Title: Only the Cause and End of Movement
Fandom: Harry Potter
Format & Word Count: Fic, 2,000 words
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Remus/Tonks, with appearances by Ted and Andromeda Tonks
Description: Angst with a side order of romantic fluff.
Warnings: Various Deathly Hallows spoilers regarding Remus and Tonks' relationship. Also, did I mention angst?
Summary: Remus comes home for the last time.

(love is itself unmoving, only the cause and end of movement)

YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO READ. AND COMMENT. For some reason I've only gotten a small handful of comments on this even though I've crossposted it all over the place, which I find really weird--is the Harry Potter fandom not quite as active anymore, or something? Because I got more responses to my Doctor Who and DW/HP crossover fics, and I'd have thought crossovers would have a more narrow audience...but, you know. Whatever.

Anyway yeah, all comments are ♥ -- I always love to hear what does and doesn't work about my writing, since that kind of feedback can really help me improve and...things.

shgkjhsg it is too early to be awake the werewolves haven't even changed back yet

Right. Taking second-time SATs in approximately an hour, have sharpened armada of pencils (I LOATHE PENCILS: but it cannot be helped); made French bread covered in sesame seeds yesterday so that I have something inspiring to nom during the snack breaks (yes, we have those) along with sharp cheddar and beef stick; brushed up my Buffy and T.S. Eliot references... in case I can use them in my essay...; totally ignoring my own advice and have donned my favourite long skirt as all trousers are in the hamper and this is much comfortabler; DON'T PANIC.

For some reason the December SATs are happening at the high school, like, five blocks from my house. Which is convenient, but weird -- that wasn't even an option last time. ...ack help does this mean someone might recognise me there and try to talk to me? (And then they will go away thinking, "Good heavens, that Jolene person certainly is rude, or possibly not all there; all she could say in response to me was 'mhhhghhh blarghle shhhhffffs ghhhhh'.")

...Also, prayer would not be unwelcome. (MUST BEAT MATH SCORE FROM LAST TIME. Have calculator this time, too.)

I have been thinking about clothes a great deal lately. Not merely because I am a Girl and rather fond of the stuff -- I had a brief struggle with being a Geek Girl and yet being so terribly fond of clothing (though not Fashion as such, as the fashion industry frightens me rather a lot, as does spending inordinate amounts of money on the stuff) -- and then I said "fie upon that!" and continued on my merry way. No, I have been thinking about clothing in a philosophical manner.

You see, I am the sort of girl who, as you may have guessed from photographic evidence, has a taste for the eccentric, and also for wildly disparate styles, which I have rarely felt badly about. I will wear my black skinny jeans and Threadless t-shirts one day and my vintage Montgomery Ward dress another and on yet another day have black lacy skirts and fishnet stockings and military vests. However, when I come across People Like Me in fiction, this is usually presented as... a personality defect?

Yes. The girl who wears long dresses to the supermarket or harbours a fancy for plum-coloured eyeshadow is usually compensating for something, such as shyness and an uncertain sense of self; the girl who can be romantically gothic one day and quirkily businesslike the next simply needs to settle down and Find Herself, and then she will spend the rest of her life happily in comfortable trousers. When I dress the way I do, it is clearly a cry for attention, quoth the stories, and as a sign of confidence in myself, I will stop wearing outlandish things to the store. There is also an underlying sense of how this girl is acting out of her insecurity and insisting upon Not Being Like Everyone Else, but when she finds her confidence, she won't need that front anymore. Clothing that is out of the ordinary is nothing but a Costume.

Now, there are parts of this which hold true: especially when I first began to be interested in doing unusual things with my clothing, I was extremely awkward and insecure and lonely, and I definitely had conversations with myself about how I didn't want to wear the same things that everyone else was. I wanted to dress like me. And perhaps some of it began as a plea for attention -- I have found myself ignored and overlooked seemingly without explanation for a lot of my life, and it is definitely harder to overlook me when I am wearing turquoise stockings -- but it grew into sheer, simple fun. I love what clothing can do for you, how putting on different sorts of things can give you different kinds of feelings, cause you to think about yourself in different ways. I like wearing a pretty dress and heels to an occasion to give myself confidence (i.e., why I inadvertently wore a bright, beaded dress, jewellery, striped stockings, and high-heeled granny boots to the SATs last spring, because bright happy colours make me feel more awake and confident, and heels make a clicking sound which is also very confident-sounding... and then everyone else was wearing old jeans and sweatshirts -- really, I do not exaggerate! -- and had not brushed their hair, and I felt that I looked rather as though I were trying to show off, eep).

