Oh Look! See the New Icon! - 10/23/11

When I posted "Mustard Seed" it was with some trepidation. It had been months since I'd done more than take a halfhearted swing at writing. Mom dying threw me for a bigger loop than I expected it too. So, to put it mildly, I expected people to boo and hiss at my obviously poor attempt at storytelling. I was warmly surprised to find out that I was so, so wrong. My apologies for doubting my readers. They really get me and my silly masculine take on the Twi-verse. Anyway one particular piece of feedback warmed me especially when the reader said that she could see the professional authors we had both read influencing my writing. That it made my writing style "familiar" and "comfy". You have no idea how much that made me smile. I jokingly told my wife and a couple of fic writing friends that I was now "the comfort food of fan fiction", and that I should change my icon. The straight-faced reply was. "Yes, you should."

So, in honor of my rebirth as a fic writer, here's my shiny new, warm, fuzzy, non-aggressive comfy icon. Bye-bye angry axe-wielding warrior, hello grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. I love the shit out of it, both literally and figuratively. Thanks @Wythanie.

What's in a Name?

Most people put a bio in here somewhere, so I thought that perhaps in was time (02/16/11) that I did so. There's little enough to tell. The most startling fact would be that I'm a guy. Yes, in the lexicon of the fandom, I'm a unicorn. A male Twilight fan. A middle-aged, very married, very sappy and romantic male Twilight fan. My previous fandoms include Buffy, Babylon-5, Roswell, Star Trek, and The West Wing; with strong strains on a dozen other fandoms on the side. I adore crossover fic. My wife and I came late to the table for Twilight. It was the movie Twilight that got us first, turning us first into Twilight fans. The books came the very next day. And yes, I'm Team Edward, like my lovely wife. The idea of Bella with the Dog drives me straight up the wall. What she did do with the Dog made me want to turn her over my knee for Edward's sake. He deserved better than whatever love she could graciously spare him from being (heavy sarcasm) "in love" with Jacob "I'm a self-serving home-wrecking manipulative jackass" Black.

The thing is, I've always been a sap. How do I know? My handle, if you please. Kzinti Killer. It sounds a bit sociopathic, but bear with me. It's sort of a Byzantine fannish inside pun. It also proves that I'm an enormous geek.

The Kzinti were the Klingons of Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe. Like the Klingons they started out as two dimensional villains who, over time, became something more. All that is beside the point. The Kzinti have honor, but given the chance they are NOT nice people. In their language the word for "alien" (any non-kzinti) has two other additional meanings. Slave, and lunch. That tells you how they see us. The only way to make them respect you is to periodically beat the everliving hell out of them in a war.

All of this is set up for the origin of my handle. One of Niven's recurring characters was a hapless adventurer named Beowulf Shaeffer. Old Beowulf really got around. Sometimes he was rich, more often he was just a guy trying to make a living, and there was nothing he wouldn't try when he was bored enough or broke enough. The opening of the short story "Flatlander" from the Niven anthology "Neutron Star" begins thus. Our Mr. Shaeffer is traveling by commercial carrier to Earth. His internal dialog is..."The most beautiful girl aboard turned out to have a husband with habits so solitary that I didn't know about him until the second week. He was about five feet four and middle-aged, but he wore a hellflare tattoo on his shoulder, which meant he'd been on Kzin during the war thirty years back, which meant he'd been trained to kill adult Kzinti with his bare hands, feet, elbows, knees, and whatnot. When we found out about each other, he very decently gave me a first warning, then he broke my arm to prove he meant it."

I'm that guy. Why? Certainly not because I could kill Kzinti with my bare hands, or even when armed to the teeth. No. Because, on any ship you care to name, in my eyes, MY WIFE would be the most beautiful girl aboard. ;-)

Yeah, I'm a sap. I like to watch her sleep too. My wife loves me anyway. It's flippin' amazing.

I'm sure that one day the man police will probably show up and drag me off for deprogramming, but until then, I have fic to write.

Oh...and my Twitter name is @TwiHusband

Just some random quotes that caught my eye...

