I have been absent for a while. Short story: new job, new baby, new sleep schedule and priorities. I have seen absolutely nothing of the last CI season. My Tivo is full to bursting, and soon it will implode.

That said, I have a story cycle to finish and I am actually writing again -- and I'm starting to watch TV again.

So.

New stories pending, barring more upheaval.

That is all.

First Encounters
Series: Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Rating: G
Characters: Barek, Goren, Deakins, Eames, Wheeler, Logan, Ross, Todd.
Summary: There is always a first time for everything. A round-robin of how they might have met, once upon a time.
A/N: Holy crap, it's been a long time since I've written anything, and damn am I out of practice. Oops.

( They work together once, before the world changes. )

Title: Viable Strategies (drabble for lawandorder100)
Flavor: CI
Rating: G
Words: 101

Carver finds Goren on a bench with his witness, mashing the controls of a Gameboy while Eames and the boy watch.

"I didn't realize you played, Detective," Carver says.

The boy shoves his head into Goren's shoulder. Excitement has swept away nerves. "Jump!" he shrills. "There! Shoot it!" He clutches Goren's arm.

Carver cranes to look. Sprites cavort across the screen. "It looks like you're just pushing buttons at random until something happens."

"Where have I heard that before?" Eames asks no one in particular.

"Lawyers have no appreciation for police work," Goren says seriously, and squashes buttons with his thumbs.

Title: The Endless Order of Things [3/7]
Series: CI
Rating: R for adult themes and language
Characters: Desire, Logan
Summary: The Endless of Sandman / The detectives of the Major Case Squad.
Chapters: [Delirium]|[Despair]|[Desire]
Author's Note: This is not the Desire of the fleshy pelvis-bumping. This is the Desire that is, for more than one reason, the twin of Despair.

( Desire )

Life has been -- haha -- bad, lately, so I haven't been doing much over here. So sorry. However, I'm back writing again. I have three stories currently underway, and hopefully I'll be finished with the third part of Endless by the end of the week (or by the beginning of next week) have some more substance on the Kubler-Ross model, and am going strong on the second half of Stakeout. So that's something!

I'm a little concerned that each chapter of the Endless thing is longer than the last. I suppose that's a sign of something-or-another. I really need a good beta reader. Is there a store you can go to for those?

In the meantime, TO PROVE I AM ACTUALLY BEING PRODUCTIVE, a snippet from Part II of Stakeout below.

( Conversation would be easier if she wasn't partnered with an encyclopedia. )

I have never written anything that rhymes before. I have whole new respect for Dr. Seuss. It is surprisingly hard to find a rhyme for 'penis' that isn't 'anus.' Which I know isn't an entirely correct rhyme (in more ways than one) but somehow I can't seem to move beyond them.

Not that I think Dr. Seuss ever had a problem with that particular issue.

I don't think.

(Gosh. If he did, I've definitely been reading the wrong books.)

Mad-Lib Fanfic. A poem for odakota_rose

The fanfic writers have shot poor Reason
And booted Rhyme out the creative door;
They spend themselves in cliches of passion
And dump our heroes naked on the floor.
The wishful wanking of a feeble muse
Finds thought a waste. Who needs it? Why bother!
Boilerplate plots are premade to abuse.
Mad-lib the blanks. Just write a disclaimer.

Plot one: banal music. Guitars start to play
Celene Dion, who croons backup to smut,
And stops the scene before the cabaret
of morning after "Who?" "You?" and then, "What?"
Lyrics spew pap prewritten on the screen
There's little work left for the writer's pen.
Chain them together with fluff in between:
Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! And again!

Take two: our damsel's in perilous danger.
(Ovaries preclude wit, skill and all smarts.)
He's qualified to swoop in and save her
By virtue of possessing jiggly parts.
Boy meets his girl just like Jack once met Jill
And like him, forgets both job and water.
He tumbles her (joke!) on that fucking hill
Then drags her away. Wedding? Meet altar.

Plot three's a sure winner: deep-seated angst.
Therapy? Pish-posh. The need's quite mistook.
Who pays for shrinks when there's far better wangst
To be found in the bedroom? Drop shorts! Look!
Her vagina preempts psychology;
His penis of power beats Prozac's best.
One thrust and all's fixed. (Ignore irony.
If the shrinks only knew! Damn, that's some sex.)

Sex leads to babies: that's birds and the bees,
Which brings us to Four. (That's plots and not spawn,
Though really, who's counting? There go the Emmys.
Eames with a gun? Hot. With diapers? Yawn.)
If sex didn't cure it, then parenthood? Well,
Ego te absolvo! -- wait. Who's fooling whom?
We all had parents. Absolution? Like hell.
Warm fuzzies? As if. Shove them back in the womb.

Up is now upside-down. Left is now right.
Characters are weak; the writing's quite dense.
Goren cries buckets; tough Eames has turned trite:
They're strangers now and no longer make sense.
Ignore them. Who cares? Take complaints offstage.
The wank is the thing: bid Reality good-bye.
Glue faces on cardboard; jerk off on the page.
There's more where that came from, an endless supply.

Impossible? Bah. Fandom knows no shame.
Gut canon. Write shit. Just leave the names the same.

My muse is dead. This is vexing. She was just fine until this weekend, when we went looking at houses. Suddenly she's demoralized and wants me to quit my job and become a barrista. I fail to see the connection between schlepping coffee to addicts and pretty much anything else in my life, but there you go. There is no questioning the stupidity of the creative impulse.

