Barb's Journal

I think it was Anne Rice who popularized (if she didn’t outright invent) the concept of vampires as cold white marble statues, but the concept has influenced many subsequent vampire stories, and even spread its stony tendrils, via fanfic, into vampire mythoi which don’t use it. Jossverse vampires are in many ways a subversion of the Anne Rice model - they’re pale and they’re room-temperature, but in other respects they’re relentlessly down-to-earth. They can have sex, with all its attendant messiness. They have to shave (cf. Angelus’s various regrettable forays into facial hair through the centuries). If they don’t bathe, they get stinky, and if they eat people food, my bet is they have to dispose of it somehow. Even when they bite their victims, it’s not a couple of neat pinpricks, it’s a big messy ragged wound.

Moreover, while they gain immortality and strength, Jossverse vampires are presented as hideous monsters, who grow more monstrous with age. The loss of one’s soul in the Jossverse is not simply something for the vampire characters to angst about; it turns them into something indisputably evil and unfailingly horrific. Becoming a vampire is never presented as something to be desired in the Jossverse.

Fans, of course, often have other ideas. The vast majority of shippy fanfic dealing with one of the vampire characters emphasizes the marvelous advantages of vampires - erections of infinite duration! No body odor! Perfect, flawless marble-statue musculature! Etc. Traits such as paleness and lack of warmth, which were intended to remind the viewer that this is an animated corpse, become eroticized, and much of the vampire character’s attractiveness arises from their lack of squishy, stinky, human imperfections. (Some of these things are only dubiously canonical; we have, for example, Anya’s word that Spike smells good, and several characters mentioning that unwashed vampires smell bad, though it might be possible to argue that it’s the clothes rather than the vampires smelling in either case.)

On the other end of the spectrum, traits such as game face, or growling, which were intended to be animalistic and horrifying, are likewise eroticized by some writers. And again, these traits are often expanded into areas of dubious canonicity, as witness the myriad stories featuring vampires purring, or having a social structure which models that of a fantasy BDSM club predatory animal.

While I haven’t made any systematic study of this, I am mildly curious as to what extent the writers and readers who tend to go for the marble statue version overlap with the writers and readers who go for the grr!argh! version. I know that the former doesn’t do much for me, whereas I enjoy many but not all of the features of the latter. One of my writerly kinks is the intersection of the fantastic and the mundane. I always want to know that the plumbing is like in the magic castle. If vampires don’t smell, why don’t they? If they do smell, what do they smell like, and why? How many situps a day does it take to maintain those washboard abs, and does pig’s blood really go straight to your hips? So for me, the marble-statue vampire is a useful concept, if only because I take a perverse pleasure in subverting it. But in the end, it’s the growly stuff for me. Purring? Totally canon.

It strikes me that in some ways, this kind of thing is a way for readers and writers to have their Exotic Other cake and eat it too. There may come a time when fetishizing dark skin or epicanthic folds carries as little cultural baggage as fetishing blue eyes or freckles, but that day is not yet. But there’s no Undead American lobby to object to writers rhapsodizing over the perfection of Angel’s cold, marble-hard, chiseled white/ivory/ecru/whatever chest, or the salutary effect of Spike’s growl on Buffy’s [insert euphemism here.] We can safely dehumanize vampires, reduce them to a collection of things that make us tingly in our naughty places, because they’re already inhuman.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

I worked on “Little Sister” over the weekend, and got a reasonable amount done on the next chapter, considering that Kathy came down sick and I mooched around all Sunday feeling groggy and headachy. I’m in a “I’m going to finish all my fic and disappear from the face of the internet” sort of mood, which I know will pass, because, let’s face it, the odds of me finishing all my fic in anything less than a couple of years is tiny indeed. I also printed up invitations for the dozen or so people we want to send snail-mail copied to - I stopped by a Hallmark store on Friday and found some blank, printable invitations I liked. I need to print off envelopes, and we should be able to mail them off this week. So the weekend wasn’t a total loss, work-wise, even it the laundry is still mocking me, and the lawn needs mowing again after all the rain.

tiirz is starting up her V:TM game again after a long hiatus, and I dug up my character sheet and dusted her off. The last time we ran a game, AtS was still on the air. Yeeks.

My back went out last night for no particular reason, and I could hardly walk this morning. Better now, but can we cancel September? Because so far, it sucks.</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

There have been many posts lately about ideas, and how you get them. This post is about the next step: once you have an idea, what do you do with it?

