Job satisfaction, and a crackfic roundup
Sep. 8th, 2005 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vulgarweedI'm pretty overwhelmed by the response "Breathless Mouths May Summon" has gotten; only a few people know this, but as of last week I was all a-wibble with anxiety about it not being good enough. (I only do this with things that really, really matter to me)...especially with a collaborator involved; being worthy of her work is a new level of responsibility. We seem to have made a lot of people happy.
If you're wondering why it was posted only to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lower_tadfield and not here, it's because the person who physically does the posting (me, in this case) gets all the email notifications, and q_w shouldn't have to keep checking both here AND there to see what folks were saying. Best to keep it all centralized.
Now, just because that story took up my whole psyche, it doesn't mean that's all I've been doing.
Remember that crackfic meme that was going around a couple weeks ago, where you take characters whose pictures appear in your icons and alphabetize them to generate pairings? I didn't do it for my own icons, but I did leave a couple drive-by crackfics in other people's comments.
For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
violet_quill I actually sort of used TWO of her pairings. The first is a het pairing, of a Real Person and a Toon. The second is....well, I'm just glad I don't actually believe in Hell.
PG, I think. Be warned - I did not spend more than half an hour on either of these.
I knew she was trouble from the moment she swayed into my office, all crimson hair and hastily-cobbled-together unproofread press releases clearly typed with a shaking hand.
“You’re the only one who can help me now, Mr. Stewart,” she said in that sad, husky voice of hers. “The mainstream media won’t touch this case. There’s no missing white girl or shark attack or hurricane involved. They don’t care that my husband was framed. We need publicity – I don’t care how we get it.”
I sighed. All the neon of New York seemed focused through the venetian blinds upon her ample…upheavals.
“You know I’m not a real newsman, Mrs…Rabbit. I’m just drawn that way.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself. You’re the only honest man in the business. Or so I’ve been told.”
“Too much honesty can get you in a lot of trouble, madam,” I said, trying to keep my eyes up to the level of her face. This would be more difficult if I stood up. She was a tall dame. I am not a tall man. But considering the state of my pants (I wasn’t wearing any) I had no intention of standing up.
“Please help me,” she said, starting with the waterworks, the wench. “We can pay — but I know you’re too ethical to take that. I love my husband, Mr. Stewart. I’ll do…anything.” And with this she leaned right over my desk. I am a sucker for a woman’s tears. Especially that one, hanging right off the tip of one damn fine gazonga.
“I — I’ll see what the writers can do with it…you know it's Comedy Central, we have to make it funny…” I said. Damn voice going shaky. I knew I was going to regret this. But as I reached up to touch her cheek and she situated her plump rear on my lap, I sure didn’t regret it then.
It worked out alright in the end. The show was funny after all, because Stephen had a really wild story for ‘This Week In God’ about some giant glowing lion — no, not a tame lion - being spotted hanging around some little second-hand bookstore in London. Apparently there’d been a sudden outbreak of whacked-out miracles. Why London? Lord knows this country needs them more.
***
Author's note: please forgive the hurricane reference that may well seem tasteless now. This was written when Katrina was barely a tropical-depression gleam in the Caribbean's eye and hurricane coverage was mostly an excuse to give weather people good airtime and to show Anderson Cooper wet and in peril.
***
The second was forxylodemon, who wound up with Crowley/Dementor. Well, this is more a story about Crowley and a Dementor. Just a little bit of virgule, ew. This one I think owes a spiritual debt to hjbender's hilarious "Revenge of the Houseplants" and I know it owes a very concrete material one to mamushi's genius illustrated treatise on Dementor reproduction, from which I used a premise. Also PG-ish.
“What exactly do you call…that?”
Crowley thought that was a ridiculous question. It was obviously a houseplant – it was in a pot after all. “It’s some kind of orchid from South America or something. They’re the rage right now.”
Aziraphale thought it was the most hideous excuse for a subject of the vegetable kingdom he had ever seen. He couldn’t even say why, but he just didn’t like it. Its vaguely petal-like black flaps and unwholesome-looking grey insides and the way it swayed slightly with no breeze gave him the heebie-jeebies.
But he was in no mood for an argument with his acquaintance, who’d always shown mild enthusiasm for fashionable, ridiculously expensive, plug-ugly, foul-smelling, and hard-to-keep-alive exotics. So he kept it to himself, and was relieved when Crowley left and took the thing home with him.
***
The plants had been doing well lately. Crowley had had lots of frustrations to channel into inventive menacing, and their lush green leaves and vines set off the blackness of the new exotic rather strikingly.
And the new arrival grew. It grew like the speed-motion photography on one of those nature shows, only not sped up—for the fear and loathing of all the plants surrounding it fed it like the richest manure and the most explosive nitrous. As it grew, they wilted, forced to relive again and again the beloved comrade who’d gone missing, the most terrifying hissing from the Master; the very moment they’d been cut from the Motherplant or ripped from the Seedsoil and sold into this…
The faster they wilted, the more vicious Crowley became at them. And the faster the little black thing reached for the ceiling.