I enjoy the freedom that comes with not confining myself to any particular clothing subculture, because I don't really conform to any specific ideological subcultures, and so there are a lot of different facets of myself, and it's tremendously fun to bring different ones out. The eyelinered, lace-punk me is just as much me as is the Peter Pan-collared garden-party me, the Converses and quirky t-shirt me, the urbanly eccentric me, or the freak-folk hippie-of-the-moors me. And while elaborate clothing-play is not something that appeals to everyone (nor do I think it ought to!), I think that everyone has multiple, seemingly contradictory facets of their personality which, instead of attempting to conform to one thing, they should celebrate and rejoice in. Yes, I'm a sensible romantic! I'm a wary idealist! I'm a free-spirit and an intellectual! It's okay!

And who says that putting on a costume is necessarily hiding oneself, anyway? Even a Halloween costume, I would submit, is less about hiding one's true self than bringing it out, revelling in a side of oneself that one doesn't often let out. Dressing up as a princess or a ninja or an evil Alice in Wonderland or a lobster says something about who you are. And so when one dresses in a theatrical manner, or in a way that one even admits is a sort of costume, that does not necessarily mean that they are hiding themselves in an unhealthy manner: merely, that they are playing with their own perceptions and imagination. I like to pretend that I am different parts of myself! There are certain things that I can put on, particularly when paired with a certain pleasantly battered sea-green sweater and some boots, in which I can happily imagine that I am the protagonist of a 1960s or '70s YA fantasy novel of the Diana Wynne Jones or Susan Cooper variety. I had a phase for long skirts, things that lace-up, and flowing sleeves during my initial Tolkien romance, which never quite went away. Last month I dressed up specifically for NaNoWriMo -- not every day, but not infrequently, either -- donning things that related to my story and its universe, which usually meant things reminiscent of Edwardian fashion or vampires. (It did help me get into the right mental space for writing, too. ^-^)

I also realise that there are certain times when it is appropriate to, you know, dress a little more like the people around you, so that you don't stand out in the wrong ways, make yourself seem unapproachable, or, um, actually breach etiquette (such as when you have A Job) -- so I can wear jeans and sneakers or flats and a nice shirt that still feel like me without alienating the people around me. I've gotten better at this, too, as my confidence in myself has improved: because, yes, one can dress outlandishly out of a sense of pride or insecurity, or to buffer interaction, and perhaps partly because one doesn't quite know how to make oneself comfortable to other people without losing that sense of unique self-ness, which does come with more confidence. (I still vacillate on this one a lot. "La la la, I shall wear these most outlandish things because they make me happy, and this situation is sure to be trying! ...Oh, wait, now I look as though I have wilfully separated myself from everyone else in the room, which is awkward.")

In conclusion, some odd things I have learnt about Dressing Eccentrically: fewer people will stare at you than you think, or maybe this has to do with how you wear your clothes; if you look comfortable and happy in them, nobody will make a big deal out of it. Except for old ladies. Somehow, my sense of fashion makes me an old lady magnet, and I have got so many gleeful compliments on things that I would not have suspected were especially septuagenarian friendly, such as green and black striped stockings and purple hair. I am... not exactly sure what to make of this.

