Confessions of a One-Track Mind

Title: Hereafter the Balance
Authored by: vanillafluffy
Rating/Work-safeness: PG for nudity
Approximate word count: 3500
Disclaimer: I am not Eric Kripke and I'm not Neil Gaiman, either.
Betaed by: pwcorgigirl
Summary: After "Abandon All Hope", Jo Harvelle finds herself in an unexpected afterlife, her soul hanging in the balance.

( You must understand, in the normal course of events, you would have been plucked by a reaper. They are the dominant claimers of mortal souls in this time and place. However, because of the upheavals going on in the Christian pantheon, *we* were able to collect you. )

Comments are shiny.
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Title: Soul Food
Authored by: vanillafluffy
Disclaimer: I don't claim to own them or make profit from the act of writing.
Warnings: Post 5.22, minor spoilers.
Word count: about 150.

( Bobby and Crowley had a deal, Bobby's soul in exchange for the location of Death, to be returned after successfully quashing the Apocalypse. Now it's time for Crowley to keep his side of the bargain.  )

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I just submitted my fic for spn_summergen. Mind you, it's not due til July 31st---I *am* the over-achiever the mod mentions in her latest post---which is quite possibly the first time in my LIFE I've ever been called that. (It surprises me, too.)

I was lucky: One of the prompts jumped out at me, ideas came together, and I started writing within an hour of the time I got the assignment. I had my first draft finished in a little over 48 hours...tweaking and beta took another week and a half, but it's a solid piece.

Without giving too much away, the prompt I went with was flexable enough that I was able to bring my own interests and knowledge into it. Enjoying the topic made the process much easier. Sorry if I sound cryptic, but I don't want to be too specific about what genre it is, setting, time-frame, etc. Mum's the word.

Now I need to get focused on my presentation for next Sunday: Hoarding. Oh yeah, this is gonna be fun.


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I know it's only June. It's a long damn time til October, specifically, til the annual "Come as You're Not" party at karaokegal's LJ. But I happened to be watching "American Pickers" on DVR this sfternoon, and Frank mentioned cranking some AC-DC and a bunny bit me hard. I can safely say that a fic/RPF crossover will be a first for me.

I also have a coda for the "Justified" season finale. (My God, I love Boyd Crowder!) That's in addition to the slightly AU SPN/Jutified crossover I've been contemplating.

Plus, my spn_summergen story is about ready to be submitted. I'm on a roll!


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I signed up for the spn_summergen fiction exchange out of giddy optimism from posting two fics in a week. Today there was a post saying assignments will be going out soon, and lamenting that "a small number of signups were very restrictive in the type of fiction they were willing to offer. Indeed, one signup was so specific the only prompts that matched perfectly were her own."

At which point I inhaled sharply and went through the requests post again---I'm pretty sure it's not me! Looking through all the prompts, there were some ideas that I wouldn't mind taking a shot at---not to mention the half-dozen times I wanted to pimp a link to something I've already written that fits the prompt. Quite a few posts had me bouncing up and down going, "Oooh! Oooh! I hope I get YOU!", while others were more along the lines of, "Oh please, anything but that!"

It's a nice, broad fandom, though. I may not be able to understand the people who veto characters A, B or C---I've written all of them, thanks---or certain scenarios, there are sure to be an equal number of people out there reading my suggestions going, "She wants WHO?! Doing WHAT?! What a fruitcake!"

I don't know what it is about exchanges, but they've gotten some good stories out of me. Maybe it's the certainty of knowing that there's SOMEONE out there who wants to read whatever it is. (A lot of my prompts are ideas I love but will probably never sit down and write for myself.) I tend to be more hyped about what I'm writing than what I'm going to get, so if the person who gets assigned me is reading this, NO PRESSURE.

Although I *really* should have specified NO ZOMBIES.

( Prompts, slightly edited from request post are below the cut. )



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Title: I'm But a Stranger Here (Heaven is My Home)
Authored by: vanillafluffy
Pairing/spoilers: Coda to 5.22, "Swan Song"
Rating/Work-safeness: PG for mild language
Approximate word count: 1500
Disclaimer: I'm not Kripke.
Betaed by: Spellcheck
Summary: Castiel returns to Heaven and finds his Father giving orders. That's not all he finds.

( He's always felt his Father's love in the abstract, but being in the same room as Him is like being a grounding rod for lightning. His skin tingles. )

Reviews are shiny.

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About 15 minutes until "Swan Song"...while the name evokes a certain album cover, the soundtrack in my head is more like the theme from "Jaws". I can't see what it is---there's no handy fin in the water---but something is gonna take a big ol' bite out of my heart real soon, I'm sure of it.

Or y'know, they *could* be throwing us completely off track and this ep is actually about freaky goings-on in a wildlife sanctuary.

Yeah, that's it....


ETA: SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS, Y'ALL

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Title: After the Dust Has Settled
Authored by: vanillafluffy
Spoilers: Guesses, not spoilers. I know nothing!
Rating/Work-safeness: PG-13 for language, implied slash
Approximate word count: 5500
Disclaimer: I own only the neurons and electrons I composed it with.
Betaed by: pwcorgigirl
Summary: Set November 2nd, 2013. With the Apocalypse behind them, the Winchesters and their friends have a reunion. The group features a mechanic, a biker, a theology student, a used car salesman and a cowboy. Who's doing what? Funny you should ask!
ETA: NOT jinxed by finale! It could still turn out this way. I wish.

( Something inside Sam shifts, like a compass needle swinging to magnetic north. Dean's just put his anxieties into perspective with a couple simple sentences. For the first time in a long time, Dean's his all-knowing big brother again, the one he idolized as a kid. He never expected to get that feeling back; it's peculiar and reassuring at the same time.  )

Reviews are shiny.

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It's good to know that no matter how bad things get, no matter how dark and twisted the world of Supernatural may be, that even so, in the midst of it all there are interludes of beauty and grace.

( SPN, spoilers for 'Two Minutes Til Midnite'. )

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According to IMDb, Eric Kripke was born in 1974, which means that in a purely biological sense, I'm old enough to be his mother. Which may explain my desire to scream at him:

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!!!

When I heard the rumor that a certain person was going to return, I kinda had a feeling it might play out something like the way it did.

And may I also say, that this is the first time in *quite* a while that an ep has ended where I wasn't going, "Fuck this shit, why am I still watching all this misery?!" Because those of you who are regulars KNOW the RL shit I've been going through as far as watching loved ones suffer goes. Even though these guys are -*ahem*- fictitious loved ones, I'm kinda strung out watching them suffer, too.

So here's to things being a lot less awful than I was afraid of.

Spoilers in the comments, if you want....

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I'm sitting here in countdown mood with a sick feeling of dread in my stomach. Why is that? SPN is my favorite show, this is supposed to be my happy place. So what's wrong?

Kripke.

Thanks to him, I can't even escape to my escapist fantasy any more. I have enough shit landing on me in real life without an on-going angst fest in prime time...particularly since I'm pretty sure it's about to go from bad to horrible in the next ninety minutes. Swell.

And God as my witness, I *WILL BAN the first person who says, "It's only a TV show.".

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My thread is here.

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( SPOILERS, YA IDJIT. )
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Monday was not the most productive day in recent memory, but I did accomplish a few things, namely, got several bags of trash down to the curb, made sure the hydrangeas were watered and weeded (they seem to be thriving), am mostly through with the book that's "due" for book club/writing group tomorrow night, oh, and wrote 1500 words for the "Ficathon Walks Into a Bar" challenge that's due on the 28th. (I hadn't even *started* the ficathon story til today, and I freely admit, I'm recycling an idea I *wanted* to write for the Crossover_Xchange. The PoV character is different, basically.)

( Trauma makes me happy! )

( CSI: Miami---What fuckery is this?! )

Next stop: Tuesday....
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So here I am, waiting for my clothes to dry. I threw everything into the wash except the schmatte I'm wearing, and made the mistake of programming the washer for "Sanitary"---which apparently means boiling everything for an hour and rinsing and spinning for another hour. Grr. Next time, I'll opt for "Express Wash". (I've never SEEN such complicated appliances---I think they're designed for MENSAns.) For clothes, anyway. I'm thinking seriously of grabbing my bedding from home and sanitizing that.

The weather is raw, wet and decidedly icky. I'm staying here instead of heading home to check my mail because it's supposed to clear up later, and I'm not going farther than WalMart in this slop if I can help it. (They have a WalMart even closer than I do, though I like "mine" better.)

I wish I could remember the dream I woke up from this morning. SPN, something about Gabriel getting drunk, spilling his flask on the bed so there were just a couple swallows left, "magicking" it back into the bottle and thinking as he chugged it, that it tasted like Tide. Go figure.
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I tried to post this last night, but for some reason, my POS computer didn't want to cooperate, so I'm gonna try it again. Here goes nothing....

A Ficathon Walks Into A Bar

Signups: 15 February to 24 February
Prompts Distributed: By 28 February
Stories Due: 31 March
Masterlist Posted: Early April


You pick a character, then you pick up to four other fandoms, and the mod will select one character from said fandom for you to meet in a bar with your character. And then you write at least 500 words on it by the end of March.

Mine, for intance was:

Username: vanillafluffy
Who walks into the bar?: Bobby Singer
What fandom are they from?: Supernatural
What other fandoms can you write?: Leverage, Jericho, Dark Angel (pref season 2, which I have on DVD), Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich.

And there are a whole bunch of really great possibilities that folks have signed up for---go, see for yourself, and sign up if you can, it looks like tons of fun!
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This is the second morning in a row that I've hallucinated the sound of my front doorbell, leaped out of bed yelling, "Hello?" and found no one there. Perhaps I dreamed it? Pity I didn't manage to get the trash to the curb, since the trash truck has come and gone.

I'm meeting GK and BC at the funeral home at 11. We're going in separate cars since GK only rented a mid-sized sedan, and there's no way it'll fit her, me, BC AND Things 1 and 2. Not to mention, I've been on car trips with her kids before, and I'd rather not, IYKWIM. I'm sure she and I will have plenty of togetherness---she's staying on for a couple days after the funeral, and her hub is flying back with the Things.

The funeral is Saturday morning, I don't know if I've said. There's a sizable hole in my heart; I still feel somewhat numb, but at the same time, I get upset easily. Drop something, trip over something, computer frustates me---hell, ANYTHING that frustrates me---and my inadvertant expletives would make a Marine blush. I've been reining in my unhappiness for months as her condition deteriorated, and now it's breaking free like a glacier calving iceburgs. Not exactly the way I *want* to celebrate Kat's legacy, it just feels like my life don't work. Not that that's anything unusual, but that plus grief? Not pretty.

The Olympics are making me happy. I'm glad the Canadians broke their drought and got a gold medal, I'm happy for those sweet Chinese couple who won the pairs figure-skating gold, and yay, the Estonians took silver in women's cross-country skiing. (My Estonian friend jokes that there are only two seasons there: winter, and lousy skiing weather....)

Yesterday's SPN marathon made me happy. I agreed with most of the eps they showed, although "Criss Angel is a D-bag"...ehh, not so much. But "Tall Tales", "Mystery Spot" are both fabu, "Hollywood Babylon" and "Bad Day at Black Rock" are both hoots, and I'll always sit through "After School Special" for the sheer pleasure of cougaring Brock Kelly.

Once more into the breach....
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