Everybody Likes To Poke Fun At Midwesterners And Our Strange Slang, But Seriously I Think It’s Hilarious

Donna Noble is indirectly (directly?) responsible for the Twelfth Doctor’s face, and that makes me very happy.

David Tennant and Olivia Coleman behind the set of Broadchurch Series 2

Peggy Carter and Ellie Miller are related. Just saying.

Rereading SW legends!verse for the first time in fifteen years, and having just finished with LotF: Inferno I HAVE THOUGHTS (specifically about Luke):

His and Jacen’s duel at the end of the book is freaking epic and it makes me so mad to know we’ll never have that realized on screen or in comic book. They’re both supremely talented in lightsaber dueling so it was interesting to see uncle and nephew going head to head-- I would have loved to have seen who would have won if not for Ben’s stabbing Jacen in the back.

(Maybe not really loved, because of the implications if Luke had been the one to win, which brings me to my next round of holy s***.)

Luke’s toeing the line this novel. Losing Mara, killing Lumyia, his grief, it’s all festering and you just get the feeling the entirety of the book that he’s not really in the best headspace. (Really, though, who would be?) I’m thinking specifically of his confrontation with Jacen/Caedus, when the former threatens the younglings:

“I'm sure you’re not threatening the younglings.” {Luke} pointed at the base of Jacen’s meditation chair and made a tapping motion with his finger. the pedestal gave a loud whumph, and the seat dropped a quarter meter. 

“Because you really don’t want to see me angry.” Luke made the tapping motion again. The pedestal emitted a metallic shriek, and the seat dropped another quarter meter. “And I think you’re smart enough to know that.”

Luke tapped a last time, and the pedestal collapsed with a loud crump, depositing Caedus on the floor with his feet sticking out in front of him like a child.

“But if you want to try me, go ahead and make that threat.”

Luke’s actions here reminds me a little of my paternal grandfather, who has never once my twenty eight years of life raised his voice in a shout. My parents have been married for forty years and my mother has never seen him angry. My dad can count on one hand the times he’s ever seen my grandpa angry or shouting. Apparently, when my grandpa gets angry it’s terrifying-- precisely because he so rarely gets to that point.

At this point in Luke’s EU arch, he’s still performing awesome feats with the Force, still proving that he’s the son of the Chosen One. But this moment with Jacen/Caedus hits harder, because he’s using the Force so casually. Such casual use of the Force on Luke’s part has been something he’s eased up on in the last few series of the EU, and to find him using it now so blatantly is terrifying in its implications.

Which leads us to his discovering Caedus torturing Ben in the Embrace of Pain:

...He started to accept that the horrible scene was real. He was, in fact, standing in the doorway of a secret cabin filled with Yuuzhan Vong torture devices, watching his twisted nephew taunt his captive son.

Luke didn’t give Jacen a chance to surrender. He just sprang.

Definitely not the Luke we’re used to in this moment, and it gets even worse as the fight continues, as he’s injured and draws on the pain to give himself strength; he lands some serious blows on Jacen and relishes in the pain he inflicts. Dark Side traits, anyone? He snaps out of it when Ben asks to be the one to kill Jacen, but it’s a near thing, and it’s an interesting plot point that’s only compounded in LotF: Invincible, when Luke looks at possible futures and sees that if he’s the one who kills Jacen the galaxy is plunged into a darkness worse than even Palpatine’s Empire. 

More thoughts to come, but this post is long enough already. Feel free to debate or share your own thoughts if you want!

Oh John, Sherlock doesn’t need someone to do that for him. He has YOU.

I’m fascinated by Tess, and I’ll be perfectly honest in saying I do still ship Alec/Tess. This fic itself isn’t shipping in terms of the show but gives a (hopefully) realistic reasoning as to how Alec and Tess may have first met, how their marriage dynamics would have been, and how their marriage ultimately dissolved.

As a shorter summary, Tess can be a possessive bitch and Alec is too “good” sometimes for his own well-being.

No matter how many times I’ve rewatched it, I still feel a thrill whenever I hear Thirteen referred to as Doctor. The gender doesn’t matter at all-- Jodie was fantastic!

I think my love and adoration of the Twelfth Doctor can be summed up in the fact that he’s the only Doctor I can imagine who would, without a hint of fear or angst-ridden pathos, respond to a Dalek with an exasperated, eyerolling “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

TobyMac. He was my first foray into modern music and he remains my favorite artist to date. If I need a way to solidify my faith or simply find inspiration I can always find it with him.

But why fanfiction?

I got asked again recently why I write fanfiction and not ‘proper books’ (I’m pretty open about my fic writing, I’m not ashamed). I told them what I’ve told everyone else - I’ve done both and this is so much better. 

I self-published a YA novel a few years back, the plot of which I was super proud of, and I even have ideas for two sequels, but they’ll never see the light of day. I just have no motivation to write them, and world building is hard and that amount of effort just doesn’t seem worth it.

See, everyone I knew wanted to read my novel, but no one wanted to buy it. Probably about 40 people read it but I only sold 16 copies, and for the effort to format text into a publishable format, the cost of ordering proof copies only to find it was wrong and to do it all again, and the stress of the whole process was just so not worth those few dollars that I made. But I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to be one of those fairy tale stories of an unknown author suddenly becoming a sensation overnight. The story was too obscure, set in Western Australia and wasn’t an ‘outback romance’ which is the only ones that seem to be popular in this setting. I’m more than okay with that because I have fanfiction now.

The difference? I have thousands of people reading my stories, and not just reading them, but I get feedback from some of them (never enough, we authors are fickle creatures who always want more comments, more interacton, more discussion). The thing is though, fanfiction gives me an audience that I will never have from my YA novel. That audience already exists, it’s out there, and they’re hungry for the story to continue. Not all fanfiction is successful - the people who read it aren’t a mindless mass; they have expectations, standards, itches that need scratching. Quality matters, but not just the quality of the writing but of the idea. It’s not just formulaic bullshit that a ghost writer can churn out, change the names but the plot is the same and then throw a big name author on the cover and it’s instantly a bestseller. We’re forgiving of small mistakes if the plot makes us want to keep reading until dawn lights the horizon, we’ll salute the authors who write in English when it’s not their native language and will gladly offer help with those phrases that they’re not sure of, and best of all, we stick together to protect and support each other from annon hate so those ideas have a safe place to grow. We’re a community, a family.

Fanfiction has also given me a platform to improve my writing. Looking back at the standard of my work at the very beginning (and even in my novel) I cringe now at how terrible it was. I’ve written over 1,200,000 words of fanfiction and I’m forever improving. I know how to properly punctuate dialogue tags now, my vocabulary has expanded, I’m not afraid to use adverbs just because some twat said ‘show, not tell’ is better. If an adverb makes the story flow better than three extra waffly sentences then I’ll damned well use it and be proud of it. I’m more confident in my writing and that shows in the quality. I would never have gained that confidence by selling fifty thousand books to ‘silent readers’. It’s the interaction, the feedback, the community that fanfic has that has made me a better writer.

So that’s why I prefer to write fanfic over ‘proper books’ and I will fight anyone who says that we’re not real writers. At the end of the day, people read fiction to be entertained and if I can honestly say that thousands of people from all over the world have been entertained by my fanfiction, that makes me a real bloody writer.