Name three fics you think I will never, ever, ever write. In return (and if inspired), I will attempt to write a snippet of one of them.

Edit Here's where I did this one before.

( based on reactions to Waters of Mars )

crossposted scarfman doctorwho

I haven't used the entry tag lonely god in some time, because there hasn't been anything new in Doctor Who for awhile to prompt the subject to me. In fact I recently wrote in someone else's journal that "if that's what Davies is doing, he's doing it so subtly or so poorly that I can't tell for sure."

I haven't seen Waters of Mars yet, and won't till qtrhorserider do the voodo that she do so well; but, from the comments I'm seeing, it looks like I was right the first time.

It occurred to me last night that the character dynamic on Warehouse 13 is much the same as on the first season of Doctor Who: an adult audience-identification-figure couple, a mysterious, eccentric and not necessarily trustworthy old scientist, and a girl or young woman associated with the old man who's as smart as he is but impetuous.

Post a single sentence from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations.

• "Your mother's example, no doubt."
• "That's right. You're from the early 1980s, aren't you."

This isn't a meme...at least not yet, but you can make it one if you want to. (every meme has to start somewhere, right?)

Have any passages from books or movies influenced you so strongly that you feel the influence shows in more than one of your stories?

(The time I tried this, I just presented it as if I'd seen it somewhere else. I did see at least one flister respond to it. No, I'm not telling you which it was.)

Not so much a single passage, but The Once and Future King has given my fanfiction a propensity for happy, amicable threesomes (Riker, Troi and Worf; Archer, T'Pol and Trip; Spock, Uhura and Kirk; but never Buffy, Angel and Spike).

( Includes discussion of casting and of trailers revealed at ComicCon )

( persiflage-1 posted a Children of Earth followup story )

In wintercompanion, a Doctor/Jack community, dameruth wrote a post-Children of Earth Doctor-Jack meetup that I saw recommended on dwfiction for the explanation it offers ( CoE spoilers from this point. )

Also, while I'm at it, J.D. Salinger breaks thirty years' press silence because he likes Terminator 4 (edit: link from tiggerallyn).

When asked what he thought of today's novelists, and whether he had plans to publish any new work, Salinger replied that he loved it when the helicopter crashes and John Connor gets grabbed by that terminator that's only half a torso, and then he blows it away with the mounted machine gun.

"But by far the best part is when they reveal the T-800 for the first time and it looks just like a young Schwarzenegger," said Salinger, his voice reaching a fever pitch. "I was like, 'Holy shit.' I guess they must've used CGI or something to get that face just right. But what a moment! I practically lost it, if you want to know the truth."

Besides setting the literary community abuzz, Salinger's decision to come out of seclusion has allowed scholars access to his massive archive of unpublished work for the first time. So far, critics have examined three never-before-seen novels, eight novellas, and more than two dozen short stories—all of which appear to be Terminator fan fiction.

"But make no mistake," said Salinger expert Professor Duane Hartworth of nearby Dartmouth College, "this is without a doubt the most personal and affecting body of Terminator fan fiction ever discovered."

1. The Doctor to Spock, on the prospect of a Federation noninterference directive: "No interplanetary federation is an island, Lieutenant."
2. Zaphod Beeblebrox at Milliway's: "When I asked for volume three of the wine list, I was placing my order."
3. Angel: "If denial is a river in Egypt, Buffy has always been an Amazon."
4. Picard to Buffy: "No one stands alone against the forces of evil when the starship Enterprise is about."
5. The Doctor to Kirk: "Making a difference to only one person was never enough for you."

• The Doctor: "Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why don't I listen to myself, when I know how clever I am?"

We saw The X-Files: I Want to Believe when scarfmom asked us to put it on her scratch tape. We liked it. What struck me most about it was that Scully is the dynamic character, the one who learns and grows; like the series overall and like my Doctor Who crossover.

Pick a character that I have written, or that you know I have substantial headcanon about, and ask any five questions about him/her. Be sure to specify whether you would like responses to be OOC (responding as the writer) or IC (responding as the character).

Liveblogging my insomnia. Rarely have I known NyQuil to fail to put me out but tonight, when I needed it most this week (so far), it fails me. Perhaps I'm developing a tolerance.

qtrhorserider noted the other day that PETA people would consider our keeping cats "slavery". "I know no form of slavery," I said, or words to this effect, "in which it falls to the masters to carry the shit away."

O flist, thou let me down.

Turning the tv on. Unfortunately, when qtrhorserider is trying to sleep, I feel obliged to keep the sound off. Fortunately, it's Doctor Who.

Hey, the Get Smart movie is on at 1 am. I hope to be asleep by then, but I've set the DVR. Which reminds me, I want to set the DVR for the movies scarfmom has asked me to tape this week, particularly since at least one is one that qtrhorserider and I will want to see ourselves.

