beware of muse

[ontology]

Guys, I need to write something. Give me a prompt. Fanfiction (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Firefly, Emily of New Moon, primarily, but I might have my arm twisted to write in another universe) or original (which could mean any projects I have hinted about or been blatant about, or it could mean something entirely mad; I do want to write short stories based on ballads someday) -- my fingers are positively tingling and yet nothing is coming out of them. As though I haven't got countless projects I ought to go bash into shape (but lots of them are great big complicated things! and I need a dark room and some of those fresh mint chocolate cookies I made today and some atmospheric music and my laptop for those! really I do!), but, you know.

Currently I am listening to a really fabulous Nickel Creek concert streaming from NPR (ASGLKHGH THEY JUST STARTED ON "THE HOUSE CARPENTER" LOVE LOVE LOVE). You ought to have a listen, you ought. If not only because Chris Thile is positively adorable between songs, and because "The House Carpenter" is three times better live (blimey, this is nearly as good as it was at Grey Fox) and also because four instruments may never have made so much noise, though I think Crooked Still and the Sparrow Quartet might be able to give them a run for their money.

Comments

[bonny-kathryn.livejournal.com]

You know, we haven't heard anything from Tuesday Skyline in a while . . . so, a few questions that I want to ask.

What is Tuesday's favorite season? Which bit does she like the best about it?

Does Tuesday have any pets? Has she ever? (If so, names?)


And a few random post it prompts that are on post-its in my drawer.


James Ann Harrington could fly before she could walk . . .

What is a "ploe"? (the plural is "ploes")

why shouldn't unicorns wear baseball caps?

On May 14th, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Sylvia Planter woke to find that she didn't care at all about the homework she was doing.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

What is Tuesday's favorite season? Which bit does she like the best about it?

"I like autumn and I like summer. Summer is the festival circuit. We play outdoor shows and sometimes I go busking (and sometimes I get people to come with me, but it's a bit of a mess trying to arrange all of that and anyway a full band set up in a corner of the subway is rather absurd -- Neil's fairly obliging, though, and sometimes Anna comes along with a djembe or the bones or a tambourine and ever so often Alan brings his fiddle and once we had a go at setting up ). I love summer because summer is freedom and opportunity. We play little festivals and attend big ones and I love the chemistry of outdoor concerts no matter what side of the stage I'm on.

I love autumn because it's weird and brief and sparking with energy. I like wind and rain and jumpers and cocoa and quilts. I love Halloween because I actually have an excuse to play pretend in public and people don't make nuisances of themselves asking annoying questions if I happen to be wearing an odd hat or a bustle or carrying a knife."


Does Tuesday have any pets? Has she ever? (If so, names?)

"I've got a cat. Only one cat, on account of living in a flat, and my landlady isn't terribly fond of cats. (This rather messes up my theory that she is a witch. Perhaps it is a ruse. Anyway she's never said anything about toads.) Her name is Jennyanydots, usually called Jenny or Jen or HEY YOU CAT (or "fanged menace" if you are Neil and don't look before you sit in chairs and are stupid about leaving plates on the table with meat on them when you run off to the loo or to get something out of the microwave or answer the doorbell). I keep hoping she will have kittens and we will have no choice but to keep them (as I will protest, teary-eyed, to The Landlady From The Abyss when she finds out and attempts to evict me in the middle of the night without warning, possibly to a prison camp).

In university I didn't have any pets properly because you don't get to have pets in your dorms at all, but there were a lot of stray cats that hung out round the bakery I worked at, hoping that we would make quiche and meat pies more often. It was much the same back in England -- Mum didn't like animals, but there were always stray cats. I like cats, because they are quiet and know when you want to be left alone and (usually) when you want something warm to lie on your feet, and they are pests enough to be interesting. Dogs hardly ever have any secrets."


(Thanks for this! I just learned a lot of things I didn't know yet when I was typing these replies out.)

[bonny-kathryn.livejournal.com]

Yay! More Tuesday!

[allie-meril.livejournal.com]

Mm, at least I'm not the only one awake at this absurd hour... And I need to be up and at 'em tomorrowday for homework... Bleh.

Erm, Firefly! Anything with River. Or Kaylee. (You know what'd be funny? If River read HP and tried to deal with all the inconsistencies. I think she might try to burn it! But really anything with either of them.)

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHA. Poor River; she'd go madder. Although we can only hope she would not stumble across fandom...

And this? I don't know quite what this is. But here it is all the same.

---


i.


