My mind, and the places it goes

Is there anyone out there who meets the following criteria:

1. Knows "Sports Night" well enough to beta a fic based on it.
2. Knows "Glee" well enough to beta a fic based on it.
3. Is willing to beta a ~2100-word story

I've been having a lot of trouble finding someone who fits both 1 and 2. If you are that person, I would really appreciate your help.

Do canons with established romantic relationships lend themselves more to AUs because otherwise you don't have the opportunity to write the how-they-met story, the how-they-got-together story? I mean, yeah. Many canons have the how-the-characters-met story in canon. But why, for example, are there a ton of Glee AUs for Kurt and Blaine but not nearly as many in, say, White Collar for Peter and Neal?

(I don't know that I've ever met a fandom as full of AUs as Glee.)

So, on 23 October 2009, "White Collar" debuted. And so rabidchild67 thought it might be nice to have a fanworks fest in honor of Caffrey-Burke Day. I hadn't planned to contribute, since my production of fanworks has been significantly curtailed recently. However, there was a news story that tickled my brain, and then this came along. So, I give you...

( A Value Beyond Pearls )

Some day, somewhere, someone must write a Nightwing fanfic with the title "50 Shades of Grayson."

-- Why don't people sign e-mail anymore? I hate having to go back to the top of a long e-mail to see the From: line just to see who sent the mail (this is especially a problem on mailing lists).

-- When did the trend of blends/portmanteau names start in fanfic? And is there an algorithm that determines whether or not fandoms use them? I remember Spuffy and Spander fic (so clearly Buffy fandom used portmanteau names), and a tiny part of my memory says there was Sculder fic, but I was in neither Buffy fandom nor X-Files fandom. I was active in West Wing fandom for a while, and I don't remember people using portmanteau names (how would one blend Donna and Josh, anyway? Dosh? Jonna?).

-- Speaking of portmanteau words, I am against "refudiated" but for "ginormous."

-- Muffin and Squeaker's birthday party yesterday was a lot of fun. There may be photos to follow of girls with chocolate cake all over their faces. Muffin loved both the chocolate cake and the ice cream cake. Squeaker, with her more choosy palate, was very fond of the chocolate cake but did not enjoy the ice cream. She, however, is not overly fond of cold food, so perhaps that was the main problem.

-- A truth about babies: just when you think you've done all their laundry, they have generated more laundry.

-- We're continuing the "Get Squeaker to Sleep in Her Crib" project. For the past couple of nights, she has slept in a pack-and-play (borrowed from lucretia_borgia) in our room, and she did pretty well (last night she spent the whole night in the pack-n-play for the first time), and today she took her first nap there as well (instead of sleeping in the bouncy chair in the living room, for which she is getting way too big). This will, hopefully, bode well for the future of getting her actually out of our room and into her own overnight.

Last night I tried something I've never tried before -- recording a story as podfic (not one of my own stories). I've been thinking about doing this for a bit, but I couldn't figure out the technical logistics of it, having neither Garage Band (since, while we have iLife, I haven't installed it due to significant lack of hard drive space) nor a good microphone (though we've been talking about getting one).

But then it hit me. I have a handy-dandy tape recorder and a spiffy little toy that allows me to make digital files from cassettes. So last night -- allergy attack and all -- I sat down to do maybe a paragraph or two to see how it came out. And I got swept away with reading the story, so I ended up doing almost the whole thing (I have maybe a screen's worth left to read). Mind you, I haven't *listened* to any of it yet (I'm vaguely frightened of hearing what I sound like). But I made a decision when I started reading: I'd read straight, leaving in all errors and the places where I went back and started a paragraph/sentence over again. I can always clip the errors out when I put it into the machine (the software that came with my toy allows that).

Of course, day 1 of Annual Horrible Allergy Attack was probably not the *best* time to do it, but I figure that, if I can do it when I sound like I'm storing a family of wombats in my nose, it'll be even better when I'm *not* congested.

In regards the use and misuse of certain words:

To lie: intransitive verb. Does not take an object.

Today I lie.

Yesterday I lay.

I have lain.


To lay: transitive verb. Takes an object.

Today the chicken lays an egg.

Yesterday the chicken laid an egg.

The chicken has laid many eggs.


Please make a note of it.