I don't think I've ever seen a real animal rear up and roar the way puppet, stop-motion and CGI animals and monsters do.

New installment on my flist of a Doctor Six story I decided to follow. Which reminds me: I half-promised my flist a third installment of Doctor/Peri 'shipping, having admitted to having composed most of it already. Haven't looked at it again since. Really must.

Was typing, missed Francine Jones slapping the Doctor.

Poked the third 'ship story a bit. Didn't tackle any of the scenes that are unwritten though. Here are the first two segments, if you've missed them.

Tried to chat per suggestion of kiri_l below in comments, but haven't had mIRC up in ages and couldn't remember which server on my Recent Servers list is #dwc's. Pretty sure it was Anime-Chat but that server wouldn't let me connect. Gonna try LambdaMOO.

LambdaMOO session log to come.

LambdaMOO session log may contain language not ordinarily appearing in this blog. LambdaMOO session log edited for clarity( and cut for length. )

Good night.

If you looked at the new character analog timeline table added a few days ago to the AKOTAS-2 FAQ, found it legible, and are a Doctor Who fan, you'll've noticed that Nimue is not analog to the two most recent Doctor Who companions, though she is to almost all the others past and future.

(This table shows that she's even analog to Leela in AKOTAS-2, which she was not in KAITAS. That's only because I got lazy when I was making the table, trying to fit all the lettering in. I'll decide for certain for the first gag that forces me, and if necessary update the table, somehow.)

I mentioned parenthetically the other day that often I draw inspiration for a gag simply by noting the biggest gap in the AKOTAS-2 timeline between existing gags. For today, according to my spreadsheet, the centerpoint of the biggest gap fell analog to the Doctor's time with Donna, one of those two companions Nimue isn't analog to. Having failed, in the time since I realized Nimue couldn't be analog to Martha or Donna if she were analog to Rose, to come up with a character from mythology, folklore and legends with red hair, yesterday I went to the Wikipedia page on red hair. There I discovered that, among others, Mary Magdalene is traditionally portrayed with red hair.

Mary Magdalene also, despite common or even base origins, spent a short time as a companion to a charismatic, world-saving man of superhuman ability, after which she descended into obscurity (doing so for the sake of survival, Dan Brown and others tell us), yet for her time as a companion has had songs sung about her through history (and is revered as a goddess herself, Dan Brown and others tell us).

I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it as hard as I thought about it when I was considering who ought to be the Superman analog in KAITAS, Hercules or Jesus. I made my decision then on the basis that Dejanira makes a better Lois Lane than Mary Magdalene does. But (a) that was back in the days before the Holy Blood, Holy Grail premise was made into novels, movies and History Channel programs, and (2) (b) not all the reasons Mary Magdalene lost out in the running for Lois Lane necessarily apply to the selection for Donna Noble. (Though I haven't any intention of showing or implying, as the paragaph above this one may suggest, that, in the AKOTAS-2 universe, Merlin turns out to have been Jesus in a predestination paradox. Jesus would be analog to ... I dunno. Wilf. Not that he wouldn't still be, you know, Jesus. He'd just also be Merlin's best friend in Mary Magdalene's neighborhood.)

Meanwhile today's cartoon takes another subject entirely. Or it will have once I've written it.

You may recall these LiveJournal entries about how I boasted I'd be writing my own third Star Wars trilogy and releasing the episodes annually starting in May 2006, then didn't. At the moment the two salient points from those posts I'd like you to be aware of are:

1. I decided, from story needs, not to come out with Episode VII till May of David Tennant's last year as the Doctor.
2. I expected to do these trilogy episodes in the same format as the most recent other crossover I'd done to fill in a missed opportunity by a franchise owner; that is, "a comic strip of a dozen panels or so with dialog that was calculatedly cliche in aid of brevity".

Wrote these in the ice_and_rage reaction post for The Ultimate Foe and decided to reprint them here so maybe I don't have to retype them every time the points come up.

Two points I like to make in discussing Trial of a Time Lord and specifically The Ultimate Foe.

• The Valeyard. People who've just reviewed the serial probably don't need this point driven in, but the Valeyard is not a normal incarnation of the Doctor. He's a "distillation" of the Doctor's dark side "from between his twelfth and final incarnations". Remember the projection of Cho Je the Doctor's Teacher had running errands for him in Planet of the Spiders, before the Teacher actually regenerated into that appearance? Remember the Watcher from Logopolis, who was projected backwards in time from the middle of the Doctor's upcoming regeneration in order to keep the Doctor on track in the events leading up to it? Like those. How the Valeyard was generated, and by whom if anyone, we're not told. I initially assumed the corrupt High Council which used him to try keeping the Doctor from exposing the Ravalox coverup, but it could have been a project of the Master's own gone awry. It'd almost have to be a Time Lord(s). But to a certain degree it depends on how much you believe what the Master says about him, since he's the only source. At that point in the story, if that point alone, the Master is the Merlin/Guinan/Giles figure, rendering exposition that we the viewers are to trust at face value. But if you particularly like a fanfiction story written by someone who didn't realize the Valeyard isn't a proper incarnation (there's at least one very good one out there), you could argue that the Master lied.