Blah. Have been feeling physically and mentally tired and sort of demoralised all week... things keep springing up and strangling me because I avoided them or put them off or just cos they're there, and then Black Friday kind of threw my entire body schedule out the window. Yeah, Black Friday was fun-- in a way, it sort of was, as a surreal cultural experience-- I normally do not participate in the National Day of Materialism, because it sets my teeth on edge (and I'm no monk; I like stuff-having), but our seven-year-old television has been slowly dying, and we couldn't afford a new one, until we found this amazing deal at Walmart's Black Friday sale for some 32" widescreen flatscreen high-definition thing, which is very exciting for film-buff Dad and me. (Also, while I watch very little television on television, and films I want to watch by myself happen on the laptop, Dad and I watch a lot of films together, and I wasn't sure if I could take watching an entire art film on a screen that shows everything dyed a horrifyingly lurid shade of salmon.) To fetch said television required me to get up at four in the morning, as Mum needed someone to come along and make sure one of us grabbed one before they ran out, and I might not have agreed were I not offered twenty dollars for this service, but I was, and I did. It was all very odd, and somewhat apocalyptic, especially the part where we took a shortcut to avoid the crowds streaming out of Walmart, and ended up on a back road through some fields lugging a giant cardboard box while a few people around us did the same, lugging peculiar combinations of highly sought-after items-- as I said, very apocalyptic. All we needed were a few machine guns and rubbish bins with fires in them.

...Annnnd ever since then I have not slept properly at all. It's been far too much like the Old Days before therapy and medication when I would spend all of my time sleeping, and could not stop doing so. Sleeping and sleeping and always being tired: very demoralising. Sleeping till eleven thirty for no good reason-- BAH HUMBUG.

In other news, finished NaNo at last zomg. Am really more relieved than anything else, as my plot gave out even earlier than it had last year, and I was left to make up new things nearly every day. Which actually got me to come up with a lot of interesting things, really, and while my manuscript is probably even shambles-ier than last year's was (i.e., no, I am not sending it to you, it is TERRIBLE and MAKES NO SENSE), it also has a lot of interesting new ideas, and, um, new characters? I have a new romance building that I find completely adorable, even if I was forced to write it by my thoroughly imaginary fanbase, who proceeded to ship it so hard from one vague interaction that they started a letter campaign, and then I could not avoid it. But it is so cute, and involves far less of the angst that defines Evy/Mr Caruthers. Also, it will probably be mostly hints until the (AAARGH) sequel. And it works nicely with the "humanise the Ministry" angle... Also there is a middle-aged woman by the name of Alba Kersey who owns a bookshop/junk shop, and I have no idea who she is, but I would like to find out. I am fairly certain she has hidden awesomeness within. And Mr Caruthers' vampire woman is definitely called Reynardine, and she is turning out... rather more sympathetic than I had suspected, and also rather terrifyingly not-human-at-all. I wrote a lot of young Rue Caruthers flashbacks, especially when I was sick of writing plotlessness, and I'm getting a better idea of him, which gets me a much better ken of the present Mr Caruthers -- Rue is a nice, pleasant, friendly, clever, totally amoral and sometimes very scary young man, which is... interesting. He has no tragic backstory to drive him into experimenting with unpleasant magics and vampires, he's just clever and bored and unfulfilled, and gets deeper and deeper into Very Bad Things.

And the last bit I wrote was a very interesting dream sequence conversation between Evy and Reynardine about the politics of power, and Evy suddenly delivered a soliloquy about how, really, everyone wants power-- the power to make their own choices, to live their own lives, or even to give up their power on their own terms. (When we submit to God or to a human or vampire government, are we not willingly giving up certain aspects of power?) Really intriguing dialogue about how, most often, in order to gain one kind of power one is required to give up another kind, and whether it is a fair trade in the end is up to oneself. And I think the story really is turning into a dialogue about different kinds of power, and who has them, and how they use them for and against other people-- a dialogue for which the Edwardian era is particularly apt and disturbing, what with colonialism and women's rights and poverty and class roles and things all being under so much scrutiny and discussion and change, and a lot of different kinds of people trying to get their power back or gain more power in different ways, some of which ways led to The War. So, um, that's nice.