"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." -- Henry Jenkins

"Good writers borrow ideas from other writers. Great writers simply steal them outright." - Deputy Communications Director, Samuel Norman Seaborn, The West Wing

“Stress: The confusion created when one's mind overrides the body's basic desire to strangle the shit out of some asshole who desperately needs it”

"Bartender? I'll have what the man on the floor is having." - Cosmo Fishhawk (a character from the comic strip "Shoe" by the late great Jeff MacNelly.)

"There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick." - Robert A. Heinlein

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea." - Robert A. Heinlein

"May God stand between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk." - Commander Susan Ivanova, Babylon 5

By the way. Twilight isn't my first time to the dance as a fic writer. I wrote Josh and Donna fic for The West Wing too. If you want to compare me, then and now, just copy the link and take out the spaces. http : / / national-library . net / authorresults . php ? author=566

Regarding "Wish Granted": I've had a couple of people remonstrate with me privately over this story. Apparently, in an alternate time line there's nothing to stop Jacob and Bella from having a happily ever after together. Well, leaving out the fact that everything that they were to each other in canon (both the good AND the bad) only existed because of Edward; and the fact that, before Edward emerged in their lives they had nothing in common outside of their fathers' friendship; and the fact that they weren't intellectual or emotional equals in any sense of the word...yeah, I'll grant you that they might by some outside "makes winning the Powerball Lottery look like a sure thing" chance get together and be happy...except for two things. 1) After what they did to Edward in Eclipse, without any sort of consequences for either of them, neither of them deserved any sort of happy ending in canon or in any alternate universe that I can conceive of. And so 2) I don't want them to have one.

Here's a reworked excerpt from a PM of mine that covers my feelings nicely.

Jacob specified a lack of Edward, and Bella agreed with him. (insert evil grin here) I've been around science fiction and fantasy for 41 years. Since I was a kid. Long enough to know that when you grant a wish like that, made under those sorts of circumstances, by people who've done the sort of revolting things that those two did together, you give them exactly what they want, but you do it in such a way as to make them sorry that they ever wanted it. What those two did to Edward in Eclipse was vile. It was especially vile when you consider that, being a Twilight vampire with a mate bond to Bella Swan, Edward didn't have the option to stop loving Bella and dump her as she deserved. As nearly any human man would have. It made the wedding and honeymoon seem like some sort of practical joke on Edward. Like Bella was somehow faking it out of obligation, and that, despite her self-aggrandizing declarations of love to Edward, love didn't even enter into it. I'm sorry, but if she was in love with the dog, then she wasn't in love with Edward. Being in love is an exclusive state of mind, not an inclusive one. One to a customer. Period. Bella Swan can't have it both ways, and neither can Stephenie Meyer.

In Eclipse Bella perpetually said one thing and did the opposite. She (with Jacob's willing and able assistance) hurt Edward when he couldn't fight back, and kept on hurting him with complete and utter disregard for his suffering while she coddled poor abused (heavy sarcasm) Jakiepoo. Even Bella eventually acknowledged that...though she never really did anything to make up for it. Black never even did that much, and he came out of it with Edward's daughter as his MATE! Edward, the poor SOB couldn't even leave to get away from them. That being the case, I'm not about to give Bella and Jacob together a happy ending of any kind for that, in this universe or any other. Black specified a world lacking Edward Cullen, and Bella agreed. That's exactly what I gave them. Everything else stays the same. It's what they asked for, and more to the point, that's what they would have earned. There's plenty of precedent for alternate time-lines behaving that way in books and movies. That you can't change events. Some things, perhaps even most things, will still happen exactly the same way.

There's precious little justice out here in the real world in situations like this one, but there's no reason that that there can't be justice in fiction. In canon, Edward Cullen deserved some justice for the suffering that those two greedy self-centered idiots inflicted on him in Eclipse, right from the first chapter and all the way through to the last chapter, and on into Breaking Dawn. So I gave him some...even if it is in a world where he wouldn't be there to see it, because the people involved (apparently including the girl whom he loved more than his own life and happiness) had wished him out of existence.

Nice going there Steph. You really did lose Edward's "voice", didn't you?

Of Wolves and Vampires or, What Were the Tribal Elders Smoking?

Steph’s Quileute mythos leaves a lot to be desired. On the face of it, I don’t buy her plot device that the Cullens triggered the 24th chromosome pair in the Quileutes. If the legends told in the Saga are to be believed, the Tribe's young men were phasing long before they ever got a whiff of their first vampire. Which can only mean that the mere presence of a vampire or vampires won't cause the the Quileute wolves to phase, but that something else certainly does. And, if the time table implied in canon is to be believed, Sam Uley didn’t phase for 18 to 24 months after the Cullens arrived. I’m sorry, but when you’re dealing with fearsome predators like vampires any offensive/defensive weapon that isn’t ready to deploy within five minutes of their arrival in the area is the next thing to useless. Had the Cullens been the horrible monsters that Billy Black and his elderly fellow xenophobes preached that they were, they could and would have cleaned house on La Push before the first wolf sprouted a single follicle. Between them, the Tribal Elders didn't have the brains that God promised a doorknob.

Which means that, either the Tribal Elders are paranoid fools (which I am inclined to believe), or something else triggered the change (which, come to think of it, I am even more inclined to believe). Perhaps some ritual was performed by the Elders to “trigger” the change. It fits the timing better, and it suits the shifty, self-justifying stance of the Tribal Council. Besides, with the climate in the area, the Olympic Peninsula would have been the vampire equivalent of Acapulco. There should have been vamps in and out of the area all the time before the Cullens set up housekeeping and posted "Keep Off the Grass" signs on the territory. If vampires make shape-shifters shift, then where was the Pack prior to the Cullens arrival? They should have been there waiting to greet them before they unpacked the first moving box.

Lame, lame, lame Stephenie. It was all “Poor, poor pitiful me…it’s all your boyfriend’s fault” leverage for Jacob Black to use to manipulate Bella, was it not? To make Jakiepoo appear to be a more sympathetic character, as opposed to the repulsive jerk that he was to those with eyes to see? Because, had you stopped to reason it out you’d have seen that a) the time-table was all wrong, and b) if the wolves want to blame someone for their plight, let them blame their various and assorted ancestors for continuing their cursed bloodline.

The Path Not Taken has a BANNER!

In an act of extraordinary kindness and generosity, Katmom volunteered to make a banner for this story. She is also apparently an artistic genius, because it's just beautiful. I'm going to try and post the URL with the usual stunts to try and get around FFN's prohibitions. http[colonslashslash]i36[dot]photobucket[dot]com / albums / e6 / rlytkk / TPNTBanner[dot]jpg

Thanks Katmom!

The Butterfly Effect now has a banner TOO!

The artistic genius that is Katmom has struck again! Be sure to let her know if the kid looks like your what your image of Katrina. Follow the link after editing it to overcome FFN's cranky policy. http[colonslashslah]i36[dot]photobucket[dot]com / albums / e6 / rlytkk / TBEBanner[dot]jpg

My Fic Reading Habits or….As a man reads, so shall he be.

Generally speaking I’m canon or canon-AU, and Edward/Bella-centric. What follows is a brief summary of my fic dos and don’ts. This applies in all fandoms and crossovers, not just Twilight, though I’m currently up to my neck in the Twi-fandom. These rules are my own and not meant to disparage anyone else’s reading choices.

No Slash. Let me define that a bit. A character, be they OC or canon, who is already gay, is fine. I’ll read a fic incorporating them, their life, and loves with no problem. However I draw the line at gaying up a het character. So, no Edward/Jacob fic. No Alice/Bella fic. The canon characters’ sexual identity is as much a part of them as their hair color. So, I just say no.

No UC or Ucon. What we called “Unconventional Couples” in Roswell Fandom. You bust up the canon couples, and I’m gone. No Edward/Esme. No Carlisle/Bella. No Jasper/Rosalie.

Using Jacob with Bella temporarily to build romantic tension I can put up with to a degree since Bella’s dalliance with the Dog is a part of canon, but bear in mind that I thought that SM way overdid that mess in canon, so there isn’t much wiggle room for even a transient Bella/Jacob pairing that's even remotely happy…and God knows after what they did to Edward in Eclipse, neither of them merits a long-term HEA with each other. Now, having a Bella/Jacob pairing, long-term or short, where they’re both totally miserable as a result is another matter. I’d make popcorn to read that.

