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I know it’s all down to what you’re used to, but 33C degrees is pleasant summer’s day, not a heatwave. lol This is an Australian take on the ‘heatwave’.

So I recently read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, and I noticed that although the main character is a bard (among other things), there aren’t any song lyrics in the book. The author sometimes describes what the songs are about, but we never see the actual words. That got me thinking: Is it a good idea or a bad idea to write song lyrics for a fic? Unless it’s a “sung to the tune” of kind of song,* the reader won’t know how the melody goes. But maybe readers will make up their own; I don’t know. Thoughts? *Or, in the case of the Hogwarts school song, a “pick any tune you want” song

You are all very welcome to take some of the rain… I’ll trade you, as many rainy days as you all want, for a week here and a week there, and a frigging warm autumn! Honestly, we are not famous for our fabulous long balmy summer days up here (other than, you know the sun never fucking going the fuck down, so in that sense, the summer days are the longest) seeing as how 34°C (I thinkz) is the highest temperature on record since we began recording, and that was hit somewhere up in buttfucknowhere-mountains. But for fuck’s sake, summer weather is not supposed to be WET… and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word. It’s either raining or just wet… too light to be rain, but too dense to be fog, so just fucking wet… And I swear, if the rain follows me to NYC, I’m sacrificing a baby goat or something… ::exits stage left, and grabs the wine on the way out::

Prose and songwriting/poetry are differing skillsets. If you’ve got both, go for it. if you haven’t got both, go for it anyway with enthusiasm because fuck it, writing’s about having fun. I’ve read a few books with chunks of original lyrics in and it’s been mostly fine – one author had comic songs at the start of every chapter, though that was a funny book.

Heh, I was going for the old fashioned pulling out the soul thing through sex. But that works too I suppose.

Similar to BW, I think celebrity because it’s still, ultimately, about the celebrity – just nested a level down – I figure the robot is effectively a fan work of the celebrity within the story universe, and then the story is about this celebrity fan work. I’d say it would be the same with fiction, if you had an eccentric billionaire genius comics fan create a Life Model Decoy of Nick Fury to fondle, you’d put it on Marvel rather than originals. Robots definitely seem like a lot less hassle for the kidnapper/rapist of leisure tbh, unless they have the ability to grow and learn and go all SkyNet and then, suddenly, eccentric billionaire wakes up to find his harem has broken their programming, taken control of his security systems, and want to play 3D Monster Maze with him. Would be one outcome. You could definitely have a lot of fun with the concept I’m sure. Wind up all your readers with an april fools update with “My god! They were robots all along! And so was I!” Or maybe not Hey, Spike tried the “robot version to fuck” with Buffybot! [off topic] And from that, and it being Mal’s topic. I remembered the memory of a story I read a long time ago of a Buffy/Firefly crossover with BuffyBot being found ad reactivated in the far future by Jayne. It was short but funny and didn’t linger on how the fuck Jayne would manage it. Shit, I hope I reviewed.[/off topic]

One of the things that drives me crazy is seeing a Master/slave relationship portrayed as Dominant/submissive. The two relationships are NOT interchangeable, at all. I'm going to post a link to a site that has probably one of the best explanations of the two terms, and I urge anyone who wants to write a real D/s relationship to read this. A Slave is Not a Submissive The author uses rather silly gender neutral pronouns, granted, but the definitions are superb.

Just said my goodbyes to three specialists because they’ve figured out whatever I have is not in their wheelhouses… They’re still not sure exactly what it is, but they’re pretty sure it’s in infectious disease territory now, so yay! Less trips to the big city hopefully! And by next week I should actually be receiving some treatment. Which will be nice. Been going downhill since March, and nobody wanted to treat me before they knew what they were dealing with.

I don’t mind dry heat. Humidity gets to me faster, to be honest, and a humid 28C will do me in long before a dry 33C. I don’t actually care for rain, unless I can remain indoors, or watch it from the porch. If snow didn’t occur in such freaking cold temperatures, I’d like it, but you know. I don’t do well below freezing.

Screw the heat, a good series of long rain showers brightens my mood.