YET FURTHER NEWS, because I have to squee-- I finally got my hands on Sarah Rees Brennan's (sarahtales) debut novel The Demon's Lexicon and it is so fantastic, I cannot even tell you. However, I can try. I have already read it twice; it is marvellous. It is urban fantasy in exactly the right way-- very heavy with the texture of City (though I would not call it a book about City-- London is a setting, not a character), and wonderfully deft worldbuilding. One of my favourite things about this book is that it is so delightfully and confidently written-- I've read a lot of books (...well, obviously), and a lot of first novels that, while good, had a certain amount of... uncertainty about them, as though even the author was not really sure of their own voice. It's difficult to describe what this looks like, but I think one almost always recognises it when one reads it. It makes for somewhat awkward reading, sort of like being in a car with a very nervous driver. But this book is smooth and wonderful, and you can sense a joy in both the story that is being told and storytelling in general. Also, it is tremendously funny. But only in the right ways-- because it is also very sharp and often devastating, and you believe in everything that Brennan is telling you. My favourite kind of writing is the kind that is both very real and painful and right, and also wryly funny, because that is how life works, and that is how my brain sees things. It may also be a side affect of loving the Joss Whedon ouevre, but I think I partly fell in love with Whedon because of this quality. I like a story that will laugh at the parts of itself that are silly and strange without feeling as though neither it nor you can take it seriously.

Also this story reminded me somewhat obscurely of Sherwood Smith's (sartorias) Crown Duel, one of my most favourite books, because of the way it works with certain fantasy tropes: not necessarily twisting or subverting them or mocking them, but illuminating them, seeing how they tick, and discovering how they might actually play out, instead of how tradition dictates they play out. There were some things that I wondered a bit about until the end-- do things really work like this in a real story, or is that just tradition talking?-- and then things happen and you learn things that put everything in a new light, and it is fantastic.

Also there is Mae, of whom I am terribly fond, because she has pink hair and dresses like me and gets to be the Strong Female Character, but also funny and tender, and I love that she really, really loves her brother, and most of all, I love that she stands up and says, "Guys? I am a human being, not a passive prize, and if you are going to fight over me and put me in the middle of your stupid personal feud, I will have none of it. So stop it. Seriously." Because girls need to say that more often. A lot more often. (One of my least favourite phrases in the English language is "He/she stole my boyfriend/girlfriend", because your girlfriend is a person who makes her own choices: therefore, unless she is very small and light and your rival bodily picks her up, hurls her over his shoulder, and kidnaps her, then she has made some manner of choice in the matter of being with him instead of you, and unless she is being severely deceived by this guy-- as in, maybe he has a criminal record or he's Bluebeard and she doesn't know about it-- I can't really see your argument for winning her back, because she is a human, and does not belong to you. Unless you were married or engaged or otherwise seriously, mutually, committed to each other and she suddenly ran off with very little apparent reason, in which case you probably have a lot to discuss, possibly with an intermediary such as a therapist.)

So there's that. And I am avoiding a lot of Life just now and should probably get back to slowly gearing myself up to bloody well deal with it. Sigh.

Today, my sister sent me a text message about how she realizes that, in the Ouran High School Host Club world, she would be characterized as a female loli version of Honey/Haninozuka. My first reply text was: "WTF are you on?"

Then she told me she was doing research for a class. By watching Ouran. Clearly, I'm in the wrong profession. But I think I've already accepted that and made do with it, lol (Liar Game for my uni finance project ftw!).

I don't think I know what Ouran character type I would be, honestly. Maybe a mixture of Tamaki and Kyouya on a good day, Mori on a bad day, and the twins on an immature day.

Regardless, if I was in their world, I'd definitely know who I'd jump >_>



SHIIIIIIINE! >__> <___<

Yeah. I spent a week in a phlegm-laden coma. It took me about a week longer to write this than I expected. Background/catch-up links:

Twilight
Twilight in Fifteen Minutes
Made of Fail podcast that I was on: Twilight movie discussion episode
Original commentary on Twilight (book)

New Moon
Discussion of New Moon (movie) and fan behavior at an early preview
Made of Fail podcast that I was on: New Moon movie and celebrity/fandom discussion episode
Original commentary on New Moon (book)

By the way, I would recommend clicking the links here within the text itself; a couple of them are really... something else. Reading 2012 in Fifteen Minutes may also help.


( Warm your hands at my chestular fires, baby )


(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

Originally published at renate.nu. You can comment here or there.

In the spirit of Barney, I have started making a “Get psyched!” playlist. The latest addition is Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. I listen to it a LOT these days, to, you know, get psyched. For studying. HELLS YEAH, STUDYING. WHOO!

