in Life's name and for Life's sake

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I have written a sonnet about the difference between spring and autumn, and it is posted somewhere on here, and I love it. Part of me wants to post it as an answer to this but I'm in the process of revising it for my poetry class on Wednesday so I'll probably keep it to myself for now.

I love autumn -- it's my favorite season. It's the transition between summer and winter -- the difference between the extremes, the warmth of summer sun and the cold of winter wind, and the moment when the leaves begin to fall in the same caramel-honey-auburn color as the slanting light that pierces my perception of life at around 5:27pm once daylight savings time hits.

I feel autumn in hot chocolate and warm blankets, in snuggling closer to the people I love on cold nights, in the condensation that forms on the inside of the single-paned windows of my dorm room, in the biting cold of early mornings, in the nestling of myself into puffy jackets and hiding from the elements in the safeguarding arms of warm wood libraries and cozy cafes. I feel it in the visceral sense that the world is preparing itself to be remade.

Also, it must be said -- now, and for the past three years, autumn is inextricably linked to National Novel Writing Month, which I am now going to shamelessly plug. DO IT! DO IT NOW! October 1st the site should open for sign-ups again. Is anyone crazy and stupid and wonderful enough to write with me this year? I still don't know what story I'm going to write. I have a few plotlines in my head. Because I am procrastinating doing my homework, I will discuss them now!

#1: At the moment I'm really considering writing this modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice that I thought up for my sister at the end of last year. I wrote the first part of it to her on a series of postcards. Technically I'd have to start from scratch since you're not supposed to bring written work with you into November, but it might be worth it. In my modern P&P, the Bennets live in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska. On a farm. Jane goes away to college in New York -- at NYU to be precise, studying communications -- and Elizabeth wants nothing more than to follow her sister in getting the hell out of Nebraska. But a (probably fictional) bill passed by the US House of Reps decreases the subsidies provided to corn farmers right after Jane goes to college, and Elizabeth knows her father won't have the kind of money he needs to support her at an out-of-state school, plus she still has three younger sisters who need to go to college, so she does the selfless thing and decides to go to University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her plan is to save money so that she can go to grad school for journalism on the east coast. Of course she visits Jane in New York over the summer where she meets Darcy, and where Jane has met Bingley, and things progress from there...

#2: This is not nearly as detailed, but it's my attempt to answer a question that I've been thinking about for a while -- how do you write a fantasy story in which your main character has no magical powers at all? Meet Leia McAllister, 17-year-old Nordstrom employee (got to put that job training to use somehow!) who finds out, quite by accident, that her friend Jill is a wizard. And once she finds out, she's on the run from Earth's Wizarding Council, most of whom want her memory completely wiped. But, a mindwipe has to take place within a certain amount of time after the memory is made, otherwise there is a danger that the mindwipe will interfere with other more important memories and potentially impair intelligence. Of course some wizards on the Council wouldn't care, but there is a radical reformist movement battling it out with a traditional conservative movement and neither side can get the upper hand. And poor Leia gets stuck in the middle of this. (Also there are aliens who are wizards!)

#3: This is the anti-Twilight story. Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Boy is vampire. Girl is drug addict, has AIDS. Girl wants sex; no one wants Girl because Girl has AIDS. Boy is vampire and can't get blood diseases anymore. No one wants Boy because Boy wants to drink their blood. Girl doesn't care if Boy drinks her blood because she's going to die anyway, but would he sleep with her first? What starts out as a skewed relationship of convenience turns into something potentially meaningful just in time for Girl to die. The End. (Great antidote to Stephenie Meyer, yeah? I think of it as RENT meets Buffy.)

#4: There is one more, but I have forgotten it.

...so now I'm going to go and actually do homework. Radical idea, I know, but what can I say? I'm pretty awesome. :)

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FOR SURE werewolves. I never got what the deal was with vampires. This is perhaps because it required Rebecca to introduce me to Laurell K. Hamilton and Buffy, and because there are no really important vampires in Harry Potter.

Really when I say "werewolves," it is my way of saying "Remus Lupin." Because seriously -- he is my favorite adult character in the entire series and I am still in denial of his death (on good days I pretend that the entire seventh book never happened and JKR is still working on a new one somewhere that will be SO MUCH BETTER).

But also now I have to say werewolves because of my personal werewolf, Roman Leroux from the Beauty and the Beast retelling that has also turned sligtly into a Jane Eyre reworking of its own accord (in which Roman was just outed as a werewolf).

This is a scattered post, but might I also add -- werewolves are fuzzy. 'Nuff said.

(And since when is drinking blood so sexy anyway? Why have we turned vampires into sex icons? Why are millions of rabid teenage girls reading AND ENJOYING things like Twilight? Any answers to these questions are very welcome.)

Unrelated but pretty darn awesome thought -- the condition of being a werewolf may be a male analogue for female menstruation. Think about it for a second: controlled by the moon, causes changes in behavior that escalate characteristics one would generally associate with the sex, essentially unstoppable by the person involved... The moon has just always been such a feminine principle, all the way back to before everything (thought right now I'm thinking of Paradise Lost because Milton has this way of piggybacking on all my ideas). So what does that mean about female werewolves?