Okay, so I'm not familiar with the specific infamous fic this is based on, but as someone who'd been kicking around fandom since way into last century*, I simply adore not only idea of this, but also the execution**.  Some darling folk in Toronto have created a web series based on 
My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie.

I'm not recommending you read the fic, as I've totally skipped that part and it is not harshing my squee from this project at all***.  And there is so much squee, I feel like I'm going to sneeze sparkles and fart rainbows of joy:


I adore the cast, and the writing is both tight and remarkably fond of both the source material and the fanon context.  Simply superb.  And now I shall go be an adult and make dinner, and watch episode five once the child is in bed.  BEING AN ADULT IS SO FUCKING PREP!

*in the late 80's I got halfway through a parody of Wesley Crusher as the ultimate Mary Sue, working title "FrankenWesley", but ran out of steam when my OOC Picard started to make me sad.

**This is the future I've been waiting for ever since the tools for film narrative became exponentially cheaper and more accessible.  Seriously, these kids are doing amazing stuff on a shoestring, and you can tell they're thinking about the pacing, the comic timing, the shot composition, the costuming, the lighting, the makeup, the music...

***I burned out my ability to read truly terrible fic years ago during an epic WIP involving Dana Scully, forced pregnancy, and bestiality.  I kept reading, hoping she'd be rescued.  Yeah, rookie mistake.

(edited to fix link)

~*~If there's one good thing about being sick, it's that it resets a baseline appreciation for digestion and thermal homeostasis. *sings* "Lowered Expectations..."

~*~Before parenthood, I couldn't bear the sound of vomiting without joining in.  Now my ability to handle everything right through the cleaning process is disturbing in comparison.  Here, let me hold back your hair; now you go rinse out your mouth and nose while I clean up this public bathroom stall using only toilet paper and my newly-forged iron constitution.

~*~My family is large and festooned with aunts and cousins on my dad's side, so going to family gatherings is sometimes like looking into an AU house of mirrors set ten to twenty years into the future (my grandma's adorableness was clearly dominant down a couple generations).  Body composition-wise, we also tend to be built fucking solid at any weight (my grandfather did decathlon in high school--that's ten events he rocked at all of five foot two).

~*~In getting the store ready there has been a ton of ladder work, painting, cleaning and wrestling large chunks of wood.  First my hips and ass were wrecked; then I had a spate of sore shoulders and knees; then my hands hurt for almost a week.  Over the last month hefting fifty pounds is no longer the limit of my strength but more like "hey, this is no longer light."

~*~I'm slowly letting go of my death grip on hyper-realism in my writing.  I grew up swimming in the Great Lakes, and once you wade out to a point about armpit height, an errant wave can lift your feet up and deposit you just further enough out that the bottom is gone when you hit the valley of the wave.  The bottom is GONE, people, and I'm trying to breathe through the chest panic as lakeweed tangles my calves and I'm desperate for the reassurance of silty sand squidging between my toes.

The infant previously known as CMonkey will be seven in August, and having outgrown the name, I have yet to think of a suitable replacement nom de guerre.  For now, let's just use Kiddo.  Like Beatrix Kiddo at the end of Kill Bill, I am constantly, charmingly, devastatingly put on my back foot with this person who is my daughter.  How did she happen?  Unlike Beatrix, I was there the whole time, and I still have no idea how this miracle on two legs occurred.

( cut for parental anecdata )

My entry is here.

While I know the answer is to write, to simply keep priming the pump until things start to flow again, there's a deep reticence to get started.

Once I start it's like riding a bike--in that it constantly feels like when I first learned to ride a bike, precariously balanced, lurching between too fast and not fast enough, and the only thing keeping me from a wide swath of gravel ground into my skin is sheer dumb fucking luck.

So I aim for a patch of grass and ditch it.  And then I don't write for a couple weeks.

Which would be okay, as a life, if I didn't have this upwelling of pressure, these images and thoughts and all the jenk and churning seafoam that I know comes out as stories when the pipes are flowing.  When they aren't thunking and juddering and spitting, full of air and rusty backflow.

