TITLE: The Care and Feeding of Smart Houses
AUTHOR: Beth CG Phoenix (phoenixchilde)
RATING: PG-13
FANDOM: Iron Man/Eureka, with a teensy dash of milliways_bar for flavor
WORD COUNT: 2,136
SUMMARY: It's all fun and games until the sentience shows up.
NOTES: Merry Christmas, neenie. I told you I'd finish it someday. ;)
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, don't sue, yadda yadda.

( I can't believe I'm having this conversation. )

TITLE: Trackers
AUTHOR: Beth CG Phoenix (phoenixchilde)
RATING: R
FANDOM: Heroes/Supernatural crossover
WORD COUNT: 19,583
SUMMARY: Mohinder's finally found his list. Too bad it's not documenting what he thinks it is -- and too bad he's not the only one who wants to get ahold of it.
SPOILERS: Heroes: Through "Homecoming," though it starts bending in strange and AU-ish ways a fair while before that. SPN: Through "Hunted."
NOTES: Written for the 2008 heroes_bigboom challenge. A huge thank you to silveraspen for betaing/hand-holding/fixing my laptop when it crashed three days before rough drafts were due (seriously, she is the Ultimate Kickass Super Beta), newredshoes for cheerleading, varadia for characterization checking, and the BigBoom mods for getting me to finish something that I thought I'd never see finished. Almost two years after the plot bunny bit me, this sucker's finally done. WOO! \o/
DISCLAIMER: In the red corner, we have Kripke, Kring, The CW, and NBC, who actually own all of these guys. In the blue corner, we have me, who doesn't. I know they could kick my ass without breaking a sweat; that's why I'm only doing this for fun and not making a dime off of it. Please don't sue.

CHAPTERS:
One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight - Nine - Ten - Eleven - Epilogue

ARTWORK:
Fanvid by pinkfinity/pear_vodka
(Note from Heidi: please let the vid load in its entirety, and please wait until after finishing the fic to watch!)

Good news, everyone! The world won't be ending after all!...for another two months, at least.

Anyway. Thirty-sixish hours until I post my BigBoom fic and fifty-sevenish until the Heroes premiere. I'm still not sure if I want to shell out thirty bucks for the S2 DVDs (people who already have, are the extras worth it? 'Cause that, and high quality vid source, are about all I'll be buying it for), but oh, jeez, with those promos that keep popping up on NBC, I am getting way more excited by S3 than I expected. Kring, please let my show -- the one I fell in love with in '06-'07 -- be back. Please.

Fic is DONE.

Fic is, excluding my NaNoWriMo entries (but including my undergrad thesis, holy shit), the longest thing I've written in seven years.

Fic is...still kind of crap and incoherent, so I am thanking every nameable god that I have until at least the 8th to run it through another round of edits. But primarily? Fic is DONE. HAH.

Completely unrelated, here, have a video of the awesome SO SAY WE ALL moment I was talking about earlier (even if it only captures a fraction of how incredible it was). If you squint really, really hard, you can kind of see me, way in the front and toward the left, jumping to my feet and screaming my lungs out on the last iteration. Oh, I am stupidly in love with EJO.

Tea: Capt. Hammer Corporate Tool Tea, purchased less because I love Dr. Horrible all that much and more because it sounded delicious. And oh, man, is it ever. The flavor's just as over-the-top as it claims, especially with sweetener, but mmmmmtasty.

Potential Home Improvement: Buying sheets upon sheets of shower board, applying it like so, and turning my place into one giant freeform brainstorming scrawlfest. Once...I have my own place. Er. Details, details.

Song: "Home" by Marc Broussard. Yeah, it's that weakness for awesome rhythm sections again. Who's surprised?

Pasttime: Recording the Olympics, cueing up "Yakety Sax", and fastforwarding through the less interesting events at top speed.

