A few things:

1) I just watched the series premiere of Castle (yes, I'm slow) and -- LOVE! LOVE. I hadn't heard too many rave reviews of it so I wasn't in a hurry to check it out but -- LOVE.

2) I also just watched (David Hewlett's part in) Century Hotel. Anyone have any Century Hotel DH fic to share? Yes? *bats lashes*

3) Today marks the end of craziness for me, or at least a serious tapering-down. I was kind of vaguely considering doing SGA Big Bang and then realized I kind of, oops, missed the deadline by about 10 minutes and oh well. I didn't want to sign up and then check out again like I did in 2007. Still, maybe I shall do it sort of on my own-like, sans the pressure of capital-P Participation. Does anyone out there in SGA-land want to lower-case-c cheerlead or (more likely) lower-case-b bully me into finishing? More importantly, does anyone have an idea for a story they've been dying to read because I'm kind of creatively tapped at the moment.

4) I just finished rereading Omiai for the first time since, well, pretty much since I wrote it. It was nice -- it's been five years (DEAR GOD, REALLY?) which is enough time to have a pleasant critical distance. The parts that were weak didn't make me want to claw my eyes out, just to smile at my former writerly self, and the parts I thought were strong were kind of bland, but it was such a fun exercise to write that novel with the flist support and the plottiness and all its attendant angst. (For those of you who weren't around back then, or weren't in SV, Omiai is a 100,000 word novel that I cranked out in nearly daily installments -- I KNOW -- over about four months.) Anyway, I feel like my writing has changed quite a bit since then. I'm striving to reach true "show, don't tell" mastery but I'm not there yet. Still, I think I've come some way from the time when I could shamelessly have my protagonist expound on his emotions (tearily) for paragraphs at a time.

5) There is no 5.

6) I really need to go and shower now. MWAH, flist.

Yaye! Apparently Omiai won a People's Choice Award over at sv_awardz! Cool!

( Banner is under here )

Thanks to everyone who voted for me! I'm not normally a big awards-for-artistic-endeavour kinda person (it's a long story and involves boring philosophical discussions about music, sad to say) but I like to look at this kind of thing as a wonderful, thoroughly agreed-upon recs list. Go and check it out if you like, and please FB authors. We are a needy horde.

So cool! elandrialore made a trailer vid for Omiai and I'm all asquee!

Go and check it out and tell her how wondrous she is!!!

And thanks to enderwiggin24 for pointing the way to me!

Know the phrase 'One-Hit Wonder'?

Describes me perfectly. *g*

I asked you guys to ask me what happens after the end of any of my stories and, of course, the only question that gets asked is 'what happens after Omiai'?

(Please don't take this as a complaint...I'm not offended or hurt. I just find it interesting that nearly two years later, Omiai is *still* the Only Thing I've Written in the larger sense of the fandom.)

Anyway, I'm willing to take that challenge on! If you recall, with The Oak Tree and the Cypress, I officially closed the Omiai-verse, so this isn't fic. It's more like the narrative outline of how I might imagine things. (But hey! If anyone wants to write it, feel free!)

This is an especially interesting exercise for me because I'm not a big planner. I've learned (through painful experience) to plot the bare bones of big stories in advance, but ultimately, I'm the Colin Mochrie of the fanfic world. Give me a prompt, give me loving feedback, and the words fly. Ask me to engineer a suspenseful and fascinating plot (with the ending known ahead of time) and I weep like a little girl. So what happened after Omiai?

Up until I wrote The Oak Tree and the Cypress, I had only the vaguest ideas. I knew Clark and Lex would remarry, but I had imagined that perhaps the Next Big Story (ha!) would be something to do with Clark becoming Superman and Lex having some part in it. I thought I might pick up the immuno-booster Krypto-vectors which were Dr. Uyeda's pet project, use them to make Clark very sick, and have the whole story from Lex's POV, trying to save him.

You'll note that this never happened.

As I said, I'm an improvisational writer, and the gimmick of the Omiai-verse -- the arranged marriage -- was over. I had no more cliches on which to riff, and the world was closed. That's why I struggled so much with writing my two codas - The Sink That Ate Christmas, and The Oak Tree and the Cypress. Writing something larger, even in a 'verse that had been insanely productive, was beyond me.

If I had to improvise what happened next, though? This is what it might look like:

( The Second Wedding )