Okay, first of all -- it's freaking minus THIRTY-ONE here (which, yes, IS ALMOST THE SAME IN FAHRENHEIT -- 24 below, American friends!) and it's supposed to hit minus FORTY-ONE overnight (which, yes, IS THE SAME in F) and all of this, my lovelies, is without taking the windchill into consideration. Right now, with that factor, it's already in the minus mid-forties. My puppy and I are snugged up in my bedroom in our drafty little house, pretending we don't inhabit the stupidest city in the world. The roads are nightmarish and my feet have been permachilled for three days.

In other news, I suck at titles. I mean, I guess anyone who's read my stuff isn't falling over with shock at this point, but the sad thing is -- the posted version? That's the *polished* title. Like, the one I agonized over, and it STILL usually sucks a lot. For example, I just opened up 5 in-progress stories on my hard drive, and they are (I shit you not) currently called the following:

conserve water

"Enforced group nudity," says Rodney through clenched teeth, "is never funny."

And then they have to shower together. Hence the, um. Water. Conservation.

preggoshep

"McKay was staring at my breasts," Janine Sheppard said, reaching behind her to scratch at the collar of the paper gown.

"And this struck you as odd?" asked Keller, arching her eyebrow. "Lie back, Colonel."

"Of course it didn't strike me as odd," Janine sighed, tucking one hand behind her head, knowing the drill. Keller was matter-of-fact as she parted the sides of the gown and began to palpate in small circles. The hiss that escaped Janine's lips was involuntary, bitten off midstream as she clamped her jaw shut against the flare of pain.

"You're a bit tender?" Keller frowned.

Janine nodded tersely, keeping her eyes fixed on her bare toes at the end of the examining bed. "Anyway, he was staring -- as *usual* -- and I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, and he said he thought they were getting bigger."

"And that sent you running to the infirmary?" Keller said, still puzzled.

Janine took a breath, held it, and released it. "There's -- my family. There's a history."

And then Sheppard turns out to be knocked up, by Rodney. And yes, this has been written (better) by Jenn. Go read hers. This is never going anywhere.

drunkrodney

Deeply descriptive title.

John wakes to the sound of Rodney shushing himself and giggling as he struggles to get out of his pants.

"Rodney," says John, rolling onto his side and rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. "You're in the wrong room."

Rodney stumbles with surprise at the sound of John's voice, sending him into a vale of fresh laughter. "No, no, I'm in the exact right room," he tells John earnestly, and drops down to sit cross-legged, his pants trailing off his feet and his hair sticking up in the back from when he pulled his t-shirt over his head.

"You're in my room," John tells Rodney, waving a hand up at Johnny Cash. "And you should be in your room." Rodney makes this mistake a lot, John has discovered.

"I --" Rodney appears to be momentarily stumped by this statement of facts, but then he snaps his fingers triumphantly and points at John. "I'm very drunk," he exclaims.

"No kidding," says John flatly. "Come on, buddy, let's get you home." He eases his way out from under warm covers and gets his arm under Rodney's, heaving upwards with no success.

"I don't want to go home," protests Rodney. He smells strongly of Zelenka's moonshine with a sweet undertone of vanilla. "No, John, I want to stay here tonight. Help me with my pants."

"You can't stay here. There's no place for you to sleep," John points out.

"I can share, I'm good at sharing. John, my pants are stuck on my feet." Rodney's giggling again and using John's first name and it's about two in the morning and -- John still can't budge Rodney. "Radek had cookies, these little sugar cookies. They were kind of stale but they had pink sugar on top. They were shaped like flowers."

"Sounds good." John pulls Rodney's shoes off through layers of pant, then tugs the pants free and tries anew to urge Rodney into a standing position. With his legs free, Rodney goes, but only far enough to wheel heavily and collapse into a lump of snickering dead weight on John's very small bed.

Ahaha... okay, I know I actually wrote, successfully, a story about Rodney wandering into John's quarters with satisfying results, but I still want to finish this. Drunk Rodney! Why search for a better title when it's so accurate as it is?

usafgrrls

Wherein I write about how, exactly, John wound up wearing Carter's terrifying sweatpants in Plan C:

Sam had known John long enough: she could see past his careful lounging and calculated prettiness, right down to the part where he was socially stunted. Anybody else might look at John -- leaning against the doorway of the guest room, all travel-rumpled and messy-haired -- and not get any further than that first overwhelming impression. But Sam could read the weird lines of tension, curving over the insides of John's elbows, the corners of his jaw -- all the little angles of John where tension pooled as he forced himself into stillness.

Sam sighed and hid a smile behind a palm. John was always like this until he settled in somewhere, like a doll that needed to be moved around and posed until it caught on about fitting in with the humans.

"Do you want a beer?" she asked. "Shower? Some fresh clothes?"

Too many options. John's eyes went wide.

condoms

a.k.a, the one I was whining about last week.

Keller, taking the cue from Carson's former practices, kept a giant open box of single-serving condoms in an out-of-the-way but public corner of the infirmary. John made a point of snagging a handful every time he came to visit an injured soldier, partly to set a good example and partly to perpetuate his image as a commanding officer who got lots of action. Mostly, though, the condoms washed ashore in his sock drawer, like the inverted version of notches in a headboard: small square counters marking the number of times John had *not* gotten laid in the past year or so.

He was mostly okay with the whole no-sex thing. It was part and parcel of being a military commander on extended combat duty, and if John occasionally missed the days of being a carefree insubordinate flyboy who fucked whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted -- well, he could just go out on the balcony off the gateroom, breathe in the salt air, and stare up at the two moons for a while, and he'd remember that he was in another *galaxy*, flying fucking *spaceships* for a living, and that just had to be better than sex.

That evening, John turned his sock drawer out onto his bed and counted: sixty-nine individually wrapped condoms, and wasn't *that* just a greatly symbolic number. He checked the expiry dates and tossed the dozen or so that had been best before 2007, then hesitated only a minute before throwing the rest of the condoms after them. Plenty more where they came from, John reasoned, and it made him feel good to put his socks back in by themselves, neatly rolled and sorted by color and usage.

Uncluttered, John thought, nodding. Simple. Good.

This may have been jossed all to hell by recent episodes, but I'm three weeks behind and I don't care! I want to finish this one anyway. Dammit.

Yeah, and take a look at the working titles of these (completed) beauties:

bj of convenience (now Static Interference)
Fandom to Work (now Tactus)
fartsnore (now Five Reasons John and Rodney Hate Sleeping Together)
lazyRodney (now Pausing to Exhale)
NudeGate (now Where the Sun Don't Shine)
singing ronon (now The Singer and the Song)
skinhungerchallenge (now Unearthed)
John Sheppard Woke Up Straight (now Straight as a Circle)

The sad part is that the final title doesn't represent a significant improvement over the working title. And on the extremely rare occasion I get the title figured out beforehand (I was writing one called 'Scenes from a Satedan Courtship') the fic itself almost never pans out. Which leads me back to the part where me = Lt. Ford. There should be a naming service where you post completed fic and others come up with the perfect title, one of those thoughtful cool titles that adds another layer of meaning to the story. Yeah. That'd be awesome.