Supernatural, Doctor Who, Elementary, Teen Wolf, Hannibal, and The Walking Dead. Spanning from a love of TV & film to literature, art, music, and the like.
“Dean,” Cas greeted, appearing out of nowhere as fucking usual. “I have a problem. And now you do, too. It’s contagious. Sorry.”
“What?” Dean asked. “What’re you talking about?”
“It’s a curse, I think,” Cas told him.
“What is?” Dean demanded. “Are you sick? Am I sick now, too?”
“No,” Castiel assured him. “It’s—”
“Swear to God, I used a condom,” Dean interrupted. “I swear to God, Cas. Seriously. Search my brain. I do. Every time.”
“It doesn’t seem to have any other effects,” Cas continued, despite Dean freaking out in front of him. “At least, none that I’ve noticed so far.”
“What is it?” Dean questioned desperately.
“You haven’t noticed?” Castiel queried.
“Noticed,” Dean hissed angrily. “Noticed what?”
Castiel doesn’t answer, instead just blinking at Dean expectantly. Dean’s about to launch into another rage of question marks and italics, but then, like a light bulb turning on, he gets it. Oh.
“Huh. Weird,” Dean observed. “Wow, seriously? What a lame ass curse.”
“Indeed,” Cas commented.
“Why can’t I just say something?” Dean went on. “That is so stupid. Who even cares if I use synonyms for said all the tiime instead of the actual word?”
“Apparently, some find it annoying,” Castiel mused. “Also, for simplicity’s sake, said is an easier and overall more practical way of dialogue expression.”
Dean narrowed his eyes. Jesus. Is Cas going to get all language technical on him?
“I understand wanting to be diverse in one’s lexicon,” Cas added. “But as many seem to forget, everything in moderation.”
“Wait. So we’re stuck like this? I’m stuck like this? Because you poofed in here and infected my lexi-whatever?” Dean fumed. “Forever?”
“Sam is doing research as we speak,” Castiel answered. “He also gave me this helpful sheet full of synonyms in case we need it.”
“Fuck,” Dean cursed. Cursed this curse, cursed his weird-ass life. “This is stupid.”
“Agreed,” Castiel agreed.
Amelia and Sam give Dean and Cas a weekend at a high-end hotel, and he’s skeptical but he doesn’t pass up these sort of comforts. The hotel is so much cleaner, the beds so much softer, the commodities so much better than what the usual motels have to offer, so Dean can’t complain. Of course, he can guess why they really paid for this unnecessary stay for them when Amelia’s got an empty guest room at her place- the end of the weekend marks the end of their break. Monday, they have decided, they set off for a major hunt on the other side of the country and Amelia will once again have to cling to the comfort of the delicate hope that they will return, alive and well and soon. When Dean thinks about how Sammy must be doing since friday, he laughs to himself. If he knows anything about his brother, Sam is doing plenty and doing just fine.
A loud roar of thunder almost completely wakes Castiel. Dean smiles from where he sits, beside Cas’ lying form, knees bent under the sheets and arms slouched over them easily. The weekend was long and fun, and he hadn’t meant to greet Monday before the sun had risen but rain is loud and violently pouring- it’s worth watching. And when his mind has spent eons wandering, he feels Cas’s arms sluggishly wrap around his stomach and Dean curves into the touch of warm arms around his bare torso. Things are so simple now, in this moment, and it’s amazing to think they were so habitually restricted to each other before.
tywinning asked you:As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?
I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.
Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.” He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser.
Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)
I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well).
What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.
I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago.
But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)
First chapter written- now what?
The whole insomniac!Stiles idea and the late nights with Derek finding local cafes and diners and stupid things to do to waste time while conveniently becoming closer and inadvertently addressing their family problems and inner turmoil. Only problem is I’ve only watched the first season of the series- and, well, I guess I want to focus more on them and their characters than following the notions of the Kanima and the more complicated things.
Think I can get away with just brushing that a side and not addressing it much? Should I make the story a post-season 1 AU-ish mess of a thing? Or do you all really think I should be more well-informed before continuing?
Opinions, please?
