harpy: bored, lazy and... generally bored, actually.
creator, and highly sporadic updater, of themetaphorazine.
residing at present in London, UK.
putting scraps of fic and fic ideas/rambles here because, well, they needed a home: archives are here. first. when they're done, they go to the ff.net account. everything else is in the journal. c&c would be great.
contact: metaphorazine at hotmail dot com
This 'fic log' kept extant due to the charming pitas.
currently reading: books: the vision of piers plowman: john langland essays: francis bacon coin locker babies: ryu murakami
manga: godchild: yuki kaori clover: ohkawa/apapa(clamp) d n angel: yukiru sugisaki (vol 5)
currently watching: trigun yami no matsuei dragonball z (yes, i am scum.)
currently hearing: sento amor: david daniels toxicity: stystem of a down balcalogo: amon tobin madonna: ...and you will know us by the trail of dead no strings attached:nsync
currently playing: final fantasy vii - stuck on a ship. and i can't move, dammit. i need a patch.
current hair colour: pink.
currently going all fangirlie over: ruri saiki kurai asmodeus faye valentine saionji kyouichi hilde schbeiker kaoru kozue oruha technomancy ('...!')
Do you believe in god, he asked, and she stopped, trying to formulate some kind of answer.
His hand burned on her arm, she could not think straight, he would not let go.
He spoke again, and she could not hear him through the crackle of white noise. Or maybe his voice was the hiss and the spark, obstructing the signal she was straining to hear. God, he said, heart, he said, worship, or was that worshipper? The syllables sounded unlike grammar, an occult code instead, written in imperial katakana on the underside of a holy statue. He was still speaking - heaven - and the flare of interference was so loud and painful and impossible to block out - equal - and there was something to concentrate on that she had forgotten.
There was a CD case on her hands. No reason to duck her head and say amen, it was too large and plastic to be a communion wafer. She uncupped her hands - right over left, the only way to be worthy to recieve, so long as the word was said - and held it more securely, less religiously.
When he released her shoulders - when had he laid his hands on her shoulders? - they ached with the loss. Sara's brother was there instead, transmitting along her nerves a new message. The scuffling of white noise was louder but somehow of a similar grain, but Ruri could not think why because she was running and the air was throwing dust into her glasses, which were broken and lying on the floor and Sara's brother was talking to her, and she could hear him now, she could hear words and ignore the language of contact.
She left her broken glasses on the side table in the kitchen, wrapped up in her mother's disapproving and then worried voice as she fretted over letting Ruri walk home on her own, the streets aren't safe any more, I'm such a bad mother, Ruri, are you alright? Who was that boy who took you home, then? He may be the brother of one of your friends, Ruri, but -. Ruri tried to stammer replies in the right places, her mind skipping through what Setsuna had said to her - skipping like a broken CD, what was on the CD?, the CD caught in his hands and his aura suddenly brighter, his aura was blurred and uncertain without her glasses, without her glasses she was cute he said, said whatever was on his mind, so innocent, so honest - and finally escaped down the corridor to her room.
Hanging up her school uniform she wondered if the change of clothes was meant to make her feel like someone else, a different girl named Ruri whose dress was not unfashionably midlength, was not unevenly bloused over the too-tight pursebelt her mother made her wear to keep her subway fare for the journey to cram-school in. A different girl named Ruri who was able to face other girls at school without muttering and blushing, who was able to smile at Setsuna so confidently like Sara did, who was able to reply to the strange foriegner who had clutched at her arm and seemed so desperate. Do you believe in god, he had asked. What would that Ruri have said to him?
A stupid question, anyway: there were so many different gods to choose from. Ruri - schoolgirl Ruri, Ruri whose teachers smiled as she walked past them in the school corridors - had been taught how to pray to the god of St Stella's, sat through each Mass and stared at the cross while the priest droned on, and she probably believed in him. But there were the kami, too, and her grandmother took her to shinto shrines and patted her hand while telling her which obseiances to make as through Ruri had forgotten since the last time, and spoke in hushed tones about the Emperor and the Sun Goddess. No-one really believed in that, now, did they? Ruri was unsure.