Anyway. This week's (probably overly-hopeful) plan is to finish my entire heroes_bigboom draft by Saturday -- right now, it's about six thousand words of fic and two thousand words of outline -- which'll leave me the next two weeks to edit it into shape. God, I hope I can pull this story off the way it ought to be pulled off. When I jump back into the fanfic pool, I jump hard, man; I don't think I've written anything new since my thousand-odd words for Yuletide '07, and certainly nothing this long since I was in high school.

The bad news: scanning utilities confirmed that my hard drive's suffered irreparable physical damage, which means that my files will definitely have to run in circles with their arms flailing above their tiny digital heads as they shriek, "ABANDON SHIP! ABANDON SHIP! WOMEN AND CHILDREN TO THE EXTERNAL DRIVE FIRST!" instead of, say, just sticking a wad of chewing gum over the leak and going about their business.

The good news: because I continue to have the Best Roommate Ever, I'll only have to pay for parts, not labor, when it comes time to buy a new hard drive. That should reduce the cost by about $150. *collapses in relief*

The awesome news: while it took some finagaling (Scrivener doesn't run on the PowerBook Aspen loaned me, so I had to root around in the guts of the project's .scriv file for a bit), I managed to salvage all of my BigBoom fic. \o/!!!! Seriously, I think the only part I lost was about two sentences' worth of notes, and now that I've had a chance to compile all the fragments and tally up my word count? It's entirely possible I'll be able to hit the draft requirements before Friday night. HUZZAH.

Yeah, okay, so a lot of the draft will be haphazard, sketchy scenes and outlines. I'M STILL GONNA MAKE IT, probably. :D :D :D!!

Dear corner wall of the apartment,

Your sacrifice of about twelve square feet will not go unsung.

Love,
the woman who's finally given up on outlining stuff in her notebook

------

Dear 3M Post-It Notes division,

Marry me.

Love,
the same woman as above, who thinks she (FINALLY) just untangled the 80% of her heroes_bigboom story that she needs to write by August 1st. HAH.

------

Dear July,

...go a little slower anyway, please?

Love,
well, you know. Aieee.

...oh, right. The heroes_bigboom draft.

That's, um, due in two weeks, isn't it?

Shit.

(P.S: Anybody know of any mirror sites for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog? The main site's getting so hammered that all I get is a timeout error whenever I load it. Angst, woe, &c.)

So I just got back from the movies a couple of hours ago.

( ...oh, you know you were thinking it, too. [Spoilers for the most recent BSG, if you haven't seen it yet.] )

You'd think seeing everybody else flail about their BigBang fics recently would've convinced me to stay away.

You'd be wrong. *facepalms*

The way I see it, it'll be a way to force myself into finishing that crossover that's been in my WIP folder for over a year and a half now.

- ...so it turns out that the smoke I was smelling five minutes ago wasn't somebody's cigarette residue, but the remnants of a fire from a couple of stores down. Uh. Okay. Thus concludes my dubious excitement of the day, I guess. I hope everybody's all right. *eyes front door worriedly*

- Pushing Daisies vid is cohering! Or beginning to cohere. That is, the clips I'm flinging at the timeline like so many clumps of Jell-O are starting to stick instead of just sliding off to land on the audio waveforms with a forlorn little plop. Next task: decromulating what's there before I return to round seventy billion of clip-flinging. Dammit, Heroes, you just had to spoil me with your pretty pretty cinematography and convenient canonical symbolism.

- On the flip side, I've officially missed the picfor1000 deadline. Augh. Well, technically, I still have another four and a half hours, but...my fic has been stalled at 230 words for the entire month, so I am far from hopeful. If I can't finish it by the end of March, I think I'm just going to stamp "INGREDIENTS: FAIL" on my forehead and throw it out, much as I don't want to. Bah.

- Tonight is the night I figure out exactly when and how I'm implementing Operation Get the Fuck Out of Dodge. I'm starting to think that the only way I'll successfully complete the move is if I take no more than (ulp) one box of books and DVDs with me. Of course, I can always get my folks to ship the rest once I'm there, but. One box, total. The pain. D:

- There is an absolutely adorable baby at the next table over who keeps glancing my way and beaming. He/she is made even more adorable by the fact that, unlike ninety-five percent of the children who come through here, he/she is not crying or shrieking at the top of his/her lungs. My eardrums thank you, tiny child. My startle reflex thanks you. I thank you.