So I’m writing a TW fic in which Stiles’ anxiety has triggered insomnia and he’s spending his nights at local cafes and diners and whatnot, wasting time until he crashes in the mornings before school. Gonna wanna address his anxiety issues and his dad, and the passing of his mom. Of course, throw in bumping into Derek and it’s gonna be a whole coffeeshop fic about them staying up together and kindling a relationship on the D-low while Scott is busy with his life and Allison and all that jazz and Derek is struggling to move on with his past and learning how to trust.
Please, guys, I need some opinions! Make it a complete AU from the series (never done that before!) or base it somehow with the whole werewolf anthology of the show?
A little while after things have settled down, Sam gives Castiel a new cell phone. A good one. And despite Dean’s complaints and annoying comments, despite the fact that Sam has to reprimand him when he tries to chuck the phone into a garbage can, they both come to terms with the eventual truth that Castiel is here to stay and needs his own things- like a cell phone, Sam reasons, and new clothes. Dean shuts up about Sam ‘douching’ Cas up with the phone. He’s not so easily persuaded out of resolving Cas’ need for clothes by letting him wear his own.
Castiel eventually loses his phone. It falls out his pocket during a hunt and is crushed by a monster before its immediate death- with the anger that Cas smites him with, Dean and Sam think it has much more to do with the phone than the three families the ugly bastard had killed the night before. They don’t bring it up. But Cas is quiet, and the long road-trip to the next hunt is silent and uneventful. No more complaints from Dean when Cas holds the camera too close to his face. No more sappy laughter from Sam when Cas narrates the video and quietly introduces Dean each time (‘this is Dean,’ he first began, ‘this is Dean again.’ Each and every time, to the unnamed audience, ‘this is Dean’).
Castiel mourns for the loss like a parent would a child. The phone was with him, in the palm of his hands, each and every day. The phone capture the twinkling of night stars and the morning glory of Dean waking from deserved sleep. It catalogued the slow growth of a smile, the familiar rubbing of the eyes that preceded a raise upwards and light peck on the nose, the forehead, the cheek, the lips. Sometimes, he’d become preoccupied. He’d forget about the phone- Dean would take it, Cas would drop it, he’d put it beside him on the bed and it’d fall off with mindless movements, the sweeping of arms or legs or torsos that lay comfortably against a soft mattress. Sometimes, the camera dropped under the bed. It waited, patient and idle, during the most wonderful, most loving moments of Castiel and Dean’s new life. Castiel didn’t delete much, but he did delete those recordings. Somethings can’t be shared.
Photos of Sam tapping at a computer or raising his hands before going off on a monologue to explain ancient lore were his favorite. Sammy is one of those people who come out best candidly, when the camera is hidden and the recording is secret. Rants and jokes and smiles, shrugs of shoulders, the drop of a gaze and a crazy mess of hair. Cas loved those, too. Just as much as he loved Deans. He loved them differently, of course, but just as much. One picture is that of an old photo they found at a place they once all knew. One photo, just one amongst the dozens of snapshots of the Winchesters, of an old drunk they let go a long while ago. There are some photos he misses more than others. He doesn’t need to tell Sam or Dean of that favorite. For all his wit and sarcasm, for his hatred of smart phones and iPods and all the like, Dean is shockingly reserved. No jokes. No criticisms. No callous shrug of the shoulders. There are momentos we keep in homage to the people we love. Dean keeps them in his trunk just as manically as Castiel keep them in the digital pixels of his phone. He knows their worth. And they are forever lost.
The first thing they do when they get into town is eat. By the end of the night, Dean has bought Castiel a new phone. This time, the first photo is the mistaken shot of Castiel’s thumb. This time, the first photo is that of Cas, Dean, and Sam smiling for the camera. Cas likes that much more.
By the end of the week, the memory on said phone is filled.
