Standing On Boxes

And it isn’t for sale!

But people keep calling my cell number asking me about it. Even got a couple calls from some of those shaddy scam artists who offered to resell it for me.

Obviously, someone has a typo in their classified ad. Not that I’ve had any luck Googling for it. Fortunately, I have a few spare minutes on the phone so it isn’t costing me anything.

But it is annoying. And I’m not taking messages. Wouldn’t know who to forward them to anyway. Sorry.

(And I’m sure whomever placed the ad wasn’t happy with the missed calls. Assuming they know about it by now.)

Might not be new, but this is the first time I’ve noticed it.

The “Cooking Channel”.

Like FoodTV used to be. Shows about cooking – people actually showing how to cook instead of many, many cooking competition type shows and uber-celebrity cook shows. Sure, they have a bunch of old shows mixed in with ones by refugees from FoodTV but at least they are about cooking. Good stuff.

Need to start working on the next part of “Portal Girl” set in Cleveland.

Do I include a Xander in it or not? I can’t decide. I so rarely drag him into one of my fics. He gets a good bit in “Slayer Mercury” and he’s reasonably important in the Season 1 intro fic I wrote but usually he is off somewhere doing other things instead of hanging out with Buffy.

Of course, I haven’t figured out if Willow will show up either. Maybe.

There’s really nothing new when it comes to fan fiction. If I look real hard at all of my stories, I can see elements of something I’ve read somewhere else in them. Sure, some are more original than others (the Buffy-librarian story being a prime example) but if I squint hard enough I can at least see the influence of things I’ve read.

And, occasionally, I will run across what I’m sure was an original idea of mine echoed in someone else’s fic. Flattering in some respects even though I’m sure the fic writer doesn’t know or realize that they aren’t the first writer to use that idea. (And I don’t have a big enough ego to think someone got the idea from one of my fics when I see it. It’s the “million monkey” theory of fic ideas. )

And original ideas? Not always good idea.

I think every fic writer has that one good idea. That idea that reaches beyond simple fan fiction and can grow into an original story.

I won’t say what mine is. Which fic I’ve written/am writing that I think would work as an original story. What plot idea is something I’m hoping to turn into something worth reading in a non-fan fiction kind of way.

Real Person Fics. Writing stories using public figures ( actors, politicians, athletes, etc.) as if they are characters in some ongoing fictional universe.

Not something I get as a form of fic writing. (Sure, I’ve read a couple rpfs over the years but they just don’t work for me.)

It’s like writing an unauthorized biography of someone who is still alive and making most of it up based on a few known facts. Like a tabloid.

But, even if the public perceptions of most famous actors/athletes are the products of their agents/PR/media, often to the point that these people are playing a character based on themselves in public and we never know who they truly are, that doesn’t mitigate the overall creepiness I personally get from the idea.

I could never write an RPF myself. I value my own privacy too much to feel comfortable invading someone else’s privacy for my own entertainment. Public figure or not.

I could just spend the next 3 days reading other people’s fics. Or I could spend time working on my own. We’ll see.

Randomness…

At one point I read a lot of Xena uber fic. There’s a great website full of it – The Royal Academy of Bards . But after a while it all became much with the sameness and it was hard to see the uber characters resembling the main Xena characters (Xena and Gabriel) in any way. Sure, one of them is always tall. One is always short. One has blonde hair, the other dark hair. One is sensitive/artistic. The other? A stoic/warrior/loner type. But not much else.

Watching some old James Bond movies with Sean Connery – my favorite Bond. The Connery Bond movies seem to be closer to the original as Fleming wrote him. Connery’s Bond was more arrogant and relied more on his tough guy/macho-ness to survive than later Bonds (Roger Moore’s Bond (Aka “Polyester Bond”) was really just The Saint with a bigger organization behind him and a ‘license to kill’). Of the “Pretty Boy Bonds (Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan) – Pierce Brosnan was my favorite, but that could be because I was a fan of “Remington Steele” back in the day. I haven’t watched the two Daniel Craig Bond movies yet. He seems to be closer in style to Connery but I can’t get past his appearance in “Tomb Raider”. (Okay, I liked ‘Tomb Raider’ but not because of him. I’ve liked all of Angelina Jolie’s action movies, so far.)

Typical Bond movie. Some poor woman indulges in “Bond-sex” and dies. You would think there would be warnngs on all of the super-villain and super-spy bulletin boards/websites/Facebook pages warning them that “the Surgeon General has determined that Bond-sex is detrimental to your health/life.”

In the US, you’re entitled to request a free credit report from each of the three credit bureaus every year. The US government made them set up a website/process for it. Decided to do that a couple weeks ago so I carefully filled out the required form (Didn’t want to do it online) and sent it off with fingers crossed.

Read More >>