Neither the kami nor the Catholic god explained the auras Ruri saw. Neither the kami nor the Catholic god explained the time when she had stared into another classmate's palm and told her not to walk on the left side of the road the next day, and then she did, was almost run over and blamed Ruri in everyone else's whispers, in stares and formal distances throughout the school. Her aura was dirtied white, an uneven and ugly shape: when asked about it, Ruri forced herself to imagine an asymmetrical heart and traces of soft pink which it would be safe to tell the other girl about. The truth was less important than her own survival.
Whichever gods gave her that sight, they were not benevolent like the suffering man whose blood stained the wood of each crucifix was supposed to be: they were cruel to her, gave her nothing but the smooth stares of girls in the hallway too content in their disbelief. No, maybe they believed but were too scared to admit it. She liked that thought: it belonged to the Ruri of home and not the Ruri of school.
Perhaps the prince forgot that he might need these for cats'-eyes to guide himself and his sister back home: perhaps he though that, having made this jorney so many times before, the pebbles would be unnecessary. Perhaps he knew that they would be needed, but his generosity was too great.
The prince and princess plucked berries from trees and ate them; they found pig-nuts fallen from a beech-tree and the prince cracked each one open with his teeth before passing an equal portion to his sister - or maybe a larger one, for he was ever generous to her. No juices streamed from their mouths, for they were well-brought up and noble, and, however famished they were, they could not bear to eat messily. As they walked, the princess sang in a clear soprano. Somtimes her brother joined in, but only softly, for his treble voice was on the curve of breaking and he did not want to spoil the songs with misplaced notes. When their voices became disrupted by the heavy going up steep little hills, mutual silence flowed between them.
When they were tired, they lay down to rest on the prince's coat, and curious birds came by to see why the rival tunes had stopped. They hovered in the air, unsure of whether to cover them with foliage or leave them leafless.
They woke and it was dusk: they could not remember their way back home, but the prince reassured his sister, saying they were sure to find some hut nearby where a generous peasant-woman (for many women, in those days, were peasants and well-disposed to the local nobility) would let them rest for the night under harsh woolen blankets and offer them cheese and rough black bread for the next morning's journey. Yet there seemed to be no peasantry in the area, and the twilight was fading to still darker grey-blues, the evening star blinking merrily toward them and wishing them pleasant dreams. Both the prince and the princess were scared, for they had not ever been out of the house so late in the day, and the prince had no words left to offer as consolation.
Had you been there to see them, once they resolved to sleep and try to rediscover their home in the morning, had you been there and somehow able to see through the darkness of the night, you might have marvelled at the way they slept, curled in upon one another like babes in arms, each one's arm a pillow for the head of the other. Had you been there keeping a vigil for them, you might have seen the princess start and shiver at the low moan of a distant owl, and then touch the arm of her brother, fondly, and let herself lie down again, secure beside him. You might also have seen, perhaps - although he tried to hide it, thinking it somehow ignoble - the prince's fear when his sister rolled away from him in the night, and the way he reached out for her form and pulled himself closer into her embrace.
They woke, and even though dew had soaked into their coats that had been used as blankets, they declared it no matter: the journey, they agreed, would warm them sufficiently to render the coats unnecessary for more than carrying. They could warm themselves further with the transcipts of their dreams, they said, and once those dreams had been exhausted they would tell stories of other princes and princesses in other worlds and in other forests.
The sun was high and hot in the sky, and the coat folded over each child's arm ever more heavy, when finally they came to a house of some kind. It was not quite a peasant hut, suggested the princess: but kindly, not wishing to criticise her brother, whose eyes were round with wonder. He for his part thought it to be some kind of castle, and indeed the light of the sun was reflected off the glazed edges of turrets, resplendent in bright greens and pinks and blues. But was that snow that collected on the ledge of the curtained window? A most illogical snow, certainly, for the day was warm and the summer only half-way through.