- GIP. All of you SPN folks have already seen the_dean_show, right? Right. Just checking. I am so unbelievably late to the party on that one and yet I cannot bring myself to care. HEE. SO CUTE.

I post this meme with the caveat that, like every other time I've done it, the odds of me finishing all of the requests are, er, kinda slim. It's not because I hate you or your prompts, I swear! It's just because, alas, I have the attention span of a goldfish.

But I promise I will do my best, and besides, they say the best cure for epic writer's block is to stride right up to it and punch it in the motherfuckin' face. So!

Give me two characters and a prompt, and I'll drabble about them.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I rang in the new year with friends (and friends-of-friends) instead of family. It was just the kind of thing I'd been needing after a long, dreary December: something big, something fun, and something emphatically not here. I even spent most of the night talking to a guy I'd never met before -- ridiculously awkwardly so, and he was the one who initiated all of our conversations, but still: talking! To a complete stranger and a male one to boot! Baby steps, progress, and good omens for this introvert's year-to-be, my friends.

Or so I'll hope.

And then my first purchase of 2008 was a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit meal from the McDonald's drive through. This bodes so well for my resolution to eat better in the coming year. *sardonic fistpump!*

Anyway! Happy New Year, everyone. :) Now that we're ripping the masks off of the yuletide authors, pointing dramatically, and going, "HAH! I KNEW IT!", I can say that I wrote Triplicate (Assassins, PG, 1167 words) for knitmeapony. Fessing up to this in light of what happened on the 27th is...weird, to say the least. In spite of all my flailing as the deadline drew nearer, I did have a lot of fun writing it -- the prompt delighted me, so very much, because it gave me a chance to explore the women in more depth and let them have the kind of say that they weren't given in canon -- but the fact remains: it's fanfic for a musical about why people kill political figureheads, and it hasn't even been a week since Benazir Bhutto died. So.*helpless shrug* I guess you can take that as you will. Just -- please know that I'm sorry if it causes any kind of offense, and I dearly wish my timing did not completely and totally suck with regard to the subject matter.

(In less cringeworthy timing aspects, though, fessing up to this the day after Sara Jane Moore's release from prison makes me go, "Hee," the tiniest bit.)

On a brighter note: I didn't know a lot about Emma Goldman before I started writing, and while I don't agree with some of her more radical philosophies, Goddamn was she a neat lady. Getting arrested for distributing information about birth control? How awesome is that?

Best wishes for the coming year to all of you, and I hope your first day of it is going well, whatever you may be doing out there. *hugs*

So adiva_calandia made a post about last Monday's Heroes which included the line, If Monica's power is making roses out of tomatoes, that's pretty damn lame.

I replied with, ...you know, now I kind of want to do a Heroesfic challenge involving lame superpowers. Because you KNOW for every person out there who can read minds or teleport, there's somebody who can, like, psychically remove all the seeds from a piece of fruit or something. It'd be awesome.

To which I received immediate encouragement from certain other individuals, and, well.

thelesserlist.

:D?

The one negative thing I can say about getting involved in vidding is that it's made me waffle a lot more on changing my online alias, as small a change as it would be. Changing it on fics is one thing; open up the HTML, make a quick edit, and boom, you're done. Changing it on vids means at least an hour of re-encoding and exporting, and the prospect of doing that is thoroughly blech.

But...screw it. I've been going by Phoenix to a huge subset of online people for almost three years now, and it's been feeling weirder and weirder not to incorporate that into a pen/vidding name somehow. So: Beth/CG no more. Beth CG Phoenix it officially is.

Quickly, Batman! To the HTML editor and Final Cut Express! *strikes heroic pose, leaps into action*

This is not in any way the product of stir-craziness. Shh.

