Writing From the Inside

So I went to Cafe Sol in Boulder, expecting better than what I got. I’m not saying the coffee wasn’t good because it was, though the poppy seed cake had a hair in it. The tables were pushed up at the edges of the room, it was on the chilly side, and the conversations were BOR-ing. There were two women to the left of me. One of them was getting signed up for Share A Car or something, where you buy a part of a car, or lease it or something, kind of like renting on a permanent basis. Oh man. The rules to doing this went on forever.

The two women on the right of me bitched on and on about how the coffee shop overcharged them. Turned out there was a ghostly charge for some juice, and the coffee shop happily gave them their money back. Yes, cash instead of putting the charge back on their card, and oh, how they moaned about that!

I couldn’t write a thing. It was not a good atmosphere. The Cafe Sol was a bust, sadly.

Keep Going and The Truth About Lies by dodger_winslow.

Gen.

Dodger_winslow and I do not agree. I’ve never talked with her about it, I’m sure she doesn’t even know I exist. She wrote Keep Going shortly after A Very Supernatural Christmas aired, and wouldn’t you know it, she thinks that John was robbed because fans thought that he didn’t come home because he was too busy hunting or that he forgot or some other unfatherly thing. I agree with them and not with her. It’s the way John comes across, and you know Dean, in that ep, he’s not very surprised that The Dad is not there and neither is Sammy. But Dodger, she disagrees.

She wrote Keep Going to describe the scenario where The Dad gets into a car accident and can’t make it home because he simply can’t. Dodger wrote it to refute all those John haters, which, based on my review and my own privately held convictions, put me in that camp. Hate John? ME? Perish the thought. I adore him. He’s a great character. He is bursting with testosterone, and is boys adore him too. Sure, he’s not a great father, but I never gave much thought beyond looking at that MOUTH of his and imagining things that I probably shouldn’t.

Enter Dodger Winslow and her high-flying theories about fatherhood and brothers and…stuff. With these two stories, she hits the nail on the head that is uncomfortable for me. John is making bad decisions, for sure, but Dodger manages to find the justification behind them that makes sense to me. It makes me mad what the hell he’s up to, but in his mind, he loves his boys and is doing his best, he really is. He doesn’t understand Sammy at ALL, and understands Dean like the back of his hand and can you imagine how hard that must be not to love one son more than the other.

Dodger can just STOP with the Christmas stories aleady because I hate Christmas and bawled my eyes out reading this one.

Family Ties by concernedilly.

Slash.

Sex, sex, and more sex. I can’t keep up. This story has the usual, the hotness, the touching, the kissing, all of that. It’s a story where Dean wants to experiment with light bondage, and I don’t believe for a minute he would indulge in that. Too many chances for it to go wrong, and I think he’s got enough excitement in his life without that. When he wants to practice with Sam, it doesn’t go very well. When Sam decides to figure it out and then give Dean what he wants, it goes better. Yeah, okay. Hot and stuff. What got me was this line:

“It takes Sam three days and four long blowjobs to forgive Dean for having to put his shirts back on to cover his still-persistent erection, go out into the night and drive thirty miles to an all-night store to get paperclips. That’s the real problem with sleeping with your brother, he thinks: Sam knows all the damage Dean’s ever taken on his arms and shoulders, spent the nights up listening to Dean grit his teeth against the pain, so he couldn’t just leave him tied with his arms up all night like he so richly deserved.”

I liked the realism of the fact that Sam remembers, knows, how many times Dean has been tied up and bashed around and that he can’t really take much more of the same. But if Dean wants to be tied up, Sam will give it to him. His way. Good stuff.  

And So Awakens Devils by concernedlily.

Slash

I hate AU, post-apolcolyptic stories. I hate stories where Sam is the Antichrist. I hate stories where Bobby is possesed by a demon. Ug. Ug. Ug. Read this story anyway. It’s fantastic.

So yesterday, I blitzed on the job hunting, and went downtown Boulder to check out a place I’d applied for. Pretty cool building, so I’d be happy with that job. Then I wandered down the street to a local coffee shop there. Amante’s Cafe or something. It was snowing, so it was a very artistic walk. The coffee shop was a bustling little bistro with English soccer on the TV and a loud Welsh announcer, so not the ideal place to “linger and chat” as the advert advised. So I couldn’t really write write, although the two gents sitting next to me were having a very INTERESTING conversation about power games and mind control (he had a freakish boss, apparently) and how he’d just lost his job that day, and how he was kind of glad to be out of that abusive relationship, where it had gotten to the point where every time he met or saw his boss his whole body would tighten up and he would start shaking. 