  A commenter asked me why I assume that someone made the Valeyard when the Watcher seemed to be a naturally occurring phenomenon.

  I assume he was made by someone because our previous examples of the same sort of thing (a) were not the regenerater's distilled dark side only (b) projected backwards in time only a short distance before the relevant regeneration (3 c) did require special circumstances to manifest: Cho Je was manifested by a Time Lord so steeped in the ways of Time that he didn't need a TARDIS to get to Earth from Gallifrey, and the Watcher (according to the screenwriter in later interviews) was manifested by the cataclysmic events surrounding the regneration. These projections don't occur naturally in the first place, or they don't occur without special circumstances; and the Valeyard has additional anomalies when observed next to our other two datapoints.

  That said, I could still be wrong. We just don't know.

• Peri. In this serial the Master, adjunct to his bout of merlinism, tells us that Peri didn't after all die at the end of the previous serial but one, and instead survived to marry Brian Blessed. This makes Peri the first companion to leave the show both by dying and by getting married (and in that order). But we're not really given an alternate scenario to explain how Peri survived the events depicted by the Valeyard-doctored Matrix five episodes ago, just a quick repeat shot of her with Yrcanos from earlier in that story. And there are people who prefer to grant the character the more dramatic exit. So it comes down to who you believe, the Master or the Valeyard. The Valeyard's possible motivations for falsely reporting Peri dead are more obvious than the Master's for falsely reporting Peri married, but notice that the Master contrived to have his version of the story reported to the Doctor by someone else than him. So that he'd have no cause to question it, to go back and investigate? Not something ever likely to be explored in the screensource or in licensed tie-ins, which leaves it to us in fanfiction. I like to think, if Peri did marry Yrcanos, it was as a temporary measure to ally with the most powerful person onsite till the Doctor came back for her; and that the Doctor, mistrusting contradictory data, did go back for her (after returning Mel to his future self), upon which they continued traveling together, the end of Peri's time maybe even overlapping with the beginning of Mel's. Perhaps one day I'll write it up properly as a series.

  Edit: While I'm at it, from my comments on The Mysterious Planet:

  I also am unable to let a discussion of this episode pass without noting that the Doctor is perfectly prepared to come out with his name perfectly casually in front of Peri in the tube station. Either whatever is special about telling people his name in Forest of the Dead doesn't happen until after this, or Peri Brown is just as special to him as River Song is. Maybe that's why he and Peri suddenly began getting along? (I say "suddenly" but her hair's a lot longer in this episode than it was in the previous episode.)

Leonard Nimoy is quoted by Reuters to say, "Canon is only important to certain people because they have to cling to their knowledge of the minutiae. Open your mind! Be a 'Star Trek' fan and open your mind and say, 'Where does Star Trek want to take me now'."

I'm going to add this quote to my essay on how there's no such thing as canon. Full article here (minor spoilers).

Now I have to decide whether to be the person who first posts the quote to startrek.

I've never signed up at Fanfiction.net because I always archived my stuff at my own website (or, since that diskspace quota filled, here at LJ), and that largely because I like to keep control of presentation. Would it be worthwhile to sign up at FFnet for the prospect of wider exposure? Would it be kosher to sign up at FFnet but upload only a representative selection of my stuff, and then link back to my real archives?

Teaspoon, same questions.

I have a question for the lawyers on my flist.

In tomorrow's AKOTAS Superman Kingman gets himself arrested on charges of obstruction of justice for failing to detain a suspect on behalf of a Homeland Security agent who declined to tell the suspect the charge(s) against him. Kingman let the suspect go because holding without being charged is unconstitutional, even though Homeland Security types have been detaining without charge for eight years or so now.

This was brought to mind by discussions on my flist of the unconstitutionality of several powers the office of the presidency granted itself over the past eight years, which haven't been reversed yet. I have in mind to possibly explore what would happen if someone like Superman were real, had like Superman pledged to uphold the law in order to keep from being just an alien bully, and ran afoul of the new directives because he has had the effrontery to question their constitutionality.

What I need to know at the moment, though, is what happens next procedurally. I mean, obviously the Batman the White Night comes across the river and bails him out, but where and when would he be expected to appear in court?

After that I suppose I'll have to decide whether I want to do a story where the case gets appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, or whether I'm just pastiching David E. Kelley. Or both. ETA: I also would like to know if anyone's heard of any case law on the subject.

Picked a good movie premiere week for this one, I guess.