I need Burgess Meredith to come kick my ass and make me drink the goddamned raw eggs already.

I used to have a job where I did mind-numbing clerking and occasionally had projects where I could write or create an organizing scheme or work with images--tiny sparks of life in a Lovecraftian sky of nihilistic dread.  Flashes of REM aboard the sleeper ship.  Then I jumped that ship and we've been swimming for the shore for a few years, rebuilding our life in a different direction.

I've been in a holding pattern for a while now, with a couple part-time gigs to keep me in the habit of putting on pants.  My main function has been as the stay-at-home parent and the main designee for medical emergencies, with my parents both going through a rough patch health-wise.  I think it's what surviving the zombie apocalypse would truly be like: harrowing instances of firing fast and running, separated by long stretches of musing that this is what you went to college for.

Now the business plan has reached a point where I come in, and now it's time for me to step up and start performing.  I have an embarrassment of riches in my lap: writing copy, processing photos, creating a plan-o-gram, drafting employee policies, codifying operations policies, setting up the back-office accounting, creating a product and service database, designing business cards, handling the website...

I haven't worked for an organization I believe in or care about for almost twenty years.  It's like finding a favorite old t-shirt that fits even better than when I lost it.

So we're opening a business.  Which was scary enough when it was an impressive business plan and investment paperwork.  Now we have funding to actually open, and so we're looking at buildings and choosing POS software and OMFG we're going to be shopkeeps.

The US has many gaping chasms of cognitive dissonance about class, and I've stumbled into one: my spouse was raised to be management, and to also be an owner.  There is nothing in his upbringing or psyche that stands in his way, beyond the universal trepidation of going through the pre-flight checklist before taking off.

In contrast, there is something in the back of my brain, lodged there when I was small, that keeps screeching "Am I allowed to do this?"

Allowed by whom?  I don't know.  Allowed by the teacher, the boss, the guy in charge, The Man, The Suit?

Here's where the idea of bootstrapping and entrepreneurship as a magic cure for social ills falls apart; here's why first and second-generation Americans outperform the descendants of earlier immigrants: blue-collar America doesn't raise owners, it raises henchfolk.

Yes, I made up the word henchfolk.  People with strong backs and little say, people who take exponentially more pride in their work than is objectively healthy, because they're where the rubber meets the road and that's often their sole source of control and pride in the workplace (and it kills them, and it burns them out, and it only raises the bar for everyone else so the squeeze gets worse).  People who punch a clock and effectively lose some of their civil rights for the duration of their shift, and so that's what work looks like to them, that's what business is, an extension of public school where they scramble for seats in class and have to pull at least a C or they starve on the street.

Hell, public school was designed to train a manufacturing workforce, and since it worked so well in producing labor cogs we've only needed to tweak the average white-collar service industry job to fit the cog.

I've had desk jobs where'd I'd've killed for a union-mandated piss break.  Where I was working a mouse through Excel like my grandmother worked a drill press and couldn't talk to the person next to me because that would be gossip and bad for morale.  Where if I made the mistake of actually caring about the clients' issues all it did was highlight the internal problems I didn't have the authority to fix, only the responsibility to endure.

I found that a college education and a white-collar resume did not make me an owner or in any way likely to ever be in charge--and looking back, at no point did I ever question the rightness of this assessment.  Work was a seat on a bus.  You don't vote on where the bus is going, and you don't get to drive and you certainly don't own the bus.

This is how you get someone who is smart, not afraid to work hard, understands sales, accounting, customers, vendors, distributors, clients, and process management, yet who still thinks, in the lizard back of her brain, that negotiating a lease on commercial property is a mystery one needs to be initiated into.  At best, I've had a window seat on the bus.  Now we're buying one and get to drive it wherever we want.  This is a major shift in perspective, and one I'm beginning to suspect my background has actively socialized me against.