And one night, when Crowley was immersed in the telly, it flew free of its roots, seeking more nutritious fare.
Crowley found himself pounced upon by a diaphanous creature that looked like a flying mass of rotten black rags and smelled like an open grave, and had a gaping hungry mouth and icy cold bony hands and when he looked up into where its face should be there was a vortex of nasty grey spinning rot that made him think of Falling, of the screams of countless damned, Spanish Inquisition, the Black Death, what Sodom looked like after…It was horrific. He was sure he was screaming and no one could hear, it was all getting sucked into that thing that was groping him ravenously…
When that chill hand touched him there he relived the time he saw Ligur naked in Hell’s locker room.
But it was still only a horny adolescent Dementor, and it had never seen an example of its proper prey — humans — and its great mistake was thinking Crowley was one. It was momentarily confused when Crowley tried to escape from its grasp by changing into a variety of forms, most of which humans would find extremely upsetting but that only made the Dementor wonder if he were some kind of relative. That befuddled it long enough for Crowley to muster his six thousand years of hard-won optimism: that girl really seemed to like that apple and she was pretty when she smiled; he didn’t get smited; there was almost always a good drink available everywhere on earth if you knew how to ask; the feeling he got when he learned that not only had both he and the angel survived, so had the Bentley and the bookshop; and best of all, his greatest triumph…
“Odegra,” he whispered joyously. The Dementor shrieked in pain.
“You idiot,” said Crowley, visualizing the M25 in his mind very clearly. “You need to go there. Lots to eat there.”
The Dementor peered at him from under its hood. Or at least Crowley guessed it was peering at him. It didn’t seem to have eyes as such. But it did seem to understand a little. It almost seemed pleased with what Crowley was “telling” it.
That didn’t mean Crowley was willing to let it kiss him, however. A little impersonal groping was one thing, but he didn’t kiss just anybody.
“See ya,” he said as it floated out the window, visions of traffic jams presumably dancing in its head, if in fact it had a head. “Wouldn’t want to be ya.”
The version of this story he told Aziraphale later was much embellished, with great lingering emphasis on his courage and cleverness and the terrible danger he was in and the lingering trauma it had caused, complete with much theatrical blanching and trembling (and the unmistakable sense that he was implying he’d need an awful lot of top-shelf wine and probably a fair amount of oral sex before he’d be quite himself again).
Aziraphale decided he was going to trust his instincts next time.
***
We all are She's still waiting for that Eminem/Gandalf, by the way.
If you're wondering why it was posted only to
lower_tadfield and not here, it's because the person who physically does the posting (me, in this case) gets all the email notifications, and q_w shouldn't have to keep checking both here AND there to see what folks were saying. Best to keep it all centralized.Now, just because that story took up my whole psyche, it doesn't mean that's all I've been doing.
Remember that crackfic meme that was going around a couple weeks ago, where you take characters whose pictures appear in your icons and alphabetize them to generate pairings? I didn't do it for my own icons, but I did leave a couple drive-by crackfics in other people's comments.
For
violet_quill I actually sort of used TWO of her pairings. The first is a het pairing, of a Real Person and a Toon. The second is....well, I'm just glad I don't actually believe in Hell.PG, I think. Be warned - I did not spend more than half an hour on either of these.
I knew she was trouble from the moment she swayed into my office, all crimson hair and hastily-cobbled-together unproofread press releases clearly typed with a shaking hand.
“You’re the only one who can help me now, Mr. Stewart,” she said in that sad, husky voice of hers. “The mainstream media won’t touch this case. There’s no missing white girl or shark attack or hurricane involved. They don’t care that my husband was framed. We need publicity – I don’t care how we get it.”
I sighed. All the neon of New York seemed focused through the venetian blinds upon her ample…upheavals.
“You know I’m not a real newsman, Mrs…Rabbit. I’m just drawn that way.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself. You’re the only honest man in the business. Or so I’ve been told.”
“Too much honesty can get you in a lot of trouble, madam,” I said, trying to keep my eyes up to the level of her face. This would be more difficult if I stood up. She was a tall dame. I am not a tall man. But considering the state of my pants (I wasn’t wearing any) I had no intention of standing up.
“Please help me,” she said, starting with the waterworks, the wench. “We can pay — but I know you’re too ethical to take that. I love my husband, Mr. Stewart. I’ll do…anything.” And with this she leaned right over my desk. I am a sucker for a woman’s tears. Especially that one, hanging right off the tip of one damn fine gazonga.
“I — I’ll see what the writers can do with it…you know it's Comedy Central, we have to make it funny…” I said. Damn voice going shaky. I knew I was going to regret this. But as I reached up to touch her cheek and she situated her plump rear on my lap, I sure didn’t regret it then.