I am therefore catching up on reading. Blue Blood is halfway done. Tonight, I finished an Amelia Peabody mystery that I forgot I bought on the way back from vacation last April, and in a few minutes I'm going to pick up the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey that I just found hiding under one of the boxes we never unpacked after moving. (I can't help it. I realize Fitzgerald isn't the best translation but I have a nostalgic affection for this one that I just can't shake.) I also have Reading Lolita in Tehran to start, Assassination Vacation started, and Bel Canto, which I keep meaning to read but somehow -- well. Books that involve musicians bug me. I'm ready to bet I'll put it off again, and end up picking up something else instead. Just looking up at my "to do" bookshelf, I--

--realize that I have an addictive propensity for buying more books than I will ever have time to read. I think I might have a problem. An expensive problem. Maybe I should call my credit card company and have them block bookstore transactions.

***

The great irritant of the night is that the freaking Tivo bailed on us and decided there was nothing worth recording today. Never mind that we had scheduled this stuff a billion years ago. This means no TV was recorded tonight. NONE. No L&O: CI, no L&O: SVU, no nothing.

If it weren't pointless to shout at a piece of consumer electronics, I would be giving it a piece of my mind right now. Thank God for reruns, but seriously. Come on. If it freaks out and misses recording Grey's Anatomy on Thursday, I will pop a cork.

***

Okay. I am now up to 34 books that I have purchased and not yet read. One of them is Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. That's going to the top. Almost to the top. It's going to the top, right under this Regency romance that I can't remember buying and is probably certainly a piece of utter fluff, not to mention utterly devoid of any merit whatsoever.

I think I'll just read that first. Just to get it out of the way, you understand. But Self-Editing is going right under it.

Oh, look. A Martha Grimes Richard Jury mystery. How did I miss that? That's going to the top. Right under Devil's Cub. And Self-Editing is going right under that. By which I mean it's going to go right under the P.G. Wodehouse Golf Omnibus and the Tales of Saki and -- dude. I bought Fragile Things. How did I forget I bought the latest Gaiman? Okay. That's going on top, and then it's the Regency, and then it's the....

So I've sort of screwed myself again. Goddammit.

I started writing this new story that I dreamed up during rush hour traffic, and it's working out great. It's flowing, and it's easy, and yay!

The only problem is that it's not a Sandman crossover story, which leaves me stuck with the original story I had, which means I'm back where I started in regards to that series and FUCK-A-DUCK. I would throw something, but that would require me to use actual muscles, and it's 6:00 pm on a Thursday and screw that.

So it's back to the original story for some shredding and serious editing to see what I can make out of it. (I'm thinking maybe if I-- no, I'm not thinking at all. I have no thoughts. None. I can't even tell what it is about the thing that pisses me off, so I think I'm better off just giving it distance.)

Darn it. This is annoying, in that it means I have effectively failed to produce anything this week. This worries me. If I don't produce anything this week, it is the thin end of the wedge, and I will very quickly lapse into never producing anything again. I know me and my short attention span. This is how it works. I slip one week, and two weeks later the hobby is GONE. And I like this one, dammit.

On the bright side, I'm really really enjoying writing the new one so far. (My earlier resolution to write non-CI fanfic has yet to materialize into real action, as yet.) I've pasted the first few paragraphs of it below because for it amuses the hell out of me. And it's 6:00 pm on a Thursday and dammit, I want to.

( snippet below )

Title: The Endless Order of Things [2/7]
Series: CI
Rating: R for adult themes
Characters: Eames, Despair
Chapters: [Delirium]|[Despair]|[Desire]
Summary: The Endless of Sandman / The detectives of the Major Case Squad.

( Despair )

I am peevish because of the following:

1. I had to work today. It is a Saturday. This is not right.
   
2. I will have to work tomorrow. It is a Sunday. This is also not right.
   
3. Then I have to work all week, and probably next weekend as well. Paycheck to pain ratio is not disproportionate enough for this to be cool.
   
4. I have started looking around the Internet for fanfiction, and I've found a lot of interesting stuff in all sorts of fandoms. I am late to the game! Whee! However. There is almost nothing on Logan and Wheeler/Logan and Barek. This is very disheartening. WTF, plz? Law & Order is apparently not a popular fanfic ... thingy. (Is there a word?) Fandom. That's it. Unless it's SVU. This disturbs me, the SVU thing. Because subject matter, in combination with the type of fic-- it makes me worry a little.
   
5. Along the same lines: there is a lot of porny fanfiction. Not that this is a point of annoyance, exactly. It's just, like, wow. There is a lot. I have learned I must read the headers on fanfiction. Lesson learned!
   
6. I am stuck on a story. Biggest point of peeve. STUCK. Not so much in where it will go, because that's nicely taken care of for me by Wolf, but because I have no idea how to write it. Boo.

On the bright side:

1. It's 7:22 and I'm in my pajamas! Blue flannel.
   
2. I have the rest of the night to work out my issues with the stupid story. Maybe inspiration will hit. Or what is more likely (since this is what has happened with everything else I've written so far) I'll swear and wrestle my way through just getting a bunch of cranky, painful words on a page, then go back and beat up on it until it turns into something passable. At which point I'll get disgusted, call it done, and then move on to something new and shiny. Like thumbtacks.
   
3. Working on this fic that's pissing me off is forcing me to go back to read all my Sandman. This is always good, even if the reason for it isn't!
   
4. I have a great book. Blue Blood, by a detective in the NYPD. I'm a third of the way through, and I highly recommend it. It's beautifully written. I'm sticking right up next to Homicide as my two favorite ... uh, nonfiction books about the police.
   
5. I have lots of DVDs. Lots and lots of DVDs. Yay!
   
6. I have a whim to write other fancoms now. So I will! Eventually. When I finish some of this other stuff I'm working on.
   

And now I'm all evened out with the bads and the good, so I will get to work and do something productive!