He put a hand to it: and it was not cold, but soft, and stuck to his fingers. He lifted it to his mouth: and the taste was sweeter than any of the berries they had picked. It melted away like snow, surely, but not with the bitter coldness and the non-taste of water-droplets on his tongue. The princess, too, tried this non-snow, and turned in equal amazement to her brother. Truly, a wonderful thing! This was, perhaps, an upside-down castle, a castle from the heavens: for no normal castle would have snow before the harvest, no normal castle's snow be so sticky and so sweet. It was quite outside the range of the life the prince and princess had led before now, quite outside the world of fairies and elves in the stories they had learnt and could re-tell to one another, quite outside, even, the great capacities of their imaginations.
...to overuse this for rambling, somehow. Perhaps because lj has the friends page, and therefore self-important rabbiting on about my writing feels like I'm... intruding, somehow, on other lives. With pitas, people can... not click the link if they don't want to read: i'm not forcing myself on others. Which is almost a direct contrast to Sabina's lj/pitas views, interestingly enough. Even though I personally start getting tetchy when People Don't Post Enough, dammit: but that's because i'd rather read blogs than, say, work. And because i'm a Confrontation Whore! Yeah! Where's the FIGHTING?
Um.
So, anyway, /ficlogging/. That was what I was going to do. Or rather, mumble on about my writing style. But I do talk about some fic /specifically/, too. So.
I'm sl0ring at the moment for c&c - come on, give it me, please, and so on - because, you know, I have a fundamental flaw as a writer: I don't know what my faults are. My personality faults I could go on about at length, my work faults, my academic faults, sure. But writing? I can't tell. It's perhaps too personal - too /close/, in a way that even my human faults aren't. Which is an intimidating thought.
I need an outside view to sit there and go: look, you're technically fine, but. Look, you use too many tricolon. Look, you have an innate aversion to the full stop (...which I /do/, in faction prose). Look, you let your characters run their internal monologues on and on and on and they should stop soon, here maybe? Look, that isn't in character (which is why i love the very idea of fanfiction, the fact that you /must/ reconile with canon, the fact that you /have/ to write inside someone else's parameters: it's a wonderful game). Look, in the light of (x), (y) doesn't make sense. Look, the voice seems to me to fail approximately /here/.
All this kind of thing that it is impossible to find someone with the time and the patience and the flat-out /ability/ to do. But a girl can hope.
The other thing is that i write so gosh-darn /slowly/. This is, of course, because I subscribe to Neoteric doctrines on writing, of being doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosus - learnéd, by Jupiter!, and laborious. I despise historians, physicists, classicists, who can't write /readably/: so, maybe they're not novelists or journalists, maybe they don't have the training, but /still/. There are /standards/ to be upheld, here. Read Livy, and you can tell the words have been chosen with care: read Cornelius Nepos, and you're bloody sure of it.
This works best with poetry, of course - it was Catullus whose line I use, there, Catullus who described his own book of poems, and by extension the poems themselves, as arida modo pumice expolitum, neatly polished with dry pumice, written and rewritten and each sentence rerevised until no word can be added or taken away - but i do it with all language, wherever I can. I spent /hours/ on a single laywer's letter, trying to give off the impression of a sweet little girl with an opinion which was founded in Morals and would therefore not change, but with an undertone of deeply fundamental irony and hints of submerged scorn: a lawyer's letter that would be read by one dumb lawyer and one dumb man paying the lawyer, neither of whom would understand the beauty of my manipulation of language and meaning. But that did not matter: the gods, as they say, see the back. Which would mean that the gods see my snideness and self-obsession... but on the other hand my painstaking desire to use every possibly nuance of the english language.
It's a wonderful language, you know. It doesn't have the clarity of latin, or the melody of greek, it doesn't have the conciseness of japanese, the vehemence of french, the expression of german. But it has its own peculiar mix-and-match beauty, being formed from a mishmash of every language it came across in its formative years: the insane simplicity of its grammar, and the irregularities that pepper it; the huge range of vocabulary, from the anglo-saxons and the normans and every other race that has invaded us militarily before 1066 (or indeed 1789 ^_^) and culturally since then.
If I could change things, of course, I would: a second-person singular (bring back 'thee'!), a third-person imperative, an alternative third-person of each gender (min! iste! if the greeks and romans had 'em, so can we), an exclusive first-person plural (we, but not with /you/ in it). But having them there just gives us new toys to play with: how do you write a scene of two girls in a room in third person and avoid making it stilted, but still keep the meaning?
