Dear God

*stares blankly at wordcount*

11 817

*blinks*

11 817

*shakes head*

11 817

Whatever's in this cold medication, I think I will just have to start taking it all the time.

Now excuse me, I have to go stuff big raw chunks of well-spun id back into my spinal column where they belong...

Cold medication, redux

A society in which it is next to impossible to find an extra strength cold medication which does not contain a sufficiently high dose of stimulants to keep you vertical and productive in all your contagious, miserable glory right up until the moment your brain runs through your nose and lands on the ground in a whimpering heap and you DIE --

Is a society which is even sicker than I am, right now.

This is all.

More poetryspam -- for Twin, who knows why

Men and Their Boring Arguments

One man on his own can be quite good fun
But don't go drinking with two -
They'll probably have an argument
And take no notice of you.

What makes men so tedious
Is the need to show off and compete.
They'll bore you to death for hours and hours
Before they'll admit defeat.

It often happens at dinner-parties
Where brother disputes with brother
And we can't even talk among ourselves
Because we're not next to each other.

Some men like to argue with women -
Don't give them a chance to begin.
You won't be allowed to change the subject
Until you have given in.

A man with the bit between his teeth
Will keep you up half the night
And the only way to get some sleep
Is to say, 'I expect you're right.'

I expect you're right, my dearest love.
I expect you're right, my friend.
These boring arguments make no difference
To anything in the end.

Wendy Cope

A brief interlude for non-fiction, or, I need a metabreak

A few things I think I know about love and sex and the writing thereof:

1) Love does not conquer all. In exactly the same way that chocolate cake does not remove stubborn stains from white tshirts -- if that's what you're trying to use love for, you may wish to read the manual again.

1a) Love can INSPIRE you to conquer quite a lot, but that's different. And not necessarily good.

1b) Love does not constitute permission to conquer. There are words for people who refer to their love affairs as conquests, and most of them are at least slightly unpleasant.

2) Actually, first times are frequently FABULOUS. Reason being, by the time you finally make up your mind that you actually are going to have sex with this person and get somewhere where you can make it happen, your brain's done most of the work already.

2a) It's the Hundred-and-First time when either you've learned to use your hands for something other than leverage or you have a problem.

3) Love actually does change everything.

3a) BEING loved, not necessarily; you can be greatly loved and totally unaffected by it. Or even unaware of it. But LOVING? Oh yeah.

3b) I said change, not improve. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes just plain different. Hell, sometimes it'll make you dead or insane.

3c) It's alchemy, not Wild Magic. Lead can become gold, Gold can become plutonium. Shit isn't going to turn into sugar, nor steel into sponge-cake. What comes out of the fire will resemble what went in.

4) Loyalty, honesty, and fidelity are desperately important in love. They also mean different things to different people. Very different things, some mutually contradictory. For some people fidelity means never being alone with another member of the opposite/same sex (if your beloved is bisexual, may I timidly suggest that this is not a good way to go unless you want them to go stir-crazy? ETA: I phrased this ambiguously. Go Here for the slightly long-winded clarification). For others, loyalty means calling when you get back from the Dangerous Secret Mission and honesty means not mentioning what -- or who -- you got up to until you're at home and they've had a chance to count all your fingers and toes.

4a) Loving someone and having a powerful and deep will to do them good doesn't actually guarantee that you know what will be good for them.

4b) These things alone can keep you in plots rich with conflict and turmoil until your keyboard screams and your fingers bleed, with never a spurious argument in the lot.

5) It's not that real sex isn't much more awkward and messy than fictional sex. It's that you don't generally much notice or care at the time, so really, there's no real reason for your characters to either.

5b) It is a truth universally acknowledged that people think about their grocery lists during bad sex. It is less widely known that this sort of thing happens during good sex too. People multitask. Knowing these things can be useful for a writer.