Tuesday and Memeage

[nightdog_barks]

Sunny and warm -- 75 degrees (23.9 degrees Celsius), with a light breeze out of the south southwest.

Memeage -- seen around, grabbed from perspi. Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Ask and I'll tell you the premise and/or paste you a paragraph from any of these. Confession: these actually aren't ALL of my WIP files, just the ones I have a chance of finishing before I'm ... 92, or so. Feel free to ask about more than one.



Doctor Circus
Spatchcock

The money-laundering thing

Declan MacDermott

Scenes From a Lesser War

The demon!fic

Wolf-verse sequel

The sword!guy

The bar-fight thing

Uncle Ribbon

Good One Side

Annals V

A Devil Put Aside

The Viking thing.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

CODIS

The peach-orchard thing (SG:A)

The future!fic

Comments

[perspi]

EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE?

Because, honestly, what an awesome title. :)

[nightdog_barks]

*hugs you*

Excerpt from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere:

The 'rest' part of the rest stop has that overly-antiseptic smell, the kind that comes when someone who doesn't care too much about their job simply empties a bucket of ammonia on the floor and slops it around with a mop. Someone (the same someone? he wonders) has left a message scrawled in what appears to be black Sharpie on the urinal wall, right at House's eye level.

FUK YOU BEATRIZ, it says.

House shakes himself off and zips up his jeans, steps away from the line of porcelain soldiers to wash his hands. It's then that he hears the raucous laughter coming from outside. He tosses his wadded-up paper towel (coarse as hell, evidently the cheapest product that State of New Jersey can buy in bulk) into the trash, steps cautiously to the doorway, and peers out into the parking lot.

The first thing he sees is the other car, angled in so that it blocks Wilson's Volvo. It's a white minivan, or some kind of small SUV -- one of those cookie-cutter crossovers that saturated the market a few years back when American consumers wanted to feel good about themselves by driving something that got twenty-three miles to the gallon instead of eighteen. Its engine is running; from where he's hidden, House can hear the dull thrum of the motor and can just make out someone in the driver's seat. The second thing he sees is Wilson, standing a few feet away from the Volvo, talking to three other men. Two of the men are laughing, that braying haw-hawing that he heard from inside the restroom; Wilson's got his hands up, chest-high, in that same placating gesture he uses on House sometimes. He's talking, but House can't hear what he's saying. The two laughing boys -- and that's what they are, young men in jeans and plain white t-shirts -- move closer, and that's when House sees the rifle one of them is carrying.

************

Yeah, it's more than a paragraph, but what the hell. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

The peach-orchard thing (SG:A)

:)

paraoptomistic

[nightdog_barks]

:-D

Excerpt from the peach-orchard thing:

The knocking has increased in strength and frequency. "I'm coming," John yells toward the door. Maybe it's not someone hungry for peaches. Maybe it's Henry, wanting to borrow John's post-hole digger again, or Teyla, come to tell him another gasket's blown on the duster, again. But it's not Henry, or Teyla, or anyone else John knows when he finally opens the door -- it's a stranger, a guy maybe about the same age as himself, dressed in a blue suit that looks as if it's just been pulled off a rack and thrown on. There's another guy too, someone John can barely make out through the tinted windows of the black Ford Expedition parked in John's driveway.

"Sheppard?" the guy at the door says. "Colonel John Sheppard?"

"Actually, it's Mister Sheppard now," John says, and the guy blinks.

"Huh," he says. "Yes, yes, of course." He tugs at his suit as if willing it to fit better, then gives up and clears his throat. "Look," he says, "I'll make this quick. My name is Rodney McKay, I'm from Acme Incorporated, and I want to buy your peach crop. The -- whole thing."

[warmdarkwoman]

I really, really want you to write more in the Annals 'verse. A taste, plz?

[nightdog_barks]

An excerpt from Annals V:

"Pragmatism," Gregorius pronounced, and James glanced up, startled, from where he'd been watching Longinus preparing the sacrifice.

Gregorius nodded at the scene below. The centurion was in full armor, the red horsehair crest nodding, the polished metal of his breastplate gleaming in the sun, catching the reflections from the harbor waves lapping at the sides of the ship. From his position above the deck, James could see the sheen of perspiration on Longinus' face. Then the centurion turned away, and James was left looking at the drape of his long woolen cloak. A seagull wheeled overhead, attracted by the possibility of food from the troop of men gathered on the ship's deck.

"Pragmatism," Gregorius repeated. "Longinus places no more stock in this foolish ritual than do I." He propped his staff against the deck railing and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the weathered wood. "He's only doing this to make the priest happy."

"The priest who's currently puking his guts out on shore," James observed.

"More foolishness," Gregorius grumbled. "Whoever heard of a sea-blessing priest with seasickness?"

************

*hugs*

[pwcorgigirl]

I was thinking about this installment of The Annals last night while reading Terra Incognito: A Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie. It's the second book in a series about a Roman army doctor, circa 118, who stumbles into crime detection. The medicine of the time is dealt with rather lightly, but I was brought up short by mention that a Roman Army operating room included restraints for tying the patient to the table. Yeeow.

[felis]

Hmm, there are so many intriguing titles and things ... but I'd like to know about the Wolf-verse sequel, please? :-)

[nightdog_barks]

If you'd like, you can ask about more than one WIP. *g*

An excerpt from the Wolf-verse, which is a sequel to Wolf in the Fold:

Their volunteer taxi driver had taken them as far north as Chickasha City, the little Chinese Tiger puttering happily the whole way, even as Wilson was sure every time they rolled a window down they left a thick cloudbank of potent Utah Gold behind. In Chickasha City they'd scavenged new clothes out of the donation bins and eaten free beans at the church for two days, until House had started grumbling about leaving other kinds of cloudbanks trailing in their wake. After a third day of beans, Wilson had persuaded a trucker to take them on, after House had diagnosed the man's persistent toothache as an abscess and had lanced and drained it. Once cured, the trucker had proved a voluble sort, telling endless stories about his ex-wife Twilight Stardust and their four kids, all in the Army and scattered to the winds.

"They're in Alaska, I think," the trucker had said, punching at the well-thumbed buttons on the radio to find a station he liked. "Fightin' the Eskimos."

"I ... don't think we're at war with the Eskimos," Wilson ventured. House rolled his eyes.

"Well," the trucker said thoughtfully. "Maybe it ain't Alaska. Maybe it's that other place that's real cold."

"Canada?" House muttered.

"Could be," the trucker agreed.

[felis]

Heh, that's not what I expected. Twilight Stardust and Canada. *snort* I like the post-crash world idea in Wolf in the Fold, and the mood of that story, so that's why I was curious to see what you'd do in a sequel.

[nightdog_barks]

*g*

It's fun to take a civilization and make it fall down. The future!fic listed above is also set in a post-crash world, although much, much further along -- it could probably be classified as more of a post-apocalyptic world.