The Desert Mermaid

At the moment there is one knotty little floater sitting bang in the middle of my right eye, making reading exceedingly annoying.

Sometimes having a body is downright weird.

Wow! That was one hell of an agency I just queried! Overnight book rejection service!

The previous guy with his failure to get back to me even after the second e-mail checking to see if he’d gotten the first? He should take note.

It’s a race now. I’m going to see if Doctors! gets accepted before I finish the manuscript for the OGYAFE. I figure if my aliens are too weird to sell, I’ll be covered because they’ll let anyone publish a YA fantasy these days. Unique or mainstream, I’m yer guy!

ME: I remember these Super Mario 64 levels being a lot bigger.

MY BROTHER: Harder, too. Remember the hours of frustrated attempts to get a single star? And oh god the 100-coin challenges.

ME: You know what’s really sad? This means that while we could never be assed to practice things like martial arts or our respective musical instruments or such skills, we actually practiced video games like FIENDS.

MY BROTHER: You’re right!

ME: Figures the one thing we’d become virtuosos at is the most useless talent ever.

MY BROTHER: If only viola had been half as motivating.


Also, forgot to link to this before, in case you haven’t seen it: You are hereby invited to write fanfic about John Scalzi as an orc and Wil Wheaton in his infamously ugly sweater riding a unicorn pegasus kitten in front of a volcano. If you’re like me, though, you can’t possibly do it* because every time you click the link you see the illustration and then you fall down laughing.


*Even though I suddenly want to write self-insert, because really who doesn’t want to hang out with John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton?

You know, before Twilight came out, I have to admit I never appreciated the sheer creativity with which the Harry Potter fandom’s batshit is imbued.

I mean, Twilight fans are batshit, but it’s a sort of vanilla batshit, the kind where you just insert yourself into the protagonist’s place and relive the story replete with fantasies of nice sparkly missionary position sex, or sit around insisting that your fandom is the BESTEST fandom.* If you’re really creative, you lust after the werewolf instead, but mostly the batshit is a matter of intensity.

There doesn’t seem to be nearly as much in the way of fans astrally married to the villainous sidekick vampire who sometimes manifests himself through the fan’s pet hamster to inform the fan that the original author is out to eat all their sweets and steal their paperclips. You just get varying levels of “MINE MINE CHARACTER ALL MINE” and “THIS IS THE ONLIEST BOOK.”**

Which strikes me as doubly funny since Twilight itself spirals from a self-insert Mary Sue self-indulgence to full-on psychodramatic crackfic.

I dunno, maybe there’s an Inverse Law of Crackiness, or maybe it’s just that Twilight appeals to a particular group of people without much interest in changing things up. Either way, though, I want to go back and salute the Potterfans. You guys still win, no question.


*I remain with the theory that many Twilight fans have an unnervingly narrow breadth of knowledge. cleolinda’s posse once suggested that Twilight fans, unlike other rabid fans, do not launch from their fandom into other fandoms, which explains their whole Stephen King fiasco.

**Although that can be pretty entertaining, I must admit.

All together now: GAAAAACK!

The suggestion of critters replacing certain organs, however, with no ill effect on the host except in the sense that suddenly they’ve got some other organism with big gross feet or something acting as a vital organ, is an intriguing sci-fi possibility. And replacing your tongue with a giant horrible crawly thing has all sorts of interesting aspects to explore.* Akin had enough trouble with his tentatongue, and that thing didn’t even have a face.

Once again, nature is a step ahead of sci-fi.


*And some entertaining aspects, too: “Now let’s see why you’re having trouble talking. Open your mouth and say ‘ahhh.’”
“Ahh.”
“YEEEEEEEK!”
“Ih ihh bahd, dokhuh?”

On the plus side, it would make for some great practical jokes on your dentist. Or small rude children who stick their tongues out at you ... Oh, the opportunities are endless.

It’s like everything stupid has coalesced into one putrid mass of destructive, disastrous idiocy.