Interfering With the Natural Order Since [Redacted]

Have acquired paid hours for my internship. Just have to restrain myself from blowing it all on lunches.

In my spare time, still drifting in a vortex of Dragon Age. Somehow, while I still haven't gotten back to work on Remembered Realms, I've taken the time to decide that if the games were to meander through a dimensional rift Veldrin would be a raging Anders fanboy.

A bunch of pre-chapter quotes I've devised for Remembered Realms; you may notice a lot of them have the same subject. Might as well put them out here, since I doubt I can use them all in any case.

( Sadly, we lack your impressive martial history. In keeping with our faith, we have resorted to stealing some. )

My initial feverish burst of keyboard-pounding for Remembered Realms has died down, but I'm still chugging merrily along for the nonce. Trying to resist the temptation to shoehorn in all my homebrewed lore. There are flavor quotes I'm dying to reach a relevant chapter for.

Veldrin and Tarlyn are getting a lot chummier than I initially expected. Mayae's scheduled to join the melee pretty soon, Nathshalee not long after, so if I can choreograph properly things will get interesting (And Vhaeraun will accuse Eilistraee of throwing him off the Bifrost).

A combination of my ficverses (published and not), canon, fanon, and headcanon from various fandoms. Not always entirely accurate.

X: I am a smoking hot sex literal god. I am crafty and sneaky but also have charisma and style. I make some pretty good points that the Good Guys overlook but I am also kind of a Chaotic Evil douchebag. Daddy always loved my sibling of unspecified gender and birth order more. Whatever the gender and birth order, I think they're a stupid meathead. You may grovel now.
Y: I'm not stupid, but my preferred method of conflict resolution is biting people in the face and I am very good at that. I am broody and lonely because hardly anyone comes near me for reasons of varying justifiability. I used to go around doing my own thing and not really hurting anyone but now due to the actions of either Our Alleged Heroes or Our Other Villains I am a raging homicidal maniac.
X: I can't believe that's my son.
Y: I can't believe that's my father.

A: Hi! I am the Chosen One, Our Hero, the Future King, and I believe in me! I am generally goodhearted and mean for the best. I look great in a portrait and do an awesome royal wave and I have a wonderfully engaging personality, so if the peasants ever storm the palace gates it won't be because of that. Watch me blithely traipse off into another adventure!
B: (facepalm) Excuse me, I'm going to trail in his wake and do the practical if underhanded thing when he's not looking and stop him from charging off into a poorly-concealed pit of spikes because I actually kind of like him and want him to do his best with what he has. Too bad everyone assumes I'm going to grow up to be the Evil Chancellor.

N: I am a wide-eyed fresh-faced newbie in way over my head.
Z: I am savvy and streetwise.
N and Z: One of us is taken prisoner and expecting unspeakable torture.
N and Z: Now let us debate.

Fell into a yawning maw of Norse mythology. As a consequence, brushed off an old premise I first dreamed up in middle school or thereabouts that might conceivably turn into something publishable (though then again someone's selling their blatant Thor* fanfic on Kindle, so maybe I'm setting the bar high). Revisiting the concept of Woobie Fenris, who is so easy to woobify if you turn it around a bit that it's not even funny. And then there's somewhat-less Woobie Tyr, especially after reading Sorensen's The Downfall of the Gods in which he comes upon baby Fenris and goes SQUEE.

*Have not actually watched Thor yet. Partly because I fear I will then become uncomfortably conscious of how out-of-character the id-punching fics I've come across actually are.

I've partly emerged from an unexpected Solitaire binge (it's so deceptively simple and conducive to one-more-round-itis) and started revising the first three chapters of my Werewolf historical, which have been left to stew for a bit. I'm even contemplating looking for a beta for the first time in years (I've told myself, whenever I read a fanficrant or whatever chiding those who haven't Got A Beta, that even if I found one I'm such a flaky fandom butterfly the betas would probably be happy not to deal with me). There's potential race/culture/sexuality/historyfail to fret about, and a major misunderstanding in these first chapters is a potential case of Poor Communication Kills - screw it up and I could have my lost cub be ridiculously paranoid about the body language he misinterprets (and/or interpret it with ridiculous precision), and/or his opposite number going right through insensitivity into sadism.

