Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in AngiePen's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Thursday, February 4th, 2010
8:56 am	Legolas Check out this gorgeous portrait of Legolas by Colleen Doran, one of my favorite artists. It's taken from a scene in the book which isn't in the movie, but the portrait is clearly based on Orlando's Legolas. Lovely. :) Angie (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
12:18 pm	Mostly Away The packers are coming tomorrow, so for some unspecified while my presence online is going to be kind of spotty-ish -- moreso than it's been recently. I'm way behind on my Flist, and that's unfortunately not going to change in the near future. As soon as things settle down a bit, I'll go as far back as my Flist will let me, which is two weeks in my experience, and catch up from there. Things have been fairly crazy lately, though, and it's all coming to a head about twenty hours from now. I have more sorting, stashing and tossing to do; everything has to be ready for strangers to start grabbing and boxing by 8am tomorrow, and I probably won't get much sleep. We're moving into a hotel tomorrow night, and the main computers will be packed up well before then. I'm just hoping we don't lose too much between here and Seattle. :/ We'll be in a hotel for eight or nine days (during the packing and moving out of our stuff, then supervising a good cleaning [flamethrower, firehose, backhoe] and whatever last-minute repairs need doing), then flying up to Seattle and moving into temporary quarters, still not quite settled where. It all depends on how the deals go -- the guy who wants to buy our condo has been dragging his feet for the last week or more, and we're counting on that for a down payment on the townhouse. If that ends up falling through for some reason, we'll have to scramble for a quick refinance (which was our original plan before this buyer popped out of the woodwork) to get our down payment; it won't be enough for a full twenty percent, which will impact our interest rate and monthly payment, plus the time it takes will cause us to incur a substantial penalty ($85/day) for failing to close on the townhouse by the deadline. I'm really hoping our buyer down here gets his act together RSN. :/ If it all comes together, we could end up staying at a hotel in Seattle for as little as a week or two. If it all goes pear-shaped and we have to go back to house-hunting from scratch, we could end up in an apartment for two months, then moving to a smaller apartment when our per-diem runs out. More likely it'll be somewhere in the middle. Oh, then at the end, moving again to wherever we end up for the next few years, hopefully the townhouse we made an offer on. [crossed fingers] Most of our stuff (everything the packers will be packing tomorrow and Thursday) will be in storage until we're in permanent housing, so we get to live out of suitcases until that happens, joy. I'm just looking forward to all this being over. You ever wish you could go to sleep and wake up a month or two later...? [wry smile] Anyway, later all. [wave] Keep the internets warm for me. :) Angie (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
7:23 pm	Rec: Second Time Around azewewish wrote me this great fic for slashababy called Second Time Around, with Karl and Lawrence. Lawrence doesn't get anywhere near enough face-time in the fandom, and it's great to see him. :D This is clearly just the beginning and I think everyone should read it, comment, and encourage [cough] Azewewish to write more.... ====== Title: Second Time Around Author: Azewewish Pairing: Karl Urban/Lawrence Makoare Rating: PG-13 Summary: Lawrence always drove Karl crazy, but that was part of his charm. Disclaimer: This is a non-profit, non-commercial work of fiction using the names and likenesses of real individuals. This fictional story is not intended to imply that the events herein actually occurred, or that the attitudes or behaviors described are engaged in or condoned by the real persons whose names are used without permission. The nicest part about having a rare day off while everyone else was working was that Karl could go to his usual pub for dinner at a decent hour and not have to worry about being interrupted by either his co-stars wanting to join him or the WETA crew dropping by for a raucous pint or three. Karl loved his friends, absolutely, and loved the close bond of brotherhood they'd all forged, but sometimes it was just nice to have some time to himself. "Thought I'd find you here." Or maybe not. Karl jerked his head up from his plate with a confused frown. Lawrence was standing next to his table, casually dressed in his usual black jeans and black t-shirt, hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, sunglasses on top of his head. He should have known that Lawrence would have found him, no matter where he was. Man had a sixth sense about Karl's whereabouts. It was a little uncanny. And sort of odd. "So you did." Read more.... (Comment on this)
Friday, January 8th, 2010
4:26 am	2009 Fiction Round-Up Looks like this is going to be another short one, although with better reason than last year. My actual posted/published totals are fairly sucky again this year, but this time it's because I spent a huge chunk of the year working on A Hidden Magic. That wrapped up at about 72,300 words, compared with about 33,000 for version 1.0. That's a lot of writing on one story, even ignoring all the dinking and editing and rewriting, which-all was the reason why it took so freaking long and cost me so much sweat and aggravation. [thwaps the boys for being uncooperative] That won't come out till later this year, though (I still don't know exactly when) so it doesn't count on the 2009 totals. :( This coming year should be a doozy, though. :D ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
2:09 am	Fic: Rugbytackle The authors are up at slashababy, so I can post this here now. :) Title: Rugbytackle Author: AngiePen Fandom: Celebrity RPS Pairing: Viggo/Sean Rating: NC-17 Request: "VigBean is my main love ... Angst that doesn't stand in the way of a happy ending is fine, but not required, as I'd be just as happy with a more upbeat story; informal BDSM is listed among my kinks (not so interested in rigid 24/7 D/s); and when it comes to VigBean I'm most fond of established relationship fic (vs. the more popular "first time" fic). I'm not too big on schmoop, though, so... I tend to shy away from fic in which the characters call each other "Baby" and the like; affection and love is wonderful, as long as it doesn't get too sticky-sweet." Summary: To Viggo, it was just having some fun for old time's sake, but the result wasn't at all what he'd intended. Any chance a few braincells will've been jarred loose? Disclaimer: I don't own anyone you recognize. I know nothing about their social lives or sexual activities, more's the pity. This is fiction, period. It is done as a labor of love and I make no money from it. Notes: AU in that Sean isn't married. Written for caras_galadhon for the 2009 slashababy fest. It'd seemed like a good idea at the time. How many disasters started out that way? Sean'd insisted on renting a car at the airport, saying he didn't fancy braving the ruts of rural Idaho in that rattletrap pile o'shite Viggo called a truck, which had made Viggo cackle at him over the phone. They'd gone back and forth with the usual round of insults before hanging up, but the idea'd popped into Viggo's head as soon as he thought of Sean driving up by himself and he'd laughed again after they got off the phone. ( Read more... ) (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
12:11 pm	My Skeevy Race Issues... ...let me show you them. [sigh] So I'm up visiting my mom and I'm reading her books. Right now I'm in the middle of Christine Warren's Wolf at the Door, part of a paranormal series about shifters. Now, most of the shifters are the usual type one finds in paranormal romances -- the girl is an American Foxwoman, which means she can shift back and forth from a fox at will, and the guy is an Irish werewolf, who can shift back and forth from a wolf unless the moon is full, in which case he has to be a wolf. Okay, fine. Then the girl gets this summons from a vampire who's clearly one of the bad guys, and she meets a couple of new people. ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
10:51 pm	Upgrade Discount? So LJ has this holiday thing going on where people with paid or permanent accounts can send $10 discount coupons to people with basic or plus accounts who want to upgrade to a year's worth of paid account. This usually costs $19.95, so with a coupon it's only $9.95. Does anyone want one? I have ten of these things to give away, so I'll send a coupon to the first ten people who comment to ask. Please mention which journal you want upgraded, if it's not the one you're commenting with, so I can send it direct. In other news, I'm flying back up to Reno to spend a little over a week with my mom for Christmas, yay. One funny thing -- about ten or twelve years ago, we were at Mom's for Christmas and a family friend named Linda was supposed to come over. So I got her a couple of glass candle holders as a gift; they were popular at the time, with a narrow well in the middle you filled with water and then floated a taper in, the idea being that as it burned down, it'd get lighter and float higher in the water, keeping the flame at about the same level. I thought they were pretty, so anyway. Well, Linda didn't come after all, so I had these two candles in boxes like twenty inches long by six square, which I took home. I figured I'd use them or something, so when I got home I unwrapped them and stuck them on top of a bookcase. We're not really into decorative stuff, though, so I never did use them, and they've been sitting there ever since, collecting dust on their boxes. We've been trying to figure out what to do with them recently, with the move coming up and all. Then we got a note from Mom a couple of days ago, saying that her friend Linda's going to be coming up for Christmas. :D Hey, I've got a present for her already! LOL! Too bad I unwrapped them back then.... Angie (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
5:28 am	Moving Stuff We're home now and mostly recovered, I think. Of course, I'm getting back on a plane on Sunday to go up to my mom's for Christmas, and I have to admit the timing of all this could've been better. We put in an offer on a condo, and the counter-offer was decent. Now it's a matter of working out all financing details; we have enough money, but apparently it's not distributed in the right pots, so the husband is working on getting it shuffled around into a configuration the banks will approve of. We'll see if that comes through. If not, we're still not really behind; we weren't actually expecting to find anything on this trip; it was more to scout neighborhoods and such. I'm not jumping up and down about the condo itself, although it's not a bad place at all. It's only a little bigger than what we have now, and I was hoping for something significantly larger. That six-bedroom house I mentioned in the previous post (four of the bedrooms plus one bathroom were part of a basement remodel, but it was done very nicely) would've been great, assuming it could've passed a home inspection. That's the problem with remodels, of course; the house itself was about fifty years old, so who knows what was behind the drywall. It was on almost half an acre, which was also very cool. Unfortunately the nearest store of any kind was half a mile away, and that was just one grocery; other necessities were farther. Good (potentially) house, less than great location for folks who don't drive. :/ The condo is new, so we don't have to worry about booby traps, and our real estate guy managed to rustle up a home inspector the very next day. He found that the place is in good shape, with just a few little things which would be easy to fix. The big selling point, though, was the location -- it's right across the street from the back of a shopping center with a grocery store, a Barnes and Noble, a Target, a post office, a bunch of low- to mid-level restaurants, plus some other stuff, AND it was near two bus lines which would take Jim downtown to work within half an hour or less. There's really nothing more we could ask of the location, and I'm willing to stay packed into something that's really too small to be comfortable in for the next few years, until Jim retires. After that, we can find a cheaper area all together and get a bigger place with a nice yard (the condo has a little bit of fenced yard, just enough for a smallish dog, which will satisfy me for now) and a good location without having to scrape change out from under the seat cushions to pay for it. Aside from the location, which is fantastic, it's not what I was hoping. I can deal with the rest, though, and we can get something which suits us better in a few years, when Jim's retired and we're not locked into a particular location because of his work. I have to admit, though, that having a big bookstore a two minute walk away would be very nice. Dangerous, but very nice. :) Angie (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
2:34 pm	Seattle Ho! I've been mostly away from the internets for a while, so I thought I'd post an update. The spousal unit and I are up in Seattle, house-hunting. He's changing jobs and due to report for work up here in mid-January, so we're trying to figure out where we're going to live. It's been up and down so far. First, it's been freaking cold up here all week. :/ They've been having record lows for the last few days, imported from the Arctic especially for us, I'm sure. I still need to buy a coat one of these days. Actually, there are times when I'd like to pile about half the hotel room furniture in the middle of the floor and start a bonfire, but that's probably not practical. [cough] But it's heating back up! It's actually supposed to be above freezing here at some point today -- might actually be above freezing now, I'm not sure. But wow, thirty-four degrees -- heat wave! [eyeroll/shiver] ( Read more... ) (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
7:24 pm	Accepted! I just got an e-mail from Shawn, one of the owners of Torquere, saying she read A Hidden Magic and they want to publish it! :D They said they weren't going to be in the office until Monday because of the holiday, but it looks like they're still working. Not exactly shocking with a small business; I thought it might happen quickly, but I didn't want to really hope, you know? Anyway, this is awesome. [beam] If you want me, I'll just be wandering around six inches off the floor somewhere.... :D Angie (37 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
4:50 am	No Pledge of Allegiance ...until there actually is liberty and justice for all. That's what ten-year-old Will Phillips says, and he's acting on it, declining to stand for the Pledge at school because his family has gay friends who aren't being treated equally under the law -- who are being deprived of the right to marry, or to adopt children. Predictably, Will is being harassed for his stance, first by a substitute teacher and (of course) by some of the more nasty and ignorant students at his school. (Although to be fair, this is only elementary school and I'd bet cookies that the students who are taunting and harassing him are just reflecting the views and behavior of their parents, so the shame is on them for not setting a better example.) Will's parents support him, though, and got the school administration to admit that he's not required to stand for the Pledge, that he does have the right to sit through it. And what about the substitute teacher who tried to bully him into participating, even threatening to get his mother and grandmother (whom she knew, although obviously not very well) on his case? Since he hadn't broken any rules in refusing to stand for the Pledge, Will's mother asked when they could expect an apology from that teacher. Well, the principal didn't see that as "necessary." Of course not. [eyeroll] Will has an excellent sense of right and wrong, though, and I applaud his stand, and also his parents for supporting him in doing what's right. Read more about Will and the Pledge incident in this Arkansas Times article, and more commentary by John Brummett, a columnist with the Arkansas News. If nothing else, Mr. Brummett's suggested alternate Pledge is entertaining, and unfortunately apt. Thanks to Indigene on The Phade for the original link. Angie (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
1:12 pm	Hanging With Wolves Jim and I spent yesterday (Sunday) at Wolf Mountain Sanctuary, in southern California in Lucerne Valley. Well, at the sanctuary, plus driving up and back with some friends; I think we spent at least half the day in the car. It was worth it, though. Wolf Mountain is smaller than I was expecting, but Tonya, the woman who owns the place, said that they're working on moving to a larger property. They have several packs which have to be kept isolated from one another -- I got the impression that they might fight if they were kept together, although I might be mistaken -- so while they have several larger enclosures with room for the wolves to trot around and play and bury things, bigger would be better. ( Read more, with pics ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 16th, 2009
4:28 am	Is YOUR Senator Pro-Gang-Rape? Yeah, that's pretty inflamatory. I'm feeling pretty damn inflamed right now, so I think that's appropriate. In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, a twenty-year-old employee of KBR -- at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, and hey look, they're hiring -- was working in Iraq. Her co-workers drugged her, gang-raped her, abused her so badly her breasts were disfigured permanently, then locked her in a shipping container for twenty-four hours without food or water. She was told by her employer that if she left Iraq to get medical attention, she'd be fired. According to an ABC News post: Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas. "I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas. "We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer. Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container. Also: ( Read more... ) (24 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
4:25 pm	Another Plagiarist My apologies if this is already all over the place; I'm behind on this Flist. I had to post about this, though. gwendolynflight, over in the Merlin fandom, decided that she didn't want to do the work to learn to write and refine her technique and develop her own style. She wanted hugs and pats and e-cookies for her wonderful writing right now. So instead of writing a novel of her own, she grabbed a copy of Jordan Castillo Price's (jordan_c_price) first PsyCops book, Among the Living, did a bit of editing to change the names and the setting and such, and posted it to her journal as a Merlin fanfic. And of course, she got a lot of applause and e-cookies for it, because it's a very good story. (Jordan isn't a particular friend of mine, I don't even have her journal friended, but we both publish with Torquere Press and I have Among the Living -- it's a good read.) Of course someone figured out what was going on -- 'cause there are fanfic readers who also read original m/m books, who knew?! -- and after some incredibly lame excuse-making, the plagiarist took the story down. But check out this screencap and read through the comments. :/ I love the part where gwendolynflight assures a commenter that "it is completely and fully beta'd." Umm, right, because the real writer polished it, then sent it to a publisher where a line editor and a proofreader went over it. [eyeroll] And then lower down where she actually admits that the story is a "fusion" with Price's PsyCops series. o_O This is where I get the idea that she's actually just that stupid, rather than a bold-faced thief. Not that being a moron is an excuse, but you know, it's something different to smack her for. Then a few comments later where she's talking to a reader about how dark the story is, and mentions that Book Two is particularly dark, and she's glad that isn't turning the reader off. So she fully intended to go on doing this, through the whole series? Once she'd ripped off all the available novels, since she seems to think she's doing absolutely nothing wrong, I wonder whether she'd have had the balls to, like, write to Jordan and nudge her about hurrying up on the next installment. :P Finally, about 2/3 of the way down, throwawayreview calls it what it is and clues poor gwendolynflight that this isn't a "fusion," it's not fanfic, it's plagiarism. And of course Ms. Gwen has all sorts of excuses, because plagiarism is "a social concept" and not absolute. And later on she says that "plagiarism isn't an inherent moral wrong - it's an issue firmly bound up in economic and patriarchal issues." Umm, right. It's a weapon of the Patriarchy. So her stealing the actual words of another woman writer and posting them as her own and accepting praise and credit for writing the words another woman actually wrote, is actually Ms. Gwen sticking it to the Patriarchy. Wow, good to know. [eyeroll] Note that Jordan has no problem with fanfic. She said, in her reaction to this situation: ( Read more... ) (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
3:20 am	Bullies Get Butts Kicked By Cross-Dressers Gacked from a few places around the net. :D A couple of homophobic thugs in Swansea, Wales, attacked two men who were walking down the street in short skirts and high heels. The two cross-dressers turned around and wiped the sidewalk with the jerks. It turns out the cross-dressers were a couple of cage fighters -- talk about picking a fight with the wrong guys! LOL! Someone named CJ in comments to the above linked article suggested "Give these 2 badges and cuffs and get them out on the streets everynight dressed that way to attract idiots who only attack people (seemingly) weaker than themselves." I'd chip in for that, seriously. [evil snicker] Angie (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 11th, 2009
2:20 pm	Irony, Thy Name Is Government Also incompetence, but it's the irony I'm mainly appreciating here. This morning at around ten, the Coast Guard carried out some exercises on the Potomac near the bridge where President Obama's motorcade passed by on his way to a 9-11 memorial event. Unfortunately they didn't think to, like, maybe notify any other agencies of what they were doing, so the exercise resulted in CNN reporting ten rounds fired at a suspicious vessel, and departures from the nearby Reagan International Airport being held for almost half an hour while the FBI scrambled to respond to the hostile incident. Oops. Good to know our tax dollars are being used wisely in these harsh economic times, to say nothing of the government's great respect for the time, money and feelings of its citizens (especially on this day -- come on, people!) who get caught up in this sort of fiasco, whether they were near the bridge and worried that they were going to be killed, or were stuck at the airport being made late for meetings, missing connections, etc. The gold standard of irony is toward the end of the article, though, where it says: The Coast Guard is part of the Homeland Security Department, which was created in response to the 9/11 attacks. The massive reorganization was designed to promote sharing of information within the department and among other law enforcement agencies. Umm, yeah. I think they need to work on that. Angie (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 15th, 2009
12:48 am	Making Amends icarusancalion has posted an explanation/apology/amends for something she did, attacking and slandering a Buddhist temple and its Lama over a period of years because she couldn't face her own responsibility for her failures as a nun and a Buddhist. Her hateful and lying words from the past have been used by others to hurt this temple and her old teacher, and she hopes that her confession and explanation will rise high enough in Google rankings that when people go looking for information on the subject, they'll find her post to mitigate the lies she helped spread, which are also still out there, propped up by others with similar issues. Aside from this being a pretty awesome melding of ancient tradition and 21st century technology, I think this is a worthy cause and then some, so I'm linking in all my personal fora. I encourage everyone to read this (it's not that long) and if you agree that it's a worthy cause, to link as well. Thank you. Angie (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
7:31 pm	Trying to Read a Fic I just saw an interesting looking fic that's almost twenty chapters in. There's no summary [sigh] but the title is suggestive of a trope I find intriguing, so I clicked through anyway. Chapter Almost-Twenty. No links. No tags. No nothing. The only way to find all the pieces would be to go on an Easter egg hunt through the journals where it's posted. I won't do that even if it's just someone's personal journal, but just to ice the cake, this person is posting directly to the (very busy) fic communities, so there'd be even more stuff to search through than there would be in a personal journal. Umm, no. Sorry. I've said before (and various other places in comments) that if a writer can't be bothered to make it easy for me to read a story -- all the way through, from the beginning, even if I'm not there as they post each chapter -- then I can't be bothered to click and search and hunt around to find all the pieces so I can actually read it. I don't care who the characters are or how intriguing the header seems; even if I had the time to go on said Easter egg hunt, which I don't, this sort of thing just pisses me off. I can only assume this person doesn't want readers, except perhaps the ones who were there when they started posting and have been there all along (sorry, no vacations allowed). And I can also only assume that this person isn't interested in being nominated for any fic awards, since it's clearly not fair to expect people doing a writer the favor of nominating, or people doing fandom the favor of running an award cycle (a thankless job if ever there was one), to take the time to go combing through the underbrush collecting however many pieces of a novel-length fic into one place so that it can be nominated, when the writer could've done it so easily as they posted but chose not to bother. So, whatever. Maybe it's a great fic, but I'm scrolling on. [sigh] Angie (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
11:26 pm	Thank You! Thanks to everyone who helped make my birthday wonderful. :D To pecos, dragonmad, anorienparker, illuminatedsin and arrowthroughme for greetings, to mistry89 for the balloons on my profile page, and to foxrafer for the e-card. Massive hugs to all of you! The day was pretty low-key at home, and getting all this love from people here on LJ made it very special and awesome. {{{}}} Angie (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 27th, 2009
5:57 am	Pirate Humor, and a Challenge The funny first. I was checking hits on my blog and I saw that someone was querying Google for "chasing fire by angela benedetti torrent" recently. Yay, someone else looking to steal one of my stories. Except I've never published a story called "Chasing Fire." :) Nor even written one. And when I checked, it doesn't seem there's anyone else named "Angela Benedetti" who's written a story by that name either. (Although there are a couple others of us; one's a meteorologist who publishes a lot of scholarly papers, and the other is a lady who works with children in Bogotá. So far as I know, neither one writes fiction.) So it looks like this is one confused pirate. :D Not that I'm complaining or anything -- confused pirates are the best kind. Hey, dude? If you can find a torrent copy of a story by me called "Chasing Fire," go for it, with my blessing. [wave] Moving on to the subject of slightly more competent pirates, someone finally did find a copy of "Learning to Love Yourself" and got it up on a torrent site back around the end of June. I sent a takedown note and, credit where it's due, the site took it down. It was up for however many days, though, and a bunch of people got free copies. ( Read more... ) (14 Comments |Comment on this)