When she stretches out her arms they feel like wings, so she extends her hands and spins round and round until her stomach lurches and she topples and here she is on the floor with the ceiling whirling above her. She settles her palms on the cool flatness to steady herself; she pulls in a breath; she shuts her eyes. Behind her eyelids the world still spins.

Someday she is going to forget this body and whirl off into the black; with moons in her eyes she will pluck buckets full of stars.



ii.


It is summer and Kaylee takes her shopping. She’s been shopping, but that was another time and another world ago. Now the world is all dust and noise and colours and they tangle themselves round each other. She touches a sky-coloured scarf and feels a reel swell beneath her fingers instead of cloth. “Oh,” she says. “Listen!”

– no one is listening, but she doesn’t mind; here the cloth sings only for her.



iii.


Sometimes she wants to get out and taste sun. Oh, she could, all bright, glory, take light in her two hands; she will slip a palm’s full into her pocket and string it from the ceiling. She spins at the thought of it, head and heart and body.

These are things you forget in walls. You forget about sun and stars and how they curl like ribbons around the darkness and the roaring and it quiets down for a while.

[allie-meril.livejournal.com]

Ooo, Banui, this is lovely. Wandering and somehow ethereal and very River.

Oh, and River + Fandom = disaster. *shudders* As if the books wouldn't be enough to driver her crazy!

[barefoottomboy.livejournal.com]

I NEED THE RECIPE FOR THOSE COOKIES.

Ahem.

Sadly, I am slack-jawed and loose-eyed with tiredness, so I got nothing on the prompt front. :-(

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

I think all women need the recipe for these cookies. Here it is off the back of the package of Hershey's mint chocolate chips.

2/3 cup butter or margarine (softened)
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon peppermint extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup baking cocoa
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 10 oz. package mint chocolate chips

i. Heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
ii. Beat butter and sugar in large bowl until creamy. Add egg and peppermint. Stir together flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt; gradually add to butter mixture, beating well. Stir in mint chocolate chips.
iii. Drop by rounded teaspoons onto greased cookie sheet. Bake 8 to 9 minutes or just until set; do not overbake. Cool slightly; remove from cookie sheet to wire rack. Cool completely. About 2 1/2 dozen cookies.

[barefoottomboy.livejournal.com]

Such a thing as mint chocolate chips exist? Oh me oh my!

Sadly, I bet they don't exist in Australia. Still, I'm sure those cookies are pretty good with dark chocolate chips, so all is not yet lost. I shall be making some as soon as I am able.

Thank you, thank you!

[barefoottomboy.livejournal.com]

And also: there are many wonderful (baking and other) recipes at my favourite cookery website: Orangette (http://www.orangette.blogspot.com/). (Recipe index link in the sidebar.)

I highly recommend the Chocolate Malted Cupcakes (more for the cupcakes than the frosting, it has to be said) and the Banana Bread With Chocolate And Cinnamon Sugar, but everything I've made from this website has been delicious.

[trolliepop.livejournal.com]

One summer, when Nymphdora Tonks was three, her cousin Sirius and his friends Remus and James took her to the muggle zoo.

[last-archangel.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Nickel Creek! I wore my t-shirt from their concert yesterday.

Hm...I'll have to think on a prompt for you.

[travellers-home.livejournal.com]

I've never done a prompt before... lessee...

How about life in a drawing (second season, "Fear Her") from the Doctor's point of view? Maybe also explaining how he drew the torch from inside the picture.

I've been writing quite a bit lately. It's heavenly. ♥

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

I am basically terrible at prompts. I am not sure why. However:

The Doctor did meet Eliot. You know it.

Crossovers. Crossovers are fun. I suggested these for dw_cross; take your pick if you want angst or crack:
-DW/Silm. Nine couldn't save Númenor either.
-DW/HP. Ten meets Dumbledore. Bonus points if he puts his feet up on Dumbledore's desk, because he would, and if they get into a conversation about favorite types of Muggle candy (I seem to remember a previous Doctor being obsessed with some kind of candy, but as it's not one I've seen, I don't know which Doctor or what candy).
-DW/HP. Jackie Tyler meets Molly Weasley.

Uhm...I would love to see more Tuesday Skyline, of course...or the Evangeline Project, maybe the first time Evangeline saw a vampire and believed they were real. Or the first time she got her wish and had an excuse to show mercy, and what happened.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Nine couldn't save Númenor either.

OH KYRA. That is brilliant. And heartbreaking and sort of devastating, but...oh, Nine. I may have to write this. Someday. Not tonight. But someday. (Actually it is one seventeen and I've got church in the morning which means I really can't write anything tonight. But -- I am not sure there is a situation with more potential for angst in the history of fanfiction.)