I /love/ that, and I want to do it all the justice I can. Which mean I don't write quickly, because every sentence I must needs go back and edit and re-re-edit and make sure i make the most of interior rhyme and assonance and hidden allusions to things only i will get and will forget far too soon but without overloading. I don't think I could write a /mary sue/ with no plot value whatsoever without trying to make it meaningful. Which reminds me, one of these days I should write a mary sue, just to see what it's like. I was going to do a gundam wing one. Because, well, no-one would notice its existence, would they? But obviously not under my 'own' name. Maybe once i've got some of this lot done...
so, /actual fic logging/. I want to write Asmo. I always want to write Asmo, and never do. This is because he is a bitch to write, and I am his fangirlie. Hey, if i was a writer who slept with her muses... he wouldn't sleep with me. Damn his eyes. Instead, I make do with Kira, who is easy when i catch him at midnight and difficult immediately after, and with trying to get Relena done.
Relena's the most irritating, really, because she's almost at the conclusion, dammit! And, you know, I'd like to get her over and done with, but the ideas just won't tie up without sounding clumsy. The colours have to be twisted right so that they don't clash or come undone. Fairy tales, femininity, tapestries, self-mutilation. I can't believe I'm actually /writing/ the self-mutilating Relena fic: inspired, really, by reading some godawful Gundam AU in which Duo was a cutter, to which I responded "Aww, cute. Girl_Duo self-insert!" Girls are cutters, kiddies: very masculine self-styled shinigami Have Gundams Which They Can Use For Destructive Tendencies. It's girls who have the social script to blame themselves for society's failings: boys blame society for their own. Girls fight inwards, boys fight outwards. Do they teach you nothing in your schools these days?
This isn't gender stereotyping, it's cultural commentary. Relena is, as i've said before, product of her social class: a class which has been isolated and thus warped. You know how the Deep South of the US can be seen as a rarefied descendant of Regency Culture? In much the same way, the upper-middle-class society of Earth circa AC195 is a collection of aspects of the international upper-middle classes, brought together and then allowed to coagulate as the division between rich and poor becomes ever wider and finally the unwashed masses are shipped off to the colonies, just like the british did with their excess proletariat, packed off to the US and the antipodes.
Thus the social roles have become stagnant - no new breath to revive them, no new /people/ but those who strive to fit in - and Lucrezia Noin is a gentleman's daughter and Zechs Merquise a gentleman (...i've never thought of it that way before. /ouch/. my gw universe is /not/ pride and prejudice, i hasten to add. and Relena is /not/ jane. stopit stopit stopit!), just like Relena is, oh, i need an entirely wrong parallel here, Scarlett O'Hara, maybe, (snerk), no, just a girl rebelling against her origins in the most minor of ways (she could not otherwise rebel, she is no rebel), falling for someone outside her social circle even though marriages are not based in love, but in social realities. That was a /bad/ sentence. But stil.
That is my GW world: regency novels and school stories and all the artefacts of a forgotten Englishness, and a forgotten Europe, that I grew up reading, because all that is /perfect/ for Relena. By contrast, the Kira I write in informed mainly by two Murakamis, by Mark McLelland and his book on male homosexuality in japan in /media/ as much as human terms, straight views as well as gay, women's views as well as men's. The best way to understand a society, I feel, is through how it treats its 'minorities', its 'aberrances', and how they themselves act, whether they be women or foriegners or the disabled or the homosexual. Honest. I'm not just reading it because i'm a faghag with a raging hard-on for shounen-ai.
But, yes, Kira comes from there - because, like many of the men there, he's a homosexual but not an okama: a man who sleeps with other men, rather than a cross-dresser (which is what an okama /is/, often more than he is gay). There is no term for him, no easy-to-use pigeonhole: gei is too Western, smacks of activism; okama is a gender issue, refers to Arachne and not him... same with, uh, the others. Damnit, i need to write those out somewhere. Plus, you know, sempai-kohai relationships. /Let/ me write fanfiction based around the phrase 'let me indulge you'.
