace. NC-17. 1,295 words.
Written for kink bingo (kink: caning). "In this room I am not a prince, therefore it is permissible for you to strike me," Horace recited hastily.

( Jemmy reckoned that he could rightly be figured some sort of expert in the field of whippings, having been on the receiving end of so many licks during his service as whipping boy to the notorious Prince Brat, but handing them out was something that he was still getting used to. )

I saw HBP on Wednesday with wisdomeagle on Wednesday, which was, briefly and non-spoilery, was just a whole lot of fun. More analytical thoughts possibly to come, or maybe just a spate of Everybody/Everybody Else fic and screencaps of Harry Potter sims.

I'm afraid my iPod and I are going to have to break up.

It's not me; it's him. It was bad enough when he started hanging my entire computer -- no mean feat -- every time I plugged him in to sync. I managed to patch things up after much reformatting by syncing only a few playlists containing a small fraction of my library, but now he's got a new trick where he drops out in the middle of long tracks like audiobooks and skips to the next one, whistling innocently. Just today he's already skipped the train scene in Half Blood Prince, which is one of my favorite bits! I see a trip to the Apple Store in my future.

Ironically, my 3G iPod is still going strong, if you allow for the fact that even the aftermarket replacement battery no longer holds so much as a secondsworth of charge. Stan uses it in bed plugged into the wall.

It is apropos that The Cully Flaug'd, one of the earliest surviving specimens of English printed pornography, depicts what commonly used to be called 'the English vice'. It features a saucy caption below, running What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction! /To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection. / Firk on Fair Lady [,] Flaug the Fumblers Thighs [,] / Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise.

The picture itself is well worth a look (assuming of course that you're into that sort of thing and not presently being monitored by internet prudes), but it's the research into the early flogging scene that really turns me on.