Hihi.

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

*waves anxiously* Hi, hi, I'm Soujin Prouvaire (and my main fandom shouldn't be too hard to guess, considering the gratuitous reference).

I'm going to be a posting author at LXF, but I'm having trouble with the formatting. I've tried [ b r ][ / b r ], and just normal spacing down, but it doesn't seem to be working, and my thing is coming out a block of text.

Does anyone know what I should be doing? Thanks! ^_^

On the Subject of Vampirism

[almightyhat.livejournal.com]

Here's a thought sort of specific to movie!League fandom...

What rules do you use for Mina's vampirism?

I've never been a fan of overpowering vampires; if the protagonists are supposed to be fighting them, it makes things too impossible, if the protagonists are vampires, too many fancy schmancy abilities make the readers lose interest.

We know from the film that Mina can change into bats-- turning into a bat is a fairly standard trick; turning into a whole group* of them seems a way of keeping that olde-worlde flair while at least giving lip service to conservation of energy. (Turning into one's body weight in bats.) She's resistant to sunlight, drinks blood, falls down real good but doesn't die if you put a sword through her heart, and has inhuman strength and speed. She heals instantly... and frankly I'm not sure if she can fly herself or has to do the bat-trick to do it. I'd have to watch the movie again.

Maybe it's just me, but those look like pretty standard Byronic traits. Dracula-- in the novel, not working from any movie-- could stand sunlight, control 'lower creatures', specifically wolves and rats*, and could also transform, though into a mist, not a whatever of bats. Like Mina, his eyes turned red while on the hunt. Bullets, as I recall, had little effect in stopping him. A stake through the heart had to be employed. It certainly looks to me as though the film followed the source novel (albeit probably by accident). True, she was supposed to have been cleansed of vampirism at the end of Dracula, but I can think of a few ways that could have gone wrong, or failed to be effective.


So. What does everyone else think? Does Mina have to obey the classic vampire rules, or is she of a more modernized sort? Certainly she's not one of the old vrykolakes. Someone would have mentioned the smell.




*does anyone know what you call a group of bats? Flock just sounds funny, as does pack.

*this should make me nervous. My sister's dog is part wolf and I just rescued a juvenile rat from her cat.

Wait, what?

[mayhemme.livejournal.com]

I hereby present my "WHAT?" moment of the bloody year.

I don't read romance, so to me, the name Gail Dayton doesn't mean a whole lot. Perhaps it might to some of you. To me, Gail Dayton is another one of the women who frequents the message boards at Tony Curran Online. But the fact is that she's a fairly prolific, well-known author.

And today she read my LXG fan fiction.

And this is what she had to say:

Okay, Norbert, why are you writing fan fiction? Your stuff is Good. (I love your dialog--especially Skinner's cute lines.)

Yeah, there's not too much market for things written in Victorian diarist style--but there could be. It's sort of historical chick lit...

Write NEW things that could be made into movies for our man to play in.

Or, you know--whatever. It's your choice. Yeah, it's hard to make the switch from fan to original, but you've got the skills. You ought to make the leap. It is possible.

I should know. (my website is at gaildayton.com if you want to see why) Though when I was writing fan fiction, there was no such thing as the internet and it didn't even have an official name...but it's great practice for writing your own stuff.

Okay, once more, with clarity: A well-read author of published romance fiction has just praised my fanfic.

Am I on Candid Camera?