#decoy-ocelot

[drchristineputnam]

KJ JUST FINISHED WRITING THE SUKEY LAZARUS ALL-GROWN-UP JEWEL THIEVES BOOK AND I THINK I MIGHT DIE OF EXCITEMENT

I HAVE NO IDEA IF SHE GONNA TURN UP IN THE FIRST BOOK BUT YES I SAW WHEN I WOKE UP AND I SCREAMED A LOT

[dancinbutterfly]

TIL about a county-wide Boil Water Advisory from a massive burst water main because I went to Waffle House for eggs

This blog has a love affair with Waffle House. Always has, always will. If you read my Magnificent Seven Justified AU (@poemsingreenink​ @fontainebleau22​ and @decoy-ocelot​ I had to share this because of yall because yall know how much I love this ridiculous institution and I thought you might be entertained too. ) you kno that me and the Awful Waffle are in a very deep and meaningful relationship of mutual support. Naturally, after a VERY EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE today I was like “My heart needs the scrambled eggs made only the way that a Waffle House cook can to heal my soul and also a pecan waffle with more fake-butter than is healthy.” 

So I rocked up at the Waffle House 1/2 mile from my house and holy shit, it’s disaster conditions up in here. No, you guys, listen to me. The plates are all styrofoam. The silverware are the packaged plastic kind. The glasses are to-go cups with lids. All beverages are canned, cartoned, or jugged. But are they up and running? YOU BUT YOUR GODDAMN ASS THEY ARE. 

Waffle House was FOUNDED in Atlanta my friends and it is still the corporate HQ. They are proud of their reputation for staying open and if you think for one second Corporate™️ going let stores close in DeKalb County, one of the top 100 most populated areas in the US, you are deluded. This is an restraunt that FEMA uses to gauge how bad disasters are.

So I get there and there’s only a few people (it’s the very begining of the dinner rush) and the advisory has JUST started and they’re rolling all the stuff out and I get to know our two servers - K, a woman in her 40s and N a young man in his late teens or early 20s. 

Now, I don’t know what your experience is with emergency situations, but I’m from Hurricane Alley on the Florida/Alabama border. Our response is “is there anything we can do? no? lets sit around and shoot the shit/eat/get wasted.” @thosecombustibleheads​ can back me up on this and the Waffle House staff feel the same. So we start talking.

I talk about hurricane country.

K tells us about the snow storm back in January when the power went out. The store stayed open but they had to light candles everywhere. 

N talks about how there have been robberies over at the stores where his mother and siblings work North Springs and Tilly Mills stores but things still run.

They both talk about how they are good to stay for crises, it actually helps with funds because people flood in and it’s a cash cow situation but they won’t touch a place that’s getting violent even if they like the culture and customers. As K said “When someone comes around the corner, I’m out the back door. The customers can come with me because I ain’t dying for Waffle House.”

This lead to the best conversation of the entire evening for me because N tells us that his brother used to work at the store that got robbed, which I thought was interesting. At which point, we took a hard turn into the fantastic.

N: Yeah my brother used to work at [Store #]XXX for like 11 years but he got blacklisted. Me: What'd he do? N: A customer tried to come over the counter and touch my mom and he hit him with a shovel. Me: Wait. A shovel? We didn't have shovels as part of our stuff when I worked at Waffle House. N: No, he brought it from home. Hang on. I gotta go get the phone.

HANG THE FUCK ON! YOU CANNOT JUST LEAVE ME THERE FRIEND! I NEED MORE INFORMATION!

What was the impetus for bringing in the shovel? Did he bring it every day or did he bring it in one day and stash it, knowing he would need it one day? What size shovel are we talking about here? DETAILS!

Thankfully, he came right back. 

Me: Okay, so what kind of shovel are we talking - the square kind with the sharp corners? The curved kind like the ace of spades? N: The curved kind like the ace of spades. Me: And how big was it [throw my arms out full wing span] Stop me when I get to the right size. [Slowly closes space] N: [Stops me at about 4 feet in diameter] There! About that long. Me: Oh my god. And at what point did he decide to bring a shovel? Did he just bring it from home every day and then take it home at the end of his shift? N: Nah he brought it in one day and shoved it under the counter.  Me:  Okay but why? N: Someone had tried to mess with my mom and it's against the rules to bring a gun to work. K: That’s a corporate rule. Like I've got a permit for a concealed carry but I can't bring that to work even if I'm at a store that's not in a safe part of town. N: So he just brought it one day and stuck it up under the counter and left it there. When the guy went over the counter trying to touch my mom, he just grabbed it up [Makes a swinging motion] hit him with the shovel.  Me: [Silently] That is the greatest thing I have ever heard. K: He was the best on that grill though. He could make shapes with those hashbrowns. N: Oh yeah! He made hearts and stuff. K: He could make anything. Stars, he made hearts on valentines day. First day I was here he made me a big old heart out of hashbrowns. I will never forget that.

There is so much to unpack in this. So much. I’m not going to unpack because most of it I can’t really explain anyway but trust me when I tell you, the story of this man is so Waffle House there are no words. It’s the most Waffle House thing to ever happen. I cannot explain it if you don’t have Waffle House where you live any more than this if you don’t have it. It’s just...its so very much itself. I am honored to have heard it in a Waffle House, while eating my waffle off a disposable plate while they served as the only open restaurant in time of community crisis. Yeah, to quote Ice-Cube “Today was a good day.”

