billy bad breaks

This post has nothing to do with its title, but after staring at this for 20 minutes trying to come up with one, I just grabbed the first song title I could find. Thanks, The Damned. Once again, you come through when I need you.

We've had a drought in Southern California for so long now, even a little rain is cause for our local news to go apeshit with STORMWATCH!!11!!1 coverage. This week, though, we've had serious storms that have produced tornadoes, mudslides, flooding, and all sorts of things that every other part of the country that actually has weather can just shrug off.

I've spent even more time than usual inside writing this week as a result of the cold and wet weather, and I've made some good progress on a few projects including a short work of fiction and Memories of the Future, Volume Two.

Working on Memories Volume 2 has been a lot of fun, even though there aren't as many atrocious episodes in the back half of the first season. The stronger episodes are more enjoyable to watch, of course, but it's the really lousy ones that are the most fun to recap and make fun of. (Too Short A Season was a fucking goldmine, but Coming Of Age was a real challenge because – even though it's all Wesley, all the time – it's really good.)

Anyway, while working on Arsenal of Freedom this week (which starts out strong and has some great character moments for Geordi, but doesn't quite fulfill its promise), I wrote some Picard/Beverly slashfic* as part of a joke. I suppose I could have taken some anti-nausea meds and gone searching for some existing work to copy and paste, but I thought it would be funnier if I actually wrote it myself. You'll have to wait for the release (or maybe even the relevant Futurecast) to experience it, but I thought some of you may want to know that I got all of 41 words before I made myself throw up in my mouth and had to stop.

I hope the sacrifices I make for comedy are appreciated, he said, in his best passive/aggressive grandmother tone.

Well, it's raining like crazy again and there's a clown in the storm drain, so I'd better get back to work. Skin of Evil isn't going to snark all over itself, you know.

* It has been brought to my attention that "slashfic" is the term used to describe fanfiction where two dudes get all teabaggy and swordfighty whatnot. I have always been under the impression that any fanfic involving sexytime was called "slash" or some derivative thereof, regardless of the genders or alien races involved. Upon discovering that I have been incorrect about the finer points of this particular world for my entire life … I'm really okay with that.

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59 thoughts on “billy bad breaks”

  2. Picard/Data fic is the best I’ve read, personally. Wesley/Mordock? Nah. Personally I’ve always wanted to read some of the Wesley/Worf fic that I know is out there somewhere on the internet. I really want/really don’t want to find such fic. Welcome to the wonderful world of slashfiction writers, Wil. I’ll go alert the webrings.
    /Not really going to alert the webrings. Are there even still webrings?
    //Personally, I’ve never written Star Trek fanfic.
    ///That’s a lie. But I have honestly never written ST slash fiction. I’m just not that… creative.

  3. “There’s a clown in the storm drain”.
    I think just wet myself – to this reader, _IT_ was the scariest Stephen King ever.
    On the other hand, _Skin of Evil_ may be the worst ST:TNG episode ever.

  4. Question for you, Wil: I know in the past you have been hard on yourself over fiction. If you have stories you don’t plan on ever selling, would you be willing to put them up for free download? Bad or not, it would be awesome to read some fiction that you wrote. Please do it!!
    http://www.livingwithanerd.com

  7. pah. webrings are SO out. Thats what LJs are for. And fanfiction.net, but we dont talk about that.
    Used to write Trek, but my muse ran off and won’t come back. Okay, its back, but it wont give me Trek stuff anymore. Actually, it hasn’t given me crap in a long time.
    Edit: Oh! Hey @angiek! just noticed it was you.

  8. If that clown offers you a balloon, don’t take it!!!
    Worth it? Worth everything and then some!! Everything you write is worth it! I can’t WAIT WAIT for Memories 2!!!!!!!! Texas has had some pretty crazy weather too. Rainy, snowy, tornadoes, ice…bipoar state. I am so glad you and your parents are ok. Finally, some good news this week!
    Take it easy Wil, and remember, be careful where you sail that boat….:-)

  9. Oh Wil. Picard/Beverly isn’t *slash*. Slash is same-sex fic, like Kirk/Spock. Picard/Beverly is just plain ol’ het. You want to do up some slash and you’ll have to crank out 41 words of Picard/Riker or Geordi/Data. That’s not even half a drabble (100 words exactly), btw. I KNOW you can do better than that! Take some Mylanta and go for it!

  12. Umm, outing myself as a fanfic nerd: I’m pretty sure that by slash fic you mean there’s sex going on but actually the term ist only used for homosexual pairings, even if there’s no sex in there(although that would mostly be termed light slash)… Two women in a relationship is called femme slash (or femslash) and if there’s actually the nasty going on, you’d call it a smut fic – or PWP (porn without plot).

  13. Oh? I always assumed that any fanfic that was sexual in nature was considered "slash."
    I have to say that I'm not too bothered to be as ignorant of this particular realm of fandom as I am, though.

  14. After having lived in the mid-west most of my life, I always marvel how Californians behave when there’s a little rain. This is one of the few times in the ten years since I’ve lived here that there was a storm that people had a right to freak out about. I still remember about 6 or 8 years ago I was watching one of the news channels when the anchor got on and announced that there was a tornado in the city of Indianapolis, my hometown. Within seconds my mom called me. She had been out running errands and wondering why every place she stopped looked like the Hulk landed on it during an epileptic seizure. I just remembered screaming into the phone, “MOM! GO HOME!”

  15. TVTropes informs me that Tim Curry played the clown in the movie version of IT. That explains a lot of my irrational fear of that awful story.

  17. LOL! I was going to correct your usage of “slashfic”, but I guess you’ve already been corrected. Somewhere, I believe there existed some Wesley/Worf slashfic, but I swear I never read it. Really. No, honest!

  18. Yeah, I can understand that. I figured given that Kirk/Spock is the first pairing to use the term “slash”, having the accurate factoid in your back pocket might not hurt.

  19. "His Little Captain" is the best I could come up with before I wanted to stab myself in the eyes and destroy my brain with fire.

  20. So you didn’t go with “Sighing gingerly, Beverly slowly separated her saucers from the stardrive of her uniform, eagerly waiting to engage the Picard Maneuver”?
    I wouldn’t have, either.

  21. I would have cared not a jot if you had used slashfic out of context. It’s a made up pseudoword and can have whatever meaning suits you! 🙂
    I’m really looking forward to Part 2 of Memories, Part 1 has made me laugh over and over and the accompanying podcasts have added immeasureably to the experience.
    By the way Wil, I bought both the hard copy and the .pdf, however, the .pdf is almost impossible to read on the Kindle. Any chance of producing the e-versions in Kindle format? It doesn’t have to be in the Kindle store to be made available in that format as far as I know.

  22. The term you’re looking for is “lemon.” No, I don’t know why. I wouldn’t even know what, but my ex was WAY too far into anime.

  24. I totally couldn’t read IT. I read “Cell” by King and I heard that was one of the least scary, and I didn’t enjoy it. Also, It makes me giggle to imagine you trying to write a lemon… and I can’t wait to see you at Phoenix Comicon!

  25. The only stand out moment from “Coming of Age” I can remember that deserves at least some comedy action is the mysterious transporter failure. People beaming back and forth from the surface all day, but mysteriously even though the shuttle has barely left the docking bay somehow they can’t teleport Jake off it.
    Oh really?
    That transporter has to be the worst piece of Deus Ex Machina to have to write around. It’s like having a great big “I WIN!” button on your ship, and having to figure out ways to stop people just pressing it.

  26. “Skin of Evil” isn’t going to snark all over itself? Are you sure about that? At the very least, the snark seems much closer to the surface of the marble block than in other episodes…
    (Don’t try this at home, kids. Mixing metaphors is dangerous.)

  28. Another funny post, and the comments were just as good 🙂
    Wesley/Worf…ouch.
    The thought of you writing Picard/Beverly fanfic is amusing on many different levels. Can’t wait to read/hear it!
    I’m really tempted to get a hold of TNG episodes and start re-watching them too. It’s been so long, some of them would be like new again to me. My friend and I once realized that it had been 10 years since the show had ended…and obviously that was a while ago. We would still talk about it then, and now even 🙂

  30. Wil, somehow I have had it in my head for years that you were in the classic “It” miniseries, playing the young Bill Denbrough. Don’t ask me why. So when I came across your site here and saw the Pennywise T-shirt in glorious 8-bit in your avatar, it made perfect sense, as have your occasional references to It. Of course, I’m spectacularly wrong, as I’d have realized if I’d just stopped to think about it for two minutes.
    You and Richard Thomas portraying younger and older versions of the same man would be very interesting casting though, I reckon.
    Hope you survive the storm! I grew up in LA, and these seem to be some of the strongest storms to hit there in my lifetime. Good luck.

  31. Re Picard fic, I assume you’ve seen this?

    I read the last third of IT in one sitting, in my bed with a flashlight under the cover because if I had stopped before I was finished, Pennywise would have gotten me…
    Good luck in the rain!
    I’m very much looking forward to MOTF Vol. 2, too.