I’m taking notes like mad, right? It’s good stuff, to hear it come out of someone’s mouth like this. Might be good if I needed notes on a story about mind games. Then his friend asked him, why didn’t you leave earlier than this? Why didn’t you speak up? So the guy goes, get this, “I’ve always been rather negative about those stories where I hear of abused women, wives, you know, who are in a relationship where the guy beats them, her husband, and I’m like, leave, woman, what’s your problem? Just leave. Until now. Now I understand why they can’t leave, they can’t speak up. They blame themselves. They’re ashamed. Like I blamed myself. I was like, you start blaming yourself. How do I fix this? You start having a certain kind of response. His mere presence set me off.  I never understood it. As for talking about it? Forget it. I felt…stupid for being that scared. Now I know.”

Can you imagine having that kind of revelation? 

PS The coffee was great and so was the chocolate croissant

We Are All Meant For Chains by flipmontgirl

Slash.

This is the story of Dean and Sam coming together and then going apart and them coming together again. It’s an odd story in that it seems to be told in snapshots of images, things Sam remembers, things he’d rather forget. Arguments he and Dean had, memories they shared. Along the way (Sam’s running from Dean) Sam picks up a young 16-year old pregnant girl. Sam never could resist a little damp street urchin, but it gets more interesting and sophisticated than you’d normally get from a fluffy bunny-sounding setup like that.

Nothing fluffy or bunny-ish about this story. Sam and Dean do get together in the end, of course, otherwise, why bother? I think the pregnant girl gets dropped off someplace safe, that’s the idea I got. But along the way? Well, I couldn’t stop thinking about this one. Be ready for edgy, be ready for graphic, but in a good way. Not gratuitious.

Once, when I went into rent Monster’s Ball with the intent of watching what everyone was talking about. Halle Berry’s performance had created buzz, so off to the local video rental I went. (Maybe it was DVD by that time, I don’t know.) The young man who checked out this rental was, oh, say 22. Let’s just say. I asked him if he’d seen it. He said, “Yes,” with some disgust, and I asked him if there was something wrong. He said, “There’s sex in this movie.” I looked at him as they say, askance, because, you know, to a 22-year old MALE that would be a good thing. I wondered what I was getting into if he was disgusted by this movie. Well, if you’ve seen the movie, there’s sex, yes, and not the nice kind. Not anything kinky, ye ken, but the sex is so realistic, it’s not like watching porn at all. It’s not pretty to the watcher, however much the participants are enjoying it. Maybe he objected sex being done for money, I don’t know. I’ve puzzled about that young man from that day to this, and I can only surmise that he was put off by the realism. Monster’s Ball was riviting, and I’ve got its images still in my brain.

So. Reading this story is rather like watching Monster’s Ball. Realism, tricky lighting, and the sex is not pretty. But man. The camera work….I’ve got one quote but don’t read it if you don’t want the effect spoiled.

Here:

“It was no trouble, asking, when he knew the answer, when he felt it: sticky warm under his hands, spit-wet under his mouth, thundering just under the skin, ferocious heartbeat against his own, hot and hard against his stomach. The answer was yes.

Hands fumbling at Dean’s belt, the buttons of his jeans. Unknown territory and the best-known all in one.

“Sammy stop. Please. We gotta stop.” The request was half-hearted at best.

No match for the smell, musk-rich, a hint of piss, dirty with a couple of days spent in the same briefs. No match for the taste, sharp, stinging, a thousand pinpricks on his tongue. No match for the way Dean sounded: rattlesnake and sizzle, dangerous and desperate with this thing they were becoming.

He was the one who prayed this time, foolishly determined. He prayed, “Say yes. If you can’t say no, at least say yes.” He knew it and yet he had to hear it.

“Yeah.” Dean arched, curving impossibly off the bed, curving with lust and guilt. Beautiful demise. “Fuck. Fuck, yeah.”

It was so easy in the end.

Destroying them.”

The part that got to me, really got to me was the realism of the underwear. I mean…gross, right? But you ever wanted someone so bad, you didn’t care? I have. Man, this girl has it.
 

So I tried a little experiement. I call it the Coffee Shop experiment. In it, I go to a coffee shop to write. It’s gotta be a local one, not a chain, and it should have good solid tables for all the words I’m going to be creating on it. I acutually did this yesterday, but I’m posting the word count today, just to keep track. I went to a place I think is called Ziggi’s but don’t quote me on that one. I did not bring my laptop, even though they have wifi, instead I brought a fountain pen and a stack of paper. Romantic, right? The ink didn’t get everywhere like it sometimes does, but my hand sure ached. I’m more used to writing on the computer these days.

So I didn’t write a lot, only 821 words, none of them blistering, but I did write. Since I did job hunting stuff this morning, and blitzed on that, tomorrow I’ll go to the coffee shop again and try it out. Again. This time I’ll bring my character list, because, crap, I forgot their names. These are secondary characters and I think they are pissed at me for not really knowing who they are because they are all blending together in one pasty faced lump.