And yes, I realize that a business owner works for their clients and patrons--this is not the newsflash that some suits believe it is for the rank and file, who are, after all, often hired expressly to deal with customers so that more important employees don't have to.  As I said, I've often had the window seat and could see many lovely avenues the bus could go down, but didn't.  I know it's the customers who pay for the diesel.  But my work history illustrates a struggle between the stated aims of the business and the policies that hinder that aim...and while I have confidence that we will do a better job of being responsive to our clientele, that this is a bedrock of what we're doing with our venture, there's a part of me simply agog to find myself here.

Here, as an owner.  Here, with a vested interest equal to any and all emotional investment I'm capable of putting in.  Here, with no corporate bullshit or isolated management layers between the goods & services and the patron.  Here, with a small handful of (nonhench)folk and all the books open to me and I can understand every decision--and when I throw my strong back into it I'll actually get somewhere.

It's a damned shame for our culture that for a kid who grew up working poor and pushed her way through college, down deep this feels like I'm breaking a taboo.

I've been writing these days.

I blame FBF, who is apparently one of two people on Earth who can use cheap psychological tricks on me that I can totally see through and that still work anyway.  So yeah, now I just need some brainpan voodoo on the fitness front and I'll have shaken the rest of this winter hibernation.

It's been a winter of circling around the mental drain and using all my will not to drop headfirst into the compelling funnel of water.  There is no truth down there.  Yes, yes, you feel old and fat and reclusive and like you haven't ever accomplished anything and none of those conclusions are real because it's the dark winter after a really stressful couple of years.  You made it to goal.  It's okay to curl up in your pajamas and shiver for a while.  I'm not good at relaxing though.  The best I often accomplish is a kind of self-loathing paralysis on the verge of action.  I can't even write about relaxing without using a verb like 'accomplish'.

In other news, I've been going through Terry Pratchett novels like individually-wrapped slices of of crack.  I'd been skirting around his work because so many folks had recommended him, and I thought either I'd hate it and then have to figure out why* or I'd love it and wind up gibbering in the gutter with Pratchett tracks up and down my damn arms [pushes sleeves down over wrists].

*I hate spending time analyzing art I don't enjoy, it's like trying to figure out exactly what someone's halitosis smells like.  Literature classes have always felt like water torture when you're thirsty.

Also, I'm crocheting Daleks in size 10 thread.  As my first actual crochet project.  Because February apparently skews your sense of what is or isn't an insane project to tackle.  But they're nearly done and turning out far more adorable than I'd dared to hope.  Unless they're hideously malformed badminton birdies.  I dunno, I've been looking at them so close up I can't tell--pretty much the same issue I've been having with my writing, except it doesn't stop my hands with the hook the same way it does with the keys.

~*~ I've realized that over the years my dad has gone from looking like a 'moustachioed Alex Trebek' to 'if Stan Lee were part Italian'.

~*~Just because you successfully do a move three times on the jungle-gym does not mean that the fourth time won't fuck you. Luckily, my wrist is bruised and not (six x-rays confirm) broken.

~*~I am disappointed that the take-home cd of my x-rays comes up blank. I was interested to see if there is any bony deformation after fifteen years of wearing a rather solid chunk of wedding ring. Plus, two of the radiological poses were mudras fbf taught me.

~*~The two-fold downside of going through gallons of penicillin as a child is 1) this sinus infection sore throat thing is giving me a wicked craving for a flavor I never enjoyed and am now 2) allergic to. Though if it gets bad enough, there are apparently cocktail enthusiasts who can assist me with a faux version. I dunno. It may be pink and possibly frothy if you shake it hard enough, but does it really capture the strawberry/banana/earwax bouquet?

~*~If I don't have a featured song or three in my head, there's a fall back list of standards that pop up. One of these is Captain & Tenille's "Love Will Keep Us Together". And yes, sometimes I have three songs stuck in my head at once. It's like a retro diner with table jukeboxes in there.

Kiddo: (sneezes)
Me: Bless you!
Kiddo: Thank you! (continues to self) And thank you, Kiddo, for not sneezing on your toast.


Kiddo: Today we had fifteen minutes of recess and then gym--I do not know what they were thinking.


Kiddo, referring to a small water feature by someone's porch: It sounds like peeing. That is not comforting.