hot flushes and hot men

I have been having hot flushes at work today from all the work-related stress and redundancy threats and meetings with disappointingly unmilitant members of the local union branch and meetings with more militant colleagues elsewhere and meetings with totally supine bugger-me-up-the-bum-oh-management colleagues. I was having physical symptoms.

I have been inventing orig characters. This has been an extremely interesting and illuminating experience. What with 4 1/2 years of fanfic under my belt, I thought I had lost the knack or simply the interest in orig characters. But what I found was that it's not so different from fanfic character. I discovered that what gets me hot under the collar and swoony are not the canon characters but my canon characters, which is to say: fanon. I love My Orli in Perfect Day (the real Bloom leaves me so stone cold these days) and I love My Dudley in my HP opus (the canon one is vile!) and I love My Karl and My Dom and I love My Sheppard on a desert island (the canon one leaves me faily cool). The only people I love perhaps as much if not more in canon are the footballers.

So now I'm loving My Invented Character, and it's not so different. And there's no canon to hold me back! There's no fear of canon mavens swooping down and saying 'oh but Rodney wouldn't say this' and 'oh there's a stray Britishism' and whatnot. This is actually nice!! And if suddenly, half-way through the day, I get a bit sick of someone's hair colour or think, hm, wouldn't this guy look really great if he were, say, Chinese or Indian? Then with a swish of the mind, I can just do that!!

85 % of the characters I have invented are young men. This, too, is strikingly similar to fandom. And 70% of those want to have sex with each other. Also, not so very different at all.

Once I've invented characters, I'll have my canon and I can proceed to fanon it.

I am re-reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and all my abject love of the man is coming back. The first time I read Cloud Atlas I thought 'I can never ever read another book'; it was breathtaking and made my mind spin. Now I'm not reading it in order, but from the middle and here and there (those of you who know this novel will understand how one can do this) and godamn it is good. I am trying to read it to learn about how to write comedy, but I just end up floored and agog and delighted and forgetting style and technique because they are so bloody good that they don't obtrude. Here's a fantastic reaction shot:

Something sudden and horrible happens at a cocktail party. Next paragraph, a one-sentence paragraph:
Someone's drink poured onto the carpet.
It is brilliant. The pacing, the timing; this sentence gives you the pause needed to digest the event and it gives you a fabulous little detail of how everyone else is digesting this.
And you know how I've been doing weather posts? Well, here's how to do weather:
A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the Midlands.
Oh, and this:
The evening was lemon blue.
Genius. The lemon (yellow) plus the blue (evening) conjures up an acidy, bright, sharp, dark image, a wonderful lollipop of contradiction.