If you happen to read this and know someone who'd be game (or if you are game)...

At least since the Old World of Darkness is already retired I probably won't have the same Jossing problem I did for a Forgotten Realms would-be epic I tried ages ago (I merrily pounded keyboard until, before I'd gotten round to posting any of it, a new tie-in novel came out which killed off my main character. Fun times). Unless, of course, I find some bombshell in one of the many sourcebooks I haven't read.

Now that half my finals stuff is done, I'm taking a breather to announce that "poke the Get of Fenris" is almost as fun as "poke the Silver Fang." There's the kid who gets into Asatru at first mainly to shock his Lutheran parents, who then finds out both are wrong in different ways (because, after all, the mythology of the Get of Fenris is respun on the premise that it's good for Fenris to munch on Odin). Then there's one who had his First Change in a "tough love" hellhole and tore apart the staff, is correspondingly leery of the "character-building" dealt out by the rest of the tribe, and has an ancestor who was traumatized by a fae lord. There's the one chock full of Pure Breed, the very image of vaunted heroes, who is also a sensitive, soft-hearted artiste that even the Children of Gaia look at a little funny and who everyone assumes is a stoner.

(He goes in the proto-pack with the Silver Fang socialist and the Silent Strider who just wants to stay home and bake pies and the earnest slow-on-uptake Shadow Lord and the shy, sickly Fianna and the Red Talon enamored with the wonders of Ape-Things. To be absolutely technical none of them have actually passed muster for those tribes yet, but they all have absolutely whopping Pure Breed which makes the elders reluctant to shunt them off to the Children of Gaia or the Bone Gnawers until they're sure they can't get the square pegs into the round holes. Not to mention the socialist finds the universal homelessness of the Bone Gnawers highly suspicious. Who knows, they might actually succeed. Haven't plotted that far)

That's not even counting the theory I came across the other day that if Set the antediluvian vampire = Loki when he's not busy being Egyptian, then logically Set the antediluvian vampire = Fenris's daddy. Oh, the potential Star Wars reenactments! ( Allow me to elucidate )

I am spending far too much time and having far too much fun sketching out a liberally crossovered cast of thousands which I have to doubt I'll ever use a tenth of, ranging from the roaming band of vampire Kinfolk who thus far have managed to avoid evisceration to the hapless changelings caught up in a werewolf-vampire territory struggle.

ETA: Inexplicable embedding now deleted.

Because I was feeling nostalgic (see the little icon?) and just can't accept death. That garden ornament about dragging your loved one back from heaven that Elaine Cunningham thought was so creepy? I'd snap it up.

More than a year ago, while working on my wannabe Realms magnum opus/divine soap opera, I did character sketches of a dozen various folk I intended to use. That fizzled, and now I busy myself reusing their names in the Remembered Realms (Shardax the snarky Vhaeraunite spy is now Shardax the bereaved boyfriend of an Elaith Craulnober wannabe) and working them into the history and the flavor quotes.

Chaszyrd Thenduk is the latter case, and right now he gets a line at the start of Tarlyn's next chapter. Have his introduction from my old opus, tweaked slightly, in which the Selvetargtlin of Eryndlyn brainstorm new sacrificial rituals in the aftermath of Selvetarm telling Lolth to stuff it.

( Selvetarm smiles on a death in battle against overwhelming odds, not a death in battle against a chit of a faerie priest waving a knife. )

Now in Remembered Realms his god's been offed, as per the book that Jossed my late lamented opus, but Chaszyrd lives on under the radar another couple hundred years, gets to be city "Weapons Master" after a number of bloody riots once Lolth's apparently followed suit, and goes on to have to an unreasonably long life, during which he produces a bunch of quotables.

Tsabrak in Remembered Realms timeline, I think, probably didn't live to see 1376.

The latest chapter's coming along slowly, but when I do finish it (perhaps sometime after I finish my finals) there'll be a lot going on in there. To prove I haven't been doing nothing in my free time but complaining on LJ and binging on clearanced Valentine's chocolate, here's a snippet from the current draft. Warning for language.

( Some context, for the passerby )

( Now books call them the Dark Seldarine, aillesel Seldarie, they'd tear it all to pieces if they could. )