[Inspired by a text post by Dirtyovercoats]
Naturally, the milestone is met in the Impala. Like so many things, like conversations about faith, or the end of a night spent indulging in desperately needed laughter at a terrified Castiel’s expense, or the interrogation of an amnesiac, the deepening of their relationship happens in the Chevy. The night sky is bright, the stars shining with a joyful flamboyance that Dean wouldn’t have noticed unless curious, wide blue eyes had looked up through the window and spotted them first. Sam is sleeping, lying across the seats in the back of the car after an all-night hunt that cultivated in more than a few bruises. And Dean isn’t at his best in that moment- there are times when he looks freakin’ fantastic, but with a cut lip and a deep bruise on by his ear, with red knuckles and a throbbing headache, today is not one of those days. Dean wonders for a bit if the angel spent too much time looking at stars to really look at him, because the question comes all the same.
“Can you teach me?” he asks, suddenly. The hand that let go of the steering wheel to softly stroke the back of Cas’ neck immediately halts. The car is parked and the hill they rest on is tall, the city below unassuming. For all his wit and brass humor, Dean can’t muster a single thing to say. “Dean?”
He knew he’d come to this. He didn’t know he’d be nervous. Nervous about what? What would come, he wondered, with teaching the oblivious angel how to kiss? Oh, he realizes. Scared that you’ll mess up. Scared that you’ll break him. Vulnerability, honesty, completely at the advantage and exposure of someone else. The age-old demons of his past.
tywinning asked you:As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?
I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.
Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.” He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser.
Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)
I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well).
What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.
I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago.
But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)
Sam Winchester understands what they experienced in purgatory most in the little things. The little things are what reveal the most, he knows. Like when they are in motels, and Dean relishes in the comfort of even the dingiest of beds. It’s in his haughty laugh and his stupid jokes- it’s in his insistence that the crap bed beneath him just has to be a temperpedic that Sam can tell he spent days struggling to rest in the most painful of places. It’s revealed to him when Dean returns from a quick run to the store or from a hustle at the nearest bar, Sam watches Castiel’s face brighten in the reassurance that Dean has returned to their side yet again, the younger brother knows there were too many moments of doubt. That the angel whole-heartily feared that Dean would not return from whatever doom he walked into far too many times for his body not to commit the slump of the shoulders, the sigh of relief, the warmth of his features to muscle-memory.
Grr.
So, it turns out I published the last chapter of Katabasis almost a month ago- what a douche I am. I’ve finally gotten the chance to start writing chapter eleven, but it’s so difficult. Tackling Leviathans and trying to build suspense, it seems, is not my forte. Grr! Rawr! Pterodactyl screech! What’s making this so hard? Why can’t I just get this through? It’s one of those chapters that make me feel like I’m just shoveling through dirt and slipping into mud, and just have this nasty mud pie to offer my readers. Gosh darn it.
Sam Winchester understands what they experienced in purgatory most in the little things. The little things are what reveal the most, he knows. Like when they are in motels, and Dean relishes in the comfort of even the dingiest of beds. It’s in his haughty laugh and his stupid jokes- it’s in his insistence that the crap bed beneath him just has to be a temperpedic that Sam can tell he spent days struggling to rest in the most painful of places. It’s revealed to him when Dean returns from a quick run to the store or from a hustle at the nearest bar, Sam watches Castiel’s face brighten in the reassurance that Dean has returned to their side yet again, the younger brother knows there were too many moments of doubt. That the angel whole-heartily feared that Dean would not return from whatever doom he walked into far too many times for his body not to commit the slump of the shoulders, the sigh of relief, the warmth of his features to muscle-memory.
When they walk through Purgatory together, they always walk side by side. Through the most unfathomable darknesses, through the most horrifying of sights, or deafening of screeches, Dean and Castiel find solace in each other. The angel tries to stay focused on the task of merely surviving for as long as they can, but the idea blossoms and takes root in the crevice of his mind and the thoughts come and go like leaves sprout and wither on a branch. He wonders, idly, if Dean considers their bouts of companionship, too. But the frivolous thoughts are hushed with the knowledge that Dean has dreams, desires, a brother and a life to return to. He is not like him. He does not fund his happiness on the proximity of only one person, like Castiel does. It is not suffice for him, the angel knows, to simply indulge in being besides his partner.
But the hunter is quick to feel for his hand when he cannot peer through the darkness, and he is unhesitant to chastise the graceless angel when he leaves himself unguarded for the sake of protecting his partner. Dean recants memories to him in soft whispers and quiet, warm chuckles when the two are alone, away from the hungering spirits. Above the blood-red ground that gnaws at smoke-black tree trunks, the two rest upon thick branches and exchange stories of the present for stories of the past. Castiel distinguishes one predator from the other with the signaling of a finger. “They do not have names,” he tells Dean, “my Father never gave them ones.” Quid pro quo, the hunter tells him about Sam’s idiotic mistakes when he first began hunting, or mornings he spent plastered and aching from crazy nights of gambling and bouts of violence before. And, sometimes, when bones are sore and skin in bruised, Dean talks about secret things- like the distinct smell of his mother’s perfume or the remarks his father would make that he’d pretend didn’t hurt.
Blessings are found in strange places, and amongst the coal frenzy of branches, Dean counts his blessings in the company of someone he thought he’d never be able to forgive. The human and his angel sit side by side, whispering until sleep prevails over the taller of the two. Here, what their animosity is all but forgotten. Here, Dean takes his word like gospel and the trust that has been kindled between them burns violently and without fear or contempt. Here, hands are held and shoulders shake and faces dampen and no one, no one, but the untied two are able to see it. The mutual pain, the shared sorrow, the eternal and intimate gratitude of companionship in the midst of peril.
Castiel wraps his wings about themselves, locking the two into place. The feeling is warm and secure, and he knows Dean has long forgotten the initial discomfort of their necessary proximity when their arms touch and the dark feathers push them together. The skies above streak and crack, only for a moment, and that is their testament that Sam, somewhere, is still faithfully attempting to break through the barrier that separates them. The angel smiles, faintly, for a moment. He sighs for Sam, for what he knows he must be suffering after each failed attempt.
But he is not sorrowful. He is eager for Earth and Heaven, but he is not melancholy. Castiel has watched humans find the best in the most horrific of places- he knows that true happiness is found in the silent, simple things and that love is proven in actions and only assured in words. Deep in the chasm of flesh and bone, where a human heart beats for a celestial being, gratitude and adoration run deep and thrive. They shine through the despair the concentrates the air they breath. They heal the tattered flesh and broken spirits. It is in that metronome of emotion and love, Castiel knows, that the two have deposited their strengths. The two talk about many things, amongst the scarlet leaves, but they do not exchange thank-you’s or words of love. They do not need them. The concrete things in this world and the next are more often felt than they are heard.
[Photograph is by no means mine. If source is found, please tell me!]
So I’m re-writing chapter ten because I really did not like it and because I berated myself- recorded [here] if you want to watch a minute of a messy-looking me talking to myself like a loon- into doing the whole thing all over again. Honestly, readers, I have never felt so drained from writing an emotional scene before. I literally felt angry, hurt, and beside myself writing this stuff down- in short, I felt amazing. I plan to ask one reviewer for an opinion, and if anyone wants to read it and give me their two cents, I’d love you forever. But either way, I’m still in shock at how much I got into the scene and how much I invested in the writing. I’ve said before that good writing is the kind that exposes the author and I think, I hope, I’ve done just that. Let’s give it a few hours- let’s hope I made something that will convey just what I felt.
Sam Winchester understands what they experienced in purgatory most in the little things. The little things are what reveal the most, he knows. Like when they are in motels, and Dean relishes in the comfort of even the dingiest of beds. It’s in his haughty laugh and his stupid jokes- it’s in his insistence that the crap bed beneath him just has to be a temperpedic that Sam can tell he spent days struggling to rest in the most painful of places. It’s revealed to him when Dean returns from a quick run to the store or from a hustle at the nearest bar, Sam watches Castiel’s face brighten in the reassurance that Dean has returned to their side yet again, the younger brother knows there were too many moments of doubt. That the angel whole-heartily feared that Dean would not return from whatever doom he walked into far too many times for his body not to commit the slump of the shoulders, the sigh of relief, the warmth of his features to muscle-memory.