Originally published at renate.nu. You can comment here or there.

I was going to write this post about something completely different, but then when I opened up the “Add new” window, I didn’t feel like writing about that anyway, because I caught a glimpse of my drafts, and wow. I need to finish some of those.

Here’s what you have to “look forward to”:

• The rest of the NYC posts (I’ve started writing NYC: Halloween).
• How I will prepare for a zombie attack.
• Confessions of a fangirl.
• On snuggling.
• Literary Maven Meme.
• TV Slave: Glee.

How excited are you!?

Dear Mum
I'm sorry for how I treated you, that I took you for granted so many times. I just presumed, as any child would, that you would be here forever. and I would give anything to have you back. Eighteen years later, and I still miss you so much.
I'm sorry, and I love you,
Ellen.

Things I am thankful for--

Stars; last night's rolling fog; the red-gold moon brimming over the tumbled clouds the night I fell back in love with Tolkien; dancing wet, muddy, bone-cold, and joyous in Canso, Nova Scotia; Lord Byron's pants; the new coffee shop; my book closet; my librarians who know me too well but are still occasionally taken aback by the sheer mass of books I check out week after week; pulling taffy with my girls; Yvaine the laptop (at last!); having red hair (and purple and crimson and magenta and blonde, occasionally); driving through Brooklyn and falling in love with graffiti and tumbledown buildings and windowboxes; the Midnight Jam at Merlefest in April; my first taste of red wine that took me two hours to drink; Janet the ridiculously gorgeous guitar; vintage and eccentric clothing for pennies at Goodwill; shopping with Kyra (and watching Chuck and Dollhouse and Iron Man with Kyra! and thrashing out stories with Kyra! and geeking out with Kyra! and taking photographs and clambering about on old trains and cliffs over the ocean and snow-clotted mountains and eating fresh bread and dressing up and talking and being with Kyra!); flying over the Alaska mountains at night and seeing fire light up on the mountainside; being on a plane all on my lonesome in general; discovering Eva Ibbotson; discovering coffee, to my parents' eye-rolling ("we've been extolling its virtues all of your life and would you listen? not at all!"); knee socks; the way my closet looks with so many lovely and varied fabrics and textures hanging in it; psych folk; thunderstorms; the swing-and-big-band station on our satellite radio; my two-and-a-half-year-old sister, who is already a geeklet; my darling heartless Willowcat; the wooden outdoor shower under the stars at our little house in Nova Scotia; PaperBackSwap; Mr Caruthers' Sordid Past; Madeleine L'Engle; busking on the internet and discovering that I can write songs (and occasionally people like DICHEN LACHMAN like them, too!); Tam-Lin; cake; the swing trio that played at our street fair; NPR; Coraline with the gang and the bathroom catching on fire; wacky vampire folklore (stealing the left sock! vampire pumpkins! OCD seed-counting vampires!); the way the light changes with the seasons; alliteration; falling in love with a book for the first time; LiveJournal paid accounts; NaNoWriMo; the fairy lights over my bed; the sound of leaves skittering across the pavement; new albums from Vienna Teng, The Swell Season, Sleepthief, Patrick Wolf, Nancy Elizabeth, Mumford & Sons, Laura Gibson, the Greencards, Brooke Waggoner, and all of the magnificent new people I discovered this year; earning money by doing things I love; watching rust-coloured jellyfish flutter through a tide pool; fake moustaches; having a parasol at last; words; metafiction; Joss Whedon; bacon; free wireless; the apple tree in my backyard; finally having great legs; lying out in the sun; that feeling you get when you are wholly inside of your art; being loved; cats lying on my ribcage in the middle of the night; quilts; people; the universe; cats; God;

-- you mad, wonderful people, who make my life brighter, wider, broader, deeper, more compassionate, and certainly more interesting, and who do incredibly silly things like want to help me pay off my debt and go along with my insane projects and ideas. You. I love you. ♥

Originally published at renate.nu. You can comment here or there.

You know what I hate? Websites that take so long to load their AD SYSTEMS that it takes several minutes for the real content that I seek to show up.

I get that some sites have to make money for them to stay online at all. I get it. But please, please, choose a system that at least doesn’t take 2-3 minutes to load in the background, blocking the rest of the site’s loading until it’s done.

