Score!

I have sent people to Anne, and lo, they liked! (Sorry, I just always get happy when pimpin' works.)

Sweet! Thank you ever so much, Plei. Getting your seal of approval on a Wes-centric fic was a wonderful way to start the morning.

You were supposed to get it last night, but I read and spaced about gushing until after your bedtime. *g*

It's really, really good.

Hm. If you liked that fic, then you might like Chuck Palahniuk's latest, Diary. ... I really, really didn't, though, and actually wrote it just because I was so angry at the laziness of his style and wanted to show that I could do it, too, I just choose not to because I think it's too easy, inelegant, cheap.

There was nothing remotely inelegant about the prose in yours, Liz. It was sleek and if there was a lot of surface, there was also an astonishing amount of yin, hinted at rather than offered.

So I don't call your piece lazy, cheap or inelegant. I call your piece subtle.

edit: also, I have a lifelong "AHEM" going with the idea that finding something easy automatically renders it worthless. The fact that you may finding writing something easy means only that you have an affinity with it. If all the piece offered was surface gloss, I would feel the disconnection, shrug, and forget its existence; see Literary for my own take on William Gibson.

That doesn't apply to yours.

edit: also, I have a lifelong "AHEM" going with the idea that finding something easy automatically renders it worthless. The fact that you may finding writing something easy means only that you have an affinity with it.

I had the first class of my poetry workshop with Charles Bernstein today.

All of our assignments are prodecedure poems, or things that require even less thought. (Poems written by Google: how so 1999.) You plug words into algorithms and a computer program hands you a bunch of phrases with linebreaks in, and, magically, this is your poem. You're an author!

(This marvelously experimental experimentalism! Soon there will be no poets left: we will all be users. The only artists are the people who actually write the code we process.)

There's no work involved. And even if I do end up with a marvelously compelling piece of poetry, I still feel uneasy with myself. Because art, I think-- if you want to really live as an artist-- involves push, involves some sweat.

I don't mind easy (I love writing when it's effortless, and wish the stuff I'm proud of came as effortlessly as that Tara story) but I don't like lazy. I don't like seeing an author Mexican-Salad his way through a novel, tossing in cheap tricks like C.P.'s verbal tics because it keeps the reader on the end of the line. I don't like trendy over-the-top rhetoric being all that's disguising a paper-thin premise. Because it can, to an extent, because it's easy to do, and it will make readers. And, mmph, maybe my story wasn't so bad on its own, even though the style's overdone, the way, you know, a chapter of Diary isn't so bad on its own. But it's still a cheap lyricism, and there's only so long, as an artist, one can coast on that.

Liz, you're talking to the converted on the topic of paper-thin premises (I'm a storyteller, remember, not a structuralist) or lazy writing. I was bouncing back off the three things you seemed to be putting together in a string - "too easy, inelegant, cheap."

If you meant them as three separate and distinct things, any of which on their own may be an issue, that's a whole nother ballgame. But if Mozart found writing "The Magic Flute" too easy - and if my recollections are correct, he found a scarifying amount of what he did damned close to effortless - does that make it cheap? Or inelegant?

Poetry, I wouldn't touch commenting on that, because for me it's unbelievably subjective. I have no idea what constitutes good or bad; I'm not convinced there is anything real in that designation, for anyone except myself. Because I get drunk on the Elizabethans and Edna St. Vincent Millay doesn't and can't mean anything to anyone but me. The fact that 90% of Allen Ginsberg makes me want to bang my own head with a rock to shut him out is neither a diss nor a rec.

So, yeah - it's the conjunction of all three of those items in a single string that I'm responding to.

OK. My 15-minute on the nose, for Cindy.

Let There Be Light

No one knew where he'd been, really. No one at all. He remembered, though, every last filthy minute of it.

There was no merciful gap in his memory, no easing of the moment at which his soul came back to him. He remembered it just fine.