I will admit most songfics and even ones that allude to a song in detail usually fail- because the song detracts from the characters and mood of the story, almost without exception. Stories come to a screeching halt even more if the song is out of context for the fiction, like popsong and vaguely medieval fantasy that doesn’t have any jet planes… I avoid songfics also because the song also rarely enhances the story unless you already know it, and the lyrics alone don’t cover the mood. Because of that I resist reading or writing songfics. I included a marching song/prayer in one story and found it incredibly hard to write. The artistic payoff for the extra erroft is not worth it. I really resent a writer’s demand that I track down and listen to an unfamiliar song to understand the chapter. I’;m not in the same emotional space when the writer came to love the song. And when I have, the music didn’t move me so it ends up a negative experience. No win scenario.

I woke up this morning with what I think is a very intriguing question for the awesome group of readers and writers here at AFF. So here goes: Recently TV shows like HBO’s Westworld, and video games such as Bethesda’s Fallout have been exploring themes such as AI (artificial intelligence) and synthetic robots that are fully capable of emulating human behavior and appearance. This morning, I had the thought what if the protagonist from my story, Billion Dollar Harem, an eccentric billionaire, was also a genius with advanced degrees in programming and robotics. He then used his brilliance to instead of kidnapping celebrities used it to build a synthetic robot harem with androids who were designed to look like and were programmed to believe they were celebrities. So, instead of capturing and imprisoning someone like Emma Watson, he built a robot who was identical in appearance to her and who believed she was her. This would allow for vast differences in personality and mannerisms than the actual celebrity. But also, it would allow for some separation from the problem of dealing with actual celebrities. I imagine the story could have fun little problems where the celebrity android’s AI acts up causing them to behave in odd and unexpected ways and the protagonist’s sometimes rough handling of them would require him to occasionally replace pieces of their hardware. Thus the story could focus just as much on them being androids as it does on them being recreations of celebrities. While I think a story like this could raise some interesting questions, my biggest question is in what archive would a story with these parameters be placed? On the one hand, it features an original character and is set in the real world as opposed to a fictional one. On the other, it does feature “celebrities,” albeit robot ones designed to appear real. So? Original or Celebrity? Discuss.

I know. I just couldn’t resist turning it into a pun. Hahaha~

Well we all have our little weaknesses. I love elves (thanks Warhammer for that...), and kind of wish I knew it.

Androids, being constructs and not living beings, don’t require an age tag per se. However, the AFF basic rules forbidding any portrayal of a real person under the age of 18 still apply, so no android of a celebrity who’s under 18 at present is allowed.

I’ve seen it done before. Tolkien did it, and so did Brian Jacques in his Redwall series. I mean, it does let you get a bit more creative and potentially show a bit more of the world. In my personal opinion I always felt it slowed down the story too much. I got pulled out too much to try and figure out what the melody was, and to basically hear a story in the story I was reading. And being a good writer of narrative doesn’t make one a good song writer.

Can do! Thank you for the interest. I keep making little changes to it and then changing again. Come the end of the week I’ll just say fuck it and stick it up anyway

It’s a very interesting spin on the notion of celebrity, and what that encompasses. Is it the actual person, or the persona we’ve assigned to them which is famous? Speaking as a moderator, I would still ask that the story be placed in the Celebrity subdomain, simply because the androids will have the appearance and names of the actual celebrity. That’s the entire point of the android, after all—to replace the actual person with something which can be owned and manipulated without fear of arrest for unlawful imprisonment, assault, et cetera. If the android resembled my neighbor, an attractive young woman of no celebrity or notoriety, there would not be the same level of interest from the eccentric billionaire, I suspect. His attraction is to the actual celebrity, and he’s found a work-around to let him have his cake and eat it, too. As a reader, and as a writer. it’s a fun concept because it does explore what we mean by fame, and what it is we expect from those we have chosen to make famous. I wonder if at some point his interest would expand to those we deem notorious—famous for all the wrong reasons. That would be as fascinating, really.

10k!! 10,000 dragon prints to Jefferey... wow.