See, if the English language had a third-person imperative, that would sound /so/ much better.
Mother's friends thought she was such a charming child, staying up so late and behaving so well. They fingered her embroidery as if planning to buy it, looked up almost guiltily when she reappeared in a plainer dress, and then turned away as she sat down. She would smooth down her skirt, missing the white folds already, and unfold her next piece of canvas. Her thighs were sticky.
Relena is sewing when Heero leaves - when Heero leaves again, rather, this is not the first time, not by any means - and she can hear his tread that did not slow outside her door. The piece is of flowers, huge blue cornflowers with no stems on a background of mottled greens. She wants to throw it across the room, to hear the clack of the frame as it hits the dresser and falls to the floor: perhaps that would stop him to identify the unfamiliar sound as no threat, a pause in the purposeful steps. It would work better than her rising and going to the door, calling his name and asking where he will go: he always says nothing, walks on to whichever unknown destination he has in mind.
Relena must not grudge him that. He is a soldier, after all: the movements he makes are far more meaningful than her speeches rehearsed into a worried mirror, the words she cuts or adds for emphasis, the make-up she applies after a sleepless night to hide the grey streaks of nervousness under each eye. She is only a little girl playing at being a princess, surrounded by adults who humour her in her play-acting and provide her with dress-up clothes, daddy's favourite white and a red sash for Sank that spills into her lap.
Noin and Pargan stand always at the corners of her vision, identical looks of worry on such different faces. They are the soldier-dolls who guard her nursery kingdom, their springs wound tight to tension. They will always fight bravely against the ballettist rats who match her in the steps of the waltz and the gavotte - cotillion dances she learnt both to lead and follow in, against the marked time of the piano in the school gym - and make casual shoptalk at her, young diplomats and gallant captains and heirs to business moguls with smiles tilted to reflect her face. Noin meets her glance over a broad epauletted shoulder, smiles. Everything is safe, princess, no-one can disturb your little games. No-one can force the pinprick to break the spell and make this dream a ten-year sleep, no-one but you yourself.
Where a needle has slipped under and through, dragging a bridal train of white silk thread behind it, the skin blushes pinkly: ridges of separated skin remain, scar tissue with a hollow centre.
And now qu'est ma chatte shall become... a fic log proper! yay!
Oh, hush you. /I/'m happy. Problem is, you know, I have too much writing waiting in limbo for inspiration to strike and flare, and therefore... I write none of them, but start new ones. As is always the way. Too many fandoms, too many characters, too many ideas that are only half-fleshed-out.
Anyway, for the record, the current fics-in-very-much-progress are:
as - kira - stuka
as - asmodeus - the devil's trill
(katou's mother's little helper is... vaguely defunct for now.)
gw - relena - needlework
ff8 - xu - hymn for berlin
Plus a whole host of others without name or even identity beyond text files sitting smugly at around 200 words in editpad. wooh. Including an AS Ruri-chan fic i /really/ want to write, because... uh... she's not in the ova! and she's /great/! and i /could/ write her, i know it: more than i can, say, write Rel, who makes me stutter in typing and turn to something less like breaking through someone's skin with a blunt axe and no anaestetic.
Relena does not want to be written as she is, as a mild and scared little girl (everyone i write seems to be scared or power-obsessed: these are my specialities, perhaps) with all the pretensions of the upper middle classes bred into her, with all the neuroses, too, the tendencies to self-destructive disorders that haunt the corridors of high-stress girl's selective schools, the feeling that you do not deserve the world, that really, everything is too hard for you - and yet you do it, because you must. All the grace and poise of Queen Relena is the grace and poise taught in early ballet lessons, then formed into an echo of her mother's movements (the mother she /knew/, not the 'real' one) and not her own: but she begins to think that maybe her mother's grace was not her own but a copy of another's. All these women, clutching an totem of another before them and following its movements like small children mirroring a mechanical doll.
I character-study too regularly. Leads to self-indulgence.
Well, I guess that counts as qmc christened: broken necks of champagne bottles hanging from gold-coloured string and whatnot. Um.
blogs I read, reverse alphabetised for no other reason than my perversity: