a conspiracy of cartographers

I have been mostly away from the internet (and fandom generally, barring sleepily checking tumblr over breakfast) for quite some time now because real life, oh god real life, everything has been a bit in crisis mode with helping people move. But! I AM OFF TO DRAGON*CON TOMORROW. I'm really hoping that it will be a proper vacation rather than something that packs on more stress, but I am really, really excited at the prospect of so many hangouts with lovely fan people.

(We're still on for a Stonehenge Apocalypse room party, right? I need this in my life. And if we time it right I may turn up with an air of faint bewilderment while dressed as Aziraphale.)

+ The majority of my physical Christmas shopping is done! Soon I will WRAP them and set them under the TREE and -- I really love the evergreens and shining lights and finding gifts and drinking delicious spiked cocoa on Christmas morning with my mother; I am ridiculously overfull of holiday spirit.

+ ...most of my giftfics are still in their embryonic stages, but my absurd Marauders polyfic (15,000 words and counting, I am starting to think I am actually psychologically incapable of short things) has finally come to the point at which everyone is sitting down and talking logistics and there might even be sex somewhere in the next five to ten pages! (I am starting to think that this story has to end in some kind of AU, because Lily teaches Remus how to not get a girl pregnant with the exciting application of Muggle prophylactics, and everyone learns good lessons about proper communication and not switching Secret Keepers at the last moment or anything like that.) In any case, perhaps it will soon be done and no longer bewilderingly consuming my life.

+ My friend Chris just gave me a call (which I missed due to aforementioned Christmas shopping) to wish me a cryogenically frozen happy birthday, to be thawed at the end of the month on the advent of me getting older. I laughed like a hyena, and then saved the message, to listen to again on the 27th.

+ There is a plot brewing amongst various of my Dragon*Con buddies to have a drunken communal watching of Stonehenge Apocalypse. Now that I kind of care about Misha's face, and also now that I have some fangirls with which to watch it, my brain is going "is it D*C yet is it D*C yet let's watch it NOW!" It'll keep, brain. It will still be horrible next September.

+ I'm also just delighted that I am delighted. Fuck this Northern Hemisphere early darkness, I'm going to light this place right up.

i. In the next few days I am road-tripping with 10littlebullets and srevans down to Dragon*Con, to meet up with rayruz & all their various fandom friends. I am ridiculous excited, because making fannish friends at cons is one of my favorite hobbies; also, I fully intend to do my best to act like a sane and friendly fan at Mark Sheppard and Mary McDonnell. I am a wee bit stressed, not because I am worried I will do something embarrassing in front of famous people of whom I am fond, but because I am not entirely sure how I will deal with basically four days straight of crowds of this magnitude. And I am getting sensory overload just looking at the program PDF. I'm still fairly sure this will be an awesome time, though.

ii. Other things I am fairly sure of: the universe is definitely hilarious enough to send me my actual Pottermore invite over D*C weekend. Tumblr is driving me slowly mad with all its talk of wands and Sortings and &c; but I've waited thirteen years for my owl, so I guess I can wait a little longer. In fact I will happily wait until next week! I do not want to miss, say, a panel about Time Lord ethics just because I really want to know whether I'm actually a Ravenclaw or not.

iii. In between chipping away at my NOVEL (right now it is NOVEL, in allcaps, because that's how it sounds in my head), this week I rewatched Avatar: the Last Airbender. It was ... really interesting, to follow up with AtLA right after rereading Harry Potter. Seriously, I could make a chart. Aang is Harry, Katara is Hermione, Sokka is Ron, Roku and Sozin are Dumbledore and Grindelwald, presumably Zuko is Draco, &c -- and it's fun to see how the canon ships would have to shift, or how obviously all Draco needed was Uncle Iroh. But really, it makes me deeply appreciate how many stunningly awesome ladies Avatar has, and how it treats nearly everyone as redeemable. It also makes me want to write bewildering fic in which Hogwarts is a school for benders and Harry is the worst avatar ever.

Anyway. Fear not, D*C compatriots, I am conversant in many fandoms! It will not be all ridiculous fusions all the time! Just some of the time.