My biggest accomplishment of yesterday was successfully editing an eight-minute song down to less than half that. That should give you some idea of how my life post-grad school is still going; I may even be bored enough to dig in and spend my days job-searching full time next week. [/deadpan]

(Even if sound editing is strangely engrossing, and that "HAH!" moment of hitting a transition so smoothly that you can barely tell there was supposed to be another forty-five seconds of music in there is a pretty cool feeling.)

I'm not sure that it's boredom, precisely, though. I've been caught in this weird place lately where I have so many creative things I want to be doing, but haven't yet gotten to the point where I have the full energy and enthusiasm to do them. I mean, I'm still routinely sleeping ten hours a night, now that all the stress that was keeping me upright this summer has gone ping! like a spring unwinding, and sometimes I even sneak in another hour-long nap on top of that. What the hell, body. *makes face* I don't think it helps that there are no cafés around here -- literally, none -- that don't involve at least a twenty-minute drive to reach, either. Pittsburgh spoiled me so hard; I didn't realize until now how much I'd been taking that "need a change in location to get your brain working again? Easy! Throw your laptop in a bag and walk ten minutes!" existence for granted.

Which means I should probably try to kickstart things in other ways, maybe remind myself that no, really, it's okay to do silly fannish things again. So: ficlets, anyone? Leave a prompt and I'll write you something. And maybe I'll even be able to finish all of them this time, too! Er.

Latest crackpot fannish idea that probably ain't gonna happen until August, at least: a Heroes ficlet cycle, "Five Years Gone"-centric, loosely based on NIN's Year Zero. Because nothing says fun like two great futuristic dystopian tastes mashed together! And man, if this album isn't the soundtrack for that episode, I don't know what is.

This is, of course, after I finish the Fic That Would Not Die (And Is Currently Stalled Out Thanks To School, Augh), and the Sylar vid, and all of the other creative fannish stuff that keeps piling up lately. I knew full well it was coming, but I still kind of want to go around slapping up posters on the neighborhood phone poles: "LOST: Small, fluffy, adorable intangible concept. Answers to the name 'Free Time.' If found, please call Beth at 1-800-AGH-MLIS."

Also:



Because if we can mobilize as fast and as thoroughly as we did for Strikethrough, we should be able to do it for the really big causes, too.

Oh, cripes, the night to discover that the fanfic I'm writing is rapidly expanding out of control is not the night when I have to be in bed by one AM at the very absolute latest. Nor the night when I still have about eighty pages of reading left to do for ethics class tomorrow. And I bet you ten bucks that by the time I've finished writing it, three other people'll have written fic utilizing the exact same idea, if they haven't done so already. The resonance walloped me so hard that I'm finding it hard to believe that it didn't hit somebody else just as hard, too.

In the meantime, though, I rescind all compliments to WriteRoom and direct them to Scrivener, because while the latter may not be free, it's fucking awesome -- and along with Delicious Library, the first piece of software over $30 that I've given serious consideration to buying since I switched to OS X. Unlike Delicious Library, though, I can see myself using Scrivener on a near-daily basis, so I may actually give in and plunk down the cash. Neil Gaiman's blog comes through again!

(...also, having only a passing connection to the rest of this post, the guy at the table across from me has Sylar eyebrows. I keep trying not to stare. It's creeping me out.)

TITLE: Five Moments to Define a Dream of Flying
AUTHOR: Beth CG Phoenix (phoenixchilde)
RATING: PG
FANDOM: Heroes
SUMMARY: We are each a product of our own experiences. Peter's no different.
SPOILERS: "Genesis."
ARCHIVE: Ask first, s'il vous plait.
NOTES: Written for batyatoon as an extremely belated Hanukkah gift. Many thanks to silveraspen and bookelfe for betaing!
DISCLAIMER: Tim Kring and NBC own 'em all. I'm just mucking around in their sandbox for fun, not profit.

( Peter Petrelli throws himself off the top of the monkey bars on his second day of kindergarten. [703 words] )

I also find that agonistes can be blamed for many things in life. Especially when I'm bored.

( Like this. :D? )