Thank you.

:D :D :D :D

The y'all was made speshal, JUST FOR YOU, kyriewaffle >___>

Ah, those days when you are surrounded by a glorious hurricane of words, tossing you this way and that, when you are powered by Story itself, fingers flying over the keys like the hooves of racehorses, barely touching down, fleeting from idea to word to sentence to scene--

Man, I love those days. I wish they happened more often. (I mean, maybe if I had any idea what the plague I am doing, perhaps they would grace The Novel with their more frequent presence, I don't know. HELLO REST OF THE PLOT WHERE ARE YOU?) Of course, now I have largely finished with the bit of the future I leapt into, so not quite sure where I am going next. Gahhh, why do I never stumble into easier stories?

Speaking of stories, I seem to have mostly quelled the initial burning urge, but, um, about a week ago, this Other Story reared its head -- nearly out of nowhere -- and demanded to be written. I thought that being seized with the urge to write this wonderful New Thing during NaNoWriMo was one of those things that happens to Other People, sort of like having one's house broken into. And I am going to blame this story on my resurgence of Tolkien love, and on Merlin, because I have not been terribly interested in going anywhere particularly near high fantasy in a very long time, especially since virtually nothing in the last high fantasy project I was writing (mostly when I was thirteen-fifteen) really catches at my interest anymore, in terms of aesthetics, plot, what I was trying to say with it, or what it was trying to say through me. (Plus, it had... virtually no magic in it. What is the point of writing high fantasy if one doesn't have things like faeries and mages and wandering wizards and small wondrous things?)

Actually, said story was probably largely influenced by the Morgause episode of Merlin recently -- Merlin sometimes drives me nearly as mad as it makes me happy, because it, I don't know, there are things that it almost does, and then doesn't follow through on, and then I want to do those things, and get closer to that other story I keep glimpsing that excites me so much. And after that episode, my head started buzzing with this need to write something like, to quote me on Twitter, "High fantasy with lots of awesome girls and weird magical systems and heavy mythological influences and a psych folk soundtrack." Especially because fandom suddenly exploded with the need to see Morgana and Gwen and Morgause going off and being awesome together and omg I want that. There's a feeling in there somewhere that I'm not sure how to catch at, but I want it, something about pre-mediaeval worlds and old magic and the weight of mythology, and forests, and girls with swords and cloaks and awesome gowns (omg, Morgause's red dress, SO FANTASTIC), and a certain sort of tang, and companionship, and choices, and mist, and cliffs, and wet mossy stone, and burning leaves, and the same kind of flavour that certain bands give me fleeting flashes of, your '60s-'70s psych folk, and the Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree, and I want it.

So, naturally, it wants me to write it. Of course, I have no characters, and no real plot, except for one badly written paragraph that pastiches Robin McKinley a little too obviously (and is also a little too smug and bordering on the light-and-merry). I know that the story takes place in the Seven Kingdoms, and that there are actually only five kingdoms therein, because the First Kingdom and the Second Kingdom destroyed each other, and the First Kingdom was sort of the centre, the-- wisest, the most powerful in magic, I don't know. And the Second Kingdom was a bit rotten, so, um, that happened. And then the magic left the Seven Kingdoms, except people are still born with it, and because the Kingdoms are no longer blessed, the magic just twists around and doesn't work right and mucks things up a lot, so the girls, one of whom is probably "cursed' with magic, want to restore magic to the Kingdoms, and there's another girl, who "comes down from the mountain", quoth the bad opening paragraph, who's been-- asleep? Enchanted? A last relic of the First Kingdom? Maybe they need to restore the First Kingdom? Oh, stop it, I have Other Things to write, you ridiculous Story, get out of my head and leave me alone!

And yet, here are some of my inspiration images. (I do this for stories-- collect images that taste like what I am writing, or what I want what I am writing to be like. It helps.)

( oh dear oh dear. )

And thus is my doom sealed. I'm going to go build a shelter under the desk now, thanks.

Originally published at renate.nu. You can comment here or there.

Because instead of studying ’round the clock, I also take time to browse the iTunes store: