I just learned that Sarah Rees Brennan, formerly known as Maya and Mistful, has not only taken her fics down and requested that those who have downloaded her master fic file not share it with others, but she has reportedly deleted her own stories from her hard drive.

I felt sick to my stomach when I read this.

Her stories have meant so much to me, given me such joy, that I really cannot express the effect they've had on my life. Maybe that sounds weird, but it's no different to me than the effect H.G. Wells or Ursula Le Guin has had on me. Good authors, no matter their subject, illuminate life and what it means to be human, and I deeply feel that SRB has done this as well as many more established authors. To know that these stories, which she must love, are lost to her and lost to all that didn't get the pdf in time or who lack the network to track someone who has the file, just makes my heart hurt.

I know the reasons why she did she took the stories down from public view. They make a certain amount of sense professionally and legally. I still can't help but feel that violence has been done to some great works of art, that by permanently removing them from her world she has symbolically  repudiated and negated those works. In a way, it is an insult to her readership.

I'm not angry with her, by any means, but I do feel deep sadness and yes, somehow betrayed.

Just in case someone reads this and misunderstands, I do not dispute her right to do as she has done. I just needed to express how I feel about it.

I've never read Samuel Butler. Until now, that is. Why is that? I shall never know. What I do know is that he is my new dead literary soulmate.

From The Way Of All Flesh:


(I have underlined the part of the text that I brought to my lips and kissed.)

Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose
minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves,
the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have
given rise to them.  Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of
the subject and there must be nothing new.  Nor, again, did he see how
hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how
closely this is paralleled in the difficulty of saying where a life
begins or ends, or an action or indeed anything, there being an unity in
spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity.

Can you think of a better description of fanfiction? Unity in spite of infinite multitude, infinite multitude in spite of unity.

I would wax rhapsodic about this man at length, but I have a book to finish!

So, sadly, about a month ago we had a death in our little voluntary family: Googly-Eyed Pete went to meet the Great Goldfish in the Sky. This left poor Ginny Weasley quite bereft, so I knew I must get her another fishy little companion.

Yesterday, I was selecting said companion when I noticed a silvery little darling wriggling amongst the other gingers. Guess who is now cohabiting with Ginevra?

Welcome Draco Malfoy, the fish animagus! Now all I need is a black goldfish and we're all set for an EWE showdown, aquarium-style!

In other news, I rashly signed up for Beltane, because apparently the fear of deadlines and dissappointing other people is the only way I ever get anything written, these days. Wish me luck!

I really can't imagine a better holiday than the one I'm having right now - my boyfriend making the turkey and about to go wrap my presents, my tree decorated and, underneath it, presents to all my friends waiting for them to come over tonight, reading a promising hd_holidays story in front of the fire (The Great Divide), and outside my city is snowier than it has ever been at this time of year. Huzzah!

If anyone wants to help motivate me, I sat down and jotted off a few paragraphs of holiday H/D yesterday.

( Here they are....  )

The most wonderful holiday gift right now would be a suggestion on what comes next...

Has anyone seen the ads for the new Palm Centro? If not, check this out:

http://www.palm.com/textclaus/index.html?fbid=B8z_zYmybA_

And here's an image:



Alright. Now, I never ever EVER expected my brain to do this to me, but I find that I want to write a H/D crossover with The Santa Clause, in which Draco finds that he must take over the post of Old Saint Nick.

Kill me now.

This is kind of a stupid post to make after 8 weeks of silence, but...

I just saw Twilight, and alls I could think was "I wish I was reading Mirabella's Harry Potter and the Inconvenient Condition."

Also, I retconned my H/D story Into the Crucible to comply with Deathly Hallows (and edited it, as well). I think it's a bit stronger this go 'round. Here it is.

I'm doing it. I'm making my first post in four months. It's like riding a bike... which I should really do more, actually.

I've been reading and commenting sporadically, but I've been AWOL from fandom for awhile, and from this journal for much longer. Suffice to say that, drunk and wide awake on the night of April 30th, I perhaps should not have clicked on the email from OkCupid that showed me new users I might like. I liked one of them all too fucking much.