(Standing in attack stance, facing off with the Slayer and her sword, stupid little blonde bitch thinking she could defeat him, it was always all about her and she never fucking got it, not once in her teeny-bopper sense of her place in the universe, that she was a small turd with all her power on loan. The world was going to die. It was going to be sucked into hell. He'd arranged it, he wanted it, and all these years he'd got what he wanted, whenever he wanted it, until he'd made a little tiny mistake, raped and drained that gypsy. The soul had messed him up, yes, but the soul was gone now. He actually owed the Slayer for that one. He'd popped her cherry and now he was going to pop her head like a grape. The last thing she was going to know before she died screaming was the enormity of her failure. He could hardly wait.)

And then the voice, a small cold passionless drone, a spell, and he screamed inside himself but there was no screaming it away. It happened fast, Willow's voice cracking through his hate and malevolence with the ease of strong teeth on a soft shell; the wrench, the noise of the maelstrom opening behind him, all of that faded for just a minute to nothing more than a pretty soft hum as Willow's voice came into him like a wasp's ovipositor, seeding him with his own soul.

She saw it happen, of course. The Slayer, Buffy, his darling girl, standing there, her face blanched with the pain that he had just felt, that he was going to feel, little miss Sweet Sixteen with two feet of cold steel and killing edge in her hand, her eyes almost lost in the glaze of what was about to happen.

And happen it did; of course it did. He couldn't argue with inevitability. He knew that damned well. Like Romeo, he understood: he was fortune's fool.

His own voice, saying her name, seeing her, understanding, remembering. Soft flesh against his own suddenly weakened shell. And then the taste of the blade, ripping through belly and spine, pushing him into the open mouth of the darkness he himself had made.

The time in hell. He understood about hell now; he hadn't before. It took every bit of self-control to which he could lay claim, to blot out even a small portion of it.

The ring, falling into sunlight. In his own hell, it had summoned him, brought him, the no-longer-a-man who fell to earth.

He remembered. This would feed the soul he had been given this second time; the pain, the agony, but also that moment of last love and her calling him back.

The door to the crypt opened, jogging him free of his own thoughts. She came in to the darkness of the crypt, smiling at him, silk and stone together.

And this, he thought, was her true power. In some way, as she blacked out the torment of memory, she brought sunlight with her.

Here's my 30. Paul kept talking, so it's short.

Fifteen Minutes in a Life She Never Had

"Why, Dr. Burkle, he looks just like you."

Fred smiles and looks down at Charles Jr, with his little tan face scrunched up in sleep and the cap her mom knitted for him that's two sizes too big perched precariously on his bald head. "I think you shouldn't have stopped wearing your glasses, Wesley. He looks just like his daddy." She strokes the softness of his cheek and watches, rapt, as he turns towards her finger, demonstrating the rooting reflex. "He's got my appetite, though."

Her little miracle wakes up, blinking slowly as he adjusts. She moves the finger to his hand, and he grasps it with his chubby ones. Palmar Grasp. Charles is proud of that grip; he claims his namesake's going to grow up with a mean sword hand. Fred doesn't care how his sword hand his, or what he grows up to be, just so long as he's happy.

"Would you like another cup of tea?" It's Wesley's first time back in California since his godson was born, and only his third since she got her PhD.

"No, sadly. My conference is in an hour, and I still need to go back to the hotel and look over my notes on the mating habits of the Azha'ar demon."

"A Watcher's work is never done."

He stands to go, pausing to smile down at the baby. "Congratulations yet again, Fred. I look forward to seeing all three of you tonight at dinner."

After Wesley leaves, she puts the dishes in the sink and carries her son to the living room, where she sings the periodic table of elements to him to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star, because if it works for the alphabet, it should work for chemistry. The dried flower arrangement on the coffee table catches her eye, and Fred reminds herself to hide it or throw it away before Wesley comes over for dinner. She owes a lot to those flowers, more than she can risk having revealed.

Charlie cries, demanding food. With another grateful smile, she sets him to her breast and starts nursing, leaving the Lethe's Bramble disposal until after naptime.

Oh, my, Plei.