Original post here: http://gyzym.tumblr.com/post/39449631206/the-internet-made-me-do-it

I only answered one question, because it was the one that caught me and I'm not into memes, as a rule, or rules in general.

6. A man shows up in a large blue box in the middle of your kitchen while you are doing the dishes. While you gape at him open mouthed, he asks you if you’d like to travel time and space with him. Do you: a) forget to turn the water off as you run into the blue box, flooding the whole house in your absence and leaving your neighbors to worry that you’ve been kidnapped by people copycatting the idiot thieves in the Home Alone movies or b) do literally anything else, which you will describe below?


I will turn off the tap and the music, because there is nothing less interesting than doing the dishes and some questions should not be answered to background of My Chemical Romance.

I will turn to the man and look at him, until I think I can see what he is now, if not what he's been or what he will be.  I will ask him, "Do you know what you're offering me?"

He will grin and ask, "do you?" I will shrug and concede the point.

I will say to him, "If I say yes--and I want to--I will fall in love with you.  It will have nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with what you are, to me, and it will never matter.  If I go I will want things, and want them terribly, and you will give them to me because you cannot bear to see people hurting.  If I go I will change very quickly, and before long I will not fit where I came from, and I will not want to go back.  I will not go back, and I hope you will not make me."

In a very little voice, I will ask, "is that okay?"

(I do not think that it will be okay, but if he still wants to take me, I will go in a heartbeat, leaving the teacups in the sink and the kitchen door unlocked.)

(If I go, I will fill notebooks of Italian paper with ink from the planet Barcelona, and keep them with me in a chest from the markets of Egypt.)

(If I go, I will live a thousand wonders that I cannot now imagine, and be a thousand people that I haven't met yet, purely on the strength of his words.)

(If I go, I will fall in love with every world we land on, just a little, but never ask to go back to any of them.  That isn't how these stories work.)

(When he brings me back, I will not be able to stay, even if the farthest I can go under my own power is the corner store.  I will go, and not look back, and it will not be my fault.)

I want to go in the hot tub tonight
Because it is the middle of winter
(The night between December and January)
And I know that when I get out of the water
I will own cold and wind and starlight,
As I did, once before.

One on a night on the edge of summer
When you and I
Had gone down to the water
And sand still scraped raw between my abraded thighs.

All the water in the world
Had taken up residence in our long, tangled hair
And we filled the narrow bed
With shaking, sunburned limbs
Until called out of the sheets, crisp-rough-chill
And into all the aching glory
Of a night I cannot now remember
Save the chill of my bones, the hint of blue in your lips.

And all the things that went unspoken between us,
All the things that always went unspoken, and always would
That leave me yearning after that sore and shaking chill
Which was all I understood.

Missing you again.
You'd think four years would be enough time to fall out of love again.
It always has been, for someone with my fickle heart.
And then a word--a thought--a note,
And there you are again.
The longing I know
As the longing for heat in the wintertime.
This is what they mean
When someone is called an 'old flame'
Bearing as it does
The implication
That some things smoulder beneath their blanket of ash
Waiting for tinder and wind
For the right condition
That right time and place
That I believe in so fiercely
The way teenagers believe in unicorns,
Or heretics believe in God.

You, and you alone
When asked to see who I have been within the thing I am becoming
Have seen it only as the slow side of winter into spring.
Have seen the fragments I do not know how to reveal
And found them not shameful, not hurtful
But made me wonder why I would be ashamed.

That right time and place
(Never and nowhere.)
(Everywhere and always.)
Serenity like a smash-and-grab,
Castles in the air built into gutter institutions,
And the memory of a dream of burned hands.

Dear Yuletide Author:

Hi.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is... wait, wrong fandom.  
Since we matched, you've presumably actually volunteered for one of my favorite bizarre fandoms.  Now, you'd probably like to know what kind of thing I'm actually hoping to get, yeah?  I'm going to err on the side of massively too much information, and casually mention that there isn't much at all that's an automatic dealbreaker in a fic for me.  There are some landmines, which I will attempt to label, but it's more of a 'be careful' then a 'don't go here'.
First, some things which make me happy--
-quiet characters being quiet.  Any kind of communication between characters that is nonverbal, or unclear, or is taken to mean something completely different than what the person saying it thought they were saying.  A remarking on the weather and B thinking it's about their relationship.  That sort of stuff.
-pining that is not secret.  Characters being in unrequited love and not trying to hide it.
-sex!  Any combination of genders/sexes/alien races containing any number of people so long as all of them are clearly consenting people.  Especially when said sex does not solve any of the relationship's problems except for sexual frustration.
-characters being forced to explain what they're thinking.  Especially characters that would rather disarm nuclear bombs naked than talk about their feelings.
-tropefic.  I've rarely met a trope I didn't love.
-worldbuilding.  Worldbuilding fic makes my id turn handsprings of joy.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand the squicks--
-nonconsensual, dubcon, or really underage sex.  (15 or so.)  This one is non-negotiable.  
-violence between partners, within families, or generally coming from anyone but the designated bad guy.  Violence inspired by racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other kinds of small-mindedness. Also non-negotiable---I just won't read it.  At all.
-Character death by suicide.  It's okay if it's not a huge part of the fic, and in fandoms like Heathers it's virtually unavoidable, but I would like to avoid on-screen suicides, or suicide attempts.  Just not my cup of tea.  Murder, however, is totally okay.  Solutions to a problem that will probably cause the character's death as a side effect are also okay.
-genderswap.  See the note below on landmines.
And finally, the landmines.  These are the things that when handled well will make me love you forever, when handled badly will make me want to pelt you with rotting squash, and when absent aren't generally missed.  Consider it the bonus points category.
Landmines--
-gender and sexuality as they relate to identity.  Trans characters, queer characters, characters who've had to make up their own words to describe who they are and whose worlds are inherently more complicated than 'gay' and 'straight' because they don't necessarily fit into the checkboxes they've been offered.  Limnal identities, if you will.  This is a fascination of mine with teeth, so unless this is something you've written before, or are willing to do a lot of research on, it's probably safer to let it lie.  
-suicidal ideation, romanticization of death, recklessness beyond all reasoning.  "The obsession with death becomes a way of life."  -shrug-  I was a high school goth, okay?  The reason this is under landmines is because it's something that I tend to feel strongly about no matter how it comes up, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it for my taste.  The right way is when  the CHARACTER is fascinated/romanticizing the dark stuff.  The wrong way is when the author is.  So.  Author beware.

Finally, happy writing!

Iron poet requests from over on Facebook.

Disclaimer:  If you think I'm writing these about you, you're almost certainly wrong.  I write about anything and anyone, in first, second, and third person.  My preoccupations are not something I care to explain, very often.

Further Disclaimer: Livejournal hates my formatting.  I don't know what these are gonna look like.  Bear with me.
( Poems here. (!!!!)Collapse )

There's only one person in the room to you, 
that much is plain.
The rest of us exist in relation
Made visible by the shadows we cast.

I know better than to try, these days
To draw the eyes of thralls from their chosen stage.
Still my voice is a little loud, a little rough
To my own ears if no one else's.

And it is bad form to read poetry about someone in the room
However clever the words,
And so I will resist.

There is ink all over my skin today
Permanent marker-- so nothing permanent.
Some by other hands, some I placed myself.

It is as though all of the secrets that hide in my skin
Have bled to the surface in stark black, vivid as bruises.

The word 'HOPE' across the knuckles of my left hand
Is a revelation, a confession, and a lie.
My right spells out 'FEAR'.
It is just as honest as a promise for the future
Just as much a falsehood as a dream.

A compass rose rides my shoulder,
Below the words 'FREAK OF NATURE'.
One of them I put there myself.
The other one was just waiting for the ink to make it visible.

I don't want wash this away
And watch all these intimations slide down the drain
And stain the ceramic of the tub.
But less do I want to wake up to ink-smeared sheets
And ink-smeared skin
And letters rubbed illegible.

Fandom: Fandom Meta
Pairing: Hurt Comfort/ Fluff
Rating: PG -13 for offscreen sex.  No language, even.
Warnings: Extreme silliness.  Yes, this is anthropomorfic.


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Iron Poet entries from the round held on facebook earlier today.

A note about process:  I don't usually have names attached to the words when I'm writing the poems.  As such, it's not uncommon for the poem I wind up with to be about or directed at someone the requester has never met.  As such, please use reasonable common sense in their interpretation.

( The poems are behind the cut.Collapse )