Or the first time she got her wish and had an excuse to show mercy, and what happened.

...Er, Kyra? You do realise that is the entire novel, yeah? Just saying.

[mermaidrain.livejournal.com]

okay, I know I haven't seen you post anything about "Moonlight" (which can be cheesy and fantastic by turns), but it's something right up your alley. If you can watch the ep's at CBS.com I highly recommend it. It's dark and angsty and definitely something you'd like.

In that vein, I'd love a little angsty vampire unrequited romance thing. You know, if you really want a suggestion on what to write. I bet you could nail that. ;)

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen "Moonlight", but I may check it out if only for Sophie Myles :p. Though my actually-watching-television habits are becoming a bit terrifying. ;D

Anyway, I've been trying to write this for several days, and it only just made any sense.



Light is a thing you forget. There is much to forget; you begin even to forget the forgetting. The world thins, it is this: dark; trees; stars; scent; heat; blood. When you think, you think this: only when there is death is there heat. Once, you might have called this irony.

You do not know why it is that you dream of candles and of lanterns, flickering through the hosts of trees.

*

When you see her first, there is blood on her hands and she is shaking. Gowned in white, cloaked in red -- oh, you recognise the signs. If they were not beacons enough, there is a stake of sharpened wood in the hand that trembles, and she leans against a tree and weeps.

One day, she will drive that stake through your heart, if you do not take her heart's blood first; you know this. But her grief is as a holy thing; something glints in the forgotten caverns of your memory (-- honour?) and you steal without sound back into the trees.



-- Gorblimey, I tried to write more, but I don't know enough yet! *stomps foot in frustration* :)

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

[builtofsorrow.livejournal.com]

The first time Neville & Luna met, from either's or both's perspective[s].

Luna meets Ten. Better yet, Ten takes her to the native planet of the Crumple-Horned Snorkacks.

[builtofsorrow.livejournal.com]

Also!

-Remus finds Sirius's hidden stash of love letters to Sarah-Jane.
-Tim Latimer meets Captain Jack (Harkness, of course).

(And, since you didn't say anything to the contrary...)
-Jack, stranded in the late 19th Century, hunts up Oscar Wilde.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

NELLE. YOU ARE THE MOST PREDICTABLE PERSON IN THE WORLD. :DDD

[builtofsorrow.livejournal.com]

NATURALLY. (I am still flailing over Wilde, how could I not bring up Oscar? -looks angelic-)

Well, now you mention it... I would certainly not protest. ^^

[wanderlight.livejournal.com]

Hmm ... Remus and a notebook? Or anything, really, having to do with Emily and Dean and (cliche as it is, but I've really been loving them lately) sunsets?

♥!

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, so, this is me on too much moody piano music. Slightly on-the-edge-of-AU, and possibly also hovering a wee bit on the edge of pretentious, because I am a horrid nasty creature who loves to torment my imaginary people so.


"He had never kissed her yet. Some subtle prescience always told him she was not yet ready to be kissed. He might have dared it there and then, in that hour of glamour that had transmuted everything into terms of romance and charm -- he might have even won her wholly then. But he hesitated -- and the magic moment passed."

- Emily's Quest

* * *

It would not have happened by daylight. Daylight slipped fingers into corners and opened windows that were never meant for opening; one was careful by daylight. But there was a moment that stretched and lingered like a silk canopy (oh the underwater stillness when the sky is cobalt edged in gold) --

This is a moment. She glances over her shoulder with her slow bloom of a smile, and a sliver of moon flickering through the cloudy skein of sky cups her cheek -- it is a hand beckoning; it is enough.

His hands find her shoulders and his mouth finds her mouth, as they have long been aching to do.

[wanderlight.livejournal.com]

I'll have you know that I went and listened to moody piano music while reading this. :D But. Oh oh oh oh, Banui, it's perfect. It is perfect. And of course it wouldn't have happened by daylight, and why didn't it happen? I think I am going to pretend that this moment is canon. ♥

[anthon1.livejournal.com]

Write me a haiku?

[midenianscholar.livejournal.com]

Unrelated to this post:
You know how you're talking about taking a year off between college and highschool? Have you thought about using that year to go to one of the college preparations/mission places?

I was going to suggest YWAM, because you can go to Ireland. *nods* You have to raise support and stuff, but with Sonlight and church and all I don't think it would be impossible.

Here's a link:
http://www.ywam.org/Default.asp?bhcp=1