It worked out alright in the end. The show was funny after all, because Stephen had a really wild story for ‘This Week In God’ about some giant glowing lion — no, not a tame lion - being spotted hanging around some little second-hand bookstore in London. Apparently there’d been a sudden outbreak of whacked-out miracles. Why London? Lord knows this country needs them more.
***
Author's note: please forgive the hurricane reference that may well seem tasteless now. This was written when Katrina was barely a tropical-depression gleam in the Caribbean's eye and hurricane coverage was mostly an excuse to give weather people good airtime and to show Anderson Cooper wet and in peril.
***
The second was for
xylodemon, who wound up with Crowley/Dementor. Well, this is more a story about Crowley and a Dementor. Just a little bit of virgule, ew. This one I think owes a spiritual debt to hjbender's hilarious "Revenge of the Houseplants" and I know it owes a very concrete material one to mamushi's genius illustrated treatise on Dementor reproduction, from which I used a premise. Also PG-ish.“What exactly do you call…that?”
Crowley thought that was a ridiculous question. It was obviously a houseplant – it was in a pot after all. “It’s some kind of orchid from South America or something. They’re the rage right now.”
Aziraphale thought it was the most hideous excuse for a subject of the vegetable kingdom he had ever seen. He couldn’t even say why, but he just didn’t like it. Its vaguely petal-like black flaps and unwholesome-looking grey insides and the way it swayed slightly with no breeze gave him the heebie-jeebies.
But he was in no mood for an argument with his acquaintance, who’d always shown mild enthusiasm for fashionable, ridiculously expensive, plug-ugly, foul-smelling, and hard-to-keep-alive exotics. So he kept it to himself, and was relieved when Crowley left and took the thing home with him.
***
The plants had been doing well lately. Crowley had had lots of frustrations to channel into inventive menacing, and their lush green leaves and vines set off the blackness of the new exotic rather strikingly.
And the new arrival grew. It grew like the speed-motion photography on one of those nature shows, only not sped up—for the fear and loathing of all the plants surrounding it fed it like the richest manure and the most explosive nitrous. As it grew, they wilted, forced to relive again and again the beloved comrade who’d gone missing, the most terrifying hissing from the Master; the very moment they’d been cut from the Motherplant or ripped from the Seedsoil and sold into this…
The faster they wilted, the more vicious Crowley became at them. And the faster the little black thing reached for the ceiling.
And one night, when Crowley was immersed in the telly, it flew free of its roots, seeking more nutritious fare.
Crowley found himself pounced upon by a diaphanous creature that looked like a flying mass of rotten black rags and smelled like an open grave, and had a gaping hungry mouth and icy cold bony hands and when he looked up into where its face should be there was a vortex of nasty grey spinning rot that made him think of Falling, of the screams of countless damned, Spanish Inquisition, the Black Death, what Sodom looked like after…It was horrific. He was sure he was screaming and no one could hear, it was all getting sucked into that thing that was groping him ravenously…
When that chill hand touched him there he relived the time he saw Ligur naked in Hell’s locker room.
But it was still only a horny adolescent Dementor, and it had never seen an example of its proper prey — humans — and its great mistake was thinking Crowley was one. It was momentarily confused when Crowley tried to escape from its grasp by changing into a variety of forms, most of which humans would find extremely upsetting but that only made the Dementor wonder if he were some kind of relative. That befuddled it long enough for Crowley to muster his six thousand years of hard-won optimism: that girl really seemed to like that apple and she was pretty when she smiled; he didn’t get smited; there was almost always a good drink available everywhere on earth if you knew how to ask; the feeling he got when he learned that not only had both he and the angel survived, so had the Bentley and the bookshop; and best of all, his greatest triumph…
“Odegra,” he whispered joyously. The Dementor shrieked in pain.
“You idiot,” said Crowley, visualizing the M25 in his mind very clearly. “You need to go there. Lots to eat there.”
The Dementor peered at him from under its hood. Or at least Crowley guessed it was peering at him. It didn’t seem to have eyes as such. But it did seem to understand a little. It almost seemed pleased with what Crowley was “telling” it.
That didn’t mean Crowley was willing to let it kiss him, however. A little impersonal groping was one thing, but he didn’t kiss just anybody.
“See ya,” he said as it floated out the window, visions of traffic jams presumably dancing in its head, if in fact it had a head. “Wouldn’t want to be ya.”
The version of this story he told Aziraphale later was much embellished, with great lingering emphasis on his courage and cleverness and the terrible danger he was in and the lingering trauma it had caused, complete with much theatrical blanching and trembling (and the unmistakable sense that he was implying he’d need an awful lot of top-shelf wine and probably a fair amount of oral sex before he’d be quite himself again).
Aziraphale decided he was going to trust his instincts next time.
***
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 08:58 pm (UTC)But. Horny adolescent Dementors. Terrorizing the already-traumatized houseplants. *Snerks* I love it!
no subject
Date: 2005-09-10 02:17 am (UTC)Heh. Traumatized houseplants are kind of like Gerber baby food. XD