Bunches of fannish stuff.

( A couple more videos of the Britain's Got Talent winner )

And you know, I feel really weird pimping America's Got Talent to high heaven, but it's SUCH cheesy fun. I know it's bad, I know there's some fairly embarrassing moments sometimes, but when it's good it's such a blast. Three more weeks, baby. Aw, yeah. *fist bump*

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( Reaction to Doctor Who, Silence In The Library )

Do me a favor.

The next time I show up at my parents' house and find out that my mother and brother have been fighting, tell me to leave before I throttle the both of them.

It's bad enough they both have annoying tempers. Neither one of them ever gets tired of yelling about the same things over and over and OVER again. They've having the same fight about his bedroom being a mess since he was little. This is now a good fifteen years of the same damn fight.

If I didn't think my mom would tear me to shreds for it, I'd totally tape a video of myself doing both sides of the argument and show it at Thanksgiving. Might as well get some entertainment value out of it, right?

I'm the wrong person to ask. I read most of these in about six months when I was eight.

Every once in a while I remember the Fine Lines articles on Jezebel about YA fiction most of us grew up with and when I go back and read the new stuff I always find something I remember more fondly than I thought I did. (Just rereading the one on "Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself" made me want to go out and get a copy of the damn thing. I read my copy so many times it fell apart.)

I was engrossed in a romance novel when we went to visit my grandfather in Boston a few years back -- he hadn't been around when I was growing up -- and when he asked my dad if I was always like that, my dad said, "Yeah, we used to be able to give her a book and she'd go sit quietly in a corner for a few hours and leave us alone." Which I would have protested, but ... yeah. Heh. That was how I learned about sex. My parents threw a book on the pile when I was about six or so and I breezed through it and moved onto the next one. I wasn't the kid who asked a lot of questions so much as I was the one who was more likely to go to the library, find what I was looking for in the index cards, and read until I found what I was looking for. It's like all of those times my grandmother told me that if I swallowed my gum it'd stay there. I got so frustrated I went and looked it up and proved her wrong.

I did that a lot because I pretty much lived in the library. I learned how to cross the street by myself specifically to get to the library. (Also, to get to the store that sold the penny candy. Oh, candy fish in a paper bag. *happy sighs*) The library had a rule that you couldn't take out more than three books at a time. During the summer, I was up there taking out and returning books almost every day. Hey, I wasn't supposed to spend all day in my grandmother's house but you could read outside, right? ;)

So saying I was the class bookworm is kind of an understatement. I had that in the bag from somewhere around kindergarten. My teachers gave up on yelling at me for getting finished and reading something not on the assigned reading list because it was a safe bet I'd already read all of the books on it. The best was in ninth grade (I think) when we had a reading list from which everyone else was picking the thinnest books possible. "A Separate Peace", "The Outsiders", etc. Meanwhile, I was one of the few people who asked for the thicker ones. It was sorta hilarious, really. The high school was mostly one long hallway at the time, and in between classes that thing got insanely crowded, but somehow I could navigate my way from one end to the other before everyone else got to the next class with my nose buried in a Stephen King or Anne Rice novel.

And the thing is, in all that time I was reading obsessively I never really thought about writing until tenth grade or so. I bought this cheap romance novel at a CVS that I'm horribly tempted to ask about on Smart Bitches and find, because I imagine it wasn't nearly as bad as I recall. It was set on the Titanic -- that was the major reason I got it; I'd read "A Night to Remember" when I was ten and I'd been hooked ever since -- and this was maybe five years before the movie came out. While I didn't know what a Mary Sue was at the time I did know that this book somehow had two of them -- identical twins -- and they irritated the hell out of my sixteen-year-old self. They were rich and blonde and smart and everybody loved them, they were staying in first class, and one fell in love with a rich man while the other fell in love with either a guy from steerage or one of the White Star employees. And one was named Smoke and the other was named (I think) Swan. Also, Captain Smith had a mistress on board who if I remember correctly was actually staying in his damn cabin.

The main thing I remember about that book was that I was almost personally offended by it. I'd been reading romance novels since I was maybe eleven or twelve -- my parents never kept me from reading anything, which could have gone so horribly wrong and thankfully never did -- and I hated it. But what I specifically remember is that it's the only time I ever felt the urge to throw a book at a wall and indulged. And I'm not sure if I said it aloud or not, but I distinctly remember thinking, "Hell, I could write better than that." Aaaand that's when I started writing.

So, yeah. I'm feeling the book love today. :)

Bwahahahaha!

Otis: *sits on my footrest and stares at me*
Me: "Hey, there. What do you want? You want to play fetch with your cow?"
Otis: *looks over at his stuffed cow when I say the word "cow"*
Me: "Well, bring it over here."
Otis: *glares*
Me: "Okay, fine, fine, I'll get it." *gets it, throws it across the apartment*

Five minutes later ...

Otis: *jumps onto the couch and drops the cow in my lap*
Me: "... wow, way to listen."

Okay, so.

I'm trying to come up with a list of mythological things that only a virgin can do. You know, like virgins are the only ones who can touch unicorns or virgin blood is tastier to vampires or whatever.

Anybody think of any others? 'Cause my list is kind of short right now.