in Life's name and for Life's sake

From lazyclaire

Pick 15 of your favorite books or series. [Since I don't have all my books with me in one place, I only have 12.]
Post the first two to three sentences of each book.
Let everyone try to guess the titles and authors of your books. (comments screened)

( It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. )

The first five people to comment in this post get to request that I write a drabble/ficlet of any pairing/character of their choosing. In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their ability level.

Because, hey, I probably won't have much time to be fannish once I move in a week, and I might as well have some fun in the meantime!

For the curious, fandoms I will write include: Beauty and the Beast, Curseworkers (Black), Doctor Who (2005), Dresden Files (Butcher), Harry Potter (Rowling), Jane Eyre (Bronte), Northanger Abbey (Austen), Persuasion (Austen), Pride and Prejudice (Austen), Torchwood, Young Wizards (Duane).

Bolded fandoms are ones I'm most comfortable/fluent in, italicized are ones I've written before, but I will write anything on the list! Also, crossovers and AUs are most certainly on the table!

Or, if you're feeling inventive, give me a short prompt of any kind and I will write original fiction (!) about it. I'm comfortable writing anything contemporary, urban fantasy, paranormal/supernatural fiction, historical fiction/fantasy, and science fiction as long as my science doesn't have to be incredibly scientific.

So guys, even if you do not think of yourselves as writers, please go forth and prompt and I will prompt you in return and everything will be lovely and nothing will hurt.

ETA: Still two more slots left for people to prompt me if interested! You don't even really have to repost to your journal, if you don't want to, though of course it would be an added bonus.

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I'm not sure this is even a question. 

I had typed up a lovely and angst-ridden couple of paragraphs about London and the United Kingdom and how I miss them (inspired by a re-watch of Series Four of Doctor Who, which just culminated with "Journey's End," which will ALWAYS make me sob like a frightened child separated from her mum), but then LJ ate those, so I'll take it as a sign to stop my whinging, be pleased -- in fact, delighted -- with the world that spreads itself out before me, and shove all the "far away can bite me" angst back into that little tiny corner of my brain (or is it heart?) that it has colonized and will not return.

(But seriously. I should never watch "Journey's End." Ever.)

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It depends if by "world" you mean a particular planet, or a particular universe. If I'm choosing between different planets/planet-like spaces/planar domains and dimensions, the first one that comes to mind is Narnia -- to live in a land where animals talk and children rule as kings and queens. Ever since The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe I've been longing for a meeting with Aslan.

But if we're talking about comprehensive fictional universes, I have to say that I'd most want to visit our mirror or neighbor universe (or is it really our universe and I haven't caught on yet?) as portrayed in Diane Duane's Young Wizards books and associated stories. Not because it has wizards, or at least, not just because it has wizards. In fact, I have a feeling that if I did go there, I wouldn't be one of those people who gets offered a chance to take the Wizard's Oath and take up a role in the great fight against entropy alongside Life Itself (because though I'm almost a "grown-up," a part of me believes or wants to believe that she's just describing the world as it really is, but as I can't see it -- and if this world really is her world, then I would have been offered the Wizard's Oath by now if there were any chance of that ever happening, because the world always needs more wizards...). But for whatever reason, Duane answers the questions of metaphysical cosmology for her universe in a way that appeals to me. Possibly this is because I first began reading her books in a moment when I was asking these same kinds of questions of my real universe, and failing to develop adequate answers. Possibly it's just another sign of the human dependency upon answers to fight off the darkness. Still, if I could head out to any of the strange and wonderful fictional worlds out there, I'd most like to find myself in a New York suburb eating dinner with the Rodriguezes and the Callahans (and perhaps, if I'm lucky, some alien visitors).

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I feel like the progress of my life thus far is really a story of profoundly influential teachers -- both in school and in life. It's hard for me to pick just one, because ALL of them, from kindergarten on up, have had such an impact on my life that I don't know what I would be like without them. They're the ones who showed me what the world looked like, and allowed me to envision myself as a part of it -- and they still do it today.

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I have a French final in an hour, so of course I'm answering this question instead of studying.

At first I looked at it and thought it would be impossible to answer -- there are so many places I love -- but then I realized that if I have to narrow it down to a single specific place, one that sticks in my memory and one that I want to return to no matter where I am in the world or how awesome my life might be at any given moment, it's probably the table by the edge of the second floor seating area at Berkeley's Cafe Milano. Between write-ins and study sessions and essay writing I probably visited at least one day a week for all of last school year, and when I think about what I miss most about Berkeley after having been in London for so long, apart from the people and the intellectual energy, this cafe is what first comes to mind. I love that it has a second story, so I can sit and sip whatever I'm drinking and look down on the people entering, distracting myself with people-watching. I love that it has a skylight, so that I can feel like I'm right in the midst of the (wonderful) Berkeley weather, be it rain or sunshine. I love that, on sunny days, they open the roof and there is nothing between me and the sky. It's so close to campus but emphatically part of a community larger than just the campus. And it makes sandwiches on some of the world's best focaccia bread. All in all, life is complete.

There are other places in the world that are more immense, more fantastical, more awe-inspiring -- Santorini's black sand beaches, the British Museum, Doe Library -- but they're not really mine the way Cafe Milano is. When I get back to Berkeley, after a full year spent away, things will be hectic at first, but eventually I'll find time to make it back to that cafe and sit with my research on the second story and bask in the warmth of the California summer sun.

Comment and I'll give you a letter, then you have to list ten people/places/things you love that begin with that letter. Afterwards, post it on your journal and fill out letters of your own. alexandria_skye gave me 'D'.

-Darcy

-December

-Deep Wizardry

-Diane Duane

-Dumbledore's Army

-Dairine Callahan

-delight

-daydreams

-dancing

-downpours

I wanted to put Dublin on my list, but I haven't been there quite yet (Saturday!!!).

Day one • a song
Day two • a picture
Day three • a book
Day four • a site
Day five • a youtube clip
Day six • a quote
Day seven • whatever tickles your fancy

All the websites that I visit on a regular basis are on my links toolbar. Most of them fall under communications/social networking (e-mail, facebook, LJ, etc.). But then some of them fall under English geekery. And perhaps the best of those is the following:

The Oxford English Dictionary

I'm spoiled rotten because every university I've been a part of (so basically Berkeley and Queen Mary) has paid for access for their students. This means that at any given moment I can look up any word that strikes my fancy and figure out exactly where it came from, how its meaning has changed, and what that means for the way I use it now. I've been known to get lost on www.oed.com just clicking through links to related words. I once spent an afternoon looking up the etymology of every swear/curse I could think of (the entry for "fuck" is rather impressive). You know you're an English geek when you don't just use the OED for scholarly research...

The downside is, if you're not affiliated with a university and want to share in the joy that is the definitive record of the English language, you've got to pay. But, as I intend to be affiliated with some university or another for the rest of my life, this doesn't seem like such a large hindrance.

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Well, this corresponds nicely with the following meme I was going to steal from gienahclarette. The rules are:

Day one • a song
Day two • a picture
Day three • a book
Day four • a site
Day five • a youtube clip
Day six • a quote
Day seven • whatever tickles your fancy

I'm not the kind of person who tends to follow individual artists; usually I just stumble across individual songs that set my mind on fire a little. I've only ever been to concerts for Jason Mraz and Vienna Teng, and I do like them both very much...but then there are the musicals. And I feel bad picking a single song out of context -- I feel like knowing the full ten helps. (Really you'd need to see the contents of my entire iPod to figure this out; I'm leaving out so many great songs from musicals and Disney movies that I love and adore, just to make sure all the right ones get in!) So, here goes!

10. "You Make My Dreams" by Hall & Oates
--I first fell in love with this song thanks to the movie (500) Days of Summer. It's just an upbeat little ditty that always makes me want to sing (and dance) along whenever it's played. Over the summer it was the number one song on my workout playlist; I would start my runs every morning to the bouncy, upbeat beginning chords and smile because everything was right with the world.

9. "I Can Go the Distance" from Hercules
--The thing about this song is that I have often dreamed of a far-off place where a hero's welcome will be waiting for me. And on some days, when that welcome seems further off than others, I can listen to this song and take hope. And it also has the nagging ability to remind me that there are different kinds of welcome -- the shift in the final verse from finding the hero's welcome in a crowd of people who are impressed by fame and fortune to finding it in the arms of someone who loves you for who you are, hero or not, to that person you are the world.

8. "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey
--Although the first Journey song that I ever listened to was "Running Alone" (because Nita listens to it in High Wizardry and I wanted to know what it was about it that made it a good enough song for Diane Duane to actually include in her novel), "Don't Stop Believing" (for all its popularity) strikes a stronger chord in me. It's about anguish and despair and making meaning out of the nothingness, whether there is any intrinsic meaning or not. There are days when I think about taking the midnight train "going anywhere," and on these days this song seems to speak even more loudly to me.

7. "Come on Get Higher" by Matt Nathanson
--When I first heard this song I didn't like it that much because everyone else liked it. Then someone had it as the leading track in a fanmix for a specific Young Wizards pairing (expect to see much more of Diane Duane's Young Wizards in this seven-day meme) and listening it in that context made me realize how beautiful it is. "Everything works in your arms"? So perfect. So true. It's a song for many moods, and I never feel like I can't listen to it.

6. "City Hall" by Vienna Teng
--I couldn't believe this song the first time I heard it. It tackles the issue of gay marriage in a singular, individual manner that makes you listen: it's not general, it's specific. Again, the piano is beautiful, understated, with this great cheeriness to it, of the smile-in-the-face-of-darkness variety, that seems so appropriate given the circumstances. "You've never seen a sight so fine as the love that's gonna shine at City Hall," and "If they take it away again some day, this beautiful thing won't change."

5. "Vienna" by Billy Joel
--Sometime during junior year of high school, when everything seemed to be all too much, Stephanie Johnson told me that I needed to listen to this song, and I'm still indebted to her for the suggestion. From its first command to "slow down, you crazy child" to the sad but true injunction to "dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true," this song provides a good breather to the person I am, a reminder that I "can't be everything [I] want to be before [my] time, although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight." It tells me that I need to slow down, to put things in perspective, but it also tells me that "only fools are satisfied," that the dreaming and the inability of ever achieving everything that I want to will hurt but will in the end be part of who I am.

4. "All That's Known" from Spring Awakening
--There are a lot of blockbuster songs in this musical, but this is the one that always gets me. Melchior's questing at the boundaries of the knowledge allowed to him by traditional institutions is something I've felt before: that, and the desire "to know the world's true yearning -- the hunger that a child feels for everything they're shown" -- to feel the world in such an immediate and unfiltered way.

3. "Beauty and the Beast" from Beauty and the Beast
--"Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong" -- I honestly think that this song charts the course of all of the great romances that I have come to know and love. And it's part of the best Disney movie in all existence, based on the best fairytale in all existence, etc. I love Angela Lansbury but I don't like the version she sings; I prefer the duet between Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson. Just the opening chords are enough to give me that feeling of warm-and-fuzzy happy.

2. "Harbor" by Vienna Teng
--I love Vienna Teng as a songwriter because she has lines like this: "Fear is the brightest of signs -- the shape of the boundary we leave behind." And she backs them up with gorgeous and emphatic piano. In this song it becomes dramatic, swelling, and yet still so personal. She takes a common metaphor -- the loved one as a safe harbor (for example, see "Wild Nights! Wild Nights!" by Emily Dickinson) -- and turns it into something unique and beautiful.

1."Brave Enough for Love" from Jane Eyre the Musical
(in a great irony, I can't listen to this track recording because I am in the UK and the service is US only -- but that means you all can listen!)
--Of course my love for Jane Eyre as a book contributes to my love of this song in the musical. Everything from the little interchanges between Jane and Rochester, taken almost verbatim from the book (R: "Am I hideous?" J: "Very, sir. (pause) You always were, you know."), to the final climactic sweep of the ending chorus, gives me hot and cold chills. And there's this idea that love is something that requires bravery -- that living in tandem with another life is difficult, a struggle -- and yet the most worthwhile struggle that mankind can engage in. The music is absolutely beautiful and backs this up wonderfully.

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Happiness -- the kind that overwhelms the whole body and spreads to others, because if it's not contagious, it doesn't count;

Empathy -- fellow-feeling, to understand the pain and joy of another and through that understanding to destroy true "other"-ness;

Ingenuity -- a searching mind that transforms the lives of others by seeing an old world through new eyes;

Passion -- the spark that lights the fire and ignites a burning;

Determination -- without which desires would quickly burn away;

Faith -- the candle lit by a blind man against the darkness;

Love.