No OOC or “Out of Character” behavior. This mainly pertains to romance. If Edward or Bella cheat on each other, I’m gone...that's a major violation of the canon for mated vampires. If they have to cheat on other people to be together, I’m likewise gone. The same goes for the other canon couples. I had my fill of OOC behavior in the canon Saga.

Bella's cheating with Jacob in Eclipse was too OOC for her to really be believable with Edward afterward. It made the wedding and honeymoon look forced and contrived, because had Edward been human Bella's behavior with Jacob would have been a deal-breaker. There would have been no wedding and honeymoon. However, as a mated vampire, he didn't have that option. He was bound to Bella for eternity all the way back in Twilight...no matter how badly she screwed him over.

So I'm not about to go for more of the same in fic.

No Sexual Fetishes. I can deal with well-written smut, as long as there a good plot around it. But, if you start making a habit of leather cat suits, S&M scenes, and similar OOC sexual behavior, I’m gone. A threesome or partner swapping will send me for the door at once.

No AH – Or “All Human”. As a general rule, no. There are occasional rare exceptions, but for the most part I find that AH fic is so far from canon that the characters are unrecognizable. They completely lose their charm. Most, and by that I mean the vast majority, of the AH stories out there aren’t Twilight to me. They’re original stories with characters of the same name. Generally speaking not my bag. I do make occasional exceptions, but from year to year I can count them on one hand with fingers left over.

Idle Thoughts

Howdy! This little piece nonsense is the result of a conversation that I had with my wife. I’m about to prove just how big a TwiNerd I am. I actually THINK about this stuff.

So, here’s what my misfiring synapses have spit out. In the Twi-verse, how long have there been vampires? And where did they come from? In the Saga Edward claimed not to know, and I believe him; however, I found his speculations on the subject to be more than a little specious for an immortal being with an off the charts IQ and a lot of time on his hands to think in. If nothing else, Carlisle was smarter than that.

Why?

I won’t even dignify the “and God created them, predator and prey” argument. Geology, plate tectonics, and the fossil record (which I have to assume is the same for the Twi-verse as it is for us) say clearly that biblical creation is pretty much nonsense. Whatever else the bible is, it is NOT science. So let’s skip Genesis and go straight to Darwin.

Which came first, the human or the vampire? The human obviously. Without humans there’s nothing for a hypothetical preexisting vampire to eat (unless he’s an unwilling vegetarian), and no way for him to make more of his kind. If fact he can’t exist at all.

So, humans came first. So WHEN did vampires appear in the Twi-World? We can’t say when they were, but we CAN say when they weren’t. They weren’t there for any of humanity’s predecessor species, nor were they there for humanity when they were still hunter-gatherers. Hypothetical cave-vampires, with little reason and no thought for the future beyond a full belly, would have outstripped their food supply and made humanity extinct before the race even got out of the gate. They would have been like newborns all the time; no more than animals.

Humans, almost 100,000 years old as a species, didn’t leave the hunter-gatherer schtick behind until quite recently in their history. It was 10,000 years ago, at the earliest, when they settled down and started farming and herding; which gave them the leisure to develop a civilization, with ethics, reason, philosophy, and above all prudence and forethought; and cities, with large homogeneous populations. In other words, the human race could now support a small population of apex predators, born of humanity, infused with enough enlightened human self-interest to restrain them when feeding or creating more of their kind.

So, at a guess the first vampire appeared in the Twi-Verse between 6000 and 10,000 years ago; probably closer to 6000 than 10000.

How did they get here?

I have no more clue than Edward did. Aliens? Space germs? Who knows. But, if I had to guess at a plausible explanation, I’d say alchemy. One of the things that ancient alchemists chased assiduously was the elixir of life. Immortality. My preferred theory is that one unlucky fool accidentally came up with something that worked…sort of; and thus became the first vampire.

I’m not saying that any of the above is ultimate truth, but I’d argue it over a beer. SM had gaping holes in her canonical history, and this is one of the biggest. My instinct is to try and plug it.