  32. This is incorrect! Slash is ANY sexual fanfic, but has become more exclusively used to refer to homoerotic material. The origin of the term is from the / in the pairing, after all. “Slash” is only gay-exclusive in communities that also use the term “het” to describe sexual stories that feature heterosexual pairings.
    I know this because I used to be WAY too involved with fanfiction. 😀

  35. But it’s not PWP just because it has sex. A fic can have sex aplenty, but it’s only PWP, if, in fact, it has no plot. A pure porn fic is PWP, but a well told story that just happens to have sex in it is only a mature story. It’s not PWP.

  36. It’s horrible, isn’t it?
    I wrote a Stargate SG-1 fanfic a few years back that was flowing along nicely. Then, about 30K in, two characters wanted to have sex. Now, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t gratuitous, and it was certainly in character, and the fact is that in the situation they were in, that’s probably what would have happened. And they were even male/female!
    But I just couldn’t do it.
    I don’t know…just…well, wanted to stab myself in the eyes and destroy my brain with fire.
    I wimped out.
    I glossed over it.
    I implied, but did not state.
    I let it go and told the rest of my story.
    *shudder*
    It’s not for me. I don’t begrudge anyone writing their thing, but I don’t care to read it and writing it is right out.
    And when you add the fact that you know the actors who portrayed these character, and…ew. Just…ew.

  37. So…re: slashfic.
    I remember seeing that word in one of your books. I’m guessing MOTF, Vol 1. I have to admit that as a fanfic writer (and no, I don’t do slash or het, but rather gen, which means no pairings at all but more adventure stories, etc, though I have been known to play the UST card a lot), it took me out of the story for a moment. I was like: what? What slash? Those are opposite gender characters? Huh?
    But I moved on. I knew what you meant in context, and though I interpret slash as male/male, I’m with Phil93805 above. It’s a made up word with a few interpretations. Who cares? It was obvious what you meant. (And femslash is a newer term, btw, as a specific form of slash. Het may be, too, for that matter. I don’t know. I suspect it is and slash was the original term for it all – yeah. You’re just old school! That’s it!)
    That said, if the fate of the world is hanging in the balance and it all comes down to you knowing some obscure fanfic definition, here’s your handy-dandy thing to fix holodecks with right here:
    http://www.bigapricot.org/archive/dictionary.shtml

  38. Wil,
    Slightly off-topic… Though I’m trilled you’re working on Volume Two. My wife and I totally enjoyed Volume One.
    I just finished listening to the audiobook of “Just a Geek”. So, so impressed by you, man. I was six when “TNG” premiered and I watched every episode. I was so sad when Wesley went away. Every time he showed up after leaving, it was my favorite episode ever.
    I’m so glad you’re writing. I’m so glad you’re happy. I’m so glad I can keep up with one of my childhood role models. Come to think of it, I’m glad I can keep up with one of my role models as an adult too.

  39. I adore fanfiction, but slashfic’s just creep me out. I frequent fanfiction.net and sometimes read Stand By Me stuff for Ace/OC(Original Character) fics and when I see summaries for Gordie/Chris I say to myself “WTF, no no no, A)They were young when they were in this, make them older it’s still wrong. B)Don’t make them do stuff like that, ewwwie!”. Can that be considered a rant, well then that’s my rant.

  40. Wil, Do you think you’ll do an Audio Book version of Memories of the Future I&II? Really hope you do!.. My girlfriend and I really loved listening to the stuff you have done so far.. your such a great story teller! I recently introduced her to TNG for the first time (she’s 24 and never really been into sci-fi,) she loved it.. just finished watching all seven seasons!…and she thought Wesley was VERY cute 🙂

  41. Most people use the word slash for a homosexual pairing, and some use it for any pairing. There is no ultimate fanfic authority to determine the right or wrong usage, so you can all stop arguing about it now.
    And it’s just my opinion, but I am really annoyed by the term femslash, just as I am by the phrase gay and lesbian. To me that sounds like people and women. I’m a gay woman. (OK, I’m bi, but whatever.) I’m not a Lesbian. Lesbos is an island in Greece.

  42. Oh, one more thing… WILWILWIL! HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?!
    2010: LIVING IN THE FUTURE!!!! A children’s book written in the 70’s, detailing what the future would be like. I’m sure it’s out of print but you can read the whole thing here:
    http://2010book.tumblr.com/post/310745454/cover
    Sorry it’s a bit off-topic, but I share your enthusiasm for living in the future. Thought you’d be interested.
    PS I would have titled your post, “Is that your phaser, or are you just happy to see me?

  43. Oh Wil. Writing slashfic for Picard and Bev? Well, I suppose that’s better than writing slashfic for Wesley and Beverly…

  46. I think it's only swordfighty whatnot if it takes place within the confines of fanfiction.
    But we've seen that this is clearly an area that falls outside of my expertise, so take it for what it's worth.

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