Barb C’s Journal

I just signed up for seasonal_spuffy, dammit. Go thou and do likewise.

Yes, you! Don’t slink away from the monitor, I can see you! Click on that link! Now! Go!

I made a pretty with all the relevant wedding/reception info - I think I’ve sent a copy to everyone who requested it, and quite a few who didn’t, but if I missed you out and you would like a copy, let me know. There are a couple of you for whom I only have snail mail addresses, and so you will get an actual paper invite shortly.

Why yes, I am approaching this whole wedding thing in a completely haphazard, “Whee! I have a barn! I have a trombone! Let’s put on a show!” way. Why do you ask?

I nerved myself to talk to my supervisor about the job issues today, and she was very enthusiastic about the idea of me applying for one of the new positions, providing they’re approved, which we’ll know by the end of the week. I keep forgetting that for some unaccountable reason my employers are a great deal more impressed with me than I am with myself. Part of me is still convinced that someday they’ll discover the Awful Truth, but until then… MWHAHAHAHA! World domination!

Anyway, thanks for the back-patting. I know that compared to many people I know, my problems amount to a hill of beans, and so I tend to downplay them to myself, and then when I write them all out like that it suddenly hits me than maybe one or two of them are worth being upset about.

And Kathy likes the salsa, so all is, I guess, not entirely lost.

I keep starting posts and erasing them because they’re all so catastrophically boring. So, bullet points:

• Re: Seasonal_Spuffy, torn between obligation to represent for ship, yo, and desire never to enter another ficathon again. Re: shiny other ficathons, ditto.
• Made salsa. Did not turn out nearly as well as last time. Think I used wrong kind of vinegar. And yet my thumbs are all stingy with jalapeno juice. Stingy thumbs + mediocre salsa = WOE.
• Massive changes coming at work - new database they’ve been begging for for years finally in production, departmental expansion featuring new quasi-managerial positions, me stressing out about whether or not I will qualify to apply for same, much less get them, much less succeed at them if I do get them. Much stressing over conversation I had with manager last quarterly evaluation, in which I blithely said I didn’t want to go into management - maybe reporting or something. However, quasi-managerial positions here, now, & paying more, putting possessors of same in line for Brighter & Better Things. Whereas nebulous non-managerial jobs in other departments not so much. Fingernails: I gnaw them.
• I owe Kathy a birthday cake and a present. Also WOE.
• Did not finish weeding the garden this weekend.
• Mom is waffling about coming to the wedding. I understand that travel is difficult for her, at her age and with her health problems, and if she’d just come out and say “I don’t feel well enough to go,” or “It would exhaust me and I wouldn’t enjoy it,” I would be sad, but I’d understand. But she keeps coming up with stuff like “I can’t leave the cats alone” or “It would be too difficult to get handicapped access at the smaller airport,” and it makes me crazy. The last time we talked she seemed to be leaning back towards going, but it kind of hurts that she’s willing to travel to Portland for a week by herself to see my sister and the grandkids, but trying to duck out of this.
• My sister’s on her last round of chemotherapy. Since her cancer had spread to so many lymph nodes, the chances of recurrence are high, so she’ll be going in for CT scans every six months for… pretty much the rest of her life, I guess. She still needs to consult with her surgeon on when or if they’re going to reverse her illiostomy. It’s good news as far as it goes, but she was saying the other day that the odds of her living to collect Social Security weren’t good. Not being depressed, just… factual.

Huh. Perhaps my salsa woe is displacement.

This is the revised and beta’d version of my lynnevitational fic. There have not been any major changes, but it’s been polished a fair bit, and some things have been clarified just a tad.

Every Silver Lining’s Got a Touch of Gray
By Barb C

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: R. A mean nasty verging on NC-17 R. An R with ATTITUDE, baby!
Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Synopsis: After Angel convinces Spike to go undercover in an attempt to find out where Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, the vampire CEO of Wolfram & Hart, has hidden the muo-ping containing his soul, Angel and Buffy must rescue Spike before it’s too late. But Buffy and Spike have unfinished business of their own…
Author’s notes: Written for the 2008 . This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” It’s set about eighteen years after POM, and is the third part of a three-part series of stories, the first two parts of which haven’t been written yet. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. But it just came out that way! Many thanks to betas slaymesftly. kehf, deborahc, and shipperx!

