I actually slept last night for a reasonable length of time. And didn't feel tired after work, even. Damn, that makes a change. Though drinking without eating dinner was a bad idea. On the other hand, my superpower is now widely known. And let's face it, knowing Teviot's door-staff, it has to be a fucking superpower.

I'm still on target for Spawn in the USA, which is both cool and slightly surprising. I must admit that some bits are probably going to get flagged for a major rewrite, as they feel like I'm describing an elephant while blindfolded. I have the basics, but not the underlying understanding yet. We shall see.

Went on a random walk through LJ, following friends trails through users in random communities. And fuck me, I'm scared. The number of teenaged girls who think that a "fandom" is the most important thing to have, and who don't seem to realise that there is more to life than posting random bollocks based on a television program, video game or over-hyped bunch of badly-written drivel.

And the fanfic! Oh, $DEITY the fanfic. I forced myself to read some, you know. In the name of masochismscientific curiosity. I had no idea about the characters, obviously, because the point of writing fanfic is apparently not to give a shit about introducing or building characters and locations; other writers have done that for you. But even taken with that caveat, viewing it purely as a writing excercise, it's uniformly shite. Really, really fucking awful. These freaks murder the language far too much, there's hideously gratuitous and (I believe) anatomically impossible sex scenes (almost always between two men otherwise described as being straight), and the grammar is frankly beyond a joke.

I will never understand this level of obsession. Never. It goes against just about everything I understand about writing. So rather than trying to, I'm sat here with a bottle of 15% French antifreeze, slowly killing my brain and looking for ideas. Fandoms as hive minds? No; it's already been done by reality. Artemis Hemmingway versus the Fangirl Squee Army of Horror! Yeah. That fucking works. There's something about having a pulp hero I can use as a rant mouthpiece that's so very nice.

On an entirely different note, I can still see leila_child's teeth marks in my arm. Though having a slightly numb hand may have advantages, if ever I work out what they are.