Like Trying to Hide the Daylight From the Sun

After six bloody months!  And I'm rather happy with it too, albeit I haven't heard any shrieks from the general UK direction, so Booster may either be asleep or at the pub, not that I blame him.  Bear in mind that due to the rules of our fic (we must send out our next chapter before we can publish the next one so that we can't paint ourselves into a complete corner, even though we've never had to use that safety net) that the chapter that just went up was written back in December and is a little short, but posting should get back up to speed for the summer.

But, God, I love this story.  So much fun, so much trans-Atlantic taunting.

Chapter 19 - It All Looks Green to Me

That's the word count on my first completed draft.  Yep.  You heard me: completed.  It's all beta-love from here.  (And yes, my betas, I love you and appreciate you and I can't wait to find out how many of those 34,829 words you think could be improved/removed/inspected/or infected.)

Spring break, how are you so close and yet so far away?

So, this may just be sleep deprivation, but I think the characters in the fic I'm working on are messing with my head. 
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"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving." - (A Hatful of Sky, Terry Pratchett

"I can't do this alone."
"Yeah, well... I don't want to." - Dean and Sam, Pilot

"- she's trying to reconcile who she's always thought she was with who she really is."
"Well, I suppose-"
Charlie put his arm around his sister's shoulder and started walking her toward the front door so she could go outside and smoke.  "Don't be so hard on yourself," he said.  "You're doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was - the one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn't understand.  Most of us don't live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we're a whole bunch of selves.  When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul - the essence of who we are, beyond the different faces we wear throughout our lives.  You're just hating the selves you've always hated, and loving the ones you've always loved.  It's bound to mess you up."  - (A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore, pg 209-210)

"Sam was nowhere to be found, and yet created this enormous Sam-shaped hole in every scene, a study in negative space." - big_pink, Notes on Single Wide, Double Yellow

"Psychologically, this is fascinating.  Doesn't it make everyone wanna lock them in separate rooms and do experiments on them?"
"..."
"Just me then." - Riley Finn, The Replacement

"Aren’t you worried, man, aren’t you worried that I could turn into Max or something?"
"No. Why?"
"Dad? Because Dad’s not here, Dean."

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man" - Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces

"There are obviously many things which we do not understand, and may never be able to." - Leela, Ship Operations AI, UESC Marathon

"Aunt Mary says they have the darkness there
They have the family disease
They have the darkness there in their minds" - Marcy Playground, Saint Joe on the Schoolbus

"I miss the honky-tonks,
Dairy Queens and 7-11s" - Talking Heads, (Nothing But) Flowers

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. " — Terry Pratchett Reaper Man

"The little folk dare anything", said his friend. "And they talk a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to 'em at your peril, and you ignore 'em at your peril, too." - Neil Gaiman, Stardust

"History finds a way. The nature of events had changed, but the nature of the dead had not. It had been a mean, shameful little fight that ended them, a flyspecked little footnote of history, but they hadn't been mean or shameful men. They hadn't run, and they could have run with honor. They'd stayed, and he wondered if the path had seemed as clear to them then as it did to him now. They'd stayed not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they choose to think of it as their job, and it was in front of them." - Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

"We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world." - Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise

"American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them." - Neil Gaiman

This is three minutes of pure wonderful. Superb writing combined with a delightful performance. The author's native  accent simply accentuates the perfection of the entire thing. How good is it? I heard it once, almost seven years ago, and it had stuck with me ever since until I found it again today. It is every bit as fantastic as I remembered.

They are there. I have seen them. I can spot them.

This is the kind of writing I strive for, that I wish I could manage: evocative without being florid, clear and crisp, wry and self-aware without being self-conscious.  It elevates banal routine to the level of mythological struggle while reminding us of the pettiness of our foibles.  I, too, am one of them. 

People wonder why I rail against bad writing so much.  It's because I'm addicted to reading.  I read all the time.  As a result, I've developed a palate for words, and the structures they make up.  Sure, I'll enjoy the occasional take-out Sookie Stackhouse book, because the execution's consistent and utilitarian and it's got enough story to stick to my guts.  But the truly reprehensible I'll spit out like bad sushi: better that than to suffer the bellyache for the next several days.  And like bad fish, you can often smell them from far off and avoid them entirely.

And that's why, to me, Codrescu's vampire narrator is sexier than a thousand Edward Cullens.  Especially with that accent.