[villa-kulla]

decoy-ocelot: OMG Happy birthday! Hope you find time to grab that cake ^^

tramstrams: Happy birthday! ^^

fontainebleau22: Happy birthday!

dreamsinteacups: Happy birthday!! Here's hoping you do have enough time to get yourself something, you certainly deserve it :)

enbouton: Happy birthday! Have a good one!

thesummoningdark: Happy birthday!

lushprocrastinatrix: Happy birth!

englishgirlapproximately: Happy Birthday my darling friend <3. I hope you have the greatest day!!!!

hazel-athena: Happy birthday!!!

<3 THANK YOU SUNSHINES!! <3

[notcaycepollard]

Author asks: 7, 18 and 25?

7) when asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

mmmmmmmm depends if someone is In Fandom. do you understand what fanfic is? sure, cool, I’ll own up to that with a certain level of pride. otherwise, n o p e.

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?

William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, mostly.

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

“Operation El Dorado Canyon,” Bucky says. “Airstrikes. UN condemnation. Pan-Am Flight 73 and 103. Crises of diplomacy, destabilization. The slow and inexorable slide of US foreign policy into what would later become the war on terrorism.” He pauses. Smiles, bloodless and cold and unamused. “Hydra is very good at achieving its goals.”

“What did you…”

“I don’t know,” Bucky shrugs. “Maybe I planted the bomb in that nightclub. Maybe I brought down Flight 103. Maybe I did none of it, maybe I was on ice the whole time, who fuckin’ knows. The bombing doesn’t matter. All that matters is the consequence.”

“And yet,” Sam says, “you're here.”

“Well,” Bucky says. “It'd be nice to know, is all.”

(from we could jump the state lines)

[adigeon]

Fic asks: 11 for "Uncomplicated" and (since Im mid-way through podficing it) 4 for "Binary System Blues"? :)

//////// ALCOHOL TW ///////////!! Uncomplicated, 11: What do you like best about this fic? This was the first time I tried writing Xander, and I really like the 3rd person limited voice I ended up giving him in the narration. In fact, it was so fun to write that I think this fic is why I ended up writing more for X/X. In a lot of ways I think Uncomplicated is pretty uneven -- uh, I both wrote and edited it while blackout drunk actually -- but I love lines like “Xiang smiles with his mouth but not his eyes, and he drinks like he’s parched” and “Xander has never been dumb enough to not admit that there’s things he doesn’t understand” were really fun to write and are fun for me to re-read.Binary System Blues, 4: What's your favorite line of dialogue? 5.“Why did you name your ship the Sarcophagus?” Billy asks, watching Goodnight fuss over the control panel. They’re in open space now, a leisurely pace, no rush to hit the Belt astral gate, avoiding shipping traffic. Goodnight likes when it’s just his ship and black and the stars, nothing pressing on the radar. Calms his nerves a little bit.

“I don’t know. Seemed funny at the time,” Goodnight says.

My favorite line of dialogue is the “I don’t know. Seemed funny at the time,” bit -- sorry for quoting the whole bit, lmao, but I wanted to contextualize -- I like it so much because I was pretty pleased with myself for working that over-the-top “fame is a sarcophagus” line into my AU in what felt like a natural way, and also just like I love writing characters who deliberately lie. I love writing those little practiced elisions of information, moments where a character intends to hide something and does -- Binary System Blues was the first longer fic I’d completed in probably five years, and while in re-reading there are definitely parts I would re-write, it’s gratifying to re-read and see some of the greater character depth I had hoped to evoke in Binary System Blues still evident to me as reader rather than author (not to say anyone else has cause to see it or compliment myself in any way, but I feel like I accomplished some of the complexity of character which I had meant to in a way which years ago seemed very, very complex to me)Idk -- the things a character lies about speak so much to what’s important or vulnerable to that character?

(author q&a meme)

[thesummoningdark]

Ask meme: What are some things you're working on at the moment? What are some things you're glad to have done/worked on? :)

Uhhhh in what sense? It’s a pretty broad question.

Right now, in terms of personal/creative projects, I’m working on trying to build a solid outline for the second half of As The Water Grinds The Stone so I can start putting chapters out again. I actually have more usable material for chapter 10 than I thought I did, but I really want to have the whole thing solidly plotted out before I start posting so I don’t stall again. I probably won’t get any real writing done until I get back from Australia.

I’m also still drawing a lot, still improving my French and Spanish, still working out (Project Gunshow is progressing, even if Abs Or Death is currently leaning more towards Or Death) and playing football.

In terms of professional projects, right now my main concern is an imaging detector we’ve been working on for a couple of years now. We’re aiming to have the second full-scale prototype up and running by the end of the year.

As for things I’m glad to have worked on...man, I barely know how to begin to answer that. I guess I tell the most stories about my time offshore, and back when I built racecars. I learned a lot from both, and from being a sound and lighting tech. To be honest, there’s not much I’ve worked on that I’m not glad to have done. Even when it was rough, I still learned a lot.

[slutaciouslestat]

Fic Reader ask meme!: 1, 17, 27?

1. What fandom(s) do you read?

Marvel - Stucky of course! Merlin - Merthur and Teen wolf - Sterek, thats pretty much all I read on a normal basis, I will read Clintasha if I am in the mood! 

17. Name a fic that made you laugh a lot.

Oh I suck so much at remembering fics! Most recent laughs have been from Whip crack by @quarra because tentacle monster Steve!

27. Name a type of fic that you wish there was more of.

I actually cant think of anything?! Like I think the fandoms I am in have everything covered tbh!

[tuntematonkorppi]

Things I associate with you: Amazing boots, Rogue One, slightly surreal, ethereal art (by other people) and tender, character-driven art (by you). Podcasts. The colour black :)

is there a more amazing list to describe me? no, no there isn’t.