Some time back, I got some feedback on “The Lesser of Two Evils” (the story where Spike kills Warren) which brought up, among other things, the fact that Warren had family in Sunnydale. And that gave me an idea. What if Warren’s mother came to Buffy and asked her to investigate her son’s disappearance?

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

I just signed up for seasonal_spuffy, dammit. Go thou and do likewise.

Yes, you! Don’t slink away from the monitor, I can see you! Click on that link! Now! Go!</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

I made a pretty with all the relevant wedding/reception info - I think I’ve sent a copy to everyone who requested it, and quite a few who didn’t, but if I missed you out and you would like a copy, let me know. There are a couple of you for whom I only have snail mail addresses, and so you will get an actual paper invite shortly.

Why yes, I am approaching this whole wedding thing in a completely haphazard, “Whee! I have a barn! I have a trombone! Let’s put on a show!” way. Why do you ask?

I nerved myself to talk to my supervisor about the job issues today, and she was very enthusiastic about the idea of me applying for one of the new positions, providing they’re approved, which we’ll know by the end of the week. I keep forgetting that for some unaccountable reason my employers are a great deal more impressed with me than I am with myself. Part of me is still convinced that someday they’ll discover the Awful Truth, but until then… MWHAHAHAHA! World domination!

Anyway, thanks for the back-patting. I know that compared to many people I know, my problems amount to a hill of beans, and so I tend to downplay them to myself, and then when I write them all out like that it suddenly hits me than maybe one or two of them are worth being upset about.

And Kathy likes the salsa, so all is, I guess, not entirely lost.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

I keep starting posts and erasing them because they’re all so catastrophically boring. So, bullet points:

• Re: Seasonal_Spuffy, torn between obligation to represent for ship, yo, and desire never to enter another ficathon again. Re: shiny other ficathons, ditto.
• Made salsa. Did not turn out nearly as well as last time. Think I used wrong kind of vinegar. And yet my thumbs are all stingy with jalapeno juice. Stingy thumbs + mediocre salsa = WOE.
• Massive changes coming at work - new database they’ve been begging for for years finally in production, departmental expansion featuring new quasi-managerial positions, me stressing out about whether or not I will qualify to apply for same, much less get them, much less succeed at them if I do get them. Much stressing over conversation I had with manager last quarterly evaluation, in which I blithely said I didn’t want to go into management - maybe reporting or something. However, quasi-managerial positions here, now, & paying more, putting possessors of same in line for Brighter & Better Things. Whereas nebulous non-managerial jobs in other departments not so much. Fingernails: I gnaw them.
• I owe Kathy a birthday cake and a present. Also WOE.
• Did not finish weeding the garden this weekend.
• Mom is waffling about coming to the wedding. I understand that travel is difficult for her, at her age and with her health problems, and if she’d just come out and say “I don’t feel well enough to go,” or “It would exhaust me and I wouldn’t enjoy it,” I would be sad, but I’d understand. But she keeps coming up with stuff like “I can’t leave the cats alone” or “It would be too difficult to get handicapped access at the smaller airport,” and it makes me crazy. The last time we talked she seemed to be leaning back towards going, but it kind of hurts that she’s willing to travel to Portland for a week by herself to see my sister and the grandkids, but trying to duck out of this.
• My sister’s on her last round of chemotherapy. Since her cancer had spread to so many lymph nodes, the chances of recurrence are high, so she’ll be going in for CT scans every six months for… pretty much the rest of her life, I guess. She still needs to consult with her surgeon on when or if they’re going to reverse her illiostomy. It’s good news as far as it goes, but she was saying the other day that the odds of her living to collect Social Security weren’t good. Not being depressed, just… factual.

Huh. Perhaps my salsa woe is displacement.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

This is the revised and beta’d version of my lynnevitational fic. There have not been any major changes, but it’s been polished a fair bit, and some things have been clarified just a tad.

Every Silver Lining’s Got a Touch of Gray
By Barb C

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: R. A mean nasty verging on NC-17 R. An R with ATTITUDE, baby!
Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Synopsis: After Angel convinces Spike to go undercover in an attempt to find out where Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, the vampire CEO of Wolfram & Hart, has hidden the muo-ping containing his soul, Angel and Buffy must rescue Spike before it’s too late. But Buffy and Spike have unfinished business of their own…
Author’s notes: Written for the 2008 </lj>lynnevitational. This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” It’s set about eighteen years after POM, and is the third part of a three-part series of stories, the first two parts of which haven’t been written yet. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. But it just came out that way! Many thanks to betas </lj>slaymesftly. </lj>kehf, </lj>deborahc, and </lj>shipperx!