You can read my review of the Supernatural episode “Scarecrow” at pinkraygun.com. Thank you!

Excerpt:

“It’s interesting to think that of the Winchester trio, Sam is considered the black sheep. Winchester men kill what they think needs killing, they destroy what needs to be destroyed, they scam credit card companies out of thousands of dollars, forge documents, live off the grid hand to mouth, and, worst of all, they don’t pay taxes! (At least I don’t think they do.) Yet Sam, who wants to go to college and live the American dream, is essentially the odd man out, or as Dean once put it, is like “The blonde chick on the Munsters.” Poor Sam. Yet at the same time, I get the feeling that Dean thinks that his status as good son is precarious at best and that one slip will make The Dad give him the old heave ho. Which son would you rather be?”

This ep seems to be about conversations, so here’s two lovely pics of the boys talking. With each other. (Click on the links to display beautiful, full-size pics. Click on thumbnails for smaller but still beautiful pics.)

Dean on the phone with Sam

Sam on the phone with Dean

Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same by walkawayslowly

Slash.

This is a post-Dean’s-Deal story, where you don’t know how they got Dean out of the Deal, you just know they did. Besides, the aftermath is the fun part. Read this story slowly, because you won’t get a first chance to read something so sweet and honest.

Everyone drives away from the place where the deal was broken, but Sam and Dean take a little time to their own, and have a quick shimmy shimmy in the Impala. Which is as it should be. Then, the shimmy shimmy happens whenever there’s a tight spot they get each other out of or out of danger…and then the shimmy happens when it wants to. From Sam’s POV, the freakout is consistent and fun, but he can’t take his mind off Dean, and it’s no wonder. The slash is hot without being porny, and I had a few good GUH moments to boot, which is hard to do, when you’ve read as many of these as I have. Remember, go slowly.

Some good quotes:

“He doesn’t notice they’re slowing down at first, not till Jo’s truck gets swallowed by a cloud of dust, fading off into the distance and then they’re not moving at all. Dean shifts into park with his left hand and drops his head to the wheel, harsh breath like it’s all just catching up to him now and he pulls their hands towards him, up to his chest.”

“It doesn’t take long, poltergeists are (mostly) old hat and this one has nothing on the malevolent force of the one in Lawrence. Still, it manages to get something, Sam can’t feel what, wrapped around his neck before the end and he’s wondering why every supernatural thing out there is obsessed with choking him, vision getting black around the edges and then it’s all gone. Poltergeist handled, apparently, the last little bag shoved into the hole Dean knocked into the wall, and Dean’s unraveling whatever the hell it is then he’s moving down Sam’s chest, fingers scrabbling at his belt and his pants and Dean swallows him down and Sam arches up into it, into Dean, little whimpers escaping among the coughs as he tries to catch his breath again. He doesn’t know, God he doesn’t know what this is about, what it means, but it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care.” (GUH, right?)

“Only now, now that Sam knows the feel of Dean’s mouth on his, the harsh rasp of his cheek scraping down Sam’s neck, now he wants to touch Dean, his arm, the small of his back, to throw Dean down on the table and blow him right there, anything to stake a claim, to plant a flag on Dean’s ass that says “mine” in huge, sparkly letters. He wants it so badly he curls his hands into fists, stuffs them under his thighs.”

“Typical night, Sam thinks, typical hook up and as much as he wants to protest it won’t make any difference. They’re close enough he can walk back to the motel and he shoves the lap top back in his bag, squares up at the bar and heads for the door. He’s only just left the dim circle of light underneath the one lamp post outside when Dean catches up with him, hooks his arm around Sam’s neck. “Haven’t you learned anything?” Dean says, pulling Sam towards the Impala. “Be afraid of the dark, Sammy, don’t go wandering around by yourself in it.”” (I loved this last line. It would look good on a tshirt.) 
  

So today, I did what I said I was going to do. I worked on my novel. I wrote a blisteringly 731 words, in about an hour. I just connected one scene to the next is all, but at least it was a STEP. In the right direction. I’m going for a walk now, feeling very proud of myself.

The novel has nothing to do with fandom, and is a historical drama set in Victorian London. I’ve always been obsessed with that era, with the repression that sat right underneath the holier-than-the-poor-unwashed folk, and the filth and the general hubbub. You go to London today, and you see smatterings of it, the class separation which seems to be still going on strong. So the story is about that a bit, and the filth, and the shoes. I’m obsessed with Victorian footwear, go figure.

Anyway, 731 words. Horray for me! (To date, the story already has 100,000 words, so I’m looking to double that for the rough draft.)