Sink Your Teeth Right Through My Bones, Baby

Because I first read about this on ariadnes_string's LJ and then saw that alyse and all the other cool kids were doing it, I've decided to sign up for hc_bingo.

This might seem like an exercise in futile insanity (I'd say 'whimsical insanity' but I don't do whimsy), but it's not, I swear! I have a plan.

The first part of the plan is to take merciless advantage of the fact that you don't have to fill in the entire card to succeed at this thing and that you can also take an entire year to do it. The second part of the plan is to use the prompts as inspiration for original fic*, because one can never have too much inspiration and if I do this right I might just end up with a collection of stories I can either try to get into professional anthologies or self-publish on Amazon.com.

I'm stoked about this, I have to say. Pretty much everything I write turns into H/C eventually, and I'm already having a great time thinking of how I can use some of these prompts to help expand vignettes I've written into full novellas or novels. Heck, nearly the whole card seems tailor-made for the Pape and Danforth thing I've been poking at. Well, maybe not the "Archaic Medicine"... (ETA: Naturally the first one I filled was "Archaic Medicine".)

Anyway, here's my card under the cut. Pretty cool, huh? Except the "Poltergeist" prompt, because ghosts kind of freak me out.

( My hc_bingo card )



*Except for the SGA fanfic I'm going to write for raphe1 because of her winning and extremely awesome bid at help_japan.

This has definitely been The Year of Things Not Quite Turing Out as I Planned.

Case in point: My son's Halloween costume.

( ::deep sigh:: )

It's also serendipity. But the serendipity comes before the irony. It's a saga, I tell you.

Around Christmas time last year one of my lovely FListers by the name of fish_echo sent me ( this epic graphic novel of love and sacrifice: )

Which, naturally, was so awesome that I made my darling husband take me to Hobby Lobby so I could get a frame for it. Because of the torn notepage edge, the surly Hobby Lobby Picture Framing person (as far as I can tell you're not allowed to work in the Framing Department unless you're permanently disgruntled) told me I should use a 'floating' frame, which meant basically to sandwich the artwork between two pieces of glass.

Or, in this case, one piece of glass and one piece of plastic. I was also required to do this myself in the comfort of my own home. Nor did the frame actually come with instructions. I guess it's the iPhone of the framing world--so intuitive you can figure it out by yourself. Or at least I'm certain that the majority of humanity could probably figure it out by themselves.

Anyway, I came home with my frame and put it on the kitchen counter, and then kind of ignored its existence for five months. Hey, I was lazy forgetful lazy busy.

But yesterday when I was tidying up the house, I decided that lo, today would be the day when I actually put fish_echo's gift up on the wall. So I took the frame and the picture to the living room, carefully unwrapped everything, exclaimed in pleased surprise over the fact that the frame included ways to hang it vertically and horizontally, and then spent the next hour trying to get the picture straight and centered in the frame.

Yeah, an hour. Which I'm going to blame on my dyslexia.

I'll get to the looming tragedy in a moment, but first the serendipity part. And not just because I like typing 'serendipity'. Naturally, because I was looking at her present after hiding it from myself for five months, I started thinking about fish_echo and what had become of her after all this time and how she was doing etcetera. And she left a comment in my most recent LJ post that very same evening! How awesome is that?

And hey, Fishy! Good to hear from you! I still love that picture!

But now we need to get back to the irony part.

Finally, finally, it was done. The picture was as even and centered as it was ever going to get. I carreeeeeefulllly placed the glass panel over it, slowly slid the metal frame edges on to hold the glass and plastic together to trap the paper in between, took a moment to admire my handiwork, then flipped the frame over to see how large a nail I'd need to hang it.

And realized I'd put the picture in upside down.

(That's not actually the ironic part. The ironic part is coming. That was just pathetically hilarious.)

There was no way in hell I was going to frame the picture again, so I luckily brilliantly figured out a way to hang the picture properly anyway. This involved glue, so I left the framed picture on the coffee table until this morning.

(Here comes the irony. Get ready.)

This morning I pick up the frame to show fish_echo's awesome present to my husband.

"That frame looks really fragile," my husband says.

"It's fine," I say. "It's a piece of glass over a piece of plastic." And I turn it over in my hands to adjust one of the metal frame pieces and promptly drop the whole thing on the living room floor.

Our living room is carpeted, but that made no difference. The glass frame shattered. Even the plastic back of the frame had a crack in it.

And I just burst out laughing. Because at that point, how couldn't I?