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

So I was having this Very Serious Discussion with my betas about the sex scenes in ESLHATOG (revised version should be up tomorrow, btw) and somehow or other, this was the result…

INT. BARB’S BRAIN

SPIKE is lounging in bed, perusing the latest issue of WSC. BUFFY is dressed in comfy PJs and sitting at her desk, reading e-mail.

SPIKE: Sodding Czechs…sodding defense… bloody, sodding Portsmouth…

BUFFY: [with a frown] Look at this!

SPIKE: [absorbed in the footy] Wossat?

BUFFY: Just look!

[She turns her laptop so SPIKE can see the following piece of SPAM}

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

A drabble in belated honor of JM’s birthday:

Looks Like Fun

by Barb C
Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: PG-13
Setting: Post-Gift AU
Pairing: B/S
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I’d just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: Happy birthday to you!
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as “A Raising in the Sun” et. al.

“But I didn’t mean to!” Connie wailed.

“What you meant doesn’t matter!” Buffy snapped. “Honey, think about - ” She glared at Spike, whose rapt gaze lacked something in the parental reprimand line. “Back me up here!”

Spike tore his eyes away from the flames. “No more playing with lighters, sweetness.”

Buffy handed over the baby with an eyeroll. “Hold Alex. I’ve got to call our insurance agent. Bill! Stop pestering the firemen!”

Connie sniffled, clinging to Spike’s leg. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Your birthday cake needed all its candles.”

“So it did.” Spike looked down and grinned. “Best birthday prezzie ever!“

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

We’ve been having more router problems (the fix turned out to be something really simple, which I should have thought of myself, and I’m ashamed to have called miertam up in a panic about it, but I did. I admit my weenieness.) so I haven’t been online at home much this week. Thus I’m even more behind than usual with comments, and I haven’t read my flist since Friday. Sorry! (she said, cringing) I’ve also realized that whenever I post from work, I’ve forgotten to post from my WordPress site, so I’m going to have to go back and do some housekeeping, and make sure everything matches up.

This weekend we got up bright and early Saturday morning and tamed the wilderness, i.e. mowed the front yard and hauled all the deadfall grapefruit out to the alley. Why, it almost looks like a civilized dwelling! In the next couple of weeks I need to get serious about cleaning the bermuda grass out of the garden, so we can plant fall flowers. We later went over to </lj>framefolly’s for yummy lasagna and a 10th Kingdom marathon, and today we did Mom’s grocery shopping and had her over for dinner.

And in between times, I worked like a mad thing trying to finish something for the </lj>lynnevitational, and I succeeded, sort of. In a manner of speaking. It’s finished in the sense of having a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s really rough, and I have an awful feeling that the ending dissolved into treacly goo when I was trying more for restrained ray of hope. I posted a link to the rough draft, but I’m not pretending it’s anything but a rough draft. I think I need to let it sit for a week or so and then go at it with a meat cleaver. But later. Just reaching ‘The End’ was exhausting enough for today.

I read a couple of the other </lj>lynnevitational stories, which are excellent as always - more will be posted over the next week. So if you don’t have the comm friended (and why don’t you?) do so now! There’s genres and pairings for all tastes, and you won’t find better BtVS/AtS fic out there anywhere.

Sleep now. Happy, happy sleep…</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

This is… um… about fifty percent of a lynnevitational post. Due to a lot of things, I have just barely finished this today, and haven’t had time to get it beta’d, or find out if it’s hopelessly confusing without the preceding stories. But I really wanted to make the deadline, and I wanted to do so with something that was at least technically finished.

So I’m posting a link to what amounts to a finished first draft. If you’d like to read it now, feel free; I don’t think it completely sucks, or I wouldn’t be posting it at all. But I do think it can be made considerably better. I’m still tinkering with it as we speak, so if you happen to refresh the page, don’t be surprised if the sentence you’re reading goes sideways. I will be posting a beta’d and most likely significantly revised version as soon as possible. I apologize most sincerely for the inconvenience, but I hope that those who are interested in the process of writing will, at least, find comparing the two versions a useful exercise.

Every Silver Lining’s Got a Touch of Gray
By Barb C

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: R. A mean nasty verging on NC-17 R. An R with ATTITUDE, baby!
Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Synopsis: After Angel convinces Spike to go undercover in an attempt to find out where Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, the vampire CEO of Wolfram & Hart, has hidden the muo-ping containing his soul, Angel and Buffy must rescue Spike before it’s too late. But Buffy and Spike have unfinished business of their own…
Author’s notes: Written for the 2008 </lj>lynnevitational. This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” It’s set about eighteen years after POM, and is the third part of a three-part series of stories, the first two parts of which haven’t been written yet. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. But it just came out that way!