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So I was having this Very Serious Discussion with my betas about the sex scenes in ESLHATOG (revised version should be up tomorrow, btw) and somehow or other, this was the result…

INT. BARB’S BRAIN

SPIKE is lounging in bed, perusing the latest issue of WSC. BUFFY is dressed in comfy PJs and sitting at her desk, reading e-mail.

SPIKE: Sodding Czechs…sodding defense… bloody, sodding Portsmouth…

BUFFY: [with a frown] Look at this!

SPIKE: [absorbed in the footy] Wossat?

BUFFY: Just look!

[She turns her laptop so SPIKE can see the following piece of SPAM}

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A drabble in belated honor of JM’s birthday:

Looks Like Fun

by Barb C
Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: PG-13
Setting: Post-Gift AU
Pairing: B/S
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I’d just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: Happy birthday to you!
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as “A Raising in the Sun” et. al.

“But I didn’t mean to!” Connie wailed.

“What you meant doesn’t matter!” Buffy snapped. “Honey, think about - ” She glared at Spike, whose rapt gaze lacked something in the parental reprimand line. “Back me up here!”

Spike tore his eyes away from the flames. “No more playing with lighters, sweetness.”

Buffy handed over the baby with an eyeroll. “Hold Alex. I’ve got to call our insurance agent. Bill! Stop pestering the firemen!”

Connie sniffled, clinging to Spike’s leg. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Your birthday cake needed all its candles.”

“So it did.” Spike looked down and grinned. “Best birthday prezzie ever!“

We’ve been having more router problems (the fix turned out to be something really simple, which I should have thought of myself, and I’m ashamed to have called miertam up in a panic about it, but I did. I admit my weenieness.) so I haven’t been online at home much this week. Thus I’m even more behind than usual with comments, and I haven’t read my flist since Friday. Sorry! (she said, cringing) I’ve also realized that whenever I post from work, I’ve forgotten to post from my WordPress site, so I’m going to have to go back and do some housekeeping, and make sure everything matches up.

This weekend we got up bright and early Saturday morning and tamed the wilderness, i.e. mowed the front yard and hauled all the deadfall grapefruit out to the alley. Why, it almost looks like a civilized dwelling! In the next couple of weeks I need to get serious about cleaning the bermuda grass out of the garden, so we can plant fall flowers. We later went over to framefolly’s for yummy lasagna and a 10th Kingdom marathon, and today we did Mom’s grocery shopping and had her over for dinner.

And in between times, I worked like a mad thing trying to finish something for the lynnevitational, and I succeeded, sort of. In a manner of speaking. It’s finished in the sense of having a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s really rough, and I have an awful feeling that the ending dissolved into treacly goo when I was trying more for restrained ray of hope. I posted a link to the rough draft, but I’m not pretending it’s anything but a rough draft. I think I need to let it sit for a week or so and then go at it with a meat cleaver. But later. Just reaching ‘The End’ was exhausting enough for today.

I read a couple of the other lynnevitational stories, which are excellent as always - more will be posted over the next week. So if you don’t have the comm friended (and why don’t you?) do so now! There’s genres and pairings for all tastes, and you won’t find better BtVS/AtS fic out there anywhere.

Sleep now. Happy, happy sleep…

This is… um… about fifty percent of a post. Due to a lot of things, I have just barely finished this today, and haven’t had time to get it beta’d, or find out if it’s hopelessly confusing without the preceding stories. But I really wanted to make the deadline, and I wanted to do so with something that was at least technically finished.

So I’m posting a link to what amounts to a finished first draft. If you’d like to read it now, feel free; I don’t think it completely sucks, or I wouldn’t be posting it at all. But I do think it can be made considerably better. I’m still tinkering with it as we speak, so if you happen to refresh the page, don’t be surprised if the sentence you’re reading goes sideways. I will be posting a beta’d and most likely significantly revised version as soon as possible. I apologize most sincerely for the inconvenience, but I hope that those who are interested in the process of writing will, at least, find comparing the two versions a useful exercise.

Every Silver Lining’s Got a Touch of Gray
By Barb C

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: R. A mean nasty verging on NC-17 R. An R with ATTITUDE, baby!
Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Synopsis: After Angel convinces Spike to go undercover in an attempt to find out where Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, the vampire CEO of Wolfram & Hart, has hidden the muo-ping containing his soul, Angel and Buffy must rescue Spike before it’s too late. But Buffy and Spike have unfinished business of their own…
Author’s notes: Written for the 2008 . This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” It’s set about eighteen years after POM, and is the third part of a three-part series of stories, the first two parts of which haven’t been written yet. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. But it just came out that way!

Continue Reading »

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