Garden of Thought

Hm, I glanced back over my recent posts and found there were only maybe two in a month and they tending to be about foodstuffs in one way or another.  How very banal, I thought, food?  All I need to add is pictures of cute kittens and exhortations to 'change the world' by clicking on some sort of pathetic looking place/person/animal and I'd really be a lost cause.

On the good side, I got a shiny laptop for my recent bday!  I hope this means I will be able to reconnect a bit as I won't have to fight for the family computer in the kitchen to do so.  A lady I swim with at the pool in the mornings talked about how she was doing a doodle-a-day challenge thing to make herself start using her dormant art skills again and it rather inspired me to try.... something.  Not sure what yet.  But reconnecting with the expression that can be carried out through things like DWth is a start.

Back in the day, I was greatly entertained by two 70s tv shows that were unhappily doomed to one season runs by the Powers That Be - alas, where is the justice in the world:
* When Things Were Rotten (Mel Brooks made a tv show spoofing Robin Hood... cheesy, stupid and full of innuendo but I loved it. The one good thing from its cancellation is it made him go on to make it into a movie thus gifting the world with Robin Hood: Men in Tights)
and
* Quark (Buck Henry of 'Get Smart' fame made a space spoof at the same time as Star Wars coming out, in which a space garbage collector and his crew cheesily reference all sorts of sci-fi shows while inadvertently saving the universe)

I wouldn't bother purchasing When Things Were Rotten, but I had fond memories of Quark, which only had a sad 8-episode run. Went looking for it and found it on dvd but for a very high price, so I went to Fanfic.net to see what others had done with it.

INTERNETZ WRITERS you have let me down! What? Not even ONE fic for Quark? Not even ONE? 0_o
Even with characters like Ficus, who was essentially Spock if he were a plant? And the Bettys? And Andy the cowardly robot? (Bettys in unison: "We would follow you to the end of the universe." Andy: "I would follow you to the door.")



Dear me, a cheesy gem has been overlooked - not often I find such a thing.

So, yesterday I was wandering around and something went by that referred to a "decapitated arm."  Ever since then the hamster of the wordly part of my mind has been chewing on it.

A decapitated arm?

Let's see. Body minus head = decapitated body.  Arm minus body = disembodied arm. 

Arm minus head?  Um, what would aliens who have heads coming off of their arms call that?  If Zaphod Beeblebrox, for instance, went a step further in his cosmetic improvements and added an extra mini-head to his arm and then some governmental authority pronounced upon him the sentence of decapitation and he used that one for the one to be whacked off and then had to describe the condition of his arm later when a passerby innocently inquired why he had it bandaged up in a sling...?

Body minus bowels = disemboweled. Bowels minus body = ...er, detached?  With bowels in place, I suppose a body could be described as being 'emboweled,' not that I've had occasion to note to a reader whether or not a character has that feature currently functioning in their body.

I can't say I can quite see using 'disembodied' for bowels.  (*cue creepy sound effect* Madame Fluffhat shrieked in terror upon beholding the ghostly glowing disembodied bowels floating above the table.)  Do bowels count as one (collective) body part the way an arm includes fingers or would it only work with specific portions (i.e. a disembodied liver)?

Tongue minus head = disembodied also?  Is there a word for a head minus a tongue aside from "mute"?  Would it be delinguated?  I think we have to fall back on the inelegant but succinct "tongueless" there, similar to the way we would note a piece usually there is missing (The alien slapped down a wide, toeless foot), but it lacks the connotation that the missing piece was forcibly removed.

Which takes me back to the arm. What would you use to describe a disembodied arm that also has the connotation that it was disembodied by force, rather than just floating about as a glowing blue ghostly arm?  Decapitated does have that sense, but what fits other parts when they are off on involuntary field trips of their own?

I was attempting to work on a WIP chapter and hitting a snag, reflexively opened up a Google tab.

Only to realize I was apparently attempting to google my *own story* to see how it went or something, you know...um, in the future...so I could write it....

Gah! Really, brain?

I think those who are likely to be most interested have probably found it now, but thought it would behoove me to not leave a link to my first fic of the year, a somewhat bizarre blend of 12 random prompts thanks to dw_straybunnies and lost_spook with her holiday challenge.

All that said... The Giraffe Convolution of Doom is over here at Teaspoon.

6 short chapters of mayhem with Two, Six and Seven with a bit of Four and Eleven plus Frobisher, Evelyn, Ace, Jamie, Sarah Jane, Martha, Rani (SJA) and the Meddling Monk at the London Zoo and Ancient Egypt. Enjoy.

 

( Once more - the 15 revealed )

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( Response for lolmac once more )

 

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John_amend_all:

 

( and finally, responses for kerravonsen )

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 Whew! That took a bit of doing, some of those.  Thank you so much to everyone, that was grand fun. :-D
 

 

I may have had to miss Fic Rush (again) but at least I was not entirely without a bit of writing going by.  I had a lot of responses and it took a while to crack some of those literary nuts, but now it's done.  I'll post the results in chunks.

First of all, here's my fifteen:

( Fifteen characters tossed in a salad bowl )

And now....

 

...

 

Spent some time copying a few of my stories from ff.net onto AO3 (still under "primsong" - keeps it simple) - Nothing like making me aware of how many stories I've put out there like moving them and having to re-tag and re-summarize and re-decide what to say in notes for each one - I made it through about two thirds of my 1-shot/vignette/single chapter bits, but I've a ways to go still and haven't tackled anything with chapters yet.

I like the layout and the various features so far, still finding my way around a bit - any of you keeping your works over there? What name are you under? What's your favorite feature there that I should know about?

Poked around AO3 a little bit last night to see what all the hoopla is about - it appears to be a fairly decent archiving site, but can anyone tell me if they've found it worth the time to copy their works over to it? Is it just re-inventing the wheel and having a reunion of the same folks we already know and love from Teaspoon and/or ff.net or have you found new readers coming out of the woodwork?

Whyfor? Can anyone tell me what makes it different/better/worth the time? Thank you!

I've been seriously contemplating whether to submit something to GreenPrints ("the Weeders Digest")... I just love them, it's the only paid magazine-like subscription I have and worth every penny, published as a small family business. It's a collection of NOT "how to garden" or "gardening tips" (the world and the web are both awash in those) it is instead a collection of gardening from the heart. The WHY of gardening, the love and the dedication and sheer passion that makes people slave just to watch a tiny bud unfold and mourn deeply when aphids eat it before it can bloom. It's a magazine for people who have a love of green things and, like Sam, would rather have a bit of earth than almost any other gift. Shall I be published? I have no idea, but I have so enjoyed reading of other people's stories and adventures and reminisces in the care of their plants, I think I should at least give it a try.

The question now is where do I start? I haven't any notion of how to winnow something tangible out of the great jumbled experience of watching and tending all the teeming green life that has passed before my hands, but I just want to share it.