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Back in business, thanks to the awesome miertam!

(salaams in your general direction)</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

jamalov29 has been doing an S/B fanfic “Name that quote” thing recently, and it got me thinking: in both the ones I saw, I couldn’t identify the exact story, but I knew immediately who the writer was.

So, question for the day: which fic writers (in any fandom) have distinctive voices for you? Are there writers whose styles you’d know anywhere? Share!</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

I was quite overwhelmed at the response to my announcement last week - thanks for all your well-wishes, everyone! ljs enquired if we were registered anywhere, and no, we aren’t - we’ve been together for twenty-plus years, and we don’t really need more stuff.

However, as you may or may not know, I work for the American Cancer Society, and my sister was recently diagnosed with colon cancer. If anyone is absolutely driven to commemorate the occasion, once we figure out exactly when the occasion will be, a donation to ACS is of more use than getting us a toaster. *g* You can go to the national website, www.cancer.org to donate online, or send it to your local ACS office.

I’m also walking in our local Strides Against Breast Cancer event again this year, and you can donate to that here:

I suppose it says terrible things about me that the current kerfuffle about outing fans has raised in me a terrible desire to do a “Wait… you mean Ben is Glory?” type parody. The funny thing (for me) is, I found my page on the Wiki That Must Not Be Named a long time ago, briefly considered updating it, and then decided I couldn’t be arsed. I didn’t find out about the owner’s idiosyncracies until much later.

In short, huh.

I don’t think I’ll be able to post part III of “Road to Byzantium” this weekend, but I might be able to get the last few scenes beaten into good enough order to send to the betas.

Kathy made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies OF THE GODS. Probably luckily, she’s taking them to work.

</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Happy birthday, sillymagpie!</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

…I did not get part III posted today. I’ve been working on it, and I’m about halfway done, but I still have the Big Climactic Scene to write, the characters are mocking me, and and it’s gonna be a bit longer. My deepest apologies.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

So as I may or may not have mentioned Kathy and I are giving serious thought to nipping over to California and getting married, because we want to destroy the moral and social fabric of America JUST THAT MUCH, and Kathy brought up the question of the ages: Cummings-Coleman or Coleman-Cummings? Or just leave it as is and forego the hassle of changing all our paperwork?

I suggested that we go the shipper route and smush them together, but neither Cumman nor Colmings seemed to appeal…

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

How many times have you opened your refrigerator or perused the produce section of your local supermarket and said to yourself, “Self, why are there not more sources of fresh figs in the greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area?” AND ANSWER CAME THERE NONE? A whole lot of times, I bet!

Well, now your problems are OVER! Never again will you wake to those midnight cravings for fig pie, fig tart, figs stuffed with cheese, dried figs, fig newtons, fig jam, figgy pudding, and roast rack of lamb with brandied fig sauce, only to slink back to your lonely, hungry bed unsated! Yes, your fig-free days are numbered, because I have figs, and I want to give them to YOU!

And not just any figs! No, these are 100% certified home-grown organic Arizona figs! No artificial pesticides or fertilizers have been used in the production of these figs, and although there are ugly rumors that the fig tree snuck some of the rose food when we weren’t looking, we categorically deny that we fertilize the roses often enough to make any difference, and we’ve spoken to the fig tree VERY sternly about it and it promises never to do it again.

You may ask how to distinguish 100% organic figs from ordinary, everyday, commercial figs, given that Arizona has no laws, enforced or otherwise, governing the labeling of organic produce. Simple! Look at my face! Would I lie to you?

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Some of our lucky fig recipients will receive SPECIAL BONUS FIGS

• Nibbled by 100% organic bugs!
• Pecked by 100% organic birds!
• Slightly shriveled by 100% organic sunlight!

You may be asking yourself, “Self, how do I take advantage of this fantabulous offer?” It couldn’t be easier! Merely go to Barb’s house, knock on the front door, and say, “Hey, Barb said I could have some figs!” And then we give you figs! YES, IT’S THAT SIMPLE!

DON’T WAIT! ACT NOW!! SUPPLIES ARE LIMITED!!! BONUS OVER-RIPE GRAPEFRUIT TO FIRST FIVE CUSTOMERS!!

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.