East Coast Gazette

I just spent an hour on the phone with one of my best friends — and in between listening to him call some guys in his barracks douchebags and motherfuckers (Marines barracks vocabulary = disturbingly similar to j-school editing class vocabulary) he mumbled something about infantry training levels and I yelled, “OH MY GOD, ARE YOU TRAINING TO BE A RECON MARINE?” and then I was like, “OF COURSE YOU ARE YOU PSYCHOPATH,” and he was all “HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT A RECON MARINE IS?” and I was like, “WHY ARE YOU GOING TO JUMP OUT OF PERFECTLY GOOD PLANES?” However, as it turns out? The moment is still much funnier in Smittywing’s paean to the Love Song Of John Sheppard And Lorne And The Navy Goat The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves than it is when I’m shouting it at my buddy in California while listening to him talk about some moron who stole a drill sergeant’s porn and tried to beat off to it in said drill sergeant’s bathroom. (Mostly because you know, I don’t want him jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.) Plus it wasn’t like I could tell him my extensive knowledge of the military is primarily rooted in me writing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell defying smut for it.

I’ve been reading an embarrassing amount of NCIS fic lately — keep in mind, 90 percent of it is appalling. Like, I’m not joking guys, really appalling, the type of stories where Gibbs gives Tony a collar which inspires him to cry and weep in gratitude at his Master or also the ever-popular Tony gets gaybashed and Gibbs tears everybody a new asshole after he attack’s Tony’s. And I like that shit. It’s like everybody has the right ideas and does like eight kilos of coke before attempting execution.

And then you stumble across a writer like Sequitur on — wait for it — ff.net. She/He writes astonishingly good NCIS genfic, with a strong, strong undercurrent of smart and awesome, and her balance of the relationship between Gibbs and his team and Tony and his team and Gibbs and Tony especially, are knock-you-over awesome.

• Rictus — Even if you’ve never read NCIS fic before, or know nothing about the show, I’d recommend you give at least Rictus a try — it’s gritty and doesn’t pull any punches, and it’s the story of how Baltimore PD Detective Anthony DiNozzo ended up meeting and working with Gibbs. It’s a work in progress, but with fourteen extremely meaty chapters that have already telegraphed the ending. I can’t say enough wonderful things about this story, about how it made me cry and laugh and ache for Tony, and how Gibbs’ reluctant concern for him shines through with admirable subtlety. It’s hard to write these two, to get the voices down, and it’s even harder to write crime stories, a real mystery, and to do it justice while addressing all the emotions involved. I couldn’t put it down. I know at least one of you mentioned a passing familiarity with the X-Files fandom, and if you were ever knee-deep in the casefile stories of yore, you’ll probably remember things like The Abyss Looks Back — this? Kick’s Abyss’ ass. I’m naming this the official best NCIS fic I have read to date, bar none, regardless of pairing.

• Ten Nonlinear Moves — This is a story about how Tony and his team manage after Gibbs leaves them in the third season finale, Hiatus (pt 1 and 2). Written in scenes and snapshots with just brilliant images and wonderfully vivid details, it’s the kind of story that describes the way memory comes in fits and spurts. Funny and sweet with an underlying thread of longing to it — and this story is just so fundamentally Tony: so much caring and worry and brains wrapped up in jokes about flowcharts and mass invites to go see Snakes on a Plane. Not to be missed.

All right folks, happy reading!

I found out about this movie while on study abroad when I was supposed to be “learning Chinese” but mostly I was “buying bootleg media” and “accidentally stumbling into back rooms filled to the gills of pornography emblazoned with bad English.” My friend Aki introduced me to Formula 17 in her boiling hot, air-condition-less dorm room on her Mac — because nothing helps with suffocating heat than hot, Taiwanese boys making out. It was a weird movie, not because of the content (please, I watched a movie, much to my disgrace, called “The Da Vinci Load,” shut up, don’t judge me) but rather by the fact that it was popular — in Taiwan — and it’s about gay boys.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t anything like the subtle, rending drama and realism of Lan Yu, which DO NOT GO SEE!!!! because I totally cried for like THREE WEEKS!!!!!, this movie is kind of retarded. So really, Formula 17 is to gay cinema as Stargate: Atlantis is to scifi (stop with the hackles, let’s all be honest with ourselves) — but it’s a God damn good time. With tons of eye-candy.

And! You can see it here — keep in mind, you will have to register with crunchyroll.com, but as an alternative to downloading enormous files in order to see Asian crack dramas of your choice? It’s so worth it.

I’ve been pretty quiet for the last couple of episodes before this one, partially because there was nothing really striking that I wanted to say, this one, however, had a really killer combination: (a) interesting patient of the week (b) Duckling alert! Duckling alert! (c) Foreshadowing — WEIRD foreshadowing.

Spoilers ho!

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And as I was pursing this line of thinking as I was — I’m not joking — on my knees scrubbing out my apartment (God damn moving), my iPod kicked in with Melissa Ferrick, “Drive,” and I said, out loud to my roommate’s conditioner: “Oh my God. That is totally Gibbs and Tony’s fucked up sex song.” I love the idea of multimedia and intertextuality, so if I could program songs to cue up in stories, I’d do it, and if there was a scene where Gibbs was shoving Tony up against a wall and pinning his wrists to the wall, whispering in his ear, I’d totally be playing this song.

So last night, after marathoning half of the third season of NCIS I started writing an appallingly evil story in which, after the events of the episode “Frame-Up,” where Tony is appropriately framed for a gruesome murder, he doesn’t manage to get out of the charge and gets sent to prison.  It was was pretty awful and written from Gibbs’ perspective and started off with Abby quitting her job in tears and crying all the way through Tony’s sentencing and then Gibbs’ blackmailing people into giving him Tony’s medical records from the inside after DiNozzo spends the third week he’s in prison in the infirmary.    It was, eventually, going to get a little better, with Tony escaping from prison and sending Gibbs postcards and signing him up for NetFlix and sending him movies and junk and it was all going to be tres long-distance forbidden romance but then my computer ate it.

Like I said: ya’ll are so lucky.

The only good thing is, now this frees me up to write a serial killer story and get back to my roots in the X-Files.

All right, you guys got a preview a few days ago, and now, here we go:

Arc pt 1/?: In which Conner never sees it coming, Clark should know better, Lex should communicate better, and Geoffrey is not actually Quasimodo. Happy reading!

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Title: Highly Classified and very Hush Hush
Rating: PG
Summary: “Damn the man,” DiNozzo whispers.

SGA has Marines — NCIS polices Marines. You didn’t honestly think I wouldn’t eventually find some way to make the two plots hold hands and fake it, did you? Happy reading!

Minervacat, Triskellita, Darastar, LN, N. and I hit the Local Consolidated Theaters (And Wow, What A Totally Unromantic Name That Is) tonight to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and it was totally money. Min and I anticipate that the wank regarding this movie started roughly five minutes ago — that’s allowing for travel time back from the theater and writing up a scathing commentary, unless of people flame lj via BlackBerry, in which case I just assume it is the end of the world and have done with it. I adored the film, thought it was hugely fun, and am more desperately in love with Jack Sparrow than ever.

Okay, so after…approximately a year and literally four discarded drafts (three of which had parts which were posted at one point or another), one major plot overhaul, and a considerable amount of sulking and stomping on my part — the third part of the Conflicts of Interest trilogy is finally — and thank GOD — officially underway.

Just a little snapshot from it:

Arc, the very first opening scene

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