Blithe

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

269. Hufflepuffs usually feel really weird about networking. The idea of getting ahead based on who you know rather than your talent or hard work makes them kinda uncomfortable

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

317. Whenever hufflepuffs attend a party in another house common room, they’ll always stay to the end to help clean up and make sure they’ve thanked the host properly for inviting them

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

318. Hufflepuffs organising a load of puppies to come into hogwarts for a day during exam season so people can pet them and relieve some of their stress

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

325. Hufflepuff mums being those embarrassing parents that insist on you wearing a helmet when riding your training broom even though it’s totally cramping your style

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

326. Hufflepuffs have a tendency to assume that anyone wearing yellow is repping their hufflepuff pride, nodding knowingly at muggles who have no idea what’s going on

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

329. Nothing annoys hufflepuffs more than queue jumpers. Everybody has to wait their turn, no exceptions.

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

331. Hufflepuffs always had the most pristine towns in animal crossing and were horrified when they visited their ravenclaw friend whose town was overrun by weeds

[hufflepuff-headcanons]

332. Hufflepuffs are the best friends to have because they somehow always seem to have exactly what you need in a difficult situation. Got a headache? Here’s some paracetamol. Short on change for the bus? Here’s the exact amount you need. Need an emergency tampon? They’ve got you covered.

[scapegrace74-blog]

Fictober, Day 11.  Theme: UFO

I played hooky from a work social event to sit in my hotel room and write fanfic.  I’d say you people were a terrible influence, except previously I would have played hooky and simply read fanfic.  Today’s drabble was inspired by a post made by @scienceandmysticism and by the many, many hours I spend staring out an airplane window.   Tagging @fictober and @today-in-fic.

They are two hours into their flight to the very plausible state of Oregon when he asks her to switch seats.   She’s momentarily confused.  With his coltish legs, there’s no way he should prefer the window, and she tells him as much.   Challenging Agent Mulder’s assertions is already beginning to feel less like a job description, and more like a secret vice.

“We’re almost over Utah.” As though that explains anything.

“What’s so special about Utah?   Is it a hotbed for UFO activity or something?”

He smiles and makes the obligatory harhar gesture, but his eyes shift to the hublot behind her, so she obliges by sliding out into the aisle.

She observes him as he watches the passing topography unspool below.   He doesn’t strike her as an unhappy man, but there’s an air of inherited sadness about him that she wishes she could diagnose.   He’s less socially peculiar than she anticipated, given his reputation, but provocative and aloof by turns.  She senses none of the chauvinism that has run like a recurring plotline through her time at the FBI, nor does he send out any signals of sexual interest, although masculinity rolls off him in waves.  Fox Mulder, thus far, is a mystery, and she didn’t become a scientist and then a doctor because she enjoyed unanswered questions.

“Are you a Catholic?” She startles at his voice, and wonders how long she’s been staring in his direction.   Her hand raises instinctively to her necklace as she answers.

“By profession of faith, yes.   I’m not necessarily adherent, though.”  It’s as much as she’s ever shared with a work colleague on the topic.

“Does it give you comfort – the idea of being part of some larger order of things?”

Her first instinct is defensiveness, but he probably didn’t break a comfortable silence to pick a fight insulting her religion, especially halfway through a trans-continental flight, so she measures out a thoughtful response.

“At times.  I find the ritualism of the Church reassuring, even if I question some of the doctrine behind it.”  Then, realizing that he’s given her an opening to get to know him better, she asks, “What about you?  Do you observe any particular religious tradition?”

He shakes his head, then cants it towards the porthole.  “That’s my holy book, right there.”

“What, Utah?   I know you’re not Mormon.”

His burst of delighted laughter makes her jump, but she’s oddly pleased to have made him laugh. She knows he doesn’t suffer fools, and she finds herself fighting the novice urge to impress him.

And then, mercurial, serious again.  “I meant the resilience of the world.  How it predates all human knowledge, and will outlast our folly.  I find comfort in the idea that time will erode even the greatest of our tragedies.”

There it is again, that sense of old hurts only partly healed.   What does this have to do with his obsession with the paranormal?  To hear him speak, he should be lecturing on nineteenth century German philosophy to moon-eyed undergrads, not chasing lights in the sky.  She wants to ask him about his belief in extra-terrestrials, but can’t quite find the right words before he’s gesturing across the aisle to a row of empty seats.

“I’m going to catch a nap before we land.   Thank you for sharing your seat with me.”   It sounds unintentionally erotic, and she blushes, feigning concentration on the case file as he unearths a Walkman and stretches out his long body in repose.

She falls into the instinctive measurement and analysis of facts and observations found in the papers in front of her, her intellectual curiousity piqued.   Unlike Agent Mulder, she won’t go looking for answers in the sky, but one of the definitions of alien is that which is not yet known.  On that, at least, they can agree.

[ydeclay]

cutting your tongue on an envelope while licking it to seal it, sending even more of yourself than you ever intended to

[stability]

[ydeclay]

if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1831 edition

[ydeclay]

How dare you sport thus with life?

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1831 edition

[ydeclay]

Quotes From Ray Bradbury

“I’ve often been accused of being too emotional and sentimental, but I believe in honest sentiment, and the need to purge ourselves at certain times, which is ancient. Men would live at least five or six more years and not have ulcers if they could cry better.”

“The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’”

“I just act and react and emotionalize and all good stuff comes out. Nobody’s ever thought their way to anything in literature.”

“You have to live in a cloud of emotions. You rev yourself up. Give yourself time in the middle of the afternoon, or when you’re waking up early in the morning, when you’re in that kind of wonderful, euphoric state in-between, on the verge of dreams when you get a kind of nuclear bombardment of all kinds of fragments of ideas jumping around inside your head and hitting each other. They begin to fuse and detonate each other. It’s a very hard thing to describe. You don’t have any control over your mind at a time like that, and you don’t want it, see? Let it run wild! Then watch it remotely at the bottom of your skull. Look up at all those things running around wild, then jump up and run over to the typewriter and feed them in!”

“I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is; in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time! There’s plenty of time. You need all of these cross-references. You never know when your head is going to use this fuel, this food for its purposes.”

“Locked into everything is a mystery. We then try to find, in any given age as writers, the truths that we grew up with. You cannot grow up in a period and not be a child of your time.”

“I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.”

“I’ve tried for 20 years at least to say I’m not afraid of machines, I’m not afraid of the computer, I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over.”

“Young writers shouldn’t kid themselves about learning to write. The best way to do that is to train yourself in the short story. Read every damn one that’s ever been written, and there aren’t that many really good ones. You must live feverishly inside a library. Colleges are not going to do you any good unless you are born, raised and live in a library every day of your life.”

“I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day. That’s three or four hundred thousand words a year. Most of that will be bilge, but the rest …? It will save your life!”

“Don’t talk about it; write.”

“All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.”

“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”

“The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.”

“Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.”

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”

“What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn’t it that way when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, ‘That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!’ Then and only then is writing worthwhile. …

“The most callous of commercial writers loves that moment. The most artificial of literary writers lives for that moment.”

“You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.”

“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.”