These past few months have been disorienting and stressful. Someone fell in love with me, I with him, but it imploded, messily and quickly. The campaign I was working on also imploded, leaving me with the choice to be unemployed or to go to Colorado for six weeks. Because of the extremely fucked-up nature of the "relationship," I decided to go to Colorado. Durango, to be precise. Where the hell is Durango, you ask? I asked the same thing. Turns out, it's in southwest Colorado, it's very pretty and once I got over the fact that not everywhere in the world can be exactly like Portland Oregon, I warmed up to it nicely. I may post some pictures if I can ever figure out how to do that.

Then I was sent to Houston for a few weeks, and tonight is my last night here. It's been strange, living in nice hotels, driving brand new cars, expensing all my meals, conducting my business as I see fit. It's also been strange being sober. About a month ago, I decided to take a break from the booze. Alls I can say is, I don't miss the hangovers, the lack of ambition or the inability to focus. I do sort of miss the dionysian wild times, but at this point in my life, I've got a lot of them to look back on with a mixture of amusement, regret and mild horror. I think I'll be fine without it for a while.

I'm somehow not that excited to be going back to Portland. Portland now reminds me unbearably of my ex-lover, which is ironic because he's moving to New Mexico in about two weeks, and hates Portland.

Well, this post is not going to win any awards for entertainment value, for which I apologize. I have been thinking of writing again, which is a good sign, so in the next few weeks you may see some H/D from me.

And to all you terrific writers out there, thank you. You make me so happy. I'm particularly thinking of rickey_a and oldenuf2nb.

A bird has invaded my bathroom.

An aggressive, head-bobbing, bitey bird.

Alls I wanted to do was brush my teeth and go to bed.

I guess I'll just go to bed.




fin.

Recently, every time I read something that resonates with me, I feel my heart reaching out, some phantom part of my spirit straining to embrace the author.

I've just read one of George MacDonald's adult novels, Robert Falconer, about a Scottish boy who struggles with his belief in God, and his desperate need to believe combined with a native inability to do so. It reminded me so much of myself at 14 and 15- absolutely tortured with a desire to be close to a God that I wasn't really sure I could believe in.  I also just finished The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells, which deals with (what else?) a passionate love between childhood friends, thwarted by society. It's both a treatise on sex relations and the sex-based subjugation of women in society, and on the wider problem of selfish jealousy in humans. And it's so beautiful, written with such an open spirit and such vivid suffering and self-examination. Wells beat at the doors of conventional morality and paid the price for it, and I've done the same in my lifetime, the details of which I won't go into here.

But here's the thing- not only do these books reach me, they do so so intensely that I feel like I reach them, too- like part of me meets the author in the realm of shared, deeply affecting experience. I don't want to sound ridiculously mystical, but the feeling is like a communion. I wonder if that makes sense to anyone who might read this.


In other news, I hope everyone on my flist has a very happy New Year, and an enjoyable, non-disastrous New Year's Eve.

O hai thar. 

I'm a little bit tipsy, and a lot pissed off.

I went to visit a friend of mine who just moved to New Orleans. Let's just call him my ex-boyfriend.

Now, my ex-boyfriend has been lonely in the few months since he moved to NOLA and started getting his PhD in mathematics. He apparently met this interesting young woman with whom he's been hanging out, and recently they started making out and talking about 'seeing' each other. Fine, fine. All's well.

Except... well, she acts like a psycho. This was immediately apparent to me upon meeting her, and said impression was only hugely bolstered by tonight's shenanigans, in which she met us at the fancy restaurant at which we had dinner FUCKING WASTED, insulting the waitress and generally under the impression that the world would excuse her assholish behavior because she's coltishly adorable a la Natalie Portman.

I won't go into the whole sad story. Suffice to say, I pretty soon had my fill, which she could tell (she told my friend 'I think she hates me'- no, sweetheart, I don't hate you- I think you're obnoxious and irritating and I want to get as far away from you as possible as soon as possible, but 'hate' is reserved for those I respect or feel threatened by). So I left.

Bah.

So far, NOLA is not impressing me. Though the architecture is lovely. And I hear John Goodman lives here.