Sweet caffeine, why have you forsaken me

1. coffeesuperhero, leiascully: I was planning to show up in your neck of the woods on Wednesday and leave Sundayish, if you folks are amenable to that plan?

2. Not sure, at this juncture, if I'm going to have to bail on thelittlebang. This is the same problem I encountered with house_bigbang this year- the deadlines fell right after I finished the semester. It was suicidal to work on them during finals, but if I leave it until afterwards, I'm so exhausted that all I want is to sit around and watch Stargate. I'm having the same problems with this story that I did with the one I intended for Big Bang, too. I keep planning out these intricate stories with, like, Themes and Messages and Angst and Actual Plots. I don't know why I keep thinking I can write like that, when the only story of substantial length in that style that I've ended up pulling off was Get Away, and I ended up hating that story. I don't know- I keep trying to write what I want to read, but it doesn't work. So instead I write a lot of porn and humor, which isn't very rewarding because it isn't hard at all.

Also, I feel like I'm losing my touch for writing House fic. House himself in particular, which is bad, because he's the POV character for like 5000 words of this story. And Cuddy- I don't have any clue whether Cuddy's in character anymore.

It's frustrating- but, I'm farther along than I was at this point with Big Bang, the word count is shorter, and they're letting people slide with 13000+ words for the final draft. I don't know; I'll give it a go again this afternoon, see if I can get another 2000 words or so done. Maybe if I lay down the frame story, it'll work better.

3. I don't really have another point; it's just that these entries seem too short without three points. Clearly, I need a coffee.

3a. Oh, right- last night at about 4AM I developed an elaborate scheme for how slash fans were just like the Tollan and het fans were just like the Tau'ri. I can't decide if it's brilliant or if it just seemed that way at 4AM.

(Multishippers are the Nox, obvs.)

There isn't enough facepalm in the New or Old Worlds

I feel a little hypocritical weighing in on Racefail: The Colonialism Remix when I kept my mouth shut through the original Racefail. It was mostly because I didn't have anything intelligent to say, and because I was up to my ass in Bourdieu at the time.

But I find I have rather a lot to say this time around.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Patricia Wrede wrote a book called The Thirteenth Child, and, well, I'll just quote the same thing everybody's quoting:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. Not that it'll be all that similar anyway; no writing plan survives contact with the characters, and it's already starting to morph.

No, really, she actually said that. Like, right on the internet in front of god and everybody. She sat down at the computer and typed that, probably read back over it to see if she misspelled anything, hit send, the whole bit.

I have debated how to present my thoughts on this, because I'm afraid that the next three paragraphs come off as me trying to establish my cred. That's not my intention; thinking about all of this has led me to ruminate on my own identity, which has always been a question of some doubt, and the things in my past that've biased me (there are a lot of them). So mostly, I'm just thinking aloud here; feel free to skip down if you only came to read about the present issue.

( On the stickiness of identity )

( On the present Fail )

On a completely separate, but tangentially related issue: ( Because this post lacks both lulz and SGA references )