East Coast Gazette

So. Over the summer, in the dizzying New York heat Speranza approached me and asked if I’d be interested in participating in a zine. Being what some people call a “whippersnapper” my basic answer was, “That’s fanfic that’s been printed out and stapled together, right?”

I turned out to be wrong, and now, months and months later, I’ve gotten my two volume set of Surfacing in the mail and have lost most of the last week to lying around in my bathtub drinking wine and reading fanfic — guys: I can read fanfic in the bathtub — you see why this appeals to me now, right? Right?

I can’t say enough nice things about these volumes: they’re really amazingly beautiful and well put together, wonderfully bound and the stories in the collections are pretty rocksome, too.

(Well, except for that bullshit some whore named “Pru” wrote but whatever we clearly don’t need to pay attention to one bad apple.)

Kurogane, being — wait for it folks — pimp. P-I-M-P. And then obviously there’s a picture of both of them trying to figure out how to hit it in this AU school in which they work without being tossed out on their asses — or blackmailed by the school nurse (who rumor has it is Yuuko). God bless CLAMP and their nonstop access to crack cocaine.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Or The Hoyden.

Started as a gag into an IM window and then went horrible, awful places and it will continue to spiral downward into horribleness unparalleled. Just wait until I start making even worse wife jokes. It’ll happen.

Read more »

“This was the point an old Akkadian author was trying to make when he spoke of neighboring tribes as people ‘who knew not grain’ and who ‘had never known a city,’” written by W.R. Jones in a paper 30 years ago about the concept of “barbarians.”

“Never known a city,” kind of haunting, isn’t it?

One of the more interesting side-effects of doing 14 Valentines is the way my unfinished stories folder gets rode hard and put away wet — left used and abused. In fact, the only stories still in there are things with filenames like “omgwtfkillmeplz” and “jack+john=bff” and “hahahawhatwasithinking.” Stories that never had much likelihood of being finished anyway. It’s comforting and at the same time a little strange to be suddenly bereft of all the guilty half-finished pieces I’ve clung to. It’s giving me time to think about new projects.

There’s the one that’s slowly percolating about John’s ex-wife, who I’ve decided met him for the first time when he was bullied into being her escort for a debutante ball and fell in love with her when she helped him sneak out and they drank whiskey out of her flask and smoked Parliaments all night on the kitchen steps of the hotel.

But more than the old school stuff I’m considering, my head’s been filled to the brim with ideas and snatches from new, possibly more interesting avenues — and for those of you who’ve been around the block once or twice, you’ll know what it means when I say — anime.

My love for bad anime is probably legendary at this point, and the fact that CLAMP has sucked me (concurrently) into xxxHolic and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles is a shame so deep and balck in my soul I can’t even talk about it. All I do know is that in order to comfort The Hoyden the other morning I found myself writing the beginnings of a post-TRC Kurogane/Fai story where (I’m not even kidding) Fai and Kurogane had moved back to Suwa where Fai was maintaining the kekkai and they’d found a baby. It was so insanely self-indulgent that it had “huge hit” written all over it.

Then there’s the fact that on xxxHolic the relationship between Doumeki and Watanuki is not only, you know, basically canonical, it’s one of those deliciously codependent things where — if left to the devices of the 14-year-old girls who write xxxHolic fanfiction on ff.net — overly emotional weeping and healing sex is almost requisite. I cannot stand for that. There must be shenanigans of the non-teary kind.

Every year I’ve done some sort of big holiday-related project I’ve always sworn that I would never do it again, and not just because by the end of it I usually had sore wrists and very little sanity. This year like all the others I utterly failed to keep that resolution, but unlike past years I didn’t exactly come out of it unscathed. My hysterical but totally warranted laughter when my creative writing professor was talking about learning to be self-disciplined with our writing was only the first sign of imminent breakdown.